[Mailman-Developers] Gsoc'16 Project:GitLab/development tools integration

[Simon Hanna]

Note that these are my personal thoughts and nothing official. :-)

On 03/21/2016 10:50 PM, Shubham Ghiya wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> My name is Shubham Ghiya, a 3 year undergraduate from IIIT-Hyderbad.
> 
> I was going through the GSOC 2016 ideas and found "GitLab/development tools
> integration" project interesting.
> 
> I have setup the mailman and postorius and have tried my hand on some bugs
> also.Right now,I am learning more about hyperkitty which will help me learn
> more about the implementation details for the project.I have a good
> understanding of functionality of various modules and how mailman works. I
> have also read the chapter on mailman by Barry Warsaw to understand mailman
> in a much better way.
> 
> For the project "GitLab/development tools integration" I figured out that
> we are expected to create a tool that will extract the contents of the mail
> on a mailing list and create an issue of it on Gitlab/Github through
> various Gitlab/hub API's and python libraries.
> 
> 1. For the extraction part Hyperkitty will be used from where we can
> extract and parse the contents of the mail.
Please note that it should be a thread not just one message of a thread.
> 
> 2. For creating an issue on Gitlab, different API's will be used which I
> have to figure out yet.
It would be nice if you design your project so that it can be used with different
providers/API's. You could add supporting Github, launchpad, etc. to your stretch goals.
> 
> I know the above points are a very naive and a basic approach. Please tell
> me if I am thinking in the right direction and how to proceed further.
I think the most challenging part is to implement a UI that let's the users decide what gets
included in the issue and what not. (Which messages of the thread, which parts of a message,
attachments, ...)

As this is only targeted at lists used by developers it would be nice if the plugin for hyperkitty
is optional meaning you don't need to have it installed at all and if you have it installed, you
don't need to enable it for a list.

There might be other practical ways to trigger the creation of an issue.
For instance by including specific headers in the email or putting a special string in the subject.
I don't think you need to do that, but if you want something challenging you can think about it.