For the last 7 years I’ve been involved in the Bazaar project. Since I am slowly stepping down, I recently wrote a retrospective on the project as I experienced it for the last 7 years.
Thanks to a few kind people for proofreading earlier drafts; if you spot any errors, please let me know in the comments.
This Friday will be my last day at Canonical.
It has been a lot of fun working here. There is so much I have learned in the last three years. I’m going to miss my colleagues.
Over the last couple of months I have slowly stepped down from my involvement in Bazaar and the Bazaar packaging in Debian and Ubuntu. I would like to stay involved in Ubuntu, but we will see how that goes.
I’m taking some time off until the end of the year to see the world and hack, before starting something new in February.
Mumble is an open source, low-latency, high quality voice chat application that we’re using at Canonical, and which Samba has recently also adopted.
After I busted the cable of my cabled headset and inspired by Matt’s post about Mumble and Bluetooth I bought a cheap Nokia Bluetooth headset that works with my laptop as well as my phone. By using BlueMan I even found that the headset worked out of the box on Maverick.
A nice feature in Mumble is that it is controllable using D-Bus. Blueman supports running an arbitrary command when the answer button is pressed. Combining these two features, it is possible to automatically toggle mute when the answer button is pressed:
#!/usr/bin/python import dbus bus = dbus.SessionBus() mumble = bus.get_object("net.sourceforge.mumble.mumble", "/") is_muted = mumble.isSelfMuted() mumble.setSelfMuted(not is_muted)
To use this script, set its path in the configuration tab for the “Headset” plugin in blueman.
The only remaining problem with this setup is that I can’t keep the headset on during my work day, as I don’t have a way to put it in standby mode automatically. This means that my battery runs out pretty quickly, even when nothing is happening on Mumble.
Currently Playing: Red Sparowes - Finally As That Blazing Sun Shone
There’s more good news on the OpenChange front. Julien has been working together with Wolfgang and Ludovic from Inverse to leverage the server-side support in OpenChange to provide native Exchange server support in SOGo.
A couple of days ago we announced that there now is an initial version that allows the use of Outlook against a SOGo server through OpenChange.
There is a screencast up on youtube (there is also a .mov version of the screencast).
As far as I know, this is the first time it’s possible to actually use Outlook clients with a non-Microsoft Exchange-compatible server, without the need for plugins on the Outlook side. And it’s all Free Software. Of course, this is just a preview, and not something we’d recommend everybody to run in production just yet. But it’s exciting to finally see this come together.
We already have OpenChange packages in Debian and Ubuntu but I hope I can help get SOGo packaged for both distributions as well.
As of a month ago there are Ubuntu archives with fresh packages of Samba 4 and OpenChange, built on a daily basis day from the latest upstream revision.
This means that it is now possible to run a version of Samba 4 that is less than 24 hours old, without having to know how to extract source code from the version control system that upstream is using, without having to know how to build and install an application from source, but perhaps most importantly: without having to go through the tedious process of manually updating the source code and rebuilding.
OpenChange is tightly coupled to Samba 4, so installing a new version of OpenChange usually involves installing a new version of Samba 4 as well. To make matters more confusing, the two projects use different version control systems (Samba 4 is in Git, while OpenChange is in Subversion) and different build systems (Samba 4 uses waf, OpenChange uses autoconf and make).
I have been involved in Samba 4 and OpenChange as an upstream developer and more recently also as a packager for both Debian and Ubuntu.
As an upstream developer for both these projects it is important for me that users can easily run the development versions. It makes it possible for interested users to confirm the fixes for issues they have reported and to test new features. The more users run the development version, the more confident I can be as a developer that doing a release will not cause any unexpected surprises.
As a packager it is useful to know when there are upstream changes that are going to break my package with the next release.
The daily builds work using so-called recipes which describe how to build a Debian source package from a set of Bazaar branches. For example, the Samba 4 recipe looks like this:
1 2 3 4 | # bzr-builder format 0.2 deb-version 4.0.0~alpha14~bzr{revno}~ppa{revno:packaging}+{revno:debian}
lp:samba
merge debian lp:~samba-team/samba/unstable
merge packaging lp:~samba-team/samba/4.0-ppa-maverick
|
This dictates that a source package should be built by taking the upstream Samba branch and merging the Debian packaging and some recipe-specific tweaking. The last bit on the first line indicates the version string to be used when generating a changelog entry for the daily build.
Every night Launchpad (through bzr-builder) merges these branches and attempts to build the resulting source package, e-mailing me in case of build problems. Generally I fix issues that come up by committing directly to upstream VCS or to the Debian packaging branch. There is no overhead in maintaining the daily build after I’ve set it up.
For more information on creating source package recipes, see getting started.
The entire toolchain that does the daily package builds for Ubuntu is Free Software, and I have contributed to various bits of that toolchain over the years. It’s exciting to see everything come together.
Launchpad consists of multiple pillars - one of those pillars is Soyuz, which I hack on as part of my day job at Canonical. Soyuz is responsible for the archive management and package building. Debian source packages (a combination of upstream source code and packaging metadata) get uploaded by users and then built for various architectures on our buildfarm and published to the Ubuntu archive or to users personal package archives.
Another pillar of Launchpad is Launchpad-code, which is responsible for the hosting and management of version control branches. Launchpad users can either host their branches on Launchpad directly or mirror branches (either native Bazaar branches or branches in a foreign format such as Subversion, Git or Mercurial). The mirrorring of native and foreign branches happens using standard Bazaar API’s. In the case of Samba and OpenChange we import the branches of the upstream projects (Samba is in Git, OpenChange is in Subversion) and the packaging for both projects is in Bazaar.
Launchad-code calls out to Bazaar to do the actual mirrorring. Over the last few years I have done a lot of work to improve Bazaars support for foreign branches, in particular on supporting Subversion, Git and Mercurial. As the code mirrorring in Launchpad is one of the biggest users of bzr-svn and bzr-git it has helped find some of the more obscure bugs in those plugins over the last few years, to the point where there are only a handful of issues with Git imports and Subversion imports left.
bzr-git provides transparent access to Git repositories from within Bazaar and is built on top of Dulwich. Dulwich is a Python library that provides access to the Git file formats and protocols that is completely independent of Bazaar. James Westby originally started it and I adopted it for bzr-git and further extended it. There are now several other projects that use it as well, including hg-git, and rabbitvcs. Apart from James and myself, almost two dozen other people have contributed it so far.
bzr-svn provides transparant access to Subversion repositories in Bazaar. When I grew frustrated with the existing Subversion Python bindings for various reasons, I decided to create independent Python bindings for Subversion from scratch. These bindings have since been split out into a separate project - subvertpy - and other projects have since also started using them, e.g. hgsubversion and basie.
To use the Samba 4 and OpenChange daily builds (Ubuntu Maverick only for now), run:
1 2 | $ apt-add-repository ppa:samba-team/ppa $ apt-add-repository ppa:openchange/daily-builds |
Currently Playing: Karnivool - Themata
For about 6 months now I’ve been working for Canonical on the Soyuz component of Launchpad. Like most other engineers at Canonical I don’t work at the office but from a desk at home, as our nearest office is in London, not really a distance that is feasible for a commute. I do work at regular hours during work days and stay in touch with my colleagues using IRC and voice over IP.
I did have some experience working on contracts and study assignments from home previously, but working a fulltime regular job has turned out to be a bigger challenge. It seems easy enough. No travel time, every day is casual Friday, being able to listen to obscure death metal all day without driving coworkers crazy. Awesome, right?
Well, not entirely. I can’t say I wasn’t warned beforehand (I was) but I still ran head-first into some of the common mistakes.
I can work well by myself and I appreciate the occasional solitude, but it does get kinda lonely when you’re physically sitting by yourself for 8 hours a day, five days a week.
Fortunately we regularly have sprints at different locations around the world and, apart from appealing to the travel junkie in me, that brings some essential face time with coworkers. Electronic communication mechanisms such as mailing lists, IRC, Skype and, more recently, mumble also help make the rest of the company feel closer, but it’s still very different from being able to talk to people at the water cooler (the point of which, btw, still escapes me. What’s wrong with proper cold tap water?).
What also seems to help is going into the city and meeting up with others for lunch, or even just to get groceries.
One of the nice things about working at home is that you’re quite flexible in planning your days; it’s possible to interrupt work to run an errand if necessary. The downside of it is that it is also really easy to get distracted, and there’s something I do very well: procrastinating. I initially ended up getting distracted quite often and then would end up working into the evening to make up for that lost time. The result being that, while only spending 8 hours doing actual work, it felt like having been at work for 12 hours in the end and having lost all spare time. Or as a friend summarized it accurately: working at home is all about boundaries.
This is at least partially related to the fact that I am a compulsive multi-tasker; I always do several things at once and context-switch every minute or so (prompted by e.g. having to wait for code to compile), including checking email and responding to conversations on IRC and Google Talk. This, among other things, has the effect that I respond quite slowly in IRC/IM conversations; if you’ve ever chatted with me you’ve probably noticed it. Multi-tasking has always worked well for me - despite research suggesting otherwise - because software development always involves a lot of waiting (for vcses, compilers, testsuites, …).
Recently I’ve tried to eliminate some of the other distractions by signing out off Skype, Empathy (Google Talk, MSN, etc) and Google reader completely and only checking email a couple of times per day.
What has perhaps surprised me most of all was how essential the satisfaction of getting something done is. After spending about a day staring at Python code it’s important for your mood to have accomplished something. This appears to be a vicious circle, as lack of progress kills the fun of work, which kills motivation, which causes a lack of progress.
I am hard core, so during my first months I used my lunch breaks and evenings to hack on other free software projects, triaging bug reports that had come in or reviewing patches. Despite the fact that this is indeed technically a break from Launchpad, it didn’t (surprise!) seem to work as well as stepping away from the computer completely. Also, it turns out that spending 14 hours a day programming doesn’t make you all that much more productive than working a couple of hours less.
What I’ve discovered recently is that getting at least one branch done by the end of each day, even if it’s just by fixing a trivial bug, helps tremendously in giving me some sense of accomplishment. Julian also wrote a blog post with some useful hints on feeling productive a while ago.
What is your experience working from home? Any good tips?
Currently Playing: Sieges Even - Unbreakable
