[rt-announce] RT 3.0 Beta 1

[Jesse Vincent]

  As is always the case with such announcements, it gives me great
pleasure to announce that the build tagged as rt.2.1.69 is the
first Beta release of RT 3.0.  This release represents over a year
of engineering work and is quite close to being released as RT
3.0.0. It's ready for widespread testing and, in limited case,
production deployment.  Best Practical Solutions does not support 
RT 2.1.x (or any other pre-release products) in production environments
unless specific prior arrangments have been negotiated. [1]

As of this morning, fsck.com's RT instance is running rt 2.1.69.

You can download this release at:

  http://www.bestpractical.com/pub/rt/devel/rt-3-0-beta1.tar.gz

A beta-quality import tool is available from:

  http://www.bestpractical.com/pub/rt/devel/rt2-to-rt3-v1.4.tar.gz

    This import tool should be used to _test_ the import of
  your data into an RT instance, but if you intend to migrate from
  RT2 to RT3 at this time, it is strongly recommended that you check
  over the imported data by hand, paying particular attention to
  Scrips and ACLs.


Selected Improvements since RT 2.0:

* RT's installation process has been streamlined and the installation process 
  now uses autoconf (./configure) to build your Makefile

* Keywords have been replaced with a much more flexible "Custom Fields" system
  that allows fulltext custom fields

* RT is now unicode-native and has been completely internationalized
  (It speaks about a dozen languages, with varying levels of fluency.
   New translations are always appreciated)

* The UI has gotten a massive overhaul. RT should be prettier, friendlier
  and easier to use. And it works even better in lynx, as most of the 
  user interface now uses Cascading Style Sheets for the pretty bits.

* RT is even more extensible than it was before. In addition to
  the "local" directory for overriding HTML::Mason components, RT's
  web UI now supports callbacks, to let you embed your own components
  within RT's UI with no changes to the core, an "overlay" system
  for the configuration file, so you can be assured that you always
  know what you've changed from the defaults and "Overlay" perl
  modules that let you override most of RT's core at the subroutine
  level in a way that will persist across upgrades

* RT's database schema has been simplified. The "Watchers" mechanism
  has been replaced with queue and ticket specific role groups, which
  should lead to much faster ticket searches and more linear scalability.

* RT's notion of groups has been significantly enhanced. Groups can now contain
  other groups, with as deep a hierarchy as you want, so long as you don't try
  to make a group a member of itself. ;)

* RT's ACL system is now much more flexible. Users who have been
  granted the right to delegeate their rights can give groups of
  users of their choosing any right they have been granted. Of course,
  when you revoke a user's rights, any of their delegations vanish
  too.

* RT's mail gateway now uses an HTTP-based RPC mechanism to talk to your RT 
  server. (The mail gateway is now a tiny perl script that doesn't need to 
  live on your RT server, run setgid or anything nasty like that.) 


Known issues that should be addressed before RT 3.0.0:

* Notify ScripAction will be enhanced to include transaction attachments

* Web UI still needs a bit of cleanup, though it's largely done

* The new CLI needs to be completed and integrated. 
    (If you need the CLI, Beta 1 is not for you)

* Translations need to be updated

* Default scrips need to be set up. Right now, you need to do it all by hand

* Approvals scrips should probably be set up by default

* The new logo needs to be included

* Some more performance tuning should happen



	Best,
	Jesse Vincent
	Best Practical Solutions, LLC


[1] If you  run RT 2.1.x in production and need support for it,
    expect to pay through the nose.

-- 
»|« http://www.bestpractical.com/rt  -- Trouble Ticketing. Free.