I have to admit that I am kind of a state tracking freak, so, your proposal is welcomed to keep that tendency at bay.

However, I would add a "category" for bugs/issues and feature requests, in the subject, else, the bot, the readers and the maintainer will have still to dig deep into threads to know which one was a feature and which one was actually a bug report.

There must be also some kind of "protocol" to transition between the various discussions, like
- from bug to a normal question
- normal question to a feature request

We must avoid that to much bugs ends up as simple discussion, without a proper sanitation of the thread subject. * I am not sure this is clear even for me :/*


On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 4:54 PM Anthony Carrico <acarrico@memebeam.org> wrote:
On 5/22/20 4:17 AM, Roland Everaert wrote:
> Example of message states:
> [QUESTION] -> [ANSWER]
> [BUG] -> ( [CONFIRMED] | [WONTFIX] | [SOLVED] )
> [CONFIRMED] -> ( [SOLVED] | [PLANNED] )
> [FEATURE] -> ( [WONTDO] | [PLANNED] | [IMPLEMENTED] )
> [PLANNED] -> ( [IMPLEMENTED] | [SOLVED] )

I love your enthusiasm. A mailing list has no means to type check
messages, so I think it does call for a more simplified mechanism,
especially as a first pass (note that the machine is necessarily
nondeterministic, since different people can cause it to transition at
the same time by sending a message).

I'd argue that questions and answers are just normal threads, that don't
need a state, and issues just need an open state, and a closed state.
/The details of the of those states are in the threads for anyone who
cares to look/. So, OPEN/CLOSED and let the threads speak for themselves.

In this way, there are just two kinds of discussions: tracked, and
untracked. Newbies can quickly pick up the OPEN/CLOSED grammar. People
can meander threads between the richer states in their discussion,
hopefully with good subject lines, and 'bots just need to look for one
pair of keywords, ignoring threads without those keywords. I don't
actually use emacs for email, but I'm guessing it wouldn't be too hard
for someone to write an elisp script to scan a mailbox/maildir to gather
a list of subject lines--is this true?

--
Anthony Carrico