To: John A Meinel <john@arbash-meinel.com>
Subject: Re: [Gnu-arch-users] tla 1.4
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	<20050125130555.39403.qmail@web50908.mail.yahoo.com>
	<20050125163720.GA29601@vagabond> <41F67BE5.7010203@mpathix.com>
	<20050125171146.GA30197@vagabond> <41F6877B.3010607@mpathix.com>
	<41F68CC6.40000@mpathix.com> <41F69C72.1000302@arbash-meinel.com>
Organization: The XEmacs Project
From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 15:40:27 +0900
In-Reply-To: <41F69C72.1000302@arbash-meinel.com> (John A. Meinel's message
	of "Tue, 25 Jan 2005 13:22:26 -0600")
Message-ID: <87sm4o8zhg.fsf@tleepslib.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>
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>>>>> "John" == John A Meinel <John@arbash-meinel.com> writes:

    John> Has anyone looked at using roundup? 
    John> http://roundup.sourceforge.net

Yes.  I'm planning to implement it for XEmacs.org, as it looks like
the bugzilla crowd is not interested in maintaining a bugzilla, only
in using it.  Those who do the work make the decisions.  :-)

The big advantage from my point of view is that XEmacs has this huge,
uh, "unstructured" bug database: the ML archives, and it's really
quite easy to import the archives, threading and all, using formail
(from the procmail distribution) on mbox files.  Then use the regular
admin interface to rationalize them.

The only things I see as needing fixing so far is that (a) imports by
default generate attempts to send mail to posters (fortunately the
ethernet was unplugged for that experiment :-), and (b) all the posts
get the current date in the database, which is not what is wanted
here.

    John> I'm using here, at I believe it has full email access (you
    John> never have to go to the website).

It's modularized; there's a backend that handles the actual database
(which can be any of several database engines), and a front end that
has three plug-in UIs: web, email, command line.  They're all of equal
power (at least advertised to be), but each makes some things more
convenient than the others do.

It is also possible to disable administrative access by email or web
somewhat selectively.

NB: the database frontend has an export/import interface, which means
you can switch engines from one of the built-in python DBs to Berkeley
db or MySQL (and maybe PostgreSQL by now) with little more trouble
than a backup/restore cycle.

    John> With a little customization it might work very well as the
    John> next buggoo.

It's been three-four months since I looked at the current state, but
at that time it looked like "a fair amount of customization".  The
"zero point single-big-digit" version number is a pretty accurate
representation AFAICT: roundup is quite usable and stable enough for
production use, but it seems to generally require a fair amount of
investment by the admin to get it running smoothly for a given project.

One plus in favor of Roundup for Arch is that it's a Python program,
and there is lots of Python expertise here.

A possible plus or minus is that it uses Zope's page templates for web
UI configuration.  I don't like them, but YMMV.

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.


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