While git is a completely distributed revision control system, sometimes
the lack of a central canonical repository can be annoying. For example,
you might want to make your repository published publically, so other
people can fork your code, or you might want all your developers to push
into (or have code pulled into) a central "golden" tree, that you then
use for automated building and continuous integration. This entry should
explain how to get this all working on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty).
Gitosis is a very useful git repository manager, which adds support like
ACLs in pre-commits and gitweb and git-daemon management. While it's
possible to set all these things up by hand, gitosis does everything for
you. It is nicely configured via git; to make configuration changes,
you push the config file changes into gitosis repository on the server.
Gitosis is available in Jaunty, but unfortunately there is a
bug
in the version in Jaunty, which means it doesn't work out of the box.
Fortunately there is a fixed version in
jaunty-proposed that
fixes the main problem. This does mean that you need to add the
following to your
sources.list:
deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty-proposed universe
Run
apt-get update && apt-get install gitosis. You should
install
0.2+20080825-2ubuntu0.1 or later. There is another
small bug in the current version too, as a result of git removing the
git-$command scripts out of
/usr/bin. Edit
/usr/share/python-support/gitosis/gitosis/templates/admin/hooks/post-update
and replace
git-update-server-info
with
git update-server-info
With these changes in place, we can now set up our gitosis
repository. On the server you are going to use to host your central
repositories, run:
sudo -H -u gitosis gitosis-init < id_rsa.pub
The
id_rsa.pub file is a public ssh key. As I mentioned,
gitosis is managed over git, so you need an initial user to clone and
then push changes back into the gitosis repo, so make sure this key
belongs to a keypair you have available to the remote user you're going
to configure gitosis.
Now, on your local computer, you can clone the gitosis-admin repo
using:
git clone gitosis@gitserver.example.com:gitosis-admin.git
If you look inside the
gitosis-admin directory, you should
find a file called
gitosis.conf and a directory called
keydir. The directory is where you can add ssh public keys for
your users. The file is the configuration file for gitosis.
[gitosis]
loglevel = INFO
[group gitosis-admin]
writable = gitosis-admin
members = david@david
[group developers]
members = david@david
writable = publicproject privateproject
[group contributors]
members = george@wilber
writable = publicproject
[repo publicproject]
daemon = yes
gitweb = yes
[repo privateproject]
daemon = no
gitweb = no
This sets up two repositories, called publicproject and
privateproject. It enables the public project to be available via the
git protocol and in gitweb if you have that installed. We also create
two groups, developers and contributors. David has access to both
projects, but George only has access to change the publicproject. David
can also modify the gitosis configuration. The users are the names of
ssh keys (the last part of the line in id_dsa.pub or id_rsa.pub).
Once you've changed this file, you can run
git add
gitosis.conf to add it to the commit,
git commit -m "update
gitosis configuration to commit it to your local repository, and
finally
git push to push your commits back up into the central
repository. Gitosis should now update the configuration on the server to
match the config file.
One last thing to do is to enable git-daemon, so people can
anonymously clone your projects. Create /etc/event.d/git-daemon with the
following contents:
start on startup
stop on shutdown
exec /usr/bin/git daemon \
--user=gitosis --group=gitosis \
--user-path=public-git \
--verbose \
--syslog \
--reuseaddr \
--base-path=/srv/gitosis/repositories/
respawn
You can now start this using
start git-daemon
So now, you need to start using your repository. You can either start
with an existing project or an empty directory. Start by running
git init and then
git add $file to add each of the
files you want in your project, and finally
git commit to
commit them to your local repository. The final task is to add a remote
repository and push your code into it.
git remote add origin gitosis@gitserver.example.com:privateproject.git
git push origin master:refs/heads/master
In future, you should be able to do
git push to push your
changes back into the central repository. You can also clone a project
using git or ssh, providing you have access, using the following
commands. The first is for read-write access over ssh and the second
uses the git protocol for read-only access. The git protocol uses TCP
port 9418, so make sure that's available externally, if you want the
world to be able to clone your repos.
git clone gitosis@gitserver.example.com:publicproject.git
git clone git://gitserver.example.com/publicproject.git
Setting up GitWeb is left as an exercise for the reader (and myself
because I am yet to attempt to set that up).
A bit more than two years ago, two young Spaniards on vacation in Latvia
maybe went a bit too far during one of their night parties and decided to
remove some Latvian flags
that hanged from a post in the streets of Riga. They spent 1 month in prison,
with charges for outraging the Latvian flag.
The Spanish media talked about the disproportionate charges, the ridiculous
and medieval laws in Latvia and so on.
Today, we learn that Jaume d'Urgell will
go to prison
due to the outraging crime of substituting the current Spanish flag with
the Republican flag of 1931 on the facade of a public building.
So much for medieval laws and institutions like the Spanish monarchy.
In the interest of sharing best practices, here is my RC
bug squashing workflow:
If you are doing a complex web layout (such as my
About four months ago I described how 
I met my friend Josef Daberning, who did his Austrian Social Service working with Drupal at the Casa de los Tres Mundos NGO, in Granada, Nicaragua, at the Central American Free Software Encounter, last May. He told me that, when going back to Austria, he would spend some days in Mexico, and wanted to give a workshop on Drupal.
The course has just started, and will take place today and tomorrow You can follow the live stream at 
Listening to 
A bit more than a week after Debconf9 ended here is a post summarising what I remember about it for myself to look back to later, for others that were there for a good memory, for those that were not there for insight and for organisers of future Debconfs to improve.
Let s start with something most people know I took photos, a lot of photos. The main photo naturally was the 
After the hike, the jumps and a hike back downhill we went into the buses and joined up with the people relaxing in the pool or in the bar right next to it. And after an hour or two later the day trip was over. While this was fun I would have preferred if after the hike we would have gone to some castle or other tourist attraction for more of a trip experience than sitting by a pool chatting.
Formal dinner was another traditional thing that we did this year. We walked over to a restaurant overlooking the city, sat down at many different tables occupying most of the place and then the waiters brought us plates with bits of food. Each plate was basically a set of 4 snacks for 4 people a plate of cheese, a plate of ham cuts, a plate of steamed vegetables and a plate of grilled meat. After that was coffee and desert. In my opinion the grilled meat was overcooked, the vegetables were passable, 1 of 5 cheeses was great (the local soft speciality) while other were ok and the ham cuts were ok. Desert was average. In all I was neither impressed by the food nor filled by it. There was also entertainment a singer with two dancers. They ware way too loud, so loud in fact that police came and shut the performance down, I did get a few interesting photos but otherwise I did not like them. They came to our venue the next night to continue the performance, luckily it was in an isolated patio and did not disturb people sleeping.
Wine and cheese party on the other hand was simply great this year there was a huge selection of wine and cheese as we were in the right part of the world for that. There were 7 tables full of cheese, wine and bread and also some extra stuff such as a barrel of peanuts and some great tea from Taiwan. People were walking around for hours eating cheese, cleaning the taste off with bread and wine, chatting and doing it all over again at another table. I left the patio at around 2am and there were still several dozen people around chatting, eating, drinking wine and tea. I m not sure how to get an event of similar size in NY as it is 
This question keeps on popping up in many recent newspaper articles, on discussion boards and in seminars debating immigration issues in Finland. At the core of the question is a general impression that, between the enthusiastic supporters of multiculturalism and the pessimistic nationalist rednecks, very little constructive discussion is possible in Finland.
At one end, humanitarian help organizations, as well as politicians from the Green Party and the Swedish Folk Party, keep on taking excessively generous initiatives towards refugees and asylum seekers, all while labeling their detractors as racists. At the other end, nationalist candidates in the National Coalition Party and True Finns Party keep on painting every immigrant as a refugee who is abusing social security and label their detractors as turning Finland into the easiest country to abuse social security, at the Finnish taxpayer's expense. In between, candidates from the Christian Democrats and Center Party spread equally among these two camps. Meanwhile, while the Left is currently avoiding discussions on this topic, Social Democrats have previously shown that they tend to side with the nationalists in labeling all immigrants as social security abusing refugees.
One interesting point is that, no matter at which end of the political spectrum one looks, the whole Finnish immigration debate keeps on focusing exclusively on refugees and asylum seekers, despite the fact that migrant workers and foreign spouses of Finnish nationals make up for a good 70% of the foreign population residing on Finnish soil.
This recalcitrance to discuss immigration from any other perspective than refugees is rather painfully noticeable. Some recent examples:
