>>>> When running e.g. `reportbug -N 853037`, a bunch of base64 is >>>> displayed instead of the actual content of the messages.
> Could the BTS SOAP interface be changed to return the decoded message > body of signed messages? Being able to deal with all other kinds of > complex MIME messages is not really necessary. I've been looking at the tools interacting here and am not yet sure where the bug is. Python-debianbts, when retrieving a bug log via the BTS SOAP interface, receives each buglog element (message) already split into header and body [get_bug_log]. If the body is base64-encoded, it gets decoded before the function returns the bug log. Python-debianbts also attempts to reconstruct something resembling the original full message by using the feedparser, and includes that in the buglog elements (dicts) it returns. I am not sure how reliable that message reconstruction is, but I suspect it is not perfect. [get_bug_log]: https://github.com/venthur/python-debianbts/blob/master/debianbts/debianbts.py#L298 Now I'd like to understand the constraints better under which python-debianbts is operating: What exactly is the BTS supposed to deliver via SOAP as the message body part of the bug log? If the message is a simple text/plain email, is the body expected to be already decoded or not? If the message is some MIME/multipart construct, is the body then expected to be the main text message part only or should it just be everything that is not part of the main message headers? I've been trying to look at the debbugs code to find the answer to these questions, but with limited success so far. Looking at lib/Debbugs/SOAP.pm in subroutine get_bug_log, it uses Debbugs::MIME's parse function to split the messages into header and body: https://salsa.debian.org/debbugs-team/debbugs/-/blob/master/lib/Debbugs/SOAP.pm#L249 `parse` in turn uses `getmailbody`, which definitely tries to extract the main text message part and does not just dump everything that isn't part of the primary message headers. So either something does not work as expected there, or I'm simply looking at the wrong code and should be looking somewhere else. Ideas? In the meantime I have come up with a workaround for this in reportbug, but it would still be useful to know if everything else is working as intended or not.
