XEmacs Tracker open for business

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

At long last the XEmacs Project enters the 21st century with a modern
issue tracker of its own.

It's based on the Roundup tracker designed by Ka-Ping Yee and
implemented by Richard Jones, with a few pieces (and probably more to
come) borrowed from the Python issue tracker.

It's been primed with about 125 XEmacs issues from the xemacs-beta
mailing list since October 1, 2007, and 60 or so tracker-specific
issues.  Currently users are expected to interact with the tracker via
the web interface, but a filter on the xemacs-beta list which will
automatically forward bug reports to the tracker is planned for the
near future.

To get started with the tracker, visit

    http://tracker.xemacs.org/XEmacs/its/

look at a few issues, and try a couple of queries to see how things
work.  Then skim the User Guide to get an idea of how the tracker is
organized and how it tracks our workflow.  (The link is at the top of
the Help block in the sidebar.)

Then register.  The registration link is in the middle of the Login
block in the sidebar.  In principle, registration is simple.  You give
Roundup your preferred user name, password, full name, and principal
email address, and (optionally) alternate email addresses.  Roundup
sends you a confirmation email, you reply to it, and you're
registered.

In practice, it's a little harder than that.  First, email delays will
be experienced because first all email to the tracker needs to go
through moderation (until I feel more confident that tracker spamming
can be prevented), and then the tracker gets email once an hour on a
cron job.  (Eventually the tracker host will get a proper MX and that
delay will be eliminated, too.)  Outgoing email should be immediate,
though.  Your patience is greatly appreciated!

Second, if you happen to be one of the lucky contributers to have your
issue already posted to the tracker, your email address will probably
have already been registered, and you won't be able to register
immediately.

If this happens, please bear with us and do one of the following things:

- Get Roundup to send you a new password.  Go to "Lost your login?" in
  the Login block of the sidebar, and in the "Password reset request"
  page enter your email address in the appropriate field, and click
  "Request password reset".  Roundup will send you mail telling you
  your username (usually equal to the mailbox portion of your email
  address) and a new password.

- Send email to me <stephen at xemacs.org> with your preferred user name,
  full name, principal email address, (optional) alternate email
  addresses, and a *temporary* password.  I'll fix you up, then you
  can log in and change your password.  (If you don't do so within a
  week, I'll disable that user.)

Once you have a user registered, you can change anything, including
your username and principal email address, from the "Your Details"
page linked from the "Hello, user" block of the sidebar.  The only
caveat is that it's difficult to change your principal email address
to one of the alternate addresses or vice versa (there's a race
condition checking for previous use of the email; someday I'll fix
that).

A copy of the instructions for registration are available as the first
section of the User Guide available on the tracker.

Happy tracking!