Search Results: "Martin Pitt"

When writing system integration tests it often happens that I want to mount some tmpfses over directories like /etc/postgresql/ or /home, and run the whole script with an unshared mount namespace so that (1) it does not interfere with the real system, and (2) is guaranteed to clean up after itself (unmounting etc.) after it ends in any possible way (including SIGKILL, which breaks usual cleanup methods like trap , finally , def tearDown() , atexit() and so on). In gvfs and postgresql-common s tests, which both have been around for a while, I prepare a set of shell commands in a variable and pipe that into unshare -m sh, but that has some major problems: It doesn t scale well to large programs, looks rather ugly, breaks syntax highlighting in editors, and it destroys the real stdin, so you cannot e. g. call a bash -i in your test for interactively debugging a failed test. I just changed postgresql-common s test runner to use unshare/tmpfses as well, and needed a better approach. What I eventually figured out preserves stdin, $0, and $@, and still looks like a normal script (i. e. not just a single big string). It still looks a bit hackish, but I can live with that:

#!/bin/sh
set -e
# call ourselves through unshare in a way that keeps normal stdin, $0, and CLI args
unshare -uim sh -- -c " tail -n +7 $0 " "$0" "$@"
exit $?
# unshared program starts here
set -e
echo "args: $@"
echo "mounting tmpfs"
mount -n -t tmpfs tmpfs /etc
grep /etc /proc/mounts
echo "done"

As Unix/Linux shebang parsing is rather limited, I didn t find a way to do something like

#!/usr/bin/env unshare -m sh

If anyone knows a trick which avoids the tail -n +7 hack and having to pay attention to passing around $@ , I d appreciate a comment how to simplify this.

With python-dbusmock you can provide mocks for arbitrary D-BUS services for your test suites or if you want to reproduce a bug. However, when writing actual tests for gnome-settings-daemon etc. I noticed that it is rather cumbersome to always have to set up the skeleton of common services such as UPower. python-dbusmock 0.2 now introduces the concept of templates which provide those skeletons for common standard services so that your code only needs to set up the particular properties and specific D-BUS objects that you need. These templates can be parameterized for common customizations, and they can provide additional convenience methods on the org.freedesktop.DBus.Mock interface to provide more abstract functionality like add a battery . So if you want to pretend you have one AC and a half-charged battery, you can now simply do

  def setUp(self):
     (self.p_mock, self.obj_upower) = self.spawn_server_template('upower',  )
  def test_ac_bat(self):
     self.obj_upower.AddAC('mock_AC', 'Mock AC')
     self.obj_upower.AddChargingBattery('mock_BAT', 'Mock Battery', 50.0, 1200)

Or, if your code is not in Python, use the CLI/D-BUS interface, like in shell:

  # start a fake system bus
  eval  dbus-launch 
  export DBUS_SYSTEM_BUS_ADDRESS=$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
  # start mock upower on the fake bus
  python3 -m dbusmock --template upower &
  # add devices
  gdbus call --system -d org.freedesktop.UPower -o /org/freedesktop/UPower \
      -m org.freedesktop.DBus.Mock.AddAC mock_ac 'Mock AC'
  gdbus call --system -d org.freedesktop.UPower -o /org/freedesktop/UPower \
      -m org.freedesktop.DBus.Mock.AddChargingBattery mock_bat 'Mock Bat' 50.0 1200

In both cases upower --dump or gnome-power-statistics will show you the expected devices (of course you need to run that within the environment of the fake $DBUS_SYSTEM_BUS_ADDRESS, or run the mock on the real system bus as root). Iftikhar Ahmad contributed a template for NetworkManager, which allows you to easily set up ethernet and wifi devices and wifi access points. See pydoc3 dbusmock.templates.networkmanager for details and the test cases for how this looks like in practice. I just released python-dbusmock 0.2.1 and uploaded the new version to Debian experimental. I will sync it into Ubuntu Raring in a few hours.

Hello World. This is the follow-up to the last 2 updates on the state of apport in Debian.

A lot has changed since the last update on Apport. Currently, in Experimental, we have version 2.6.1-2. With this version, and going forward, there will be no hacks to make it work for Debian. Thanks to Martin Pitt, with his assistance, Apport now has a very basic crashdb in place for Debian. The Debian crashdb provides Apport the interface to interact with the Debian BTS.

This change is already upstream as part of the 2.6.1 release. So for Debian, the packaging is a mere change of the crashdb from 'default' to 'debian'. Being Just Another CrashDB inside Apport, it leverage full support of future Apport releases, fixes and enhancements.

I would like to highlight some points, and some concerns, I have heard in my previous blog posts.

Direct email reports to the developer: This was a concern from the last blog post. There will be no such pop-up anymore. It has been knocked off.
Useless/Incomplete bug reports: With no proper backtrace, it is worried that the bug report will be useless. Apport has intellignece to check if the backtrace is complete. If it is not, it will not report the bug.

Opt-Out: What if the maintainer is not interested in apport reports? The maintainer can ship a blacklist hook into /etc/apport/blacklist.d/. See /etc/apport/blacklist.d/README.blacklist for details.

Categories:

Keywords:

For writing tests for GVFS (current tests, proposed improvements) I want to run Samba as normal user, so that we can test gvfs smb backend without root privileges and thus can run them safely and conveniently in a make check environment for developers and in JHBuild for continuous integration testing. Before these tests could only run under gvfs-testbed, which needs root. Unlike other servers such as ssh or ftp, this turned out surprisingly non-obvious and hard, so I want to document it in this blog post for posterity s benefit. Running the server Running smbd itself is mainly an exercise of figuring out all the options that you need to set; Alex Larsson and I had some fun figuring out all the quirks and hiccups that happen between Ubuntu s and Fedora s packaging and 3.6 vs. 4.0, but finally arrived at something working. First, you need to create an empty directory where smbd can put all its databases and state files in. For tests you would use mkdtemp(), but for easier reading I just assume mkdir /tmp/samba here. The main knowledge is in the Samba configuration file, let s call it /tmp/smb.conf:

[global]
workgroup = TESTGROUP
interfaces = lo 127.0.0.0/8
smb ports = 1445
log level = 2
map to guest = Bad User
passdb backend = smbpasswd
smb passwd file = /tmp/smbpasswd
lock directory = /tmp/samba
state directory = /tmp/samba
cache directory = /tmp/samba
pid directory = /tmp/samba
private dir = /tmp/samba
ncalrpc dir = /tmp/samba
[public]
path = /tmp/public
guest ok = yes
[private]
path = /tmp/private
read only = no

For running this as a normal user you need to set a port > 1024, so this uses 1445 to resemble the original (privileged) port 445. The map to guest line makes anonymous logins work on Fedora/Samba 4.0 (I m not sure whether it s a distribution or a version issue). Don t ask about dir vs. directory , that s an inconsistency in Samba; with above names it works on both 3.6 and 4.0. We use the old smbpasswd backend as shipping large tdb files is usually too inconvenient and brittle for test suites. I created an smbpasswd file by running smbpasswd on a real Samba installation, and then using pdbedit to convert it to a smbpasswd file:

sudo smbpasswd -a martin
sudo pdbedit -i tdbsam:/var/lib/samba/passdb.tdb -e smbpasswd:/tmp/smbpasswd

The result for password foo is

myuser:0:XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX:AC8E657F83DF82BEEA5D43BDAF7800CC:[U          ]:LCT-507C14C7:

which you are welcome to copy&paste (you can replace myuser with any valid user name, of course). This also defines two shares, one public, one authenticated. You need to create the directories and populate them a bit:

mkdir /tmp/public /tmp/private
echo hello > /tmp/public/hello.txt
echo secret > /tmp/private/myfile.txt

Now you can run the server with

smbd -iFS -s /tmp/smb.conf

The main problem with this approach is that smbd exits ( Server exit (failed to receive smb request) ) after a client terminates, so you need to write your tests in a way to only run one connection/request per test, or to start smbd in a loop. Running the client If you merely use the smbclient command line tool, this is rather simple: It has a -p option for specifying the port:

$ smbclient -p 1445 //localhost/private
Enter martin's password: [enter "foo" here]
Domain=[TESTGROUP] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 3.6.6]
smb: \> dir
  .                                   D        0  Wed Oct 17 08:28:23 2012
  ..                                  D        0  Wed Oct 17 08:31:24 2012
  myfile.txt                                   7  Wed Oct 17 08:28:23 2012

In the case of gvfs it wasn t so simple, however. Surprisingly, libsmbclient does not have an API to set the port, it always assumes 445. smbclient itself uses some internal libcli API which does have a way to change the port, but it s not exposed through libsmbclient. However, Alex and I found some mailing list posts ([1], [2]) that mention $LIBSMB_PROG, and it s also mentioned in smbclient s manpage. It doesn t quite work as advertised in the second ML post (you can t set it to smbd, smbd apparently doesn t speak the socket protocol over stdin/stdout), and it s not being used anywhere in the current Samba sources, but what does work is to use good old netcat:

export LIBSMB_PROG="nc localhost 1445"

with that, you can use smbclient or any program using libsmbclient to talk to our test smb server running as user.

I found it surprisingly hard to determine in tearDown() whether or not the test that currently ran succeeded or not. I am writing some tests for gnome-settings-daemon and want to show the log output of the daemon if a test failed. I now cobbled together the following hack, but I wonder if there s a more elegant way? The interwebs don t seem to have a good solution for this either.

    def tearDown(self):
        [...]
        # collect log, run() shows it on failures
        with open(self.daemon_log.name) as f:
            self.log_output = f.read()
    def run(self, result=None):
        '''Show log output on failed tests'''
        if result:
            orig_err_fail = result.errors + result.failures
        super().run(result)
        if result and result.errors + result.failures > orig_err_fail:
            print('\n----- daemon log -----\n%s\n------\n' % self.log_output)

I was working on writing tests for gnome-settings-daemon a week or so ago, and finally got blocked on being unable to set up upower/ConsoleKit/etc. the way I need them. Also, doing so needs root privileges, I don t want my test suite to actually suspend my machine, and using the real service is generally not suitable for test suites that are supposed to run during make check , in jhbuild, and the like these do not have the polkit privileges to do all that, and may not even have a system D-Bus running in the first place. So I wrote a little test_upower.py helper, then realized that I need another one for systemd/ConsoleKit (for the system idle property), also looked at the mock polkit in udisks and finally sat down for two days to generalize this and do this properly. The result is python-dbusmock, I just released the first tarball. With this you can easily create mock objects on D-Bus from any programming language with a D-Bus binding, or even from the shell. The mock objects look like the real API (or at least the parts that you actually need), but they do not actually do anything (or only some action that you specify yourself). You can configure their state, behaviour and responses as you like in your test, without making any assumptions about the real system status. When using a local system/session bus, you can do unit or integration testing without needing root privileges or disturbing a running system. The Python API offers some convenience functions like start_session_bus() and start_system_bus() for this, in a DBusTestCase class (subclass of the standard unittest.TestCase ). Surprisingly I found very little precedence here. There is a Perl module, but that s not particuarly helpful for test suites in C/Vala/Python. And there is Phil s excellent Bendy Bus, but this has a different goal: If you want to thoroughly test a particular D-BUS service, such as ensuring that it does the right thing, doesn t crash on bad input, etc., then Bendy Bus is for you (and python-dbusmock isn t). However, it is too much overhead and rather inconvenient if you want to test a client-side program and just need a few system services around it which you want to set up in different states for each test. You can use python-dbusmock with any programming language, as you can run the mocker as a normal program. The actual setup of the mock (adding objects, methods, properties, etc.) all happen via D-Bus methods on the org.freedesktop.DBus.Mock interface. You just don t have the convenience D-Bus launch API. The simplest possible example is to create a mock upower with a single Suspend() method, which you can set up like this from Python:

import dbus
import dbusmock
class TestMyProgram(dbusmock.DBusTestCase):
[...]
    def setUp(self):
        self.p_mock = self.spawn_server('org.freedesktop.UPower',
                                        '/org/freedesktop/UPower',
                                        'org.freedesktop.UPower',
                                        system_bus=True,
                                        stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
        # Get a proxy for the UPower object's Mock interface
        self.dbus_upower_mock = dbus.Interface(self.dbus_con.get_object(
            'org.freedesktop.UPower', '/org/freedesktop/UPower'),
            'org.freedesktop.DBus.Mock')
        self.dbus_upower_mock.AddMethod('', 'Suspend', '', '', '')
[...]
    def test_suspend_on_idle(self):
        # run your program in a way that should trigger one suspend call
        # now check the log that we got one Suspend() call
        self.assertRegex(self.p_mock.stdout.readline(), b'^[0-9.]+ Suspend$')

This doesn t depend on Python, you can just as well run the mocker like this:

python3 -m dbusmock org.freedesktop.UPower /org/freedesktop/UPower org.freedesktop.UPower

and then set up the mocks through D-Bus like

gdbus call --system -d org.freedesktop.UPower -o /org/freedesktop/UPower \
      -m org.freedesktop.DBus.Mock.AddMethod '' Suspend '' '' ''

If you use it with Python, you get access to the dbusmock.DBusTestCase class which provides some convenience functions to set up and tear down local private session and system buses. If you use it from another language, you have to call dbus-launch yourself. Please see the README for some more details, pointers to documentation and examples. Update: You can now install this via pip from PyPI or from the daily builds PPA. Update 2: Adjusted blog entry for version 0.0.3 API, to avoid spreading now false information too far.

I just released PyGObject 3.3.92, for GNOME 3.5.92. There is nothing too exciting in this release; a couple of small bug fixes and a lot of new test cases. See the detailled list of changes below. Thanks to all contributors! Changes:

release-news: Generate HTML changelog (Martin Pitt)
[API add] Add ObjectInfo.get_abstract method (Simon Feltman) (#675581)
Add deprecation warning when setting gpointers to anything other than int. (Simon Feltman) (#683599)
test_properties: Test accessing a property from a superclass (Martin Pitt) (#684058)
test_properties.py: Consistent test names (Martin Pitt)
test_everything: Ensure TestSignals callback does get called (Martin Pitt)
argument: Fix 64bit integer convertion from GValue (Nicolas Dufresne) (#683596)
Add Simon Feltman as a project maintainer (Martin Pitt)
test_signals.py: Drop global type variables (Martin Pitt)
test_signals.py: Consistent test names (Martin Pitt)
Add test cases for GValue signal arguments (Martin Pitt) (#683775)
Add test for GValue signal return values (Martin Pitt) (#683596)
Improve setting pointer fields/arguments to NULL using None (Simon Feltman) (#683150)
Test gint64 C signal arguments and return values (Martin Pitt)
Test in/out int64 GValue method arguments. (Martin Pitt) (#683596)
Bump g-i dependency to 1.33.10 (Martin Pitt)
Fix -uninstalled.pc.in file (Thibault Saunier) (#683379)

PostgreSQL 9.2 has just been released, after a series of betas and a release candidate. See for yourself what s new, and try it out! Packages are available in Debian experimental as well as my PostgreSQL backports PPA for Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.10, as usual. Please note that 9.2 will not land any more in the feature frozen Debian Wheezy and Ubuntu Quantal (12.10) releases, as none of the server-side extensions are packaged for 9.2 yet.

I just released PyGObject 3.3.91, for GNOME 3.5.91. The big new feature in this release (thanks to the release team for granting an exception) is Simon Feltman s new Signal helper class, which makes defining custom signals a whole lot simpler and more obvious. In the past, you had to do

 class C(GObject.GObject):
    __gsignals__ =  
        'my_signal': (GObject.SIGNAL_RUN_FIRST, GObject.TYPE_NONE,
                      (GObject.TYPE_INT,))
     
    def do_my_signal(self, arg):
        print("my_signal called with %i" % arg)

whereas now this looks like

class C(GObject.GObject):
    @GObject.Signal(arg_types=(int,))
    def my_signal(self, arg):
        print("my_signal called with %i" % arg)

or even more elegantly when using Python 3 and its new type annotations:

class C(GObject.GObject):
    @GObject.Signal
    def my_signal(self, arg:int):
        print("my_signal called with %i" % arg)

Check out the updated example and docstring for other ways how to use it. Overrides can now be in a directory different from the one that pygobject installs itself into. These overrides need to put this into their __init__.py at the top:

from pkgutil import extend_path
__path__ = extend_path(__path__, __name__)

and put themselves somewhere into the default PYTHONPATH. This should make it a lot easier for library packages to ship their own overrides for Python. This new version also comes with a couple of new overrides and bug fixes. See the detailled list of changes below. Thanks to all contributors!

Fix exception test case for Python 2 (Martin Pitt)
Bump g-i dependency to >= 1.3.9 (Martin Pitt)
Show proper exception when trying to allocate a disguised struct (Martin Pitt) (#639972)
Support marshalling GParamSpec signal arguments (Mark Nauwelaerts) (#683099)
Add test for a signal that returns a GParamSpec (Martin Pitt) (#683265)
[API add] Add Signal class for adding and connecting custom signals. (Simon Feltman) (#434924)
Fix pygtkcompat s Gtk.TreeView.insert_column_with_attributes() (Martin Pitt)
Add override for Gtk.TreeView.insert_column_with_attributes() (Marta Maria Casetti) (#679415)
.gitignore: Add missing built files (Martin Pitt)
Ship tests/gi in tarball (Martin Pitt)
Split test_overrides.py (Martin Pitt) (#683188)
_pygi_argument_to_object(): Clean up array unmarshalling (Martin Pitt)
Fix memory leak in _pygi_argument_to_object() (Alban Browaeys) (#682979)
Fix setting pointer fields/arguments to NULL using None. (Simon Feltman) (#683150)
Fix for python 2.6, officially drop support for < 2.6 (Martin Pitt) (#682422)
Allow overrides in other directories than gi itself (Thibault Saunier) (#680913)
Clean up sys.path handling in tests (Simon Feltman) (#680913)
Fix dynamic creation of enum and flag gi types for Python 3.3 (Simon Feltman) (#682323)
[API add] Override g_menu_item_set_attribute (Paolo Borelli) (#682436)

The unstoppable PostgreSQL team just announced the first release candidate of 9.2, with several bug fixes since the Beta 4. If you haven t tested 9.2 yet, now is the time! Remember that you can run a copy of your 8.4 or 9.2 cluster in parallel for testing with pg_upgradecluster. If you use Debian, 9.2rc1 will be available in experimental in a few hours. For Ubuntu, you can get packages for all supported releases from my PostgreSQL backports PPA as usual. Enjoy!

Almost a year has passed since my talk at pgconf.eu 2011 in Amsterdam on Connecting the Debian and PostgreSQL worlds, and unfortunately little has happened on that front, mostly due to my limited spare time between family and job. pgapt.debian.net is up and running, but got few updates and is lagging behind on PostgreSQL releases. Luckily, we got the project moving. Dimitri Fontaine and Magnus Hagander suggested to do a face-to-face meeting, so we got together at my house for two days last week and discussed ideas, repository layouts, build scripts, and whatnot to get all of us aligned for pushing the project ahead. My employer sponsored my time off work for that. We almost finished moving the repository to postgresql.org infrastructure, barring some questions of how to hook the repository into the existing mirror infrastructure; this should get resolved this week. The build server running Jenkins is still located on my laptop, but moving this to a proper host will also happen really soon now. We are using Mika Prokop's jenkins-debian-glue scripts for driving the package build from Jenkins. The big plus point about Jenkins is that it makes executing jobs on different distributions and architectures in parallel much easier than a bunch of homemade shell scripts could get us with reasonable effort. Here's a list of random points we discussed:

We decided to go for "pgdg" in version numbers and distribution names, i.e. packages will have version numbers like 9.1.5-1.pgdg+1, with distributions wheezy-pgdg, squeeze-pgdg, and so on.
There will be Debian-testing-style distributions called like wheezy-pgdg-testing that packages go into for some time before they get promoted to the "live" distributions.
PostgreSQL versions out of support (8.2 and below) will not be removed from the repository, but will be moved to distributions called like wheezy-pgdg-deprecated. People will still be able to use them, but the naming should make it clear that they should really be upgrading.
We have a slightly modified (compared to Debian unstable) postgresql-common package that sets the "supported-versions" to all versions supported by the PostgreSQL project. That will make the postgresql-server-dev-all package pull in build-dependencies for all server versions, and make extension module packages compile for all of them automatically. (Provided they are using pg_buildext.)
There's no Ubuntu support in there yet, but that's mostly only a matter of adding more cowbuilder chroots to the build jobs. TBD soon.

We really aim at using unmodified packages from Debian as much as possible, and in fact this project doesn't mean to replace Debian's PostgreSQL packaging work, but to extend it beyond the number of server versions (and Debian and Ubuntu versions covered) supported. The people behind the Debian and Ubuntu packages, and this repository are mostly the same, so we will claim that "our" packages will be the same quality as the "original" ones. Big thanks go to Martin Pitt for maintaining the postgresql-common testsuite that really covers every aspect of running PostgreSQL servers on Debian/Ubuntu systems. Stay tuned for updates! :)

I just released PyGObject 3.3.90, for GNOME 3.5.90. This is now working correctly on big-endian 64 bit machines such as powerpc64, and fixes marshalling for GParamSpec attributes and return values, as well as a few small bug fixes. Thanks to all contributors! Complete list of changes:

Implement marshalling for GParamSpec (Mathieu Duponchelle) (#681565)
Fix erronous import statements for Python 3.3 (Simon Feltman) (#682051)
Do not fail tests if pyflakes or pep8 are not installed (Martin Pitt)
Fix PEP-8 whitespace checking and issues in the code (Martin Pitt)
Fix unmarshalling of gssize (David Malcolm) (#680693)
Fix various endianess errors (David Malcolm) (#680692)
Gtk overrides: Add TreeModelSort.__init__(self, model) (Simon Feltman) (#681477)
Convert Gtk.CellRendererState in the pygi-convert script (Manuel Qui ones) (#681596)

I have had the pleasure of attending GUADEC in full this year. TL;DR: A lot of great presentations + lots of hall conversations about QA stuff + the obligatory be er,ach = . Last year I just went to the hackfest, and I never made it to any previous one, so GUADEC 2012 was a kind of first-time experience for me. It was great to put some faces and personal impressions to a lot of the people I have worked with for many years, as well as catching up with others that I did meet before. I discussed various hardware/software testing stuff with Colin Walters, Matthias Clasen, Lennart Poettering, Bertrand Lorentz, and others, so I have a better idea how to proceed with automated testing in plumbing and GNOME now. It was also really nice to meet my fellow PyGObject co-maintainer Paolo Borelli, as well as seeing Simon Schampier and Ignacio Casal Quinteiro again. No need to replicate the whole schedule here (see for yourself on the interwebs), so I just want to point out some personal highlights in the presentations:

Jacob Appelbaum s keynote about Tor brought up some surprising facts about how the project has outgrown its past performance problems and how useful it was during e. g. the Arab revolution
Philip Whitnall s presented Bendy Bus, a tool to mock D-Bus services for both unit and fuzz testing. He successfully used it to find and replicate bugs in Evolution (by mocking evolution-data-server) as well as libfolks (by mocking the telepathy daemons). It should work just as well to mock system services like upower or NetworkManager to test the UI bits that use it. This is a topic which has been on my wishlist for a long time already, so I m happy that there is already an existing solution out there. We might have to add some small features to it, but it s by and large what I had in mind, and in the discussion afterwards Philip said he d appreciate patches against it.
Christophe Fergeau showed how to easily do Windows builds and installers from GNOME tarballs with MinGW-w64, without having to actually touch/use Windows (using cross-building and running tests etc. under wine). I found it surprising how easy that actually is, and it should not be hard to integrate that in a jhbuild-like setup, so that it does not keep breaking every time.
Colin Walters gave an introduction to OSTree, a project to build bootable images from kernel/plumbing/desktop upstream git heads on a daily basis. This is mostly to avoid the long delays that we otherwise have with doing upstream releases, packaging them, and getting them into a form that can safely be tested by users. In an afterwards discussion we threw some ideas around how we can integrate existing and future tests into this (something in spirit like our autopkgtest). This will be the area where I ll put most focus on in the next time.
Adam Dingle of yorba fame shared his thoughts about how we can crowdfunding of Free Software Projects work in practice, comparing efforts like codefoundry and kickstarter. Of course he does not have a solution for this yet, but he raised some interesting concerns and it spun off lots of good discussions over lunchtime.
Last but not least, the sport event on Saturday evening was awesome! In hindsight I was happy to not have signed up for soccer, as people like Bastian or Jordi played this really seriously. I participated in the Basketball competition instead, which was the right mix of fun and competition without seriously trying to hurt each other.

There were a lot of other good ones, some of them technical and some amusing and enlightening, such as Frederico s review of the history of GNOME. On Monday I prepared and participated in a PyGObject hackfest, but I ll blog about this separately. I want to thank all presenters for the excellent program, as well as the tireless GUADEC organizer team for making everything so smooth and working flawlessly! Great Job, and see you again in Strasbourg or Brno!

I started to collect some easy PyGObject bugs which are appropriate for the PyGObject hackfest at GUADEC on July 30th. These are bugs which do not need a lot of previous knowlege and are excellent starters for new contributors, such as adding overrides, fixing build system issues, etc. I also created an initial idea pool/agenda/coordination page, where participants can add or signup for things to work on. Feel free to add your own topics! I m really looking forward to GUADEC and the hackfest, see you there!

So yet another bug reporting tool. :-)When I prepared Apport for Debian, I wasn't sure how it will look going forward. If you look at the current one lying in experimental, it just detects your crashes and pops up in your systray. It doesn't have the mechanism to interact with BTS.So, like the title of this post says, this is the first worthy feature for Apport in the context of Debian. Apport Detail Report

Nothing special here. You would have seen a similar window before if you have installed apport. What changes with this release is, that now, when you check the Send an error report to help fix this problem, it will really file a bug report on the BTS.Here's what the emailed bug report will look like:

Package: leafnode
Version: 2.0.0.alpha20090406a-1
=============================
ProblemType: Crash
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue Jul  3 00:08:02 2012
Dependencies:
 adduser 3.113+nmu3
 base-passwd 3.5.24
 cron 3.0pl1-123
 debconf 1.5.44
 debianutils 4.3.1
 dpkg 1.16.4.3
 gcc-4.7-base 4.7.1-2
 libbz2-1.0 1.0.6-3
 libc-bin 2.13-33
 libc6 2.13-33
 libclass-isa-perl 0.36-3
 libdb5.1 5.1.29-4
 libfile-copy-recursive-perl 0.38-1
 libgcc1 1:4.7.1-2
 libgdbm3 1.8.3-11
 liblzma5 5.1.1alpha+20120614-1
 libpam-modules 1.1.3-7.1
 libpam-modules-bin 1.1.3-7.1
 libpam-runtime 1.1.3-7.1
 libpam0g 1.1.3-7.1
 libpcre3 1:8.30-5
 libpopt0 1.16-7
 libselinux1 2.1.9-5
 libsemanage-common 2.1.6-6
 libsemanage1 2.1.6-6
 libsepol1 2.1.4-3
 libswitch-perl 2.16-2
 libustr-1.0-1 1.0.4-3
 libwrap0 7.6.q-23
 logrotate 3.8.1-4
 lsb-base 4.1+Debian7 [modified: lib/lsb/init-functions]
 multiarch-support 2.13-33
 netbase 5.0
 openbsd-inetd 0.20091229-2
 passwd 1:4.1.5.1-1
 perl 5.14.2-12
 perl-base 5.14.2-12
 perl-modules 5.14.2-12
 sensible-utils 0.0.7
 tar 1.26-4
 tcpd 7.6.q-23
 update-inetd 4.43
 zlib1g 1:1.2.7.dfsg-13
Disassembly:
 => 0x7f8e69738475 <*__GI_raise+53>:	cmp    $0xfffffffffffff000,%rax
    0x7f8e6973847b <*__GI_raise+59>:	ja     0x7f8e69738492 <*__GI_raise+82>
    0x7f8e6973847d <*__GI_raise+61>:	repz retq 
    0x7f8e6973847f <*__GI_raise+63>:	nop
    0x7f8e69738480 <*__GI_raise+64>:	test   %eax,%eax
    0x7f8e69738482 <*__GI_raise+66>:	jg     0x7f8e69738465 <*__GI_raise+37>
    0x7f8e69738484 <*__GI_raise+68>:	test   $0x7fffffff,%eax
    0x7f8e69738489 <*__GI_raise+73>:	jne    0x7f8e697384a2 <*__GI_raise+98>
    0x7f8e6973848b <*__GI_raise+75>:	mov    %esi,%eax
    0x7f8e6973848d <*__GI_raise+77>:	nopl   (%rax)
    0x7f8e69738490 <*__GI_raise+80>:	jmp    0x7f8e69738465 <*__GI_raise+37>
    0x7f8e69738492 <*__GI_raise+82>:	mov    0x34e97f(%rip),%rdx        # 0x7f8e69a86e18
    0x7f8e69738499 <*__GI_raise+89>:	neg    %eax
    0x7f8e6973849b <*__GI_raise+91>:	mov    %eax,%fs:(%rdx)
    0x7f8e6973849e <*__GI_raise+94>:	or     $0xffffffff,%eax
    0x7f8e697384a1 <*__GI_raise+97>:	retq
DistroRelease: Debian 7.0
ExecutablePath: /usr/sbin/fetchnews
ExecutableTimestamp: 1265584779
Package: leafnode 2.0.0.alpha20090406a-1
PackageArchitecture: amd64
ProcCmdline: /usr/sbin/fetchnews
ProcCwd: /
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US:en
 LC_TIME=en_IN.UTF-8
 LC_MONETARY=en_IN.UTF-8
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LC_ADDRESS=en_IN.UTF-8
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 LC_TELEPHONE=en_IN.UTF-8
 LC_NAME=en_IN.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/sh
 LC_MEASUREMENT=en_IN.UTF-8
 LC_NUMERIC=en_IN.UTF-8
 LC_PAPER=en_IN.UTF-8
ProcMaps:
 00400000-00421000 r-xp 00000000 08:06 4464934                            /usr/sbin/fetchnews
 00621000-00622000 rw-p 00021000 08:06 4464934                            /usr/sbin/fetchnews
 00622000-00623000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 
 00be4000-00c05000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0                                  [heap]
 7f8e68edc000-7f8e68eef000 r-xp 00000000 08:06 1179776                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libresolv-2.13.so
 7f8e68eef000-7f8e690ee000 ---p 00013000 08:06 1179776                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libresolv-2.13.so
 7f8e690ee000-7f8e690ef000 r--p 00012000 08:06 1179776                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libresolv-2.13.so
 7f8e690ef000-7f8e690f0000 rw-p 00013000 08:06 1179776                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libresolv-2.13.so
 7f8e690f0000-7f8e690f2000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 
 7f8e690f2000-7f8e690f7000 r-xp 00000000 08:06 1180036                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_dns-2.13.so
 7f8e690f7000-7f8e692f6000 ---p 00005000 08:06 1180036                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_dns-2.13.so
 7f8e692f6000-7f8e692f7000 r--p 00004000 08:06 1180036                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_dns-2.13.so
 7f8e692f7000-7f8e692f8000 rw-p 00005000 08:06 1180036                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_dns-2.13.so
 7f8e692f8000-7f8e692fa000 r-xp 00000000 08:06 1183392                    /lib/libnss_mdns4_minimal.so.2
 7f8e692fa000-7f8e694f9000 ---p 00002000 08:06 1183392                    /lib/libnss_mdns4_minimal.so.2
 7f8e694f9000-7f8e694fa000 rw-p 00001000 08:06 1183392                    /lib/libnss_mdns4_minimal.so.2
 7f8e694fa000-7f8e69505000 r-xp 00000000 08:06 1180055                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_files-2.13.so
 7f8e69505000-7f8e69704000 ---p 0000b000 08:06 1180055                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_files-2.13.so
 7f8e69704000-7f8e69705000 r--p 0000a000 08:06 1180055                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_files-2.13.so
 7f8e69705000-7f8e69706000 rw-p 0000b000 08:06 1180055                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_files-2.13.so
 7f8e69706000-7f8e69883000 r-xp 00000000 08:06 1179700                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc-2.13.so
 7f8e69883000-7f8e69a83000 ---p 0017d000 08:06 1179700                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc-2.13.so
 7f8e69a83000-7f8e69a87000 r--p 0017d000 08:06 1179700                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc-2.13.so
 7f8e69a87000-7f8e69a88000 rw-p 00181000 08:06 1179700                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc-2.13.so
 7f8e69a88000-7f8e69a8d000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 
 7f8e69a8d000-7f8e69a95000 r-xp 00000000 08:06 1180031                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcrypt-2.13.so
 7f8e69a95000-7f8e69c94000 ---p 00008000 08:06 1180031                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcrypt-2.13.so
 7f8e69c94000-7f8e69c95000 r--p 00007000 08:06 1180031                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcrypt-2.13.so
 7f8e69c95000-7f8e69c96000 rw-p 00008000 08:06 1180031                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcrypt-2.13.so
 7f8e69c96000-7f8e69cc4000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 
 7f8e69cc4000-7f8e69cc6000 r-xp 00000000 08:06 1180047                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl-2.13.so
 7f8e69cc6000-7f8e69ec6000 ---p 00002000 08:06 1180047                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl-2.13.so
 7f8e69ec6000-7f8e69ec7000 r--p 00002000 08:06 1180047                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl-2.13.so
 7f8e69ec7000-7f8e69ec8000 rw-p 00003000 08:06 1180047                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl-2.13.so
 7f8e69ec8000-7f8e69ed5000 r-xp 00000000 08:06 1179893                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpam.so.0.83.0
 7f8e69ed5000-7f8e6a0d4000 ---p 0000d000 08:06 1179893                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpam.so.0.83.0
 7f8e6a0d4000-7f8e6a0d5000 r--p 0000c000 08:06 1179893                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpam.so.0.83.0
 7f8e6a0d5000-7f8e6a0d6000 rw-p 0000d000 08:06 1179893                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpam.so.0.83.0
 7f8e6a0d6000-7f8e6a112000 r-xp 00000000 08:06 1182916                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre.so.3.13.1
 7f8e6a112000-7f8e6a312000 ---p 0003c000 08:06 1182916                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre.so.3.13.1
 7f8e6a312000-7f8e6a313000 rw-p 0003c000 08:06 1182916                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre.so.3.13.1
 7f8e6a313000-7f8e6a333000 r-xp 00000000 08:06 1180134                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ld-2.13.so
 7f8e6a503000-7f8e6a507000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 
 7f8e6a530000-7f8e6a532000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 
 7f8e6a532000-7f8e6a533000 r--p 0001f000 08:06 1180134                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ld-2.13.so
 7f8e6a533000-7f8e6a534000 rw-p 00020000 08:06 1180134                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ld-2.13.so
 7f8e6a534000-7f8e6a535000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 
 7fffbc06e000-7fffbc08f000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0                          [stack]
 7fffbc1ff000-7fffbc200000 r-xp 00000000 00:00 0                          [vdso]
 ffffffffff600000-ffffffffff601000 r-xp 00000000 00:00 0                  [vsyscall]
ProcStatus:
 Name:	fetchnews
 State:	S (sleeping)
 Tgid:	6872
 Pid:	6872
 PPid:	6871
 TracerPid:	0
 Uid:	9	9	9	9
 Gid:	9	9	9	9
 FDSize:	64
 Groups:	9 
 VmPeak:	   21440 kB
 VmSize:	   21276 kB
 VmLck:	       0 kB
 VmPin:	       0 kB
 VmHWM:	     984 kB
 VmRSS:	     984 kB
 VmData:	     380 kB
 VmStk:	     136 kB
 VmExe:	     132 kB
 VmLib:	    2132 kB
 VmPTE:	      64 kB
 VmSwap:	       0 kB
 Threads:	1
 SigQ:	0/23227
 SigPnd:	0000000000000000
 ShdPnd:	0000000000000000
 SigBlk:	0000000000000000
 SigIgn:	0000000000000000
 SigCgt:	0000000000000000
 CapInh:	0000000000000000
 CapPrm:	0000000000000000
 CapEff:	0000000000000000
 CapBnd:	ffffffffffffffff
 Cpus_allowed:	f
 Cpus_allowed_list:	0-3
 Mems_allowed:	00000000,00000001
 Mems_allowed_list:	0
 voluntary_ctxt_switches:	6
 nonvoluntary_ctxt_switches:	1
Registers:
 rax            0x0	0
 rbx            0x0	0
 rcx            0xffffffffffffffff	-1
 rdx            0x6	6
 rsi            0x1ad8	6872
 rdi            0x1ad8	6872
 rbp            0x0	0x0
 rsp            0x7fffbc08d4f8	0x7fffbc08d4f8
 r8             0x7f8e6a504700	140249645729536
 r9             0x6d6f642064656966	7885631562835126630
 r10            0x8	8
 r11            0x246	582
 r12            0x0	0
 r13            0x7fffbc08d920	140736348084512
 r14            0x0	0
 r15            0x0	0
 rip            0x7f8e69738475	0x7f8e69738475 <*__GI_raise+53>
 eflags         0x246	[ PF ZF IF ]
 cs             0x33	51
 ss             0x2b	43
 ds             0x0	0
 es             0x0	0
 fs             0x0	0
 gs             0x0	0
Signal: 6
SourcePackage: leafnode
Stacktrace:
 #0  0x00007f8e69738475 in *__GI_raise (sig=<optimized out>) at ../nptl/sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/raise.c:64
         pid = <optimized out>
         selftid = <optimized out>
 #1  0x00007f8e6973b6f0 in *__GI_abort () at abort.c:92
         act =  __sigaction_handler =  sa_handler = 0x7f8e69850d3d, sa_sigaction = 0x7f8e69850d3d , sa_mask =  __val =  140736348083740, 140249634747968, 0, 0, 140736348084512, 140249631083424, 140249645738440, 0, 4294967295, 206158430232, 1, 6427272, 0, 0, 0, 0 , sa_flags = 1781664242, sa_restorer = 0x1 
         sigs =  __val =  32, 0 <repeats 15 times> 
 #2  0x0000000000416292 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #3  0x0000000000411c80 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #4  0x0000000000406952 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #5  0x00007f8e69724ead in __libc_start_main (main=<optimized out>, argc=<optimized out>, ubp_av=<optimized out>, init=<optimized out>, fini=<optimized out>, rtld_fini=<optimized out>, stack_end=0x7fffbc08d918) at libc-start.c:228
         result = <optimized out>
         unwind_buf =  cancel_jmp_buf =  jmp_buf =  0, 498162418289285118, 4206480, 140736348084512, 0, 0, -498021567843461122, -435434157313288194 , mask_was_saved = 0 , priv =  pad =  0x0, 0x0, 0x418360, 0x7fffbc08d928 , data =  prev = 0x0, cleanup = 0x0, canceltype = 4293472 
         not_first_call = <optimized out>
 #6  0x0000000000402fb9 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #7  0x00007fffbc08d918 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #8  0x000000000000001c in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #9  0x0000000000000001 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #10 0x00007fffbc08ee96 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #11 0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
StacktraceTop:
 ?? ()
 ?? ()
 ?? ()
 __libc_start_main (main=<optimized out>, argc=<optimized out>, ubp_av=<optimized out>, init=<optimized out>, fini=<optimized out>, rtld_fini=<optimized out>, stack_end=0x7fffbc08d918) at libc-start.c:228
 ?? ()
ThreadStacktrace:
 .
 Thread 1 (LWP 6872):
 #0  0x00007f8e69738475 in *__GI_raise (sig=<optimized out>) at ../nptl/sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/raise.c:64
         pid = <optimized out>
         selftid = <optimized out>
 #1  0x00007f8e6973b6f0 in *__GI_abort () at abort.c:92
         act =  __sigaction_handler =  sa_handler = 0x7f8e69850d3d, sa_sigaction = 0x7f8e69850d3d , sa_mask =  __val =  140736348083740, 140249634747968, 0, 0, 140736348084512, 140249631083424, 140249645738440, 0, 4294967295, 206158430232, 1, 6427272, 0, 0, 0, 0 , sa_flags = 1781664242, sa_restorer = 0x1 
         sigs =  __val =  32, 0 <repeats 15 times> 
 #2  0x0000000000416292 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #3  0x0000000000411c80 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #4  0x0000000000406952 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #5  0x00007f8e69724ead in __libc_start_main (main=<optimized out>, argc=<optimized out>, ubp_av=<optimized out>, init=<optimized out>, fini=<optimized out>, rtld_fini=<optimized out>, stack_end=0x7fffbc08d918) at libc-start.c:228
         result = <optimized out>
         unwind_buf =  cancel_jmp_buf =  jmp_buf =  0, 498162418289285118, 4206480, 140736348084512, 0, 0, -498021567843461122, -435434157313288194 , mask_was_saved = 0 , priv =  pad =  0x0, 0x0, 0x418360, 0x7fffbc08d928 , data =  prev = 0x0, cleanup = 0x0, canceltype = 4293472 
         not_first_call = <optimized out>
 #6  0x0000000000402fb9 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #7  0x00007fffbc08d918 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #8  0x000000000000001c in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #9  0x0000000000000001 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #10 0x00007fffbc08ee96 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #11 0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
Title: fetchnews crashed with SIGABRT in __libc_start_main()
Uname: Linux 3.4-trunk-amd64 x86_64
UserGroups:

The first 2 lines should be enough for the BTS server to file the bug report to the correct package and against the correct version.If you paid attention in the screen shot and the email report, you will notice that the email report does not include the CoreDump section. This was knocked off intentionally as we currently might not need it. If there is a need, the data is always available on the user's apport database, and the dev/user and seek it on a need basis. But in case, if a day comes when we really want it, that too is possible. The same email report will have the CoreDump seciton with a section like the following:

CoreDump: base64

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 7xNNReLV6SpPH/NUzH0OWZNHkPAVYPl+Npo9GEaua1GDtfIF2ni7wz+5QP5fOOOIXxxTJYjWPgP/bfLQHSLRkUd3hTgv749PWm7FP7r0FcDP15U/cmO9fL4jLFNgzkaiBr4zwWL//QaYtey3vH/NtBrxEbbBHFJk6bOTuFt4v9cmwj4N/vn4ODg4ODg4ODg4OD4/wE3aZ7/G/H8n60B2aDfFmVs9kOf/5vJ325CV2n+HSgol59tKvYiasZmxRzNJCeIhG0q7gY1Y4OCA1UlsKl4b5hRxWxhu2Vdmq0Dp6vYi8UxS5SgCmdEuBiEi4F

Now, Is this going to be useful? Will we get flooded with bug reports?

Usefulness: I think this will uncover many bugs that might be getting unnoticed today. Take this example itself. This bug was detect against the leafnode package's fetchnews binary. That binary does a quiet job in the background, fetching news. I never was aware that it had been crashing. As a system-wide monitoring tool, apport was able to detect, trap and inform the user of the crash. So I think this will be useful and improve the overall quality.

Abuse/Flood: This is something I can't predict. Perhaps it will bring in challenges if people just blindly click on the Send Report button. One option can be to have the "Send Report" checkbox unchecked by default. That'll hopefully lower down the possibilities.

What do you think? Let me know your comments.

This change will soon be pushed to apport in experimental. Hopefully this weekend.

I want to wrap up this post with a Thank You note to Martin Pitt and his team who created Apport, and with such simplicity. It took me 30 lines of code to adapt it to Debian. My intent with Apport is to keep the changes to the minimum so that we can always leverage new features and fixes that Apport brings in. So, as far as I'll try, there will be no drift from its original shape.

Categories:

Keywords:

New PostgreSQL microreleases with two security fixes and several bug fixes was just announced publically. I spent the morning with the packaging orgy for Debian unstable and experimental (now uploaded), Debian Wheezy (update sent to security team), Ubuntu hardy, lucid, natty, oneiric, precise (LP #1008317) and my backports PPA. I tested these fairly thoroughly, but please let me know if you encounter any problem with these.

The first Beta of the upcoming PostgreSQL 9.2 was released yesterday (see announcement). Your humble maintainer has now created packages for you to test. Please give them a whirl, and report any problems/regressions that you may see to the PostgreSQL developers, so that we can have a rock solid 9.2 release. Remember, with the postgresql-common infrastructure you can use pg_upgradecluster to create a 9.2 cluster from your existing 8.4/9.1 cluster and run them both in parallel without endangering your data. For Debian the package is currently waiting in the NEW queue, I expect them to go into experimental in a day or two. For Ubuntu 12.04 LTS you can get packages from my usual PostgreSQL backports PPA. Note that you need at least postgresql-common version 0.130, which is available in Debian unstable and the PPA now. I (or rather, the postgresql-common test suite) found one regression: Upgrades do not keep the current value of sequences, but reset them to their default value. I reported this upstream and will provide updated packages as soon as this is fixed.

Part of our efforts to reduce power consumption is to identify processes which keep waking up the disk even when the computer is idle. This already resulted in a few bug reports (and some fixes, too), but we only really just began with this. Unfortunately there is no really good tool to trace file access events system-wide. powertop claims to, but its output is both very incomplete, and also wrong (e. g. it claims that read accesses are writes). strace gives you everything you do and don t want to know about what s going on, but is per-process, and attaching strace to all running and new processes is cumbersome. blktrace is system-wide, but operates at a way too low level for this task: its output has nothing to do any more with files or even inodes, just raw block numbers which are impossible to convert back to an inode and file path. So I created a little tool called fatrace ( file access trace , not fat race

) which uses fanotify, a couple of /proc lookups and some glue to provide this. By default it monitors the whole system, i. e. all mounts (except the virtual ones like /proc, tmpfs, etc.), but you can also tell it to just consider the mount of the current directory. You can write the log into a file (stdout by default), and run it for a specified number of seconds. Optional time stamps and PID filters are also provided.

$ sudo fatrace
rsyslogd(967): W /var/log/auth.log
notify-osd(2264): O /usr/share/pixmaps/weechat.xpm
compiz(2001): R device 8:2 inode 658203
[...]

It shows the process name and pid, the event type (Rread, Write, Open, or Close), and the path. Sometimes its not possible to determine a path (usually because it s a temporary file which already got deleted, and I suspect mmaps as well), in that case it shows the device and inode number; such programs then need closer inspection with strace. If you run this in gnome-terminal, there is an annoying feedback loop, as gnome-terminal causes a disk access with each output line, which then causes another output line, ad infinitum. To fix this, you can either redirect output to a file (-o /tmp/trace) or ignore the PID of gnome-terminal (-p pidof gnome-terminal ). So to investigate which programs are keeping your disk spinning, run something like

  $ sudo fatrace -o /tmp/trace -s 60

and then do nothing until it finishes. My next task will be to write an integration program which calls fatrace and powertop, and creates a nice little report out of that raw data, sorted by number of accesses and process name, and all that. But it might already help some folks as it is right now. The code lives in bzr branch lp:fatrace (web view), you can just run make and sudo ./fatrace. I also uploaded a package to Ubuntu Precise, but it still needs to go through the NEW queue. I also made a 0.1 release, so you can just grab the release tarball if you prefer. Have a look at the manpage and --help, it should be pretty self-explanatory.

The Ubuntu Technical Board conducts a regular review of the most popular Ubuntu Brainstorm ideas (previous reviews conducted by Matt Zimmerman and Martin Pitt). This time it was my turn. Apologies for the late arrival of this review. Contact lens in the Unity Dash (#27584) Unity supports Lenses, which provide a consistent way for users to quickly search for information via the Dash. Current lenses include Applications, Files, and Music, but a number of people have asked for contacts to be accessible using the same interface. While Canonical's DX team isn't currently working on this for Ubuntu 11.10 or 12.04, we'd love somebody who's interested in this to get involved. Allison Randal explains how to get started, including some skeleton example code and several useful links. Displaying Ubuntu version information (#27460) Several people have asked for it to be more obvious what Ubuntu version they're running, as well as other general information about their system. John Lea, user experience architect on the Unity team, responds that in Ubuntu 11.10 the new LightDM greeter shows the Ubuntu version number, making that basic information very easily visible. For more detail, System Settings -> System Info provides a simple summary. Volume adjustments for headphone use (#27275) People often find that they need to adjust their sound volume when plugging in or removing headphones. It seems as though the computer ought to be able to remember this kind of thing and do it automatically; after all, a major goal of Ubuntu is to make the desktop Just Work. David Henningson, a member of Canonical's OEM Services group and an Ubuntu audio developer, responds on his blog with a summary of how PulseAudio jack detection has improved matters in Ubuntu 11.10, and what's left to do:

The good news: in the upcoming Ubuntu Oneiric (11.10), this is actually working. The bad news: it isn't working for everyone.

Making it easier to find software to handle a file (#28148) Ubuntu is not always as helpful as it could be when you don't have the right software installed to handle a particular file. Michael Vogt, one of the developers of the Ubuntu Software Center, responded to this. It seems that most of the pieces to make this work nicely are in place, but there are a few more bits of glue required:

Thanks a lot for this suggestion. I like the idea and it's something that software-center itself supports now. In the coming version 5.0 we will offer to "sort by top-rated" (based on the ratings&reviews data). It's also possible to search for an application based on its mime data. To search for a mime-type, you can enter "mime:text/html" or "mime:audio/ogg" into the search field. What is needed however is better integration into the file manager nautilus. I will make sure this gets attention at the next developer meeting and filed bug #860536 about it. In nautilus, there is now a button called "Find applications online" available as an option when opening an unknown file or when the user selects "open with...other application" in the context menu. But that will not use the data from software-center.

Show pop-up alert on low battery (#28037) Some users have reported on Brainstorm that they are not alerted frequently enough when their laptop's battery is low, as they clearly ought to be. This is an odd one, because there are already several power alert levels and this has been working well for us for some time. Nevertheless, enough people have voted for this idea that there must be something behind it, perhaps a bug that only affects certain systems. Martin Pitt, technical lead of the Ubuntu desktop team, has responded directly to the Brainstorm idea with a description of the current system and how to file a bug when it does not work as intended.

Hot on the heels of the PostgreSQL 9.1.0 release I am happy to announce that the final version is now packaged for Debian unstable, the current Ubuntu development version Oneiric , and also in my Ubuntu backports PPA for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, 10.10, and 11.04. Enjoy trying out all the cool new features like builtin synchronous replication or per-column collation settings for correctly handling international strings, or an even finer-grained access control for large environments. Please see the detailled explanation of the new features. As already announced a few days ago, 9.0 is gone from Ubuntu 11.10, as it is still only a development version and not an LTS. 9.1 will be the version which the next 12.04 LTS will support, so this slightly reduces the number of major upgrades Ubuntu users will need to do. However, 9.0 will still be available in Debian unstable and backports, and the Ubuntu backports PPA for a couple of months to give DB administrators some time to migrate.

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