Paul's Blog Entries for April 2008

Tuesday 1st April 2008

Fedora Project

Local Packages

Wednesday 2nd April 2008

Local Packages

Fedora Project

Thursday 3rd April 2008

Fedora Project

Local Packages

Monday 7th April 2008

Local Packages

Fedora Project

Wednesday 9th April 2008

Fedora Project

Finally found some time to look at the pile of bugs that have built up on bittorrent, and apply some fixes. I guess the bugzilla triaging effort and yesterday's Final Freeze for Fedora 9 were enough to spur me on. In additional to updating Rawhide, I cloned the package for Fedora 7 and 8 and requested they be pushed to the testing repositories.

In addition to those bugs, I also moved the default data directory out of /srv to /var/lib/bittorrent because Fedora policy is not to include anything under /srv in packages (see PackagingDrafts/NoBitsInSrv), and also silenced some "deprecated function" warnings that originated from pygtk2.

I also managed to get the updated Rawhide package included in Fedora 9 Final despite missing the Final Freeze date, by making a successful appeal to the Fedora Release Engineering team :-)

A busy day!

Thursday 10th April 2008

Local Packages

Friday 11th April 2008

Local Packages

Testing GUI Applications in Mock

mock is the standard tool for building Fedora packages these days, and provides a convenient way to build RPMs for older or newer distribution releases than the machines you have available. For instance, all of my machines are running Fedora 8 at the moment but by using mock I can build packages for distributions as old as Red Hat Linux 7.3, and also for CentOS 3,4,5. However, what's not as obvious is that mock can also be used to run applications for these distributions so as to test them in their target environments.

For instance, earlier this week I applied a bunch of patches to my bittorrent package and wanted to make sure that the GUI still worked on Fedora Core 4 (basically checking that I hadn't introduced something that relied on newer versions of dependent packages). I used two machines to do this test, the build server (let's call it buildhost) where I built the package, and the display server (let's call it displayhost) where I wanted to view the GUI window.

The first task is to install the package to be tested (and any necessary infrastructure) into the mock chroot on the build server:

$ mock -r fedora-4-x86_64-core init
$ mock -r fedora-4-x86_64-core --install bittorrent-gui bitmap-fonts dejavu-fonts xorg-x11-fonts-base  xorg-x11-fonts-misc xorg-x11-fonts-Type1

Then set up an X display to view the application. I use Xnest (from the xorg-x11-server-Xnest package) on the display host for this, to set up a clean new display with no authentication aggravation.

$ Xnest -ac :2

Then, back on the build server, I point the DISPLAY variable at my target display and start the application.

$ mock -r fedora-4-x86_64-core shell
mock-chroot> export DISPLAY=displayhost:2
mock-chroot> bittorrent

The application appears on the Xnest display and I can test it to my heart's content.

Tuesday 15th April 2008

Local Packages

Fedora Project

Monday 21st April 2008

No updates recently as I was in the States on business last week.

Local Packages

Tuesday 22nd April 2008

Local Packages

Fedora Project

Wednesday 23rd April 2008

Local Packages

Thursday 24th April 2008

Local Packages

Sunday 27th April 2008

Fedora Project

Local Packages

Wednesday 30th April 2008

Local Packages

Fedora Project

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