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

[Nic]

Mathieu Roy <address@hidden> writes:

> 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?

Yeah. If you want that I suggest we do one of two things, depending
on your requirements, I'll leave it to you to choose:

1. have a "live" xml snapshot of the data in a project built using
   PHP. This is just another PHP page but one that generates XML. I'd
   recommend that we still have a single XML file format but that the
   PHP page takes some arguments to ensure that the file gets
   generated with only bugs, or only tasks or only the last "n" days
   bugs and tasks.

   These xml snapshots would not follow the RSS syntax.

   have a seperate RSS system based on a batch job as I have
   described.

   Advantages:
   - you get live snapshot data
   
   Disadvantages:
   - more work
   - risk of resource drain from people doing whole snapshot.


2. have a batch job based snapshot system generating a complete XML
   in some savannah specific format. Generate the RSS with transforms
   of that.

   Advantages:
   - single system
   - probably less maintenance

   Disadvantages:
   - much slower generation (snapshots will be large)


I have some guile that can be adapted quite quickly to do batch RSS
creation on some mysql querys (we just plug the querys into the RSS
generator). Since it's going to be a batch job it doesn't matter that
it's guile and not PHP. So that can be done quite quickly and I'm
going to proceed with that.

Do you know if we have a webserver that we could use for providing
the RSS feeds? I really don't think it's a good idea to have it on
savannah (given the space and load problems).

A snapshot tool would take a lot more work. I'd be interested in
working on one for PHP but I have no development environment right
now. I'm hoping to set one up in the near future (the next month or
two) but I am pretty busy.


-- 
Nic Ferrier
http://www.tapsellferrier.co.uk