registry prototyping / design

2007/8/17, Harry Phillips <hphillips@tux.com.au>:
> I was really surprised to see that there was a maintainer of the GIMP
> registry. I had forgotten my username and password to the registry.
> Despite several messages asking for help I got no response.

OK... second time, so a public reply seems in order: Yep, it has
happened that I miss a mail, and I'm sorry about it. I know it is
frustrating from personal experience.

However, what /I/ am surprised about is that people send me one or two
e-mails, receive no timely answer and then conclude that I'm dead or
something. Honestly, folks, have you considered that I might also
have other things to do and that there are -- unfortunately! -- times
when those other things take up so much of my day that there is not
much time left? I try to follow up on requests when I have more time
again, but I sometimes miss them. It happens to the best of us.

As it is, these periods are intermittent and when I could, I have been
very forthcoming with help, including both requests like yours about
lost accounts and things like the 2006 Google SoC proposal (which
never amounted to anything btw, which could explain me becoming a bit
cynical about such things). Michael in particular knows this and I
would appreciate it if he acknowledged that from time to time.

btw, just for some background info: I'm a PhD student and the peak
points in my workload mainly stem from two things: Teaching and demos.
I have been responsible for classes of more than ~100 students in the
past, you can imagine what that does to my inbox.

> I saw how much the current registry sucked

You know, I'm always surprised that people think a good way to start a
new undertaking is by badmouthing the old. How about "there are a lot
of things that could be improved"?

For the record, the current experiment linked to in the first mail in
this thread does most of the things you mentioned and the additional
search categories are trivial to add. If you're interested, register
yourself for an account and I'll assign the required privileges so
that you can work on it, too. I'd certainly be happy for some help --
people are always happy to request some features but very few are
willing to put in some work of their own.

cheers,

Quoting Ingo Lütkebohle <iluetkeb@gmail.com>:

> 2007/8/17, Harry Phillips <hphillips@tux.com.au>:
>> I was really surprised to see that there was a maintainer of the GIMP
>> registry. I had forgotten my username and password to the registry.
>> Despite several messages asking for help I got no response.
>
> OK... second time, so a public reply seems in order:

I am still not used to this webmail interface but I think it will work
this time

>
>> I saw how much the current registry sucked
>
> You know, I'm always surprised that people think a good way to start a
> new undertaking is by badmouthing the old. How about "there are a lot
> of things that could be improved"?
>
> For the record, the current experiment linked to in the first mail in
> this thread does most of the things you mentioned and the additional
> search categories are trivial to add. If you're interested, register
> yourself for an account and I'll assign the required privileges so
> that you can work on it, too. I'd certainly be happy for some help --
> people are always happy to request some features but very few are
> willing to put in some work of their own.
>

I should have worded that statement *alot* better. I was willing to
write a new registry from the ground up, I have written almost all of
the GIMP tutorials on the OSP wiki
(http://wiki.osphoto.org/index.php/GIMP) and am very active in the
GIMP user group on flickr.

If you will still accept my help I am willing to put in as much effort
as you need.

Quoting Harry Phillips <gimp-list@tux.com.au>:
>>
>> If you're interested, register
>> yourself for an account and I'll assign the required privileges so
>> that you can work on it, too.
>
> If you will still accept my help I am willing to put in as much effort
> as you need.
>

I registered the username tuxcomputers with an email address of
gimp-registry@tux.com.au. It said that I was going to be sent a
password and more instructions.

Half an hour later I still haven't got anything. Have you got it
configured so that the registration message is not sent automatically?
I tried using the "Request new password" facility but it said to
contact the admin, so that's what I am doing.

2007/8/18, Harry Phillips <gimp-list@tux.com.au>:
> I should have worded that statement *alot* better. I was willing to
> write a new registry from the ground up, I have written almost all of
> the GIMP tutorials on the OSP wiki
> (http://wiki.osphoto.org/index.php/GIMP) and am very active in the
> GIMP user group on flickr.
> If you will still accept my help I am willing to put in as much effort
> as you need.

Certainly, as I said, I'd be very happy about help! I wasn't too
pleased with the earlier wording but then, I can see where thats
coming from and I'm not very happy about the state myself.

Is there a particular reason you'd prefer a rewrite, as opposed to
doing the new registry based on Drupal? The registry is not that
complicated at heart and all functionality I can think of at the
moment would be very easy to build using Drupal and the various
modules it offers. In particular, the Content Construction Kit (CCK),
coupled with the Views module, is really neat for building specialized
content types and customized views for them. The effort is /much/
less than doing all that from scratch, plus you get a lot thrown in
for free, such as user management, templating, access control and
roles, etc. pp.

cheers

P.S. regarding the account, please try logging in again. it is listed
as active but there was a problem with the e-mail config.

2007/8/19, Harry Phillips <gimp-list@tux.com.au>:
> If you are customising Drupal then that's great but that's beyond my
> skill.

Ah, don't worry. All of the stuff that is there currently has been
done entirely through Drupals administration interface. There was no
custom coding involved. That is what I like so much about it: It
provides all the basics and you can configure it to get a site
tailored to your exact needs. Check out http://www.drupal.org --
there is lots of documentation.

That said, you still have to know what you want done, what kind of
features you need. Thats certainly something where you could put your
user sense to work!

For starters, you could check out how the "plugin" content type and
the "category_list" view have been set up. Feel free to create a new
content type and/or view and play around with it. I have assigned the
necessary privileges, let me know if something doesn't work.

btw, I think you can still learn quite a bit about HTML and Scripting
based on Drupal, both when creating content and for more advanced
stuff.

> I don't know how because I did not get the e-mail. Is that the normal
> behaviour of Drupal? The account is active and goes to inactive if no
> response from the e-mail?

No, it is not -- I configured it to require e-mail confirmation.

> I did not get the original messages and have used the "Request new
> password" facility (twice), still no message after 15 minutes, are you
> sure you fixed the e-mail config?

Well, it appears I didn't, sorry about that. As it were, the smart
host was not configured to relay mail from the virtual host. Because
the smart host is also /my/ e-mail host, my own testmail was accepted
(delivery, not relay), but the one to you wasn't.

I changed that and requested a new password to be sent to you.
According to the mail-server logfiles, it was delivered to
mail.tux.com.au, which looks good.

cheers,

Dear gimp-web folks,

I'm writing in regard to the plug-in registry, which I've maintained
(more or less) over the past years. See http://registry.gimp.org/

The thing with the registry is, I didn't really work much on it, I
just kept it running. The code is from '99 and even looking at it
makes me slightly queasy ;-) I've also been busy with other things.
For quite a while, this worked fine but the information has seriously
degraded over time this couldn't go on. An overhaul undertaken last
year as part of Googles SoC never got done.

Recently, I have undertaken an experiment, the result of which can be seen at
http://registry.gimp.org:81/
Its a tad slow, as the box its running on is quite busy, but should
give you an idea. Also, its not public yet (and I hope it was OK to
nick your logo without asking, I didn't want to make this known before
something basic was available.) but feel free to pass the URL around.

Basically, its a CMS-driven registry. The CMS in question is Drupal,
mainly because I had prior experience with it and because I like the
community orientation. There are several important things here:
* it took less than a day to build it and yet its functionally
equivalent to the old site (which wasn't all that complicated)
* the drupal setup would allow others to come in and help out with
maintaining it, i.e. looking for bit-rot, salvage outdated plug-ins,
and so on
* should functional extensions be required, they are quite easy to do
* if someone were to look at the design, its template-driven

One large chunk of work remains to be done and that is migrating the
old information. However, before doing that, I would like to ask for
some feedback from you guys. Do you think this is still a worthwhile
service to provide? Is there something that should be done to it?
Would you like the design to be more in line with what is being done
at next.gimp.org?

On Tue, Aug 14, 2007 at 02:11:28PM +0200, Ingo Lütkebohle wrote:
> Dear gimp-web folks,
>
> I'm writing in regard to the plug-in registry, which I've maintained
> (more or less) over the past years. See http://registry.gimp.org/
> [...]
>
> Recently, I have undertaken an experiment, the result of which can be seen at
> http://registry.gimp.org:81/
> Its a tad slow, as the box its running on is quite busy, but should
> give you an idea. Also, its not public yet (and I hope it was OK to
> nick your logo without asking, I didn't want to make this known before
> something basic was available.) but feel free to pass the URL around.
>
> Basically, its a CMS-driven registry. The CMS in question is Drupal,
> mainly because I had prior experience with it and because I like the
> community orientation. There are several important things here:
> * it took less than a day to build it and yet its functionally
> equivalent to the old site (which wasn't all that complicated)
> * the drupal setup would allow others to come in and help out with
> maintaining it, i.e. looking for bit-rot, salvage outdated plug-ins,
> and so on
> * should functional extensions be required, they are quite easy to do
> * if someone were to look at the design, its template-driven

I like the idea that the people can maintian their own scripts and
plugins. Are you going to maintain the system as well as you maintained
the registry?

I think it might need a similar functionality like other extension sites
have (thinking of addons.mozilla.org). Having a similar design to
gimp.org would be neat, but I think we should finish gimp.org first and
think about derivate designs afterwards ...

Greetings,

2007/8/15, Roman Joost <romanofski@gimp.org>:
> I like the idea that the people can maintian their own scripts and
> plugins. Are you going to maintain the system as well as you maintained
> the registry?

*cough* I guess that depends on whether you think I maintained the
current registry well ;-)

What I'm definitely going to do is keep the system running, do
software security updates and so on. I will do this indefinitely, just
as I have promised for the current registry.

Regarding the content, I think I have not been doing a good job in
weeding out duplicates and so on. Here, I'm looking for help from
others and the new site would make it much more easy to assign
moderation and administration privileges to other people.

> I think it might need a similar functionality like other extension sites
> have (thinking of addons.mozilla.org).

Which functionality do you refer to here? One thing that is already
different from the previous registry is the commenting feature, where
people can leave tips, hints and ratings for plug-ins.

> Having a similar design to
> gimp.org would be neat, but I think we should finish gimp.org first and
> think about derivate designs afterwards ...

OK, no problem. I am fine with the current theme (which comes
standard with Drupal) and think it wil definitely serve for the mean
time.

cheers,

Von: "Ingo Lütkebohle" <iluetkeb@gmail.com>

> What I'm definitely going to do is keep the system running, do
> software security updates and so on. I will do this indefinitely, just
> as I have promised for the current registry.

... and remember to provide life signs from time to time.


HTH,
Michael

On Wed, 15 Aug 2007 15:34:31 +0200, "Ingo Lütkebohle" <iluetkeb@gmail.com> wrote:
> Regarding the content, I think I have not been doing a good job in
> weeding out duplicates and so on. Here, I'm looking for help from
> others and the new site would make it much more easy to assign
> moderation and administration privileges to other people.

That would be great. Some kind of easy password or account recovery
procedure for plug-in authors was missing from the old site. That can
probably explain several duplicates, etc.

Also, there was no way for a new maintainer to take over an old
plug-in. I don't think that this happens so frequently that the site
should offer a way to transfer ownership automatically, but it should
at least be possible for administrators to perform this transfer when
it makes sense (i.e. when the original author agrees or has not been
seen in several years).

> > I think it might need a similar functionality like other extension sites
> > have (thinking of addons.mozilla.org).
>
> Which functionality do you refer to here? One thing that is already
> different from the previous registry is the commenting feature, where
> people can leave tips, hints and ratings for plug-ins.

At first I thought that such a feature was not necessary, but I think
that it would be rather useful. And it will probably show what
plug-ins are the most popular. I just hope that you (or the other
administrators) will not have to deal with comment spam...

-Raphaël

2007/8/15, Raphaël Quinet <raphael@gimp.org>:
> On Wed, 15 Aug 2007 15:34:31 +0200, "Ingo Lütkebohle" <iluetkeb@gmail.com> wrote:
> Also, there was no way for a new maintainer to take over an old
> plug-in. I don't think that this happens so frequently that the site
> should offer a way to transfer ownership automatically, but it should
> at least be possible for administrators to perform this transfer when
> it makes sense (i.e. when the original author agrees or has not been
> seen in several years).

Yes, that was the cause for some duplicates. I'm currently thinking
about how to handle this. Transfer of ownership like you suggested
would be easily possible with Drupal. A different possibility would
be to let confirmed authors edit anything they like. There is a
revision keeping feature that would make that safe to do -- sort of
like in a Wiki -- and it would easily allow groups of authors (of
which there are a few) to share maintenance.

If you guys have any preference there, let me know.

> At first I thought that such a feature was not necessary, but I think
> that it would be rather useful. And it will probably show what
> plug-ins are the most popular. I just hope that you (or the other
> administrators) will not have to deal with comment spam...

Commenting is currently restricted to users with accounts and thats
how I'd like to keep it.

cheers,

On Thu, 16 Aug 2007 23:04:13 +0200, "Ingo Lütkebohle" <iluetkeb@gmail.com> wrote:
> [...] A different possibility would
> be to let confirmed authors edit anything they like. There is a
> revision keeping feature that would make that safe to do -- sort of
> like in a Wiki -- and it would easily allow groups of authors (of
> which there are a few) to share maintenance.

If the revision history is reliable, then it would be great to let
confirmed authors edit anything they like. Wikis tend to work quite
well as long as there is a minimum level of mutual trust and I think
that it would work well with plug-in authors.

> > [...] I just hope that you (or the other
> > administrators) will not have to deal with comment spam...
>
> Commenting is currently restricted to users with accounts and thats
> how I'd like to keep it.

There is the risk that someone writes a bot that creates new accounts
automatically and starts posting spam in comments. We had this
problem more than once in the GIMP wiki. I just hope that it will
not happen in the registry, or that we will be able to counter these
attacks quickly.

Anyway, great work so far! It is nice to see that you are back in
business with nice ideas... :-)

-Raphaël

Von: "Raphaël Quinet" <raphael@gimp.org>

> There is the risk that someone writes a bot that creates new accounts
> automatically and starts posting spam in comments. We had this
> problem more than once in the GIMP wiki.

It's gone since we activated the global (and I mean global) spammer URL blocking, isn't it?

If you don't block them, but do block what they try to put into your system, you seem to become worthless for them very quickly.


Michael

On Tue, 2007-08-14 at 14:11 +0200, Ingo Lütkebohle wrote:
>
> Recently, I have undertaken an experiment, the result of which can be
> seen at
> http://registry.gimp.org:81/

Hi ngo!
This is great! Having the maintenance decentralized at large is a must.

I will try to help with styling the registry to match the new gimp.org
styling. I hope it's easy to get drupal installed locally so I could
hand you a skin.

good stuff!

2007/8/15, Jakub Steiner <jimmac@gmail.com>:
> I will try to help with styling the registry to match the new gimp.org
> styling. I hope it's easy to get drupal installed locally so I could
> hand you a skin.

Cool! Yeah, Drupal should be easy enough to install locally, its
mostly unpacking, creating a database and configuring Drupal with the
database user credentials, the rest is done by the installation script
through the web.

> good stuff!

Thanks! In fact, you guys working on next.gimp.org was mentioned to
me by a user of the site. Good stuff there, too, which caused me to
look at the registry again :)

cheers,

Ingo Lütkebohle wrote:

Hi Ingo,

good to see this flurry of action around the registry.

> Do you think this is still a worthwhile service to provide?

Yes, absolutely. I'd like to be able to get my win32 binaries closer to
the original plug-ins, and it looks like this will become a lot easier
with the new system.

> Is there something that should be done to it?

Yes. Uploading Python files currently appends _.txt to their file name.
Does Drupal try to figure out the file type and append the
"standart[tm]" extension? This should be turned off.


Regards,
Michael

2007/8/19, Michael Schumacher <schumaml@gmx.de>:
> Yes, absolutely. I'd like to be able to get my win32 binaries closer to
> the original plug-ins, and it looks like this will become a lot easier
> with the new system

Cool :) Thats definitely a service users will like. At the moment,
one can only his/her own plugins (at least thats the intention). For
file uploads to show up directly with the plugin they refer to, I need
to come up with a specialized view. Will look into that...

> Yes. Uploading Python files currently appends _.txt to their file name.
> Does Drupal try to figure out the file type and append the
> "standart[tm]" extension? This should be turned off.

No, but only a specific set of extensions is allowed on upload. I
reckon that the above extension will apply to anything thats not in
the list of allowed extensions.

.py is now added, as well as .pl and .scm

cheers,

Ingo Lütkebohle wrote:

> No, but only a specific set of extensions is allowed on upload. I
> reckon that the above extension will apply to anything thats not in
> the list of allowed extensions.
>
> .py is now added, as well as .pl and .scm

THe behaviour has changed, but not as expected:

"The selected file test-brush-api.scm can not be attached to this post,
because it is only possible to attach files with the following
extensions: jpg jpeg gif png txt html doc xls pdf ppt pps odt ods odp
tar.gz tar.bz2 tar gz bz2 c."


Michael

Ingo Lütkebohle wrote:

> No, but only a specific set of extensions is allowed on upload. I
> reckon that the above extension will apply to anything thats not in
> the list of allowed extensions.
>
> .py is now added, as well as .pl and .scm

.py does still get .txt appended to it.

.scm works

Regards,
Michael

2007/8/30, Michael Schumacher <schumaml@gmx.de>:
> .py does still get .txt appended to it.
>
> .scm works

That is strange -- they are configured exactly the same. Could there
be a problem related to the previous upload, which was renamed like
that?

> Von: "Ingo Lütkebohle" <iluetkeb@gmail.com>

> 2007/8/30, Michael Schumacher <schumaml@gmx.de>:
> > .py does still get .txt appended to it.
> >
> > .scm works
>
> That is strange -- they are configured exactly the same. Could there
> be a problem related to the previous upload, which was renamed like
> that?

It does happen from any system I tried, and with any .py-File I upload.


HTH,
Michael