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Thursday 18 December 2008

Early <insert-your-end-of-year-favorite-holiday-here> gift!

After months of work, openSUSE 11.1 is now available. It's of course full of coolness inside, so you know you want to try it! Yep, go download it!

http://counter.opensuse.org/11.1/medium

What's interesting about this openSUSE release, and what gets me really excited, is that it's the first release that has been mainly developed with the build service, which also means that we started growing our developer community for real! To put it simply, if there's something that you don't like in a openSUSE package, you can fix it: it's now trivial for everybody to submit an update.

And of course we're already planning the 11.2 development: there's a lively discussion around the 11.2 schedule, and I'm really happy to see the community jump in to give feedback there. Exciting times!

[15:17] | [openSUSE] | [#499] | [one comment]

Friday 5 December 2008

Distributions of the year?

Every year, in December, you start seeing a lot of articles about the big events that occurred during the year, or about delivering awards for the best whatever of the year. And when I say a lot, I think I'm underestimating the amount of those articles. Some are interesting, some are meaningful, a few are both interesting and meaningful, probably most are neither interesting nor meaningful. So when Magnus gave a link saying that openSUSE was distro of the year, I wasn't sure what to expect. It turned out to be a good surprise.

Ars Technica chose two distributions as distros of the year: Foresight and openSUSE. I honestly can't say that the choice is good or bad -- all major distros are making great progress, because they all benefit from what the various upstream projects are doing. While openSUSE is now close to my heart, I'm still fond of Debian, Fedora or Ubuntu. That's probably because I'm still very much upstream-centric in my way of looking at the free software world (and hopefully, I'll stay this way). I could probably write stuff about each distribution, telling you a few things that happened there that were great, or why I like them. But let's focus on Foresight and openSUSE.

So yeah, it's good to see openSUSE picked up as one of the distributions of the year by Ars Technica, but I wouldn't usually care much about this -- nearly everybody has its own favorite distribution because it's the best out there (always funny to see that there are more than one best distribution ;-)). However in this case, the way the project evolved during the last year was considered and that's what kept my attention; I'm really glad to see that outside people are noticing that the openSUSE community is growing, with the development being more and more open; the openSUSE distribution certainly has many qualities, but this point is the most important change for the project. At least, that's my opinion. Sure, there are still tons of things to fix in the community and in the way we develop stuff, but we're getting there. And I feel a huge difference in the openSUSE project between what it was at the beginning of the year and what it is today.

It's also great to see the work done on Foresight noticed. What I really like about Foresight is that they provide GNOME with live media for stable releases, and they do that really quickly. That's simply awesome, no need to argue. As far as I know, they're also trying to not do a lot of changes compared to upstream, so you get an upstream experience. And I love that.

But in the end, I really liked the article because it was useful to me. Really. Let me tell you why. It helped me identify a goal for next year: try to get everyone to spell out openSUSE the correct way (hint: it's not OpenSUSE, nor openSuSE, nor OpenSuSE, nor...). Yeah, after the GNOME vs Gnome war, I had to find a new spelling war ;-)

[00:18] | [openSUSE] | [#497] | [5 comments]

Thursday 19 June 2008

openSUSE 11.0 is alive!

It's officially out: go grab openSUSE 11.0! You can also use the web interface to help you choose what to download and how to download it.

I'm quite new to the openSUSE world but I've seen great progress in the last six months and I'm definitely happy with the work that is going on in the GNOME team. There are many reasons for that:

  • many people are willing to help (and when I say many, it also means more and more) in the openSUSE-GNOME community and so useful things get actually done :-) I'm quite confident that we'll have even more contributions in the future thanks to the new collaboration features of the build service.
  • there's an ongoing effort to reduce our number of patches: we want to be good upstream citizen and keeping patches can only hurt us in the long term anyway (they require maintenance, after all). This means we're reviewing all of our patches by making sure they have been sent upstream, and dropping them when we consider they're not worth the effort.
  • most (I don't dare saying all, but maybe I should) of the development we're doing is being done upstream. Did I mention we want to be good upstream citizen?
  • with all this upstream orientation, you could get the feeling that we're not doing anything useful inside the distribution. But we want to get everything polished and well-integrated with the rest of the distribution, and I hope people will agree we're not doing bad in this area.
  • oh, and the people are so great. I won't try to describe howcrazy good the atmosphere is -- just join the IRC channel or the list!

The summary could read: great people, upstream work and awesome result.

I wanted to do quite a few things to celebrate this release, but I unfortunately lost my internet connectivity at home, which makes me quite less productive (but it might be good to help cure the addiction ;-)). Anyway, I'll keep those (not so) secret ideas for the next release! Because, you know, I've the feeling that 11.0 was only first step and 11.1 will get some pure love :-)

[15:48] | [openSUSE] | [#475] | [2 comments]

Wednesday 28 May 2008

Ich bin ein Berliner

After Prague (will post about it really soon, I promise :-)), I came back home a few days and didn't even have time to feel home: I'm now in Berlin for LinuxTag. Interestingly, I was surprisingly happy to walk in Berlin after landing earlier in the evening. I'm not quite sure why, but I guess it means I have a positive feeling for the city. Also good to see that I'm having fun speaking (or maybe I should say trying to speak) German, while back in school, this was really something I disliked. I guess that's because I now choose to speak German instead of being forced to do so...

I'm getting quite excited about LinuxTag since it will be my first time attending this event, and I wonder how it will be in comparison of the other big events I know. But from what I've heard, that's a pretty decent event :-) It will also be a good occasion to meet a lot of openSUSE people -- always good to put faces on names. Oh, and I've heard there are some cool openSUSE stickers on the booth, so everybody should come and say hi! Hopefully, there'll also be a good bunch of GNOME friends there (can't wait to see them again), and I'll obviously be glad to talk about GNOME with everybody patient enough to listen to me.

On Saturday morning, I'll give a talk around freedesktop.org and cross-desktop collaboration during the GNOME track. Of course, as usual for me, my slides are... err... not finished yet ;-) But it's nearly there, really: I just need to sit down and put on paper^Wthe slides what is already completely ready in my brain -- it shouldn't take too long...

[00:39] | [openSUSE] | [#472] | [3 comments]

Saturday 22 March 2008

What I've been doing today...

vuntz@buildmachine ~/>./bin/create-summaries --output-database ~/data.db
vuntz@buildmachine ~/>python
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Sep 21 2007, 22:46:31)
[GCC 4.2.1 (SUSE Linux)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import sqlite3
>>> db=sqlite3.connect('/suse/vuntz/data.db')
>>> c=db.cursor()
>>> c.execute('select count(*) from patch where srcpackage = (select id from srcpackage where name = "gnome-panel")').fetchone()[0]
25
>>> c.execute('select count(*) from rpmlint').fetchone()[0]
7120
>>> c.execute('select count(*) from rpmlint where type="not-listed-as-documentation"').fetchone()[0]
6388
>>> c.execute('select count(*) from srcpackage where version < upstream_version').fetchone()[0]
26

Quick answers to some FAQ:

  • yes, I know, the UI isn't really user-friendly ;-)
  • this demo is really short, more can be done right now. And after a bit more work, there'll be some more data in there to query.
  • there are certainly bugs when collecting the data, so I wouldn't trust the returned values. It still gives a rough idea of how things are.
  • it's only working on packages where upstream is hosted on the GNOME FTP server. That's mainly for convenience reasons; adding other packages later shouldn't be hard.
  • yes, there are lots of gnome-panel patches in our package. I'll look at them in a not too distant future.
  • most of the rpmlint warnings (6388 out of 7120 -- this includes some false positives, but still) seem to be related to this bug. The good news is that I attached a simple patch earlier today.

I love my job :-)

[02:36] | [openSUSE] | [#462] | [2 comments]

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by Vincent