How to use Trac for GNU Go development
This site is an installation of Trac. See the "Help/Guide" and "About Trac" links in the menu above for general information. This page documents how Trac is used in GNU Go development as a complement to the mailing list, the web pages at gnu.org, and the CVS at Savannah. For the moment the main purpose is to manage patches and keep track of bug reports, which have previously had a tendency to quickly get buried in the mailing list archive.
Who can enter information here?
Everybody has full read access at this site. To also enter information you need to have an account and be logged in. To get an account, click on the "register" link in the upper right. After logging in that link will change to "My Account", where you can change your password.
Important: After being hit by spam the policy has been changed. New users can still register accounts but to obtain write permission requires manual intervention by an admin. Send mail to the GNU Go development list to request that.
Tickets
Bug reports and patches are entered as tickets. Patches are signified by setting the "patch" property of the ticket. This is a custom property added in the configuration file.
Use the milestone field to indicate for which version the ticket is planned to be resolved. This can always be changed later. In particular an applied patch should always have a milestone telling when it was applied.
The version field is maybe most interesting for bug reports but it's doubtful how useful it is. It is intended to mark for what version the bug report applies or the patch is created from. One possibility is to always leave this field blank, unless it's a bug report for a stable version.
Component can be one of source, patterns, regressions and documentation. The rule in the choice of these is that, for patches, if any source is changed it goes as "source". Otherwise if any patterns are changed it goes as "patterns". Otherwise if any regressions are changed it goes as "regressions", and if only documentation is changed it goes as "documentation". Source code comments count as documentation.
Priority and severity are probably useful but the exact semantics are unclear. We can change the names of the priority/severity levels if we want to.
New milestones can be added on the roadmap.
The actual patches should probably be added to the tickets as attachments. Unfortunately this is somewhat inconvenient, e.g. it can't be done until the ticket has already been created.
Reports
The "View Tickets" button gives access to a number of "Reports", which are views into the ticket database.
Browse Source
Trac is integrated with Subversion. It is a long term plan to migrate from CVS to Subversion but until that occurs we are using a CVS to Subversion bridge to mirror the CVS repository at Savannah to a local read-only Subversion repository. This mirroring is imperfect, however, since no branches or tag information are mirrored, only mainline.
Updates in CVS are mirrored hourly.
Wiki
Many issues (which are not concrete or specific enough to fit as tickets) can be managed in the Wiki part of Trac. E.g. a discussion about future modifications of the eye analysis or a collection of test cases relevant for the semeai reading would be perfect here.
Discussion of specific test cases can also be done in the wiki. For a test page, see gunnar:27.
Timeline
This shows activity on the site, such as edited wiki pages and new and closed tickets. Unfortunately ticket comments are not visible here. If we were using subversion, checkins would also be shown.
Graphical Go Boards
The wiki formatting can be used not only in the wiki but also in tickets. It is also possible to extend, e.g. with graphical go boards like this,
See GraphicalGoBoards for more details.
Backups
The content of this site is backed up daily to the http://www.lysator.liu.se/~gunnar/gnugo/trac-backup directory. A number of backup copies will be kept around; for the last seven days, one each for the last four weeks, one each for the last three months, and quarterly backups indefinitely.
Please feel welcome to mirror this directory periodically if you can.
