Re: Call for help on mentors.debian.net/debexpo

[Ondrej Certik <ondrej@certik.cz>]

Hi Christoph!

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 12:57 PM, Christoph Haas <haas@debian.org> wrote:
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> Dear list,
>
> I've been running mentors.debian.net for quite some years now. The
> software running the repository including importers, user handling,
> package checks and IRC bot has been a custom thing right from the start
> [1]. It's now already the third version of the software but still in
> certain areas it's not very fault-tolerant.
>
> So last year (2008) after a project proposal I mentored Jonny Lamb as a
> Google Summer of Code student working on a web application that would be
> useful both as a personal repository (what Ubuntu calls "PPA" = personal
> package archive) but still extendable enough to suit the needs of
> mentors.debian.net. It is called "debexpo" and its project page is
> available at http://debexpo.workaround.org/
>
> As usual with software projects the last lines were coded hours before
> the deadline so it was sufficiently done for Google but not tested by
> the audience due to lack of time. That said even after a year of
> finishing the project it has still not replaced mentors.debian.net and
> meanwhile everybody who initially showed interest has lost that because
> patches were accepted slowly and the software wasn't perfectly  documented.
>
> - From the feedback I get and the number of packages uploaded I'd say that
> mentors.debian.net is worth being kept alive. This is where I need some
> help. Fixing the current code is not what I want. Instead I would like
> to get some help with "debexpo". Anybody who knows about Python and
> Debian source packages and perhaps even the "Pylons" web framework is
> invited to take a look and help. I will try to revive the project again
> but perhaps with more helping hands it can be done faster and with
> better ideas. Even for package maintainers who wish to host their own
> private repositories "debexpo" will be a cool thing.

Thanks for pushing this forward. Unfortunately I will not have time
for this soon, but I still want to encourage you not to give up. :)

It'd be cool if you could set this up at some server, and ask people
to try it out, report bugs etc. Then, initially you'll have to fix
them yourself, but eventually, people will join in.

Good luck,
Ondrej