
Debian Bug Tracking System (bts) - gtk helper applications
----------------------------------------------------------

  The intention of this package is to create a number of gtk applications for
interacting with the Debian bug tracking system.


 ***   This is currently in development so is HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL, ***
 ***            LIKELY TO BREAK and  generally UNFINISHED          ***


The package includes a number of widgets which may be used by any application
and a few applications which use these widgets:

BugViewer:
         Fetches and displays a bug reports. Simple filter alows limitation
		 based on tags, severities, title search, or full body search/
BugLister: 
         Fetches and displays bug listings for a package/source
		 pkg/maintainer/submitter. Edit facility allows easy generation of
		 emails for the control mailserver as well as individual bug reports.
BugWatcher:
         Application for monitoring packages bug listings. Quite similar in
		 appearance and function as an email client.
BugReporter:
		Graphical bug reporting application

bts interaction is achieved with the com.tildemh.debbug package (developed
alongside this). That was inspired by the reportbug program and initially coded
to just work - the bug reports are fetched by http from the very pages used for
public viewing and then some magic gets them into java classes. Hopefully we
will add a nicer interface to the bts for this sort of thing in the future. 

GTK interface is all done by the java-gnome libraries. 

The general program is written entirely in Java. 

JVM Requirements
----------------
These programs need a jvm in order to run. gij and Blackdown java are known to
work. The wrapper scripts currently use /usr/bin/java, which is an alternative.
This must be set to either blackdown java or gij-wrapper in order for these
programs to work. 
In the future, I will probably switch to natively compiled applications.


Please contact me if you are interested in helping out in any way with this
package. Particular areas where I would like more help are:
- *specific* suggestions for improvement (please report as wishlist bugs)
- documentation
- Java coding.

---------------------------
Mark Howard <mh@debian.org>
