The
Mahara project has just moved to mandatory code reviews for every commit that gets applied to core code.
Here is a description of how
Gerrit Code Review, the peer-review system used by
Android, was retrofitted into our existing
git repository on
Gitorious.
(If you want to know more about Gerrit, listen to
this FLOSS Weekly interview.)
Replacing existing Gitorious committers with a robotThe first thing to do was to log into Gitorious and remove commit rights from everyone in the
main repository. Then I created a new
maharabot account with a password-less SSH key (stored under
/home/gerrit/.ssh/) and made that new account the sole committer.
This is to ensure that nobody pushes to the repository by mistake since all of these changes would be overwritten by Gerrit.
Basic Gerrit installationAfter going through the
installation instructions, I logged into the Gerrit admin interface and created a new "mahara"
project.
I picked the "merge if necessary" submit action because "cherry-pick" would
disable dependency tracking which is quite a handy feature.
Reverse proxy using NginxSince we wanted to offer Gerrit over HTTPS, I decided to run it behind an
Nginx proxy. This is the Nginx configuration I ended up with:
server
listen 443;
server_name reviews.mahara.org;
add_header Strict-Transport-Security max-age=15768000;
ssl on;
ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/certs/reviews.mahara.org.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/certs/reviews.mahara.org.pem;
ssl_session_timeout 5m;
ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:1m;
ssl_protocols TLSv1;
ssl_ciphers HIGH:!ADH;
ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
location /
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8081;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
Things to note:
- An HTTP to HTTPS redirection is not provided.
- The HSTS headers indicates to modern browsers that this URL should only be accessed via HTTPS.
- Only strong SSL ciphers are enabled.
- Before proxying requests to Gerrit, Nginx adds a few headers to identify the origin of the request. The Host header in particular must be present otherwise built-in Gerrit redirections will fail.
Mail setupTo enable Gerrit to email reviewers and committers, I installed
Postfix and used "reviews.mahara.org" as the "System mail name".
Then I added the following to
/home/gerrit/mahara_reviews/etc/gerrit.config:
[user]
email = "gerrit@reviews.mahara.org"
to fix the From address in outgoing emails.
Init script and cronFollowing the
installation instructions, I created these symlinks:
ln -s /home/gerrit/mahara_reviews/bin/gerrit.sh /etc/init.d/gerrit
cd /etc/rc2.d && ln -s ../init.d/gerrit S19gerrit
cd /etc/rc3.d && ln -s ../init.d/gerrit S19gerrit
cd /etc/rc4.d && ln -s ../init.d/gerrit S19gerrit
cd /etc/rc5.d && ln -s ../init.d/gerrit S19gerrit
cd /etc/rc0.d && ln -s ../init.d/gerrit K21gerrit
cd /etc/rc1.d && ln -s ../init.d/gerrit K21gerrit
cd /etc/rc6.d && ln -s ../init.d/gerrit K21gerrit
and put the following settings into
/etc/default/gerritcodereview:
GERRIT_SITE=/home/gerrit/mahara_reviews
GERRIT_USER=gerrit
GERRIT_WAR=/home/gerrit/gerrit.war
to automatically start and stop Gerrit.
I also added a cron job in
/etc/cron.d/gitcleanup to ensure that the built-in git repository doesn't get bloated:
MAILTO=admin@example.com
20 4 * * * gerrit GIT_DIR=/home/gerrit/mahara_reviews/git/mahara.git git gc --quiet
Configuration enhancementsTo allow images in change requests to be displayed inside the browser, I
marked them as safe in
/home/gerrit/mahara_reviews/etc/gerrit.config:
[mimetype "image/*"]
safe = true
Another thing I did to enhance the review experience was to enable the gitweb repository browser:
apt-get install gitweb
and to make checkouts faster by enabling anonymous Git access:
[gerrit]
canonicalGitUrl = git://reviews.mahara.org/git/
[download]
scheme = ssh
scheme = anon_http
scheme = anon_git
which requires that you have a git daemon running and listening on port 9418:
apt-get install git-daemon-run
ln -s /home/gerrit/mahara_reviews/git/mahara.git /var/cache/git/
touch /home/gerrit/mahara_reviews/git/mahara.git/git-daemon-export-ok
Finally, I included the Mahara branding in the header and footer of each page by
providing valid XHTML fragments in
/home/gerrit/mahara_reviews/etc/GerritSiteHeader.html and
GerritSiteFooter.html.
Initial import and replicationOnce Gerrit was fully working, I performed the initial code import by using my administrator account to push the exiting Gitorious branches to the internal git repository:
git remote add gerrit ssh://username@reviews.mahara.org:29418/mahara
git push gerrit 1.2_STABLE
git push gerrit 1.3_STABLE
git push gerrit master
Note that I had to temporarily disable "Require Change IDs" in the project settings in order to import the old commits which didn't have these.
To replicate the internal Gerrit repository back to Gitorious, I created a new
/home/gerrit/mahara_reviews/etc/replication.config file:
[remote "gitorious"]
url = gitorious.org:mahara/$ name .git
push = +refs/heads/*:refs/heads/*
push = +refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*
(The $ name variable is
required even when you have a single project.)
Contributor instructionsThis is how developers can get a working checkout of our code now:
git clone git://gitorious.org/mahara/mahara.git
cd mahara
git remote add gerrit ssh://username@reviews.mahara.org:29418/mahara
git fetch gerrit
scp -p -P 29418 reviews.mahara.org:hooks/commit-msg .git/hooks/
and this is how they can submit local changes to Gerrit:
git push gerrit HEAD:refs/for/master
Anybody can submit change requests or
comment on them but make sure you do not have the Cookie Pie Firefox extension installed or you will be
unable to log into Gerrit.
See comment at the end about this 2nd version
This is time again for yet another bubulle game: counting the number of developers per
country. I already published such analysis in 2010 and 2009.
So, here we are with the June 2011 version, sorted by the ratio of *active* developers per million
population for each country.
The near-term goals are certainly:
I say this after probably 48 hours of what I estimate is a sustained 60 kB/s of
brute force SIP traffic from 61.146.178.173 has been sent my way.
I'd very cheerfully sign up for a service that had all Chinese IP addresses
null routed, and provided a proxy server for any HTTP access. I have no
business needing direct IP connectivity to China, and I certainly do it not
want it from China to me.
I was pleasantly surprised to be able to call up Comcast's 
Just 
On June 8, 2011, will be 
IIT Bombay, like most likely most Indian educational instituates, has some rules and regulations about the interaction between boys and girls that, at least to the uninitiated eye of a foreigner who was brought up in a liberal society, seem arbitrary and archaic. At IIT Bombay, for example, there may be no visits in hostels by students of the other gender (yes, there are separate boys and girls hostels) between 10pm and 7am, and during the day any such visit has to be registered at the 
It's 2011. Computers are here for a couple of decades now, but they still don't help me with the most simple problems. I've been asked once again about a recommendation for a GroupWare and still don't know what to say. This are the simple requirements:
This summer, I ll be taking a bit of time off, moving back to San Francisco and starting 
Particularly around local government, but also some not-for-profits and universities, I m trying to persuade people to stop using huge Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) lists that they keep in their address book and switch over to using mailing list manager software. 
IPv6 adoption is increasing, and along with it come a new set of behaviours and defaults that system administrators and users must learn and become familiar with. I was recently caught out by Linux s handling of IPv6 router advertisements (RAs) when forwarding is also enabled on the interface. It took me a while to figure out and searching for obvious terms (such as those in the first half of the title of this post) didn t immediately yield useful answers, so here is my attempt to help shed some light on the subject.
By default Linux will ignore IPv6 RAs if the interface is configured to forward traffic. This is in line with 
[0] Arguably you really don t want to be autoconfiguring addresses on your router ever, but that s a philosophical debate that isn t really relevant to this post.
Date for end of sponsored registrations for this years 
Professional/Corporate
This is category for those who are sent by their companies, and whose participation/attendance is sponsored by the same. Professional covers the price of actual costs of their visit, while the corporate is double that price, which is for those who besides paying the actual costs also want to contribute money and help Debian.
Organized transport and getting to Banja Luka
Now, for those who are flying to Banja Luka I personally told you to come to via Zagreb. Why did I do this, if Banja Luka has its own airport? I told you this because Zagreb is much larger airport and thus has many budget companies, meaning cheaper flights. Once the registrations are closed, based on your arrival/departure dates we ll be able to statistically predict how many of you will be coming to Zagreb on each date and each time as we re planning to have organized transport. This means that we ll send buses/shuttles to pick people up in Zagreb. Of course to have this organized we ll need to set up arrival/departure pages with all the information that s need for us to have this organized.
Now, for those who want to come directly to Banja Luka airport this might be bit pricer then going via Zagreb, but not by much. I personally value my time and I even fly from Zagreb to Sarajevo 
Mostly everything in life boils down to the same troublesome issue: people are reading different things into what they read, and interpret them regularly in a way it wasn't meant to. It seems that in certain areas a culture of interpreting things in a bad way instead of good or asking how they were actually meant has established the rules of (not) working together but rather against each other and around each other. At times I would like to account it to language barriers, or cultural differences, but it happens with people from all areas so that reasoning would be too easy.
Even artists manage to do that, and in that certain area it creates something extremely creative and thoughtful. This blog entry thus contains three songs and six videos: Two different interpretations of the same lyrics. Maybe this is able to stir some thinking process whether the interpretation that one found for a given situation might be biased or even just looking from the wrong angle.