[Reportbug-maint] merging common stuff in python-debianbts?

[Sandro Tosi]

I'm replying to the original email, since I'm explaining my thoughts about that:

> im Bastian Venthur, developer of reportbug-ng. I wonder why I haven't
> thought of this before, but since both, reportbug and reportbug-ng are
> written in python and therefore share a lot of functionality, wouldn't
> it be nice to merge some common stuff in a separate library both
> programs could depend on? I'm particularly thinking of the way both

I'm really happy about Bastian's email: I was wondering since some
time about "involve" rng maint, in particular about sharing the same
maintence team (ok, I know it's a little bit too extreme, but I think
it might worth), to start with.

> programs fetch the bugreports. If I remember correctly, reportbug gets
> the information from bugs.d.o's webinterface by parsing the html answer
> of a specific request. reportbug-ng did that too in the beginning but
> dropped it in favor of bugs.d.o's SOAP interface.
>
> What I'd like to have is a generic python lib like "python-debianbts"
> which provides an interface for querying the debian BTS. It could have
> implemented both ways: via html parsing and SOAP which could be
> configurable via some kind of option. The important idea is to have a
> single interface (from python's POV) to get the information, but of
> course more than one way under the hood how it gets the information.
>
> If something changes in debians BTS we don't have to change both
> reportbug and reportbug-ng but just the python-debianbts lib.
>
> What do you think? We could develop and maintain the lib together. If
> you're interested, I propose to define the API of the lib (which methods
> retun which datatypes and so on) and then could take reportbug's HTML
> parsing as one implementation of the interface and reportbug-ng's SOAP
> stuff as a second one.

Since due to my professional work, I prefer a lot of simple "tools" to
do the job (a-la-unix) to join together to fulfill the higher
requests. So, personally, I'd like to "externalize" all common
activities (Bastian pointed out one, BTS interrogation) in a
completely separated package, but letting it be reusable. I'm thinking
about something like python-debianbts (for the specific point)
eventually using/integrating other python modules (like python-debian,
maybe) customising *inside* reportbug their usage to match our needs.

I know, it would be a lot of work, but this way we can leverage
existing (i.e. tested) code while contributing with other to be used
in other programs.

I'd be glad to hear your comments.

Cheers,
Sandro

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