Showstopper in the RPM submission procesdure

[Eric S. Raymond]

I have spent significant portions of the last couple of days trying to
weap my mind around what Fedora is doing.  Let me start off by saying
that I think the direction of the project is wonderful and much
needed.  As a system administrator managing three boxes, I love the
prospect of being able to use apt-get or yum to continuously upgrade
my systems without having to go through periodic CD shuffles and
reboots.  Thus, I've joined fedora-devel to help.

However, at the moment there is at least one serious practical problem
that loses me as a package contributor.  That is the use of Bugzilla
(or any other method that requires manual click-and-confirm) for RPM
submission.  Most people maintain one or two packages at most; they
can live with a manual submission process.  At last count, I
maintained thirty-seven packages -- thus, I can't.  (This is also why
I don't publish through SourceForge.)

What I need is to be able to write an "upload" script for each of my
projects *once* (per project) that remote-scripts the RPM submission
process and all other things I need to do to publish a release.  So,
what I need from Fedora is for there to be a submission front end
(call it 'fedora-submit') which, given a collection of RPMS as
arguments, does in a batch mode all that is necessary to upload them
and put them on a submission queue at fedora.  It is OK if
fedora-submit requires additional metadata as long as it can all be
specified at start of run by command-line switches.

I asked about this on the IRC channel and was told that Bugzilla has
an XML-RPC interface.  If so, writing fedora-submit as an XML-RPC
client ought not be too difficult; I would be surprised if it required
more than 150-200 lines of Python.

I am actually willing to write this myself, if anyone can point me at 
documentation for the XML-RPC interface to Bugzilla and is willing to 
answer questions about places where the documentation is inadequate.
In the process, I would be willing to help improve the (presently 
inadequate) documentation on the submission procedure.

In case it's not obvious, I think the result ought to ship as part of
fedora-core in order to reduce the entry barriers for independent 
packagers as much as possible.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>