With quite usual delay after release, book Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.4 for Effective MySQL Management has been published.
Unlike the previous edition, I was not doing technical review here, but it is anyway special book for me - the cover photo is coming from me, what is actually for the very first time this has happened.
As usual with Packt opensource books, phpMyAdmin project receives some money for each sold copy of the book, so you're welcome to buy it :-).
Since infamous erasing of factory calibration in my ColorHug device and restoring calibration matrix, I noticed it did screen calibration wrong. However I did not find time to properly investigate the issue. Yesterdays mail from Richard was actually trigger for me so I've opened up this topic.
In the end it turned out to be caused by Little CMS wrongly parsing CCMX in case you are using locales which use something else than . as decimal point.
After lot of googling, I've realized there is probably no good way of parsing floats independent on current locales, so I used one of hacks I found and I think it's less intrusive - get current decimal point by printing float string using printf and then convert the string to it. I know it looks ugly, but including own implementation of strtod is also not nice and playing with locales is definitely something not thread safe to do within widely used library.
Anyway I've asked upstream to merge my patches, so let's see what they think of it.
As you might have noticed from my previous posts, we've moved phpMyAdmin code to github. Now I'm going to describe some things which might be useful for you if you are about do to similar switch.
While using git, moving to another hosting provider should be pretty straightforward. Just add another remote, push code there and it should be done. On the other side you probably have dozens of things in your infrastructure which you need to adjust. So the first thing to do is write down what all services are connected to your current git repositories. Let me name some which might be worth checking:
Once you think you have remembered all important things (the less important will probably show up anyway, but majority of things should work), you're ready to make the move.
I've decided to make the move in few steps. First push all data to new location, what can take some time. I'll get in more details to that later. In the same time I asked all contributors to give me their login information, so that I can allow them access to new repositories. Once all recently active developers were migrated, it was time to push all remaining commits to new git repositories and make the switch for real.
Pushing git repo to another location, should be pretty easy. On the other side if you have many branches, it get's slightly more complex, I've ended up with following shell snippet (pushing all branches present in origin to github remote):
git branch -r | grep origin/ | grep -v HEAD | sed 's@.*/@@' | while read b ; do git checkout $b ; git push github $b:$b ; done
Please ensure that you check output of this, because you may hit network problems somewhere in the middle and you end up with few branches than you expect. As the code is pretty much idempotent, you can safely run it several times until there is nothing to push. You should also push all tags to new location:
git push --tags github
Okay, we've all data on right place, so let's switch all our users to new location:
git remote set-url origin git@github.com:phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin.git # read/write
git remote set-url origin git://github.com/phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin.git # read only
Of course everybody has to do this manually.
Next good thing is to let people know when they are using wrong repo (which will stay there for some time). Unfortunately there is AFAIK no way to warn them on pull, so let's warn at least on push:
$ cat > hooks/update
#!/bin/sh
echo "phpMyAdmin git repositories have moved to https://github.com/phpmyadmin"
exit 1
I think this is pretty much all. You can find some more bits in our Git migration wiki page.
PS: Thanks to github for offering us hosting and sorry for breaking their branch displaying page by too many divergent branches.
I've just updated phpMyAdmin repos on github and enabled notifications hooks there, so the earlier announced switch to github is done.
All you need to do is point your repositories to pull/push to github, for main repository it can be done using:
git remote set-url origin git@github.com:phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin.git
If you are using just read only access then use following:
git remote set-url origin git://github.com/phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin.git
For other repositories just replace last part of the URL with repository name (they have not changed).
Everything should work as before, pushes should be now faster, because all notifications are done in background on github and they don't block pushing.
Yet another FOSDEM is behind us and I'd like to thank all people organizing it. It was a great event as usual.
This year there were some changes - the conference grew and there was an extra building. This is great, but on the other side, there were more tracks to follow and occasionally I wanted to be in four places at once, what is of course not manageable.
Combined with quite freezing weather (well it was still much warmer than it is now in Prague), moving from one side of campus to another was not that comfortable as in last years, but there is not much man can do with that.
And the biggest change for me - I did not manage beer event this year. We enjoyed great team dinner on Friday evening and while it ended, I was too lazy to move to crowded beer event and rather enjoyed bed in my hotel.
Yesterday we did held phpMyAdmin team meeting and we discussed several things for project future. One of discussed things was to move our repositories to github for easier collaboration and management of private repositories.
After some discussions we've decided to go for it. As I write this blog, all repositories are being pushed there and once all developers will get their access rights there, we will move completely.
But even right now, you can fork us on github, the code is already there and will be updated obsessionally until we fully move there.
Again, as usual in last few years, I'm spending first weekend in February in Brussels, where FOSDEM is happening.
This year we've again decided to do make this team meeting for phpMyAdmin, so people from five countries and three continents came to one conference to discuss future development and other stuff.
But of course this is not only thing I'm going to do here. I came with openSUSE folks, where we've brought lot of beer, some DVDs and hardware to show. You're welcome to check it out.
And of course there is about 430 talks to visit during weekend :-).
First of all, take this blog post as a rant from developer. I don't expect that this will change anything in how people ask me questions.
Anyway before you write me email with some questions, please check following easy bits:
If you do follow these basic rules, you might get more help than usual. If you are interested in knowing more, there is famous How To Ask Questions The Smart Way which will tell you more information than I did in this rant.
As phpMyAdmin is approaching to 3.5 release, it has come time to share about translations status. Here comes second round of translation status update.
Since last update we have two more translations at 100%:
There are few which are really close to 100% and I hope they will get there soon:
Just on next level is Czech, where I'm progressing quite slowly and would welcome help :-).
There was also great improvement in Romanian in past week so I hope we will see it soon on top of the list as well.
Was your language not mentioned? It's now perfect time to contribute to it.
All of Gammu and Wammu related projects are slowly dying under my hands in past months (maybe I could even say years). The reason for this is lack of motivation and time to work on that properly.
Last year I've managed to collect some bugfixes and to fix some bugs myself what lead to releasing Gammu 1.31.0, which seems to be quite good release. But since then, I've again hardly done any work there and my biggest motivation for working on Gammu is that without my involvement the project would be probably completely dead. This is definitely not the best motivation and the outcome can be clearly seen.
The project definitely has it's problems (I could name them, but let's avoid making this blog post too long), but there are quite a lot of users using it. Currently most interesting feature seems to be SMS daemon, which is probably superior to what others provide, because this is where Gammu gets most of it's new users.
Unfortunately not much of them are active in development, the biggest contribution I can expect there is to fix issues they face. On the other side bug tracker and mailing list are full of reported bugs. Not speaking of feature requests to support new phone models. Some of them should be easy to support like new S40 based Nokia's, but things like Android, iPhone or Windows Mobile would require much more work.
Of course the big question is whether somebody needs anything else than SMSD. In modern phones, you anyway have most of the data on "cloud" as well, being it Google, Apple or Microsoft and possibility of doing backups to the computer are not that important as in past.
I'm definitely not using Gammu to backup my phone (anyway MeeGo is not supported) and I don't think I will in near future. Simply there are better and easier ways to get my data out of phone than implementing support for Gammu.
Anyway if anybody is willing to help Gammu now or in future, I'm definitely willing to help him.