Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for phpMyAdmin

As usual, I look at the application stats for phpMyAdmin just after student application period of Google Summer of Code is over.

First of all we got more proposals than in last years, this time there is way more students from India and discussions on mentors lists shows this is quite similar for other projects. Maybe it's just different timing which works better for students there, but there might be different reasons as well. There is also quite low number of spam or bogus proposals.

Same as in past years, people leave the submission to the last moment, even though we encourage them to submit early so that they can adjust the application based on our feedback.

Anyway we're just working on evaluation and will finalize it in upcoming days. Of course you will know the results from Google on April 21st.

Since introduction of Developer's Certificate of Origin in phpMyAdmin, we've struggled with automatically checking pull requests on GitHub that they match this.

First attempt was to integrate this check into Travis environment, but that proven to be hard to understand by potential contributors as it did not give direct feedback what went wrong. So it was still useful for us, but still we had to explain the situation. With recent flood of contributions from potential GSoC students, it became quite tedious task.

So let's automate that. GitHub has quite powerful API, so it should not be that hard. Looking at Webhooks documentation, it is quite easy to get hooked on pull request creation and updates and checking commits and adding comments is just a piece of cake. The hardest choice was choosing language in which to implement it :-). While not finding binding for GitHub in any of my favorite language packaged in Debian. I've decided to hack this quickly in PHP without using any library and if this turns out to be limitation in future, it can be easily rewritten.

First incarnation of our commit checker did check just Signed-Off-By lines in commit messages, but I've found that there might be some other useful checks. So the script got extended for various simple coding style violations, which we see quite often like wrong indentation or using DOS end of lines (the example of all fired checks can be found in pull request 1081). You can find the code for it in our scripts repository.

phpMyAdmin has been accepted for Google Summer of Code 2014. So if you are a student and thinking about how to spend this summer, you might want to join us.

As usual, we have prepared dozen of ideas, so in case you are interested, it's really the time to start to work on your application. We require you to contribute before GSoC, so that we can see you can handle the code and our tools. All details you might need are available in our applicant guide.

Our requirements might sound strict, but without them, we would drown in hundredths of applications with no clue how to decide, so do your homework and prepare perfect application. If you have any questions, get in touch with us on mailing list and submit the application to to GSoC website.

Same as in past year, I'm attending FOSDEM 2014. This is the best opportunity to meet with free software world in Europe and get in touch with people you know only from mailing lists.

If you want to meet me in person and discuss anything, just get in touch with me and we'll arrange it.

As usual with our phpMyAdmin team meetings, quite a lot things get decided there and it was no difference this year, when we've met at DebConf 13.

We've discussed quite a lot of topics and some had quite interesting outcome.

One of already changes is that we're going to consolidate our support efforts on Stack Overflow. We've provided various support channels so far (IRC, mailing list, web forums and support tracker), which have overlapped quite a lot and we simply lack manpower to do all of that properly.

So users on IRC mostly get bored and left before somebody got to them. The mailing list received just few mails in a month, so they were almost not used. The web forums worked quite well for answering questions, but nobody was able to find answers there (the forums on SourceForge are quite hard to get properly indexed by Google), so the questions got repeated quite a lot. In the end we've decide to use Stack Overflow as it was anyway already used by lot of our users and concentrating our effort on single channel will even improve this.

Yesterday, we've spent nice day on a day trip of DebConf. I took the long hike, which ended up at Creux du Van, what is wonderful rocky place.

The way up was through nice nature and we've met quite a lot of cows on the way:

They we've finally arrived to Creux du Van:

Of course we could not miss an opportunity to take a group photo:

After wandering around the rocks, we took a lunch and headed to Neuchâtel, where some music festival was going on:

The whole day was nicely finished on a boat with a dinner.

PS: More DebConf photos are available in my gallery.

Weblate 1.6 has been released today. It comes with lot of improvements, especially adds voting for suggestions, improves import performance and brings more helpful admin interface. This is also first release with crowdfunded feature, but there are still some features to fund!

Full list of changes for 1.6:

• Nicer error handling on registration.
• Browsing of changes.
• Fixed sorting of machine translation suggestions.
• Improved support for MyMemory machine translation.
• Added support for Amagama machine translation.
• Various optimizations on frequently used pages.
• Highlights searched phrase in search results.
• Support for automatic fixups while saving the message.
• Tracking of translation history and option to revert it.
• Added support for Google Translate API.
• Added support for managing SSH host keys.
• Various form validation improvements.
• Various quality checks improvements.
• Performance improvements for import.
• Added support for voting on suggestions.
• Cleanup of admin interface.

You can find more information about Weblate on it's website, 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. Ready to run appliances will be soon available in SUSE Studio Gallery.

Weblate is also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others.

If you are free software project which would like to use Weblate, I'm happy to help you with set up or even host Weblate for you.

As student application period of Google Summer of Code 2013 is over, it's time to look at proposals we got for phpMyAdmin.

First of all we got slightly less proposals than in past years. This is probably related to the fact that we still heavily focus on code cleanup this year and this is definitely not that interesting topic as adding new features. I think quality has also slightly improved and this time we received no bogus or spam proposals.

Also as usual, people tend to leave submission for very last date (though not that much as in past years):

Quite unsurprisingly the most interesting topic seemed to be interface improvements, though it is quite wide. You can see how other topics were frequent in following chart:

Please note that the numbers are not 100% accurate as some proposals really did not fit into above categories.

Anyway we're just working on evaluation and will finalize it in upcoming days. Of course you will know the results from Google on May 27th.

Weblate 1.5 has been released today. It comes with lot of improvements, especially in performance, reporting and support for machine translations.

Full list of changes for 1.5:

• Please check manual for upgrade instructions.
• Added public user pages.
• Better naming of plural forms.
• Added support for TBX export of glossary.
• Added support for Bitbucket notifications.
• Activity charts are now available for each translation, language or user.
• Extended options of import_project admin command.
• Compatible with Django 1.5.
• Avatars are now shown using libravatar.
• Added possibility to pretty print JSON export.
• Various performance improvements.
• Indicate failing checks or fuzzy strings in progress bars for projects or languages as well.
• Added support for custom pre-commit hooks and commiting additional files.
• Rewritten search for better performance and user experience.
• New interface for machine translations.
• Added support for monolingual po files.
• Extend amount of cached metadata to improve speed of various searches.
• Now shows word counts as well.

You can find more information about Weblate on it's website, 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. Ready to run appliances will be soon available in SUSE Studio Gallery.

Weblate is also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others.

If you are free software project which would like to use Weblate, I'm happy to help you with set up or even host Weblate for you.

phpMyAdmin 4.0-rc2 is out and if your want to have your language in final release, it's last moment to start working on translation.

So let's look at which translations are at 100% right now (new ones are bold):

• Catalan
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English (United Kingdom)
• Estonian
• French
• German
• Greek
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish

Almost complete:

• Galician
• Polish
• Russian
• Simplified Chinese

As you can see, there is still lot of languages missing, this might be your opportunity to contribute to phpMyAdmin. Also you are welcome to translate phpMyAdmin 4.0 using translation server.

If your language is already fully translated and you want to help as well, you can translate our documentation as well.