Stationary Traveller

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.").

On Tuesday we had the "Launchpad" mini-conf, which featured talks from various Launchpad developers about different parts of Launchpad as well as from community members about their use of Launchpad. It wasn't necessarily about hosting projects on Launchpad, but rather about how various projects could benefit from Launchpad.

I popped out of 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.

In the afternoon I gave the talk about Launchpad code imports and code reviews that I had prepared with Aaron earlier. We had planned to give the talk together, but I unexpectedly ended up giving it by myself because of some confusion about the schedule.

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

As usual there were miniconfs the first two days before the actual conference. On the first day I attended some of the talks in the Open Languages track.

mwhudson gave a talk about pypy - Python implemented in Python. He discussed the reasons for doing what they do and the progress they've made so far. Like so many of the custom Python implementations, one of the main thing that's holding them back is the lack of support for the extensions written in C for CPython.

Rusty gave a quick tutorial to talloc/ after lunch ("it's a shame K&R didn't think of this!") and explained why it's so great.

In the afternoon I caught some of the talks in the distro summit track. Both of the talks that I attended happened to be Ubuntu-related - first Dustin gave a quick introduction to the components of Launchpad, followed by a talk from Lucas about the
relationship between Ubuntu and Debian. There was a discussion afterwards about
interoperability between the various hosting sites and bug trackers. Several audience members questioned the relevance of Debian and suggested everything should just switch to Launchpad, but this seemed to be founded in ignorance. (none were actually Launchpad developers, contrary to the impression Martin seems to have).

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).

Roughly a week ago I joined Julian, Muharem and Michael, working on the Soyuz component of Launchpad. For now I've been working on easy Soyuz bugs, as a way of becoming more familiar with the internals. I'm working from home but I had the chance to hang out with some of the other Launchpad developers, including the full Soyuz team, at UDS Lucid in Dallas.

Launchpad is different from most other FOSS projects I have worked on so far. Some things I noticed during my first week:

The codebase is big and well tied together. I don't think I've ever used grep and ctags as often as I have in the last week. Fortunately, the directory structure makes it relatively easy to predict where to look for things.

Reviews are really quick - no long round-trips between author and reviewer trying to get a branch landed. This is a really *really* great thing.

It's easy to find somebody familiar with a particular piece of code and it doesn't take long to get an answer when you ask questions. I'm still getting used to this - I tend to ask questions sporadically because I have gotten used to having to wait a couple of days for an answer that's actually useful.

Setting up the development environment takes some time. Or perhaps I'm spoiled by Bazaar where "bzr branch lp:bzr bzr && ./bzr/bzr selftest" is all you need to start hacking. And it seems like karmic is the only platform on which things work - I tried with Debian Sid and Lucid as well, but things broke in strange and unusual ways.

The test suite is heavy and takes long to start up, something that makes proper TDD too hard. I also managed to run into some unexplainable problems where the librarian wouldn't shut down on one of my systems. Since there is only one instance of the database it is not really possible to run multiple instances of the testsuite at the same time unless you use chroots or something like that - this makes it hard to work on multiple branches at the same time, something which would especially be nice since the testsuite is slow (so you can run the testsuite in one branch, hack in another and alterate).

Doctests, while fast, a bit of a nuisance. Because of the setup/teardown overhead that is paid for every single test, doc tests are a lot faster than unit tests. On the other hand, pdb doesn't play well with doc tests - it doesn't show any context. Conceptually I also prefer small unit tests over doc tests, since they're quicker to read, easier to understand and there's less side-effects from previous instructions in the test that could affect the code that's being tested.

And for those that know me well; yes, getting used to somewhat regular working hours was indeed a challenge, but I seem to have managed.

These past few days in the US were a bit of a rollercoaster. Some random observations:

• The mentor summit was very nice and well organized (or rather: well disorganized). Lots of awesome people around from a wide variety of projects and nationalities.
• "Next Generation VCS" seems to be an alias for git these days in the minds of most people.
• I didn't write a single line of code in almost a week, something that is very rare.
• Driving an automatic gives you two spare limbs to use for other things. What those other things are, I have yet to figure out.
• Is the fact that your kid was student of the month or the fact that you own two cats and a dog really something that belongs on a bumper sticker?
• Gas is cheap (compared to Europe). I drove 300 miles on a $30 tank.
• The malls in the Bay Area are some of the biggest I've ever seen, but strangely enough they seem to lack both book- and cd-stores.
• Visiting Fry's continues to have a significant effect on the contents of my wallet.
• It is legal to turn right on a red traffic sign in California unless otherwise indicated. It took me a while to realize this until people repeatedly started honking behind me...
• The waiver I had to sign to be able to skydive in California was scary. I can cope with my operating system coming without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose, but my parachute?
• I stopped pretending to have any regularity in my sleeping habits. 6 AM flights? It seemed like a good idea at the time.

After over 7 years of working on it off and on, I'm looking for somebody to help maintain (and eventually take over) CtrlProxy. I started working on CtrlProxy somewhere in 2002, only a short while after Wilmer started hacking on BitlBee. If I remember correctly I started working on it because I didn't want to run a separate dircproxy (the only real competitor at the time) instance (with configuration) for each IRC network that I connected to. It was also just a good excuse to play with the IRC protocol a bit.

Over the years, CtrlProxy has served as a playground for me to try out new and interesting things. It's been rewritten or severely refactored several times in its early history, the latest time being the 3.0 release (from 2005). I've tried different build systems, I've tried different implementation languages, I've tried different configuration file formats, I've tried different support libraries, I've tried different version control systems, I've tried different documentation formats. So while it's definitely been a very educational project for me personally, I haven't really had the time or the interest to dedicate to the project that it deserved during the last few years. This was mostly because there were other more interesting FOSS projects I spent my spare cycles on.

These days there are plenty of other good IRC proxies out there, such as BIP, so I doubt CtrlProxy will be missed if it were to disappear. Despite that, if anybody is interested in taking over, please send me an email (jelmer@samba.org) or contact me on IRC (jelmer on the OFTC and Freenode networks).

cp: Anathema - Shroud of False

For this years (the fifth?) Summer of Code, I participated once again as a mentor for the Samba and OpenChange projects.

Samba was assigned four slots this year: one was a CIFSFS project mentored by Steve French and the other three were Python projects related to Samba 4, co-mentored by Andrew and me. Our students did very well this year, although we unfortunately had to drop one after the mid-term evaluations due to lack of effort. Nonetheless, we're very happy with the results of the other two projects:

Calin Crisan (France) converted the rest of the applications in SambaGtk to Python, and worked on a GTK+ user manager for Samba and Windows. With his improvements, it is now possible to edit registries, manage users, inspect the endpoint mapper, plan tasks and manage services on a remote Windows machine using a GTK+ application on a Linux workstation.

Ricardo Velhote (Portugal) designed and implemented a new version of SWAT - the Samba Web Administration Tool. Unlike the old SWAT, his implementation is more than just a simple web-based editor for smb.conf. As we were expecting at the start of the Summer of Code, not all of the functionality could be implemented properly in a couple of months, not while getting the design and infrastructure right. With a basic version working, we now hope the remaining subsystems can be contributed with help from the community.

I'm planning to merge Calin's improvements to Samba-Gtk into the mainline in the next month or so. SWAT is a standalone application and will continue to live as a separate project, while being a part of the Samba ecosystem. Congratulations to both Calin and Ricardo on their achievements!

So far I'm very much enjoying my first DebCamp / DebConf. It's nice to finally meet a lot of people in person that I have worked together with or talked to on IRC in the last few years. Cáceres is a relatively small town with a nice old city center.

I arrived early for DebCamp and spent the first few days here working on fixing bugs in the Bazaar and Samba packages as well as discussing the integration between Samba 4 and Kerberos with Sam (both in general and on Debian specifically). In trying to set up a Samba 4 domain we found a number of bugs in the provisioning script, most of which seem to be fixed now.

In the last few days I've mostly worked on getting Samba 4 and OpenChange ready to go into Sid (they're in experimental only at the moment) and have discussed bzr-builddeb and related Bazaar issues with James.

My identi.ca feed is now also being forwarded to twitter here: http://twitter.com/ctrlsoft.

cp: Pixies - Velouria

I'm looking forward to going to my first DebCamp/DebConf. I won't be giving a talk, but I hope to work together with others on integrating Samba 3 and 4 better with the rest of the system and VCS integration.

I'll be giving a talk at the next NLLGG meeting about the Franky project.

Update: slides

At the moment I'm in Barcelona, attending the Bazaar sprint, which happens to be cohosted with the Ubuntu Developer Summit. I attended half a day of the UDS in Sydney a couple of years ago, so I had some idea of what I was in for already. It's a lot of fun, and having the two events at the same place at the same time was really worthwhile :-) I finally got to meet some of the Ubuntu server people in person.

I flew here a couple of days early so I could do some sightseeing, never having been in Barcelona (or Spain) before. The city was much nicer than I had expected, and we had some great weather. The timing was great, too: we we were there during the Cycling Tour of Catalonia and F.C.B. won both the national title and the European champions league (I hope I got that right, the important bit was the large amount of people partying outside :-).

During the first day of the summit I gave a short plenary talk on the Samba packaging in Ubuntu. Other than that I spent most of the time during the day switching back and forth between the Bazaar sprint room and the various break-out sessions. The main topics in the Bazaar world were the 2.0 release, and what had to be done to get it out of the door.

Following SambaXP I'm spending a couple of days in Paris. There was a surprisingly good train connection, we left Göttingen a bit before midnight and arriving in Paris around 8 the next morning, without any transits. The plan is to walk around a bit tomorrow and maybe visit the Louvre with Andrew, Kirsty and Julien. I guess I should've known this already, but Paris is expensive. Forgot to look at the menu card in advance the other day and ended up having a 8 euro (special) beer.

I'm staying a couple of days after Andrew and Kirsty travel on to England, so I can visit some friends and family before I head back. There might also be OpenChange hacking involved.

Last week most of the Samba team met again for our annual conference in Göttingen. It was nice seeing everybody again, specially the folks I hadn't seen since the last one.

Together with Andrew and his wife Kirsty I took the train from Amsterdam into Germany a couple of days early and we did some sightseeing together with Anatoli and Nadezhda during the weekend. There's still plenty of things to discover in Göttingen for me, even though I've already been there about two dozen times. We did a tour of the city walls, visited some of the churches and
climbed the tower.

Julien's talk about OpenChange was interesting and humorous as always. Volkers' tutorial on asynchronous programming in C. Even though I've spent quite some time working with and looking at these API's it was nice going through them step by step once again. It's a strange thing to wrap your head around.

Andrew and I also gave our yearly "State of Samba 4" talk again. As I've mentioned in other places, I'm really excited about the social effects of the Franky project. Once again I was reminded that giving a talk the morning after the conference party (this year in the "Oriental Lounge") is a bad idea.

Several of my fellow Debian Samba maintainers made it to SambaXP, it was nice to see Christian, Luk, Michael and Noël there. We made some decisions about the direction of the Samba packages, and a plan to allow the Samba 3 and Samba 4 packages to be installed on the same system. Unfortunately I had to miss Christian's talk because it was in the same timeslot as Jeff's talk about the CIFS kernel module.

Back from another awesome FOSDEM weekend. Finding good food in the Brussels city center is still as hard as it ever was, but at least the beer was good. Only attended two talks, but met lots of nice people.

After spending a little bit more than three years in the Debian New Maintainers queue, I finally became a Debian Developer.

Many thanks to the various people who have helped me through NM and have sponsored me over the past few years.

Being in Berlin for new years was a lot of fun, but there were some repercussions. I spent the last few days in bed with influenza. Lack of sleep, whiskey and freezing cold are a bad combination :-(

% bzr branch deb:line6-usb-source debian
Retrieving Vcs locating from line6-usb-source Debian version 0.7.4-1
Branched 354 revision(s).
% bzr merge-upstream https://line6linux.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/line6linux/driver/trunk
All changes applied successfully.
Using version string 0.7.4+svn511 for upstream branch.
The new upstream version has been imported. You should now update the changelog (try dch -v 0.7.4+svn511-1 "New upstream snapshot."), resolve any conflicts, and then commit.
% dch -v 0.7.4+svn511-1 "New upstream snapshot.
% bzr builddeb
Building using working tree
Preparing the build area: ../build-area
Purging the build dir: ../build-area/line6-usb-0.7.4+svn511
[...]
Placing result in /home/jelmer/bzr/line6-usb/result
% ls ../result
line6-usb_0.7.4+svn511-1_amd64.changes line6-usb_0.7.4+svn511-1.dsc
line6-usb-source_0.7.4+svn511-1_all.deb
line6-usb_0.7.4+svn511-1.diff.gz line6-usb_0.7.4+svn511.orig.tar.gz

cp: Phideaux - Microdeath Softstar

I just got back home after spending the weekend in Goettingen at Ubucon.de. The conference was very nice and well organized. Since the talks were mainly user-oriented, I didn't attend a lot of them but spent most time working with the other Samba developers on Franky and (trying to) talk to other people. That last bit was a harder than I thought since my German seems to be a bit rusty when it comes to speaking; listening is usually fine.

We made a lot of progress on the merged build; we're getting close to having about half the code shared between Samba 3 and Samba 4.

cp: Van der Graaf Generator - The Least We Can Do Is Wave To Each Other

It took a while, but I've now got Kerberos authentication working for most services.

Done:

• IMAP (Dovecot, Evolution, Thunderbird, Mutt)
• SMTP (Postfix)
• NFS (NFSv4, Linux)
• SMB (Samba, CIFSFS)
• HTTP (apache, firefox, epiphany)
• FTP (kftp, heimdal ftp server, bzr)
• IPP (CUPS, GTK+)
• XMPP (Jabberd2, pyxmpp, gossip/telepathy, gajim, BitlBee)
• LDAP (OpenLDAP)
• SSH (OpenSSH)
• libvirt
• DNS (bind, for dynamic updates)
• Subversion

Todo:

• IRC using SASL?
• bzr smart server
• VNC
• X11
• LDAP GSSAPI authentication in Evolution
• Thunderbird MANAGIESIEVE extension

It's still a lot more work to set this sort of thing up then it should be. Mac OS X and Windows are way ahead of any of the Linux distributions in this area.

cp: Cynic - Veil of maya