Re: Introducing Myself

Hi Carsten,

On Sun, 21 Apr 2019 08:54:47 +0200
Carsten Schoenert <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hello Shlomi,
> 
> Am 20.04.19 um 17:19 schrieb Shlomi Fish:
> > Hi all!
> > 
> > My name is Shlomi and I subscribed to this list because I currently maintain
> > https://github.com/thewml/website-meta-language (WML) which is used by the
> > Debian site and which https://github.com/xtaran , who is a debian dev, has
> > given me some input on.  
> 
> your are welcome!
> 

thanks.

> > Now, I've done a lot of work on refactoring and optimising the wml source
> > ...  
> 
> > Before (make -j4):
> > 
> > 5150.42user 722.23system 29:46.58elapsed 328%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata
> > 607256maxresident)k 510336inputs+1485768outputs
> > (477major+170659478minor)pagefaults 0swaps
> > 
> > After:
> > 
> > 3390.15user 558.96system 26:09.35elapsed 251%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata
> > 607368maxresident)k 420840inputs+1485168outputs
> > (661major+126278869minor)pagefaults 0swaps  
> 
> That's an important and nice decreasing of build time! Build time does
> always matter in large scaled projects like the website of Debian.
> 

yes, note that the patch is not yet production ready.

> We held a few weeks ago a sprint of the webteam for Debian and talked of
> course also about the situation around the wml system. Some people found
> some issues to build the Debian website with the current version of
> Debian testing if I remember right.
> 

Ah.

> But we'd really appreciate if you as the maintainer of wml could be a
> person we can reach in such cases! So yes, a warm welcome to you again.
> 

Thanks again.

> ...
> > Anyway, I also spent some time converting the sources of
> > https://github.com/shlomif/perl-begin from wml to
> > https://metacpan.org/pod/Template and while it was quite a lot of work, it
> > made the brute rebuild time of the site over two times faster (and there is
> > some overhead). So I can recommend to gradually convert debian-www away
> > from wml as well for optimising the build time.  
> 
> For sure we'd like to decrease the build time of the website even more,
> so no question. And moving over to an better system because it is faster
> and also flexible would be a thing that's worth to achieve.
> Unfortunately the webteam isn't currently in a position with a rich
> amount of people that can do the work, especially in this regard to
> modernize the underlying system. So we need volunteers that can jump in
> and will do this work.
> 
> I don't have a deep knowledge about Perl and can't overview how much
> work would be needed here to adjust the system. There are nearly 55.000
> wml files currently in the tree.
> 
> > $ find -type f -name "*.wml" | wc -l
> > 54912  
> 
> Hopefully most of a transition work could be automated, otherwise I
> guess it's quite impossible to do this manually.
> 

One can write a translator tool and do a before-vs-after diff to make sure no
regressions were introduced.

> If you can take a closer look into a migration to the new format and can
> come up with a way to walk we will find time to work on this more seriously.
> Feel free to speak up anytime in case you have suggestion or even also
> questions!
> 

Which "the" new format? My port to TT2 was for
https://github.com/shlomif/perl-begin and partly done because I wanted it to
remain based on perl because perl-begin is about perl. But there are many
other https://staticsitegenerators.net/ that can be used for the Debian site,
some of which may be even faster.

Regards,

	Shlomi

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
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