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[gsoc] osc code cleanup – summary of week 4

June 19th, 2011 by

Hi,

here’s a small summary of the 4th (coding) week. I spent most of the
time with writing the RemoteFile classes and the BuildResult class
(+ testcases of course:) ).

TODO for this week:

  • improve RemoteFile classes
  • add APIInfo class:
    – resolve url-like parameters (api://foo/bar repo/arch)
    – raise an exception if required parameters are missing
    – initialize optional parameters with the config default
    – encapsulate “context-sensitivity” logic (sometimes parameters
    should be read from the working copy (like apiurl, project or
    package))

Marcus

Posted in Build Service, GSOC | Comments Off on [gsoc] osc code cleanup – summary of week 4

Aux armes citoyens! Et cetera

June 19th, 2011 by

This post is for the openSUSE Members!

Whatever your opinion, just vote

Freedom and Democracy

Well, I think I have to explain that french title…

Nah, let’s not bother and move on 😀

Part of democracy is that if you don’t cast your ballot you have no influence! So don’t let others decide for you, when you can act!

Members, we need your vote!

We’re almost 500 members, and this message is for you.
Our freedom to choose our direction and control our project as we wish works only when we vote. As in real world democracies, not voting gets you nowhere.

So why this reminder?

Because : I want you to vote!

  • First you read the stategy document (it’s really quickly done)
  • Think about it (Well, you have 10 days left for that)
  • Take a decision : Can you support that strategy?

    1. If 50% of your neurons +1 agree : vote yes
    2. if not : vote no
    3. if you really don’t know : vote I don’t know/care.
  • Connect to connect.opensuse.org and cast your vote.

What we need here is to send a strong signal that 99% of our members are alive and care about our project.
Otherwise, why would we bothered to become members, and keep that status, if not to infuence?

Ideas

Why not add this signature to your mails you use on ML and/or forums?

The openSUSE Strategy, I've casted my vote! And you? http://bit.ly/iB2Dzh

When?

Oh come on, I really hope that you’ve acted before reading this line 😉

Dead line is 29 June

Links related

[1] Aux armes citoyens : La Marseillaise
[2] etc the singing version by Serge Gainsbourg
[3] Cast your vote connect poll
[4] Article on news.o.o

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Posted in Board, Boosters, Distribution, Events, Marketing | Comments Off on Aux armes citoyens! Et cetera

ATI/AMD fglrx 8.861 Catalyst 11.6 available for openSUSE 11.2, 11.3, 11.4, Factory

June 17th, 2011 by

New version of catalyst 11.6 / fglrx 8.861 available

fglrx-8.861

Please refer to my previous article where all the installation procedure is explained.

  • Quick résumé :
  • There’s no full changelog about them, but Catalyst 11.6 installer (pdf)
  • Get the cheat-sheet 11.6 version
  • Kernel supported up to 3.0x version
  • Should be the latest version supporting 11.2
  • Wrong (to my point of view) create an xorg.conf file which is unneeded if you work with /etc/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf and have driver "fglrx&quot inside

Warning

Some instabilities could happen. In case of crash like no keyboard, mouse, and blackscreen on reboot. Try to shutdown properly your computer with the shutdown poweroff button (or remote ssh). On reboot, just add 3 at the end of grub line to restart in console mode.
Then with yast or zypper you can always remove the actual version and try the previous version available in the repos.

All credits to Sebastian Siebert (freespacer) : 11.6 article (German)

What about tumbleweed, factory?

Users have reported that version 8.861 of catalyst 11.6 compile correctly under Tumbleweed with 2.6.39 kernel and the driver is ready for kernel 3.0x, so until xorg change too much and then AMD support for the new version, installing the 11.4 version should work

For factory, I’ve build a repository (see previous article) that can be used, and fglrx build.
The new package are called SUSE121 & no more SUSEFACTORY.

Stats Numbers ?

Month Unique IP Number of visits Pages Hits Bandwidth
Jan 2011 2355 6411 19688 35263 16.63 GB
Feb 2011 2906 7719 26383 41142 22.37 GB
Mar 2011 8055 21157 228494 258613 59.13 GB
Apr 2011 10592 29129 418281 437416 76.87 GB
May 2011 12511 36816 608350 626901 104.91 GB

All proudly served by openSUSE powered server! zypper dup from 11.2 to 11.4 in 45minutes last month

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Posted in Base System, Distribution, Factory, Kernel, lizards.openSUSE.org, openSUSE 11.2, X.org | 10 Comments »

[gsoc] summary of week 3

June 10th, 2011 by

Hi,

here’s a small summary of the 3rd (coding) week. This week I spent
most of my time with developing the remote model classes. The goal
was to put most of the code into a base class from which all remote
models will be derived (if you’re interested how it works have a
look at it). So far we have classes for:

  • a remote project (RemoteProject – manages project metadata)
  • a remote package (RemotePackage – manages package metadata)
  • a request (Request)

TODO for this week:

  • add exception handling to the httprequest.py module
  • add a RemoteFile class which can be used to access a remote file
    like a buildlog, prjconf or a source file
  • add a BuildResult class:
    – get the build results for a project or package
    – get the buildlog of a package
    – get the binary/binaries from the api

Posted in Build Service, GSOC | Comments Off on [gsoc] summary of week 3

Bee Keeping: Catch a Swarm

June 6th, 2011 by

Quite off topic, but for those of you who are interested in bee keeping as I am I for once like to share a video that we were able to create on a sunny sunday morning recently:

It shows the activity of catching a bee swarm that has been going out of the bee hive before. Swarming is natural behaviour of bees for reproduction. In early summer the bees create a new queen and as it is emerging, the old queen is swarming out of the hive looking for a new home. One form of the old and meaningful circle of reproduction.

A bee swarm is a very impressive event, the clip might give you an impression. And as our seven year old son was brave enough to take this movie, I thought it is worth sharing. Bee keeping is a family virus 🙂

Tags: ,
Posted in Boosters, Events | 2 Comments »

[gsoc] summary of week 2

June 3rd, 2011 by

Hi,

here’s a small summary of the 2nd (coding) week. This
week I spent most of my time with working on an OO-style class
for doing http requests:

  • it’s possible to switch the http(s) implementation without touching any
    library code
  • supports response validation (if a schema was specified for the request)

Currently I’m still working on the “remote models”:

  • decided to use lxml.objectify:
  • – goal is to encapsulate the xml logic solely into the object itself
  • – example workflow:
    prj = RemoteProject(‘some_name’)
    prj.title = ‘dummy’
    prj.description = ‘foo bar’
    repo = prj.add_repository(name=’openSUSE_Factory’)
    repo.add_path(project=’openSUSE:Factory’, repository=’standard’)
    repo.add_arch(‘i586’)
    # change arch to x86_64
    repo.arch[0] = ‘x86_64’
    repo.save()

Minor stuff:

  • decided to use the “logging” module:
    this way we can easily add “debug” and “info” etc. messages and it’s up to
    the “client” which messages it wants to display (I’m not talking about
    the messages which are displayed when “osc up” is called or something like
    that)

Tags: ,
Posted in Build Service, GSOC | Comments Off on [gsoc] summary of week 2

Factory Progress 2011-06-03

June 3rd, 2011 by

This week saw the release of the first milestone of openSUSE 12.1 and work on factory is continuing, I’ve found the following changes important:

GNU C Library (glibc) 2.13

We’ve updated glibc from version 2.11 to 2.13 which brings many bug fixes and AFAIK no major breakages to packages. The package itself got cleaned up a little bit as well, so please report any problems.

GO Programming Language

Factory now contains a compiler for the GO language which is “is an expressive, concurrent, garbage collected systems programming language that is type safe and memory safe.”. More details about GO are available on the openSUSE Wiki, the devel project with additional packages is devel:languages:go.

Packaging: Source Processing

The usage of _service files in Factory confused many packagers and resulted in broken packages so that these will be deprecated. As a replacement, Adrian implemented now a new source processing method and asks for testers.

Packaging: Adding useful Provides to cups drivers

Vincent “updated python-cups to a new version, and it is now shipping
files to automatically add Provides tag to packages that are shipping
cups drivers.”. This allows desktop packages to install the right printer driver – or users to do it via zypper. Packages with cups drivers just need to add a “BuildRequires: python-cups”.

Open Build Service Improvement

The “My Work” view has been updated to better show packages that are in review state and need your review. I suggest everybody to check out the page and cleanup your list.

Multiple Buildroots with osc

If you like to use more than one build at the same time, there are several options like pointed out on the opensuse-packaging mailing list:

  • Use of the environment variable OSC_BUILD_ROOT to define a build root.
  • Editing of the osc config file ~/.oscrc and setting build-root to contain the variables %(repo), %(arch),  %(project) or %(package).

Correction on auto-legal build service check

Jürgen corrected my report from last week: He would love to see the checks for auto-legal moved and welcomes any help.

Thanks

Thanks for the words of encouragement to my first blog post. I’ll try to continue this series. If there’s anything you think should be added to it, please contact me via email at aj at opensuse dot org.

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Posted in Base System, Distribution, Factory | 2 Comments »

Some updates on the Banshee repositories…

May 31st, 2011 by

Sometime ago Gabriel asked me if I could give him help with the Banshee repositories for openSUSE; This repositories have many users hanging around and some packages are enabled on other projects, which makes them somehow sensible to deep changes.

Today I’ve pushed to openSUSE:Factory Banshee 2.0.1 (latest stable release) and a few packages which live in the Banshee repository. I’ve also submitted a deletion request to ipod-sharp which is no longer maintained and was replaced in the past for libgpod.

I’ve fixed the pending issues I’ve seen on the Banshee repository and Banshee 2.0.1 and disabled SLE 11 builds (not requiring all the dependencies). The repository serves now the following platforms (banshee and banshee-community-extensions):
* SLE 11 SP1;
* openSUSE 11.3;
* openSUSE 11.4;
* openSUSE Factory;
* openSUSE Tumbleweed (new).

On Banshee:Unstable (which should hold the unstable releases, currently 2.1.0) I’ll be introducing some changes during the next days which will feature:
* Package being renamed to ‘banshee’, thus dropping the current banshee-1;
* Migration to pkgconfig() calls for >= 1130;
* Packages banshee and banshee-core get merged into banshee (currently banshee had only 4 documentation files);
*  New sub-package banshee-common to hold all the architecture independent files (ex: text files, icons, etc);
* A few cleanups on the spec file for unsupported platforms (SLE11 and SLE11SP1 do not meet the requirements for this version and superior).

Once this is implemented and tested I will look into Banshee:Alpha and see the best way to start building daily/weekly snapshots using the OBS magic available and some magic tricks hidden in Dimstar’s sleeve which kindly accepted my request to give me a hand on such evil task.

In the future, on the next stable release (2.2.0), I’ll move the changes from Banshee:Unstable to Banshee and hopefully change the development repository to Banshee (as if Factory has the latest stable release it makes no sense in having Banshee’s development repository in Banshee:Unstable) and synch all at once.

Users subscribed to Banshee:Unstable repository might see some turbulence during the next days, while users subscribing now through the 1-Click installer will already be installing Banshee with the changes described above.

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Posted in Desktop, Distribution, Factory, GNOME, Mono, Packaging, Sound | 4 Comments »

[gsoc] summary of week 1

May 28th, 2011 by

Hi,

this is a short summary of this week:

  • published proposal of the new user interface:
    we got some really constructive feedback (see thread)

The next task is to create model classes which represent a project, package, request etc.
This way we can modify the package metadata (for instance) in a object orientated manner. Our plan
is to write tests first and afterwards we start with the implementation (TDD).

Posted in GSOC | Comments Off on [gsoc] summary of week 1

Factory Progress

May 27th, 2011 by

A lot of things are happening in our Factory distribution that will be released in November 2011 as openSUSE 12.1 and I’d like to point out a few things from the last few weeks that users and developers of factory shouldn’t miss.

Roadmap openSUSE 12.1

Stephan “Coolo” Kulow has updated the openSUSE 12.1 Roadmap, the next milestone is Milestone 1 which is delayed and targeted now for release on Tuesday, 30th May. The next paragraphs highlight some of the updates for this versions.

GCC 4.6

The GNU Compiler Collection has been updated to version 4.6, the list of  changes includes the following new warning that will be visible while compiling packages for openSUSE Factory:

  • “New -Wunused-but-set-variable and -Wunused-but-set-parameter warnings were added for C, C++, Objective-C and Objective-C++. These warnings diagnose variables respective parameters which are only set in the code and never otherwise used. Usually such variables are useless and often even the value assigned to them is computed needlessly, sometimes expensively. The -Wunused-but-set-variable warning is enabled by default by -Wall flag and -Wunused-but-set-parameter by -Wall -Wextra flags.”

Some packages have been failing by the new GCC due to new warnings and new optimizations and most have been fixed already but please double check that your packages are building and running fine.

RPM 4.9

Michael Schröder announced RPM 4.9 for Factory. He explains the main packager visible changes as:

“Besides some bug fixes and an update to a newer BerkeleyDB
library rpm-4.9.0 contains plugin architecture for dependency
generation. In older rpms, the internal dependency generator
was pretty much hardcoded in C, so we always used the old
external one to generate dependencies. With rpm-4.9.0, the
internal generator has become flexible enough so that we
can use it.

This means for you, that rpm will no longer use the %__find_provides and %__find_requires macros. Some packages redefined those macros to be able to filter the generated dependencies.
This will no longer work in rpm-4.9.0. Instead, support for
dependency filtering was added to rpm…”

GNOME 3

GNOME 3 has now hit Factory as well and Vincent Untz explained how to fix failures due to the large push.

Linux Kernel 2.6.39

This update was a “boring” update – nothing broke AFAIK ;), so I hope it’s a solid version. Users will benefit from the new features in it. 2.6.39 is the first kernel without the Big Kernel Lock at all!

Packaging Changes

Besides new software, also new ways of handling it get introduced. The following catched my eyes:

Rpmlint update

Ludwig Nussel updated rpmlint to version 1.2 and explained the new warnings about packaging of rpm packages – and what to do about them.

Changing the process of Factory submissions with the Open Build Service

Now with every submission to Factory scripts are run automatically that do two different reviews before the package goes to human check-in review:

  • The “legal-auto” review checks the updated package for changes in licenses.
  • The “factory-auto” review checks that the updated package builds actually in the devel project – and if not, rejects it.

The “legal-auto” review has quite a long backlog at the moment and Jürgen is working on moving some of the checks to rpmlint or osc checks – so that the packager notices and fixes them before submission to Factory.

Also, you can now submit packages to Factory even if you are not the maintainer of the package but in this case the maintainer (packager) gets a review request to review that the package really can go to factory and thus a plea to packagers to handle their review requests.

openSUSE Conference

The openSUSE Conference is this year co-located with the SUSE Labs conference. Join us to present and discuss also Factory related topics. The Call for papers is open now!

I’m interested on feedback on this article – should I start a series?

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Posted in Distribution, Factory | 11 Comments »

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