Life is so good, it gets better every day

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Havoc, sure you weren’t smoking any when writing this entry?

Podcasted

So as Jeff mentions, I recently featured in James Purser’s Linux Australia Update. It’s my first podcast, and I probably didn’t prepare my voice with enough beer beforehand. Didn’t get to talk much about our JDS work on OpenSolaris as I hoped, and I probably need to figure out the ‘What is OpenSolaris’ pitch a little better – hindsight is a wonderful thing. Out of mild fear, do I really sound that English in real life?

Phone a Friend

Most of my best thoughts happen around alcohol. I’m not embarassed by that or anything – I figure it’s in the blood being an Irishman. For a while I’ve been thinking about how people get involved in Open Source development. A lot of the time they lurk behind user groups, installing the latest ISOs or upgrading to the the latest release of their favorite software. That’s great – I’m glad they’re trying our software.

But what takes them to go to the next level? What persistence does it take to log a bug, attach a patch? How do you get to be the next Jeff Waugh [tm]?

For me, everything happened overnight when I attended my first GNOME conference in Copenhagen. I remember feeling amazingly motivated after that conference. I saw so many new faces, and talked to so many new and exciting people who were interested in the project that I was. Those faces soon turned into so many wonderful friends and I owe the GNOME project so much for that.

So, it’s time to reach out. I want to make that connection once again. We have all these fantastic new technologies to make that connection so much easier – everything from skype to the standard telephone. Instead of replying to a bugzilla reports, we should talk in real time.

Send me your phone number, or skype username. Let’s talk.

OpenSolaris ISO

Luis, I’d *love* to see us have a completely open easily installable OpenSolaris ISO but we’re not there yet. While there are the derived SchilliX and now BeleniX, I’d love to see an OpenSolaris distribution along the lines of OpenSuSE and Fedora. In a way, we do have those ISOs already though – it’s called ‘Solaris Express Community Release’ [see downloads].

From what I gather, the choice of what to use was based on the license and what restrictions we already had with regard to 3rd party code – not whether it was GPL or non-GPL compatible. If we were going GPL, then I imagine our lawyers would probably still be sitting in a room talking. IANAL, so I’ll let others field questions for this one though – as mentioned, it gives the opportunity for the developer to be in full control of how much they want to share, how much they want to keep, and price to pay for their products. While I’m pretty sure Sun will be one of those ‘sharing’ companies, I’m not sure how comfortable I am with making that decision for others.

But sending questions or complaints to ombudsman [at] sun [dot] com would probably be a better way of getting the feedback to the right group of people within Sun.

Better Tools

Mikael, there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from installing OpenSolaris/Solaris and using DTrace though – I and others would encourage it. Those tools are still available, and it might even run on your choice of hardware. Don’t forget the CDDL is just an attempt to stop the proliferation of software licenses – it’s a filed based, templated license, with the Mozilla Public License under the hood, and it was chosen for pretty good reasons, I believe.

Obviously there’s also nothing to stop you from taking those ideas and reimplementing them somewhere else – Jonathan even said so publically at OSCON, ‘knock yourself out’. The BSD guys are already on that path, with some Sun engineers helping them along the way. I’m sure the SystemTap guys will learn from DTrace as well, with time.

DTrace on OSX then, Mikael? *cough*

Solaris WiFi

I’ve been playing a lot with setting up my new Solaris laptop. It’s so nice to have a small, light laptop that doesn’t hum like a Boeing 747. One of the things I struggled with was getting wireless working with the new wireless tools. Seemingly the driver for the Intel Pro Wireless 2200BG [not yet released on opensolaris.org] requires you to publicize the ESSID from the access point. Not only that, for some reason it didn’t like the access point handing out a different address space to my router, so configuring that as a pass through made things work like a charm.

Update: Joshua Stein points me to a fix in the BSD driver for the ESSID fix. Seems it was fixed in 1.49 – hopefully that fix can propagate into our sources. Thanks Joshua!

Also got pointed at some nice GUI network scripts from Mike Ramchand and Darren Moffat to help me on my way. And for the first time *ever*, I’m using zenity for something other than looking at my easter egg.

Next up, GNOME 2.12 and an IRC client.

Kung Fu Hustle

Met up with Phil last night to go see Kung Fu Hustle in the late showing. Wow, this is just an incredible movie. There’s not too many movies you go to these days where you immediately walk out of the cinema thinking ‘I want to see that again, tomorrow’. Not your average martial arts film – but funny, stylish and for once, a good story and character development. I totally recommend this for anyone who hasn’t yet seen it.

Buggle Eyed

After 3 days of bug triaging, I’m still on P4 bugs. I’ve definitely pissed a few people off, but I hope they realize that this work part of being more effective at picking up new bugs that are being logged in the future. The P4 count is down from 900+ to just over 400 now and others in the team have already started on the 1000+ P3 bugs that we have.

If it wasn’t obvious from this exercise, Luis was totally right – Everyone Needs a Bugmaster. We would have been much more effective if we had done regular triaging rather than this once every so often approach.

Actually the whole bug life cycle process has been bugging me a lot, and I’ve been trying to think how we might be able to get a handle on things while we juggle managing 2 bug tracking databases – the community bugzilla, Sun’s bug tracker, and now OpenSolaris interaction. So I came up with a new crazy process of how I’d like us to work in the future. Okay, so it’s amazingly naive, and I’m sure it’ll have people coming at me with an axe, but in reflection, it nicely fits in with our long term goal of maximizing our work during the community unstable development cycle, which is going to benefit us much more in the long run.

1. During unstable community development, log all bugs in bugzilla.gnome.org
2. When we branch for a stable release [say for the version of JDS going into Nevada], start logging bugs in Sun’s bugtracker
3. Do our usual analysis based on the data in Sun’s bugtracker in terms of stability, and our GO/NO GO decisions
4. Once we have a GO in terms of shipping, then we know that the bugs we have in Sun’s bug tracker are either of 2 following states –
   • Update candidates – those bugs that we really want to get into an update release because we think they’re important enough to fix, and may not have had the time previously
   • Not update candidates – those bugs which we care less about, and don’t have the motivation, cost or resources to get them into an update release
5. Identify all the update candidate bugs that we want to fix, and then close out all the other bugs that will not go into an update. By closing out, of course I mean making sure that the bug is registered in community bugzilla and closing out the bug logged internally.

So, this is a radically different, and so highly political that it may not be possible to pull it off, but I think it’s the right thing to do. It makes us more effective internally, and encourages us to work outside the walls of Sun as much as possible in the community bug tracker if we want a stable product at the end of it. It could be another hair-brained idea, and I’m full of those, but I’m hoping that it might help simplify our business and benefit everyone.

New Laptop!

My new laptop arrived yesteday – a nice new Toshiba Portege M300, as well as a nice long life 12 hour battery. Spent some time downloading the ISOs for Solaris Express Build 22 and installing them. Everything seems to have gone well and quite looking forward to the challenges of running a 100% Solaris laptop as my main development box.

However, right now I’ve powered down the new laptop, closed the lid because I want it to be a nice treat after I finish this bug triage. I’ve gone through about 600 bugs in the last 2 days and managed to close a whole heap of really old bugs. Only another 400+ P4 bugs to go – fortunately I think I’ve started a trend and others are beginning to help now. If I seem responsive and unmotivated, you’ll know the reason. Triaging is *hard*.

Dear Federico

Dear Federico,
Use DTrace. You’re killin’ us here…Seriously.
Love Gman.
P.S. Good work though, except with your choice of tools 😉