After what charitably may be two years of stagnation, reportbug is gaining a couple of new interfaces soon. Probably the more high-profile effort—and the one that’s closer to primetime—is Philipp Kern’s “Summer of Code” project to add a Gnome2 interface to reportbug, which should be hitting the experimental distribution soon.

Meanwhile, I’ve started fiddling with the urwid library and have made startlingly rapid progress constructing a UI with it, even though I am still getting the hang of the widget system… some widgets just refuse to go inside other widgets in ways that are not completely obvious to me, leading to strange runtime exceptions that are hard to debug. In any event, before it hits the mirrors, there’s more stuff to be done—most notably, the bug tracking system query interface (I haven’t even started tackling that yet) and figuring out how to suspend the urwid session to launch an editor that may want to use the console. On the latter point, I may go back to running each dialog as a separate session, which would also give me the console log back.