Infrastructure

Since the core Serendipity project is now maintained on github.com and every developer is quite happy about that, we decided to go the jquery-plugins route and delete all Serendipity plugins.

No, just kidding. We actually imported all data from the SourceForge.net CVS servers into the github infrastructure. The short version for normal end-users: Nothing should change for you!

https://github.com/s9y/additional_plugins

https://github.com/s9y/additional_themes

All current Serendipity developers also have access to those repositories to contribute code. Developers now no longer should commit code to CVS (actually, they can't, because I took all their committing karma *eg*).

The harder task for the Spartacus infrastructure service is the actual publishing of data. The Spartacus plugin operates on a PEAR-like XML format for each plugin, which luckily is automatically generated by a small shellscript which runs once daily on one of our webservers (emerge.sh). That script iterates on a checkout of all plugins and templates, creates the XML and uploads it to all mirror servers (currently netmirror.org, s9y.org and now also github.com).

Downloading the files also either works via the files that are uploaded daily to netmirror.org and s9y.org, or you always could use the SourceForge.net server, that published the file via a nasty ViewVC oddity. The spartacus plugin of the current github core code (version 2.25) now can also retrieve those files from the Github.com servers.

For all users that currently use the Spartacus plugin with the SourceForge.Net mirror, our daily script now pushes all changes in the GitHub tree also to CVS, so that both repositories *should* be kept in sync. This is done via the gitclone.sh and gitclone.php scripts in the additional_plugins repository, for anyone that's interested.

Most likely, something in this script won't work properly, so in the next days it might be that some glitches in the matrix can occur. In that case, please report issues and remain seated. Or buy christmas presents for your beloved. Or your beloved developers.

This is just a reference posting to indicate something important going on. Please read here on the process of the Serendipity source code repository being about to move to GitHub

Read the posting on the s9y forums

Serendipity's code repository is being hosted on BerliOS for several years. Their free service is now closing down, which means that Serendipity will move its versioning control to a new provider.

The current idea is to migrate SVN over to GitHub.com. This might even motivate some new contributors to get accustomed with the Serendipity core code and make contributing patches easier.

We are planning to move the code repository at the end of October and will keep you posted here. If there are people reading this who are well familiar with Git and especially SVN migration, please step up here or in the forums to help us in the process.

Asides from the SVN service, Serendipity is currently using this infrastructure:

• A self-hosted webserver providing a phpBB board on http://board.s9y.org. This is quite active and will stay in the future.
• A self-hosted wiki software on http://www.s9y.org/ that allows for a custom navigation and wiki documentation by users. We might switch this to another software, but are not happy with the way MediaWiki handles navigation. We'll see if GitHub is an option to power this.
• A self-hosted Serendipity installation on http://blog.s9y.org/
• The http://spartacus.s9y.org/ plugin and theme repository, hosted on SourceForge.Net
• The code repository for plugins and themes, also hosted on SourceForge.Net and maintained through CVS. Depending on the usage license of GitHub, we are looking into if we can merge plugins/templates and the Core code on GitHub.
• A issue tracker, hosted on SourceForge.net. We might utilize the GitHub-Tracker for this in the future.
• A mailinglist, that is not very active anymore, also hosted on SourceForge.Net. Since we favor the s9y forums, we might not further spend time on changing this mailinglist.

The s9y.org server currently is experiencing some issues. Jannis, our master-bithorder is investigating the issue and we hope it will be resolved shortly. The s9y.org server powers the main wiki as well as the forums; this blog here is hosted on a different machine.

Meanwhile: Summer.

Update 2010-07-05: The server was up and running during parts of the weekend, but it seems the situation was not resolved completely. The server is now once again up and running, but the bootup-process seems to be blocking due to some MySQL issue. The hardware does not report any specific failure, so we're a bit clueless as to what is happening, but we currently do not have the time to completely setup a new server. We'll further investigate the issue, and hope that this outage won't repeat itself too soon.

If something fails, the SourceForge.net support options on SourceForge.net/Projecs/php-blog will be there. We'll also try to work out a possibility for a secondary forum installation that people have offered, and see if we can setup a dump of s9y.org on a static install.

Update 2010-07-06: And the server went down again. We cannot seem to find the reason why it hangs. We might need to completely reinstall the machine. We try to make it happen as soon as possible and post updates here.

Update 2010-07-06, #2: Until being able to reinstall the machine, we try to fix the situation by manually booting the machine's services - currently it seems as if the machine "lives" for about 24-30 hours after each reboot.

Update 2010-07-06, #3: I created a temporary support forum on SourceForge: SourceForge Forum for Serendipity.

UPDATE: Serendipity 1.5.2 release

Some SQLite upgrades from Serendipity prior to 1.5 to the current version might create a problem, that the database update cannot properly update the serendipity_authors database table structure to insert the new "hashtype" (int) column. Due to that column missing, this can lead to the inability to log in.

Sadly SQLite does not easily allow to ALTER a table structure, so unless you have a SQLite admin tool to manually that column, and until the Serendipity Team can provide a proper fix, you should not yet update. Due to Christmas 2009.1 getting released soon, this might takes us a few more extra days.

If you have NOT yet uploaded the new serendipity release and executed the update, you can simply copy the file sql/db_update_1.5-alpha1_1.5-alpha2_sqlite.sql onto your installation, which fixes the upgrade procedure.

Side information: Hashtype defines whether md5 (value '0') or salted sha1 (value '1') is used for the stored encrypted password of the serendipity_authors table. Once you login with a hashtype=0, serendipity will automatically convert your password to sha1, and adjust the hashtype column. This is why once we fix this issue in 1.5.2, we must make sure that no manuall updates you might have used are overwritten, that could lead to Serendipity no longer knowing which hashtype was used for your column. That requires some thoughtful thinking, and a bit more time instead of a hotfix that might make the situation worse.

Note that this ONLY applies to users UPGRADING and using SQLite. A fresh installation as well as using other Database types is not affected.

Currently the mailserver of the board.s9y.org is malfunctioning, so new board registrations and reply notifications cannot be sent. Jannis is working on migrating the Mailserver so that the unstable behaviour of the mail-sending of the board is hopefully an issue of the past quite soon.

Update 2009-20-12: SMTP should work again now! If anyone still faces problem, please contact garvin(-at)s9y(-dot)org!