Switch
No, not the bzr switch… rather the book : http://www.amazon.com/Switch-Change-Things-When-Hard/dp/0385528752
Read it, its solid.
Switch
No, not the bzr switch… rather the book : http://www.amazon.com/Switch-Change-Things-When-Hard/dp/0385528752
Read it, its solid.
Subunit and nose
Looks like someone has come up with a nose plugin for subunit – excellent! http://www.liucougar.net/blog/projects/nose-subunit
In their post the author notes that subunit is not easy_installable at the moment. It will be shortly. Thanks to Tres Seaver there is a setup.py for the python component of Subunit, and he has offered to maintain that going forward. His patch is in trunk, and the next release will include a pypi upload.
The next subunit release should be pretty soon too – the unicode support in testtools has been overhauled thanks to Martin[gz], and so we’re in much better shape on Python 2.x than we were before. Python3 for testtools is trouble free in this area because confused strings don’t exist there
Maintainable pyunit test suites
There’s a test code maintenance issue I’ve been grappling with, and watching others grapple with for a while now. I’ve blogged about some infrastructural things related to it before, but now I think its time to talk about the problem itself. The problem shows up as soon as you start writing setUp functions, or custom assertThing functions. And the problem is – where do you put this code?
class Matcher: def __str__(self): "Describe this matcher.""" def match(self, something): """Determine if something is matched. :param something: Something to match. :return: None if something matched, or a Mismatch object otherwise. """ class Mismatch: def describe(self): """Describe a mismatch that has occured."""
BaseTestCase1 +TestCase1 +TestCase2 +BaseTestCase2 +TestCase3 +TestCase4 +BaseTestCase3 +TestCase5 ...
def useFixture(self, fixture): fixture.setUp() self.addCleanup(fixture.tearDown) return fixture
def test_foo(self): server = self.useFixture(NewServerWithUsers()) self.assertThat(server, HasUser('fred'))
LibrePlanet 2010 day 3
Free network services – A discussion session led by Bradley Kuhn, Mako & Matt Lee : Libre.fm encouraged last.fm to write an API so they didn’t need to screen scrape; outcome of the network services story still unknown – netbooks without local productivity apps might now work, most users of network office apps are using them because of collaboration. We have a replacement for twitter – status.net, distributed system, but nothing like facebook [yet?]. Bradley says – like the original GNU problem, just start writing secure peer to peer network services to offer the things that are currently proprietary. There is perhaps a lack of an architectural vision for replacing these proprietary things: folk are asking how we will replace ‘the cloud’ aspects of facebook etc – tagging photos and other stuff around the web, while not using hosted-by-other-people-services. I stopped at this point to switch sessions – the rooms were not in sync session time wise.
Mentoring in free software – Leslie Hawthorne: Projector not working, so Leslie carried on a discussion carried on from the previous talk about the use of sexual themes in promoting projects/talk content and the like. This is almost certainly best covered by watching the video. A few themes from it though:
We then got Leslies actual talk. Sadly I missed the start of it – I was outside organising security guards because we had (and boy it was ironic) a very loud, confrontational guy at the front who was replying to every statement and the tone in the room had gotten to the point that a fight was brewing.
From where I got back:
Chris Ball, Hanna Wallach, Erinn Clark and Denise Paolucci — Recruiting/retaining women in free software projects. Not a unique problem to women – things that make it better for women can also increase the recruitment and retention of men. Make a lack of diversity a bug; provide onramps – small easy bugs in the bug tracker (tagged as such), have a dedicated womens sub project – and permit [well behaved ] men in there – helps build connections into the rest of the project. Make it clear that mistakes are ok. On retention… recognise first patches, first commits in newsletters and the like. Call out big things or long wanted features – by the person that helped. Regular discussion of patches and fixes – rather than just the changelog. CMU did a study on undergrad women participation in CS : ‘Lack of confidence preceeds lack of interest/partipation’. Engagement with what they are doing is a key thing too. ‘Women are consistently undervaluing their worth to the free software community’. ‘Its the personal touch that seems to make a huge difference’. ‘More projects should do a code of conduct – kudos to Ubuntu for doing it’ — Chris Ball.
I found the mentoring and women-in-free-software talks to have extremely similar themes – which is perhaps confirmation or something – but it wasn’t surprising to me. They were both really good talks though!
And thats my coverage of LibrePlanet – I’m catching a plane after lunch . Its a good low-key conference, and well put together.
LibrePlanet 2010 Day 2
John Gilmore keynote – What do we do next, having produced a free software system for our computers? Perhaps we should aim at Windows? Wine + an extended ndiswrapper to run other hardware drivers + a better system administration interface/resources/manuals. However that means knowing a lot about windows internals – something that open source developers don’t seem to want to do. We shouldn’t just carry on tweaking – its not inspiring; whats our stretch goal? Discussion followed – reactos, continue integrating software and people with a goal of achieving really close integration: software as human rights issue! ‘Desktop paradigm needs to be replaced’ : need to move away from a document based desktop to a device based desktop. Concern about the goal of running binary drivers for hardware: encourages manufacturers to sell hardware w/out specs; we shouldn’t encourage the idea that that is ok. Lots of concern about cloning, lots of concern about what will bring more freedom to users, and what it will take to have a compelling vision to inspire 50000 free software hackers. Free software in cars – lots of safety issues in .e.g brake controllers, accelerators.
Eben Moglen – ‘We’re at the inflection point of free software’ – because any large scale global projects these days are not feasible without free software. Claims that doing something that scales from tiny to huge environment requires ‘us’ — A claim I would (sadly) dispute. Lots of incoming and remaining challenges. ‘Entirely clear that the patent systems relationship to technology is pathological and dangerous’ – that I agree with! Patent muggings are a problem – patent holders are unhappy with patents granted to other people . Patent pools are helping slowly as they grow. Companies which don’t care about the freedom aspect of GPLv3 are adopting it because of the patent protection aspects. Patent system is at the head of the list of causes-of-bad-things affecting free software. SFLC is building coalitions outside the core community to protect the interests of the free software community. We are starting to be taken for granted at the high end of mgmt in companies that build on free software. … We face a problem in the erosion of privacy. We need to build a stack, running on commodity hardware that runs federated services rather than folk needing centralised services.
Marina Zhurakhinskaya on GNOME Shell: Integrates old and new ideas in an overall comprehensive design. Marina ran through the various goals of the shell – growing with users, being delightful, starting simply so new users are not overwhelmed. The activities screen looks pretty nice The workspace rearrangement UI is really good. The notifications thing is interesting; you can respond to a chat message in-line in the notification.
Richard Stallman on Software as a Service – he presented verbally the case made in the paper. Some key quotes… “All your data on a server is equivalent to total spyware” – I think this is a worst-case analogy; it suggests that you can never trust another party: kindof a sad state of paranoia to assume that all network servers are always out to get you all the time. And I have to ask – should we get rid of Savannah then (because all the data is stored there) – the argument for why Savannah is not SaaS is not convincing: its just file storage, so what makes it different to e.g. Ubuntu One? “If there is a server and only a little bit of it is SaaS, perhaps just say don’t worry about it – because that little bit is often the hardest bit to replace.” ”Lets write systems for collaborative word process that don’t involve a central server” — abiword w/the sharing plugin ? RMS seems to be claiming that someone else sysadmining a server for you is better than someone else sysadmining a time-shared server for you: I don’t actually see the difference, unless you’re also asserting that you’ll always have root over your’ own machine’. The argument seems very fuzzy and unclear to me as to why there is really a greater risk – in particular when there is a commercial relationship with the operator (as opposed to, say, an advertising supported relationship).
LibrePlanet – GNU Hackers Meetup
GNU Hackers meetups are a face to face meeting to balance the online collaboration that GNU maintainers and contributors do all the time. These are a recent (since 2007) thing, and are having a positive effect within GNU and the FSF.
The LibrePlanet 2010 GNU Hackers meetup runs concurrent with the first day of LibrePlanet.
We started with some project updates:
Felipe Sanches presented his list of things that should be on the high priority project list:
–lunch–
John Eaton on Octave. John compared the octave contributors – 30 or so over the years, and never more than 2 at a time. The Proprietary product Matlab that Octave is very similar to has 2000 staff working at the company producing it. Users seem to expect the two products to be equivalent, and are disappointed that Octave is less capable, and that the community is not as able to do the sort of support that a commercial organisation might have done. Octave would like to gain some more developers and be able to educe users more effectively – convert more to become developers.
Rob Myers, the chief GNU webmaster gave a description of his role: The webmasters deal with adding new content, dealing with mail to webmaster@, which can be queries for the GNU project, random questions about CDs, and an endless flood of spam. The webmasters project is run as a free software project – the site is in CVS (yes CVS), visible on Savannah. Templates could be made nicer and perhaps move to a CMS.
Aubrey Jaffer on cross platform. There is a thing called Water which is meant to replace all the different languages used in web apps – generates html, css, alters the DOM, does what you’d do with javascript. So there is a Water -> backend translator that outputs Java for servers, C# for windows, and so on. (I think, this wasn’t entirely clear). He went on to talk about many of the internals of a thing called Schlep which is used as a compiler to get scheme code running in C/C#/Java so as to make it available to Water backends in different environments.
Matt Lee spoke about GNU FM – GNU FM is a free ‘last.fm’ site. The site is running at http://libre.fm/. 24ish devs, but stalle after 6 months – whats next? Matt has started GNU Social to build a communication framework for GNU projects to talk to each other – e.g. for each GNU FM site to communicate on the back end, with a particular focus on doing social functionality – groups, friendships, personal info. The wiki page needs ideas!
GNU advisory board discussion… too much to capture, but focused GNU wide issues – things like how projects get contributors, contributions, coordination. Teams were a big discussion point, bug trackers – how to coordinate teams followed up of that, and there is s ‘GNU Source Release Collection’ project to do coordinated releases of GNU software that are all known to work together.
LCA 2010 videos are showing up
Not all the videos are there yet, but they are starting to show up . Yay. See http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/linux.conf.au/2010/index.html or your local LA mirror.
Yay Dell-with-Ubuntu down under
Dell has been offering Ubuntu on selected models for a while. I had however nearly given up hope on being able to buy one, because they hadn’t started doing that in Australia. I am very glad to see this has changed though – check out their notebook page. Not all models yet, but a reasonable number have Ubuntu as an option.
Yay!
Using UEC instead of EC2
So, we wanted to move a Hudson CI server at Canonical from using chroots to VM’s (for better isolation and security), and there is this great product Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC – basically Eucalyptus). To do this I needed to make some changes to the Hudson EC2 plugin – and thats where the fun starts. While I focus on getting Hudson up and running with UEC in this post, folk generally interested in the differences between UEC and EC2, or getting a single-machine UEC instance up for testing should also find this useful.
Firstly, getting a test UEC instance installed was a little tricky – I only had one machine to deploy it on, and this is an unusual configuration. Nicely though, it all worked, once a few initial bugs and misconfiguration items got fixed up. I wrote up the crux of the outcome on the Ubuntu community help wiki. See ‘1 Physical system’. The particular trap to watch out for seems to be that this configuration is not well tested, so the installation scripts have a hard time getting it right. I haven’t tried to make it play nice with Network Manager in the loop, but I’m pretty sure that that can be done via interface aliasing or something similar.
Secondly I needed to find out what was different between EC2 and UEC (Note that I was running on Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10) – so things could be different in Lucid). I couldn’t find a simple description of this, so this list may be incomplete:
So the next step then is to modify the Hudson EC2 plugin to support these differences. Fortunately it is in Java, and the Java community has already updated the various libraries (jets3t and typica) to support UEC – I just needed to write a UI for the differences and pass the info down the various code paths. Kohsuke has let me land this now even though it has an average UI (in rev 27366), and I’m going to make the UI better now by consolidating all the little aspects into a couple of URL’s. Folk comfortable with building their own .hpi can get this now by svn updating and rebuilding the ec2 plugin. We’ve also filed another bug asking for a single API call to establish the endpoints, so that its even easier for users to set this up.
Finally, and this isn’t a UEC difference, I needed to modify the Hudson EC2 plugin to work with the ubuntu user rather than root, as Ubuntu AMI’s ship with root disabled (as all Ubuntu installs do). I chose to have Hudson reenable root, rather than making everything work without root, because the current code paths assume they can scp things as root, so this was less disruptive.
With all that done, its now possible to configure up a Hudson instance testing via UEC nodes. Here’s how:
cat >> /etc/apt/sources.list << EOF deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic multiverse deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic-updates multiverse deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic-security multiverse EOF export http_proxy=http://192.168.1.1:8080/ export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get update echo "buildd shared/accepted-sun-dlj-v1-1 boolean true" | debconf-set-selections apt-get install -y -f sun-java6-jre
Note that I have included my local HTTP proxy there – just remove that line if you don’t have one.
Note that Hudson will try to use java from s3 if you don’t install it, but that won’t work right for a few reasons – I’ll be filing an issue in the Hudson tracker about it, as thats a bit of unusual structure in the existing code that I’m happier leaving well enough alone .
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.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
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!