The transition went faster than I expected, and the shift has already been made. However, Sourceforge only allows subversion accesses over a SSL connection and the version of svn compiled on sapheron.org doesn’t have ssl support built in. Blame my laziness when I built it ages ago. I’ll have to get that rebuilt before I can get access to the svn server.

Beginning with my little snafu last week involving an errant cvs update, I’ve noticed a few errors filling the log files. It doesn’t seem to happen every time a request is made, which is why I didn’t notice at first. However, there are several errors every day, so it’s far from isolated.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/home/greg/lib/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi", line 82, in ?
    p.run()
  File "/usr/home/greg/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom/pyblosxom.py", line 166, in run
    blosxom_handler(self._request)
  File "/usr/home/greg/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom/pyblosxom.py", line 856, in blosxom_handler
    renderer.render()
  File "/usr/home/greg/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom/renderers/blosxom.py", line 320, in render
    self._processContent()
  File "/usr/home/greg/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom/renderers/blosxom.py", line 270, in _processContent
    output, current_date = self._processEntry(entry, current_date)
  File "/usr/home/greg/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom/renderers/blosxom.py", line 228, in _processEntry
    if entry["date"] and entry['date'] != current_date:
  File "/usr/home/greg/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom/entries/base.py", line 232, in __getitem__
    return self.getMetadata(key, default)
  File "/usr/home/greg/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom/entries/fileentry.py", line 108, in getMetadata
    self.__populateData()
  File "/usr/home/greg/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom/entries/fileentry.py", line 162, in __populateData
    entrydict = eparser(self._filename, self._request)
  File "/usr/home/greg/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom/pyblosxom.py", line 909, in blosxom_entry_parser
    entryData[meta[0].strip()] = meta[1].strip()
IndexError: list index out of range

I can see how some malformedness can cause a problem, however. Here is the offending block:

    # absorb meta data lines which begin with a #
    while lines and lines[0].startswith("#"):
        meta = lines.pop(0)
        meta = meta[1:].strip()     # remove the hash
        meta = meta.split(" ", 1)
        entryData[meta[0].strip()] = meta[1].strip()

At the beginning of a file entry, there is a section to provide metadata. Lines that begin with # will be marked as metadata containers, which get passed into the dictionary entryData. If a malformed line were passed in, such as:

#MalformedLine

it could not be used to form a key/value pair to insert into the dictionary, and the above error would be raised.

There was one recent change that came through this file:

1.75         (willhelm 11-Nov-05):     while lines and lines[0].startswith("#"):
1.74         (willhelm 11-Nov-05):         meta = lines.pop(0)
1.74         (willhelm 11-Nov-05):         meta = meta[1:].strip()     # remove the hash
1.89         (willhelm 28-Dec-05):         meta = meta.split(" ", 1)
1.76         (willhelm 12-Nov-05):         entryData[meta[0].strip()] = meta[1].strip()

I don’t want to just randomly screw with the checkout unless I have to, so my apologies if you get random errors. I will try to get this fixed up, but the first step is to clean up how my installation is organised. A recent posting to the pyblosxom-devel mailing list indicates that the repository is about be moved from cvs to svn. This move would be a push to get that management in place so that I can screw around without causing damage like this.

In the meantime, I guess I’ll just have to track down any files that might have offending metadata lines and fix them without redating the entries.

News is going around about the release of Harmeet Sooden and two other hostages. It’s great to hear that Harmeet is okay, and must be a relief to everyone who knows him. As someone with an honest intention to help a situation, to do something he believes in, it is horribly ironic that Harmeet was held hostage for 4 months.

The article mentions that Harmeet required medical attention after his rescue. I hope he recovers quickly and is able to hold onto his hope for a better world. It seems to be a relatively rare trait these days.