Hi,

Having found a round tuit, and as you may have suspected if you've been
following some of my recent commits, I've decided to take the bull by
its proverbial horns and look at converting some of our current HTML
scraping to use the BTS SOAP interface.

Before looking at the detail, I had a couple of general queries:

1) Is it worth discussing, or at least mentioning, this on -devel? I'm
more than happy with "no" as an answer ;-)

2) Do we want to provide a fallback to the current parsing code in the
event that the user doesn't have libsoap-lite-perl installed? My
personal preference would be not to, if only because doing so leaves us
still having to maintain the HTML scraping.

Anyway, on to the individual scripts:

tagpending
----------

Rewrite in perl. Mostly done, and not as mad as it sounds. :-)

tagpending already contains four perl invocations (two bts select calls
and one each to dpkg-parsechangelog and URI::Escape; the latter
shouldn't be necessary after moving to SOAP). Personally, I'd also be
more comfortable implementing #439688 (including changelog entries as
comments in the generated e-mail) in perl than in shell.

debchange
---------

Mostly implemented (as you may have spotted from my accidental check-in
of the partially finished change; oops). Waiting for source package
names to be available via SOAP (see #465332).

bts
---

The perennial trigger for discussions about replacing HTML scraping with
SOAP. Sadly the fact that bts (rather usefully :) supports offline
working and local caches of bug content means we're largely stuck with
parsing the generated HTML. 

Hopefully aj's work on smarturl
[ http://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ] will make this less 
painful in the longer term.

wnpp-alert
----------

Parses http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/* in order to derive a list of
orphaned and RF{A,H}ed bugs. Not sure that it's worth rewriting the code
given how frequently it's likely to be called.

Comments welcome :-)

Adam


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