I just did the 1000th commit of postgresql-common, the Debian/Ubuntu PostgreSQL management utilities. Wow, what started as a small hack in December 2004 to be able to install several major PostgreSQL versions in parallel has turned out to be a > 600 kB project providing a comprehensive tool set for uniformly setting up, upgrading, and maintaining PostgreSQL database instances from version 7.4 up to the just announced 9.0 beta-1, with a comprehensive test suite that I’m really proud of (it tests just about every aspect, option, and corner case of the installation, integration, upgrade, locale support, and error handling, and takes about half an hour on my system). ... Read More

“Grüß Gott!” zusammen aus dem Land südlich des Weißwurstäquators! Auch wenn ich selbige Würste bisher noch nicht verkosten konnte, steht dies ganz oben auf dem Programm! Ich bin am Samstag gut in München angekommen, wo mich Netti gleich am Hauptbahnhof abgeholt hat. Da wir nun schon mal im Zentrum waren, haben wir die Zeit auch gleich für einen Spaziergang über den Viktualienmarkt und dann für eine Stunde Stadtrundfahrt genutzt, um schon mal einen Überblick zu bekommen. ... Read More

Es ist mal wieder diese Zeit im Jahr – und diesmal ist es gleich die Grosse Drei-Null, die mich gestern heimsuchte! Netti hat mir einen gaaanz tollen und leckeren Schokokuchen gebacken, mit weissen Schokoladenplätzchen mit einem Kinderfoto von mir drauf. Über die philosophischen Konsequenzen, seine eigene Jugend aufzuessen, muss ich mir noch tiefere Gedanken machen, zunächst hab ich mir es erstmal schmecken lassen. Der gestrige Tag ist auch eine gute Gelegenheit für einen Rückblick. ... Read More

PostgreSQL did microrelease updates three weeks ago: 8.4.3, 8.3.10, and 8.1.20 are the ones relevant for Debian/Ubuntu. There haven’t been reports about regressions in Debian or the upstream lists so far, so it’s time to push these into stable releases. The new releases are in Lucid Beta-2, and hardy/jaunty/karmic-proposed. If you are running PostgreSQL, please upgrade to the proposed versions and give feedback to LP #557408. Updates for Debian Lenny are prepared as well, and await release team ack. ... Read More

Thanks to the work of David Henningsson, we now have a proper Apport symptom for audio bugs. It just got updated again to set default bug titles, which include the card/codec name and the problem, so that Launchpad’s suggested duplicates should work much more reliably. So from now on you are strongly encouraged to report sound problems with $ ubuntu-bug audio instead of trying to guess the package right.

I finally listened to Sebastien Bacher and applied for GNOME commit rights yesterday, after hassling Seb once more about committing an approved patch for me. Surprisingly, it only took some 4 hours until my application was approved and my account created, wow! Apparently 71 patches are enough. 🙂 With my new powers, I fixed a crash in gdm, and applied two stragglers into gvfs’ build system today. More to come!

These days I often use launchpadlib in my projects for scripting access/modifications in Launchpad. While launchpadlib has quite a good API documentation, this only covers the method calls, not the attributes or collections. So it often takes some poking and trying until you figure out how to access/change things. I found myself typing the same things over and over, so I finally wrote a little script called lpshell: #!/usr/bin/python -i import code, os, sys from launchpadlib. ... Read More

Ich wünsche allen ein gutes, gesundes und erfolgreiches Jahr 2010! Wir haben gestern mit ein paar Freunden gefeiert. Das neue Jahr haben wir gleich angemessen mit Wunderkerzen begrüßt: (Klick auf Bild für größeres Format)

The days before Chistmas are a wonderfully quiet time to catch up on old work which otherwise just drowns in the daily noise. I got a lot of Apport cleanups and improvements done. One particular highlight of 1.11 is that it is now easy and consistent to collect information for a bug report on one place/at one time and save it into a file $ apport-bug --save /tmp/argh.apport udev … and report that later on with ... Read More

Yesterday PostgreSQL released new security/bug fix microreleases 8.4.2, 8.3.9, and 8.1.19, which fix two security issues and a whole bunch of bugs. Updates for all supported Ubuntu releases are built in the ubuntu-security-proposed PPA. They pass the upstream and postgresql-common test suites, but more testing is heavily appreciated! Please give feedback in bug LP#496923. Thanks!