[Soc-coordination] [Package Tracking System rewrite] Week 2 - June 28 - Status Report

[Marko Lalic]

Hello,

The last iteration has seen the following new user stories implemented:

- Email subscription statistics - a management command which lists
some relevant statistics on email subscriptions
- Handling email message bounces - track sent and bounced messages and
automatically drop all subscriptions for users who bounce too much
- Management command to force unsubscribe a user from all packages -
allows admins to manually unsubscribe a problematic user.
- Management command to list subscribers to a package on the command
line. Optionally provide a list of packages for which subscribers
should be output or print it for all packages by default.
- List package subscribers email control command. Emails are
obfuscated to make it harder for bots to abuse this command.
- Refactored all Debian-specific strings, emails and URLs to config
values in order to make the project easier to customize and
potentially allow other vendors to roll their own PTS instance.
- Vendor specific mail handling. Allows vendors to provide a module
(which implements certain functions) which the PTS plugs in to allow
easy customization of the message dispatch process. It allows vendors
to:
   - Define their own set of additional headers to be included in
forwarded messages
   - Define their own set of additional rules for tagging messages with keywords
   - Define their own set of rules for allowing "default" tagged
messages to be forwarded (based on trusted senders or any other logic)
- Implemented a better confirmation mechanism; based on a bug report
[1] for the current PTS. For all commands in a control email which
require confirmation, users now only ever receive a single
confirmation mail to confirm them all.

Various refactoring work, minor bugfixes and work on high level design
options for the upcoming Web portion were also done during the week.
Finally, a new deployment was made on the test EC2 instance. As
mentioned in the previous report, to test the current deployment you
may send control emails to control at pts.debian.net (try the help
command and keep in mind that currently only packages named
"dummy-package", "second-package" are available).

Next week's plan is to start work on the Web portion of the PTS. More
specifically, the stories in the works are:
- Handle email messages with Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit (email
control/dispatch bugfix). This is about making sure both Python 2 and
3 always return payload bytes which can be decoded using the message's
charset (since one of the requirements of this project is to work on
both versions).
- Subscribe to pseudo-packages (email control command)
- Access a package page (Web). This includes being able to find the
package's page by typing into an available auto-completing form or
simply going to the correct URL. Redirects for the current URL system
will be set up.
- Define the package repositories to monitor (Web admin story)
- See general information about a package on its page (Web). This is
the "general" box of the current PTS. This story includes actually
retrieving this data from the package repositories that are defined.

Once again some important links which you may be interested in are the
Trello board [2] where all user stories are planned, the Git
repository of the project [3] and perhaps my blog [4] where I will
make weekly posts which go into more detail on some features
implemented during the previous week (and reported in these reports).

Kind regards,
Marko Lalic


[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=340863
[2] https://trello.com/board/pts-rewrite/51aae98b9a269a5e4a001251
[3] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=qa/pts.git
[4] http://mlalic.blogspot.com/

--
Marko Lalić

email: marko.lalic at gmail.com
mobile: +387 61 817 681