...or, "Bits from a Gforge maintainer", if you'd like.
After being neglected for way too long, the Gforge packages have finally started moving again. Packages for the most recent upstream release (4.5.14) are available in experimental, with quite a few improvements over the version currently in unstable:
- lots of improvements upstream, of course;
- no more sourceforge transitional package;
- source control management systems are now integrated via plugins rather than core code; existing plugins are gforge-plugin-scmcvs for CVS and -scmsvn for Subversion (both are in experimental);
- should support recent versions of PostgreSQL;
- default authentication scheme for users created through Gforge is now no longer LDAP (although it's still available for the masochistic); nss-pgsql is now preferred, with lots of benefits (not the least being that its configuration and setup are far less brittle);
- and lots more, thanks to Christian Bayle's work while I was busy doing something else.
From a Debian maintainer's point of view, my Gforge-related TODO list now mainly sports three items.
- First, rewrite some PHP code into Perl: the script in charge of bringing the database schema up-to-date, db-upgrade.pl, currently delegates some of its work to PHP scripts with system() calls. That's justifiable by the fact that these PHP scripts can use the Gforge code, classes and methods, but it makes the whole upgrading process fragile: for some reason, the system() calls sometimes fail without db-upgrade.pl noticing, and the process then just goes on with a broken DB instead of stopping right there with an error. Also, this is doomed to fail sometime: the Gforge classes used are the ones currently installed, which may or may not correspond to the database schema (remember we're in the middle of an upgrade, so the schema is moving). Since I want this db-upgrade.pl script to be unbreakable, I need to change that.
- In addition to that (or in parallel), I'd like to migrade the gforge packages to use the dbconfig-common infrastructure. It's supposed to be able to take on the tasks of database (and database user) creation, while still giving me a hook to plug db-upgrade.pl into.
- When the dbconfig-common migration is done, I'll probably spam^Wcontact the various translation teams, so the Debconf templates look good and consistent.
I suppose I could also try and migrate to the webapps-common framework, but I'll keep that for later.
Of course, any help is welcome. Remember: the sooner I get the Gforge packages into a reasonable shape, the sooner they'll go to unstable, then testing, and the sooner I'll be backporting them to sarge, which means Alioth can be upgraded. But since I've heard a few complaints about Alioth being too damn slow or broken or whatever, I expect I'll get lots of patches (in bug reports, please) from disgruntled users eager to help.
