August 11th, 2009 by John Carr
Despite the constant threat of bike shedding, the sysadmin team will be hosting a small irc meeting (on #sysadmin) in the near future. Feel free to join in and tell us how much you love us <3. See here for more details, and here to help us choose between Friday and Sunday.
Minutes from the last meeting are here.
On a related note, one of the tasks to come out of the last meeting was to try and make bugzilla faster, or at least come up with a plan. That task kind of disappeared, because the bugzilla 3 porting work is now finished. Yes, as you may have seen, Bugzilla 3 is coming!!.
Tags: bugzilla, meeting, Sysadmin
Posted in Nerd | 1 Comment »
July 15th, 2009 by John Carr
Just a quick blog to point you at the external dependencies branch of JHBuild i’ve been working on.
The external deps branch aims to do 2 things:
- Don’t jhbuild any modules that are already system installed
- Add a new command to jhbuild to install system packages so they don’t need to be jhbuilded
It pretty much works, it needs massaging into shape to merge into master. Then we need to collect some meta-data:
- Minimum versions. How do we know if the system installed glib is new enough? I added a minimum=”" annotation to the dependency information we already have.
- Package names. Right now it’s a bit difficult to map jhbuild module names to package names. I’ve added aliases files for now, and some crude python to try and infer the aliases for Debian. Better ideas welcome.
I also need to get round to a PackageKit backend so it supports more than Debian/Ubuntu :]
If you want a jhbuild where ‘jhbuild build gedit’ only builds the least amount of stuff, help me :]
Tags: JHBuild
Posted in Nerd | 6 Comments »
July 10th, 2009 by John Carr
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
May 16th, 2009 by John Carr
Noticed that Channel 4’s on demand service 4oD is now advertising mac compatibility. So I gave it a shot on Ubuntu Jaunty (with the full fat dirty evil flash 10). Ladies and gents, it looks like 4 on demand now works on Linux too, shame they didnt advertise that on the tele.
Tags: 4oD
Posted in General | 4 Comments »
May 15th, 2009 by John Carr
I’ve been playing with the master branch of tracker and i’m loving it – it looks like its finally reached the stage where I won’t just turn it straight off after a fresh install.
It now brings GNOME an RDF store with a SPARQL interface. Powerful joo-joo, but kinda scary if you haven’t seen it before. Most conversations about it lead to words like graphs, triples, ontologies… My eyes start to gloss over.. I need to learn by doing. So i’ve been playing with writing some python wrappers to hide tracker and just provide a familiar pythonic interface.
Any object type that tracker knows about will be available in python via the wonders of introspection. All properties of the class are available, with docstrings explaining the intent of the property and its type. Obviously you can get, set and delete and do simple queries. And behind the scenes are SPARQL queries in all their glory. Theres a lot still to do, but enough done that I can synchronise my address book to Tracker with Conduit (see my tracker branch).
So far it looks something like this (but its subject to very rapid change):
import tralchemy
from tralchemy.nco import Contact
# add a contact
c = Contact.create()
c.fullname = "John Carr"
c.firstname = "John"
c.nickname = "Jc2k"
c.commit()
# find all the people called John
for c in Contact.get(firstname="John"):
print c.uri, c.fullname
# subscribe to any contact changes
def callback(subjects):
print subjects
Contact.notifications.connect("SubjectsAdded", callback)
# Will probably be just:
Contact.added.connect(callback)
While get() is a nice way to do simple queries, what if you wanted to do something a little more complicated. It always feels messy when you have SQL or SPARQL nested in other code. Existing SQL ORM tools are a great place to start at avoiding this, but i quite like the LINQ style generator-to-SPARQL. Something like:
q = Query(Contact.firstname for Contact in Store if Contact.nickname == 'Jc2k')
or
q = Query(c.firstname for c in Store if c is Contact and c.nickname == 'Jc2k')
Hmm decisions. Hope to implement similar abstractions in JavaScript, C# (via LINQ) and Vala (via Magic). Anyone wanna share their cloning tech?
Tags: Conduit, GNOME, Python, RDF, Tracker
Posted in Nerd | 7 Comments »
May 3rd, 2009 by John Carr
Jelmer just pinged me to show me a new fangled Mercurial plugin. Thats right folks – pulling and pushing between Git and Mercurial! It uses the dulwich library that I worked on with Jelmer (was the basis for my “git serve” crack and is also used for pushing and pulling between Bazaar branches and Git with bzr-git).
Coolness.
I look forward to seeing some new dulwich patches (they are using a patched copy right now).
Tags: Git, Mercurial
Posted in Nerd | 1 Comment »
April 27th, 2009 by John Carr
When GNOME SVN was migrated to Git all your commits were attached to a generated e-mail address in the form username@src.gnome.org.
If you have a GitHub account you can go to your settings and add that e-mail address. Now all the old commits you made will be associated with your account when viewed on GitHub. If you’re a fan of the cute GitHub graphs, you’ll love this too.
Tags: Git
Posted in Nerd | Comments Off
April 17th, 2009 by John Carr
Owen just announced the formation of formal sysadmin team which I will be coordinating on an interim basis.
Want to join the team? Want to get your pet peeve fixed? Everything will unfold on the gnome-infrastructure mailing list, so sign up there if you want to get involved!
Tags: GNOME, Sysadmin
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off
April 15th, 2009 by John Carr
Tomorrow we move to Git! If I could offer you one piece of advice, git config would be it. Just a simple:
git config --global user.name "Your Name Comes Here"
git config --global user.email you@yourdomain.example.com
on every new machine you use Git on. Otherwise the history is going to look like crap (look at the email address).
commit 9dea54aab2c97181f8d8c67a8cdce956baa30d05
Author: Gnome User <gnome@ubuntu-desktop.(none)>
Date: Tue Apr 7 10:17:13 2009 +1200
That is all.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
January 8th, 2009 by John Carr
A couple of days ago I was pondering DVCS whilst wandering along an icy road. Not focusing on the ice proved disastrous. My right foot flew forward and i landed flat on my ****, much to the amusement of my fellow codethinkers. My head bounced off the tarmac and my elbow hit.. well who knows, but my elbow ended up pretty damn swollen. The day after brought little mercy – I seemed to have pulled muscles i didn’t even know I had and looking far left or right proved challenging, as did the simple act of putting my bag over my shoulder. Difficulty sleeping followed.
My point is, all this talk of DVCS caused me physical harm. Discussion considered harmful, lesson learned.
A couple of interesting points were raised about the git-serve bridge which I would like to answer, regardless of what infrastructure GNOME migrates to. I should have been more clear from the start, but the bulk of the work to implement the Git protocol is happening in an upstream project called dulwich. Theres no relation to Bazaar, and might be a nice library for anyone doing Git work in python (it doesnt need to spawn git processes to operate). The code there is based on some earlier work by James Westby and its current maintainer is Jelmer Vernooij. Any code for the git-serve mapping between Git and Bazaar is getting added to the bzr-git plugin, and again i’m working with Jelmer.
I’ve written some basic responses to the common gut reactions on the Bazaar wiki.
In the context of GNOME, a more interesting question was about how to merge branches from people not using GNOME infrastructure and a different VCS to the maintainer. First of all, why arent they using us? But one interesting thing i’d like to see is a code review system with tight VCS integration. For example, using dulwich to allow people to push a branch to review board and convert it into a review automatically. (The Git protocol will send only the commits that need to be merged). Anyone can push, no plugins or setup needed by the contributor. Then we can allow people to land a merge from review-board in the browser, or merge from review-board into their local branch or even request buildbot test the branch first. git:// is a protocol. We implement lots of other protocols in the freedesktop world, lots of them far more complicated, lots of them much less open. So this doesnt scare me. Its just an efficient way of swapping patches. And of course we can reuse bzrlib for supporting Bazaar.
Most points that have been raised have a valid counter-argument if you approach them with a “we can” attitude, but going over them would likely lead to more ice slipping. I will be at FOSDEM, be sure to bring a stick.
Even if we don’t use Bazaar (and dulwich) as the platform for our core source code hosting, we can still build lots of cool tools and services around GNOME with it. If you want to help out get in touch, or get in #gnome-bzr.
Tags: Bazaar, dulwich, Git, GNOME
Posted in Nerd | 3 Comments »
