So, I’ve kind of taken over Request Tracker (bestpractical.com).

Initially I took it because I’m interested in using RT at work to take track customer service emails. All I did at the time was bump the version and remove old, insecure versions from the tree.

However, as I’ve finally gotten around to working on getting it setup, I’ve discovered there were a lot of issues that had gone unreported.

The intention is for RT to run out of its virtual host root, like /var/www/localhost/rt-4.2.9/bin/rt and configured by /var/www/localhost/rt-4.2.9/etc/RT_SiteConfig.pm, and for it to reference any supplementary packages with ${VHOST_ROOT} as its root. However, because of a broken install process and a broken hook script used by webapp-config that didn’t happen. Further, the rt_apache.conf included by us was outdated by a few years, too, which in itself isn’t a bad thing, except that it was wrong for RT 4+.

I spent much longer than I care to admit trying to figure out why my settings weren’t sticking when I edited RT_SiteConfig.pm. I was trying to run RT under its own path rather than on a subdomain, but Set($WebPath, ‘/rt’) wasn’t doing what it should.

It also complained about not being able to write to /usr/share/webapps/rt/rt-4.2.9/data/mason_data/obj, which clearly wasn’t right.

Once I tried moving RT_SiteConfig.pm to /usr/share/webapps/rt/rt-4.2.9/etc/, and chmod and chown on ../data/mason_data/obj, everything worked as it should.

Knowing this was wrong and that it would prevent anyone using our package from having multiple installation, aka vhosts, I set out to fix it.

It was a descent into madness. Things I expected to happen did not. Things that shouldn’t have been a problem were. Much of the trouble I had circled around webapp-config and webapp.eclass.

But, I prevailed, and now you can really have multiple RT installations side-by-side. Also, I’ve added an article (wiki.gentoo.org) to our wiki with updated instructions on getting RT up and running.

Caveat: I didn’t use FastCGI, so that part may be wrong still, but mod_perl is good to go.