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vendredi, avril 18 2008

Updating my .plan

I've been on holidays for one week now, breaking my usual workflow. Well, that allowed me to rest and to think about what I'd like to do and things I need to handle during next weeks.

The urgent things this next days will be my primary server replacement. It is currently dying, and I already had to change its power supply twice in a month. Unfortunately, I'm now at a point where I do not have any spare piece so if things go wrong again, I'm screwed. I need to collect some money and buy a new server, or maybe get a server if someone have an old or spare one to give me, I do not know yet.

On the awesome front, I'm about to release awesome 2.3, which will be the final minor release of the major branch 2. This will lead me to work on awesome 3 at a slower rate and a cooler pace.

Then, the thing I do not have to hurry for is awesome 3. There's no big problems in awesome 2, and the xcb-util stuff are not stabilized yet. After my gentle yelling on XCB mailing list, it seems that things will move but will slowly. So I do have time to make things right and do what I want on that branch, making bugfix release on awesome 2 if needed. You can read more about futur on my last post about awesome.

All this should give me some more spare time to work on the upcoming Debian release, lenny, which I'd like to work on. Two years ago (my god, time flies), we've done good work with the french cabal squashing critical bugs and I'd like to go back on this and squash asses again.

mardi, février 26 2008

Back from holidays

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.

mardi, février 12 2008

Testing out GRUB 2

After reading Jordi post about GRUB 2, I decided to give it a try on my EeePC.

I've just installed the grub-pc package, answered the questions, and that was it. I tested it with the chainload method from GRUB legacy, and it worked. I just had to rerun grub-install to replace the legacy with the new one. And I've a nice Debian background in the menu now!

What seems amazing is that GRUB now see my... LVM logical volumes! So this seems to be really cool, because this means no more /boot-without-lvm-ext3-formatted partitions because my-boot-loader-sucks-a-bit.

lundi, février 11 2008

Holidays and projects

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.

lundi, janvier 21 2008

New laptop: EeePC!

This morning, the snail mail brought me a new toy! A brand new EeePC!

Kawoosh!

It's a very very nice device. I did not test the Xandros system more than 5 minutes, but it looks fine for dummy users. I've plugged an USB key into it, booted on the Debian installer (provided on the Debian wiki) and installed it in a few minutes.

The hardest part was adding wifi support, since I needed to grab madwifi svn version, added a patch, and compiled it. It was not so hard after all, just don't expect to use Debian packages for now.

It even boot in less than one minute! The hardest part is to type on a such tiny keyboard.

Keyboard Plectrum as reference size

mardi, décembre 4 2007

rebuildd demo

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.

lundi, décembre 3 2007

rebuildd 0.3.0 released

Everything seems to work, so just releasing it. I think it's becoming an amazing tool to do archive rebuild.

It just misses a good Web interface. :-(

dimanche, décembre 2 2007

Testing out rebuildd 0.3.0

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.

vendredi, novembre 16 2007

awesome 2.0-rc1

awesome 2.0-rc1 released and waiting in Debian NEW queue. :-)

jeudi, novembre 15 2007

Time < work

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.

mardi, octobre 2 2007

Ubuntu: not contributing to Debian, and even doing bad work

Googling around using the rebuildd keyword to find if people were talking about it, I found that patch from Ubuntu.

This patch is used to ship rebuildd Debian package in Ubuntu.

Wahou. First surprise! So, Ubuntu is fixing bugs and not telling me. I though that people saying "Ubuntu does not contribute back to Debian!" were exaggerating. Seems I was wrong.

Nevermind: I take the patch. I read the patch. I apply the pat… oh wait: the fix is wrong.

lol.

mardi, septembre 25 2007

Random news

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…

vendredi, septembre 21 2007

Is X.org 7.3 a sucking release?

I just upgraded my X server at work. Oh my god. I had a working configuration with multi-head (without Xinerama).

I was happy. Oh yes I remember yesterday everything was so fine. And now it screwed everything up.

I've got 3 LCD screens and 2 Matrox G450 PCI cards. After restarting X.Org 7.3, all I've got was two screens (connected on the first card) in clone mode. Very useful.... After 1 hour of googling I managed to use xrandr to setup a Xinerama display on this 2 screens....

I don't want Xinerama and I want my other Matrox card back. I don't know why but reading Brice Goglin post around, I understand that the old behaviour is no more available. GREAT, now I'm stuck with Xinerama that a lot of window managers don't handle correctly and I still don't know why my other Matrox card doesn't work.

Is X.Org 7.3 a piece of shit or what?

jeudi, août 16 2007

Debian archive rebuild for nostrip finished

rebuildd BD

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.

mercredi, août 15 2007

i386--, amd64++

As I said previously, abydos was dead. I bought new hardware some days after, mainly a new Enermax Liberty ELT 500 W power supply (ATX 2.2 compliant, sick, my old Enermax ATX 1.2 could not work with new mainboards), an Asus P5K, 2 GB of G.Skill DDR2 PC6400, an Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 and a GeForce 8400 GS 512 MB.

At that time, I just switched the hard drives without reinstalling the box. However, I had to reinstall some days because my old was an old Intel Pentium 4 (i386) and the new is 64 bits-ready.

Before that, I played with some kind of stuff. First, installing cpufrequtils is just magic, because now my processor is set at 2 GHz instead of 2.66 GHz, and rise to 2.66 GHz on demand. Just cool: less power, less warm, less noise.

I tried to tweak my SATA drives. I did something very wrong: hdparm -s. Kids, don't do this at home, it killed my hard drives! Yes, you're warned if you read the hdparm manual and you have to force the command, but I'm mad anyway. After that, the drives were no more detected at boot time by the buggy BIOS. Why buggy? Because after some googling, I found that they were NOT dead, just sleeping. And the fucking BIOSes around never try to wake them up. Fortunately, hdparm people distribute an bootable ISO that will wake your drives... It saved me.

The Asus P5K is not well supported by the 2.6.18 kernel, so you won't have network during install of etch (or lenny beta 1), and when you will reboot you won't be able to boot correctly because initrd is stuck with hard drive detection. Furthermore 2.6.18 on this mainboard is fucking slow anyway.

Fortunately, I just added another NIC in the box, boot on the CD, mount disks, chrooted and dist-upgrade to sid with a 2.6.22 kernel which work perfectly.

So now, everything's ready and set up, I can play!

vendredi, août 10 2007

On media players, xmms and audacious

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.

mercredi, août 8 2007

rebuildd 0.2.1 released

Running rebuildd for real since 48 hours, I've found some nasty bugs I have been able to fix. One of the biggest was me trying to do things that Python understood in a different maner, so it was quite interesting.

I'm now very happy about that project. From my point of view, I really managed to write a build handler daemon in a very better and more modern way that buildd used to do. It really fits my needs, and it's a real pleasure to use it. Ok, ok. stopping the self-congrats stuff.

I've updated the Web page to be more close to the 0.2.1 version.

mardi, août 7 2007

Rebuilding on octave

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. :-) HP Netserver TF

lundi, août 6 2007

Implementing Debian policy check with rebuildd

After reading Mike Hommey's idea about buildd network for QA testing, I decided to try to implement the 10.1 policy recommendations check using rebuildd.

Here is how I proceeded.

Install and configure rebuildd

This is done by apt-get install rebuildd. Then, init database (I use sqlite) with rebuildd init.

Then I initialized build system with rebuildd-init-build-system. I had to add nostrip to DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS, so I decided to do quick and dirty and I edited /usr/bin/dpkg-build-package adding the good export info in the first lines.

Configuration file and post build cmd

My configuration file is simple and the one by default: I only changed email addresses and add a post_build_cmd script.

Here's the code for the script:


#!/bin/sh
dist=$1
pkg=$2
version=$3
arch=`dpkg --print-architecture`
RET=0
cd /var/cache/pbuilder/result || exit 1

for file in $(grep '.deb$' ${pkg}_${version}_${arch}.changes |cut -d\  -f6)
do
	echo Checking $file for stripped binaries...
	echo ---------------------------------------
	mkdir /tmp/$file
	dpkg -x $file /tmp/$file
	find /tmp/$file -type f | (while read line
	do 
		L=$(file $line | egrep 'ELF.*, stripped')
		if test ! -z "$L"
		then
			echo $L
			RET=1
		fi
	done; exit $RET)
	RET=$?
	rm -rf /tmp/$file
done
echo
echo ...done

echo Removing result files...
for file in $(grep-dctrl -sFiles . ${pkg}_${version}_${arch}.changes | sed '1d' | cut -d\  -f6)
do
	rm -f $file
	rm -f /var/cache/rebuildd/build/$file
done
rm -f ${pkg}_${version}_${arch}.changes
echo ...done

exit $RET

Fille the db

Then I fill the database with:

grep-dctrl -sPackage,Version .  /var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.fr.debian.org_debian_dists_sid_main_source_Sources | cut -d: -f2- | tr '\n' ' ' | sed 's/   /\n/g'| sed 's/  / /' | xargs -L1 -ixxxxxx echo xxxxxx sid | rebuildd-job add

And finally I just have to start rebuildd and let it do the job.

Argh, already 3 build logs received with stripped binaries…

Update: Bug list can be found here

jeudi, juillet 19 2007

rebuildd 0.2.0 released

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(-)

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