The repository is updated with chromaprint, gstreamer-chromaprint, longomatch, and some of my own projects: moap, mach, morituri, and savon.

I filed some bugs, and fixed moap to adjust for the behavioural changes, sprinkling comments.

I packaged up redland-bindings and it’s available from my package repository.
I’m going to retry to get it into Fedora properly, so here is the package review request.

The interface is lifted from git, obviously, since that’s where most people will know the feature from.

I implemented it first with CVS, so I could fix this pychecker bug which was blocking Fedora from bumping the pychecker version from 0.8.17 (3 years old) to 0.8.18. And sure enough, it picked out the commit I broke.

While implementing and while dealing with CVS’s idea of how it stores CVS revisions and dates and so on, I googled and was amused to find this first hit on google for the words cvs and bisect. Clever Andy! And he cleverly sidestepped the problem I wrestled with by making the user specify two dates at the start instead of trying to figure it out from the checkout. And all in lisp too!

Then, to test that my VCS interface was sane, I implemented it for Subversion as well. That took about 15 minutes, since Subversion is much more sane than CVS. I tried the following command on a flumotion checkout:

moap vcs bisect reset; moap vcs bisect start; svn up; moap vcs bisect good; svn up -r 3000; moap vcs bisect bad; MOAP_DEBUG=4 moap vcs bisect run ./test.sh

With test.sh containing
test -e flumotion/component/consumers/gdp/gdp.py

(In other words, look for the commit that added this file.)

Sure enough, it picked out this commit:


[moap-trunk] [thomas@ana flumotion]$ moap vcs bisect diff
Index: /home/thomas/tmp/flumotion/configure.ac
===================================================================
--- /home/thomas/tmp/flumotion/configure.ac (revision 6909)
+++ /home/thomas/tmp/flumotion/configure.ac (revision 6908)
@@ -212,7 +212,6 @@
flumotion/component/combiners/switch/Makefile
flumotion/component/consumers/Makefile
flumotion/component/consumers/disker/Makefile
-flumotion/component/consumers/gdp/Makefile
flumotion/component/consumers/httpstreamer/Makefile
flumotion/component/consumers/preview/Makefile
flumotion/component/consumers/shout2/Makefile
Index: /home/thomas/tmp/flumotion/flumotion/component/consumers/Makefile.am
===================================================================
--- /home/thomas/tmp/flumotion/flumotion/component/consumers/Makefile.am (revision 6909)
+++ /home/thomas/tmp/flumotion/flumotion/component/consumers/Makefile.am (revision 6908)
@@ -11,7 +11,6 @@

SUBDIRS = \
disker \
- gdp \
httpstreamer \
preview \
shout2
Index: /home/thomas/tmp/flumotion/ChangeLog
===================================================================
--- /home/thomas/tmp/flumotion/ChangeLog (revision 6909)
+++ /home/thomas/tmp/flumotion/ChangeLog (revision 6908)
@@ -1,16 +1,5 @@
2008-06-20 Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas at apestaart dot org>
</thomas>

- * configure.ac:
- * flumotion/component/consumers/Makefile.am:
- * flumotion/component/consumers/gdp (added):
- * flumotion/component/consumers/gdp/gdp.py (added):
- * flumotion/component/consumers/gdp/__init__.py (added):
- * flumotion/component/consumers/gdp/Makefile.am (added):
- * flumotion/component/consumers/gdp/gdp.xml (added):
- Add a GDP consumer.
-
-2008-06-20 Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas at apestaart dot org>
-
* flumotion/component/producers/gdp/gdp.py:
Add error for http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=532364
</thomas>

So, the feature is ready for testing. It could use some more documenting, and some additional goodies like accepting arguments to moap vcs bisect start for example.

Feedback appreciated!

This is MOAP 0.2.7, “MMM…”.

Coverage in 0.2.7: 1424 / 1899 (74 %), 109 python tests, 2 bash tests

Features added since 0.2.6:
- Added moap vcs backup, a command to backup a checkout to a tarball that
can be used later to reconstruct the checkout. Implemented for svn.
- Fixes for git-svn, git, svn and darcs.
- Fixes for Python 2.3 and Python 2.6

I’ve been fixing things left and right for python 2.6, and in the process I noticed that moap hasn’t had a release for over a year. This release contains mostly bug fixes collected over the year, and a new feature that isn’t implemented yet for all VCS’s. Basically it’s an automatic replacement for something I was doing manually every time I removed an old GNOME cvs/svn/git checkout: figure out what’s in that tree that’s not in the repository (diffs, unversioned files, …), so I can delete everything else and free some disk space.

The only problem with this release is that, after doing the release, I noticed that Freshmeat removed their XML-RPC interface. Apparently they have some new kind of interface they want people to use. Sigh. But that means 0.2.8 is right around the corner!

I am looking for packagers for various distros. I have people for Debian/Ubuntu and am going to submit for Fedora myself in a bit. But all other packagers are welcome, both to package moap and to try it out

If you’re interested, here are the release notes:

This is MOAP 0.2.6, “Nerd Night”.

Coverage in 0.2.6: 1288 / 1742 (73 %), 103 python tests, 2 bash tests

Features added since 0.2.5:
- Added support for git-svn.
- Fix brz diff.
- Added moap changelog find to search through a ChangeLog.
- Added man page.
- Added moap tracadmin to administrate trac installations.
- Added changed properties/added/deleted files when preparing ChangeLog entries.
- Added checking of unchanged ChangeLog entry template.

Bugs fixed since 0.2.5:
- 263: broken changelog unit test
- 267: a man page
- 270: cl find completely busted
- 275: cl prepare –ctags failure with exuberant ctags 5.7
- 257: ImportError: No module named moap.util
- 258: git-svn support
- 259: bzr diff patch
- 266: svn:ignore property not well parsed
- 273: DEP: RDF, Fedora release 7 (Moonshine)
- 277: “changelog prepare” doesn’t list changed functions in C++ files.
- 281: changelog prepare -c crashes with “not a ctags line”
- 282: make install fails
- 284: not full change detected on svn move file
- 286: [svn] propedit on externals is not recognized as a change
- 239: warn if ChangeLog has not been saved
- 260: Add changelog grep command
- 261: Option to make ‘changelog diff’ include differences in ChangeLog file
- 262: changelog find: fix for multiple search terms
- 264: Make changelog find case insensitive by default
- 265: git diff should show staged changes
- 271: trailing spaces in date/name/address line for entry break parsing

Contributors to this release:
- Arek Korbik
- Marc-Andre Lureau
- Thomas Vander Stichele
- Tim Philipp-Müller

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.

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.

[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 !

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 !

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 !