May 2012 - openSUSE Project - openSUSE Mailing Lists

[opensuse-project] Announcing AppStream GSoC project
by Matthias Klumpp 19 May '12

19 May '12

Hello OpenSUSE! I am Matthias Klumpp and I will work on making the AppStream[1] project work for OpenSUSE as part of the Google Summer of Code this year. A little bit about myself: I study Molecular Biomedicine in my second semester at University of Bonn in Germany and I use Linux for years now. I contribute to KDE (mainly to Apper, the PackageKit-based KDE package manager) and I am PackageKit upstream developer, as well as the maintainer of Listaller, a cross-distro application installer, which has the goal to make installations of 3rd-party apps on multiple distributions as easy, generic and integrated as possible, by using just one package. (Yes, 3rd-party repos and native packages have some issues, just before you ask the obvious question ^^) I’m not really a typical KDE user, as I also use GNOME from time to time and contribute to GNOME (but just very unimportant things for now). Knowing both desktops and both communities is usually an advantage, and therefore I very much enjoyed the last Desktop Summit in Berlin. If you’ve been there, you might have met me there already ;-) I am Debian Maintainer and maintain all PackageKit and most PackageKit-related packages there. This means I also use Debian, so doing a project for OpenSUSE might look strange on the first look. But’s it’s not strange at all: I’m working on a cross-distro project so the distribution doesn’t matter that much. Also, SUSE was the first Linux distribution I've ever tried :-) - so I know OpenSUSE. In general kudos to openSUSE for doing the cross-distro GSoC tasks which no other distribution does! OpenSUSE has always been the distribution with the highest activity in this area, although they could’ve said “we don’t care about collaboration and interoperability”, which would’ve been perfectly sane. My greatest respect for that open-minded attitude and I’m really happy to work with you all! I already tweaked the Software-Center a little, so starting time is up to 420% faster, and we just need one call to PackageKit anymore, instead of doing thousands of Resolve() calls. Next weeks I'll work on a simple package information cache in PackageKit, which the SC will use then. The cache will also serve as some kind of PackageKit-backend-benchmark, as there is a plan to change PK's structure to allow parallel database-queries. But implementing that will take much longer than my GSoC (and it needs to be discussed first) So the cache is a viable solution right now. After that, I'll split out some components of SC, mainly the Xapian-database generator, and probably rewrite it in C++ (makes it faster and reusing the Python code won't necessarily be possible) This will make it possible to create different implementations of a Software-center, for example you could write one for KDE too. Then, I'll focus on tweaking the SC again, making it a pleasure to work with on other distributions. If I've time left, I'll also work on other parts of AppStream, but I want a great-looking-great-working Software Center first. I'll write weekly or biweekly status reports to this list, to keep you informed. It's cool to work on a cross-distro project for OpenSUSE and I'm looking forward to a great time! If you have any questions regarding anything written above, feel free to ask! :-) Matthias Klumpp -------- [1]: http://distributions.freedesktop.org/wiki/AppStream -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

1 0

[opensuse-project] Our progress in taking the list back
by Pascal Bleser 19 May '12

19 May '12

Hi all I'm sure everyone will have noticed that we, collectively, made substantial progress in taking back our list as our media of communication. There have been, and still are, quite a few interesting topics of discussion over here, and the tone remained civil and even friendly, quite focused, and productive. So let's pat ourselves on the back and keep up the good work :) And if you believe I'm wrong, please let me (or even everyone on the list) know. To fix issues, we first need to be aware of them -- people have different sensibilities and goals, there are difficulties with language, etc..., so if you believe there is something wrong, please let us know instead of staying in your corner with it or even going away :) But let's not keep it there, let's think and discuss about ways to keep improving it. Personally, I believe we should look at ways to improve the productivity of discussions, as the threads are still really long. That is fine (as long as it doesn't go off-topic or turns into a fight), but we might want to think of ways of capturing the results of such discussions as they get swamped easily into the depths of threads. 1. Better threads ----------------- A suggestion (including to myself): when you want to reply something somewhat related, ask yourself whether it wouldn't be better suited as a new thread with a Subject line that better identifies what is is about, that should help focusing threads and making them less long. 2. Capturing the essence in the wiki ------------------------------------ Another idea would be to try to detect when discussions become "TODOs" where we'd need someone to take ownership of the task in order to drive it, and also summarize the topic a bit as a wiki page (e.g. as Fedora does it for its Features pages, e.g. [1] and [2]). That way the substance won't get lost and we avoid repeating the same things over and over again. A very useful task that doesn't require any technical (or other specific) skills by the way and hence up to anyone to jump in and do :) (Owning a task doesn't mean that you need to have expertise on it, but rather that you see it as your job to extract substance and summarize discussions on that thread/topic, and maybe even poke a few people to get things done.) [1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/systemd [2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/UsrMove cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf

1 0

[opensuse-project] Resign from medical coordinator
by Stathis Iosifidis (aka diamond_gr) 19 May '12

19 May '12

Hello mates, With this mail I would like to let you know that I resign from the coordinator of medical project. All this time, I focused more on the Greek community projects I'm coordinating and didn't have enough time and technical skills to make the medical project work. All that time I noticed that the live cd isn't functional unless it's installed. That was the path I was working and made the first EMR (openEMR) program to work but the graphic environment wasn't helping me. Next step was to check the next EMR programs. Anyways, I hope next coordinator will make it work. Have a lot of fun, Stathis -- http://about.me/iosifidis http://iosifidis.co.cc or http://eiosifidis.tk http://eiosifidis.wordpress.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/eiosifidis Google+: http://bit.ly/IU5p3I Connect: https://connect.opensuse.org/pg/profile/diamond_gr Ένα γραμμάριο δράσης αξίζει ένα τόνο θεωρίας -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

2 1

[opensuse-project] Introducing myself and GSoC syslog-ng MongoDB driver project
by Eun Kyung 18 May '12

18 May '12

Greetings, fellow developers. I recently joined the openSUSE and syslog-ng communities because of Google Summer of Code, and I thought this would be a good time to briefly introduce myself. I am studying Information Technology in Dublin, Ireland, and I got accepted for GSoC 2012 to work on the MongoDB destination driver project. Syslog-ng, the leading logging platform for log collection and management, has been storing logs in MongoDB for over a year, but the technical documentation on the implementation is rudimentary, which impedes the improvement of the driver's functionality and speed. The goal of this project is to enhance the MongoDB destination driver for syslog-ng, to make it more robust, scalable and performant. Specific tasks and deliverables will include: - modifying syslog-ng's internal value pairs subsystem so that it will be able to emit a tree of values, instead of just a flat name:value list; - teaching the mongodb driver to walk the tree, and constructing BSON objects out of it, and using 'insert' instead of 'upsert'; - adding support for bulk inserts into a MongoDB, instead of inserting one by one My GSoC project proposal can be found at https://google-melange.appspot.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2012/eky… This is my first time working on an open source project, and I've liked a lot so far. My mentor has been tremendously friendly and helpful. I'm looking forward to a great summer of code with the syslog-ng community, and I would certainly like to keep you posted on the discussions and patches I will be making. Meanwhile, your comments and feedback would always be helpful. Best regards, Eun Kyung -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

1 0

[opensuse-project] a fully autonomous local repository mirror (was: When is a mirror not a mirror?)
by Per Jessen 18 May '12

18 May '12

Per Jessen wrote: > Per Jessen wrote: > >> Togan Muftuoglu wrote: >> >>> On 05/04/2012 02:59 PM, Per Jessen wrote: >>>> >>>> With a couple of custom add-ons, squid will do fine. I've got such >>>> a proxy setup running since November, you're welcome to try it out. >>> >>> Care to share those custom add-ons >>> >>> Togan >> >> I have actually written most of it up already: >> >> http://wiki.jessen.ch/index/Squid_and_openSUSE >> >> The download links don't work, I'll see if I can also prepare a >> tarball with all the ingredients. > > Okay, the download links should be working now - be aware, this is not > exactly a one-click install, i.e. some assembly required. Feel free > to contact me off-line if you need help. I've updated the fetcher206 package and added a step-by-step guide. http://wiki.jessen.ch/index/Squid_and_openSUSE On a fairly fast internet connection (50Mbit/s), I have a time saving of 16% (about 5min for per regular openSUSE12.1 network install). At home I used to have only ADSL at 6Mbit/s downstream, with that speed a lot more time was saved by caching. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (18.0°C) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

1 0

Re: [opensuse-project] bugzilla resolution "OBSOLETE"
by Felix Miata 17 May '12

17 May '12

On 2012/05/16 16:09 (GMT) Jim Henderson composed: > On Wed, 16 May 2012 14:11:26 +0200, Vincent Untz wrote: >> In GNOME Bugzilla, we do have a OBSOLETE resolution. I think that would >> help in such cases. > I like this idea in concept. I don't... > I think the use of an OBSOLETE resolution is something that would be > useful, but we have to be careful in actually using it - obviously there > are some fixes (security in particular) where backporting a fix is > generally considered a good idea. So we need to be extremely clear that > the reason it's flagged obsolete is because (a) it's been resolved in a > later release, and (b) a decision has been made (and that decision should > at least be explained in the comments, IMHO) to not backport because of > the effort/impact/whatever. Instead of OBSOLETE, do like mozilla.org -> EXPIRED or INCOMPLETE, neither of which judge what has been done, and leave for consideration possible propriety to reopen with updated information. Don't forget too that one justification for INVALID can be obsolescence. Looking briefly through bugzilla.mozilla.org re the Bugzilla software product, the word obsolete seems to have a special meaning reserved for use with attachments. If it were up to me, "OBSOLETE" would not be added. -- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation) Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

7 14

[opensuse-project] Freight Train/Bugzilla discussions, etc.
by Bryen M Yunashko 17 May '12

17 May '12

I think the last few days have definitely brought up some good and interesting discussions regarding the freight train, and particularly what we should start looking at regarding bugzilla. However, at the same time, I see the thread becoming longer and longer. And the "discussers", including myself, are pretty much a few set of people. I wonder if we've reached a sufficient point now where we've identified the people who are genuinely interested in this topic and should move those into a task force team to focus on this subject matter directly (and report to the Project at large of its findings and conclusions periodically.) In this way, we won't turn off people who feel the project list has become too bogged down on a subject they may not be interested in. Thoughts (at the risk of bogging down with another long thread)? :-) Bryen M Yunashko openSUSE Project -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

4 3

[opensuse-project] Re: Improving the bug management lifecycle/process
by Helen South 16 May '12

16 May '12

Forwarding the message I'd accidentally sent off-list. Hopefully it will stay embedded in the correct thread. In the light of what Jim says here - and others have said about the process, too - perhaps it could be worthwhile to look at integrating FATE and Bugzilla, but only if it doesn't come at the cost of becoming too complex to manage. The issue with the vast number of products making Bugzilla almost unmanageable is an interesting - and worrying - point, and even from the user experience of having to navigate the selection options on the front page, it's daunting. Would it be possible to have a discrete instance of Bugzilla purely for openSUSE/SUSE maintained separately to all the other products? How did the system cope when we had Bug Squashing Days? cheers Helen ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jim Henderson <hendersj(a)gmail.com> Date: Thu, May 17, 2012 at 1:56 AM Subject: Re: [opensuse-project] Re: Improving the bug management lifecycle/process To: helen.south(a)opensuse.org Not sure if you meant to send this off-list - these are good questions and probably should be in the ongoing thread. :) On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 11:27 PM, Helen South <helen.south(a)opensuse.org> wrote: >>> It may be more prudent to first talk about the tool itself. There's >>> been talk from time to time by people wanting to see FATE and Bugzilla >>> functionality merged because its too confusing going to two different >>> places and not clear to some people the distinction between the two >>> tools. > > Hmm. I think they seem very different - one is ideas and the overall > vision, the other with fixing breakages, really. Maybe it's a simple > matter of putting some messaging on the gateway pages to help people > identify which they want. They can be pretty different, but I've seen implementations of Bugzilla that use it for both bugs and enhancements - and there is some benefit to doing that. For example, if someone submits something they think is a bug but is in fact a request for new functionality (which I see happen a bit in general - they think a program should have some functionality and that it doesn't is a 'bug' in their mind, even though it's new functionality), it's easy enough to recategorize it in Bugzilla. I think two systems puts us in the position of telling someone who's misclassified a feature request as a bug that they need to take it to another system, and we should try to reduce having to redirect people to a different system. Something that's integrated is going to be a bit clearer in terms of managing expectations. At the same time, Bugzilla isn't really geared towards tracking enhancements specifically, and there are some shortcomings in that area. The question in that regard is whether or not those shortcomings are show stoppers, or if even with them it would be "good enough". > I think it's a good idea to keep it very focused at this point: fixing > the Bugzilla workflow. Much more likely to create results, rather than > discussion! Yes, I agree. :) > The numbers seem very manageable to me - a hundred, even a few hundred > - that's human-auditable. I'd been thinking along the lines of > scanning submissions for keywords, but for this kind of volume human > eyeballs are probably better. Yes, I think so as well. There is a tendency, especially amongst non-technical reporters, to misclassify bugs (due to the nature of them not knowing exactly how best to classify a bug). > Just having an initial browse of Bugzilla: not the most inviting of > search interfaces! Fortunately the opensuse.org Bugzilla conveniently > links to the submission-step-1 page with the 'hot 100' and 'two weeks' > search options. A lot of contemporary computer users won't do an > exploratory click to find out what they can find out: they have to be > told stuff (in bold letters) and guided through by the hand. Is > redesigning the user interface an option? Probably not on bugzilla.novell.com, but maybe there's something we can do to "front end" it. Someone would have to do some research to see if that's possible. It might be possible to add a simple query form, but even then for the non-technical, if they're not sure how to classify a bug properly, they may not know how to identify a bug that's similar enough to theirs. Ultimately, the goal here would be to reduce the work for de-duping bugs rather than to eliminate the need to do that completely (that would be an unattainable goal, I think). > In the first instance I'm noticing some time being spent in marking > duplicates, I suspect language might be an issue for some - a non > technical user might not recognize a bug filed by someone who is > expressing it in more specific terms - eg 'my printer won't work' > versus 'cups-driver....' Yep. (See above). > Also noting some problems in trying to replicate an issue. I'm > wondering, with tricky issues, if there's some way to use > virtualization and information from the user's installation to > facilitate replication. How often is replication a problem? Is it > always necessary? Intermittent issues can be much more difficult to dupe (that's been part of the issue with solving the forums' issues the past several months). Duplication helps in diagnosis and /can/ shift information gathering to the person fixing the bug rather than having to go back to the original reporter(s) and having them try things. It depends on a lot on the complexity of the bug, though - something like a difference between signed and unsigned might be relatively easy to track down. A kernel bug that manifests itself with specific hardware (esp. hardware the dev doesn't have access to) becomes much more involved and complex. > What have the people who are hands-on fixing these bugs stated about > the process? What really drives them nuts? What I'm seeing from my POV > might be very different to their experience. These are good questions and we definitely will need to ask the devs what their pain points are in order to try to resolve (or reduce) them. > Regarding the earlier observation about Novell's bugzilla being > stretched thin: would you care to elaborate? So I spent 8 years working for Novell in the training department, and a couple of the things I was involved in were initiatives to track issues with training courseware and the performance-based testing (the hands-on exams for CLP/CLE), so I spent some time working with the people who managed bugzilla. I also have years of experience in the Novell forums and have had access to large pieces of internal bug tracking as a consequence of that. The bugzilla permissions system (for example) is relatively simplistic, so adding a new group to grant permissions to non-public bugs is a pretty massive undertaking because Bugzilla was created really to have things open rather than hidden. As I recall, the number of products and components listed is testing the limits of what Bugzilla can handle. I've seen times with the full product list where you select a product and the list of components (which builds dynamically) seems to take ages to populate because of the amount of data involved. I think they've migrated to beefier hardware, but the limits are still really being tested, and to my knowledge, no other organization has an implementation of Bugzilla on this scale in terms of product/component count. I remember talking with the guy who used to run it (I don't think he's there any more) and even trying to get minor customizations in order to meet my needs (for example, being able to automatically create some components for a consistently-created type of product - training material - so we wouldn't have to manually create components for the course guide, labs, and workbook) was something they didn't have the bandwidth for. As far as I know, the number of people to work on those types of requests has been reduced rather than increased, so any customization we'd want would be, I think, unlikely (but I'd be happy to be proven wrong). Jim -- IRC: helen_au helen.south(a)opensuse.org helensouth.com -- IRC: helen_au helen.south(a)opensuse.org helensouth.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

1 0

[opensuse-project] openSUSE Collaboration Summer Camp in Greece
by Kostas Koudaras 16 May '12

16 May '12

Summer in Greece! Is the weather too hot for you to code or contribute to your favorite FOSS project? It is time to get together one more time in this year's openSUSE Collaboration Summer Camp !!! So, ok, I’ll be there! And then what? We will be together next to the sea to watch various workshops (do not forget to bring your laptop!) And we will work on our favorite projects! When? The weekend 20-22 of July 2012, at the heart of Summer. Where? In central Greece at Grand Platon Hotel ( www.grandplaton-hotel.gr ) at Olympiaki akti (at the beach of the city of Katerini). Who? The Greek openSUSE community organizes the second openSUSE Collaboration Summer Camp and will take care for smooth flow of the program, location and details of the event. Aimed at everyone involved in the FOSS which can both participate and make their own workshop! Why all that? Because we love what we do, we are having fun contributing to FOSS and we hate doing it alone in our rooms during Summer time. Besides coding, translating and all other ‘boring stuff’ there will also be plenty of sun and beach, a large swimming pool and plenty of beers - all paid by you since we only sponsor the sun, the fun and all the other free stuff...Those who want to participate, please contact us so we can better organize the availability of the rooms! We are looking forward to seeing you all! For more information & registration form: -- Send us an e-mail at : summercamp(a)os-el.gr -- Get into our IRC Channel #openSUSE-el in Freenode Kostas 'Warlordfff' Koudaras -- --- \m/ --- http://opensuse.gr http://os-el.gr http://amb.opensuse.gr http://www.kde.gr http://warlordfff.tk --- \m/ --- me I am not I --- \m/ --- Time travel is possible, you just need to know the right aliens -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

1 0

[opensuse-project] Who do I contact about bugzilla?
by Per Jessen 16 May '12

16 May '12

$SUBJ - I would like to have the "Scheduled Reports (Daily, Weekly, Hourly, etc.) by Email" feature activated. thanks -- Per Jessen, Zürich (7.1°C) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org

4 4