Revolution blahg

I started my Fedora Summer Coding last week. Although most people started almost two months ago, I chose (and was allowed to – Yay, FSC!) a different schedule because I just finished college last week.

This summer I’ll be working on a new project for Fedora – Copr. Fedora Copr will allow any Fedorian to have their own package repository with packages built and hosted by Fedora’s Infrastructure. My mentor this summer will be Toshio, I’ve always enjoyed working with him and this summer will be no different. Here is my actual FSC proposal. Although the things written in that proposal are turning out to be a bit inaccurate, it’s still a good bird’s eye view of what I’m going to do this summer.

So about the first week. Things started really slow. I did a lot of orientation, certainly more than I thought I would. I hadn’t used TurboGears2 before, though I had worked with TurboGears 1.x on Fedora’s pkgdb. When I started out I had only a TG2 automatically generated skeleton app – well it’s mostly the same now, though at least I now know a lot more about what’s in there. The fact that I had to start it up myself meant I had to learn a lot of things about TG2 that I would’ve normally just copied from other parts of a fully-functional project. And that was a great experience. In a way it’s fulfilling to be able to pioneer things in this way ;). I’m trying to only ask my mentor questions about designing the actual app and solve my “How do I … in TurboGears/Python?” questions elsewhere. My mentor has always given me a lot of independence when working on things and that feels really good, though at times I feel inexperienced. There’s the thought that the project I’m working on will be used by a lot of technical users and I’m really not sure what my decisions’ impact will be on the whole project.

I’m mostly on time with my mock-up schedule because I had set the first week for orienteering. I also wrote the DB schema for Coprs, though that was on the second week. That doesn’t mean I’m ahead of schedule however, because I’ll probably have a lot to work on the Copr controllers, and a lot of documenting and designing.

I’m proud that I setup testing after a day of wading through the scattered documentation of TurboGears2 testing. There’s mostly no documentation on testing on the TurboGears2.0 docs website. So I went to the python nose webpage. But they don’t have any info on the TurboGears2 web helpers which I needed to use. So I went to pylonshq docs about testing, but they use a slightly different syntax because they’re using paste.fixture. I finally found the TurboGears2.1 testing docs which was what I really needed. It turns out that TurboGears 2.x uses WebTest.

So now I have testing. My project is not supposed to have any web interface at this point, so writing tests is the easiest way to prove that things are actually working.

This next week I’ll probably get some work done on Copr controllers. Implementing the ability to CRUD Coprs and Repos.

With GSOC now over, which I should write a blogpost about soon, I’ve taken a break from pkgdb and web programming and started developing another skill.

The fact that this page is empty has been bugging me for too much time, so I set out to fix it. I also wanted to find out more about the packaging process and the road of a package before it gets accepted into fedora’s official repos which is a bit complex. This knowledge would also help me better understand the parts of pkgdb which packagers interact with.

It was not my first time trying to make a package for fedora. I think this is actually my third time. I’d given up before, scared by all the different tools and scattered documentation. In a previous life, I had made some AUR packages, but the experience is a lot different. I’m now starting to get used to all the different tools that I was scared of before, like mock and rpmlint and I can now find my way around the fedora wiki for package related information. There is a wealth of information in the wiki, but you need a lot of patience.

I started slow, with quite a complex application to package: Calibre. Having all those different distros is great when you’re a packager, because you have somewhere to look for help and the Debian package of calibre helped me a lot. It took me about two days to get a somewhat acceptable version of calibre packaged, which I then posted to redhat’s bugzilla. The following days I found more small apps to be packaged and it became easier and easier for me to do it. Last night for example, I was just browsing Hacker News as usual when I found a link to facebook’s opensourcing of their web server framework . I just rushed to the download and installation instructions page and I quickly got it packaged. I’m not saying it’s perfect, it probably needs a lot of improvement, but it was fun to do. It’s fun to think that you’re making things easier for someone and learning a lot at the same time. I now have 5 packages waiting to be reviewed and I’ve found someone willing to sponsor me into the packager group. Anyone in a package-review mood? ;)

My journey into the packaging world has been enlightening so far and the good thing is I’m just beginning. There’s a whole new world to be discovered out there and also another part of the fedora community.

I just got back from this year’s EMEA FUDCON in Berlin with Nicu . I didn’t have time to write anything while I was there because so much was happening all the time.

FUDCon and LinuxTag

LinuxTag wasn’t really the purpose of our visit, but we got free tickets so I checked the place out for a while. There were lots of booths and some speeches (mostly in German). There were also some activities, but I really didn’t get to any of them since most appeared to be German-only. I was a bit disappointed, eLiberatica had way better talks and guests.

FUDCon was nice. The first day was a little slow to start, but the BarCamp session the next day was very interesting and diverse. More of that would’ve been nice. Some of the cool topics I enjoyed were: koji at CERN, git for hackers, Fedora EKG and UI Design. The last day was mostly random hacking by people who already had something to work on. I did a bit of pkgdb hacking on my own and then went Berlinxploring.

Berlin

The city was awesome. I haven’t been to a lot of different countries, but right now Berlin is my favourite. Its public transportation is awesome, the people are polite, friendly and everyone can speak English. There were a lot of trees everywhere, the temperature was really cool and there were wild bunnies in the parks! I separated from the crowd two times to go visit the city and I got to see some stuff I would’ve missed otherwise. It was also cool because what I did was basically ride the train and get off whenever I would see something interesting. I went to the Brandenburg gate and the Governmental district and also got a closer look of the bombed church. I also went to a cool flea market.

German Beer

The best part of the whole conference were the nights out at the restaurant, I think. I and Nicu were lucky to tag along to a few people from Red Hat before the majority of people had arrived. We got to see some nice places that way, especially thanks to Jesse’s iphone. I got to eat indian food, assembly line sushy and we were also at the local Zoo. I soon found out that my English was a bit slow and so I couldn’t keep up with their constant witty joking so I sort of gave up and switched into listening mode.
The nights-at-the-restaurant got better and better as more people arrived. We went to a small restaurant right under the railways for free pizza (thanks Red Hat!) where I met a few of the newly arrived people and had some interesting chats mostly about fedora and Red Hat.
The next day we went looking for a Sudanese restaurant, but ended up at a Cuban restaurant with cool waitresses. I got to taste the first real German beer and socialised with some of the other European guys which was really fun.
The last night was the best night. We had interesting discussions about fonetics(!), German beer, the Dutch language and RMS among other things. They also had the greatest dark German beer, which I forgot the name of. Real traditional German beer really doesn’t compare with any other beer. It’s a whole different beverage and an awesome one.

Conclusion

Overall I think it was a great experience. I got to meet a lot of interesting and smart people from all over the world who all shared a passion for their work and for Fedora.
So these are sort of the words to Nicu’s photos which explain the rest, only better.

Wow, what an event! It was way more awesome than I expected. This is probably one of the later posts to get to the planet from eLiberatica because I wanted to form a complete opinion on the event.

eLiberatica is the first big open source and free software conference I’ve been to. The scale of it is quite amazing for something this far East in Europe and especially for my country. Some high-profile guest even said that he was astonished at the presence of very influential, key FLOSS personalities that aren’t present at some bigger events.
the booths

We (ajoian , nicubunu, alexxed and myself) had a whole booth for fedora and we really made the best of that opportunity, I think. We had a lot of SWAG. Nicu had printed some posters for the event which really helped beautify the booth and had also printed some fedora business cards for each of us. We had fedora t-shirts and a lot of CDs sent by Max (thanks Max!). These were the most helpful for starting conversations with passers-by. We even helped out the Ubuntu people when they ran out of cds on the first day!

The booth activity was more fun than I had expected. I didn’t think I would enjoy talking to people about fedora so much. We had people ask us to come to their town and “do something about fedora”. We told them we’d come and hold presentations when they would be ready and we gave them some free LiveCDs to spread around in the meantime. I hope we’ll have some new local fedora communities spring up. I’m especially hopeful of the guys from Iași who are active contributors to different opensource projects, mostly xwiki .

There were two other cool booths that were very engaging with the passers-by: the Mozilla booth and the Romanian Free Software Communities booth which was more of an Ubuntu booth actually, but that was good since a lot of people were interested in that.
the speakers

I only went to a few speeches as the booth activity and the new people I met were too engaging. I think Jeroen‘s speech was awesome and his message was very clear. It was a great complement to the discourse we were holding at the booth – telling people that fedora is all about contributing, not just using a stable, already tested linux distribution. A lot of people were ubuntu users, especially the ones in the Politehnica University (the host of the event) who are taught Ubuntu in class (there are no linux machines at my university :| ). Everyone kept asking how fedora is better than ubuntu. It was an honest question since many of them didn’t have experience anything else and I hope we succeeded in getting our message accross.

There were other awesome people, too. There was Monty – the founder of MySQL who told us about his new project to give MySQL back to the community: MariaDB . There was the president of fsfe and the OpenSource Diva – Danesse Cooper who both gave great philosophical speeches. There was David Axmark who had a great presentation about his awesome new project to create a stripped-down version of MySQL for webshops called Drizzle – I think this will be a great project to watch evolve. I didn’t get to spend too much time on the openagile track, but I went to Corey Haines ‘s talk about software craftsmanship in an agile context which I enjoyed.
the friends

contributors
The most awesome part of the entire conference, I think, were the people I met. There were a lot of people I only knew from online discussions. Some of them I had known for years, but had never met. I had a revelation with a couple of people who I didn’t like online, but prooved to be very nice people in real life.

I met some fellow Romanian Google Summer of Code guys for this year and last year with whom I hope to meet again.
I met a few Eau de Web guys – a small python/zope web company especially Alex who’s blog I had been reading and who turned out to be an even cooler guy than I expected. We discussed a lot of interesting python things. (I almost got him to switch from his OS X + virtual Debian setup to fedora. But I hope I’ll have another swing at it soon).
I met an old friend, Vlad who gave me an awesome idea for an enhancement to the fedora business cards that I’ll hopefully have time to implement this summer.
The guys from the other Romanian communities were cool people and I hope we’ll interact better and do more awesome FLOSS stuff now that we’ve met face to face. These were people from Software Liber, rosedu and the cool lonely guy from openSUSE Romania who had a taste of our fedora CDs, literally (the opensuse community is just starting out in Romania).
Last, but not least, the Romanian Fedora community was awesome. We got along really well and had a lot of fun. We made some really nasty videos with the fedora sign that I was going to post, but I changed my mind when I actually looked at them :), you can look at nicubunu’s pictures, though.
miscellaneous

I added 3 more O’Reilly books to my I hope I’ll read them this summer reading list: Beautiful Code, Masterminds of Programming and SQL and the Relational Theory.

This conference and the people I talked to really influenced me I think, career-wise. I got a lot of motivation and a great yearning to sometime be able to work with people such as the ones I met there. I’ll probably slip into a bit of a depression now that the event is over and I’m going back to real life and ignorant school people. That’ll hopefully be over in less than two weeks and I’ll have time to work work work == fun fun fun for the Fedora Project.

The good news is I’m going to FUDCon Berlin with Nicu. I hope to meet a lot of cool fedorians there aswell.

A few days ago, me and a few friends from Fedora Romania decided we’d like some fedora business cards for the upcoming eLiberatica conference. Ian Weller had already developed an official template and even created a cool python generator script and packaged it.

The problem, however, was that it only supported US-style business cards which are a bit smaller than the Romanian/Central European ones. Live and learn… It seems that there are a lot of different sizes actually.

So I got my hacking hat and dived in. The code was quite nice to look at and easy to understand. The XML in the svg templates is quite easy to hack, too. Especially when using tools like python’s minidom . It makes working with python and XML taste like javascript dom manipulation which is quite nice.

Everything went smooth, I renamed a few tags, made some modifiable (for height and width), but then I had to make the blue strip on the right of the front of the business card extendable1 . There is no way in XML to align an element to the right so I spent about an hour coming up with a sweet solution. Instead of having a big white background on which I would apply the blue band, I made a big blue background and made the white background just a little narrower. Because the white background was on top of the blue one, it could get aligned to the left (x=0, y=0 in XML) and cover just the part that needed to be white, and left a blue band at the right. Problem solved. Hoo-grah!

Now I’m waiting for an answer to the patch that I sent to bugzilla. Hopefully it’ll be accepted and will be available in Fedora, soon, so that others may enjoy and cherish the coolness that it be!

My Fedora proposal got accepted to this year’s Google Summer of Code Program. You can look at a short abstract here . Now I’m going to try to explain what this project is about and what I did to prepare for being accepted, hopefully without going mad about how happy I am about it.

I started work on the Fedora Project almost a year ago. One day I popped on the mailing list and then on the irc channel of the infrastructure team and asked for something to do. Luckily, Toshio Kuratomi was on the watch and after giving me a short tour of the various projects he could help me get familiar with, I picked the package database. Most of the work I’ve done so far is in the pkgdb (the search capability is the most obvious thing I worked on). The overview on the front page describes it quite well; it’s got package information and it’s aimed at package developers. It’s not a very famous part of the fedora project websites, certainly not as famous as something like packages.ubuntu.com is for ubuntu. But that’s not what it was intended for, even if that’s what attracted me to the project at first. I liked the exposure of such a website, but also the fact that, at the time, it was easier for me to understand what it did and how it worked :).

The idea of making the package database more user-friendly as opposed to developer-centric wasn’t a new one. Toshio, the main developer had been thinking about it for a long time, but I guess it never really became a priority. The idea had also been proposed for last year’s GSOC, but it hadn’t been accepted (this scared me a bit when I found out). I picked this idea on a whim when I told Toshio I wanted to participate in this year’s GSOC on pkgdb and he asked me what exactly I wanted to do. I wasn’t expecting the question, so I answered with the first thing that came to mind. Looking back, I think it was a good choice.

All my involvement with the Fedora Project owes a lot to the best possible person who could have become my mentor for GSOC. The Infrastructure Team is a great one to work with, and the Fedora contributor community is made up of a lot of smart, fun and selfless people. I say this after having spent a lot of time lurking the IRC channels, the various mailing lists, the planet etc. and to a somewhat lesser extent interacting with other contributors. However, I wouldn’t have continued contributing if it weren’t for the continuous support and guidance of Toshio. I probably wouldn’t have been able to participate in the GSOC without the many discussions (starting in February) with Toshio about the proposal and the support when explaining the idea to other community members. Having said that, I think that being familiar with the pkgdb also helped a lot with writing the proposal. I didn’t have to waste time on getting to know the code, the community, the devs as I would have if I had written a proposal for a different project. I also had a fair idea of what would constitute a good proposal and a rough idea about how it could be implemented. I think this helped with my credibility in the eyes of the mentors who ranked my proposal.

I was never convinced I would get a spot on Fedora & JBoss’s accepted proposal’s list , but it was is a great thing to dream of. The butterflies in my stomach were killing me at the end of the waiting period, especially since it had lasted for more than 2 months. I now have a summer to work full time on my hobby :).

At the end of the summer, the fedora community will hopefully have a package database with package versions, size, dependencies, rss feeds, tagging, package reviews etc. There’s even a detailed schedule from my proposal you can drool on if you’re so inclined.

And hello, fedora planet! Sorry for being late.