Things change. They evolve. In previous versions of FreshPorts, to see the files for a particular commit, you went to /category/ports/files.php?message_id=Some.Message.ID. But no longer. Now you can see all the details at /commit.php?message_id=Some.Message.ID. That’s a shorter URL and eliminates some ugly URL parsing.

commit.php now doubles up and shows you both […]

More and more people are learning about Bacula. Here is a little survey I did at LISA06.

I recently mentioned that Robert Watson suggested that the ability to flag commits in FreshSource. Over the past few days, durings flights and waiting for flights, I’ve managed to put together a quick and dirty try-me session.
If you visit the BETA site, and log in, you’ll notice a flag beside each commit. Click […]

I’m headed to LISA. I was able to get a cheap air ticket, and an even cheaper hotel. I’ll be meeting up with the PostgreSQL group and spending most of my time at the *BSD booth. I’ll also be bringing along some brochures for the PostgreSQL conference.
If you’re there, stop by.

Robert Watson has raised a few idea on how FreshSource can be used as a developer platform. These ideas are equally applicable to FreshPorts.
See http://www.freshsource.org/phorum/read.php?f=1&i=33&t=33.

Today I noticed a problem with the FreshPorts email processing daemon. It’s not really a daemon. It’s a shell script. After a reboot, I noticed the script was not running. Trying the script by hand, I found this error message:
.: missing filename

This sample script duplicates the problem:

#!/bin/sh
while .
do
sleep […]

Remember that wonderful new scheme for parsing URLs? Well, it broke virtual categories. That’s only because I forgot about them. Not because the schema is broken. It will still work, for any item in the tree. But virtual categories are not in the tree. I’ll change the new code to […]

And today, for my first trick (yes, it is my first trick, but my second post today), I shall transform this URL:
http://www.freshports.org/news/pan2/files.php?message_id=200605010349.k413nOGF019378@repoman.freebsd.org

into
http://www.freshports.org/commit.php?message_id=200605010349.k413nOGF019378@repoman.freebsd.org&category=news&port=pan2&files=yes

Why? Because it is impolite to break existing URLs. It is far better to redirect them to the new improved content.
Our documentation for today’s exercise shall be http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html#RewriteRule.
Our first attempt at fixing […]

Central to how FreshPorts works is the parsing of the URL. Almost everying in FreshPorts is in a database, not in a static file somewhere. I need to improve the URL parsing.

Earlier this week, we had a bit of a crisis. The colo which provides bandwidth and servers to FreshPorts (and all the other websites I run), was unexpectedly shutdown. BChosting sold their Vancouver facilities to Netluxe, who, by all accounts, shut down the ops center without notifying customers. Well, I wasn’t notified. […]