Email Interface

Overview

The interactive email interface to Bugs Everywhere (BE) attempts to provide a Debian-bug-tracking-system-style interface to a BE repository. Users can mail in bug reports, comments, or control requests, which will be committed to the served repository. Developers can then pull the changes they approve of from the served repository into their other repositories and push updates back onto the served repository.

Architecture

In order to reduce setup costs, the entire interface can piggyback on an existing email address, although from a security standpoint it’s probably best to create a dedicated user. Incoming email is filtered by procmail, with matching emails being piped into be-handle-mail for execution.

Once be-handle-mail receives the email, the parsing method is selected according to the subject tag that procmail used grab the email in the first place. There are four parsing styles:

Style	Subject
creating bugs	[be-bug:submit] new bug summary
commenting on bugs	[be-bug:<bug-id>] commit message
control	[be-bug] commit message

These are analogous to submit@bugs.debian.org, nnn@bugs.debian.org, and control@bugs.debian.org respectively.

Creating bugs

This interface creates a bug whose summary is given by the email’s post-tag subject. The body of the email must begin with a pseudo-header containing at least the Version field. Anything after the pseudo-header and before a line starting with -- is, if present, attached as the bug’s first comment.:

From jdoe@example.com Fri Apr 18 12:00:00 2008
From: John Doe <jdoe@example.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:00:00 +0000
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Subject: [be-bug:submit] Need tests for the email interface.

Version: XYZ
Severity: minor

Someone should write up a series of test emails to send into
be-handle-mail so we can test changes quickly without having to
use procmail.

--
Goofy tagline not included.

Available pseudo-headers are Version, Reporter, Assign, Depend, Severity, Status, Tag, and Target.

Commenting on bugs

This interface appends a comment to the bug specified in the subject tag. The the first non-multipart body is attached with the appropriate content-type. In the case of text/plain contents, anything following a line starting with -- is stripped.:

From jdoe@example.com Fri Apr 18 12:00:00 2008
From: John Doe <jdoe@example.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:00:00 +0000
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Subject: [be-bug:XYZ] Isolated problem in baz()

Finally tracked it down to the bar() call.  Some sort of
string<->unicode conversion problem.  Solution ideas?

--
Goofy tagline not included.

Controlling bugs

This interface consists of a list of allowed be commands, with one command per line. Blank lines and lines beginning with # are ignored, as well anything following a line starting with --. All the listed commands are executed in order and their output returned. The commands are split into arguments with the POSIX-compliant shlex.split().:

From jdoe@example.com Fri Apr 18 12:00:00 2008
From: John Doe <jdoe@example.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:00:00 +0000
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Subject: [be-bug] I'll handle XYZ by release 1.2.3

assign XYZ "John Doe <jdoe@example.com>"
status XYZ assigned
severity XYZ critical
target XYZ 1.2.3

--
Goofy tagline ignored.

Example emails

Take a look at interfaces/email/interactive/examples for some more examples.

Procmail rules

The file _procmailrc as it stands is fairly appropriate for as a dedicated user’s ~/.procmailrc. It forwards matching mail to be-handle-mail, which should be installed somewhere in the user’s path. All non-matching mail is dumped into /dev/null. Everything procmail does will be logged to ~/be-mail/procmail.log.

If you’re piggybacking the interface on top of an existing account, you probably only need to add the be-handle-mail stanza to your existing ~/.procmailrc, since you will still want to receive non-bug emails.

Note that you will probably have to add a:

--repo /path/to/served/repository

option to the be-handle-mail invocation so it knows what repository to serve.

Multiple repositories may be served by the same email address by adding multiple be-handle-mail stanzas, each matching a different tag, for example the [be-bug portion of the stanza could be [projectX-bug, [projectY-bug, etc. If you change the base tag, be sure to add a:

--tag-base "projectX-bug"

or equivalent to your be-handle-mail invocation.

Testing

Send test emails in to be-handle-mail with something like:

cat examples/blank | ./be-handle-mail -o -l - -a