Re: Malformed link from Planet GNU?

[Amin Bandali]

Hi Bob, Dora,

Bob Proulx writes:

> Hi Dora!
>
> Dora Scilipoti wrote:
>> submitting a news item from Savannah [1] goes to Planet GNU [2]. But
>> there is no link back to [1] from Planet GNU. Instead, it's a prompt to
>> download a www.atom file.

Actually, there is a link back to the news item: the item's title is a
clickable link.  For instance, in the case of the latest www entry,
"Malware in Proprietary Software - Latest Additions" links back to
"https://savannah.gnu.org/news/?id=10606";.  But that's perhaps not
immediately obvious due to the unfortunate styling of item title links
on the planet.

As for the "www @ Savannah" shown in larger font, however, that
corresponds to the title of the feed itself (in this case, the www
Savannah group), and not individual item titles.  As such, it wouldn't
make sense for *it* to link to the individual item.  I agree, however,
that it linking to the atom feed is less than helpful.  It should link
to the group's page, as previously noted and e.g. shown below by Bob.

Continuing my reply below.

> I think this must be on the planet.gnu.org side of things.  I don't
> have any acces to it.  But I scanned through the Internet Archive's
> copy of things and I see that this was the last time it was "working".
> Note the "October 07, 2017" "health @ Savannah" entry.
>
>     https://web.archive.org/web/20171014141946/https://planet.gnu.org/
>
> And the next snapshot shows the atom feed.  Look for the "March 11,
> 2018" "automake @ Savannah" entry and it is an atom feed then.
>
>     https://web.archive.org/web/20180313234855/http://planet.gnu.org/
>
> What Savannah provides is a file with a list of projects.  The
> aggregator on planet then polls the projects news feeds and scrapes
> out the new news articles and posts them to planet.
>
>> Is this intentional? I would expect a link back to the original online
>> page instead of the file.
>
> This does have the feel like an unintentional change.  I don't think
> (can't guarentee it without looking at the planet side aggregator) but
> I think this must have been a change on the aggregator side of things.
> The news article rendering on the Savannah web UI side looks the same
> to my eye but I don't know exactly what the aggregator will be
> scraping from it.  It's possible something changed in there and the
> aggregator became confused and started grabbing a different link.

Planet Venus (the software that runs on planet.gnu.org) calculates
the link destination of each feed from information in the feed itself,
and does not expose a method for changing it from the planet side.
I don't know what changed on the planet side between 2017 and 2018,
but I don't see any relevant changes in Savannah in that time frame.

That link is taken from the top-level <link> element with a
rel="alternate" attribute.  So I just pushed and deployed a commit[0]
to Savannah to add one for each group's feed.  For example,
https://savannah.gnu.org/news/atom.php?group=www now has:

 <link rel="alternate" href="https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/www"/>

I'm hoping this will cause the group link for future items to be to
the group page rather than the atom feed itself.

[0]: 
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/administration/savane.git/commit/?h=frontend&id=f95530753e974ac1d60f8c0c697f148099475f1a

> I don't have access to the planet0p VM.  I don't know who does.
> Pretty sure Sylvain brought the feed back online again after an
> absence in 2016 due to a note I see.  I will ask sysadmin about it
> tomorrow.
>
> Bob
>

Being the person who set up the planet venus software on the planet0p
VM currently running planet.gnu.org since August 2021, I have access
to it, along with Jason Self and the FSF sysadmins.

Best,
-a