BeaverSource Times
April 30th, 2008
Two CS 411 groups have signed up for BeaverSource? so far. They found some problems with file permissions on SVN hook scripts (being the first to really use SVN remotely) that we got fixed. KC told me yesterday they have also run into the 1 MB file limit for SVN; it's possible that the kernel version they are working with is one that still includes encoded firmware images in the source code and that's the reason for the large file size. He's going to look into it further, so we may raise that commit limit.
We started an IRC channel, #beaversource, on the Freenode network. It's been great for discussions and decision making, and might end up being a good resource for BeaverSource? users as well.
Shay Dakan was kind enough to donate an SSL certificate for the SVN repositories, which is the one place so far that we have to ask for ONID credentials.
Eric polished up the current Beaver theme, and Carlos made an updated logo. We had some trouble with the Trac setup and the theme sometimes not being loaded, but I think that was purely due to Trac settings.
The Trac setup process changed a bit after Eric pointed out that we could have a central config file and one installation of our common plugins. New BeaverSource? projects will use this new method, and we can take our time converting Admin and CWS.
Eric has been putting time in on Elgg, the social networking application. The URL for Elgg is:
After the working lunch last week, Jose came back with an SSO patch so that's been nicely integrated. After Eric's Postgres patch for Elgg and Jose's SSO patch were added to our SVN repository, I stepped in with some notes on the wiki about maintaining a custom patch set using SVN and reorganized the Elgg part of the repository a bit.
Also during the working lunch, we talked about the best way to get information out of our many Trac instances and into Elgg. At the lowest level the multitrac setup we are using would let us query the database for complete project information. I pointed out that we are going to need some kind of project meta-database soon with ownership and other information that isn't part of Trac, and suggested that might be a good place for statistics and participation info as well. No decision was made either way, and discussion continues.
Getting back to our Eric coverage, he has beautified the project listing page:
and we are assured that alphabetical sorting is forthcoming. This has involved patching some non-core Trac files, so we'll need to work on a plan for that. My best plan so far is to maintain a source tree just like Trac, and use that to build a debian package with a custom version string. This gets us most of the benefits of package management (upgrades, dependencies, etc) but should keep a debian update from clobbering our changes.
April 9th, 2008
We got some good stuff done last week. Some more polish on the setup and administration scripts for Trac and SVN; new Trac sites get meaningful titles, better SSO login functionality thanks to Eric, and we have a logo and theme:
A good chunk of the process is documented on the wiki, with more to follow as we figure out our list of plugins and such:
http://beaversource.oregonstate.edu/projects/admin/wiki/BeaverSourceAdmin
I moved the CWS web calendar project to BeaverSource?:
and Matthew and I will be cleaning that up and starting some real development work on it soon.
I also imported our existing Mantis bug database for the calendar into Trac, which was a little bit of an adventure. My hope was that we could easily provide some functionality for importing an existing bug database/svn repository, but there are enough gotchas in the process that I don't think that'll happen for a while.
This statistics plugin (flash and login required) is pretty sweet:
http://beaversource.oregonstate.edu/projects/admin/stractistics
-Robert Hopson
