so what i'm wondering is: is there an easily parseable or structured
interface (xmlrpc, soap, read-only JSON export, whatever) to the php.net bts
that could be used to get a bug's information? or would such a bts-link
service need to resort to scraping the page for a particular bug's status?
Not sure if this really helps you (and I agree that the bug system really needs some sort of better programmatic interface), but you can translate most bugs.php.net pages into rss (which is easier to parse than HTML... usually (-: ) by prepending rss/ to the URL. This useful for reading.
For example:
http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=46944
becomes:
http://bugs.php.net/rss/bug.php?id=46944
and:
http://bugs.php.net/search.php?boolean=0&limit=All&order_by=status&direction=ASC&cmd=display&status=Open&bug_type[]=Documentation+problem&bug_age=0
becomes:
http://bugs.php.net/rss/search.php?boolean=0&limit=All&order_by=status&direction=ASC&cmd=display&status=Open&bug_type[]=Documentation+problem&bug_age=0
S