"bug report" field in DESCRIPTION file?

"DM" == Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca>
    on Thu, 26 Nov 2009 08:39:27 -0500 writes:
    DM> On 26/11/2009 7:09 AM, Barry Rowlingson wrote:
    >> A lot of R packages are now effectively maintained by several people
    >> and so use sites like R-forge or google code for development. This
    >> means the best way to report bugs or problems with these packages is
    >> via the development site's bug tracking rather than emailing the
    >> maintainer. Could we agree on a field in DESCRIPTION explicitly for
    >> bug reports?
    >> 
    >> The DESCRIPTION file has an optional URL field which generally sends
    >> the user to the 'home page' of the package. Whether or not there is a
    >> bug tracker somewhere there isn't made explicit, so I don't think
    >> overloading URL for a bug report address is a good idea. The Hmisc
    >> package mentions its bug tracker in the Description field and also has
    >> it in the URL field with three other URLs. This tells me a bug report
    >> field might be a better idea.
    >> 
    >> I'd prefer an optional field called 'BugReports:', which would be a
    >> URL, and this could either be the http: address of a web site bug
    >> tracker or a mailto: URL (of a real live human or a mail-based
    >> tracker).
    >> 
    >> If there's agreement on this then a further step may be to write a
    >> 'bugreport(package)' function that would first look for a BugReport
    >> field, then the URL or maintainer fields to give the poor confused
    >> user some advice on what to do. Then when someone emails R-dev saying
    >> they think there's a bug in package foo, we can say "Have you read the
    >> output of 'bugreport("foo")'?" which might be more helpful than saying
    >> 'bugs with 'foo' should be reported to the maintainer'.
    >> 
    DM> This sounds like a good idea, though I would add a "package" parameter 
    DM> to the bug.report() function, rather than creating a new function.

I agree (good idea;  use  bug.report() with arguments).

    DM> Does the logic below sound right for bug.report() with the package 
    DM> specified?

    DM> If there's a BugReports field, bug.report() calls browseURL() on that page.

I'm not sure if that's easy:  One main reason for bug.report() is
to auto-collect the necessary info and put it into the body of
an e-mail message.  So, I think the above only "works" when the
BugReports fields is a 'mailto:' URL, but not, e.g., when it
points to an R-forge bug tracking web page form.

The idea was that we would not use the auto-collection at all if there 
was a BugReports field, because the package author(s) had indicated by 
it that they didn't want emailed bug reports.

Duncan Murdoch
    DM> If not, it does more or less what it does now, but
    DM> - it defaults "address" to the package maintainer. 
    DM> - it adds a line in the intro to the message pointing to the URL field 
    DM> if there was one.

that sounds good.
Martin

    DM> Duncan Murdoch

    >> Just an idea for a rainy morning...
    >> 
    >> Barry
    >> 
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"bug report" field in DESCRIPTION file?

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