Roundup FAQ

Installation

Living without a mailserver

Remove the nosy reactor - delete the tracker file detectors/nosyreactor.py from your tracker home.

You do need to configure the [mail] section of config.ini. Specifically the domain and host settings have to have a value. The values don’t matter, but the config parser will complain if they are not set.

The cgi-bin is very slow!

Yep, it sure is. It has to start up Python and load all of the support libraries for every request.

The solution is to use the built in server (or possibly mod_wsgi or other WSGI support).

To make Roundup more seamless with your website, you may place the built in server behind apache and link it into your web tree (see below).

How do I put Roundup behind Apache

We have a project (foo) running on tracker.example:8080. We want http://tracker.example/issues to use the roundup server, so we set that up on port 8080 on tracker.example with the config.ini line:

[tracker]
...
web = 'http://tracker.example/issues/'

We have a “foo_issues” tracker and we run the server with:

roundup-server -p 8080 issues=/home/roundup/trackers/issues

Then, on the Apache machine (eg. redhat 7.3 with apache 1.3), in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf uncomment:

LoadModule proxy_module       modules/libproxy.so

and:

AddModule mod_proxy.c

Then add:

# roundup stuff (added manually)
<IfModule mod_proxy.c>
# proxy through one tracker
ProxyPass /issues/ http://tracker.example:8080/issues/
# proxy through all tracker(*)
#ProxyPass /roundup/ http://tracker.example:8080/
</IfModule>

Then restart Apache. Now Apache will proxy the request on to the roundup-server.

Note that if you’re proxying multiple trackers, you’ll need to use the second ProxyPass rule described above. It will mean that your TRACKER_WEB will change to:

TRACKER_WEB = 'http://tracker.example/roundup/issues/'

Once you’re done, you can firewall off port 8080 from the rest of the world.

Note that in some situations (eg. virtual hosting) you might need to use a more complex rewrite rule instead of the simpler ProxyPass above. The following should be useful as a starting template:

# roundup stuff (added manually)
<IfModule mod_proxy.c>

RewriteEngine on

# General Roundup
RewriteRule ^/roundup$  roundup/    [R]
RewriteRule ^/roundup/(.*)$ http://tracker.example:8080/$1   [P,L]

# Handle Foo Issues
RewriteRule ^/issues$  issues/    [R]
RewriteRule ^/issues/(.*)$ http://tracker.example:8080/issues/$1 [P,L]

</IfModule>

How do I run Roundup through SSL (HTTPS)?

The preferred way of using SSL is to proxy through apache and use its SSL service. See the previous question on how to proxy through apache.

The standalone roundup-server now also has SSL support which is still considered experimental. For details refer to the documentation of roundup server, in particular to the generated configuration file generated with

roundup-server --save-config

that describes the needed option in detail. With the standalone server now XMLRPC over SSL works, too.

Templates

What is that stuff in the tracker html directory?

This is the template code that Roundup uses to display the various pages. This is based upon the template markup language in Zope called, oddly enough, “Zope Page Templates”. There’s documentation in the Roundup reference documentation. For more information have a look at:

specifically the chapter (10) on “Using Zope Page Templates” and the chapter (13) on “Advanced Page Templates”. (Note the link above is for a newer version of Zope, so some of the info may not apply to version 2 of Zope which is used in roundup. The version 2 docs appear to not be available anymore.)

But I just want a select/option list for ….

Really easy… edit html/issue.item.html. For nosy, change the line (around line 69) from:

<span tal:replace="structure context/nosy/field" />

to:

<span tal:replace="structure context/nosy/menu" />

For assigned to, this is already done around line 77:

<td tal:content="structure context/assignedto/menu">assignedto menu</td>

Great! But now the select/option list is too big

That is a little harder (but only a little ;^)

Again, edit html/issue.item. For nosy, change line (around line 69) from:

<span tal:replace="structure context/nosy/field" />

to:

<span tal:replace="structure python:context.nosy.menu(height=3)" />

for more information, go and read about Zope Page Templates.

Using Roundup

I got an error and I cannot reload it!

If you’re using Netscape/Mozilla, try holding shift and pressing reload. If you’re using IE then install Mozilla and try again ;^)

I keep getting logged out

Make sure that the tracker -> web setting in your tracker’s config.ini is set to the URL of the tracker.

I’m getting infinite redirects in the browser

A wrong value for the tracker -> web setting may also result in infinite redirects, see https://issues.roundup-tracker.org/issue2537286

How is sorting performed, and why does it seem to fail sometimes?

When we sort items in the hyperdb, we use one of a number of methods, depending on the properties being sorted on:

  1. If it’s a String, Integer, Number, Date or Interval property, we just sort the scalar value of the property. Strings are sorted case-sensitively.

  2. If it’s a Link property, we sort by either the linked item’s “order” property (if it has one) or the linked item’s “id”.

  3. Mulitlinks sort similar to #2, but we start with the first Multilink list item, and if they’re the same, we sort by the second item, and so on.

Note that if an “order” property is defined on a Class that is used for sorting, all items of that Class must have a value against the “order” property, or sorting will result in random ordering.

How do I filter roundup emails?

When roundup emails users, it provides an email header:

X-Roundup-(class)-(property): values

for every property that is a link or multilink (usually things set by a dropdown or selection in the web interface).

For example, assume you have a category field for issues in your tracker. You respond to issues that fall into the catagories: Network and Security.

You will see headers like:

X-Roundup-issue-category: Network

or

X-Roundup-issue-category: Network, Security, Linux

Then you can set up a filter looking for X-Roundup-issue-category followed by Network or Security in your mail program.

Also for newer (post version 1.6.X) releases there is also a header:

X-Roundup-issue-Id: 22

for messages from issue22. Directions on using your mail program are beyond the scope of this FAQ entry.

(If you don’t see a header for a multilink or link property, look for msg_header_property in the roundup docs. In some cases you have to explicitly enable the header.)