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Making magic with Zikula for Fedora Insight

Pay attention if you want to know more about Zikula, want to work with it, and can spend some time helping Fedora Infrastructure.  Especially if you can do design and know (enough) CSS.

Today I sat with my project manager glasses participating in an IRC work session on Fedora Insight.  The session, much of which was logged and summarized using the awesome zodbot and the meetbot module (plain text logs and summary.)  The logs were started a bit late, but include a summary followed by work on the internals of Zikula, it’s templating system, and making things that much better for the Fedora Insight move to production.

We are meeting tomorrow (Sunday 28 February at 13:00 UTC and going for another eight to ten hours) in #fedora-meeting-1 to continue working on the final bits.  This includes documenting and teaching the process of moving from publictest instance to staging.  We have a Zikula team member, Simon Birtwistle, who is making that magic happen.  We want to make sure we capture that as knowledge in to the Infrastructure SOP system.

In addition, we’ll be following some Infrastructure procedures to dump the database from testing and load it in staging.

This has been a long journey with a lot of hands helping along the way.  It’s the double-edged sword of fighting with free/libre and open source software on your side.  You can’t brute force your way through some of the parts because time isn’t the most important value in the equation.  Both the Fedora systems and the upstream Zikula team have benefited from the work, we are now literally 99% there.  Smacking good!

There continues to be some balance with the existing Zikula package.  The current one in Fedora is in the version range of 1.1.x, while upstream has a 1.2.x series that we need to run instead.  By comparison to 1.1.x, 1.2.x  contains fixes and removes hacks in favor of better solutions, some of which are related directly to working with the Fedora Project.  There is a ticket requesting that a 1.2.x version be hosted by Fedora Infrastructure until an appropriate solution can be made for the Fedora main version, which may be waiting for 1.3 to release.

That’s my wrap for the day.  Pascal will publish something to the logistics list archives later, I reckon.