I've been amusing myself over the past few days working up an email interface for the distributed ugtracker Bugs Everywhere. One of the things we've been struggling with with BE is how end users should submit bugs/comments/etc, since
$ apt-get install bzr
$ bzr branch http://whatever/remote/repo local_repo
$ cd local_repo
$ be new "The demuxulizer is broken"
Created bug with ID 48f
$ be comment 48f
<Describe bug>
$ bzr send --mail-to "whatever-dev@fancyprojects.com"
mostly just raises eyebrows among non-devs ;). My interface replaces it with
$ cat | mail -s "[be-bug] new" "whatever-dev@fancyprojects.com"
The demuxulizer is broken
<describe bug>
^D
Which will hopefully be more user friendly. Of course, most non-devs I know (and some devs) avoid the command line like the plague, so we will still want a web-frontend. Luckily, web frontends seem popular with other devs, so I don't have to bother with that ;).
Curious parties can branch my public repo:
$ git clone http://www.physics.drexel.edu/~wking/code/bzr/be-email be.email
As a nice side effect of this little project, my [[send_pgp_mime] is now much more elegant.
Update: the BE project is now versioned in Git. The Bazaar repository is no longer supported.