Last few days I spent working on this tool: a small tool that will
make life easier for those who would like to quickly report bugs on
our Bugzilla (named ede-bug-report, nothing fancy ;)). Those
familiary with bug-buddy from GNOME will know what I'm talking
about :)
Anyway, this development was my first expirience with
xmlrpc-c library.
For those who do not knows, Bugzilla exposes own API via XMLRPC
protocol so if you have the right libraries (or enough bravery to
write your own), you can nicely access it without using browser
(with consulting
Bugzilla
API documentation, of course).
I can summarize using xmlrpc-c with two words: very painful.
I had to rewrite bugzilla client three times, mostly due bad
xmlrpc-c documentation. The first time (maybe this shouldn't be
counted) was client emerged from my playground with Bugzilla API.
This client was synchronous and was pretty unusable with GUI, but
was working.
Second try was with xmlrpc-c asynchronous API, and after a
few days of guessing how things should work (because documentation
is horribly bad in this part), I managed to get it running. At
least I though it.
Somehow, xmlrpc-c asynchronous API badly manage cookie
sessions so after loggin in, submitting bug wasn't posssible and
Bugzilla would report how I'm not logged in. I'm not sure is this
due this library or I was doing something wrong (hardly since you
have only few async functions and is pretty hard to get things
wrong :P) but I couldn't get it running in any way.
And, at the end, the third try was/is synchronous client with
threading. Although I'm not a big fan of threading, using threads
was very joyable comparing to horrible xmlrpc-c async API. Damnit,
you can't even cancel requests with it, so if you try to shut down
the client forcefully, you'll get assertion straigth from the
library.
Asside from these internal stuff, I tried to keep client's
GUI pretty minimal. When I get those bug report dialogs with tons
of input fields, I lose desire to report the bug, no matter how
critical it was. Few fields and let developers sort it as they
like, right :). Here is the shot:
Next is to make it work together with
ede-crasher, so when
something crashes, users get an option to report it in the same
time. And move it from the branches in the trunk, of course.
New bug report tool
July 1, 2009