Older blog entries for DV (starting at number 201)

Legal Spam

So who else got that legal SPAM :

Greetings $project Maintainer:

We currently use the $project package and we are quite pleased with it,
but our legal council has recommended that we discontinue its use. ...

And then 2 Word document with list of files, generated, test suites, etc...
missing a Copyright label. Apparently I'm not the only one, so if you got this
don't worry, you are not the only one. My answer was basically that such
issues should be made public if such legal changes was needed to an
Open Source project, I wondering how they are gonna react :-)

libxml2-2.6.20

Getting that release out had been harder than usual, but this is normal considering:

• That the last release was beginning of April though I usually release every months
  
• The large amount of changes and testing which afected packaging
  

Technically the big progresses are on the XSD Schemas support (streaming and big improvements in the conformance), there is also revamped testing tools purely based on C to be able to test fully on Windows, valgrind or embedded systems, and some DOM "import" like functions for the tree APIs.

Fun with rpmfind.net

The machine had been super stable since I upgraded it last summer, uptime around 200 days when one of the drives died, the system survived but I had to reboot still and needed to increase drive space, expecially Fedora and Red Hat mirrors were starting to outgrow the largest 120GB drives I could plug on the venerable 3ware card, so clearly it was time to start adding SATA especially since 200MB drives are now the cheapest per capacity I bought a couple. That's where things started to be nasty: the Promise TX4200 wasn't supported by RHEL3 or 4, I didn't trust the drivers coming from the vendor either, so I bought a cheapo SIL based SATA card, which worked to some extend on RHEL3 but depending on the kernel version I got either crashes or non-dma transfers and kernel errrors. It was clearly time for a software ugrade too, and since the box don't have a CD drive (it's all disks, 11 drives in that box), the upgrade was a little funky (rsync to a new drive at home, local upgrade to RHEL 4, and then swapping the new root drive later on-site). Anyway it works very well now, no partition is full anymore, there is now more than a terabyte of storage, twice more RAM, and I hope I will get to a 200 days+ uptime again ! Knocking on wood !

Software Patents in Europe

At least the crap at the EC level got blocked, thanks a million to all who worked on this, including the FFII and our representative (my MEP is Rocard, I'm fairly happy to have voted for him !). As Calum pointed out it is nice to see Sun Microsystems lining up with us on this, they are still members of EICTA but dissenting,
excellent ! As for the block on rpmfind.net I simply removed it 2 hours after the results for the vote ;-) (rpmfind.net was down earlier today, changed memory, added 2 sata drives and it broke during the night apparently, the good point is that I now have a 200GB drive for Fedora). Now it's time for me to celebrate !

Software Patents in Europe

I feel threatened by this. Frustrated too as IBM, Apple, Sun, HP, Nokia ... who are paying for the pro-patents lobbyist in Brussels also use libxml2 and libxslt heavilly one way or another, I feel backstabbed by the entities I made a big gift to. I am starting to look at ways to protect myself, and since the only handle I have in this fight is my Copyright ownership for a large part of the code I may change the License to protect myself agaisnt patent infrigement lawsuits in the future, I'm not sure adding a clause to the MIT License I use now makes sense, I have been pointed by one of the other listed authors of libxml2/libxslt to the Academic Free License from Lawrence E. Rosen and looks very interesting. I hope I won't have to go though this, it will cost me a bit, and it will cost way more to everybody using the software to recertify it for their use :-( .

Taking things personally

I have been trying to analyze why I react so personally to things related to my libxml2 or libxslt and to a lower extend to other parts of my GNOME work. My conclusion at this point is that I invested an awful lot of my life, not just work time, in that code base and project. If I die tomorrow that would be the only think significant left of my stay around, this is a sad in a sense, but can also explain why I'm so sensitive about this.

Pink Floyd

I happened by chance to see their performance at Live8 on TV yesterday, it was amazing, I could not block a few tears, I was moved and could not resist, incredibly powerful ...

Democracy and Iran

Thanks roozbeh, I doubt french will be able to do anything about how the US politicians perceive the situation there. W.r.t. the controversy about atomic weapons, well it's clear based on the last 30 years of US "interventionism" a country had better get the bomb or be ready to get run over based on politician and monetary interest from our US friends (the list starts with Vitenam and ends up with Iraq, I would rather not see it growing even if it means "small" nuclear power proliferation). It's obviously better to be in the position of Pakistan than Afghanistan to negociate ... Yes, this is sad.

If even Tehran voted Ahmadinejad then this is really a society problem I guess, or people could not stand Rafsanjani anymore, impressive and scary.

Knee troubles

Since John started talking about his here is for the people with interest in the field:
<img src="http://veillard.com/photos/2005/Jun/26Sun:19:01/.thumbnails/IMG_2207.JPGP" alt="" />
<img src="http://veillard.com/photos/2005/Jun/26Sun:19:01/.thumbnails/IMG_2208.JPGP" alt="" />

Just before going in vacations in April I heard 2 small crackling in my left knee while playing badminton. I was afraid that some of the troubles I had in the past resurfaced. To be sure I had a Nuclear magnetic resonance scan (Philips IRM scan, 2Tesla) of my knee and this is 2 shots of the scans. If you look a bit closely at the big picture you will see some big white spot in the middle, they are the artefact generated by the metalic screws I still have in there remaining from the replacement of my cross ligament 10+ years ago. The result twas actually positive I had no observable new degradation, and actually had more of the meniscus left than what I expected !
For further informations on reading my scan I suggest people read the Wikipedia Knee page

GNOME marketing list

I have been co-managing this list with Jeff for a few weeks now, and I am suprized by the momentum there, first there is around 2 new subscription per day in average, and we reached 150 subscribers today. GNOME promotion is growing, this is a nice feeling !

LinuxTag

I was in Karlsruhe for Linux tag on Thursday and Friday. Even if it may sound a bit silly to drive 1200km for just 2 days there I still think it was worth it. I didn't had that much time to wander around, I was in a day long meeting organized by the iDABC the first day, did a presentation on Xen the second day for the Fedora Conference and worked a bit on the Red Hat booth. The GNOME booth was well-staffed, nice to see Murray, Swen and the volunteers showing 2.10 to visitors, but we need Fedora based bootable CD (not DVD) to be able to demo and give away on a large scale, Ubuntu is nearly getting a monopoly at this point. Oh and the CD duplication machine was amazing, whoever managed to get that machine lent to us, THANKS to you and the volunteers ! Notably missing at the expo was Novell, it was a bit strange, I also could not spot a booth dedicated to Debian, though there was for sure a lot of Debian logos and Tee-Shirt around.

the European Union iDABC

The acronym hides the fact that this is a program from the European Commision about electronic governement services. The ABC mean Administration Businesses and Citizens, i.e. the scope is relatively wide, though they are really providing guidelines to Public Administrations. Of course the deployement and development of Open Source software is a hot topic, if not a hot potato, for them. I was invited by Barbara Held to participate, as the topic was about how software developped within the EU should be made open source (or developped in an open fashion). There interesting discussions about building sourceforge like collaborative site for european administrations, and also on a draft of a new OSS License, apparently the existing ones don't really match the needs of the governements, yes it's annoying to get yet another License, but the mismatch seems to have been blocking existing efforts toward open-sourcing exitsing code bases so this is really needed. The very positive point is that the language of the License is understandable by mere mortals and very clear/well structured, I just asked for a specific provision against submarine patents. It was interesting to discuss with some of the Brussels and various local governement representative, and to see Intel/Sun/IBM/Microsoft doing their lobbying parade. Good to see we had some real OSS advocates like Leon Shirman and Anne Østergaard around too. The burning hot potato of open office document formats wasn't discussed, at least not in the main track, but this a domain iDABC has been working on of course.

You can learn more about the iDABC online, they also have a special section dedicated to Open Source with a number of resources and case studies (and are looking for more case studies so if you have OSS adoption examples in the european public sector to share please contact them).

On a related note the City of Munich has an Open Source page related to their migration, and with various documents. This is of course watched closely by a lot of public sector administrations.

Xen and Linux virtualization

My talk on the second day was about Xen the OS virtualization layer and its inclusion in Fedora Core. Unfortunately my talk started 30mn before the published schedule so a lot of people rushed in in the middle of the presentation, sorry for those who misssed the beginning, but the slides are online. The room was fully packed at the end, obviously people are eager to learn about Xen, and Xen has the potential to change a lot of things, to take Daniel Glazman's terms this is a Disruptive Innovation, not virtualization in itself as it's a well known and deployed technology in the mainframe world for decade, but the fact it comes nearly without price to the standard and cheap PC platform. Moreover their recent work on migrating VM between machines within a cluster opens the door to a number of changes in the way we do computing, this is very exciting and since we are only at the beginning of the deployment phase this is a domain where new comers have an opportunity to get involved in something exciting and make a difference. But to learn more about this I really suggest people go look and read the most recent publications from the Xen group in Cambridge research lab especially those about Xen-3.0 roadmap and about live migration of VMs, it's IMHO amazing !

A wedding

Congratulations to Damien and Jonita, and enjoy your vacations !

and a burial ?

Condoleance to our friends in Iran, I don't know how we will be able to help, I just hope it won't have too much of an impact. What I really don't understand is how this can happen in a country where women have the right to vote, is there vote statistics available to try to understand town vs. countryside, sex, age influence on people's vote. Of course those who didn't vote deserve the right to be ignored (I had to go vote for Chirac in the last presidential election here to block the ultra right wing, and still feel bitter about this but this is democracy rules).

Libxml2 vacations

I'm on vacations until Friday, the goal is to clean some of the backlogs of bugs I have on libxml2, libxslt and make new releases as people have been asking and waiting for those. Weather forecast is 37C in Grenoble on Tuesday, I refuse to install aircon on principles ground but this is gonna be nasty. Lot of sweat ahead ...

One of those days

You know those day where even before finishing your coffee you get a nasty bug report, then you try to debug it and immediately step onto another serious problem, and the ball keeps rolling until you realize it's way past lunch, and this continue with an avalanche of mails, bug reports once you get back to the keyboard... till the end of the day. Yeah, that was one of those days, I probably didn't do more than the usual days but end up wasted, though happy to have survived. On the nice side a long but good GNOME board meeting at the end.

The positive side is that I'm on vacations till next Monday, away from the Internet, laptop fully loaded with mail archives, CVS checkout, Fedora Core 4 and Xen, so I will probably do some work anyway. I'm visiting my father retired in the mountains.

Fedora Core 4 Release

Seems to be a very successful release. I'm watching the traffic on (fr.)rpmfind.net, currently around 9MBytes/s maxing the pipe out, with a load average around 100, still responsive even if with only 512MB of memory the disk holding Fedora is trashing a bit (good old RHEL3 box). I was surprized how fast the demand kicked in, from the time I flipped the access bit the downloads reached 60Mbps in approximately 60 seconds. Maintaining a server and watching the good bits spread is a nice feeling :-) , it's less personal than a maintainer release but the raw volumes of those release is impressive, we will have to watch the numbers from the bittorent trackers, and the load at the ISP levels in the next few days.

My last blog really didn't go into technical matters, here is some news thanks to Drivel

libxml2 progress: Schemas

Thanks to Kasimier Buchcik, there is a lot of progresses there, he integrated the new version of the W3C/NIST regression tests which show some serious progresses (current CVS):

## Running XML Schema tests (NIST)
Ran 23170 of 23170 tests (3953 schemata): 32 failed ( 2 internal )
## Running Schema tests (Sun)
Ran 193 of 193 tests (40 schemata): 41 failed ( 9 unimplemented 14 skip-invalid-schema )
## Running Schema tests (Microsoft)
Ran 7230 of 7230 tests (4686 schemata): 1236 failed ( 50 unimplemented 50 skip-invalid-schema ) 4 leaks

XSD is excruciatingly hard to implement, in a large part because the specification is nearly impossible to understand (at least for the structure part), getting most of the NIST test is a serious achievement (and some of the remaining problems are my fault especially about \n handling in regexps).

Also coming but not yet finalized API wise is streaming of Schemas validation. It should be available at the xmlReader level soon, and probably at the SAX level too, this is something which has lot of value for some corporate users. it's interesting to see the interest growing there. To put that in comparison, libxml2 is also being ported to Symbian the tiny embedded system OS, it was also interesting to hear from the Nokia person who did the "port" of libxml2 on the 770, if he compiled without Schemas support there would be failures on the Gnome desktop, I'm wondering what in Gnome is using Schemas (or RelaxNG they share
the configure switch).

gamin: trying to reach a stabilization phase

I released gamin-0.1.1 last Friday, if fix yet another desktop UI regression, and will be pushed to Fedora Core updates. Gamin should not work on a variety of kernel back-end (dnotify, inotify, MacOS-X and BSD kqueue, and Hurd/Mach), it's hard to make sure all platforms are equal but the regression tests are expanding as new bugs are hit, I'm getting increasingly more confidence on the dnotify based behaviour even if dnotify itself is really an ugly interface.