Likely almost all bugmail lost between 10:00 and 20:00 UTC

Very likely almost all bugmail has been lost between 10:00 and 20:00 UTC today (being July 11th). Due to a mailserver configuration error only people with a @gnome.org address could receive bugmail between this period. This includes new account emails, etc.

I made a quick query to show the 202 new and changed bugs between this period:
this query

Note that this query uses the last changed date. So as soon as the bug is changed again it will disappear from this list (this is on purpose).

Update: Whoops! Used the wrong month in the query

TARBALLS DUE: GNOME 2.15.4 Development Release

Tarballs are due on Monday July 10th (this Monday) before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 2.15.4 Development Release, which will be delivered on
Wednesday. If for some reason you are not able to make a tarball before Monday, please send a mail to the release team: they can find someone to roll the tarball for you!

After July 10th the following announcement periods begin:

  • String Change Announcement: All string changes must be announced to both gnome-i18n@ and gnome-doc-list@.
  • UI Change Announcement Period: All user interface changes must be
    announced to gnome-doc-list@.

Modules which were proposed for inclusion should try to follow the 2.15 schedule so everyone can test them.

For more informations about 2.15, the full schedule and the official
module lists, please see our shiny 2.15 page on the wiki:

http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointFifteen

To help write good release notes, please add major user-visible changes
happening during the 2.15 release cycle to this wiki page:

http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointFifteen/ReleaseNotes

Usually these announcements go to devel-announce-list and gnome-hackers, but as I still haven’t seen the email pop up after 9 hours…

Bugzilla will be DOWN Friday 7 July 2006 21:00 UTC

Bugzilla will move to a different server on Friday 7 July at 21:00 UTC. If you want to know what time that is for your location, look here. The move should not take more than 30 minutes, including DNS update (refresh time has already been shortened to prepare for the move). For those with broken DNS servers I will announce another name here + on the old server to reach bugzilla.gnome.org after the move has been completed (it will not work reliably before everything has been moved over).

I am now an upstream Bugzilla developer. Checking their Getting CVS Write Access feels a bit overwhelming. Getting GNOME CVS access was much easier (ok, I just dislike the faxing part).

Feeds from blogs.gnome.org

The software behind blogs.gnome.org (NewsBruiser) has an interesting default. By default the feeds only give the entries for the current month. So if you make a post minutes before a month ends, likely no planet will show your post.

I couldn’t really understand how I could fix this safely (without breaking other stuff), so I’ve added a hack instead. The feeds from blogs.gnome.org will now always show the last 15 entries. There is some code in there so you can get a feed specific for a year. This is probably broken now.

I checked the server logs and nobody seems to be using anything but the standard syndication URL, so above hack shouldn’t cause any problems. If you find your feed is broken, please file a bug. And please post a patch as well 😉

A few more patches I made for Bugzilla (official one, not b.g.o) have been accepted. Bugzilla 2.24 (or the not-yet-released 2.23.2) will now have a preference to control the initial state of the ‘Add me to the CC-list’ checkbox. By default it is checked unless you have a role (reporter/assignee/qa contact) on the bug.

An important patch is one that detects if the user is trying to submit the same bug multiple times. This could happen if a user refreshes the post_bug.cgi page. Due to some dynamic content on the post_bug.cgi the obvious fix (redirect to show_bug.cgi) could not be done. The patch will give a warning when the users tries to submit the same bug again (for more details, read the bugreport).

Another one that was accepted a while ago adds a X-Bugzilla-Watch-Reason. It changes the existing X-Bugzilla-Reason header to only contain the reasons why you are on a bug (Assignee, Reporter, etc). If you are only watching people on a bug, X-Bugzilla-Reason will contain None (handy for filtering). The X-Bugzilla-Watch-Reason will contain None if you are not watching anyone on the bug. If you are watching someone it will contain the reasons and also the email addresses you are watching. I plan to merge this patch into bugzilla.gnome.org soon (currently we do differ between being a role and watching a role, but it all ends up in X-Bugzilla-Reason).

LpSolit (Bugzilla developer) is currently working on moving the CheckCanChangeField function from process_bug.cgi to Bugzilla/Bug.pm. This function checks if the current user is allowed to change a field (priority/version/summary/etc). When this is done I’m going to change the show_bug.cgi template to use this function and only allow the user to change the fields they are allowed to change. The end result will be like on bugzilla.gnome.org, except on b.g.o I hard-coded the permissions in show_bug.cgi, while the upstream version will use the same function for the UI as well as the backend.

Bug-buddy usage

When Bug-Buddy starts it will check if it needs to update its configuration files. It does this maximum once per day by checking the time of three XML files on bugzilla.gnome.org.

From the bugzilla.gnome.org webservers logs I grepped the hits to one of these files. Each hit will contain the gnome-vfs version that was used to access it. A pretty safe assumption is that the gnome-vfs version is the same as the GNOME version.

Per GNOME (gnome-vfs) version I now have the number of hits generated during a month of data. Again, Bug-Buddy only checks once a day and the hit is only done when someone starts Bug-buddy (eg app crashes and you click the ‘Inform Developers’ button).

Bugzilla, Bugzilla, Bugzilla

On the main page of bugzilla.gnome.org there is an image of a bug:

image of a -hard to recognise- bug

I do not like that image. Could someone please design a better one and attach it to bug 339216?

Another thing I hate is the color used for quoted text (#ad7fa8). I chose that color so that I could make the first person who complained responsible for giving a better one. Unfortunately no one complained. Still want a better (non-blueish) color.

GUADEC Goal(s)

The #1 thing we must have at GUADEC is the following:

I’ve already informed him that his attendance is mandatory, but I think we need more aggressive methods to actually make it happen. I’m mainly looking for a kidnapping expert, but other suggestions are also welcome.

GNOME performance tip

Run ‘fc-cache -f’ as root and as a normal user. Usually a distribution runs this when needed, but for some reason Mandriva didn’t (or there was some other problem). This caused all apps to start very, very slowly.

In GNOME 2.13.latest as described elsewhere the multimedia keys have been removed from the Keyboard Shortcuts capplet. You now need to correctly select your keyboard in the Keyboard capplet → Layouts → Keyboard model to make the multimedia keys work. Pretty annoying as I want the Play/Pause to work as a Pause key, not Play as GNOME/xorg thinks it is. Having that key set to Pause will make Audacious correctly switch between Play/Pause. But as removing the support fixes a major bug (ignoring modifiers like ctrl/alt when selecting ctrl-alt-p, allowing normal keys like ‘P’ to be used and not ‘unbinding’ the key to make ‘P’ work again) I can understand why it was removed.

Speeding up NewsBruiser – Initial results

Switched to the hotshot profiler instead of profile. The hotshot profile is better than profile. Made two changes, one to delay reading a notebooks configuration until something actually needs something out of it. Second change is storing the order of the blogs in a seperate file. This avoids NewsBruiser reading the order from each blog.

The hotshot profiler produces different results. A profile before above changes:

         77867 function calls (75825 primitive calls) in 0.905 CPU seconds

   Ordered by: internal time, call count
   List reduced from 856 to 100 due to restriction 

   ncalls  tottime  percall  cumtime  percall filename:lineno(function)
      139    0.179    0.001    0.347    0.002 Notebook.py:626(readConfiguration)
        1    0.062    0.062    0.165    0.165 core.py:15(?)
        3    0.062    0.021    0.063    0.021 __init__.py:9(?)
       86    0.058    0.001    0.506    0.006 NBConfig.py:156(__registerPluginDir)
    15078    0.057    0.000    0.057    0.000 string.py:351(find)
   402/71    0.039    0.000    0.095    0.001 sre_parse.py:374(_parse)
       26    0.039    0.001    0.481    0.019 __init__.py:1(?)
     6459    0.038    0.000    0.049    0.000 util.py:59(replaceBaseURLs)
     6526    0.031    0.000    0.048    0.000 IWantOptions.py:154(getOption)

And after:

         28853 function calls (26806 primitive calls) in 0.467 CPU seconds

   Ordered by: internal time, call count
   List reduced from 856 to 100 due to restriction 

   ncalls  tottime  percall  cumtime  percall filename:lineno(function)
        1    0.060    0.060    0.077    0.077 drv_libxml2.py:35(?)
   402/71    0.040    0.000    0.106    0.001 sre_parse.py:374(_parse)
        1    0.037    0.037    0.114    0.114 saxexts.py:41(_create_parser)
       26    0.020    0.001    0.697    0.027 __init__.py:1(?)
        1    0.019    0.019    0.312    0.312 feedparser.py:12(?)
   747/67    0.018    0.000    0.038    0.001 sre_compile.py:27(_compile)
     3541    0.017    0.000    0.025    0.000 sre_parse.py:201(get)
        3    0.016    0.005    0.065    0.022 __init__.py:3(?)
        1    0.015    0.015    0.051    0.051 cookielib.py:26(?)

Have to do a little work before I can commit this. I need to ensure the cache file will be saved whenever the order changes (or a new blog is added). Also need to rest it on Python 2.2 (version on the server). Still pretty good for a 120 line patch (large part consists of indenting changes and some debugging code).

Update: Patch has been committed.