***thl is now known as knurd

I never was really happy with my TLA as nickname -- but well, thl (from Thorsten Heiner Leemhuis oder Thorsten Leemhuis) was the thing that sprung to my mind when I needed a nickname for IRC. I actually tried to think about something else quite a bit of time back then, but I didn't find something better that was free, so I just started using thl.

But recently I thought again to look out for something else -- IRC once again was the trigger, as thl was owned by someone else on OFTC already (and there was actually somebody else on freenode that tried to use thl these days). So I searched for something else.

I considered "steinlaus" (Petrophaga lorioti), but that joke is hard to understand for people outside of Germany (I'm actually wondering how many Germans will understand it these days), so I took something more international.

Evil?

'Our informal corporate motto is "Don't be evil."' -- that's written on the top of Google's Code of Conduct. Well, they managed that in the beginning imho when they were still a search engine and not much more. But they are becoming evil more and more in my eyes -- they were imho more then big enough already to be trusted and had much to much control over the Web already. Now they are buying DoubleClick. That really makes me anxious; where will that end? I'm starting to fear a Google controlled Internet where I can't visit a website without having "Big Brother Google" watching me. Just imagine what might happen if Google buys Microsoft (or vice versa); just a cooperation would be bad enough probably. <Prediction of the day>But I suppose Google will buy Canonical first</prediction of the day> ;-)

Google until now was one of the rare sides that were allowed to set cookies on my machine for more than one session as I had some settings saved that influenced what search results I get and how they are formated. That will change now. I'll probably look out for another blog hosting, too, and will try to get rid of gmail (which I'm using for jabber only anyway).

exclude=*-devel.i386 [Update]

I'm normally trying to use the default software and settings my linux distribution provides as much as possible, as everything that one changes in my experience fires back sooner or later and requires manual adjustments (read: time) to make it work again; that makes slightly advantages often obsolete if looked back at the situation in retrospective later.

But well, today I made a big exception again. I added "exclude=*-devel.i386" to my /etc/yum.conf; getting all those *-devel.i386 packages by default really annoyed me, as I always forgot to add the ".x86_64" when running "yum install foo-devel". The download of those i386 packages consumes bandwidth and takes time; installing and updating the packages later takes even more time. And even worse: you end with lots of unwanted and unneeded userspace apps and libs for i386 as well, as the devel packages normally depend on them; those packages are not cached by rpmdev-rmdevelrpms either, so I end up with lots of cruft on my hardisk.

All this IMHO for a small benefit: to be able to develop i386 packages on a x86_64 host. How big is the number of users doing that? And does it really work in practice? A lot of configure scripts and apps (including rpm) in my experience seem to get confused if you try to compile something for i386 on a x86_64 host (even when remembering to use setarch). So it's really the best and the safest to use a chroot (e.g. mock) for this purposes as far as I can see.

So in other words: is installing *-devel.i386 packages on x86_64 really a sane default for Fedora? I really doubt it. It creates more trouble for the growing number of x86_64 users and makes it a slightly bit easier for only a small group of users. I'm really wondering if it would be better to have those *-devel.i386 packages in a separate Fedora-add-on repository that people just can enable if they really want them.

[Update] Seems I need to clarify something, as I got two comments on this blog now, and it seems both users got tracked into the wrong direction. Rahul for example wrote:

>> All this IMHO for a small benefit: to be able to
>> develop i386 packages on a x86_64 host
> This is not the primary benefit. The primary reason
> is that there is a number of third party software that
> are still 32 bit and multi lib by default helps them
> work better without fiddling.

You got me wrong here. I'm all for having .i386 libs and maybe even some i386 apps (like firefox) in the repo, because (as your write) they are needed for third party software (for example). I was taking about the *-devel.i386 packages only.

I can still write spec files

My Fedora involvement in these days seems to me more in housekeeping/organization areas than packaging. But it seems I haven't lost all of my packaging skills in the past months and got two new Packages into Fedora over the weekend: rss2email and python-html2text -- the latter is needed by the former. Patrice Dumas, thanks for the quick review.

BTW, that's all your fault Max -- you shamelessly placed the idea of running an rssfeed-to-email daemon or cron job in my head with your blog post months ago. But rss2email suited my needs better than newspipe, which seems to be your preferred choice.

You're wondering what rss2email actually does? Well, it reads a rss or atom feed and sends all new (or, if you like, updated) entries to you by mail (html or plain text -- whatever you prefer). You can even use different e-mail addresses per feed and point the output directly to the proper IMAP folder that way.

Why all that? Easy: with rss2email I don't have to synchronize a rss-reader's settings-directory between different computers, I don't have to run and learn and additional application and I don't have to tell any web-service which feeds I like.

My usual way of browsing the web changed dramatically due to rss2email already -- I spend even more time in Thunderbird now (is that possible? I'm there already a lot to read all those mailing lists...) and less in Firefox.

BTW, is anyone still interested in having websec in Fedora? I'm using it on one of my servers for ages, but it seems I accidentally never packaged it up for Fedora :-(

Leaving FESCo

Just FYI, I'm not in FESCo any longer. Now with the Core and Extras merge it became to conflicting with my day job (we all need to earn money somehow for living), so I left (after being in FESCo for about 1 2/3 years) before the problems became to pressing. Yes, stepping down as chair some weeks ago was a preparation for this step; but no, I probably would have stepped down as chair then, too, even if I wouldn't have to leave FESCo now.

And be warned: I'll stay active in Fedora land. I'll in the long term hopefully do what I'd really like to see more in Fedora land: "Simply work on stuff, solve problems, write proposals, write policies or help with getting shit ^w stuff done that is needed or improves Fedora, even if you are not in FESCo or a similar committee". IMHO way to many people yell about (organizational) problems in Fedora land, without actually really helping to make those problems go away.

I wish FESCo all the best with its work and I'm sure it'll do a good job -- but guys, please make sure the community at least gets as much involved as in the past and make sure you try to get them even more involved. I think that's hardly needed, especially now with the merge when Extras-maintainers from the Fedora Community get in touch with Red Hat employees more often -- that's afaics sometimes like people from two different worlds meeting for the first time without actually understanding how the other world works and is organized. That can result in a lot of trouble...

My plans for the short term: finish some stuff like co-maintainership (I prepared a updated proposal, just need to look over it again) and the mailing list reorganization (that's still blocked; I'm waiting for decisions how we want to realize it technically -- e.g. a new server, a alias hostname that points to the current server, or just continue with the current setup...). I plan to get a lot more involved in EPEL (again) -- I had to put that down on my agenda a bit for the past months, as other FESCo jobs were more important.

For Fedora 8 I hope to revisit and rework the kernel module packaging standard -- we sat down and talked about it with some people on FUDCon. I hope we actually can have a enhanced standard for kernel modules in the future that is a mix of the current one and a dkms like solution in addition for those that want it (that might use dkms -- still unsure how to actually do that, but well, we'll see). That should fit most people: "normal" users then can get pre-compiled packages via yum while other that really want to (for whatever reasons) can use a dkms(-like) automatic build solution. Ohh, and I have two other Fedora-related, not-yet-publicly-announced pet projects that I plan to work on, too.

Ohh, and yes, besides that I hope to actually find time again to read a book or two :-)

Parallel installable Firefox 2.0 RPMS for Fedora Core 6

As some of you know I really disliked that Fedora Core 6 shipped (and sticks) to Firefox 1.5. But I understand the reasons why Fedora does that, and why the firefox2 package didn't make it into Extras. But the SRPM from Gawain Lynch was quite nice and he put a lot of effort into it. So I thought: why not get into the repo business for a while and set up a small repo with it? And that's what I did. Use

rpm -ivh http://www.leemhuis.info/files/repo/fc6-thl-ff2/6/i386/thl-ff2-for-fc6-release-1-1.fc6.thl.ff2.noarch.rpm

or something similar to install the repo file and the key which was used to sign the packages. Then run

yum install firefox2

to get Firefox 2.0 installed. The package installs in parallel to the Firefox 1.5 package from Fedora Core, so all those apps from Core and Extras that were build against 1.5 should still work. Note that some of your plugins might not work with Firefox 2.0 and that it will use the same profile directory as Firefox 1.5 (that's different from Gawain's packages -- he started Firefox 2.0 with the profile manager b default, *if* you start it from the menu).

To start Firefox 2.0 simply use the launcher from the menu or start it with "firefox2" from the command line. The package sets a alias "firefox -> firefox2" via a profile.d file, so after the next log in you should be able to just start if by using "firefox".

Special feature: I put a special package into the repo that should obsolete and thus delete the firefox2 package when you update to the development tree or to Fedora 7 later when it comes out -- just make sure the repo stays enabled.

There is one bug ^w feature I don't know how to workaround -- Firefox 1.5 starts up if you click on a URL in a Gnome app in case Firefox 2.0 is not yet running and Firefox 1.5 is still configured as your default browser. That happen to me multiple times, but it did not do any harm to my profile that I got aware of -- but it could, so you have been warned!

Home from FUDCon Boston 2007

Made it home from FUDCon fine. This time the flight worked well so I was at home on Monday morning local time. Haven't had that much luck earlier on my way to Boston -- we had a four hours delay in Paris CDG because they had to fix one of the engines :-( . We were in the plane all the time, so including the flight I got stuck in it for about 12 hours...

FUDCon was great, so it was worth the flight over the ocean -- especially meeting all those people from IRC real life was great, but even three days were not enough time to talk to each and everyone I wold have like to talk to. For the next conference I'll try to prepare a shirt or a cap that has my nick printed on it in big letters -- that should hopefully help that people find me on the first day :-) .

The Barcamp format was nice and worked quite well. The time was to short to visit all the session I was interested in -- I for example could not attend to the key signing party or the Live-CDs stuff. Got quite a bit of work done and stuff discussed during FUDCon and the Hackfest on Saturday/Sunday. Between discussion EPEL, mailing lists, kernel modules, a FESCo meeting and other stuff (side note: we forget to talk where we want to put the Extras wiki-pages after the merge) I reviewed some packages. I chose to work on xorg-x11 stuff -- don't know if that was a wise. I stopped reviewing xorg-x11-drv-* packages soon, as I found some issues in the first two packages that will likely be in others as well -- so it's probably wise to sort them out first before continuing.