Splitting from here.

The Bug Tracking System itself seems to have more bugs than it is hosting, i.e. the BTS itself is buggy:

After the last update of the BTS engine I never received status mails from it any more. Did any one?

Another strange thing: About a year ago I added a comment to bug 598. Now I wanted to have a look at it, in order to see what happened to the bug, but all I get is:

Error!
There was an error fetching bug 598, you probably don't have permission to access to this bug

It doesn't matter if I'm logged in or not. WTF? <grmbl!>

Guess we could start collecting BTS bugs in this thread. Are there more bugs than this two?

BTW: The site title when viewing bug 588 or bug 587 is broken, too: K-Meleon Bugs - {title}

<title>K-Meleon Bugs - {title}</title> - it must desplay like it does.

Maybe make a backup of data ? there are script rests inside the html.

ra,

I'm willing to post here or in the BTS (since I've just managed to login for the first time and actually post. For the life of me, I can't figure out why I couldn't post in the past.

Anyhow, if you need my W98se posts, I will look at whatever anybody more technically proficient deems worth looking at and post my findings both here and in the BTS.

Just point me in the right direction. (Don't know if paging through all the listed bugs with my lack of expertise is worth anything.)

N

I'm not sure about the no-emails bug, but yeah, I've seen the "no permission" one. I didn't even know the BTS had viewing permissions; maybe Brian added it in, or maybe the database is corrupt.

@ndebord
You overlooked the link? like me : ) Or
The BTS has a problem also. So maybe it did not accept Your to check in?
ra spoke about a similar problem - BTS said he was not allowed to view a bug.
All are allowed to view but we must be signed in to comment.

Well i guess we will talk about new found bugs here - in this Forum -
when steps are verified - finder can post them to BTS.

In BTS ? well You are an experinaced user and know the new browser and all 0.9.
some things that were reported for 0.8 might be not true any more
- maybe comment? best weekend to all

Guenter,

I really don't remember what happened the last time I tried to do BTS except that I was using an earlier version of KM back then and I couldn't for the life of me get to post. Since that is old news, and I can now post, I'll just forget about it and move on.

The thing about email messages holds true for me. I've not received any from BTS, so I am resigned to just signing in at BTS from time to time to see what is going there.


N

@ra: I can fully confirm your observations. The BTS is indeed fowl!

When Dorian changed the status of Bug 787 recently, the BTS should have sent me a mail, but it hasn't...

Earlier, I tried to view Bug 751. It was a feature request by rmn. I commented it. Same error message as for your Bug 798...

Oh no... what feature request? Maybe I can rewrite it.

Lets not worry and get excited folks: Since not all read mailing list:
everling has sent info into mailing list that he will check & try to fix
& Andrew that some info might be retrieved.
So do not start to redo work untill You know.

@guenter: Thanks for your mail to dev-list. Good to hear, that somebody is looking into it...

@rmn: Don't panic! I saved the page to disk. We can restore it - when it turns out to be necessary...

I've located the cause of the missing bugs. Just waiting for an agreement on a course of action to fix it.

As for the e-mail bug, I'll check into it tomorrow.

Um, the details of the problem were mailed to the dev-list.

@everling, thx for help - it was also very kind that You took the time to inform us.
& i think: doing it at all is speedy : ) greetings

Okay, the problem with permissions fixed. I went ahead with rmn's suggestion because it's not dificult to be undone. :-)

Great. You also chose a nice name for things with maybe no great priority ; )

Great. Hopefully I can start using the BTS again, if you've fixed that e-mail "feature". :-)

Some bad news on the e-mail part. http://sourceforge.net/docs/E07#email

I don't understand how to fix the e-mail service. Does anybody understand that section?

To me this document looks like insufficiant data.
As far as i unerstand, it states that the feature can be available via cron job (unix?).
Either there is other, better info - or some that know from the past, other projet ...

IMHO, no mail is better then loosing data.

btw. Do spent too much time in trying - either one in Forum knows or we ask the old devs. Someone must have constructed the e-mail service. If knowledge is not available any more we can carry on without, untill we find out or forever.

What I understand is, the bug tracker, instead of sending emails, should store it in the db (myqsl) or in a file somewhere. Then the cron job would fetch the datas from the db or the file, send the emails and empty it.

better be good at unix shell scripting.

Unfortunately, I don't know unix shell scripting... ;_;

The PHP scripts are working fine, and PHP sends the e-mails to the local SMTP server to be sent. Unfortunately, the SMTP server is refusing to send them, because Sourceforge disabled that feature due to previous abuses.

I don't know where to send the e-mails and what cron command I need to get the e-mails sent.


For those who don't know, cron is like Windows Task Scheduler.

I have a "simple" solution.

First you must create a template for the mails to be send, like in the php script:

#--- begin
Bug @BUGID@ : @SUMMARY@
http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/bugs/viewbug.php?bugid=@BUGID@
[...]
#--- end

The bug tracker create a script bugmails.sh. It will add a line in it whenever it need to send emails. This file would look like :

#--- begin
sed -e 's/@BUGID@/xxx/' -e 's/@SUMMARY@/summaryxxx/' bugmail.tpl | mail nobody@nobody.com -s Bug xxx: summary -b recipient1@mail.com recipient2@mail.com
sed -e 's/@BUGID@/yyy/' -e 's/@SUMMARY@/summaryyyy/' bugmail.tpl | mail nobody@nobody.com -s Bug xxx: summary -b recipient1@mail.com recipient2@mail.com
#--- end

The cron job would just execute the bugmail.sh script and delete it.

Explanation :

sed use regular expression to replace text in file. It applies each regular expression after a -e switch in its parameters, so

sed -e 's/@BUGID@/xxx/' file

replace @BUGID@ by xxx in file

the result is send to the mail command (with the | ) which will use it for the message body. The syntax is

mail recipient -s subject -b hidden recipients

If you know regular expression you could do some better things like displaying only what changed, etc ..

Thanks Dorian, I think I have a much clearer understanding of what needs to be done here.

Any updates on this topic?

Sorry for the delay. Learning new stuff via putty isn't that fun because of the latency. ^_^;

Well, I can e-mail stuff back to myself and I just finished learning vim. So next up is to learn crontab, which is going to be a pain, because I "should" only execute it once per hour -- makes testing difficult. After that, I should be able to get the e-mails working again within a day or two.

Dorian, I'm concerned that if the cron job is processing the shell script and PHP tries to write new data to be e-mailed at the same time, it may result in lost e-mails. Not likely to happen, but is there a neat way to avoid this potential problem?

Sharing resource beetween shell scripts is not difficult, but between php and shell, I don't know. The cron job could set a lockfile. If the php script see it, it could write data in a temporary file, and put it in the script only at the next processing, if the lock is released. But you should probably look for a better solution.

Got one major problem here. After a few days of tinkering, it appears that PHP just can't write or modify any files, it states "Read-only file system", but I don't understand why is this the case. I've turned to the sourceforge.net people for help on this problem.

Create a special folder for it and execute:
chmod a+rw folder_name

( a = all user; + = allow; r = read; w = write; )

If my memory is good, then you should be able to read & write in this folder. Enabling reading could be troublesome though :-\

CHMOD is so useful. I wish Windows came with it as it would surely benefit from it. Sometimes I have trouble with writing and executing files using Apache on Windows XP, but I usually get it working one way or another.

Brian

Uguuu~... I hadn't realised it's been so long already. Sorry for disappearing for awhile and I will still be busy for the next couple of days.

I doubt that the chmod trick would work since sourceforge intentionally did something to the filesystem. They actually set up a "persistent tmp directory" when they messed with the filesystem. I'm not comfortable with messing with that

I'm going to try another idea, after my real-life work is done. Write the e-mails to the MySQL database and use PHP-CLI to extract it via a cron job. This should avoid any concurrent issues. The reason I haven't thought of this before was because I've never done it before.

But if that still doesn't take, I'll prioritise on the forum upgrade first before coming back to the e-mail bug.