I’m proud to release version 2.5.0 of the Roundup issue tracker. This release is a bugfix and feature release, so make sure to read docs/upgrading.txt to bring your tracker up to date.

The 42 changes, as usual, include some new features and many bug fixes.

Version 2.5.0 does not support Python 2. The minimum Python version is 3.7.

Note that you should run roundup-admin ... migrate to update the database schema version. Do this before you use the web, command-line or mail interface and before any users access the tracker.

You can install it with:

pip install roundup

(preferably in a virtual environment). To download it, use:

pip download roundup

then unpack and test/install from the tarball.

Among the significant enhancements in version 2.5.0 compared to the 2.4.0 release are:

• XSS vulnerability with devel and responsive templates fixed

  Just before release an XSS security issue with trackers based on the devel or responsive templates was discovered. The updating directions include instructions on fixing this issue with the html templates.

• The property/field advanced search expression feature has been enhanced and documented.

  Search expressions are usually built using the expression editor on the search page. They can be built manually by modifying the search URL but the RPN search expression format was undocumented. Errors in expressions could return results that didn’t match the user’s intent. This release documents the RPN expression syntax, adds basic expression error detection, and improves error reporting.

• The default hash method for password storage is more secure.

  We use PBKDF2 with SHA512 (was SHA1). With this change you can lower the value of password_pbkdf2_default_rounds in your tracker’s config.ini. Check the upgrading documentation for more info. (Note this may cause longer authentication times, the upgrade doc describes how to downgrade the hash method if required.)

• Roundup’s session token is now prefixed with the magic ``__Secure__`` tag when using HTTPS.

  This adds another layer of protection in addition to the existing Secure property that comes with the session cookie.

• Data authorization can be done at the database level speeding up display of index pages.

  Roundup verifies the user’s authorization for the data fetched from the database after retrieving data from the database. A new optional filter argument has been added to Permission objects. When the administrator supplies a filter function, it can boost performance with SQL server databases by pushing selection criteria to the database. By offloading some permission checks to the database, less data is retrieved from the database. This leads to quicker display of index pages with reduced CPU and network traffic.

• The REST endpoint can supply binary data (images, pdf, …) to its clients.

  Requesting binary data from a REST endpoint has been a hassle. Since JSON can’t handle binary data, images (and other binary data) need to be encoded. This makes them significantly larger. The workaround was to use a non-REST endpoint for fetching non-text attachments. This update lets the REST endpoint return raw message or file content data. You can utilize the binary_content endpoint along with an appropriate Accept header (e.g. image/jpeg) in your request.

• Extract translatable strings from your tracker easily.

  The roundup-gettext tool has been enhanced to extract translatable strings from detectors and extensions. This will simplify the process of translating your trackers.

Other miscellaneous fixes include:

• Fix a crash bug on Windows with Python 3.13.

• Update documentation on required REST headers, along with other documentation updates.

• Improve handling of an error condition generated when an invalid REST response format is requested. For example if XML output is requested, but dicttoxml is not installed, we now return an error without doing any work.

• Fix an incorrect error report when a PUT REST request sets the user’s email address to its current value.

• Add support for the defusedxml Python module to enhance security when using XML.

• Introduce the templating function: utils.set_http_response(integer) to set the HTTP return code directly from your template. This allows the template logic to return a 404 or other code when the user invokes a template incorrectly.

• Add a new registerUtilMethod('name', my_function). which makes it easier to define and use complex templating utilities. It passes a default argument that allows access to the client instance, translation functions, and other templating utility functions. Previously you had to pass the arguments explicitly when calling the utility from the template.

• Add the ability to generate native HTML date and number/integer inputs. Check the upgrading document for caveats. This feature is disabled by default.

• Re-enable support for GPG/PGP signed emails, which requires installation from the test PyPi repository.

The file CHANGES.txt has a detailed list of feature additions and bug fixes for each release. The most recent changes from there are at the end of this announcement. Also see the information in doc/upgrading.txt.

If you find bugs, please report them to issues AT roundup-tracker.org or create an account at https://issues.roundup-tracker.org and open a new ticket. If you have patches to fix the issues they can be attached to the email or uploaded to the tracker.

Upgrading

If you’re upgrading from an older version of Roundup you must follow all the “Software Upgrade” guidelines given in the doc/upgrading.txt documentation.

Note that you should run roundup-admin ... migrate for all your trackers to update the database schema version. Do this before you use the web, command-line or mail interface and before any users access the tracker.

Roundup requires Python 3 newer than or equal to version 3.7 for correct operation. (Python 3.4 or 3.5, or 3.6 may work, but are not tested.) Note that Roundup 2.4.0 was the last release to support Python 2. You should deploy new trackers with Python 3 and plan on upgrading older trackers from Python 2 to Python 3. See the upgrade guide.

To give Roundup a try, just download (directions above), unpack and run:

python demo.py

then open the url printed by the demo app.

Release info and download page:

https://pypi.org/project/roundup/

Source and documentation is available at the website:

https://www.roundup-tracker.org/

Mailing lists - the place to ask questions:

https://sourceforge.net/p/roundup/mailman/

About Roundup

Roundup is a simple-to-use and install issue-tracking system with command-line, web and e-mail interfaces. It is based on the winning design from Ka-Ping Yee in the Software Carpentry “Track” design competition.

Roundup manages a number of issues (with flexible properties such as “description”, “priority”, and so on) and provides the ability to:

1. submit new issues,

2. find and edit existing issues, and

3. discuss issues with other participants.

The system facilitates communication among the participants by managing discussions and notifying interested parties when issues are edited. One of the major design goals for Roundup that it be simple to get going. Roundup is therefore usable “out of the box” with any Python 3.7+ installation. It doesn’t even need to be “installed” to be operational, though an install script is provided.

It comes with five basic issue tracker templates

• a classic bug/feature tracker

• a more extensive devel tracker for bug/features etc.

• a responsive version of the devel tracker

• a jinja2 version of the devel template (work in progress)

• a minimal skeleton

and supports four database back-ends (anydbm, sqlite, mysql and postgresql).

Recent Changes

From 2.4.0 to 2.5.0

Fixed:

• issue2551343 - Remove support for PySQLite. It is unmaintained and sqlite3 is used which is the default for a Python distribution. (John Rouillard)

• replace use of os.listdir with os.scandir. Performance improvement. Using with Python 2 requires ‘pip install scandir’. (John Rouillard)

• issue2551131 - Return accept-patch if patch body not accepted (415 code). Accept-Patch returned with acceptable values. (John Rouillard)

• issue2551074 - In “responsive” template: click on hide comment leads to a red error msg. (Report by Ludwig Reiter; fix John Rouillard)

• issue2550698 - added documentation on filtering using RPN property expressions. (John Rouillard)

• issue2551372 - Better document necessary headers for REST and fix logging to log missing Origin header (Ralf Schlatterbeck with suggestions on documentation by John Rouillard)

• issue2551289 - Invalid REST Accept header with post/put performs change before returning 406. Error before making any changes to the db if we can’t respond with requested format. (John Rouillard)

• issue2551356 - Add etag header when If-Modified-Since GET request returns not-modified (304). Breaking change to function signature for client.py-Client::_serve_file(). (John Rouillard)

• issue2551381 - roundup-server parses URI’s with multiple ‘?” incorrectly. (John Rouillard)

• issue2551382 - invalid @verbose, @page_* values in rest uri’s generate 409 not 400 error. (John Rouillard)

• fix issues with rest doc and use of PUT on a property item. Response is similar to use of PUT on the item, not a GET on the item. Discovered while fuzz testing. (John Rouillard)

• issue2551383 - Setting same address via REST PUT command results in an error. Now the userauditor does not trigger an error if a user sets the primary address to the existing value. (John Rouillard)

• issue2551253 - Modify password PBKDF2 method to use SHA512. The default password hashing algorithm has been upgraded to PBKDF2-SHA512 from PBKDF2-SHA1. The default pbkdf2 rounds in the config file has been changed to 250000. The admin should change it manually if it is at 2 million. PBKDF2-SHA512 (PBKDF2S5) has been available since release 2.3, but it required a manual step to make it the default. (John Rouillard)

• fixed a crash with roundup-admin perftest password when rounds not set on command line. (John Rouillard)

• issue2551374 - Add error handling for filter expressions. Filter expression errors are now reported. (John Rouillard)

• issue2551384: Modify flow in client.py’s REST handler to verify authorization earlier. The validation order for REST requests has been changed. Checking user authorization to use the REST interface is done before validating the Origin header. As a result, incorrectly formatted CORS preflight requests (e.g. missing Origin header) can now return HTTP status 403 as well as status 400. (John Rouillard)

• issue2551387 - TypeError: not indexable. Fix crash due to uninitialized list element on a (Mini)FieldStorage when unexpected input is posted via wsgi. (Reported and debugged by Christof Meerwald; fix John Rouillard)

• close http socket and send a 408 status when a timeout exception is handed in roundup-server. This prevents another exception caused by using a timed out socket. (John Rouillard)

• issue2551391, partial fix for issue1513369. input fields were not getting id’s assigned. Fixed automatic id assignment to input fields. Thinko in the code. (John Rouillard)

• issue1895197 - translated help texts in admin.py not displayed correctly. (Initial patch tobias-herp, John Rouillard)

• issue2551238 - roundup-server should exit with error if -d <pidfile> is used without -l <logfile>. Added code to report the issue. Added issue with relative paths for log file whn using -L and -d with roundup-server. (John Rouillard)

• Allow the specification of a “form” parameter for Date fields to make the popup calendar work when the enclosing form has a name different from “itemSynopsis”. (Ralf Schlatterbeck)

• issue2551376: Fix tracebacks in item templates (Ralf Schlatterbeck)

• issue2551396: Use of os.path.stat.ST_MTIME in python 3.13 crashes roundup on windows. Replaced with equivalent stat.ST_MTIME. (Randy on IRC, fix: John Rouillard and R. David Murray (bitdancer))

• issue2551323: remove functions used for XHTML template support. XHTML was deprecated in Roundup 2.3.0 and an invalid value in 2.4.0. (John Rouillard)

• issue2551406: ‘Templating Error: too many values to unpack’ crash fixed. (reported by and patch Christof Meerwald, commit/test John Rouillard)

• fix potential HTTP Response Splitting issue in roundup-server. Discovered by CodeQL in CI. (John Rouillard)

Features:

• issue2551287 - Enhance roundup_gettext.py to extract strings from detectors/extensions. If the polib module is available, roundup-gettext will extract translatable strings from the tracker’s Python code. If polib is missing, it will print a warning. (Patch Marcus Priesch, cleanup to remove python 2 issues, John Rouillard.)

• issue2551315 - Document use of RestfulInstance.max_response_row_size to limit data returned from rest request. (John Rouillard)

• issue2551330 - Add an optional ‘filter’ function to the Permission objects and the addPermission method. This is used to optimize search performance by not checking items returned from a database query one-by-one (using the check function) but instead offload the permission checks to the database. For SQL backends this performs the filtering in the database. (Ralf Schlatterbeck)

• issue2551370 - mark roundup session cookie with __Secure- prefix. (John Rouillard)

• add -P flag to roundup-server to log client address from X-Forwarded-For reverse proxy header rather than connecting address. This logs the actual client address when roundup-server is run behind a reverse proxy. It also appends a + sign to the logged address/name. (John Rouillard)

• issue2551068 - Provide way to retrieve file/msg data via rest endpoint. Raw file/msg data can be retrieved using the /binary_content attribute and an Accept header to select the mime type for the data (e.g. image/png for a png file). The existing html interface method still works and is supported, but is legacy. (John Rouillard)

• added fuzz testing for some code. Found issue2551382 and others. (John Rouillard)

• issue2551116 - Replace xmlrpclib (xmlrpc.client) with defusedxml. Added support for defusedxml to better secure the xmlrpc endpoint. (John Rouillard)

• Added new instance.registerUtilMethod() method to make using complex templating easier as it provides a default Client instance to the templating method. (John Rouillard)

• Added new templating utils.set_http_response(integer) method to allow reporting an error to the user from a template. (John Rouillard)

• issue2551390 - Replace text input/calendar popup with native date input. Also add double-click and exit keyboard handlers to allow copy/paste/editing the text version of the date. Configurable via the use_browser_date_input setting in the [web] section of config.ini. By default browser native dates are turned off. (John Rouillard, Ralf Schlatterbeck)

• Use native number type input for Number() and Integer() properties. Integer() uses step=1 as well. Configurable via the use_browser_number_input setting in the [web] section of config.ini. Set off by default. See https://issues.roundup-tracker.org/issue2551398 for discussion of issues with native number inputs. (John Rouillard, Ralf Schlatterbeck)

• issue2551231 - template.py-HTMLClass::classhelp doesn’t merge user defined classes. It now merges them in. (John Rouillard)

• re-enable support for GPG/PGP encrypted emails using new python gpg package on the test pypi instance. (Paul Schwabauer)