We need to allocate some more disk capacity on the servers today, which requires a reboot of the gitorious.org server. This means the servers will be unavailable from 15:00 CET, they should be online about 20 minutes after that.
We will post an update as soon as the servers are available again.
Edit: We’re back up again now
Up until a few days the only way to stay updated on new activities across many projects was to either subscribe to a bunch of atom feeds or visit each projects overview page regularly. But that’s no fun.
A few days ago we introduced a little star button next to repositories and merge requests. Clicking this subscribe you do new activities for that repository or merge request. Your new dashboard page will then list new activities in your own personal news feed, as well as list everything you’re watching making it easier to both find interesting projects and stay updated on them. Your dashboard is the new default page when you visit gitorious and you’re logged in, but you can still see the global activities
Now, on the subject of email notifications. This is one of those things that sounds simple but brings up all kinds of little issues when start implementing it and looking at use-cases. For instance on a large active project, not everyone who’s a committer may be interesting in receiving emails about new merge requests, and if you send them a lot of email (since it may be a very active project) they’ll quickly loose their patience and filter them out of their inbox.
So we’re making things more opt-in when it comes to email notifications, currently you can select per watched item whether you’d like to receive email or not when there’s new activity. All your repositories and merge requests are already in your watch list and any new ones you create will be placed there as well.
Further down the road we’ll be looking at more fine-grained email notifications and bringing you even more relevant things on your dashboard.
Primary git filesystem had to be rebooted, currently checking the filesystem integrity. Site will be back up in about 15 minutes (there’s a lot of data to check).
*Update* And it’s back
Ever had the need to give someone permissions to triage merge request, but not give them commit access? Well, now you can, thanks to our new finer-grained repository access permissions.
This also means to can set some users as reviewers (and committers), while the rest of the committers won’t get notified about new merge requests. This is something some of the larger projects here on Gitorious with large groups of committers has requested.
One of the greatest features of Gitorious is the merge requests, we think it’s a pretty sweet way of wrapping up the whole communication and management aspect of accepting contributions for your project. The StatusNet project makes good use of the merge requests, as does Nokias Qt project where each merge request is carefully reviewed by the staff.
The last part there is the keyword for our newest feature.
A couple of months ago we made it possible to update a merge request with new commits after it has been submitted to the target repository (described in a separate post)
As a Gitorious user you can now push new commits to a hidden branch in the target repository, creating a new version of the merge request. This way the owner(s) of the repository you want your feature to appear in can give you feedback on your contribution and ask you to make changes so that your contribution meets the coding style, test practices, translation requirements etc. of the project owner.
Yesterday we rolled out a new feature making it even easier to comment on specific portions of the code; inline commenting. By clicking and dragging on the changed line numbers in the diffs you can now enter a comment directly under the code which makes it much easier to perform code reviews of incoming patches. There should be nothing negative about code reviews, it’s all about improving code, not knocking it down. As a contributor you get feedback on your submissions and might just learn a few things and as a project maintainer you get to educate your community and get better patches.
Existing comments are enumerated next to the line numbers, clicking the number will show all the comments for the affected lines and hovering over a comment will highlight the lines the comment is about. 
if a merge request has lots of inline comments, we also list them all below the diffs in the normal comments list, together with comments for the merge request as a whole, displayed together with the diff. This makes it easy to just scroll through the comments and see what changes they’re discussing.
We’ll be adding this feature to the normal commit diffs soon as well, but we really love this feature already and it’s an important step in improving the merge requests, and we know you’ll find it useful as well.
For those behind firewalls who block outbound SSH connections, we have now added a workaround for you.
The SSH daemon for pushing Git repositories also now listens on port 443, however we use that port for other things (https traffic) on our main IP, we’ve added ssh.gitorious.org who listens on port 443.
By adding this to your ~/.ssh/config:
Host gitorious.org
Hostname ssh.gitorious.org
Port 443you don’t have to remember to change git@gitorious.org to git@ssh.gitorious.org whenever you copy the push url from the website.
If you’re behind an even stricter firewall you’ll have to setup something like Corkscrew, Tor Arne kindly provides an example config in this mailing list thread. As always, contact support@gitorious.org if you run into any issues.
Maemo is a wide range of open source software for mobile devices such as the N810 internet tablet and the quite fancy looking new N900 phone, and they’re now officially starting to switch to Git and Gitorious, maemo.gitorious.org already has a handful of their projects, with more to come!
Incidentally I’ll be speaking at the Maemo Summit about Gitorious and I’m already looking forward to talk to people from the Maemo community about hacking on their phones, unlike the locked-down fruity one I got now..
We’re in a need to add additional resources to the server cluster, which means we have to take parts of the site down today (28th september) at 13:00 UTC. While the upgrade is a relatively uneventful thing, we may need to take down services for up to an hour to avoid things getting out of sync.
This post will be updated throughout the maintenance window with information.
Updates:
13:00 UTC: Starting maintenance window
13:15 UTC: Database hardware upgraded successfully
13:17 UTC: Webservers going down for upgrades
13:30 UTC: Halfway through filesystem verifications
13:36 UTC: We’re back again! More hardware makes us happy gits.
Christian Johansen has just published an article that takes you through installing Gitorious on your own server. In his article, he walks through the dependencies and explains the steps required in getting your own server running with Gitorious in less than an hour. His article covers installation on an Ubuntu/Debian machine, but should also be a great resource if you want to install on another Linux distribution.
Thanks to Christian for a great resource!
In order to be able to easier cope with future expansion we’re taking down the site today (July 23rd) at 11:00 GMT for approximately 15 minutes. We’re doing some changes to the way the database is stored and thus we need to turn everything off during the switch, which should not take more than 15 minutes at most. The upside is that it makes it much easier to add capacity as we continue to grow.
This post will be updated throughout the maintenance window with information.
Update 11:00 GMT: Starting maintenance
Update 11:15 GMT: Fixing a small permission-related problem
Update 11:18 GMT: Services are starting to re-appear again
Update 11:19 GMT: All done! Sorry for the slight delay
