I don’t want to criticize the outcome of the UK’s EU referendum — first of all I’m not wiser than everyone else, and second in a democracy you always have the right to decide both ways. Freedom absolutely includes the freedom to hurt yourself and do bad decisions (note, I’m explicitly not saying — or even knowing! — which is which!). What concerns me though, is how the course of political debates at large and this referendum in particular have been going. ... Read More
Historically, the “adt-run” command line has allowed multiple tests; as a consequence, arguments like --binary or --override-control were position dependent, which confused users a lot (#795274, #785068, #795274, LP #1453509). On the other hand I don’t know anyone or any CI system which actually makes use of the “multiple tests on a single command line” feature. The command line also was a bit confusing in other ways, like the explicit --built-tree vs. ... Read More
This week from Tuesday to Thursday four Canonical Foundations team members held a virtual sprint about the proposed-migration infrastructure. It’s been a loooong three days and nightshifts, but it was absolutely worth it. Thanks to Brian, Barry, and Robert for your great work! I started the sprint on Tuesday with a presentation (slides) about the design and some details about the involved components, and showed how to deploy the whole thing locally in juju-local. ... Read More
The last two major autopkgtest releases (3.18 from November, and 3.19 fresh from yesterday) bring some new features that are worth spreading. New LXD virtualization backend 3.19 debuts the new adt-virt-lxd virtualization backend. In case you missed it, LXD is an API/CLI layer on top of LXC which introduces proper image management, seamlessly use images and containers on remote locations, intelligently caching them locally, automatically configure performant storage backends like zfs or btrfs, and just generally feels really clean and much simpler to use than the “classic” LXC. ... Read More
Almost every new autopkgtest release brings some small improvements, but 3.14 got some reboot related changes worth pointing out. First of all, I simplified and unified the implementation of rebooting across all runners that support it (ssh, lxc, and qemu). If you use a custom setup script for adt-virt-ssh you might have to update it: Previously, the setup script needed to respond to a reboot function to trigger a reboot, wait for the testbed to go down, and come back up. ... Read More
Wir sind wieder zurück aus unserem tollen Winterurlaub! Es ging nach Lappland in Nord-Finnland und Nord-Norwegen. Das ganze Fotoalbum gibt es auch zu sehen. Am Montag den 16. März starten wir unsere Reise nach Lappland, vom Flughafen München über Helsinki bis nach Ivalo. Auf dem Flug bekommt man schon einen guten Eindruck von Finnland: Außer an den südlichen Küstengebieten ist das Land sehr dünn bevölkert, und der ganze Norden besteht fast nur aus einem Flickenteppich aus Wald, Seen, und Flüssen. ... Read More
ROS what? Robot Operating System (ROS) is a set of libraries, services, protocols, conventions, and tools to write robot software. It’s about seven years old now, free software, and a growing community, bringing Linux into the interesting field of robotics. They primarily target/support running on Ubuntu (current Indigo ROS release runs on 14.04 LTS on x86), but they also have some other experimental platforms like Ubuntu ARM and OS X. ... Read More
I’m on my way home from Düsseldorf where I attended the LinuxCon Europe and Linux Plumber conferences. I was quite surprised how huge LinuxCon was, there were about 1.500 people there! Certainly much more than last year in New Orleans. Containers (in both LXC and docker flavors) are the Big Thing everybody talks about and works with these days; there was hardly a presentation where these weren’t mentioned at all, and (what felt like) half of the presentations were either how to improve these, or how to use these technologies to solve problems. ... Read More
It’s great to see more and more packages in Debian and Ubuntu getting an autopkgtest. We now have some 660, and soon we’ll get another ~ 4000 from Perl and Ruby packages. Both Debian’s and Ubuntu’s autopkgtest runner machines are currently static manually maintained machines which ache under their load. They just don’t scale, and at least Ubuntu’s runners need quite a lot of handholding. This needs to stop. To quote Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor: We need more power! ... Read More
Last week’s autopkgtest 3.5 release (in Debian sid and Ubuntu Utopic) brings several new features which I’d like to announce. Tests that reboot For testing low-level packages like init or the kernel it is sometimes desirable to reboot the testbed in the middle of a test. For example, I added a new boot_and_services systemd autopkgtest which configures grub to boot with systemd as pid 1, reboots, and then checks that the most important services like lightdm, D-BUS, NetworkManager, and cron come up as expected. ... Read More