SIG Coordinator Resource Guide

Each PSA SIG coordinator has at their disposal:

• A mailman mailing list
• A SIG Web directory, situated in <http://www.python.org/sigs/>, which the coordinator can remotely control.

These resources are available on python.org, under the name of the SIG. The SIG coordinator has remote control of them, with email- and web-mediated administrative authority of the mailing list, and special group privileges, invocable within anonymous-ftp, to control the contents of the sig directory. Both facilities are keyed on a single password, which is assigned to the SIG coordinator.

Mailman controls

http://www.python.org/mailman/admin/<sig-name>

To change a subscriber's options, visit the listinfo page for the sig:

http://www.python.org/mailman/listinfo/<sig-name>

and click on or enter the user's address to go to the options page for the user. You can then us the list administrators password to authorize option changes or unsubscription of the user.

Finally, the list administrative db:

http://www.python.org/mailman/admindb/<sig-name>

contains the current set of requests, if any, pending administrative judgement and decision.

www.python.org Web Documents and The .ht Template File

www.python.org Web Documents Organization and Formatting

• The pages are mirrored at other sites
• We maintain a regular page layout, via a preprocessing arrangement

The mirroring requires that all links going from one page to another within the python.org web site not presume anything about the location of the root of the hierarchy. That is, they should be relative links, strictly within the hierarchy.

The regular page layout entails producing your pages as template files, rather than regular html. (We conventionally qualify the template files with ".ht", instead of ".html".) It also requires processing your files after you've uploaded them to the www.python.org host, which is provide for with an exported make command, as described below.

The tempate file which you produce is basically html, but with the document header and footer mostly excluded. The standard header and footer are incorporated by processing your template file with a local utility, to produce the corresponding, regularly formatted ".html" result. This utility puts on the header and footer, including things like a handy-dandy quick-jump bar, link and border colors which indicate the category of the page (general vs psa vs documentation), and so forth - all using relative URL paths, so their integrity is preserved on the mirror sites.

The relative links situation should be fairly self explanatory - examine the source of some existing documents in the mainstream of the hierarchy for examples. To construct your own .ht files, see the Python Web Maintenance document, particularly the section concerning the template format, for details.

The following topics describe how to gain access privileges to upload your documents to your SIG directory, and to run the procedure to produce .html documents from .ht ones.

SIG Web Directory Controls

Getting Group Access Privileges

Do an anonymous ftp login to ftp.python.org.

Change directories to your sigs dir - i'll use the progenv-sig for example:

ftp> cd /pub/www.python.org/sigs/progenv-sig
250 CWD command successful.

Invoke the group access, in two steps:

Specify the group:

ftp> quote site group progenvsig
200 Request for group progenvsig accepted.

(Note that you use the SIG name excluding the '-' dash.)

Specify the password:

ftp> quote site gpass progenv-sig-password 200 Request for access to group progenvsig accepted.

(Note that a successful GROUP command must come immediately before a successful GPASS command - so you must redo the GROUP command if you do an unsuccessful GPASS, and need to reattempt it.

The anonymous-ftp group privileges enables you to upload to the SIG directory. However, you are not able to overwrite anything - you have to use a special site-exec command, sigjob, to remove existing files, first, and then you can do a regular ftp put to put your new version in place. This command, described below, also enables you to process .ht template files, converting them to site-conformant .html files.

The sigjob Command

• We need a safe way to provide overwrite and deletion capability, and the anonymous ftp mechanism is not sufficient.
• We need to make the mechanism for processing the standardized python.org web page format (see above) externally available.

quote site exec sigjob <command> [<args>]

Puts the command on a job queue. The command is executed in your SIG directory, and the results are registered in a log file in the directory, named .done.

quote site exec sigjoblog [num]

Show the current contents of the log file, or the last num lines, when specified.

The sigs jobs daemon checks for and processes jobs immediately, but asynchronously, so the results will show up in the log file shortly after your submission of the command returns.

There is a small set of sigjob commands currently available.

quote site exec sigjob make [html-files]

Convert any fresh .ht files to their corresponding html equivalent. Without any arguments, processes all .ht files newer than their .html versions.

quote site exec sigjob rm files

Get the specified files out of your SIG dir - typically, so you can put new ones in their place. (The anonymous ftp group permissions do not enable you to overwrite existing files. Once the file is out of the way, however, you can do a regular ftp put to put your new version in place.)

The files are not actually deleted - they are put in a "trashcan" so we can recover them, even if they didn't exist before the last (daily) system backup.

quote site exec sigjob echo stuff and whatnot

Echo a line into the log file, so you can see that the process is really happening. (See the sigjoblog command, above, for the means to review the log file.)

quote site exec sigjob purge-log

Reinit the jobs log file, to empty it out.

This system is growing. Please send suggestions and questions to ftpmaster@python.org.