Changelog entry for 5.8.0

 - Legacy-Id: 8754

Author: levkowetz

changelog

@@ -1,3 +1,43 @@
+ietfdb (5.8.0) ietf; urgency=medium
+
+   This release introduces a machine-readable API to the datatracker database
+   content, based on Tastypie (https://django-tastypie.readthedocs.org/).
+
+   Currently the API is set to read-only; but Tastypie does support
+   fine-grained control of create, read, update, and delete permissions, so if
+   we find that it makes sense at some point, we can open up for authenticated
+   access to more than just reading database content.
+
+   The details of which tables and objects from the database that are exposed
+   in the API are controlled by a series of resources.py files; one per Django
+   app.  By default, no data is exposed; in order to expose a table, the
+   resources file must contain a resource specification, in the form of a
+   python class which determines which table fields should be exposed, and how.
+
+   Since we want to expose almost all the database content, rather than only a
+   few selected tables, there is a lot of code which needs to be specified
+   (more than 200 classes, with almost 2000 lines, at this writing) in order
+   to make data available through the API.
+
+   Rather than manually type out all of the needed classes, a management
+   command (ietf/manage.py makeresources) has been added which will generate
+   the needed resource classes in the resources.py files automatically.
+   Existing classes will be left intact, though, which makes it feasible to
+   hand tune the classes if needed, but still auto-generate resource classes
+   when new tables are added.
+
+   In addition to read access to the exposed tables and objects, the Tastypie
+   API provides support for automated discovery of the available tables.  Starting
+   at the URL https://datatracker.ietf.org/api/v1/, the returned machine-readable
+   data provides URL information for all available API endpoints, which makes it
+   possible to recurse down to all available data.
+
+   Data is currently provided in JSON and XML format.  Adding new formats is
+   fairly easy, if it should be found desriable.
+
+ -- Henrik Levkowetz <henrik@levkowetz.com>  18 Dec 2014 16:06:05 +0000
+
+
 ietfdb (5.7.4) ietf; urgency=medium
 
   This release contains the datatracker bugfixes and enhancements from the