jd:/dev/blog

After 10 days of nice holidays, I'm back. I was totally offline, so I had to read some hundred of mails first, which is done now.

For a good restart, I've fixed a bunch of bugs in awesome and released 2.2-rc2 version. I've also migrated apt-build repository on Alioth from Subversion to git. I've uploaded a new version of this one with some patches, and a also put in the archive a new version of the mp32ogg package.

Next step will be to move my packages repositories which are in my global home Subversion repository, to my own git repositories on Alioth.

Long story short: I'm busy.

These days are quite busy. I'm working (you know, I need to eat so I've a job), to the point that I have many vacation days to take. So I'll be in holidays and offline from friday for 10 days.

I'm still working on awesome developement. Code base is quite good now, so I don't do 30 commits/day anymore, and update are less frequent. It's very nice that the users base is increasing every day, without polluting the mailing list and the BTS with bug reports and request for documentation. That means we at least achieve to do a not-so-bad code with a not-so-bad documentation. The feature requests list is still a bit long, but I think it will decrease in the next weeks.

On a human side, that's the biggest project I ever managed and it's very pleasant to have so many users and contributors.

I've some more project I'd like to work too. I plan to write a small git stats generator in Python when I'll have some more spare time. I'd also like to do some developement work around LDAP and Python for my servers, but I did not find the courage to do it neither the good library to handle LDAP object correctly (a DB_Object way would be good).

I'm always following Debian developement with one eye, so I'm not totally out. I really hope I could to some bug squashing like I did with several Debian buddies 2 years ago for the etch release.

Stay tuned.

I've set up a quick rebuildd demo. It may allow you to rebuild one of your package on etch/lenny/sid and for amd64/i386 as you wish. You will get build log by email.

I've just wrote the PHP page in 2 hours. I just hate Web interfaces and PHP is crap, seriously. For the record, I've tried to use DataGrid, and after having lost 1h to get it work with no PHP/PEAR error printed or available, I managed to have it working with a big pear upgrade-all. OMFG.

awesome beiing in rc state, that leaves me a small amount of spare time. I decided to spend it on rebuildd. I had started the 0.3.0 version back in August, but never touched it again until now.

I was afraid because I did not remember in which state I left the code repository. And, good surprise, the code was in a quite good shape!

I just implemented and fixed some stuff that were reported on the BTS, and then, I only had to test it out.

For that I used the servers kindly provided by TuxFamily.org:

• whisky: 6 x Pentium III @ 700 MHz/L2 1 MB + 1.7 GB RAM
• octave: 8 x Pentium III @ 500 MHz/L2 2 MO + 2 GB RAM

I stored the MySQL database on whisky. filled it with rebuildd-job add-quinn-diff (new feature in 0.3.0) and then started rebuildd on each node. And then I saw the 2 hosts starting to grab, lock jobs, build packages on each side. Wonderful. That just works.

rebuildd-job stats says that 20 % of the archive is now built in less than 24h, seems fast, cool.

Bad point is that I'm building and trashing logs into /dev/null because I've no QA idea to implement right now.

It's official: I'm beginning to be a bit overloaded.

Luk gently asked me about my status in the (stable) release management team. That just made a bit more guilty not doing that I'd like to do.

Current TODO list involves:

• release awesome 2.0-rc1 and update website and documentation for it;
• work on rebuildd, finish and polish 0.3 version;
• run a full rebuild of the Debian archive to test rebuldd 0.3, do some QA work;
• update mod_defensible to fix problem with udns timeout;
• work on Debian release management, at least rewrite lost script for (old-)proposed-updates which were on ries'
• work on Debian Xen;
• handle a lot of waiting task on my network/servers.

Now, the thing that will help: I'm house moving this week-end with no (real) Internet connection yet. I only managed to establish a VPN over port 53/udp on a hotspot from a pub near my new apartment with 25-30 KB/s bandwidth, which is better than nothing actually.

• awesome* is asking me a lot of time right now, and since it's my last launched project, I am motivated and have a lot of idea, so I like to hack on him right now. I think I will have to postpone future release to not forget other things.

I'm going to see what happens by the end of the year and if I'm able to catch up with everything. Otherwise I might need to drop some things…

Life is too short.

Wouhou, yesterday was quite a productive day.

First, I've released mod_defensible 1.4 which is just one line different from 1.3 but fix a huge bug (RC in Debian) with udns 0.0.9. Already uploaded to sid.

Second, I've updated greylistd in Debian and I've set myself as maintainer after 5 NMU in something like 1 year.

Then, I've pushed some updates to awesome. I may release 1.2 in the week, since it seems bug free and has some useful new features. We're now quite close to Xmonad functionalities as far as I can tell.

And the beat goes on…

So after rebuilding the whole archive with octave and rebuildd during 8 days, here are the results.

Some stats:

• 813 bugs
• 95 bugs already resolved
• A lot of FTBFS (some due to my buildd running out of free space)
• One DD grunting at me
• Some DD giving good advices
• A lot of thanks

Direct side effect: a lot of packages updated with more fixes thans the nostrip ones: triggering a rebuild is also triggering DD's work.

I'll do a rebuild in some weeks to check if fixed packages are really fixed and to rebuild packages that FTBFS and wil be fixed at that time.

And thanks to Mike Hommey for this idea.

Last month the new thread I was afraid about has started. Called Considerations for 'xmms' removal from Debian, the maintainers of the xmms package proposed the removal of it.

I used xmms (and, before, x11amp) for something like 9 or 10 years. I know, I love it. I can't bear other players. Amarok is heavy, rhythmbox seems like a joke to me. I like to load my 6500 files playlist in one shot, press 'j' and jump to the song I want. I don't see how it could be easier to use a music player.

Following the thread, I must admit that, yes, xmms is old, gtk1.2, unmaintained, etc. I had to switch, sooner is better.

So I use now Audacious. At least I try to. Last time I tested it, the search (jump, 'j' key) function was… not working. No it is, it works like xmms, and I'm happy. I know that upstream author of audacious dislikes being compared to xmms, but, screw you, you're like xmms, and I like it, so I like audacious for this. The plugins and the interface is like xmms, so it's great also.

However it's buggyyyyyyy. Third day of use, serious bug reported as #436557. It segfaults sometimes, or simply blocks reading a file.

The information loading 'on demand' is so crapy compared to xmms. I mean, it's fucking slow! When I put shuffle on and I lick 'next song please', then it hangs reading informations. xmms was doing what in a better way.

However, dear audacious-author-that-already-hates-me-for-comparing-xmms-and-audacious, I really think it'll be a real alternative for old xmms users like me and a lot I know (yes, I know a lot of people, damn it!). Developement seems to be very active, so I'll continue to report bug and use it.

Yes, I believe in audacious.

Due to the generosity of the administrator team from TuxFamily.org, I can now run rebuildd on octave, their (spare) HP NetServer LXr 8500 (8xPIII 500 MHz / 2 GB RAM). Which is quite faster that the P4 1.4 GHz I used for my first tests.

I can now run 24 builds in parallel.

I just released rebuildd 0.2.0 and uploaded it to NEW queue.

Lot of changes expected, and got lot of changes. Database is quite stable now, but not compatible with previous release (but who cares). The main change is the rewrite of the Web server, which is now standalone (and so optional) and use a new framework, webpy, which is finally quite cool.

I'd like to enhance a bit more the Web interface, but it's getting on my nerves so I think I'm going to let others do it.

Some stats between 0.1.0 and 0.2.0:

 30 files changed, 1032 insertions(+), 355 deletions(-)