A few questions for each tool - PET

[Martín Ferrari]

Sorry for the dalay,

On Mon, Sep 1, 2008 at 16:42, Lucas Nussbaum <lucas at lucas-nussbaum.net> wrote:

> - Define the goal of your tool in one line (i.e which problem is it
>  trying to solve?)

Teamwork coordination, concentrating all the information necessary for
maintenance while maintaining readability.

> - Where is the code? Where does it run, currently?

The code is in http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/pet/
It can run in any place. Nowadays there are about 6 or 7 installations
in alioth, and I know of at least two single-maintainer instances in
private hosts.

> - Which URL do users use to access it? Provide one/a few pages as
>  example.

Configurable at will.
http://pkg-perl.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/pet.cgi being the canonical
example.

> - Which languages did you use ?

Perl, plus Template Toolkit for the frontend.

> - How do you store data? (think of all the data you use, including a
>  local mirror, local checkouts from svn, etc). Can you describe its
>  schema, or point to a schema somewhere?

It stores "caches" in Storable files, which are just on-disk
representations of arbitrary perl structures. It doesn't have much of
a schema, and that's one of the weakest points in pet nowadays. Each
of these caches store downloaded data from different sources, and
there's one that's special: the consolidated cache, which concentrates
pre-mined data.

One important design desicion about the data is that everything can be
deleted and regenerated at any moment without any loss of information.
That's why the files are called caches.

> - Which data from external sources do you use? How do you update it?

Debian archive (Sources.gz only), NEW and INCOMING queues, pertinent
svn repository, BTS, upstream webpages (via watchfiles).

It's updated by a script that can be called from post-commit hooks
and/or cronjobs.

> - Which data do you generate locally? (using tests, for example?)

Just the mining and the report.

> - Which questions did I forget?

Maybe future plans?

-- 
Martín Ferrari