Build from branch

meta = {'category': misc, 'date': Mon 01 February 2010}

At the moment I am returning home after three very productive and awesome weeks in Wellington, Sydney and Strasbourg.

I spent the first week in the West Plaza in Wellington, working together with fellow Launchpad developers on getting the basics of building from branches working. We eventually managed to get something working at the end of Friday afternoon. We split the work up at the beginning of the week and then worked on it in pairs for a couple of days before integrating all work on Friday. At the end of the week William managed to get a basic source package build from recipe through the queue.

Pair-programming with Jono and Michael was very educational, I suspect I’ll be a fair bit quicker when I get back to hacking on Launchpad by myself. It’s scary to see how some people can make the changes that would take me a full day in a mere hour.

Tim picked up my initial work on support for Mercurial imports and completed and landed it during the sprint. Since the rollout on Wednesday it is possible to request Mercurial imports on Launchpad. Most imports (e.g. mutt, dovecot, hg) seem to work fine, with the main exception being the really large Mercurial repositories such as OpenOffice.org and OpenJDK. This is because of (known) scaling issues that will be fixed in one of the next releases of bzr-hg.

This was the first time I was back in Wellington since 2006, and the weather this year was exactly as I remembered it; showers and wind, with the occasional day of sunshine. For a capital the city centre is quite small, but it has its charm and the view from the various hills around the bay is amazing.

On the weekend I met up with Andrew and Kirsty and we did some hiking around Wellington (where the weather allowed it).

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SambaXP 2009

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Mon 20 April 2009}

Last week most of the Samba team met again for our annual conference in Göttingen. It was nice seeing everybody again, specially the folks I hadn’t seen since the last one.

Together with Andrew and his wife Kirsty I took the train from Amsterdam into Germany a couple of days early and we did some sightseeing together with Anatoli and Nadezhda during the weekend. There’s still plenty of things to discover in Göttingen for me, even though I’ve already been there about two dozen times. We did a tour of the city walls, visited some of the churches and climbed the tower.

Julien’s talk about OpenChange was interesting and humorous as always. Volkers’ tutorial on asynchronous programming in C. Even though I’ve spent quite some time working with and looking at these API’s it was nice going through them step by step once again. It’s a strange thing to wrap your head around.

Andrew and I also gave our yearly “State of Samba 4” talk again. As I’ve mentioned in other places, I’m really excited about the social effects of the Franky project. Once again I was reminded that giving a talk the morning after the conference party (this year in the “Oriental Lounge”) is a bad idea.

Several of my fellow Debian Samba maintainers made it to SambaXP, it was nice to see Christian, Luk, Michael and Noël there. We made some decisions about the direction of the Samba packages, and a plan to allow the Samba 3 and Samba 4 packages to be installed on the same system. Unfortunately I had to miss Christian’s talk because it was in the same timeslot as Jeff’s talk about the CIFS kernel module.

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SambaXP and other travel

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Sat 26 April 2008}

It’s been a busy two weeks. Wilco and I drove up to Göttingen on Sunday two weeks ago to spend some days hacking and meeting up with the other developers before the start of SambaXP. It was really nice to see everybody again after more than 7 months.

SambaXP was a bit different this year. There were three tracks during the second part of the conference this year, one more than previously and of course, there were several engineers from Microsoft attending this time! Some of the interesting talks this year included Julien’s update on OpenChange, Tridge’s talk on PFIF, the talk from the likewise folks and of course the talk from Microsofts’ Wolfgang Grieskamp on SMB2. We also had some other informal discussions with the Microsoft folks about specific topics - very useful!

There are some photos up on the SambaXP homepage. And just to be ahead of the comments: yes, I know I need a haircut.

I did some initial work on several bits and pieces of code that I hope to expand over the next few months. Volker has started working on ncacn_ip_tcp support and I have been working on making the Samba 3 DCE/RPC library compatible with Samba 4. This should allow OpenChange to use Samba 3 in the future.

Guenther, Wilco and I made some initial progress on the policy library, allowing client-side manipulation of (group) policies in Samba. I worked with Simo on trying to get rid of an evil hack in Samba4’s event subsystem.

David Holder blogged about some of the IPv6 development that we did during the conference: http://www.ipv6consultancy.com/ipv6blog/?p=34

And lots of other things I can’t remember at the moment…

After the conference Andrew, Wilco and I drove back to the Netherlands and I played tour guide for a bit showing Andrew around the country during the afternoon and hacking Samba together in the morning. Later this week we took the train to Brussels, Eurostar to London and visited Sam’s company in the UK Midlands for a couple of days.

And in the midst of all this, it seems Ubuntu Hardy was released. Congratulations to all those involved!

Currently Playing: Brandi Carlile - Turpentine

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SerNet asks Microsoft for specs

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Sun 07 October 2007}

Now that the European court has decided SerNet has asked Microsoft to publish specifications on SMB/CIFS.

Martijn has posted some photos of the concert we went to a couple of days ago.

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