Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Debian

As usual with our phpMyAdmin team meetings, quite a lot things get decided there and it was no difference this year, when we've met at DebConf 13.

We've discussed quite a lot of topics and some had quite interesting outcome.

One of already changes is that we're going to consolidate our support efforts on Stack Overflow. We've provided various support channels so far (IRC, mailing list, web forums and support tracker), which have overlapped quite a lot and we simply lack manpower to do all of that properly.

So users on IRC mostly get bored and left before somebody got to them. The mailing list received just few mails in a month, so they were almost not used. The web forums worked quite well for answering questions, but nobody was able to find answers there (the forums on SourceForge are quite hard to get properly indexed by Google), so the questions got repeated quite a lot. In the end we've decide to use Stack Overflow as it was anyway already used by lot of our users and concentrating our effort on single channel will even improve this.

Yesterday, we've spent nice day on a day trip of DebConf. I took the long hike, which ended up at Creux du Van, what is wonderful rocky place.

The way up was through nice nature and we've met quite a lot of cows on the way:

They we've finally arrived to Creux du Van:

Of course we could not miss an opportunity to take a group photo:

After wandering around the rocks, we took a lunch and headed to Neuchâtel, where some music festival was going on:

The whole day was nicely finished on a boat with a dinner.

PS: More DebConf photos are available in my gallery.

Yesterday evening I've arrived at DebConf 13. I was quite tired after traveling so I just had few beers and went to bed.

The travel went quite well besides somebody else broke wine and my suitcase was all wet from it. Fortunately almost nothing got inside so I have some clean clothes for next week :-).

As I went to bed quite early, I woke up early as well so I went to short walk to see what is nearby:

Photo uploader has just got first release under new maintainer. It mostly fixes various bugs, but the project is going on.

Full list of changes:

• Compatibility with Python 3.
• Fix build with Python 2.7.
• Added documentation in Sphinx format.
• Updated imageshack support.

Thanks to Andrew Shadura for taking over this tool.

PS: The package should be soon available in Debian as well.

FOSDEM 2013 is over and it's time to look what interesting I have seen there on Sunday.

Sunday was supposed to start for me with L20N, but it was postponed to 13:00 as the presenters weren't on time. I could have used one more hour of sleep, but at least I spent some time on coding.

Detect merge conflicts in realtime was quite interesting talk, though I was pretty surprised that the conflict detecting does not at all care about underlying version control system, but does purely file based guesses.

The Hardening MySQL talk pretty much described why security in MySQL sucks and what you should do to make it secure. Quite good introduction to the topic, but not much new information for me.

Introduction of Firefox OS, was quite nice demo showing they have something working, though it had some problems with flaky network on FOSDEM. Looking forward to see phone being sold, though it will probably not be something I'd buy.

To add some fun, I've stayed on systemd, Two Years Later presentation, which gave some summary of what is currently in systemd and where it wants to go. Still it did not move systemd from category of "I don't care as long as it works".

Now followed delayed L20N talk - it showed new Mozilla's effort for localization. Which is quite powerful and has nice features, on the other side it put's quite more load to translators - now they would have to understand some basics of programming as well to be able to use the new features (or not so new ones as plurals). Their motivation is to remove localization effort from developers, but I'm not really convinced it will work nicely.

After some meetings and lunch, I went to LibreOffice: cleaning and re-factoring a giant code-base, which showed some challenges LibreOffice has to take and how they dealt with that. I think it's pretty great job done and I'm looking forward to new releases.

Being GNOME user, I could not skip Has the GNOME community gone crazy?. It of course tried to tell that they did not :-).

Last, but not least my friend Dieter from phpMyAdmin had talk Present and future of phpMyAdmin. He listed some of the new features, demoed 3.5 and 4.0 version (of course the demo of 4.0 version broke due to some caching). Even when the talk had quite unpleasant timing, it has attracted some people and they even asked few questions.

This years FOSDEM was again great and looking forward to be there next year.

FOSDEM 2013 is over and it's time to look what interesting I have seen there on Saturday.

First of all the most important for me is to meet people. As usual, I came with SUSE folks, but it's not that unusual to meet people from company where you work :-). I've met some current and former phpMyAdmin developers and surprisingly I've met few Weblate users or people who consider using it on their project. This gave me some important feedback and one of first thing you will see in near future is remade Weblate website to give more information about some of it's unique features. As for the talks, I think I've managed to visit quite lot of them.

How we made the Jenkins community explained some ways Jenkins has used to build good community - mostly focused on extensibility of the code and having everything as an extension, but with some focus on social things as well (and important thing that with Git people are not that motivated to join the team).

Better software through user research was about various way to gather information of what your users hate on the software. It was pretty interesting, though many of that can not easily be used on small scale free software product.

OSS code goes in and never comes out talk focused about licensing issues of various software as a service platforms. As I've never used Amazon cloud or such, it was quite surprising how these behave in relation to GPL and actually made me thing more about AGPL and attend related panel discussion later.

An Integrated Localization Environment is Mozilla approach to online translation, quite different than anything we have before, but mostly for reasons which were explained later on Sunday talk on l20n. Maybe reverse ordering of these would make it easier to understand the motivation.

Scale your Jenkins build pipeline automatically to minimize test time was not that useful as I thought - increasing test speed by buying EC2 instances and pushing part of the work to them is not something what will help me in near future.

Trends in Open Source Security explained what is going on in distributions security, mostly focused on Redhat (but touching Debian as well). It has some interesting thoughts about sharing the information between vendors, so let's see if it will really work in future.

QML’s many faces showed some other ways to use QML besides using QtQuick. Some uses were quite interesting, though I'm not really fan of creating yet another buildsystem based on it.

Panel Discussion: GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 was last thing I've visited on Sunday and it was really interesting to listen all that opinions on AGPL. Still I was not confirmed to consider switching to this license.

Finally, phpMyAdmin packages for Debian and Ubuntu do not lag much behind upstream. Today, I've prepared packages for yesterday released bug fix release 3.5.6.

For Debian users, the package should be soon available in experimental (sorry no uploads to unstable during freeze).

Ubuntu users, can use my phpMyAdmin PPA. After dozens of comments and no help offered, I've still decided to be nice to Ubuntu users and adjusted the package so that it should work on Lucid as well. The downside is that, unlike in Debian, the package includes bundled copy of many PHP and javascript libraries.

PS: As soon as Debian is not frozen or 4.0 is officially released, I will start uploading 4.0 to experimental. My current bet is that 4.0 release will come earlier.

Finally, I've found some time to update phpMyAdmin packages in Debian to 3.5 series. For long it was not possible due to licensing reasons, but recently this issue was resolved upstream by using jqPlot instead of Highcharts.

While packaging new version, I've also replaced all embedded libraries to use corresponding packages from Debian. I've done some testing and everything seems to work fine, but still this frightens me as some versions are slightly different than upstream.

Anyway new version is available in experimental for now. Ubuntu users can get it from phpMyAdmin PPA.

I've just confirmed my flight and hotel bookings for FOSDEM 2013, so I'm looking to meet all great people there again.

This year my schedule is not that packed as I have no talks (Weblate lightning talk was not accepted) and also there will be no big phpMyAdmin team meeting, so get in touch if you want to discuss anything with me.

As most of the rooms still don't have a schedule, I can't give you hint where I will be present, but I definitely won't miss Friday beer event and Dieter's talk about phpMyAdmin in MySQL room. The rest pretty much depends on who I will meet :-).

Year 2013 has just started and it's time to think how to spend my free time during this year.

Weblate

Weblate was my toy project number one in last year and I expect it to stay for next year as well. I have several ideas for new features, but all that depends on free time. I will most likely spend my hackweek on that as well.

phpMyAdmin

I think my involvement will stay at about same level at phpMyAdmin - doing few random bugfixes, mostly security ones, taking care of infrastructure for translations and wiki and mentoring few GSoC students.

Gammu and Wammu

Gammu and Wammu has not seen much activity from me in past year and it will probably not change. I don't use the program anymore and this pretty much limits my interest in adding new features. In case somebody active will pop up on mailing list, I'd be happy to transfer the project ownership.

Mobile apps

I'd like to make some progress here, I was also thinking about making some of them working on Android as well, but this involves lot of learning and time is always an issue here. Anyway this might be good challenge for hackweek as well.

Debian

No changes expected here :-).

Others

I consider pretty much anything else from my software projects abandoned or finished.