[Reportbug-maint] Bug#735952: reportbug: The search feature is almost unusable

[Z]

Package: reportbug
Version: 6.4.4
Severity: minor

Dear Maintainer,

Reporting various bugs against various packages using reportbug, I have come to
realise the search is almost unusable. When you search for something, in this
case "search", but equally with longer or more complex strings of words, it
brings up many unrelated options. I'm not sure what the criterion are for being
brought up in a search, but almost always most of the things returned bear no
meaningful relation to what is being searched. Slightly more complex search
principles to help decide what and how to return things, would make it much
more useful. Not only finding anything with the word in, but prioritising it,
depending on weather the word is in the title/descriptive text, how often the
words come up, what order and so on, and ranking them based on this. It comes
across as a program that has had a GUI tacked on to a CLI program, rather than
making use of the possible features. This makes it difficult to find previous
reports, and is slightly off-putting - which prevents small (usability) bugs
from being reportant. Rethinking the presentation could be good as well. The
different categories of Important/minor/ etc... are useful, but instead of
having to open and look through each of these seperately, it would be more
useful if the program tried to just order the reports in relevance to the
search, and then had buttons to sort them, as with email clients.

This would all make it quicker and easier to find similar reports, and make the
whole process easier.



-- Package-specific info:
** Environment settings:
INTERFACE="gtk2"

** /home/zack/.reportbugrc:
reportbug_version "6.4.4"
mode standard
ui gtk2
realname "Z"
email "bugs at theloosespoke.org.uk"
no-cc
header "X-Debbugs-CC: bugs at theloosespoke.org.uk"
smtphost reportbug.debian.org

-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.12-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages reportbug depends on:
ii  apt               0.9.14.2
ii  python            2.7.5-5
ii  python-reportbug  6.4.4

reportbug recommends no packages.

Versions of packages reportbug suggests:
pn  claws-mail                                 <none>
pn  debconf-utils                              <none>
pn  debsums                                    <none>
pn  dlocate                                    <none>
pn  emacs22-bin-common | emacs23-bin-common    <none>
ii  exim4                                      4.82-3
ii  exim4-daemon-light [mail-transport-agent]  4.82-3
ii  file                                       1:5.14-2
ii  gnupg                                      1.4.16-1
ii  python-gtk2                                2.24.0-3+b1
ii  python-gtkspell                            2.25.3-12
pn  python-urwid                               <none>
ii  python-vte                                 1:0.28.2-5
ii  xdg-utils                                  1.1.0~rc1+git20111210-7

Versions of packages python-reportbug depends on:
ii  apt               0.9.14.2
ii  python            2.7.5-5
ii  python-debian     0.1.21+nmu2
ii  python-debianbts  1.11
ii  python-support    1.0.15

python-reportbug suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information