US: Observations

meta = {'category': misc, 'date': Fri 30 October 2009}

These past few days in the US were a bit of a rollercoaster. Some random observations:

• The mentor summit was very nice and well organized (or rather: well disorganized). Lots of awesome people around from a wide variety of projects and nationalities.
• “Next Generation VCS” seems to be an alias for git these days in the minds of most people.
• I didn’t write a single line of code in almost a week, something that is very rare.
• Driving an automatic gives you two spare limbs to use for other things. What those other things are, I have yet to figure out.
• Is the fact that your kid was student of the month or the fact that you own two cats and a dog really something that belongs on a bumper sticker?
• Gas is cheap (compared to Europe). I drove 300 miles on a $30 tank.
• The malls in the Bay Area are some of the biggest I’ve ever seen, but strangely enough they seem to lack both book- and cd-stores.
• It is legal to turn right on a red traffic sign in California unless otherwise indicated. It took me a while to realize this until people repeatedly started honking behind me…
• The waiver I had to sign to be able to skydive in California was scary. I can live with my operating system coming without implied warranty or fitness for a particular purpose, but my parachute?
• I stopped pretending to have any regularity in my sleeping habits. 6 AM flights? It seemed like a good idea at the time.

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CtrlProxy: Looking for a new maintainer

meta = {'category': misc, 'date': Sun 13 September 2009}

After over 7 years of working on it off and on, I’m looking for somebody to help maintain (and eventually take over) CtrlProxy. I started working on CtrlProxy somewhere in 2002, only a short while after Wilmer started hacking on BitlBee. If I remember correctly I started working on it because I didn’t want to run a separate dircproxy (the only real competitor at the time) instance (with configuration) for each IRC network that I connected to. It was also just a good excuse to play with the IRC protocol a bit.

Over the years, CtrlProxy has served as a playground for me to try out new and interesting things. It’s been rewritten or severely refactored several times in its early history, the latest time being the 3.0 release (from 2005). I’ve tried different build systems, I’ve tried different implementation languages, I’ve tried different configuration file formats, I’ve tried different support libraries, I’ve tried different version control systems, I’ve tried different documentation formats. So while it’s definitely been a very educational project for me personally, I haven’t really had the time or the interest to dedicate to the project that it deserved during the last few years. This was mostly because there were other more interesting FOSS projects I spent my spare cycles on.

These days there are plenty of other good IRC proxies out there, such as BIP, so I doubt CtrlProxy will be missed if it were to disappear. Despite that, if anybody is interested in taking over, please send me an email (jelmer@samba.org) or contact me on IRC (jelmer on the OFTC and Freenode networks).

Currently Playing: Anathema - Shroud of False

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Summer of Code 2009

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Fri 11 September 2009}

For this years (the fifth?) Summer of Code, I participated once again as a mentor for the Samba and OpenChange projects.

Samba was assigned four slots this year: one was a CIFSFS project mentored by Steve French and the other three were Python projects related to Samba 4, co-mentored by Andrew and me. Our students did very well this year, although we unfortunately had to drop one after the mid-term evaluations due to lack of effort. Nonetheless, we’re very happy with the results of the other two projects:

Calin Crisan (France) converted the rest of the applications in SambaGtk to Python, and worked on a GTK+ user manager for Samba and Windows. With his improvements, it is now possible to edit registries, manage users, inspect the endpoint mapper, plan tasks and manage services on a remote Windows machine using a GTK+ application on a Linux workstation.

Ricardo Velhote (Portugal) designed and implemented a new version of SWAT - the Samba Web Administration Tool. Unlike the old SWAT, his implementation is more than just a simple web-based editor for smb.conf. As we were expecting at the start of the Summer of Code, not all of the functionality could be implemented properly in a couple of months, not while getting the design and infrastructure right. With a basic version working, we now hope the remaining subsystems can be contributed with help from the community.

I’m planning to merge Calin’s improvements to Samba-Gtk into the mainline in the next month or so. SWAT is a standalone application and will continue to live as a separate project, while being a part of the Samba ecosystem. Congratulations, Calin and Ricardo!

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DebCamp / DebConf9

meta = {'category': debian, 'date': Wed 22 July 2009}

So far I’m very much enjoying my first DebCamp / DebConf. It’s nice to finally meet a lot of people in person that I have worked together with or talked to on IRC in the last few years. Cáceres is a relatively small town with a nice old city center.

I arrived early for DebCamp and spent the first few days here working on fixing bugs in the Bazaar and Samba packages as well as discussing the integration between Samba 4 and Kerberos with Sam (both in general and on Debian specifically). In trying to set up a Samba 4 domain we found a number of bugs in the provisioning script, most of which seem to be fixed now.

In the last few days I’ve mostly worked on getting Samba 4 and OpenChange ready to go into Sid (they’re in experimental only at the moment) and have discussed bzr-builddeb and related Bazaar issues with James.

Currently Playing: Pixies - Velouria

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DebConf

meta = {'category': debian, 'date': Sat 04 July 2009}

I’m looking forward to going to my first DebCamp/DebConf. I won’t be giving a talk, but I hope to work together with others on integrating Samba 3 and 4 better with the rest of the system and VCS integration.

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“Franky” Talk at SambaXP

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Thu 04 June 2009}

I’ll be giving a talk at the next NLLGG meeting about the Franky project.

Update: Slides

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SambaXP 2009

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Mon 20 April 2009}

Last week most of the Samba team met again for our annual conference in Göttingen. It was nice seeing everybody again, specially the folks I hadn’t seen since the last one.

Together with Andrew and his wife Kirsty I took the train from Amsterdam into Germany a couple of days early and we did some sightseeing together with Anatoli and Nadezhda during the weekend. There’s still plenty of things to discover in Göttingen for me, even though I’ve already been there about two dozen times. We did a tour of the city walls, visited some of the churches and climbed the tower.

Julien’s talk about OpenChange was interesting and humorous as always. Volkers’ tutorial on asynchronous programming in C. Even though I’ve spent quite some time working with and looking at these API’s it was nice going through them step by step once again. It’s a strange thing to wrap your head around.

Andrew and I also gave our yearly “State of Samba 4” talk again. As I’ve mentioned in other places, I’m really excited about the social effects of the Franky project. Once again I was reminded that giving a talk the morning after the conference party (this year in the “Oriental Lounge”) is a bad idea.

Several of my fellow Debian Samba maintainers made it to SambaXP, it was nice to see Christian, Luk, Michael and Noël there. We made some decisions about the direction of the Samba packages, and a plan to allow the Samba 3 and Samba 4 packages to be installed on the same system. Unfortunately I had to miss Christian’s talk because it was in the same timeslot as Jeff’s talk about the CIFS kernel module.

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Finally a DD

meta = {'category': debian, 'date': Thu 15 January 2009}

After spending a little bit more than three years in the Debian New Maintainers queue, I have finally become a Debian Developer.

Many thanks to the various people who have helped me through NM and have sponsored my uploads over the past few years.

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bzr-builddeb FTW

meta = {'category': bazaar, 'date': Fri 07 November 2008}

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% bzr branch deb:line6-usb-source debian
Retrieving Vcs locating from line6-usb-source Debian version 0.7.4-1
Branched 354 revision(s).
% bzr merge-upstream https://line6linux.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/line6linux/driver/trunk
All changes applied successfully.
Using version string 0.7.4+svn511 for upstream branch.
The new upstream version has been imported. You should now update the changelog (try dch -v 0.7.4+svn511-1 "New upstream snapshot."), resolve any conflicts, and then commit.
% dch -v 0.7.4+svn511-1 "New upstream snapshot.
% bzr builddeb
Building using working tree
Preparing the build area: ../build-area
Purging the build dir: ../build-area/line6-usb-0.7.4+svn511
[...]
Placing result in /home/jelmer/bzr/line6-usb/result
% ls ../result
line6-usb_0.7.4+svn511-1_amd64.changes  line6-usb_0.7.4+svn511-1.dsc
line6-usb-source_0.7.4+svn511-1_all.deb
line6-usb_0.7.4+svn511-1.diff.gz        line6-usb_0.7.4+svn511.orig.tar.gz

Currently Playing: Phideaux - Microdeath Softstar

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Reconciling the Samba 3 and Samba 4 source code trees

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Mon 15 September 2008}

While a few of us have been working very hard on Samba 4 to allow it to rock your socks off as an Active Directory Domain Controller, some of the other Samba developers have been working just as hard on improving the existing Samba 3 codebase and adding features to that. This situation has caused tension between developers as well as technical problems in the past - code with the same purpose is being developed in parallel, libraries diverge because features are only added in one branch and not in the other, one codebase is considered “obsolete” by some and the other is considered only a playground for experimental features by others.

As of yesterday, we now have the two codebases living in one and the same git branch. This should make it a lot easier for the two to use the same libraries. Better yet, it should allow us to reconcile the copies of various libraries that exist in both codebases, all of which have diverged to some degree in the last few years.

After a few problems came up merging the two branches the easy way (they both have a directory called “source” and git doesn’t deal well with renaming them to “source3” and “source4” respectively), we decided to replay the history of both branches . This has the disadvantage that all existing branches that are based on the Samba 3 and Samba 4 branches will have to be rebased against the new master branch, but it also means we keep the ability to run “git log” inside of our source directories and having it work right.

Other than the fact that this makes it possible to share more code between the two codebases, one of the ideas we have is also to see if it is possible to provide an Active Directory DC by glueing the best bits of Samba 3 and Samba 4 together (aka “Franky“) before they are eventually merged completely.

Currently Playing: Phideaux - Formaldehyde

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Oxegen ‘08

meta = {'category': misc, 'date': Wed 16 July 2008}

Oxegen was a bit expensive but awesome. Irish people rock.

update: Wilmer has details.

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Microblogging

meta = {'category': misc, 'date': Sun 06 July 2008}

I’ve joined the microblogging hype; I’ll be giving status updates on my coffee drinking habits and other uninteresting facts at http://identi.ca/jelmer.

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bzr-svn push without file properties

meta = {'category': bazaar, 'date': Mon 30 June 2008}

Ever since bzr-svn started supporting “true push”, people have been complaining about the extra file properties it sets.

The key thing about “true” push is that it preserves the exact revisions that were present in Subversion. This lets bzr behave on Subversion branches transparently using the same UI you also use for “native” Bazaar branches.

In other words, if I push to a Subversion branch from my machine, then that branch in Subversion contains enough information for somebody else to reconstruct the exact bzr branch I had.

Since some Bazaar metadata can not be represented in Subversion, it is stored in Bazaar-specific Subversion properties. Unfortunately, these file properties show up in email commit notifications and trac and so they tend to annoy people.

There are two ways around this:

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bzr-svn: now with its own Subversion Python bindings

meta = {'category': bazaar, 'date': Sun 22 June 2008}

bzr-svn has always been using the standard Python bindings that were provided with Subversion itself. Unfortunately, I had to fix some issues in these bindings since they were incomplete or broken and thus bzr-svn has always depended on a development snapshot of Subversion.

As of today, bzr-svn is using its own Python bindings for Subversion.

There were several reasons for switching to our own bindings:

• There are no requirements for backwards compatibility within bzr-svn. This means the API can be made sane without worrying about the mess it was in the past and users who still rely on that.
• Deployment. It took 2 years for my fixes to the Subversion Python bindings to be part of a release. It’ll be even longer before Subversion 1.5 makes it into most available distributions. That makes it very hard to just download and install bzr-svn.
• They’re in plain C, not SWIG. SWIG has a big advantage for the Subversion folks since it can generate python, ruby, java or tcl bindings all at once without a lot of overhead per language. However, it has issues as well that make it a bad choice for bzr-svn.
  • It generates inefficient code - it generates proxy classes that add more layers in the stack
  • Bindings tend to be very much like the C API rather than “Pythonic”. To make them more Pythonic, you need tons of typemaps. For example, the Python bindings in bzr-svn provide an iterator when browsing the revision history rather than a callback as C and the SWIG bindings do.
  • Hard to write - personally at least, I write bindings in C faster than in SWIG
  • Adds an extra dependency to the build process. Several people had trouble building Subversion on their Mac machines because they didn’t have the right version of SWIG available.

Since all of the patches that bzr-svn depended on previously were in the Python bindings for Subversion, it is now possible to use bzr-svn with any version of Subversion newer than 1.4.0. Of course, you do need to have the development headers installed as well.

Currently Playing: Kathleen Edwards - Independent Thief

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Bazaar in the GNOME world

meta = {'category': bazaar, 'date': Thu 19 June 2008}

I was happy to see that John Carr has set up a Bazaar Mirror of all projects in GNOME Subversion, all created using bzr-svn. There’s also a quick introduction to using Bazaar for GNOME developers on the GNOME Wiki.

Wouter, long time Bazaar user and GNOME dude, recently blogged about pushing Bazaar branches into GNOME Subversion, working around the restrictions imposed by the pre-commit hooks in GNOME Subversion.

The problems John ran into with memory usage in the Python Subversion bindings encouraged me to continue the work on bzr-svn’s own Python bindings, thus avoiding any dependency on unreleased versions of Subversion and several other issues.

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