Colors of Noise

This went out to d-d-a already but I figured that this might be of interest here too:

The fifth Debian Groupware Meeting was held in the LinuxHotel, Essen, Germany. Eight persons attended which is an all time high! This is a short summary of what happened during the weekend:

• We pushed a ESR (extended support release) version of icedove including l10n and the calendaring extension to unstable. By cherry-picking lots of build-fixes from iceweasel we made the testing transition getting rid of the old 3.X version.

• Since iceowl (the standalone calendar) is not maintained upstream anymore we're keeping it in experimental only for now. A new version got uploaded including updated l10n.

• A new upstream version of evolution-mapi was upload to sid fixing an FTBFS.

• d-push 1.5.8 (the rebranded version of z-push) got uploaded to unstable including translation updates and adaption to php 5.4.0.

• Lots of progress was made on packaging SOGo and related components and it's now quiet close to an upload to sid.

• Work on OpenChange included looking into using the version in Debian for SOGo packaging as well as fixing Samba4 issues that broke (among other things) the OpenChange build.

• Progress was made on packaging Zarafa ZCP for Debian (rebranded as giraffe). The packages are working but rebranding is not yet complete.

• About 60 evolution bugs where either closed or commented on.

• As usual the Groupware page got updated.

• The meetings 5th anniversary was celebrated with a barbecue.

During FOSDEM I finally got around to hack on a iodine plugin for network manager. Given a suitably prepared server on the other end this allows you to tunnel connections over DNS when all other traffic is firewalled. The basic configuration only needs the domain name set:

You can grab the sources from git.gnome.org, a Debian package is also available.

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I've started uploading snapshots of git-buildpackage to experimental recently. Here's a short list of what changed over the version in wheezy and sid:

• git-buildpackage now has a --git-pristine-tar-commit option that commits a tarball right back to the pristine-tar branch if it's not already there. This makes tracking upstream git and dfsg-clean source handling easier.
• git-buildpackage's --git-upstream-tree now accepts a tree directly without the need to use --git-upstream-branch.
• git-buildpackage's --git-export now parses the exported changelog instead of the working copy. This way we automatically pick up the correct tarballs, branches, etc. reducing the number of options needed.
• Jan Čapek added a --git-postexport hook to allow to mangle the source after exporting it.
• gbp-pull and gbp-fetch now support shallow clones thanks to Markus Lehtonen.
• gbp-pull got a speed up by skipping the checkout for fast-forward. This makes updating large source trees less time consuming.
• git-import-orig and git-import-dsc can now import into bare repositories.
• Russ Allbery updated git-pbuilder to 1.27.
• gbp-pq should be easier to use thanks to the --force and --switch options. It also handles patches without descriptions more robustly.
• The test coverage of the internal test suite increased quiet a bit. We're now generating coverage information during the build in build/cover.
• We're now generating apidocs which also serves as usage examples.

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A recent trip to Switzerland made me dig out my prepaid card for UMTS usage again. This resulted in some minor enhancements for Prepaid Manager. The new release handles disabled and missing modems more reliably. It also has some visual feedback if we know the length of the top up code:

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Debian's libvirt in unstable finally passes the Technology Compatibility Kit (libvirt-tck) for qemu:///system:

Files=59, Tests=1579, 315 wallclock secs ( 0.77 usr  1.02 sys + 31.40 cusr 10.14 csys = 43.33 CPU)
Result: PASS

We're running libvirt's internal test suite since 0.9.0 but this doesn't launch any real virtual machines to check things like suspend, resume, snapshotting, migration and it doesn't create storage pools and volumes or networks. This means a lot of testing was done manually with each release.

libvirt-tck provides a framework to perform these kinds of integration testing between libvirt and it's drivers, comes with hundreds of testcases already and it's easy to set up since it's available in experimental:

apt-get install -t experimental libvirt-tck

Edit /etc/libvirt-tck/default.cfg if you don't want to use the default connection URI. Then just run libvirt-tck:

libvirt-tck

Since this is supposed to stress libvirtd and the hypervisor and since it creates and deletes storage pools, networks and virtual machines it's recommended to run this on a dedicated system to make sure the tests don't blow away any precious config.

If a test fails one can debug that single test using:

LIBVIRT_TCK_CONFIG=/etc/libvirt-tck/default.cfg prove --verbose /usr/share/libvirt-tck/tests/hooks/051-daemon-hook.t

This already revealed errors in our package like a missing parted build dependency breaking the creation of disk based storage pools, bugs in libvirt, crashes in QEMU and minor errors in the test suite itself. We're currently cheating a bit since the tests for hooks and nwfilter are currently disabled due to license problems with the used Perl modules.

libvirt-tck can easily be integrated into Jenkins since it can now use libtap-formatter-junit-perl to generate JUnit XML. To do so simply configure a free-style software project to execute these commands:

rm -f libvirt-tck.xml
sudo libvirt-tck --timer --format junit --force > libvirt-tck.xml

allow Jenkins to run libvirt-tck as root

jenkins ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/libvirt-tck --timer --format junit --force

and configure it to publish a JUnit test result report.

Currently I'm only running the tests for qemu:///system so any help running and debugging this for LXC, VirtualBox or XEN is very welcome.

Many thanks go to Salvatore Bonaccorso for packaging the missing Perl modules needed by libvirt-tck.

The new release switches to GDBus and adds an application icon. Together with the recently released Modem Manager 0.5 it's now able to fetch the balance information via USSD on Huawei and ZTE modems as well.

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During todays very interesting Puppet Skills Exchange given by Christian Hofstaedtler at Debconf 11 it was recommended to syntax check puppet manifests in git commit hooks. Since I wanted to do the same some time ago and I couldn't find anything that does manifests, ruby and erb I wrote some hooks that can be either used on commit or on the remote site when receiving the update. The git archive of this can be found at:

git clone git://honk.sigxcpu.org/git/puppet-helpers.git

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Due to two totally different bugs in tip22 the d-i netinstall images for IP22 (SGI Indy) and IP32 (SGI O2) won't boot the installer correctly.

Tip22 is responsible for merging a minimal loader, kernel and initramfs into a single ELF or ECOFF binary, depending on the architecture. This can then be fetched by the machine's ARC PROM via tftp.

A fixed tip22 has been uploaded to unstable and updated images are available from here until we can get this fixed via stable-proposed-updates.

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I've made a first release of GNOME Prepaid Manager a couple of days ago after switching to GTK+3, GSettings and PyGObject's GObject introspection but it still wasn't that useful since the very common Huawei chipsets (present in many UMTS USB sticks) weren't working due to some missing code in ModemManager.

Thanks to Dan's great description I just got around to add that which should make ppm useful to more people.

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This went out to d-d-a a couple of days ago already but I figured that this might be of interest here too:

The fourth Debian Groupware Meeting was held in the LinuxHotel, Essen, Germany. This is a short summary of what happened during the weekend:

• We pushed new versions of icedove and iceowl to unstable fixing several issues with gnome-shell in the later. Unstable now ships packages based on Thunderbird's current 3.1 branch.

• The iceowl-l10n language package got resurrected (currently sitting in NEW) providing translations for iceowl-extension and (in a yet incomplete way) for iceowl. (Update: it's already in unstable now)

• We've done Citadel ↔ ice{dove,owl} interop testing and bug fixing.

• Work was done on Citadel's event driven SMTP client and IPv6 compatibility

• The z-push package got updated to 1.5.1. The patent restrictions are resolved now and we're closer to resolving the trademark issues. So hopefully an upload to main can happen real soon now.

• SOGo packaging made nice progress. Remaining issues involve linking against GNUTLS to resolve the OpenSSL GPL license incompatibility, and handling of the embedded copies of JavaScript libraries.

• We updated the groupware overview page.

• We were invited by the FrOSCon organizers to join their barbecue. Many thanks for that!