On Mon, Jul 06, 2009 at 08:26:24AM +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
> "W. Trevor King" <wking@drexel.edu> writes:
> 
> > On Sat, Jul 04, 2009 at 10:19:35AM +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
> > > Instead of a separate command for each output format, could we have
> > > a single "produce a static report of the bug database" command, and
> > > specify output format as an option?
> > 
> > Do people like this architecture better than my be-xml-to-mbox
> > approach?
> 
> I think this question is illuminated by the related question: Is mbox
> output a static report, or another read-write data store?

Gianluca is clearly thinking about a static report:

On Fri, Jul 03, 2009 at 10:50:17PM +0200, Gianluca Montecchi wrote:
> The goal is to be able to do something like "be html /web/page" to have in the
> /web/page directory some static html pages that basically are the dump of the
> be repository, much like ditz have

I think truly interactive frontends like Steve's working on need to be
build on top of libbe directly, since they'll need to make lots of
small changes to the database, and it's to slow to be reloading the
database for every change.  Static dumps like my mbox or Gianluca's
html could just parse the xml output of `be list' and other be
commands.

There should also be an xml import for `be new' and `be comment' so
you could import new bugs/comments from whatever format after writing
a whatever->xml converter.  This would allow you to email new bugs and
comments to the database (e.g. via some procmail-spawned
be-parse-email script) which would give you some level of
interactivity, but you'd have to regenerate your mbox to see your new
comments in your mail reader.

I think interactive use that gives you live-updates in your mail
reader isn't worth the trouble, since you'd need to teach BE imap or
smtp+mbox-locking.  Hmm, maybe it smtp+mbox-locking wouldn't be so bad,
but that would be a distinct frontend project like Steve's, not part
of the becommands.

Trevor

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