[three]Bean

Yesterday, Ian Weller and I got the first iteration of "datagrepper" into production. It is a JSON api that lets you query the history of the fedmsg bus. In case you're confused.. it is related to, but not the same thing as "datanommer". You can check out the datagrepper docs on its index page as well as on its reference page.

It is another building block. With it, we can now:

• Use it as a reliability resource for other fedmsg projects.
  • Say you have a daemon that listens for fedmsg messages to act on... but it crashes. When it gets restarted it can ask datagrepper "What messages did I miss since this morning at 4:03am?" and catch up on those as it can.
• Build apps that query it to show "the latest so many messages that meet such and such criteria."
  • Imagine an HTML5 mobile app that shows you the latest of anything and everything in Fedora. (pingou is at work on this).
  • Imagine package-centric UI widgets that show the latest Fedora-wide events pertaining to a certain package. We could embed them in the Fedora Packages app.
  • Imagine user-centric UI widgets that show the latest activity of developers. You could embed yours in your blog or wiki page.
• Statistics! The whole dataset is available to you and updated in real time. Can you tell any cool stories with it?

It is, like I mentioned, an initial release so please be gentle. We have a big list of plans and bugs to crack on. If you run into issues or simply have questions, feel free to file a bug or ping us in #fedora-apps on freenode.

Last week the infrastructure team launched a new version of Fedora Tagger. It is a webapp that allows users to upvote/downvote tags on packages as well as rate packages themselves. The data ends up getting pulled into yum repo metadata by the bodhi masher and into the Fedora Packages indexer to improve search results. Fedora Tagger is also one of our first attempts at "gamification". You earn "points" by voting and rating and there's a leaderboard on which you can muscle for first place(!)

This new version is quite a bit of a rewrite. The original version was written on top of the TurboGears2 framework; this new one is written on Flask instead.

The rewrite has given us an opportunity to more clearly define the API (thanks to the hard efforts of Pierre-Yves Chibon). This affords us the opportunity to write tools against it: Pierre is working on a desktop tagger application and we've been in some conversation with Richard Hughes about using it for gnome-software.

Aside from having such a documented API, there are new end-user features and bugfixes, including:

• OpenID FAS Login for security and convenience.
• You can now cast your rating on packages (not just tags on packages)
• The scoring system is more complicated. Adding new tags is worth more points than voting on pre-existing tags.
• oddshocks contributed a nice link to the bug tracker from the main page.
• After some deliberation on how to go about it, you can actually view packages with no tags when anonymous now.
• There used to be some weird focus-stealing bugs when using hotkeys. Those have been eliminated.

Try it out, help improve package search, and climb your way to the number-one tagger spot!

I wrote the code for it back in 2012, but it wasn't until today that I got Fedora Infrastructure's collectd instance tracking fedmsg messages:

We're tracking fedmsg messages in other places like datanommer, irc, and the identi.ca bot, but having them in collectd is cool because that's the place we go to monitor all our other system stats. All of our stuff in one place (but not all of our eggs in one basket).

You can click here to mess around with it.

It took some lifting, but I got python3-pyramid packaged and in Fedora.

I know none of us are using python3 in the wild yet, but its another brick layed on the long road to the future.

fedmsg (the Fedora Infrastructure Message Bus) now has a full list of published message topics with example messages and more.

For instance, one of the topics on which the koji build system emits messages is org.fedoraproject.prod.buildsys.build.state.change. The docs there show:

• The topic.
• Some description of the event.
• An example message in JSON format. This is what you would see if you ran $ fedmsg-tail --really-pretty.
• Some description of what you would get if you passed the example message into some of the functions in the fedmsg.meta python module. This is the stuff you see in the #fedora-fedmsg irc channel and on the identi.ca bot.

Just in case you didn't know, you can listen to the public fedmsg bus (with no configuration) by running:

$ sudo yum install fedmsg
$ fedmsg-tail --really-pretty

If you want to program something that responds to fedmsg messages, check out the docs on consuming messages from python -- the new list of topics should come in handy.