Michal Čihař - Archive for 8/2013

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.

Yesterday evening I've arrived at DebConf 13. I was quite tired after traveling so I just had few beers and went to bed.

The travel went quite well besides somebody else broke wine and my suitcase was all wet from it. Fortunately almost nothing got inside so I have some clean clothes for next week :-).

As I went to bed quite early, I woke up early as well so I went to short walk to see what is nearby:

Weblate 1.6 is already two weeks out without any regressions, so now it's time to think about features for 1.7.

I definitely want to improve support for monolingual translation formats as they currently suffer by various metadata issues (eg. checks not working correctly). This requires quite big change in underlying database, but I think it's quite manageable.

When talking about checks, I want to make them configurable per project as global configuration is quite limiting for shared sites like hosted Weblate.

I will definitely need to touch registration and authentication, either by supporting latest django-registration API or to move some other solution with support for federated login. Which of these approaches will be used depends on my time, what is always the most limiting factor.

This might sound as too few features, but I'd like to make releases more often, so that should fit into this plan. However if you want to push for some feature, you still have two days to fund something on Catincan!

Finally, Weblate 1.6 is available as ready to use appliance in SUSE Studio.

This took quite long as openSUSE 12.3 does not work as expected inside SUSE Studio and I was too lazy to find all necessary tweaks earlier. The same problem actually prevented from Weblate 1.5 being there at all.

The biggest obstacle was MySQL setup - after enabling "Set up MySQL" in studio, you end up with MySQL database with empty mysql.users table, which obviously can not authenticate anybody. As I've found out, the only way around is manual setup.

Once this was figured out, the appliance only needed minor tweaking and is now ready to use in SUSE Gallery in all formats used for virtualization.