[request-tracker-maintainers] Bug#822328: request-tracker4: complex HTML to text formatting breakage

[Dominic Hargreaves]

Package: request-tracker4
Version: 4.2.8-3

[this is an updated version of my email reply at [1]]

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. I'm filing this bug to track the
problem.

As far as I can tell the patches required are:

https://github.com/bestpractical/rt/commit/b01f8750b01e65456ed58dd82b67504ec52751bc
https://github.com/bestpractical/rt/commit/155e7d5499b65911272984e43bfa98da59b3a450
https://github.com/bestpractical/rt/commit/2ba4730f8d4817f8e518564437ca00796136d442
https://github.com/bestpractical/rt/commit/58c01f00dde5562475bd49f5db443084ffe8d468

They don't look too bad - mostly self-contained.

> 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

[snip discussion of backport, which is separate from the bug
itself - see [1]].

Any other thoughts about fixing this in jessie?

Cheers,
Dominic.

[1] <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-request-tracker-maintainers/2016-April/004139.html>