Laney's blog

This post is about Ubuntu development processes. If you don't care about that, skip it now.

photo credit: Zemlinki!

I think I'm coming to a sad conclusion: I'm no longer a motivated MOTU.

I joined the team in February 2009, and in my application I said:

I want to continue to work closely with the Debian teams I've been recently involved with. Also, I want to work to convince kaol (Debian's GHC maintainer) that team-maintenance of Haskell related packages is a good idea – maintainer-lock can become a problem here. If successful, pkg-haskell will be another exciting area for me to work in.

Agda (together with its standard library) is crying out for a package.

This all happened. These goals all related to doing stuff in Debian. I also said this:

If bestowed with MOTUhood, I'll definitely join u-u-s and do my share of sponsorship, having helped to fill the queue myself in the past. Backports is also an area that I will consider getting involved with.

This is all in addition to the "bread and butter" QA-style work such as rcbugs and NBS, which I will obviously do too.

Ah, ahem. This may have happened a bit. But not any more; take a look at my +uploaded-packages page. It's obvious that I didn't care about the wider Universe in Lucid, opting to focus on my personal areas of interest which are Haskell packages (pkg-haskell) and CLI/Mono packages (pkg-mono pkg-cli-apps pkg-cli-libs).

Does this make me a bad MOTU? Debian is our upstream, and we are always talking about sending work there. It's only natural (and zack mentioned this happening in his talk today) that Ubuntu developers over time should migrate to do most of their work in Debian directly. But when people specialise and/or go over to Debian, they obviously work less — or not at all — on Universe QA.

I've been talking to some people at UDS — stefanlsd and persia mainly — about this problem: I'm not motivated to do general Universe work any more. When I was learning packaging this stuff was a great way to become familiar with the tools and different ways that things can be done. But now I know that, and have found my niche, I don't really feel that doing random merges/syncs/NBS/FTBFS/… is a good use of my time.

But we had a session this morning on Universe QA, and it seemed like the agreement there is that we do need to do better at this. There was also consensus that MOTU as a whole isn't doing very well these days, both in terms of keeping up with the tasks that we should be doing, and in recruiting new developers to the project. I have just described why I'm not pulling my weight on this front. On a motivational front, it seems as if the archive reorganisation effort and other developments (the 'cool apps' spec) are going to diminish the role of MOTU even further.

I really like being an Ubuntu developer, and I'd love to be better at it. I'm concerned that just concentrating on my packages isn't enough. Is it? Is it inevitable that contributors will specialise? If so, who fulfils the QA function of MOTU? Maybe there are superstars who love managing random transitions.

In summary: I suck (at being a good MOTU), and I don't know if I even can get better. But if I don't step up, who else will? And how can I expect others to do it if I don't set a good example?

he;lp

. o O (WordPress 2.7.1 is pretty sexy)

Congratulations on mankind for reaching the splendid milestone that is 1234567890 seconds since 1970 began. Who'd have thought we'd make it this far?

But really, congratulations on the Debian team for releasing Lenny (I even have one package uploaded there)! The point of this post is mainly to point people upgrading their Xen DomUs of a bug that I encountered and how to fix it (thanks to Andy Smith).

When doing the upgrade I got this message:

laney@cripps:~$ sudo dpkg --configure -a
Setting up linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686 (2.6.26-13) ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-1-xen-686
Searching for GRUB installation directory ... found: /boot/grub
warning: grub-probe can't find drive for /dev/sda1.
grub-probe: error: Cannot find a GRUB drive for /dev/sda1. Check your
device.map.

dpkg: error processing linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686 (--configure):
subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of linux-image-2.6-xen-686:
linux-image-2.6-xen-686 depends on linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686; however:
Package linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686 is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing linux-image-2.6-xen-686 (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of linux-image-xen-686:
linux-image-xen-686 depends on linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686; however:
Package linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686 is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing linux-image-xen-686 (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686
linux-image-2.6-xen-686
linux-image-xen-686

This is apparently a bug in grub-probe when dealing with Xen virtual machines. A post by Andy here gives the magic incantation to fix it:

sudo sh -c "echo '(hd0) /dev/sda' > /boot/grub/device.map && cd /dev && mknod sda b 202 0"

(you might need to change sda to xvda depending on what your error says).

A quick dpkg --configure -a later and everything is hunky-dory. Now in a sexy Lenny system in which everything seems to just work, just like the marketing says. Some Apache and MySQL warnings to fix up, but nothing too major. Yet.

(on a side-note – I got MOTU recently. Breakage coming to an Ubuntu near you. Yay!)

photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

Well, hello Planet! Since I've been approved as an Ubuntu member, I figured this is as good a time as any to post some drivel. I'm Laney, and I am very pleased to have your attention. I am 22 years young and in a small number of weeks will be a PhD student at the School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham.

I might as well use this platform to ask for your help. No, not for myself, for the Intrepid Ibex. Look at the picture up there, he needs you to help him. You couldn't say no to that, could you?

James Westby has made a much more comprehensive post on this, but I'd just like to retierate the testing part. If you feel you're able to recover from any problems that might occur (should not be too severe now we're in feature freeze) and your system is not mission critical then please do consider helping out. It was with some hesitation that I made the switch a week or so ago, and I've certainly found my fair share of bugs and have to live with a slightly more unstable system (particularly audio-wise), but it'll be worth it in the end when we ship an excellent Ubuntu 8.10. If you do test, I urge you to get involved in bug reporting, otherwise you're just putting yourself through pain for no gain. When you come across a problem, search Launchpad and the affected program's upstream bug tracker for the issue and see if you can add any more information. If there is no bug, or if you just don't have the time to be searching bug trackers then please do still file the bug on Launchpad and a triager will deal with it for you (maybe asking you for more information). As the ever wise Tesco say, "Every little helps". I've definitely come across a few bugs (probably some I've forgotten here):

• Banshee crashes on Last.FM login
• terminator crashed with AttributeError in get_first_notebook_page()
• seahorse crashed with SIGSEGV in IA__g_object_set_valist()
• file-roller crashed with SIGSEGV in find_image_offset()
• tracker-applet crashed with SIGSEGV in signal_emit_unlocked_R()
• Can no longer configure keyboard shortcuts for switching tabs

A lot of the bugs have a similar format: "x crashed with y in z". This is apport at work, an excellent tool which takes a lot of the work out of reporting crash bugs. Even just reporting these bugs helps to stabilise the system.

So, I urge you, please do run update-manager -d (Ubuntu users) or adept_manager --version-upgrade (Kubuntu), and get involved!

I'm going to start a series of posts where I walk through various things that I do as part of my Ubuntu development work with the MOTU team. I'm currently trying to get myself up to a level where I can apply to the Ubuntu Universe Contributors team, and then at some point in the future for MOTUship.

This article describes the process for merging a package from Debian to the development version of Ubuntu, currently the Intrepid Ibex. If you want to see how I generally go about doing this, follow the jump.

(more…)

I've had a lot on recently. Mainly a never-ending stream of coursework followed by the inevitable dissertation panic. This is all over now, however: all that remains to be done are 3 exams starting in 8 days (better get revising!). The last lecture of my degree has been and gone in the biggest anticlimax ever. Talk about going out with a whimper instead of a bang! I don't know how I feel about finishing my course. To some extent it's not so bad as I'm staying on to do a PhD here (that was another thing which occupied my time and I neglected to post about) starting in October, but this will still be a very different experience. The last three years seem to have flown by, but then when I think back to the sheer amount of things I've done, and the stuff I've learned then perhaps it wasn't so quick after all.

I managed to sort myself out a job for the Summer which will allow me to stay in Nottingham, which I really want to do. It's weird how for half of my University life I considered home to be back in Alconbury, but then something changed and now I feel more at home here than back there. Perhaps it's because most of my friends have moved on, or maybe I've simply become more used to life here. I'm definitely not going to complain. Notts may have its problems, but it feels like it's on the up to me, and is definitely somewhere I'm happy to stay. That's not to say that the choice between York and Nottingham for my PhD wasn't one of the hardest I've had to make. It really tore me up for a number of weeks, but for a few reasons which I won't go into here I plumped for Nottingham in the end. I'll probably keep wondering how different it would have been had I chosen York though.

Anyway, enough about life. What about nerdy stuff?

The Hardy Heron was released not long ago, and I'm very proud to be able to say that I played a tiny role in its development. My goal is to up my participation levels for the Intrepid Ibex. After my exams are over in a few weeks, I'll find myself with a lot more free time which I'll be able to spend working on the distro. My beady eye is already on a few merges to get the ball rolling, and then who knows? I'd say my goal for this cycle is to get to "Contributing Developer" status, once I've learned enough.

Overall Hardy seems like an incremental improvement over Gutsy. I upgraded (using update-manger) to the beta during development, so the major changes aren't that visible to me sadly. Perhaps a fresh install is in order to see the major changes stand out. It's good to have newer versions of most software too, even if there are some regressions that I've found thus far. Such is life. My linux-fu has definitely increased since I started using it 100% of the time. Prior to using Ubuntu, I'd been using Linux on-and-off every few months but always returning to Windows after some annoying problem forced me to give up. Not so this time; my new PC was (almost) fully compatible from the get-go, and I'd decided to have the resolve to see any problems through. It's been a blast so far.

A little while ago I uploaded my first patch to Launchpad, closing bug 159727. This is one of the easiest bugs there is – someone even provided the icon file needed to fix it! Nevertheless, I'm still pleased to have taken my first small step in Ubuntu development.

<crimsun> Laney: thanks, uploaded.

ROCK ON!