Advogato blog for wez

parser and lexer generators for PHP

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 15:12:00 GMT

[Update: I've put these parser/lexer tools on BitBucket and Github; enjoy!]

From time to time, I find that I need to put a parser together. Most of the time I find that I need to do this in C for performance, but other times I just want something convenient, like PHP, and have been out of luck.

This thanksgiving I set out to remedy this and adapted lemon to optionally emit PHP code, and likewise with JLex.

You need a C compiler to build lemon and a java compiler and runtime to build and ...

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mtrack repo ACLs

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 06:07:14 GMT

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 ...

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mtrack repo ACLs

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 19:07:08 GMT

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 ...

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mtrack user repos and ssh

Sat, 9 Oct 2010 05:09:51 GMT

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 ...

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mtrack: burndown and postgres

Wed, 6 Oct 2010 03:05:06 GMT

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.

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mtrack: custom fields, snippets

Tue, 7 Sep 2010 01:08:45 GMT

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

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mtrack: facelift + other progress

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 02:10:51 GMT

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 ...

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OSCON 2010 Redux

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 18:12:34 GMT

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 ...

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Gimli at OSCON

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 18:12:34 GMT

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.

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mtrack: roadmap RFC

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 19:06:18 GMT

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 ...

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