EvolvisForge

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No, it’s not just half the answer. I think we’re much farther down the way than that ☺ while there are still improvements planned, under development, and to come, we’ve gone a long ways from 4.5 based Evolvis platform releases.

I have just upgraded all tarent-internal instances of Evolvis, as well as the public evolvis.org forge, to a new version of the FusionForge based EvolvisForge as well as MediaWiki and its extensions.

There are several new extensions, almost all of them enabled by default. You can see a tech demo of these at https://evolvis.org/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/evolvis/index.php/PluginDemo (which will automatically show you an English- or German language version depending on your web browser’s preferences). The extensions are:

• Math
• Cite
• Collection
• CreateBox
• Footnote
• GraphViz
• ImageMap
• InputBox
• LanguageSelector
• NewestPages
• News
• PageCSS
• ParserFunctions
• Polyglot
• RSS_Reader
• SpecialCite
• SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi

The MediaWiki extensions are “driven” (configured) by the forge semi-automatically, for example RSS_Reader uses a per-project (forge group) cache directory instead of disabling the cache (which needed to be done for the Debian package, since the default installation does not have the luxury of a directory writable for the Apache user). The configuration closely matches the “old-style” (JH) Wiki integration that has been done for Evolvis 4.5 previously.

Further changes include a fair number of bugfixes to the code, theme, wiki, extensions (fed upstream), and XHTML compliance. We know there are still enough bugs to keep us busy for a while, but you might notice some improvements; others are hidden but shorten the Apache error_log noticeably ☺

To further summarise from the developer/package management system changelog the (non-bugfix) changes from the last version include:

• reduced space requirements by using the xz compressor instead of gzip for nightly Subversion backups
• give forge (group/project and site) admins more permissions in the Wiki by default
• Konqueror users have clickable sftp:// links in the places where SFTP/manual file upload can be used
• displaying filenames of uploaded files, including rules for them, has been improved
• there are now two automatic mailing lists (for newly created groups/projects): unixname-commits (where every member with commit rights will be added automatically) and unixname-discuss (where every member will be added automatically); of course there’s still the option to unsubscribe or, for non-members, to subscribe (a new Mailman integration is being worked on)
• Mailman list administrator passwords can now be (re-)set from the forge (by group/project or site admins); be careful to tell your co-admins the new password though…
• new values for PM (Tasks) status fields
• the ability to copy a task to another subproject
• customisable display for the Tasks area

Notable bugfixes:

• the SCM URLs now always use the correct hostname
• help window pop-ups are working again
• Evolvis can now almost fully be used with PHP 5.3 on Debian unstable (although we are still formally targetting Debian Lenny (with select backports and custom packages) specifically)
• font sizes (in the forge and the wiki) are finally consistent
• slight performance improvements

The time tracking area in Tasks has been disabled, since there is a company-internal tool doing the same, with an Evolvis integration being developed.

We hope you enjoy the latest installment of the Evolvis platform!

— Thorsten Glaser, for the tarent Evolvis task forge, FusionForge and Mediawiki

Configuration simplification

With EvolvisForge 4.8.3+evolvis20, we have a new configuration system for Apache 2 (being prepared for merging into FusionForge) which greatly simplifies things.

The most common tasks can now be easily solved:

• /etc/gforge/templates/httpd.ssl0.inc: uncomment two lines, and all forge vhosts redirect to https unconditionally
• /etc/gforge/templates/httpd.auth.forge.inc: uncomment a bunch of lines, and you get HTTP Basic Auth with PAM backend accessing nss_pgsql2, which means you must login with your forge username and password to display the site
• /etc/gforge/templates/httpd.auth.projects.inc: copy the same lines here, and the project homepages (*.forge vhosts) are protected in the same manner
• /etc/gforge/httpd.d/*: change 02namevhost, 06maindirhttp, 20list, 40virtualhost if you want not *:80 and *:443 vhosts but per-IPv4-address vhosts
• /etc/gforge/gforge.conf: insert lines like 「sys_sslcrt=/etc/ssl/my.cer」, 「sys_sslkey=/etc/ssl/private/my.key」, 「sys_ssl_apache_extra_cmd=SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/ssl/chain.pem」 to configure HTTPS properly and easily

Of course, there’s more to that: If you have more vhosts, just 「Include /etc/gforge/httpd.security.inc」 to disable a potential security hole / information leak, 「Include /etc/gforge/httpd.log.inc」 to log into the same files, 「Include /etc/gforge/httpd.ssl0.inc」 (SSL off) and 「Include /etc/gforge/httpd.ssl1.inc」 (SSL on) to use the same SSL configuration as the forge. The latter is especially important if you have more than one 〈VirtualHost *:443〉 container, as Apache 2 uses the configuration from the ASCIIbetically first one.

I was able to completely switch from the old, hand-edited configuration to a generated one with little, if any, changes on all our installations now. Some legacy or useful vhosts have been split out, for example a redirect for the old-style Wiki URIs, the Maven 2 repository vhosts, and Alfresco/Domisol (which was already separate but now got split port-80/443 configuration and the above-mentioned Include directives).

Furthermore, eMails from forge users to the FOO-commits@ mailing lists are always allowed by default for newly created lists, and users added to a group with SVN commit rights will be automatically subscribed to that list. We now issue the Forge Identification Header and display the version on the webpage. There was, of course, your usual round of bugfixes and infrastructure improvements, including preparations for more things to come (so stay tuned).

Roland will, as usual, take the best out of EvolvisForge and put it into FusionForge (et vice versa).

There’s also news on the not-so-forge front of Evolvis: our Hudson installations talk Jabber now, and the integration is becoming more tight. We can drive both old-style wikis and gforge-plugin-mediawiki at the same time. We’ve begun adding a bunch of mediawiki plugins (more to follow as needed); if there are people packaging those for Debian already, cooperation is desired.

Until 12th of June, the “Fairtrade Software” booth at LinuxTag 2010 in Berlin, Germany, will present Evolvis and FusionForge to the public. Visit us in Hall 7.2a, Booth 123, and check out the other exciting tarent projects!

Migration successful!

I just installed EvolvisForge 4.8.3+evolvis12 (after quite some bugfixing) on evolvis.org and the last remaining internal instance.

This means that tarent is no longer running GForge 4.5 so let’s celebrate!

You’re hereby cordially invited to check out the public Evolvis and what makes it so good (FusionForge based) and then even better (our hard work ☺). This is the latest and greatest, but still work in progress, we have a lot of further improvements planned, so stay tuned!

Just deployed evolvisforge 4.8.3+evolvis2

I’m happy. I just was able to deploy a new version with many improvements on almost all of our systems (save the two which are not yet on 4.8 but stuck on 4.5 codebase).

For example, Roland has provided code to set the roles’ default permissions in a new forum, tasks or tracker subproject to some (sane) default value, instead of Read – now that they’re suddenly honoured, the bug (of them not being set to e.g. Tech) surprised many people.

I’ve written a CAPTCHA for user self-registration, in the hope of fooling automated login bots to fight spam accounts like we see at evolvis.org quite often these days (maybe spammers have special bot codes for *forge?).

The automated creation of ~user/.forward to enable mail forwarding for «user»@«forge» the same way «user»@users.«forge» is already handled now also works well. Other nifty things include bug fixes and more features in our theme (which should not be considered public) and the mediawiki plugin (allowing better control over importing, editing the Sidebar, logos, etc) and better XHTML/CSS compliance and browser compatibility.

Admins will love this: one can now set the password of any user if one is a Site Admin! (Before, this involved quite some database fiddling after calling md5(1) and encrypt(1) manually.)

The only sad things I see are that we cannot yet upgrade all instances we run to gforge-plugin-mediawiki, so they keep running the old-style separate wikis, which run on the same database though, preventing it from being upgraded from PostgreSQL 8.1 to 8.3 (due to the age of the mediawiki engine being used), and that our internal forge and the public one, evolvis.org, cannot yet be upgraded (especially as I’ll be on vacation RSN).

Still, we hope our cow-orkers enjoy the new release.

On the other track, we’re already running towards a stable 5.0 release, which will rock. One of my colleagues is helping with translating the strings into German upstream, and the branch is created; the code is being stabilised now and short of a release (also, thanks to the speedy help of the Debian FTP masters, with a detailed and correct debian/copyright file and a DFSG free distfile). Some tarent/evolvis extensions have found their way in there already; FusionForge 5.1 will have more, we guess.

Keep up the great work, FusionForge people!

FAQ: When will FusionForge 5.0 be released? ⇒ As soon as it’s ready. Faster if you help.

EvolvisForge will migrate to a 5.0-based code some time after, taking care of possible regressions and merging our changes, some of which will then wander into FusionForge trunk, hopefully ☺

EvolvisForge blog created

It took us a while, but we’ll be participating at Plänet Forge soon as well. We, that is the Evolvis team at tarent GmbH:

• Thorsten Glaser (that’s me), a sysadmin at tarent and an Evolvis developer
• Sven Frommeyer, an apprentice sysadmin at tarent
• Stefan Walenda, our project manager
• … and potentially others

To clean up the nomenclature…

• Evolvis is the platform consisting of EvolvisForge and others, such as a Continuum or Hudson build server, an Alfresco DMS, a MediaWiki, …
• EvolvisForge shall be the name of the customised installation (not fork) of FusionForge (formerly gforge-*.deb) that is used by Evolvis
• evolvis.org is the public platform where tarent GmbH is presenting their open-sourced projects
• There are other Evolvis installations at *.tarent.de domains, which are private.

EvolvisForge customisations mostly consist of: take a stable FusionForge version plus bugfixes, sometimes backports (such as the FF 5.0 MediaWiki integration), change some defaults, and add Evolvis branding such as our theme. Also, some integration with the other Evolvis components, Univention/LDAP, etc.

This is a welcoming posting, so I better keep it short. We’ve been in Issy-les-Moulineaux (I hope I spelt that correctly) breaking up the French cabal, but they’re all nice people. Let’s try and improve all the forges!