Michal Čihař - Archive for 4/2016

Weblate 2.6

Going back to faster release cycle, Weblate 2.6 has been just released. There is improved support for Python 3 or brand new HTTP REST API.

Full list of changes for 2.6:

  • Fixed validation of subprojects with language filter.
  • Improved support for XLIFF files.
  • Fixed machine translation for non English sources.
  • Added REST API.
  • Django 1.10 compatibility.
  • Added categories to whiteboard messages.

If you are upgrading from older version, please follow our upgrading instructions.

You can find more information about Weblate on https://weblate.org, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Weblate is also being used https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, OsmAnd, Aptoide, FreedomBox, Weblate itself and many other projects.

Should you be looking for hosting of translations for your project, I'm happy to host them for you or help with setting it up on your infrastructure.

Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far! The roadmap for next release is just being prepared, you can influence this by expressing support for individual issues either by comments or by providing bounty for them.

motranslator 1.0

After two months since it's announcement I think it's good time to release 1.0 version of motranslator. This release doesn't bring any major changes, it's more to indicate that the library is stable :-).

The motranslator is a translation library used in current phpMyAdmin master (upcoming 4.7.0) with focus on speed and memory usage. It uses Gettext MO files to load the translations. It also comes with testsuite (100% coverage) and basic documentation.

Recommended way to install it is using composer from Packagist repository:

composer require phpmyadmin/motranslator

The Debian package will be available probably at point phpMyAdmin 4.7.0 will be out, but if you see need to have it earlier, just let me know.

Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2016-W16

Last week was again focused on bug fixing due to increased amount of received bug reports on 4.6.0 release. Fortunately most of the annoying bugs are already fixed in git and will be soon released as 4.6.1.

Another bigger task which was started last week was wiki migration. So far we've been using own wiki running MediaWiki and we're migrating it to GitHub wiki. The wiki on GitHub is way simpler, but it seems as better choice for us. During the migration all user documentation will be merged into our documentation, so that it's all in one place and wiki will be targeted on developers.

Handled issues:

Testing Sphinx documentation with Jenkins

While reviewing comments on phpMyAdmin wiki (which we're shrinking down to developer documentation and moving end user documentation to proper documentation) I've noticed that people complained there on broken links in our documentation. Indeed there was quite some of them as this is something nobody really checks. It seems like obvious task to automate.

It seemed to me as obvious as somebody had to do it already. Unfortunately I have not found much, but at least there was Using Jenkins to parse sphinx warnings. This helps with the build warnings, but unfortunately I found no integration for the linkcheck builder. Fortunately it's quite easy with the Jenkins Warnings plugin to write custom parsers and to parse linkcheck output as well.

The Sphinx output parser based on above link can be configured like:

Regular Expression: 

^(.*):(\d+): \((.*)\) (.*)

Mapping Script:

import hudson.plugins.warnings.parser.Warning

String fileName = matcher.group(1)
String lineNumber = matcher.group(2)
String category = matcher.group(3)
String message = matcher.group(4)

return new Warning(fileName, Integer.parseInt(lineNumber), "sphinx", category, message);

Example Log Message:

Percona-Server-1.0.2-3.rst:67: (WARNING/2) Inline literal start-string without end-string.

The Sphinx linkcheck output is quite similar:

Regular Expression:

^(.*):(\d+): \[([^\]]*)\] (.*)

Mapping Script:

import hudson.plugins.warnings.parser.Warning

String fileName = matcher.group(1)
String lineNumber = matcher.group(2)
String category = matcher.group(3)
String message = matcher.group(4)

return new Warning(fileName, Integer.parseInt(lineNumber), "sphinx-linkcheck", category, message);

Example Log Message:

faq.rst:793: [broken] http://www.hardened-php.net/: <urlopen error [Errno -3] Temporary failure in name resolution>

All you need to do now is to enable these in your Jenkins project, let the Sphinx parse output and the Sphinx linkcheck one file generated by linkcheck (usually _build/linkcheck/output.txt). The result can be found on the phpMyAdmin CI server.

Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2016-W15

After weeks of bugfixing my focus has again shifted to refactoring and code cleanups.

One big area was charsets and collations, which were cached in the session data so far. This had bad effect of making the session data quite huge leading to performance loss on every page, while the cached information is needed only on few pages. I've removed this caching, cleaned up the code and everything seems to be behave faster, even the pages which used cached content in the past.

Second area was handling of file uploads. Historically we had two copies of code doing almost the same thing. I've tried to merge them and use File class for all the operations. However this code was built to handle lot of corner cases, so I'm a bit afraid of breaking some special setups.

Handled issues:

Gammu 1.37.2

Yesterday, Gammu 1.37.1 and Gammu 1.37.2 have been released. As usual it collects bug fixes and minor improvements.

Full list of changes in 1.37.1:

  • Properly report errors in HEX encoded strings from SMSD SQL backends.
  • Configurable SMSD table names.
  • Improved support for Huawei E303.
  • Improved support for Vodafone K4511.
  • Improved support for Telit M2M modules.

Full list of changes in 1.37.2:

  • Fixed compilation of SMSD.

Would you like to see more features in Gammu? You an support further Gammu development at Bountysource salt or by direct donation.

Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2016-W14

Last week was focused on our SQL parser as several issues have been found there. If was for me also first release of SQL parser to packagist repository.

Besides code changes, there was quite some time spent on reviewing incoming issues. Most of they have been already fixed and users will get fixes in the 4.6.1 release.

Handled issues:

API for Weblate

The long requested feature for Weblate is here - it now has API which you can use to control it. It's scope is currently limited, but it will expand in future releases. The API is currently available in Git, deployed on both Demo server and Hosted Weblate, our hosted solution. It will be also part of 2.6 release, which should be released by end of April.

Anyway the API now provides basic operations up to translation level - you can not edit individual translations, handle suggestions or other advanced features. However what you can do includes:

  • Manipulating with the underlaying VCS repository (commit, push, pull, reset)
  • Download or upload translation files
  • Get information about translations, components, projects and languages
  • Lock or unlock components for translation

As you can see this really covers the basic operations which were most frequently requested, more will come in future. You can see more detailed the Weblate API documentation.

Ukolovnik 1.5

There were quite some translation and code fixes in the repository, so I guess it's time to release it as well. So here comes Ukolovnik 1.5, released almost four years since last release.

Full list of changes:

  • Translations update.
  • Changed licence to GPL 3 or later.
  • Various code cleanup.
  • Development moved to GitHub.

PS: I don't plan any further development of this tool, this is just to bring all (few) users to current code in git.