✔ GNOME Gitlab achievement unlocked
✘ Write something about ‘life-work balance’ here
GNOME 3.36 user documentation updates
Looks like since the release of GNOME 3.34.0 in September 2019 I made exactly 500 commits in GNOME Git. :)
Localized screenshots shipped in GNOME 3.34 versus the same screenshot in 3.36
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My main focus was on updating documentation. The user help of cheese, gnome-klotski, gnome-mahjongg, gnome-nibbles, gnome-robots, gnome-terminal, gnome-tetravex, iagno, lightsoff, quadrapassel, rhythmbox, zenity should be up-to-date in 3.36 again.
(If not, then report issues in GNOME GitLab with the label “8. User Docs” or contribute patches yourself.) -
This also included updating a majority of outdated screenshots (both English and localized versions when feasible) across projects.
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I also took the liberty to push quite some trivial markup fixes in some translations when a language was not already reserved for translation on GNOME’s translation platform (as such actions would interfere).
Posted in gnome, lang-en, user-documentation
3 Comments
Prioritization of bug reports and feature requests in Free and Open Source software projects
A few months ago I wrote an essay on software development planning in FOSS projects. It tries to answer the following questions:
- Why has nobody fixed this issue yet?
- Why wasn’t I consulted about these changes?
- How I can influence what is worked on?
Some parts of the essay are specific to Wikimedia but I hope it can also be useful for other communities. It is published under CC BY-SA 3.0 so feel free to remix.
If you have a similar document for your project, please feel free to share a link in the comments.
Updating some GNOME 3.32 user documentation
Apart from replacing many broken links to git.gnome.org or replacing links to GNOME Bugzilla with links to GNOME Gitlab in many code repositories and wiki pages, in the last months I spent some good time updating random GNOME user docs all over the place:
- The user docs for Rhythmbox 3.4.3, GNOME Chess 3.32, five-or-more 3.32 and four-in-a-row 3.32 should be up-to-date.
- The Totem 3.32 user documentation is up-to-date and now in Mallard format, based on work started in 2013 by Magda and Kat.
- The screenshots in the user help of gnome-klotski, simple-scan, swell-foop, tali, and zenity are up-to-date.
- Updated hopefully all places which mentioned an application menu now replaced by a menu button.
- Removed a bunch of unused help images from some repositories shipped for no reason and bloating tarballs.
Enjoy and check the GNOME Wiki if you are interested in working on user documentation!
Posted in gnome, lang-en, user-documentation
1 Comment
GNOME Bugzilla closed for new bug entry
As part of GNOME’s ongoing migration from Bugzilla to Gitlab, from today on there are no products left in GNOME Bugzilla which allow the creation of new tickets.
The ID of the last GNOME Bugzilla ticket is 797430 (note that there are gaps between 173191–200000 and 274555–299999 as the 2xxxxx ID range was used for tickets imported from Ximian Bugzilla).
Since the year 2000, the Bugzilla software had served as GNOME’s issue tracking system. As forges emerged which offer tight and convenient integration of issue tracking, code review of proposed patches, automated continuous integration testing, code repository browsing and hosting and further functionality, Bugzilla’s shortcomings became painful obstacles for modern software development practices.
Nearly all products which used GNOME Bugzilla have moved to GNOME Gitlab to manage issues. A few projects (Bluefish, Doxygen, GnuCash, GStreamer, java-gnome, LDTP, NetworkManager, Tomboy) have moved to other places (such as freedesktop.org Gitlab, self-hosted Bugzilla instances, or Github) to track their issues.
Reaching this milestone required finding, contacting and discussing over the last months with project maintainers of mostly less active projects which had used GNOME Bugzilla for their issue tracking.
For convenience, there are redirects in place (for those websites out there which still directly link to Bugzilla’s ticket creation page) to guide them to the new issue tracking venues.
Note that closing only refers to creating new tickets: There are still 189 products with 21019 open tickets in GNOME Bugzilla. IMO these tickets should either get migrated to Gitlab or mass-closed on a per-product basis, depending on maintainers’ preferences. The long-term goal should be making GNOME Bugzilla completely read-only.
I also fixed the custom “Browse” product pages in GNOME Bugzilla to get displayed (the previous code expected products to be open for new bug entry). Should make it easier again for maintainers to potentially triage and clean up their old open tickets in Bugzilla.
Thanks to Carlos and Andrea and everyone involved for all their help!
PS: Big Thanks to Lenka and everyone who signed the postcard for me at FOSDEM 2019. Missed you too! :)
Wikimedia in Google Code-in 2018
Newcomer and Mentor stickers designed by GCI 2017 participant Ashley Zhang, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Google Code-in (GCI) is an annual seven week long contest for 14–17-year-old students exploring free and open source software projects. Organizations, such as the Wikimedia community, offer small tasks in the areas of code, documentation, outreach, research, and design. Students who complete tasks receive a digital certificate and a shirt from Google. The top students in every participating organization win a visit of Google’s headquarters. Students can directly experience how large online projects are organized, collaborate with humans across the planet, and the students’ accepted work is made available to millions of worldwide users.
For the sixth time, Wikimedia was one of 27 participating organizations which offered tasks mentored by community members.
In late 2018, 199 students worked on 765 Wikimedia tasks with the help of 39 mentors. To list only some students’ achievements and show the variety of projects, areas, and programming languages in the Wikimedia community:
- VisualEditor now allows editing a table cell by pressing F2; Several fixes for the “Page Options” dialog; Leading spaces from the “format” field in TemplateData user interface are now stripped
- Documentation written how to use our Gerrit test instance
- More unit tests in MediaWiki’s Thanks and StructuredDiscussions extensions
- Code coverage: Several MediaWiki extensions got missing @covers tags added
- MediaWiki web upgrade process now handles errors in purgeCache correctly
- Improved the workflow in MediaWiki web installer if an error occurs
- MediaWiki Action API now returns HTTP 405 error code when an unsupported http method is used; Included namespace information on the action=info page
- The Wikimedia Hashtags tool on Toolforge now has a JSON endpoint
- The Wikinity tool on Toolforge now has a coordinate format converter
- Pywikibot now removes disambiguation brackets in labels to create new items for articles in Wikidata; unused code removed in some places
- Several fixes and improvements for the JSDoc WMF theme
- Several MW extensions now display their licenses on Special:Version
- Several students took incremental tasks to learn Lua and templates
- Sticker designs, such as racconicorns or “Personal Space Needed”
- Constructed SQL queries in Quarry to get statistics about Wikipedia
- Dozens of fixes & new features for WMCZ‘s expense tracking app “Tracker”
- In the user interface of the Wikidata Query Service, the placeholder now updates the language dynamically and code examples were improved
- Added support for the Eastern Pwo language (kjp) to MediaWiki’s Names.php
- Mobile frontend/Minerva skin: The “Edit” button is now disabled for anonymous editors; Control-clicking on an image now opens the image in a new tab; Moved client side code inside initEditLink to server; Category overlay in MediaWiki’s MobileFrontend extension now refreshes after a category was added to a page
- Some Wikimedia site configuration changes were prepared (and deployed) by students
- WikiEduDashboard: Now shows file urls and author in ‘Recent Uploads’ on user profile pages; `no-undef` eslint rule enabled; users now get informed when a course is not listed in any campaigns
- FormWizard extension: Extension group on special page modified and further small fixes
- Modified the Newsletter ‘issue announce’ summary textbox
- Removed unchecked calls to Title::getTalkPage in MediaWiki extensions
- Replaced usage of jshint/jscs with eslint in numerous MediaWiki extensions
- Some guided tours created for MediaWiki’s StructuredDiscussions extension
- Some fixes for syntax errors in translated messages in MediaWiki and extensions
- Images (corresponding to an emoji) added to Wikimedia Commons Twitter Bot code
- Musical partitions transcribed for various Wikipedia articles.
…and many many more.
Some students have also written about their experience. Google also posted a summary with statistics.
We would like to congratulate our winners Nathan and Shreyas Minocha, our finalists arcaynia, Jan Rosa, takidelfin and Zoran Dori, and all contributors on their many contributions! We hope to see you around! We would also like to thank all our mentors for their commitment to be available also on weekends and holidays, for coming up with task ideas, working together, quickly reviewing contributions, and for providing feedback what we could improve next time.
Thanks to everybody on IRC, Gerrit, Phabricator, mailing lists, Github, Telegram for their friendliness, patience, support and help.
Wikimedia always welcomes contributions to improve free and open knowledge. Find out how you can contribute.
Google Code-in 2018 and Wikimedia: Mentors and smaller tasks wanted!
Google Code-in will take place again soon (from October 23 to December 13). GCI is an annual contest for 13-17 year old students to start contributing to free and open projects. It is not only about coding: We also need tasks about design, documentation, outreach/research, and quality assurance. And you can mentor them!
Last year, 300 students worked on 760 Wikimedia tasks, supported by 51 mentors from our community.
- Your gadget code uses some deprecated API calls?
- You’d enjoy helping someone port your template to Lua?
- You’d welcome some translation help (which cannot be performed by machines)?
- Your documentation needs specific improvements?
- Your user interface has some smaller design issues?
- Your Outreachy/Summer of Code project welcomes small tweaks?
- You have tasks in mind that welcome some research?
Note that “beginner tasks” (e.g. “Set up Vagrant”) and generic tasks are very welcome (like “Choose and fix 2 PHP7 issues from the list in this task” style).
If you have tasks in mind which would take an experienced contributor 2-3 hours, become a mentor and add your name to our list!
Thank you in advance, as we cannot run this without your help.
GUADEC 2018 (It’s a Gitlab world)
Karlovy Vary – Ankali.
GUADEC in Almería was a great opportunity to catch up with some technologies in the GNOME world, hang out with lovely folks again, and spend time at the beach.
- Wrote stock answers / canned replies for GNOME Gitlab (to be used in your local browser as a user script) as stock answers are not supported yet by default in Gitlab.
- Realized that I can still directly push into Git repositories hosted in GNOME Gitlab. Also created my first proper merge request after forking in Gitlab. Workflows.
- I finally removed GNOME Evolution’s ancient Quick Reference PDF, after Raniere Silva had moved the list of keyboard shortcuts into the Evolution user help (thanks for your patch!). Also fixed a good bunch of Evolution user documentation issues.
- One last time: Presented Bugzilla activity statistics at the AGM.
- Closed about 2500 open tickets of unmaintained products in GNOME Bugzilla.
- Had a GNOME Release Team meeting.
- Realized that Sébastien and I enjoy the idea of better development statistics. As volunteer time is too precious to reinvent wheels:
- A shell script to pull and/or update all Git repositories in GNOME Gitlab
- Print the date of the last non-translation commit (translation commits are located in the /po subdirectory) in a git repository: git log -n 1 --pretty=format:"%cd" --date=short -- !(po)
- Print the number of non-translation commits since a certain date: git log --after=2010-07-10 --pretty=oneline -- !(po) | wc -l
- Print the number of different non-translation committers since a certain date: git log --after=2010-07-10 --committer='' --pretty=format:"%ae" -- !(po) | sort -u | wc -l
- Print the email addresses of people listed as maintainers in a project’s DOAP file: xmlstarlet sel -N doap="http://usefulinc.com/ns/doap#" -N rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" -t -v "/doap:Project/doap:maintainer/foaf:Person/foaf:mbox/@rdf:resource" somename.doap
- Carlos was kind enough to tell me about Quick actions in Gitlab plus keyboard shortcuts, to save me some triage time. Plus to answer all my Bugzilla to Gitlab related questions (or concerns?) as I had not followed closely for the last months…
- …which also made me curious how far GNOME has already migrated from Bugzilla to Gitlab (kudos to Carlos, Andrea, Alberto, the Gitlab crew, and everybody else involved in planning and performing this move!) so I decided to gather some numbers yesterday:
- 265 products in GNOME Bugzilla have zero open tickets, do not accept filing new tickets in Bugzilla anymore, and do not exist in Gitlab either. Ancient stuff. Nothing to do.
- 103 products in GNOME Bugzilla have zero open tickets and do not accept filing new tickets in Bugzilla anymore as you get redirected to Gitlab. Either already fully migrated or small projects. Nothing to do.
- Doxygen has 1908 open tickets in Bugzilla, does not accept new tickets in Bugzilla, and does not exist in Gitlab.
- 17 products in GNOME Bugzilla have zero open tickets and do accept filing new tickets in Bugzilla. That’s projects to still set up in Gitlab, I’d say.
- 197 products in GNOME Bugzilla have 23426 open tickets in total and do not accept filing new tickets in Bugzilla anymore as you get redirected to Gitlab. That’s tickets to either mass-migrate from or close with an explanation in Bugzilla, I’d say.
- 51 products in GNOME Bugzilla have 5791 open tickets in total and still accept filing new tickets in Bugzilla. That’s products and tickets to set up in Gitlab and either mass-migrate from or close with an explanation in Bugzilla, I’d say.
Posted in bugzilla, gitlab, gnome, lang-en
2 Comments
Statistics, Google Code-in, Gitlab, Bugzilla
- Spending some good time to get Wikimedia’s code activity statistics (hosted by Bitergia) into better shape. Still some smaller bugs to iron out.
- Blogged in other places about Wikimedia’s successful participation in Google Code-in 2017. Impressive numbers and achievements.
- Posted GNOME Bugzilla statistics for 2017 already earlier this year.
- The draft for the GNOME 3.29/3.30 release schedule is out.
- As GNOME is moving from Bugzilla to GitLab, I took the opportunity to publish a bunch of quick and dirty shell scripts to run in a local checkout of GNOME’s Git repositories. Those scripts help finding unused images in the user docs bloating the tarballs or broken markup in user help translations. Also found a way to clone all GNOME repositories from GitLab in order to gather statistics about the number of contributors and changes in git master branches in a future GitLab-only GNOME universe.
- Also published the local browser user script that saves me some time when triaging tasks in Wikimedia’s task tracking system.
2017: Music.
That annual list of awkward incomplete pop music preferences: Stuff I listened to a lot in the last 12 months. Which did not necessarily get released in 2017. But mostly, I think. And/or enjoyable gigs.
Noga Erez‘ debut album and Zagami Jericho‘s first EP are my favs.
Followed by the latest release by Moby & The Void Pacific Choir, Sevdaliza‘s debut, and Bulp‘s first album.
Looking back at sets, Recondite, Helena Hauff and Setaoc Mass were long nights that left marks.
Looking back at concerts, EMA, Waxahatchee, Lali Puna, Moderat.
Ufomammut and Shobaleader One were banging.
Being able to see Battery live, after all those years.
Someone please send Days’n’Daze on a European tour.
I’d like to thank my bunch.
It’s been a special year, in many ways.
Posted in lang-en, music, non-technical
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