[Reportbug-maint] Bug#590214: support for submitting bug reports via http

[Olivier Berger]

Hi.

On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 02:07:48AM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 11:50:36PM +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> > On Sat, 2010-07-24 at 15:06 -0400, Holger Levsen wrote:
> > > So, to summarize: a.) I still think reportbug should be able to submit bugs 
> > > using port 80
> > 
> > Agreed.
> 
> Ditto.
> As I haven't been able to find a feature request for that, here is one!
> 
> Dear reportbug maintainers, the contest of this request is the -devel
> (sub)thread started at
> <http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/07/msg00492.html>. In
> subsequent messages, it has been argued that permitting to report bugs
> via http (actually, via port 80 ...) would remove some more barriers to
> bug reporting, due to firewalling and the like.
> 
> I understand that for such a feature mere support in reportbug isn't
> enough, so you might want to block this feature request by some other
> feature request on debbugs (I haven't yet checked whether the latter
> request already exists or not).
> 

May I suggest that it would be great if debbugs was to support a standard like OSLC-CM for bug submission through REST POSTs (through HTTP/HTTPs) and reportbug would speak this standard as a client.

See http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=565513 which already proposed some ideas regarding OSLC-CM.

IMHO, REST offers many advantages over SOAP in this respect (including the ability to interlink bugs using linked-data approach), and OSLC-CM may some day become a standard for interoperability between bugtrackers, so other tools than reportbug could be used too (more likely candidate so far : Mylyn in Eclipse).

Hope this helps.

P.S.: we're currently working on a OSLC-CM addon for Mantis FWIW.