Trac

Trac is an online system for tracking software bugs and organizing software development. OLPC uses trac to coordinate all its official software development. Bugs, features, and other work items are entered into trac as trac tickets. This assigns the work a unique reference number, which can be used to track progress using the trac system. (See also: submitting bugs)

Trac Usage Guidelines

Gregorio 10:45, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

From Michael's notes on recent meeting: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-June/015749.html

Please comment there or here. Once we are agreed on the conventions we should also link them from Trac per Bert's suggestion.

In yesterday's software status meeting, we formulated some conventions for using Trac for the next few months. They are:

1. The release team - presently including me, Greg Smith, and Kim Quirk

  will occasionally tag a ticket as 'blocks:8.2.0' to indicate that it
  blocks the 8.2.0 release. Such tickets will be understood to be part
  of our release criteria. If you think that a ticket should be so
  marked, please poke us until we deal with it.

2. Greg will record customer preference data according to whatever means

  he sees fit and will inform us of these data in regular meetings.

3. Kim wants a way to keep track of 'critical' bugs. Michael defined

  'critical bugs' as those bugs which receive the most careful oversight
  by the release team. Shortly, the release team will invent a
  convention for identifying such bugs which permits their inclusion in
  reports. These reports will be listed on the frontpage of Trac.
 

4. People should indicate the release they _wish_ that changes would

  land in via the Milestone field.

5. People should indicate their confidence that the changes _will_ land

  by tagging tickets with strings like:

     8.2.0:+ -- means that the change is "within reach" or, preferably,
     has been included in a dist-olpc3-updates series build.
                
     8.2.0:? -- the change is "in danger of missing the boat".

     8.2.0:- -- the change is unlikely to be ready for release

  (NB: Please be conservative in tagging things <rel>:+.)

6. When it's unambiguous, people should attach test results to tickets

  with tags like:

     joyride-2027:-  --  the issue persists in joyride-2027
     joyride-2029:+  --  the issue was not reproducible in joyride-2027

  If appropriate, please also describe the test procedure that was
  executed to generate the result.

7. We have added a 'Needs Action' field to Trac with several states for

  common actions (and various kinds of ignorance of what action is
  needed.) Please use it. Let us know if we need to change the set of
  actions.

8. The 'priority' field is a place for component maintainers to say what

  they think is important; however, we expect that our regular IRC
  meetings and emails will be the primary vehicle for communicating
  day-to-day priority information.

  (NB: We may revisit the priority information decisions.)

Please comment freely.

Regards,

Michael

Trac ticket wiki markup

The OLPC wiki is configured to allow automatic linking to trac tickets using special markup. For example, this code:

* <trac>1</trac>

renders as the a link to the page for trac ticket item number 1:

• <trac>1</trac>

See also:

• OLPC trac installation
• trac wikipedia page
• Official trac site
• Submitting bugs