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Ruby Apps Typo
41

On Thu, 15 Jun 2006 18:14:55 -0500, Timothy F.
[email protected] wrote:

I agree with that idea. The Typo community should eat its own dog food
and run an instance on typosphere.org. Give accounts to a few active
individuals and let them post not just about Typo, but about the
competition as well.

That way we spread the responsibility out over several busy individuals
rather than one busy individual, and by writing about innovations across
the blogging community and not just within Typo we will better see how
Typo stacks up against other offerings.

Definintely, and now is the time to regroup, after all the Mepistop talk
I did some looking around and found this snippet:

Mephisto

This is unrelated to the other happenings above, but I wanted to comment
on this due to the recent happenings. The Rails Weblog has just swapped
their blogging engine from Typo to Mephisto. Of course they would give
Rick all the credit wouldnâ??t they. ;-p

Mephisto is a new Rails based publishing system (yes, another one). We
havenâ??t released an official version of it yet, but we hope to be doing
that soon. At the moment Iâ??m implementing a new interface for Mephisto
and we have to work out file management as well before we do an official
release. Here is a sneak peak at the new interface (pay no mind to the
text):
[…]
Some of you may or may not know, but I had a hand in Typo as well. Itâ??s
actually how I met and started working with Tobias. So why are people
swapping from Typo? I donâ??t mean to take anything away from the talented
folks who are doing the upkeep on Typo, but to me, Typo has lost focus
of itâ??s purpose. Typoâ??s purpose was to publish content, but it has
quickly evolved into much more, the interface has suffered as a result
of this. There is so much focus on the development that the usability
has taken a big blow. Iâ??m not sure if the Typo team has an active
designer on staff, but I know that a sole designer simply canâ??t keep up
with the pace of development. Or, at least, this was the case right
before I stopped working on it. (Disclaimer: I havenâ??t checked out any
of the recent version of Typo).

With Mephisto itâ??s primarily just me and Rick working on it, although we
have received some great contributions from others. We both have very
high standards and we want to see those high standards reflected in what
we release to the public. Mephisto is still in itâ??s infancy, but keep
your eyes pealed for more to come.

http://encytemedia.com/blog/articles/2006/06/13/railsconf-railsday-vacation-and-mephisto

So it’s not just us that feel like this, but now it’s becoming the
consensus is in the Rails community; Typo has lost ground, but we need
to look forward with what we can do to strengthen the community. First
off has to be the website, make it easier to use obviously, but also
have a 1-2-3-4 step process where a newbie can downlaod/install/run a
2.6.0 instance in short order. From there I think we need a target
date and requirement list for 4.0.0, then a theme site to allow users
all of the themes for 2.6.0 and a sep listing for -trunk, that way when
4.0.0 comes out there will be a slew of themes avail out of the gate.
Sorry, but people will judge Typo in how it looks, but with the themes
we have from the contest that’s no problem, it’s just making those
themes available (how about shipping with the top 5 rated ones? As well
as migrating them to work with -trunk/4.0.0.

P

few guy are doing a really good job on typo dev, but everything (but
Typo helped me to discover RoR and I’m addicted but sometimes people
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/typo-list
Typo-list mailing list
[email protected]
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/typo-list

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42

Some people are volunteering to update the documentation, others are
rescuing obsolete themes from TypoGarden. This is wonderful to see!
Typo may have more life in it yet.

But what about Typo’s biggest problem?

http://www.typosphere.org/trac/browser/trunk

No commits since May 20th, and not a peep from anybody with commit
access. Well, one single peep. :slight_smile:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.typo.user/2677/focus=2686

r1055 is just not suitable for running a production blog and nobody
appears to be merging the patches in Trac. How can this be fixed?

- Scott
43

Jon Gretar B. wrote:

Sorry. What I meant by stable is that I never get any administration
errors or anything like that. Simply sometimes when the page is being
viewed I get an Applicaton Error(rails). But then I just refresh and
everything works.

I used to get that all the time. Then my web host contacted me and said
Typo was running the server into the ground, and please could I switch
to a more expensive plan that included fastcgi.

mathew

44

Jon Gretar B. wrote:

Well… You just have to find a revision before everything went bad
and use that one.

I’ve mentioned this before, but If you want a good revision of typo
trunk, I’ve been having luck with 1039 and Rails 1.1.1. Posting works,
admin works, RSS works, comments work, fastcgi has only crashed once.

mathew

45

On Fri, 16 Jun 2006 09:59:08 -0500, mathew [email protected] wrote:

Jon Gretar B. wrote:

Well… You just have to find a revision before everything went bad
and use that one.

I’ve mentioned this before, but If you want a good revision of typo
trunk, I’ve been having luck with 1039 and Rails 1.1.1. Posting works,
admin works, RSS works, comments work, fastcgi has only crashed once.

Mathew
Can you help us with this? I’ve asked off and on how to get to a
‘stable’ version of trunk. Namely:

what are the steps?

svn typo trunk
svn rails 1038?
rake migrate VERSION=???

Sorry if this is obvious, but I don’t know how to target things to make
this work. Thanks

P

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46

On 6/16/06, mathew [email protected] wrote:

Jon Gretar B. wrote:

Sorry. What I meant by stable is that I never get any administration
errors or anything like that. Simply sometimes when the page is being
viewed I get an Applicaton Error(rails). But then I just refresh and
everything works.

I used to get that all the time. Then my web host contacted me and said
Typo was running the server into the ground, and please could I switch
to a more expensive plan that included fastcgi.

I actually was thinking about this being Apache related. Although I
was using fastcgi of course. As serverpowered.com gives me 3 ip
addresses for my money I quickly set up LightTPD alongside Apache and
bound to a seperate IP and have that problem a lot less. Now I’m
moving most things to Lighty.

If only Lighty supported SVN I would make a complete switch.

–

47

On 6/16/06, Jon Gretar B. [email protected] wrote:

I actually was thinking about this being Apache related. Although I
was using fastcgi of course. As serverpowered.com gives me 3 ip
addresses for my money I quickly set up LightTPD alongside Apache and
bound to a seperate IP and have that problem a lot less. Now I’m
moving most things to Lighty.

If only Lighty supported SVN I would make a complete switch.

Have people been having problems with FastCGI on the newer revisions?

My sad devotion to the older versions that used page_cache haven’t
helped me conjure up any new patches. The order of magnitude slowdown
in pages per second served just wasn’t worth it on my low CPU/memory
capacity server. Of course now I realize I don’t even know how that
whole page_cache vs. action_cache debate worked out.

48

On 6/16/06, Scott B. [email protected] wrote:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.typo.user/2677/focus=2686

r1055 is just not suitable for running a production blog and nobody
appears to be merging the patches in Trac. How can this be fixed?

I supposed it’s time to jump in here. I’ve been insanely busy with
with work for the past couple months. Even worse, I’m oncall for work
this week, and just haven’t had the energy to deal with this thread.

As I see it, we have a few problems (in random order):

  1. Typosphere needs more detail. Adding a blog would be nice, as
    would more documentation. We’ve discussed this before, but no one has
    stepped forward to get it working. Technically, this is pretty easy.

  2. No one is actively committing things to SVN. There are 3
    semi-active developers on Typo right now (my, Piers, and Kevin), but
    none of us have much time right now.

  3. Bugs are getting fixed/patches aren’t being applied. This is sort
    of complex. First, it’s been really hard to find patches, thanks to
    all of the spam in Trac. Kevin’s beat the spam back quite a bit, but
    it’s still hard. Perhaps we’d be best off if people would discuss
    patches here.

  4. We’re missing documentation, and Typo’s hard to install. This is
    mostly my fault. I’ve been trying to fix the install process for
    months and just haven’t found the time.

  5. Typo isn’t very stable. This is a bit different from “bugs aren’t
    getting fixed.” It’s proven to be difficult to install Typo in
    different environments reliabily. Over the past year, I’ve seen a
    huge number of weird bug reports just really don’t make sense. It’s
    like the combination of Apache+FCGI+Ruby+rails+ruby FCGI+Typo+DB is
    tough to get reliable.

  6. Typo has a huge resource footprint. For some reason, Typo seems
    to leak memory. I don’t know how to debug this. In some
    environments, Typo can jump up to 50+ MB, while others seem relatively
    stable. Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell where the memory’s
    going    .

  7. Typo has gone down the “more features” route rather then the
    “small and fast” route. I don’t know how to address this. It is what
    it is, largely because we’ve added the things that we want and people
    have asked for. Most of the “bloat” is my code, including things like
    sidebars and plugable text filters.

  8. There’s no stable 4.0 release, even after months. This is
    basically my fault, too. People have been waiting for the installer
    that I haven’t been able to finish. With any luck, I’ll have some
    free time once I’m back off being on-call, and I’ll be able to spend
    10-15 hours on the installer. Until then, can people help with bug
    fixes? If we can get a list of bugs that are really broken, and
    ideally a list of patches that need applied, then it’ll be vastly
    easier to get changes applied.

  9. We need maintainers with time. Right now, I think there are 6 or
    7 people with SVN write access. 4 of those are basically done with
    Typo, leaving 3 of us semi-active. If a couple people could step up
    and demonstrate that they (a) have time, (b) know what they’re doing,
    and (c) are good at dealing with bugs, then I’d be glad to add them to
    the commit list.

So, what am I missing?

Scott

49

Everybody has access to Trac. Just hit the ‘Edit this page’ button

Curious…that’s what I thought too, but I don’t have an ‘edit this
page’
button. That’s probably because I haven’t logged in…except I don’t
have a
login and there’s no place to register from the looks of it.

Uzair

50

So, does anyone know how to go about getting a login? If yes, I
volunteer to
put this info on Trac :slight_smile:

Uzair

51

On Fri, 16 Jun 2006, Scott L. wrote:

access. Well, one single peep. :slight_smile:

  1. Typosphere needs more detail. Adding a blog would be nice, as
    would more documentation. We’ve discussed this before, but no one has
    stepped forward to get it working. Technically, this is pretty easy.

This effort seems to have a lot of people behind it.

  1. No one is actively committing things to SVN. There are 3
    semi-active developers on Typo right now (my, Piers, and Kevin), but
    none of us have much time right now.

I would love to help here, and I can apply properly formatted patches to
trunk, but I don’t know enough about the entire typo codebase to really
be
able to hack on it yet.

  1. Bugs are getting fixed/patches aren’t being applied. This is sort
    of complex. First, it’s been really hard to find patches, thanks to
    all of the spam in Trac. Kevin’s beat the spam back quite a bit, but
    it’s still hard. Perhaps we’d be best off if people would discuss
    patches here.

I’ve found a few. I’ve also been doing a cleanup of trac, closing off
old
bugs that have been fixed, as well as closing off bugs that are
obviously
not bugs. I think I’ve picked off most of the low hanging fruit though.

  1. We’re missing documentation, and Typo’s hard to install. This is
    mostly my fault. I’ve been trying to fix the install process for
    months and just haven’t found the time.

Do you have any code that you can throw onto trunk? I’d love to be able
to at least try what you’ve got, and open bugs and/or write patches for
it.

  1. Typo isn’t very stable. This is a bit different from “bugs aren’t
    getting fixed.” It’s proven to be difficult to install Typo in
    different environments reliabily. Over the past year, I’ve seen a
    huge number of weird bug reports just really don’t make sense. It’s
    like the combination of Apache+FCGI+Ruby+rails+ruby FCGI+Typo+DB is
    tough to get reliable.

I think we need to put a bug triage in place.
A lot of the bugs we haven’t been able to track down because we don’t
know
enough about the environment to place the problem. I’ve seen a lot of
well written bugs that include all the necessary information, but I’ve
also seen a lot of bugs that don’t include the necessary info to even
determine whether or not it’s a problem with typo, or fastcgi, or rails,
or lighthttpd, or what.

  1. Typo has a huge resource footprint. For some reason, Typo seems
    to leak memory. I don’t know how to debug this. In some
    environments, Typo can jump up to 50+ MB, while others seem relatively
    stable. Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell where the memory’s
    going    .

I haven’t seen this.

  1. Typo has gone down the “more features” route rather then the
    “small and fast” route. I don’t know how to address this. It is what
    it is, largely because we’ve added the things that we want and people
    have asked for. Most of the “bloat” is my code, including things like
    sidebars and plugable text filters.

These features are actually what differentiate typo from WP. Feature
differentiation is good, and doesn’t necessarily mean more features, it
just means that Typo has different features. For example, our post
editor
sucks, but that was part of the design decision. Most typo users use an
external blog tool to post to typo, so they don’t need a good post
editor.
I think we need to find areas where we can add features that users want,
without bloating the code.

  1. There’s no stable 4.0 release, even after months. This is
    basically my fault, too. People have been waiting for the installer
    that I haven’t been able to finish. With any luck, I’ll have some
    free time once I’m back off being on-call, and I’ll be able to spend
    10-15 hours on the installer. Until then, can people help with bug
    fixes? If we can get a list of bugs that are really broken, and
    ideally a list of patches that need applied, then it’ll be vastly
    easier to get changes applied.

I’ve spent a good part of today going through the trac site, and I have
a
list of 7 defects that have a milestone of 4.0

http://www.typosphere.org/trac/query?status=new&status=assigned&status=reopened&milestone=4.0&type=defect&order=priority

5 of these defects have patches.

There are 4 enhancements with a 4.0 milestone, only one blocks the
release. That one is, umm, yours.

http://www.typosphere.org/trac/query?status=new&status=assigned&status=reopened&milestone=4.0&type=enhancement&order=priority

  1. We need maintainers with time. Right now, I think there are 6 or
    7 people with SVN write access. 4 of those are basically done with
    Typo, leaving 3 of us semi-active. If a couple people could step up
    and demonstrate that they (a) have time, (b) know what they’re doing,
    and (c) are good at dealing with bugs, then I’d be glad to add them to
    the commit list.

I don’t have that much time, I don’t really know what I’m doing, but
I am good at dealing with bugs. It’s what I do professionally.

So, what am I missing?

All we’re missing now is a plan.

I really think we should look at putting out a beta of 4.0 soon. I can
help clean off bugs, and start to come up with a test plan for the
patches
that are in trac. I have NO IDEA how unit testing is done with rails,
or
ruby, but I’ll take a look.

Thanks for composing this response.

Scott

Typo-list mailing list
[email protected]
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/typo-list

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