Issue Tracking With RT



Rob Austein
58th IETF, Minneapolis

What is RT?

• Name stands for "Request Tracker"

• General purpose "ticketing" system

• Basic concepts:
  • Users
  • Tickets
  • Queues

• Interfaces
  • Web
  • Email

• Not particularly customized for IETF issue tracking

Getting Started (1)

• Entry point link and FAQ at http://rt.psg.com/

• RT system itself is at https://rt.psg.com/
  • Uses private certificate authority (CA)
  • See http://rt.psg.com/ for link to CA Cert
  • PGP signature of CA Cert available

• Public (read-only) access:
  • username "ietf"
  • password "ietf"

• To create or modify tickets you need an account
  • Account name will be your email address
  • What you can do is controlled by ACL system
  • One account can interact with any number of queues

• If you need help, contact:
  • rt-admin@rt.psg.com

How RT works

• This part is not specific to IETF usage

• Basic model:
  • Tickets...
  • ...are organized into queues...
  • ...which are manipulated by users...
  • ...if the ACL system thinks they have the appropriate rights.

• Ticket states:
  • new
  • open
  • resolved
  • (and a few others)

• Ticket lifecycle:
  • Created
  • Taken by (or assigned to) a user
  • Opened
  • Updated
  • Resolved (closed)

About the "IETF RT" system at rt.psg.com

• Not claiming that this is any kind of official service, just had to call it something...

• Consists of an RT installation plus some scripts we wrote
  • Not the latest version of RT, because of the scripts
  • We're working on it and will upgrade when we can

• Default settings customized to expected IETF usage

• Most settings can be modified if appropriate

rt.psg.com default setup

• Default ACL setup
  • Allows anybody to read (eg, ietf/ietf)
  • Allows only queue admins to create/modify/resolve tickets

• Usernames are email addresses
  • Because it was easier for us

• Assumptions:
  • Queues are either:
    • One queue per WG or
    • One queue per WG "project" (eg, document)
  • Queue admins are:
    • WG chairs
    • Doc editors

rt.psg.com email setup

• Incoming mail runs through spamassassin and tmda
  • No appeal from SpamAssassin
  • tmda challenges each user once, then whitelists

• Setup to allow email ticket creation by the world is in place
  • ACL disables this by default

• Queue email addresses are of the form rt+queuename@rt.psg.com
  • Because it lets us use a common processing setup
  • Subject line checked for ticket ID

Getting started (2)

• WG chairs can ask for one or more queues to be set up

• What you need to tell us:
  • Name of queue
    • or "-"
    • Keep it fairly short
  • Email addresses of people who should be queue admins
    • WG chairs
    • Doc editors
    • Whatever makes sense for your WG
  • Any changes from the default setup
    • It's ok to defer this until you understand the default setup :)

More stuff on top of this (1): Templates

• Some WGs are using templates to structure their issue tracking

• At the moment they're doing this manually

• Should be easy to do this via a web form if a WG wants to do so

• Web form would generate mail to rt

More stuff on top of this (2): Watchers

• One can configure an RT queue to have "watchers"

• Watchers receive copies of all ticket actions

• One might conceivably want to have a mailing list as a "watcher"

• Probably not a WG's main discussion list, but that's your choice

• Requires some setup, can look into streamlining this given sufficient interest

All good clean fun, but...

• "It's not the purchase price of the notebook that's the problem, it's the upkeep"

• This is a tool, not a magic bullet

• Somebody has to drive it

• And it's worth every penny you paid for it

Questions?
(page 12)