Monday, May 09, 2005

KDE and CIA

No, the intelligence agency is not messing with KDE, this blog is about CIA Open Source Notification System. It provides a web page and some bots like the one present at #kde-commits where you can dig info about commits of KDE and a zillion other different projects.

With the change to SVN the #kde-commits bot stopped working, i contacted the #cia guys and they said we were in our own, either we helped debuging the mail parser or installed one of the cia clients on our SVN server.

He wanted us to debug the mail parser because "I only added KDE mail parser to help CIA bootstrap (read get more exposure)", so i had a look at the mail parser and everything seemed fine, after all the SVN commit mails are 99.99% similar to the CVS ones. So as the CIA server itself was not working because they were rebuilding the DB i thought i'd wait and see if it worked.

Today it was clear the mail parser was not working (#kde-commits bot was still silent) so i entered #cia again and after some messages i saw

<CIA-9> micah * r8234 cia/mail/ (dot_procmailrc filter_kde.py): KDE's filter script no longer works properly. Remove it, since it's easier to just give up the special treatment and have them install a real client script.

So all the CIA and #kde-commits fans you better convince our admins to install the svn client if you still want to see that services work.

For me it has been clearly demostrated that we got used by CIA when they needed some exposure and now that they don't need us anymore nothing stops them to throwing us away, IMHO not a nice move.

UPDATE: Dirk fixed it, so thanks a lot, next time coolo says "no" i'll speak to you before making it a state afair :-D

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have nothing against KDE, I just want to phase out the email scraper scripts. Yes, KDE was one of a handful of projects that was added to CIA at the very beginning to give us some initial commits to watch. In a way you can say we were using KDE.

However, this is now. CIA is a service I provide in as unbiased a way as possible. It's the individual projects' responsibility to provide CIA with information. I understand it's more convenient for the KDE folks if I keep updating the mailing list scrapers when they change formats, but it's just far more practical to accept this as an excuse to move over to a real client script. Again, I have nothing against KDE- I'd love for Gnome, Xfree86, and the very small group of other projects using mailing list filters to move over to externally maintained clients too. I consider the mailing list filters to be just as much of a backwards compatibility hack as the old 'colortext' commits... and everyone knows how much I want to get rid of those ;)

--Micah

Albert Astals Cid said...

It's working now and probably better as before because you said having the client on the server made us more independant from CIA server availability so we all win :-=