YaSTuza Headquarters

I survived FOSDEM 2011

2011-02-09T15:48:17Z

After some reports from other LibreOffice crowd members (here and here), I'm adding mine to the heap:

Friday

The fun has started at Prague airport already. Due to (to put it mildly) incompetence of the printing shop I'm not gonna name, Kendy and me had exactly 10 minutes to dispatch 45 kilos of swag through the check-in -- that meant distributing the load into our luggage and shipping the remaining boxes as overweight ( including paying criminal surcharge for it). I hereby apologize to Czech Airways check-in clerk for spoiling her shift with it ;-) Getting the material from Brussels luggage claim to the train station was rather challenging as well, but fortunately there were some helping hands waiting for us at Brussels Nord (thanks Thorsten, Rene and Kohei). In Kendy's words: "The experience doesn't necessarily have to be positive, but it definitely has to be remarkable. We would have nothing to talk about otherwise."

Friday's beer event (my first ever) was also an enchanting experience. Met Caolan and Florian 'flr' Reuter for the first time (who, in slightly boozed state, asked me "Hey, so you are my successor at Novell?"). It was amazing to see LibreOffice crew almost having blocked the street in front of Delirium Cafe :)

Saturday

Pleased to meet more LibreOffice crew members (Chris, Bjoern, Jacqueline), some of them for the first time (Cor, Charles). I've spent most of the day in and around LibreOffice booth, talking to people and selling/giving out swag, but there was plenty of time for other stuff as well. I've seen lightning talk by Rudolf 'Ruik' Marek on coreboot (purely as his fan club member, he's FEL CVUT alumni just as I am) and also Nokia's Kenneth Christiansen presentation on challenges encountered by devs of mobile applications. Managed to have my empty cellphone battery charged by a device made of hairclip (thanks, Pavel). Also made a tour around the other boots, to grab some interesting swag (there'll be another blog post on this in the near future).
Here are some photos from the day (left to right, up to down: unpacking the swag; Caolan and Fridrich; LibreOffice crew in hot hot hot T-shirts; LibreOffice crew talking to visitors -- Jacqueline, Bjoern, Thorsten, Kendy; more visitors chatting -- Cor and Chris; hungry Kendy with portion of vlaamse frieten):

The fun continued until late in Volle Gas restaurant, where LibreOffice crowd & its fan club and friends moved after FOSDEM venue closed. Got introduced to Jim Blandy ("that Madeira guy") and talented Mr. Seward -- more than pleased (insider joke: having Wikipedia article about oneself is an ultimate tool to impress anyone, not just women ;-) ). I was slightly underwhelmed by the quality of food, but hey, for having a really good rabbit one has to go to Malta.
Some more pics to share (left to right, up to down: the whole crowd in Volle Gas; Fridrich, Flr and Kohei; genius' corner; shiny happy Sweetshark):

Sunday

Spent morning in the LibreOffice booth, boosting our swag sales with Cor. The highlight of the day is clearly this Sun/Oracle executive in LibreOffice sweatshirt:

As LibreOffice devroom has been opened today and we were pretty much short on crew, there was unfortunately not much time for me to see some other presentations. Bad luck, I heard Michael's talk has been fun (as usually, he knows how to make a show) and I was also curious about WoMoz ladies. However, within our devroom I attended Chris' fabulous presentation on LibreOffice design team, Thorsten's Impressive hacking talk and Kohei's Calc bright future presentation (as a camera (wo)man, not quite voluntarily *grin*). Time passed by quickly and unfortunately (or not, I was already feeling as if run over by truck ;-) ) we had to leave. With Thorsten, we managed to grab some delicious waffle (lot of cream, strawberries and chocolate) on the way to the airport, yummy :)

And that, dear children, is finally the end of FOSDEM fairytale. I'm definitely coming back next year.

Yay! LibreOffice 3.3 released

2011-01-26T16:22:40Z

Most of the important stuff has been already said, so without much ado, let me share some pictures from LibreOffice release party we threw yesterday at 12 a.m. sharp in Prague Novell office.

Prague hacker crowd waiting for the fun to start:

Ready to rock!

Kendy waving the LibreOffice flag:

... and the final baptism of this baby of ours:

Many thanks to everyone who participated! Another round of thanks to Kobliha for photodocumentation. No animals were harmed and no hackers got drunk while producing those pics.

Freeeeeee Fall!

2010-08-24T08:44:50Z

Yeah, it is really me jumping from the aircraft and falling down. My first thoughts after the jump weren't "Wow, this is fun", but "Geez, I've done it and I'm still alive".
Big thanks to Gejza and Bery (the two instructors accompanying me) - if it weren't for them, I would have never mustered courage to actually jump. Another big thanks to ACMik, Alenka and Danny - there's nothing like landing into the cheering crowd of your friends, especially when it's your first time :)

I survived LinuxTag 2010

2010-06-15T19:39:31Z

Migraine. Fatigue.
Sucky talk on the usual suspect. Better let some projects die.
Saw Matthias SuperStar Ettrich live. Yes, and QML rocks too.
Disappointed to see no hackers in OpenOffice booth.
Got introduced to lovely Jacqueline (German community lead).
Seen Szabgab's talk on Perl testing, didn't manage to say shalom to him.
Currywurst (the best in the world) with Oliver and Thomas.
Absolutely fantastic talk by Ivanka on how to make usability happen in Linux.
More talks, on how Microsoft and SAP care about open source.
Didn't quite enjoy the party (anti-social event).
Enlightened by AJ on why Berlin cycling lanes are red (it's all blood of the tourists).
Attended OOo usability workshop ...
... turned out to be " what's wrong with OOo community, oh and btw also with OOo interoperability" discussion.
Met Elizabeth and Talented Mr.Noack. Long chat about Rennaisance. Wish I could participate
Interview for Radio Tux. Must've been lousy companion.
Saw what has remained of Berlin Wall (wish for tearing down the wall between Israel and Palestine one day).
More fatigue. Waiting for the circle to close.

Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day

2010-03-24T22:52:13Z

Today is Ada Lovelace day - an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science ((thanks Sankar for reminding me, although I signed the pledge some time ago already, I would have certainly forgotten it completely in this "moved to a new team" frenzy ;-)).

I'm going to introduce to you one of the most brilliant mathematicians of her era, a heroine that lived in difficult times where women were not admitted to the universities and scientific societies. Despite all the obstacles, she significantly contributed to number theory and her findings helped to solve one of the greatest mathematical mysteries of all times - Fermat's last theorem. Ladies and gentleman, Sophie Germain.

Sophie was born in 1776 into the middle class French family. She discovered magical world of numbers and mathematics as a teenager, to a great dismay of her parents who in the effort to prevent their daughter from pursuing such an unfeminine career used to confiscate her candles and remove heating from her room so that she couldn't study. But in the end, it was her father who financially supported her research and her efforts to break into the male-only community of mathematicians.

In 1794, Ecole Polytechnique was opened in Paris, but unfortunately, its gates were closed to women. In order to pursue studies anyway, Sophie assumed an identity of drop-out student, monsieur Le Blanc and was submitting answer sheets under this pseudonym. It was only after course supervisor, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, astonished by her brilliant answers, insisted on meeting the talented student when her true identity was revealed.

She quickly moved from homework assignments to more difficult problems and being interested in number theory, she had to come across Fermat's theorem sooner or later. She proved the theorem for particular type of primes, making an important step towards the final proof on which later generations of mathematicians could build. In later age, she also explored elasticity theory and received grand prize from Paris Academy of Sciences for her research on the subject. Sophie died of breast cancer in 1831. A particular type of primes (if n is prime, 2n+1 is also prime) is called "Sophie Germain prime" in her honour.

My choice of extraordinary female scientist to blog about was not random - I wanted to introduce a pioneer woman in some field to illustrate how much prejudice and institutionalized misogyny women had to (and sadly, sometimes still have to) overcome to succeed just as well as men do. Using the words of Carl Friedrich Gauss ("the prince of mathematician") in one of his letters to Germain: "A taste for the abstract sciences in general and above all the mysteries of numbers is excessively rare: one is not astonished at it: the enchanting charms of this sublime science reveal only to those who have the courage to go deeply into it. But when a person of the sex which, according to our customs and prejudices, must encounter infinitely more difficulties than men to familiarize herself with these thorny researches, succeeds nevertheless in surmounting these obstacles and penetrating the most obscure parts of them, then without doubt she must have the noblest courage, quite extraordinary talents and superior genius."

Many thanks to these brave heroines who paved the way to us, modern women in technology and science.

References: Wikipedia, Simon Singh's book (Fermat's Last Theorem - highly recommended read)

Back from Israel

2010-03-22T20:30:28Z

It has been fabulous vacation I can wholeheartedly recommend to everyone. Not taking into account some small things, such as obnoxious security officers at Prague airport who spent almost an hour questioning me (young women traveling on their own are probably the most dangerous criminals ;) maybe because they're so stealth :D ), it'd be perfect.

I brought this hilarious joke home as a souvenir (attention - if you tend to be offended by jokes showing the Palestinians in negative light, don't read on):

What happens when a fly falls into a coffee cup?

The Italian - throws the cup, breaks it, and walks away in a fit of rage.

The German - carefully washes the cup, sterilizes it and makes a new cup of coffee.

The Frenchman - takes out the fly, and drinks the coffee.

The Chinese - eats the fly and throws away the coffee.

The Russian - Drinks the coffee with the fly, since it was extra with no charge.

The Israeli - sells the coffee to the Frenchman, the fly to the Chinese, drinks tea and uses the extra money to invent a device that prevents flies from falling into coffee.

The Palestinian - blames the Israeli for the fly falling in his coffee, protests the act of aggression to the UN, takes a loan from the European Union to buy a new cup of coffee, uses the money to purchase explosives and then blows up the coffee house where the Italian, the Frenchman, the Chinese, the German and the Russian are all trying to explain to the Israeli that he should give away his cup of tea to the Palestinian.

Sad and blue

2010-02-12T22:40:34Z

I'm blue. And not only that, I seem to suffer from writer's block. If there's something like "code-writer's block", I probably suffer from that, too (I believe there is, there was just no Stephen King to write a few horror books about it so far .... something I can consider doing when I retire).

I no longer feel the sense of accomplishment from the things I'm working on and I'm unhappy with the way where something I was always doing with passion (ie. YaST hacking) is heading. The fact that I can do absolutely nothing to change that further deepens my blues.

Most of the time, I tend to be the one trying to cheer up my colleagues and friends when they write blogposts like this by writing encouraging comments or pasting links to some feel-good stuff (my favourite one). Unfortunately, I can't do the same now for myself. Oh well ...

News from libstorage/YaST partitioner insectarium

2010-01-28T12:55:57Z

NFS to the power of 4

After ext4 and btrfs in openSUSE 11.2, nfs4 is the next filesystem to be fully supported by libstorage (libstorage is the engine that makes YaST partitioner moving). In the upcoming first milestone of openSUSE 11.3, you can already try mounting nfs4 shares from partitioner during installation and later too (*cough* it has been possible to opt for mounting the share as nfs4 already in 11.1, but GUI option was just dummy, you ended up with regular nfs3 anyway *cough* ;-) ). Big thanks to Arvin and Thomas for implementing it (if you want to help with libstorage hacking, read here how, if you are not into hacking, you can contribute your ideas).

And slightly off-topic (as this post tends to be storage-related): you can also give nfs4-based software repositories a try - openSUSE 11.3 libzypp (hence also zypper and YaST repo manager) is now nfs4-enabled, too.

Sheep^WDisk cloning

Imagine a box with four brand-new clean disks you want to combine into RAID5. Unless you're proficient in CLI tools usage and script writing, here's what you'd probably do: go to YaST partitioner, click first disk, click Add (1st partition), enter the data, click Finish, click Add again (for 2nd partition), enter the data, click Finish ... the same procedure for all partitions on the first disk. Now multiply that by four - isn't so much clicking around an annoying waste of time and energy?

Well, it doesn't have to be so anymore. As disks in RAIDs tend to have identical (or at least, very similar) partition layout, you can make use of new disk cloning feature (openSUSE 11.3 is the first one to have it - the original code was written by me for SLE11 SP1, and ported to 11.3 by captain Arvin):

Here you just partition one disk and pick the cloning option from the menu. A dialog with list that pops up shows all available disks that are suitable candidates for being the clone of the first one [1] Select one or more of those, confirm with OK and after committing the changes, voila! - there are now few clone brothers with the same partition layout, ready to be bundled into RAID (or LVM). It's easy :)

I wonder if any of other distro's partitioning tools can clone, too, and what approach they're using for setting up complex storage scenarios in an user-friendly way ...

[1] Of course, only the same size or bigger disks qualify, and for simplicity sake, they must share the cylinder size as well

On testing

2010-01-21T00:19:05Z

( I promised this article to Lukáš today, so now I really have to write it :) )

What is the most important part of software project? Experienced developers? Creative user interface designers? Good managers? Meticulous testers? Decision making in the right hands? Hmmm ... if you ask me, it's balanced combination of all of these, but this is not what I'm going to write about. Testing - that's (maybe along with l10n work) one of the most underestimated and largely invisible part of any software project, be it a small appliance or something as large-scale as Linux distribution.

Hackers often look down on QA guys and view them as those not being smart enough to actually write the code. Nothing can be further from the truth. A good tester is worth his/her weight in gold. Fairly recent experience with work on (partially closed-source) project taught me a lesson about vital importance of testing that I'll never forget. Really. Even the best code is dead without somebody testing it.

It is a tester who has to, using his/her experience and intuition, be able to pinpoint weak points of the software. When implementing a feature or creating a bugfix, developer's time is just enough to do some basic testing, verify it works, the bug is really fixed and be done with it. Tester has to use his/her creativity and come up with scenarios developer never dreamed about.

Tester has to have enough patience to go through the same boring set of basic routines with each and every new build. His/her learning curve with a new software has to be pretty steep. In limited time, s/he has to understand principles and configuration of the software and start using it as if s/he was an advanced user. At the same time, s/he has to quickly find out where the borderline between PEBCAK (Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard aka Layer 8 issue) and a real bug lies. I have to admit that this was the reason why I pretty much sucked at testing - I was so anxious about "I don't want to look stupid and file an invalid bug" that I spent hours and days studying docs and verifying it's not just me doing something wrong. I didn't realize that misleading documentation or confusing UI qualify as bugs as well.

When the project is finished, hackers are the guys in the spotlight and, sadly enough, QA work often stays unnoticed. Worse even, if the whole thing is a failure, testing squad is the first one to blame ("Damn, those guys must've had no QA. What? They had some? What they have been doing all that time then?"). Needless to say, that doesn't exactly boost one's confidence in the meaningfulness of his/her work.

To conclude, I'd like to dedicate this post to all our Four-Letter-Project testers (especially to the most active one of them) and to all former, present and future openSUSE testers. Ladies and gentlemen, a big round of applause for all those heroes, known and unknown!

bYnary incompatiDEbility

2010-01-12T22:03:23Z

All I really need know I learned in kindergarten ... Come on, say you're sorry when you mess things up. Allright, we released a YaST (ncurses) update. It broke ncurses packager in openSUSE 11.1 and 11.2 for everyone. One could still use GUI (qt/gtk) packager or zypper CLI - instead, or to fix things up (e.g. to downgrade), but this is not exactly the thing that boosts user's trust in the distribution, is it? Many thanks to Marcus for prompt response - a new update has been released swiftly and it can be downloaded by now. It was enough to rebuild ncurses packager against updated YaST ncurses UI lib ...

Logically, one could now ask "How comes you guys released such a crappy update? Hasn't it been tested at all?". Well, as Marcus already stated in bzilla, openSUSE update testing largely depends on those community members who use Update:Test repo and apply patches (almost) ready for the release before they hit official update repositories.
To improve the quality of updates (and to prevent buggy updates from hitting many users), we need more hero testers. What does it mean? Go subscribe Update:Test repo and/or look here how you can help maintenance team otherwise. Oh, and you may also talk your neighbour (sister, cousin, ... ) into doing the same :)

Moreover, in this particular case, it was few other little things that summed up and resulted in failure.

The original bug ("paging bug") this update was about to fix was reported against Package1 (yast2-backup), fixed in Package2 (yast2-ncurses) and the resulting patch crashed Package3 (yast2-ncurses-pkg). Package3 is one of approx. 80 YaST packages. Taking also update description into account, even a seasoned tester would probably pick the original module (yast2-backup) for testing here.
With dramatic increase in the popularity of zypper and "mainstreamness" of GUI tools, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that very few of our update testers actively use ncurses packager
This was the first yast2-ncurses update introducing ABI incompatibility since its split (package manager used to be integral part of the library in the past). We didn't have the experience "a dependent pack must be also included in the update" yet

Wanted: plugin lib versioning know-how

When sh** hit the fan, my thoughts followed along this line: "Now, if we introduce some system of tracking ABI changes in YaST libs .. " (shared library versioning it is called, now I know it) "... and have dependent packages require the correct version of shared library, we can avoid breakages like this in the future." But alas, my visit to YaST core wizard made me pretty pessimistic. Not only YaST core doesn't encourage shared lib writers to version their libs correctly, it makes (in its current form) the versioning impossible.

YaST core doesn't link against shared libs, it loads ( dlopen()s ) them on demand as plugins and the existence of different versions of plugins would complicate the situation ... So, my dear readers, if you happen to know some (preferably) open-source project that is already proficient in this i.e. it loads its components as plugins AND applies solid library versioning policy at the same time, let us (include MVidner the Wizard in the loop, too) know. Kingdom for know-how !

And now .... winter hibernation again.

YaST is falling, make a wish

2010-01-05T16:33:22Z

There it is - a new year and /me turning into fossil more and more each day :P I've never been much into making New Year's resolutions, as failure to fulfill them (almost always) only contributed to my overall frustration. So, what about making an exception and try some this year? Such as "I will finally lose some weight, my rear end is way too big" (but downhill skiing won't help me much there, will it?). Or "I will try harder to keep my apartment clean" (but frying a heap of falafels for dinner will turn the kitchen back to the state where it was before the cleaning). Or "I will be nice and friendly to my sister" ( er, ehm, ufff, ... ).

OK, this won't work. What about something realistic, such as "I will add some nice features to YaST's Qt control centre"? That's sort of better. So - I promise I will, but let's do it like this: it is you, this blog readers and openSUSE users, who will make a wish. But please don't be too fast and make one wish each :) Here are some ideas that accumulated over the time:

Introduce "not yet installed modules" feature (this is originally Kobliha's idea). That is, have CC display (along with already installed YaST modules) also those that do exist in our repositories, but are not installed on the system yet. The user would see right away whether a YaST module e.g. for a service s/he needs to configure exists and if it does, s/he could install it. To distinguish those modules from "regular" YaST modules, their icons could be e.g. greyed out ( they're not greyed out yet on the following pic, it's just to get the idea):

Show additional info on selected YaST module. Think of it as viewing "properties" of the module without actually launching the module itself- a short textual summary showing what is already configured here and how. This is Duncan's idea and he already prepared some infrastructure for it in the CC code. I just failed to integrate it to the final openSUSE 11.2 version as I couldn't think of suitable way of presenting the data (the amount of the text seemed to me too much for a simple tooltip as you can see on the following pic).

Show something like history ("Recently used modules") and/or allow user to select his/her favourite ones and have them as a separate category (no pic for this, sorry)

Improving the navigation?

I've designed Qt4 port of YaST CC to be similar to Gnome's one when it comes to navigation, but obviously I've made some users unhappy with it. The ideas how to improve/change the navigation I got as a feedback from the users fall into two categories:

Revert back to old style of navigation. That is - click on a module group shows only modules in that particular group. See bug 561135
reported by Maciej.
Get even closer to Gnome and highlight all the icons in a group on selecting it, as Ra100 requests it in bug 538384

Another option is to do none of the above and to think of something entirely different (but beware, I'm lazy coder ;) ). Yet another option that makes (almost) everyone happy is to implement both, make it all configurable and allow user to switch between these two modes.

So, my beloved openSUSErs, comment the above ideas or add your own ones and if you feel you really can't live without particular feature being implemented for openSUSE 11.3 (or 12), enter it to openFaTE. Happy new year!

Creating and using driver update disk has never been so easy

2009-10-25T19:49:25Z

Hanging around on developer IRC channels and quite some mailing lists, I have answered "How do I create driver update disk?" question many times already. Usually a person asking was given RPM package with the fix and was asked to test it by creating driver update disk. Unfortunately, existing documentation leaves that poor fellow pretty helpless as for how it can be done.

There is this (almost) fossil how-to created by Henne and though it still holds up to these days, things were incredibly simplified in the meantime and now anyone can use driver update disk without any advanced technical knowledge. This post is an attempt to make up for missing documentation on the subject.

What is driver update disk and why do I need it?

Driver update disk is a mechanism to add or replace some functionality (binary, library, script, ...) in the minimalistic system of 1st stage of installation (inst-sys). Historically, it was a real physical media (CD/DVD) often used to extend inst-sys by new hardware drivers. Nowadays, its usage is neither limited to physical media, nor to deployment of device drivers.

Usually you would use driver update disk in one of following two situations:

Something in inst-sys is broken and you want to replace it with functional version
Something is not in inst-sys at all and you want to use it during installation anyway (e.g. a proprietary device driver).

OK, now how do I do it?

We will have a look at two use-cases - creating driver update disk from 1 RPM package (easy) and from two or more RPM packages (a bit more complicated, but still fairly easy), as the procedure slightly differs. We will need:

replacement/additional RPM package(s)
HTTP/FTP installation repository (no NFS/CIFS at the moment, sorry)

One package driver update disk

Example: during installation, you want to create /home partition with CrapwareFS which is already supported by YaST, but it fails because of bug in parted. A new parted-x.y-z.rpm seems to contain a fix for the bug. HTTP installation repository is on http://your.server.net/11.2/

Place fixed RPM package to HTTP installation repository (e.g. to its root directory)
Pass the path to fixed package (which will be one and the only component of our driver update disk) to the installer as follows:
```
dud=http://your.server.net/11.2/parted-x.y-z.rpm
```
(see picture below where exactly to type it in the installation screen)
Launch the installation and enjoy it, provided that updated package really fixes the bug

N packages driver update disk

Example: you have seen package slide show during installation many times already and in order not to be bored while packages are being installed, you would like to play chess (a bit artificially constructed example, but it serves the purpose of showing driver update with more packages fairly well :) ). You have already downloaded xboard-a.b-c, gnuchess-d.e-f and xorg-X11-fonts-g.h-i from contrib or other online repositories. HTTP installation repository is again on http://your.server.net/11.2

Place extra RPM packages to the root directory of HTTP repository (you may place it anywhere though, but then modify paths below accordingly)

Create a simple text file e.g. info.txt with one package per one line as follows:


dud=http://your.server.net/11.2/xboard-a.b-c.rpm
dud=http://your.server.net/11.2/gnuches-d.e-f.rpm
dud=http://your.server.net/11.2/xorg-X11-fonts-g.h-i.rpm

Place info file to the root directory of HTTP repository

Point the installer to info file:


info=http://your.server.net/11.2/info.txt

Launch the installation
As soon as you get bored, open xterm window (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-X), run xboard and play! :)

And we're done. Piece of cake, isn't it? :)

Some more notes: Currently, only HTTP and FTP repositories can handle these simplified driver updated discs. You can use, aside from RPM packages, cpio archives or fs images. If you find this functionality useful, send some beers to Steffen Winterfeld.

openSUSE Conference 2009 Impressions

2009-10-16T15:57:19Z

Yes, it's been a month since openSUSE Conference 2009 took place. And yes, I've been buried in other work to write my account of it any sooner. So - here it finally is. As there has already been a lot of posts like this, I'll just cherry-pick the things that were the most interesting for me.

I gave "Libyui - three interfaces for the price of one code" talk and received some valuable feedback (on the conference and later too, as I reiterated the talk for SUSE Prague employees) on making the library even better - how to improve packaging (from Pavol and Martin) and how to modify event handling (from Reinhard). As evaluating myself and the things I do objectively has never been my strength (which means, in other words, that I really suck at it), I'll deliberately not say anything more on topic :) ;) Enjoy libyui slides

Software portal in new costume

I was really looking forward to Benji and Pascal's talk on Software portal as I'm YaST webpin frontend maintainer (which is, contrary to some beliefs, not a beta version anymore - it has its own package and also a brand new chapter in openSUSE 11.2 docu :) ) They introduced concept and architecture of new improved software portal and also described some issues they face. Too many package repositories, lot of package duplication and lack of concise rating system were among the most prominent ones. I was also happy to learn that susetags repo parsing and indexing is on the way, so soon also Factory will be webpin-searchable.

Cute (Qt) community

I couldn't have missed Alexandra Leisse's presentation on Qt community and contributions as it's always delighting to find some of one's own species among tech conference speakers and not to be the only one standing out in the crowd.
Alexandra is web community manager and we learned that even though uploading videos to youtube, tweeting and feeding news to Facebook looks like funny job, it can be hell of a hard work :) She explained how they manage public relations with wannabe developers (in a sense of well accessible developer documentation, contribution how-to, tutorial and feature videos etc.), which ways they took in opening up the code to public (their cooperation with gitorious.org was especially interesting bit) and how they handle community contributions and code reviews. She also described some of the problems they had to tackle.

opensuse.org in the eyes of eye-tracking device

With software usability being my area of interest, I decided to pick one of unconference tracks led by SUSE's usability expert Sigi Olschner. I've never seen usage of eye-tracking device in practice, so I was really curious what feedback it can provide to user interface designer (oddly enough, I couldn't be the guinea pig myself, as I wear contact lenses and the device just failed to calibrate my pupils with lenses on :) ). As sophisticated as eye-tracker is, it can record eye movement, mouse pointer movement and keyboard focus movement and later present data in various forms - such as heat maps, or "movies" (where one can replay the sequence of how user moved the mouse and where s/he looked during the test).

Test tasks this time were really simple. "Go to openSUSE forums and try to find some information on driver for Radeon gfx card" and "Go to openSUSE wiki and find out the date of 11.2 GoldMaster release".

Weeeell ... one does not need an expensive device to find out how much opensuse.org (in a sense - "anything on opensuse.org beyond the title page") sucks^W improvement would be needed and how cumbersome it is to find what you're looking for in there (you're far better off googling for "$searchphrase site:opensuse.org"). But seeing the final video of an attempt to find openSUSE 11.2 GM release date, with user's eye focus running chaotically up and down on the page in combination with mouse pointer zig-zag track revealed opensuse.org's bad usability in its essence (at the end, he was unable to find the date at all - from the title page he correctly navigated to the page announcing milestone7, but couldn't spot the link to full release schedule at its very bottom).

Suggestion: could Pascal's next release countdown applet be moved to some more prominent place e.g. to the opensuse.org title page?

Moreover, in the light of previous talk on Qt community I surfed on Qt community pages later at home and their proffesional appearance, easily accesible information and intuitive navigation were really in sharp contrast with our pages. I wonder how many more users would improved navigation and look&feel of opensuse.org (wiki and forums) win us ...

A movie with package dependencies as main stars

Everyone knows package dependency browser in YaST Qt package manager. So I was rather curious what more on visualizing package dependencies Klaus Kaempf has to show. And that was really something. More sophisticated 2D graph, 3D graph and even a movie, visualizing how GNOME basesystem is being installed and how packages are gradually pulled in (as it really looked like a star galaxy, we can say that GNOME packages were the main stars of the talk :)).
Klaus however left ideas where to use package dependencies visualizations up to the audience and at the end of the brainstorming, there were quite some useful proposals. I really liked one of the build service integration ideas, where I could view which packages block the build of my package when I see its status as "blocked".

.... and that's all, folks. I had to leave early on Saturday. But not early enough to miss out lunch, which was really excellent. Praise goes to conference catering.

I'm too sexy for men's T-shirt

2009-09-22T20:38:11Z

openSUSE shop already got the wind of it:

(obviously, this item is so popular that by now, it is available in America's shop only, being sold out from Europe's one for quite some time already).
Surprisingly, so did root.cz, the most popular Czech Linux and open-source e-zine:

(those folks went even further and offered those cute penguin motives also on ladies thongs, check out their shop :))

Unfortunately, this year's openSUSE conference organizing team either assumed that all the conference participants will be male, or (more likely) deliberately chose not to take female minority into account. Ladies tees were sadly not among the conference swag. So I said no, thanks, I already have a shelf full of Linux/opensource/tech conference T-shirts I can hardly wear, because they simply do not fit (those of you who happened to meet me at the conference know that I look drowned even in men's S size ;-) ). I see no point in handing them to friends/relatives either, after all, it was me, not them, who participated at the event, right?

It is a tiny little detail (compared to e.g. lack of wi-fi connection at the conference site), you may say, and you're actually right. But often it is a tiny little detail that can make you feel welcome and accepted in the community (and absence of which, on the contrary, can contribute to the feeling of being marginalized and invisible minority).

I don't believe this is all about money (and saving some cents on T-shirt print run). Some fraction of the T-shirt pool can well be a ladies model, those do not cost more. I also don't believe that majority of ladies tees would be left after the conference as participating ladies simply did not match organizing team estimate when it comes to the sizes. Come on, two years ago really cute ladies tees were handed out on SUSE Labs conference (even though only up to 5 of the participants were female) and they were gone in the first two days. Reason? Hackers simply took them home for their wives/girlfriends.

Imho, this is more about the least common denominator, minimalized effort and that sort of things. But - even if conference swag is just a cherry on the top of the cake, it can speak volumes. About how much you care about your community and how much you value users as individuals.

To conclude, instead of repeating obvious and anything that has been already said, read more on topic

on Kathy Sierra's blog and
on geekfeminism wiki

I couldn't say it better. And hey, conference team, for the next year, help openSUSE folks (all of them - including 4% female minority - 10 out of ~250 registered participants were women) look good in your T-shirts. After all, it is a form of community marketing, isn't it?

Words, words, words

2009-08-15T20:59:47Z

Now that I'm back from vacation (some breath-taking climbing in Italy), it's time to pamper penny-a-liner side of me and give some publicity to few fresh openSUSE 11.2 features. Here is one of them:

Back in the times of KDE3, I used to find the fact that I can search KCM modules by keywords (that is, in addition to module names, it looked for a match also in groups of tags, describing the function of the module in detail) rather handy. My colleague Pavol, the user of Most Awesome Computer OS X, seemingly appreciates that Apple's System Preferences (equivalent of YaST) can do the same, so he requested feature #305845. It was then a matter of one afternoon to teach Qt4 Control Centre to do the same.

Now let's have a look at some real example. I want to share my vacation photos with the others by exporting the folder, so that they can mount it (or alternatively, I want to mount somebody else's shared folder with photos). After typing 'share' keyword, I can see a selection of YaST modules which I can possibly use:

Now I can choose between samba and NFS server if I want to export my shared folder, or NFS client if I want to mount somebody else's one.

Contribution needed

To make the search effective (better, to make it find at least something ;)), it is necessary to assign sets of suitable keywords to as many YaST modules as possible and this is exactly the place where community contribution will be useful.
So - if you feel that certain YaST module does not match the keyword even though it should, please do one of the following:

Use bugzilla to file an enhancement request and assign it to the mainteiner of that module
For that particular YaST package, do a Factory submit request, extending its .desktop file with the keyword(s)

For the latter, use X-SuSE-YaST-Keywords .desktop file entry and add a comma-separated list of words. E.g it can look as follows:


X-SuSE-YaST-Keywords = disk, partition, LVM, RAID, NFS, mount,format, encrypt, fstab

(guessing which module this could belong to is an exercise for the reader :) ) Anyway, any help will be appreciated ...

Voulez-vous chercher les paquets avec moi?

2009-07-22T08:43:04Z

"Ladies and gentlemen, now the moment you've all been waiting for - the world famous ..."

... YaST webpin package search client!

It is already quite some time since I blogged about YaST frontend to webpin package search, which enables user to search packages in online repositories and install them via one-click handler later. I proposed some solutions of integrating it with the rest of YaST, but did not particularly like any of them (that's the perfectionist side of me ...). After being (just a little bit :)) poked by some openSUSE users, I decided to implement two of the less perfect solutions ;-) in the first part of Hackweek IV.

In order to use the client and search packages in online repositories, you will need a new yast2-packager-webpin package (which has been splitted off the "main" yast2-packager). It contains the module, the client and the .desktop file, which effectively adds the icon to YaST control centre. The idea behind creating a new package is rather simple - not to clutter software section of CC with (similar) modules/icons by default for all users, including those who don't want to make use of that functionality. Now I guess I've made this package (originating from Packman) rather obsoleted .. :)

In addition to that, you can launch webpin package search from package manager's menu (Qt and ncurses so far), just as you would do with repository manager or online update configuration.

Call for contribution

These are the things that still need to be done in order to get webpin search integration even better:

1. A new icon for webpin client is needed - as you can see, I recycled package manager icon for the time being
2. Gtk package manager (yast2-gtk-pkg) can't call webpin client currently - should be simple and straightforward to add the functionality to it.

If any of those sounds appealing to you, please let me know and I'll give you all the necessary information on how, what, where etc. :)

FAQ's

Q: Why haven't you made webpin search separate filter view of package manager/integrated it into regular search in existing package manager(s) GUI?
A: Because neither of package managers (Qt/Gtk/curses) speaks XML and webpin search engine does not speak libzypp. Learning PMs read XML and adjusting their data models to feed it, along with libzypp data, to UI is work for few hackweeks in a row (for me, a person with zero experience with C++ XML libs - yast2-packager-webpin uses Perl XML::Simple). However if anyone's willing to hack on this ...

Q: Why does webpin search not work in Factory?
A: Because Factory is not a rpm-md repo. See bug #431939 for gory details

Farewell to Qt3, enter YaST Qt4 Control Centre

2009-06-30T08:50:57Z

During the longest break in the history of this blog, I've been working on the project of my dreams. As exhausting as it got, it almost sucked all life out of me, but it's finally here - Qt4 port of YaST Control Centre. It now builds in Factory, so you can install it and try it soon. It is by no means perfect and it has certainly quite some rough edges, so please give it a good deal of testing in the beginning. Enough of words for now, let the picture speak

I'd like to use this opportunity to say thanks to all my real-life and online friends for their valuable feedback - they took their time to look at the screenshots, try the experimental interface and comment on it. "Omg, it looks so gtk2 control-centre-ish" said one of them when he saw one of the final prototypes and ... I have to admit he was somehow right. It was partially my intention to make those two (Qt4 and Gnome control centre) similar at least when it comes to controlling the user interface, not only in order to make our Doku-Wichtl happy so that they don't have to make two sets of screenshots :) It is in general rather user unfriendly to have users get used to entirely different UI concept when they switch between two major desktops (KDE & Gnome). Moreover, many control-centre-like applications (aforementioned YaST Gnome CC, KDE4 kcontrol, briefly saw something similar in Win XP as well ... ) use the idea of categorized icon view with underlined category headers (it is maybe because they're all trying to imitate Mac OS X *evil-grin*)

What's new?

Transparently to the user, the whole thing has been rewritten to use model-view-controller paradigm (original initiative by Duncan MV)
Window size and its position on the screen is now persistent - this is something users have been asking for for ages, YaST CC window used to open always in the same hard-coded size, no matter the resolution. Due to QSettings magic, coding it was incredibly easy
Remember you now have to double-click the icon to launch the YaST module (single click is reserved for something that is not fully implemented yet)
Modules are searched (filtered) as you type in the search field - that means no more opening of extra window to search. Search is done over the names only, keyword search to come soon :)

And that's all, folks. I'll post some more screenshots of not-yet-ready little features and ask for feedback soon.

Footnote: the bubblegum pink is not supposed stay in the real version. It is my little gift to Pepa Reidinger.

Ext to the power of 4

2009-05-15T14:58:14Z

Picture (and even more so action) speaks louder than words. So ... voilà:

YaST partitioner can now (since feature #305691 is implemented) do ext4 and in addition to that (to really stress-test the feature and have possible bugs reported asap), ext4 has been made a default filesystem for openSUSE 11.2. And though I'm not in the position to really appreciate and make use of all the cool ext4 features, I'm sure there is bunch of our users that will.

Now don't thank me, thank captain Arvin as it was him who did the work and added ext4 support to the partitioner (in one afternoon, so to say). And while you're at it, you can send him some beer :) :D

Secret AutoYaST feature :)

2009-05-05T11:22:51Z

Recently I've discovered a secret feature in AutoYaST. Well, probably not so secret, because a SLES11 user (from our Two-Letter Customer) discovered it as well and reported a bug about it :) But all in all, if you googled for the keyword (keep_install_network) a week ago, the only hits were an AutoYaST changelog with short notice "I've added this feature" and few questions about it on opensuse-autoinstall mailing list. The documentation did not reveal any more details.

So - what does keep_install_network parameter, set to 'true' and inserted into <networking> section of AutoYaST profile, do? One can intuitively guess that it will preserve network configuration - that is, interfaces setup, resolv.conf bits, static routing, udev rules & co. - from 1st stage of installation (of course, only if the installation actually runs over the network) and it is indeed like that. Uwe blogs about it in more details

But unless you use openSUSE Factory, please don't try this at home :)

<networking>
  <keep_install_network config:type="boolean">true</keep_install_network>
</networking>

Network interfaces setup (ifcfg files) from the installation will be successfully preserved, but due to a bug, your static routing configuration (if you have any) will be moved into backup file and YaST won't create a new one and you will lose most of the information in /etc/resolv.conf. Unfortunately, nobody got the idea to test with the profile containing nothing more but keep_install_network entry in networking section so far :(

The bug is fixed now for openSUSE 11.2 and SLE11 SP1 (if nothing in particular sub-section of networking section is defined, the setup from installation is used, but AutoYaST profile is the higher authority here). However, if you use SLE11, you'd better install with profile containing at least minimal DNS and routing info, for example like this (set search domain, 1 nameserver and default gateway):

<networking>
    <keep_install_network config:type="boolean">true</keep_install_network>
    <dns>
      <dhcp_hostname config:type="boolean">false</dhcp_hostname>
      <domain>home.net</domain>
      <hostname>dolphin</hostname>
      <nameservers config:type="list"> 
        <nameserver>192.168.0.2</nameserver>
      </nameservers>
      <searchlist config:type="list">
        <search>home.net</search>
      </searchlist>
    </dns>
    <routing>
      <ip_forward config:type="boolean">false</ip_forward>
      <routes config:type="list">
        <route>
          <destination>default</destination>
          <device>-</device>
          <gateway>192.168.0.1</gateway>
          <netmask>-</netmask>
        </route>
      </routes>
    </routing>
  </networking>

Or use a workaround post-script Uwe posted to bugzilla, to backup your setup and to restore it later.

One good thing about these bugs is that not only it broadens your knowledge (when user comes up with scenario you never thought of) ;-) but it also helps us to improve things. keep_install_network feature is now documented and not secret anymore. Enjoy it!

How (not) to install openSUSE 11.1 on ThinkPad T-series

2009-04-27T12:40:00Z

Disclaimer: The information value of this posts tends to zero. Take it as an example of girlie chit-chat.

And now repeat after me:

"I will never partition my disk without creating separate /boot partition"

To begin with - for those who don't know it yet, I got myself a new toy and installing openSUSE 11.1 on it and playing with it looked like a cool way to spend Friday night, now didn't it? Foolishly enough, I decided that I want to have dual boot with pre-installed Windows and I don't want to lose ThinkVantage stuff. Thus, before leaving the office for the weekend, I was briefed by our YaST bootloader wizard which options in bootloader configuration to tick and which leave blank - basically, I must not let YaST overwrite master boot record if I ever want to be able to use ThinkVantage. He did not forget to add that if anything went wrong, I should bring the box over to him on Monday and he'll fix it up for me ...

A small intermezzo: though I've been pretending that I'm doing some YaST development for almost 3 years already ;-) I'm not really a technical person. I know a lot about widgets, user interface, usability and all that fancy stuff, but my knowledge of the system configuration ends in /etc/sysconfig or /etc/fstab at most. When it comes to something like system boot, I'm completely lost. At least I admit to it :-) :-D

The installation went on fine - I picked KDE4 as my default desktop environment, had the partitioner shrink Windows partition, created root and /home partition, double-checked whether I got the bootloader installation options right ("Boot from root partition" - check, "Boot from MBR" - uncheck, "Set active flag for boot partition" - check, "Write generic code to MBR" - uncheck) and watched the slideshow. The standard set of 1st stage finish scripts followed and then bang! - "Failed to install the bootloader. Try the configuration again?" (or something along those lines). Hm, if I answer "Yes" now, I'm smart enough to figure out it'll fail again, I thought, unless I change something - but what? Looking at y2log did not make me any less helpless - the last thing I saw was how bootloader uses some cryptic Perl script (/usr/lib/YaST2/bin/tp_mbr, to be exact) to detect ThinkVantage sequence in MBR and preserve it.

Nevermind, I rebooted, picked "Repair installed system" from the installation options and hoped that yast2-repair will help me find out what went wrong. Not surprisingly, it did not. It only showed me already well-known message about failed bootloader installation - quite a cruel joke :) At this point, I gave up. Trying to solve a problem where I don't understand a single bit of its principles is not that much like me. And after all, there are more pleasant ways how to spend Friday night - dancing salsa, for example ... :)

But don't get desperate, my friends - this story has a good ending. I brought my laptop to the wizard :-) I was not looking over his shoulder as he was working, so I don't know what magic spells and potions he used, but I know he did the following:

Created partitioning setup with separate /boot partition and told the bootloader to boot from it (that was maybe the crucial point)
Added a repository with openSUSE 11.1 updates as an add-on during installation
Made extended partition (with swap, /, /home and /boot) 1 cylinder smaller, as ThinkVantage partition at the very end of the disk did not begin exactly at the cylinder boundary

The last two steps were probably superfluous and it could've well worked out without them, but ... now I can't tell. Anyway the installation finished, the system booted and now I have shiny new ThinkPad with openSUSE 11.1. In this post, I'm writing about interesting host naming schemes people use - as for me, all my machines have animal names. So, say hello to Dolphin - he is named after one of my favourite books by Eric Lambert (it is so little known that even Google does not find it ;-) )

In conclusion, I consider myself to be quite lucky that I'm surrounded by many wizards (bootloader wizard, installation wizard, KDE wizard, some wireless stuff wizards, suspend wizard, ... ) ;-) What do normal openSUSE users who can't grab their machine and bring it to a wizard do, if the same (or similar) thing happens to them? "Oh, they go to #suse and cry there. Or they simply give up and go using Ubuntu" says Darix (whom I sometimes chat with when I suffer from insomnia and he stays at work at night). Sad to say that, but it's probably true ... :-(

[XZ]en and the art of giving compliments - part II

2009-04-21T21:54:52Z

Needless to say more :

"Not sure how you are doing it, but you always make me smile when we are talking."
"I know how - because you are doing the same. It is then easy to smile in return."

Wish you a nice day (evening/night, depending on the timezone you are in) and if you haven't got any compliment today so far, try to give some out :)

P.S. Exceptionally, I am being positive. Enjoy it, it does not happen to me very often :D

I survived LinuxExpo 2009 ...

2009-04-18T11:11:54Z

LinuxExpo is one of the biggest Czech Linux and open-source software events. It takes place every year in Prague and openSUSE project is for several years already one of the event regulars. In our openSUSE booth visitors can see and try the newest openSUSE release, get openSUSE DVD for free or buy a T-shirt. At the same time, talks and presentations of folks from Prague SUSE office are part of the event program.

This year, I also participated. With Miso Zugec, we had a joint talk on network-based installation and AutoYaST. Miso opened the talk by saying that for installing openSUSE on your machine neither you necessarily need any of the usual pre-requisities such as DVD, hard-disk or monitor, nor you have to spend 1 hour in cold server room clicking and answering installer's questions. He has shown some practical examples of how to use installation repository on network, install on iSCSI disk, or remotely via SSH or VNC.

I went on to introduce AutoYaST - a tool that comes in really handy when you install often, install lot of machines and you want to automate great part of the process. I introduced the basic concept of AutoYaST, showed folks the smallest AutoYaST profile in the world, how to clone your system and mentioned even some advanced AutoYaST usage, such as "<ask>" feature (a simple way of interactively asking for user input - such as root password or hostname - in the beginning of installation), or AutoYaST scripts.

In general, the talk was a success and I'm not saying that just because the presentation room (with ~100 seats) was so full that people had to stand on the corridor as they did not fit in. For me, much more significant measure was the number and meaningfullness of the questions people were asking in question time. At the end, I was really sorry that I did not have more time, so I could have introduced even more AY features, such as rules.

We spent the rest of the day in our openSUSE booth. To attract more visitors, a quiz question on openSUSE (Did you know when the openSUSE project was founded? Or how many binary packages is there in our BuildService?) was published every hour or so and folks could submit their answers. At announced time, three correct answers were drawn and winners got openSUSE T-shirts, plush geekos and other presents.

Other open-source project also participated on the event. For example, our booth was just next to Ubuntu's one (it was funny to see how people used Ubuntu machines in there to google for correct answers to openSUSE questions :) ). All in all, Pavol has some interesting pictures from the event (these are from Day 1) and there is also an article on LinuxExpo on root.cz (in Czech only, I'm sorry).

P.S. root.cz could definitely benefit from hiring a better photographer ... and I'm not saying that just because I, unlike the photo, don't look like zombie in real life :D In general, much of the photos from the talks are of rather bad quality, considering the fact that you can do much better with my beloved Canon EOS 350D (which is what their photographer also had).

Customize your partitioner (+ let's go graphical)

2009-04-03T17:16:29Z

I must admit I've been waiting with this post until today, the reason being that it is not supposed to be 1st April joke, like for example this one (thanks, captain Arvin, you really made me laugh) :D
As you probably noticed, for openSUSE 11.2 our goal is to significantly improve usability of YaST partitioner. I want to show you a feature that is in partitioner for quite some time already, yet it is quite little known. It helps you to customize the partitioner to best suit your needs.

One of the frequent complaints about partitioner was that it is "overengineered" and it presents so much information that it is really confusing for the (home) user i.e. the "1 laptop, 1 hard disk" usecase. While there are some other problematic areas, this particular one can be fixed rather quickly and in a simple way. And by "fixed" I of course do not mean that from now on, we will tailor the partitioner only to the needs of Aunt Tillie (Oma Krause), leaving the power users high and dry. Let's have a look at partitioner settings (that is, we'll switch to the branch labeled "Settings" in the left tree panel), especially at "visible fields" selection box:

Here you can set which information on storage devices you want to see, that is, how many columns the tables are going to have and how much details the overviews are going to contain. The less boxes you tick, the less details that only uselessly fill up the screen you'll see. For example, if you use neither LVM nor RAID setup, seeing "used-by" field is probably of no use to you. Similarly, if you have laptop with one hard disk, you don't need fiber channel ID bits of information. And since these settings are written to sysconfig, they are persistent. This is the default sysconfig configuration shipped with openSUSE 11.1 (and SLES11):

Too detailed and not much home-user friendly, now is it? This is the new, simplified default for openSUSE 11.2:

If you are a power user who uses advanced setup and wants to see more detailed information, you now know where to go and make it visible again :) Besides data presentation details, you can also pick a default filesystem or default mount-by method for newly created devices here.

Everybody else is doing it, so why can't we?

If you have ever used partitioning GUI tools in other distribution, even on other operating systems (GParted, PartitionMagic, DiskDruid,...), you have noticed that almost every one of those has some graphical representation of how the disk is partitioned. From now on, even YaST partitioner does:

However, compared to other partitioners, our bar graph is rather dumb. It is not interactive (if you click on a partition in graph, nothing happens) and it does not even highlight current partition as one scrolls down the table. At least a tiny little improvement is that it can do tooltips now, so if the partition description text is too wide it does not fit the graph segment, the text is still replicated in a tooltip.

Do you like the graph? Do you want to have it improved? If so, please vote for feature 303534 in openFATE. I'd really like to have at least highlighting the current partition implemented (preferably, by thick pink border :) :D

Quantum of debugging

2009-03-12T22:29:40Z

As Murphy's law states, if things can go wrong, they certainly will and usually at the most inopportune moment. Not surprisingly, as SLE11 slowly approached to becoming gold, the weirdest bugs, corner cases and users making up the most exotic test scenarios started to pop up from just about everywhere. The pieces of code I maintain were not an exception.

Alors, this time, I'm not going to write about some exciting new stuff I'm hacking in YaST (well, of course I'm currently working on something, but I'm going to make it public when the time comes - in the moment I'll be quite certain that it is not absolute fiasco :)). The final phase of product release is an ideal time for sharing quantum theory of bugs. Take this post as an example of junk literature ;-)

I'm sure every sw engineer knows the situation. A bug 100% reproducible at customer's site, with sufficiently high priority and bunch of important managers in Cc: that mysteriously disappears as soon as you try to reproduce it. It smells the debugger from afar and flees quickly enough ;-) That is so-called Heisenbug. Quoting Wikipedia:

A heisenbug (named after the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is a computer bug that disappears or alters its characteristics when an attempt is made to study it. The name heisenbug is a pun on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle quantum physics concept which is commonly (yet inaccurately) used to refer to the fact that in the Copenhagen Interpretation model of quantum mechanical behavior, observers affect what they are observing, by the mere act of observing it alone"

Or look at Schroedingbug - another one of those mysteries. Let's see what Wikipedia says again:

A schroedinbug is a bug that manifests only after someone reading source code or using the program in an unusual way notices that it never should have worked in the first place, at which point the program promptly stops working for everybody until fixed.

SLE11 debugging phase was sufficiently long to come across one of those, too. I was reading the source code (of YaST ncurses packager this time), cursing myself how could I possibly overlook such an obvious usage of NULL pointers, wondering how comes it has never crashed for anybody and suddenly bang! There is was - a critical bug from our Three-Letter-Customer, complaining that "yast -i crashes" . Guess where :-)

If you love quantum physic humour or if you just need some entertainment in the quantum of bugs you're dealing with, point your browsers here and read about bohrbugs, mandelbugs, phase of the moon bugs and other nightmares.

And while the customers are testing bugfixes and another set of packages is being built, I can moan and groan on IRC query with Uwe. It was actually him, who pointed me non-quantum layer 8 bug notion (if you don't get it, review your OSI layer knowledge first ;-)). He told me: "Go ahead and tell these Three-Letter-Customer guys that what they are experiencing is a layer 8 bug. It will make them feel special." So I did. They didn't seem to share the same sense of humour :-) :-D Anyway, we agreed that quantum debugging should be discovered ASAP.

Install more packages? ["Yes"]["No"]

2009-02-13T21:30:55Z

When it comes to software, its users are usually very picky creatures :-) Put feature X in and hear them complaining how bad and user-unfriendly you actually made it. If they complain long/loudly enough, finally decide to remove it and be sure that so-far silent majority starts to complain even more.

It was the same with YaST package manager and pop-up question from the title of this post. I'm sure we all remember that one:

It was introduced in openSUSE 10.1 (aka BrokenSwManagement edition) in order to alleviate suffering of the poor users forced to use our package management (powered by zmd and baby-libzypp) with ultra-slow start-up. libzypp grew faster and faster over the time, but the pop-up question remained and (quite reasonably) it started to annoy users. "Why do I have to click to have this crappy pop-up disappear?" they asked. "I've made my choice, installed all packages I wanted, so I want to answer no further questions."

After many heated discussions, we finally made the pop-up go away in openSUSE 11.1 After clicking on 'Accept' and installing all packages, package manager simply ended. That, of course, made the other half of the users speak up: "Why YaST does not ask anymore whether I want to install more packages? I don't want to start package manager anew each time. I simply want to have an option to install something more I forgot about in the first round."

In openSUSE 11.2, my colleague lslezak (now the link to his blog should be here, but he is too shy to have one :)) used really ingenious way of cutting the Gordian knot - he made the behaviour on exit from package manager configurable. And not only that - besides an option to close package manager (for those who want to be done with it) and option to restart it (for those who may want to come back and select something more), he added a third one. When the package installation is over, you can choose to display a neat summary of what has been installed/deleted, how long did it take and view some detailed logs. Then, you can either finish, or go back to install more packages:

Now all you have to do is to open /etc/sysconfig/yast2 file in your favourite editor and set PKGMGR_ACTION_AT_EXIT variable to some reasonable value. Please find more detailed information here.

"But I don't want to edit some cryptic file manually," you might think. "Isn't there any other way?" Well, of course there is. YaST ncurses package manager has a brand new menu that allows you to pick the exit action of your choice in a few key presses:

There are some minor things left to polish, but it basically works by now. Better don't ask me how the sysconfig variable is actually written :-) It took me by surprise to realize that libzypp's interface to sysconfig is read-only, so I'm impatienly waiting for Augeas ;-)