[sane-devel] SANE website on GitLab Pages (was Re: GitLab mirrors, GitLab-CI builds and GitLab Pages)

Tue Jun 21 22:37:26 UTC 2016

Hmm, recently I have been getting this from the nightly cron
/home/groups/sane/bin/update-htdocs.sh

chgrp: changing group of `./.git/index': Operation not permitted

Is that related to a change you have made here?

allan

On Tue, Jun 21, 2016 at 9:23 AM, Olaf Meeuwissen
<paddy-hack at member.fsf.org> wrote:
> Hi allan,
>
> First, a bit of background is probably in order.  I am playing around on
> GitLab trying to automate parts of the SANE development process.  Some
> of this is done already at Alioth but I get the impression that Alioth
> is not good enough or at least behind the curve.
>
> Below are my findings with respect to the website repository and the
> project's home pages at http://www.sane-project.org/
>
> I am mostly looking for advice/feedback on how to proceed and improve.
> With that in the back of your head, please read on.
>
> Olaf Meeuwissen writes:
>
>> [... based on the GitLab mirror of the website repository ...]
>> The website is rebuilt with every sync/commit as well and, if the build
>> was successfull and passed the tests, "deployed" to
>>
>>   https://sane-project.gitlab.io/
>>
>> Right now, there is very little testing going on (and even if there is a
>> problem the tests succeed).  Also, not all of the current website is up
>> yet.  Consider this a work in progress.
>
> I've been poking around a bit on alioth.debian.org, specifically in
> /home/groups/sane/bin/ in an attempt to reduce the error count on the
> GitLab Pages.  At the moment, these pages aims to mirror what's on
> www.sane-project.org but I'd like to give that a bit of an update (and
> face lift).
>
> Anyway, of the scripts in that directory make-git-snapshots.sh and
> update-htdocs.sh appear to run daily.  The update-lists.sh and
> update-search.sh scripts seem to run approximately weekly.  All this
> appears to be coordinated by kitno-guest cron jobs on alioth.
>
> I've got the make-git-snapshots and update-lists parts covered in my CI
> builds just fine (apart from the daily trigger but that can be solved,
> see https://gitlab.com/help/ci/triggers/README.md which actually makes
> me believe that commits to sane-backends can be used to trigger updates
> for the website, cool!).
>
> # Just noticed that the snapshots/ index doesn't render.  That's due to
> # the GitLab Pages being static and not backed by a web server HTMLizing
> # directory listings :-(  Todays tarballs *are* there, though.
>
> I even have the update-sanei-docs part covered.  The official website is
> using something that was generated 2011-01-31 by the looks of it.  Guess
> the lack of doxygen on alioth is to blame for that.  Is that right?
>
> With the above I think I have most of update-htdocs covered.  The only
> thing that seems to be missing is the relink to the old-archive.  That
> is a static directory and I am pondering how to get this integrated
> without undue overhead with every rebuild of the GitLab Pages site.
>
> The CGI interfaces to search the old-archive and supported device lists
> (input files maintained by update-search.sh?)  are something that won't
> work on a static site as exposed by the GitLab Pages.  The device lists
> might still work through an SPA (single page application) but the
> old-archive is too big to handle that way.  Do we still need it?
>
> The unused-driver-cvs.sh script seems to be unused.  Is that right?
>
> While going through getting this to work, I was wondering why the HTML'd
> manual pages and SANE API specs were not updated.  Apart from the latest
> released and current development version issue, I got the impression
> that part of the reason is that alioth doesn't have the required tools
> installed in order to automate this.  That would also explain why these
> files are in the website repository.  Still, automating this would beat
> the manual maintenance that is used now.
>
> The dlh source code[1] was last released in 1998 and isn't packaged by
> any distribution that I know of.  The man2html convertor originates from
> a BSD clone somewhere out there, is not compatible with Debian's
> man2html and seems abandoned as of 2003[2].
>
>  [1] ftp://ftp.cs.arizona.edu/dlh/
>  [2] http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/man2html/man2html?root=man2html&view=log
>
> I did get man2html to work on Debian 8 but wasn't able to get dlh to do
> anything useful.  FTR, these two are used when you run
>
>   make -C doc html-man
>   make -C doc sane-html
>
> respectively.
>
> Seeing the current, rather sad, state of affairs, I got an urge to
> replace these fossilized tools with something more up-to-date.  Any
> suggestions?
>
> # Actually, I have also been toying with the idea of converting all the
> # documentation to reStructuredText.  There's plenty of tools that can
> # convert that to HTML, manual pages, PDF and what not.  I have recently
> # started using Sphinx[3] @the-office and that seems to support qthelp as
> # well as devhelp (for GTK) and applehelp, all of which would ease the
> # integration of the API documentation in application developer's IDEs
> # (if I understand correctly).
> #
> #  [3] http://sphinx-doc.org/
>
>> You can find the GitLab sane-project at
>>
>>   https://gitlab.com/groups/sane-project
>
> Please take a look and let me (and the list?) know what you think!
>
> Hope this helps,
> --
> Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
>  GnuPG key: F84A2DD9/B3C0 2F47 EA19 64F4 9F13  F43E B8A4 A88A F84A 2DD9
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