Recent blog entries for pnasrat

Who ate all the PIEs

Settling in to routine at Red Hat now, and starting to get stuff done. Stumbled across a particularly nasty side affect of PIE and rpm's internal provides generator.

It turns out rpmbuild is adding Provides: basename(/path/to/pie/exec) to the package header. This in turn causes all EVR against that basename (often identical to the package name, or even worse for ppp created pppd which was conflicting with initscripts).

Fix is now in HEAD.

Life resumes

After a brief hiatus of marriage, and honeymoon life is starting to settle down.

I did a few installs this week of FC2 to test out stuff, fairly nice on both my iBook G3 and my new work laptop. I've started to setup the devel repository for JPackage so I can get cracking on the ant 1.6 changes, this will also probably be where things like eclipse 3 milestones will be pushed.

I've spent some time thinking about java depenancy issues for rpm/cojapas, I'm hoping to code something up next week sometime - jython + bcel are my friends.

Meanwhile boto has revised the 8086 gcc target for 3.3.3, this could be fun for ELKS.

World Wide Meeting

I survived what was a very hectic and busy few days. Hopefully I didn't make too big a fool of myself to my new employer :) Lack of eating, combined with tiredness and alcohol is not a good combination.

I didn't spend as much time with katzj and others as I'd expected - but it was good nonetheless. I got to know quite a few of the UK people which was useful - it seems likely I'll be popping up to Cambridge quite regularly.

It was good to find sane voices on the Java front, and the intrest in JPackage looks positive. Tech stuff on hold untill after the wedding...

It Installs

Last night I successfully did a cold (other than having an AppleBootstrap Part already) install of rawhide onto my iMac DV SE. Here are the gotchas:

• install in text mode as we don't get correct X setup for macs yet - ie mac text at second yaboot prompt
• you must be running an anaconda >= 9.92-5
• Partitioning works other than for mac specific stuff - I just autopartitioned
• complete install
• reboot but use the cd again and go into rescue mode - mac rescue
• I used nfs install so /mnt/source is now the tree - I installed hfsutils - either rpm --root or cp, chroot, rpm will do
• I ran yabootconfig and edited then ran ybin
• set default run level to 3 and reboot
• I manually configure XFree86 (actually I cheated by using ydl's Xautoconfig rebuilt using xorg-foo

For all those keen to go I am pushing my tree courtesy of skvidal to duke:

http://fedora.linux.duke.edu/fedorappc/

Update

Note off the cd you can tell yaboot to boot off the kernel - during install note the following partition numbers - / partition and /boot partition if seperate. Also note the kernel version (check from you mirror)

Boot from CD:

For non-boot cases (where 4 is / partition)

tell yaboot to boot hd:4,/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.5-1.327 root=/dev/hda4

For seperate boot (where 4 is /boot and 6 is /):

tell yaboot to boot hd:4,/vmlinuz-2.6.5-1.327 root=/dev/hda6

Oh and the snapshot is up of the tree that worked.

Java a packagers viewpoint

Life has been busy - weddings take up a lot of your time...

Well havoc and others are commenting on java currently so I thought I'd give an opinion from the trenches.

Having worked with JPackage for a long time one the main frustrations is having to make our users repackage the non-free components. However due to licensing confusion as summarised by another Jpackage member figuring out what we could provide as a package is non-trivial. Also trying to keep things FHS compliant means modifications (even if it is just changing paths or wrapper scripts due to lack of proper symlink resolving) which the license prohibits.

On the bright side there is cross distribution discussion that is looking at the issues with java both on free VM's and vendor ones.

I have been very impressed with RHUG and the native java stuff going into Fedora, it is good news for JPackage as people are looking at interoperability. Java support is required for both Fedora and RHEL realistically and it isn't going to go away soon, hopefully we can make it transparent for any implementation.

Oh and hopefully we'll get an updated native Eclipse snapshot soon...

It's been a while LifeStuff(tm)

Fedora PPC

Things are looking fairly good atm, I've been running arjan's ppc kernel this week, rebuilt for firewire so it'll talk to my shiny new firewire drive I'm going to test builds on.

After wrestling with anaconda in test mode (turned out prodpath in anaconda was still looking for RedHat) a test run went fairly well. Real install on Sunday.

Other stuff

For doing my kernel builds I've started to use mezzanine to wrap around CVS and a PDR type setup. Useful for generating diffs of specs and .configs.

Discussion on objects in python for rpm is starting which is nice, there is still so much to do at the rpm-python level, including a nasty for biarch setups in addErase that skvidal caught - that's on the list for Sunday too.

Today (Saturday) is Red Hat World Tour meets my LUG which should be fun.

UPDATE I'll leave it to you, dear reader to figure some of the questions I asked Red Hat.

Fedora PPC

Apparently ppc support may be hitting the Fedora kernel tree.

The patches to arch/ppc/mm/init.c and include/asm-ppc/pgalloc.h sound identical to what I did based on spot's sparc patches.

At least can work with the split out configs for pmac. This gives me hope for test3, now I just need to persuade my fiancee to let my buy a G5.

Catching up

Been busy with various things over the last week, so not had great deal of time. However today got a fedora core 2.6.3 derived kernel up, running with selinux on ppc32. Minor patches need to push to various people after more testing.

[pauln@imac pauln]$ uname -a
Linux imac.eridu 2.6.3psn1 #6 SMP Sun Mar 7 09:41:38 GMT 2004 ppc ppc ppc GNU/Linux
[pauln@imac pauln]$ id -Z
user_u:user_r:user_t

Caught up in bugzilla checking existing ppc bugs and got yaboot/ybin added to policy-sources. Probably should get quik and silo added too.

Also looked at ELKS for the first time in ages, some patches I need to check over and merge. I'm glad to see things picking up on it, I just need to unpack my 8086's.

Back to the grindstone

Well had housewarming this weekend which took up lots of my time - but was very worth while. Lots of people I hadn't seen for a while.

I've made a start on rpm.spec for rpm-python, it'll be the first rpm-python component I've done from scratch but I'm fairly happy with how it's going. I've also experimented with wrapping the rpm extension under a python module to make it easier to merge some helper functions.

jbj has added glob support for macrofiles which will make jpackage's life easier for macros.jpackage.

My rpmdb went a bit foo'ey so I took the opportunity to play some more with skvidal's rpmUtils module in order to fix it. Only real annoyance was not being able to access some useful functions in rpmUtils.updates as they are part of the class. Probably me being lazy though.