Month: October 2007

Just FYI: The machine hosting Bugzilla has a hardware failure. Bugzilla is now at 209.132.176.175. Please put

209.132.176.175 bugzilla.gnome.org

in /etc/hosts. It can take up to one day before this DNS update is visible everywhere.

Menubar
Don’t forget the planned menubar upgrade later today. This machine does mail and primary DNS

Please read the announcement here.

New SVN accounts:

Module	Number
n/a (new modules, etc)	2
gnome-subtitles	1
ooo-build	2
tomboy	2

As announced in the GNOME 2.20.1 release mail, each GNOME module needs to add 5 new developers before 31 December 2007.

I’ve changed more of mail.gnome.org to the new layout. Thanks to Frederic Peters, I now know how to make Google search a specific part of the site/URL, without showing inurl:$FOO in the search box. This means mail.gnome.org now uses Google instead of Namazu (which was broken for a while). One less thing that needs maintaining. Currently the machine is regenerating the archives to ensure everything has the new layout. It still needs a few fixes (want to use the sidebar, change the footer and change layout of the messages), but at least you can search recent messages.
Note: This means you cannot search private archives anymore. As searching was broken anyway, I’ll leave it for someone else to fix.

GNOME 2.20.1
I’m going to make the GNOME 2.20.1 release. Hopefully everything will go ok.

Frederic Peters finished making crash.gnome.org look like a GNOME site. Andreas Nilsson helped by changing the icon to one made by Sebastian Kraft (which Fer still hasn’t committed in a Bug-Buddy version.. hint hint hint). Further, the site now is only accessible via port 80. The port 5000 stuff is gone/firewalled. Nice to get people helping out!

I asked Frederic if he could change the other GNOME sites (except Bugzilla and the soon obsolete www.gnome.org) to use the new style layout as well. Anyone is free to help out with this. Just look for SVN modules ending with ‘-web’.
For mail.gnome.org, Frederic changed the main page and added the CSS + images. After that I copied his stuff and changed the archive index page as well (created by a script in a sysadmin-only SVN module). Until you click a few times, mail.gnome.org looks much better. Note that mailman layout is difficult to change, I only want to concentrate on the archives.

Screenshot:

Unfortunately, mail.gnome.org wasn’t updated automatically from SVN. There is a script to handle most of it in a sysadmin module. So I enabled this for mail.gnome.org. Immediately I got an error message via the mail… forgot that the mail.gnome.org machine (menubar) is RHEL3. The script assumes at least Python 2.4. A lot of sysadmin scripts cannot be improved just because of that one machine still being RHEL3. As it is our mail machine, any downtime will have a noticeable effect. However, I really am annoyed by the RHEL3 + too many custom RPM packages and general hackiness of the setup.
That is why I plan to upgrade the machine on October 20 to RHEL5. This is probably the most uncertain upgrade out of all machines hosted at Red Hat. Many of the packages used by that machine are custom (Postfix, mailman, mhonarc, amavis.. basically everything that should run on the machine is not standard RHEL3). Since the upgrade of the other machines to RHEL5 I haven’t seen much progress towards avoiding anything other than a ‘upgrade and see what happens’.

Fernando Herrera released Bug-Buddy 2.20.1. In this version he added support for submitting crashreports to the GNOME Socorro server. The web frontend for this is available at: http://crash.gnome.org/. Note: it currently redirects to port 5000. However, I’ll change that soon to only allow access from normal port 80; port 5000 will be firewalled again.

This work is all very recent, it requires a bit of work. Stuff that needs doing (by Fernando, you or me):

• I quickly made the web frontend look more like a GNOME site. However, needs finishing.
• Finish up the installation instructions. Probably need to ask Fer to add the stuff he did.
• Add scripts to download the -debug packages for Fedora, see if they are linked against GTK+, or libglib in case of libs and store the symbols. Later goal is to expand for other distributions. However, ideally (when everything works well enough), it would be best if distributions could host their own server.
• Ensure everything will work well enough to allow distributions to host their own Socorro servers. This can be done already, but there aren’t even example scripts yet to parse -debug packages (AFAIK, maybe Fer has something).
• Somehow a crash report needs to be forwarded to GNOME Bugzilla. Hopefully Fer has an idea (mainly about how to determine a new crasher and ensure it was not reported already to Bugzilla)

Screenshot:

Because bug-buddy in 2.20 is activated as a GTK module, it will now see crashes from all GTK+ applications. This even if they do not link against libgnome. Ideally we should get these crashreports to the developers/maintainers of these apps. This is related to ensuring that when a server is run by a distribution we will still be able to see the crashreports. There should be something generic enough to either push the top crashers to a project or some kind of pull system (current web interface seems a bit simple).

Note: Fer added DWARF2 to Socorro/Breakpad. However, that was added by hacking in some GPL’d code. This cannot be merged upstream as they use some other license. The GNOME version of this is available as the socorro module in svn.gnome.org.

Since the availability of debug packages, people have requested Bug-Buddy to install them. However, with the loads of different package formats/frontends this wasn’t easy to solve (although work is being done to solve this). Further, the debug packages are usually very big in size. Really nice to have a better solution. Thanks Fer!