Month: February 2008

Monday at 23:59 UTC is the latest time to upload tarballs for inclusion for GNOME 2.21.92 (the release candidate). However, we’re aware of FOSDEM. That is why we will be more lenient if you inform release-team@gnome.org beforehand. Note: with lenient I mean that you’re allowed to release tarball slightly later, or that you request us (r-t) to create the tarball.

Could anyone host a server for the GGZ Gaming Zone project? It is used within GNOME, KDE (and others) to allow players to compete via the internet. They (GGZ) have been awarded with a server donation at the most recent grant round in December 2007. The server will be provided by Sun Microsystems Nederland. The specifications aren’t yet available.

Right now they have access to a hardly saturated 2 MBit/s line. This is because all of the games are turn-based with few events. In addition, the traffic includes some chat messages and some web page retrievals. The traffic usage will increase as GGZ plans to offer Freeciv pubserver hosting . Unfortunately the old pubserver has crashed and old traffic data is not available. If needed, Josef might be able to get some traffic estimates.

GGZ doesn’t have a preferred hosting location. USA/Canada/EUR should be fine; GGZ has users from USA/Canada as well as Europe.

Can you help GGZ? If so, please send an email to Josef Spillner (josef AT ggzgamingzone DOT org).

And some background information from Josef explaining why hosting this server would be a good idea:

Now, why is it worth to host the GGZ server? We think that casual gaming on Linux is not yet attractive enough to many users. There’s the classic chicken-and-egg issue of needing prosperous communities first before this will get some momentum on their own. We successfully managed to lure many cards players off Microsoft’s MSN gaming site in 2006 due to their increasingly restrictive policies and advertisement flooding, but didn’t at that time have the right tools for admin and host players to govern their clubs and tournament participants. This led to many of them leaving again after some time to other (proprietary) sites. Now the tooling has improved, and we would like to lure them again.

Both the cards players and freeciv have strong self-organised player communities. With GGZ’s infrastructure and tooling available, we would like to cover them and also reach out for KDE and GNOME gamers. GGZ support in the respective software has been added over recent months and is now ready for prime-time.

Hours after upgrading moinmoin, they released 1.6.1. This is a very minor upgrade. Took about 5 minutes in total to upgrade the site, including writing instructions for the next sysadmin.

I’ve noticed a few more issues:

• There are a around 170 very outdated translated pages. So if you use live.gnome.org in some language other than English the instructions might not work on 1.6.x. The cause seems to be that the upgrade instructions weren’t followed in the past.
• Linking to a bug using [[gnomebug:163163]] doesn’t work. Not sure why and #moin is silent.

I’ve upgraded MoinMoin to 1.6.0 today. MoinMoin is the software behind live.gnome.org, www.gnome-db.org and www.pango.org. The upgrade took a bit longer than expected due to:

• A bug in 1.5.8 to 1.6.0 migration script. It tried to read the whole event-log file into memory. As that file was 2.2GB for live.gnome.org the server ran out of memory, causing the script to fail. Fortunately #moin was quick to provide assistance.. I assumed some memory leak.
• Another bug which is triggered if language_ignore_browser is enabled. It prevents any page from loading. I fixed this myself. Later on I learned that this was already fixed upstream. I initially suspected our custom themes to be the cause, so didn’t ask right away on IRC.

New stuff:

• Suggest to take a look at http://moinmo.in/MoinMoinRelease1.6. I was interested in the sysadmin related changes.
• There are a few changes when making links. Basically: use <<BR>> for macro’s such as BR and [[URL]] for links. Images should use: {{attachment:filename.png}}. The upgrade script converted all existing pages to the new format.
• Hierarchical ACLs. This should ensure pages will not unintentially do not have an acl. Note: This currently is NOT enabled!
• Inline comments. Don’t really see the point, but perhaps someone likes it
• Discussion pages. I think this requires some configuration first.
• A trick to prevent spiders from causing too much server load. Plus ability to generate a sitemap.
• Something to easier allow static files to have a long Expires header. I still have to do configure the server for this.
• Xapian for search. Not enabled.

Fixed issue:

• GNOME theme uses the moinmoin icons instead of the GNOME ones. Not exactly sure why they aren’t used. Update: Fixed!

Oh, and it has been ~2 months since I prevented some annoying spammer from attacking our wiki sites. I only saw one spam attack since then, this was done manually by the spammer.

Want to help GNOME? Please port a module to GIO! See http://live.gnome.org/GioPort for instructions. I’d really appreciate a patch for librsvg (or any other not-yet ported module). Nautilus uses GIO. However, it still links against gnome-vfs and (one of?) the reason(s) is librsvg. Perhaps that is caused by other things as well. If so, please provide patches for those modules as well.
Note: Please keep the wiki page up to date. Just create an account and you will be able to edit it. Some modules might have been ported by the maintainer already (without the page being updated). If so, please update the wiki page as well.

The conversion of the CVS archive is complete. All the archives CVS modules are now available at http://svn-archive.gnome.org/viewvc/. I’ve killed anoncvs.

The cvs.gnome.org site was still running. It is has been a year since the migration to SVN and the site is not maintained anymore. However, it still contained the CVS archive. Before killing the site I wanted to move the CVS archive into SVN. That is happening at the moment. You can follow the progress at http://svn.gnome.org/migration/status-recent.xml. I’ve already made the CVS website redirect to svn.gnome.org.

Another thing I want to kill anoncvs. It has been a year and I don’t like to run services that aren’t looked at. Unfortunately I cannot kill CVS completely as there are still some external users (cvs.rpm.org.. although it seems they switched to hg).

I’ve looked at other infrastructure tasks I still want to complete, but there isn’t anything I want to do atm. After 2.22 I plan to upgrade the svn.gnome.org machine to the latest Ubuntu LTS (has a newer SVN). The LTS will only be out after 2.22, and doing such a change just before a stable release wouldn’t be good for development.