Linux.Conf.Au 2010 - Day 3 - Wednesday

meta = {'category': misc, 'date': Thu 04 February 2010}

I went to Jonathan Corbet’s yearly update of the status of the Linux kernel. He talked about the various big changes that went into the kernel over the last year as well as the development processes. The Linux kernel is probably one of the largest open source projects, and very healthy - there are a lot of individuals and companies contributing to it. With this size comes a few interesting challenges coping with the flow of changes into Linus’ tree. Their current processes seem to deal with this quite well, and don’t seem to need a lot of major changes at the moment.

His talk also included the obligatory list of features that landed in the last year. The only one that really matters to me is the Nouveau driver, which I’m looking forward to trying out.

The second talk I went to in the morning was Selena Deckelmann’s overview of the Open Source database landscape. She mentioned there’s new projects started daily, but it was still a bit disappointing not to see TDB up there.

After lunch Rob gave a talk about Subunit, introducing to the ideas behind the Subunit protocol as well as presenting an overview of the tools that are available for it and the projects that have Subunitized as of yet. It’s exciting to see the Subunit universe slowly growing, I wasn’t aware of some of the projects that are using it. The recently announced testrepository also looks interesting, even though it is still very rudimentary at the moment.

In the evening Tridge, Rusty, Andrew, Jeremy, AJ and I participated in the hackoff as the “Samba Team”.

The hackoff was a lot of fun, and consisted of 6 problems, each of which involved somehow decoding the data file for the problem and extracting a short token from it in one way or another, which was required to retrieve the next problem. We managed to solve 4 problems in the hour that the organizers had allocated, and ended first because we were a bit quicker in solving the 4th problem than the runner-ups. No doubt the fact that we were the largest team had something to do with this.

I hung out with some of the awesome Git and Github developers in the Malthouse in the evening, and talked about Dulwich, Bazaar and Launchpad (“No really, I am not aware of any plans to add Git support to Launchpad.”).

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Linux.Conf.Au 2010 - Day 2 - Tuesday

meta = {'category': misc, 'date': Wed 03 February 2010}

On Tuesday we had our “Launchpad” mini-conf, which featured talks from Launchpad developers and users alike. It wasn’t necessarily about hosting projects on Launchpad, but rather about how various projects could benefit from Launchpad.

I popped out of the Launchpad track for a bit to attend Andrews talk about the current status of Samba 4. He did a nice job of summarizing the events in the last year, the most of import one of course being the support for DC synchronization. I’m proud we’ve finally managed to pull this off - and hopefully we’ll actually have a beta out next year. We have been saying “maybe next year” for almost 4 years now when people asked us for estimates of a release date.

At the end of the day Aaron and I gave a quick introduction to Launchpad’s code imports and code reviews.

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Linux.Conf.Au 2010 - Day 1

meta = {'category': misc, 'date': Wed 03 February 2010}

Linux.Conf.Au has a reputation for being one of the best FLOSS conferences in the world, and it more than lived up to my high expectations. The last one I attended was also in New Zealand, but further south - in Dunedin.

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Build from branch

meta = {'category': misc, 'date': Mon 01 February 2010}

At the moment I am returning home after three very productive and awesome weeks in Wellington, Sydney and Strasbourg.

I spent the first week in the West Plaza in Wellington, working together with fellow Launchpad developers on getting the basics of building from branches working. We eventually managed to get something working at the end of Friday afternoon. We split the work up at the beginning of the week and then worked on it in pairs for a couple of days before integrating all work on Friday. At the end of the week William managed to get a basic source package build from recipe through the queue.

Pair-programming with Jono and Michael was very educational, I suspect I’ll be a fair bit quicker when I get back to hacking on Launchpad by myself. It’s scary to see how some people can make the changes that would take me a full day in a mere hour.

Tim picked up my initial work on support for Mercurial imports and completed and landed it during the sprint. Since the rollout on Wednesday it is possible to request Mercurial imports on Launchpad. Most imports (e.g. mutt, dovecot, hg) seem to work fine, with the main exception being the really large Mercurial repositories such as OpenOffice.org and OpenJDK. This is because of (known) scaling issues that will be fixed in one of the next releases of bzr-hg.

This was the first time I was back in Wellington since 2006, and the weather this year was exactly as I remembered it; showers and wind, with the occasional day of sunshine. For a capital the city centre is quite small, but it has its charm and the view from the various hills around the bay is amazing.

On the weekend I met up with Andrew and Kirsty and we did some hiking around Wellington (where the weather allowed it).

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