I have used LaTeX and latex-beamer for pretty much my entire life of document and presentation production, i. e. since about my 9th school grade. I’ve always found the LaTeX syntax a bit clumsy, but with good enough editor shortcuts to insert e. g. \begin{itemize} \item...\end{itemize} with just two keystrokes, it has been good enough for me. A few months ago a friend of mine pointed out pandoc to me, which is just simply awesome. ... Read More

Yesterday’s autopkgtest 3.2 release brings several changes and improvements that developers should be aware of. Cleanup of CLI options, and config files Previous adt-run versions had rather complex, confusing, and rarely (if ever?) used options for filtering binaries and building sources without testing them. All of those (--instantiate, --sources-tests, --sources-no-tests, --built-binaries-filter<code>, <code>--binaries-forbuilds, and --binaries-fortests) now went away. Now there is only -B/--no-built-binaries left, which disables building/using binaries for the subsequent unbuilt tree or dsc arguments (by default they get built and their binaries used for tests), and I added its opposite --built-binaries for completeness (although you most probably never need this). ... Read More

We currently use completely different methods and tools of building test beds and running tests for Debian vs. Click packages, for normal uploads vs. CI airline landings vs. upstream project merge proposal testing, and keep lots of knowledge about Click package test metadata external and not easily accessible/discoverable. Today I released autopkgtest 3.0 (and 3.0.1 with a few minor updates) which is a major milestone in unifying how we run package tests both locally and in production CI. ... Read More

Hot on the heels of my previous annoucement of my systemd PPA for trusty, I’m now happy to announce that the latest systemd 204-10ubuntu1 just landed in Utopic, after sorting out enough of the current uninstallability in -proposed. The other fixes (bluez, resolvconf, lightdm, etc.) already landed a few days ago. Compared to the PPA these have a lot of other fixes and cleanups, due to the excellent hackfest that we held last weekend. ... Read More

On the last UDS we talked about migrating from upstart to systemd to boot Ubuntu, after Mark announced that Ubuntu will follow Debian in that regard. There’s a lot of work to do, but it parallelizes well once developers can run systemd on their workstations or in VMs easily and the system boots up enough to still be able to work with it. So today I merged our systemd package with Debian again, dropped the systemd-services split (which wasn’t accepted by Debian and will be unnecessary now), and put it into my systemd PPA. ... Read More

Our current autopkgtest machinery uses Jenkins (a private and a public one) and lots of “rsync state files between hosts”, both of which have reached a state where they fall over far too often. It’s flakey, hard to maintain, and hard to extend with new test execution slaves (e. g. for new architectures, or using different test runners). So I’m looking into what it would take to replace this with something robust, modern, and more lightweight. ... Read More

Today’s autopilot release provides a new feature for test case writers. Unless the widget you want to test has a direct object name (GtkBuilder ID/Qt objectName), it is often not that easy to find a widget in a deeply nested hierarchy in autopilot vis. With the new version, if you have some parent widget (like the containing dialog) w in your test, you can now call w.print_tree() to dump the paths and properties of that widget and all its children to stdout. ... Read More

The current default D-BUS configuration (at least on Ubuntu) disallows monitoring method calls on the system D-BUS (dbus-monitor --system), which makes debugging rather cumbersome; this has worked years ago, but apparently got changed for security reasons. It took me a half an hour to figure out how to enable this for debugging, and as this has annoyingly little Google juice (I didn’t find any solution), let’s add some. The trick seems to be to set a global policy to be able to eavesdrop any method call after the individual /etc/dbus-1/system. ... Read More

I recently created a test for digicam photo import for Shotwell (using autopilot and umockdev), and made that run as an autopkgtest. It occurred to me that this might be interesting for other desktop applications as well. The community QA team has written some autopkgtests for desktop applications such as evince, nautilus, or Firefox. We run them regularly in Jenkins on real hardware in a full desktop environment, so that they can use the full desktop integration (3D, indicators, D-BUS services, etc). ... Read More

umockdev 0.3 introduced the notion of an “umockdev script”, i. e. recording the read()s and write()s that happen on a device node such as ttyUSB0. With that one can successfully run ModemManager in an umockdev testbed to pretend that one has e. g. an USB 3G stick. However, this didn’t yet apply to the Ubuntu phone stack, where ofonod talks to Android’s “rild” (Radio Interface Layer Daemon) through the Unix socket /dev/socket/rild. ... Read More