[Imc-tech] CVS and active

[Zachary C.Miller]

Please read this whole email. Very important imc-tech software
information included.

Wow. That took WAY longer than I had hoped. I have put our version of
the active software into CVS so we can now tinker with it and test our
changes before making them public on the site.

The first thing I had troubles with was that it is apparently
impossible to convince the software to use a database other than
"active_urbana". I don't know if this is an apache/php issue with
persistent database connections or WHAT. Its driving me crazy and I
just can't work on it anymore for a while. The long and short of this
is that if you want to check out the software on my machine you will
have to use it with the live database. So don't change any code that
has to do with database stuff and don't add "test" stories because
they'll go our main site. It should be as simple to use a second
database as editting the db-setup.php3 file but those settings just
don't seem to mean anything when the software actually runs. My brain
is broken and I don't want to even try to expain this more lucidly. We
can still do major dev work even if we share the database.

The second thing that I had troubles with is that I corrupted the
database and for the life of me I couldn't get the thing to rebuild
from backups because everytime I would destroy it and recreate a blank
database all teh old data would magically come back. I couldn't find a
trace of the old data on teh system after I ran destroydb but then I'd
run createdb and boom it is back (with the corruption and
all). Eventually I figured out how to manually remove all teh tables
and rebuild from backup but boy was it a nightmare debugging what was
even going on in the first place.

So here are some useful commands that you can run to have your own
checked out version of active to play with:

#begin commands
cd ~
mkdir public_html
cd public_html
cvs -d /var/cvs checkout active
cd active
./postcheckout_setup
#end commands

You only have to execute those commands one time to get your tree set up.

Now you can access the three major subsystems of your installation at:

http://wolfgang.groogroo.com/~USERNAME/active/news/
http://wolfgang.groogroo.com/~USERNAME/active/calendar/
http://wolfgang.groogroo.com/~USERNAME/active/groups/

Where you replace USERNAME with your login name on my system. 

Another useful command that you should remember:

pg_dump active_urbana > ~/FILENAME

You can use anything you want for FILENAME. This will backup the
current production database as it stands at the moment you run the
command into a file in your homedirectory. Then if you accidentally
corrupt the database you can come crying to me and I will restore it
from that file. I also make automated backups every morning. So don't
worry _too_ much about messing stuff up, it won't end the world or
anything.

Two more useful commands:

cd ~/www/active; cvs commit
cd ~/www/active; cvs update

The commit command submits your changes back to the central repository. 
The update command merges other people's committed changes into your code. 
You should update more often than you commit. Only commit working code.

If you want to be able to play with a database that is independent of
the production database you'll need to install this on some other unix
box. I'm hoping that when we get a linux box set up at the IMC that we
can use it for testing new software and development stuff like
this. I'm also hoping that when I have more free time to learn about
PHP, apache, and postgres that I can figure out how to get 2 installs
of the software on the same machine to use 2 different databases.

Ok? ok.

Remember some (dubiously) useful URLs for tech info are:

http://tech.indymedia.org/
http://process.indymedia.org/
http://process.indymedia.org/tech/
http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/public/imc-tech/

My understanding is that Paul will work on customizing the news, Maiko
will work on customizing the calendar, and Ellen will work on
customizing the groups. I can work one on one with each of you to
explain what these tasks entail. Let me know if you have any
questions.

Holy crap it is much too late at night. Share and enjoy.

-- 
Zachary C. Miller - @= - http://wolfgang.groogroo.com/
IMSA 1995 - UIUC 2000 - Just Another Leftist Muppet
An amusing breakdown of how I want to spend 202 out of 168 hours every week:
http://wolfgang.groogroo.com/time.txt