Re: ANNC: New Debbugs
On Wed, 2003-01-01 at 16:54, Steve Greenland wrote:
> * A way to programatically access BTS content w/o parsing HTML. A
> specified schema, whether it's XML, LDAP, SQL, whatever.
This would be very useful. I'd suggest xml, since it's probably the
easiest (it's essentially the web frontend with a different layout), and
so most likely to be useful. If you want someone else to take a look at
this, I'll probably have time around Easter.
Also, it would be very useful if you could add a http header field
containing the last modification date for the bug.
> Why: it would be very nice to be able to write a front-end to the BTS to
> correctly read and manipulate bugs. THere have been a couple of stabs
> at this before, but all foundered on the weight of parsing the HTML (or
> perhaps lack of interest, or a combination.) There was, at one time,
> IIRC, LDAP access, but it was an incomplete one-off, with no commitment
> to maintain it.
I've been working on such a system recently. Unfortunately, my work is
also experimentation with the in-development java-gnome project (Java
bindings for gtk.gnome). This currently only works well with Blackdown
java >1.4.1 (not yet packaged for Debian systems); and natively compiled
code by gcj - but not using the versions currently in Debian. I will
keep working on this, although my time will be very limited when I go
back to uni.
My design did involve parsing the html for the simple reason that it
would work and wouldn't be difficult to implement. I have, however
designed the system so that only the parser would have to be changed to
support changes in the bts - the internal Java representation of the
bugs should still survive.
In terms of manipulating bugs, I personally feel that the best approach
is for the system to generate emails to be sent - then the users will
still realise that they are dealing with people, not just machines and
will hopefully be more interested in being more helpful. There may be
room for improvement in the way (number/format) acknowledgement emails
are sent out, but I think that's something which needs to be implemented
before being discussed.
--
.''`. Mark Howard
: :' :
`. `' http://www.tildemh.com
`- mh@debian.org | mh@tildemh.com | mh344@cam.ac.uk
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