This morning I created maverick chroots for the Apport retracers, and they are currently processing the backlog. I also uploaded a new Apport package which now enables crash reporting by default again.

Happy segfaulting!

The new releases are in Lucid Beta-2, and hardy/jaunty/karmic-proposed. If you are running PostgreSQL, please upgrade to the proposed versions and give feedback to LP #557408.

Updates for Debian Lenny are prepared as well, and await release team ack.

On a related note, I recently fixed quite a major problem in pg_upgradecluster in postgresql-common 106: It did not copy database-level ACLs and configuration settings (Debian #543506). Fixing this required some reenginering of the upgrade process. It’s all thoroughly test case’d, but practical feedback would be very welcome! Remember, if anything goes wrong, the cluster of the previous version is still intact and untouched, so you can run upgrades as many times as you like and only pg_dropcluster the old one when you’re completely satisfied with the upgrade.

Thanks,

Martin

So from now on you are strongly encouraged to report sound problems with

$ ubuntu-bug audio

instead of trying to guess the package right.

I found myself typing the same things over and over, so I finally wrote a little script called lpshell:

#!/usr/bin/python -i
import code, os, sys
from launchpadlib.launchpad import Launchpad, STAGING_SERVICE_ROOT, EDGE_SERVICE_ROOT
lp = Launchpad.login_with('test', STAGING_SERVICE_ROOT)

This logs into Launchpad and gives you an interactive Python shell with an “lp” object:

$ lpshell
>>> lp.bugs[439482].duplicate_of

Update: I committed this to ubuntu-dev-tools now, renamed to lp-shell for consistency with the other lp-* commands.

Yesterday I dropped the superfluous hal dependency from gparted, today I uploaded gdm to stop using hal for getting the keyboard layout and use libxklavier instead.

I also applied Julian Cristau’s udevified X.org branch to our xorg-edgers packages into my halsectomy PPA, created some udev rules for udev-based X.org input detection ([1], [2]), and off we go: that was the last hal reverse dependency. My system now fully boots and works without hal.

Hooray!

One known drawback is that the guest session is not currently restricted by AppArmor rules yet. I’ll get to this at some point, I filed LP #425793 to keep it on the radar.

Because this is rather inconvenient, I don’t do as many upstream releases as I should. But thanks to our tireless launchpadlib developers it is now possible to automate all that, so I wrote a new script lp-project-upload which does all that in a simple command:

  $ lp-project-upload apport 1.8.2 apport-1.8.2.tar.gz
  Release 1.8.2 could not be found for project. Create it? (Y/n) y
 

The script is based on Brad Crittenden’s recipe for uploading project files, and I added the creation of milestones and releases.

The script is contained in current Karmic’s ubuntu-dev-tools package now. Enjoy, and of course feel free to extend it for changelogs, release notes, etc.

Now I just need to hassle David Zeuthen to apply the patches soon. Of course I couldn’t wait and already uploaded them to Karmic, so please test the hell out of it and let me know about problems.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Halsectomy is a little greener once again.

As discussed at UDS Barcelona, Apport will grow this functionality in Karmic. A first preview is available in my PPA. The GUI looks horrible, but the API for hooks won’t change any more, so you can now begin to develop your interactive hooks.

Example:

import apport.hookutils

def add_info(report, ui):
    apport.hookutils.attach_alsa(report)

    ui.information('Now playing test sound...')

    report['AplayOut'] = apport.hookutils.command_output(['aplay',
            '/usr/share/sounds/question.wav'])

    response = ui.yesno('Did you hear the sound?')
    if response == None: # user cancelled
        raise StopIteration
    report['SoundAudible'] = str(response)

Please see the package-hooks.txt documentation for details.

I implemented all currently existing UI functions (information, yes/no question, file selector, multiple choice dialog) for GTK and CLI, and all except the multiple choice dialog for Qt. Anyone willing to hack on an implementation of ui_question_choice() similar to what the GTK frontend is doing?

Update:I merged Richard Johnson’s branch (thanks!) and uploaded a new package into my PPA. apport-qt is now fully functional.

I started a discussion with upstream about how to migrate the libgphoto bits away from hal to udev rules. It shoulnd’t actually be hard to do, and I’m keen on working on it, but it needs agreement between the libgphoto, udev-extras, and gvfs/KDE upstreams, so some coordination work is in order.

I also created a wiki page of the current migration status. Please edit if I forgot something. If you feel inclined to work on a particular bit, the Linux world will heavily appreciate this! It’s still a major Karmic goal to push the transition as far as possible, to avoid intrusive system changes for Ubuntu 10.04 (which is likely to become an LTS).