Entries from December 2005 ↓

(Sorry folks, local issues, so pt_BR only.)

Eu acho ridículo como a mídia brasileira tende a ser BAIRRISTA. Hoje pela manhã aconteceram dois incêndios: um no prédio do INSS em Brasília, e outro em um pavilhão de artesanados em Maceió. Tudo bem, concordo plenamente que o caso de Brasília precisa ser largamente vinculado, mas eu achei um abusurdo não encontrar nenhuma nota em nenhuma mídia nacional sobre o caso em Maceió.

Daí algum ridículo comenta: “mas o problema foi em Maceió, o que interessa ao resto do Brasil?”. Certo, e eu pergunto, quando pega fogo em um prédio de sem-tetos em São Paulo, ou quando um traficante põe fogo em uma casa numa favela no Rio, porque isso é notícia nacional? Putz! Hoje mesmo apareceu uma notícia de um ônibus que tombou na Via Dutra. Isso é matéria local, gente!

Pra quem não sabe, o tal incêndio em Maceió não matou ninguém, mas vai deixar dezenas de desempregados, várias pessoas em sérias dificuldades financeiras, e vai causar uma polêmica terrível. Queimou tudo. Um pavilhão de artesanato onde não sobrou nada. Mercadorias queimadas, dinheiro perdido, e a suposição de que seja um ato criminoso.

Jornalistas do Brasil, por favor, o que vale pra um, vale pra todos. Chega de bairrismo e regionalismo, e achar que SP e RJ são os únicos lugares que importam no Brasil.

(Referência: Incêndio no Cheiro da Terra pode ter sido criminoso)

Yesterday I released the first public patch to add YaST2 support into Smart.

- Mailing list announcement
- Additional note
- Tracker entry

I’m expecting to hear from the brave people that are willing to test it.

Smart 0.41 has been released yesterday. Among many modifications, I would like to call your attention to a better support for RPM Metadata (rpm-md), that now uses cElementTree as a parser, speeding up cache loading. It also implements the first ‘test’ framework (more on that later). And last, but not the least, four new features coded by me, and one bug fix (SUSE freezing) that I helped.

Ok, this is my blog, isn’t it? This is the first Smart release that comes with some code as an official contributor, so I’m pretty happy with that. I hope to contribute more in the future.

By the way, read the release mesage. Once again, thanks Pascal Blesser for being the first packager among all (Guru’s RPM for SUSE).

<what a day!>

- I woke up with a nice cup of cappuccino. Sit down on my computer, read my e-mails and filled my amaroK queue with 16 albums from The Beatles (The Black Box Set, 10h of old school rock).
- With this nice background music, I starded some Python coding. After my brain got tired with so much ifs/fors/classes, and such, I enqueued 7 albums from Nirvana (6h of nice old grunge rock).
- Some time later, I went to the mall an bought myself a christma’s gift (DVD LG DK9923N, with DivX support). The final touch was a nice night of good pizza.
- I beat my own record of 17 slices, and that time I crammed myself with 20 slices.
- After all that, I came home, enqueued 3 albums from cold play, and ended my day with some more Python coding.

</what a day!>

There’s been some interesting discussions about users asking for Smart being oficially supported on Fedora Core. Some obviously won’t agree, while others don’t bother and are just working to add the package to contrib (extras) repositories.

- FedoraForum.org
- RedHat Bugzilla
- fedora-devel-list (thread “What about smartpm?”)

Yesterday I received the green light from Gustavo Niemeyer to start coding YaST2 repository support into Smart. It will take some weeks (probably months) to get it working stable, but I’ll have Pascal Bleser and Christoph Thiel working along, helping me understand and testing it. We hope we can get it working with as much capabilities as possible.

The important thing here isn’t what he said, but really how it has been said.

“Without tip-toeing around the matter, Linus Torvalds made his preference in the GNOME vs. KDE matter quite clear on the GNOME-usability list: “I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE. This ‘users are idiots, and are confused by functionality’ mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don’t use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn’t do what I need it to do. Please, just tell people to use KDE.” Also, “Gnome seems to be developed by interface nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not ‘it’s too complicated to do’, but ‘it would confuse users’.”"

Posted on Slashdot.

Great news! Smart freezing on SuSE has been fixed. As I’ve said before, it was needed to code a workaround on Smart so it bypasses some erroneous behavior on SuSE’s RPM.

Official notice and rationale can be found on Smart’s mailing list archive.

Pascal Blesser, from Guru’s RPM Site, already packaged a patched version of Smart, and it will be available soon on mirrors.

Again, just to be sure, this was not Smart’s fault, but an unpatched error on SuSE’s RPM.

Here we go again with some more fun!

Now I’ve found A Gamer’s Day, a very cool home made video from Daniel P. Schenk, a sick guy who lives in Germany (I think) and likes to make movies and write books by his own.

This movie is a very cool way of seeing one day of a sick internet gamer, clearly addicted to Counter Strike. Besides the normal fact that he doesn’t want to leave the room, yels at his mom, forgets his girlfriend birthday and is a pig (in the sense of dirty), he also is totally nuts! He (thinks) dresses like a counter-terrorist and start wandering around on his place faking like he’s on a real CS round. That’s what I call sick.

Anyway, it’s a very interesting movie. And the witter were very intelligent not involving any dialogs or such, so it can be watched by any non-german spoken people. Ok, there are some speaches and words on the screen and walls, but they’re not important to the story.

An the best part: it’s a free download!

Oh! And you can find some other stuff on his site too. Maybe I’ll comment on them another day.

There are many reports around about Smart freezing on SUSE. Niemeyer (Smart’s main coder) and I are working to solve this and here’s what we’ve found out so far.

SUSE runs a non-pached RPM 4.1.1 (old) with a known bug that makes child threads to not return SIGCHLD in very specific cases (some strange specific %post scripts), which makes it very difficult to track from Smart. This is a known issue, and has been corrected on many other distros when they were using this same version, although most are now using newer releases, which don’t have the bug. We think it’s not easy to solve that way, since we couldn’t find strong arguments to justfy the upgrade of RPM on SUSE.

There are a few workarounds for that, and the easiest one is using Smart into stepped mode (option “–stepped” on the command line). This can be explained because the more packages you enqueue on the same transaction, the more you raise the probability of a missing thread somewhere. So breaking each transaction into smaller sub-transactions would slow down thread creation and possibly avoid freezing. There are other tricks that can be done on the code level, but we prefer not to suggest them since we’re not sure about long term results using it.

The fact is that YaST and YOU won’t have the same problem since they work on a higher level from RPM. Smart threats packages on a more refined way, and deals directly with the rpm libraries, while YaST works almost like a wrapper, so it doesn’t see the same level of details as Smart does. Maybe that’s why SUSE never bothered upgrading RPM.

So, we’re absolutely sure that it’s NOT an Smart issue (no way). It’s really a problem on how RPM works with many concurrent threads on the same transacion, and this bug only exist on RPM 4.1 and older, but SUSE didn’t bother upgrading yet, and we haven’t asked it since we want to avoid biger problems that could possibly be caused by such upgrade on a stable release.

Bottom line, it’s just a matter of time for us to come up with a solution. Meanwhile, patience is a virtue.