BillReminder

I spent a good chunk of my evening trying to implement the automatic registration of a gconf schema file via a setup.py and… got nowhere. Seems that most people who wanted to do the same ended up running gconftool-2 directly as such:

GCONF_CONFIG_SOURCE=`gconftool-2 –get-default-source` gconftool-2 –makefile-install-rule /etc/gconf/schemas/*.schemas

Has anyone got any advice (patches would be awesome) to go with my code?

Amazing! There’s no other better way to describe the turn around for the translation progress of BillReminder after yesterday’s post/pledge! In less than 24 hours there were 8 new translations available bringing the total of available translations now to 17! Awesome! I want to thank every single person who took the time to lend me a hand!

During the course of merging the new stuff into the repository, I was a bit confused as far as the work flow for people who have their projects hosted on Launchpad but not necessarily host the source code in their bzr servers. I immediately fired an email to the Launchpad mailing list but decided to also post it here for anyone who may be interested in the subject.

My questions were:

1. If I make a change to the message catalog (*.pot) of my project in its own repository (i.e. not bzr), will the message catalog stored in Rosetta be automatically updated with it once the code is synced?
2. If the answer for the question above is ‘True’, will then all existing translations be merged against the newer message catalog?

If you know anything about this, please feel free to reply.

This last Thursday I was surprised by Johan Dahlin when he showed me the new feature he’s adding to Stoq: colored coded categories.

He said he was inspired by the same feature I added to BillReminder. Wow! I couldn’t help but feel very flattered with this… after all, Stoq is a great piece of software developed by a very clever crew!

So I have finally migrated BillReminder to Google Code, thanks to the helping hand of a few gents from Google. I did expect a full, smooth migration process but, for better or worse, there are a lot of manual steps that you have to perform before you can have the same structure (well, not the same but something usefull) from SourceForge. I figured I’d mention here some of the things I had to do for those who may find themselves wanting to do the same thing.

I strongly recommend that you subscribe to the Hosting at Google Code discussion group… this is where you can expect some good help and pointers!

Once you have your project set up, you’ll probably want to migrate your source code repository from SourceForge. That can be easily done by executing the following command:

svnsync init –username [your username] https://[your project].googlecode.com/svn https://[your project].svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/[your project]
svnsync sync –username [your username] https://[your project].googlecode.com/svn

Obviously, you want to change the commands above with your information. It is also important to fetch your repository’s password (not to confuse with your gmail’s password) from your project’s settings page, as you’ll be prompted for it.

The second command responsible for synching up your new repository failed for me a couple of times… but do not dispair. For me, four times was a charm!

From that point onward, I tweaked the settings for my project a bit and even managed to add the latest release to the downloads page. Unfortunately my bugs, patches and feature/support requests were not part of the migration and I’m yet to read up on how to do it (hopefully) without too much complications. More on that on another follow up post, as well as how to set up mailing lists and commit lists for your developers.

So don’t forget to update the source code repository the next time you feel the urge to contribute with BillReminder:

svn checkout http://billreminder.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ billreminder-read-only

For the last 2 weeks I have (unsuccesfully) tried to migrate BillReminder from SourceForge to Google Code project hosting. I have filled out the web form to register a new project on Google Code, but since this project already exists in SourceForge, I have to go through an extra step where a message should be sent to the project lead (which happens to be me) requesting approval for this migration. The problem is that I always get a 500 page when I click on the submit button!

There is definitely something borked in this process, for when I first tried to go through this process, I would some times see a captcha box above the button… and sometimes I wouldn’t! Regardless of whether I saw (and obviously filled) the captcha field, I always ended up with the 500 error page.

Both of my emails to their google-code-hosting-reservations@googlegroups.com contact email have gone unanswered… No luck asking on #google at Freenode either. So… anyone from Google reading this post who can lend me a hand?