openssh unix dev - Mar 2010 - Help required for Research

Hi,

I am a graduate student at Oregon State University pursuing my Masters
degree in Computer Science. I am interested in conducting research on
the bug reports in many open source projects. I would like to study how
the projects manage their bug reports and identifying how Bugzilla and
similar bug repository systems could be improved to facilitate this
process. I have a bunch of Perl scripts which parses the XML format of
bug reports from the Bugzilla repository. In order to do this research,
I need access to your bug repository. Instead of downloading your bug
reports through Bugzilla or your web interface, I was hoping you might
instead send me the bug files (in XML format) in a zip file instead if
you have access to these. This will reduce the load on your servers, and
save me a great deal of work. You could use this email address for
sending the zipped bug files. Your help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Sincerely,
Nitin

On Sun, 21 Mar 2010, Nitin Mohan wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am a graduate student at Oregon State University pursuing my Masters
> degree in Computer Science. I am interested in conducting research on
> the bug reports in many open source projects. I would like to study how
> the projects manage their bug reports and identifying how Bugzilla and
> similar bug repository systems could be improved to facilitate this
> process. I have a bunch of Perl scripts which parses the XML format of
> bug reports from the Bugzilla repository. In order to do this research,
> I need access to your bug repository. Instead of downloading your bug
> reports through Bugzilla or your web interface, I was hoping you might
> instead send me the bug files (in XML format) in a zip file instead if
> you have access to these. This will reduce the load on your servers, and
> save me a great deal of work. You could use this email address for
> sending the zipped bug files. Your help is greatly appreciated.
Do you have some instructions on how to generate these extracts?

-d

Quoting Damien Miller <djm at mindrot.org>:
> On Sun, 21 Mar 2010, Nitin Mohan wrote:
>
>> In order to do this research,
>> I need access to your bug repository. Instead of downloading your bug
>> reports through Bugzilla or your web interface, I was hoping you might
>> instead send me the bug files (in XML format) in a zip file instead if
>> you have access to these. This will reduce the load on your servers,
and
>> save me a great deal of work. You could use this email address for
>> sending the zipped bug files. Your help is greatly appreciated.
>
> Do you have some instructions on how to generate these extracts?
>
As far as I know, Bugzilla has a link at the bottom of every bug  
description which gives us an option to convert that bug desc page  
into a XML. So, going through every bug in the Bugzilla repository and  
then convert them into XML should do the job, but its too laborious.  
Thats why I wanted to ask for your suggestion whether some other way  
exists to retrieve the bugs as XML.

Thanks for your reply.

Nitin

Nitin Mohan wrote:
> As far as I know, Bugzilla has a link at the bottom of every bug
> description which gives us an option to convert that bug desc page
> into a XML. So, going through every bug in the Bugzilla repository and
> then convert them into XML should do the job, but its too laborious.
> Thats why I wanted to ask for your suggestion whether some other way
> exists to retrieve the bugs as XML.
>
> Thanks for your reply.
>
> Nitin

Laborious?

for n in `seq 1 100`; do
wget "https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?ctype=xml&id=$n"
-O
bug_$n.xml
done

Replace 100 with the number of bugs to parse, bugzilla.mindrot.org with
the bugzilla you want to crawl.

You can speed it up reusing the same connection:
(for n in `seq 1 100`; do
echo "https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?ctype=xml&id=$n"
done) | wget -i - -O bugs.xml

(that generates a concatenation of xmls, may work for your scripts or
may need some preprocessing)

Quoting Keisial <keisial at gmail.com>:
>
> Laborious?
>
> for n in `seq 1 100`; do
> wget
"https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?ctype=xml&id=$n" -O
> bug_$n.xml
> done
>
> Replace 100 with the number of bugs to parse, bugzilla.mindrot.org with
> the bugzilla you want to crawl.
>
> You can speed it up reusing the same connection:
> (for n in `seq 1 100`; do
> echo
"https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?ctype=xml&id=$n"
> done) | wget -i - -O bugs.xml
>
> (that generates a concatenation of xmls, may work for your scripts or
> may need some preprocessing)
>
Wow! Thats a great suggestion. Will definitely try that out. Just the  
kind of suggestion I was looking for.

Thanks for the help.

Nitin