» Packman: transition to 11.2

As you might have noticed already, we've been building our packages for openSUSE Factory for a couple of weeks now. openSUSE 11.2 is almost there now, and we are currently re-building everything for 11.2 (against the openSUSE:11.2:Updates project on build.opensuse.org). Previously, our Packman repository for openSUSE 11.2 was merely a symbolic link to our factory repository, but two days ago I removed that symbolic link and, as mentioned above, in the process of building a proper repository there. In the mean time, if you're on a Release Candidate of openSUSE 11.2, please use our factory repository for a couple more days, until we managed to at least build an essential set of core packages for 11.2.

» Vote against big brother

If you're a Belgian citizen, sign the petition against forcing ISPs to store Internet connectivity information for 6-12 months.

» FOSDEM 2010 Distribution Miniconf

So there we are, the cat is out of the bag ;): for the upcoming FOSDEM 2010, we will organize a shared, common, mixed mini-conference-in-the-conference with distribution projects. For further details, read here. I already poked openSUSE, Fedora, CentOS, Exherbo, Debian, Ubuntu (*), Mandriva and ArchLinux (*) ... but if you read this and you're involved into another distribution project, please do join the party. The more, the merrier :) (*) no reply yet

» Send mail to openSUSE Build Service project maintainers

Just wrote a little script that parses the output of osc meta prj or osc meta pkg, grabs the list of users in there and pokes the openSUSE Build Service API again to retrieve their email address. All that is then used to call Thunderbird in compose mode with the appropriate list of email addresses (and real names, when available). It also uses a cache file to speed things up. Examples:

osc meta prj security | omail
osc meta pkg security keychain | omail

You can download that (Perl) script from here. Simply copy it to ~/bin or /usr/local/bin and do a chmod 755 on it. Of course, you might as well add support for your favourite MUA (email client), which should be fairly trivial, given that the script already does the dirty work ;-) An alternative would be to re-author that script as an osc plugin.

» Packman upgrading to SVN OBS

Don't panic if you notice insane amounts of updates to packages in the Packman repository for openSUSE. We are currently switching from OBS (openSUSE Build Service) version 1.6.0 to the latest SVN trunk HEAD, which requires some experimentation and also caused a complete rebuild (for unknown reasons).

» Packman: deleting 10.2 packages

We are going to delete the packages for openSUSE 10.2 from the Packman repository very soon because our builds for Factory are starting to kill off the disk space on some of our mirrors. If you still want them, you must pull a local copy ASAP, e.g.:

rsync -avP rsync://ftp.skynet.be/packman/suse/10.2/ \
/some/directory/for/the/mirror/10.2/

Note that the 10.2 packages currently sum up to around 25 GB.

» Updated openSUSE countdown image

Our infamous Jakub "jimmac" Steiner designed new openSUSE countdown artwork that is more in line with the look and feel of the upcoming openSUSE 11.2 distribution. He also proposed using SVG templates and rsvg in order to render the various localized images, rather than the Python PIL script with crappy math I wrote a while ago, including the many ugly hacks to compute the coordinates text coordinates, font size adjustments, etc... It is indeed much more comfortable and flexible now, simply by using Inkscape to design the templates (one for each image size, because it uses a raster background rather than a vectorized SVG), containing placeholders.
A plain Python script contains all the localization logic and replaces those placeholders with the appropriate content for each language, and then feeds that into rsvg-convert to render PNG files.

If you're interested by the nitty gritty of that script, it is available at forgesvn1.novell.com. For details on how to include that openSUSE countdown image on your site, blog, ..., please consult the corresponding page on the openSUSE wiki.

» No internets

Just a quick post to say I'm not dead. But my Internet uplink is. Well... seems like my ISP (Belgacom/Skynet) is having a major, global tits up, and I have no idea when they'll manage to fix it. It's already been 2 days without Internet at home. Feels like holidays :D