Paul's Web Pages

Also Giving up on Ruby Packaging

Paul van Tilburg — 2011-01-25T00:00:00+01:00

I have just sent a mail to the Debian/Ruby Extras mailing list stating that I will also give up most of my Ruby packaging efforts and reduce my involvement in the team. I am following Lucas Nussbaum in his decision. Although our reasons are slightly different, I subscribe most of what he says in his blog post. Besides that, I haven’t done much Ruby programming in the past years, making me lose the motivation for the huge load of packages I am responsible for and thus subconsciously perceive that as a burden, as I feel guilty not having/making time to work on them.

So, what does this mean? I will handover (co)maintainership of over 50 libraries. Many of which have dead upstream, unfortunately. Also will I be looking for someone to take over the administrative tasks of heading the team such as mailing list moderation and Alioth repository access. I will keep maintaining some programs that I still use, such as Camping, and am approachable for (mentor) uploads.

Meanwhile I will continue my work on my PhD thesis, which is progressing well and should lead to my defence (hopefully) somewhere around September this year. That said, I will try to keep tinkering with Ruby and other F/OSS projects. Oh, and also to get more motivated and some inspiration…

Post-FOSDEM 2009

Paul van Tilburg — 2009-02-16T00:00:00+01:00

I have attended FOSDEM again this year. Most of all, it was nice to see everyone again, especially the Collabora crew. Besides having fun while hanging out with them again, I must say FOSDEM was quite a motivation boost too!

I feel motivated again to work on Ruby packaging. The whole RubyGem mess and other less-specific Ruby-related messes keep draining my motivation. This feels very conflicting, since I like the language very much. The upcoming transition to Ruby 1.9.1 will be quite a challenge and I hope that we can finally work out a nice, actual Ruby policy for Squeeze.

A few days ago I have also joined the pkg-gstreamer team, mainly to work on Elisa packaging. Elisa is a nice-looking media center application that I am using on my HTPC. Debian’s experimental suite now contains an up-to-date version of Elisa, try it out if you want.

Elisa 0.5.27

So, why is Elisa not in unstable yet. Well, Elisa has a plugin system which also features auto-updates. While this is very nice on platforms such as Windows, it is not really nice for Debian. I have been working to get this updating disabled by default. Once I am sure (hopefully by the time 0.5.28 gets released) that it is in order, I wil upload it to unstable.

Meanwhile I am planning to work on some Elisa plugins to add some features that I feel are missing. First of all I need webradio a la Rhythmbox in there. Then something to watch TV: a MythTV frontend-plugin, via UPnp, or whatever works. Finally it might be nice to have to have a plugin to setup video-conferencing using Telepathy. I’m quite sure some of these things are lying around somewhere, more about that later.

Lenny Released

Paul van Tilburg — 2009-02-15T00:00:00+01:00

The long-awaited, big and stable Debian GNU/Linux “Lenny” 5.0 has been released! Great job everyone and congratulations!

In this release the Debian/Ruby Extra team has an ever greater presence. We were able to increase the number of mainted libraries and applications to over 95 packages. Also quite a lot of issues were resolved and I am proud that we obtained this quality level.

For Squeeze we plan to deal with the transition to Ruby 1.9 and with possible multiple interpreter-support (still Ruby 1.8, JRuby?). We might also deal with the gems, who knows? :)

P.S. Indeed, did I just started posting without explaining why I was away for over 7 months?

Taking and Giving

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-11-04T00:00:00+01:00

From Debian I downloaded, installed and toyed around with Liquidsoap. It took me a few moments to understand the language, but once I did, I got very enthusiastic about it. I always wanted something more than just streaming a set for my friends now and then and this tool allows me to created a quite contrived webradio setup. More about that later…

To Debian unstable I finally uploaded Camping, a small Ruby web framework for MCV type applications. It is in NEW now. I’ve been writing (or at least started writing) quite a few apps based on Camping the past few months. Primarily because it is fun, but also because I like its flexibility and strength very much (see also some examples). Once Camping is in Debian, I’d like to put more Camping apps out in the open.

Back Home

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-06-27T00:00:00+02:00

And before you know it, another week has passed… I arrived back home yesterday, sooner that I had expected. The flight, landing and taxiing went very quickly and smoothly; this is probably to compensate for the enormously slow and dramatic check-in and boarding.

I had a great time meeting all the Debian people, getting to know each developer’s backgrounds, talking, discussing, eating, etc. In my opinion, the people at Debconf and especially the organisation team cannot be thanked enough for making this possible, so here we go: thank you very much everyone, for making Debconf 7 possible and fun. :-) See you in Argentina, I hope!

My own photos containing some general impressions will follow shortly. Though, I left most of the Debconf photographing to people with real cameras and some of these photo have already been published on the Debconf 7 gallery.

Feeding Frenzy! Uploaded

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-06-20T00:00:00+02:00

There is some effort here at Debconf to improve Debian’s game stuff. I want to contribute to that by announcing my first upload of the game “Feeding Frenzy!” to Debian Sid. The game is about dwarfs (or sheep) that have to collect food to survive which becomes increasingly scarce during the game. Besides collecting food, the dwarfs can also can choose to throw the food at competing dwarfs to temporarily disable them.

Four years ago, a group consisting of some of my friends and myself created this game as an assignment for a project in our bachelor computer science. A few weeks ago, we undusted the game, Bram fixed some compiler warnings and I fixed up the package. It is ready for Debian now and has a pretty good gameplay, though it can probably still be improved graphic- and level-wise. I uploaded it two days ago. So, if our FTP-masters are no longer busy with Debconf, I hope they can get the game through the NEW queue soon.

Debconf Debian/Ruby Extras Meeting

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-06-19T00:00:00+02:00

The Debian/Ruby Extras team has come to an agreement about a meeting time and date, yay! We’re going to meet today, Tuesday June 19, 2007 and discuss current packaging issues, plans for the future, and the Ruby policy. I’m delighted that half of the members of the team are here and are able to get together.

Invitation If anyone is interested in joining the team or observing what we do, please meet us at 18:00 in front of the cafeteria.

Oh, and could somebody at least bring a computer, because my PowerBook is not as portable anymore as it used to be.

Update: I forgot to mention that most team members usually hide out on IRC in the #debian-ruby channel on OFTC.

DebCamp Update

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-06-15T00:00:00+02:00

It is time for a DebCamp update, since I’ve been here three days now. I have mainly been working on picking up the slack regarding Debian/Ruby Extras. This meant: getting rid of a CDBS rule that substitutes the entire team in the Uploaders field, cleaning up some package, uploading some packages with new upstream, solving and filing bugs.

During all this, the “picture” of the environment outside is actually only missing yellow/brown trees shedding their leaves.

Ruby D-Bus 0.2.0

In between the Debian/Ruby Extras work I have been able to finish the documentation of our Ruby D-Bus protocol implementation. It is due for release this weekend and I think we’ll make it.

Arrival

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-06-12T00:00:00+02:00

I have just arrived in Edinburgh. The flight was just fine. The weather is a bit foggy and cold (compared to NL), but it is exactly how I remember it. I was transported to MACS at the Heriot-Watt university. It’s weird to sit on my old working spot again. :-)

Schedule Spring 2007

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-04-06T00:00:00+02:00

Since Spring is well underway, I wanted to post a sort of schedule summary of my activities in the following three months. First of all, I have registered and booked the flight for Debconf 7, yay! I can stay with friends of mine that I know from the time I worked in Edinburgh. I want to thank Krzysztof for this offer, it saves a lot of money and it will be nice to catch up.

Besides Debconf, there are also several nice parties and events this spring, and of course the completion of my master project.

2007-04-19: Finish my Master Project paper
2007-05-16: Finish my Master thesis
2007-05-17: A State of Trance 300 celebration outdoor
2007-06-01: Master Project presentation (date not definite)
2007-06-12 — 2007-06-26: Attend Debconf7, holiday in Edinburgh
2007-07-19: Official graduation date (ceremony postponed till 2007-08-28)
2007-07-07: Intuition Summer event!

And after that,… who knows? It probably should involve some work in the summer and maybe an ad-hoc holiday. I’m looking at several options: maybe do a PhD, maybe working for Google or maybe something completely different. More about that later.

IPv6 Troubles

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-03-26T00:00:00+02:00

In response to Joey’s IPv6 autoconfiguration troubles:

Over the years I’ve gotten IPv6 autoconfiguration working just as you described: load the module and bring the interface down and back up. Though, I suspect you may have been running Debian’s linux-image-2.6.18-3-{arch} kernel which seemed to drop/neglect/whatever (I haven’t checked the specifics) IPv6 multicast (link-local) traffic over which the autoconfiguration is done. When 2.6.18-4 arrived in Sid, all worked fine for me after a reboot too.

Technical Stuff

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-03-21T00:00:00+01:00

Hobix

There were some issues concerning Hobix and the new Ruby (1.8.6) that entered Sid recently. I’ve solved the problem, as you can see, and uploaded a Subversion snapshot package to experimental.

Update: It seems that hobix 0.5~svn20070319-1 accidently was uploaded without share data. This was spotted and fixed by Arnaud, thanks! A new version (0.5~svn20070319-2) is on its way to experimental!

Ruby D-Bus

A few weeks ago I wrote to Arnaud Cornet about the fact that it is quite amazing that there is no up-to-date implementation of D-Bus for Ruby at all after such a long time. This resulted a few days ago in our Ruby D-Bus project. Some stuff is working already, quite low-level still, but really nice. I’m looking forward to designing the high-level API.

I found out that other people had the same thoughts as us and also started to work on an implementations on their own without telling anyone. So, it seems there are three implementions now (as far as I know) that all have specific features working. I hope we can merge everything into one project. We’ll see what happens…

OpenID

I have taken some interest into OpenID, having to register some accounts on arbitrary forums. I ran into the fact that Rails recently got OpenID support and that support for phpBB is coming up, which is nice. Finally it could be over with all the logins and all the password. At the moment I haven’t found a statisfactory identity provider yet, so I started working on my own service. Ruby OpenID has an example server implementation which I am working on to become FLOIDS: the Free Luon OpenID Service.

Koditoj

Recently, I inventoried all the programs I authored or co-authored in the past 8 years. There is some stuff in there that maybe deserves a second life or at least some description. So, in a series of posts that I’ll call ‘Koditoj’ (free translatable from Esperanto to ‘things that have been coded’) I want to go over all these programs and libraries and give them some attention. More to come soon…

What Etch Will Bring

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-12-31T00:00:00+01:00

With 2006 almost finished, I can look back at a succesful year for the Debian/Ruby Extras team. The infrastructure was set up and we gained 12 new team members and a lot of packages. With Etch frozen, I can now almost certainly say what Etch will bring Ruby-wise:

35 new libraries and applications.
A meta-package libruby-extras to extend the Ruby Standard Library with some more useful libs.
Consistent packaging of the 44 team-packaged apps and libs.
RubyGem support (courtesy of Daigo Moriwaki)

I am proud of what we have accomplished, good work everyone! Not team related is the change that the whole Ruby stdlib is now bundled in libruby(1.8) and is no longer split up! So you all can remove those Debian-specific messages about having to “do extras things when using Debian”. ;)

Future plans for Lenny

Future plans for Lenny include updating and extending the Ruby Policy. Focus points will be package versioning, improving documentation. Also we intend to package even more Ruby libraries and applications and ask current Ruby lib/app developers to join us. A third matter I’d like to address is Gem support.

Debian Ruby Extras Etch To Do

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-11-01T00:00:00+01:00

During the past weeks I’ve been drawing up a list with things to be done for the Etch release concerning my work for the Debian/Ruby Extras team. I think it is quite complete now. I hope my fellow team members can help me accomplish these goals:

Solve all remaining issues concerning the ruby-pkg-tools.
Make sure that all team-maintained packages are:
- bug-less, that is, no open priority minor or higher bug reports,
- installable,
- up-to-date with respect to the upstream version.
Consider all work-in-progress packages and get them in Etch if they are worthy.
Take over the packages put up for adaption by Damog.
Create the libextras-ruby meta-package and get it into Etch.

I think the first two items are as good as taken care of. However, the last three points need some more attention the next few weeks.

Journal Revamp

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-09-05T00:00:00+02:00

Although I have a lot to post it has been quiet on this journal. The main reason is that I wanted to wait with new posts until I had the new Hobix package ready. In the Debian/Ruby Extras team I have been working on the package and it’s getting along nicely. The new Hobix release features support for trackbacks, comments, tags, publishing via a webapp and has some more plugins out-of-the-box.

Journal Alive Again

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-07-01T00:00:00+02:00

After replacing the laptop disk of my “server” that was failing yet again, my journal is alive again. I already had to replace the disk in November 2005. Of course, I cannot expect it to run for more than 7 months.

Anyway, holiday is near! I will leave for France (Perret, Bretagne) with friends and will really be gone for two weeks. I will leave July 8 and return on July 22. I am looking forward to this, especially because this is going to be my first real “external” holiday in 3 years.

Study

The study is going smoothly. I have almost finished my exams and the ones I have done so far went quite well. I had to change my planning though, since I was asking too much of myself. A feasible, less ambitious planning will get the job done much better than an overfull, too ambitious plan (4 courses, 4 assignment and 10 hours of work per week). While everybody is probably consciously aware of this, including me, I had to learn it the hard way.

After my holiday I plan to finish the pending thee assignments that I have been postponing for years and then, September 1, start with my 6 month Master project. I hope to finish the project and get my MSc somewhere in April 2007, so near… :)

Debian/Ruby

I noticed that the Debian Python team beat us to it with the rigorous policy changes. The Debian/Ruby Extras team has been planning quite some changes for a few months but actually haven’t gotten around to discussing about it and doing some real proposals. Meanwhile the team grown in numbers of members and packages and everything is running smoothly (except of course for some issues concerning the current policy). I hope to activate that process in or just after the summer holidays.

Sarge Released

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-06-06T00:00:00+02:00

I wanted to congratulate everyone with the Sarge Release . It took a while, true, but it’s done now… that’s all I have to say about it. :)

Package status

I’ve filed quite some ITPs lately and I have worked on some of them, so here is a small status overview.

Hobix — Almost ready, I am awaiting the “plugin-system” rework to be finalized in CVS, which will take some work out of my hands.
RPA Base — I am not yet sure how to package this… how this is going to cooperate with a Debian installation. This is the same thing that has been itching with RubyGems
Ruby Facets, Ruby Carets — Still working on those.
Ruby Breakpoint — I haven’t started yet, but it shouldn’t pose much of a problem.
Ruby SVG — The most recent ITP, a small little library that I have already packaged unofficially. It needs more documentation and then it’s ready.

I have also been working on a CDBS class for Ruby’s setup.rb. It is basically working, but I am not satisfied, it misses some features like documentation generation, and support for creating debs for multiple Ruby versions. Because Christian Neukirchen posted a very nice proposal for a distutil-alike install system for Ruby on Ruby-Talk and the Debian Ruby list, I am going to suspend work on the setup.rb class for a while and see how this system will evolve.

Debian Ruby Team

Ruby Carets, Ruby Facets and Ruby Breakpoint libraries are meant to become members of a sort of Ruby Standard Library supplement. These and other useful small libraries will be caught under a libruby-extras virtual package. Work on this package will be done by a Debian Ruby Maintainers Team¹ using a project on Alioth. More about that soon!

¹ The team still has to be formed, if you want to help/join, please let us know via the list.

Revolution

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-04-30T00:00:00+02:00

I’ve just sponsored the upload of libevolution-ruby (Ruby Evolution Data Server bindings) a few moments ago, maintained by David Moreno Garza. It is really a small nice thing with some potential. I’ve just written this script email_of to perform a regex search in my contacts and print them in a “email-style” manner:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'revolution'

# Add functionality to the Contact class for 
# displaying using an "email-style" format.
class Revolution::Contact
  def name_and_email
    email_addresses.values.flatten.map { |email|
      "%s %s <%s>" % [first_name, last_name, email]
    }.join("\n")
  end
end

# Get the pattern from the command-line (if any).
if ARGV.length == 1
  pattern = Regexp.new(ARGV.first)
else
  $stderr.puts "Usage: #{$PROGRAM_NAME} <pattern>"
  exit 1
end

# Find the contacts matching the pattern.
evo = Revolution::Revolution.new
found = evo.get_all_contacts.find_all do |contact|
          pattern.match(contact.first_name) or 
          pattern.match(contact.last_name)
        end

puts found.map { |c| c.name_and_email }.join("\n")

Easy does it!

GUADEC

Bram Senders and I are arranging for Spacelabs trip to go to GUADEC this year. For us the entrance fee was a surprise as well, but enough about that. We hope to get it all settled soon, so we can just sit and wait for it to become May 26. Right :)

Ruby Stdlib (3)

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-03-15T00:00:00+01:00

I’ve mailed a few times with Akira Yamada and after some tweaking, his Ruby 1.8 packages have been uploaded with most of Ruby’s standard library packages put in one package: libruby1.8. The libraries still being packages separately are the ones have dependencies unrelated to Ruby’s dependencies. Great work Akira.

This is step 1 and I hope that Fumitoshy Ukai will follow with step 2: adapting the ruby-defaults to follow the setup of the new ruby1.8 package structure. When this is done (hopefully soon), the “main complaint” about Debian from a Ruby users perspective (yes, Andrew, some people are nuts and get involved with another blasted pocket language) will be gone when it’s time to release Sarge¹.

Website

Between studying for exams I’ve finished converting my own small website to use Hobix as well, so that the layout side but also maintaining side works and looks the same. A lean and mean site for my P233-laptop-server, dynamic HTML is overrated anyway.

¹ Nope, I am not going to say anything about that. :)

RubyGems and Debian

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-02-11T00:00:00+01:00

I was surprised to see some activity for packaging RubyGems for Debian two weeks ago; it has been really quiet in that area for a while now. There had been a lot of discussion in the Ruby community some time ago whether RPA or RubyGems should be used to install third party Ruby libraries and applications. Currently the general consensus is that both systems can live together as long as developers are not going to publish their software in Gem form only.

Last week there was some discussion about RPA/RubyGems and Debian on the Debian-Ruby list as a reaction on the packaging of Rails (which is well underway). Marcelo E. Magallon brought up some interesting points and hit the spot with what I had been thinking about the situation too.

In my opinion RPA does and will do a better job for Debian Ruby package maintainers both philosophy and operational wise, because they are very much alike. I’ve posted about RPA earlier and have decided to ITP RPA base. The resulting package will be meant as a tool for Debian Ruby developers so that QA can be done in cooperation with the RPA team but also to work in a CPAN-like manner, provided it can be adapted not to update Debian native installed libs and handle other subtle issues.

Ruby Stdlib (2)

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-01-27T00:00:00+01:00

There has been quite a lot of fuss about the Debian Ruby Stdlib stuff the past days. Adeodato Simó, Andres Salomon and I have drafted a proposal for a possible working solution for the problem. I think the solution given in the proposal is better than what the idea I had in a previous journal entry. It adapts the ruby-defaults package and providing for ways to install ruby using three levels (on a Debian X-like manner):

ruby — installs the full ruby suite (ruby-core and rest of standard libs that depends on non-standard/required libraries).

ruby-core — installs ruby-interpreter and most of the standard libs that are either pure Ruby or depend on standard/required libraries.

ruby-interpreter — installs the Ruby interpreter only, what the ruby package is now.

This way, apt-get install ruby will install what everyone expects, the interpreter and all of standard lib. I have uploaded a modified version of the ruby-defaults packages to try this setup, they are available via:

deb http://people.debian.org/~paulvt/ruby ./

I can now use ruby-core since I don’t feel much for having Tk and stuff. Note that there are still some version depends on ruby. Although ruby-interpreter provides ruby, you’ll still have to install the entire tree when you got some packages installed that have a versioned depend on ruby.

Ruby Stdlib

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-01-25T00:00:00+01:00

OK! I have to write something about this. Warren Brian Noronha on the #ruby-lang IRC (FreeNode) channel pointed me to some nasty blog entries (too-biased and the buckblogs here) about the current state of Ruby’s standard library packages in Debian. Besides the fact that such an issue shouldn’t be a reason at all to switch distro (if it is, one can keep switching forever), there is a point in all this.

A bug report has been open for a while requesting the creation of a ruby-stdlib virtual packaging and I’ve seen it be seconded many times on the debian-ruby mailinglist. Unfortunately I’ve seen no action on nor any comments about this bug/request. I’ve heard many requests for putting everything in one ruby-stdlib package, which is not a really nice solution either, IMO. I can understand the maintainers reluctance; such a package would introduce dependencies on Tk, XML libraries, etc.

A compromise could be to make the ruby package depend on ruby-stdlib-core, which is a real package containing all architecture independent libs without causing dependencies on other Debian packages (ala perl-modules). Both can be installed regardless anything. Next to that, ruby should recommend on the virtual ruby-stdlib-other (or some other name) package, that depends on smaller stdlib packages as libruby-tk, etc (ala gstreamer0.8-plugins).

NB. If someone has other suggestions, please mail them to the debian-ruby list or drop by at the IRC channel (#debian-ruby@FreeNode).

RPA and Debian

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-10-31T00:00:00+02:00

I seem not to have written here for two weeks, where did the time go? Well, study projects probably… I have been working on GOAT! a lot and other misc stuff.

Today, I’ve looked into the first implementations of the RPA and Debian coupling. Now RPA base is maturing and the development 0.3 branch had some Debian source/binary specific generating code in it by bitserf, I decided to try it and and maybe help.

It is going to look something like this (or then again, maybe not at all):

  % rpa source iowa
  % rpa-build -t debian -b ./iowa source
  % ls
  iowa/
  iowa-0.9.1/
  iowa_0.9.1-2.diff.gz
  iowa_0.9.1-2.dsc
  iowa_0.9.1.orig.tar.gz
  % cd iowa-0.9.1
  % dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot …

When the source port is downloaded, Debian source can be generated from the meta-data in the RPA installer file/class in iowa/install.rb.

A Debian specific install script is put in iowa-0.9.1/debian/rules which could inherit the installer and be modified at will by the maintainer. An example of generated debian/rules template doing the standard stuff:

  #!/usr/bin/env ruby
require ‘install’
class Debianize_iowa < Install_iowa
end

I’m not sure how to handle the Debian Changelog yet. debian/rules specific targets should be handled by the class in some way as well.

If we get this working, both RPA (and thus users of other operating systems working with Ruby) and Debian will benefit from this. I intend to commit non-Debian specific changes back to RPA (also QA stuff) and create a tight coupling so that Debian packages are very up-to-date and easy to maintain (read: no work at all to maintain). I’m currently trying to find my way in the code. You will hear more of this…