jpackage.org website issues

Jeff Bachtel <[email protected]> Tue, 27 Aug 2013 18:05:17 -0400
Newsgroups gmane.linux.jpackage.general
Message-ID <CAHahqg0bkVfbvgTaPoELN9ymF3RJ+=Vi4CxOnBXSj=CmrQqgAA@mail.gmail.com>
I am interested in using jpackage, and when I run up against bugs or
deficiencies either filing bugreps or submitting patches. Due to
certain bugs with the jpackage.org website and infrastructure itself,
the latter is currently nearly impossible.

Some outstanding problems:

https://www.jpackage.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_status=REOPENED
generates a 404.
https://www.jpackage.org/bugzilla.cgi/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_status=REOPENED
generates a 403 but it is unclear whether that is actually the proper
new URL for Bugzilla.

http://jpackage.org/browser/browse.php?jppversion=6.0 throws PHP
errors likely indicating a configuration change on zarb.org, and
breaks when packages are selected.

https://www.zarb.org/mailman/listinfo/jpackage-discuss generates a 404
(this linked to on http://www.jpackage.org/mlists.php as well as the
URL mailman is configured with and puts at the end of email messages
to the list), whereas
https://www.zarb.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/jpackage-discuss is the
actual functional URL.

The canonical jpackage mirror at
http://ftp.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/jpackage/ is not listed anywhere on the
site. This might be an intentional omission, of course.

All of the CVS viewer links are 404s currently. Fiddling with the URLs
to pull out cgi-bin generates 403, probably due to hosting
configuration changes.

http://jpackage.org/cvsaccess.php contains a "what the?" statement:
"Read access through annonymous CVS will be provided soon, but it is
only really useful for string searches. The CVS repository is not used
directly for maintaining packages but as a backend storage for the JPP
upload script, so there is no reason to manipulate it directly."
whereas http://jpackage.org/buildprocess.php goes into how to use CVS
to pull down specfiles to build packages. There is still no anoncvs
access 7 years after this page was initially constructed.

I've used enough software packages over the years that I know how
these website/project situations can occur and get worse as time goes
on. If JPackage wasn't already tremendously useful please believe that
I wouldn't bother with this sort of manual roll-up bug report. As it
is, to do my own development and patches I've manually mirrored all of
the SRPMS from 6.0, and I'll be extracting specfiles out to use (I'd
hate to be considered yet another random whiner, I'm doing what I
can).

Thanks for your project's packaging efforts and your time reviewing
that wall of text,

Jeff