[Python-Dev] Roundup / Python Tracker enhancements

[Daniel (ajax) Diniz]

  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