With Firefox 4 released a few weeks ago it’s time for me to look into what comes next.

The first to follow are maintenance updates for Firefox 4 which are now codenamed Macaw. 4.0.1 is in upstream beta testing for a few days now. At some point in future we will have a SeaMonkey 2.1 release which will  be (most likely) based on the same Gecko version as Firefox 4 and you can get 2.1b3 snapshots for that from mozilla:beta. From the same repository you can also install a new Thunderbird 3.3a4 (codename Miramar). Please note that this early package has no Enigmail support yet.

Now to some interesting changes which are coming up with Firefox development and releases. Mozilla switched to a “rapid release cycle” after the release of FF4. This means that we will see new Firefox major releases around every 6 weeks. Firefox 5 is currently planned for end of June 2011. Firefox now is developed through different stages before the final release where Aurora is branched already for FF5 and will enter the beta stage in a few weeks. A current Firefox Aurora build is available in mozilla:alpha.

This changed release process also means that there won’t be long maintained branches anymore which has an impact on how we deal with updates during a distribution lifetime. Nothing has been discussed on that topic yet though. Another fallout is that our Firefox packages will be standalone packages again after several years of being based on XULRunner. What will happen to XULRunner in the distribution is yet another thing we need to figure out.

You might run into this too: when using Eclipse Helios (3.6.2 here), it sometimes crashes on an alleged double free in the JVM, detected by glibc.
That's actually a feature of glibc that serves to detect bugs and security issues, which kills a process that tries to free a previously allocated memory area that has already been freed.

In this case, however, it is most probably a false positive, but glibc still decides to kill the process.

The workaround is to run Eclipse with the environment variable MALLOC_CHECK_ set to 0. There are several ways to achieve this:

1. when you run eclipse from a shell, run it like this:
   
   MALLOC_CHECK_=0 eclipse
2. if you prefer to just run eclipse or by clicking on an icon, create the following file in your $HOME/bin, e.g. like this (just copy/paste into a shell):
   
   cat<<EOF >"$HOME/bin/eclipse"
   #!/bin/bash
   export MALLOC_CHECK_=0
   exec /usr/bin/eclipse "$@"
   EOF
   chmod 0755 "$HOME/bin/eclipse"

Note that with the latter option, you obviously need to adapt the fully qualified path to the eclipse script depending on how and where you installed it. If it comes from RPM packages, than /usr/bin/eclipse is fine. If, like me, you downloaded the tarball from eclipse.org and unpacked it somewhere under your home, you must change it accordingly -- e.g. to $HOME/apps/eclipse/eclipse

In any case, you should NOT add export MALLOC_CHECK_=0 to your ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc as that would turn off that glibc check for ALL the applications and processes you would run. And that's a bad idea.

I’ve just noticed that I haven’t written about Evergreen here since the beginning. I actually did post at least one status update on our list but I think it would be good to give some information to a wider audience (hoping that this blog is read by more people).

In general we are in good shape. Up to now we have released around 55 source updates. You can find the list here. So looking back that means that we were able to update almost everything including desktop applications which was not clear in the beginning how that would work out. Also the Packman team decided to support Evergreen by keeping the Essentials repository available. Unfortunately it is not quite usable at the moment since it contains RPM packages signed with keys not supported by the RPM version in 11.1 which means zypper refuses to install those.

Another milestone is that it seems we will also support 11.2 when it runs out of Novell’s maintenance on May 12th, 2011. Another community member agreed to  lead the effort. More details on that to come soon.

But not everything is working perfectly fine though. Besides some rare cases where community members submitted packages to Evergreen/11.1 all the backporting/packaging work up to now was done by myself. At some points in time I was quite on the limit of my time for the project and there is no redundancy if something bad happens to me. We really need more people contributing to Evergreen. That said it would be really nice if maintainers (especially community maintainers) would  prepare updates for 11.1 as well. Obviously there is no obligation in doing so but I somehow think that in some cases they are just missing the fact that Evergreen exists at all.

So if anyone out there has interest in helping maintaining 11.1 and/or 11.2 please contact us through our mailinglist or contact me directly.

Returning back to my base happy and satisfied after a funny, educational and tiring weekend at openfest. Our community presence there certainly made the difference. Our booth was full of promo material (at least in the beginning, because nothing was left after so many people having come by). The attendants were very enthusiastic about the event and us and continually came and talk with us about free software and our favorite distro. I have met many people and I am positive that we made many new openSUSE users. Of course we will see that from the forum and the lists. However I am ready to help any newcomer.

We talked about many interesting things, not only about geecko but also for free software. I was very happy to meet people that try bringing free software to the education, as it is very important for the future and creativity of young people (from every educational degree). I have also learned about school labs which are set up with free software. Unfortunately, I have also learned that free software labs were reset up with closed source software from the operating system to the office suite because of the inability and the lack of interest to learn something new from the teachers. Concerning the legality of this software I cannot say anything as I have no proof, but I certainly can imagine what happened.

Many people were asking me how they can use free/open source software in business or at home. Apparently, they think of it from the cost’s point of view, especially with the economic crisis here in Greece. However, it is a good argument that makes free software even more popular. I was very happy that working developers are beginning to realize the importance of freedom to the life and evolution of a project. For example, a fellow developer’ s words; “But you did it, why are you keeping it for yourself, we won’t steal it, besides we work for the same boss. I only need a function. Why should I spend a day writing it from scratch when it already exists?” This words are very important when they come from working guys and not just hobbyists. We also talked about free software tools that help the developer through his work.

We also talked a lot about our favorite distro. Besides that was one major reason we were there. I had a lot of fun saying: “You know, that is actually very easy in openSUSE. From Yast click there and after that you follow the wizard and next.. next done”. So, I have just one thing in my mind. Yast rules! We have an amazing tool and we should be very proud of it. I am! This is what makes our distro perfect for servers even for the new administrator who wants to find his way with the configuration files through the clasic cli tools. Without a graphical environment the ncurses user interface is light-years ahead other distros’ administrative tools. Of course it is not the only thing that makes openSUSE perfect for servers. Google itself (yes, the famous one) requires it for some of its tools (google earth server). In fact, I wasn’t just talking, but also showing these tricks. Besides we had so many laptops with geecko on our hard drives. Ctrl+F1 and live demonstration of yast in terminal for network configuration, software management, nfs configuration etc. They were all amazed.

Plus our presentations rolled out smoothly. People were very interested and kept coming to the booth asking. Personally I made one on Saturday and a workshop on Sunday about the features and use of OBS. The presentation is in the wiki updated in 11.4 colors. People here hadn’t heard of obs and they loved it. On Sunday’s workshop we worked on build.opensuse.org and luckily Murphy (the famous law maker) was on vacation, so we hadn’t many issues. However not many people attended it. I delayed it a little waiting for more to come but things didn’t change a lot. The point is that I wanted to show many technical things but there weren’t so many developers. So instead of working with osc, I played with the webUI and less technical words to avoid making them sleep (I didn’t wanna loose them).

About the openfest and the people that ran it I have to say Well done! The organization was good. Thank you for being so kind and friendly. I wish the next year’s event to be even more successful with even more attendants and interesting speeches and workshops. Many many thanks.

I have just revived my 4 years old hack that adds MSVC support to ccache. The use case is a bit limited - you have to use it from inside cygwin; but that is exactly what LibreOffice needs :-) So I have updated LibreOffice's configure.in to be able to handle it well - so far in the libreoffice-3-4 branch, but it will get to master the next time we merge the branch there.

How to use it? Download the ccache.exe binary, put it to eg. your ~/bin (or somewhere else in your PATH), setup the CC and CXX environment variables, and compile as you are used to (./autogen.sh, make, ...), like:

 CC="ccache C:/PROGRA~1/MICROS~1.0/VC/bin/cl.exe" CXX="ccache C:/PROGRA~1/MICROS~1.0/VC/bin/cl.exe" ./autogen.sh make 

And yes, it would be great to do the ccache support as simple as a --enable-ccache configure option - but I did not find time to fine tune it on the other platforms, so I'll go for that only when I find there is a demand for that - drop me a mail ;-)

If you want to have a look at the ccache's statistics, run ccache -s. I've done no measurement how much time it saves overall - if are able to do any, please mail me your results too.

Maybe not everybody knows it or it may be a bit too late, but nevertheless… the Calibre repository on home:thomas-schraitle:calibre has been moved to Documentation:Tools. It was necessary due to some internal reorganisation. The new location is now the official devel project.

Have fun!

In the last days I read two post on planetkde and planetsuse, written by (to me) new contributors with the best intention to help their projects. However the response of the community was not as positive as they would have expected. What happened?

3 types of potential new contributors

Some lines from my last years Akademy paper.

"Krogh, Spaeth and Lakhani analyzed the characters of potential new contributors in mailing lists.[12] Based on that work three types could be found.

• Proactive problem-solver: They use the program, find a bug, and work out the solution. In the first mail to the list they send the patch. These people are very successful in communities and often become continuous contributors.
• Waiting volunteer: This group offers their abilities to the community and waits until they get a job allocated. In general this character is not very active. Most communities can not integrate them successfully.
• Visionary: They use the program and have ideas on how the program should be improved. Although visions and aims are important in communities, the character-type visionary is not successful. In the past his/her visions were not identical with the ideas of the code developers. The resulting costs of conflicts exceed the benefits of the discussion."

Even the headline of one of the post gives you a hint which type might be behind the post in question. Visionaries often use words like "it should", "you have to" etc. instead of "I have done" or "I am going to do".

Results matter - words do not

In open source communities the developers decide what they do. They want to get work done. In most cases they have a vision for their project and not enough time to do as much as they would like to. That's one of the reasons why achievement is the currency. Talking and writing visions is not. If you want a change - do it.

This does not mean, that your contribution is not appreciated. The contrary is the truth.

Contributions that make a difference

KDE as well as openSUSE have special pages to guide new contributors. They propose your first steps into the project. (You will find other useful information about how to start contributing at openhatch a plattform to bring new contributors and projects together.)

Contributions that make a difference are contributions which are important and valuable from the perspective of the community; things the developers want to get done. Help them and you will succeed. Junior Jobs (JJ) are a good starting point as well.

Start now doing things!

There is really a lot to do. Your contribution is very welcome. Visions are important in communities, but they are not the best point to start with.
Instead, grab a task the community needs to be done. Inform yourself first, invest some time and love. Then contact the mailing list and post your questions or ask for a mentor. Present a solution and be amazed by the positive feedback you might receive.

Good luck!

P.S.: If you have an idea how the program could be improved use the provided tools (the brainstorm section in the KDE forum is the place for your are locking for; more experienced users could open a feature request at bugs.kde.org; openSUSE has openFATE.) or contact the developers on the mailing list.

While getting one of my packages rejected for inclusion into the python lang repo for openSuSE, the comments made by the reviewer pointed me to find the package: py2pack.

This package made the packaging of Python packages on OpenSuSE brain dead easy by doing all of the heavy lifting, creating a sample spec file that really needs very little editing. Install py2pack, and follow this guide, http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Packaging_Python#The_fast_and_automated_way and put that together with the great openSuSE build service and you will have a great time packaging which is usually a thankless job no one wants to do.

Update:

Wow the ruby packaging method is about the same too: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Packaging_Ruby

We just released OBS 2.2.72, another alpha release for OBS 2.3. The most significant change to former alpha snapshots is the switch to apache. We do so for a number of reasons:

1. Getting a maintained base again for our default httpd
2. Using mod_rails (passenger) is more flexible then the static setup before
3. Optimizations are possible via additional modules (more about that later)

We think that some bugs like the invalid occassional empty replies by the api server are solved via this switch as well.

The OBS 2.2.72 appliance is already comming with apache setup. Please note that we use also SSL by default, a default SSL CA is created on bootup and becomes part of your data partition.

In case you use the packages outside of the appliance, you need to do some configuration steps. But don’t worry, a apache vhost file comes with the packages already and only a few steps need to be done, the README files should reflect this already.

lighttpd setups should still work, but please note that lighttpd is running with an own user id (“lighttpd”) and the default is now the generic “wwwrun” user for some directories.

Did that get your attention? Good, it was supposed to. Now get back to making KDE 4 rock in whatever way you are able and resist the temptation to put 'KDE 5' in your blog title to get some clicks. KDE 4 is not going anywhere in the foreseeable future because GNOME just increased their major release number.