Home Home
Sign up | Login

Deprecation notice: openSUSE Lizards user blog platform is deprecated, and will remain read only for the time being. Learn more...

Sascha Manns

Author Archive

« Older Entries

New Package for packager: whohas

November 16th, 2010 by

Sometimes a packager asked himself, who has already packaged this Software? Maybe the Packagingfiles can help me to fix a error? Or maybe an other packager has a written a patch that i can use for my situation?
Philipp L. Wesche knows this situation, and he wrote a program, that allows to view in other Distributions and Repositories, who has a specific Software packaged. The commandline tool “whohas” supports Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, openSUSE, Slackware, linuxpackages.net, Source Mage, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Fink, MacPorts and Cygwin. Philipp wrote this tool in Perl and was designed to help package maintainers find ebuilds, pkgbuilds and similar package definitions to learn from.

The Tutorial from the Autor can found at: http://www.philippwesche.org/200811/whohas/intro.html

You can download this tool on: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:/Factory:/Contrib

Tags: , ,
Posted in Build Service, Packaging | 1 Comment »

openSUSE medical team releases stable version 0.0.6

November 11th, 2010 by

Some month our team was busy, and so you hasn’t heard about us. But we are alive. We are pleased to announce our new openSUSE Distribution who still medical needs.

Whats happened? In the beginning of the project we tried to package some stuff just as beginning. Then we published 2 pre versions, but there we found some things to fix. We have worked hard for you, and now we are pleased to announce openSUSE medical version 0.0.6 with fresh packaged packages.

What’s new?

FreeMedForms (FMF) is a multi-platform software (available on MacOS, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows), multilingual, free and open source, released under the new BSD license.
FreeMedForms is developed by medical doctors and is mainly intended for health professionals. Currently, the suite is under development. It is available only for testing purposes. The main objective of FreeMedForms is to manage the electronic medical records based on your medical practice or the practice of clinical research groups. Your records will be fully customizable through the use of plugins. Some parts of the suite are already operational and usable in practice as the prescriber FreeDiams (formerly DrugsInteractions). If you like to use FreeMedForms, you have to login yourself in the application as user “admin” with password “admin”.

FreeDiams prescriber is the result of FreeMedForms prescriber plugins built into a standalone application.
FreeDiams is a multi-platform (MacOS, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows), free and open source released under the GPLv3 license. It is developed by medical doctors and is intended for use by these same professionals. It can be used alone to prescribe and / or test drug interactions within a prescription. It can be linked to any application thanks to its command line parameters. FreeDiams can use several drugs database. Are currently available: Drugs database FDA_USA, the french AFSSAPS drugs database, the Canadian drugs databases (HCDPD), and the South African (SAEPI) are available. Drugs interactions calculation is available for all these drugs databases beginning with the upcoming v0.5.0.

The GNUmed project builds free, liberated open source Electronic Medical Record software in multiple languages to assist and improve longitudinal care (specifically in ambulatory settings, i.e. multi-professional practices and clinics). It is made available at no charge and is capable of running on GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. It is developed by a handful of medical doctors and programmers from all over the world. It can be useful to anyone documenting the health of patients including, but not limited to, doctors, physical therapists, occupational therapists, acupuncturists, nurses, psychologists …

TEMPO is open source software for 3D visualization of brain electrical activity. TEMPO accepts EEG file in standard EDF format and creates animated sequence of topographic maps. Topographic maps are generated over 3D head model and user is able to navigate around head and examine maps from different viewpoints. Most mapping parameters are adjustable through appropriate graphical user interface controls. Also, individual topographic maps could be saved in PNG format for future examination or publishing.

But the openSUSE medical Distribution has more inside the DVD. The openSUSE medical team has hand-selected which package to add into the Distribution.

So we can say, that we have a good solution for Doctors, Students, Clinics and other people who trying to spread the word about Open Source.

We also have added a complete openOffice.org package, multimedia-codecs and multimediaplayer.  So you can play with different inputformats.  And the last addition was the KMyMoney Package, so you can know how to make money 🙂

Thanks a lot on this time for the Upstream Coder: Eric Maeker from France,  Sebastian Siebert from Germany and the TEMPO Team.

Technically: From this version on we have fixed the *.desktop files. Now all medical desktop applications can found under Menu/Education/Science/. So it is easier for our users to find the needed software. Tomorrow i’ll starting to create a list of “Must have” applications for our project. So every Packager can choose the the product he like to package. But we need more Packagers in our team.  So if you know the BuildService and don’t know what should you do, just join the team.

But, where you can get this nice stuff?

You can get it there: http://susegallery.com/a/NETBqB/opensuse-medicalos11332bitkde4

How can you see our good Team?

You can visit our teampage: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Medical_team The site explains how you can be a part of our Mailinglist or Project.

All the other things you can find in our Portalpage: http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Medical There you can find all important Links, and how to file a Bug or how to drop a openFATE Entry.

The Horizon: We can see good clouds on the horizon. ATM our team plans a collaboration between openSUSE and Fedora and Debian. The goal is that we can create new packages and share the package and all needed Informations and Experiences with other medical teams on the screen. We hope to arrange a shared Guideline for packaging medical Software and find new Ideas and Enhencements for the medical Community. Thats our Part for “Collaboration across Borders”.

Now enjoy your openSUSE medical.

Tags:
Posted in Derivative | Comments Off on openSUSE medical team releases stable version 0.0.6

Guest Blog: Rares Aioanei – Kernel Weekly Review with openSUSE Flavor

July 3rd, 2010 by

Hello, and be welcome to the 12th edition of the Weekly Kernel News!

-The first news for this week is Jan Kara’s pull request fot linux-fs (ext2 and ext3 in our case) aimed at -rc4, Frederic Weisbecker posting his pull request for the perf tree and Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo’s pull request for perf/core targetted at 2.6.36 .

-Sticking to the pull requests, we have also Dmitry Torokhov posting input updates for 2.6.35-rc1, Trond Myklebust with NFS client improvements, Tejun Heo with two fixes for the percpu tree and David Miller with networking fixes , quite a few of them, since they accumulated during Linus’ vacation, as the author explains.

-Neil Brown posted a pull request related to md, targetted @ 2.6.35, containing  various bugfixes, Thomas Gleixner posted various fixes for the core, x86, timer, scheduler, genirq and perf trees targetting also 2.6.35, Jens Axboe also has a pull request for  the block/IO subsystem (targetting -rc*) and Steven Rostedt posted a pull request for the tracing/perf/core tree aimed at 2.6.36 .

-Jeffrey Merkey posted an announcement of MDB Merkey’s Kernel Debugger x86_64 2.6.34 06-28-2010,  with the following summary : “http://merkeydebugger.googlecode.com/files/mdb-2.6.34-x86_64-06-28-2010.patch

This is the first full x86_64 version of MDB.  This implementation of MDB also uses the x86_64 and IA32 versions of the GDB disassmbler instead of the older IA32 disassembler from previous version of MDB.  bfd has been integrated into MDB which will support easy porting of MDB to other processor types.  I used the kdb disassembler GDB source base and added all the MDB features and layout (intel style).  This version also supports 8086 disassembly and IA32.  There is a short list of items left on the list and I will update these as I have more time to work on MDB.” Following is a list of fixes and todo’s, go check them out if interested.

-Junio C Hamano announced the release of git 1.7.11, which can be downloaded at http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/ , and that is where one can also find RPM packages. The fixes list is too long to be posted here, but you can always check it out via web.

-Jeffrey Merkey comes back with the release of his MDB (see above) dated 29.06.2010,  introducing a few fixes :
“- fixed DS and W commands to output qwords in stack argument dump
– add find_extend_vma and follow_page to exported symbols
– add ds: and es: segment lookups in disassembler
– enable .TM flag to toggle memory read between physical and user space read/write for addresses < PAGE_OFFSET”

-Tony Lindgren asks Linus for the usual pull, in this case pertaining to omap fixes for 2.6.35-rc3, OpenSUSE’s own Greg Kroah Hartman posted a series of patches related to USB, staging and serial for 2.6.35-git, Dave Airlie posted fixes for drm, agp and fb, all part of the drm tree, John W. Linville posted some wireless fixes for 2.6.35 and Wim Van Sebroeck posted a pull request for the watchdog tree that introduces a  documentation fixi (for -rc3).

-Karel Zak announces the release of util-linux-ng v2.18 (stable) which you can download from the usual location : ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux-ng/v2.18/ .

-Junio C Hamano announced git 1.7.2.rc1 , available at the same URL as above, make sure you check it out or just update your distro.

-The vhost-net tree was updated by a pull request by Michael S. Tsirkin, asking to merge the tree for 2.6.35, while Jeff Garzik updated the libata tree with a few fixes and Paul McKenney updated the rcu tree with a revert commit, while Thomas Gleixner posted a pull request for the sched tree.

-Greg Kroah Hartman started a series of 149 patches as part of the review cycle of 2.6.32.16 : “This is the start of the stable review cycle for the 2.6.32.16 release. There are 149 patches in this series, all will be posted as a response to this one.  If anyone has any issues with these being applied, please let me know.  If anyone is a maintainer of the proper subsystem, and wants to add a Signed-off-by: line to the patch, please respond with it.

Responses should be made by Sat, July 3, 17:00:00 UTC UTC. Anything received after that time might be too late.

The whole patch series can be found in one patch at: kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/stable-review/patch-2.6.32.16-rc1.gz and the diffstat can be found below.” Greg also started posting the same series of patches, this time for 2.6.27.48, 2.6.33.6, 2.6.34.1 .

That’s all, folks! Have a sunny weekend!

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

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

July 3rd, 2010 by

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week’s PostgreSQL News, issue 130!

-Josh Berkus made an official announcement related to 7.4 and 8.0 becoming EOS (End-Of-Support) : “The next bugfix or security update release for PostgreSQL versions 7.4 and 8.0 will be the last updates for those versions. This is in accord with the PostgreSQL Release Support Policy announced in December. We urge users still using 7.4 or 8.0 in production to begin planning migration to newer versions immediately.

Version 8.1 will stop being updated in November, so users of version 8.1 should be planning an upgrade this year.

While we regret the inconvenience to some PostgreSQL users, the community has limited resources and time spend maintaining old versions of PostgreSQL reduces the time we have to develop new features.  Users who are unable to upgrade their PostgreSQL installations will need to make their own plans for backporting patches, possibly with the help of a commercial PostgreSQL support provider.”

-Steve Singer announced the release of Slony-I 2.0.4 , which introduces  some fixes to issues introduced by 2.0.3 . http://www.slony.info is the address you need 🙂

-Josh Berkus wrote on hackers@, proposing that the release date of beta3 will be July the 8th, in order to give American contributors enough time to recover after their national holiday. After discussions and oppinion exchanges, we should expect the release of the 3rd beta in the first half of July.

-In Planet PostgreSQL we have Bruce Momijan talking about PostgreSQL 9.0 Illustrated, which is a easier way to understand what to expect in the new release, so if you feel confused by the release notes, use this link : http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Illustrated_9_0

-Leo Hsu and Regina Obe talk about importing data into PostgreSQL using OpenOffice Base 3.2; look it up here : http://www.postgresonline.com/journal/index.php?/archives/167-Importing-data-into PostgreSQL-using-Open-Office-Base-3.2.html#extended .  Since the authors’ native tongue isn’t English, you may encounter some language-related flaws, but other than that, it’s an article worth reading. 🙂

-Finally, we try to summarise the PostgreSQL Weekly News (the official news, that is) :

-This week sees the release of Benetl v3.5, an ETL tool for files using PostgreSQL.
-Muldis-D 0.130.0, a specification for an object-relational language intended to run atop, among other systems, PostgreSQL, is released.
-Except these news, and the ones we’ve already talked about, this week is again kinda poor in news. For the usual list of patches, accepted, rejected and pending, check the weekly news.

That’s it for me, see you next week with hopefully more interesting news!

Tags: ,
Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Guest Blog: Rares Aioanei – Weekly Review of PostgreSQL with openSUSE Flavor

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.

Tags: ,
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!

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

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!

Tags:
Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Guest Blog: Rares Aaioanei – Weekly Review of PostgreSQL Project with openSUSE Flavor

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!

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

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

June 11th, 2010 by

Guest Blog from Rares Aioanei

Welcome to another edition of openSUSE’s kernel weekly news!
This week sees the launch of 2.6.35-rc2, plus other goodies, so let’s dive into it!

-Takashi Iwai pushed sound fixes for -rc2, mainly for the USB audio stack, v4l/dvb fixes were pushed by Mauro Carvalho Chehab (-rc1), Len Brown has patches for the SFI and ACPI trees targetting -rc1 and openSUSE’s Greg Kroah-Hartman also posted multiple fixes for USB, driver-core, staging and TTY and serial targetting 2.6.35-git.

-Grant Likely has fixes for the sparc architecture : “This patch moves SPARC architecture specific data members out of struct of_device and into the pdev_archdata structure. The reason for this change is to unify the struct of_device definition amongst all the architectures.  It also remvoes the .sysdata, .slot, .portid and .clock_freq properties because they aren’t actually used by anything.

A subsequent patch will replace struct of_device entirely with struct platform_device and the of_platform support code will share common routines with the platform bus (but the bus instances themselves can remain separate).

This patch also adds ‘struct resources *resource’ and num_resources to match the fields defined in struct platform_device.  After this change, ‘struct platform_device’ can be used as a drop-in replacement for ‘struct of_platform’.

This change is in preparation for merging the of_platform_bus_type with the platform_bus_type.”

-Al Viro posted fixes for the vfs tree targetting -rc2, while Ryusuke Konishi and David Miller posted patches for the nilfs2 and networking trees, respectively. Alex Elder updated the XFS tree  for -rc2, Jens Axboe updated block for -rc1, Michal Simek updated the arch/microblaze tree with fixes targetting 2.6.35-rc3 and Jeff Garzik updated the libata tree with some quirk fixes.

-Jeffrey Merkey announced Merkey’s Kernel Debugger 2.6.34 :  “Have not tested the APIC IPI calls yet but should work.  Let me know if there are problems.  I disable the hw_breakpoints interface with MDB is loaded because it is not well designed and to be honest, virtualizing DR6 and trying to handle these types of events outside of a debugger core causes a lot of problems.  Has support for x86_64 and works under it however, I have not completed the dissassembler with the newer x86_64 instructions, so some of them do not display properly and do not detect the 64 bit flag, but will finish this at a later date as I need it.  I do most of my work on 32 bit anyway and will work on it as I have time.  Someone else is welcome to add it and send me back the changes since this is the only thing missing for full
x86_64 features — finished everything else.”

-Mr. Torvalds, Linus Torvalds, announced the release of 2.6.35-rc2 thusly :
“So -rc2 is out there, and hopefully fixes way more problems than it introduces. I’m slightly unhappy with its size – admittedly it’s not nearly as big as rc2 was the last release cycle, but that was an unusually big -rc2. And I really hoped for a calmer release cycle this time.

In fact, for once I’m going to enforce -rc3 being sane, because the  upcoming week is the last week of school for my kids. And when the kids get out of school, I’m going be offline for a while. And as a result, I _really_ don’t want to pull anything even half-way scary in the next week for -rc3.

So any pull requests had better be obvious fixes only, and this time I’m not going to let things slide.

Anyway, the biggest patches in -rc2 are some staging drivers (70% of the patch is just that), so while it’s still biggish, at least most of it is clearly staging.

Of the remaining non-staging 30%, half of _that_ is just the regular drivers (drm: i915 and radeon, along with some dvb updates is a noticeable chunk), with a new Core i7 EDAC driver that I had gotten a pull request for before -rc1, but just hadn’t had the energy to pull until -rc2 (same goes for a build system update – the pull request predated -rc1).

And some late powerpc changes that I do _not_ think predated -rc1. Tssk.  I’m really not going to let things like that slide next -rc, as mentioned.

But the most important part is obviously the regression fixes, which tend to be small and not show up much in the patch statistics. A number of reverts, a number of fixes, hopefully things are all rosy.

And it really isn’t _that_ bad – the -rc2 shortlog is almost never small  enough to be worth posting on the mailing list, but I think it’s doable this time, even if it’s borderline. So ShortLog appended if people care
about the (summary of) details.

Linus ”

-Dave Airlie updated the drm tree with some fixes as he explains in his mail : “3 regressions fixes, one radeon loading on IGP, one i865 loading, one and  an evergreen userspace interaction workaround.

It adds hwmon support for a temperature sensor on r600 cards, later PM patches were build on this and Alex had tested them in one so I didn’t want to cherry-pick around it. Also its useful to report the gpu temp to check if power management is helping cooling it down.”

-Stefan Richter came up with a single update/fix for Firewire, Martin Schwidefsky posted three bug fixes and a defconfig update for the s390 architecture targetting-rc2, Tejun Heo has also some fixes, this time for sched/core and Frederic Weisbecker updated the perf and tracing trees with various fixes.

-Karel Zak of Redhat announces util-linux-ng version 2.18-rc1, posting also the release notes, stating the updates, fixes and improvements specific to this version.

-Artem Bityutskiy posted a pull request for the UBI tree targetting -rc3, David Miller pushed another series of networking updates, Jesse Barnes updated the PCI tree, while Takashi Iwai targeted -rc3 with updates to the sound tree; other updates include perf (Ingo Molnar), perf for 2.6.36 (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo) and block/io (Jens Axboe).

-Rafael Wysocki posted a list of reported regressions from 2.6.33.4 (related to-rc2-git2), comprised of 15 regressions, from which 13 are pending and 10 are unresolved.

-Thomas Gleixner announced 2.6.33.5-rt23, a new kernel from the preempt-rt series – changelog to be found in the lkml archive.

-Avi Kivity has updates for the kvm tree targetted at -rc2, Jeff Garzik updated the libata tree with some fixes, Sage Weil, as usual, updated the ceph tree (for -rc3) and Steven Rostedt updated the perf tree (2.6.35).

That would be it for this week, take care and enjoy your weekend!

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

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

June 11th, 2010 by

Guest Blog from Rares Aioanei

Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s Weekly PostgreSQL News, served openSUSE-style!

-As usual, we start with some insight of this week’s mailing list events, then we will focus on the Planet PostgreSQL posts and news.

-Jon Schewe posted on perform@ an interesting comparison of various filesystems under Linux (OpenSUSE64) , how do they perform and under what circumstances. I ain’t gonna spoil
it for you, so go grab a read.

-Peter Eisentraut, on hackers@, posted a quite interesting idea titled Functional dependencies and GROUP BY : “I have developed a patch that partially implements the “functional dependency” feature that allows some columns to be omitted from the GROUP BY clause if it can be shown that the columns are functionally dependent on the columns in the group by clause and therefore guaranteed to be unique per group.  The full functional dependency deduction rules are pretty big and arcane, so I concentrated on getting a useful subset working.  In particular:

* When grouping by primary key, the other columns can be omitted, e.g.,

* CREATE TABLE tab1 (a int PRIMARY KEY, b int);

* SELECT a, b FROM tab1 GROUP BY a;

This is frequently requested by MySQL converts (and possibly others).

Also, when a column is compared with a constant, it can appear ungrouped:

SELECT x, y FROM tab2 WHERE y = 5 GROUP BY x;

For lack of a better idea, I have made it so that merge-joinable operators qualify as equality operators.  Better ideas welcome.

Other rules could be added over time (but I’m current not planning to work on that myself).

At this point, this patch could use some review and testing with unusual queries that break my implementation. 😉 ”

-This week, The San Francisco Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup Group will have a meeting on June the 15th; here are the details : http://postgresql.meetup.com/1/calendar/13675701/

-In Planet-related news, Leo Hsu and Regina Obe write about what’s new in PostgreSQL 9.0, since the 2nd beta was released this week :  “PostgreSQL 9.0 beta 2 just got released this week. We may see another beta before 9.0 is finally released, but it looks like PostgreSQL 9.0 will be here probably sometime this month. Robert Treat has a great slide presentation showcasing all the new features. The slide share for those on Robert Treat’s slide share page.  We’ll list the key ones with our favorites at the top:
Our favorites
The window function functionality has been enhanced to support ROWS PRECEDING and FOLLOWING. Recall we discussed this in Running totals and sums using PostgreSQL 8.4 a hack for getting around the lack of ROWS x PRECEDING and FOLLOWING.
No more need for that. This changes our comparison we did Window Functions Comparison Between PostgreSQL 8.4, SQL Server 2008, Oracle, IBM DB2. Now the syntax is inching even closer to Oracle’s window functionality, far superior to SQL Server 2005/2008, and about on par with IBM DB2. We’ll do updated compare late this month or early next month. Depesz has an example of this in Waiting for 9.0 – extended frames for window functions Ordered Aggregates.
This is extremely useful for spatial aggregates and ARRAY_AGG, STRING_AGG, and medians where you care about the order of the aggregation. Will have to give it a try. For example if you are building a linestring using ST_MakeLine, a hack you normally do would be to order your dataset a certain way and then run ST_MakeLine. This will allow you to do ST_MakeLine(pt_geom ORDER BY track_time) or ARRAY_AGG(student ORDER BY score) This is very very cool. Depesz has some examples of ordered aggregates. Join removal — this is a feature that will remove joins from the execution plans where they are not needed. For example
* where you have a left join that doesn’t appear in a where or as a column in select. This is important for people like us that rely on views to allow less skilled users to be able to write meaningful queries without knowing too much about
* joins or creating ad-hoc query tools that allow users to pick from multiple tables. Check out Robert Haas why join removal is cool for more use cases. GRANT/REVOKE ON ALL object IN SCHEMA and ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES. This is just a much simpler user-friendly way of applying permissions. I can’t tell you how many times we get beat up by MySQL users who find the PostgreSQL security management tricky and tedious to get right. Of course you can count on Depesz to have an example of this too Waiting  for 9.0 – GRANT ALL”

-From the PostgreSQL Weekly News from the 6th of June we find out some local news, such as the Italian Conference for Free Software (Cagliari, Sardinia) and the talks, sessions and workshops related to our fav database, we also find news about the release of ChronicDB v2.2.2, plus the usual patchlist.

There you go, that’s all for this week. Enjoy. 🙂

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

« Older Entries