I finally sorted out some remaining issues and released a new Jockey. This brings support for third-party package repositories, and implements an XML-RPC driver database client, aside from the usual load of bug fixes. The test suite improved again, too, it (optionally) uses python-coverage now.

Planning ahead, the next things I want to get to are

* Find some interested people to work on a driver database server (I will write a specification page for it soon).

* Write a driver DB implementation for the OpenPrinting driver database.

* Implement a dbus service to request a device driver. For now this will be used by system-config-printer to request a printer driver, but I guess it will be generally useful for other parts of the desktop as well.

* Change the upstream default implementation of the package related bits in OSLib from “not implemented exception” to PackageKit. I hope we can find a way soon to make PK work on Ubuntu as well.

As a lot of you were rightfully complaining, the automatic Apport crash bug retracers had been offline for about two weeks. The main reason was that the hardy chroot became totally broken, due to bugs in fakechroot.

Yesterday I finally took some hours to track them down and fix them (see LP #228534). Now, after also dealing with the usual breakage of python-launchpad-bugs and Launchpad getting out of sync, the retracers have been restarted and are working happily again.

Now they are grinding through a huge backlog, I guess it will take them a few days to process all the crash reports that piled up.

Thanks to David for summarizing the future of hardware management. Interesting read, and the thread promises an interesting discussion.