LibreOffice conference 2012 (day 2)

I’ve started the morning with the easy hacks for non developers talks, which for my opinion lacked some code related tasks that even non developers can do like fixing translation problems in the source (in the English strings), fixing some simple logic bugs which doesn’t require reading complex code (e.g. traversing records and first/last special cases). The other options mentioned in the talk aren’t less important, but I think people shouldn’t be afraid reading/touching the code to some level even with very limited coding skills.

Later I’ve used Rene’s 3.7/master builds for Debian to verify two RTL bugs (fdo#43210, fdo#44925) fixed by the Motah guys from Saudi Arabia. After the verification, I pushed the changes to the 3.6 branch (should appear in 3.6.4).

Katya, which I’ve met in the last conference, told me see watched my talked remotely, and took interest in RTL ui forcing right alignment to non aligned text. While reproducing the bug on her computer we were able to narrow the problem a bit, to be related to the locale and not only to the RTL interface. Till the end of the day she’d identified the problem in the odp file and I hope a fix will be available by tomorrow.

Jan (kendy) had a good progress with fdo#44657 (RTL problem #1). Checking the fix is quite confusing, and we had to use two laptops to understand and compare the right and desired behavior. Hopefully this problem will end soon, which will make coming to the conference worthwhile (as for the RTL status and efforts).

Later I started working on moving the RTL status page from a wiki in Hebrew to the TDF wiki RTL Bugs page in English . By this I hope to get more visibility to the current status, and as a base to collaboration, let others help with RTL more easily.

During one of the breaks I heard Lionel encourages someone to do builds on his own, and I decided that after avoiding this tasks for two years, it’s about time. By the evening I got a build running according to the native build guide in the wiki (which took half the night on my laptop). There are still a few things to learn how to do with this build, but I how to now be more active in testing things without waiting for official Debian builds (which are quite hard when Debian is frozen). Thanks to Lionel for the encouragement.

LibreOffice conference 2012 (day 1)

Most of the day before the conference, and the conference morning spent working and finalizing my RTL status presentation. My apologies to the lecturers whose lectures I attend only physically (sorry, I can’t split my attention too well).

To my disappointment I had very few attendees in the talk, but I can understand the competition, as the other parallel talks were quite interesting. In at least one of them I wished to attend my self (if I could only be in two places in the same time…). Maybe next year we should have less parallel talks (4 tacks is a lot).

To still push some of the RTL issues, I’ve done a private talk over RTL issues for Caolan and Jan (kendy), which was interesting with some feedback. Jan took fdo#44657 on himself, and by the evening he showed me a great improvement in the status of things, so at least there’s horizontal scrolling in Calc with RTL interface.

With the help of Rene, I got master builds for Debian, and would spend the rest of the conference to check some bugs with it.

During the evening dinner and social event I wanted to thank Miklos personally for really improving the RTF support for RTL and Hebrew documents, and he showed me a few of the new stuff he’d done in master/3.7. While working I’ve noticed a few regressions, and I’m glad they were caught early.

Cedric told me that after last years talk, he started to check his features also in RTL interface, which for me was the best feedback on my efforts. Having developers keeping RTL in mind (even only nce in a while) saves a lot of trouble along the road. I would prefer to check and double check features while they’re being created instead of trying to get bugs fixed later on the release process.

Another thing which I enjoyed noticing is the “fresh blood” the GSoC project brings to LibreOffice. I’ve met with Miklos and Eilidh and got impressed with how a successful internship was used as a springboard into a good job. As there almost aren’t any Israelis who take part in GSoC, I’m not used to notice the effect closely.

The event dinner and mingling was very successful for me, I’ve got a chance to talk with old friends and meet some of the new attendees (and even get some technical work done by talking with people)… Thanks again for the organizational team.

uptime

An old server decided to mail me about a filesystem space problem it had.  Before logging in my first thought was “is this server still alive?”. While checking things up, I’ve noticed too many processes had “2010 ?” in their STIME column of ps, which made me check when was the last reboot.
The results talk for themselves.

# uptime
23:51:06 up 636 days,  8:36,  1 user,  load average: 0.12, 0.43, 0.33

# who -b
system boot  2010-11-11 14:15

# cat /etc/debian_version
4.0

Sweet (:

With these records, no wander I could forget about it…

Debian packaging for beginners @ FOSDEM – the video

I recently got a question by email about the lecture I presented at FOSDEM, and by that mail I discovered that the video of the lecture was uploaded to YouTube (FOSDEM 2012 – Debian packaging for beginners). While I thank the person who did the upload, he/she did not keep the right license for the video which is CC-BY-SA 3.0 (as noted at FOSDEM archive). You can also grab the webm file directly.

Well, the next task will be to listen to myself in order to improve for FOSDEM 2013… See you there.

Taking a vacation from open source

In the last 6 months I’ve devoted a lot of time to the open source projects I’m part of.  I decided to take a vacation from most of the open source stuff I do. This is mainly to balance things better and make sure I don’t feel burnt out. I’m not disappearing completely, but rather shifting into a lower gear and focus on the things I enjoy most regarding open source.

Debian packaging for beginners @ FOSDEM

After not attending FOSDEM for a few years, this year I decided to attend and also give a talk about “Debian packaging for beginners”, a replay of a talk given by Gergely Nagy in Debconf11 (video). As the per distribution devrooms were replaced a few years ago with the cross-distributions rooms, I thought it might be a good chance to have this kind of introduction talk to help people started contributing to Debian (or derived distributions).

The talk wasn’t meant to replace reading the  documentation (new maintainer’s guide, developer’s references and the debian policy), but it’s a good start for those who want some hands-on experience. The idea is to start with a just the upstream directory and progress trough the various errors and warnings we get during the build process using dpkg-buildpackage. The outcome is of course very basic, but enough to get people ready to do things on their own, including various QA tests on the package (e.g. lintian and debdiff).

The presentation covers the important points of the 3 main files in the debian directory: control, changelog and rules. It addition it holds some information about the various tools one can used to test the packages. I hope to make another version of the presentation to be more standalone than just having the main points during the talk itself.

PHP 5.4 @ Zend

As a Linux integration guy at Zend, most of my time is spent in compiling PHP related code or dealing with the variety of Linux distributions we support. With the coming release for PHP 5.4, we (at Zend) had some interesting stuff going on.

As part of the RC phase, I got to check the status of the 50-60 PHP extensions we provide, especially the PECL extensions which have different release cycles than the main PHP. With minor versions, this usually doesn’t really matter, but for major versions this means that some extensions need a little bit of love and fixes to work well with the new PHP version. This of course with the help of our developers.

The changes are usually one-liners due to a variable type change, or finding commits in the extension’s SCM and applying/back-porting it to the current versions (e.g. pecl memcache). Our policy regarding the patches we have, is that they should at least be sent to upstream (a core member or a bug report, e.g. #55703). I think I’m in the best position to enforce that patch policy, so in a few recent cases, I found myself asking one of our developers if the patch he sent me was already accepted upstream before willing to take it into the build process (in this case they are used temporarily, till we’ll work with the next RC or final release).

While most people build PHP as a final and standalone product, we also test it against ZendServer (or the other way around, depends on your POV). This helps to discover problems related to and implications of the changes done in the major version. During the PHP 5.4 RC cycle (which is still not finished), we had, more than a few times, that an internal problem discovered led to debugging, code reviewing and sending feedback (and patches when relevant) to the PHP project. Providing fixes for the issues found, helps having PHP in a better shape for release. At least for me, that’s one of the fun parts of work – getting the chance to contribute back to the community (or at least making sure others do, as I don’t write the patches myself).