This weekend I finished the penultimate feature for the LVFS. Before today, when uploading firmware there was up to a 24h delay before the new firmware would appear in the metadata. This was because there was a cronjob on my home server downloading files every night from the LVFS site, running appstream-builder on them locally and then uploading the metadata back to the site. Not awesome at all.
Actually generating the metadata in the OpenShift instance was impossible, until today. Due to libgcab and libappstream-glib not being available on the RHEL 6.2 instance I’m using, I had to re-implement two things in Python:
- Reading and writing Microsoft cabinet archives
- Reading MetaInfo files and writing compressed AppStream XML
The two helper libraries (only really implementing the parts required, but patches welcome) are python-cabarchive and python-appstream. I’m not awesome at Python, so feedback (in the form of pull requests) welcome.
This means I’m nearly okay to be hit by a bus. Well, nearly; the final feature is to collect statistics about how many people are downloading each firmware file, and possibly collecting data on how many failures and successes there have been when actually applying the firmware. This is actually quite tricky to do without causing privacy issues and not doing double counting. I’ll do some more thinking and then write up a proposal, ideas welcome.
Bus factor link broken, check the url (there’s a superfluous ‘.’)
RHEL 6.2, really? The latest versions are RHEL 6.7 and 7.1, but maybe it’s a typo for 7.2 since you’re at the source.
Regardless of the resilience of your projects to bus-factor, please, do try not to walk under one. :)