February 26, 2010

enhancerepo 0.4.1 released

You can find the packages in my home project.

Changes

  • Gemified. It is now available as a ruby gem. The rpm package is now therefore rubygem-enhancerepo
  • Changed command line option parsing: for multiple items in an option, don’t use commas anymore: –generate-update pkg1,pkg2 becomes –generate-update pkg1 pkg2
  • Support for product metadata generation from release packages. Enhancerepo will scan *-release rpm packages and insert product.xml information in the metadata.
  • Bugfixes for delta and updates generation
  • Improved output

Thanks

This release was possible thanks to contributions and testing from Michael Calmer and Jordi Massaguer Pla

Next release

A 0.4.2 release will follow shortly, because 0.4.1 was queued from some time already. At least 2 features are planned for 0.4.2/0.4.3

  • Merge splitting of any metadata patch from Jordi Massaguer Pla
  • Merge pattern conversion patch from Michael Calmer

About Enhancerepo

Enhancerepo is a tool to edit and index rpm-md (a.k.a yum) software repositories. It is developed in gitorious.

Main features:

  • Reindex metadata
  • Generate delta rpms from different package versions, and the corresponding metadata
  • Generate updates (patches) metadata from different package versions
  • Insert keywords and other properties
  • Create product descriptions from -release packages
February 11, 2010

You don’t need Kopete Facebook plugin anymore

In May 2008, Facebook announced that they were planning to add XMPP (a.k.a Jabber), the standard messaging protocol behind Google Talk and other chat programs, to their Facebook Chat solution.

In May 2009, seeing that nothing happened, I announced that I was working on Facebook support for Kopete and released a prototype on github. The plugin was not perfect, and it was talking to Facebook using non-standard ways (including html scrapping!), but allowed people to see their contacts and chat.

Yesterday, Facebook finally announced XMPP support. This means various things:

  • You can connecto to Facebook chat using any XMPP compatible program: Kopete (using the standard Jabber plugin)
  • My Kopete plugin is not longer needed and will be deprecated

To setup it with Kopete just add a Jabber account like this:

Kopete preferences for Facebook chat

This is a great move from Facebook. As Lars already mentioned, the Web 2.0 sites have brought lot of innovation and fresh wind to the Web. However, they have ignored interoperability a lot, and he is right, you need “connectors” to get your data.

The Web 2.0 has changed the way users store their data. Now it is everywhere. Without good interoperability we are only adding complexity to users.

If your website implements contacts, don’t forget to add a url with a http accessible vCard list. If your site implement events, provide an url with iCal entries. Google has done a good job with Google Calendar and Google Mail. Worth to mention the urls with calendar/contact entries can be “secret urls” which contain a long random string, but require no authentication, which makes it easy to add to your desktop mashup utilities, organizers, plasmods, etc.

Facebook still could do more. They invented a whole new email system. But they forgot to offer IMAP/SMTP interoperability with it. I am not sure either (feel free to correct me) whether I can generate a secret url with iCal entries of Facebook events as well.

Anyways, big thanks to whoever is responsible of getting this done. You did a big favor to the Internet itself.

As for Kopete. As protocols start to use XMPP, the need of hiding XMPP for the end user arises. The account wizard should display the services known by name, and do the XMPP setup with the known preferences. May be something I can work on now that I don’t need to maintain the protocol anymore. And I almost forget: we need a way to migrate current users of the plugin.

October 26, 2009

On upgrading openSUSE with 3rd party repositories

With the availability of up to date software for openSUSE, thanks to the amazing build service, our users have started managing the software in ways we did not imagined some years ago.

Update? Upgrade?

This has created some confusion between operations like update and upgrade, package vendors and the package selector functionality. This new situation plus the confusion leads to bug 548551

When you install a package, it has a vendor. Official packages have the “openSUSE” vendor. While packman packages vendor is something like “Packman Project”, and packages from the build service, have a vendor based on the project name, like “OBS KDE Project”.

Updating your system means looking for the latest package of the same vendor that can be installed without doing destructive operations to your system, like uninstalling another package due to a conflict. This is the reason for behaviors like:

  • “zypper up” does not pick latest KDE packages even if the repository is added
  • An official update (same vendor) for SoftwareFoo is available, but because your custom libSomething packages conflict with it, the update is not applied.
  • However, if you manually switch to the packman package, “zypper up” will upgrade from now on using new versions of the package in the packman repository, and therefore ignoring the openSUSE one.

This behavior is expected as we don’t consider a package with the same name to be the same package across vendors. A packman package may include mp3 support and the one in the openSUSE repo may not. If packman updates this package every monday, and openSUSE does every Friday, “zypper up” would end with your application having mp3 support depending on the day you are upgrading.

Bleeding edge repositories

If you are using a distribution like openSUSE Factory, packages are removed, split, renamed and aggressively replaced by new versions. This makes moving from a openSUSE Factory installation on a given day, to the state of the repository some time later a process that may require more aggressive operations, like downgrading packages or removing others, in order to reach the goal of moving to the second point.

As we explained above, the update operation won’t do this. The right way to do it is to perform a distribution upgrade. People using “zypper dup” are doing exactly this. This operation will move your system to the versions of the available packages. This may actually mean downgrading and removing installed packages. The recommended way to do this, is to perform it against a specific repository. This helps narrowing the “goal” further than telling the solver to do a “wide” distribution upgrade. This is what “zypper dup –from repo” should do.

If you intend to use “zypper dup” without an specific repository. You need to define repository priorities if you don’t want to encounter some surprises. For example you could set packman to a higher priority than openSUSE Factory so every Factory update does not remove your mp3 support.

What was missing?

Part of the confusion, and the difficulties to follow repositories with latest versions of big components (like KDE) on top of a stable release (like 11.1) comes from two sides:

  • “zypper dup –from” was broken, and therefore performing a “wide” distribution upgrade ( bug #549490), which is fixed now (1.2.7).
  • YaST package selector had no support for performing upgrade operations. This is available starting yast2-qt-pkg 2.18.18.

Upgrade operations are requests to the solver. When selecting packages by selecting the latest one manually (what “upgrade all in this list” did) you are not necessarily selecting the one the solver will select. Therefore such operations are best represented as “requests”, which can be combined with manual user selection/removal of other packages.

When browsing the packages in the repository view, you will see a notification that allows to insert a request to the solver to switch all installed packages to the versions of this repository.

upgrade-repo-1

Once you file the request, you will see the list of repository upgrade requests. You can cancel any of these.

upgrade-repo-2

And finally, you can do this in multiple repositories (equivalent to passing –from multiple times to zypper).

upgrade-repo-3

I hope this post made more clear how this operations work. The changes described above should be available in Factory soon. And may be we need to think what to do with legacy functionality like “upgrade all in this list”.

You can use the new functionality to stay current with your favorite desktop environment community repositories, or why not, to stay current with Factory.

October 16, 2009

What is with rpm-metadata (createrepo) and yum on openSUSE?

Long time ago, I wrote about our interoperability efforts built around rpm-metadata format and first-class PackageKit support.

On the rpm-metadata side however, even if we depend a lot on these tools, the situation was far from ideal:

  • We need usually extensions to the rpm-metadata to support the features that make the openSUSE software management more powerful compared to other tools
  • We are in continuous talk with the yum team to make those extensions common so they can be standardized instead of staying in suseinfo/susedata.xml
  • Some of those extensions got implemented, in createrepo 0.9.x
  • We are stuck with createrepo 0.4.x plus a high stack of patches
  • createrepo 0.9.x requires a recent yum
  • yum on openSUSE is unmaintained, and not included in the distribution
  • openSUSE Build Service and other infrastructure depend on a proven createrepo (which means they depend on the custom patches)

This situation won’t sustain in the long term, so the following action plan was agreed between various stakeholders:

  • we will update yum and createrepo to the upstream latest versions, and maintain them in [the system:packagemanager] project
  • all patches except a couple were discarded, so don’t expect those versions to work flawlessly for now, we will reevaluate them one by one, upstream them or discard them
  • openSUSE infrastructure will freeze their production version from our project once the newer versions work, instead of maintaining a fork
  • as we don’t want to include yum in the default package selection, but createrepo depends on it, yum was split in yum and yum-common (libraries).
  • yum is still available in the system:packagemanager, and will be kept up-to-date. We are interested in competition, as it makes the [ZYpp][10] team work harder :-)
  • I will improve enhancerepo (for custom tag extensions generation) and include it in this project in a near future
  • Most patches in the current packages were one liner fixes where the developer did not spent 5 minutes to upstream it. This attitude created a uncomfortable patch mess. We will change this by upstreaming fixes or just rejecting having those patches in the package.

If you use createrepo or yum in your infrastructure, we invite you to contribute to this project! yum-3.2.25 was released a couple of days ago, and it is already available there.

[10]: http://en.opensuse.org/Libzypp

kopete-facebook 0.1.4

I have released kopete-facebook 0.1.4 which fixes idle status of contacts and message sending.

I still have some important bugs, which I hope I can fix before the openSUSE 11.2 release.

From those known bugs, one is the inability to reconnect (go offline and offline), which is due to the “myself” contact using the email as userid, which is in turn due to a Kopete limitation of needing to know an id, but facebook sends it after login. I have tried so many hacks (like switching the myself contact at runtime), but all have other side effects.

Another one is a crash at exit, which I still can’t understand. Help appreciated.

Note: this plugin is not affiliated with Facebook in any way.

Should appear here soon (or build it yourself).

September 29, 2009

How to gain root in a HTC Hero (aka G2 Touch) phone

DISCLAIMER: I am not recommending you to root your phone and if you are not sure what for or what are the consequences of doing it (including your warranty), then don’t do it. This post is only an explanation on how to do it. Also I am not responsible for any damage to your phone, including bricking it.

First, download Android SDK 1.5 from here, unpack it and go to the tools/ directory.

My first problem:

./adb shell
error: device not found

./adb devices                        
List of devices attached

Reading around I found out how to fix it, and then realized it was documented here

Create a file /etc/udev/rules.d/90-android.rules with the following content:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="0bb4", MODE="0666"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb",ATTR{idVendor}=="0bb4",ATTR{idProduct}=="0c02",SYMLINK+="android_adb"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb",ATTR{idVendor}=="0bb4",ATTR{idProduct}=="0c01",SYMLINK+="android_fastboot"

And restart udev by doing killall -HUP udevd, then unplug and plug the phone.

Now, get Recovery-RA-HERO-v1.2.2.img and fastboot (unpack and chmod +x this one), and put them somewhere, or as this example assumes, in the same tools/ directory.

Now boot the recovery image:

./adb shell reboot bootloader
./fastboot boot Recovery-RA-HERO-v1.2.2.img

You can use the NDroid Backup option to backup your phone to the SDCard.

Get Superuser.zip (requires registration in the xda-developers phorum) and unpack it. You will get two files from there: “Superuser.apk” and “su”.

./adb shell mount /system
./adb push su /system/bin/
./adb shell chmod 4755 /system/bin/su
./adb push Superuser.apk /system/app/
./adb shell reboot

Now confirm that it worked:

./adb shell
su

(Click Always allow on the phone)

And that is!.

If you need to restore your NDroid backup, I haven’t tried, but you can do it from the recovery image or manually pointing it to the images:

fastboot flash boot /boot.img
fastboot flash system /system.img
fastboot flash userdata /data.img
fastboot reboot
September 15, 2009

zypper: First download everything, then installl

Always wanted zypper or YaST (they share the ZYpp brain) or even your PackageKit compatible frontends to first download everything, give a look to the new commit policies that will be coming in 11.2. Note that zypper options to control them at runtime are not ready yet.

Also, if you need to access your repositories with nfs4, see this post Michael Andres just published.

August 27, 2009

ruby block syntax

Reading a commit from DHH I found out a syntax I was not aware of.

Instead of doing:

[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10].select { |x| x.even? }

You can do:

[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10].select(&:even?)

When I asked in #rubyonrails irc channel about this syntax, I got enlightened: The first part is obvious: last argument starting with & is interpreted as a Proc and equivalent to passing a block, so it is not a &: operator but & and a symbol. How does the symbol work?

According to the people in the channel, it is rails magic. When I said that it works for me in irb I was told I must be running ruby 1.9, which I am not. After some discussion we realized this magic is in ruby 1.8.7 too.

The magic is of course, just Symbol#to_proc method ;-)

Rails engines and static assets (public/)

I was very happy that Rails Engines got merged in Rails 2.3. However I never liked that engines did not support overlaying static assets like they do with controllers, models and views. Even worse, the discussion was around “mirroring” the engine’s assets into the application public/ directory (like you can see in this railcast).

I imagined that doing something more transparent would be non-trivial. But I never asked myself why. When mentioning this limitation to Daniel when explaining how we use engines in our code, he asked the magical question: “Why?”.

I have been looking at Rails’s Rack support recently. I love Rack. And if you see how Rails builds its complex pieces over such simple components based on Rack, you realize how good Rack is for the Ruby community as a base component.

So, I tried the very first though: Create a Rake middleware called StaticOverlay that is initialized with various overlay directories. When the middleware is called it will look for the file in the overlays, and if it finds it in one, it will serve it (using Rack::File), if not, it just call the application (or next middleware in the chain).

Once I put the rack middleware together it worked out of the box, so I started a thread in rails core list to find out whether this would be a valid approach to hack a real patch and add support for this in Rails itself.

August 4, 2009

SUSE Appliance Program WebYaST alpha demo

Together with the launch of SUSE Studio 1.0, an alpha demo of WebYaST was also included in the Appliance Kit preview. We talked about WebYaST earlier this year. The demo includes small functionality like setting the system language, system time, patches/updates and general status of your appliance.

WebYaST mission is to add value to your appliance by providing the basic setup requiring only a web browser. The idea is that you build your appliance with Studio and include WebYaST so you can perform setup, configuration and basic monitoring.

The WebYaST demo is available as an appliance (built with SUSE Studio) on the Novell Appliance Program page. Advanced users can follow the YaST:Web repository on the openSUSE Build Service.

Built with SUSE Studio

Haven’t tried SUSE Studio yet? Here is a nice demonstration video.

If you are an ISV, you may also want to checkout the upcoming SUSE Lifecycle Management Server, everything you need to serve your appliance customers with your application plus operating system updates.

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