Heptapod News, mid February

Heptapod at FOSDEM

The whole Octobus development team was at FOSDEM 2020 where we made also junction with Laurent and Quentin from Clever Cloud.

I gave a lightning talk on the second day about the whole Heptapod project and in particular the launch of the public FOSS instance.

As usual with the excellent organization at FOSDEM, the slides and the video are available on the talk page.

New administrators and projects on the public FOSS instance

Since the original announcement, we've welcomed three volunteer administrators on foss.heptapod.net, who are not affiliated with Octobus nor Clever Cloud. This is in line with our wish to make this public service community managed.

We've drafted a process to treat Hosting Requests, and started to onboard projects:

• the Mercurial group will soon welcome some more extensions and TortoiseHg, the well-known graphical user interface
• we have some BSD utilities under way.
• The import of PyPy is scheduled to happen on February 12th. This will be the biggest and most complex import from Bitbucket that we've performed – one that has actually been our major test bed for the importer. At almost 100 000 changesets, it will come a close second to Heptapod itself in terms of repository size.

OSU OSL backing up FOSS public instance CI

Continuous Integration (CI) is naturally a major aspect of public service hosting for free and open source software. With more projects to join us, we expect the required computing resources to be substantial. So we've started to look for partnerships in that area.

If you are involved in an organization that would be willing to grant us some processing power in the benefit of free and open source software, don't hesitate to contact us!

Last week, we've been granted servers by the OSU Open Source Lab and we set them up as shared runners for the continuous integration on the FOSS public instance. One can see them running pipeline jobs right now.

This is a great development, many thanks to the OSU OSL for this!

Quoting from the OSU OSL web site:

The Open Source Lab is a nonprofit organization working for the advancement of open source technologies.

The lab, in partnership with the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University, provides hosting for more than 160 projects, including those of worldwide leaders like the Apache Software Foundation, the Linux Foundation and Drupal. Together, the OSL’s hosted sites deliver nearly 430 terabytes of information to people around the world every month. The most active organization of its kind, the OSL offers world-class hosting services, professional software development and on-the-ground training for promising students interested in open source management and programming.

Heptapod 0.8.2 released

Since version 0.8.0, we've had two bugfix releases.

The first, 0.8.1 was mostly about tidying things up for the launch of foss.heptapod.net, while 0.8.2 fixes some problems found after everything has been reimported into the new install at Clever Cloud.

For a precise list, see the regular changelog.

What else ?

I've got a working experimental version of Heptapod running on top of GitLab 11.2 and it looks like 12.2 is just around the corner.