Monthly Archives: March 2009

It’s Upgrade Week

I spent a good portion of this week upgrading various parts of the AM “infrastructure” (read: server held together with twine and duct tape).

2009-03-08
 * 16:32 GMT-5. PHP FastCGI upgraded from 5.2.8 to 5.2.9.
 * 16:44 GMT-5. MySQL upgraded from 5.1.30 to 5.1.32.
 * 17:38 GMT-5. MediaWiki upgraded from 1.10.1 to 1.14.0.
 * 17:44 GMT-5: ViewVC upgraded from 1.0.5 to 1.0.7.
 * 17:55 GMT-5: phpMyAdmin upgraded from 2.11.3 to 3.1.3.
 * 18:55 GMT-5: PHP FastCGI recompiled against MySQL 5.1.32.
 * 19:27 GMT-5: Apache for users upgraded from 2.2.8 to 2.2.11.
 * 22:08 GMT-5: Apache for vhosts upgraded to 2.2.8 to 2.2.11.
2009-03-09
 * 00:13 GMT-5: Bugzilla upgraded from 3.1.4 to 3.2.2.
 * 01:16 GMT-5: Buildbot upgraded from 0.7.8 to 0.7.10.
 * 01:59 GMT-5: Mercurial upgraded from 1.0.2 to 1.2.
 * 04:39 GMT-5: Debian upgraded from 4.0 (etch) to 5.0 (lenny).
 * 04:42 GMT-5: Mercurial and Buildbot switched from Python 2.4.4 to 2.5.2.
2009-03-10
 * 00:44 GMT-5: vBulletin upgraded from 3.6.7 to 3.8.1-PL1.

DS helped me on the Buildbot/Mercurial side. Hopefully everything still works for the most part. Many of these upgrades were sorely needed, fixing known bugs or security issues.

All of this was delayed so long because, well, no one wanted to do it. We maintain private patches against Apache, Bugzilla, vBulletin, and ViewVC. Keeping track of those changes is difficult.

This time around we started using Mercurial Queues. We keep the official software in a Mercurial repository and our custom changes in a queue (patch series). When it’s time to update, we pop the series, commit the new software, then push the series back.

This workflow is nice and all but Mercurial queues aren’t really a part of the repository. So if someone wants to check out the repository and stage development somewhere else, they have to export the queue manually and re-import manually on the other side. Ideally, these patches would be lightweight development forks off the main repository.

We used to keep separate repositories and do three-way diffs. That was a huge pain. Never again. It still seems like we’re missing something though.