Tuleap 12.4 January 2021

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.

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.