Evolvis 4.8.35 has been released this week. This is an amazing upgrade within the 4.8 series of development, to bridge the time gap until such time as the 5.1 series can be used.

As announced earlier, our APT Repository contains packages targetting Debian Lenny (amd64, i386), including side packages and backports needed for a standard EvolvisForge installation, add one of these lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list to use it. These packages might work on Debian squeeze, maybe even *buntu, but will probably have issues with multiarch on Debian unstable.

First the big caveat: support for old-style (Jutta Horstmann) external Wiki instances has been removed, since we migrated all Evolvis installations to use gforge-plugin-mediawiki a while ago already.

Now the big news: bug trackers (old and new) contain several predefined search queries useful for Software Engineering and Quality Assurance. There’s a new standard tracker type called “Funktionsreferenz” (functionality specification) on every newly created project. The Extratabs plugin, backported from 5.1 then enhanced, allows adding arbitrary tabs as link or IFRAME (embedding content) to any project. And the DatePicker component allows easily entering a date, or a date plus time-of-day, using an ECMAscript pop-up while also accepting simple strings, for instance from Lynx users. The format used for displaying dates can be configured in “My Account” between d.m.y, y-m-d and m/d/y; the software accepts all three formats, always, nevertheless. Furthermore, the ECMAscript DatePicker widget is available in a number of languages for all three formats — English, German (Deutsch), Spanish (Español), French (Français), Italian (Italiano), Dutch (Nederlands), Polish (Polsku), Portuguese (Portugues), Romanian (Românesc), Bulgarian (Български), Russian (Русский), Hungarian (Magyar), Norwegian (but I’m not sure if it’s Nynorsk or Bokmål).

Now the small improvements: a robots.txt file is present by default, allowing wget and asking all crawlers to slow down; system administrators may configure it (in gforge.conf) to switch to one disallowing search engine spiders. Newly created Tasks have a default duration of two weeks (standard Scrum timeframe), not one week. /usr/share/gforge/bin/scm-newsubrepo.php supports easily adding new git repositories to a project already using them.

And finally, the most important / visible bug fixes: Sorting tables in Tasks works again, and the search drop-down boxen in Tracker are now sorted. The modify task/tracker forms have more “Submit” buttons and have been slightly rearranged to improve User Experience. “Copy+Close” a task works again. Some links, labels and translations (German only) have been corrected. Project members are now added to the default mailing lists correctly, i.e. to the -discuss group always, to the -commits group if they have SCM Write permissions. Custom Tracker fields of type Checkbox no longer have the “100 None” option. Tasks do not show up on “My Page” several times now, once is enough ;-)

Last but not least, a look at the future: we’re working on our Jenkins Plugin, which we might provide for Evolvis 4.8 if it’s functioning quickly enough. We’re also working on getting Evolvis 5.1 into a usable shape, and porting all Evolvis 4.8 functionality to it. Much has been integrated in the recently released FusionForge 5.1 already. A new functionality to mark bugs as duplicate, followup or having a simple, nontyped relationship to another tracker item is being worked on, as are improvements (new items, better look’n’feel) to the “My Page”. And that’s just the big news.

A German language User’s Guide / Handbook is also being worked on. It’s a Wiki, so feel free to help ☺ (although the licence is CC-BY-NC-SA and thus non-free, sorry for that, but the software itself is GPLv2+). And as usual, there’s a full changelog and you can look at the svn revision log.

We wish you an enjoyable software development and lifecycle management, your tarent solutions GmbH Evolvis Project Team