Tag - debian

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Thursday, September 6 2007

OCaml 3.10.0 transition is ongoing

By gildor on Thursday, September 6 2007, 00:18

After this long summer without posting (holiday time)... I come back to work.

The Debian OCaml Task Force has decided to migrate to OCaml 3.10.0. We have done a full round of test in experimental repository before deciding to submit a request to debian release management. After more than one week to let release manager give us permission to initiate the transition, we take the decision to do it!

Now, people can follow our progress using this web page or this one. On the status page, only package in unstable should be taken into account (package in experimental was the first round of test).

During this transition, Zack has also decided to create a common scheme for OCamldoc generated API documentation. For now, every library package that I upload contains this html/api location. This will allow to create a API bookshelf for OCaml library (more information on policy page).

Since this morning, OCaml 3.10.0 has been built for every arches and is installed... More packages to come

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Thursday, June 28 2007

Debconf 7 - That was one week ago

By gildor on Thursday, June 28 2007, 23:02

The return from Debconf 7 with Lunar was at least as interesting as the whole conference. I really enjoy this week. The only problem was that my luggage get lost in Edinburgh or Paris airport... Take two days to get it back.

The things i remember the most clearly from the end of the last week is several talks/bof about Debian debtags and general archive testing. There is really great QA idea. I decided to give a try to sbuild setup to try some automated testing of OCaml packages.

Another point is that i realized how many differents people are involved in Debian. The idea about "friends of debian" (or debian-community.org) can really be a great things to give some official status to all this people involved in Debian.

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Tuesday, June 19 2007

Debconf 7 - Already 3 days

By gildor on Tuesday, June 19 2007, 18:14

A lot of talks for now:

  • Welcome talk
  • Bits from the DPL
  • SE Linux for dummies
  • Data mining popcon
  • Debian installer an update
  • Dependency based boot sequence
  • Rewriting the Policy to be machine interpretable
  • Debian Release Management
  • Debian Live
  • Resurrecting "cruft"
  • OpenStreetMap
  • Popcon BOF

I really appreciate the ones about popcon. I think that today searching packages inside debian is a pain. I think that one of the way to make Debian more sexy is to show what is the best in Debian: a huge number of packages (more or less) well maintained ... This is a real advantage over any other distributions (thinking to Red Hat or Mandriva) which has a lot of disseminated source of packages which are not bound together and most of the time are uninstallable.

The idea behind using popcon data to propose more accurate result is great. I think that this idea combinated with debtags, should enable our users to have really good results when searching for a particular package. Another idea should also be interesting: adding hardware information to popcon. This should enable to do even more precise query (e.g. what TV viewer should i use, considering that my card is XXX). This could save a lot of time to many people that do not exactly know what program to use with their hardware. But the couple of package and hardware data in popcon could led to a problem of privacy...

Anyway, i think that searching a 15000 packages database is not enough efficiant debian (but i must agree that using debtags/ara is already a good way to search).

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Saturday, June 16 2007

Debconf 7 - First impression

By gildor on Saturday, June 16 2007, 23:47

Today i attend two talks : HP relationship with Debian, DAK future direction.

The talk about DAK led me to meet some known people in a technical background. Many ideas were exchanged and in particular one about the possibility to create staging area into experimental! I think this should be really great and would enable debian to do things in a more team synchronized manner.

Going back to my own experiment, with ocaml packaging, i think this should really help ocaml people to do more soft transition. The big problem of team work is that their playground is unstable. There should be no problem concerning that -- expect when you need to do big transition that will break most of the team maintained packages. For example, uploading new OCaml package will break almost all OCaml library packages. You must at least binNMU all packages and most of the time you have to patches/upload new upstream. This transition make all the ocaml packages uninstallable/unusable for a time. This can be quite long when there is big problem with particular package (thinking of coq and mldonkey).

People should also consider the fact that this kind of staging area must:

  • be easy to setup (just give a name and a list of GPG key of people that are allowed to upload)
  • configure a list of arch to build (for team maintained package, chances are that you have at least i386, amd64, ppc)
  • define a shorter delay for rebuilding packages/updating ftp area
  • simulate an upload to unstable by building on all arches in sequence
  • upload packages to unstable waiting for them to be build on every arches before uploading the next one.

As usual this kind of thing should be great but the main problem, is the lack of manpower to create it...

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Wednesday, February 7 2007

ocaml-dbus, ocaml-inotify and ocamlp3l

By gildor on Wednesday, February 7 2007, 02:41

Reading OCaml mailing list is really great source of good ideas.

I was thinking for some times to have a binding to DBUS in OCaml. This can give an easy access to HAL which is a good tool to detect most of the interesting hardware on a computer. I think this is a good way to write efficient script (as i am experimenting with Perl to detect my DVD writer). I think this deserve a debian package ;-)

While browsing for ocaml-dbus, i see that the upstream author also release a binding to inotify... This is also something i am interested in. I was thinking of building a inotify daemon to launch commands when files appear in a directory. Inotify can detect this kind of events.

And yesterday, while reading ocaml-beginners, someone talk about ocamlp3l. I have already seen this software, but at the time, i have no interest in it. But as of today, i think this can be a great way to unravel the power of a dual core computer! OCamlp3l helps people building parallel application. I also want to give this a try one day (when i will have finished to package everything).

For now, there is an RFS for ocamlp3l, but all these packages need to be authorized by upstream author.

My next package :

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Monday, February 5 2007

Solution Linux 2007

By gildor on Monday, February 5 2007, 23:31

Last week i was at Solution Linux 2007. I meet some other debian developper and it is good to meet some member of the community. I am a little bit disappointed concerning the people who attends this event. It was not as crowded as it used to be. I think Linux is no more the top "hype" thing of the year (but i heard at least twice "web 2.0" during the show... the "hype" was here).

During a discussion after this, i realize that some people think that the town of associations ("village des assoces" in french) was not enough opened to non-technical users. This guy thinks that open-source guy doesn't know how to sell OSS.

I am wondering if the spirit of the OSS is to "sell" anything to the public. Most of the people that are working on this are technical guy, there is no real "marketing" staff of the open source among them. I think that the core is essentially non-marketing guy (i really do think no one will never perform selling "cron" or "at" to any windows users -- and they are essential components of a GNU/Linux distribution).

After all, what does the OSS has to win doing "maketing" things. More users ? To my mind it is non sense, users coming to GNU/Linux, for example, must have personnal motivation. It is not like selling a box with a "Windows Vista" compatible sticker on it. They will loose a lot of applications, habits and eye-candiness. They should have a stronger reason to do that. This must be a real "motivation". I won't try to convince a guy that there is no problem using OSS -- because nothings is perfect.

As conclusion, i think that the town of associations was what it should be : a place where OSS developper can meet.

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Friday, January 19 2007

libiptcdata and ocamlgsl

By gildor on Friday, January 19 2007, 00:13

I rebuild a stripped version of ocamlgsl (0.5.2-0etch1) in order to have a package that only contains the correction of bug 406711. I think this time it will enter testing (i hope).

I try to upload libiptcdata, but for now there is already a version uploaded by Ian Wienand standing in the queue... I need to investigate to see if there is a way to overwrite this former package.

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Thursday, January 18 2007

libiptcdata upgrade to debian standard

By gildor on Thursday, January 18 2007, 02:52

I rework the Ubuntu layout of libiptcdata to get a debian package (in my opinion). In particular i add all the stuff like "watch" and "doc-base". Ian Wienand is working with me on this debian package. I hope we can release it soon.

Anyway, thanks to Hubert Figuiere for building the ubuntu package. This package was clean and we reuse most of his work.

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