342075 - bugZilla unified forum/discussion API

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 79534

(Bugzilla :: Bugzilla-General, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Michael]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050920
Build Identifier: 

An increasing number of feature requests in bugZilla refers to the functionality and appearance of the bug discussion pages, basically some people seem to hope bugZilla becomes a new forum software in itself:

Given that there is in fact some room for improvement, but implementing such features would obviously be sort of redundant due to the enormous amount of freely available forum software, how about considering approaching the underlying issue from a different angle: that is, by providing bugZilla with a well-defined forum/discussion API, so that it can be relatively easily plugged together with existing forum software such as phpBB or SMF?
 
Basically, this would mainly come down to providing publicly accessible interfaces to some of bugZilla's database fields, so that the forum software and bugZilla can be directly synchronized. A web based forum requires usually only very few data for posting, i.e.: username, thread id, posting (date, time, sub forum).
All of this is basically already available in bugZilla (sub forums could be automatically synchronized by setting up forums for each component).

Ultimately, administrators could set up bugZilla to use its own discussion infrastructure or to provide a corresponding interface that could be used by (accordingly modified) forum software. 

Ultimately, this would have the potential of combining the best of both worlds: bugZilla for bug tracking and arbitrary forum software for the corresponding discussions. That way, bugZilla developers could in fact concentrate on the bug tracking related code, and would no longer have to maintain their own "mini forum" component. Providing corresponding bindings for popular forum packages should be pretty straight forward, too.

While I realize that, due to the nature of this suggestion, I am going out on a limb here-the overall idea shouldn't be that farfetched, given that there are plans to provide a standardized, SOAP based, remote interface. Such an interface could be easily used by other software, why not a forum? ;-)

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Marc Schumann [:Wurblzap]]

Is this a duplicate of bug 224577?

Comment 2

[Frédéric Buclin]

I would rather mark it as a dupe of bug 79534. Bugzilla should remain what it is designed for: a bug tracking system.

Comment 3

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

Based on the description of the request, I'm going with it's a dupe of XML-RPC.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 224577 ***

Comment 4

[Michael]

As you might have noticed in the discussions concerning 224577, as well as in the original proposal, I am fully aware of 224577, however I don't think this is really a duplicate-rather it could sort of depend on 224577, or at least this one should possibly be taken into consideration for the (further) implementation of 224577.
While having 224577 would definitely come in handy to implement this request, it isn't necessarily a prerequisite, though. Also, there's a different implementation emphasis: 224577 strives mainly to expose the bug tracking infrastructure via a well-defined API, while this request could easily be implemented by exposing "only" the discussion-related functionality via an open interface. 
However, I would agree with comment #2 that some sort of meta bug "Bugzilla should remain what it is designed for: a bug tracking system" would be suitable to categorize this one.

Comment 5

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

Michael: The XML-RPC interface would expose all of Bugzilla's functionality, ideally. If you want specific XML-RPC functions, you should file a bug requesting those specific functions. Adding and removing comments is easy enough. That's all this basically requires, right?

Anyhow, you can already get all of the info about Bugzilla's database fields from the XML format of a bug.

It would be up to the developers of any particular bulletin board software to then integrate with Bugzilla. I'm sure there are already plugins out there somewhere.

Comment 6

[Michael]

Yes, okay-maybe we have different ideas here, but regardless of whether bugZilla's full functionality is exported or not, there's still a different emphasis  between these two requests:

1) XML-RPC would basically provide an interface to "remote control" bugZilla via a well-defined interface by arbitrary clients 

2) a unified forum/discussion API would be mainly about providing bugZilla itself with the required bindings/infrastructure to allow it to serve as remote control for forum software. That is specific functionality would be implemented externally.

The difference being: even an ideal XML/RPC interface would usually NOT provide the OUTBOUND bindings required to *MAKE* XML/RPC CALLS to other (forum) software, in order to have specific functionality being delegated to external software (comments/discussion in this case).

Comment 7

[Michael]

Basically, it boils down to whether bugZilla is a SERVER for XML/RPC requests, or whether it exposes an XML/RPC interface to act as a CLIENT in order to be able to delegate some of its functionality.