[request-tracker-maintainers] RTFM woes

[Niko Tyni]

Hi folks,

I just realized that before dropping request-tracker3.4 we have
to do something with the rtfm package since it's depending on
request-tracker3.4.

Currently rtfm is orphaned. The version in Debian is 2.0.3, apparently
with a pretty serious usability bug (#294587) fixed in 2.0.4.

I gave 2.0.4 a shot with request-tracker3.6 3.6.4-1 and it seems to work
for me apart from some cosmetic glitches (particularly the 'New Custom
Field' page.) Jesse recommends 2.2.0rc5 for everything, with 2.2.0 due
to be released 'this fall'.

Although I don't currently use RTFM anywhere, I'm thinking of adopting
it for the pkg-request-tracker group. The only concerns I have are
those of upgrading to 2.2.0, as this includes SQL schema changes.

So far we have been able to get away with not doing schema changes on
upgrade automatically because we provide a 'new' package with every
major upstream RT version. Here, I don't think that can be justified,
and we should do at least something so as not to break things for users
upgrading from 2.0 to 2.2. OTOH, this is a bit theoretic since rtfm
has been more or less broken for a long time, and popcon only lists 19
installations, of which 13 are 'old' ones, ie. not used regularly.

I think the real solution for this is dbconfig-common, but I haven't
really had the time yet to look into it properly. 

I'm leaning towards adopting rtfm and upgrading to 2.0.4 now, and hoping
that we can pull the dbconfig-common stuff together before the upgrade to
2.2 becomes unavoidable. Things can hardly get worse than they are now,
and if the alternative is to get rtfm dropped now, we will have that
option available later too.

Opinions welcome,
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at iki.fi