Re: Migrating debbugs' SOAP interface to JSON

On Thu, 06 Dec 2018, Bastian Venthur wrote:
> I'm Bastian the developer of python-debianbts, the library that is used by
> reportbug to query the BTS.
> 
> First of all, I'm really happy that we have an API that allows to query the
> BTS, and the current interface is *a lot* better than the HTML parsing that
> we did 10 years ago. However, while SOAP was state of the art a while ago,
> it has it's limitations. The most severe one for us: it's getting harder and
> harder to find libraries that parse SOAP properly in Python and trying to
> parse SOAP replies "by hand" seems daunting.

Yeah, I totally agree that we should move to replace SOAP.

My long-standing plan is to have it replaced with a REST API that
returns json or html (maybe even xml?) depending on the Accepts: header.
I'd certainly love to see someone write a good specification for that
API using openAPI (swagger) which I (or someone else) could then work to
write the perl backend to the BTS to spit out that API.