Posts Tagged ‘fedora’
February 27th, 2010
I read a little bit of the most recent humongous thread on the devel list. For those who like to ignore threads with 70+ replies in them, it’s about changing the Fedora updates system to not allow anyone to go straight to stable. (The policy isn’t actually written yet, so we don’t know if packages will require testing or if we can wait until the old_testing period is up or what. I also just summarized 70 emails worth of data into two sentences, so obviously I’m missing something—if you want to bite, read the thread.)
I have never had karma posted to a testing update—positive or negative—unless I, well, basically campaigned for people to test and vote, and I only did this for Gwibber when I maintained it. I spent more time trying to get three people to test this update than I did rebuilding and testing the update myself. I really only did this because I thought it was for the betterment of Fedora, and it really is, but it was one of the reasons I gave up maintenance of Gwibber: I didn’t have enough time to test it properly myself. (Then again, I had stopped using it for personal use as well.)
Gwibber is one of the few packages that I pushed to testing, and I only started doing so after someone started asking maintainers why they were pushing straight to stable. I didn’t have an excuse. :)
The bigger picture is that people don’t have time to give positive karma on packages that aren’t actively tested (like kernel). I’m going to source some conversation I looked at in #fedora-devel (and hopefully the owners of the words won’t care):
< hno> I usually keep my updates in testing until getting that email that it's
about time to push it, which I for a long time took as a policy. But sad
truth is that the amount of feedback given from users is usually nil..
< hno> and without users testing it does not really matter what policy there are
imho.
< nirik> well, no karma does not mean no one tested it.
< nirik> it means that it didn't break or annoy them enough to go -1. Or matter
to them enough to +1
< hno> true, but it also means the packager have no idea if it's been tested.
< kylem> the kernel has a huge problem here. nobody notices it's running unless
it doesn't work.
< kylem> that's not as big a problem as the people who don't understand what
regression means.
< kylem> but just vote -1 to every kernel because i didn't bother to fix their junk.
< kylem> which actively harms everyone else.
< kylem> makes me a sad panda.
I don’t know how to refactor the updates system so that we have more effective package updates and more effective testing. I’m no updates engineer. But I do think that requiring all packages to go through a two-week or indefinite testing period really pushes (hah) us farther and farther away from our why upstream policy.
Tags: bodhi, fedora | Comments Off
January 22nd, 2010
John Gruber on Vimeo’s new HTML5 player:
“Nice. And, just like YouTube’s, it only works with Safari and Chrome because they’re using H.264. Firefox supports the HTML5 video element, but only for Ogg Theora video. Get with the program, Mozilla.”
Mr. Gruber, I subscribe to your blog in my feed reader because I enjoy feeling like a rational human being. I am still a recovering Apple zealot, and it’s interesting to see how much my views have changed over the last five years.
Some of my friends know that I started with Linux simply because it was free and accessible to me, but I stuck around because of the philosophy behind it—most notably, the concept of free software, and the concept of what is “bad” software because you can’t change it or legally use it.
When I hear comments such as Mr. Gruber’s—”get with the program, Mozilla”—I wonder if people really understand the patent issues that surround the HTML5 open video debate. (Read more on the debate from Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul.) Long story short, H.264 is patent encumbered, Ogg Theora isn’t (as far as anybody can tell). Full stop.
Unfortunately here in the United States, we still permit software patents. Also unfortunate is that somebody is charging for patent licenses to the H.264 codec.
There’s a reason Mozilla is staying away from H.264, and it’s not just about the monetary cost of a license. Mozilla has taken on the responsibility of providing a free-software solution for browsing the web, which often directly conflicts with anything that requires a separate license. Even if Mozilla did want to pay for the patent license, even redistributing Firefox with the H.264 codec would taint the very freedom that it touts.
So, Mr. Gruber, et al.: Get with the program. Understand what Mozilla and its hundreds of contributors want to do. Help put an end to software patents. Or, help to make Theora better, making it more useful to YouTube and Vimeo. It takes a community to have real action, not just the beck and call of the few and powerful.
Tags: fedora, html5, mozilla, ogg theora, open video, rant | 16 Comments »
December 7th, 2009
During an extremely long hackfest today at FUDCon Toronto 2009, I planned to work on resurrecting fuse-mediawiki from its 15-month slumber.
I failed.
After talking with Jesus M. Rodriguez for an hour or so, we both determined that FUSE is not the right way to go about this for what I want to accomplish. The only thing we were planning to use FUSE for so far was downloading the wiki pages; everything else would be done with helper scripts.
We discussed things like “pull” and “commit”. It started to sound like a bastardized VCS. So we wrote a bastardized VCS. :)
Introducing mw: a command-line program with subcommands like “fetch” and “commit” to work with MediaWiki installations. I spent all day creating the framework for commands and all sorts of things, and ended up creating the init and fetch commands to start a mw repo and fetch some pages.
Currently: useless. Future: promising. I’m hoping that I can get the committing portion ready to roll within the week, and have fetch get all the pages of wikis and categories soonish.
Some key awesomeness: attempts to merge instead of just giving up (haha, you suck, MediaWiki), unified diffs, logs, and anything you really feel like doing.
Clone it now and read the README and HACKING:
git clone git://github.com/ianweller/mw.git
Edit: If you want to discuss this with me at FUDCon tomorrow, by all means do. Ping me on IRC to see where I’m at. :)
Tags: fedora, fudcon, fudconf13, mediawiki, mw, python | 1 Comment »
November 21st, 2009
Huge interface rework. A lot nicer looking. Go test it—F11 and F12 are in Bodhi.
Tags: fedora, gwibber | 6 Comments »
November 9th, 2009
It’s a meme!
Me, exhibiting the new BlurryArm feature in Fedora at SouthEast Linux Fest. Photo by Jeremy Sands, stolen from Facebook with assumed permission :)
Name: Ian Weller
Quest: To seek the freest software
Favorite color: Blue. (This seems fairly obvious.)
IRC nick: ianweller (Also fairly obvious.)
Channels: Practically #fedora-* on FreeNode
Location: Salina, Kansas, USA
I’ll be at FUDCon Toronto 2009!
Tags: fedora | Comments Off
November 2nd, 2009
Down at FAD Fedora Talk 2009, I spent most of my time working on a mockup for how we could create a new interface to control Fedora Talk in Fedora Community. Here’s a screenshot of what I ended up committing to a new talk branch:
The hope for this interface is to provide a drop-dead simple way of starting a conference and selecting whether to stream and record it or not.
Tags: asterisk, fedora, fedora community, ftalk, moksha | 2 Comments »
September 10th, 2009
During my summer internship with Red Hat’s Community Architecture team, my main assignment was to build an automated platform (which eventually was built into Fedora Community) for generating and displaying statistics within our community.
Needless to say, it didn’t get done. :) But it did get a healthy start, and even though the last couple of months I haven’t been extremely active in Fedora, it’s still alive and well.
This week, I started working on a research paper for my independent study at my high school. This independent study just happens to be continuing work on the project that I started a couple of months ago. The paper will include mostly primary sources of what people have said on Stats 2.0’s discussion page on the wiki, but I would love to talk with people on IRC about what they think is important to track so we can analyze not only the growth of the Fedora, but the growth of the community.
It doesn’t end with the one-semester independent study. I am presenting on this subject at UTOSC 2009. In this presentation I will discuss many of the variables of a free software community that can be tracked, and even provide example code and where to get started on automatically tracking them.
So, there’s the state of the Stats 2.0. Would you like to speak with me on IRC sometime about what you think is important to be tracked?
Tags: community, fedora, free software, high school, red hat, statistics, utosc, utosc 2009 | 2 Comments »
July 21st, 2009
- Got a temporary badge for the Red Hat offices. I can open doors!
- Participated in discussions on the history of free software/open source/good stuff and the sort of “network(ing) operations” of free software hacking
- Ate lunch (om nom nom)
- Pestered people massively over IRC
- Ran a camera (video and still)
- Triaged email and sat on my butt, as well as floors and desks
- Ate a damn good pizza
Tags: fedora, red hat, Teaching Open Source | Comments Off
July 20th, 2009
I’m really only writing this to see if it gets up on the planet in time before we go on to the next subject ;)
Hello, POSSE! :D
Tags: fedora, Teaching Open Source | 1 Comment »
July 20th, 2009
no sleep is CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL >:(
In other news, Delta messed up my flights but they fixed it all without any hitches other than my parents getting worried, and I met Mel. All’s cool! :)
Tags: blamethebed, fedora, red hat, Teaching Open Source | Comments Off
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