[Soc-coordination] [Package Tracking System rewrite] Week 3 - July 5 - Status Report

[Marko Lalic]

Hello,

During the last week's iteration the following user stories were completed:

- Implemented correct handling of received email messages with the
Content-Transfer-Encoding header set to 8bit in both Python2 and
Python3

- Allow users to subscribe to pseudo-packages and "subscription-only"
packages. A list of existing pseudo-packages can be provided by a
vendor-specific function which the PTS plugs in to a management
command which updates the list of pseudo-packages. So, this feature is
not locked in to Debian-specific packages. Since some restructuring of
classes was required to implement this story, this also ended up
including work which will allow us to display Web pages for
pseudo-packages too (which is not the case in the current PTS
implementation).

- Accessing a package Web page. Finally, the PTS rewrite gets a Web
presence. You may find the current deployment at [1] and give it a go.
Currently, this includes the following features:
   - Front page of the PTS with only a search form and header/footer
   - Search form (on both package and front page) with auto-complete
allowing users to jump to a package page
   - A bare-bones package page displaying the package's name, general
header/footer and a body HTML skeleton allowing for three columns of
content
   - Something which is invisible when looking at the page itself, is
a complete framework which allows us to embed a "panel" (analogous to
the boxes in the current PTS such as general, versions, etc.) in a
particular column of the page.
   - The pages are "responsive" and rearrange the content to suit the
size of the display, e.g. the three columns on the package page are
reduced to one on mobile and the package page header information ends
up stacked one on top of the other instead of being pushed out of
visible bounds.

- Allow admins to define package repositories which the PTS should
monitor via the admin panel. This includes:
   - Letting admins enter only the archive URL and distribution name
(a la sources.list entries), with all the other information about the
repository being pulled from its Release file
   - Alternatively, admins can enter all of the repository information "by hand"
   - Allow admins to rearrange repository order - works with a
drag-and-drop when Javascript is enabled, gracefully degrading to
manually entering the position number if disabled.

I did not manage to complete the last story which was planned for this
week since the "accessing a package page" story ended up taking longer
than estimated.

Of course, the week also included the usual deployment of the previous
iteration, bug fixes and refactorings on my mentors' suggestions and
planning the next iteration.

So, the plan for this week's stories is:

- See general information about a package on its Web page -- the
"general" box in the current PTS
- See versions of a package in monitored repositories -- the
"versions" box in the current PTS
- Add a new keyword -- a new story relating to the email interface.
Lets PTS admins add a new keyword which can be used to tag messages
sent to packages' mailing lists.
- See binary packages related to the source package on its Web page --
the "binaries" box in the current PTS.

Time permitting, some updates of the documentation will also be done.
This means formatting it to be in line with Sphinx syntax, adding some
high-level design documentation and filling in some possibly missing
parts in the docstrings/API documentation.

Thanks for reading.

Kind regards,
Marko

[1] http://pts.debian.net

--
Marko Lalić

email: marko.lalic at gmail.com
mobile: +387 61 817 681
web: www.eestec-sa.ba