roundup 1.4.17

A simple-to-use and -install issue-tracking system with command-line, web and e-mail interfaces. Highly customisable.

I’m proud to release version 1.4.17 of Roundup which introduces some minor features and, as usual, fixes some bugs:

Features:

• Allow declaration of default_values for properties in schema.

• Add explicit “Search” permissions, see Security Fix below.

• Add “lookup” method to xmlrpc interface (Ralf Schlatterbeck)

• Multilinks can be filtered by combining elements with AND, OR and NOT operators now. A javascript gui was added for “keywords”, see issue2550648. Developed by Sascha Teichmann; funded by Intevation. (Bernhard Reiter)

• Factor MailGW message parsing into a separate class, thanks to John Kristensen who did the major work in issue2550576 – I wouldn’t have attempted it without this. Fixes issue2550576. (Ralf)

• Now if the -C option to roundup-mailgw specifies “issue” this refers to an issue-like class. The real class is determined from the configured default class, or the -c option to the mailgw, or the class resulting from mail subject parsing. We also accept multiple -S options for the same class now. (Ralf)

• Optimisation: Late evaluation of Multilinks (only in rdbms backends): previously we materialized each multilink in a Node – this creates an SQL query for each multilink (e.g. ‘files’ and ‘messages’ for each line in the issue index display) – even if the multilinks aren’t displayed. Now we compute multilinks only if they’re accessed (and keep them cached).

• Add a filter_iter similar to the existing filter call. This feature is considered experimental. This is currently not used in the web-interface but passes all tests for the filter call except sorting by Multilinks (which isn’t supported by SQL and isn’t a sane concept anyway). When using filter_iter instead of filter this saves a lot of SQL queries: Filter returns only the IDs of Nodes in the database, the additional content of a Node has to be fetched in a separate SQL call. The new filter_iter also returns the IDs of Nodes (one by one, it’s an iterator) but pre-seeds the cache with the content of the Node. The information needed for seeding the cache is retrieved in the same SQL query as the ids.

Fixed:

• Security Fix: Add a check for search-permissions: now we allow searching for properties only if the property is readable without a check method or if an explicit search permission (see above unter “Features) is given for the property. This fixes cases where a user doesn’t have access to a property but can deduce the content by crafting a clever search, group or sort query. see doc/upgrading.txt for how to fix your trackers! (Ralf Schlatterbeck).

• Range support in roundup-server so large files can be served, e.g. media files on iOS/iPads; issue2550694. (Bernhard Reiter; Thanks to Jon C. Thomason for the patch.)

• Fix search for xapian 1.2 issue2550676 (Bernhard Reiter; Thanks to Olly Betts for providing the patch.)

• Some minor typos fixed in doc/customizing.txt (Thanks Ralf Hemmecke).

• XML-RPC documentation now linked from the docs/index (Bernhard Reiter).

• Fix setting of sys.path when importing schema.py, fixes issue2550675, thanks to Bryce L Nordgren for reporting. (Ralf Schlatterbeck)

• clear the cache on commit for rdbms backends: Don’t carry over cached values from one transaction to the next (there may be other changes from other transactions) see new ConcurrentDBTest for a read-modify-update cycle that fails with the old caching behavior. (Ralf Schlatterbeck)

• Fix incorrect setting of template in customizing.txt example action, patch via issue2550682 (thanks John Kristensen)

• Configuration issue: On some postgresql 8.4 installations (notably on debian squeeze) the default template database used for database creation doesn’t match the needed character encoding UTF8 – a new config option ‘template’ in the rdbms section now allows specification of the template. You know you need this option if you get the error message: psycopg2.DataError: new encoding (UTF8) is incompatible with the encoding of the template database (SQL_ASCII) HINT: Use the same encoding as in the template database, or use template0 as template. (Ralf Schlatterbeck)

• Fixed bug in mailgw refactoring, patch issue2550697 (thanks Hubert Touvet)

• Fix Password handling security issue2550688 (thanks Joseph Myers for reporting and Eli Collins for fixing) – this fixes all observations by Joseph Myers except for auto-migration of existing passwords.

• Add new config-option ‘migrate_passwords’ in section ‘web’ to auto-migrate passwords at web-login time. Default for the new option is “yes” so if you don’t want that passwords are auto-migrated to a more secure password scheme on user login, set this to “no” before running your tracker(s) after the upgrade.

• Add new config-option ‘password_pbkdf2_default_rounds’ in ‘main’ section to configure the default parameter for new password generation. Set this to a higher value on faster systems which want more security. Thanks to Eli Collins for implementing this (see issue2550688).

• Fix documentation for roundup-server about the ‘host’ parameter as suggested in issue2550693, fixes the first part of this issue. Make ‘localhost’ the new default for this parameter, note the upgrading documentation of changed behaviour. We also deprecate the empty host parameter for binding to all interfaces now (still left in for compatibility). Thanks to Toni Mueller for providing the first version of this patch and discussing implementations.

• Fixed bug in filter_iter refactoring (lazy multilinks), in rare cases this would result in duplicate multilinks to the same node. We’re now going the safe route and doing lazy evaluation only for read-only access, whenever updates are done we fetch everything.

If you’re upgrading from an older version of Roundup you must follow the “Software Upgrade” guidelines given in the maintenance documentation.

Roundup requires python 2.4 or later (but not 3+) for correct operation.

To give Roundup a try, just download (see below), unpack and run:

roundup-demo

Release info and download page:

http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/roundup

Source and documentation is available at the website:

http://roundup-tracker.org/

Mailing lists - the place to ask questions:

http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=31577

About Roundup

Roundup is a simple-to-use and -install issue-tracking system with command-line, web and e-mail interfaces. It is based on the winning design from Ka-Ping Yee in the Software Carpentry “Track” design competition.

Note: Ping is not responsible for this project. The contact for this project is [e-mail].

Roundup manages a number of issues (with flexible properties such as “description”, “priority”, and so on) and provides the ability to:

1. submit new issues,

2. find and edit existing issues, and

3. discuss issues with other participants.

The system will facilitate communication among the participants by managing discussions and notifying interested parties when issues are edited. One of the major design goals for Roundup that it be simple to get going. Roundup is therefore usable “out of the box” with any python 2.4+ (but not 3+) installation. It doesn’t even need to be “installed” to be operational, though an install script is provided.

It comes with two issue tracker templates (a classic bug/feature tracker and a minimal skeleton) and four database back-ends (anydbm, sqlite, mysql and postgresql).