The darkness is slowly falling on my wizard tower, where I’m spending most of the time, when working on the new stuff in realm of the release-monitoring.org. But if you already arrived I could give you some of my time. You probably want to know what I’m working on. It’s not really a secret, but if you insist, I will tell you what happened in the realm in past weeks. So take a chair and hear my words.

Missing scribe

This story began on 28th March. I was looking at the news arriving by carrier pigeons (fedora-devel mailing list in Thunderbird 🙂 ) and there was one asking this question “Is Anitya not working again?”. I was terrified at first that something happened on Anitya and I’m not aware of it. So I cast a teleportation spell and transported myself directly to Anitya (checked release-monitoring.org openshift instance). Everything was in order.

So I asked by using the carrier pigeons a few additional questions. It turned out that the original sender of the message was using Abstract Positive Intuition (API) to introduce plenty of new projects to Anitya.

I started to look for the root of this inconvenience and it doesn’t take long to find it. I arrived to the department that is taking care of the Abstract Positive Intuition (API) and found out, that there is no scribe sending messages when we get a new request for projects added to Fedora universe (when new mapping is added through API, there was trigger to send message about this). I fixed this quickly in my work in progress version by adding a new scribe (fixed in master on GitHub).

But the damage has been done. I asked the original sender to provide me a list of Fedora universe projects (list of packages) he added to Anitya and started working on magical formulae (python script) to make things right. This took more time than I thought, but I’m able to now fix similar issues when they happen. I added the magical formulae to my library, to have it close to hand when something happen, you can look at it, if you dare. However you need certain rights to be able to use it.

After fixing the projects (the script is deleting the latest version from the list of projects and let the cronjob to check for them again) on the list that original sender sent to me I was approached by two others that had similar problems. So I can say that this work already paid off.

Support for multiple prefixes

Every time a news (version) from some project arrives, Anitya needs to do some changes before it could be shown to everyone interested. One of the things that Anitya does is stripping the news of unimportant parts like prefix. This prefix could be any text. Until recently Anitya only supported one prefix, which wasn’t enough for some projects. And now I did some magic and we are supporting multiple of those prefixes.

I will conjure a few images to present you how this works. On the first image you could see some project we are watching without any changes.


So what I do is to change the project and define two prefixes split by ‘;’.

And now you can see the output.

As you can see this isn’t the best example, because this caused the order of news to change. In standard situation you wouldn’t remove parts of the news itself, but things like ‘rel’, ‘release-‘, ‘project-‘ and similar.

Hungry rat

Recently we had a particularly hungry rat in Anitya, which always ate one of the workers when someone tried to change the known aliases of the project (package mappings). This caused that instead of the original worker, who knew something about the alias, we send fresh one that didn’t know nothing (first distribution was shown instead of the mapped one.)

It took some effort and few of the ice spells (thank gods we don’t need to pay any health insurance) to finally find the rat and catch it. We are now using it to run in the wheel to create some magical energy for Anitya. It eats much, but it’s producing vast amount of energy.

The workers are now happy that nobody wants to eat them, when running with their information. And anybody who wants to change known aliases is happy, because the information is not lost.

Post scriptum

So, when you could see these changes in Anitya? Look for the version 0.16.0, which is currently still work in progress.

This is all for now from the world of release-monitoring.org. Do you like this world and want to join our conclave of mages? Seek me (mkonecny) in the magical yellow pages (IRC freenode -apps) and ask how can you help. Or visit the Bugcronomicon (GitHub issues on Anitya or the-new-hotness) directly and pick something to work on.