Website updates and virtualmin-install git repository

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#1 Sat, 01/16/2016 - 17:18
Joe
Joe's picture

Website updates and virtualmin-install git repository

Howdy all,

Over the past couple of days I've been putting out fires caused by the website and server migration and new version (it's always a great idea to launch multiple major new things all at one time, I recommend it for everyone who hates sleep and leisure time). But, also got some new things done:

  • Printable invoices in your account page. Browse to Account->Orders->Printable Receipt.
  • Red "new" indicator on posts that are new to you, for logged in users. This was dark grey before. It's easier to scan for new stuff in a long thread now.
  • Performance and stability tweaks to the database. There were some 500 errors caused by database overload a couple days ago. This was both because we're getting a bit more traffic than in the past, and because the software repos are checking against the database instead of a separate .htpasswd file.

And, perhaps more interestingly, I've moved the virtualmin-install.sh into its own git repository, which is publicly available. It has, for more than a decade, resided in our private repository. No reason for it to be there, it was just the way it always way. So, because one of my goals for this year is to make everything that is Open Source within Virtualmin more visible, more hackable, and more robust, and because this is the simplest piece of Virtualmin that we can move out of the private repo...it's now living here:

https://github.com/virtualmin/virtualmin-install

If you have ever wanted Virtualmin to be easy to install on a system not supported by us, now is your chance to help make it happen. I would love to be able to support every OS and version ever made. But, realistically speaking, we already have a hard time staying on top of the eight systems/versions we do support (three CentOS, three Debian, two Ubuntu, I think). Several had fallen behind enough that I was uncomfortable calling them supported when I remade the OS support page (FreeBSD and Solaris have been downgraded...FreeBSD will hopefully be back, and maybe some OpenSolaris/IllumOS system like SmartOS will come back). We're team of four now, but I'm the primary one working on the installer (Jamie certainly has the ability, but every minute he spends on installer is time not spent on Virtualmin, Webmin, Cloudmin, and Usermin...it's not a good deal for any of us to distract him from those things), so staying on top of how all of these systems work, how their package names have changes, whether they're systemd or upstart or initscripts, etc. is a big job, and I make more mistakes than I'd like.

Anyway, it's just been cleaned up with shellcheck (and awesome tool!), the dead systems (Mandriva and old SuSE) support has been removed completely, and we've got a prety clean slate for building from. So, xBSD users, in particular...I know y'all have the skills to help out (FreeBSD users are all smart and good looking, if a little odd), so come help me get FreeBSD installs working nicely again. But, I'm open to anyone and any OS. Hell, I'd even accept Gentoo related pull requests!

Over the next several weeks, everything Free and Open Source in the Virtualmin stack (except Virtualmin GPL, itself, which is currenty too tightly integrated with VIrtualmin Pro in our repository to be extricated by me, and will require Jamie time) will be moved into individual git repos on github. So, all of the plugin modules and the Open Source install scripts, vrtualmin-base (which is the other big part of the install process and will be coming next). While Webmin and Usermin have always been developed in the open, Virtualmin and Cloudmin have been in a private repo. There's not really any good reason for it (we love FOSS, and have been working on it our whole adult lives), we just never took the time to split out the Free Software from the proprietary stuff. That'll change now.

OK, that's all for now, I'm gonna go have dinner and then dig back into trying to stay on top of license issues and other stuff!

Cheers,

Joe