Tentative roadmap for bzr web interfaces

[Martin Albisetti]

Hello  :)

I *might* be getting a big chunk of free/extra time for the following
months, and after discussing it a bit with poolie, we agreed that it
might be best invested into working on a bzr web interface (mainly,
loggerhead).
So, I tried and put together what my plan was, and see what other people think.

It's on the wiki so feel free to add/edit directly, on addition to
discussing in the list.

http://bazaar-vcs.org/WebInterface/Roadmap



== Web Interface ==
The first thing I'd like to do is to develop an independent web
interface, that can be plugged on top of any backend (loggerhead, php,
integrated into bzr, webserve, etc), using standard json and a nice
AJAX frontend which can fetch information asynchronously, and possibly
cache some of the information client-side to speed up expensive
operations and minimize server usage.

I'd also like to add more ways to view logs, like a tree view which
shows merges in a better way, with option expansion of each piece of
information (commit message, files changes, parents, committer, etc).

This interface should reflect much more information on the state of
the repository itself (info, status), and I'd like to make it flexible
enough to be able to make use of some plugins, like stats, which would
look really nice on a web interface  :)

Another feature I'd like to put in is exporting plain HTML output, to
be able to use, well, with whatever people need it for, but
integrating into some current software sounds like a probable one.
I'd like to aim at a really good modular web interface, that can be
later on used for any backend, and expanded by plugins which provide
more/better information.

== Make installing easy ==
Currently, installing loggerhead is a real pain, and there are quite a
few hoops to jump through.
I haven't looked into it, but it might be worth making it not depend
explicitly on python 2.4 (I'm not sure why it does, maybe Michael can
shed some light on this), and build a deb for it.
It might get more people using it, consequently more chances of
getting contributors.

Another important step, and we discussed this at the sprint, is having
a lightweight http server integrated into the bzr core, so I'd like to
look into different existing options and evaluate what it would take.


== Integrating the new Interface ==
Loggerhead will need quite a lot of work to use the new interface, so
a big chunk of time will have to be spent re-working bits of the
backend.
On top of that, I'd like to finally release the PHP version of it, and
see how far the lightweight version of the server got.



Cheers!

Martin