any way to synchonise between Redmine(or other issue trackers) and a plain text todo list?

Question

I would like to access a Redmine taskbase via a simple text based interface - wondering what the shortest path would be (minimum investment/development).

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Right now, this boils down to 2 use cases/phases:

1. Import a batch of tasks into Redmine from simple, wiki-based, bulletted TODO list, ie. plain text content. This is more of a one-off task, so a quick and dirty solution would be fine.

2. Later, some smooth two-way synchrosation would be great.. E.g. edit loads of tasks via some friendly plain text (or XML) in an editor, or scripting where I could manipulate all of them with simple text processing; then synchronise with Redmine and commit them back.

Any ideas on the easiest way to achieve these?

I'd prefer an external solution (i.e not touching the server), especially for the one-off import case; something like a neat IDE/editor/client, or a standalone Ruby script (e.g using the RM API). If an appropriate RM plugin would be available, I would not resist giving it a try (can get root access from our lovely IT support:).. Current ideas:

• Emacs/Org-mode, looks like a great combination of a cool task manager UI and full plain text power. It seems rich enough to capture tags, states as well. This artice looks promising Orgmode and Roundup: Bridging public bugtrackers and local tasklists, although not exactly a perfect match.
• org-mode parser in Ruby, could be used in an script with redmine-api access, or - worst case(for me, right now)- in newly developed RM plugin.. This looks like a good start: org-ruby
• export RM->XML, process file, import XML->RM... not sure if this is supported? I guess it's always possible to talk to the DB directly, but I'd prefer to avoid that.

Actually, I'm also interested a similar solution for Bugzilla.

Answer 1

At the simplest level, you could write a RM/Rails plugin that parses an Org-Mode task list, updating corresponding issues in the RM Model.

Equally, you can build a view for Redmine (again as a Rails plugin) to generate an org list of the current (or subset of) issues.

For Bugzilla I think you would be best off using the XML-RPC interface to do your issue comparison/update sync, so you'd have to take a very different approach from Redmine.

If you have any specific questions, please update your question, it's quite broad at the moment.

Update

At the moment, there are a few plugins which will probably help you figure out your solution, for example Nick Boltons xml import and Martin Liu's Redmine CSV Import Plugin but neither of these are going to completely solve the problem for you, just give you some useful starting point.

On the other hand, If you write a script that interacts with Redmine's REST api, you don't need it to be in any specific lanugage, in fact you could do it in Emacs-lisp, if the target users of the script are all Emacs aware, then this might well be the best way to do the job. (it would certainly be the most appealing option to me.)

Answer 2

Maybe this can be useful: https://github.com/fukamachi/redmine-el