[ghns] ghns status, api, etc.

[Jeremy Whiting]

Hey all, especially Frank and Josef,

I'm wondering about the state of ghns as it is now.  The KNewStuff2 client 
library has been dormant for a long time (mostly because of my lack of time 
probably) but I believe I could easily get it up-to-date with respect to ghns 
functionality (viewing comments, reading comments, searching, voting, even 
uploading, etc.) if we can clearly define a common api for interacting with web 
services. (Or even discovering the functionality of different api's 
automatically maybe?)

One example is voting, in Frank's opendesktop REST api there's one method to 
vote for items, by passing an id, and a vote, and authenticating.  In hotstuff 
there's a different api using soap and dxs to do the same thing.  This is 
troublesome to the client because it basically has to know and understand both 
protocols/api's to work with both.  I'm wondering if we could have on each web 
service an xml file or something that clearly defines the api and protocols 
used.  This would make it fairly simple for the client to support both 
protocols/api's.  This could also make it fairly simple for sites that provide 
only artwork/other data via rss feeds to provide an xml file explaining it's 
rss feed format so KNewStuff2 could use them as providers also.

Just wanting to get the ball rolling on some collaboration/consensus to get 
things working better and get missing functionality implemented.

Jeremy