This proposal has two main goals: making the Python bug tracker more efficient for core developers and improving Roundup in areas that don't directly concern the PSF trackers. Most of the code would land in Roundup's repositories, but many instance-level changes would be specific to our tracker.
Justification Python Tracker Some feedback is necessary to find out unvoiced problems, shortcomings and RFEs core developers have in mind regarding the tracker. From my work on old issues and with a couple of meta-tracker tickets, I can highlight a few pain points. Quoting myself: [A] relevant time-sink consists of inadequacies of the current [tracker] interface. Many search features are hard to use or notice, among them date spans and entering multiple inputs as lists. Other search features are lacking, mostly simple boolean relations, e.g. those including more than one keyword, full search terms, type, component, etc. Besides searching, the lack of interfaces (and backend support) for selecting and working with multiple issues tends to waste considerable amounts of time. To that, I can add some RFEs and bugs with the email interface, support for third-party authentication and many possible UI improvements. See a list of these below. Roundup The project has suffered from lack of developer time for a while and has grown a list of important improvements that would help it's adoption and revitalize the community. Correct handling of different charsets, DB performance and alternative indexers and templating engines are examples of often requested features. Making Roundup a better tool for developers and end-users, with a productive community can only benefit the PSF.
Pre-Requisites and Status We have been working in this area recently, so many ideas are well developed, with a few fleshed out in great detail. Regarding the Python tracker, Martin is guiding my work on simple tracker issues, Brett gave us documents and many discussions about the issue handling workflow, Tennessee Leeuwenburg and R. David Murray are willing to triage issues and contribute to a better workflow. On the Roundup side, Stefan Seefeld and Richard Jones are leading new wave of features and fixes, with contributions from Tobias Herp, Bernhard Reiter and others.
Student With the caveat that I'm probably unable to assess this objectively, a student should be comfortable with Python and have a grasp of general bug/issue handling procedures. Familiarity with Roundup is a huge plus, but the code is newbie-friendly.
Mentors Under the condition that enough attention is given to Roundup itself, Stefan Seefeld is willing to mentor this proposal. I'll be available to help mentors and the student in many tasks. Martin von Löwis would be able to discuss many important parts of the work.
Deliverables: Patches for upstream Roundup and for the Python instance.
For a given proposal, a major goal should be declared, e.g. 'improve and clean up the infrastructure' or 'work on integration with third party services and tools'. Under that goal, task groups like 'refactor the different frontends' or 'implement VCS integration' should organize the developement effort in somewhat isolated steps.
Some suggested topics, with examples: * means the idea is well developed and suitable for implementation # means a simple task or group of tasks, easy to implement
Clean up and improve the base infrastructure Audit and fix any potential security issues * Fix support of diverse character encodings
Performance improvements Reduce the number of RDBMS calls Improve caching across requests
Improve end-user UI and features Enhance search abilities, better indexing Boolean operators Make forms easier to use and understand Support upload of multiple files in one request *# Support for third-party authentication, e.g. OpenID *
Add developer-focused features to Roundup Support for milestones, tasks, workgroups Integration with code review tools Integration with Rietveld * Update/implement [D]VCS integration SVN integration Mercurial integration Interface to continuous integration tools Buildbot
Administration enhancements Mass-update/batch-editing support *# UI for Class administration
Discussion of more detailed tasks and open issues on roundup-devel[5] is highly encouraged.
[1] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/roundup-devel