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

[Mathieu Roy]

Nic <address@hidden> said:

> Mathieu Roy <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > Can your single RSS be working fine for a project with 30009 bugs,
> > 13939943 tasks and 120393 news?
> 
> But that's not what RSS is for. RSS is for news. Only recent items
> should be included. IMHO we should be including at least one days
> bugs, one days tasks and one weeks news. We could switch it round and
> just do things by numbers: eg: 5 latest bugs, 5 latest tasks, 5
> latest news items.
> 
> Note that some versions of RSS limit the number of items that can be
> present in the feed to 20. If we were to support these versions using
> category based feeds might be a good idea. But I don't think
> supporting those versions of RSS is a good idea.

Ok. I was not especially aware of RSS limitations.

RSS is more limited than I thought. Along with the RSS implementation,
can we come up with a XML exporting tool that would be working for any
savannah artifact, per project?

If you implement the RSS but are not interested in such XML, can you
make the function you'll create reusable for this XML extracting
purpose?


> > If the RSS is generated by PHP, only requested RSS would be
> > loaded.
> 
> If the RSS were generated on demand then only the RSS that was
> requested would cause a resource problem. But RSS is a syndication
> tool, it is designed to be aggregated and many aggregators will hit
> as many RSS sources as they can find. That's sensible: RSS' value
> increases the more points there are in the feed network. But it
> creates resource problems for feed providers. 

Ok.

> > 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.
> 
> I'm not sure I undestand you... we can't change the RSS tags. That's
> how it works: tag conventions.

All the tags are defined from the start? I was definitely making a
wrong idea of RSS.

> > 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)?
> 
> RSS is a news syndication tool. You don't use it to syndicate an
> entire project description. You could provide a similar XML system to
> do that... but you wouldn't want to use the RSS format because very
> large files being syndicated would cause a problem.

Ok, I got your point.
> 
> Your 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?
> 
> Why would they need to extract "data for about 1000 projects"? They
> just extract the info for their project. In this case what they would
> do is have a batch job to do this:

In fact, I was not aware of the fact that the RSS can only be used for
the very recent changes.

> > As you see it, what would be the usage of the RSS?
> 
> For distribution of news. This is what RSS is for, we should aim to
> make it as good as possible at doing that. If, eventually, we can get
> to the point where we are updating the rss files for each project
> more than 4 times a day we will be doing well.

Ok.

> 
> What do you want it for?

I was thinking more about a system that permits users to extract and
reuse their data we have on Savannah as they want to. Which is really
needed and important, but as you pointed out, RSS is not appropriate
for this purpose, we can provide some XML export instead.

Regards,


-- 
Mathieu Roy
 
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