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Archive for June, 2010

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Buildservice development on 11.3

June 26th, 2010 by

The build service (and any other of openSUSE infrastructure software using RoR) is using rails 2.3.5, because we once decided to harmonize on the version of SLE11 SP1. Of course the latest version has less bugs (usually), but mixing RoR versions between different developers and deployment is a nightmare, so we had to decide on one.

Now comes the catch: 11.3 has rails 2.3.8 and as such you can’t develop the build service on factory/11.3 as is. But the good news, openSUSE:Tools has all the right versions, so you can add the repo (zypper ar -r http://r.opensu.se/openSUSE:Tools/f/r) and then install zypper in -f rubygem-rack-1.0.1 rubygem-activesupport-2_3-2.3.5

To make sure, the next zypper dup is not going to take it away, use zypper al rubygem-rack rubygem-activesupport-2_3

Posted in Build Service | 1 Comment »

Guest Blog: Rares Aioanei – PostgreSQL Review (openSUSE Flavor)

June 26th, 2010 by

Hi all, and welcome! Let’s see what’s new in the PostgreSQL world this week…

-Benoit Carpentier announced the release of Benetl v. 3.5; Benetl is a free ETL tool for files using PostgreSQL. You can find out more/download from www.benetl.net .

-Darren Duncan announced version 0.130.0 of the specification of the Muldis D language for ORDBs : “The largest change since last month’s spec version 0.129.1 is the elimination of the “$” sigil that was used semi-gratuitously to mark data-entities (variables, parameters, attributes, named expression nodes).  These are now regularly formatted as barewords instead, like most languages and SQL, but unlike Perl.

Another significant change is renaming a syntax shorthand from “>foo” to “=>foo” for clarity; it means “foo => foo” and has nothing to do with “greater-than”.

A few other improvements were made to the concrete grammars as well.”

-Robert Haas started a thread on hackers@ titled “deprecating =>, take two”. Here are some excerpts : “By consensus, we have removed the new-to-9.0 operator text[] => text[] and renamed the hstore => text[] operator.  (The current name is “%”, but there is some discussion of “%>”, some yet other name, or getting rid of it altogether; please comment on that thread if you wish to weigh in.)  This means that the only remaining => operator in CVS is the text => text operator which constructs a single-element hstore, which has been around since 8.2.  In lieu of providing a substitute operator, Tom Lane proposed that we simply encourage people to use the hstore(text, text) function which does the same thing:

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2010-06/msg00711.php

Per that email, and subsequent concurrence, here is a series of patches which does the following:

1. In CVS HEAD, document the hstore(text, text) function and adjust CREATE OPERATOR to throw a warning when => is used as an operator name, using the wording previously suggested by Tom.
2. In the back branches, add an hstore(text, text) function.  These branches already have a tconvert(text, text) function which does the same thing, but the consensus seemed to be that we do not want to go  back to the name tconvert() for this functionality, and that back-patching the new name was preferable.
3. In 8.4 and 8.3, also add hstore(text, text) to the documentation. 8.2 appears to have no contrib documentation.

Barring vigorous objections, I will apply these tomorrow so that we can consider deprecating => as an operator name in 9.1, for better compliance with the SQL standard.

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2010-05/msg01501.php”

The general consensus was that it’s a good idea, but for all the comments and proposals I recommend you read the whole thread.

-Josh Berkus announced the first draft of the PSQL 9.0 release announcement ( http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/90ReleaseDraft ) also asking for feedback from the release team; people stepped in with suggestions and you might wanna check the link above for details.

-Moving on to PostgreSQL Planet, we delve into the Weekly News, which isscarce this week, so except the usual local news and the list of submitted and rejected patches, there really is nothing more. If the aforementioned topics interest you, check out http://www.postgresql.org/community/weeklynews/pwn20100620 .

-Andrew Gierth writes about range aggregation with window functions, describing the problem as ” Assume you have a table of ranges expressed as “start” (s) and “end” (e) columns; we’ll assume that these are half-open intervals, i.e. each row represents the range [s,e). We also assume that the constraint (e > s) is enforced. The problem is to aggregate all overlapping ranges and produce a result with one row for each
disjoint collection of ranges.” His solution and explanations are to be found here : http://blog.rhodiumtoad.org.uk/2010/06/21/range-aggregation-with-window-functions/ .

-Leo Hsu and Regina Obe write about NOT IN NULL and the mathematical and even philosophical implications of NULL : ” I know a lot has been said about this beautiful value we affectionately call  NULL, which is neither here nor there and that manages to catch many of us off guard with its casual neither here nor thereness. Database analysts who are really just back seat mathematicians in disguise like to philosophize about the unknown and pat themselves on the back when they feel they have mastered the unknown better than any one else. Of course database spatial analysts, the worst kind of back seat mathematicians, like to talk not only about NULL but about EMPTY and compare notes with their brethren and write dissertations about what to do about something that is neither here nor there but is more known
than the unknown, but not quite as known as the empty string.” Read more here: http://www.postgresonline.com/journal/index.php?/archives/166-NOT-IN-NULL-Uniqueness-trickery.html#extended .

-Andrew Dunstan wrote a concentrated version of a thread in hackers@ regarding the use of enums : ” Some people don’t seem to get enumeration types. They think of them as C programmers tend to – as  symbolic names for integer values.

But quiche eaters like me have quite a different point of view. Languages like Ada have had first class  enumeration types for a long time (Ada is nearly 30 years old now). PostgreSQL’s enum types are more of this kind, an ordered set of labels. Some people naïvely expect that underneath they will be stored as  their ordinal position in the label set. In fact, for a technical reason, they are not. Rather, they are stored as globally (within the database) unique Oids. This is a bit counter-intuitive to some people, but really, it’s just an implementation detail.

The biggest thing that bugs people about PostgreSQL’s enums is that you can’t extend them, i.e. you can’t add more labels to the list. There is a workaround involving creating a new type, but it involves rewriting the tables that use them, which is unpleasant. Recently I have given some thought to that. I came up with scheme for a new enum type that would have been extensible. But as often happens, Tom Lane came up with a better idea. I’ve been working on fleshing that out, especially testing the possible performance impact, and I hope we can have something in 9.1. Being able to add labels to an enum set without table rewriting would make them much more usable.

Okay getting to the point, one of our clients asked us about a peculiar problem they had with a query, and the strange results they were getting. We admit this still manages to catch us off guard every once in a while.”

Well, that’s about it, folks. Take care and have a nice weekend.

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Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Guest Blog: Rares Aioanei – PostgreSQL Review (openSUSE Flavor)

Guest Blog: Rares Aioanei – Weekly Kernel Review (openSUSE Flavor)

June 26th, 2010 by

Hi everyone, and welcome to this week’s edition! As usual, new commits, patches and fixes are waiting, so let’s dive in!

-Karel Zak announced the release of util-linux-ng v 2.18-rc2, available at ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux-ng/v2.18/ ; a changelog is also available in the announcement.

-Matthieu Desnoyers announced Userspace RCU 0.4.6 with the following (short) announcement text : “I just released userspace rcu 0.4.6, which contains added ARMv7l support. It also includes the new make check target. I skipped 0.4.5 because I updated the README file after the release.”

-Jeffrey Merkey announced Open Cworthy 6-19-2010 x86_64 fixes with the following changes : “Fixed NWSCREEN pointer size mismatch on x86_64

Fixed build problems on x86_64
Fixed Memory Overwrite glibc message on Fedora 13 x86_64
Upgraded memset and memcpy functions for x86_64

Tested on a 4 processor opteron HP Proliant running Fedora Core 13 x86_64 and FC8 ia32”

-Jean Delvare pushed hwmon fixes for Linus, targetting 2.6.35, Jesse Barnes comitted  a fix for the PCI tree (for -rc3), Paul Mundt posted a pull request to Linus regarding sh updates for -rc4 and John W. Linville posted his pull request regarding the wireless tree (22.06.2010), with just one fix. As some of you may already know, Linus is in a vacation, so the number of git pull requests is smaller than usual.

-Matthieu Desnoyers made an announcement pertaining to the release of LTTng 0.217 for 2.6.34, describing the update as follows : “LTTng 0.218 adds a missing irq_desc export in kernel/irq/handle.c, which only affects sparse irq configurations. This omission only appeared in 0.217.”

-Henrik Rydberg announced the release of mtdev 1.0.1, explained as “mtdev – Multitouch Protocol Translation Library (MIT license)

The mtdev library is a kernel input event stream translator, which greatly simplifies multitouch handling in applications. The input events are simply routed through mtdev, which transforms them to a uniform stream of MT slot events. Software finger tracking is performed when needed, making all devices appear as if they had tracking capabilities. For further details and the source git tree, see

http://bitmath.org/code/mtdev/

The bulk of mtdev has been around since 2008, as part of the Multitouch X Driver project (http://bitmath.org/code/multitouch/). By releasing mtdev as a stand-alone package under the free MIT (X11) license, we hope to simplify the adoption of the MT event protocol in applications.”

-Rafael J. Wysocki posted the list of reported regressions from 2.6.34 related to 2.6.35-rc3, as well as a list of reported regressions between 2.6.33 and 2.6.34.

-The H Online published an article titled “Linus resolves to apply a strict policy over merging changes”,  with the following headline : “It would appear that Linus Torvalds has resolved to apply a strict policy of accepting only bug fix changes to the kernel after the merge window has closed. Torvalds has also stuck his oar into the debate over the Android suspend block API and made the situation even more complicated.”
You can read the whole thing here: http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Kernel-Log-Linus-resolves-to-apply-a-strict-policy-over-merging-changes-1026919.html

-Rusty Russell published few virtio fixes targetted at -rc3, Steven Rostedt posted a pull request for Ingo Molnar related to the tracing tree, and that’s about it for this week, a week with shorter news and no rc, nevertheless with some interesting points worth reading.

Have a great weekend! See y’all next week!

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Posted in Base System, Kernel | Comments Off on Guest Blog: Rares Aioanei – Weekly Kernel Review (openSUSE Flavor)

Let’s beat the drum for openSUSE conference 2010

June 23rd, 2010 by

Robert and myself visited most open source projects attending LinuxTag 2 weeks ago and invited them to come to the openSUSE Conference – be it as visitor, giving a presentation or doing a workshop. Feedback was all over the place positive. But feedback isn’t enough – we’ll do some follow up to make some of them participate and all of us should now promote the openSUSE Conference where possible.

Let’s spread the word about the openSUSE Conference and its motto “Collaboration across borders”, invite developers of other communities and other projects to join as a visitor or to give a presentation on a topic which affects all of us or lets do a workshop, hack session or just having fun. Call for papers is open till July 31 – so now is the time to shape the conference. Send in our proposal or idea to cfp@opensuse.org.

Robert and gnokii created some artwork for the openSUSE conference which is perfect to add it on web pages or to print out the posters to do some promotion in your area.

openSUSE Conference in short:

  • October 20-23 in Nürnberg, Germany
  • Free entrance
  • 4 days conference with 4 tracks plus hack sessions and workshops
  • Topics:
    • Technology and Upstream Development
    • Education and Science
    • Business
    • User and Home
  • Everything is possible – just send an email to cfp@opensuse.org

Posted in Artwork, Events, Marketing | Comments Off on Let’s beat the drum for openSUSE conference 2010

Call for voters … lvm2 / udev bugs

June 22nd, 2010 by

There’s a very annoying bug (even in RC1 and + ) actually which prevent you to install openSUSE 11.3 or destroy your favorite LVM layouts.

Can every admin using lvm2 on their computers add a vote to the
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=598193

We really need a solution, now ! Before RC2 hit the street …

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Distribution | 1 Comment »

Augmented reality in openSUSE 11.2

June 21st, 2010 by

In  post, the  vídeo:  Testing laboratory with the technology of augmented reality in the operating system openSUSE …

Posted in Distribution | Comments Off on Augmented reality in openSUSE 11.2

Guest Blog: Rares Aaioanei – Weekly Review of PostgreSQL Project with openSUSE Flavor

June 18th, 2010 by

Hello everyone, and welcome to this week’s edition of OpenSUSE PostgreSQL news!

-The first news for this week is Simon Riggs’ announcement of “CHAR(10)” a short conference on PostgreSQL high availability techniques, including :
“* Clustering
* High Availability
* Replication
as well as
* caching
* scalability
* synchronous replication
* cloud deployment
* parallel databases

Conference covers all the latest tech in PostgreSQL 9.0 and related projects, with 14 speakers from US, Europe and Japan.

Visit http://www.char10.org/ to book and/or pay online

Or contact char10@2ndQuadrant.com”

-As it seems this week’s news are scarce with tech news, and more announcements,  here goes Jason Dixon’s announcement of Surge, the Scalability and Performance Conference, “to be held in Baltimore on Sept 30 and Oct 1, 2010.  The event focuses on case studies that demonstrate successes (and failures) in Web applications and Internet architectures.

Robert Treat will be presenting one of his PostgreSQL talks at Surge, and our Keynote speakers include John Allspaw and Theo Schlossnagle.  We are currently accepting submissions for the Call For Papers through July 9th.  You can find more information, including our current list of speakers, online:

http://omniti.com/surge/2010

If you’ve been to Velocity, or wanted to but couldn’t afford it, then Surge is just what you’ve been waiting for.  For more information, including CFP, sponsorship of the event, or participating as an exhibitor, please contact us at surge@omniti.com.”

-Kevin Grittner announced on hackers@ the call for a reviewfest, announced as follows : “Folks, The PostgreSQL 9.1 Development Plan: http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_9.1_Development_Plan calls for a ReviewFest to run from the 15th of June (tomorrow) until the start of the first CommitFest for the 9.1 release.  The idea is that those with time available to contribute beyond what they can usefully contribute to getting 9.0 released can help provide feedback on patches submitted so far, to lighten the load of the CF proper when it starts.  I have agreed to manage this RF.

Of course, we also need reviewers.  I do want to emphasize that we *don’t* want this process to impact the release of 9.0; it is in the best interest of everyone that 9.0 is tested, stable, and released as soon as practicable.  Please think hard about whether there is some testing or review you could do to facilitate the 9.0 release effort, and only participate in this RF to the extent that it doesn’t detract from the other effort.

Also, in testing these patches, be alert to any problems in the *before* version — you may find 9.0 issues in the process of attempting to test these patches, and such issues, if found, should take priority.  If you find a possible 9.0 issue, please set aside efforts to review the patch until you have pursued the preexisting issue.

This is essentially being treated as an early start on the 2010-07 CF, so that is where the process will be managed: https://commitfest.postgresql.org/action/commitfest_view?id=6

Note that we don’t expect any commits for these patches to happen until after the 9.0 stable branch is created and committers are done with their 9.0 release efforts, most likely some time after the 2010-07 CF is officially in progress.  Also, we probably won’t be bumping many patches to “returned with feedback” status during the RF; the apparent work required would need to be more than could reasonably be expected to be completed for the CF.

Before signing up, please review these pages, to get an idea what’s involved:

http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Reviewing_a_Patch
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/RRReviewers

On the lighter side:

http://wiki.postgresql.org/images/5/58/11_eggyknap-patch-review.pdf

Please send me an email (without copying the list) if you are available to review; feel free to include any information that might be helpful in assigning you an appropriate patch.”

-Speaking of announcements, David E. Wheeler announced the launch of the PGXN development project : “PGXN, the PostgreSQL Extension Network, is modelled on CPAN, the Perl community’s archive of “all things Perl.” PGXN will provide four major pieces of infrastructure to the PostgreSQL community:

* An upload and distribution infrastructure for extension developers
* A centralized index and API of distribution metadata
* A website for searching extensions and perusing their documentation
* A command-line client for downloading, testing, and installing extensions

We have started the fundraising phase of the project now. Thanks to founding sponsors myYearbook.com  and PostgreSQL Experts, Inc., we’re already 2/5 of the way to our goal. Complete details of the project —  including the specification, implementation plan, and  fundraising FAQ — are on the site.”

-In the non-mailing-lists news, this week we have Simon Riggs’ article on planet.potgresql.org titled “Smoothing replication”, Bruce Momijan talks about “The magic of hot steaming replication”, which you may wanna read here – http://momjian.us/main/presentations/technical.html#hot_streaming.

-The main title of this week’s PostgreSQL Weekly News is the release of 9.0 beta2. In other news, pgnotifyd v. 0.1, PostgreSQL local and the usual list of patches.

-This is your latest PostgreSQL Weekly News … see ya next week!

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Guest Blog: Rares Aioanei – Weekly Kernel Review (openSUSE Flavor)

June 18th, 2010 by

Hello, and welcome! Looks like just after I finished my article, 2.6.35-rc3 was announced, so I will have to make the announcement in this week’s edition. Let’s begin.

-LWN.net’s Jonathan Corbet posted an article titled “Kernel Prepatch 2.6.35-rc3” , marking the announcement of the 3rd release candidate. Link is here : http://lwn.net/Articles/391864/rss .

-Michal Marek posted kbuild fixes, while Dominik Brodowski posted also some small fixes for PCMCIA (-rc3), David Miller has his usual dose of fixes for networking, Rafael J. Wysocki posted a resume fix for x86 (the pm tree) and Len Brown posted ACPI patches for -rc3.

-Jeffrey Merkey annonced the 11.06.2010 release of the Open Cworthy Linux libraries with the following changelog : “FIXES

Corrected pthread concurrency issues with ncurses and ncursesw.  These libraries are not pthread safe on linux 2.6.33 and later kernels and require mutexes for access to any of the screen refresh() calls or they will corrupt the video display removed vitriolic messages from the code and comments this version supports multiple update panels with pthread safe calls to ncurses libraries.  Supports VT100, VT220, XTerm, and Linux terminals.  Dumb terminal and ANSI still have some issues but these problems are ncurses related.  Sample IFCON program included.

This version was tested on a 4 processor Opteron HP Proliant Server.”

-Here comes, ladies and gentlemen, the offcial announcement of 2.6.35-rc3, made, of course,  by Linus Torvalds : “So I’ve been hardnosed now for a week – perhaps overly so – and hopefully that means that 2.6.35-rc3 will be better than -rc2 was. Not only do we have a number of regressions handled, we don’t have that silly memory corruptor that bit so many people with -rc2 and confused people with its many varied forms of bugs it seemed to take, depending on just what random memory it happened to corrupt.

One effect of being strict is that this is likely the smallest -rc3 we’ve had in a long long time. The diffstat summary line for the week
looks like this:

165 files changed, 1624 insertions(+), 859 deletions(-)
from 159 commits, and even then the biggest single change was due to moving some functions around in iwl-agn.c, rather than a lot of actual changed lines.

So give it a good testing.

Linus”

-Benjamin Herrenschmidt posted a small group of powerpc fixes for 2.6.35, Takashi Iwai has sound fixes for 2.6.35-rc4, Chris Mason has also some btrfs fixes,  Tomi Valkeinen has two fixes for the OMAP framebuffer driver, Paul E. McKenney  posted some RCU-lockdep splat fixes, and John W. Linville announced a series of fixes for the wireless tree : “Here is another passel of of fixes intended for 2.6.35. Included are some build warning fixes, a PCI identifier, a fix for premature IRQs during hostap initialization, a fix for a warning caused by failing to cancel a scan watchdog in iwlwifi, a fix for a null pointer dereference in iwlwifi, and a fix for a race condition in the same driver.  Also included is the MAINTAINERS change for the orphaning of the older Intel wireless drivers.  All but the last few warning fixes have spent some time in linux-next already.”

And…that’s it for this week! Have a sunny and enjoyable weekend!

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OpenOffice_org 3.2.1 bugfix release available for openSUSE

June 18th, 2010 by

I’m happy to announce updated OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:STABLE project and provide some useful fixes. The most critical one is the crash in non-Oxygen KDE4 themes that affects openSUSE-11.3 and Factory KDE4 users. Please, check also the older announce for more details about OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 release.

The openSUSE OOo team hopes that you will appreciate this update. We kindly ask you to report any other bugs so that we could fixed them in the future releases.

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice_org 3.2.1 bugfix release available for openSUSE

Hackweek V: mkdiststats

June 16th, 2010 by

When Coolo mentioned that he is looking into improving the rebuild time of Factory
I couldn’t resist to try the script he was using myself. It turned
out that the script was extremly slow, it took about 15 minutes for
the calculation on my computer. The script was originally written a
long time ago for the old autobuild with a much lower number of
packages and dependencies to take care of. The ad-hoc method used
for the ‘rebuild simulation’ just didn’t scale well. Hackweek was a
good opportunity to improve the performance and to add some more
options.
(more…)

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