(For Those Who Care About An Introduction: Christine Spang gave a talk during DebConf10 about Simple Defects (SD), and blogged about it later on.)

Folks maintaining Debian packages are already able to partially-clone bugs.debian.org’s bug database thanks to the local-debbugs tool. But what about upstream’s bug tracker? Taking a (shamelessly self-centered) example: X.Org packages are hosted on FreeDesktop.org’s bugzilla. Thanks to SD, it’s possible to fetch bugs from there as well! Here’s the obligatory picture:

This means that you can browse/search them locally while being offline (or well-connected, but without having to use that !$\§%$^ bugzilla web interface). Many of the replica types support both reading and writing, meaning you can also queue some changes locally, and push them later. Currently, sd help sync says that read-write support is available for RT, Hiveminder, Trac, Google Code, and GitHub. There’s also read-only support for redmine. Debbugs is being worked on, see Christine’s blog post about her SD talk for more info.

Given there was no support for bugzilla, I had a quick look and reported my findings. The main point being: \o/ Bugzilla’s XMLRPC \o/

A little while later (I’m not exactly fluent in Perl…), I came up with a tentatively-mergeable branch adding preliminary read-only support for bugzilla. There’s still a lot of work, but I’m trying to work on it on a regular basis, adding support for more properties, and fixing bugs (tests should be written some day, too).