One of this year’s Google Summer of Code projects is a an Eclipse plugin to access the Build Service, developed by Long Hong from Beijing. If you are interested, read on.

While there are still issues to be solved, I think it’s in a state that everybody can try it out. Grab a package from my home project, launch eclipse and open the Build Service perspective. Please note that the package itself is a bit experimental and was only tested to work on openSUSE 11.0. Enjoy!

$ reboot
-bash: reboot: command not found
$ /sbin/reboot
reboot: must be superuser.

In KDE / GNOME, you can just click reboot in the menu and your session sends a message to display manager, which runs as root and does the dirty job of rebooting or shutting down your machine. Unfortunately, things are not that easy if you are using a simpler window manager or want to shutdown from a script. Sure, there is sudo, but that has to be configured first to work without password. Luckily, after a couple of hours of googling (only to find helpful advice as “this can be done easily with ConsoleKit or hal”), reading documentation of dbus, {Console,Policy}Kit and hal and clicking in qdbusviewer, I finally found a way with hal+dbus:

$ dbus-send --system --dest=org.freedesktop.Hal \
  --type=method_call --print-reply \
  /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer \
  org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.SystemPowerManagement.Reboot

To shutdown, just replace Reboot with Shutdown. I’m going to add this to the default icewm configuration, so that the logout menu finally works.

Recently, I wanted to show how the buildservice makes packaging easier by creating a specfile template for you (just click the “Create RPM SPEC file templat” checkbox when creating a new package). Unfortunatelly, the template it creates is not really useful for someone not skilled in writing spec files. Also, it’s just a static template, so you have to write the summary and description even though you have just entered both in the web form. Definitely nothing to show off to newbies ;-). But knowing that the buildservice developers have more important stuff to do, and wanting to learn something new, I decided give it a try and fix it myself.

My idea is: The buildservice api asks a set of questions, which are presented by the client (webclient, osc, …) to the user, and creates a specfile based on these questions. Also, the api tries to suggest good defaults where possible. After spending some time learning ruby, rails and the api code, I have an ugly 200 line patch to the api that generates a working specfile for GNU hello ;-).

The user interface part is not yet done, but should be easy. What’s more chalenging is adding heuristics to “do the right thing”: detecting the build system (autotools, cmake, Makefile.PL, etc), detecting build dependencies, and so on. Right now, it only extracts the version number from the tar name.