Minor updates, and a lot of maintenance on the issue tracker

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#1 Thu, 08/11/2016 - 02:36
Joe
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Minor updates, and a lot of maintenance on the issue tracker

Howdy all,

I just wanted to give folks a heads up that I'll be doing some work on the issue tracker over the next week or two, to hopefully make it a more fun, useful, and helpful place.

One big visible change in the short term is that I'll be closing tons of old issues via automated and manual means. The automated status changes won't trigger email notifications, but the manual changes will; so, if you're following whole project tags within the issue tracker, or have old issues that are still open, you'll possibly be getting some notifications about issues that might be as old as a decade (yes, I just checked, we really have some "open" issues from as far back as 2005!).

As some folks know, we're preparing to branch 2.0 of Webmin (the first time we've ever broken backward compatibility in Webmin, so it'll bring major architectural changes), so we want to start with a clean-ish slate in the tracker. Lots of old issues will become irrelevant, and most issues older than a couple of years are probably already irrelevant (i.e. they've been fixed or otherwise resolved and we just forgot to close the related issue; we do that a lot, especially with the new tracker, as it requires an extra, annoying, step to close an issue).

I'll likely also be doing some cleanup on the issue creation form (it's stupidly complex, and not easy to change), and simplifying search a little bit, assuming I can figure out how to do it (this particular module is even more ornery than the rest of Drupal, when it comes to make changes).

Anyway, you don't need to do anything other than be aware of why you're suddenly getting notifications about ancient tickets. And, if you see I've broken something, please let me know! I'll be testing all the changes on our devel server, of course, but it's still possible to break stuff and not notice for something this complex.

Cheers,

Joe

Fri, 08/12/2016 - 00:47
Joe
Joe's picture

Just wanted to ping this thread with an update.

I've rolled out the new layout for issues in the issue tracker, which simplifies issue creation (I've removed a couple of unnecessary fields) and makes the issue display more pleasant and clear, by separating out the issue metadata and putting it into a box on the left side. This is responsive, so it should work nicely on mobile, too; stacking the status box on top of the issue content.

Holler if anything looks awry; be sure to let me know what browser you're using if you see weirdness in the new layout or style sheet.

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Sat, 08/13/2016 - 22:49
JEMEDIACORP

Did I hear you say Webmin 2.0? Awesome! Is it going to be released soon, either in beta (which I would totally love to try) or in public form? What new features or updates are planned for this version of the software? I've been using Webmin since as far back as 2009, 3 years before I began using Virtualmin, and I absolutely love what you all have done with the software and the full-featured product you have created. Specifically, the accessibility to those with visual impairments and who are using a screen reading program is excellent, due to the fact that the interface is simple and text-based (I'm still using the old framed theme rather than the new AJAX theme). Speaking of the new AJAX theme though, it's really an accessibility nightmare. :(

Sun, 08/14/2016 - 02:23 (Reply to #3)
Joe
Joe's picture

We care a lot about accessibility (which is part of why the old theme works well with readers...we've had several users who've helped us sort that out over the years), we just don't really know how to fix things. We've done a couple of passes with accessibility testing tools on Authentic, but I know we still have a long way to go. I wish we had a budget for testing and development on that front; a friend of mine is blind and does that kind of work professionally, but we can't afford to hire him. ;-)

2.0 will branch as soon as we have built better unit testing and have performed a bit of a "Modern Perl" translation on all of the core modules. There's a roadmap for what that looks like here: https://github.com/webmin/webmin/wiki/Webmin-2.0-roadmap

Though, after my changes to BIND broke some stuff that my testing didn't catch, I think I probably need to put better unit test coverage ahead of the strict/warnings pass, which will slow us down on branching 2.0. Webmin is huge, so expanding test coverage will take ages. But, I'm excited about it, too.

We specifically do want help with testing for accessibility issues. It's probably too soon for me to suggest you start using Authentic theme and report bugs, since it sounds like it may be too messy to even use with a reader. I'll talk to Ilia to see if there's anything we can do on that front to get it into a state where you'd be able to use it and find a small number of bugs, rather than currently where it's probably overwhelming trying to report accessibility bugs.

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Sun, 09/25/2016 - 03:40
pcfreak30

Hey Joe, you still have not fixed the project autocomplete box. Has the ajax/permission error still.

Wed, 09/28/2016 - 16:51 (Reply to #5)
Joe
Joe's picture

I'd added a comment saying why it wasn't fixed yet (I'd tried, wasting several hours spelunking the Drupal issue tracker, and finding some various red herring issues that looked the same, but the proposed solutions didn't work for this particular bug). It is a Drupal bug, still mysterious to me as to why it's hitting us but not all Drupal project_issue trackers...but, the good news is that I dug into the code myself just now, and figured out what it was looking for, and added the column it was looking for to our database manually.

So, I did evil awful things to our database (added an nid field to drupal_field_data_field_project_type and populated it with the correct node id for each of our project types), and now that particular bug is quashed. You should be able to browse by project category (e.g. issues just about "Virtualmin Virtual Servers" or "Webmin"). That bug has existed in one form or another in our tracker for years! (It didn't work right in Drupal 6, either but for entirely different reasons and with different symptoms.) Just another exciting way for Drupal to make my life miserable.

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Thu, 09/29/2016 - 16:27 (Reply to #6)
Fri, 09/30/2016 - 02:36 (Reply to #7)
Joe
Joe's picture

OK, try it again. Same problem, different database table for that particular type of search (I was testing by clicking on a project name, which uses a different table to do the lookup against...go figure). Drupal is gonna be the death of me.

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Fri, 09/30/2016 - 02:54 (Reply to #8)
pcfreak30

Thanks, it works.

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