FISL in the Morning

The Fedora booth has been well populated by Fedora Ambassadors from all around Latin America from Brazil to Mexico. For someone from the insular world of the United States, it's awe-inspiring to watch the ambassadors in action. Even though some speak Spanish and others Portuguese, they cheerfully work out their differences in language and laughingly toss jokes at one another. A line of potential Fedora users stretches out from the booth, entertained to watch interviews of Fedora ambassadors and developers as they wait to sign up for a FAS account and get the Brazilian Fedora 11 spin.

The conference is huge. And very oriented on free software. I attended LinuxWorld in San Francisco once and the crowd was roughly this size. The type of attendee is very different, though. Where LinuxWorld seemed to have an abundance of businessmen looking to buy or sell a solution to someone else, FISL seems populated mostly with enthusiasts eager to meet up with fellow contributors to the projects they are involved in. A very nice crowd to watch and try to interact with despite my limited Portuguese.

Luis hits the nail on the head.

People who lean toward the DAG as *recording* history will prefer Mercurial or Bazaar. People who tend to see the DAG as a tool for *presenting* changes will prefer git.People who lean toward the DAG as *recording* history will prefer Mercurial or Bazaar. People who tend to see the DAG as a tool for *presenting* changes will prefer git.

-- Stephen J. Turnbull on python-dev

While this doesn't express my main issues with git (which are UI driven) (although the UI might be irretrievably broken because of these features... I dunno :-), it does capture the reason I don't jump up and down when contemplating git's "advanced features".

Found out today that git, bless its heart, has non-symmetric UI. watch:

[badger@Clingman bugzilla]$ git pull
Already up-to-date.
[badger@Clingman bugzilla]$ git push
Counting objects: 7, done.
Compressing objects: 100% (4/4), done.
Writing objects: 100% (4/4), 418 bytes, done.
Total 4 (delta 3), reused 0 (delta 0)
To ssh://git.fedorahosted.org/git/python-bugzilla
   c387d20..ef6bb9c  master -> master
 ! [rejected]        0.5 -> 0.5 (non-fast forward)
error: failed to push some refs to
'ssh://git.fedorahosted.org/git/python-bugzilla'

After a bunch of head scratching we finally realized that pull only updates a single branch whereas push attempts to update them all. Horrible UI. Imagine the case where you're sharing dozens of feature branches with other developers. Before you push new work you have to git pull in each of them?

And a Warm Thank-You To...

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams (ivazquez) is one of the most helpful people around. He seems to always be present on #fedora-python answering questions. He gives out sound packaging advice on fedora-devel-list. Many contributors fondly remember him helping them through package reviews or making sure they were on the right track after he sponsored them.

My current thank-you is for the task he took on for the new release of python-fedora. A TurboGears identity provider that allows our web applications to have single-signon with the Fedora Account System has been a feature of python-fedora since the first release. ivazquez has added an auth provider that does the same for Django applications. This was a frustrating task as he had to work with the guts of python-fedora's client module, understand the TurboGears authentication scheme, the Fedora Account System API, and then map all of that into the Django authentication provider.

Thanks to his work we'll have authentication against the Account System when we deploy the Django version of Transifex (And a thank-you is owed to the Transifex devs for the shiny new release!) just in time for the Fedora-11 string freeze.