Re: multiple infrastructure issues / support bottlenecks

[Peter Horvath]

Hi,

Thank you very much the quick reaction. I believe, having two parallel bugtracks is probably the worst among all possible options. If I get an access to the host of the trac, I could likely fix it, but no prob if I do not get it as an anonym internet user :-)

So the current reality is that the new bugtrack works and the old does not, so I suggest to track the new one.

I collected some minor but important changes, in various merge requests now. That is 5 changes. These were required for me to make the project compilable as it was written in the project front page docs. All of them are in my gitlab project repo: https://gitlab.com/peter.horvath/mediagoblin

The brances prefixed with "mr/" (merge request) are those I would suggest to include. Their details:

* mr/bcrypt-python310-compilability

   Newer pythons have no more some collection classes imported by the used (and quite old) celery version. My experiments showed, at least celery >= 4.3 is needed. Unfortunately, comment says that there no more sqlite transport alias exists, which make tests fail. Suggestion: first, make the project compatible with recent celery, second, fix the test cases :-) Beside that, some newer libraries (particularly, rust-related depencies or the bcrypt) are needed.

* mr/bugfix/12-autoconf That is the issue #12 in the sourcehut bugtraq. The gnu autoconf needed a minor tuning, it does not love embedded IF-s any more, but has a better nearly-equivalent syntax. Without that, the bootstrap.sh-based deployment, as written in the project tutorial, won't work.

* mr/gitignore-fix After a successful build, many intermediate files appear as new sources. Normally these should be covered by a gitignore (so that a "git clean" should be able to recover the prune source tree), I imporoved the gitignore to handle them.

* mr/no-system-pip That is a matter of taste. I suggest to not use and to not expect system pips. I think, being independent from the possible build systems (containers) would worth more than not needing to install trivial python libs (likely lxml).

* mr/pipinst The compilation with python setup.py does not really work and it is very unstable. Python loves today much more "pip install". This patch changes the Makefile.in to do a "pip install" instead of "python setup".

Kindly regards,

Peter

(P.s. I think it is very likely that you never needed docker to host your bugtrack. Docker promises a lot but actually it is just a chroot. Running demons in chroot is a big pain.)

Am Sa., 17. Dez. 2022 um 23:36 Uhr schrieb Ben Sturmfels <ben@sturm.com.au>:

Hi Peter,

Thanks very much for your contributions, and sorry for the delays in responding.

Peter Horvath <horvath.akos.peter@gmail.com> writes:

> Thank you very much reaction. Are you currently the only one active developer of the
> project?

Myself and Olivier are the current maintainers. The project *is* still
being developed, but progress is a little slow and sporadic with
occasional contributions from others.

> About the bugtrack: I have never seen the old bugtrack working. I think, some migration
> option should exist to convert the things to the sourcehut.

Thanks for this feedback. Keep in mind that somehow migrating thousands
of old issues would be a significant amount of work. It's certainly not
a high priority from my perspective. As I mentioned, the legacy issue
tracker has been unstable for some time - stabilising this by moving it
out of docker-compose would be a useful contribution if anyone was willing.

> In the sourcehut bugtrack, I have made some changes, mostly simple bugfixes. I reported
> them in the issue. May I ask you, how can I get a merge?

Thank you for these, we really appreciate your effort. It may be some
weeks before I personally have a chance to review these. I'm sorry about
that, but it's that time of year.

> Beside these, also my request for inclusion is waiting for approval. How can I get it?

I received your request to be part of the mediagoblin group on Savannah,
thanks. Commit access to the project is normally reserved for
established contributors, so it wouldn't be appropriate to grant you
access at this early stage sorry. We'd certainly love to have you
involved though and would consider giving you commit access in the
future.

Regards,
Ben


> Am Fr., 16. Dez. 2022 um 14:21 Uhr schrieb Ben Sturmfels <ben@sturm.com.au>:
>
>  Hi Bill,
>
>  Thanks for the prompting and also for your support of others on the
>  issue tracker! I haven't been very responsive on the mailing list, issue
>  tracker or IRC recently, so apologies to those who have had to wait or
>  haven't been able to resolve their issues.
>
>  (For context, this unresponsiveness is somewhat intentional. To make
>  sure I don't burn out and am here for MediaGoblin in the longer-term, I
>  sometimes need to curb my volunteering for many months at a time to
>  accommodate family and work commitments. This year I made time to coach
>  my kids field hockey team, and a few weeks back we finally made a start
>  on the backyard tree-house we'd been talking about for years - no
>  regrets there! :) Also for context, for many people here in Australia,
>  the last weeks before Christmas and summer holidays are extraordinarily
>  busy, so it's likely the support situation won't improve significantly
>  in the next month or so.)
>
>  bill-auger <bill-auger@peers.community> writes:
>
>  > * people are unable to join the mailing list
>  >   (admin, accept if pending registration like: 'peter_horvath')
>
>  Checking just now, it does appear we had moderation set on for new
>  mailing list subscribers. Moderated posts were being approved in a reasonably
>  timely manner, I don't think there's any need this restriction right
>  now, so I've removed it and un-moderated all moderated users.
>
>  > * does the dev team monitor IRC?
>  >   (eg: people asking for assistance how to join the mailing list)
>
>  I haven't been monitoring on the MediaGoblin IRC recently. When I'm
>  actively working on the project or around the time of a release I do
>  tend to hang around.
>
>  > * there are two bug trackers, both actively used
>  >   which are the dev team watching? (i would close the other)
>  >
>  > * issues.mediagoblin.org returns 503
>
>  The Sourcehut issue tracker https://todo.sr.ht/~mediagoblin/mediagoblin
>  is our primary issue tracker going forwards.
>
>  Our legacy issue tracker, issues.mediagoblin.org, has been unstable for
>  a number of years. It was previously also plagued by spam and
>  performance issues, but I resolved those a couple of years
>  back. Shutting it down is one option, but then we lose a lot of useful
>  historical info, so it's not quite that simple. This is certainly
>  somewhere we could use help, since responding to tickets would be a
>  better use of my time than dealing with infrastructure.
>
>  Regards,
>  Ben