Once upon a time, (25th of August 2003 to be precise), Goswin von
Brederlow
submitted a patch to add RFC822-like output
to debbugs. It never made it into upstream.
This is very sad.
I’ve spent all morning writing some test code that screenscrapes my
Debian bug list from the quasi-HTML that it generates, using the
almighty
BeautifulSoup.
But in the end it’s a hack, it’s dirty, it’s not very general and
it’s going to take a bit of work before it’s usable with
tuffet for anyone but me.
Debbugs, Bugzilla, Sourceforget, none of them have a programmatic
interface. (Ok, so there’s a patch that adds XML-RPC to
Bugzilla… has it been incorporated upstream yet? Who other than
Gnome and Red Hat are actually using it?) What decade are we in again?
Request Tracker has a programmatic API – REST. So RT’s off my
immediate shitlist, but nobody’s writing client libraries for REST
so again I’m building up dirty hacks to get the immediate job done.
I suppose that this will change over time. I hope that this tool will get
used by enough people that there will be demand for programmatic APIs
in all the bug tracking webapps out there. I also hope that all
webapps that provide some storage service create a programmatic API –
LiveJournal and Flickr and Google Maps are great examples of what
people can do when your access to the data model is not restricted to
an HTML view. MVC all the way baby.
If you’re writing a public webapp, you are doing your users a
disservice by not considering non-browser access to the data model.
If you’re building an public webapp for the open source community, and
you don’t have a programmatic API to your data model,
you’re not just doing your users a disservice, you’re committing a
crime against humanity.