debbugs URLs often aren't handy, making bug watches difficult

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

From Matt Zimmerman: "When marking a bug as existing in Debian, I'm no longer given the opportunity to enter a bug number. Instead, I must enter a URL. Since most bug activity in Debian is email-based, not web-based, this is unnecessarily inconvenient. Emails received from debbugs do not contain a
URL for the bug, and one must be constructed by hand."

A single "Enter the bug report's number or URL:" field may also be helpful for other occasions when the bug number is given but the URL is not, such as IRC and phone conversations.

[Björn Tillenius (bjornt)]

On Sat, Feb 10, 2007 at 04:37:42AM -0000, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> Public bug reported:
>
> >From Matt Zimmerman: "When marking a bug as existing in Debian, I'm no longer given the opportunity to enter a bug number. Instead, I must enter a URL. Since most bug activity in Debian is email-based, not web-based, this is unnecessarily inconvenient. Emails received from debbugs do not contain a
> URL for the bug, and one must be constructed by hand."
>
> A single "Enter the bug report's number or URL:" field may also be
> helpful for other occasions when the bug number is given but the URL is
> not, such as IRC and phone conversations.

What do you mean by 'A single "Enter the bug report's number or URL:'"
field'? Where would you specify which bug tracker's being used?

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Darnit, you're right, we'd need the bugtracker selector back too. I'm very sorry.
(However, I don't remember why we let people set up bug watches for any bugtracker other than the one that's already associated with the selected project.)

One way of presenting it would be a menu that listed bugtrackers (by domain name rather than unpredictable displayname, please!), but had a default "URL" item to show that it accepted bug report URLs.

"Enter the bug report URL, or select the bugtracker and enter the bug number:

"[URL____:^] [__________________]"