The desk in the wizard tower was full of manuscripts, reports from workers and written complaints from outside entities (users). It was a long week. I waved my hand to add more light to this room. Simple spell that is helping me to concentrate.

There was a figure in the door. “Come inside, traveler. I’m glad you are here. There are plenty of new things I want to share with you.”

Lost in the sorting

One of the complaints we are receiving often is that the news we are obtaining from the other realms are not sorted properly. This means that you can be notified by a messenger about new version, when in fact this isn’t a new version. This is sometimes causing confusion and filling up the complaints pile.

Currently we allow only Restructured Partial Magic (RPM) way of sorting, which is not usable for every project out there.

To prevent this in the future, we decided to teach two new ways of sorting to our workers. One is based on the time machine (calendar version scheme) and second on simple mathematics (semantic version scheme).

First we started with the sorting based on the simple mathematics. This was really easy to do, because there is already a magic book (library) that contains everything we need. So it only took a few hours to teach the workers the spells.

Much worse was the situation with time machine. Time machines have no strict standard, everybody can make their own. How we can work in this mess? After some thinking about this, we found a solution. We introduced the pattern for the time machine that will allow the outside entities (users) specify the configuration of the project’s time machine. To see how this works, look at the illustration bellow.

Defining time machine pattern
Time machine sorting in action

Big changes

The Conclave of mages decided that release-monitoring.org is one of the priorities for this year. What this means for us? This means that we will get more mages working on release-monitoring.org, that will help us get missing features and fixing bugs more quickly.

Target of this initiative is to switch release-monitoring.org to maintain mode. This means that I will be more free to work with other mages on other things that are important for whole Conclave and the release-monitoring.org will be transformed to state that should be free of most of the issues we are facing right now. You can look at the plan for both Anitya and the-new-hotness.

Post scriptum

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 #fedora-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.