As I wrote two weeks ago, I consider the QA related changes in Ubuntu 12.04 a great success. But while we will continue and even extend our efforts there, this is not where the ball stops: it’s great to have the feedback cycle between “break it” and “notice the bug” reduced from potentially a few months to one day in many cases, but wouldn’t it be cool to reduce that to a few minutes, and also put the machinery right at where stuff really happens — into the upstream trunks? ... Read More

The first Beta of the upcoming PostgreSQL 9.2 was released yesterday (see announcement). Your humble maintainer has now created packages for you to test. Please give them a whirl, and report any problems/regressions that you may see to the PostgreSQL developers, so that we can have a rock solid 9.2 release. Remember, with the postgresql-common infrastructure you can use pg_upgradecluster to create a 9.2 cluster from your existing 8.4⁄9.1 cluster and run them both in parallel without endangering your data. ... Read More

This announcement comes very late (a week after release), but better late than never.. The first PyGObject 3.3 series release is now out, with lots of yummy fixes and improvements. Dieter, Sebastian, and I went through a round of bugzilla spring cleaning to clean up old bugs, fix simple bugs, and apply good patches that were waiting, so as a result the patch queue is now almost empty and PyGObject works better than ever. ... Read More

Half a year ago I blogged about the changed expectancies and processes to improve quality of the development release which we discussed at the UDS in Orlando: A promise that we don’t break the development version, regressions are not to be tolerated, acceptance criteria for Canonical upstreams. For that we introduced the Stable+1 team, actually did some reversions of broken packages, our QA team set up rigorous daily installation image and upgrade tests, and the code development process for Unity and related project was changed to enforce buildability and passing automatic tests with each and every change to trunk. ... Read More

I just released a new pygobject version 3.1.92, for this week’s GNOME 3.3.92. This was my first-ever GNOME release (yay!), so please bear with me. One highlight of this release is the new pygtkcompat module, contributed by Johan Dahlin. It provides backwards compatibility to pygtk far beyond to what the Gtk overrrides do, and also includes some shims for the old static webkit, gudev, and other modules. You can, and have to, enable them individually: ... Read More

Part of our efforts to reduce power consumption in Ubuntu is to provide an easy tool to hunt down which programs and devices are to blame for inordinate power consumption. powertop’s interactive mode is pretty good for this if you are sitting in a train and want to tweak some knobs to max out battery life, but we need something more reproducible and noninteractive for developers who want to file proper bug reports. ... Read More

Part of our efforts to reduce power consumption is to identify processes which keep waking up the disk even when the computer is idle. This already resulted in a few bug reports (and some fixes, too), but we only really just began with this. Unfortunately there is no really good tool to trace file access events system-wide. powertop claims to, but its output is both very incomplete, and also wrong (e. ... Read More

PackageKit has a “WhatProvides” API for mapping distribution independent concepts to particular package names. For example, you could ask “which packages provide a decoder for AC3 audio files? $ pkcon what-provides "gstreamer0.10(decoder-audio/ac3)" [...] Installed gstreamer0.10-plugins-good-0.10.30.2-2ubuntu2.amd64 GStreamer plugins from the "good" set Available gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-0.10.18-3ubuntu4.amd64 GStreamer plugins from the "ugly" set This is the kind of question your video player would ask the system if it encounters a video it cannot play. ... Read More

Suppose you install Ubuntu and select a language other than English (it’s known to happen!). This will install the general and the GNOME language packs, translated LibreOffice help, and so on. Now, install a KDE package or GIMP. You’ll notice that the new application is not translated and has no help available for your language. The next time you open the language selector from control-center it would tell you that you miss some language support and offer to install it, but this has been pretty indiscoverable, and we really can do better. ... Read More

On my 8 hour train ride to Budapest last Sunday I finally worked on making libxklavier introspectable. Thanks to Sergey’s fast review the code now landed in trunk. I sent a couple of refinements to the bug report still, but those are mostly just icing on the cake, the main functionality of getting and setting keyboard layouts is working nicely now (see the example script).