August 16, 2020 by Drew DeVault

What's cooking on Sourcehut? August 2020

Another month passes and we find ourselves writing (or reading) this status update on a quiet, rainy Sunday morning. Today our userbase numbers 16,683 members strong, up 580 from last month. Please extend a kind welcome to our new colleagues! Thanks for reading these posts and keeping up with what’s new on the platform.

First, I’d like to extend a thanks to contributor наб, who has been sending an impressive number of patches lately, and is responsible for most of the features detailed in this update. Other contributors who deserve thanks this month include 2xsaiko, Amin Bandali, Chris Vittal, gildarts, and Peter Sanchez. Thanks, everyone!

For my part, I’ve been focused on operational work this month. I oversaw the installation of and migration to the new hg.sr.ht server, which should enjoy improved performance and support a larger number of repositories going forward. The same server is also going to be useful as a testbed for our new standard VM server setup, which will scale better to long-term high-availability plans. Additionally, our PostgreSQL robustness deployment has been overhauled, which should lend improvements both to integrity and availability.

git.sr.ht

git.sr.ht now supports default branches other than master. For details on changing your default branch name, consult the docs.

Many additional minor bug fixes and performance improvements have been made throughout. For example, non-UTF-8 branch & tag names are handled better now, with additional improvements heading to pygit2 upstream.

builds.sr.ht

The Ubuntu images have been overhauled to more closely map to the upstream release schedule. Consult the compatibility page for details. Affected users were emailed before the update rolled out; if you did not receive an email then it is unlikely that you will have to change your build manifests.

todo.sr.ht

A number of improvements have been made for logged-out/anonymous users, mostly minor changes. One larger change is that users without accounts may now subscribe to specific tickets by email.

lists.sr.ht

Searching by username is now supported in the From, To, and Cc fields, via the from:~username search key format. Additionally, git patches prepared with git send-email --rfc are now correctly recognized as such.

project hub

When the hub submits CI jobs to builds.sr.ht for patches in mailing lists, a builds.sr.ht job group is now utilized. This reduces the number of emails sent in response to one, even for repos with many build manifests.

Additionally, a number of small improvements have been made to increase the visibility of featured projects.

meta.sr.ht

For users who run their own instance of meta.sr.ht, PAM support has been added for authentication, allowing you to use the Unix account database for usernames and passwords rather than storing them in SQL.