Mid 2009 bts-link update

Several months had passed since I started acting bts-link maintainer and I've never issued a "state of the union" message, so I'm fixing it now :)

I'm going to enlist some of the most relevant facts that have happened:

• bts-link now runs on merkel, that will help it to be identified as an official Debian tool, in particular from upstream projects that doesn't like to be "flooded" by a pick of requests;
• it's executed almost always twice a week (this also reduce load on remote issue tracking systems); now I tried to standardize on Monday and Thursday, but since it's still executed by hand, days may change;
• we now have a log of each execution, and we added to it several additional information to help use drive it the right way;
• the logs are publicly available (even if a bit hidden until now) here;
• we created a scripts to parse those logs and create a couple of graphs (using matplotlib) for each execution, available at the same location of logs; they show us the summary of all logged bts-link executions and (mainly) what are the projects with a lot of forwarded bugs that are still not handled by bts-link (images links are from last run);
• as you can see from the summary graph, the Unconfigured forwarded bugs count is drastically reduced; this is due to mainly 2 reasons: 1. we recently added Roundup (python, gnupg, darcs, mercurial, etc) and Google Code (tesseract, and many small others) issue tracking systems support; 2. we added several missing project for remote BTSes already supported.
• Recap - we are now able to configure packages with remote issue tracking system that uses these tools: berlios, bugzilla, gnats, launchpad, mantis, rt, savane, sourceforge, trac, gforge, googlecode, roundup.
• we have a really active contributor: Olivier Berger. Thanks a lot, Olivier! But we want mooooore;
• we got also a changelog.
  

It's a lot, but there is still more to do:

• add more remote issue tracking systems: php is the next big one, and meebey just told me it has a XMLRPC backend, so it's an easy one; let's hope MySQL has the same XMLRPC enabled, since they based their BTS on php one;
• add more Debian packages under bts-link monitoring: those are packages with forwarded bugs to upstreams with a supported remote BTSes - here we need your help!
• make bts-link more a general purpose tool, not Debian specific - and here Olivier is working really hard, let's hope I can help him achieve this (for example reviewing and merging his changes ;) ).
• have a more suitable summary output, with elapsed time, already grouped up information from results, ready to be parsed and graphed; something is already done, but some code refactoring is needed to complete it;
• [long term] convert it to "some sort of" daemon; run executed by cron is a beginning, but there were talks about a real daemon, continuously checking forwarded bugs, with a reasonable amount of delay to not bother that much on BTSes;
• [long term] integrated with Debian bts;
• we got also a TODO list.
  

What can you do for bts-link? a lot!

• do you maintain a package with forwarded bugs to a supported remote issue tracking system not yet checked by bts-link? let us know, and we'll add it;
• do you maintain a package with forwarded bugs to a not yet supported remote issue tracking system? let us know, and we'll add it (it's welcome if you already contact upstream to alert them of the possibility of automatic tool checking their BTS and to find out if their BTS support some sort of programmatic querying, like CSV exporting, XMLRPC, etc.);
• do you want to help? contact us, there's always something to do :)

Have fun!