Hi, [ This is directed towards CRUX developers; this is not a wishlist thread, so if you're not a developer and like something to be changed, please DON'T post it as follow-up to this! Thank you ] 2.2 is getting more and more real, thanks to Simone's great work and your testing. Along with the work on 2.2 itself, I'd like to address a number of things which seems tedious now; this mail is a (non exclusive) list of things I'd like to see changed, in the hope that we could discuss them on IRC sometimes; I'd propose next wednesday, 22.2., 8pm CET as a first meeting; #crux-cruxcon is the place to be. If you can make it, that would be great; otherwise, feel free to comment here, in private mail (again, please CRUX devs only) or on IRC at any other point in time. ----------------------------------------------------------- I. Trac, Apache, Subversion 1. Trac There are a number of issues here: - the wiki is rather weak; it lacks features of other wikis, like category support which would be great for documentation - the bug tracking in 0.8 is horrible (free text "assign" field, no fine grained permission model etc, bad defaults for the "assign field" etc.). Also, there's no way to send notifications directly to the person who got the report assigned. - trac's templates (or the way we use it) are a bit unflexible, which made us avoid the conversions to 0.9 so far - the tight coupling of all the components (website/wiki, bug tracker) makes it harder to update in general 2. Subversion & Apache Subversion has been a great replacement for CVS so far, and I'm basically very happy; however, there are a couple of downsides: - Its dependencies and compile time - the "five minute export for rsync hack" - The way we use it, we're forced to use apache as webserver, since it's the only one supporting mod_dav_svn I've talked to Simone about this, and the (fairly radical) proposal from us would be: a. Switch to Wikka as Wiki http://varlock.com/tmp/wikka2/wikka01.png b. Switch to flyspray as bug tracking (Simone uses it at work, and seems very happy with it) http://varlock.com/tmp/wikka2/flyspray01.png c. Switch to git as revision control tool; alternatives have either more dependencies (hg, bzr, svk), or are awkward to use (GNU arch/tla, bazaar) d. use gitweb as VCS interface http://www.kernel.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=git/git.git;a=summary This would mean the following: - we can update the wiki, bugtracking, version control, and web server without any interdependencies - we get a more powerful wiki - we get a more powerful bug tracking, which has proper access right control (i.e. only registered users can submit bugs) - we can send out direct mail notifications to tickets, making clc/crux-devel a much nicer list again; there's also jabber notification support :-) - git has no dependencies beyond patch and diff, and installs fairly quickly - the git repository could directly be served via rsyncd for ports -u (ignoring .git and therefore the history), which would allow us to get rid of the "five minute export" crontab - we can (actually have to) use system groups to control permissions for several git repositories, which I think it nice - we could drop apache and go with lighttpd if we wanted :-) Disadvantages are: - we'll have to get uses to a new revision control tool - some work to set up the initial repositories A final note regarding git: Tilman who uses it for xmms2 said he sees no reason why we couldn't use it for CRUX; Per uses it at work; I've been toying with it lately; conversion should be painless, IMO (except for the initial import, which could require some work) A final note regarding the setup: Simone volunteered to do a test setup for the wiki and flyspray; I'd suggest we do this ASAP. Matt suggested to do further planning for this switch in the test setup, which sounds good to me :-) ----------------------------------------------------------- II. Mailing list move We're ready to move the mailing lists to crux.nu; this will mean that they'll get a new address; the suggested names are: crux@lists.crux.nu crux-dev@lists.crux.nu crux-git-commits@lists.crux.nu :-) I'm not sure if we'd want to drop the prefix crux- for the later two; it's pretty obvious from the second level domain anyway... if we want to import the old mails into the archive, we'd need the relevant files from the old lists [<-- open task] ----------------------------------------------------------- III. Ports mirroring We have a ports.crux.nu subdomain, and 2.2's 'ports' utility should use that; we'd also like to allow admins to mirror the ports tree around the world (we've been asked a couple of times whether this is possible). Therefore we need a concept to allow users to select a ports mirror. Simplest solution: set it in rc.conf, source that one from ports. slightly more elegant: introduce a ports.conf; kinda overkill though Obviously, we can use ports.crux.nu as a default here ----------------------------------------------------------- IV. SF DNS RR fix So we've had fixes in our /etc/hosts for a while, which is fine. However, it doesn't look like SF is going to "fix" their DNS anytime soon, so I think a better solution would be to work around it in pkgutils. There are different ways around it: 1. using a variable in Pkgfiles: source=($SF_MIRROR/...) 2. sed'ing "s|dl.sf.net|$SF_MIRROR|" in pkgmk; advantage: requires no changes to the package files; could also be made more generic, to allow users to specify things like this: url_transform=(dl.sf.net:heanet.dl.sf.net someother.common.host:mirror.to.it) SF_MIRROR and url_transform would probably go into pkgmk.conf. Crucial here is that we have a stable mirror as default. I think #2 is quite a hack, but this is where we meet reality :-/ ----------------------------------------------------------- Okay, that was quite a bit of information. I hope it's making sense, and am looking forward to discuss some of those ideas with you soon. Thanks for reading, Best regards Johannes -- Johannes Winkelmann mailto:jw@tks6.net Zurich, Switzerland http://jw.tks6.net