Michal Čihař - Archive for 2/2011

As I've already written, SourceForge.Net has limited things which you can do on git/mercurial servers and one of the things they have prohibited is sending emails.

This is one of few things which almost every projects uses so it has brought quite obvious reaction, people are reporting bugs that it stopped to working. The major reason for reporting bug is that this change was not at all communicated to users (nor users nor project admins), so it was just a surprise and every body expects bug and not this kind of reply.

As I don't have way to reopen the ticket, I had to open another one, that the documentation is wrong and I hope the reply will be slightly better.

SF.net, if you still don't believe people used this feature quite a lot, just look at number of bug reports you have in your tracker right now...

After recent attack on sf.net servers, some services have been unavailable for some time. Now things are returning to "normal" operations, CVS has been made available yesterday.

But this has lead to other (quite unrelated) change, affecting all SCM services:

outbound email is not functional, so any script utilizing this will fail. If you need to send outbound email, a workaround would be to use curl and and external site or Project Web to send the email.

I think this is just wrong. If this is as a measure against spam, it will rather open dozens of other places where to send spam, because every project wanting commit notifications (or using CIA.vc), will need to deploy some script on web to send mail. And I guess it simply won't be much protected.

Maybe it's time to consider changing service provider...

PS: The bug I've reported on this topic is here.

I've decided to try to get rid of some more Debian packages. The main reason being that I don't use MPD anymore so following packages are for sale:

• mpdris
• mpdscribble
• python-mpd
• sonata

I will continue to upload new versions (should there be any) until somebody steps up, but that's pretty much all I can do.

PS: And there is still gpointing-device-settings for sale as well.

Today we've got new submission for phpMyAdmin theme contest and I must say it really looks great.

The new theme is called pmahomme after it's author Mike Homme:

It's now also available on the demo server, so don't hesitate and try it there.

Looking forward for other submissions to our contest.

As we're slowly heading towards phpMyAdmin 3.4, it is good time to look at current translations state.

There are few which are already at 100%, so they are in best possible shape:

• Czech
• English (United Kingdom)
• French
• Slovenian
• Turkish

Some languages really miss just few messages, so they will hopefully get to 100% soon:

• Swedish
• Greek
• Chinese (China)
• Catalan

And there is huge progress in Russian, which will at this pace get to 100% this week.

Was your language not listed? You can help it being better!

Squeeze was released this weekend and it's time to slowly migrate servers to it. The first to upgrade came the ones backing up phpMyAdmin demo server. Reason for trying them first is they have mostly same setup as other, while definitely not being critical to run all the time. For simple reasons that users break them time to time as well :-).

Everything went surprisingly smoothly, the only problematic thing being no availability of MariaDB packages for Squeeze right now. But it does not matter that much, as Lenny packages still work fine.

There should be no visible changes on the servers, but in case there is something broken, please let me know.

While having experience with upgrading database servers, I went to production database server and it is now running Squeeze as well. What still remains is the server doing virtualization, but I prefer to do this in time when I can quickly get to the housing, in case something goes wrong with the reboot.

Picture this week is a little bit later because of time spent on FOSDEM and traveling there.

It was taken last Wednesday from Vyšehrad, the Prague castle is disappearing in morning fog.

Today, I've made available two new themes for phpMyAdmin on our demo server.

First one is Toba theme which was contributed by Azhari Harahap:

Second one is Graphite theme which I've started during Hackweek and finished during free time around FOSDEM:

And we're still waiting for more contributions to our Theme contest.

PS: Forgot to mention that new themes are only for 3.4 branch and won't work with others.