As part of the Gentoo Events project, I would like to have some form of web-based gallery, preferably LDAP-enabled, to allow developers to post pictures of events where Gentoo has a presence or has given a talk. This could be used for any image hosting really, but my primary concern is for pictures from events. Gentoo currently has nowhere for hosting such images that is publicly accessible, and a piece of software that does automatic thumbnailing would be excellent. I have personally used www-apps/gallery and it meets these requirements, but is PHP-based and has had a history of security issues. As I mentioned to Lance when I emailed him directly, I'm willing to put in all of the work to setup and maintain this system, as I have familiarity with it. That being said, I'm not stuck on using any particular piece of software, as it is the feature set that I am wanting, not the particular software.
After discussing it with solar (quite a long time ago), I eventually set up a gallery with devpics: it's at http://dev.gentoo.org/~nattfodd/devpics/devpics.html (it's only a test thing and uses an old CVS snapshot). The point is that it's entirely static and uses plain html/css (btw, the css used here is simply main.css, it could certainly use some refinement). It's generated by llgal, which is a simple perl script and is in portage. Thus generating a new page would be a matter of uploading the pictures to some CVS and running a script that would fetch the images and run llgal. That's a pretty simple solution and would imho be quite nice on security matters.
Would this meet your needs Chris?
It probably would... my point was more to have a more friendly interface on it, and not requiring the binary image files be stored in CVS. There's also no ability (that I see) to add comments and such to the individual pictures, which was probably the thing I was looking to have the most, since it will be used for events primarily at the start.
Adding comments can be done beforehands by adding it to the image metadata. There is also an extra file that can be generated with a list of the photos and you can specify which extra text you want displayed. So it would easily be scriptable. However, there is no way to add comments afterwards, at least not without regenerating the whole gallery. About not needing CVS, perhaps can we setup a very simple webapp that basically uploads the photo to some dir and then we just need to generate the gallery?
so what's the conclusion here ? infra doesnt want to setup a gallery so the trade off is to store images in cvs and then have a script to regenerate the webpage ?
(In reply to comment #5) > so what's the conclusion here ? infra doesnt want to setup a gallery so the > trade off is to store images in cvs and then have a script to regenerate the > webpage ? > I'm fine with the simplicity of how nattfodd made the page. I guess if we could take a look a the generation scripts and how we can incorporate it into our setup, that would be the next step. Then we can iron out the details of things like: * how do devs get pictures on there * how do we add comments (if we need that feature) * how do we remove pictures * etc, etc. So, if you could please send us instructions on how to set it up, we can take a look at it. Spanky: you fine with what he had as a solution?
Setting it up is quite straightforward. You need media-gfx/llgal, which is in the tree and requires a couple of perl modules + imagemagick and exiftool. You then cd to a directory with your images, copy the directory dev.gentoo.org:/home/nattfodd/public_html/devpics/style/ in it and run the line llgal --cf -u --tx 150 --ty 120 --templates style --nf --title "Title of the gallery" -i "name_of_the_main_html_file" It will generate a bunch of html files and a .llgal directory containing the thumbnails. There are many other options to be explored ("llgal --gc" is really useful if you want to modify the order in which to display the images or add comments). The CSS file (in the style directory) could probably use a bit of tweaking as well but I'm not really an expert. I spoke to upstream (he's a friend of mine) and he'll release a 0.13.6 version with some bugfixes soon (nothing outstanding though). If we have specific needs that are not yet in the software, he should be able to add it quite quickly.
llgal-0.13.6 has been in the tree for a while now, is anything else than time needed? Should I make a formal request or something? I'll certainly make some pictures for the JDLL event next week, it would be nice to have such a system for this kind of occasions.
Well, the lack of comments after the fact really stinks. Having a picture is one thing, having a picture with a caption like "SpanKY giving wltjr some good loving" is another. It also still requires that we keep an ever-growing number of binary files in CVS, which was something I definitely wanted to avoid.
Actually, if we are going for a static gallery, we need to regenerate the gallery each time we change something (like adding a comment), and llgal can do it very easily through TEXT fields in the caption file (and again, if some reasonable feature is needed, it can be added quite fast by upstream). After that, it's just a matter of writing a small script to add automagically the right line in the right file. On the other hand, a very simple php comment system is trivial to do (I implemented one on my website last week, it's less than 50 lines), though it opens the door to security problems. It's all a matter of whether regenerating the gallery each time a comment is added is too much of an overhead.
The original request mentioned gallery, which I've used quite a bit and find it very easy. I didn't see a reason why we didn't want to use it (other than the php issues, which we can't really use as an argument given all the other things we use that depend on php) Is the expectation that any developer will be able to add pictures? (in which case I have concerns about sprawl) Or is this really intended for "official" Gentoo events with a small handful of users having administrative access to the site?
it's intended to host Gentoo-related pictures ... currently that means pictures from all of our events i think giving admin control over to like the PR group should be fine
As you are talking about security issues with gallery, do we have a box with web-sandboxes/chroots/jails on it? This should be the best to isolate gallery from our other services.
Well, this was requested over two years ago and I've not seen much traction on it. I know that we ordered the server, since that was done back when I was still a Trustee. Since I'm no longer running the show over in PR and I was the one asking for this, I'm going to assume that Infra either is incapable of providing this service, or unwilling. In either case, there's not much else to be done about it, so I'm closing this bug and marking it as CANTFIX.
