Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

Here are some screenshots of goman - the Gentoo Overlays Manager tool that I’m currently building in PHP.

Any feedback, questions, or feature requests, please drop by in #gentoo-overlays on irc.freenode.net

It’s official. overlays.gentoo.org is no longer under wraps, and folks are now free to blog about it as much as they’d like. We’ve put out a press release, and hopefully over the next few days we’ll be getting some more PR for our new service out the door too.

Folks who deserve a big thanks are Lance from Infra, Stefan from Overlays and Sunrise, Gunnar for creating layman, and Christel from User Relations. You guys made all this possible, and you made it better than it would have been originally. A big thank you too to everyone who has already signed up for the service. I hope you’ll be the first of many many people to do so.

The big thing about o.g.o isn’t that it provides hosting for overlays on Gentoo infrastructure. That’s nice, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not the point of the project. o.g.o is the place where Gentoo developers (folks w/ the nice shiny @gentoo.org email address) and Gentoo users (folks w/out the nice shiny @gentoo.org email address) can directly collaborate together on creating packages and documentation for Gentoo. Instead of having to wait for ages for patches to make their way from Bugzilla into the Portage tree, folks instead can ask for commit access to the relevant overlay, and under the mentoring of experienced Gentoo devs, can commit their changes directly into the overlay. This has a profound effect on users who get involved, because for the first time they really are involved in creating packages for Gentoo. The difference has to be seen to be believed, and if you’re a Gentoo developer struggling to recruit folks to help you with a herd of packages, you should strongly consider going down the overlays route to help you reach out to the Gentoo user community.

We’re calling these overlays social workspaces, because they bring folks from the wider Gentoo community together to work together.

It’s an exciting project, and we won’t be stopping here. We have a few little tidy-ups to do with the homepage and RSS feeds, and then it’s on to providing a choice of version control systems, and with providing a web-based control panel for folks to directly admin their own overlays.

I’m working on a web-based control panel for Gentoo Overlays, so that users can do things like change their passwords, and overlay owners can do things like manage who can do what to their overlay. It’ll stop my Overlays admin team being a bottleneck for run-of-the-mill stuff, which should help us provide a high-quality and responsive service.

Step 1 is to get a PHP5 app working that manages data about users and overlays in an SQLite3 database. That’s coming along nicely, and should be complete during the coming week.

stuart@belal /var/www/localhost/htdocs/goman $ wc -l `find . -name '*.php'`
   25 ./index.php
   36 ./logout.php
   76 ./createOverlay.php
   75 ./changePassword.php
   55 ./yourPanel.php
   71 ./changeEmail.php
   63 ./login.php
  114 ./createUser.php
   68 ./classes/FormMessages.class.php
   97 ./classes/UserCookie.class.php
   43 ./classes/OverlayRole.class.php
   47 ./classes/UserTypeBehaviour.class.php
   61 ./classes/UserRecord.class.php
   27 ./classes/OverlayUrlBehaviour.class.php
   44 ./classes/OverlayRecord.class.php
   56 ./common.php
   14 ./snippets/userCreated.page.php
   42 ./snippets/createOverlay.form.php
   30 ./snippets/login.form.php
   29 ./snippets/changeEmail.form.php
   57 ./snippets/createUser.form.php
   14 ./snippets/emailChanged.page.php
   14 ./snippets/passwordChanged.page.php
   31 ./snippets/changePassword.form.php
   64 ./snippets/controlPanel.page.php
 1253 total

This is my first project working with SQLite3, and my feelings about it are mixed. On the positive side, it’s well suited to the size of data that we’re going to be managing, and to the amount of use that Goman is going to get. Infra don’t like requests for MySQL databases, so SQLite3 fits well with them too.

On the downside, SQLite3’s ALTER TABLE statement can’t be used to change the design of a table. You can work around it by creating a new SQLite3 database with the new schema, and then writing a single script to migrate the data from the old database to the new one, but it quickly becomes tiresome during development, when you’re constantly evolving the schema.

The other negative for me is that PHP’s SQLite3 driver is a PDO driver. I recently investigated a PDO segfault, which led me to raise concerns about how PDO is currently implemented under the bonnet. It should be safe on o.g.o, if for no other reason that we regularly restart Apache on there anyway to force Trac to pick up configuration changes.

Tomorrow’s job is to test the existing forms with the Nokia N770 tablet, and make sure they work with it too. I’ll try and find the time later this week to post my first impressions of the Nokia N770; it’s an interesting toy to be sure.

I’ve started converting the Developers’ Guide to Gentoo Overlays into GuideXML. Most of the content is written, but I’m at an early stage of marking up the document. If you have any feedback on the doc, or any questions that it doesn’t answer, please let me know, and I’ll use it to improve the doc.

<rant>I’d forgotten just how much I hate, loathe and detest GuideXML, and the Gentoo Documentation Project’s total and abject failure at providing tools to take away the pain; working on the formatting this morning for the doc reminded me Roll on the day we finally ditch this, and join the rest of the world in simply using XHTML instead. Maybe then it won’t take longer to mark up a document than it does to write it in the first place! (Or alternatively, move to a wiki like other distributions have done)</rant>

http://overlays.gentoo.org/

As folks probably know, my Gentoo brainchild this year is the new Gentoo Overlays service, where we provide hosting for project and developer overlays, and (this is the bit that makes it special) we make it possible for users to have commit access to the overlays too. These “Social Workspaces” provide a way for users to get involved in Gentoo, and to get a feel for what it’s like to be a full Gentoo developer, without having to go through the full recruitment process up front.

It feels like we’ve been working on getting this service up and running forever, but I’m happy to say that we’re getting close to having everything ready to officially announce. At the moment, we have:

• overlays.gentoo.org is up and running via HTTP, with the homepage showing RSS feeds from all of the overlays already installed
• We have a number of projects currently using the service.
• We also have a number of developers also using the service.
• Overlays currently come with Trac as the wiki / subversion repo browser, and Subversion as the version control system.
• And (very importantly) we have Gunnar Wrobel’s layman utility to make it easy for users to install overlays and keep them up to date.

In short, we’re almost there. My TODO list before launch currently looks like this:

1. HTTPS support for o.g.o (Action: with Lance atm)
2. Complete the user docs (Action: with Stu atm)
3. GuideXML-ify admin, dev and user docs (Action: with Stu atm, volunteers happily accepted, because I still hate GuideXML)
4. Update homepage template: add links to project & developer homepages (Action: with Stu atm)
5. Subscribe all overlay owners to the overlay owners mailing list, so that when I have important news for them, I can contact them all at once (Action: with Stu atm)

… and then Gentoo Overlays phase 1 should be ready to announce to the world.

Other things that are being worked on, but which aren’t required for the launch, include:

• Support for posting to #gentoo-commits (Action: with Stefan atm
• Support for posting to a -commits list of your choice (Action: with Stu atm

Phase 1 implies that we plan to go further … and indeed we do. Items on the longer-term roadmap currently are:

• Support for GIT
• Support for darcs
• Support for mercurial
• Web-based tool for updating passwords
• Web-based tool for managing group permissions
• Replace the homepage template with something nicer
• Support for tarball downloads of overlays
• Support for rsync downloads of overlays
• Support for Luca’s portage -> overlay sync script (as used by the PHP project)

I’m also on the look-out for any cool ideas that would make the overlays service even better. If you have one, or (Gentoo devs & projects only!) you want an overlay on o.g.o, drop by #gentoo-overlays and say hello.

Gentoo Overlays is a project designed to bring social workspaces to Gentoo. We’ll provide a place for Gentoo projects and developers to host their overlays, and the support required for Gentoo users to contribute to the overlays.

Can anyone help us by creating us a logo similar to that used by the Gentoo Forums? If you can, drop by #gentoo-overlays on irc.freenode.net, and let us know!

Today’s a public holiday over here in the UK, and I’ve spent most of it drafting an initial project page for the Gentoo Overlays project, and drafting an initial policy document. It looked like a nice sunny day out the window too, but instead I’ve been wading through my gentoo-dev ML archive, trying to make sure the policy reflects what was discussed earlier in the year.

Thanks to Antarus and Christel, we also have our own channel #gentoo-overlays on IRC.

I’ve spoken with wrobel this morning, and we’re going to be recommending that people use wrobel’s excellent layman app for accessing overlays hosted on overlays.g.o.

The debate about which distributed VCS’s to support - and how on earth we’re going to manage to do so - is continuing in #gentoo-overlays. If you have an opinion, drop by and let us know!

Phase 1 of overlays.g.o will launch with trac & subversion as the offered service. Let’s get that up and running, whilst we look at what alternatives we can offer.

The next step is (still) for me to email Lance with instructions on how we want trac & subversion setup on the box. I was hoping to get that finished today, but I’ll have to finish that later this week. Things are busy for infra atm anyway, so don’t expect to see overlays.g.o launched for a little while yet!