[request-tracker-maintainers] request-tracker4 backport?

[Dominic Hargreaves]

On Thu, Apr 07, 2016 at 10:06:26AM +0100, Chris Boot wrote:
> Dear RT maintainers,
> 
> I'm emailing on behalf of a client of my work, who would like to see a
> backport of RT 4.2.12 from testing to jessie-backports. They are
> experiencing a bug that appears to have been fixed in RT 4.2.10.
> 
> The bug itself is to do with converting HTML mail containing tables to
> text, which breaks and results in empty emails being sent. The fix in
> 4.2.10 as I understand it is to use w3m or similar external text-only
> browsers to do the conversion, which is quite an intrusive patch and
> likely unsuitable for inclusion in a stable point release (though I
> admit I haven't looked in any detail).

Right - I didn't realise that change (or at least the problems it solves)
was as significant as it seems. A bug report for this is probably a good
idea, to help people who run into this later find it (or indeed, if it
turns out that a stable update is appropriate after all).

It would be good if you could dig out some more information about this,
eg upstream bug reports, the relevant commits - so we can make an informed
decision about applying it to a stable update. But I suspect you're right.

> Here is a thread with some discussion about the topic:
> http://requesttracker.8502.n7.nabble.com/RT-4-2-8-reply-emails-go-out-blank-td59465.html
> 
> I have briefly checked how easy it would be to backport RT 4.2.12
> myself. It seems this is quite simple but requires a couple of extra
> dependencies (hence the CC to Debian Perl Group as well):
> 
> - libdatetime-locale-perl
> - libencode-perl
> 
> Both seem to require only a straight rebuild for jessie-backports.
> 
> With those two built, request-tracker4 also builds cleanly and passes
> its test suite. I have not tested the built packages beyond that, though.
> 
> Would the Perl and RT maintainers be amenable to backporting this? Would
> it help or hinder if I were to upload backports of the three packages in
> question myself?

I can certainly backport 4.2.12 to jessie - in fact I'm somewhat
surprised it's taken this long for someone to ask :)

I don't believe that the other backports will be difficult - if someone
else in pkg-perl beats me to it, that would be fine by me. Otherwise I
will look at this all next week.

It's worth bearing in mind that this release will fairly soon become
superceded in sid when 4.4 gets uploaded (although that will go to
experimental first). But that more or less matches the situation in
wheezy, where 4.0.x has had security fixes applied directly to backports,
and I decided not to backport 4.2.x to wheezy.

Cheers,
Dominic.