Search Results: "Iain Lane"

13 August 2017

Mike Gabriel: @DebConf17: Work for Debian and FLOSS I got done during DebCamp and DebConf... and Beyond...

People I Met and will Remember Topics I have worked on Talks and BoFs Packages Uploaded to Debian unstable Packages Uploaded to Debian NEW I also looked into lightdm-webkit2-greeter, but upstream is in the middle of a transition from Gtk3 to Qt5, so this has been suspended for now. Packages Uploaded to oldstable-/stable-proposed-updates or -security Other Package related Stuff Thanks to Everyone Making This Event Possible A big thanks to everyone who made it possible for me to attend this event!!!

22 July 2017

Niels Thykier: Improving bulk performance in debhelper

Since debhelper/10.3, there has been a number of performance related changes. The vast majority primarily improves bulk performance or only have visible effects at larger input sizes. Most visible cases are: For debhelper, this mostly involved: How to take advantage of these improvements in tools that use Dh_Lib: Credits: I would like to thank the following for reporting performance issues, regressions or/and providing patches. The list is in no particular order: Should I have missed your contribution, please do not hesitate to let me know.
Filed under: Debhelper, Debian

Niels Thykier: Improving bulk performance in debhelper

Since debhelper/10.3, there has been a number of performance related changes. The vast majority primarily improves bulk performance or only have visible effects at larger input sizes. Most visible cases are: For debhelper, this mostly involved: How to take advantage of these improvements in tools that use Dh_Lib: Credits: I would like to thank the following for reporting performance issues, regressions or/and providing patches. The list is in no particular order: Should I have missed your contribution, please do not hesitate to let me know.
Filed under: Debhelper, Debian

3 December 2016

Ross Gammon: My Open Source Contributions June November 2016

So much for my monthly blogging! Here s what I have been up to in the Open Source world over the last 6 months. Debian Ubuntu Other Plan for December Debian Before the 5th January 2017 Debian Stretch soft freeze I hope to: Ubuntu Other

20 September 2016

Gunnar Wolf: Proposing a GR to repeal the 2005 vote for declassification of the debian-private mailing list

For the non-Debian people among my readers: The following post presents bits of the decision-taking process in the Debian project. You might find it interesting, or terribly dull and boring :-) Proceed at your own risk. My reason for posting this entry is to get more people to read the accompanying options for my proposed General Resolution (GR), and have as full a ballot as possible. Almost three weeks ago, I sent a mail to the debian-vote mailing list. I'm quoting it here in full: 
Some weeks ago, Nicolas Dandrimont proposed a GR for declassifying
debian-private[1]. In the course of the following discussion, he
accepted[2] Don Armstrong's amendment[3], which intended to clarify the
meaning and implementation regarding the work of our delegates and the
powers of the DPL, and recognizing the historical value that could lie
within said list.
[1] https://www.debian.org/vote/2016/vote_002
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2016/07/msg00108.html
[3] https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2016/07/msg00078.html
In the process of the discussion, several people objected to the
amended wording, particularly to the fact that "sufficient time and
opportunity" might not be sufficiently bound and defined.
I am, as some of its initial seconders, a strong believer in Nicolas'
original proposal; repealing a GR that was never implemented in the
slightest way basically means the Debian project should stop lying,
both to itself and to the whole free software community within which
it exists, about something that would be nice but is effectively not
implementable.
While Don's proposal is a good contribution, given that in the
aforementioned GR "Further Discussion" won 134 votes against 118, I
hereby propose the following General Resolution:
=== BEGIN GR TEXT ===
Title: Acknowledge that the debian-private list will remain private.
1. The 2005 General Resolution titled "Declassification of debian-private
   list archives" is repealed.
2. In keeping with paragraph 3 of the Debian Social Contract, Debian
   Developers are strongly encouraged to use the debian-private mailing
   list only for discussions that should not be disclosed.
=== END GR TEXT ===
Thanks for your consideration,
--
Gunnar Wolf
(with thanks to Nicolas for writing the entirety of the GR text ;-) )
Yesterday, I spoke with the Debian project secretary, who confirmed my proposal has reached enough Seconds (that is, we have reached five people wanting the vote to happen), so I could now formally do a call for votes. Thing is, there are two other proposals I feel are interesting, and should be part of the same ballot, and both address part of the reasons why the GR initially proposed by Nicolas didn't succeed: So, once more (and finally!), why am I posting this? I plan to do the formal call for votes by Friday 23.
[update] Kurt informed me that the discussion period started yesterday, when I received the 5th second. The minimum discussion period is two weeks, so I will be doing a call for votes at or after 2016-10-03.

26 April 2016

Matthias Klumpp: A GNOME Software Hackfest report

Two weeks ago was the GNOME Software hackfest in London, and I ve been there! And I just now found the time to blog about it, but better do it late than never . Arriving in London and finding the Red Hat offices After being stuck in trains for the weekend, but fortunately arriving at the airport in time, I finally made it to London with quite some delay due to the slow bus transfer from Stansted Airport. After finding the hotel, the next issue was to get food and a place which accepted my credit card, which was surprisingly hard in defence of London I must say though, that it was a Sunday, 7 p.m. and my card is somewhat special (in Canada, it managed to crash some card readers, so they needed a hard-reset). While searching for food, I also found the Red Hat offices where the hackfest was starting the next day by accident. My hotel, the office and the tower bridge were really close, which was awesome! I have been to London in 2008 the last time, and only for a day, so being that close to the city center was great. The hackfest didn t leave any time to visit the city much, but by being close to the center, one could hardly avoid the London experience . Cool people working on great stuff towerbridge2016That s basically the summary for the hackfest . It was awesome to meet with Richard Hughes again, since we haven t seen each other in person since 2011, but work on lots of stuff together. This was especially important, since we managed to solve quite some disagreements we had over stuff Richard even almost managed to make me give in to adding <kudos/> to the AppStream spec, something which I was pretty against supporting (it didn t make it yet, but I am no longer against the idea of having that the remaining issues are solvable). Meeting Iain Lane again (after FOSDEM) was also very nice, and also seeing other people I ve only worked with over IRC or bug reports (e.g. William, Kalev, ) was great. Also lots of new people were there, like guys from Endless, who build their low-budget computer for developing/emerging countries on top of GNOME and Linux technologies. It s pretty cool stuff they do, you should check out their website! (they also build their distribution on top of Debian, which is even more awesome, and something I didn t know before (because many Endless people I met before were associated with GNOME or Fedora, I kind of implicitly assumed the system was based on Fedora )). The incarnation of GNOME Software used by endless looks pretty different from what the normal GNOME user sees, since it s adjusted for a different audience and input method. But it looks great, and is a good example for how versatile GS already is! And for upstream GNOME, we ve seen some pretty great mockups done by Endless too I hope those will make it into production somehow.
Ironically, a "snapstore" was close to the office ;-)

Ironically, a snapstore was close to the office ;-)

XdgApp and sandboxing of apps was also a big topic, aside from Ubuntu and Endless integration. Fortunately, Alexander Larsson was also there to answer all the sandboxing and XdgApp-questions. I used the time to follow up on a conversation with Alexander we started at FOSDEM this year, about the Limba vs. XdgApp bundling issue. While we are in-line on the sandboxing approach, the way how software is distributed is implemented differently in Limba and XdgApp, and it is bad to have too many bundling systems around (doesn t make for a good story where we can just tell developers ship as this bundling format, and it will be supported everywhere ). Talking with Alex about this was very nice, and I think there is a way out of the too-many-solutions dilemma, at least for Limba and XdgApp I will blog about that separately soon. On the Ubuntu side, a lot of bugs and issues were squashed and changes upstreamed to GNOME, and people were generally doing their best to reduce Richard s bus-factor on the project a little . I mainly worked on AppStream issues, finishing up the last pieces of appstream-generator and running it against some sample package sets (and later that week against the whole Debian archive). I also started to implement support for showing AppStream issues in the Debian PTS (this work is not finished yet). I also managed to solve a few bugs in the old DEP-11 generator and prepare another release for Ubuntu. We also enjoyed some good Japanese food, and some incredibly great, but also suddenly very expensive Indian food (but that s a different story ). The most important thing for me though was to get together with people actually using AppStream metadata in software centers and also more specialized places. This yielded some useful findings, e.g. that localized screenshots are not something weird, but actually a wanted feature of Endless for their curated AppStore. So localized screenshots will be part of the next AppStream spec. Also, there seems to be a general need to ship curation information for software centers somehow (which apps are featured? how are they styled? added special banners for some featured apps, app of the day features, etc.). This problem hasn t been solved, since it s highly implementation-specific, and AppStream should be distro-agnostic. But it is something we might be able to address in a generic way sooner or later (I need to talk to people at KDE and Elementary about it). In summary It was a great event! Going to conferences and hackfests always makes me feel like it moves projects leaps ahead, even if you do little coding. Sorting out issues together with people you see in person (rather than communicating with them via text messages or video chat), is IMHO always the most productive way to move forward (yeah, unless you do this every week, but I think you get my point ). For me, being the only (and youngest ^^) developer at the hackfest who was not employed by any company in the FLOSS business, the hackfest was also motivating to continue to invest spare time into working on these projects. So, the only thing left to do is a huge shout out of THANK YOU to the Ubuntu Community Fund and therefore the Ubuntu community for sponsoring me! You rock! Also huge thanks to Canonical for organizing the sponsoring really quickly, so I didn t get into trouble with paying my flights.
Laney and attente walking on the Millennium Bridge after we walked the distance between Red Hat and Canonical's offices.

Laney and attente on the Millennium Bridge after we walked the distance between Red Hat and Canonical s offices.

To worried KDE people: No, I didn t leave the blue side I just generally work on cross-desktop stuff, and would like all desktops to work as well as possible

12 April 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 48 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between March 20th and March 26th: Toolchain fixes Daniel Kahn Gillmor worked on removing build path from build symbols submitting a patch adding -fdebug-prefix-map to clang to match GCC, another patch against gcc-5 to backport the removal of -fdebug-prefix-map from DW_AT_producer, and finally by proposing the addition of a normalizedebugpath to the reproducible feature set of dpkg-buildflags that would use -fdebug-prefix-map to replace the current directory with . using -fdebug-prefix-map. Sergey Poznyakoff merged the --clamp-mtime option so that it will be featured in the next Tar release. This option is likely to be used by dpkg-deb to implement deterministic mtimes for packaged files. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: augeas, gmtkbabel, ktikz, octave-control, octave-general, octave-image, octave-ltfat, octave-miscellaneous, octave-mpi, octave-nurbs, octave-octcdf, octave-sockets, octave-strings, openlayers, python-structlog, signond. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: tests.reproducible-builds.org i386 build nodes have been setup by converting 2 of the 4 amd64 nodes to i386. (h01ger) Package reviews 92 reviews have been removed, 66 added and 31 updated in the previous week. New issues: timestamps_generated_by_xbean_spring, timestamps_generated_by_mangosdk_spiprocessor. Chris Lamb filed 7 FTBFS bugs. Misc. On March 20th, Chris Lamb gave a talk at FOSSASIA 2016 in Singapore. The very same day, but a few timezones apart, h01ger did a presentation at LibrePlanet 2016 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Seven GSoC/Outreachy applications were made by potential interns to work on various aspects of the reproducible builds effort. On top of interacting with several applicants, prospective mentors gathered to review the applications.

27 March 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 48 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between March 20th and March 26th:

Toolchain fixes
  • Sebastian Ramacher uploaded breathe/4.2.0-1 which makes its output deterministic. Original patch by Chris Lamb, merged uptream.
  • Rafael Laboissiere uploaded octave/4.0.1-1 which allows packages to be built in place and avoid unreproducible builds due to temporary build directories appearing in the .oct files.
Daniel Kahn Gillmor worked on removing build path from build symbols submitting a patch adding -fdebug-prefix-map to clang to match GCC, another patch against gcc-5 to backport the removal of -fdebug-prefix-map from DW_AT_producer, and finally by proposing the addition of a normalizedebugpath to the reproducible feature set of dpkg-buildflags that would use -fdebug-prefix-map to replace the current directory with . using -fdebug-prefix-map. As succesful result of lobbying at LibrePlanet 2016, the --clamp-mtime option will be featured in the next Tar release. This option is likely to be used by dpkg-deb to implement deterministic mtimes for packaged files.

Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: augeas, gmtkbabel, ktikz, octave-control, octave-general, octave-image, octave-ltfat, octave-miscellaneous, octave-mpi, octave-nurbs, octave-octcdf, octave-sockets, octave-strings, openlayers, python-structlog, signond. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:
  • #818742 on milkytracker by Reiner Herrmann: sorts the list of source files.
  • #818752 on tcl8.4 by Reiner Herrmann: sort source files using C locale.
  • #818753 on tk8.6 by Reiner Herrmann: sort source files using C locale.
  • #818754 on tk8.5 by Reiner Herrmann: sort source files using C locale.
  • #818755 on tk8.4 by Reiner Herrmann: sort source files using C locale.
  • #818952 on marionnet by ceridwen: dummy out build date and uname to make build reproducible.
  • #819334 on avahi by Reiner Herrmann: ship upstream changelog instead of the one generated by gettextize (although duplicate of #804141 by Santiago Vila).

tests.reproducible-builds.org i386 build nodes have been setup by converting 2 of the 4 amd64 nodes to i386. (h01ger)

Package reviews 92 reviews have been removed, 66 added and 31 updated in the previous week. New issues: timestamps_generated_by_xbean_spring, timestamps_generated_by_mangosdk_spiprocessor. Chris Lamb filed 7 FTBFS bugs.

Misc. On March 20th, Chris Lamb gave a talk at FOSSASIA 2016 in Singapore. The very same day, but a few timezones apart, h01ger did a presentation at LibrePlanet 2016 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Seven GSoC/Outreachy applications were made by potential interns to work on various aspects of the reproducible builds effort. On top of interacting with several applicants, prospective mentors gathered to review the applications. Huge thanks to Linda Naeun Lee for the new hackergotchi visible on Planet Debian.

3 June 2013

Iain Lane: Helping others

A pattern I see quite often on help channels goes like this. 
<new person> How do I foo the bar?
<experienced person> new person: Run baz --quux and look at ../wibble.bob
at this point the new person has the information that they wanted and can carry on with whatever it was that they were trying to do. Quite often, however, the conversation continues thus. 
<another experinced person> new person: Also, you could run flubble --grog --foo   mycoolscript > ../wibble.bob to get the same effect
Add in experienced person then trying to justify their initial recommendation, and another experienced person then counter-arguing (possibly highlighting new person all the way, if we're on IRC or a social network that allows this) and you have a confusing experience for the newcomer. Let's try to think about the information we're conveying to newcomers and how we're doing it. Easing people in to our projects gently is a friendlier approach, and will result in happier newcomers who are more likely to stick around.

30 January 2013

Paul Tagliamonte: dput-ng/1.4 in unstable

Changes: 
dput-ng (1.4) unstable; urgency=low
   [ Arno T ll ]
   * Really fix #696659 by making sure the command line tool uses the most recent
     version of the library.
   * Mark several fields to be required in profiles (incoming, method)
   * Fix broken tests.
   * Do not run the check-debs hook in our mentors.d.n profile
   * Fix "[dcut] dm bombed out" by using the profile key only when defined
     (Closes: #698232)
   * Parse the gecos field to obtain the user name / email address from the local
     system when DEBFULLNAME and DEBEMAIL are not set.
   * Fix "dcut reschedule sends "None-day" to ftp-master if the delay is
     not specified" by forcing the corresponding parameter (Closes: #698719)
 .
   [ Luca Falavigna ]
   * Implement default_keyid option. This is particularly useful with multiple
     GPG keys, so dcut is aware of which one to use.
   * Make scp uploader aware of "port" configuration option.
 .
   [ Paul Tagliamonte ]
   * Hack around Launchpad's SFTP implementation. We musn't stat *anything*.
     "Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting wabbits" (Closes: #696558).
   * Rewrote the test suite to actually test the majority of the codepaths we
     take during an upload. Back up to 60%.
   * Added a README for the twitter hook, Thanks to Sandro Tosi for the bug,
     and Gergely Nagy for poking me about it. (Closes: #697768).
   * Added a doc for helping folks install hooks into dput-ng (Closes: #697862).
   * Properly remove DEFAULT from loadable config blocks. (Closes: #698157).
   * Allow upload of more then one file. Thanks to Iain Lane for the
     suggestion. (Closes: #698855).
 .
   [ Bernhard R. Link ]
   * allow empty incoming dir to upload directly to the home directory
 .
   [ Sandro Tosi ]
   * Install example hooks (Closes: #697767).
Thanks to all the contributors! For anyone who doesn t know, you should check out the docs.

31 December 2011

Iain Lane: Beer bread bakin'

I got a beer bread kit from Mum for Christmas this year. enticing It seems pretty easy, so for a pre-new-year treat, I gave it a go. simple to make ready to go Of course, for the beer I'm using one of my first batch of home brewed beer that I made just before the holidays. :-) professionally crown capped a nice colour, and not too cloudy too Chuck it in slop Mix it for around 30 seconds. bash it about, and this comes out Discover there is no bread tin here, so use cake tins instead. baz it in the oven Flatter than it should be, but otherwise YUM YUM YUM hells yeahs

27 December 2011

Niels Thykier: Handling transitions with smooth updates

Lately, I have been working more on release stuff. It all started when Julien convinced me to do the gpsd transition. It was a small, simple transition though I had to bounce obdgpslogger from testing (#648495). After that I picked up the zita-convovler transition (finished yesterday) and gssdp/gupnp ,-igd (currently blocked by #653131 and #652783). I also got the mono, libindicator+libdbusmenu+libindicate and the libarchive transitions on my to-do list. The mono transition is going to be most interesting and challenging of these. It is a bit above 100 packages and the binNMU order (for the 30ish packages that are not arch:all) is non-trivial. Thankfully, Iain Laney appears to have that part covered and will be helping me get it right. I am also very happy with Britney2 s transition assistance. Unlike her retired older sister, Britney2 smooth updates libraries, which allows us to break the transition into smaller steps. Normally when Britney2 migrates a source package, she will throw out all the binaries from the old (version of the) source package. Then she moves the new source package and its binaries into testing. But in a smooth update, she will keep the old library binary packages around (if they are still in use). In a concrete example, during the zita-convolver transition, we transitioned from libzita-convolver2 to libzita-convolver3. On the 24th of December[1], Britney migrated zita-convolver 3.1.0-1 to testing with libzita-convolver3, but kept libzita-convolver2 in testing as well. This is because ir.lv2 was not ready to migrate at that time. With Britney1 zita-convolver 3.1.0-1 would have had to wait until all of its reverse dependencies were ready to migrate. For a small transition like zita-convolver (with 3 or so reverse dependencies), it would have been easy. But having to keep 100+ packages migration ready for the mono transition that is where handling a transition becomes an art. I may still need some hinting to finish the mono transition, but most likely it will be a lot easier than it would have been with Britney1. :) [1] The PTS says the 25th. This is because it uses the day it receives the migration -email from trille, which was sent the day after.

7 November 2011

Jo Shields: Bansheegeddon

It s seeming increasingly likely that reports regarding the future of Banshee, Tomboy, and the rest of the Mono stack in the default Ubuntu desktop install are accurate. Ubuntu 12.04 will likely be the first Ubuntu release since 5.10 not to ship with any Mono apps in the default install ending a run of 12 releases over 6 years. The decision seems to have come about during the default apps session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit just ended in Orlando, Florida. Prior to heavy vandalism, the only reasons cited for the change in the UDS session log are Banshee not well maintained and porting music store to GTK3 is blocked on banshee ported to GTK3 . Other reasons mentioned but not in the session logs are complaints that it doesn t work on ARM. I m using a lot of conjecture in this first paragraph because the news about the decision appeared on the blogosphere before anywhere else. The first many Banshee or Tomboy developers read about it was reading a flurry of activity on the Tweetosphere from the anti-Mono activists declaring victory. So first, a word on the cited reasoning. Banshee works fine on ARM, since Mono works fine on ARM. Xamarin, the company behind most upstream Mono work, earns their income almost entirely from ARM versions of Mono, running on the varied ARM implementations found in smartphones. Every major Banshee release is personally tested on my Genesi EfikaMX, an ARM system with a Freescale i.mx51 processor. I ve also demonstrated Banshee running in an Ubuntu chroot on my HP Touchpad, an ARM-based tablet. What is known is that Banshee has some problems running on Texas Instruments OMAP4 processors the target ARM platform for Canonical s ARM work. None of the Banshee upstream developers, Mono upstream developers, or Mono Ubuntu team has ever been able to reproduce the cited problems, since problems specific to an exact ARM chip are impossible to reproduce without the requisite hardware and none of us owns an ARM system matching Canonical s target. That Banshee is still a GTK+2 app is true. A port to GTK+3 is almost complete, but blocking on a single technical bug deep within GTK# s guts, which could be fixed by someone with sufficient knowledge of GTK+ semantics. Nobody with the required GTK+ knowledge has stepped forward with a fix at this point in time. As for the final point, that Banshee is not well maintained, this seems like a directed personal insult against the active and responsive Banshee maintainer, Chow Loong Jin, and upstream bug triager David Nielsen, in addition to the immeasurable hours contributed free of charge for the benefit of Ubuntu users by various other members of related Mono app and library teams, including myself. I need to stress at this point that my annoyance with this decision has nothing to do with the actual app changes. Keeping Tomboy and gbrainy, at a cost of about 25 meg of unsquashed disk space, is a hard argument to make compared with those two plus Banshee for 40 meg. Dropping gbrainy and Tomboy, and switching to Rhythmbox, will save about 30 meg of unsquashed space, all told.I m unconvinced that Rhythmbox is a technically superior app to Banshee several features which were gained by the first app swap will be lost again but that s another long tedious argument to be had. No, what has me deeply angered is the shambolic way the changes were made and announced. Significant accommodations were made by Banshee upstream in order to make life easier for Canonical to integrate Banshee into their OS. For one thing, that s why the Ubuntu One Music Store support is a core Banshee feature, not part of the third-party community extensions package. If Banshee was being considered for replacement due to unresolved technical issues, then perhaps it would have been polite to, I don t know, inform upstream that it was on the cards? Or, if Canonical felt that problems specific to their own itches required scratching, then is it completely beyond the realm of possibility to imagine they might have spent developer resources on bug fixing their OS and sending those fixes upstream? Or even and call me crazy providing access for upstream to specialized hardware such as a $174 Pandaboard to empower upstream to isolate and fix unreproducible bugs specific to Canonical s target hardware? And here s where it gets more astonishing for me Canonical paid money to ship one of the community-based packagers responsible for the stack, Iain Lane, to Orlando for UDS, and didn t think it was worth bothering to perhaps inform him hey, the stuff you work on is in danger of being axed from the default install, maybe you should go to this session . So I m not cross that the stuff I work on has been removed from the default install. I intend to continue working on it as I have for the last 4 years, through my work in Debian. No, why I m cross that I heard about it from fucking Boycott Novell. Regardless of your opinions regarding Banshee or its stack, if you read the above and don t see it as an abysmal failure of community engagement by a company whose community manager wrote a book on the damn topic, then there s something seriously wrong with your understanding of how community labour should be seen as a resource. Maybe someone at Canonical should try reading Jono s book. It s not a first-time offence, and this mail from a PiTiVi developer regarding changes in 11.10 makes for useful further reading. [edit] There is some worthwhile discussion going on on the ubuntu-desktop mailing list covering the technical issues surrounding the decision, I would suggest it s a good place for ongoing technical discussion.

6 November 2011

Iain Lane: Goodbye Orlando

After a tiring UDS in which I very nearly achieved my goal of mentioning Debian in every session and conversation, I ventured out to a nearby outlet mall. scary monster Imagine my surprise when this little chap ended up in my bag! err and then I found out where the Angry Birds hang out when taking a break from destroying those evil pigs shoes and after this twin impact, I needed some retail therapy. This is probably the second pair of shoes I have ever purchased for myself. Good week :-). And so to the delayed flight home

12 October 2011

Iain Lane: Robin Hood beer festival 2011

tasty beerskis Greetings real ale fans, This most exciting time of year is almost upon us again. Yes, it's the Nottingham Robin Hood Beer Festival! This year I have followed in the footsteps of Alex and Karen and decided to trawl through the list of over 900 beers so that I can best sample the delights on offer. My selection is here. I'm attending on both the Thursday and Saturday, so there's plenty of time for me to sample a reasonable number of different ales. Beer aficionados, I'd welcome suggestions for alternative beers to try, if you'd recommend any of them. I promise to update the list after. I might even be tempted by the ciders, perries and wines. Generally I tend to prefer paler ales, but I also quite like a mild given half the chance. See you on the other side! (Image by Ant & Carrie Coleman, cc-by-nd 2.0)

14 August 2011

Iain Lane: Dear lazyweb: Cycle touring by train

dangly bikelets Dear lazyweb, In a couple of weeks I'm likely to be going cycle touring around the North East of England. This will involve first taking a train from Nottingham. While looking at train options just now, I was reminded of a little survey that I wanted to conduct. Taking bicycles on trains in the UK can be a hit-or-miss experience. The UK's train routes are operated by a variety of train operating companies who each have different policies on taking bicycles on their trains. Some require a reservation, some do not. Some do not even allow reservations at all. There's no official database of these policies. It is up to you to check all of the companies' websites individually. As far as I can tell it is impossible to make a cycle reservation online. If you don't make a reservation, chances are that you'll be OK, but there are no guarantees you won't find yourself stranded in Bolton when none of your connections will take you. The number of spaces reserved for cycles is extermely limited. Two seems to be the most common number that a train can officially carry (you may be able to stash it in the vestibule). Even given this, it is usual to find that the cycle spaces are taken up by prams, luggage and other crap when you actually board the train, so the effective number may actually be 0. However, it is thankfully not uncommon to find staff and other passengers who are more than willing to go out of their way to help you if they see you are trying to take a bicycle onto a train. :-) Anyway, I'm interested in how this situation is in other non-UK countries. Better or worse? A lot of countries certainly have a more cycle-friendly culture I'd like to know how this kind of thing works there so that I can write a Strongly Worded Letter about how we Should Be Doing Better. (Image by onohiroki, CC-by-nd.)

4 August 2011

Iain Lane: Farewell, UCycle!

bike + trent OH MY I took my university hire bike out for a spin along Nottingham's big track at the weekend. It was great. If you're ever in the area with a bike I thoroughly recommend it. I'll be getting my own trusty steed back after 11.5 months later this week. More on that saga later.

3 July 2011

Iain Lane: Ubuntu upload history now available in UDD

There are two different uses (within Debian/Ubuntu) of the initialism UDD: Ubuntu Distributed Development and the Ultimate Debian Database. This article talks about the latter. At UDS-O in Budapest a few weeks ago we had a session (video) on DEX: an initiative to improve collaboration between Debian and its derivatives. There's an Ubuntu DEX subproject, and this is what the session was about, thinking up ideas. I thought of something that could possibly yield some results --- my action from the session was:
[laney] measure relative uploads between ubuntu and debian and see if anything interesting pops up: TODO
It seems to me that if we could tell which packages were uploaded with the most frequency to Ubuntu with respect to Debian, then we may be able to figure out why this is and if there's any way we can do the work in Debian instead. Clearly for this to happen we are going to need data! And where better to house a load of data than the Ultimate Debian Database itself? So I wrote some scripts to download the Ubuntu changes, handily made available as mbox archives, chop them around a bit and eventually split them out in a format that UDD can understand. Lucas Nussbaum then kindly integrated the output into UDD itself, and the end result is that an as-near-as-possible complete history of Ubuntu uploads is now available for your creative querying. For example, Wednesday sees the most uploads and Sunday the fewest: 
udd=> SELECT EXTRACT (DOW FROM date) AS dow, COUNT(EXTRACT (DOW
FROM date)) AS count FROM ubuntu_upload_history GROUP BY dow ORDER
BY count DESC;
 dow   count 
-----+-------
   3   26739
   2   26699
   1   25361
   5   23497
   4   22154
   6    9687
   0    8752
(7 rows)
I'll lovingly craft a script to generate the data we need for the DEX project in the next few days. But I hope that the data proves useful for other things too. The three tables you want to look at (with \d+ at a psql prompt) are ubuntu_upload_history, ubuntu_upload_history_launchpad_closes (LP bugs closed by uploads) and ubuntu_upload_history_closes (Debian bugs closed, probably not so interesting). Information on how to use UDD yourself is on this wiki page.

25 May 2011

Iain Lane: Greetings, Planet Debian!

Well hello there. A couple of days ago my debian.org account was created, meaning that I'm one1 of the crop of current new Debian Developers. Actually the news was broken to me by Rhonda when I attached to irssi after arriving at work, a nice surprise :-) 
<Rhonda> All congratulate Laney on becoming a Debian Developer.  ;)
* Rhonda . o O ( http://db.debian.org/search.cgi?dosearch=1&uid=laney )
<Laney> Rhonda: I did?!?!?!
I'll quickly introduce myself by paraphrasing from the background section of the AM report before letting you go about your business. I apparently submitted my first thrilling patch to the alsa-tools package in Ubuntu on February 2nd, 2008. This was sponsored into Hardy by Daniel Chen. Thereafter followed a myriad of exciting patches to various packages that somehow managed to convince a bunch of people that I had enough skill to become an Ubuntu developer. Fast forward a while and I get sucked into the world of Debian packaging by the CLI/Mono strike force of Mirco Bauer and Jo Shields by way of the Mono 2.0 transition. This was where I got my first Debian upload, and it was in this team that I fully realised both the excellence and importance of Debian in the FOSS world2. At some point the Debian Haskell Group formed and I've been involved to some extent there all along too. What I've mainly learned from these two groups is that team maintenance is a really great way to look after a bunch of related packages. When I see people touting new packages about, I often recommend that they look at the list of teams to find a nice home. Perhaps one or two actually did. Thanks to everyone who's supported me so far. I hope to be able to do the same for others in the future.
  1. Along with obergix, lopippo, oliva, aron, madamezou, taffit. Congrats to the rest of you, too :-)
  2. I now consider it one of my primary duties as an Ubuntu developer to reduce the number of fixes that are uploaded to Ubuntu, and take every opportunity that is given to me to promote Debian as the natural home for technically excellent work. Not least because I fully expect DDs to not shy away from calling out poor work presented to them.

2 February 2010

Marco T&uacute;lio Gontijo e Silva: Hi Debian Planet!


Hi Debian Planet! Finally I became a Debian Developer on saturday. Some time after that I sent my first e-mail @debian.org, and today I uploaded my first package: haskell-qio, a sponsored upload for Iain Lane. I d like to thanks everyone that have helped me in the process:
  • Joachim Breitner: for being my sponsor, telling me to look into NM, advocating me in NM and DM, helping me with packaging and other things.
  • Gustavo Noronha: for advocating me in DM, helping me with packaging and agreeing that packaging is not an easy to learn task.
  • Enrico Zini: for being a very nice to work with and helpful AM.
  • Marcelo Vieira: for the chats about the process, which made it pass faster.
  • Ian Costa de Andrade: for not complaining too much about me spending the whole day in the computer, and for all support and encouragement.
  • Marina Gontijo Andrade: for existing.
  • Wagner Meira and Fernando Pereira: for allowing me to work on Debian and giving me a scholarship for it.
  • Thadeu Cascardo and Samuel Vale: for giving me a Debian-related job which made me study about the system.
I m absolutely sure I m forgetting about someone, but I m also sure I ll never remember everyone and I ll always have this sensation. Being a Debian Developer is something I wanted for a long time, and I m very happy to have made it now. Currently I m working mostly in the Debian Haskell Group. These days I m checking if it s possible to make ghci be built in all architectures, and trying to make the newer versions of ghc6, from sid (6.10.4-1) and experimental (6.12.1-4), build in ia64, hurd-i386 and m68k. Any help is welcome. By the way, while I was reading the instructions to migrate some things to the new account, I ve not paid very much attention that I should only change the submitter of the unarchived e-mail, and I made a script, which I posted on the wiki, to change it for all the bugs. Neil Williams commented that this was not necessary, and Sandro Tosi pointed that I could have done this using only one mail to do all commands. Yves-Alexis Perez said that even with the unarchived bug this may not be a good idea, because of the generated noise. So I update the script in the wiki, following these tips, thanks for them. Special thanks for Jimmy Klapowitz, who was nice and supportive in a moment people were not being very nice to me. Sorry for the maintainers that received a lot of e-mails because of this, specially to the people who sign the pkg-haskell-maintainers mailling list, which received the biggest ammount of mail.

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