Search Results: "felix"

4 May 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: first week in Stretch cycle

Debian Jessie has been released on April 25th, 2015. This has opened the Stretch development cycle. Reactions to the idea of making Debian build reproducibly have been pretty enthusiastic. As the pace is now likely to be even faster, let's see if we can keep everyone up-to-date on the developments. Before the release of Jessie The story goes back a long way but a formal announcement to the project has only been sent in February 2015. Since then, too much work has happened to make a complete report, but to give some highlights: Lunar did a pretty improvised lightning talk during the Mini-DebConf in Lyon. This past week It seems changes were pilling behind the curtains given the amount of activity that happened in just one week. Toolchain fixes We also rebased the experimental version of debhelper twice to merge the latest set of changes. Lunar submitted a patch to add a -creation-date to genisoimage. Reiner Herrmann opened #783938 to request making -notimestamp the default behavior for javadoc. Juan Picca submitted a patch to add a --use-date flag to texi2html. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes of their build dependencies: apport, batctl, cil, commons-math3, devscripts, disruptor, ehcache, ftphs, gtk2hs-buildtools, haskell-abstract-deque, haskell-abstract-par, haskell-acid-state, haskell-adjunctions, haskell-aeson, haskell-aeson-pretty, haskell-alut, haskell-ansi-terminal, haskell-async, haskell-attoparsec, haskell-augeas, haskell-auto-update, haskell-binary-conduit, haskell-hscurses, jsch, ledgersmb, libapache2-mod-auth-mellon, libarchive-tar-wrapper-perl, libbusiness-onlinepayment-payflowpro-perl, libcapture-tiny-perl, libchi-perl, libcommons-codec-java, libconfig-model-itself-perl, libconfig-model-tester-perl, libcpan-perl-releases-perl, libcrypt-unixcrypt-perl, libdatetime-timezone-perl, libdbd-firebird-perl, libdbix-class-resultset-recursiveupdate-perl, libdbix-profile-perl, libdevel-cover-perl, libdevel-ptkdb-perl, libfile-tail-perl, libfinance-quote-perl, libformat-human-bytes-perl, libgtk2-perl, libhibernate-validator-java, libimage-exiftool-perl, libjson-perl, liblinux-prctl-perl, liblog-any-perl, libmail-imapclient-perl, libmocked-perl, libmodule-build-xsutil-perl, libmodule-extractuse-perl, libmodule-signature-perl, libmoosex-simpleconfig-perl, libmoox-handlesvia-perl, libnet-frame-layer-ipv6-perl, libnet-openssh-perl, libnumber-format-perl, libobject-id-perl, libpackage-pkg-perl, libpdf-fdf-simple-perl, libpod-webserver-perl, libpoe-component-pubsub-perl, libregexp-grammars-perl, libreply-perl, libscalar-defer-perl, libsereal-encoder-perl, libspreadsheet-read-perl, libspring-java, libsql-abstract-more-perl, libsvn-class-perl, libtemplate-plugin-gravatar-perl, libterm-progressbar-perl, libterm-shellui-perl, libtest-dir-perl, libtest-log4perl-perl, libtext-context-eitherside-perl, libtime-warp-perl, libtree-simple-perl, libwww-shorten-simple-perl, libwx-perl-processstream-perl, libxml-filter-xslt-perl, libxml-writer-string-perl, libyaml-tiny-perl, mupen64plus-core, nmap, openssl, pkg-perl-tools, quodlibet, r-cran-rjags, r-cran-rjson, r-cran-sn, r-cran-statmod, ruby-nokogiri, sezpoz, skksearch, slurm-llnl, stellarium. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which did not make their way to the archive yet: Improvements to reproducible.debian.net Mattia Rizzolo has been working on compressing logs using gzip to save disk space. The web server would uncompress them on-the-fly for clients which does not accept gzip content. Mattia Rizzolo worked on a new page listing various breakage: missing or bad debbindiff output, missing build logs, unavailable build dependencies. Holger Levsen added a new execution environment to run debbindiff using dependencies from testing. This is required for packages built with GHC as the compiler only understands interfaces built by the same version. debbindiff development Version 17 has been uploaded to unstable. It now supports comparing ISO9660 images, dictzip files and should compare identical files much faster. Documentation update Various small updates and fixes to the pages about PDF produced by LaTeX, DVI produced by LaTeX, static libraries, Javadoc, PE binaries, and Epydoc. Package reviews Known issues have been tagged when known to be deterministic as some might unfortunately not show up on every single build. For example, two new issues have been identified by building with one timezone in April and one in May. RD and help2man add current month and year to the documentation they are producing. 1162 packages have been removed and 774 have been added in the past week. Most of them are the work of proper automated investigation done by Chris West. Summer of code Finally, we learned that both akira and Dhole were accepted for this Google Summer of Code. Let's welcome them! They have until May 25th before coding officialy begins. Now is the good time to help them feel more comfortable by sharing all these little bits of knowledge on how Debian works.

28 December 2014

Ian Donnelly: New Release and Farewell to Planet Debian

Hi Everyone, So first I want to say, that I appreciate all the interest in our project from the folks who read our posts at Planet Debian. This will be our last post there for now, I hope you enjoyed the posts about my Google Summer of Code project and other info about Elektra we posted there. To stay informed about Elektra s releases, please subscribe to this RSS feed. Today I want to thank you all and tell you about the latest exciting Elektra news, our newest release 0.8.10! This new release brings many exciting updates and features, since I didn t to a post for Elektra 0.8.9, this post will cover changes and additions from Elektra 0.8.8 to 0.8.10. First of all, there is now a new gui for KDB! A big thanks goes out to Raffael Pancheri for developing this GUI! Once included in your Elektra build, this gui can be run using the command kdb qt-gui. It is very important to note that the gui is in version 0.0.2, meaning it is an alpha project and shouldn t be considered stable yet! This GUI is a convenient tool that lets you mount, unmount, search, import and export configurations. We are very excited about this tool and we hope it makes Elektra more accessible to all users. Check out the screenshot below to see this new GUI in action:

A screenshot of the new qt-gui tool

A few other new features are that Felix added support for multi-line into the ini plugin. Users are able to turn this feature on or off for each configuration. Additionally, Kai-Uwe added support for Windows 7 to Elektra! The Windows 7 port relies on a new resolver called wresolver which is a simpler version of the regular resolver which is compatible with Windows. Additionally, there is a new Java binding, so now Elektra is compatible with applications and plugins written in Java! On top of these features, a new hosts plugin and a new rename plugin have been written. The new hosts in conjunction with improvements to the ini plugin allows for multiple styles of comments (because some ini dialects allow ; and # to be used to differentiate comments) to be used and preserved in configuration files. Additionally, this new hosts plugin is compatible with and differentiates between ipv4 and ipv6 entries. There have also been a huge number of under-the-hood improvements, changes, and fixes; there have been so many in-fact that I am going to list them: There are many more new changes that I could not mention here. Please keep up-to-date with Elektra news and releases by subscribing to this RSS feed and following our news page on GitHub. As always feel free to comment on our posts and I will get back to you as soon as possible. Again, thanks for reading our blog, enjoy the new release! Sincerely,
Ian S. Donnelly P.S. Happy New Year to everybody!

10 September 2014

Ian Donnelly: New Release: Elektra 0.8.8

Hi Everybody! Great news! I am very happy to announce that we have reached a new milestone for Elektra and released a new version, 0.8.8! This release comes right on the tail of the 0.8.7 release and it might just be our biggest release yet! We already have a great article covering all the changes from the previous release on our News documentation on GitHub. I just wanted to focus on a few of those changes on this blog, especially the ones that pertain to my Google Summer of Code Project. First of all, Felix has worked to greatly improve the ini plug-in. This is the plug-in I used in my technical demo for mounting Samba s smb.conf file. It now works even better with complex ini files such as smb.conf which means the automatic merging of files like smb.conf is even better now! That really goes to show one of the greatest strengths of the design of Elektra. Just by improving plug-ins, all the functions of Elektra can improve as well. The merge code was not changed in this release, yet because of an updated plug-in, the merge has improved. Secondly, there have been some good improvements to the kdb command-line tool. Many of these improvements were used in my technical demo, but now they are actually a part of release (and a little more refined from then). We added a new command called kdb remount which allows a user (or script) to mount a file to the Elektra Key Database using an existing backend. An example of this command is:
kdb remount [new filename] [new path] [existing mountpoint]
This command mounts the new file to the new path in the Key Database using an existing backend. This works with the conffile merging by allowing us to mount the various versions of the conffile without having to specify which backend to use (it will use the same backend as the currently used conffile). Additionally, the umount command was updated to allow users to umount using the current mountpath (allowing commands such as kdb umount system/smb.conf) as opposed to backends. Moreover, we added an option to the kdb import command to specify a merge strategy using thing -s option. Now you can import a file into the Key Database and merge the content of that file with the current Keys in the Database. Thirdly, we added some new scripts to Elektra to help with the ucf integration. These scripts were used in my technical demo, but now they are part of the release. elektra-mount and elektra-umount are wrappers for the commands kdb mount and kdb umount respectively. They are designed to be used in debian package scripts and are adapted for easier use than the generic commands. For instance, running elektra-mount will check to see if a file is already mounted at that location in the Key Database. Similarly, elektra-umount will not produce an error if the file was already unmounted. This is because maintainer scripts can be run multiple times in a row and producing an error will stop dpkg even when it shouldn t. Additionally, we added a script called elektra-merge which can be used as a method for ucf to merge configuration files. This script acts as a liaison between ucf and elektra allowing automatic merges to be done by ucf using Elektra s merge features in a seamless manner. For information of how these scripts work, check out my tutorial on integrating elektra-merge into a debian package. The last bit of news I would like to share is the great progress of the Debian package. Thanks to Pino Toscano, version 0.8.7-4 of Elektra is now available in the Debian testing repo! This is great news as we are now that much closer to replacing the outdated Elektra 0.7 versions that are currently the latest versions of Elektra in the stable repo. Once the 0.8.X versions of Elektra make it to stable it will be much easier for us to keep the latest versions of Elektra in Debian, and that s key to allowing Elektra to help improve users lives. You can download the release from:
http://www.markus-raab.org/ftp/elektra/releases/elektra-0.8.8.tar.gz size: 1644441
md5sum: fe11c6704b0032bdde2d0c8fa5e1c7e3
sha1: 16e43c63cd6d62b9fce82cb0a33288c390e39d12
sha256: ae75873966f4b5b5300ef5e5de5816542af50f35809f602847136a8cb21104e2 And the API-Documentation can be found here: http://doc.libelektra.org/api/0.8.8/html/ Hope you enjoy the new release! Sincerely,
Ian S. Donnelly

22 August 2014

Ian Donnelly: Wrapping Up

Hi Everybody! I have been keeping very busy on this blog the past few days with some very exciting updates! Everything is now in place for my Google Summer of Code project! Elektra now has the ability to merge KeySets, ucf has been patched to allow custom merge commands, we included a new elektra-merge script to use in conjunction with the new ucf command, and we wrote a great tutorial on how to use Elektra to merge configuration files in any package using ucf. There are few things I have missed updating you all on or are still wrapping up. First of all, I would like to address the Debian packages. While Elektra includes everything needed for my Google Summer of Code Project, it must be built from source right now. Unfortunately, with the rapid development Elektra has seen the past few months, we did not pay enough attention to the Debian packages and they became dusty and riddles with bugs. Fortunately, we have a solution and his name is Pino Toscano. Pino has, very graciously, agreed to help us fix our Debian packages back into shape. If you wish to see the current progress of the packages, you can check his repo. Pino has already made fantastic progress creating the Debian packages. I will post here when packages are all fixed up and the latest versions of Elektra are into the Debian repo. Some great news that we just received is that Elektra 0.8.7 has just been accepted into Debian unstable! This is huge progress for our team and means that users can now download our packages directly from Debian s unstable repo and test out these new features. Obviously, the normal caveats apply for any packages in unstable but this is still an amazing piece of news and I would like to thank Pino again for all the support he has provided. Another worthy piece of news that I unfortunately haven t had time to cover is that thanks to Felix Berlakovich Elektra has a new plug-in called ini. In case you couldn t guess, this new plug-in is used to mount ini files and the good news is that it is a vast improvement on our older simpleini plug-in. While it is still a work in progress, this new plug-in is much more powerful than simpleini. The new plug-in supports section and comments and works with many more ini files than the old plug-in. You may have noticed that I used this new plug-in to mount smb.conf in my technical demo of Samba using Elektra from configuration merging. Since smb.conf follows the same syntax as an ini file this new plug-in works great for mounting this file into the Elektra Key Database. I hope my blogs so far have been very informative and helpful. Sincerely,
Ian S. Donnelly

13 August 2014

Ian Donnelly: The New Deal: ucf Integration

Hi Everybody, A few days ago I posted an entry on this blog called dpkg Woes where I explained that due to a lack of response, we were abandoning our plan to patch dpkg for my Google Summer of Code project, and I explained that we had a new solution. Well today I would like to tell you about that solution. Instead of patching dpkg, which would take a long time and seemed like it would never make it upstream, we have added some new features to ucf which will allow my Google Summer of Code project to be realized. If you don t know, ucf, which stands for Update Configuration File, is a popular Debian package whose goal is to preserve user changes to config files. It is meant to act as an alternative to considering a configuration file a conffile on systems that use dpkg. Instead, package maintainers can use ucf to handle these files in a conffile-like way. Where conffiles must work on all systems, because they are shipped with the package, configuration files that use ucf can be handled by maintainer scripts and can vary between systems. ucf exists as a script that allows conffile-like handling of non-conffile configuration files and allows much more flexibility than dpkg s conffile system. In fact, ucf even includes an option to perform a three-way merge on files it manages, it currently only uses diff3 for the task though. As you can see, ucf has a goal that while different than ours, seems naturally compatible to our goal of automatic conffile merging. Obviously, since ucf is a different tool than dpkg we had to re-think how we were going to integrate with ucf. Luckily, integration with ucf proved to be much more simple than integration with dpkg. All we had to do to integrate with ucf was to add a generic hook to attempt a three way merge using any tool created for the task such as Elektra and kdb merge. Felix submitted a pull request with the exact code almost a week ago and we have talked with Manoj Srivastava, the developer for ucf, and he seemed to really like the idea. The only changes we made are to add an option for a three-way merge command, and if one is present, the merge is attempted using the specified command. It s all pretty simple really. Since we decided to include a generic hook for a three-way merge command instead of an Elektra-specific one (which would be less open and would create a dependency on Elektra), we also had to add functionality to Elektra to work with this hook. We ended up writing a new script, called elektra-merge which is now included in our repository. All this script does is act as a liaison between the ucf --three-way-merge-command option and Elektra itself. The script automatically mounts the correct files for theirs and base and dest using the new remount command. Since the only parameters that are passed to the ucf merge command are the paths of ours, theirs, base and result, we were missing vital information on how to mount these files. Our solution was to create the remount command which mirrors the backend configuration of an existing mountpoint to create a new mountpoint using a new file. So if ours is mounted to system/ours using ini, kdb remount /etc/theirs system/theirs system/ours will mount /etc/theirs to system/theirs using the same backend as ours. Since theirs, base, and result should all have the same backend as ours, we can use remount to mount these files even if all we know is their paths. Now, package maintainers can edit their scripts to utilize this new feature. If they want, package maintainers can specify a command to use to merge files using ucf during package upgrades. I will soon be posting a tutorial about how to integrate this feature into a package and how to use Elektra in your scripts in order to allow for automatic three-way merges during package upgrade. I will post a link to the tutorial here once it is published. Sincerely,
Ian S. Donnelly

11 August 2014

Ian Donnelly: dpkg Woes

Hi Everybody, The original plan for my Google Summer of Code project involved creating a merge tool for Elektra including a kdb merge command, that part is all finished and integrated into the newest release of Elektra, 0.8.7 already. The next step was to patch dpkg to add an option for conffile merging. The basic overview of how this would work is: Obviously, all of these things require patching dpkg, although not in too large away. Luckily, we found a previous attempt to patch dpkg for a three-way merge hook, however it is a few years old and was never included in dpkg. Felix decided to update this patch to work with the new versions of dpkg and cleaned up a bit of redundancy, he then resubmitted it to see if the dpkg maintainers would be interested in such a patch, and to start a dialogue about including all the patches we need. Unfortunately there has been no response from the dpkg team, any many bugs on their tracker have been sitting unanswered for years. Additionally, dpkg s source can be quite complex and it would require a ton of effort for us to make all these patches with no guarantee of integration. As a result, we have decided to go another route (which I will be posting about soon). I just wanted to update anybody interested on the progress of my Google Summer of Code Project by letting them know the experience with dpkg. We have come up with a new solution that is already looking great and you will hear a lot more about it this final week of Google Summer of Code. Stay Tuned!
- Ian S. Donnelly

4 August 2014

Ian Donnelly: New Release: Elektra 0.8.7

Hi Everybody! I am very proud to inform you all that Elektra has just shipped a new release, version 0.8.7, with many great features and fixes! First of all, I want to let you all know that a lot of work from my Google Summer of Code Project has made its way into this release. Elektra now includes support for a three way merge of KeySets! A special and sincere thanks goes out to Felix Berlakovich for helping me test this new merge feature and adding some great features to allow for different merge strategies and dealing with meta keys. You can try out the new merge features using the kdb merge command or by using the Elektra API. There is still work to be done with Merging and improving documentation (also look for some posts on this blog soon about the feature). Additionally, thanks to Felix, we have technical previews for some new plug-ins. The new plug-ins are keytometa and ini. In short the keytometa plugin allows to convert normal keys to meta keys during the get operation and reverting this conversion during the set operation. The ini plugin is basically a rewrite of the simpleini plugin and makes use of the inih library. Also there have been many improvements made to the glob plug-in. He even found some time to add a new script for bash tab completion which is located under scripts/kdb-bash-completion. To use it on debian just copy it to /etc/bash_completion.d/ and make sure it is executable. Moreover, we fixed a lot of things with this newest release. Pino Toscano has been working on fixing up the Debian packages for Elektra but he has also fixed many other things along the way including fixing a lot of spelling errors, simplifying the RPATH setting, improvements to respecting $HOME and $TMPDIR, and improvements to some test cases. The kdb tool now does a better job of checking for subfolders that aren t allow and it now makes sure to output warnings before errors so errors can more easily be seen. We have also improved some tests for kdb tool and some plugins as well as fixed compiler warnings on clang and gcc 4.9. We also made some fixes to kdb import and export for some storage plugins and fixed some bugs so that kdb run_all now works flawlessly. There have also been a few tweaks to the API for this release, specifically in the C++ bindings. There is now a delMeta() function for C++. The reason for this is that contrary to the C API, calling

key.setMeta("metaname", NULL)

does not delete the metadata, but stores the value 0 . Additionally, we changed the arguments for isBelow, isDirectBelow, and isBelowSame for the C++ binding to be easier to understand and be more natural to use. Before this change, the C++ binding closely mirrored the C API which lead to an unintuitive behaviour. Before the change the API did the following:

Key ( user/config/key/below ).isBelow (Key ( user/config )) == false
Key ( user/config/key/below ).isBelow (Key ( user/config/key/below/deeper )) == true

That is because the first argument in the C API is the object itself in the C++ API.
The attribute of being below the key in question (the object) refers to the second key in the C API.
While this makes some sense for the C API, it definitely does not for the C++ API. Now the API behaves as follows (as intuitively expected):

Key ( user/config/key/below ).isBelow (Key ( user/config )) == true
Key ( user/config/key/below ).isBelow (Key ( user/config/key/below/deeper )) == false

We even had time for a bunch of documentation changes. We now have a tutorial for contextual values to GitHub so developers can start using contextual values with Elektra. We also included a specification for metadata and a better specification for contracts. There is even a little bit of extra news to share. We now use GitHub for active development of Elektra. We have adopted its issue tracker for issues. Also, now pull requests automatically get built by the server to see if the merge would brake the build and whether it passes all the tests. We are also in the process of updating a lot of our documentation and READMEs to use Markdown so they can be viewed easily on GitHub. Also, Raffael Pancheri has been making really great progress on a qt-gui for Elektra. There is still work to be done but it looks great and is coming along nicely. You can download the release now from Markus site: http://www.markus-raab.org/ftp/elektra/releases/elektra-0.8.7.tar.gz size: 1566800
md5sum: 4996df62942791373b192c793d912b4c
sha1: 00887cc8edb3dea1bc110f69ea64f6b700c29402
sha256: 698ebd41d540eb0c6427c17c13a6a0f03eef94655fbd40655c9b42d612ea1c9b Also there are packages already ready for some distributions: There is a lot of ongoing work to fix the Debian packages and I will post about it on this blog when they are good to go! Enjoy the new release!
-Ian S. Donnelly

14 June 2014

Ian Donnelly: Week 3: Learning Debian Packaging

This was another good week. This week I focused on cleaning up the merge implementation as well as learning about Debian packaging. As far as cleaning up the implementation, I got a few tests written to test the merge function. Additionally I rewrote the merge command code (the code responsible for the kdb merge command, it depends on the implementation of merge I wrote last week). Now the kdb merge command takes in a parent key for each keyset and creates a keyset containing all the keys under the parent key. It then invokes the KeysetMerge function I wrote on those keysets and saves the returned keyset to the key database. Most of the week I spent learning about Debian packaging. I was able to get some hand-on experience by creating a package for the augeas plugin for Elektra. I modified the control file to include the libaugeas0 dependency and adding in a description of the plugin. Also I created a new libelektra-augeas4.install file to install the share library to the correct location on the system. Then, I tried building the source using git-buildpackage but unfortunately it failed on packaging the plugin because the libelektra-augeas.so file was never built. It turned out that the augeas plugin had to be added to ElektraCache.cmake under plugins_dep (plugins with dependencies) so that the plugin would be built on make. So I fixed that and ran buildpackage again and voila! It worked! I successfully make my first Debian package! The other thing I looked into was how configuration files get updated during a package upgrade under Debian. It turns out, most package define their configurations as conffiles . These conffiles do not get overwritten during package upgrade if the user has edited them. Basically, during an upgrade, dpkg calculates a checksum on each conffile and if it has changed, prompts the user what to do. Instead, the goal of our project is to attempt an automatic merge of the conffile and if successful, used the merge version. If the merge is unsuccessful dpkg will prompt the user as usual. I need to figure out how to change dpkg s behavior during an upgrade with a conffile so I can build a prototype of a package upgrade merging a file. Lastly, this week I looked into adding tab completion to the kdb tool. Currently kdb does not try to complete commands using tab completion in bash. It turns out adding tab completion isn t that difficult. You basically just need to write rules for how tab completion should work for your program and add it to /etc/bash_completion.d/ I wrote a basic tab completion script for kdb that will complete the commands for kdb. It follows here: #Proof of concept bash completion for kdb. You must copy this file to /etc/bash_completion.d/kdb and load it with ". /etc/bash_completion.d/kdb"
_kdb()

local cur prev opts
COMPREPLY=()
cur="$ COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD] "
prev="$ COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD-1] "
opts="check convert cp export file fstab get getmeta import info ls lsmeta merge mount mv rm set setmeta sget shell test umount vset" if [[ $ cur == * ]] ; then
COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "$ opts " -- $ cur ) )
return 0
fi

complete -F _kdb kdb Its just a proof on concept but its a really neat feature and surprisingly easy to implement. One of the other students working on Elektra, Felix, is also working on tab completion. I think we will collaborate and have this feature implemented for kdb very soon. For next week I have a few goals I would like to accomplish. First of all I will have a working prototype of a package being upgraded with automatic conffile merging using kdb merge. Second, I want to continue working on the merge implementation to make it cleaner and work on more sophisticated keysets. I also need to add better error handling to tell if a merge was successful or not, and if not why. Third, I want to work on some of the lintan errors for the deb package of Elektra 0.8.6 and try to get some of those fixed to move closer toward release. Lastly I want to updated the kdb man page for Debian to make it more informative for the shell tool. I was able to get all my goals done for this week except the man page and getting some of the lintian errors fixed up. Overall though it was a very productive week. Until next week,
Ian S. Donnelly

6 June 2014

Ian Donnelly: Week 3: First Merge Implementation

This week went much better. I figured out how to properly implement over an Elektra Keyset and was able to write my first implementation of the Merge function. Right now I need to move on to testing my implementation and fixing the bugs. Already I am aware of a change that will need to be made. I am going to need to use full key names for lookup instead of a cascading lookup like I have now. I plan to use the full name for the root of the keyset in conjunction with the keys full names to change the names to look in the right place for each keyset. Additionally I had a video call with Markus and Felix today and I have a clear plan for what the next two weeks should look like. I really feel like I am getting into the swing of things and better understanding Elektra as well as the development process. So for next week I plan to better test the merge implementation and fix any bugs that crop up. Additionally I plan to write some automated tests for the merge function to make sure it is running correctly. Additionally I am going to work to understand Debian packaging. Also I am going to look at Samba and understand when it checks the configuration files when upgrading the package to see where the merge tool would be used. I want to get a prototype of a package upgrade running the kdb merge tool during an upgrade instead of prompting the user to manually merge the config files. I also plan to spend some extra hours looking at the latest version on Elektra and trying to fix errors with the debian package. I am going to package a version with the augeas_plugin. Additionally I am going to work on fixing some of the lintian errors that are occurring. In other words, it is going to be a very busy week. For reference, here is the proper way to iterate through a keyset. KeySet ks;
Key key;
ks.rewind(); //This is the line I was forgetting. It is necessary to call this function to point the KeySet's internal cursor to the beginning of the KeySet.
while(key=ks.next())
//This will iterate through the KeySet until key is no longer valid (the end of the KeySet).
 Anyway, I will update you all next week. Until Then,
Ian

28 April 2014

Evgeni Golov: Debian Bug Squashing Party Salzburg 2014

bsp2014_small This weekend, Bernd Zeimetz organized a BSP at the offices of conova in Salzburg, Austria. Three days of discussions, bugfixes, sparc removals and a lot of fun and laughter. We squashed a total of 87 bugs: 66 bugs affecting Jessie/Sid were closed, 9 downgraded and 8 closed via removals. As people tend to care about (old)stable, 3 bugs were fixed in Wheezy and one in Squeeze. These numbers might be not totaly correct, as were kinda creative at counting Marga promised a talk about an introduction to properly counting bugs using the Haus vom Nikolaus algorithm to the base of 7 . IMG_20140427_182902 Speaking of numbers, I touched the following bugs (not all RC): A couple of (non-free) pictures are available at Uwe s salzburg-cityguide.at. Thanks again to Bernd for organizing and conova and credativ for sponsoring!

0 comment(s) this blog is flattr enabled

8 February 2013

Olivier Berger: RDF development in PHP with a PostGreSQL triple store thanks to the LibRDF OO wrapper for redland/librdf

Redland/librdf offers powerful features like being able to persist an RDF model to a relational database (only PostGreSQL seems to work on my setup with 1.0.16, but I may have misconfigured it). You can then do SPARQL queries over the model, and lots of other nice things. Unfortunately, the default PHP bindings are not really object-oriented, so the code isn t looking so good. But thanks to a gentleman named David Shea, there is an object-oriented library named LibRDF (case is sensitive), that helps write nice looking PHP. I discovered it via the blog post of Felix Ostrowski, who took over the maintenance of the LibRDF library (still the docs live on the original author s site). In his post, Felix illustrates how you may use it to parse Richard Cyganiak s FOAF profile. But the examples he gives don t illustrate the full potential of persistence of the RDF graph into the DB. Here s my contribution in 2 examples that will hopefully help : first, one that load Richard s FOAF to the DB, and one, that later retrieve the saved model and perform the same query (both pushed to my github clone of the library). There may be some problems with the use of librdf, including its availability, as it is not full PHP of course and I ve heard of memory management problems, but, depening on your needs, this may be quite handy for writing Linked Data applications.

12 May 2012

DebConf team: Report from our visit to Managua, Nicaragua (Posted by Holger Levsen)

I ve send a mail today with a summary of some of my experiences in Managua and tiny bits of Nicaragua late April / early May 2012. If you are considering going to DebConf12 (which you obviously should do as you are reading this!) go and read this mail, as it includes a thematically sorted list of impressions and advice written by Gunnar, Norman, Leo, Felix and myself, which should give you some better idea about DebConf12 in Managua! While I spent 14 days in Nicaragua in total, for the last three days I was joined by Gunnar Wolf, to make sure my impressions about the local team, the status of the preparations and everything were correct. Our visit also seems to have been very motivating to local team members, whom I ve seen really enthusiastic to welcome a huge Debian crowd for the first DebConf in Central America in just a few weeks! At the last DebConf12 IRC meeting I summarized it like this: in very short: my two weeks were great, I had a great vacation, met many members of the localteam, which is way bigger then it seems on irc, saw and liked UCA (Universidad Centroamericana, the DebConf12 venue), had zillions of reunions (meetings, see schedule wiki page) and met many nice people and a very hot & interesting country+capital with great countryside. The deadline for sponsored accomodation ends in three days - so if you haven t registered yet, hurry up, DebCamp starts in 49 days! :-) (After that registration is still possible, but you will need to pay for your costs yourself.) We re looking forward to see you there and have a great DebConf together! Hopefully we sweat together while Wheezy is frozen :-D

6 May 2012

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2012/17-18

as I was mostly offline last week, this is a report covering two weeks. as in the week before, it's mainly a mix of build-arch & gcc 4.7 bugs.

5 March 2012

DebConf team: DebConf12 Website online (Posted by Felix Delattre)

After using our small pre-website for some time now, we are very happy to announce the official website has gone live: http://debconf12.debconf.org Now it is the right time for you to get involved supporting the event or just enjoy the design and help us to spread the new website, f.e. by using our nice banners in the artwork section. Please stay tuned: Registration is going to be opened soon.

1 February 2012

Dominique Dumont: SDL packaging team update: most SDL packages are now up-to-date

Hello Thanks to the effort of Felix Geyer (debfx) and Manuel Montecelo (mafm), most of SDL packages in Debian unstable are now up-to-date. These guys did a really great job: most of the time, I could upload the packages they prepared without modification. These guys should become DD, they have the skills. Ok, debfx has started the process (congrats) and mafm is still thinking about it Anyway, here the messages for all those who gave up packaging new SDL games for Debian because of stale SDL packages: SDL team is alive, the core SDL packages are now up-to-date, the wait is over. This is true also for Perl SDL games: I ve uploaded yesterday the latest Perl bindings to SDL. Unfortunately, this upload broke some games like frozen-bubble, pangzero and dizzy. But new versions compatible with new SDL perl are available upstream so theses games won t be broken for long. All the best

27 November 2011

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2011/47

after the rather intensive last week, this week was more business as usual. here's the list:

23 September 2010

Dirk Eddelbuettel: R Project and Google Summer of Code: Wrapping up

As this year's admin, I wrote up the following summary which has now been posted at the R site in the appropriate slot. My thanks to this year's students, fellow mentors and everybody else who helped to make it happen. GSoC 2010 logo

Projects 2010 As in 2008 and 2009, the R Project has again participated in the Google Summer of Code during 2010. Based on ideas collected and disussed on the R Wiki, the projects and students listed below (and sorted alphabetically by student) were selected for participation and have been sponsored by Google during the summer 2010. The finished projects are available via the R / GSoC 2010 repository at Google Code, and in several cases also via their individual repos (see below). Informal updates and final summaries on the work was also provided via the GSoC 2010 R group blog.

rdx - Automatic Differentiation in R Chidambaram Annamalai, mentored by John Nash. Proposal: radx is a package to compute derivatives (of any order) of native R code for multivariate functions with vector outputs, f:R^m -> R^n, through Automatic Differentiation (AD). Numerical evaluation of derivatives has widespread uses in many fields. rdx will implement two modes for the computation of derivatives, the Forward and Reverse modes of AD, combining which we can efficiently compute Jacobians and Hessians. Higher order derivatives will be evaluated through Univariate Taylor Propagation. Delivered: Two packages radx: forward automatic differentiation in R and tada: templated automatic differentiation in C++ were created; see this blog post for details.

A GUI for Graphics using ggplot and Deducer by Ian Fellows, mentored by Hadley Wickham. Proposal: R puts the latest statistical techniques at one's fingertips through thousands of add-on packages available on the CRAN download servers. The price for all of this power is complexity. Deducer is a cross-platform cross-console graphical user interface built on top of R designed to reduce this complexity. This project proposes to extend the scope of Deducer by creating an innovative yet intuitive system for generating statistical graphics based on the ggplot2 package. Delivered: All of the major features have been implemented, and are outlined in the video links in this blog post.

rgeos - an R wrapper for GEOS by Colin Rundel, mentored by Roger Bivand. Proposal: At present there does not exist a robust geometry engine available to R, the tools that are available tend to be limited in scope and do not easily integrate with existing spatial analysis tools. GEOS is a powerful open source geometry engine written in C++ that implements spatial functions and operators from the OpenGIS Simple Features for SQL specification. rgeos will make these tools available within R and will integrate with existing spatial data tools through the sp package. Delivered: The rgeos project on R-Forge; see the final update blog post.

Social Relations Analyses in R by Felix Schoenbrodt, mentored by Stefan Schmukle. Proposal: Social Relations Analyses (SRAs; Kenny, 1994) are a hot topic both in personality and in social psychology. While more and more research groups adopt the methodology, software solutions are lacking far behind - the main software for calculating SRAs are two DOS programs from 1995, which have a lot of restrictions. My GSOC project will extend the functionality of these existing programs and bring the power of SRAs into the R Environment for Statistical Computing as a state-of-the-art package. Delivered: The TripleR package is now on CRAN and hosted on RForge.Net; see this blog post for updates.

NoSQL Interface for R by Yasuhisa Yoshida, mentored by Dirk Eddelbuettel. Proposal: So-called NoSQL databases are becoming increasingly popular. They generally provide very efficient lookup of key/value pairs. I'll provide several implementation of NoSQL interface for R. Beyond a sample interface package, I'll try to support generic interface similar to what the DBI package does for SQL backends Status: An initial prototype is available via RTokyoCabinet on Github. No updates were made since June; no communication occurred with anybody related to the GSoC project since June and the project earned a fail.

Last modified: Wed Sep 22 19:39:43 CDT 2010

22 July 2010

Alexander Reichle-Schmehl: Recent RC-Bug activity

Remember the one rc bug a days activities from Steinar and Zack? Well, maybe I won't make to one rc bug per day, but at least I could blog about some of my recent activities. Maybe it motivates some others? #553248 libnel-dev: missing-dependency-on-libc needed...
Trivial bug solved by adapting the depends-lines; uploaded.
#589344 missing symbols in library
Missing build depends; sponsored NMU by Davi Leal to delayed.
#582309 Links against libclamav
"solved" by disabling clamav support; uploaded to delayed 15.
#589819 Unmet Recommends on extremetuxracer-racer
Fixed typo in recommends (introduced by yours truly); uploaded.
#565805 FTBFS on kfreebsd-*: need to define type GLUTesselatorFunction
Applied patch by Felix Geyer; (doesn't help the release, package is experimental).
#568990 planetpenguin-racer-extras: Outdated; needs restructured and updated to be usefull
Upload fixed package prepared by Bertrand Marc.
#548084 aegir-provision: /etc/aegir/drushrc.php PHP error,
#548085 aegir-provision: /etc/aegir and /etc/aegir/drushrc.php file permissions
and unreported piuparts problem Uploaded to delayed.
#569177 kernel-patch-nfs-ngroups: doesn't apply anymore
Added an updated version of the patch; uploaded.
#580120 mediatomb allows anyone to browse and export the whole filesystem
Disabled user interface in configuration file; uploaded to delayed.
#588554 jamin: Ships files in /usr/lib64/
Patched configure-script to install to the correct place; with maintainers permission uploaded without delay.
#576901 init.d script fails under Squeeze with insserv due to lack of run level definitions
Updated LSB header of init script same was as upstream did in recent version; uploaded to delayed (got thanks from the maintainer for that).
#574624 dibbler-client: after removing package with dselect impossible to purge it.
Verified fix by Edward Welbourne and uploaded to delayed.
#586057 havp 0.91-1.1~volatile1 still haven't show up in lenny-volatile yet.
Seems to have been an infrastructure hick up, which got solved in the meantime. Closed without upload.
#518227 hplip: text missing at the bottom of a page on HP DJ 5550
Discussed with release team, severity got lowered.
As you can see, finding fixable rc bugs is certainly possible. So please step in :) BTW: If you don't have upload rights yourself, but prepared an NMU / patch, feel free to ping me and I'll take a look and try to sponsor your NMU. Just ask!

4 June 2010

Colin Watson: Hacking on grub2

Various people observed in a long thread on debian-devel that the grub2 package was in a bit of a mess in terms of its release-critical bug count, and Jordi and Stefano both got in touch with me directly to gently point out that I probably ought to be doing something about it as one of the co-maintainers. Actually, I don't think grub2 was in quite as bad a state as its 18 RC bugs suggested. Of course every boot loader failure is critical to the person affected by it, not to mention that GRUB 2 offers more complex functionality than any other boot loader (e.g. LVM and RAID), and so it tends to accumulate RC bugs at rather a high rate. That said, we'd been neglecting its bug list for some time; Robert and Felix have both been taking some time off, Jordi mostly only cared about PowerPC and can't do that any more due to hardware failure, and I hadn't been able to pick up the slack. Most of my projects at work for the next while involve GRUB in one way or another, so I decided it was a perfectly reasonable use of work time to do something about this; I was going to need fully up-to-date snapshots anyway, and practically all the Debian grub2 bugs affect Ubuntu too. Thus, with the exception of some other little things like releasing the first Maverick alpha, I've spent pretty much the last week and a half solidly trying to get the grub2 package back into shape, with four uploads so far. The RC issues that remain are: If we can fix that lot, or even just the ones that are reasonably well-understood, I think we'll be in reasonable shape. I'd also like to make grub-mkconfig a bit more robust in the event that the root filesystem isn't one that GRUB understands (#561855, #562672), and I'd quite like to write some more documentation. On the upside, progress has been good. We have multiple terminal support thanks to a new upstream snapshot (#506707), update-grub runs much faster (#508834, #574088), we have DM-RAID support with a following wind (#579919), the new scheme with symlinks under /dev/mapper/ works (#550704), we have basic support for btrfs / as long as you have something GRUB understands properly on /boot (#540786), we have full info documentation covering all the user-adjustable settings in /etc/default/grub, and a host of other smaller fixes. I'm hoping we can keep this up. If you'd like to help, contact me, especially if there's something particular that isn't being handled that you think you could work on. GRUB 2 is actually quite a pleasant codebase to work on once you get used to its layout; it's certainly much easier to fix bugs in than GRUB Legacy ever was, as far as I'm concerned. Thanks to tools like grub-probe and grub-fstest, it's very often possible to fix problems without needing to reboot for anything other than a final sanity check (although KVM certainly helps), and you can often debug very substantial bits of the boot loader - the bits that actually go wrong - using standard tools such as strace and gdb. Upstream is helpful and I've been able to get many of the problems above fixed directly there. If you have a sound knowledge of C and a decent level of understanding of the environment a boot loader needs to operate in - or for that matter specialist knowledge of interesting device types - then you should be able to find something to do.

27 April 2010

Diego Escalante Urrelo: Summer lessons

Over the last few months I ve been working for Igalia, as an intern, fixing regressions in Epiphany, which extends to WebKitGTK+ sometimes. Surely a dream job: working on my favourite projects, on a great company, surrounded by great teammates and friends. Igalia: Free Software Engineering I m happy about it, really really happy. I love this job, totally, completely!. I ve had the chance to learn a lot. Here I d like to share some things I have learned so far, I look forward to post again with more ideas, but meanwhile here you have two. Different timezones are hard The time when I find most of the Igalia crew online is between 2am and 12pm. Of course this doesn t mean you can t find them past 12pm, but it s already 7pm or 8pm in Europe then. I m on UTC-5 and Spain is on UTC+1 or (now) UTC+2. You probably agree that asking anyone to wake up at 7am in summer is unrealistic. Luckily, Igalia doesn t make me pass a turing test everyday at a fixed time. This rocks.

valpo
Valpara so, Chile I love it when people understand that a happy hacker working at midnight is better than an unhappy hacker working on a set in stone schedule. Kudos to Igalia for that. Your code should explain and defend itself My written expression teacher says Your text should be good enough to explain and defend itself . This applies to code too. I confirmed this at the expense of Xan s patience. It s a common situation: when the maintainer reviews your patch you are not around to explain it, or present the rationale you put into the change. The solution? well, simple, your patch and commit log should explain by themselves.

Felix, chillin
Don t just post a patch and do this.
Review it yourself. I saw, after realising how much ping-pong Xan and I had to play to get a patch in, that my patches lacked a harder review by myself before being posted. You have to be your first reviewer. Be a severe judge of your patch, ask yourself if you would accept such a patch, if you would like a commit message like that, if that variable name is really good, if someone could quickly grasp what s it all about, etc. Get into the flippy flops of the maintainer, don t assume everything is obvious to everyone.

Next.

Previous.