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the avatar of Stephan Kulow

Shortcut for the package download

If you look at the list of binaries for a package (e.g. icecream), you may think that you can download the RPM right away – but if you follow the link in a browser you get to see details about the rpm.

Now if you only want to download it, you may already know the details and don’t care. So I added a little shortcut: if you request the binary url with a client not accepting html explicitly (e.g. curl, wget…), you get the file directly. Just copy & paste the link to your console and be done.

And due to the joy of rails, it’s just a couple of lines and now I get:


--2010-07-09 13:51:31-- https://build.opensuse.org/stage/package/binary?arch=i586&filename=icecream-0.9.5-11.1.i586.rpm&package=icecream&project=home%3Acoolo&repository=openSUSE_11.3
Resolving build.opensuse.org... 195.135.221.34
Connecting to build.opensuse.org|195.135.221.34|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
Location: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/coolo/openSUSE_11.3/i586/icecream-0.9.5-11.1.i586.rpm [following]
--2010-07-09 13:51:32-- http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/coolo/openSUSE_11.3/i586/icecream-0.9.5-11.1.i586.rpm
Resolving download.opensuse.org... 195.135.221.130
Connecting to download.opensuse.org|195.135.221.130|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
Location: http://widehat.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/coolo/openSUSE_11.3/i586/icecream-0.9.5-11.1.i586.rpm [following]
--2010-07-09 13:51:32-- http://widehat.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/coolo/openSUSE_11.3/i586/icecream-0.9.5-11.1.i586.rpm
Resolving widehat.opensuse.org... 62.146.92.202, 2a01:138:a004:0:21a:a0ff:fe26:efa9
Connecting to widehat.opensuse.org|62.146.92.202|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 184745 (180K) [application/x-rpm]
Saving to: `icecream-0.9.5-11.1.i586.rpm'

the avatar of Andrés G. Aragoneses

a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

Atualizações esporádicas - 4

Ganhei mais dois livros: "O andar do bêbado" e "A janela de Euclides", os dois de Leonard Mlodinow. Como são farinha do mesmo saco (Matemática), resolvi interromper a leitura de "Chaplin — uma vida" momentaneamente e acabei criando um FIFO de leitura, incluindo entre "A janela de Euclides" e "Chaplin" o primeiro volume do ramo sírio das 1001 Noites. Provavelmente terei que recomeçar "Chaplin"

the avatar of Martin Vidner

Helping Newcomers

Since the discussion (do check out the linked paper, BTW) and the opensuse-women announcement, I've been thinking about how to make the openSUSE community more friendly to women.

I think one good way is to make sure that new people feel welcome when they join a conversation, be it on the forums, on IRC or on the mailing lists. Now this would be easier if we all had infinite time to read and answer all questions, but as we don't, I decided to focus somehow.

The forums provide a handy shortcut for the focus, labeling a user who made few posts as a "Puzzled Penguin". So I've made a simple service, a feed of http://forums.opensuse.org showing only the posts by newcomer users: http://vidner.net/martin/software/rss-creator-blacklist

(Actually right now it does not show Puzzled Penguins only but instead excludes the 100 most-posting users until I learn how to optimize the PHP code.)

a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

Nautilus automated test script under Mago applications

As part of an effort to expand Mago a bit by adding nautilus, Jeff Lane from Ubuntu created a launchpad team called mago-applications. It was created to let people interested in adding new applications to Mago collaborate on the same code bases without cluttering up the mago-contributors team.

The way we see it, mago-applications can focus on simply adding new application interfaces and test suites/cases to Mago, while mago-contributors can focus on the core Mago code making sure it works with the latest changes to LDTP and so forth.

So, if you're interested in adding applications to Mago, feel free to join:

https://launchpad.net/~mago-applications

Feel free to create your own branches there to add new apps to Mago, there are plenty that can be added to enhance desktop testing of Ubuntu!

Also, adding an application is a good way to get some experience adding to a project that uses Python, is OO based, complex, and useful!
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

Substituição de artigos

Retomei o Francês por mim mesma hoje. Como o básico são os artigos definidos e a melhor prática é memorizar o substantivo sempre com o artigo correto (às vezes, até com o gênero no caso de l' no Francês e no Italiano). Não tendo nada o que fazer, escrevi um script que realiza a substituição dos artigos em uma página html (URLs dados em um arquivo) por sublinhados, p/ que o texto possa ser

a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

Packager-O-Matic

As already mentioned, I have this certain tool in works that can do various magic when it comes to creating packages, especially for people who have no idea how to do them themselves. And since

too, and on Wednesday I have scheduled a slot for demoing the tool and helping people who'd like to create packages of their software, I've worked on implementing and improving various features that make it more interesting:

  • Besides the obvious CMake support, there is now also support for autotools-based software. Autotools stuff is harder to process then CMake (funny, I remember not being very impressed by the move to CMake, but going back now made me wince here and there), but it's already pretty usable.
  • Which means that even though the tools is called kde-obs-generator it can handle non-KDE stuff too. For example I have GEdit, Gnumeric or GOffice (why aim low, right?) in my testing project, and while none of that finish the build completely yet, it just needs handling more of the autofoo trickery. I guess the tool is about to need a better name.
  • There's QMake support too, kind of. However, if you use QMake, you probably want to switch to CMake anyway.
  • The recommended way of use is setting the build service project in a way that presents a more unified build environment, with macros and package name substitutions automatically taking care of distribution differences. This results in the .spec files being quite clean and easy to read. But there is also a mode that doesn't require this setup and builds directly in normal openSUSE, Mandriva and Fedora repositories (and Ubuntu, but that's already different enough from the rest). It means of course that the .spec may have a bunch of %ifdef's and manually written macros at the top, but it works.
  • A consequence of this is that it is also usable for creating normal openSUSE packages. If the project build only for openSUSE, the resulting .spec is more or less a normal openSUSE .spec file. I've already watched few times Pavol and Michal explaining packaging to people who would like to learn it, and I couldn't help wondering how scary it has to be for some of them, getting a full .spec file explained line by line on how they need to write it manually. Well, for the next time the introduction part can be greatly reduced to just "run this tool, if it works and you're happy with the result, that's all then".
  • There is also the bonus even for somebody who knows how to create packages. It's still nice to have the .spec generated automatically, including all the build requirements (if they are already in the database), the file list and so on. Everything I have posted at kde-apps.org for the last several months has up-to-date binary packages too, and it's almost boring to create them.

So, whoever would be interested, just talk to me at Akademy or come to the Wednesday session and I'll try to help you getting your stuff built and answer any questions (except for the two questions about blue hair - really, people, I've heard both of them already enough times, can't you get at least a bit innovative :) ?).

the avatar of Sandy Armstrong

Recent Releases: Tomboy 1.3.1, Snowy 0.1, Stewie 0.12

'Yo Quiero Tomboy Online', remixed from 'Benito Chihuahua'


Monday I made two releases: Tomboy 1.3.1 and Snowy 0.1.

Tomboy 1.3.1 is our second development release of the cycle. So far we have been focusing on bug fixing, cleaning out old patches from bugzilla, and removing use of APIs that are deprecated for GNOME 3.0. Some highlights of 1.3.0 and 1.3.1 are:

  • New topic-based help from Paul Cutler and others on the GNOME docs team should provide a more useful way to get help when using Tomboy.
  • Panel applet support is now disabled by default (distributors, please use --enable-panel-applet when configuring) to drop most GNOME 2 dependencies (many thanks to Javier Jardón for this, and Aaron Borden for other API usage updates).
  • Alejandro Cura added libproxy support to web sync, and there was much rejoicing.
  • If you're hacking on Tomboy and are sick of having to install to test your changes, you'll be glad to hear that make run finally works again.
  • We added a couple of hidden preferences that we may expose in the Preferences UI this cycle: hiding the tray icon is handy for folks who use Docky or gnome-do instead of the tray menu (Matthew Pirocchi), and deleting notes without being prompted for confirmation may speed up your workflow (Jeff Stoner).
  • Brian Mattern fixed a bug noticeable on Ubuntu, where the panel applet wasn't using their fancy new icons.
  • In bullet list land, Owen Williams fixed an irritating printing bug, and Stefan Schweizer fixed some keyboard navigation issues.


I'm really glad to have so many contributors helping out this cycle, as I've been splitting my time between two babies. First, here's a cute picture of my awesome son Stewart Daniel Kekoa Armstrong, who was born on May 16th:

Stewie 0.12


The other baby is Snowy, the AGPL Django app that will power the upcoming Tomboy Online free web service. We had planned on releasing according to the GNOME schedule, but wanted to wait until we added OpenID support to limit how many times alpha testers need to wipe their databases and start over again. ;-)

So today, I am proud to offer our first development release of Snowy: 0.1, the Chihuahua release. Ripped from the headlines, here are the features:
  • An implementation of the Tomboy web sync REST API (the same API that Ubuntu One implements for note sync)
  • OpenID support, so you can log in with your Google/Launchpad/whatever account
  • Read-only online note access (notes can be made publicly readable in the admin UI for now)
  • A friendly Tomboy-like web UI for accessing your notes, supporting rich text, note links, note pinning, full-text search, etc
  • An initial unit test suite


Although Brad Taylor wrote most of the initial app, and I did a lot of the sync related work, I'd really like to call attention to some of our awesome contributors who have made this release possible:

  • Leon Handreke improved our sync code, fixed a ton of our unit tests (on multiple occasions), and added OpenID support so that you can log in with your Google account or any other OpenID, instead of having to remember a new username/password pair for our little service. He also made some slick improvements to our note search UI.
  • Sander Dijkhuis made improvements to our web UI, improved the ease of testing deployment by adding a fake mail server, and has been active on bugzilla and in IRC helping people work through deployment issues.
  • Benoit Garrett, Stuart Langridge, and Olivie Le Thanh Duong have made numerous contributions to the REST API, OAuth support, and upstream django-piston, which is the library we use to achieve those features.
  • We've also had great contributions from Adam Ziolkowski, Andy Duplain, Jordan Keyes, Mike Gorse, Ray Wang, and Shayne Macaulay.
  • And we'd love to add your name to this list! We need Python hackers, designers, HTML/CSS pros, Javascript wranglers, testers, Django deployment experts...and I could use a babysitter, too.


Please join us in #snowy on GIMPNet, or on our mailing list, and help us bring Tomboy to your web.
the avatar of Martin Vidner

kiwi2puppet

I have started working on kiwi2puppet, a tool to convert KIWI image descriptions to Puppet manifests.

The goal is to recycle the data that went into the building of an image and use it for managing a deployed appliance.

So far it is a prototype that can write these resources
  • package
  • yumrepo
  • user
  • group
It is written in Ruby, like Puppet.

Source at GitHub: http://github.com/mvidner/kiwi2puppet
RPMs: http://software.opensuse.org/search?q=kiwi2puppet&baseproject=ALL (currently it is a single Ruby script, so at the moment RPMs are not worth any trouble)
Novell Reference: FATE#309497

Get in touch if you're interested.

In case you didn't know:
"The openSUSE KIWI Image System provides a complete operating system image solution for Linux supported hardware platforms as well as for virtualisation systems like Xen Qemu or VMware."
"Puppet is an open source data center automation and configuration management framework. Puppet provides system administrators with a simplified platform that allows for consistent, transparent, and flexible systems management."
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

WebYaST: Switch from XML into JSON (day two)

Hi!
Today I compared JSON vs XML communication in WebYaST.
And the result is ... there's no big difference for us.
Calling groups index page without profiling takes almost same time with XML or JSON:

JSON
5.59, 5.7, 5.59, 5.82, 6.01 (average 5.742)

XML
5.99, 5.98, 5.88, 6.17, 5.96 (average 5.996)


Comparing processor cycles - JSON is winner, but the difference is not so visible, because there are much bigger time consumers than XML/JSON parsing.
Maybe (as jreidinger suggested) caching on client side could improve the performance ...