The explanation for emacsclient's mis-behaviour when reporting *this* bug turns out to be fairly easy: emacs23 has installed its emacsclient and told the alternatives system to use that by default, so I was using emacs23's emacsclient with emacs22.
The misbehaviour when I told reportbug to use vi, however, remains ... Eddy. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org