Debconf: Day 2

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Second day in the big city and after the obligatory pancakes, scrambled eggs and bacon breakfast, I spend almost the entire day in the hacklab fixing the documentation for the debbugs SOAP interface. Thanks to Don I think I finally have the get_status part at an accurate state. Accordingly I was very busy making changes in python-debianbts which uses the SOAP interface to query the BTS. Some Bugreport attributes disappeared, others got their data type fixed, Unittests where added and docstrings updated. Finally I uploaded the new version to unstable.

Between that mess I met a lot of nice people, and heard a talk whose slides consisted almost entirely of lolcat images — which was of course awesome! I definitively have to try that in one of my next scientific talks.

Hopefully tomorrow I’ll find some time to actually prepare my talk.

linen and towels

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Dear lazyweb or someone who is already in NY,

do I have to bring my own bed linen and towels or are they provided by Furnald? I couldn’t find the information on the website. I guess I have to bring that stuff since it is not really a hotel, right?

I may go to Debconf 10

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Today I received a mail from the DebConf Travel Sponsorship Team and they informed me that I may get partially (or fully) sponsored. Ok that’s a bit vague for now, but that also means that I may come to Debconf 10 — yeah!

I also applied for this Debconf Newbies thingy, as this will be the first DebConf for me, but unfortunately there where too many applicants and not enough money and they had to decline my request.

Github announces SVN support

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This is freakin’ awesome! It is now possible to checkout from- and commit to git repositories on github with SVN.

This just made my day. This could also mean that this SVN support may later be added into official git (like the CVS emulation), allowing the early movers to use git also on the repository side while staying backwards compatible with the rest who is still using SVN on the client side. Currently it’s more the other way ’round, the wherever SVN is used, git users have to resort to git-svn.

Debbugs RW-SOAP API Project in GSoC 2010

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Google Summer of Code 2010

This year again, I’m proposing a project for this year’s Summer of Code. Very much like my last year’s proposal, it is about adding submit- and manipulation capabilities to debbugs’ SOAP interface. The idea for this project is to add another way to communicate with our bug tracking system than email. Since we already have a read-only SOAP interface, it seems natural to add write-capabilities. Libraries like python-debianbts would adopt those features and end user applications like reportbug or reportbug-ng could use it to enhance usability.

One student has already applied. Others are also very welcome — but be quick, the deadline for student applications is April 9th at 19:00 UTC.

apt-get update slow when LANG != C?

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For a few weeks now, aptitude is really slow updating the package list — downloading the lists is actually fast as normal but it always waits for a minute or so with a 99% [Warten auf Kopfzeilen] (Waiting for headers) message. I tried apt-get update — same problem.

Now the funny thing is: LANG=C apt-get update or LANG=C aptitude -u works just fine! I also tested with LANG=de_DE, it_IT, fr_FR and even en_US — always slow, so it looks it always occurs when LANG is not set to C?

Anyone else noticed this problem? I skimmed through the bug reports of apt, but didn’t find a similar bug.

Update: Looks like google-chrome is the problem! Commenting out the content of /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list, as Jaime suggested in the comments, everything worked fine again.

Reportbug-ng can now hide closed bugs

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Today I finally found the reason why the table in reportbug-ng was not always sorted correctly. The fix was trivial and I’m happy it’s finally corrected. As announced last week, reportbug-ng now also can optionally hide closed bugs, which makes reportbug-ng together with the complex queries a great tool for finding easy NMU candidates.

To play around with those new features, I also did 5 lazy NMUs today. Most of them where fixes for FTBFS/RC bugs which had already a patch in the BTS.

Reportbug-ng now supports complex queries

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Until today you could only use reportbug-ng to query the BTS with simple queries like “packagename”, “bugnumber”, “tag:patch”, etc. But the BTS actually supports composite queries like “severity:grave tag:patch” which returns bugreports with severity grave and a patch. The underlying Python library python-debianbts also supported this right from the start, but reportbug-ng did not make use of it.

Last weekend I finally had the time to fix that and the result is on it’s way to unstable.

Composite queries provide a very convenient way to find cheap NMU candidates: the query "severity:critical severity:grave severity:serious tag:patch" will return release critical bugs which have a patch. Now you can just go through this list, pick an open bug, test the patch and do what’s necessary to release Squeeze in time.

Next item on my list is an option to hide closed bugs, maybe next weekend.