wiki:SiteUpgradeProposal

Version 24 (modified by Ryan J Ollos, 12 years ago) (diff)

Refs #10193.

Site Upgrade Proposal

This page documents the proposed work for upgrading trac-hacks.org from 0.10.6dev to 0.12.3, or better 1.0.

The first stage of the project will be to upgrade the site to a newer version of Trac. The installed plugins will need to be adapted to the newer version of Trac and extensive testing will need to be done before the upgraded site can go live.

The second stage of the project will improving the site by addressing the open issues and perhaps even tackling some features from the wish list.

Milestone 1

  • Upgrade plugins to work with the upgraded version of Trac. This work is being tracked in #10193.

Milestone 2

  • Subversion: 1.5.1 -> 1.6.18 - post-upgrade, requires Trac > 0.11.4
  • Python: 2.5 -> 2.7 - optional, Trac 1.0 will not require more than 2.5

Open Issues

There are a number of open defects and enhancements that we may want to address during the upgrade. Here are some specific ones that we may want to give higher priority:

  • Many plugins don't have a license. An idea outlined in #9805 is to force the user to either specify a license or accept a default license when creating a NewHack.
  • Spam continues to be a problem. Upgrading to the t:SpamFilter might improve the issue, but the captcha from the latest th:SpamFilter plugin as observed on t.e.o can be frustrating experience and we don't want to risk driving away users.
    • A related issue is that many tickets are created by anonymous and anonymous often does not follow-up when more information or feedback is requested. We could require users to create an account before they can create a ticket, which might cut down on newticket spam as well as these abandoned tickets.
    • Deleting and marking spam is tedious. After deleting the spam ticket, comment or edit; we have to navigate to the Monitoring panel on the Admin page and then manually locate the entry in the logs. It would be much easier if the delete button also flagged the entry as spam, and there was a delete checkbox on the logs page so that this is a one-step operation.
  • There are a number projects that are no longer maintained, have been supplanted by another project and are just taking up space at this point.
    • We should have a process for removing old projects. Perhaps we should have a policy of reviewing and voting on them, a notification should be placed on the page and then a prescribed waiting period elapsed before eventually deleting them. Obsolete plugins with no license would have even more reason to be deleted (see also #9805).
    • Projects that have no source, often because the links to an external site are dead, are being tagged with tag:nosource.

Policies

On several occasions questions have come up about proper use of the site and how it should be administered. This suggests we need more site policies, and the philosophy of trac-hacks suggests that these policies be formed by the community.

  • LicensingPolicies page that describes the proper way to document the license for a plugin.
  • Page that describes proper promotion and what types of external links are allowed, similar to t:TracUsers#guidelines.

Wish List

  • Hosting the #trac IRC logs using the IrcLogsPlugin (mailing list discussion).
    • osminons suggested that we host the IRC bot on a server other than the t-h.o server since running a bot presents potential security concerns. This might be accomplished with a minimal VPS and sending the logs to t-h.o through RPC after implementation of #10118.
  • Hosting a pastebin using the TracPastePlugin (mailing list discussion).
  • Expanded support for creating polls and voting on projects and tickets (#6471). t.e.o uses the VotePlugin, so it is probably pretty stable. FiveStarVotePlugin is another that we could consider using. The PollMacro is currently installed on t.h.o, and EasyPollMacro appears to build on it and add more functionality.
    • Would be cool if the Top50 of the plugin charts are somehow installed (automatically with their latest (stable?) version) on a demo-site for seeing how they look like and for playing and testing with it. That would give the user a chance to see what it actually is and can do before he spend the time with installing.
      • Is there a way to show a download/svn-update/checkout statistics counter for each plugin? This would also be something like a "judge".
  • Tools to facilitate code reviews, such as the CodeReviewerPlugin.
  • Support for Git and Hg in addition to SVN. Is it practical to have live mirrors, do we settle on a single DVCS or do we just give the user a choice of which to work with?
  • Support for translated wiki pages
  • TICKET_EDIT_COMMENT should be set for correcting typos, at least for own comments
  • BookmarkPlugin