Currently, darcs' roundup instance uses tables to force the navigation
sidebar to the left of the page content.  My browsers (w3m, emacs-w3m,
html2ps) generate EXTREMELY ugly output because they think that they
layout table is a *real* table -- that is, tabular data.

Using div-based layout (with appropriate CSS-based float directives)
would address this problem, because my browsers just ignore authors'
CSS.  The result would be that the sidebar DIV would simply be listed
at the bottom of the page.

PS: Ideally the sidebar would also be hidden for print-oriented
browsers @media=print { display: None; }; while this wouldn't affect
me personally, Gecko and Webkit users would probably get better print
versions.

Attached are example screenshots from emacs-w3m and html2ps
demonstrating the problem, and examples from wikipedia demonstrating
desirable layout.

Attachments

• Bimaristan.pdf
• Bimaristan.txt
• issue920.pdf
• issue920.txt

Note that http://bugs.python.org/ (also a roundup instance) does not
abuse the TABLE tag in this manner.

I have had some success stealing bugs.python.org's templates.

It turns out that Roundup exposes templates to end users, so I use
this technique to fetch them.  Here are my notes on how to get the
b.p.o templates in a demo roundup instance.

    apt-get install roundup
    roundup-demo
    # When prompted, you MUST choose ./demo.
    # When you see "Server running", type ^C (Control + c) to stop the server.

    cd demo
    mv html html.orig
    cd html.orig
    for i in *; do wget -P ../html http://bugs.python.org/@@file/$i; done
    cd ../..
    roundup-demo
    # roundup-demo SHOULD NOT prompt you to create a demo tracker.

In demo/ you can now diff html.orig/ and html/ to see what is
different in b.p.o's templates.  In particular, the "front page" is
governed by page.html and index.issues.html.

Note that changes to page.html won't be noticed by a running
roundup-demo -- you have to restart roundup-demo.

Argh, I just found this on the roundup wiki:
Source code for this installation is available in the python subversion repository at http://svn.python.org/projects/tracker/instances/python-dev
-- http://www.mechanicalcat.net/tech/roundup/wiki/TrackerTemplates

What action, if any, is required on my part?

Am I needed for this yet?

On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 05:45:25PM +0000, Eric Kow wrote:
> Am I needed for this yet?

I don't know.  IIRC it's clear what needs to be done, we just need
someone to write and test a patch to http://darcs.net/roundup [1] Once
the patch is ready, they can "darcs send" to roundup-admin@darcs.net
and presumably that's when you apply it.

[1] or wherever it is now; I can't find it.

Thanks.  For the interested:
   darcs get http://darcs.net/darcs-bugtracker