The IETF Datatracker is the primary day-to-day front-end to the IETF database for people who work on IETF standards. It contains data about the documents, working groups, meetings, agendas, minutes, presentations, and more, of the IETF. The primary public face of the IETF is at www.ietf.org.
All the Datatracker code is publicly available from the IETF tools SVN repository. Bug tickets and wiki notes are available from the Issue Tracker, and there are also release notes available since version 2.00.
Below you'll find a brief history of the datatracker development, in terms of the big moments. For the nitty-gritty week-to-week code changes, please check the release notes or the commit log.
Between the release of 6.0.0 in April 2015 and the latest release there has been numerous releases (75, as of 11 Feb 2017) which has extended the functionality of the datatracker substantially. The release list gives more information.
During more than a year, from July 2013 to late 2014, Lars Eggert worked intensively on a major facelift to the datatracker, porting the GUI to Bootstrap. The work took 287 separate commits , and comprised changes to 1016 different files.
This work has turned the IETF Datatracker website into a responsive website which support use on a much larger variety of devices, from small mobile devices to desktops.
The work relies heavily on the capabilities of Bootstrap, and continues to use the Django framework which the datatracker has been build on since version 2.00 . It also uses icons from FontAwesome, and functions from django-bootstrap3.
Additional page conversion work has been done by Ole Laursen, with final style tweaks, bug-fixes and adaptations by Henrik Levkowetz, giving it a distinct colour palette (with the addition of complementing green and red colours for success and error indications), and a selection of fonts from ParaType (PT Serif for body text, PT Sans Caption for headers, PT Sans for menus, and PT Mono for monospaced documents). (Even if PT Sans Caption was created as a 'Caption' (6-8pt) optical size font to go with PT Sans, it works well for headers when paired with PT Serif.)
Between the release of 5.0.0 in January 2014 and the last release in the 5.x series in April 2015, there were 42 releases containing bug fixes and features. Worth mentioning were 4 code sprint releases, added support for the secretariat's agenda scheduling work, the addition of pages for Research Groups and Teams, a JSON interface to the database for tool builders, improved IPR support , a move to Django 1.7, and many improvements in testing support .
This release was a complete re-write of the CGI/Perl-based IESG datatracker in Python, using the Django framework. It comprised about 8000 lines of Python code, and 6000 lines of template code. The work was done as a skunkworks project by Bill Fenner and Henrik Levkowetz from mid-April to mid-May 2007, and continued as an official project from then on. The aim was to eliminate numerous SQL injection insecurities in the current code, and also provide a better framework on which to build future enhancements. During the most intensive period, Bill and Henrik worked 10 hours per day to get all public pages ported and released. The release was deployed in the early hours of 28 June 2007, and nobody noticed the change :-))
The first version of the idtracker was commissioned by the IESG under Harald Alvestrand in 2001, and the IESG started using it at the beginning of 2002. It was written by Michael Lee in Perl, with direct SQL statements. It provided a major improvement in visibility of the progress of drafts by the IESG. The first public presentation of it and its capabilities was made 2002-11-20 in Atlanta by Thomas Narten.
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