Present Perfect

I put out a new moap release. Here's a short list of changes:

• moap doap freshmeat -b allows forcing a branch name (e.g. 'Default')
• distro checking code to give hints on how to install dependencies
• RSS2 feed generation from .doap release entries using Genshi or Cheetah templates
• ability to operate on multiple .doap files
• make moap changelog prepare also check the CHANGE_LOG_EMAIL_ADDRESS variable
• implement searching for your project's home page using Yahoo or Google
• parse wiki attribute of a DOAP Project

Jan wants to do some GStreamer releases, so I think I'll be working to add some features for that to moap this week.

As you may have noticed, moap now has a logo, and I like it a lot. I asked Christophe, Fluendo's visual wizard, to create me a logo based on the hammer and sickle, in orange, Tango-style, and with Russian-looking letters. He gave me three choices, I picked one, he gave me another three refining my choice, I picked one, and then he gave me another three, and I picked one. I can't believe how easy this process was compared to me trying to come up with something on my own. I should make T-shirts with this logo.

Happy hacking !

I put out a new moap release. Here's a short list of changes: moap doap freshmeat -b allows forcing a branch name (e.g. 'Default') distro checking code to give hints...

A new moap release is out ! This release adds support for Darcs to the moap changelog prepare/commit/diff and moap ignore commands, and generation of iCal data based on the releases in DOAP files.

I've been wanting to add iCal and RSS feed generation based on this for a long time, so I can automatically update feeds when I do a release of any piece of software. RSS feeds are an excellent way to keep updated about project releases. And I like seeing the GNOME iCal spread all over my Evolution calendar.

Now, with Dates getting better on my N800 with every release Opened Hand is rocking out on, I wanted to get the GStreamer releases on there too. It was pretty hard to figure out why Evolution was refusing my ics files when subscribed to on the web. Importing them worked fine. In the end, it turned out I was missing a UID field for each VENTRY. And evolution-data-server-1.8 was telling me so ... on its stdout.

(Sure, it is nice for Evo to be all component-based and stuff, but if the end result is that your code is writing to stdout without anything being connected to stdout - because you are some background server process - then you need a better way to get warnings to the main application. Now the components in eds just litter silly output to stdout, showing that nobody ever sees that stuff because nobody bothers keeping it clean. Like I really need to know what memory pointer the currently selected calendar uses ? Enough ranting though.)

Anyway, now I have lovely Dates showing lovely GStreamer releases. Maybe now I should actually make some !

HELP

I am looking for people interested in making me a nice image or icon. Hey, it works for the Opened Hand guys, why can't I use the intarweb to shake down for icons ?

I am also looking for people to package moap for their favourite distro. Come on Gentoo hackers - be agile ! Come on Ubuntu people - care about maintenance !

Shed bike

This is your opportunity to bikeshed ! I have a quick-and-dirty implementation of an RSS feed feature ready to get commited using templating with Cheetah. Users will want to customize their RSS feeds so allowing them to template the feed makes a lot of sense. I am also planning to get the release mail be templated, and do atom support ,and possibly more stuff.

Cheetah was easy to get started with, in about an hour I had the meat of the feature programmed. I am also going to look at Nevow, just because I am ridiculously reverent of anything Twisted - even though it seems Nevow is more suited for XML-like output.

Here's your chance to bike shed ! Which (Python) template system should I use and why ? Bear in mind that I want to be able to generate at least plain text, HTML, RSS, and Atom. Answers on a post card or in the comments !

A new moap release is out ! This release adds support for Darcs to the moap changelog prepare/commit/diff and moap ignore commands, and generation of iCal data based on the...

One more item off my weekend TODO-list !

mach allows you to set up clean roots from scratch for any distribution or
distribution variation supported.

This clean build root can be used to run jailed services, create disk images,
or build clean packages.

Changes:
- Add FC6, CentOS 4 and JPackage 1.7 configs (Ville)
- Run rpmlint by default (Thomas)
- Cleanup of dist files (Ville)
- Enable buildroot and rpath checks in FE roots (Ville)
- Add /dev/(u)random to the root (Thomas)
- Sync FC build package sets with Fedora guidelines (Ville)
- Create RPM transaction lock directories during prep (Nigel)
- Add Fedora PPC configs (Matthias)
- Add debian build files (Jan)

More info: mach project page

One more item off my weekend TODO-list ! mach allows you to set up clean roots from scratch for any distribution or distribution variation supported. This clean build root can...

Threw out a new mach release today. I did some nice fixes over the last two months related to reverting to a clean build state, because I was getting annoyed at various random failure cases. Most of them were happening when packages that are in the build list get an upgrade available, and then of course it tries to remove those. If the update is, say, glibc, oops :)

Lately I've been wondering about project maintenance and version numbering. I'm not getting any younger, and basically in the last ten years I don't think I've ever released any software that made it past 0.x Which, when you think of it, is a little silly, because I've written software that works fine, fulfills my needs, and works for others as well. I mean, really, when you are happy with it and you feel ok with recommending it to other people, 1.x should be fine.

So, given that mach mostly just works, that I'm already writing a next generation of it that's easier to maintain, and that I don't plan any major feature additions anyway to this one, I should be moving it to a 1.0 release. So this release jumped from 0.4.9 to 0.9.0.

I vaguely toyed with the idea of releasing it as 2.0 even (because this is the second generation of mach - the first one was makefile-based), but then I would feel forced to number releases of mach3 with 3.x, and it would feel wrong to have a "new-and-unstable" mach3-2.9 or whatever against a mature stable mach2-2.0.

I don't know why I obsess over these little details. Anyway, I am going to break my self-imposed ban on 1.x versions soon.

I Celebrated the release by packaging the latest Twisted releases, which are now split across several modules, as well as a huge chunk of the divmod stack. It's very satisfying to be able to do

mach build python-*/*.spec

, watch it build 15 src.rpm's, order them correctly, and build one after the other without a hitch...

More on twisted and DivMod later.

Threw out a new mach release today. I did some nice fixes over the last two months related to reverting to a clean build state, because I was getting annoyed...

A movie paints a thousand stills, so first of all ...

If you didn't see a hairy movie, there are two possibilities. Either your aggregator strips embed tags, in which case go here to see it. Otherwise, you are probably missing a Java plug-in for your browser.

Cortado is an implementation of the GStreamer 0.10 design, but completely in Java. It has plug-ins for Ogg, Vorbis, Theora, Mulaw, JPEG, Multipart, HTTP and Audio and Video sinks. It can be used to play live streams and on-demand streams. On-demand streams can be seeked in (as you should be able to test in the applet above).

Cortado is completely free and an open project. We welcome other people trying it out and hacking on it. Several sites are already using it in production today. In short, if you want to producer or serve video, all the tools are available to do so in free formats.

For more information about this release, check out the release notes or go to the Cortado home page.

I've got soulbut I'm not a soldier A movie paints a thousand stills, so first of all ... If you didn't see a hairy movie, there are two possibilities. Either...