Martin Pitt

addicted to Free Software Development

Artikel getaggt mit ubuntu

PyGTK is dead, long live PyGI! – App Developer Week Talk

Apr 8

Gepostet von pitti in debian, ubuntu | 6 Kommentare

On next Monday this cycle’s Ubuntu Application Developer Week classes will start.

The topic that kept me busy most in this cycle was Python gobject-introspection, and porting pygtk2 apps to PyGI (see my initial steps and my report from the PyGI hackfest.)

To spread the love, there will be two talks about this next week: On Monday 17:00 UTC the very Tomeu Vizoso himself will explain what gobject-introspection (“GI”) is, why we need it, and how library developers use it to ship a good and useful GI binding (“typelib”) for application developers. I will then follow up on Tuesday 16:00 UTC about the app developer side, in particular how to use the GI typelibs in Python, and how to port PyGTK2 applications to PyGI.

For the most part these sessions are distribution neutral (we don’t have any special sauce for this in Debian/Ubuntu, it all happened right upstream :-) ); only a very small fraction of it (where I explain package names, etc.) will be specific to Debian/Ubuntu, but shouldn’t be hard to apply to other distributions as well.

So please feel invited to join, and bombard us with questions!

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New Apport feature: custom bug duplicate identification

Mrz 19

Gepostet von pitti in ubuntu | 3 Kommentare

Apport has provided built-in support for automatically identifying and marking duplicate bug reports for normal signal as well as Python crashes. However, we have more kinds of bug reports submitted through Apport which could benefit from automatic duplication: X.org GPU freezes, package installation failures, kernel oopses, or gcc internal compiler errors, i. e. pretty much everything that gets reported automatically these days.

The latest Apport 1.20 (which also just hit current Ubuntu Natty) now allows package hooks to set a special field DuplicateSignature, which abstracts the concept for other kinds of bug reports where Apport doesn’t do automatic duplication. This field should both uniquely identify the problem class (e. g. “XorgGPUFreeze”) as well as the particular problem, i. e. variables which tell this instance apart from different problems. Aside from these requirements, the value can be any free-form string, Apport only treats it as an opaque value. It doesn’t even need to be ASCII only or only be one line, but for better human inspection I recommend this.

So your report could do something like

   report['DuplicateSignature'] = 'XorgGPUFreeze: instruction %s regs:%s:%s:%s' % (
                     current_instruction, regs[0], regs[1], regs[2])

or

    report['DuplicateSignature'] = 'PackageFailure: ' + log.splitlines()[-1]

This is integrated into Apport’s already existing CrashDatabase class, which maintains a signature →master bug mapping in a SQLite database. So far these contained the crash signatures (built from executable name, signal number, and the topmost 5 stack trace names). As usual, if an incoming report defines a duplicate signature (from the crash stack trace or from DuplicateSignature), the first one will become the master bug, and all subsequent reports will automatically get closed as a duplicate in Launchpad.

Thanks to Bryce Harrington, who already came up with using this in the latest Intel X.org graphics driver for GPU hangs!

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New tool to check support status of dependencies

Jan 14

Gepostet von pitti in ubuntu | 1 Kommentar

A common source of unnoticed depwaits or uninstallability are main packages which introduce new build or binary dependencies from universe. These either require fixing, or filing a main inclusion report.

To help with this, I added a new check-mir script into ubuntu-dev-tools version 0.110, which walks through all build and binary dependencies, checks if they are in main/restricted, also considers alternative dependencies, and create a report with a few hints.

For a main package where everything is alright, it looks like this:

$ check-mir
Checking support status of build dependencies...

Checking support status of binary dependencies...
All dependencies are supported in main or restricted.

Example output for a totally synthetic situation with universe dependencies, non-preferred alternatives in main, and other special cases:

Checking support status of build dependencies...
 * pmount binary and source package is in universe
  ... alternative libexif-dev is already in main; consider preferring it
 * weechat binary and source package is in universe
 * sendmail-bin is in universe, but its source sendmail is already in main; file an ubuntu-archive bug for promoting the current preferred alternative

Checking support status of binary dependencies...
 * wesnot does not exist (pure virtual?)
 * wesnoth binary and source package is in universe

Please check https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MainInclusionProcess if this source package needs to get into in main/restricted, or reconsider if the package really needs above dependencies.

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Ubuntu Natty: Where did my changelogs go?

Nov 9

Gepostet von pitti in ubuntu | 14 Kommentare

Since last Tuesday, packages built in natty don’t come with a Debian changelog included any more. Due to the continuous demand for downsizing both our installation media, as well as the install footprint, we looked for packages which we should eliminate (duplicate libraries, unnecessary runtimes like our current effort to eliminate perl (-modules, not -base), but also for stuff that users generally don’t need and won’t miss. IMO package changelogs very much fall into the latter category, so they were very high on the “first against the wall” list.

Changelogs are of course a valuable developer tool, but for those it is usually less important to have them available locally, as long as there is a convenient method to access them. For that I wrote a helper tool “apt-changelog” which retrieves it from changelogs.ubuntu.com.

So 

$ apt-changelog gnome-panel

now replaces

$ zless /usr/share/doc/gnome-panel/changelog.Debian.gz

apt-changelog is now shipped in apt-utils in Natty.

So far this was discussed pre-UDS on and at UDS in a blueprint and various hallway conversations.

However, there were some concerns, so we got a new compromise to just ship the top 10 changelog records, and add a comment about apt-changelog at the bottom. That way, the most interesting entries are still shipped, and developers and users will get used to “apt-changelog”; this will provide a smoother transition, but still get rid of about 90% of the changelog size. This is implemented by pkgbinarymangler version 81 (just uploaded).

We can re-evaluate this after the next LTS, and eventually drop them completely.

I’ll make sure that by the end of the release all packages that got built between last Tuesday and now will be rebuilt at least once and thus get their changelogs back.

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PostgreSQL 9.0 final released

Sep 20

Gepostet von pitti in debian, ubuntu | 54 Kommentare

After 20 days of final polishing and maturing since the release candidate, the PostgreSQL team released the final 9.0 version today.

Hot off the press, I uploaded postgresql-9.0 final into Debian unstable; they will not go into Debian Squeeze, because Squeeze is frozen and it will take a long time to port all the packaged server side extensions to 9.0.

If you are on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS or Ubuntu 10.10, you can add my PostgreSQL backports for stable Ubuntu releases PPA, which will carry 9.0 until it can be moved to the official Ubuntu backports (i. e. when 9.0 goes into Ubuntu Natty).

Enjoy, and kudos to the PostgreSQL team!

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Apport crash processing now enabled for Maverick

Jul 5

Gepostet von pitti in ubuntu | 2 Kommentare

The Debian import freeze is settled, the first rush of major changes went into Maverick, and the dust now has settled a bit. Thus it’s time to turn back some attention to crashes and quality in general.

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!

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PostgreSQL bug fix releases up for testing in Ubuntu

Apr 9

Gepostet von pitti in debian, ubuntu | Keine Kommentare

PostgreSQL did microrelease updates three weeks ago: 8.4.3, 8.3.10, and 8.1.20 are the ones relevant for Debian/Ubuntu. There haven’t been reports about regressions in Debian or the upstream lists so far, so it’s time to push these into stable releases.

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

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ubuntu-bug audio

Feb 8

Gepostet von pitti in ubuntu | 6 Kommentare

Thanks to the work of David Henningsson, we now have a proper Apport symptom for audio bugs. It just got updated again to set default bug titles, which include the card/codec name and the problem, so that Launchpad’s suggested duplicates should work much more reliably.

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

$ ubuntu-bug audio

instead of trying to guess the package right.

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lpshell – convenient launchpadlib script

Jan 12

Gepostet von pitti in ubuntu | 7 Kommentare

These days I often use launchpadlib in my projects for scripting access/modifications in Launchpad. While launchpadlib has quite a good API documentation, this only covers the method calls, not the attributes or collections. So it often takes some poking and trying until you figure out how to access/change things.

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.

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sudo dpkg -P hal

Nov 27

Gepostet von pitti in ubuntu | 27 Kommentare

The day has come!

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!

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