Present Perfect

While doing various tasks around the house and ripping CD's I have from bands playing at next week's Pukkelpop festival I've been tackling some simple moap bugs so I can do a next release.  I've reworked a patch Tim sent in (a project starts getting fun when outside people start contributing and send in patches, making it heaps more easy for you to actually get stuff done if you just have to review and adapt patches), fixed another one of the bugs he filed, and fixed a bug for Philippe who seems to think French is a perfectly fine language to run a computer in.

In fact, for the first time I've picked a milestone date for 0.2.6 so I can coax other contributors like Marc-André Lureau into getting their patches ready for this Saturday.  He has been doing work on the git and git-svn VCS backends.

In related news, I talked to Martyn Russell (who works on maintainer.py) while at GUADEC to see if we could possibly merge our efforts.  I was specifically avoiding copying any functionality maintainer.py provides until I had some time to discuss this idea with Martyn himself.  I don't want to jump the gun but  we agreed on merging the projects and should now figure out the practical details.

On my side, it probably involves changing the logo and moving SVN and Trac to Freedesktop, a more neutral ground.  This means I have to double-check with people like Daniel who have an aversity to SVN, but hey, I should be able to be FDO's Subversion bitch right ?

After that, it's a matter of bringing all of maintainer.py's functionality under, for example, a "gnome" subcommand.

I've also had some interest expressed from people hacking on Gentoo, Debian, KDE, and Nokia to integrate some stuff into moap, but we'll see how that pans out when we get there.  It should in fact be easy to extend moap by dropping in additional command classes, so I guess I should make that possible in the future.

In related news, my Practical Project Maintenance talk at GUADEC went fine for a first version, and seemed to be well received.  I'll write more about that in my GUADEC wrapup, but for the people who asked me for the slides - I am going through Flickr withdrawal, I have all the links from where I got the photos and should now figure out if I can actually use them in the presentation or ask for permission if not.  I'll get going on that this week.

While doing various tasks around the house and ripping CD's I have from bands playing at next week's Pukkelpop festival I've been tackling some simple moap bugs so I can...

With a push and a shove, I excreted a new release of moap

An exciting release for me - with the help of some friends, bugs got fixed and features got added.

There is now a Bzr and a Git backend, bringing the number of supported VCS systems up to 5 - better than any copy I of prepare-ChangeLog.pl that I know of.

I also added a Bugzilla bug querying backend.  And Stefan is working on a SourceForge tracker backend.

One of the nicer things I've added recently is a way of being helpful to users when a dependency is missing.   For example, if you don't have Genshi installed, it will tell you that you're missing Genshi, and where you can find Genshi.  If moap knows about your distribution, it will even tell you how to install it if it knows.

If moap doesn't know about your distribution, or about how to get this dependency for your distribution, it will give you a link to file a ticket with the summary filled in for you already.  All you need to do is enter some information on how to detect your distro or install the dependency for your distro.  If this works out well, I can see myself adding this sort of thing to other projects.

Anyway, that brings me again one step closer to my talk at GUADEC, "Practical Project Maintenance".  The talk will also discuss moap, but the idea of the talk is mostly to draw on some of my experiences - as well as others' - in doing project maintenance work.

If you have any suggestions or ideas for this talk, or things you think I should cover, feel free to comment.

With a push and a shove, I excreted a new release of moap An exciting release for me - with the help of some friends, bugs got fixed and features...

Just added this bit to moap

[moap-trunk] [thomas@otto trunk]$ moap bug -U http://bugzilla.gnome.org/ query "product=GStreamer&component=gst-plugins-base&target_milestone=0.10.2"

324216: [cdparanoia] missing patches from 0.8

324696: [videotestsrc] does not start counting the time from zero when restarted324900: Problem compiling gst-plugins-base with Forte

325984: [playbin] cannot handle sources that produce raw audio/video

325990: patch videotestsrc for using glib types

326601: GstRingBuffer crashes with alaw/mulaw caps

327114: [theoradec] should post tags on the bus

327216: vorbisdec segfaults on certain queries

328423: [gnomevfs] doesn't handle case when gnomevfs can't init

326881: [playbin] stream selector connects to 'state-changed'

Compared to this screenscraping horror, a lot less code and a lot more robust.

I decided to use queries with CSV since both Redhat's and GNOME's bugzilla seem to support it.

AFAICT, GNOME's supports ATOM but not RSS, and Redhat's supports RSS but not ATOM. Yay for the magic that is Bugzilla !

Just added this bit to moap [moap-trunk] [thomas@otto trunk]$ moap bug -U http://bugzilla.gnome.org/ query "product=GStreamer&component=gst-plugins-base&target_milestone=0.10.2" 324216: [cdparanoia] missing patches from 0.8 324696: [videotestsrc] does not start counting the time from...

I put out a new moap release. Here's a short list of changes:

• moap doap freshmeat -b allows forcing a branch name (e.g. 'Default')
• distro checking code to give hints on how to install dependencies
• RSS2 feed generation from .doap release entries using Genshi or Cheetah templates
• ability to operate on multiple .doap files
• make moap changelog prepare also check the CHANGE_LOG_EMAIL_ADDRESS variable
• implement searching for your project's home page using Yahoo or Google
• parse wiki attribute of a DOAP Project

Jan wants to do some GStreamer releases, so I think I'll be working to add some features for that to moap this week.

As you may have noticed, moap now has a logo, and I like it a lot. I asked Christophe, Fluendo's visual wizard, to create me a logo based on the hammer and sickle, in orange, Tango-style, and with Russian-looking letters. He gave me three choices, I picked one, he gave me another three refining my choice, I picked one, and then he gave me another three, and I picked one. I can't believe how easy this process was compared to me trying to come up with something on my own. I should make T-shirts with this logo.

Happy hacking !

I put out a new moap release. Here's a short list of changes: moap doap freshmeat -b allows forcing a branch name (e.g. 'Default') distro checking code to give hints...

This week, after receiving a Google API key from a kind mecenas (which probably violates the EULA and thus she shall go unnamed) I implemented another one of my wishlist features for moap: looking up your project's home page using Google or Yahoo.

This is part of my preparation for my GUADEC talk on Practical Project Maintenance. Especially in the early days of a project, you need to make sure people can find your project easily, not only on the name of your project, but also on keywords related to what your project does. People are out there googling for keywords that should lead to your particular project if it's any good.

Since Yahoo's web API is completely open, I'm defaulting to yahoo's search for now. I must say I was always down on Yahoo like everyone else. But Google has gone from a search engine to a an ad company and made their API less useful, while Yahoo - who made the transition of search -> ads a long time before - actually trumps Google on accessible API for the search part.

Anyways, a curious thing has happened. My project page used to be hit number 5 on Google for the keyword "moap". After reading some page recently on Google optimization, telling me I should have as many key words as possible in the first paragraph and such, I expanded the text on the start page a little. I did not yet add keywords - as I need to figure out how to do that with Trac. I also added a logo and a favourite icon - which is unrelated to the optimization I want to do but I wanted to make it look a little nicer than the default page.

Now, today I run the search again, and I'm not even in the top 100 anymore. Did Google not like my logo ? Did Google know I was going to shuffle a complaint in this blog post before I even wrote it ? I don't know ! I don't understand this whole search engine thing.

Luckily, Yahoo has the project page at hit number 3. Another reason to like Yahoo...

I'm going to do another release of moap soon.

Feel free to leave tips on optimizing my entry page for search results !

This week, after receiving a Google API key from a kind mecenas (which probably violates the EULA and thus she shall go unnamed) I implemented another one of my wishlist...