[Soc-coordination] Summer of Code mid-term report

[Gustavo R. Montesino]

Hello,

I've just posted a mid-term report to my blog. The full text follows:

I. Introduction

Today, the mid-term evaluations of the Google Summer of Code starts. It
means it's a good for a comprehensive summary of what I've done so far.

For those who don't remember, My GSoC project is the Bug Triaging and
Forwarding Tool, whose aim is to help triaging of Debian bug reports. On
my proposal, I had included the following timeline:


        
        
      * April - May: Study of the resources available for use in the
        project
        (Debian BTS SOAP/LDAP interface, Bugzilla interaction resources,
        etc)
        and the design of the tool. Request needed unavailable features,
        if any, with patches if possible
        
        
      * May - July: Development of initial interface and code to
        interact with
        Debian BTS
        
        
      * August: Development of Bugzilla plugin
        

During the proposals evaluations and the community bounding period, it
was pointed to me that there's already a lot of good tools to handle bug
reports, so I've changed this a bit and already started to work on
BTS-Bugzilla interaction, which seems to be the more novel part of the
tool.

The development has been fragmented in three modules: btsutils, bzutils
and bug-triage.

II. btsutils

The btstutils is a python module to interact with the Debian Bug Track
System. Currently, it can query the bts by bug number, package, source
package, maintainer, submitter and usertag. For each bug, it returns bug
number, package, summary, status, severity, submitter and tags. Support
for returning usertags is under way.

Ths btsutils can use html or soap to access the bug data, and has also a
backend-agnostic module wwith tries the best method and, if that fails,
tries the other.

Steffano Zacchiroli has offered me to include the btsutils on the
debian-bundle, a bundle of python modules for dealing with Debian
infrastrcture. I'm very excited by this idea, and believe that if all or
at least some of the Debian tools which interact with BTS end using a
standardized module for access, this might end up being the major
contribution of my GSoC project for the Debian community.

III. bzutils

The bzutils is similar to the bzutils, but is to interact with bugzillas
instead. Currently it can do queries based on GNOME's bugzilla boogle
and the more generic boolean charts. The later works (at least) on
GNOME, KDE and standard bugzilla (i.e., landfill). For each bug, it
returns bug id,
product, component, status, resolution, reporter, assignee, summary,
priority and severity.

IV. bug-triage

The bug-triage is the Bug triaging and forwarding tool. It's being
developed using python, gtk and glade.

Currently, it can query the BTS using any of the btsutils' supported
fields (even though the usertags aren't really accessible through the
interface yet). It can also launch one of the returned bug reports in a
web browser.

Integration with bugzillas is under development. It already has an
interface to establish links between Debian packages and upstream
bugzilla's address, product and component. The next steps will be to add
an upstream button in the toolbar/menu and make it show the bugs
selected through these info, allowing the user to mark the bug as
forwarded to one of them.

V. The future

After that, I'll work on these features (in no particular order):
filling a new upstream bug using the Debian bug data as a starting
point, more advanced filtering options to filter the upstream bugs (such
as filtering by words in the bug summary, and maybe through backtraces
if available) and more ways to manipulate the BTS through the interface.

To be sincere, it seems this project won't be as advanced as I would
like on the end of the GSoC. There are some new, unexpected (and good
^_^) things going on my life, which are taking some of the time I
expected to dedicate to GSoC, which means I'll likely keep the current
pace until the end of the project (I expected to increase it during
July). Even so, I believe the
project is going on a good path, and I hope it'll be very useful for the
Debian community.