my blog

Thursday 5 February 2009

Of course I'm going!

Going to FOSDEM

Of course, I'm going! I'm actually leaving tomorrow morning. It'll be quite some busy days with lots of discussion on different topics, but it'll be great to see tons of people again. My main worry at the moment is that I'm pretty sure the two days and a half will be way too short for everything ;-)

On the GNOME side, we'll now have our traditional GNOME beer event on Saturday evening. The usual stand will be animated by a team of volunteers (you can still sign up to help!), and there will be free stickers, and t-shirts with a new design -- I'm quite eager to finally see how they look. If I'm not mistaken, the t-shirts will be at the usual price: €5 for GNOME Foundation members and €10 for everybody else. Oh, and I didn't mention the devroom which will be a good place for some exciting stuff. Glad to see quite some french-speaking people talking :-)

Going to FOSDEM

We're trying to organize a group photo on Saturday afternoon. Depending on the weather, we'll do it inside the devroom or outside. We'll announce this once we know how sunny the sky will be, but be ready for 15:45! Of course, we'll need a camera, but that shouldn't be a big issue. There will also be a photo with the KDE people -- quite a challenge to have everybody on one photo.

On the openSUSE side, Martin has been taking care of nearly everything so I expect the presence to be quite good. I can't wait to meet more of the openSUSE community, since I still can't put any face on most names... There are tons of things to discuss, and I hope we'll get some interesting feedback from users but also people who'd like to contribute. Oh, and it seems I'll be talking about our rocking GNOME team on Sunday :-)

Woo, quite excited about all this!

[23:38] | [GNOME] | [#503]

Wednesday 4 February 2009

Pushing a completely updated GNOME stack to Factory

Back in December, a small team of volunteers wanted to work on updating GNOME in openSUSE to 2.25. But openSUSE was still frozen, so this was not possible to do. Or at least not possible the usual way. Let me explain why:

  • as people probably know, the development version of openSUSE is called Factory. It's being developed in the build service, as the openSUSE:Factory project.
  • the GNOME team maintains quite a number of packages (more than 350) and so we use a specific project where everybody can submit updates and where we make sure everything works fine together. This is the GNOME:Factory project in the build service. When we're happy with a package, we push it to openSUSE:Factory.
  • whenever openSUSE:Factory is frozen, we freeze GNOME:Factory too. This enables us to use GNOME:Factory to fix all kind of bugs in Factory (when Factory is only frozen from an upstream version point of view), or to fix critical bugs in Factory (when Factory is really frozen).

So, openSUSE was frozen. But the small team of volunteers was crazy enough to push and to create a GNOME:Factory:Next project to start packaging the latest upstream versions of all the modules we maintain. This was a totally crazy idea. And completely insane since there was no real review of the changes being done. They worked hard as they of course tried to follow the GNOME schedule to update packages. And there were some bad surprises along the way (for example: someone directly updating a package in Factory to fix some issue, which then requires a manual merge in GNOME:Factory:Next).

Then Factory opened again for development. We started merging things in GNOME:Factory, reviewing the changes, fixing stuff here and there. What was done in GNOME:Factory:Next was certainly not perfect, but it was still pretty good. And during all this process, we took some time to review some of our patches, trying to send upstream those that were never sent (usually for bad reasons), or trying to simply kill them. It's a tedious task since there are packagers who don't send the patch upstream, some who add a patch but don't mention the patch name explicitly (so it's quite hard to know why the patch was added), or you can find patches linking to the wrong bug... But I digress, that's something that I should discuss in another post.

And now, fast forward to today: after the tons of changes, I pushed the packages to openSUSE:Factory. How many packages? 201. All at once. Unless they were using GNOME:Factory, GNOME users of Factory all had some GNOME 2.24.x until now. They'll finally have a mix of 2.25.5 and 2.25.90 now. That's a big leap forward :-)

Oh. Yeah, I probably didn't mention yet that the team of volunteers was made of Magnus Boman, Luis Medinas (hrm, Luis, you're not on Planet SUSE!?) and Suman Manjunath. Rocking people!

[21:53] | [openSUSE] | [#502] | [2 trackbacks]

Tuesday 3 February 2009

Browsing the openSUSE sources

At the end of last week, Sébastien and Michael were discussing some gnome-session thing and they wondered if there was a patch in openSUSE to make it work. The bad thing is that they couldn't look by themselves without creating an account on the build service, and so they asked me. It reminded me of a time where I was looking at the patches in all distributions for the modules I maintained, and I was quite annoyed by the same problem. And, well, it sounded so easy I couldn't resist: I hacked a quick workaround.

It turns out you can list the content of a source package and download the files without an account; however it's at the moment not possible to get the list of source packages. This last point is quite a blocker if you want to easily browse the sources. So I just wrote a small script that periodically exports the list of source packages for the released distributions and Factory, and voilà! You can now browse the packages and download all files, including the most interesting part: patches.

There's a small bug in the build service -- it does't send the MIME type, I think, so you can't directly view the files in the browser. Also, I didn't make this work with all the projects in the build service but only a subset. So you don't get, for example, the latest work we're doing in the GNOME team (since it's in GNOME:Factory). But still, better than nothing, isn't it? Everybody will now be able to see the weird patches we have, and this can only be a good thing.

Note that in the future, the build service content will probably be readable without an account, so this will make this hack irrelevant (which is a good thing!). Also you'll have noticed the tmp in the URL of the server; did I mention it was a hack? ;-) Oh, I nearly forgot: if you want to run some script on this data, contact me, we'll find a better way than just parsing those webpages.

Update: oh, well, I decided to add GNOME:Factory since it's really where people should look for the GNOME stuff. I had to play a bit around to find the right way to handle this because the packages are links to the ones in openSUSE:Factory, but I got it. If someone wants me to add another project, let me know, it's really trivial.

[00:42] | [openSUSE] | [#501] | [9 comments]

Monday 2 February 2009

Question de genre

En parlant ce matin (ok, en début d'après-midi) avec une amie, j'ai eu les oreilles qui m'ont châtouillé. Ce fut à l'occasion d'une phrase qui sonnait comme mon Debian est piraté. Non, non, il ne faut pas s'inquiéter sur le contexte, c'est particulier ;-) Donc, la partie coupable de ce désagrément est mon Debian. Effectivement, j'aurais tendance à dire ma Debian. Et Google me confirme gentiment que la majorité emploie Debian au féminin. Certes, la majorité n'a pas toujours raison, mais là, j'aurais tendance à penser que c'est le cas. Pour sa décharge, l'amie en question est argentine ; nous ne la blâmerons donc pas ici.

Mais d'abord, pourquoi est-ce féminin ? On dit un Nokia (c'est un téléphone), une Renault (c'est une voiture), une HP (c'est une imprimante), un Windows ou un Mac OS X (c'est un système d'exploitation), un Linux (c'est un noyau), mais une Debian, une Fedora, une Mandriva, une openSUSE, une Ubuntu, etc. Parce que ce sont des distributions.

Intéressant. Reculons donc d'un pas et cherchons la règle en question. Wikipédia nous donne une petite aide sur le genre des noms propres, avec ce petit passage :

Lorsque rien n'indique le genre du nom propre, (un inanimé, le plus souvent) on considère le plus souvent que ce nom propre hérite du genre du nom générique englobant le référent du nom propre.

J'en arrive donc à la question existentielle du jour : le concept de distribution serait-il donc prépondérant par rapport au concept de système d'exploitation ?

[17:11] | [Mon avis] | [#500] | [3 comments]

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]

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by Vincent