trac.md

Important note: Trac was migrated to howto/GitLab in June 2020. See howto/gitlab for the details. This is kept only for historical reference.

GitLab migration

GitLab was migrated from Trac in June 2020, after a few months of testing. Tests were done first on a server called dip.torproject.org, a reference to salsa.debian.org, the GitLab server ran by the Debian project. We identified some problems with merge requests during the test so the server was reinstalled with the "GitLab Omnibus" package on the current server, gitlab-02 which will enter production in the week of June 15th 2020.

Why migrate?

We're hoping gitlab will be a good fit because:

• Gitlab will allow us to collect our different engineering tools into a single application: Git repository handling, Wiki, Issue tracking, Code reviews, and project management tooling.
• Gitlab is well-maintained, while Trac plugins are not well maintained and Trac itself hasn't seen a release for over a year (since 2019)
• Gitlab will allow us to build a more modern approach to handling CI for our different projects. This is going to happen after the ticket and wiki migration.

(Note that we're only planning to install and use the freely licensed version of gitlab. There is an "enterprise" version with additional features, but we prefer to use free software whenever possible.)

Migrated content

The issues and wiki of the "Tor" project are migrated. There are no other projects in Trac.

• Trac wiki: https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/trac
• Trac issues: https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/trac/-/issues

Trac issues that remain are really legacy issues, others issues have been "moved" to the respective projects. @ahf, who did the migration, created a copy of the mapping for those looking for their old stuff.

All the tickets that were not moved to their respective projects have been closed in the first week of july.

Not migrated

We are not migrating away from Gitolite and Jenkins just yet. This means those services are still fully operational and their equivalent features in GitLab are not supported (namely Git hosting and CI). Those services might eventually be migrated to GitLab, but that's not part of the current migration plan. See [issue 36][] for the followup on that.

Again, the canonical copy for source code hosted by git is:

• git-rw.torproject - writable git repositories over SSH
• https://git.torproject.org/ - readonly clones
• https://gitweb.torproject.org/ - web interface

We also do not host "GitLab pages", the static site hosting provided by GitLab.

The priority of those features would be:

1. gitolite replacement and migration
2. CI deployment, with people migrating their own job from Jenkinks and TPA shutting down Jenkins on a flag date
3. GitLab pages replacement and migration from the current static site hosting system

Those are each large projects and will be undertaken at a later stage, progressively.

Feature equivalence

Feature	Trac	GitLab	Comments
Ticket relations	parent/child	checklists	checklists show up as "X of Y tasks completed"¹
Milestones	yes	yes
Estimates	points/actual	estimation/spending	requires conversion from days to hours
Private issues	no	yes
Issue subscription	RSS, email, ML	email	Trac sends email to trac-bugs
User projects	no	yes	if users can create projects
User registration	optional	disabled	²
Search	advanced	basic	no support for custom queries in GitLab³
Markup	WikiCreole	Markdown, GitHub-like	⁴
IRC bot	yes	yes	zwiebelbot has to be patched, other bots to be deployed for notifications⁵
Git hosting	no, gitolite	yes, builtin	concerns about trusting GitLab with our code
CI	no, Jenkins	yes, builtin	maybe in the future
Upstream maintenance	slow	fast	Trac does not seem well maintained
Wikis	one big wiki	per-project	⁶
API	XML-RPC	REST, multiple clients
Javascript	optional	required	Drag-and-drop boards seem not to work but the list of issues still can be used.

Notes:

1. Trac parent/child issue relationships have been converted into a simple comment at the beginnning of the ticket linking to the child/parent tickets. It was originally hoped to use the "checklists" features but this was not implemented for lack of time.

2. User registration is perfectly possible in GitLab but since GitLab instances are frequently attacked by spammers, it is disabled until we find an alternative. See missing features below for details).

3. GitLab, in particular, does not support inline searches, see Missing features below for details.

4. The wiki and issue formatting markup is different. Whereas Trac uses wiki formatting inspired by old wikis like MoinMoin, a subset of the somewhat standard Wikicreole markup, GitLab uses Markdown, specifically their own GitLab version of markdown inspired by GitHub's markdown extensions. The wiki and issues were automatically converted to Markdown, but when you file new issues, you will need to use Markdown, not Creole.

5. specifically, zwiebelbot now knows about foo#N pointing to issue N in project foo in GitLab. We need to update (or replace) the nsa bot in #tor-bots to broadcast announcements to projects. This could be done with the KGB bot for which we now have a Puppet module so it could easily be deployed here

6. because Trac does not allow users to create projects, we have historically used one gigantic project for everything, which means we had only one wiki. technically, Trac also supports one wiki per project, but because project creation requires an admin intervention, this never concretized.

Ticket fields equivalence

Trac	GitLab	Comments
id	id	keep the ticket id in legacy project, starts at 40000 in GitLab
Summary	?	unused?
Reporter	Reporter
Description	Body
Type	Label	use templates to make sure those are filled
Milestone	Milestone, Label
Version	Label
Keywords	Label
Points, in days	/estimate, in hours	requires conversion
Actual points	/spending
Sponsor	Label
Priority	Board, Label	boards can sort issues instead of assigning arbitrary keywords
Component	Subproject, Label
Severity	Label	mark only blocker issues to resolve
Cc	@people	paid plans also have multiple assignees
Parent issue	#reference	issue mentions and checklists
Reviewer	Label
Attachements	Attachements, per comment
Status	Label	Kanban boards panels

Notice how the Label field is used as a fallback when no equivalent field exists.

Missing features

GitLab does not provide one-to-one feature parity with Trac, but it comes pretty close. It has issue tracking, wikis, milestones, keywords, time estimates, and much more.

But one feature it is missing is the advanced ticket query features of Trac. It's not possible to create "reports" in GitLab to have pre-cooked issue listings. And it's especially not possible to embed special searches in wiki pages the same way it is done in Trac.

We suggest people use the "dashboard" feature of GitLab instead. This featuers follows the Kanban development strategy which is implemented in GitLab as issue boards. It is also, of course, possible to link so specific searches from the wiki, but not embed those tickets in the output.

We do not have a anonymous account (AKA cypherpunks) for now. GitLab will be in closed registration for now, with users needing to request approval on a per-person basis for now. Eventually, we're going to consider other options to work around this (human) bottleneck.

Interesting new features

1. Using pull requests to your project repositories, and assigning reviewers on pull requests, rather than using reviewer and needs_review labels on issues. Issues can refer to pull requests and vice versa.

2. Your team can work on using Gitlab boards for handling the different stages of issue handling. All the way from selection to finalization with code in a PR. You can have as many boards as you like: per subproject, per sponsor, per week, all of this is something we can experiment with.

3. You can now use time estimation in Gitlab simply by adding a specially formatted comment in your issues/pull requests instead of using points and actual_points. See the time tracking documentation for details

4. Familiarize yourself with new interfaces such as the "to do" dashboard where you can see what needs your input since last visit

5. Create email filters for tickets: Gitlab adds a lot more email headers to each notification you receive (if you want it via email), which for example allows you split notifications in your mail program into different directories.

   Bonus info: You will be able to reply via email to the notifications you receive from Gitlab, and Gitlab will put your responses into the system as notes on issues :-)

bugs.torproject.org redirections

The https://bugs.torproject.org redirection now points at GitLab. The following rules apply:

1. legacy tickets: bugs.torproject.org/N redirects to gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/trac/-/issues/N
2. new issues: bugs.tpo/PROJECT/N redirects to gitlab.tpo/PROJECT/-/issues/N
3. merge requests: bugs.tpo/PROJECT!N redirects to gitlab.tpo/PROJECT/-/merge_requests/N
4. catch all: bugs.tpo/FOO redirects to gitlab.tpo/FOO
5. ticket list: a bare bugs.tpo redirects to https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/-/issues

It used to be that bugs.tpo/N would redirect to issue N the Trac "tor" project. But unfortunately, there's no global "number space" for issues in GitLab (or at least not a user-visible one), so N is not distinct across projects. We therefore need the prefix to disambiguate.

We considered enforcing the tpo prefix there to shorten links, but we decided against it because it would forbid pointers to user-specific projects and would make it extremely hard to switch away from the global tpo group if we ever decide to do that.

Content organisation

Projects are all stored under the over-arching tpo group. This is done this way to allow project managers to have an overview of all projects going on at TPO. It also allows us to host other organisations on our GitLab in a different namespace.

Under the tpo group, each team has its own subgroup and they have autonomy under that group to manage accesses and projects.

Permissions

Given the above Team/Group organization, users will be members in gitlab for the groups/teams they belong to.

Any projects that need to be shared between multiple groups should be shared using the “Share Project” functionality.

There should be a limited number of members in the Tor Project group, as these will have access to all subgroups and their projects. Currently this is limited to Project Managers and Services and Sysadmins.

A reminder of the GitLab permission system and types of users:

• Guests: anybody that may need to report issues on a project and/or make comments on an issue.
• Reporter: they can also manage labels
• Developer: they can create branches, manage merge requests, force push to non-protected branches
• Maintainer: edit projects, manage runners, edit comments, delete wiki pages.
• Owner: we are setting this role for every member in the TPO team. They can also transfer projects to other name spaces, switch visilbity level, delete issues.

Labels

At group level we have sponsor labels and state labels. The ones that are used by the whole organization are in the tpo group. Each team can decide which other labels they add for their projects.

• Kanban columns
  • Icebox
  • Backlog
  • Next
  • Doing
  • Needs Review
• Types of Issue
  • Defect
  • Enhancement
  • Task
• Related to a project
  • Scalability
  • UX
• Sponsors
  • Sponsor X
• Keywords
  • Other possible keywords needed at group level.

Note that those labels are being worked on ticket 4. We also have a lot more label than we would like (ticket 3) which makes GitLab hard to use. Because there are thousands of labels in some projects, loading the label list can take a second or more on slower links, and it's really hard to find the label you're looking for, which affects usability -- and especially discoverability -- quite a bit.

ahf performed a major label cleanup operation on 2020-06-27, following the specification in the label cleanup repository. It rewrote and deleted labels in one batch in all projects. When the job was done, empty labels were removed as well.

A dump of the previous state is available for historical purposes.

Project organisation

It is recommended that each team sets up a team project which can welcome issues from outside contributors who might not otherwise know where to file an issue.

That project is also where each team can have their own wiki. The Trac wiki was migrated into the legacy/trac project but that content will have to be manually migrated to the respective teams.

This organisation is still being discussed, see issue 28.

TODO: that issue is closed, stuff that is mentioned there might be documented here or in the GitLab docs?

Git repository migration

Migration from Gitolite is still being discussed, in ticket 36 and is not part of this migration.

What will break, and when will you fix it?

Most notably, we're going to have an interruption in the ability to open new accounts and new tickets. We did not want to migrate without a solution here; we'll try to have at least a stop-gap solution in place soon, and something better in the future. For now, we're planning for people that want to get a new account please send a mail to gitlab-admin@torproject.org. We hope to have something else in place once the migration is succesful.

We're not going to migrate long-unused accounts.

Some wiki pages that contained automated listings of tickets will stop containing those lists: that's a trac feature that gitlab doesn't have. We'll have to adjust our workflows to work around this. In some cases, we can use gitlab milestone pages or projects that do not need a wiki page as a work around.

Trac Archival

A copy of all Trac web pages were stored in the Internet Archive's Wayback machine, thanks to ArchiveBot, a tool developed by ArchiveTeam, of which anarcat is somewhat a part of.

First, a list of tickets was created:

seq 1 40000 | sed 's#^#https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/#'

This was uploaded to anarcat's pastebin (using pubpaste) and fed into archivebot with:

!ao < https://paste.anarc.at/publish/2020-06-17/trac.torproject.org-tickets-1-40000-final.txt
!ao https://paste.anarc.at/publish/2020-06-17/trac.torproject.org-tickets-1-40000-final.txt

This tells ArchiveBot to crawl each ticket individually, and then archive the list itself as well.

Simultaneously, a full crawl of the entire site (and first level outgoing links) was started, with:

!a https://trac.torproject.org --explain "migrated to gitlab, readonly" --delay 500

A list of excludes was added to ignore traps and infinite loops:

!ig bpu6j3ucrv87g4aix1zdrhb6k ^https?://trac\.torproject\.org/projects/tor/query.*[?&]order=(?!priority)
!ig bpu6j3ucrv87g4aix1zdrhb6k ^https?://trac\.torproject\.org/projects/tor/query.*[&?]desc=1
!ig bpu6j3ucrv87g4aix1zdrhb6k ^https?://gitweb\.torproject\.org/
!ig bpu6j3ucrv87g4aix1zdrhb6k ^https?://trac\.torproject\.org/projects/tor/timeline\?
!ig bpu6j3ucrv87g4aix1zdrhb6k ^https?://trac\.torproject\.org/projects/tor/query\?status=!closed&keywords=
!ig bpu6j3ucrv87g4aix1zdrhb6k ^https?://trac\.torproject\.org/projects/tor/query\?status=!closed&(version|reporter|owner|cc)=
!ig bpu6j3ucrv87g4aix1zdrhb6k ^https?://trac\.torproject\.org/projects/tor/query\?(.*&)?(reporter|priority|component|severity|cc|owner|version)=
!ig bpu6j3ucrv87g4aix1zdrhb6k ^https?://cdn\.media\.ccc\.de/
!ig bpu6j3ucrv87g4aix1zdrhb6k ^https?://www\.redditstatic\.com/desktop2x/
!ig bpu6j3ucrv87g4aix1zdrhb6k ^https?://trac\.torproject\.org/projects/tor/report/\d+.*[?&]sort=
!ig bpu6j3ucrv87g4aix1zdrhb6k ^https?://support\.stripe\.com/
!ig bpu6j3ucrv87g4aix1zdrhb6k  ^https?://cdn\.cms-twdigitalassets\.com/
!ig bpu6j3ucrv87g4aix1zdrhb6k  ^https?://cypherpunks\:writecode@trac\.torproject\.org/
!ig bpu6j3ucrv87g4aix1zdrhb6k ^https?://login\.blockchain\.com/
!ig bpu6j3ucrv87g4aix1zdrhb6k ^https?://dnsprivacy\.org/

The crawl was slowed down with a 500-1000ms delay to avoid hammering the server:

!d bpu6j3ucrv87g4aix1zdrhb6k 500 1000

The results will be accessible in the wayback machine a few days after the crawl. Another crawl was performed back in 2019, so the known full archives of Trac are as follows:

• june 2019 ticket crawl: 6h30, 29892 files, 1.9 GiB
• june 2020 ticket crawl: 4h30, 33582 files, 1.9GiB
• june 2019 and 2020 full crawls: 5 days, 7h30, 732488 files, 105.4 GiB; 5 days, 16h10, 837100 files, 137.6 GiB.

This information can be extracted back again from the *-meta.warc.gz (text) files in the above URLs. This was done as part of ticket 40003. There has also been other, independent, crawls of Trac, which are partly visible in the viewer.

History

• lost in the mists of time: migration from Bugzilla to Flyspray (40 tickets)
• 2010-04-23: migration from Flyspray to Trac completed (last Flyspray ticket is 1393, first Trac ticket is 2000)
• 2016-11-29: first request to setup a GitLab server
• ~2017: oniongit.eu (warning: squatted domain) deployed to test GitLab with the network team, considered as gitlab.torproject.net but ultimately abandoned
• 2019-02-28: gitlab-01 AKA dip.torproject.org test server setup (issue 29400), following the Brussels meeting
• 2019-07-17: GitLab discussed again at the Stockholm meeting
• 2019-07-29: Formal proposal to deploy GitLab sent to tor-project, no objection
• 2020-03-05: GitLab migrated from gitlab-01 (AKA "dip") to gitlab-02 using the Omnibus package
• 2020-04-27: gitlab-01 retired
• 2020-06-13 19:00UTC: Trac readonly
• 2020-06-13 02:25UTC: Trac tickets migrated (32401 tickets, last ticket id is 34451, first GitLab legacy project ticket id is 40000)
• 2020-06-14 21:22UTC: Trac wiki migrated
• 2020-06-15 18:30UTC: bugs.torproject.org redirects to gitlab
• 2020-06-16 02:15UTC: GitLab launch announced to tor-internal
• 2020-06-17 12:33UTC: Archivebot starts crawling all tickets of, and the entire Trac website
• 2020-06-23: Archivebot completes the full Trac crawl, Trac is fully archived on the Internet Archive

Commandline access

We use cartman, a "commandline trac client" which "allows you to create and manage your Trac tickets from the command-line, without the need to setup physical access to the Trac installation/database".

Install:

virtualenv --python=python3 --system-site-packages ~/.virtualenvs/cartman
~/.virtualenvs/cartman/bin/pip install cartman
alias cm=~/.virtualenvs/cartman/bin/cm

Config:

[trac]
base_url = https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor
username = anarcat
password = ....
auth_type = basic

The password can be ommitted and passed through the environment instead with this patch.

Template:

To: anarcat
Cc: 
Milestone: 
Component: Internal Services/Tor Sysadmin Team
Priority: Medium
Type: defect
Keywords: 
Version: 
Subject: test

test

Running:

TRAC_PASSWORD=$(pass trac.torproject.org) cm new

Other documentation

There's very little documentation on our Trac instance out there. This page was originally created to quickly jot down notes on how to batch-create tickets. There's also a Trac page in the Tor Trac wiki and the upstream documentation.