Older blog entries for wez (starting at number 58)

mtrack repo ACLs

Updated: Added schema and UI for Projects to own repos and manage groups.

Following through on user repos and SSH, I revised the ACL support in mtrack and added a permissions editor for the repo editing screen. When you create a repo, it defaults to granting you (the creator) full access and denying everybody else access (equivalent to a private repo in services like Github and Bitbucket).

These permissions are respected by the SSH plumbing, so you can prevent checking in or out on a repo-by-repo basis.

Another important change in the tip is that ...

Syndicated 2010-10-11 07:00:00 from Wez Furlong

mtrack repo ACLs

Following through on user repos and SSH, I revised the ACL support in mtrack and added a permissions editor for the repo editing screen. When you create a repo, it defaults to granting you (the creator) full access and denying everybody else access (equivalent to a private repo in services like Github and Bitbucket).

These permissions are respected by the SSH plumbing, so you can prevent checking in or out on a repo-by-repo basis.

Another important change in the tip is that the "admin" role now magically short-circuits permission checks in a fashion similar to ...

Syndicated 2010-10-10 18:01:00 from Wez Furlong

mtrack user repos and ssh

I've just pushed a somewhat experimental change to the default branch of mtrack that enables per-user repositories, repository forking, SSH key management, and SSH repository serving integration.

It's important to stress that this is preliminary in as much as restrictive controls are missing. There are some ACLs and rights around repo creation that are not yet implemented. Additionally, if you are using OpenID, any authenticated user will be able to add an ssh key and access the mtrack created repos (but nothing outside of that).

What you get in the current tip:

• Users can ...

Syndicated 2010-10-09 04:05:00 from Wez Furlong

mtrack: burndown and postgres

It's that time of the month... mtrack update time. Not a huge number of items to report on this time around, but it's a decently significant stepping stone--the schema management code takes us one step closer to an upgrade/deployment process.

• If you don't explicitly include the burndown macro text in a milestone, a default burndown graph will now be displayed when the milestone summary is rendered in the roadmap section.
• Added schema management code to handle upgrades that change the schema
• Added preliminary postgres DB support on top of the schema management code.
...

Syndicated 2010-10-06 02:28:00 from Wez Furlong

mtrack: custom fields, snippets

It's time for another mtrack update; here's what's new:

• Add "Snippets" feature; works like pastebin, but allows for comments to be supplied in wiki syntax in addition to the code or text snippet that you're pasting
• Add Custom Field support. This is implemented by modifying the schema (custom fields always have an "x_" prefix).
• Improvements to the "custom ticket query" screens, including ability to select which columns (including custom fields) are included in the results
• Fix an issue with sorting the "Remaining" time column
• Fix some IE compatibility issues
...

Syndicated 2010-09-06 23:32:00 from Wez Furlong

mtrack: facelift + other progress

I've been working on some changes to mtrack (a software development tracker implemented in PHP) this weekend, with a focus on improving the user experience for the mtrack administrator. To be brutally honest, it was at best a meagre experience for the administrator, but now things are better. They're still not perfect, but it should be a low enough bar to encourage more folks to play with mtrack. I've also spent a little bit of effort to add some caching to improve performance for certain pages.

For those that have tried it in the past, there's a ...

Syndicated 2010-08-15 23:21:00 from Wez Furlong

OSCON 2010 Redux

Another OSCON is done. As usual, it was a great mix of folks and ideas across many different areas of OpenSource technology.

The most valuable track at these conferences (for me, at least) has become the hallway track. This is due in-part to my becoming a big-headed know-it-all; you pick up a lot of knowledge after you been to a good number of these conferences/conventions. But it is really important to me to be able to converse with fellow OpenSourcerors, whether they are working on the tools that I use on a daily basis or are working ...

Syndicated 2010-07-25 16:08:00 from Wez Furlong

Gimli at OSCON

Update: the session is complete; you can find the slides on slideshare.net and the code on bitbucket

I'm speaking at OSCON again with another new topic. This year, I'm spreading the news about Gimli, a Server Process Monitoring and Fault Analysis framework that I built at Message Systems and will be sharing with the world at OSCON.

In a nutshell, Gimli will supervise a process and capture an extensive crash trace (using DWARF 3 debugging information if possible) if the process crashes or wedges, and then restarts the process.

Syndicated 2010-07-25 16:00:00 from Wez Furlong

mtrack: roadmap RFC

I wanted to share some of my thoughts on future development in mtrack, and solicit some feedback. Some of these are driven directly from user requests, and others are things that I've been thinking about on-and-off for a little while.

I really want to hear your thoughts, whether they relate to ideas and feature suggestions, or whether you have some experience or anecdotes on these topics.

Custom Fields

I was hoping to avoid having to enable this as a feature, as I find the implementation approach taken in the original Trac to be sub-optimal, both ...

Syndicated 2010-07-10 04:53:00 from Wez Furlong

HTTP POST from PHP, without cURL

Update May 2010: This is one of my most popular blog entries, so it seems worthwhile to modernize it a little. I've added an example of a generic REST helper that I've been using in a couple of places below the original do_post_request function in this entry. Enjoy!

I don't think we do a very good job of evangelizing some of the nice things that the PHP streams layer does in the PHP manual, or even in general. At least, every time I search for the code snippet that allows you to do an HTTP POST ...

Syndicated 2010-05-23 04:00:00 from Wez Furlong