Getting rid of bts.d.o files parsing: alternatives

[Sandro Tosi]

Hi all,
Today I had an interesting discussion on #debian-devel about ways to
avoid to elaborate bugs.d.o files, here is a recap.

* Current file parsing - let's remove it
it works but replicate GBs (t0o work locally) or grepping over many
files is not a way I would stay with forever ;) In particular because
then it uses those files again to retrieve other bugs information, and
we should query the SOAP interface once we have the bug #.

* UDD - a master database to collect all Debian project information,
hence bugs too:

udd=> select count(*) from bugs where forwarded like 'http%' AND
status not in ('done','fixed');
 count
-------
  4392
(1 row)

this is a sample query to retrieve all opened bugs in forwarded state.
I don't think udd psql db will ever be opened to everyone to connect
to, so this way will only be accessible from debian hosts.
dondelelcaro (BTS maintainer) noted that adding another layer over BTS
might not be that smart. And UDD is some hours back (since bts info
are update only every 4 hrs)

* Current API

$ bts select status:forwarded | wc -l
6915

So there already exists a way to query forwarded bug, but dondelelcaro
discourage to use it since sloooooow

* New API - to be requested

dondelelcaro suggest me to request a new API, to retrieve in an
efficient matter all the forwarded bugs, so we can parse it and do
what we have to.


Both the API approach can work locally and on debian hosts, and given
that UDD is still a work in progress, I'd like to "sponsor" the "new
API".

Thought? Ideas? Others? :)

Cheers,
-- 
Sandro Tosi (aka morph, morpheus, matrixhasu)
My website: http://matrixhasu.altervista.org/
Me at Debian: http://wiki.debian.org/SandroTosi