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

[Mathieu Roy]

Nic <address@hidden> said:

> 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?"

Can your single RSS be working fine for a project with 30009 bugs,
13939943 tasks and 120393 news?

> 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.

If the RSS is generated by PHP, only requested RSS would be
loaded. And smaller RSS file, no?


> > 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>
> 

The tags should, to be coherent with the rest of Savannah (see mail
headers etc)

<project>
<artifact>
<artifact_id>

But that's not a problem.



Is the RSS, as you seem to be interested in, just about giving last items
(news, file release -which is more complicated because we do not the
sourceforge original file release system-, bug)?

Wouldn't it be wonderful if it permits people to extract whatever
data, whenever they want.

Stupid examples:

The project Tralala use the Savannah bug tracker but
host his website on www.tralala.org.
They can use the RSS for the project giving only the bugs to show any
useful information on www.tralala.org.
If they have to load a RSS with data for about 1000 projects, it's a
problem, isn't it?

The project Nipouf use the Savannah task tracker but some people use a
special software to print nice tabulars with the task tracker
data... by reading the RSS. Do they need to read a file containing any
other info?



As you see it, what would be the usage of the 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?

No.



-- 
Mathieu Roy
 
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