Two weeks ago, PostgreSQL announced the first beta version of the new major 9.1 version, with a lot of anticipated new features like synchronous replication or better support for multilingual databases. Please see the release announcement for details. Due to my recent moving and the Ubuntu Developer Summit it took me a bit to package them for Debian and Ubuntu, but here they are at last. I uploaded postgresql-9.1 to Debian experimental; currently they are sitting in the NEW queue, but I’m sure our restless Debian archive admins will get to it in a few days. ... Read More

Update at 13:06 UTC: Corrected NetworkManager description, thanks Mathieu for pointing out. A few months ago, Matt Zimmerman kicked offa new tradition of a quarterly review of the most popular Ubuntu Brainstorm ideas. He did the December review, now it was my turn to coordinate the March review. 7zip desktop support (#26504) The 7zip compression format becomes increasingly more popular these days; Ubuntu releases up to 10.10 did not support it on the desktop support as well as older formats like zip or bzip2. ... Read More

As a followup action to my recent Talk about PyGI I now re-used my notes to provide some real wiki documentation. It would be great if you could add package name info for Fedora/SUSE/etc., and perhaps add more example links for porting different kinds of software! Please also let me know if you have suggestions how to improve the structure of the page.

On next Monday this cycle’s Ubuntu Application Developer Week classes will start. The topic that kept me busy most in this cycle was Python gobject-introspection, and porting pygtk2 apps to PyGI (see my initial steps and my report from the PyGI hackfest.) To spread the love, there will be two talks about this next week: On Monday 17:00 UTC the very Tomeu Vizoso himself will explain what gobject-introspection (“GI”) is, why we need it, and how library developers use it to ship a good and useful GI binding (“typelib”) for application developers. ... Read More

Apport has provided built-in support for automatically identifying and marking duplicate bug reports for normal signal as well as Python crashes. However, we have more kinds of bug reports submitted through Apport which could benefit from automatic duplication: X.org GPU freezes, package installation failures, kernel oopses, or gcc internal compiler errors, i. e. pretty much everything that gets reported automatically these days. The latest Apport 1.20 (which also just hit current Ubuntu Natty) now allows package hooks to set a special field DuplicateSignature, which abstracts the concept for other kinds of bug reports where Apport doesn’t do automatic duplication. ... Read More

(Update: Link to Tomeu’s blog post, repost for planet.gnome.org) Last week I was in Prague to attend the GNOME/Python 2011 Hackfest for gobject-introspection, to which Tomeu Vizoso kindly invited me after I started working with PyGI some months ago. It happened at a place called brmlab which was quite the right environment for a bunch of 9 hackers: Some comfy couches and chairs, soldering irons, lots of old TV tubes, chips, and other electronics, a big Pirate flag, really good Wifi, plenty of Club Mate and Coke supplies, and not putting unnecessary effort into mundane things like wallpapers. ... Read More

A common source of unnoticed depwaits or uninstallability are main packages which introduce new build or binary dependencies from universe. These either require fixing, or filing a main inclusion report. To help with this, I added a new check-mir script into ubuntu-dev-tools version 0.110, which walks through all build and binary dependencies, checks if they are in main/restricted, also considers alternative dependencies, and create a report with a few hints. ... Read More

For a test suite I need to create a local SSL-enabled HTTPS server in my Python project. I googled around and found various recipes using pyOpenSSL, but all of those are quite complicated, and I didn’t even get the referenced one to work. Also, Python has shipped its own built-in SSL module for quite a while. After reading some docs and playing around, I eventually got it to work with a remarkably simple piece of code using the builtin ssl module: ... Read More

GNOME 3.0 and Ubuntu Natty are currently undergoing a major architectural shift from GTK 2.0 to 3.0. Part of this is that the previous set of manually maintained language bindings, such as PyGTK, are being deprecated in favor of GObject Introspection, a really cool technology! For us this means that we have to port all our PyGTK applications from PyGTK 2 to gobject-introspection and GTK 3.0 at the same time. I started with that for my own projects (Apport and Jockey) a few days ago, and along the way encountered a number of problems. ... Read More

Since last Tuesday, packages built in natty don’t come with a Debian changelog included any more. Due to the continuous demand for downsizing both our installation media, as well as the install footprint, we looked for packages which we should eliminate (duplicate libraries, unnecessary runtimes like our current effort to eliminate perl (-modules, not -base), but also for stuff that users generally don’t need and won’t miss. IMO package changelogs very much fall into the latter category, so they were very high on the “first against the wall” list. ... Read More