… but only if you are not yet using an ssh based svn account!

According to the schedule, we will stop providing access to svn if you use a password based account on August 25th.

If you have not converted yet. Do it now. Though everyone affected should have received a personal invitation already. Don’t wait any longer, do it now! If you did not contact sysadmin now!

You might wonder how many accounts are affected. When we started with the first round of invitations two or three months ago, we sent out 1209 invitation to convert. This time we have sent 861 invitation. That means 350 contributors already converted [edit: or indicated the account can be deleted because it is no longer used]

Eike Hein did a further analysis of those 861 accounts that are not yet git-ready. He noted that only 92 accounts of those have been active this year, only 56 with more than 10 commits this year. That means we are on track with the conversion, and we are confident that those accounts will be converted in this round of invitations.

One of the reasons is that ssh only worked on port 22, some people are behind a firewall, and have only access to port 80 (http) and 443 (https). Starting from today we also offer svn via ssh on port 443. That means those account holders can convert too now.

The past month or so, the sysadmin team has been busy with the preparations for the launch of our own git infrastructure. But with the setup of git infrastructure, we also have taken the opportunity to launch a couple of new services:

Gosa
The Gosa system is a webinterface which makes it possible to maintain your personal data, like name and e-mail. A bit similar to the -soon deprecated- kde-common/accounts file. This system can also be used to maintain your personal ssh-keys that you want to use for repository access.

SSI
Gosa will also be used as base for a Single Sign In system. In the past few years we have launched several services that require a seperate login and password (techbase & friends, reviewboard, kde-developers, etc). We don’t want that in the future. The username and password that you use for Gosa, can also be used for reviewboard and other new services in the future.

Redmine
With the launch of git, we also want a per project landing page. A place where you can find all relevant information about a project, where you can browse the source code, find links to communitybase and tarballs, and where projects can also place news items. We have chosen Redmine for this task.

We have now reached a point that we have tested all the individual items and feel that it is time to let all those pieces of the puzzle fall together.

We have chosen to not go for a simulation of the big bang and launch everything at the same day, but have chosen for a step-by-step schedule with different milestones. In the end we are changing key infrastructure and we don’t want to make errors.

It also means that whenever we encounter a problem along the way, the schedule will be delayed. We will keep the page up to date as we go along.

At key moments we will also inform the kde-core-devel and kde-cvs-announce mailing lists.

You can find the schedule here! Have fun.

Today I went to Den Haag, NL, where the Guadec conference takes place this week. They laughed a bit at the registration desk when they saw KDE on my badge, but let me in anyhow.

The first talk was about Evolution. They gave an overview of the last year which seemed to me like regular bug fixes and implementing some new features. They’ve rewritten some parts, and rewritten an IMAP library, called IMAPX. It supports IDLE, multiple connections and that kind of stuff. Which made me a bit depressed, because we have written something similar the past year or so too. With a simple mail we might have joined forces, maybe making something better than the two implementations we have now.

Anyhow chatted a bit with them about the past after the presentation and exchanged some business cards ( luckily i still had my Akonadi-cards, yay). I really hope we can do better – communication wise – in the future (from both sides).

Gnome Shell is basically a bit of window management, the interface around alt-tab and their activities interface. It looked nice and easy to use. Although we discovered quite a few inconsistencies in the new interface and some weird design decisions, like no good fallback for unsupported video cards and no connections at all with the gnome theming, Anyhow, I was impressed and think many of the gnome users will be happy with it.

The state of the union was a fun show, without much concrete content. It was just a pleasant break in the middle of the day and a very good laugh.

I’ve also been to some kind of a BOF like presentation where they were discussing the current state of the gnome. I managed to take a picture of a slide that says it all:

So, while KDE is just getting started with making a desktop, Gnome is Done :). Anyhow, the context is that he thinks a bit more should be invested in the Platform part of Gnome. He made some valid points about for example the fact that new developers are somewhat more attracted to develop for the mobile platform and it is hard to find devels for desktop, due the somewhat high entry level regarding setting up a devel system and learning the tools.

He wants to tackle that by working towards a simple SDK which can get new devels up and running quickly. That kind of opened up my eyes regarding the work that Aaron Seigo does for plasma. Probably with the somewhat same motivation. I should check it out.

Finally I went to a presentation from Jake Edge from lwn.net. Although a bit boring in regard of the presentation skills, he gave a nice, good and – in my eyes – complete overview of the things which you have to deal with regarding the promotion of your Open Source Project. Ranging from looking at what the minimal requirements for your website to how to write a press release which will have a good chance to get published. Maybe no surprising items, like they are all logical an we all know them, but still a good reminder about what I did wrong in the past and what some projects are still doing wrong.

Had a nice day there in Den Haag. Nice presentations and nice venue!

Nothing KDE related, so feel free to skip this entry

Just saw Unthinkable. It’s about three nuclear bombs hidden around the US and one brave guy trying to interrogate the one who planted them to discover the locations.

The idea of the movie is to get people thinking which interrogation methods are allowed to get the suspect to talk. How much can you folter torture this guy to get the locations. Someone probably watched 24 one series too much. This issue has been triggered by them already.. Would you sacrifice a life to save a million…

The comparison with 24 can be continued while comparing the actors. Samuel Jackson vs. Kiefer Sutherland. Both are good guys, but you don’t want to be interrogated by either of them. Samuel’s acting is great, but I can’t say that from some of the other people in the movie. But Samuel compensates a lot.

And that should then be the reason to go to see the movie. The plot is close to crap and predictable. I hate predictable plots. I always try to refrain from predicting, but I keep doing it. I won’t spoil the fun (as far as there might still be some), but in hindsight, when you know the end, some of the dialogs and remarks from some people are strange to say the least.

In any case, a simple, entertaining movie, like there are a gazillion. Too bad the creators did not make more of it and have chosen to make some sections of the movie way too predictable.

We thought it might be a good idea to give everyone a new status update about the progress we are making regarding the conversion to Git. This report has been put together by a couple of members of the sysadmin team. Let’s start with the tasks done in the past weeks:

• SSH Key Management itself can be done in Gosa – but the backend to get it live with gitolite is still to be done (see current todo list below)
• Integration of Reviewboard with LDAP has been accomplished in a testing instance successfully. A script has also been written to sync data such as names and email addresses from LDAP into both Redmine and Reviewboard.
• Gosa has begun to be themed using the kde.org style, chihuahua. Ingo Malchow is brave enough to work on this part.
• Ben Cooksley has been working on making some additional forms for the initial account registration. Basically the new workflow will be like this:
  1. User can register, and can use their account immediately after verifying their email address.
  2. User immediately gets access to redmine and reviewboard and gosa with one and the same login credentials. This is called Single Sign In.
  3. User can change his own data in gosa, for example his ssh public keys. Add more keys or replace lost ones. (yay for no more sysadmin involvement for that)
  4. If the user wants push access to the git repositories (or SVN while it’s still around), he has to apply for that. This is similar to the current form; indicate a supporter and write a small justification.
  5. After evaluation and approval from the supporter, we add the user to the Developers group in gosa, and the user immediately gets push access.
     This grouping mechanism can be extended in the future, to have – for example – a good address book like system for eV-members, or to upgrade users to sysadmins.

The current todo list is basically:

• drive redmine project and reviewboard group creation from gitolite
• This will be used to allow any project to instantly begin to recieve reviews, without any further effort being needed.
• redmine and rb project namespace problems
  At the moment, both Redmine and Reviewboard have problems with projects using the same name, which when you have sub-projects to create a tree of projects, becomes problematic.
• A script to create GOsa accounts, insert SSH key(s) + mail address from the existing data
• Modification of Gitolite to read from LDAP for SSH keys
  By default Gitolite reads the allowed keys from the git admin repository, but we have decided to put the keys in an LDAP database, so there have to be a process to copy the keys to the right place. Currently we do it manually, but that’s not a solution we like :) We just discussed this with Sitaram Chamarty, the author of gitolite and came up with the following workflow:
  • When a user changes a key in gosa, automatically a script is called on the gitolite server so we know something has changed for that user.
  • A script extracts the keys from the LDAP database and updates a folder where all the keys are.
  • Once this is done the internal list of authorised keys will be updated, allowing the new SSH key to be used immediately by the developer.
    That means the keys wont need to go into the special git admin repository which is only accessible by sysadmins. Disadvantage is that this change has to be written by Sitaram with our assistance. So give Sitaram cookies when you see him.
  • Use gitolite for SVN authentication, tying SVN into the unified account system
  • Retire the old “Get an SVN account” web app (as Gosa takes its place)
  • Send out a final set of ‘convert to ssh keys or else your svn access will stop working’ invitations for svn users which use a password currently.
  • Move all the software bits to the right hardware, and give everything the final shake down.

  This blog is a bit on the technical side probably. The open todo’s unfortunately are rather technical, so that’s unavoidable. But it still gives you a good idea about the progress and the things we are currently facing.

  

  We thought it might be a good idea to give everyone a new status update about the progress we are making regarding the conversion to Git. This report has been put together by a couple of members of the sysadmin team. Let's start with the tasks done in the past weeks: SSH Key Management itself can be done in Gosa - but the backend to get it live with gitolite is still to be done (see current todo list below) Integration of Reviewboard with LDAP has been accomplished in a testing instance successfully. A script has also been written to sync data such as names and email addresses from LDAP into both Redmine and Reviewboard. Gosa has begun to be themed using the kde.org style, chihuahua. Ingo Malchow is brave enough to work on this part. Ben Cooksley has been working on making some additional forms for the initial account registration. Basically the new workflow will be like this: User can register, and can use their account immediately after verifying their email address. User immediately gets