Mozdev.org

Participants: kinger (Brian King), silfreed (Doug Warner)

Community participants: [none]

Discussion was held publically in #mozdev

Next meeting January 13, 2009 @ 16:00 UTC in #mozdev

I didn't spend a whole lot of time around Mozdev over the holidays, but things should be picking back up now.

Things I did touch on over the holidays included:

• Looked into bug where md5 updateHash isn't found by Firefox 3 for updates
• Debugging/fixing of admin page for pending projects
• Adding ability to change project/user names/descriptions for admin page for pending projects
• Put automatic project creation in production
• Performed some cleanup of the new project request form
• Tried to fix validations/restrictions on new project request form
• Working on Drupal subscriptions module problem with multisite installs
• Researching/creating patch/creating tests for rewrite rule problems with some bugzilla links
• user support

To kick off the new year I have some minor bugs with the project creation automation to iron out and will begin looking over the roadmap to evaluate where to go with the top priorities. Some things like simplified wiki editing needs re-examined now that there is a split in wiki syntaxes in the Mozilla universe (MDC uses DekiWiki syntax while WMO uses MediaWiki syntax). Other things like the extension project wizard just need evaluated to see how it can best be integrated into our new-project creation process.

It's been a long time coming, but your requests to speed up the project creation process are coming to fruition.

Over the past couple years there have been two major pain points in setting up new projects: tracking the requests to make sure they're handled properly and actually creating projects (CVS trees and websites, mailing lists and newsgroups, and bugzilla products). We finally have the tools in place to handle tracking the project requests and creating projects which should dramatically increase the response time of setting up new projects.

We still have some work to do; we need to automate setting up Bugzilla products and we'd like to make it easier for existing project owners to get new projects setup, but we're well on our way to making those things happen.

We'd like to bring some changes to our project request form as well; we need to add items for our new features like Drupal and Mercurial, but we'd like to make it even easier for someone to submit a project request without having a lot of choices get in their way. If you have any suggestions feel free to ring in.

So feel free to stop by and request a project, we'll get you set up in no time.

Last week was again spent in project creation automation land. It's getting very close to and should be live Real Soon Now.

• Lots of improvements to admin interface to allow us to create users and automatically send activation emails.
• Lots of improvements to project creation including lots of testing of the creation process (cvs, website, mailman, newsgroup) and sending project activation emails
• Filing bugs against Bugzilla for product creation automation including setting up products, users, and groups (creating new components already existed) and updating user's groups (which depends on updating a user).
• Learning about javascript closures so I don't pollute the global namespace as much when I write AJAX stuff
• Created lots of bugzilla products for recent new projects; let us know if your project still needs one

This week I plan on trying to get project creation automation running in production - this will be an exciting time for developers looking to use Mozdev (and they don't even know it) !

Mozdev's Drupal instance was upgraded to version 5.13 due to a security vulnerability.

Participants: davidwboswell (David Boswell), gjm (Gerry Murphy), Brian King (kinger), silfreed (Doug Warner)

Community participants: [none]

Discussion was held publically in #mozdev

Next meeting December 16, 2008 @ 15:00 UTC in #mozdev

Last week was mostly spent working on automating project creation testing. Things are moving along well on that front and results should be available soon.
Other minor things that came up included:

• Investigating problems composing new master mirror
• Adding additional monitoring of mirror composition
• Fixes to project submission to allow additional valid project contributor names

This week I hope to finish up my testing on bug#19552 and start looking to deploy the project creation automation.

Participants: davidwboswell (David Boswell), gjm (Gerry Murphy), silfreed (Doug Warner)

Community participants: [none]

Discussion was held publically in #mozdev

Next meeting December 09, 2008 @ 15:00 UTC in #mozdev

Participants: davidwboswell (David Boswell), silfreed (Doug Warner)

Community participants: [none]

Discussion was held publically in #mozdev

Next meeting December 2nd, 2008 @ 15:00 UTC in #mozdev

Tasks this week included:

• Improving log replay script
• Getting new master mirror ready
• Updating template system to not display unpublished projects
• Research into errors output by log replay script
• Sync staging machine w/ production contents
• Continuing pending project automation by writing functions for creating real projects and users from pending projects and users
• Figured out that I don't need to create a "job queue" for performing tasks; can do the equivalent by utilizing sudo to run specific commands as other users once a pending project has been approved

Next week I plan on looking over the error logs of the latest log replay and continuing to write a program to create new projects that can be run periodically (from cron) with reduced privileges.

• Looking into Mollom for blocking spam (comments, content, and registrations)
• Working on project/user creation
• Lots of improvements to pending project admin page to make it more usable as a task list (lots of new todo items for bugzilla, maillist, newsgroup, users; new actions for marking pending projects ignored/verified/waiting response/complete)
• Getting new mirror machine ready

Next week I hope to get the new mirror machine in service, get the log replay script running better (currently taking too long; it isn't forking or performing queries properly), and continue working on getting the CVS creation scripts running from a job runner.

Lots of time put in last week to creating a log replay tool so that we can test changes with production data and evaluate their impact. I researched httperf, autobench, siege, and others but ended up having to write some custom perl scripts (replay tool based on torture.pl) to analyze php and httpd error logs, convert our log file to a unique file list, and replay the logs. They still require a bit of work to use together, but should allow us to do testing of our new security features and other web server changes easier.

Back to a more "normal" week here now that everyone is getting settled into their new roles in the family. At Mozdev I was able to work on these things:

• Updated admin page for pending projects to hide older, already setup projects. This makes the pending project list a bit more useful for seeing what tasks are left to get a project setup
• Continued testing trying to lock down PHP at Mozdev.
• Researching setting up a PHP opcache
• Researching some sort of HTTP log replay script setup so I can look at what errors are generated when a web server config is changed. I'm currently looking at using httperf and autobench; let me know if you have any other tools in mind that do well here.
• Started working on prereqs for auto-creation of CVS repos; I've created a "project setup validation" toolchain that can be used to evaluate how well a project has been setup and what might be broken about it's installation (necessary after years of manual project creation).
• Blogged about Fennec support at Mozdev
• Updated Mozdev's Drupal support to allow unmoderated comments, wiki, and forum posts

This week I plan on trying to get some type of HTTP log-replay capability setup so we can see what errors we are introducing by changes and use that to see if any of the above PHP changes are going to be a huge impact on Mozdev users. For auto-setup of projects' CVS repository I need to create some sort of "Job Bot" that can watch a queue for incoming jobs ("create CVS repo", "setup mailman/newsgroup") that each runs under different UIDs. After the job bot is ready I can figure out if I want to reuse the existing project creation scripts (faster setup) or roll my own (easier to integrate w/ the test suite).

Wednesday morning I had an email waiting for me about a new application GUID that an extension at Mozdev supported. This was interesting since we don't have new applications added to our list very frequently; upon looking up the GUID ({a23983c0-fd0e-11dc-95ff-0800200c9a66}) I was excited to discover that it was Fennec! I quickly filled out the information about the new app and went over to our supported applications list to see what extension now supported Fennec (it was Mel Reyes' MR Tech Toolkit at eMusic).
We're always excited to discover what new things projects at Mozdev are doing and we think it's great that developers are supporting applications like Fennec before they've even released a beta! Great work!

This was probably my first really-productive week since we had the baby, although it hasn't been totally quiet around the house ;).

Lots of time was spent this week preparing improvements to our security by making use of PHP's open_basedir where possibly; this also required generating virtualhosts for all our projects. The additional of all these virtualhosts adds a dramatic increase in memory usage from Apache; we're not sure this will work out for us, but we need to test it out to see. If you have any experience in that kind of thing, let us know.

Otherwise I've been trying to get our pending project admin page at least functional by listing what tasks are still needed to be done so we don't have to keep manual lists (setup bugzilla, create users; still to come are things like "create project" or "setup CVS/Hg"). There was also a hiccup in the emails getting to my bot that keeps track of replies so that's been ironed out so projects will properly move through the stages (pending -> verified in this case).

Otherwise there was some community support, Drupal and some modules got upgraded, and some mirror management was performed.