This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by the University of CaliforniaLawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract No. W-7405-Eng-48.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, P.O. Box 808, Livermore, CA 94551-0808

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A Tour of Roundup

Paul F. Dubois

AX-Division

Contributing Editor, IEEE Computing in Science and Engineering

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This talk is in increasing order of geekiness.

1.What is Roundup, and why is it useful?

2.A demo

3.Some technical / managerial details and suggestions

4.Special guest appearance: real geeks from NIF

“Wait for it” – Radar O’Reilly

If your question is more geeky than my current level, wait and see.

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Roundup is a versatile issue tracker.

“Issues” may represent:

• Bug reports,

• Wishes and features,

• FAQs,

• Reports,

• Handy files / examples,

• Notices to users or project members.

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Issues have many parts.

An issue

• Is classified by a priority,

• Annotated by a status and keywords,

• Can be assigned to someone,

• Can have attached files,

• Has an email mini-list of “nosy” people.

• Has a time-stamped audit trail.

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Users submit issues and follow ups by web or email.

• Users can send mail about issues to a support address, or reply to mail received from the tracker.

• Users can log on to the website to see / search / modify issues.

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Users manage their own details.

• Using the tracker, a user can change their password, email, phone number, name, etc.

• Registration can have email confirmation.

• Anonymous bug reports can be allowed, or not. Not.

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Choose your attitude toward the unwashed public.

• Allow anonymous users, or not, or with restrictions.

• Give different users different abilities.

• Show users with different privileges different views of the data.

Even public sites like Python’s tracker have found that anonymous bug reports are a bad idea.

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Nosy lists are Roundup’s big advantage.

• New comments about an issue generate mail to the issue’s “nosy list”.

• These custom mini-lists balance the amount of email each person gets.

• Artificial ‘mail list’ users can be added.

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The nosy lists are user managed.

• Starts with the issue’s author and anyone he adds.

• Those who comment on the issue are added.

• Anyone who gets “nosy” can add themselves.

• Anyone disinterested can remove themselves.

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You can email new issues to a “triage team”.

• This ensures that every new issue is seen by someone.

• The small reactor for this is in the customization manual, but just ask me and I’ll mail you mine.

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Roundup is easy to install and use.

• Download / install Python

• Download Roundup and install runtime. No compiling required, it is in pure Python.

• Any platform

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A tracker is created in two steps.

1. Creation: roundup-admin init• This populates the tracker with database and html templates.• Edit the configuration file to state your url and email, choose

some options.

2. Initialize: roundup-admin initialise.• Note the s, it is Australian• Edit and install server-ctl script.• Set up desired email gateway.

Execute server-ctl start

• Set up “keep-alive” cron job: server-ctl condstart

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You have choices*.

• A tracker has:– A database* (change what kind of db)– A database schema* (add more fields)– A set of html templates* (look and feel)– Detectors* (audit/react)– Extensions* (new, I don’t know them)

• All defaults are reasonable, but within very wide limits you can change almost everything.

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One server can manage many trackers.

• An organization can run one server that serves several different trackers.

• This makes the most sense if the different projects can agree on most customizations so that a base customization is then branched to the separate projects.

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You can add Python scripts that screen and react to changes.

• “Detectors” come in two flavors:

– Auditor: called when something is about to change, and gives you a chance to veto or modify it.

– Reactor: called after something has changed, gives you a chance to do something in response.

• The “nosy reactor” handles the nosy email, for example.

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Here are some of our customizations.

• Project name in corner of each page.

• Restricting assignment of issues to developers not users.

• Adding due dates for issues.

• Added priorities for FAQ, Notices.

• Special treatment of status reports.

• Customized (remembered) searches.

• Link to “news” synchronized with source control.

• Link to project documentation.

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We use our tracker for more than bugs and wishes.

• FAQ– An issue when it is closed can often become an FAQ. We just give the issues priority and status of “faq”.

• Status reports– Status reports have a keyword “Status Report” and their nosy lists don’t email.

– Each contributes their report to the current “issue”

– Instant archive of progress reports.

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Non-bug issues include features and wishes.

• Features

– Explanations of “how it is”, arguments about how it should be.

• Wishes

– User / developer requests for enhancement

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We have additional scripts that run periodically to enhance Roundup.

1. Email users a list of open issues assigned to them.

2. Email users a list of unassigned bugs.

3. Transfer comments made in source code submissions to the Roundup issues they pertain to, and close those issues if desired.

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A link to “project news” on the first page shows you our main-line news directory in the project source.

• HTML link from main page to a “news” subdirectory.

• The news subdirectory is updated periodically with the source control system’s “sync” to copy the “main/news” directory from source control.

• This news directory has documentation of the latest changes submitted by the author along with their source changes.

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Demo

• This is the demo that comes with Roundup. After installing Roundup, run it to be sure your installation works.

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The email sent can be replied to, and has a link to the issue.

From: "Michael R. Zika Kull Tracker" <kullsupport@llnl.gov>To: brantley1@llnl.gov, dubois1@llnl.gov, tbyang@llnl.govSubject: [issue925] Can we stop the code based on some conditional?Date: 26 Jul 2006 20:53:00 +0000

Michael R. Zika <zika@llnl.gov> added the comment:

<snip> contents omitted

_________________________________________Kull Issue Tracker <kullsupport@llnl.gov><https://bugzi.llnl.gov/kull/issue925>

Support address

Link to issue

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There are 3 ways to deploy the server.

• Stand-alone server on a blocked port, with proxy-pass from (possibly secure) web server. (See next slide)

• Stand-alone server on a public port.

• As a CGI in the web server.

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I like putting Roundup “behind” the web server.

1) User logs into https://myplace.llnl.gov/mytracker

2) Web server is configured with “proxy pass” to redirect this traffic tohttp://myplace.llnl.gov:8070/mytracker

3) Roundup server runs on blocked port 8070.

Root must configure the web server by adding two lines; everything else can be done as a “normal” user.

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An artificial user that owns roundup is a good idea.

• User “roundup” runs the server.

• Maintainers login as themselves, then sudo su roundup to “become” this user. This is thus a shared account without a shared password.

• User “roundup” runs the cron jobs for server-keep-alive, mail gateway, etc.

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There are two¹ ways to configure the email access.

• Get ‘mysupport@llnl.gov’ POP account.– Run roundup-mailgw every few minutes using a cron job to fetch mail from mail.llnl.gov.

• Use a mail alias on server’s machine that pipes mail into roundup-mailgw. – For classified servers, use this one. User “mail” and user “roundup” must be in a group.

¹I lied, there is a third way I can’t explain.

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Manage customizations with your source-control system.

• Main line: Roundup as shipped

• Branch to: Ours

• Modify Ours as desired and install tracker.

• When a new version of Roundup arrives, install it as changes to main line, then integrate main to “Ours”.

– Use merge tools to resolve conflicts

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The effort is proportional to the amount of customization.

• No backup needed except as normally done on the machine.

• Moving to a new machine is a small effort.

• The database can export / import csv files.

• Users do not seem to need much if any training.

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Customizing is probably a 200-level job.

• HTML -> TAL -> METAL languages just for the html area.

• Understanding of database basics.

• Python for the detectors.

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We love Roundup.

• Just the right amount of communication.

• For many developers, Roundup is their todo list.

• We think the email interface / nosy lists are the key. The first page displays the bug list without further action.

• History is captured, everything is searchable.