AGORA GAMES

This is a post about XML and JSON.

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It’s no secret that Agorian systems folk favor NGINX for our web serving needs. We’ve written about it a lot before. Therefore, it should be no surprise that we end up making a lot of things designed to work on Apache work on NGINX. (We’ve also written about that before, come to think of it…)

One example is vBulletin. A number of Agora’s sites are powered by the forum software, which comes with rewriting rules for Apache’s mod_rewrite and IIS… but not NGINX.

So, if you’re interested in setting up vBulletin behind NGINX (and are using the advanced URL rewriting, like we are), you can find a sample configuration for doing so here.

Let us know if you have any questions!

Our very own Devon Smith (Agora’s multi-talented QA Lead) had an article published in this month’s T.E.S.T Magazine. You can see her article online (http://www.testmagazine.co.uk/2010/03/keep-the-user-in-mind/), or buy it in print later this month.

When I joined Agora, one of the first things I did was talk up git and how it’ll cure cancer, AIDS, and solve world peace. All at once. What that means for me is I’ve basically been tasked with the job of migrating anything that’s not git to git.

For some things these kinds of migration are first class citizens. Conveniently SVN, our old VCS is one of those. One of my new migrations was, less conveniently, Bazaar. Now we have nothing against Bazaar at Agora. I mean my main personal open source project, Exaile, uses Bazaar. But we agreed we would rather only have one VCS in house.

After looking around and trying some fancy tools that didn’t work (read: tailor), I stumbled on a really quick solution that seems like it does everything necessary. Both Git and Bazaar (via plugins) support the fast-import/export format. I’m not sure about the mystic ways of how this format works but I do know it made my Bazaar repository a Git repository, and that makes me pleased.

Getting the bzr plugin

The first step would be to get the fast-import plugin for Bazaar from the launchpad mirror.

mkdir -p ~/.bazaar/plugins
cd ~/.bazaar/plugins
bzr clone lp:bzr-fastimport fastimport

You can make sure it installed properly using a bzr fast-export --help and ensure that it doesn’t complain.

Copy the repository

Now that we have all the tools, time to copy it over

mkdir ~/project.git
cd ~/project.git
git init
bzr fast-export --plain ~/path/to/bzr/branch | git fast-import
git checkout master  # only needed for a non-bare repository, like I made above

Wait a little while (or a long while if you’re testing the above code on a netbook for some reason like me). And that should be it.

I’m not sure how well this works with multiple Bazaar branches. There may be some crazy --flags on each side to make it work but running the code I put above on a full repo makes fast-export complain that I’m not pointing it to a valid branch. Please give us your comments if you know how to do this :).

Update: Found out it was .bazaar not .bzr. My bad.