Search Results: "Drew Parsons"

25 July 2017

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 117 in Buster cycle

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday July 16 and Saturday July 22 2017: Toolchain development Bernhard M. Wiedemann wrote a tool to automatically run through different sources of non-determinism, and report which of these caused irreproducibility. Dan Kegel's patches to fpm were merged. Bugs filed Patches submitted upstream: Patches filed in Debian: Reviews of unreproducible packages 73 package reviews have been added, 44 have been updated and 50 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. No issue types were updated. Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: diffoscope development reprotest development Ximin also restarted the discussion with autopkgtest-devel about code reuse for reprotest. Santiago Torres began a series of patches to make reprotest more distro-agnostic, with the aim of making it usable on Arch Linux. Ximin reviewed these patches. Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Bernhard M. Wiedemann and Chris Lamb & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

16 April 2007

David Nusinow: Why Xorg 7.2 Isn't In Unstable Yet

I think people are still a little euphoric over the etch release, but I'd like to let people know why Xorg 7.2 is still in experimental. Julien Cristau has done a ton of the grunt work, uploading all the usual library updates to unstable, and they're looking good so far, so at least that part is in place. The problem relates to the fact that the XSF wants to push forward with moving from Xlib to XCB. XCB represents a significant improvement over the traditional Xlib, and it's important that we work to nurture and standardize it. The good news about XCB is that most people transitioned over to it without any noticeable issues. Everything pretty much seems to work transparently, which is testament to the amount of care and time the XCB team has put in to creating it over the past several years.

But now for the bad news: there's some regressions, and they're almost all in non-free software. The biggest issue is this one: XCB will break java. You can work around it in older versions of java (as documented in that bug report) but in the newer ones you can't do much of anything. The XCB team and XSF (there's actually a fair bit of overlap there, because the XCB guys are Debian developers and I consider them XSF team members in that sense) were trying to hash out a solution to the problem. We're still working on it, but it represents the problems with depending heavily on non-free software in a free software context. Hopefully Sun will actually try to respond to the issue and release a java update that works with XCB. We can hack around the problem by disabling some checks in XCB, but the problem is really with buggy software, and we want to catch and fix those bugs. Essentially though, I'm not willing to break java in unstable so we're at something of a standstill.

In addition, there's a bug with a bit of proprietary Nvidia code. The XCB guys have a handle on that one, and think they can patch XCB itself to work around it, so hopefully that's a non-issue. Finally, some number of users have reported major performance degredation using XCB in some configurations. The XCB guys were actively going after that bug as well yesterday, so hopefully that'll be resolved soon too.

So that's where we're at. The server is looking good, and thanks to Julien and Drew Parsons we've got the latest X server release candidate and new drivers sitting in experimental, complete with the new (intel-only right now) randr 1.2 hotness, so if you want it, you know where to get it. I've finally begun my small contributions to the having a fully automagic configuring X server in experimental as well, but I'll blog about that when I reach my first milestone.

1 February 2007

David Nusinow: Bits From The XSF

This has been a little overdue, but here it is. Lots of less than glamorous stuff has been going on in the XSF, and a few more exciting things are in the pipeline.

Among the less glamorous stuff, our resident release junkie/alpha porter, Steve Langasek, fixed #392500 which was our major RC bug on the alpha arch. Aside from that bug, there's been a whole host of bug triage by our newest team member, Brice Goglin. Brice has taken on the unenviable task of going through the massive list of bugs owned by the XSF. I've been traditionally less than responsible about handling bug reports like I should, and Brice is dealing with the mess I've left behind. Before he started, we were at over 2000 outstanding bugs, and as of this writing we're down to 1646 bugs, which is a huge amount of work. Hopefully this will go a long way towards making our little corner of the BTS usable for mere mortals. Aside from that, there's been an enormous amount of small cleanups and bug fixes by the whole team, most notably Julien Cristau (who's been doing more actual release management than yours truly), Thierry Redding, and Drew Parsons. Perhaps most important among these are miscellaneous last minute driver fixes that will enable a fair number of people to actually run Etch without backports. Michel D nzer has continued to be his usual awesome self, responding to the tough DRI bugs that the rest of us are terrified to approach.

Some of the more exciting stuff from a user perspective has been the various updates and new packaging going on. Thierry has taken on mesa, which is an incredibly daunting task, and he's done and incredible job of it so far. He and Julien cooperated on getting the newest mesa release, 6.5.2, in to experimental. That's a huge step on the way to getting the 7.2 release in to the archive. Thierry has also packaged up the newest compiz and some additional plugins ported from beryl, both of which are waiting in NEW right now for our overworked ftp masters to find time to have a look at them. Speaking of beryl, we also have that more or less complete and packaged. Our second-newest XSF member, Shawn Starr, has taken on beryl, and done a great job of getting the packages ready for experimental. They came back from review with a few minor comments, so he's busy getting those last issues resolved, so beryl should be winging its way over to NEW again for re-review soon. Finally, Josh Triplett and Jamie Sharp, who are both Debian and XCB developers, have put XCB in to experimental for you to test and play with. Expect to hear more about this when the Lenny development cycle starts.

The other huge thing that's been going on, and what I've been devoting most of my time to (aside from reading all the mail from Brice's bug triage), is transitioning the XSF over to git. Thierry has written major chunk of infrastructure to help move us over. I've done most of the conversion locally, and have been putting things up on git.debian.org as I go. As of now, we've got a very large chunk of X in git now, and using svn for those bits is officially closed. I'm hoping to complete the move in the next two weeks or so. If you want the above software that's not yet in the archive (beryl, compiz, compiz-extra, etc) you can clone it from the git repositories and build away. The other major thing that I've been doing is writing up a XSF git policy. This required a lot of input from the team, and we had to come up with a reasonable way of working the archive so that we could easily work with an upstream that was also using git, which as far as I know is a unique situation right now. It's in pretty good shape right now and we're just starting to put it in to real use. I've proposed a talk for Debconf on the XSF roadmap for Lenny, and I'll be sure to talk about our experiences using git if it gets accepted. In addition, we've all been learning the ins and outs of git, which is a whole other post in itself. I think that the XSF will end up being a really good resource for people in Debian who are looking to use git, as we'll have a lot of real world experience with a tool that relatively few people actually seem to know. Since I think git usage will only grow in the future, hopefully this will end up being valuable for Debian as a whole.

10 November 2006

David Nusinow

With all the talk about binary drivers, and Ubuntu's recent decision to ship them by default, I was going to try and rant or philosophize about the various issues it raises, and how I think ripping Ubuntu a new one for this move is justified, but instead I'm going to talk about kitties and happy things.

On the XSF front, the coolest news has come from people other than me. In addition to providing compiz updates and improvements, Thierry Reding has been busy cleaning up the Debian mesa packaging in the XSF repo. Mesa's Debian maintainer hasn't been very active over the past few months, so Thierry has stepped in to help out there.

Julien Cristau, who helped in the early work moving from XFree86 to Xorg, has returned to the XSF to take over maintainance of xterm, which I've almost completely neglected. Both these packages needed more dedicated maintainance than I could provide, and it's great to see them both being beaten in to shape.

Drew Parsons has been as industrious as ever, packaging updates for drivers so we can ship Etch with driver support that is very close to what will be released upstream as 7.2. In addition, he's packaged the modesetting branch of the i810 driver. This is an experimental development branch that will become the mainline in the nearish future, and it basically allows the driver to set modelines that aren't specified by the BIOS, just like other drivers.

Christian Perrier continues to rock the translations.

I've been doing unglamorous work bringing the Xorg docs in to the late 90's, thus making sure that we ship with docs so that users can tell what's on their systems.

Finally, Thierry has put a ton of work in building infrastructure to move the XSF svn repo over to git. I've been evaluating this, and hopefully we can make the move soon so that we hit etch+1 development running. Using git will provide an easier means of pulling from and pushing to upstream. Hopefully, downstream derivatives will also use git as well to facilitate this. I'm really excited about all of this because it feels like we're active across the board.

And now for the kitties. Nicole and I have adopted a cat. We get to take her home from the shelter next Wednesday, so if some random characters start to appear from me on irc, it's probably her fault. Rest assured that when I never run for DPL, she will be a far better running mate than Zeke. As a favor I would like to ask you, all my loyal readers: if I start to talk about my cat constantly, like one would one's own child, please punch me in the kidney. Thank you.

17 October 2006

David Watson: I am now a double D

I’m extremely happy to let everyone know that I am now a Debian Developer. I’d like to thank my AM - Martin Michlmayr, Drew Parsons for advocating me and sponsoring uploads, and Roger Leigh for also sponsoring uploads. I’d also like to thanks the FD and DAM teams (looks like they have been busy during this last week). The entire process took 13 months to complete, with that time roughly split between waiting for an AM and then covering P&P and T&S. My wait in the FD and DAM queues was quite short. Of course the first thing I did once I found out, like any email freak was to update my .sig file. Thanks once again to all of those people that helped during my time in the NM queue.

20 September 2006

David Nusinow: Checklist

Things to do for Etch:

[X] Transition from XFree86 to Xorg
[X] Transition from the monolith to modular
[X] Put Xorg 7.1 in to unstable so it can be shipped with Etch
[ ] Fix all the bugs

The heroes for this one were Drew Parsons, Andres Salomon, and Steve Langasek. Onward to the release!

17 September 2006

David Nusinow: Rock

Finally, after too long, I can indulge in the glory that is the internet and Debian infighting from the privacy of my own home.

You may have noticed that Drew Parsons has been delivering swift kicks to the junk of the idea that Debian ships old X software. Thanks to his tireless efforts, we've got all the X libs for 7.1 in unstable right now. The server is basically ready to go, and Steve "OMG I GOT A HACKERGOTCHI FINALLY!!!" Langasek is attacking the terrifying task of a mesa update to lay the final bit of groundwork for the server and drivers. We should be able to get the new server and drivers in unstable within a week, at which point the XSF enters the home stretch of cleaning and polishing for the release. There's tons of this that we have to do, but to be honest I'm amazed at how far we've come over the past year or two, and I'm sure that people will be happy with the packages we ship with etch.

For post-etch, there's bigger things (like World Peace) in store, but the whole XSF has worked really hard on this and I believe the effort shows.

23 July 2006

David Nusinow: burp

What a couple of weeks.

So I went off to Europe. I had planned to meet up with Daniel Stone and many others in Paris, but fate decided to piss in my cornflakes and delay my flight out of Boston so that we missed the connecting flight to Paris. I spent the whole next day in Montreal's airport, and while I got a lot of reading about Norse mythology done, I didn't have nearly as much time in Paris and didn't get to meet up with anyone. Daniel and I will have to postpone drinking and bashing X in person until a latter date. The time that I did spend there, was great though, and I got to do some of the tourist things that I didn't get to do last time I was there. Nicole, my girlfriend, had never been to Europe, so she was thrilled to see things for the first time.

Then it was off to Munich, where I did get to spend some time with Michael Banck, who is even more awesome in person than on the internets. Michael was my sponsor in Debian for well over a year, as well as my advocate, and now we're both ops in #debian together, so it was a real thrill to finally meet up with him. He was too polite to let me buy him dinner or a drink as thanks, so I'm hoping he comes to visit so I can repay him. I also got to meet several others, including release manager extraordinare Andreas Barth, which was a lot of fun. We were in town when Germany was playing Sweden in the world cup, and Germany actually won, so the whole city was singing until dawn. Ever since I've been back I've been drinking lots of Hefeveisens and wishing that they were served in 1 liter form.

Surprisingly, since I've been back, I've had the opportunity to do some programming at work and push Free Software at the same time. A co-worker of mine recently did an experiment that got her a list of 900 genes, and she wanted to narrow that list by comparing them to another list or two, but had no idea how to get this done in a reasonable amount of time. So one afternoon I wrote a small ruby script to do this, and all of a sudden my boss is looking at me wondering what other sort of neat computer things I could whip up. I also had to start doing some statistics, and I found a test that I needed to do which Excel couldn't do, so I started learning and coding a bit of R, which is pretty nice so far. The co-worker of mine just invested $800 in a two day class on learning to use an add-on for R, which is cool because I've totally failed until now to get anyone to use Free Software in the lab. The whole thing is making my labmates look at me a little funny though, since this stuff is way out of their league for the most part.

The bad news is that a few days after I came back, I found that my laptop's hard drive started making some very bad noises. I moved my data to backup computer that I'd inherited but not really used, only to find that the backup machine was prone to weird random errors. That left me without a functional computer at home. I took the opportunity to order a new machine for myself, but for now I'm kind of stuck with a web browser at work. In the meanwhile, I've taken to teaching myself statistics, and in order to do that, I've been re-learning calculus. I find it a little weird that I'm going home at night and picking up a calculus text book in my free time.

As far as X work goes, not having a working computer has caused a bit of a problem. Luckily, just before my machine died, Andres Salomon had nearly finished work on backporting Xorg 7.1 to sarge. Afterwards, he decided that he wanted to join the XSF, so since then he's been spearheading getting 7.1 in to experimental. He's been continuing the work that I haven't been able to do lately, and I'm excited to work with him in the future. In addition, Jurij Smakov joined the team as sparc driver maintainer, and Drew Parsons is officially joining the team, bringing Xprint officially in to the XSF. So even though I haven't been able to do much, things are moving forward, which is wonderful to see. As soon as I can get set up, I'm going to keep working with Andres to get 7.1 ready to ship in December.

Surprisingly, I drink far more lately than when I had a working computer. I think something is wrong with me if working on Debian helps to keep me from seeking chemical modification.