Here’s an alternative to applying Configuration Profiles in OSX without using an MDM client. Profiles are deployed using Group Policy over SMB, so you don’t have to open APN ports to Apple.
QAS is an AD bridge tool for unix/linux systems (including mac) that also provides Group Policy support. You can view more details here.

QAS Group Policy lets you specify Group Policy settings inside the Group Policy Management Editor, the same way you’d apply settings for a Windows host.
It works similar to Apple’s Profile Manager.

You can also create custom profiles by writing preference manifests. The preference manifests are converted to Configuration Profiles before they’re applied on the OSX host.

On the OSX host, settings are retrieved from Group Policy, and installed as Configuration Profiles.

A new version of mdds is out, and this time, we’ve decided to bump up the version to 1.0.0. As always, you can download it from the project’s main page.

Here is the highlight of this release.

First off, C++11 is now a hard requirement starting with this release. It’s been four years since the C++11 standard was finalized. It’s about time we made this a new baseline.

Secondly, we now have an official API documentation. It’s programatically generated from the source code documentation via Doxygen, Sphinx and Breathe. Huge thanks to the contributors of the aforementioned projects. You guys make publishing API documentation such a breathe (no pun intended).

This release has finally dropped mixed_type_matrix which has been deprecated for quite some time now in favor of multi_type_matrix.

The multi_type_vector data structure has received some performance optimization thanks to patches from William Bonnet.

Aside from that, there is one important bug fix in sorted_string_map, to fix false positives due to incorrect key matching.

API versioning

One thing I need to note with this release is the introduction of API versioning. Starting with this release, we’ll use API versions to flag any API-incompatible releases. Going forward, anytime we introduce an API-incompatible change, we’ll use the version of that release as the new API version. The API version will only contain major and minor components i.e. API versions can be 1.0, 1.2, 2.1 etc. but never 1.0.6, for instance. That also implies that we will never introduce API-incompatible changes in the micro releases.

The API version will be a part of the package name. For example, this release will have a package name of mdds-1.0 so that, when using tools like pkg-config to query for compiler/linker flags, you’ll need to query for mdds-1.0 instead of simply mdds. The package name will stay that way until we have another release with an API-incompatible change.

Disclaimer: I am aware that python does not allow easy installation of 2 libraries in parallel. It is just an example.

Let’s say you have an upstream requirement "needs pyfoo >= 1.6.0 but smaller than 2". Sounds easy right? Our naive solution will be:

Requires: python-pyfoo >= 1.6.0
Requires: python-pyfoo < 2

so far … so good. If your repository has only one version of pyfoo available we will probably get the package you want. now lets say we have more than one version available.

In OBS we use source tarballs everywhere to build rpms (and debs) from.

This has at least two major downsides:

1. Storing all old tar files takes up a lot of disk space
2. OBS workflows with .tar files and patches are rather different and somewhat disconnected from the git workflows we usually use everywhere else these days. E.g. for the SUSE OpenStack Cloud team we have a “trackupstream” jenkins job, that pulls the latest git version into a tarball once every day.

Fedora already keeps their metadata in git, but only a hash of the tarball.

So as one first step, I used two rather different projects to see how different the space usage would be. On the slow side I used 20 gtk2 tarballs from the last 5 years and on the fast side, I used 31 openstack-nova tarballs from Cloud:OpenStack:Master project from the last 5 months.
I used scripts that uncompressed each tarball, added it to a git repo and used git gc to trigger git’s compression.

Here are the resulting cumulative size graphs:

The raw numbers after 20 tarballs: for nova the ratio is 89772:7344 = 12.2 and for gtk2 the ratio is 296836:53076 = 5.6

What do you think: would it be worth the effort to use more git in our OBS workflows?

Do we care about being able to reproduce the original tarballs? While this is possible, it has some challenges in differing file-ordering, timestamps, file-ownerships and compression levels.
Or would it be enough if OBS converted a tarball into a signed commit (so it cannot be forged without people being able to notice)?

Do you know of a tool that can uncompress tarballs in a way that allows to track the content as single files, and allows to later re-create the original verbatim tarball, such that upstream signatures would still match?

Click the slide to see the presentation.

Click the slide to see the presentation.

Click the slide to see the presentation.

Table Styles in Writer

Further work

Who those, who won’t use terminal to compile program I’ve created tao-makefile-ui.

Tao-makefile-ui is a simple tool, which aims allow to go through each step of compiling program in graphical user interface. Program will run autogen.sh, configure and make. It allows to select make target and save targets list to file. It also allows to change variables of Makefile.

There’s package for OpenSUSE. You can watch the video demonstrating tao-makefile-ui here

Thanks!