Olav Vitters

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.

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:

• http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/ant/core/trunk/doap_Ant.rdf
• http://projects.apache.org/projects/ant.html

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).

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)

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.

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.

The Bugzilla version on GNOME Bugzilla does table locking, which makes Bugzilla appear to hang for long periods. There are a few solutions to that:

1. Port GNOME Bugzilla to latest CVS version (mostly uses InnoDB and transactions)
2. Setup a ‘shadow’ database (master/slave replication)
3. Optimizing the queries
4. Killing the long running queries

The fastest way was option #4. See viewvc for the patch. It needs Sys::SigAction and works basically like the example code in that module. This means that queries running longer than 60 seconds will be killed (the buglist.cgi ones).

Before the switch to SVN loads of very very old modules (5+ years without a commit) have been moved to the CVS archive. After that, Thomas H.P. Andersen and Andre Klapper have been looking through the rest of the list (600+ modules) to determine which modules could also be archived. They’ve contacted the maintainers to get their agreement. This wasn’t easy as the maintainer couldn’t always be determined and a lot of the email addresses bounced. Following this, the remaining list of modules have been moved to the SVN archive (at svn-archive.gnome.org). Please read the blog posting by Thomas or the announcement mail for more information.

Killing CVS
Anoncvs (shows commits up to 31 Dec 2006) should work again thanks to Owen. Someone actually needed to use it. However, I plan to disable the whole CVS stuff soon, starting with the web interface. Not worth the maintenance and security risk.

Responding to what Julien wrote:
Anyone is welcome to help improve Mango (system used to create GNOME SVN accounts). Creating an account is much faster currently than before. From request to commit access (including cron) has taken as little as 16min. In general, accounts@gnome.org is no longer the bottleneck for new accounts (except for translator accounts, haven’t finished setting that up in Mango, currently writing the script to handle the modules, will include translations eventually).

Of course, changes to existing accounts still take a lot of time. But ehr, all my requests for people helping to improve Mango are usually responded in two ways: 1) seen as a vacancy 2) nothing. Not talking about the accounts team. That has expanded (much appreciated).

It would be so much easier if I had help or enough time. Or a real understanding of LDAP (see lack of time). Or if I could force everyone in GNOME to just use GPG (I would’ve if it wasn’t for the lack of time). The lack of GPG combined with wanting security makes some things very difficult to solve.

Currently, I get complaints about not being able to reset the password. Yes, that doesn’t work (can’t really be automated ATM.. lack of GPG, time, etc). Oh well, at least the complaints are different.

I’d like to push as much of the stuff elsewhere. E.g., if you’ve been accepted to the GNOME foundation, you should get an LDAP (Mango) account. Currently the foundation members are a record in a database (no connection to the LDAP account.. also not possible due to slightly different names, email addresses that do not match, etc). If at one point every GNOME foundation member would have an LDAP account, requesting the gnome.org alias would take max 21min (cron). This won’t happen any time soon.

Currently there are various sysadmin tickets I haven’t responded to (or looked at). Three membership committee members who need to be able to do their work (RT3, Mango, IIRC some SSH key resetting as well). Bugzilla config for bugs.gnome.org is still broken, Bugzilla itself should be ported to 3.0. Mango needs to be developed further. Foundation members should be migrated somehow. Etc, etc. Like I said often enough, help is welcome (again: to automate stuff; there are only a few things that require something other than SVN commit access, which I’d gladly provide).

I don’t see above as an organisational problem.

Agree with what Luis Villa wrote. Meaning Murray is exactly using this year’s elections to voice his opinion , and any calls for retraction on that grounds are misguided.. This is the time to make such things known. Saying that he should rather only vote than speak up for this reason is not what the intention of an election is. Anyway, Luis Villa has worded it much better than I can, see his post.

I’m fine with people saying it should’ve been worded differently. But don’t tell someone to be quiet. Anyway, I won’t be voting for Og Maciel.

Update: Since this post Og Magiel said he intented that post to have a different meaning. I still have trouble reading the update there in any other way (the part about ‘use this year’s elections to really voice his opinion’), not what the post initially stated. However, as he says he didn’t intend that, then I respect it. Meaning, it is not an no, but a ‘have to check’ (only decided to vote for one person ATM).
I still wouldn’t vote for anyone who wants people to be quiet though (e.g. argue about how it was said, the contents, but not that people argue). The latter is a clear no.

Seems the abuse form on listed for Google mail is useless, never received any action or human response (only the automated ‘ticket received’). Could someone at Google please look at the tickets filed by gnome-sysadmin@gnome.org? Or just to summarize: Please cancel the gmail account of ryanchua82@gmail.com. I’ve filled in enough tickets, it does come from your servers, and I do know how to read mail headers. It really is time to act.