On Thu, Jun 26, 2003 at 06:44:21PM +0100, Mark Howard wrote: > To help solve the second point, I would like to have a machine-friendly > interface to the bts. The attached cgi scripts hope to do this. > > I'm not a perl programmer, so I apologise for any stupid mistakes. I > don't have access to a debbug installation to test them on, so they are > untested. > Much of the code in machpkg.cgi is copied from common and pkgreport. If > you choose to use these scripts, it would probably be better to allow > this code to be shared.
The code should definitely be shared; see the existing code for examples of simple CGI argument parsing which you can use. Also, I think the output format is a bit too unstructured and will cause compatibility problems as more fields are added (the VERSION header helps but it would be easier if the output were somewhat self-versioning so that clients don't *have* to be updated every time a new field is added). How about a simple Debian control file-style output, a.k.a. RFC822, so that the bugreport.cgi?bug=nnnnn&rfc822=yes output would look like this: Output-Version: 1 Package: foo Severity: wishlist Submitter: Helpful User <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Dead easy to generate and parse. If you want the log as well, it should come out in parsed format, one message at a time; you don't want all the control characters that are used as record separators in the real log file. I'm not sure I can think of a good way to represent this in RFC822. How about a newline after all the headers above, after which follows something like the output you currently get from bugreport.cgi?bug=nnnnn&mbox=yes? We've got the code for that bit already. Similar for pkgreport.cgi, and you probably want modifications to pkgindex.cgi too. > [Please CC me - I'm not on the list] A Mail-Followup-To: header saying that would be helpful, if you can. Cheers, -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
