Improvements to the website comming soon

Hello,
The following improvements were developed and should be applied into production soon:
changes/improvements will be applied:
* Source/Diff are no longer specific links and will point to the base directory instead
* Comments will now be version targeted instead of release target (right now 32 bits and 64 bits comments are not merged), with this change the existing comments will be removed
* Applications can be rated by registered users
* Missing hard coded strings are now translatable

This changes will required the translations to be updated, some people should expect to read some untranslated strings until the respective translator provides an update.

Building for Ubuntu Hardy

Ubuntu Hardy was released last week as planned, following our regular support policy we are now only building packages for Ubuntu Hardy.
There are a lot of packages that were available for Gutsy and that need to be rebuilt for Hardy, however we do not have any kind of automation for this task, it will be done mostly based on visual inspection and user requests. The repackage work may not be trivial, there are debhelper changes that affects some packages which will need to have their build rules adapted.

Some statistics

We are about to get into the 4rd release cycle (so far we have packaged for Dapper, Edgy, Gutsy), it is a good time to provide some statistics on database records.

500 applications
During Hardy's release we should check the applications list for applications which had no release on the past year, there is probably some repackaging effort required for some applications which already have build rules and should be trivial to update.

10115 registered users
We have a great user base we clearly lack user oriented features, the ability to vote applications is a long requested feature, release reviews could also be an important resource. Unfortunately there is no estimated time for implementation, life is busy.

12 mirrors, providing around 9 GB/day
There is an increasing concern with the files total size which is now exceeding the 10 GB, unfortunately the current files structure is not release based which makes it hard to do a release specific clean-up, this will be improved for Hardy releases, we should expect a major clean-up for Hardy+1. Related to the disk space concern is the ability to provide some of the huge game packages, right now the recommended approach is to use a meta-package that will install the data packages from one of the game official mirrors.

1176 application description translations
Despite the lack of improvements on the site internationalization support there has been a significant use of the applications translation feature.

OT: I'm back

Nobody really noticed but I'm back up and running again with just a few minor problems. Last week Ubuntu decided not to do what it was supposed to do. GDM gave error messages as soon as it started, no I don't know which ones as the characters were just little boxes, it complained about being unable to convert UTF-8. I installed KDM and was able to start a Gnome session but then programs complained about the locales. Installing KDE didn't help and upgrading to Hardy didn't do much either, I got myself in quiet a mess :)
Eventually I decided it was time to wipe out the drive and reinstall Ubuntu from scratch. I was able to backup my work and settings on to another box I have at home. Going over what to backup took some time and in the end I did forget something and made one mistake. The mistake isn's a biggie, I thought I archived my Tomboy notes but the archive only had the Tomboy log so I lost all my notes (grr) the thing I forgot has more impact, I forgot to archive my Getdeb building directory, I don't have my work of programs I build for Getdeb or myself for that matter. I always kept the latest build I did, the archive file and the diff.gz file that way it could quickly rebuild a a new version when it came out. It's not a big deal, I can download them from the Getdeb website for the programs I build but I do miss the stuff I build for myself. Oh well, just have to start over again.

GetDebi development started

One of the common complains the annoying and non-intuitive support for multiple-packages software. This is unfortunately the best we can do with the gdebi application, Ubuntu's default graphical installer for .deb files.
There are some APT based options to overcome this, however there are some limitations on APT to be used with our particular case, unlike regular APT repositories we have very frequent updates, this would most likely drive us into synchronization and availability problems.
A short term solution was to implement a custom installer capable of downloading the required .deb files from a specification file that will be published on the site.
The installer name is GetDebi, a project was setup for it at launchpad and some initial code was already committed.
We should implement it as simpler as possible, using standard formats and tools. The publishing specification is the only custom format that we will need to develop.
The development language is Python with GTK for the GUI, let's hope to get skilled people interested to get all the required features to be ready for Hardy+1 .

Updates for LTS releases

A few persons have asked about our plans to keep updates for LTS releases during the LTS support time, this is probably a good subject to write about.
A few months ago we have decided to limit updates for the "current" released version, starting the move as soon a release reaches the Release Candidate stage.
This decision was taken based on the visitors statistical analysis, the majority of users upgrade as soon as possible, this together with the fact that we have resources shortage, providing packages for several releases multiplies the package building a testing effort.
This is the current status, however there are some team members interested in keeping LTS packages, in case we can improve our reviewing/publishing process to a fully automated system we are probably going to change our policy dependent on the team members willingness to support the older releases.

Automated Build System improvement

This task was on my to do list for a long time, one of the main limitations on the ABS was the inability to build packages which would depend on other new packages submitted to the ABS.
I have created a script with scans the post_build directory and generates a local repository, this repository is then used on the sbuild environments.
Now that the package building infrastructure covers most of it's requirements it is the time to focus on improving the publishing system. As it is now, the package publishing depends on manually inserting data into mysql tables, this process is too much human dependent (error prone and time consuming), most of the publishing data should be retrieved automatically from the package descriptions files.
Hopefully during the next months I will have sufficient time for the publishing improvements.