I found it surprisingly hard to determine in tearDown() whether or not the test that currently ran succeeded or not. I am writing some tests for gnome-settings-daemon and want to show the log output of the daemon if a test failed. I now cobbled together the following hack, but I wonder if there’s a more elegant way? The interwebs don’t seem to have a good solution for this either. def tearDown(self): [. ... Read More

I was working on writing tests for gnome-settings-daemon a week or so ago, and finally got blocked on being unable to set up upower/ConsoleKit/etc. the way I need them. Also, doing so needs root privileges, I don’t want my test suite to actually suspend my machine, and using the real service is generally not suitable for test suites that are supposed to run during “make check”, in jhbuild, and the like — these do not have the polkit privileges to do all that, and may not even have a system D-Bus running in the first place. ... Read More

I just released PyGObject 3.3.92, for GNOME 3.5.92. There is nothing too exciting in this release; a couple of small bug fixes and a lot of new test cases. See the detailled list of changes below. Thanks to all contributors! Changes: release-news: Generate HTML changelog (Martin Pitt) [API add] Add ObjectInfo.get_abstract method (Simon Feltman) (#675581) Add deprecation warning when setting gpointers to anything other than int. (Simon Feltman) (#683599) test_properties: Test accessing a property from a superclass (Martin Pitt) (#684058) test_properties. ... Read More

PostgreSQL 9.2 has just been released, after a series of betas and a release candidate. See for yourself what’s new, and try it out! Packages are available in Debian experimental as well as my PostgreSQL backports PPA for Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.10, as usual. Please note that 9.2 will not land any more in the feature frozen Debian Wheezy and Ubuntu Quantal (12.10) releases, as none of the server-side extensions are packaged for 9. ... Read More

I just released PyGObject 3.3.91, for GNOME 3.5.91. The big new feature in this release (thanks to the release team for granting an exception) is Simon Feltman’s new Signal helper class, which makes defining custom signals a whole lot simpler and more obvious. In the past, you had to do class C(GObject.GObject): __gsignals__ = { 'my_signal': (GObject.SIGNAL_RUN_FIRST, GObject.TYPE_NONE, (GObject.TYPE_INT,)) } def do_my_signal(self, arg): print("my_signal called with %i" % arg) whereas now this looks like ... Read More

The unstoppable PostgreSQL team just announced the first release candidate of 9.2, with several bug fixes since the Beta 4. If you haven’t tested 9.2 yet, now is the time! Remember that you can run a copy of your 8.4 or 9.2 cluster in parallel for testing with pg_upgradecluster. If you use Debian, 9.2rc1 will be available in experimental in a few hours. For Ubuntu, you can get packages for all supported releases from my PostgreSQL backports PPA as usual. ... Read More

I just released Apport 2.5 with a bunch of new features and some bug fixes. By default you cannot report bugs and crashes to packages from PPAs, as they are not Ubuntu packages. Some packages like Unity or UbuntuOne define their own crash database which reports bugs against the project instead. This has been a bit cumbersome in the past, as these packages needed to ship a /etc/apport/crashdb.conf.d/ snippet. This has become much easier, package hooks can define a new crash database directly now (#551330): ... Read More

I just released PyGObject 3.3.90, for GNOME 3.5.90. This is now working correctly on big-endian 64 bit machines such as powerpc64, and fixes marshalling for GParamSpec attributes and return values, as well as a few small bug fixes. Thanks to all contributors! Complete list of changes: Implement marshalling for GParamSpec (Mathieu Duponchelle) (#681565) Fix erronous import statements for Python 3.3 (Simon Feltman) (#682051) Do not fail tests if pyflakes or pep8 are not installed (Martin Pitt) Fix PEP-8 whitespace checking and issues in the code (Martin Pitt) Fix unmarshalling of gssize (David Malcolm) (#680693) Fix various endianess errors (David Malcolm) (#680692) Gtk overrides: Add TreeModelSort. ... Read More

Yesterday, GUADEC hosted a PyGObject hackfest. I was really happy to see so many participants, and a lot of whom who are rather new to the project. I originally feared that it would just be the core crew of four people, as this is not exactly the shiniest part of GNOME development. So I did not work on the stuff I was planning for, but instead walked around and provided mentoring, help, and patch review. ... Read More

I have had the pleasure of attending GUADEC in full this year. TL;DR: A lot of great presentations + lots of hall conversations about QA stuff + the obligatory be{er,ach} = ♥. Last year I just went to the hackfest, and I never made it to any previous one, so GUADEC 2012 was a kind of first-time experience for me. It was great to put some faces and personal impressions to a lot of the people I have worked with for many years, as well as catching up with others that I did meet before. ... Read More