SF Personal   Stefano Forenza - Personal Blog

Sometime ago I filed a bug against Launchpad. I am happy to see today that it has been marked as confirmed and the whole thing is recognized as a potential missing feature to Launchpad.

What I am talking about ? I really think Launchpad needs a wiki for every project. Just like Google code has. This would help independant projects teams to get rid of unuseful own sites setup just for keeping blueprints and documentation. And would help to avoid further time loss setting up an own wiki, an access list etc.

While I have nothing against an open source team to open up their own site, this brings a fair amount of uncertainness for the future of it.

Suppose I write a nifty lib, and then waste my 10$ on a domain just to keep its documentation. In 3 years I could just loose interest in the whole thing and let my domain go down. Every existing/prospective user would be left without a project homepage to consult.

Hasn’t ever happened to you to look for the homepage of a project and find just a parked domain page ? It happened to me today, while checking the xmms2tray (it’s a pygtk present into ubuntu’s repositories) homepage. A site like Launchpad, on the other hand, is much less likely to go down anytime soon.

As a developer I wish my projects stuff to stay around as long as possible, even after I cease to work on it. That would help existing users or people willing to take over in the project.

I filed a brainstorm idea, linked to the bug. If you agree with me, go and vote for it !

Today Celeste made a very good point.

The problem with the current GNOME implementation is that it doesn’t support users who make errors.

Very true. That’s because we (Gnome users) don’t make mistakes. Never ever.

Working on Rapache, it’s been a while I wanted to add syntax highlightining, but I didn’t dare too loose time on a “side feature” like that. Last night though, Jason came in chat, and pasted me the code to do that straight away. That was nice, I only needed to paste that code in the source and make little adjustments.

Some little glitches arose though, so I eventually had to work a little more on it. I just thought I’d share what I had to do with other people.

My problems:

• I had to put together a language definition for Apache config files, since no one currently exists
• I had to find out how to read if from a non system dir (ie. from my program data directory)

This is the Apache .lang file (needs more love, but that’s a start) ended up with.

Here’s the code:

import gtksourceview2

custom_langs_path = '/home/myuser/mydir/datafiles'
bufferS = gtksourceview2.Buffer()
manager = gtksourceview2.LanguageManager()
manager.set_search_path( [ custom_langs_path ] + manager.get_search_path() )
language = manager.get_language('apache')
bufferS.set_language(language)
bufferS.set_highlight_syntax(True)
sourceview = gtksourceview2.View(bufferS)
sourceview.set_show_line_numbers(True)
#TODO sniff gnome default monospace font
sourceview.modify_font(pango.FontDescription("monospace 10"))

This is how the final result looks like:

Everything looks nicer now !

It’s been a while from the last post about Rapache. So I thought time has come to make our last progresses public.

For those who doesn’t know Rapache is a GTK utility that tries to ease the configuration of Apache on Debian alike systems.

This night was a long night :). It’s 6.48am here, so I’ll just get to the point: features !

Not so fast, baby !

• Thanks to Qense, Rapache now detects if Apache is not installed and refuses to run.

What’s new in the Main window

• Rapache now features two handy buttons, one to open a VirtualHost URL in the default browser and one to browse the DocumentRoot folder with Nautilus
• We moved the problem handling (for now just virtualhost not conforming to debian guidelines) in a separate tab, which appears only when its needed.

Edit window completely redesigned

• This guy, other than helping tremendously in other parts of the software, completely redesigned the VirtualHost creation window
• Rapache now allows to specify any number of aliases to be associated with the virtual host.

We has modulez !

• Module enabling/disabling was put in place. Things are not perfect, but works nicely.
• Many modules show a brief description just under the module name. I love this one :-).
• We also detect the dependencies (and that work is misspelled in the screenshot above and in the actual program - deep apologies) of every module.
• Modules .conf files editing is in the works. Not available at the moment, sorry !

How to get it

Beware, this is still an alpha release and it took a fair amount of refactoring, so you’re likely to find little glitches here and there. Despite of that, we are likely to package it today or tomorrow on our PPA. If you’re not prone to wait, you can check it out right now with bzr:

#install bazaar if you don't already have it
sudo apt-get install bzr
#to get rapache
bzr branch lp:~rapache-devel/rapache/rapache-stage0
#to launch it
cd rapache-stage0
./rapache

If you prefer to wait to get the old version from the repository and just wait for updates you can add these lines to your repository list and then:

#install it
sudo apt-get install rapache
#run it
rapache

Lending an hand

You can always lend us an hand.

• If you’re interested in the project, just checkout the Launchpad Page, or drop to say hi in #rapache-devel on freenode. Feel free to branch the last revision, play with it and propose it for merge.

• If you have any suggestion please open a bug in launchpad, we’d love to hear from you !
• Let you friends know about the project, this could help us get some contributors. Digg or share the link of this page and/or project page, or post it in your favourite forum.