Le weblog entièrement nu

This is getting old news, and others have blogged about them before I did, but here's my summary of the recent activity in and around FusionForge.

The early February meeting was a success, and gathered about twenty people on the first day and a dozen or so on the second day (not planned initially). My impression is that there was a healthy mix of FusionForge hackers, FusionForge users, and people from other forge communities (Codendi, NovaForge, and even one representative from nFORGE, from South Korea). I'm not going to repeat all that was said then, especially since the proceedings are online. Beyond the technical points, I'll just advertise PlanetForge again, since everyone present agreed we had lots to share and that this site would be a good and relatively neutral place. If you're into forges, I recommend joining us in that community.

On the purely FusionForge front, news are good too. Most of the major pieces we want to see in the next release (which is probably going to be called 5.0) are in place. The last blocker we had was the merge of the rework of the default theme for better accessibility and easier maintenance and customisability (most of the theming now happens in CSS). This merge has been completed this week, and although there are still a few rough edges, it's mostly done. We'll try to fix most of these rough edges soonish, then start a stabilisation branch towards 5.0, so more experimental work can start again on trunk. For the impatient and the curious, there's a list of new features on the fusionforge.org homepage, and the site is now running code from trunk.

Of course, we're eager to get testers for that, which is why I prepared snapshot packages. They are currently stuck in NEW on their way to the official Debian experimental repository due to the renaming of the source package and the introduction of plenty of new binary packages, but they can already be obtained from my unofficial repository at people.debian.org. The packages are built for Debian unstable, but they seem to run just fine on Lenny if you grab mediawiki from backports (only required for the Mediawiki plugin, of course), and libnusoap-php and php-htmlpurifier from Debian testing (they don't drag any extra dependencies).

I'll end this note by reminding people of the announcement I did three months ago: as of this week, Debian Etch is no longer officially supported security-wise, and so neither is GForge 4.5. As far as I know, I was the last person doing that, and my incentives have gone away on the day Etch ceased to be supported, since it was also the day the Adullact forge finally migrated from Etch with GForge 4.5 to Lenny with FusionForge 4.8. If you're still using 4.5, well… I think you should be aware of that.

That more or less wraps it up for now. The next announcement is likely to be about a release candidate…