[csw-maintainers] multi-catalog package browser vs mantis

[Ben Walton]

Hi All,

I've implemented many of the modifications required to move our
package browsing interface from a mysql backed setup to a combination
of a small mysql database (serving as a cache) and an ajax interface
using Maciej's pkgdb REST interface.  (I haven't made these publicly
available yet but will over the weekend, I hope.)

There are some hurdles to overcome if this is the direction that we're
going to move but most of those can be handled by extending the REST
interface to allow more and different calls.

The real problem, as I see it, will be the mantis integration.  We're
able to provide links to the bugs for a package right now because the
php code accesses both the mantis and package databases.  It is able
to extract and ID for a package given the catalog name.  (Mantis has
no sense of package names at all.)  Our mantis integration (and indeed
our whole mantis approach) is centred on a single catalog of package
information.  It lacks any sort of decent api, as far as I can tell,
to even jump directly to a bug list by anything other than a project
id which requires a db lookup to extract.

I can hack around the ID lookup issue to facilitate providing a link
from the package info to the mantis page but it will be a leaky
workaround.  Does anyone have thoughts on the best way to address
this?  We've talked before about mantis' shortcomings and a desire to
move away from it...volunteers?

The alternate approach is pull all catalog info to a local mysql
database but that still leaves the mantis problem, so this isn't just
a methodology issue but a fundamental disconnect between how we're
using mantis and how we'd like our users to be able to see our catalog
information.

Thoughts?

Thanks
-Ben