So you know a thing or two about RT and want to help make rt.cpan.org be as awesome as the RT you've got running at the office? Or maybe you've been looking for an excuse to learn more about RT and want to help the Perl community? Someone asked me about this sort of thing and the only thing I knew to do was to bother Jesse (who already spends lots of time, money, and effort for the love of all things Perl) about it.
And it turns out, that's sort of the standard procedure for those who would like to help. This is a bit sub-optimal in that you have to feel like you're interrupting someone (and in fact you probably are) to satisfy your curiosity about whether you can help.
Since Jesse and his crew have already taken the trouble to answer my questions about the matter, I figured I would pass some information along.
Currently, the RT on rt.cpan.org is a 3.6 with a set of overlays which were written to work-around problems or missing features in 3.6. These have not yet been tested on version 3.8.1, and it is quite likely that many of the new 3.8 features will render some of the old overlays obsolete (possibly even breaking them.) That is, rt.cpan.org has some custom hacks which probably can (and should) now be "unhacked" so that we don't get additional drift with future versions.
So, who needs to do this? Well, how awesome of you to volunteer! If you think you have what it takes, take a look at the repository and specifically this setup script to get an idea of what you'll need to setup a local copy and test it. The pull-live script has some hard-coded bits assuming an 'rtcpan' user and is going to try to sudo make install several distros from the bestpractical svn, so you'll probably want to either hack it to fit your machine's environment or simply read through it to copy the svn urls it uses to perform the setup yourself. The bit about sudo make upgrade is also suspect because you likely don't have one setup yet.
With any luck, this is making sense to you (or at least, you're now looking forward to reading the RT documentation.)
Once you get it running and working correctly, I would guess that your mission is then to switch the tag to rt/3.8/trunk and see where the magic smoke comes out. Problems at this stage would likely be answered in the #rt channel on irc.perl.org. Patches would also be warmly greeted there. Ultimately, a member of the awesome BPS crew will be in charge of flipping the big switch on the live rt.cpan.org server and your updates to the code will then be subjected to the wrath of 7k+ authors debugging almost 17k distributions (not to mention millions of users).
Ok, we've now exceeded my depth of RT knowledge and I'm out of time for further exploration. Hopefully someone with more tuits can use this information to help bring us the latest and greatest of RT for rt.cpan.org.
