GLUE version control and bugtracking abstraction layer

[Kristis Makris]

Hi Fred,

On Fri, 2007-01-05 at 17:02 +0100, Fred Leeflang wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I just briefly mentioned something about this on the bugzilla IRC channel
> but since everybody's pretty busy, including myself, I thought I'd ask 
> it here
> instead.
> 
> I'm working on an opensource tool called 'GLUE'. The development stage
> is pre-alpha but things are coming along quite well. GLUE aims to be
> an abstraction layer between version control systems and bugtracking 
> systems.
> A 'tutorial' or rather terse design for it can be found at 
> http://glue.3dn.nl/tutorial.php

Your design seems, in some respects, similar to the Scmbug work:

http://www.mkgnu.net/?q=scmbug
http://files.mkgnu.net/files/scmbug/doc/latest_manual/html-single/manual.html#DESIGN

For example, the current daemon protocol could be transformed into a
SOAP-based protocol. We have a BTS API -- it's only used by the daemon.
We don't have a VCS API -- VCS access goes from the VCS side to the
daemon only; it's not bidirectional. And we don't have an Output API --
our VDD tool somewhat provides that, but currently is a daemon call. 

In a sense, we already made BTS and VCS systems GLUE compliant.

But your design extends beyond what Scmbug has to sharing SBBs (somewhat
like the Scmbug Merge tool).

> When you glance over the tutorial you will hopefully understand the 
> nature of my
> proposal. I want to try and access the bugzilla database through a 
> webservice
> so I can query the bugzilla database for all sorts of relevant 
> information about bugs
> and then link that information together with relevant information from 
> version
> control systems. Obviously this could be do-able through accessing 
> Bugzilla through
> it's web interface programmatically and parsing out the results but this 
> would also
> be very tedious and prone to errors.
> 
> So mkanat already pointed out the Webservice interface to bugzilla at 
> http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/tip/html/api/ -> Bugzilla::WebService. I 
> glanced
> over this and it seems that the webservices are rather limited at this 
> point.
> 
> I would love to help developping this some more and make bugzilla integrate
> with GLUE (or make GLUE integrate with bugzilla if you want :)
> 
> Would you be interested in such a cooperation?

As a Scmbug developer, I would be greatly interested in extending Scmbug
to fit your design. Convert the current protocol to SOAP, and extend it
to become a general BTS protocol.

Could you have a look over the Scmbug materials and see if Scmbug could
be of help ? I'd hate for you to duplicate effort, after working on this
for 2 years now.