Comment 4 for bug 37392

I asked about how to add support myself on an Answers thread. From there, Christian Reis said:

"So what Launchpad normally does it pull data from the bugtracker, ideally in a structured manner (XML, CSV, etc), and ideally obtaining information for multiple bugs in a single HTTP request."

I doubt their tracker supports that; I've emailed the webmaster asking about it and offering to write them a module myself. (It seems rather straightforward, and I know the language their site is written in.)

"In some cases, such as SourceForge and Google code, there is no structured output and we need to screen-scrape a bug at a time, which is inefficient and annoys the server admins."

Hopefully the server admin there will feel the same way and either write the specified module or let me do it. In the meantime, screen-scraping is pretty straightforward:

$ curl "http://www.cups.org/str.php?L2780" 2>/dev/null|egrep "^<tr><th align='right' valign='top' nowrap>"|egrep '(Status|Priority)'|sed -e 's#<[^>]*>##g'
Status:5 - New
Priority:3 - Moderate, e.g. unable to compile the software

Like any screen-scraping, it's brittle and liable to change if they update with the site, but it could work as a fallback if the webmaster(s) don't want to add an extra customized interface.

"We also need to know if the bugtracker accepts anonymous connections or not."

I didn't have to log in (I don't have an account there), and all my testing works fine just using curl from the command line. Is there anything else needed?