[Mailman-Developers] GitHub/Development tools integration project Gsoc'15

Prabhanshu Abhishek prabhanshua at gmail.com
Thu Mar 19 22:47:50 CET 2015


Hi,
I am Prabhanshu Abhishek, second year undergraduate student at Indian
Institute of Technology,Kanpur (IIT Kanpur), studying Computer Science and
Engineering.

I am very much interested in the project GitHub/Development tools
integration under Gsoc'15.
I have given much thought on how it can be implemented, can i get feedback
on my implementation. The draft for the proposal:

Creating a tool that will take a thread from a Mailman mailing list and
turn it into a thread on a GitHub issue.

In short:
I propose to make a user interface which will be accessible to the list
administrator. If the administrator thinks that a thread or multiple
threads could be an issue for his/her development organisation's
repository, he/she can mark the thread for posting, and the backend will
process it with the GitHub API to send it to the repository as an issue.

In detail:
1) User interface: A simple webpage that will have an option to mark
threads and a send_to_github button which initiates the backend process to
convert the thread into a series of comments used to raise the issue.

2) Processing emails: The UI for the administrator will have an interface
to edit emails so as to discard any unwanted piece of the emails (such as
the reply emails containing the previous mails' conversation). The backend
process will also be able to do the initial work for this on its own (as
the previous mail conversation probably starts with ">").

3) Github API: The thread's subject will be, by default, used as the main
title for the issue, or the administrator can provide an alternate title.
The backend will find out which other emails are to be posted as comments
(as the emails header contains an "in reply to:" field). The tool will use
the administrator's GitHub username as the creator of the issue. It will
use OAuth2 authentication with GitHub. The issue comment will contain
content of the email within the original mailing list thread. The tool will
use this information to post the issue to the GitHub repository's issue
tracker, using the GitHub API.
Actually, the user interface can be made available to all the users
subscribed to that mailing list.

4) The backend will be written in Python, which will interact with the REST
API and the GitHub APIs to do all its work.

I have some specific questions also, like:
Should this be a standalone web interface, or should it be a plugin for
HyperKitty or Postorius, or should it be a command-line tool.

Hoping for some feedback on the proposal'draft.

Also,
I think there is no mentor specified to the project, so, i want to ask if
some of you might be interested in this project.

Thanks,
Prabhanshu Abhishek


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