This definitely is server abuse. I don't mind though; It's my own doing. Besides, they are not running since they make too much noise (I should have thought of that when I bought them).
]]>It's amazing how little people know who's who, but then again these events are all about meeting people, and not just people you know already, of course. We already met a few people first night we were here, in the bar of the Sheraton which BTW is LOADED with Red Hat Summit attendees, visitors, speakers, etc - and most of the FUDCon people still have to arrive, I imagine.
Tonights plan is to go to Fenway Park, a baseball stadium even the baseball-ignorant Dutchmen know -that's how famous it is ;-) I'm curious whether just a badge (whether for FUDCon of for the Red Hat Summit) will get you inside as one of us, Jonathan Steffan, originally wanted to register for the Summit but didn't -now it turns out some of us do have all-access, like me being the European RHCE of the Year, he's about the only one without registration. Either way though, we'll be drinking beers and chat no matter whether we all get into Fenway Park ;-)
Another amazing thing is I'm about the only one in a Fedora Ambassador polo, some other people have Fedora shirts, and some more people (like, the rest) all have Red Hat T-shirts and caps and stuff.... I'd like to see that change when FUDCon really takes off; we'll have gotten everyone who pre-registered for FUDCon the Official FUDCon Boston 2008 T-shirt, so secretly I hope the amount of Red Hat vs. Fedora T-shirts goes 180 ;-))
]]>I'd like to share this idea I have, with you. The SUMS Update Management System (SUMS). Being named SUMS for several reasons I won't go into right now, here's the basic idea:
I've played with this idea for some time and actually came up with a web interface in TurboGears using Kid that would sync repos and let you move packages to testing, and approve or disapprove them. To take it to the next level, I need your help.
I'd like to think about:
If you have additional ideas about what it can do I urge you to drop me a line stating what idea you have, and if you have some vague idea of how this could work, again, let me know.
I'll be at FUDCon in a few days, and at the Red Hat Summit also (for obvious reasons) - if you are there too, come and walk up to me and share ;-)
]]>Being a Red Hat Certified Engineer, you get an email reminding you to register for the contest of RHCE of the Year; allow me to quote from that message:
"There are any number of accomplishments that could catapult you to this great distinction--maybe you're administering an impossible number of boxes, maybe you solve an insurmountable problem, or maybe your business card just looks cool with an RHCE logo on it. No matter what the reason, we want to hear about it."
So I thought "I'm upstream, let's sign up and give them my fedoraproject.org wiki page". A few weeks later, I get a phonecall. You know the rest.
I first started playing with Linux back in 1998 - I was barely 15 years old. Of course that was all play, and no work. Ever since I've been hooked, and ended up making a living doing what used to be my hobby - and it still wasn't enough. Hence I finally joined the great Fedora community (I think it was in 2005 or 2006?), and immediately had enough to sink my teeth in -and I still have. Now, compared to when I started, it's completely vice-versa; all work and no play... I just can't tell the difference anymore ;-))
Thank you Red Hat, for rewarding me this great honour, and thanks to the many great people in the community that make my hobby/work so enjoyable! I'll see some of you at the Red Hat Summit / FUDCon next week in Boston. We'll have a beer, or two, or more, to celebrate ;-)
]]>I need to apologize for not keeping my promise; I was supposed to blog a little every day, but I didn't. There's no real excuse, but you gotta imagine these events are very busy -and exhausting. So many people to meet, so many people to talk to, so many things to pursue, so many talks to attend (and in my case give), so many patches to sources to enable giving out localized spins, so many beers.
On average, I think I had 3 hours of sleep a day -and so did many others. As there were 26 of us, give or take, you're never finished talking to all of your fellow Fedorians. Of course, alcohol was involved ;-) It was very nice to see everyone and meet some new faces.
My personal highlights for LinuxTag include the bathrobes, and especially the entrance we made at the LinuxNight Social Event. I think there was about 300 exhibitors, speakers and VIPs wondering how cool they were, and where they could get one - instead some of them asked us a few questions (Why? Isn't it hot? - no, it's cool!). I'm sure there's many, many pictures floating around the web that can give you a good impression.
Another highlight is, there was this one person at the booth whom I've met at last year's LinuxTag as well, and whom was using Revisor for all kinds of stuff. We talked a little about some brokenness that had been in Fedora 9 (the GUI wasn't starting) which luckily I had fixed already, and some of the use-cases he is trying to get done with Revisor. Long story short; he saw a bunch of Fedora T-Shirts go past us and he showed interest. I gave him one in his size and I got a "Linux Inside" coffee mug in return; Thanks again ;-)
I'll upload some photos I made when I'm back home.
]]>
]]>
There's about 28 Fedora enthusiasts getting together at LinuxTag, which makes it the single largest event besides the official FUDCon's. Most of them I've already met in person, others I'll meet for the first time. It's always interesting to speak to someone in person and see what vision that someone has, what drives him within Fedora, and if I can help -or know someone that could help- to achieve these goals -even if just by talking, which I'd like to think helps someone get the idea he's not alone and can ask for help. Either way, it's still fun to share ideas, vision and ambition -preferably over a beer (or two).
LinuxTag is one of those events that gives you the chance to do just that. It spans 4 days, instead of the usual 2 or 3, and everyone arrives a day or so in advance, and leaves one day after the event is over. That makes it an exhausting event as well, but then again, who in Fedora ever gets tired of doing more with Fedora? It'll mostly be work and no play, but then again there isn't all that much difference between work and play when it concerns Fedora.
More coming up over the next few days!
]]>Some people choose Fedora as their hobby or even just operating system for the reasons that make Fedora Fedora. Other people choose Fedora because Fedora is what Fedora is -and might become part of the first group after a while, but then again could become valuable contributors from where they are right then as well.
In the ignorance-is-bliss category, there's people who might just choose Fedora because Fedora just so happens to be whatever Fedora is to them, and then start shouting it doesn't do what they expect it to do, obviously overdoing on the ignorance part -causing us to shift our focus again and again with discussions about making it easier to install codecs, linking to third party repositories, firmware, etc. while in fact the real problem remains -non-free software. I'm sure trying to gain understanding here is less valuable then continuing the work and maintaining our focus. Having said that, of course there's other audiences in our society where gaining an understanding is the primary focus in way more valuable ways.
Then, in the, substantially overdoing the ignorance, dont-know-dont-care category there's people that might choose another operating system or Linux distribution, but who cares.
Which of these groups would be Fedora's Market?
]]>
This definitely is server abuse. I don't mind though; It's my own doing. Besides, they are not running since they make too much noise (I should have thought of that when I bought them).
]]>
So, how does one do that? I have no clip or anything like that, as there is another door where a clip should go onto a wall. Well, I've found a practical use for the FUDCon wristbands:
Go to http://spins.fedoraunity.org/spins to get the bits!
The Everything Spin includes everything available at the time of the release of Fedora 9. It is the same, really, it is. Just more. Way, way more! And the more Fedora, the better!
The i386 as well as x86_64 Fedora 9 Everything Spin is rather large, yet sized a fashionable 4 DVD's. You can imagine carrying those around as your complete, instant, bootable and installable mirror of everything Fedora has to offer -at the moment Fedora 9 was released. Of course you could just use a USB Harddrive, or even USB thumbdrive (16GB), but that wouldn't make the Everything Spin any more fun now would it?
Fedora Unity normally includes a CD version "for those of us that do not have DVD drives", as we use to say in our Re-Spin release announcements, but not this time;
This time Fedora Unity includes a 23 (!) CD version of the Everything Spin, *just for kicks* ;-) With Fedora 8, the Everything Spin was just 19 CDs, so there's 4 discs of extra, new, shiny software! You can see how this looks when you're installing from it:
I'd like to see these discs piled up at every booth showing off the enormous amount of available Free and Open Source Software :P
Undoubtfully, some people will give away the CD version of the Everything Spin as a birthday present. Also, it reminds people why it is they need to upgrade their CD-ROM to DVD players ;-)
Have fun ;-)
P.S. In the screenshot, the numbering a little off for Unknown Reasons(TM) - installation completes though
These Re-Spin ISOs are based on the officially released Fedora 8 installation media and include all updates released as of May 1st, 2008.
The ISO images are available for i386, x86_64 and PPC architectures via Jigdo and Torrent starting Monday, May 5th, 2008.
Go to http://spins.fedoraunity.org/spins to get the bits!
We have included CD Image sets for those in the Fedora community that do not have DVD drives or burners available.
With this particular Re-Spin, fixes for the following bugs are included, like on our last Fedora 8 Re-Spin releases[1,2]:
We have incorporated the updates image made by Jeremy Katz (comment #11 in the bug), and we have verified that a full Fedora 7 installation upgrades to Fedora 8 without issues.
On i586 hardware, the installation media wouldn't boot and thus renders itself unusable. We have backported the fix for this issue from anaconda development to the Fedora 8 stock anaconda, as anaconda is not updated during a release.
A dependency problem in selinux-policy-strict during upgrades is resolved in an updated selinux-policy-strict package, which is included in the Re-Spin
Updates to pykickstart incorporated in the rebuilt installer resolve this issue.
The kickstart file name searched for after booting from CD or DVD with option "linux ks" and using a dhcp and nfs server is wrong.
Also, we would like to let you know that NetworkManager is now installed by default, and for people doing minimal installations; this service will need to be disabled before the network starts to work.
We would like to give a special thanks to the following for testing this Re-Spin:
- Harley-D Dana Hoffman Jr
- zcat Jason Farrell
- iWolf Jeffrey Tadlock
- vwbusguy- Scott Williams
- baard1973 S.A. Hartsuiker
- Southern_Gentleman Ben Williams
- nirik Kevin Fenzi
- kanarip Jeroen van Meeuwen
A full test matrix can be found at our Test Matrix
A full list of bugs, packages and changelogs that have been updated in this Re-Spin can be reviewed on http://spins.fedoraunity.org/changelogs/20080501/
Due to limited resources, this spin will immediately obsolete 20080331, which will be deleted from our mirrors in the next few days.
Fedora Unity has taken up the Re-Spin task to provide the community with the chance to install Fedora with recent updates already included.
These updates might otherwise comprise more than 2.05GiB of downloads for a full install.
This is a community project, for and by the community. You can contribute to the community by joining our test process.
Go to http://spins.fedoraunity.org/spins to get the bits!
If you are interested in helping with the testing or mirroring efforts, please contact the Fedora Unity team.
Contact information is available at http://fedoraunity.org/ or the #fedora-unity channel on the Freenode IRC Network (irc.freenode.net).
To report bugs in the Re-Spins please use http://bugs.fedoraunity.org/
]]>Today I've created a rawhide Everything spin just to see what a Fedora 9 Everything Spin would look like. Again, there's a CD, a DVD, and a DVD Dual Layer version, and of course you'd want to use the CD version, just for kicks. Here's what it would look like:
If Fedora continues like this, and IT WILL, I'll need to log a bug against anaconda in the Fedora 10 development cycle, because the list won't fit on any screen, and hence the buttons to confirm or cancel won't be available.
]]>"I'm sure that they are not tested, at least not enough, or not by normal people." - Davidson Paulo
The rest of the blog sounds like he's doing a number 2, and all he gets is a red face. I gotta admit he's right though. I never test enough, and I'm not a normal person. Anyway the real question remains: Are the tools developed by the Fedora team tested?
I think I can answer that, but first let me set the record straight:
That being said let's get back to the real question at hand: "Why this wasn't fixed before packaging Revisor? Were Revisor checked by its packager? Were Revisor tested by its developers?"
Why wasn't this fixed?
The current version of Revisor in Fedora 8 is 2.0.5-15.fc8. Use:
yumdownloader --source revisor
and download the Source RPM, or navigate to the Source Tree for this version.
Either way, you won't find $releasever, $arch or $basearch anywhere in the package other then commented out in sample kickstart files, and in the cfg.py where we so subtly replace all occurrences with the proper values, should they appear in 'repo' directives in the kickstart you supplied. So, Revisor ships with valid configuration files.
If anything, it's the packaging guidelines that prevent us from replacing old (possibly bad) configuration files in /etc/ with new ones. I know I had released Revisor once or twice with bad configuration files. You may have had Revisor installed previously, and have a couple of .rpmnew files in /etc/revisor/conf.d right now.
FWIW, I agree with the packaging guidelines in this aspect as well as the other aspects and I'm not going to change the location of the configuration files, nor am I going to bluntly replace existing configuration files with a newer copy as these files may hold customized configuration such as the inclusion of third party packages. I can only assume someone spent a little time crafting them.
Was Revisor checked by it's packager?
Since I am the packager, this one lands right in my lap. Yes, I do check things before I release them. Yes, things will slip through the cracks. I'm terribly sorry for the inconvenience it may have cost you, seriously.
Was Revisor tested by it's developers?
Since I am the developer, this one lands right in my lap also. Again, all I can say is that I test stuff. Again, yes, things will slip through the cracks. You can imagine there's some cracks in developing software in one's free, spare time. Between my 40-hour dayjob, my life, my family, my girlfriend and the occasional getting-drunk-friday-night, there's a couple of "not-seeing-$releasever-or-$basearch" moments and if I happen to be releasing Revisor at one of these oblivous moments, it ends up on your PC (and then later on your blog).
So, now that we've gotten the questions out of the way...
Would you mind logging a bug against the appropriate package? I'm too ignorant to Google the web in search of bugs reported in blogs or newsgroups or any other location then http://bugzilla.redhat.com/ You neglected to file one against Revisor.
Last but not least, another quote: "Software testing is not an obligation of end-users.", and again I can only say you are so right. It is not an obligation to you, me, or anyone else. Neither is using or developing software. I consider using or testing new software to be a chance, a unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Writing new software is a challenge. Getting bugs reported properly is a motivator. Reading blogs like yours is hilarious.
]]>
So, what I'm trying to say is: Thank you, additional 40 voluntary seeders! And thank you, 45 original seeders! In 4 days after my original blog post requesting additional seeds, you doubled the amount of seeds and took some weight off my shoulders. I can breath again! The torrent tracker is also the master mirror for the release via Jigdo, the primary compose host for our Re-Spins and Revisor development, and my workstation -the load average makes me work on my laptop instead.
]]>Imagine you get to choose between two programs that do the same job, more or less.
One program is used a lot by the general public. How it works is obscure and you don't know exactly what it does if you press a button, but you do know that, in general, the program just works -duh, lots of people are using it. You may find documentation on how to use the program -which is often very conceptual and superficial- but still it doesn't give you any insight in the programs operations -the exact how, when and why fact sheet. Although I actually do know, let's assume that I don't; A user will think that it's all vague and obscure but it works.
The other program is made by a bunch of people that are extremely passionate, it's broadly used, it's well-documented, it has the proper fact sheets, and you can join news groups and mailing lists with any questions, problems and ideas you might have, and even talk to the developers directly. If push comes to shove you can also track down what it is the program is doing exactly -hence where things go wrong, behave differently from what you expect or where you need it to do something different. Not that you need to, but a huge number of other people to do it either because they're just as passionate, or they need a specific piece of the program to do what it is they need it to do -or because someone like you requested something that made them dig through all the code and fix something for you.
The principles on proprietary and freedom put aside, ask yourself;
If you're a user: Which program would you trust to work now and improve in the future?
If you're a developer of course the question for users applies as well, but also: Which one would you care most passionately about -bug tracking/solving, hacking, developing? Which poses the bigger challenge (greater reward)?
]]>