Back from OLS

Finally back from Ottawa, so exhausted by travel I slept 12 hours in a row last night. Good conference overall, it's a bit scary to listen about Linux powering 512 CPU single image systems as well as digital camera, and see support for hot plug CPU add and removal being added while on the other hand the embedded system guys trick it to boot in less than a second. The system is becoming a completely all-purpose stable OS, and even though there is some need for more specialized features (Desktop/inotify, virtualization, QoS, etc...) they are now mostly small incremental changes that are expected to be pushed directly on the main branch. This reminds me on the way I handle libxml2 and libxslt, no more API changes, everything goes to head, no backporting, and people get fixes on latest releases. This really minimize the updates/fix deliveries delay, maximixing the bandwidth between producers of the features/fixes and the consumers, to me this is mostly a sign of having reached a high stability level, next step is to just burn it in silicon and forget about it.

Laptop

The laptop is now declared officially dead, I should hopefully get a replacement soon, Alan apparently want the corpse to increase his collection of dead hardware :-)

Linsys

Following the wireless experiment done at LesSuites hotel for OLS, I bought the Linksys WRT54GS we had in our room, it's part of a crazy plan to not rely on a normal PC for my network infrastructure and provide wireless in the other side of the appartment. I will be playing with it and OpenWRT once I have a bit of time.

Gamin

Among the first thing done today while processing mail was integration of a couple of patches for gamin, one fixing FAM disconnection API and the other one providing support for the inotify experimental kernel API replacing dnotify. I hope this goes in the kernel, dnotify signal based interface plus the requirement to open the monitored file is really bad and inotify should fix a number of problems this raises.

Fedora

We also had an interesting BOF at OLS, good to meet the people though lot of them were Red Hat employees. Checking the agent logs of Speakeasy new rpmfind.net box, it's impressive to see that nearly half of the requests for the last 6 days seems generated by Yum, the fedora update agent (Python-urllib/1.15 would be yum or up2date I think). There is a lot of metadata work to be done around linux distros and packaging, for distros, mirror, repositories, packages and projects. With a bit of luck all this is gonna fit together and provide a standard and stable set of data upon which new set of maintenance tools can be build, with better integration, better UI, faster updates while still maintaining a secure framework.