New AspectJ website
Summary
This is a quasi follow-up on #1746 (closed). Because project lead @aclement has been generally unresponsive for quite a while now and I am the only active developer on both AspectJ and AJDT, two years ago I started converting old AspectJ documentation content based on DocBook XML to AsciiDoc. The last few days, I picked up where I left off two years ago and am basically finished or at least far enough to cut over. The new docs for the binary distribution will soon be included into the AspectJ installer. They constitute about 95% of the website content. The remainder are old general info links, downloads for legacy AspectJ versions and similar things.
A quick glance at the website GitHub repo reveals, that the existing website seems to be PHP-based, which is not true for the new HTML & CSS content generated from AsciiDoc files.
The decision I am trying to make now, is how to proceed. The options are as follows:
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Continue using the existing repository, committing code there (if I can, I actually never tried), overwriting the legacy stuff, maybe salvaging parts which are not part of the AspectJ project. Here, my question to the infra team is: Does anything happen automagically when I commit to the main branch in that repository? I.e., is the website published to https://eclipse.dev/aspectj/ automatically? Or does anyone have to take additional, manual steps? If so, which ones and do I have the rights to perform them?
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Continue using the existing repository, but configuring the AspectJ project to use that repository as a source for GitHub Pages which would then become available under https://eclipse-aspectj.github.io/aspectj/ and be linked to from the Eclipse AspectJ project website as the new project website. What are the pros and cons for this approach?
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Similar to 2, but configuring the AspectJ project to use a gh-pages branch as its source to create a GitHub Pages site. The pro that comes to mind compared to 2 is that everything would be in one repository. The con would be that branch switches would be necessary in the publishing workflow and that cloning the AspectJ repository would also download the full (new) website history with all binaries like images and PDFs published there.
I think, I like 1 or 2 more than 3 with a tendency towards 2, unless it has significant downsides compared to 1. I would like your advice in this matter in order to make an informed decision.
Another related question: Where do www.eclipse.org/downloads download files like this one come from? Since 1.9.7, we attach the downloads to GitHub releases, but it would still be good to know, if and how I could upload files to the central Eclipse download site. The only thing I figured out is how to use a Jenkins job to upload AJDT to an Eclipse update site.
Priority
- Urgent
- High
- Medium
- Low
Severity
- Blocker
- Major
- Normal
- Low
Impact
It is important, not urgent. But ideally, I would like to release a bugfix release AspectJ 1.9.21.1 very soon with the new AsciiDoc-based docs in its installer. It would be desirable to have the website based on the same content up and running by then.
Activity
Semi off-topic question: Can anyone tell me what I need to do to become at least co-lead for AspectJ and AJDT or replace @aclement in his role, if he no longer wants to be involved and in charge? Andy, by all means, if you read this, then respond, because I would rather want to do this with your consent than without you, just because you seem to be busy with other things outside of AspectJ.
My favourite outcome would be for you to become an active committer and project lead again. I am just in much doubt, if this is realistic.
Edited by Alexander KriegischAnother related question: Where do www.eclipse.org/downloads download files like this one come from? Since 1.9.7, we attach the downloads to GitHub releases, but it would still be good to know, if and how I could upload files to the central Eclipse download site. The only thing I figured out is how to use a Jenkins job to upload AJDT to an Eclipse update site.
OK, I found out about the downloads at least: SFTP or SCP with Eclipse user credentials to projects-storage.eclipse.org.
- AspectJ release downloads are under /home/data/httpd/download.eclipse.org/tools/aspectj.
- AJDT update sites are under /home/data/httpd/download.eclipse.org/tools/ajdt.
Remains the open question where the website content is and how to publish it. I edited one file in the website Git repository in place right on GitHub ~25 minutes ago, and it has not been published yet. I am assuming that an additional, manual step is necessary. Going to look around a bit while having my morning tea.
The Infra guide says:
Project websites are hosted in a git repository separate from the actual project code. You can browse project website repositories using cGit. Once the webmaster adds a space for your project, files you commit to the website repository are automatically published to www.eclipse.org/xyz, where xyz is your project's short name. You are free to use HTML and PHP on your website.
On cGit, I cannot find a website repo for AspectJ, which is no big surprise, because it was moved to GitHub. So, after some research, I still do not know how to push content to the website.
added IT-prioritylow IT-severitylow team:infra labels
Can anyone tell me what I need to do to become at least co-lead for AspectJ and AJDT or replace @aclement in his role, if he no longer wants to be involved and in charge? Andy, by all means, if you read this, then respond
My time has become even more constrained with Broadcom purchasing VMware but I don't want to lose my commit rights completely. Happy to explore either of the proposed options I think.
@aclement if you want, @akriegisch can be nominated as a co-lead. That has no impact on your role at all. If you log into the PMI, you should have an option to begin an election for this: https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/tools.aspectj
(based on info in the Eclipse Project handbook) https://www.eclipse.org/projects/handbook/#elections-pl
@akriegisch if you're logged into the same page on PMI (link above) you should have a location to specify the website repository URL under Edit > Links and Documentation.
Thanks @droy - I kicked off co-lead nomination.
We got side-tracked, which is my fault, because I asked follow-up questions, one of them not even related to the issue at all. I want to apologise for that. But the actual questions about the website have not been discussed yet. Which of the three options would you advise me to choose? And what stops the website from being updated after I pushed changes to the website repository on GitHub?
Oh, sorry, I missed that.
A quick glance at the website GitHub repo reveals, that the existing website seems to be PHP-based, which is not true for the new HTML & CSS content generated from AsciiDoc files.
https://eclipse.dev/aspectj/ will display what you want. If it's PHP right now, that can certainly be changed to HTML + CSS (actually, that is desirable, as I expect we will phase out PHP over time).
If you replace index.php in your website repository with an index.html, you'll be well on your way to accomplishing that. Our webdev team provides templates to include the standard header, footer, font and colour schemes to save on the effort. The Hugo Solstice theme is one of them: https://webdev.eclipse.org/docs/hugo/
I've notified the webdev team of this issue. Perhaps they can chime in with some advice.
Edited by Denis Roy
As @droy said, the Hugo Solstice Theme can provide our website layout. It is a theme for Hugo, a popular static site generator.
We recommend migrating the project website to Hugo and our theme using the following boilerplate: https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipsefdn/it/webdev/hugo-eclipsefdn-website-boilerplate
The README has instructions on how to bootstrap your website with our theme.
Let us know if you have any more questions @akriegisch
Sorry for repeating myself, but before I can try to change anything substantial in the existing repository - so far, I made one small content change and a big commit with reformatting the PHP and HTML code without any functional changes - we are still yet to find out why those changes have not been pushed to the website. As I said twice before, the link seems broken, any nobody has answered my question concerning the root cause. My working hypothesis for now is, that since the repository was moved to GitHub, it has never worked to begin with. The fact simply remained unnoticed, because nobody changed anything on the website since AspectJ 1.9.7 or so.
Edited by Alexander Kriegischassigned to @droy
Your question was answered in this comment: #4123 (comment 1609222)
You've mentioned initially that the website repo is: https://github.com/eclipse-aspectj/aspectj-website
But the website repository that is used to source the website is not that:
Your changes have not been pushed to the website because the project is not configured to source website content from the repository you've linked to. Please log into the PMI page https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/tools.aspectj and edit the data there to link to the correct repository.
As a side note, as you've pointed out, perhaps a more focused scope for issues would be preferable. We get many issues in a day, and I for one have a small brain that can only process so much
Please let me know if I've missed anything else.
I had read your previous message, but thought it was a hint where to change the link to the actual website, not the source where it is generated from. I had shelved that until I will make a decision how to continue technically, GitHub Pages or Eclipse hosting. That decision has by no means been made yet, both options are still on the table.
My view of https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/tools.aspectj/edit is:
I do not see any "website repo" section there. Shouldn't I with my shiny new project lead rights?
I would think so, but I could be wrong. In the interest of moving things forward, I have made the change:
the content should be published to https://eclipse.dev/aspectj/ shortly
Nothing happened since yesterday, I even pushed an extra commit to test.
Is maybe something wrong in the URL? You seem to have linked to the browser web site rather than to the actual repository. The URLs are either of the following, depending on the protocol:
- git@github.com:eclipse-aspectj/aspectj-website.git
- https://github.com/eclipse-aspectj/aspectj-website.git
Please verify that it works before notifying me next time. As I cannot see the link on the website, I have to rely on your screenshots and only noticed the URL by chance. Thank you.
Maybe you can also find out why I cannot see and edit it in the first place.
Edited by Alexander Kriegisch
It looks like there was an issue in the checkout script that was preventing it from cleaning up correctly when the URL for the repo changed. I've submitted a patch to try and resolve that, and forced a cleanup in the meantime so things should 'just work' now.
This 'feature' was added initially so that the Infra team could pre-load data while prepping the move to eclipse.dev. As such it only needed to be visible to us. Since this should be something that changes approximately once in never we never really discussed making it more accessible.
