Read-only API for retrieving Trac data

[laymonage]

Per discussion in django/code.djangoproject.com#198 (comment).

The same XmlRpcPlugin for Trac that we removed in django/code.djangoproject.com#198 was also responsible for the JSON RPC (/jsonrpc endpoint). The endpoint seems useful for extracting data to gain insights, e.g.

• the "Who contributed to Django X.Y?" project by Katie from DjangoCon Europe 2022: https://github.com/glasnt/dceu2022-sprints-work
• demo by Tobias from this gist: https://gist.github.com/rixx/422392d2aa580b5d286e585418bf6915

Instead of restoring the old API, which relies on an old Trac plugin and does not give us full control over the output, we probably want to create our own API.

There is a draft PR at #1656.

For now, I think it's OK to limit the scope of the API to be read-only. If we find use cases for a write API, we can file a separate issue.

[thibaudcolas]

I’d love to see this happen, as this kind of API endpoint seems to be the only reliable way to check people’s commenting and triaging activity. For example, this would help in assessing people’s eligibility as candidates for Steering Council elections, as triaging contributions are one of the areas where we acknowledge candidates’ work:

Reviewing pull requests and/or triaging Django project tickets

So I need a way to assess how often someone helps by:

• Accepting or closing tickets
• Sharing git bisect results to find a regression commit
• Answering questions
• Linking tickets

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In the meantime I’m using site:code.djangoproject.com inurl:/ticket/ "by Person Name" in Google to find comments, but it’s proving unreliable. I might scrape the tickets instead.

[sarahboyce]

An idea was discussed in the DSF office hours to have a GitHub action for django/django which would add labels to PRs based off their status in Trac to acheive easy filtering within GitHub

So for example, adding a "needs review" label (which would check the ticket from the title and needs_docs=0, needs_tests=0, patch_needs_improvement=no), a "needs tests" label etc.

Having an api which includes these flags for tickets would be really great 💚

I don't mind working on this but would appreciate an agreement on what would be the minimum work required to get this accepted