Month: January 2008

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Requiring DOAP instead of MAINTAINERS file

I wrote a long email to desktop-devel-list and gnome-infrastructure about doap files. I’d like to require these files and drop the /trunk/MAINTAINERS file requirement.

Excerpt from the mail:

Currently project information is spread thoughout various systems. The maintainers are available in MAINTAINERS files, developers in AUTHORS, the description is possibly in either Bugzilla or some README file, etc. I’d like to make use of DOAP files for this.

See for example the usage of DOAP on projects.apache.org:

Examples of what is in a DOAP file:

  • maintainers
  • long description
  • releases
  • homepage / download link
  • bugtracker link ()
  • repository info (SVN + viewvc)

And others:

  • short description
  • mailing lists
  • various kinds of contributors
  • programming language
  • category
  • etc

Please read the email as I don’t want to repeat the whole thing. Comments welcome (preferrably on d-d-l).

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Three interesting things

Noticed a few interesting things today:

  1. GNOME hackers ask things that are answered by the (very short) IRC topic
  2. Someone asked if the GTK 1.2 (1.2.0 was released on 27-Feb-1999) documentation could be put on a site somewhere again, as it is ‘extremely handy’
  3. Some spammer asked if his post could be removed from the archives at mail.gnome.org

Oh, and my addition of sftp to the releng convert-to-tarballs script wasn’t useless. It finally noticed a tarball before it was on the main mirror, ftp.gnome.org. This to ensure any release team member (with a properly configured setup) won’t be affected by any mirror lag. The script will try to d/l any tarball for up to 2 minutes with an appropriate waiting time in between (might need to increase the total number of tries though). It’ll also use resume (so in case of a partial d/l, it doesn’t d/l the whole file again, except if it is corrupt)

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SVN-commits-list now show diffs

I’ve switched from the custom commit-email.pl script to the mailer.py from Subversion 1.4.6. Apart from one issue (svn.core.svn_path_canonicalize), it seems to work fine with Subversion 1.3.1. This time when I submitted the patches they actually appeared on upstream dev mailing list as well.

Anyway, as of now you’ll see the diffs of a commit right in the email as suggested by Gabriel Burt. It doesn’t diff .po files, nor deletions or binary files. A custom reply-to header can be set. Just email me if you want one (or svnmaster@gnome.org). The reply-to can be set per repository and it needs to be the development mailing list of the repository. By default the reply-to is empty (so you’ll mail the committer). Perhaps it should default to desktop-devel-list instead.

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Non-working new accounts and other stuff

The LDAP replication was broken between the master LDAP server and svn.gnome.org. This meant that new accounts didn’t work, nor any SSH key changes. This has been fixed by Ross Golder. So if you had any problems, please try again. If you still have problems, email accounts@gnome.org.

Patrick Fey
We have a new hacker working on Mango, he now has an SVN account.

Non-working email addresses
Note that people with non-working email addresses will have their SVN permissions disabled if the new email address cannot be found / verified. Of course, as soon as the new email address is known, SVN will be reinstated. Mail accounts@gnome.org if that happens to you. We don’t check email addresses actively btw, so this will generally only occur for people who can approve accounts in Mango (because of a bounce of the Mango explanation email).

Translator accounts
Mango now has a drop down list with translation teams. This wasn’t added before as adding this involved more than just showing a list of languages.