Hartwork Blog (Posts about Planet KDE)

Making Audex use MusicBrainz (rather than FreeDB)

Sebastian Pipping — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 11:48:03 GMT

From my experience, MusicBrainz's data is more complete and of higher quality than that from FreeDB. Sadly, the official list of MusicBrainz enabled CD rippers lists a single CD ripper for Linux, only: Sound Juicer. In the "spirit of GNOME" Sound Juicer aims to stay as minimal as possible, which exclude features like custom folder naming schemes (the one of my choice is not included). So I moved to using Audex with FreeDB a long time ago. Sadly, some of the CDs I bought lately could not be resolved using FreeDB. Happily I just found the MusicBrainz FreeDB gateway. With that, Audex just keeps talking the FreeDB protocol but provides the quality and completeness of using MusicBrainz. All I had to do is enter freedb.musicbrainz.org at MENU > Settings > Configure Audex... > CDDB Settings > Lookup > Freedb Server > Freedb Server .

Before svn2git you want to run: svneverever

Sebastian Pipping — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 00:13:45 GMT

First: There are several tools called svn2git: this is about the svn2git of KDE up on Gitorious. So you're about to convert a larger SVN repository to Git, say 15,000 revisions. You check out the latest revision, run some find command or fire up a file browser to get a better view of file hierarchy in there. Then it strikes you:

What if the layout didn't look like that all the time?
Are there any sub projects hidden in there that you want to ignore or extract to a separate repository?

You may end up using "svn ls" or something peeping in here and there not being really sure until you've seen it all. What a nightmare. When converting the repository of Gentoo's Portage I wrote a simple tool in Python to do that work for me in automated fashion: I called it svneverever. It runs through all history collecting additions of directories. In the end it presents a tree of all directories ever having existed in the repository. Let's do a quick example. First we create tiny but suitable sample repository:

# Create and checkout dummy SVN repo
svnadmin create example-store
svn co file://$PWD/example-store example-workdir
cd example-workdir

# Make revision #1 for /trunk
mkdir trunk
touch trunk/readme.txt
svn add trunk
svn ci -m 'Add /trunk'

# Make revision #2 for /project7/trunk
mkdir project7
svn add project7/
svn mv trunk project7/
svn ci -m 'Move /trunk to /project7/trunk'

Let's feed that to svneverever:

svneverever file://$PWD/../example-store

Its output will be:

Analyzing 2 revisions.... 50% (r1)... 100% (r2).

/project7
    /trunk
/trunk

(The output for Portage was more complex, have a look at all-portage-repo- dirs-ever.txt if you're curious.) With that information at hand it's easy to write a svn2git rules file for it:

create repository project7
end repository

match /project7/trunk/
  repository project7
  branch master
end match

match /trunk/
  repository project7
  branch master
end match

or this one after unification of the matchers into one:

create repository project7
end repository

match (?:/project7)?/trunk/
  repository project7
  branch master
end match

(For Portage we ended up with these rules (v3).) On one hand svneverever is a working tool already, on the other some of you will want more from it. As of now I just won't be able to handle potential feature request but I hope to have time to review and accept sets of clean patches. So if you have patches for me: please contact me. Last but not least a big THANK YOU to the authors of svn2git. It's powerful and fast: 110 minutes faster than git-svn on the history of Portage over here. Thank you (in order of current commit count, descending):

Thiago Macieira
Thomas Zander
Torgny Nyblom
Anders Kaseorg

One last time: here's the link to svneverever.

Created with Free Software! A button to spread the word

Sebastian Pipping — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:08:12 GMT

Last month I did a presentation on the concept of redundancy in a human factor related seminar at university. As most participants were non-IT people and using Windows I felt like promoting Free Software without making it "too loud". So I came up with the idea of putting a rubber stamp "Created with Free Software" onto the front slide. I found an Inkscape tutorial on rubber stamps to get me started. This is the result: On the the front slide: To get the stamp appear at that very place can be a little tricky. Feel free to inspect the slide sources, particularly redundanz.tex. By now there is optimized PNGs

in 4 colors (original/red, gray, white and black)
in 4 sizes (88x28/59, 120x38/81, 180x57/121 and 300x95/201)
rotated or not (0° and 25° counter-clockwise)

and SVGs respectively. In case you need PDFs: Inkscape converts well on the commandline:

# inkscape --export-pdf=out.pdf in.svg

To see them all please visit the "Created with Free Software" page of the FSFE. Please make use of this stamp whereever you see fits. If you have photos or screenshots of the button in action please comment here. Please join promoting Free Software!

[EDIT] : The button sources (SVG) are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license (unlike this blog post itself, see box below). The PNG versions are licensed even more liberally under the Creative Commons Zero 1.0 Universal license. The idea is to keep derivatives "in the pool" while allowing to use the PNGs without even attribution.

Inviting you to project "PackageMap"

Sebastian Pipping — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 06:42:50 GMT

Quick (re-)introduction: My task for Gentoo/Google Summer of Code 2009 is to give Gentoo a Debian popcon equivalent, a tool to collect statistics on "what package is installed how often". To achieve this goal I'm extending Smolt (a tool currently doing similar things with hardware information) by fine-tunable software stats gathering. The plan we have for Smolt is to make it cross-distro, not just fit Gentoo or Fedora. One point where the consequences and benefits of such an approach can be seen clearly is with counting packages from different distros into the same buckets.

What do I mean by that? Debian's Git counts for Gentoo's Git counts for Fedora's, you know the list. With packages counted from accross distros we can suddenly answer questions that we currently cannot answer, among them

What globally popular packages are missing in distro X? Let's say we don't have a package for product P. Do other distros have one? They do, maybe we need one, too? They don't, maybe P is not that important then?
How many Linux users are approximately using program X in total? Not just on Ubuntu or Arch - all across Linux, BSD, Solaris!
Does distro X have 10 times the packages of Y or is it just different splitting?

To count into the same bucket we use global identifiers for the "products" that fall out of a package. Gentoo package "dev-util/git" can produce product "cpe://a:git:git", Debian's "git-core" can, too. That string before is a CPE name, a concept close to package naming in Java. This "intermediate language" allows us to relate package names from distro X with those of distro Y and answer various questions from that data. To do such mapping we need code (or a "service") that does the mapping for us and base of collected data that the service can operate on. Both of these is project "PackageMap". I have started populating the database with packages (currently 312 in number) made from information extracted from the Gentoo tree and the National Vulnerability Database. Latter holds many CPEs. Let me state clearly that packagemap is not about Gentoo in particular. Sure, the initial data has lots of Gentoo in it but the whole point of the project is to get information and people from different distros together. To see what these 312 packages maps look like at the moment you best do a few clicks through the database folder yourself: https://git.goodpoint.de/?p=packagemap.git;a=tree;f=database Also, there are Relax NG schema and DTD for validation, more documentation than I usually write and a few scripts: https://git.goodpoint.de/?p=packagemap.git;a=tree

By now I hope you have gained interest in what this can become. Your active participation is highly appreciated. A few minutes from everyone can make a huge difference here. If you want write access to the repo - mail me: sebastian@pipping.org. Please have a look at the Git repository and ask questions. Thanks for reading up to this point. PS: I'm aware "hartwork.org" might not make a good longterm location for DTDs, XML namespaces and such for a cross-distro project. Any ideas where to put them best?

libbs2b 2.2.1 released

Sebastian Pipping — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 11:17:36 GMT

bs2b is short for "Bauer stereophonic-to- binaural DSP", an audio effect increasing headphone listening pleasure. Check the well-explained algorithm details for more. I helped with making a shared library from bs2b using the Autotools family: Autoconf, Automake, Libtool, autogen.sh. The just-released libbs2b-2.2.1 is featuring that. bs2b plugins for many popular audio players are already available (e.g. XMMS and Winamp) or in the making and to be released soon (i.e. QMMP). Still, some DSP- supporting players lack a bs2b plugin (e.g. Audacious) and that's a great place for you to step in. Please contact me about details if you're interested.

libxspf 1.1.0 released (successor of libSpiff)

Sebastian Pipping — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 00:35:02 GMT

With this release libSpiff mutates into libxspf, same thing new name. Under the hood the build system has improved and generation of Qt Assistant-friendly documentation has been added. The source code moved from a Subversion to a Git repository. Please meet me at the XSPF mailing list to team up on any transition-related issues. Thank you!

Hire me, I do Free Software

Sebastian Pipping — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 16:21:12 GMT

I'm looking for a job with following three required qualities:

Producing Free Open Source Software
Part time, about two days a week
From home or in Berlin, Germany

I'm quite open about the rest though I sure won't do Visual Basic ;-) Being sponsored on continuing development of uriparser would rock, for instance. Check out my CV here:

~~CV Sebastian Pipping~~ (taken off-line)

Mail me, call me, invite me:

sebastian@pipping.org
(+49177) 460 46 17

Looking forward to hearing from you. Sebastian PS: Thanks to Jason Blevins for his CV template.

Commit log IRC bot... for a KDE project

Sebastian Pipping — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:28:58 GMT

For Kate we have a cia.vc IRC bot posting stuff like this when new Kate related content is commited:

[00:18:29] <cia-20> ehamberg * r874179 [..]/katevikeysequenceparser.cpp
[00:18:29] <cia-20> fix crash when a qkeyevent's text() is empty
[00:18:29] <cia-20> https://websvn.kde.org/?view=rev&revision=874179

As cia.vc seems to attribute all KDE commits to project "KDE" and not its actual children (i.e. "Kate" in our case) and because getting the above n-liner with Websvn link is not completely trivial so I thought I blog about it and show our current "Advanced Filtering" code here:

<and>
 <or>
  <match path="project">Kate</match>
  <match path="project">KDE</match>
 </or>
 <or>
  <find path="files">KDE/kdesdk/kate</find>
  <find path="files">KDE/kdelibs/kate</find>
  <find path="files">KDE/kdesdk/doc/kate</find>
  <find path="files">KDE/kdelibs/interfaces/ktexteditor</find>
 </or>
</and>
>  
<formatter medium="irc">
 <format appliesTo="CommitToIRC">
  <autoHide>
   <color fg='green'><author/></color>
  </autoHide>
  <autoHide>
   <color fg='orange'><branch/></color>
  </autoHide>
  *
  <autoHide>
   r<b><revision/></b>
  </autoHide>
  <files/>
  <br/><log/>
  <autoHide>
   <br/>https://websvn.kde.org/?view=rev&amp;revision=<revision/>
  </autoHide>
 </format>
</formatter>

I'm very happy to see that cia.cv

provides such a service
has online validation of the filter code so you won't save a broken filter
has invented such a nice XML format

Well done guys, I'm impressed.

Kate searching: New bar just arrived

Sebastian Pipping — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:23:13 GMT

v3, now status quo

The "Add..." buttons

.. are not gone - they went into the line edit's context menu.

The search mode

.. can now be switched using the shortcuts from Alt+1 to Alt+4. No more Tab- Tab-Tab and no more need to click.

Selection only

.. is inside Options, though several people wanted direct access. I'd say try to work with it for some time and if it's a real pain we will have to find another solution later. Okay? I should mention that one tiny bit of this is still missing: The plan is to re-initialize Selection only when the user changes selection in the document. I expect this to come in the next few days, stay tuned. [EDIT 2008-10-13]: Just arrived with revision 970640.

Use placeholders

.. has been removed as an option. It internally enabled when replacing text in Regular Expression or Escape Sequences mode. I hope this is working for you, not against you.

Kate searching: on to better usability 2

Sebastian Pipping — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 00:32:12 GMT

v3, a new candidate

I have been talking to people, read written feedback and put both in the new mockup. Like last time, below I will try to explain what drove which changes. If I get green from the main KatePart devs I'll go for implementing this.

Selection only

.. is still not there, though requested. Let me explain. In KDE3's KatePart the checkbox called "Selected text" is initialized when the dialog opens as following:

If multi-line text is selected it's checked
If single-line text is selected it's not checked
If no text is selected it's not checked

So actually toggling the checkbox means that you want to do one of these two things:

Searching the whole document for something spanning several lines
Searching for text within a single-line selection

I assume both to be "rare" cases. For now I'd like to put Selection only into the Options combo and see how it works in action.

The mode combo box

.. aligns with the line edits now so they share the same vertical scan line when the dialog is shown at minimal width. As we have one button less in v3 than v2, we have more space to do stuff like that. Still, v3 is less wide than v2.

Highlight all

.. will probably not change too often. It's current state can often be told from looking at the document. Therefore it's moved into the Options combo box.

The "Find:" label

.. is right aligned now as requested.