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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DebConf

meta = {'category': debian, 'date': Sat 04 July 2009}

I’m looking forward to going to my first DebCamp/DebConf. I won’t be giving a talk, but I hope to work together with others on integrating Samba 3 and 4 better with the rest of the system and VCS integration.

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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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Podcast with the Samba team

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Tue 02 October 2007}

Last week was the annual Samba get-together in the US. Jeremy and Leslie from Google organized a somewhat more informal event than the SNIA CIFS interop lab that we usually attend.

Several Samba team members, including myself, took part in a podcast about our involvement in the Summer of Code afterwards.

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Bazaar 0.15

meta = {'category': bazaar, 'date': Tue 20 March 2007}

Since I’ve upgraded serendipity to version 1.1, it seems to keep losing my draft blog entries (either that, or hiding them somewhere I can’t find them). For that reason, this blog post is a bit short, as I’m too lazy to rewrite the original one I had drafted up.

Bazaar 0.15 is promising to be a really great release. Several new features are going to land: dirstate (fast working tree access), tags and initial nested tree support.

I miss travelling.

cp: Smashing Pumpkins - Ava Adore

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Bazaar Sprint

meta = {'category': bazaar, 'date': Sat 10 June 2006}

It’s been a fun week. I visited the Bazaar sprint in London with LarstIQ and had a great time meeting the core developers. Especially the pair-programming and test driven development was very interesting; the number of lines of code I wrote was smaller than usual, but I have never spent so little time debugging. Among the things I worked on were Commit Builder with Robert and some more work on bzr-svn.

The Arrow Rock festival yesterday was great. I was a little skeptical about Porcupine Tree’s live performance, but I was very pleasantly surprised. Roger Waters’ show was shorter than announced (3 hours) but very good nonetheless. Queensryche was the only disappointment - they played only a few old songs and their sound was pretty bad (at least from where I was standing).

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