Re: Gnus backend for GitHub/GitLab?

["Adam Sjøgren" <asjo@koldfront.dk>]

Lars writes:

> Adam Sjøgren <asjo@koldfront.dk> writes:
>
>> It hit me that accessing comments on GitHub/GitLab seems like an obvious
>> candidate for a Gnus backend.
>>
>>   * GitHub/GitLab-instance: a Gnus server
>>   * Each project you're interested in: a subscribed group
>>   * Each issue: a top-level article
>>   * Each comment: replies to issues/other comments
>>   * Label, State ...: headers that can be edited
>
> That would indeed be nice, but the main problem with the APIs that
> Gitlab provides is that...  they're very chatty and aren't geared
> towards "show me what's changed since <foo>" (which is what Gnus thrives
> on).

I think this is what Michael Albinus addressed - in an email that seems to
be stuck in the mailing list flow somewhere - where he wrote:

    GET /projects/<id>/issues?scope=all&updated_after=2019-11-19T13:22:55.640Z

    <id> is your project id.

    Best regards, Michael.

That might be useful?

Anyway, I intend to use this against quite small projects (i.e. not
Emacs sized, but more in the thousands of issues).

> This means that you have to issue a whole bunch of API requests just to
> get the basic info, which means that things get very s-l-o-w.

Are you thinking of having to fetch all comments for all issues again
and again, or?

I *am* worried about ending up with yet-another-nnslashdot backend,
which is so dog slow that it is unusable...

> But I've just skimmed the Gitlab API documentation; perhaps it has
> what's needed to make things go fast.

Alternatively I could build a "gitlab_to_nntpd", but I think the
integration (especially with changing labels and status by editing
articles, rather than superseding), would be easier/better if it is a
backend that Gnus knows that editing directly works for?

Another thing I was thinking was that maybe nngitlab could build upon
the code in Magit Forge that already exists to talk to the APIs... but
given my level of familiarity with elisp, I might just start attempting
the simplest possible.


  Best regards,

    Adam

-- 
 "I wish *I* was a tiger!"                                     Adam Sjøgren
 "A common lament."                                       asjo@koldfront.dk