[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [MiNT] Bugtracker



On 12/31/09 2:22 PM, Paul Wratt wrote:
(see previous mentioned thread)

Thanks for that Rob, it might be an idea to add web frontend that can
interface with CVS so the website can be updated without CVS access,
secured of course, and it can be path limited to the SpareMiNT Website
only (extra secure)

Typically when you go CVS that is the only way you go. For instance, if you have web content that is in CVS and someone starts making peacemeal changes without committing them to CVS then you lose all of the benefits and features of using CVS to begin wtih. It should either be used religiously or not at all.
Vincent was right, you just need a captcha plugin, its also works well
for anonymous stuff too

DONT got the wiki route, for one reason, portablity, web site contents
cant be easy moved or ported to another interface, unless it can
access plain text files, or db text (which can be dumped, manipulated,
and re-db'ed)

The wiki format is actually fairly portable. There is only basic formatting blocks that can be stripped out to get a text format. Wiki offers the benefit of loose control and anyone can make changes. This is something the atari community really needs as we regularly have people that control important projects disappear either permanently or for years at a time. There should be no one person that holds the keys because people die unexpectedly and that's just how it goes :(
I dont mind updating any web stuff, especially id it means "typing up docs".

wiki and docs are synonymous. Almost all freemint docs would be best housed in a wiki.
A couple of questions:
1) is SpareMiNT site the home of FreeMiNT. I am thinking about road
map, TOS5, and other OS related stuff also (most of which is present
in CVS)
Sparemint is the home of sparemint. Freemint has no official home though I guess you could say sparemint is the home of freemint since it has the only source of info about freemint cvs and other docs. But technically sparemint is just one most commonly used flavor of freemint with others being gentoo, debian, kgmd, etc.
2) should sparemint site just need a makeover/update, and add new
http://freemint.sparemint.org
For every person that agrees with this, there's someone that disagrees but my vision for sparemint is at http://dev.sparemint.org. It is to be a dynamic site that is php powered and all data is stored in back end databases. There are different variants of sparemint called repositories and they can be optimized for 060, coldfire, etc. There is a program called sum that operates in both text and gui gem mode and updates from this new sparemint database using a basic http api. It will work similar to yum on fedora, etc but will be less featureful (it has no dependency checking which is largely useless for statically linked sparemint). When a user wants to contribute to sparemint, he/she simply builds the source rpm file on their own. This requires the package to build successfully in order to get the srpm output. The server will then extract the srpm, glean metadata about the package and build binary rpms for all the different available repository. Once the rpm is build it will be provided to <repository>-testing. Any users who are using the testing version of that repository will automatically get the package updates. People who test the package and can confirm it works properly for them can then login to the sparemint website and submit an approval. With X number of approvals, say 2, from different users + the original package uploaders implicit approval we then push the package out to the rest of the population.

This vision is about 90% complete. I need to push to finish the build farm daemon which is currently shell scripts but I want it to be a c++ program, I need to completely build sparemint with gcc 4.x for each variant, and I need to fix a few bugs in the sparemint update manager.

The reason I did all this is because right now you upload packages to sparemint incoming and I believe only Frank Naumann approves packages but he disappeared and didn't approve or disapprove of some rpms I spent lots of time building. I decided there must be a better 100% community driven way. (nothing against frank of course).
3) Can we get a OS specific website up, that covers all things needed
to get up and running from current CVS, but also make room for TOS5,
ACP/v4e, and current CVS development roadmap
Much of the docs are completely obsolete.
4) Can we get website for Current OS Fluff, like what atari forums
had, for XaAES skins themes, custom builds, and other related "fluff"
(sound, MyAES themes)

Really we need an official XaAES and MyAES home. Really ideally these should all be projects on gforge running on atariforge. It's really the best place to independently manage these separate projects.
"websites" can come under single site, and I dont mind putting its
together. It can use a CMS if need be, so others can manage it as well

For Mantis:
1) Helmut should have developer status (can close)
2) Is there a way to "second" a closure, and can closed bugs be reopened.

Something needs to be done regarding bugtrakker actions, and also CVS
actions. For example, once a month it MiNT-list gets a CVS-changelog
for that month, and Bugs-closed/Bus-open for that month

That would help everyone who is not a CVS dev, or mint/xaaes dev to
keep up to date without overloading anything. It would also allow
another way of tracking and searching for CVS issues, and patch/bug
related issues, and may actually improve problem resolution..

For developers, is it a good idea to allow "nightly patches" (or
weekly?) through Mantis, as oppossed to single CVS patch commits. Can
Mantis do this? Also for those developers who dont have CVS commit
access, should there be a group of people who are willing to test the
patches first, taking some of the patch duties off Alan shoulders (at
least so he can commit without question, or use Mantis to do it)

Something you seem to miss is that there is not a lot of active development. There is no release cycles. No need for nightly anything for the most part, etc. Nightly cvs builds are fine because all they waste is cpu cycles. In fact one idea I had is to enable my nightly cvs builds and forward build failures to the mint list. Then people can easily see when a change committed to cvs breaks it at least for me.
Again, I dont mind doing the web stuff, including additions to Mantis
if required

Paul
PS I think Mark said he has some GCC 4 RPM builds, and others need RPM
building to be documented (for SpareMiNT compatibility, the is a doc
somewhere) and CVS patch commits (as per thread)

I don't have anything current but I did it before. I decided to make a push to do this again but I ran into the malloc bug and gave up. If I can't escape the bugs of the platform that are supposedly fixed then I can't help much with packaging. RPM needs the build to go uninterrupted with no random problems. Because of this in the last couple weeks I have been learning assembler to help work on freemint itself as well as firetos for m5485evb with lynx and usb drivers.

I don't mean to sound bitter but my atari life has been a lot of hard pushes involving lots of my time followed by many unsolvable letdowns which push my work aside. Right now though I am working on bootstrapping a fresh version of sparemint 100% with newest mintlib, gcc, binutils, etc. If I still have malloc bug then it is most definitely not me using a tool statically linked against an old mintlib. But I have to get past these gcc 4.x.x builds which have problems with limits.h and syslimits.h.

Btw, I also vote for a mintlib and freemint release so that we can update the sparemint packages for these. Sorry for the long winded msg. Happy new year guys!

Thanks,
Mark