Hartwork Blog

I’ve been playing with matplotlib and Gentoo bug numbers from the last ~6 month to be able to see how we are performing at fixing bugs lately. This is the current output:

I am presenting this graph today to suggest that:

• Bugzilla stats have interesting things to tell
• Fixing bugs could use more attention, manpower and a better process in Gentoo
• The planned re-write of bugday.gentoo.org could play a keys role with improving the process
• A Gentoo Google Summer of Code project could work on software to continuously extract detailed bug statistics for us
• You can do neat plots using Python and matplotlib

[EDIT] The source code to produce above graph is now available.

Just a very quick call:

Today, Saturdays 6th is a Gentoo bugday.

Users and developers get together at #gentoo-bugs on Freenode IRC to cooperate on fixing bugs: ideally all at once but a few thousands per participant makes a good start, too. It makes a difference, it’s fun, it’s a great way of contributing to Gentoo.

See you there!

(Actually I need a few hours of sleep first…)

We’re introducing a new category dev-vcs keeping version control focused utilities today and will be moving packages (like Subversion, Git and the like) over step by step. Moving packages involves quite a few steps and has high potential to break things so please give us some time to complete this.

If you happen to run into trouble due to the ongoing move please file a bug and make #56967 depend on that one. Thank you!

This years Chemnitzer Linux-Tage on March 13th and 14th is another great chance to

• get in touch with Gentoo developers
• buy Gentoo shirts (be quick, first come first serve)
• chat, discuss, start with ebuilds and overlays, you name it.

Be there or be there. Here’s what the shirts look like:

So what do I do when I should actually be learning? Watching Google Techtalks!
Let me recommend this one to you:

His slides (PDF) are available, too.

Intro

Converting PDF to PNG is not something that ImageMagick seems to really excel in: My input was a PDF of LaTeX Beamer slides, my desired output was a sharp 1024×768 PNG file. Whatever I got out was either (ugly and) scaled (when tuning calls to convert of ImageMagick directly) or mis-sized (when tuning pixels-per-inch resolution in calls to GhostScript; ImageMagick printed that in verbose mode). If you managed to get either working well I’d be interested to hear how.

Solution

So after Googling around without too much insight I somehow felt like playing around with the Python bindings of Poppler. In the end I actually got a sharp 1024×768 PNG file out. This is what I did:

import poppler
import gtk
import urllib

input_filename = 'some-presentation.pdf'
output_filename = 'frontslide-shot.png'
width = 1024
height = 768

doc = poppler.document_new_from_file('file://%s' % \
    urllib.pathname2url(input_filename), password=None)
page = doc.get_page(0)
pixbuf = gtk.gdk.Pixbuf(gtk.gdk.COLORSPACE_RGB, True, 8, width, height)
page.render_to_pixbuf(src_x=0, src_y=0, src_width=width, src_height=height,
    scale=width/page.get_size()[0], rotation=0, pixbuf=pixbuf)
pixbuf.save(output_filename, 'png')

Now that the latest bugfixes have received a positive response it’s time to share them with a wider audience, i.e. with you: layman 1.3.1 out now. Thanks go to Dmitry Karasik and Jimmy Jazz.

Summary

layman-1.3.1 is a bugfix release: Adding/deleting/syncing overlays did not work in all cases.

Details

• Fix handling of CVS overlays (bug #301689)
• Fix handling of non-existing overlays (bug #301612)
• Now delete empty overlay directories (bug #301612) ..
  • on deletion of a non-existing overlay and
  • after failed addition of an overlay.

How to upgrade

1. Unmask =app-portage/layman-1.3.1 if you’re on stable
2. sudo emerge -av =app-portage/layman-1.3.1
3. sudo etc-update
   

Time to collect bugfixes to 1.3.0_rc1 for a new release…

Summary

layman-1.3.0 fixes expected rough edges from 1.3.0_rc1. Thanks to everyone reporting bugs, i.e. thanks to Piotr Mitas, Albert W. Hopkins and tman/cornicx.

Details

• Move storage default from /usr/local/portage/layman to /var/lib/layman (fixes bug #253725)
• Syncing failed for overlays that no longer exist in the remote lists without need to (bug #301174)
• No longer treat sync warnings like errors (bug #301327)
• Fix faults introduced at refactoring (bug #301253)

How to upgrade

1. Unmask =app-portage/layman-1.3.0 if you’re on stable
2. sudo emerge -av =app-portage/layman-1.3.0
3. sudo etc-update
   

Gentoo is dy-what?

New features this time: here is Layman 1.3.0_rc1. Let me try to summarize:

Summary

layman-1.3.0_rc1 introduces support for several sources per overlay. Also, layman -i overlay now makes full use of metadata that arrived with the migration from layman-global.txt to the repositories.xml format.

Details

• Add support for several sources per overlay (also fixes #280472)
  When adding an overlay all sources will be probed until a working one is found. This should help Layman through some firewalls.
• Display related directory when deleting overlays
• Improve overlay info display (i.e. layman -i):
  • Add quality indicator (keep in mind: no guarantee)
  • Add feed URIs
  • Fix whitespace handling for description field
  • Improve layman usage display

How to upgrade

1. Unmask =app-portage/layman-1.3.0_rc1 if you’re on stable
2. sudo emerge -av =app-portage/layman-1.3.0_rc1
3. sudo etc-update

What else?

• Please report bugs!
• Using layman and proxies, programming Python?
  Feel like doing James a favor with bug #300651?

Gentoo is dying? Says who?!

In spirit of release-early-and-without-reason: here is Layman 1.2.6. Let me try to summarize:

Summary

layman-1.2.6 introduces support for tar overlays that are compressed with an algorithm other than gzip or bzip2. That, plus minor fixes.

Details

• Warn on lack of write permissions (fixes #260218)
• Migrate to GNU tar’s compression format auto-detection which adds potential support for more types of compressed tar archives (LZMA, xz or Z) as a side-effect
  (Requires GNU tar 1.15 or later, released in 2005)
• Drop support for broken tar overlays with missing category level (and missing profiles/repo_name as a consequence)
• Make missing overlay directory not fail removal of that overlay from the local list
• Start shipping doc sources and release notes with release archives
• Start shipping test suite files missing from the 1.2.5 release

How to upgrade

1. Unmask =app-portage/layman-1.2.6 if you’re on stable
2. sudo emerge -av =app-portage/layman-1.2.6
3. sudo etc-update

What else?

• Please report bugs!
• Using layman and proxies, programming Python?
  Feel like doing James a favor with bug #300651?

Gentoo is dying? Says who?!