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Posts Tagged ‘infrastructure’

Hermes Improvements

September 3rd, 2009 by

I did some interesting changes to the Hermes instance of openSUSE.

There have been complaints that it is not possible to follow requests that have been originated by oneself, which can result in the weird situation that one does not get information what happened to a request. I fixed that by adding a new subscription called OBS Request Author to the Hermes start page that informs you about all changes to a request originated by you. All people who already had a subscription on the request change notifications have been automatically subscribed. The subscription can of course be removed on the Hermes page if it is not wanted.

Another problem was that people who are subscribed on Build Failure with the _mypackages special filter were flooded by mails. That happens because the _mypackages filter thinks a package belongs to you if you’re either maintainer of the project or package. Since this is not what maintainers of big projects want I created a _mypackagesstrict filter that only fires if one is really the maintainer of the package. To enable this fix, please go to the Hermes Expert page to edit your subscription to BIULD_FAILURE. Edit the filter to set it to special value _mypackagesstrict.

I hope that makes Hermes again a bit more useful for you. Please let me know what you think!

Hermes Hack Session

June 2nd, 2009 by

Last week Cornelius and me spent two days in the office in Prague to practice two days Ruby on Rails with our czech colleagues.
It was not only fun as usual but we had chosen Hermes as a trainings project. Hermes, our openSUSE notification system where the user decides how she wants to be notified definetely can make use of work so it were great to discuss with ten developers about it, hear their opinions and get some patches finished which will improve the system.

All went to a branch in svn and I hope to find time soon to merge it back and put it into production.
Thanks to our colleagues for hosting us and work with us. Maybe YOU also want to train on something real? Hermes is your friend – send me a note and get a free svn account 🙂

Smolt and openSUSE

December 1st, 2008 by

This morning I realised that openSUSE appears on the hardware database smolt the first time. We are introducing smolt with openSUSE 11.1 in the installation workflow. People can choose to send up their data to the smolt database. All that is of course done anonymously, the data is stored under a unique UUID which can not be tracked back to the submitter (Privacy Policy here.)

Smolt is a project started by Fedora to collect information about the hardware that is used with computers running Linux. We at (open-)SUSE were seeing this demand as well and also were discussing a solution. But it became clear quite quickly that it does not make sense to have a per-distro solution for that – if we want to have momentum with a hardware database a combined effort promisses the most.

On Linuxtag 2007 I was first time involved in meetings were people from the Fedora project offered us to participate in smolt. It became clear that the idea behind smolt is what we also wanted. The working athmosphere was (and still is) open, friendly and productive and thus we decided to join in. With openSUSE 11.0 we first time shipped a smolt client, but not in the installation workflow.

Smolt isn’t finished yet. While it is a stable infrastructure thanks to Mike McGrath and friends who work on it there are still some things that could be improved. Maybe there is somebody in the openSUSE community interesting in joining the smolt community and help? That would be great because the contributions from our side are still limited and I think it would be great if everybody would bring something to the party.

Smolt is not limited to Fedora and openSUSE btw. Other distros are invited to participate as well. With that I think smolt is a great thing for Linux overall. Hopefully some time in the future it will help us to convince more hardware manufacturers that supporting Linux is important for them.

An interesting read is also http://www.linux.com/feature/118322

Ah – yes, of course you should not forget to actually use smolt and send up your hardware data when installing openSUSE – we can still climb up in the OS list on http://smolts.org/static/stats/stats.html 🙂