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Email notifications for Debian bugs

2022-12-28

tl;dr

w3m is a web browser^W^Wpager#0 going back to the last millennium. The original upstream is gone since a long time ago. The current 'official' version is maintained by the Debian maintainer Tatsuya 'tats' Kinoshita at GitHub[3]. Starting about 18 month ago, I spend quite some time working with the code to help to keep the project alive.

I keep an eye on the GitHub Issues[4] and the Debian Bug Tracker[5] to see if new bugs are reported. While it was quite easy to get notifications for newly created GitHub issues. I had a hard time figuring out how to get an email notification when a new bug on Debian's bug tracking system is created.

Today I had some time and took another approach. I found a Debian IRC channel #debian-bugs[6] which is dedicated to the fixing-bugs topic. After stating my problem and desire it took not long to get a response. The trick is not to look for how to get notified about bugs. The correct term that will lead in the correct direction is to track a package. There is https://tracker.debian.org[7] and the documentation[8] is quite clear,

With the mailbot

To subscribe to a package through email, you will have to send an email to control@
distro-tracker-domain containing the command subscribe package-name either in the
subject or in the body of the mail. This will subscribe the email address that you
used to send the message. You can ask for the subscription of another email address
by using the command subscribe package-name email.

where distro-tracker-domain is https://tracker.debian.org.

tl;dr

To get email notifications for newly created bugs for w3m:

mail -s "subscribe w3m" control@tracker.debian.org

Now let's wait till some one creates a bug and hope I did not tell total BS up there. :)

0: See the README for details ;)

Last modified: 2022-12-28T15:03:07Z

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[5] Debian Bug Tracker

[6] #debian-bugs

[7] https://tracker.debian.org