Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for English

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.

It has become a tradition, that I'm going into Dolomites each October with friends using Pentax. This year the weather looked more like a winter than autumn, but still it was nice opportunity to take some mountain pictures.

We've started near Passo Rolle:

However our first night and morning was at Passo Valles:

Inevitably we had to visit some places where we've been in past as well, so we went again to Passo Falzarego:

Last morning was at Passo Gardena, though it should be last time we did this (we've said this last year as well):

Weblate 1.8 has been released today. It comes with lot of improvements, especially in registration process where you can now use many third party services.

Full list of changes for 1.8:

• Please check manual for upgrade instructions.
• Nicer listing of project summary.
• Better visible options for sharing.
• More control over anonymous users privileges.
• Supports login using third party services, check manual for more details.
• Users can login by email instead of username.
• Documentation improvements.
• Improved source strings review.
• Searching across all units.
• Better tracking of source strings.
• Captcha protection for registration.

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.

Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far!

Thanks to great amount of changes I've been able do in Weblate during Hackweek, the 1.8 release is quite close.

All features I wanted there are implemented and it is already running for some time on my production servers which look quite stable. The only thing which needs still some improvement are translations. So that's your chance to contribute.

If there won't be any blocking issue, Weblate 1.8 will be released during next week.

10th hackweek is over and I think it has been again great chance to hack on something. This year we even had better food supplies so interruptions from hacking were even less frequent.

As you've might have already noticed, I was working on Weblate whole week and I think it worked pretty well and I've implemented all what I wanted.

First of all, Weblate now supports login using lot of third party services (like GitHub, Facebook, Google, ...). This was achieved by using python-social-auth for that. It is quite new module for this, so hopefully it's API will stay stable enough to be usable in the long term. It was surprisingly easy to implement, though I've spent quite a lot of tweaking of the login and registration process to make it work according to my expectations.

After doing this quite big change, I thought it's about time to restructure the documentation and document new features in it. I think it now covers all important things, but if you can't find something or some parts are hard to understand, just let me know, I'll fix it.

Another quite big feature (though it won't be much visible in upcoming 1.8 release) is source string tracking. This is prerequisite for many features people have requested in Weblate's issue tracker, but these will have to wait for next releases. If you want to see some feature earlier, you can support it by money on Bountysource :-).

Weblate can now also search in all strings, which might become handy if grepping over dozen of Git repositories is not your favorite game.

And last but not least, I've implemented simple Captcha protection for new registrations as the demo server is full of bots who register there and do nothing afterward.

Basically I think this makes Weblate 1.8 feature complete and I'd like to stabilize it in upcoming weeks to release. Right now it is deployed on the demo server, where you can play with it and discover bugs :-). Also it's now time to work on Weblate translations!

First day of hackweek did not really go as planned. I had to spend too much time on tasks which I did not now I will have to do in advance.

I've started with releasing Weblate 1.7. As a part of that I update SUSE Studio images with Weblate. Unfortunately this turned out to be more challenging than usual as with new version the build script always failed but without any obvious error. After some time, I've realized that it just does not show whole output, so the last (and most important) lines are missing.

Then it was easy to spot that the problem is in Whoosh version and it's just matter of providing newer version.

After fixing the image, I could finally focus on Weblate's issue tracker and resolved few issues and questions. I've also improved some of the in application documentation and links to documentation or other resources.

Meanwhile I could also setup translation hosting for monkeysign, happy translating!

Weblate 1.7 has been released today. It comes with lot of improvements, especially in translation speed and many new features.

Full list of changes for 1.7:

• Please check manual for upgrade instructions.
• Support for checking Python brace format string.
• Per subproject customization of quality checks.
• Detailed per translation stats.
• Changed way of linking suggestions, checks and comments to units.
• Users can now add text to commit message.
• Support for subscribing on new language requests.
• Support for adding new translations.
• Widgets and charts are now rendered using Pillow instead of Pango + Cairo.
• Add status badge widget.
• Dropped invalid text direction check.
• Changes in dictionary are now logged in history.
• Performance improvements for translating view.

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.

Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far!

Weblate, a free web-based translation management system, of course also needs to be translated. Now it's right time to complete translation into your language before Weblate 1.7 will be released.

The release is currently planned on Monday, to have clean table before hacking on Weblate during Hackweek. There is not much time left so jump in right now and start translating :-).