Ready for 2021? Let’s start this brand-new year with good news: GitLab integration, better cross-references, improved WebDAV and Keyboard Navigation, and more. Check it out.
Enhancements
Integration with Gitlab
We are thrilled to announce the first stage of the integration with GitLab 🎉
Before going down to the feature, you might wonder why we did that. To be honest, that’s a good question given that GitLab and Tuleap can be seen as competitors, as they both provide features in the same « area ». The short answer is while the tools are competitors, they can also be complementary. Here’s why you might find it useful to use Tuleap and Gitlab together:
- there is already a GitLab in place in your organization, but teams need more advanced tracking & project management features;
- some teams want to leverage GitLab features – the most frequent request is for GitLab CI.
Actually, this feature was designed based on this specific use case: There is a development team that use GitLab for their development. Those developments are part of a much larger scope that implies better coordination with non-development people (testers, project managers, sales, …). Teams want a complete traceability of developments from business needs down to commits (for regulation, troubleshooting, history & knowledge management, etc).
GitLab’s repositories can be referenced in Tuleap git service. They will appear just like any regular git repositories, only we added a small 🦊 icon to distinguish them.
In order to create this traceability, developers will reference Tuleap artifacts in their commits thanks to a special keyword, TULEAP-XXX
where XXX
is the ID of the artifact (if you read this coming from GitLab, an artifact in Tuleap can be compared to an issue in GitLab).
Tuleap will recognize the keyword and create a reference (link) to the commit. From the artifact you have then the full list of commits made on GitLab side.
Having references of commits is the first step. The following developments will be on branches and merge requests. Stay tuned 😉
Improved Cross References in Trackers
If you are a seasoned Tuleap user you might have noticed in the previous section that GitLab references were rendered in a way you are not used to; if so, you’re completely right.
We took the opportunity of the work on GitLab to completely redesign the way references are rendered, to make them more readable and arguably more useful.
Basically, now all references that have a one line « summary » are displayed (Document title, artifact based on the semantic, and of course git commits). The best part is that it also applies on existing references, so you will get this improvement on all artifacts and all the references you made those past years.
Checkbox field rendering changes in Trackers
Checkbox are recommended when you want to present a (short) list of possible, multiple values, and when it’s necessary to identify selected AND not selected values (as opposed to multi-select box for instance). Until now, in read-only view, it was not possible to distinguish a multi-select box from a checkbox because they were both rendered as a list. With Tuleap 12.4, checkbox are now rendered with square brackets, ticked or not, in read-only.
Keyboard navigation for Document
There is an on going effort to bring a first class experience of keyboard navigation in Tuleap and the first stage just landed in Document.
To get started, when you are in Document, you just have to type ?
to get the list of all shortcuts, as shown in the image below.
We are still polishing the pure keyboard navigation, but it’s mature enough to be exposed to a wider audience. Let us know if you find it useful and where you would like us to bring keyboard navigation.
WebDAV
We prepare an overdue upgrade of the underlying library we rely on to provide the access. A couple of things changed:
- Only « Files » and « Embedded files » type of documents are now rendered for the Document part of WebDAV. Until now « Links » or « Wiki » were shown, but as empty documents. We figured it could be misleading, because one might think that it is actually empty files and delete them. As those file types make no sense in WebDAV, they are no longer displayed;
- The support of « Access Keys » for WebDAV. It comes as an alternative to password (like for git, REST API or SVN) for authentication. It’s especially important in environments that relies on OpenID Connect for identification of users as regular password can no longer be used;
- Finally, starting 12.4, whenever the plugin is activated, the URL
/plugins/webdav
will always be accessible regardless of the way WebDAV server is configured. This is especially important for platforms that had to support Microsoft Windows 7 and earlier (in)famous built-in WebDAV client that was only able to deal with root (/
) urls. Back in time, you had to configure Tuleap to serve WebDAV on a dedicated host (like https://webdav.tuleap.example.com). This is no longer a recommended way to configure WebDAV access due to the unnecessary complexity it brings. You should advertise the new url to your troop, and we are going to enter in more active deprecation phase later this year.
Mailing list fresh look
The mailing list service got a UI refresh for the administration and the main page. The browsing of messages (aka. ForumML) didn’t change.
Tracker v3 migration with IDs
By the end of June 2021 tracker v3 will be completely removed from Tuleap. The migration tool have been there since a long time but there was still one road block for people who wanted to keep the artifact ID for traceability. It’s now possible to do the migration to Tracker v5 and to keep the artifact IDs.
Please note that the migration with artifacts ids can, of course, be done only once.
End of Internet Explorer and Edge Legacy support
As announced 2021 starts on fresh bases without IE11 & Edge Legacy support. The warning popup can no longer be closed.
Bugs and requests
There were 48 bugs fixed and requests implemented during 12.4 release cycle. Bugs and security fixes were already backported on Tuleap Enterprise builds. You will find below a selection of the most notable fixes.
Security
- request #18816 XSS in tracker administration UI via the name of a tracker used for a shared field
- request #18442 Set the Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy to same-origin on every responses
- request #18441 Increase password work factor
Tracker
- request #18462 Grantt creation is broken
- request #18457 Text field HTML diff must work with multiple characters like é or è
Docker image
- request #18501 TEE Plugin – Missing French locale
- request #18446 Let docker admin define it’s own command in docker image startup
Agile
- request #17997 Remove first Taskboard column if no hierarchy defined
- request #17996 [Kanban] Open the « backlog » column by default
Misc
- request #18449 Avatar modification is not visible until the new avatar is saved
- request #18418 Do not allow unix/shortname project rename if git repositories as migrated to gerrit
- request #18346 Artefact can’t be deployed into the « Dependency Graph »