[Savannah-hackers] Re: RSS for savannah pages.

[Nic]

Mathieu Roy <address@hidden> writes:

> > I don't agree with doing it per project per item. I'd prefer a single
> > project RSS with each item clearly categorised. That way one wouldn't
> > need to aggregate the feeds for a single project to see all the news.
> 
> The problem is easy: is one RSS per project scalable?

I don't understand your use of the word scalable here. I interpret the
question to mean "can this application go from a very small load to a
very large load without fundamental change?"

The answer to that question is yes. One file per project would be
better than many files because there would be less aggregator load on
the GNU servers. That's a good thing.


> We spend to much time to rewrite stuff that was wrote in 3 different
> ways in Sourceforge: as it's clear that some people, including me,
> will want RSS for any kind of artifact (bugs, tasks, news etc) 
> we can have for a project, it must be working/implemented for any kind
> of artifact easily. 

I understand that sourceforge do this with multiple files. But it
really is foolish to do it that way. If we use a single file then we
can always break it down into the separate sections anyway (using
simple xslt) but if we use many files we can't easily combine them
for a whole project.

I'll illustrate the kind of format I'm invisaging:

<rss>
  <channel>
    <title>guile-xmlxsl</title>
    <item>
      <title>file release</title>
      <link>http://savannah.gnu.org/files?prjid=xxx&file=yyy</link>
      <description>The file: guile-xmlxsl-0.2.tar.gz was released
        </description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>new bug 102020</title>
      <link>http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs?prjid=xxx&file=yyy</link>
      <description>....</description>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>


This would leave you free to pass this through a template extracting
just the bugs based only on the title. We could add such a transform
to the default server config.

With the addition of a <category/> element within each item we could
do it even easier. Since RSS does not have a DTD we are allowed to do
that.


Do you know if sourceforge tried this approach?


Nic