Present Perfect

Somehow I always end up delaying releases of mach until a few weeks after a new Fedora Core release, even though I always add the relevant files before the release. This time was no exception. One of the main reasons is because I don't have a smooth release process as I have for GStreamer, and that always annoys me enough to not properly do a release.

Anyway, using the prototype tools I cobbled together over the weekend I sent out the release announcement mail and updated the freshmeat record.

As for mach itself, features in this release include:
- added DOAP file (Thomas)
- added Fedora Core 5 (Thomas)
- fix build ordering when building multiple packages (Thomas)
- always evaluate spec file inside the root (Thomas)
- add an option for md5summing of results (Matthias)
- pass 'buildopts' from a root config to rpmbuild (Thomas)
- add 'excludearch' property to root config,
fixes yum's semi-random behaviour on x86_64 (Thomas)
- store yum cache data per-dist, shared for flavors (Thomas)
- clean up yum metadata for local repositories (Thomas)

Enjoy, and let me know if you run into anyissues.

Meanwhile, the mach3 rewrite is getting functionality added step by step as I have some days off to work on them. I added a bunch more stuff the past weekend, and I now have a working mach binary that can go through all the setup steps. That's probably going to stimulate me more than anything else to go back to hacking on it - even though developing the classes correctly and writing unit tests for them on its own is fun as well, as long as there isn't a mach binary to play with it still feels as if it's years away from completion.

Somehow I always end up delaying releases of mach until a few weeks after a new Fedora Core release, even though I always add the relevant files before the release....

As my Friday project of last friday, I wanted to take a look at Description of a Project and see if it would fit my needs as a release maintainer of GStreamer, and possibly other projects.

There are a number of problems I'd like to solve; some of them are:

1. use the DOAP file for a project to centralize the short and long descriptions used everywhere (website, feeds, tracker sites, packages, ...)
2. submit to freshmeat from the doap file
3. send out release announcements
4. keep track of releases and their dates on the various branches
5. possibly keep track of the future release schedule
6. generate an iCal file and an rss feed to get the history
7. merge multiple files to get a combined feed for all GStreamer projects

All items of this list related to keeping track of multiple releases on the same branch seem to be outside of the scope of DOAP; sadly, it seems most things I would like to be able to do with it need this. I don't understand RDF well enough yet to know if I'm doing something wrong by stuffing multiple Version nodes with the same branch inside the DOAP file (Apache seems to be doing it, not sure if that counts) and possibly I should learn to extend DOAP in some compliant way so that I'm doing things correctly.

However, that makes it grow a little out of scope for a Friday project :)

In any case, I started off by trying to install the Redland RDF library and its python bindings. I took the .src.rpm's, rebuilt them for FC4 (I was trying on one of the other machines at the office), had to tweak here and there, and then tried a python example. That crashed with a double free. I took some time to look through the code and found a double fclose() which fixed my problem when I patched it. Submitted a patch and everything, only to find out that the same patch had already been sent to the mailing list (but not logged in the bug tracker). Well anyway, at least I can fix bugs in a completely new-to-me library.

Due to some other interruptions, Friday went quickly by.

After more experimenting, I ran into another segfault with the 1.0.3 version. I decided to clean up the spec files completely today, and build the 1.0.2 version on my laptop - which runs FC5, to see if that worked better. Yes, it did - no more crashing. So now I could focus on writing some actual programs.

RDF is something completely new to me - I thought the world had ended at XML and XSLT. Now it seems I have a new format to learn that looks a lot like XML, but apparently you can't just use XSLT on it. Not sure yet if I will then be able to integrate DOAP stuff with our current GStreamer site, which is completely built with XML and XSLT.

In any case, after some hacking, I cobbled together some basic tests which manage to generate an RSS feed and an .ics file, as well as submit project releases to freshmeat.

The rss 1.0 feed works fine in straw, but not in RSSOwl; the rss 2.0 feed works fine in straw and RSSOwl; and the .ics file works fine if I import it locally in Evolution, but importing it as on the web (and changing webcal:// to http://) makes evolution hang - not sure what's going on there.

All in all, a good first stab at trying to solve some of my releasing problems.

As my Friday project of last friday, I wanted to take a look at Description of a Project and see if it would fit my needs as a release maintainer...

Pretty much every time I upgrade Fedora something has changed in the way USB is handled and/or my camera (A Canon Powershot G2) can't talk to my computer anymore. I really don't know what is going on this time. Who are these usb hackers, and is it too much to ask to keep things working for more than six months? If I were paranoid I'd think they're out to get me.

I'm sure my mood will get better once I figure out, *again*, what the magic hoops are I have to jump through to get it working for this Fedora release.

Pretty much every time I upgrade Fedora something has changed in the way USB is handled and/or my camera (A Canon Powershot G2) can't talk to my computer anymore. I...