[BlueOnyx:17658] Re: Feature Request: Announcement List

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Tobias,

> I am working with BlueOnyx and its predecessors now for some years.
> I think it is time to say thank you for all the work you do on
> keeping this project alive.

Many thanks!

> What do you think about setting up a mailing list of its own in
> which new updates are getting announced, including the changelogs
> of the affected packages?

To be honest: I'm not really a huge fan of that. Usually if there is an
important update, then I post it in the News section of the BlueOnyx
webpage. The RSS feed of that is on the start page in the GUI, too.

However: I haven't done so in a while because pretty much all of the
recent updates were just minor fixes. Like small GUI related glitches
where an error message about an "undefined index" might or might not pop
up depending on the circumstances or eventuality.

Even if I'd post each and any update (small or big) to a mailing list or
webpage, then it would only replicate the exact info from the SVN
frontend "Trac".

See: http://devel.blueonyx.it/trac/browser (click on "Last Change").

Example: http://devel.blueonyx.it/trac/changeset/2099/

There you can see that I fixed base-apache for BlueOnyx 5209R and the
actual fix is always mentioned in the "Message" on top of the pages as
well as in the %changelog entry of each rpmdefs.tmpl in SVN.

Like in this example:

2.1.1-0BX28
- Modified ui/chorizo/extensions/10_PHP.php.modifyWeb.Vsite. If a server
  had no extra PHP packages installed and there were legacy Vsites on it
  from before the support of multiple PHP versions, then we would get an
  'undefined index' for the used PHP version of that Vsite. The used PHP
  version is now correctly extracted from the list of all available PHP
  versions and is inserted correctly.

That is as detailed as it gets. What's more, the actual code changes are
also very easy to spot. The lines marked in red were replaced with the
lines in green.

> The background is of course that we had a problem with one of the 
> last updates "base-apache-glue". This enforces better encryption
> algorithms in apache and a customer of ours had problems with
> an external appliction which is sporadicly feeding data to
> database on its website. Because we didn't know of the change
> we didn't test this special application and so the problem
> persisted one week until the customer was asking us.

I can relate to that. But look at it from my perspective: This was a
trivial change that needed no special announcement. And it didn't really
affect your client in a serious way, because it took him a week to
notice that something was amiss. :p

Sure, we know how clients are. They then throw you a curve ball and it's
always "your fault". :o)

So I'd say the best way (that doesn't force me to do more and redundant
work) is to check what YUM updates were installed on a box to see what
updates (if any) happened since the problem occurred. And then go to
http://devel.blueonyx.it/trac/browser and check the revision log for
published updates until you find the one that matches the platform and
the version number of said update. And you'll get all the information
you need: What was changed, why and how.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber