[ Please note the cross-post and Reply-To ] Hi folks,
As promised, here's a quick summary of what was discussed at the web team BoF session in Montréal. Thanks to the awesome efforts of our video team, the session is already online [1]. I've taken a copy of the Gobby notes too, alongside my small set of slides for the session. [2] We had a conversation about some of the issues facing the web team. Initial Agenda -------------- 1. Design work 2. Migration from CVS 3. Content Design Work ----------- People continue to appear on debian-...@lists.debian.org either complaining or offering re-designs. There are thousands of pages, it's not just a case of fixing the front page or simply tweaking CSS. If we're going to make changes, we need continued maintenance, not just short-term contributors. We have multiple people working on design already, but we're not following through and making many changes. Why? How can we make a difference? We should be looking at mockups for designs - it's difficult to evaluate things without that. CVS continues to be a barrier (more later). It's very difficult to do "radical" things, and this will put people off. webwml may also be putting people off. If we look into new designs / VCS / backends, it's *imperative* that we don't lose our translations too - they're critically important. We should also discuss what part of our website is targeted for which kind of visitors? Migration from CVS ------------------ CVS is extremely difficult to do radical things (like renaming or deleting files!) There are differing opinions about how painful CVS is, but maybe some people are just too used to it and its limitations? Steve used to be a CVS expert, but recently just working on making modifications to a small section of the website was effectively stalled due to the pain of using CVS. We believe it may be dissuading others from helping, and we should do something about that. We know that some people are already running their own CVS<->git conversions and/or gateways right now. Osamu Aoki has scripts to help with this. Migrating from CVS to git is not a small task. The models are very different. Conversion to git does make for a very large repository, so even small changes need a full clone. Maybe we can use a git web services (github/gitlab/similar) to help with this and make it easier for people to make small changes. We don't want to put off potential contributors... ACTION: Steve is volunteering his own time to make a cvs->git migration happen this year. He'll need some help to understand more of the website setup, workflow etc. to make that happen. Does history matter? Is leaving history in CVS acceptable? Other options? After some discussion, it became clear that history preservation has been very useful at times. We came to a clear general consensus: keeping history is important and we should do that. Moving to git is, if anything, going to make using history even easier and therefore more likely. Archaeology in the website history is more common than most people realise! There will be more discussion needed around this area in the future, so we'll get periodic meetings to manage this process. We're not trying to do the whole thing in one big chunk. Expect to do multiple conversions as a learning process, with progress visible in the coming months. Help welcome, but it's also understood that we're struggling for person power to make this change and that's why we've not done this yet... We're also going to be asking for help from non-coding people during the migration process, to help with verifying things as we go. Workflows --------- How do people currently work on the website source? * For some people, check out pages, edit, build locally, commit * For other (larjona!), checkout, edit, commit, wait to see if it broke things * Translators: very different workflow that depends on how CVS works (commits are always incremental). There are scripts to help with this work, e.g. to mark if translated pages are out of date. This does not appear to be well documented anywhere, and this is a problem. We'll need to provide new docs for a new workflow, of course. There are pages describing how to work on the website, but lots of people are not finding them / reading them. That's not helping. Iain Learmonth apparently already started working on VCS-agnostic interfaces for the website scripts some time ago. Hopefully that should help us! Build process ------------- The current process for building the website is very slow. What can we do to change that? It's been painful to do changes quickly, e.g. for changing version and announcing things on release days. There's an "update-parts" script on the main web server which can help with this. This has been improved lately: * not always pushing to mirrors straight away * not descending subdirectories * able to change just the top page "make" is slow for huge trees of subdirectories, and "cvs update" is very slow too. Can we improve the way that we deploy the website? It would be lovely to have a staging area for the website build that we can use. For example, on a release day we could have all the website work done and ready to ship early. Then when we're done, simply flip a switch (using a sym-link or similar?) so that everything is released at once. If we can't make the process *directly* faster, at least hide the slowness. We currently have ~8G of content on the website, and this is part of the reason it's slow! Content ------- Is there too much content? There is lots of duplicate information spread around the website, meaning a lot of it is out of date and unmaintained. The security section is enormous, and basically static. It sounds like an ideal set of data to split out. We want to try and break things up into smaller compartments which can be owned by teams. non-CVS would make it easier to experiment with removing content and being able to get it back. In terms of broken link checking, we apparently already use linklint (http://www.linklint.org/). This probably needs checking, though - a human should also check that linked external content continues to be appropriate. There's a mail alias already existing to see errors from the website build process. Steve is going to sign up for that! Suggestion to just auto-switch some broken links to point them to archive.org maybe? With a more powerful VCS, could we maybe track who added a link so we can ask them to update it as/when things move/break? [1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2017/debconf17/debian-web-team-bof.vp8.webm [2] https://www.einval.com/~steve/talks/Debconf17-webteam-BoF/ -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. st...@einval.com "Because heaters aren't purple!" -- Catherine Pitt
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