Using Trac to Participate in EasyPush Development

This document explains how to use this website to participate in EasyPush development.

Project URL

The EasyPush development web-site can be accessed using the following

 http://wiki.deeproot.in/EasyPush/

This will load the main project website. This site is powered by a web-based project maangement tool called  Trac.

Using the EasyPush Trac web-site

As you would be able to see after logging in, the EasyPush Trac project consists of some major links on the left. Here are some descriptions what you can do with Trac:

Wiki

Clicking on the Wiki link will take you to the EasyPush project wiki. A wiki is a freely editable web-site that makes it possible to author and store content without having to learn or know HTML markup. Moreover, content can be developed over the Internet collaboratively by multiple people. Changes to any page are recorded. Hence, it is always possible to see who made changes to which page and what those changes were.

We will use the Wiki section to store all documentation about the project.

View Tickets / New Ticket

Tickets are a feature that can be used in two ways: As a means of specifying work to be done and as a means of tracking or reporting defects or requesting enhancements in EasyPush.

To report a new issue with the EasyPush, you can simply click on the New Ticket link in the menubar and fill in information in the corresponding form. The View Ticket link lets you look at existing tickets grouped in a variety of ways.

Reporting Issues or Requesting Changes

You have two easy ways of reporting issues or problems with EasyPush or suggesting enhancements and changes. You can either send an email to the mailing list or you could come here and open a New Ticket. Opening a new ticket, vis-a-vis reporting problems over the mailing list has certain advantages, though.

The tickets functionality in Trac lets all of us track progress on various tasks related to EasyPush development - whether is it fixing small problem, developing major features or documenting various aspects of EasyPush. Opening a tickets gives a unique ID to the issue you are reporting.

Here are the steps to follow to open a new ticket with EasyPush:

1. Fill in your email address in the Your email or username field.

If you are going to be participating in EasyPush development regularly, it would be more useful to  register an account for yourself. Once you login, your username will be use automatically and you won't have to type anything here at all.

On the other hand, if you are reporting just a one-off issue, you could just type in your email address here. You also leave this field to its default value of anonymous. But then we would not be able to get back to you with more details or notify you once things are sorted out.

2. The Short Summary field should be used to include a one line description of the problem. This is the text that will show up in search results, in ticket reports, in the subject fields of email alerts, in RSS feeds and so on. A good single line description will ensure that anyone looking at the ticket or email will immediately understand what type of issue you are trying to report.

3. EasyPush Trac supports a Ticket Type field. Available ticket types include: defect, enhancement or task. If you are reporting a problem or bug with EasyPush, please set the ticket type to defect. If you are requesting an enhancement or suggesting a change, please set the ticket type to enhancement. The task ticket type can be used to report various generic Easyush related tasks.

4. The 'Full description' field is used to include all other information about the issue you are reporting. You can type in a detailed description of the problem or enhancement. In case of a crash or an error, you can even copy & paste the exact error message into this field along with other useful information like what you were doing when you got the error, how to replicate the problem and anything else that you might like or need to tell us.

If you have taken a screenshot of the screen when the error happened, you could also attach the screenshot image by enabling the I have files to attach to this ticket. In case you are attaching a file, we will earnestly request that you limit the attachment file type to image formats like .jpg, .png, .bmp in case of screenshots or content formats like PDF, Plain Text or HTML.

5. While filing the ticket you should also set at least the following ticket properties:
   1. Priority - What priority would you want to allocate to the ticket?
   2. Component - Choose which component the ticket is related to.
   3. Version - Choose the version of EasyPush where you encountered the problem.

6. Once you're done filling in these details, you can should click on Submit Ticket button to save the ticket. You will get an email with the ticket contents along with the ticket number over email.

The general convention is to open us a new ticket for each issue unless most issues are regarding the same component and too small to have separate tickets dedicated to them.

Timeline

The Timeline link allows you to view recent happennings in the project. Happennings cover everything about the project - newtickets being added (or resolved or updated), changes to the source code, changes to the wiki and so on.

You can use this link to track all sorts of activity. Each type of change (wiki page, ticket, source code) is denoted by a separate icon along with a short summary of the change. In case of tickets, what is shown is the title of the ticket. In case of a source code change (known as 'Changeset'), it would be a short description of the changes (descriptions would be put in by the person making a change to the source code). In case of a wiki change, it will show a link to a 'diff' which shows the difference between the previous and current version of the wiki page.

Since all changes are ordered by date, it would be possible for you to know and track exactly how much progress was made on a specific day.

Activity here is also trackable using a RSS feed aggregator like Mozilla Firefox (via its 'live bookmarks' feature). To do so, you can click on the RSS Feed icon in your browser's location bar.

The full URL for the RSS Feed of the EasyPush project is:

    http://wiki.deeproot.in/EasyPush/timeline?milestone=on&ticket=on&wiki=on&max=50&daysback=90&format=rss

Roadmap

This is one of the most useful components of Trac. This gives you a macro-level picture of the whole project. The theory is that each ticket that is registered with Trac contributes to the achievement of some milestone in the project. To this end, each ticket has a Milestone property denoting the time by which it has to be completed.

EasyPush development is divided into a series of releases aka. milestones. Each milestone will deliver certain incremental functionality and fixes. Functionality, feature-set and goal for that milestone will be displayed on the roadmap page. A milestone's pending work is determined by number of tickets that have their milestone property set to the specific value.

Clicking on a milestone name lets you look at the milestone in greater detail. You know who has to do how much work and for which component most work is planned / pending and so on.

Browse Source

This link takes you to the source code browser and lets you view the source code of the project. Using the source code browser, you can view not only the current status of the code, by also its past past revisions, changes over a period of time and so on.

This source code is all that will ever be required to deploy and run the EasyPush Server Manager on a deepOfix Messaging Server.