Bazaar: A retrospective
For the last 7 years I've been involved in the Bazaar project. Since I am slowly stepping down, I recently wrote a retrospective on the project as I experienced it for the last 7 years.
Thanks to a few kind people for proofreading earlier drafts; if you spot any errors, please let me know in the comments.
Samba 4.0.0, finally
This afternoon we released version 4.0.0 of Samba. This is a significant milestone, and I'm very proud of the result. Samba 4 is the first version that can be a domain controller in an Active Directory domain.
We embarked on this journey almost a decade ago - the first commit is from August 2003. It's been a long and bumpy ride. I hardly recognize the people in this team photo from 2003 (I'm second from the left).
A lot has happened in that time. We wrote a few million lines of code. We migrated from CVS to Subversion to Git. We've drifted apart and grown back together as a team.
In my youthful naivity I predicted a release "within 1 or 2 years" during a talk at the NLUUG in 2004. But Active Directory was a lot harder than we thought, and there were quite a few other distractions as well. I'm glad this release, which is by far the biggest and longest running software project I have ever worked on, has finally happened.
Some older RCs of Samba 4 have already been packaged for Debian and Ubuntu, in the samba4 source package. For Debian jessie, these will be integrated into the main samba source package. Please use experimental if you do want to try the existing packages, as it is most up to date.
Documentation
From LWN's weekly edition:
Documentation is the sort of thing that will never be great unless someone from outside contributes it (since the developers can never remember which parts are hard to understand).
Back to blogging
Hello Internet. After a long silence and several fights with Serendipity I am back.
The contents from my old Serendipity install have been migrated to restructuredText in pelican. Among other things, this means I can now get rid of the last PHP install I had left on my server.
Last day at Canonical
This Friday will be my last day at Canonical.
It has been a lot of fun working here. There is so much I have learned in the last three years. I'm going to miss my colleagues.
Over the last couple of months I have slowly stepped down from my involvement in Bazaar and the Bazaar packaging in Debian and Ubuntu. I would like to stay involved in Ubuntu, but we will see how that goes.
I'm taking some time off until the end of the year to see the world and hack, before starting something new in February.
Summer of Code 2011
The Samba team is once again participating in the Summer of Code this year. This year we have 4 students working on various projects related to Samba.
This year I am mentoring Dhananjay Sathe, who is improving the GTK+ frontends for Samba. In particular, he is making it possible to manage shares and users of a remote Samba or Windows machine.
Dhananjay is also blogging about his progress.
libapache2-mod-bzr
During the last two days I hacked together a Bazaar module for Apache. This module makes it possible to easily enable the Bazaar smart server for Bazaar branches. It also can display a simple placeholder page for Bazaar branches without working tree. It's surprisingly easy to write Apache modules.
The main advantage this has over a mod_wsgi / mod_python / mod_fcgi setup is that it doesn't require any additional Python hacking on the users side or other configuration outside of Apache, and it doesn't require configuration for each single branch in the Apache configuration. In the future I'd also like to support the settings "BazaarFrontend Wikkid" and "BazaarFrontend Loggerhead".
The configuration is currently as simple as:
LoadModule bzr_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_bzr.so
BazaarSmart on
BazaarFrontend Basic
in your apache2.conf. The BazaarSmart and BazaarFrontend directives can appear in
At the moment this project is a proof of concept, and probably not something you would want to run in production. For example, there is no way to limit the access to a branch to read only. I need to double-check there are no threading issues.
Testing and patches are welcome. The project is hosted here:
On the way to Samba 4
After Samba XP 2008 Andrew and I started keeping a wiki page with our bi-weekly goals and achievements for Samba 4. Because planning in a Free Software project is hard (time availability and priorities change over time, and other volunteers are equally unpredictable) we called this our "Fantasy page"; it listed things we wanted to work on next ("fantasies"), but reality being what it is we would usually actually end up working on something entirely different. We discussed our progress and new plans in - what I would now call - a bi-weekly standup call.
There were several reasons for doing this. It gave us some sense of direction as well as a sense of accomplishment; a way to look back at the end of the year and realize how much we had actually achieved. Because Samba 4 is such a long term project (it is 7 years old at this point) it is easy to become disillusioned, to look back at a year of commits and to not see the gradual improvement, just the fact that there is no release yet.
We managed to keep this up for two years, much longer than I had anticipated, and eventually started to slip last year.
More recently Kai and Tridge have started to blog weekly about their efforts to make Samba 4.0 a reality and I'm going to join them by trying to blog regularly - every two weeks - about my contributions, even if there were none.
In the next two weeks I plan to work on finally getting alpha 14 of Samba 4 out and on fixing the daily builds of Samba 4 and OpenChange for Ubuntu on Launchpad after we did a massive reorganization of the private libraries in Samba 4.
cp: Zero 7 - Somersault
Mumble and bluetooth
Mumble is an open source, low-latency, high quality voice chat application that we're using at Canonical, and which Samba has recently also adopted.
After I busted the cable of my cabled headset and inspired by Matt's post about Mumble and Bluetooth I bought a cheap Nokia Bluetooth headset that works with my laptop as well as my phone. By using BlueMan I even found that the headset worked out of the box on Maverick.
A nice feature in Mumble is that it is controllable using D-Bus. Blueman supports running an arbitrary command when the answer button is pressed. Combining these two features, it is possible to automatically toggle mute when the answer button is pressed:
#!/usr/bin/python
import dbus
bus = dbus.SessionBus()
mumble = bus.get_object("net.sourceforge.mumble.mumble", "/")
is_muted = mumble.isSelfMuted()
mumble.setSelfMuted(not is_muted)
To use this script, set its path in the configuration tab for the "Headset" plugin in blueman.
The only remaining problem with this setup is that I can't keep the headset on during my work day, as I don't have a way to put it in standby mode automatically. This means that my battery runs out pretty quickly, even when nothing is happening on Mumble.
cp: Red Sparowes - Finally As That Blazing Sun Shone
OpenChange server and SOGo
There's more good news on the OpenChange front. Julien has been working together with Wolfgang and Ludovic from Inverse recently to leverage the server-side support in OpenChange to provide native Exchange server support in SOGo.
A couple of days ago we announced that there now is an initial version that allows the use of Outlook against a SOGo server through OpenChange.
As far as I know, this is the first time it's possible to actually use Outlook clients with a non-Microsoft Exchange-compatible server without the need for plugins on the Outlook side. And it's all Free Software. Of course, this is just a preview, and not something we'd recommend everybody to run in production yet. But it's exciting to finally see this come together.
We already have OpenChange packages in Debian and Ubuntu but I hope I can help get SOGo packaged for both distributions as well.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
