Just pushed to the market, enjoy

• Improved requests layout, including gravatars
• colored diffs

Release fast, release early. That is what I am trying this time so don’t get too excited. I only added one feature. Yes one.

You can list the pending submit requests related to you. Nothing else. And not with a very pretty layout but it will get better.

However, I have an infrastructure in place that will allow me to consume the API very easily, and I will push new versions every time I add something.

What I want to add next?

• Improve the user interface so that it looks pretty
• Ability to act on a request and see the diff (colored!)
• Explore projects and packages
• A service that polls for build failures and show notifications. Same for requests.

I don’t plan to implement the whole user interface in a phone, but mostly the parts where a phone makes a good tool for the build service. Do you have an idea? Screen mockup? Share it with me!

To try it, just search “opensuse” in the market. The code is available here.

openSUSE is a gem for ruby development

In this post I would like to show what openSUSE has to offer to ruby enthusiasts.

The latest openSUSE version ships with ruby 1.8.7, rubygems 1.3.1 and rails 2.3.2. The latest two being not so recent, here is where the openSUSE project shines. Say hello to devel:languages:ruby and devel:languages:ruby:extensions build service projects.

The first is a project containing a more recent 1.8.7 ruby (p249 vs p72 in 11.2). However, as a build service project, it is built on top of multiple targets so you can add this repository not only to 11.2 but also to SLE and older openSUSE releases.

In this project you will also find a ruby19 package which is nothing else than ruby 1.9.1 p376 installable in parallel with 1.8.7.

The devel:languages:ruby:extensions contains ruby libraries and gems. For example you can find rails 2.3.5 there. Libraries are usually packaged as ruby-something and gems are packaged as rubygem-something. Gem packages have some nice attributes:

• They are visible by the software management stack (rpm ZYpp, and all the ZYpp integrated tools: PackageKit, YaST, etc)
• They are visible to the gem tool. The rpm is installed where the gem tools expects to find it
• They are the best choice if you want distribute a fully packaged application, or an appliance using SUSE Studio
• You can easily create them from a standard gem using the gem2rpm-opensuse script included in the rubygem-gem2rpm package

To add the gem repository to your 11.2 system, just do (as root):

zypper ar \
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/ruby:/extensions/openSUSE_11.2 rubygems

Living on the edge

While the ruby environment provided by openSUSE is great, you may want to go one step further. What comes to my head:

• If you have both ruby and ruby19, you would need to have a different package for each ruby interpreter
• Sometimes you want to try a really experimental virtual machine, however openSUSE offers no package for it (eeer, and experimental VMs make packaging difficult, especially if the developers are MacOS users whose build script download prebuilt binaries of LLVM over the internet eeeek!)
• If you run or develop applications in the same machine, you may want to isolate the gem environment for each applications
• You may want quickly to test a program with different interpreters.
• You may not have root access! And sadly quacking like an administrator won’t give you superpowers.

Enter rvm, the ruby version manager

rvm is a nice tool that can quickly compile ruby interpreters from source and switch between them, all without root access (you can also set the current interpreter to the “system” one). Gems you install for one interpreter are isolated from the other interpreters, and you can create “gem sets”.

While rvm can be installed really easily:

bash < <( curl http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/releases/rvm-install-head )

for the HEAD version in github or

bash < <( curl http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/releases/rvm-install-latest )

You can also install it the “openSUSE way”, if you added the devel:languages:ruby:extensions repository:

zypper install rubygem-rvm

Once you have it installed, you will need to run rvm-install (as user) and edit your shell profile so that the environment is set correctly.

Then you can start using it. To see all the interpreters available in your system:

rvm list

To see all the ones known to rvm:

rvm list --all

Build 1.9 from source:

rvm install ruby-1.9.2-head

Build JRuby:

rvm install jruby

Use jruby:

rvm use jruby

Then you can “double check”:

ruby -v

jruby 1.4.0 (ruby 1.8.7 patchlevel 174) (2009-11-02 69fbfa3) (Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM 1.6.0_20) [amd64-java]

Combine rvm with the powerful bundler

Of all the new ruby tools, the ones I find most useful is the bundler, which was created as a rails independent solution to make ruby applications specify the gems they need in their environment.

You can create a Gemfile in the top level directory of your application:

Something like.

source 'http://gemcutter.org'
gem "rails", "3.0.0.beta3"
gem "runt", :git => "http://github.com/tevio/runt.git"

As you can see, you can specify gems from git repositories, or use specific branches or versions. This is really nice for deployment, as you can get the working environment really easy.

bundle install

Would install the missing gems. It would reuse system gems, etc. If you are using rvm, it would install them in the interpreter specific gems.

The bundler has more advanced features, like the ability to take all the gems and “bundle” them directly “in” the application, but I leave that as an exercise to the reader.

Conclusions

So that finishes this post. I hope you could see how openSUSE looks like for a ruby developer.

I would like to first thanks Marcus Rückert (a.k.a darix) as he was the main brain behind the rubygem packages. Also big thanks to the YaST, Klaus, SUSE Studio and Build Service teams, whose development resulted in many package updates and contributions.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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).

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

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.