Present Perfect

Yay for Sundays. GStreamer hackers told me something was wrong with CVS - commits were going in as uid(somenumber) instead of the actual account name for the last two weeks. Also, spewage from post commit hooks indicated the same problem.

With the help of Jan, I figured out what the problem was. CVS runs inside a chroot, the chroot was still on Debian sarge while someone upgraded the hot machine to Etch. The passwd.db file got copied from host to chroot and presumably the sarge libs can't read the etch version of that file. But it took a few hours to figure out that this was the problem. Anyway, should be fixed now.  The uid's in the commits already made will be fixed in the future after we migrate to Subversion - I'm actually (for work) adding a feature to moap that allows you to rename authors for past revisions.

I also deleted some 33000 files from its /tmp directory left over from cvs commit rules...

It makes me think that sitewranglers, as a group, is not very effective. I wonder who did the upgrade to etch in the first place ?

Dobey also asked me to take a look at why Tango 's website didn't work - MySQL had the user allowed only from the full hostname and not localhost. Fixed now too.

I'm guessing SVN will have the same problem - can anyone let me know which projects use svn and wants to take a look at it with me so I can fix it ?

Since my Thinkpad is still in limbo, and Jan has come over today to do some hacking, I am doing today's hacking from a Mac PowerBook G3 running Ubuntu Warthy. Apparently Warthy does not even exist anymore on Ubuntu's servers, so upgrading it was out of the question. Jan helped me set up XDMCP on my desktop in the office room, and now I'm using this paperweight machine to work remotely on my desktop. Works pretty well.

But how anyone would ever have wanted to actually buy a machine like this is beyond my comprehension. I don' t even have a Delete button ! I can' t delete mails in Evolution ! Well, I could go right-click and select Delete ... oh no wait a minute, this is a Macintosh broken-by-design machine with ONLY ONE MOUSE BUTTON. Sigh.

Yay for Sundays. GStreamer hackers told me something was wrong with CVS - commits were going in as uid(somenumber) instead of the actual account name for the last two weeks....

I got annoyed again at trying to remember my manual procedure for copying Evolution filters.xml between machines, so I wrote up my understanding of how to do it in my wiki, (which I should use more to collect random info, but I digress)

It's enough info for me to be able to remember how to easily fix the problem, while allowing me to be lazy about filing bugs, fixing bugs, or writing scripts to do it. Should do for now, let me know if you have anything to add.

Time for breakfast !

I got annoyed again at trying to remember my manual procedure for copying Evolution filters.xml between machines, so I wrote up my understanding of how to do it in my...

I type duck all the time.  It makes me feel pythonic.

I type duck all the time.  It makes me feel pythonic.

If you find it, please bring it back. It would let us fix monstrosity warnings like this one:

WARNING: failed to install schema `/schemas/apps/gnome-sound-recorder/popup-warning-v' locale `C': Unable to store a value at key '/schemas/apps/gnome-sound-recorder/popup-warning-v', as the configuration server has no writable databases. There are some common causes of this problem: 1) your configuration path file /etc/gconf/2/path doesn't contain any databases or wasn't found 2) somehow we mistakenly created two gconfd processes 3) your operating system is misconfigured so NFS file locking doesn't work in your home directory or 4) your NFS client machine crashed and didn't properly notify the server on reboot that file locks should be dropped. If you have two gconfd processes (or had two at the time the second was launched), logging out, killing all copies of gconfd, and logging back in may help. If you have stale locks, remove ~/.gconf*/*lock. Perhaps the problem is that you attempted to use GConf from two machines at once, and ORBit still has its default configuration that prevents remote CORBA connections - put "ORBIIOPIPv4=1" in /etc/orbitrc. As always, check the user.* syslog for details on problems gconfd encountered. There can only be one gconfd per home directory, and it must own a lockfile in ~/.gconfd and also lockfiles in individual storage locations such as ~/.gconf

If you find it, please bring it back. It would let us fix monstrosity warnings like this one: WARNING: failed to install schema `/schemas/apps/gnome-sound-recorder/popup-warning-v' locale `C': Unable to store a...

While doing various tasks around the house and ripping CD's I have from bands playing at next week's Pukkelpop festival I've been tackling some simple moap bugs so I can do a next release.  I've reworked a patch Tim sent in (a project starts getting fun when outside people start contributing and send in patches, making it heaps more easy for you to actually get stuff done if you just have to review and adapt patches), fixed another one of the bugs he filed, and fixed a bug for Philippe who seems to think French is a perfectly fine language to run a computer in.

In fact, for the first time I've picked a milestone date for 0.2.6 so I can coax other contributors like Marc-André Lureau into getting their patches ready for this Saturday.  He has been doing work on the git and git-svn VCS backends.

In related news, I talked to Martyn Russell (who works on maintainer.py) while at GUADEC to see if we could possibly merge our efforts.  I was specifically avoiding copying any functionality maintainer.py provides until I had some time to discuss this idea with Martyn himself.  I don't want to jump the gun but  we agreed on merging the projects and should now figure out the practical details.

On my side, it probably involves changing the logo and moving SVN and Trac to Freedesktop, a more neutral ground.  This means I have to double-check with people like Daniel who have an aversity to SVN, but hey, I should be able to be FDO's Subversion bitch right ?

After that, it's a matter of bringing all of maintainer.py's functionality under, for example, a "gnome" subcommand.

I've also had some interest expressed from people hacking on Gentoo, Debian, KDE, and Nokia to integrate some stuff into moap, but we'll see how that pans out when we get there.  It should in fact be easy to extend moap by dropping in additional command classes, so I guess I should make that possible in the future.

In related news, my Practical Project Maintenance talk at GUADEC went fine for a first version, and seemed to be well received.  I'll write more about that in my GUADEC wrapup, but for the people who asked me for the slides - I am going through Flickr withdrawal, I have all the links from where I got the photos and should now figure out if I can actually use them in the presentation or ask for permission if not.  I'll get going on that this week.

While doing various tasks around the house and ripping CD's I have from bands playing at next week's Pukkelpop festival I've been tackling some simple moap bugs so I can...