Subject: Bug database: ideas and volunteers wanted
From: James Amundson
Date: 25 Mar 2003 09:38:13 -0600
On Mon, 2003-03-24 at 18:14, Stavros Macrakis wrote:
> > we can easily get a dump of the bug database in xml format.
> > Does anyone out there have any bright ideas as to what we
> > might do with an exported xml version of the database?
>
> This is pretty low-tech, but frankly the first thing I would do with an
> XML dump is simply use it AS IS for seeing if a bug had been reported
> before. I'd just get a snapshot every so often and use Emacs as my, um,
> "query tool".
Right. That's what I was planning to do with it.
> Obviously we can do much much better than that, but -- believe it or
> not -- I had actually put together a little Emacs program to scrape the
> bug reports from the HTML pages!!! So an XML dump is an improvement on
> that.
>
> If we're going to do anything more than that, we'll need to host the
> database and the scripts somewhere....
Yes. Sourceforge provides MySQL database for us, but it isn't clear to
me what we can do in the way of scriptable web queries. I haven't really
looked into it.
> So what is the magic incantation for XML dumping?
There's the rub. The xml dump is easy to get from
<http://sourceforge.net/export/>;, but you have to be the project
administrator to get it. I can send you the copy I got yesterday, but
that obviously is not a long-term solution. (Seriously, let me know if
you would like a private copy. It's 108k gzip'd, 444k uncompressed.) I
would be willing to grant administrator privileges to someone who wanted
to do something serious with the export facility.
--Jim