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

After 20 days of final polishing and maturing since the release candidate, the PostgreSQL team released the final 9.0 version today. Hot off the press, I uploaded postgresql-9.0 final into Debian unstable; they will not go into Debian Squeeze, because Squeeze is frozen and it will take a long time to port all the packaged server side extensions to 9.0. If you are on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS or Ubuntu 10.10, you can add my PostgreSQL backports for stable Ubuntu releases PPA, which will carry 9. ... Read More

For an embedded/thin client project without GNOME, KDE, or even full XFCE I needed a small daemon to automount USB sticks. Using the full gvfs/gdu/nautilus or Thunar stack is too heavyweight for my purposes, but a simple udev rule just doesn’t cut it — I need to mount these USB sticks for a particular user (permissions), and also want to do an action like pop up a window with the contents. ... Read More

It’s been a decade ago when I did my first steps with contributing to Free Software, about seven years when I joined Debian, and about 6 with Canonical and Ubuntu. Time for some reflection what I have done over these years! Distribution Packaging and Maintenance My first sponsored Debian upload ever was cracklib2, which seriously needed some love and was looking for a new maintainer. So in that upload I managed to close all outstanding bugs. ... Read More

Dresden hat Netti und mich wieder! Gestern hat der IC uns und unsere Fahrräder komfortabel wieder von Wien nach Dresden gebracht, nach nur etwas mehr als einer Urlaubswoche. Wir sind am Freitag den 3. September in Passau gestartet, und dann bis Mittwoch entlang der Donau geradelt. Die Nächte haben wir meistens im Zelt verbracht; der schönste Campingplatz war in Sommerau, quasi bei einer Familie im riesigen Garten: Am Mittwoch Mittag sind wir nach 340 Fahrradkilometern dann in der Stadt der k. ... Read More

PostgreSQL 9.0 with a whole lot of new features and improvements is nearing completion. The first release candidate was just announced. As with the beta versions, I uploaded RC1 to Debian experimental again. If you want to test/use them on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), you can get packages from my “PostgreSQL backports for stable Ubuntu releases” PPA. Please let me know if you need them for other releases. Just for the records, both Debian 6. ... Read More

Vor etwa einem Jahr war ich auf meiner ersten Klettersteigtour auf dem Innsbrucker Klettersteig, was mich damals schon recht beeindruckt hat. Dieses Jahr haben wir, d. h. mein Vater, mein Schwager, und ich, die Schwierigkeit um ein oder zwei Stufen erhöht, und sind letzten Samstag auf den Elferkofel geklettert. Die Tour begann an der Seilbahn-Bergstation in Neustift, wo wir zunächst ein mal eine Handvoll Paraglider-Fans beim konzentrierten Entfitzen und Sortieren der Schnüre und Planen beobachteten. ... Read More

The Debian import freeze is settled, the first rush of major changes went into Maverick, and the dust now has settled a bit. Thus it’s time to turn back some attention to crashes and quality in general. This morning I created maverick chroots for the [Apport retracers][1], and they are currently processing the backlog. I also uploaded a new Apport package which now enables crash reporting by default again. Happy segfaulting! ... Read More

I just learned about vapigen to build a Vala .vapi interface from gobject introspection. Unfortunately it seems that through the way of g-ir-scanner some information gets lost and gir cannot transmit information such as the semantics of arrays (null-terminated or with length, etc.). I played with a “metadata” file for an hour (as described upstream), but it seems to be ignored entirely. So for now I committed a manually adjusted vapi for gudev. ... Read More