On Tue, Feb 12, 2008 at 09:04:14PM +0000, Adam D. Barratt wrote: > 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.
That's great news! > 1) Is it worth discussing, or at least mentioning, this on -devel? I'm > more than happy with "no" as an answer ;-) IMO no. We are the team maintaining devscripts, and among us you are the one currently writing code. It's up to the maintainers decide this kind of technical stuff. > 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. Again, IMO no. Any (reasonable) extra dependency in devscripts can be tolerated: we are not talking about a package which is in the base system or a generally user-installed package. devscripts is a package mostly for Debian Developers, and a developer should be able to tolerate the need of (reasonable) extra stuff. This argument is to me more general than your request, and to me also accounts well for making devscripts depend on some extra language if needed. As a fresh example I have in mind I see no reason to plainly refuse an useful tool to be added to devscript only because it is python or ruby. In particular, since we have a python library to interact with the BTS now, I would also welcome efforts to port devscripts' code to it. > 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. Uhm, does it? I might start asking dumb questions since I've never used the offline part of bts, but what features are actually provided in offline mode? According to the manpage: * show/bugs clearly should work offline, but in that case we are anyhow showing either an HTML page or a mailbox, so it isn't really related to SOAP or scarping HTML, since in one of the two cases the HTML is actually the final target of our action * select is already only working if SOAP is enabled, so even in the state of the art it won't work offline (I presume) * the other commands seems all related to manipulate the bug report using the control interface: again, it is pointless to use them offline, and anyhow they won't need neither SOAP nor HTML scarping What have I left out? Thanks for your efforts, Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli -*- PhD in Computer Science ............... now what? [EMAIL PROTECTED],cs.unibo.it,debian.org} -<%>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/ (15:56:48) Zack: e la demo dema ? /\ All one has to do is hit the (15:57:15) Bac: no, la demo scema \/ right keys at the right time
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