..feeding the attention whore within

It’s been exactly one year since I last blogged and as Matthew Dawkins of the Unity Linux project has just released a new Unity Linux shapshot of cooker, I figured that it was about time for me to make a quick blog entry about it. :)

As it’s been a while since we last made a new release and also as Matthew Dawkins pointed out to me earlier; cooker is in a very nice and stable state now, this is very welcome! :)

On the RPM development side, I’m just about to finish up work on preparing for switching to using RPM’s internal depedency generator, which will be a nice milestone in my RPM development work that  I wont bore anyone with the gory details about right now (except for pointing out that it might just break cooker the nice and stable cooker a bit again;) .. ;p

I’m just happy about finally finishing the work! :o)

Things are starting to look really nice now, cooker activity seems to have gotten back to previous levels and even then some and interest from new contributors seems to have increased as well, really nice to see!

Also one of my favourite news is Eugeni Dodonov now being appointed cooker project leader, being one of my favs since ever I had my first chats with him, I knew he was *the* right guy that Mandriva *desperatly* needed and had been in lack of for the last three years now, awesome, Eugeni has done a great job so far and is proving himself to exceed new expectations everyday being proactive and being really good at discussing and listening to input and technical matters and suggestions. For me, this is awesome as I personally have been missing this all the time since Flepied, Warly & Gwenole left us *sigh*.

Beyond that, the defintive most interesting and “controversial”/intrusive thing of my biggest focus these days is taking over rpm maintenance and now working with great assistance from Jeff & Ric on preparing and getting the final bits and pieces in place for getting some of the biggest and neatest changes wrt. rpm in Mandriva since probably forever, not only technically, but community-wise, influence, r&d and simply being able to make packaging way easier and maintenance work way less demanding. A lot of new things will now come now that we’re not only maintaining obsolete versions of rpm with no interaction and participation in upstream, but we actually help drive it now and will be able to satisfy more user requests, distro interest, credibility and more. In the end, I think we will end up being able to be the awesome alternative in the forked world, hoping for interest of other distros, actively inviting their participation and offering to help merge, clean up and help them adapt and get onboard and satisfy their requests as well..

I’ll be joining Mandiva again within a short period to work on rpm, urpmi and git with cross-distro collaboration in mind now as well. So things are certainly gonna be happening from now on!

I expect to upload a new release of rpm5 to main/testing by tomorrow hopefully ironing out the last remaining rpmdb conversion issues and related, then ported the few remaining rpm related packages requiring so (perl-URPM has already been rewritten to pure rpm5 native api, with a lot of refactorization, improvements++, even caixa’s apt branch has gone through much of the same for rpm5 now ;).

If everything goes to plan, I hope for rpm5 to hit main/release by the end of next week with less rough introduction this time than as was the case for main/testing earlier.. (thx to rindolf and especially Ric for patience, helpfulness and eagerness in helping out in the process, some day later I¨lll make it wortwhile in one way or the other! ;).
I’m curious about what stance Mageia will take on this though, I’m certainly hoping they will adopt our work and allow for us to help them and contribute back and forth, if not I fear they’ll miss out on several changes in just perl-URPM done recently during rpm5 rewrite, and even more so those planned when rpm5 upgrade situtation settles..

Oh well, just thought I’d give an update, I’m more excited about the situation of cooker and copmany than I’ve been for ages, I just hope the same will rub on to others as well! :D

Whoa, been quite a long time since I’ve blogged last time now and the longer it’s been, I’ve felt that I’ve needed to come up with something of more interest to blog about once I finally do some blogging again… ;)

Well, I read this poor review of Mandriva Linux 2010 (the only poor review I’ve seen so far actually), which I got a bit provoked about, not that much because I’m taking things personal, but it’s rather more about stupid people pisses me off! ;p

The reviewer seemed to only actually try review the One edition and then trailed off making up his own irrelevant and ignorant FUD conclusions about the Powerpack version which he didn’t tested, about how we seemed to be more interested
in pushing proprietary software (despite he later made some ignorat complains about the trouble from lack of this in the Free edition later on), then on and on.
With such amazingly borderline retarded and biased ranted I just had to write a longer comment on the article myself (which is something I seldom do), and in the process I was very happy to see that others shared my annoyance and awareness of ignorance as well- Pretty much all comments flamed the article, most of them based on very nice insight and knowledge about the distribution and it’s strengths, especially in comparision with others, this also from many people who weren’t even using Mandriva!

I found it really nice to see that we seem to finally gain a more favorable impression and also really our users finally growing aware of our strenghts and all.

I really hope to see this being a growing trend with a community hopefully finally starting to really be growing again for real! :)

Oh btw. Happy new year to all of you, even those of you who doesn’t deserve it or that I just don’t like. ;p

The french Mandriva Linux community magazine MAGNUM has just published their 06 issue where they’ve started a series of interviews with open source developers, and at the end of last year I had the honour of being their first to interview for this. :)

The interview were conducted by mail, and since I was running late, had a friend visiting and stressed getting it done by time promised, I didn’t get time to read before I replied with my answers (that didn’t prevent me from writing in great lengths though;), so I hope it doesn’t come off as something to be easily misinterpreted, taken out of context etc., I suspect some of my points might not seem as balanced as intended..

Oh well.

You can also the original in english here.

It’s been over a week since I got back from FOSDEM, so about time I should blog a bit about it. :)

So coming back from FOSDEM last year I was a bit disappointed about Mandriva presence, this year
we had our own booth at least and I must say that it was quite succesful! :)

I hung out at the booth a lot of the time and our booth was next to the Ubuntu booth (those bastards!;), and guess what?
We seemed to actually attract a “lot” more attention than our neighbour booth most of the time, I’m not sure at what the
Ubuntu people presented in their booth (I actually forgot to really check it out:/), but since they didn’t seem to catch
my attention I guess they didn’t seem to have that much interesting and flashy stuff to offer (hmm, that’s kinda pretty
much in sync with my general view of Ubuntu, coincidence;p)..
I guess that all the different netbooks with the different Mandriva versions was sufficient to catch a lot of attention
from various people to our booth, especially the mips based Gdiums from Emtec running Mandriva G-Linux (which is our mipsel port with special customizations for the Gdium). I got mine powered up at FOSDEM and put it on display and basically everyone else but myself seemed to get to play with it more than I did, which is a good thing since it’s not available for sale quite yet so that way people get to discover it and I got to play with it when I got back home anyways. :D

In addition to the Gdium, Emtec also displayed their new and upcoming G-cube which is a HTPC solution which is also mips based, unfortunately it wasn’t demonstrated so no first impressions there yet, but I’d sure like to get my hands on one later!

For the talks at FOSDEM this year I was a bit disappointed, most of those I attented (ie. the cmake and rpm talks) wasn’t really targeted at developers, but more of the introductionary type for (new) users.. And for most of the talks that I would’ve found interesting I managed to miss, ie. Rob Savoye’s talk about gnash (which I had the pleasure of dining with at Sunday evening, really cool guy!:). :/
I did attend Peter Pöml’s talk about MirrorBrain though which I had interest in since I did the initial implementation of the geolocalized metalinks stuff for urpmi a while back and I exchanged ideas with him on the metalink mailing lists regarding these things, you’ll even find me talking about these things in Mandriva in the video stream of the talk. (Watching it now I think that I with my dry mouth picked up Peter’s german accent in there;p)

Other good things regarding Mandriva was that Anne managed to calm my scepticism towards the Community Steering Committee and the Mandriva Linux Assembly stuff, it seems like we’re mostly on the same page about stuff, aware of the same things with ideas and all that should be quite compatible. :)
I kinda regret that I left FOSDEM early on Saturday to go with Jeff to dine with the CentOS people in Leuvre though as I didn’t really get the chance to discuss such things in dept and interact with all the cool Mandriva d00dz as I hoped for. :/

In summary, FOSDEM was as always great and I’m most definitively planning on attending it next year as well! :D