webapp-config 1.50.9

The new webapp-config version features a few minor bug fixes:

• Allows to declare that files are owned by the web server and config-protected at the same time.
• Displays correct instructions after upgrading an application
• Improved error message for situations like this one
• "Correctly" handles broken symlinks

Applications that allow you to modify the configuration through the web should benefit from the first fix. Modifying the permissions of the configuration files should not be necessary anymore.

The "symlink" fix allows to correctly install typo3. Renat fixed the ebuild and added it to our overlay.

The transition to the python version has been rather smooth so far and we received no complaints over bugzilla. If it continues like this we should be able to mark the tool stable in February.

Meanwhile webapp-config-1.60 is progressing. It will mainly feature some major internal changes to allow further improvements of the software.

Posted at: 23:51 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo

Overlays on trac

If creating Gentoo overlays and managing them with trac is a sickness then I got infected last week. PHP is doing it, web-apps is doing it, and science also joined the club. There are probably more that I don't know about.

As a web-apps herd member I have been working with the web-apps overlay and I cannot say that this made me fall in love with trac. There are definitely some features missing especially concerning bug tracking. But the integration with subversion is pretty nice.

So I wrapped my personal overlay into a trac site. I documented the setup process here and the site is accessible here.

One thing I did not like in the web-apps overlay was editing the contents page once we added or removed an ebuild. It somehow feels redundant and I am not exactly a fan of editing stuff through the web. But at this point trac provides something that makes me like it: you can plug in your own python macros.

It was pretty easy to generate a small macro that would automatically fetch information from the overlay and display it on the wiki page. You can download the macro here and store it in your wiki-macros directory of the trac site. Then add a statement like this

[[lay2wiki(/trunk/overlay)]]

to your wiki page. The argument is the path to the overlay within the repository. The result should look like this.

Most of the information is automatically retrieved from the ebuild files, but you can add an info.trac file to a package directory to provide additional information. See my trac setup page for more details.

Looks like I won't be able to avoid the trac infection.

Posted at: 17:34 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo

Pay your taxes

If you are registered as a company or freelancer in Germany your are required by law to submit your tax reports electronically since the beginning of last year. Initially they only offered a wonderful Windows program. I think this year they managed to create an on-line java tool that leaves you more choice concerning your OS.

Taxbird is a free alternative for Linux that has been available for half a year now. Had no problems with it so far and so I added it to the portage tree as app-office/taxbird.

The software has been accredited by the ministry of finance so you are actually allowed to use it ;) Never ever admit that you do, though. I called their telephone support once. Funny experience.

Posted at: 18:42 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo

Added pyblosxom to the tree

Pyblosxom is a simple weblog system that awaited inclusion in the portage tree for about two years. It does not require a database and publishes the blog entries from simple text files. So it's probably more appealing to the command line junkies.

Combine it with Emacs and the muse-mode and you'll get a nice system to publish your website from the command line. Well, provided you like Emacs ;)

I'll add the necessary Emacs packages to the tree soon. If you want to know how a pyblosxom/muse-mode page can look like, you can visit Micheal Olsons or my page.

Posted at: 23:13 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo

webapp-config 1.50.7 released

Just a minor bugfix release. The new webapp-config version should now be able to install typo3. In addition there was a problem with the configuration hooks that has been fixed with this release.

I am now going to unmask the package and request the Gentoo Arch teams to mark the package as unstable. Let's see what happens...

Posted at: 21:06 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo

goCluster updates

I gathered the support requests from the last two months and updated the goCluster page. The FAQ got a new item that explains linking gene identifiers and GO annotation in greater detail.

The main change to the package itself has been a new annotation class that can retrieve the annotation values from a look-up file. This is quite useful for all cases where you do not have an AnnBuilder meta package available for your microarray.

The package now also contains a change log where you'll find the latest fixes in detailed form. The newest version available in the bioconducter development section is now 1.5.1.

Posted at: 23:01 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/projects

webapp-config-1.50.6 released

The new version fixes two minor bugs and adds a testing feature. This allows you to run the internal webapp-config unit tests. To activate it, emerge webapp-config with

FEATURES="maketest" emerge webapp-config

The standard user will not really benefit from the tests but it should help the Gentoo arch teams to get the package stabilized as quick as possible. This means that we are actually on the road to unmask the new python version. The only thing I still want to do is to write an automatic testing script that will help the webapp-config developers but that will also be provided to the arch teams.

Posted at: 09:17 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo