Entries by Harald Sitter

For comments on comments from yesterday's post please read at the very bottom.

Let's get started with the technical details.


I am not at home right now, so I can't use my awesome paper+pencil-drawing(tm) for this explaination so bear with me in case some parts are a bit too complex (I actually created most code while operating on ballmer's peek, so it's as difficult for me to understand it as it might be for you

Anyway, the Neon framework, which is responsbile for the important parts of the nightly build process (I am considering building as not important here ) is written in Ruby (omg!).

http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/extragear/multimedia/amarok/supplementary_scripts/neon

Those of you who had a look at the upcoming Amarok release script will notice quite some similarities, most of them are caused by the fact that I absolutely hate scrolling in files so both source trees consist of some dirs and a couple of files named according to their use (surprise!).

Neon basically consist of 4 components which more or less rely on each other:

• neon.rb/libneon.rb as core component
• fetcher.rb is handling the collection of sources - more on that later
• publisher.rb is basically a wrapper for various ways of source distribution (e.g. tarball upload via FTP)
• distro.rb is a wrapper for distributions
  

neon.rb is responsible for very very very basic tasks, like setting necessary variables/constants, deciding which parts fetcher.rb actually has to fetch and how to publish the tarballs as well as which distribution processes to invoke (well, and cleanup work, but that might eventually get it's own file).

The first real work that is done, is checking which source trees need to be fetched (Qt gets built once a month - Strigi, TagLib, KDELibs and KDEBase are built once a week - and only Amarok is built once a day). Qt and KDELibs are actually just downloaded from the KDE snapshots on ftp.kde.org, the others get fetched directly from SVN (kdebase, or rather kdebaseruntime is a very cut down version which only ships with stuff that is necessary to run Amarok - the Xine Phonon backend for example).

In case all the SVN magic finished without problems the publishers would kick in and pull the newly created tarballs to some source distribution server (ftp/web server).

Then the distributions get their source packages. All distribution realted tasks are within special files located in neon/distros/ - the only working one is Kubuntu right now, but the processes are the same for most package types anyway.

First it pulls a copy of the source trees, and prepares everything as necessary for the package type/distribution, once that is done, it uploads to a remote build server (in case of Kubuntu this is done package by package to prevent complete meltdowns of the repository in case of an issue.

The most important part is that fetcher.rb created an array listing all fetched source trees (including their SVN revision number), so that all distributions can create an appropriate version string (Kubuntu is using DATE+svnREVISON-0amarok1).

There are a couple of guidelines all distribution packages should follow, for example they should require few to none maintenance. Ultimately the only reason one would have to edit the packaging, once everything works properly, is to make it work for new distribution releases.

Again Kubuntu as example: source packages are created according to the soure tarballs provided by fetcher.rb, they get thrown in a build deamon and run threw some automated cmake/kde build scripts and one gets _one resulting binary per source package.

Also, all packages should come with development headers and debugging symbols (I guess it's pretty obvious why that is

To sum that up: the most tricky part is probably to get the packaging right - general information for distributions are on the wiki page.

Everyone who is interessted in contribution, either contact me personally or use the Neon mailing list

------------------
Regarding Comments:

OpenSuse build service
Good thing, but it's really up to the maintainers where they want to build. For Kubuntu it makes most sense to use the Launchpad Personal Package Archive, for openSUSE however we will of course use the OSBS

Ubuntu -> Debian
Not much of a problem, with a bit of tuning they could actually rely on the same debian directories. The only tricky part is the remote build server, I guess using the openSUSE build service is a good idea?

-dev packages
The first public release of Neon had quite some dependencies on -dev packages, they are there because Neon is also meant to help developers join Amaork development. I removed them from the deps stack (strigi, taglib, kdelibs, kdebaseruntime, amarok) they should disappear from qt at some rebuild as well.
For the developers there will be a seperate package for all necessary -dev packages. Should be available soonish.

Missing Icons?
Should be fixed now.

Wrong Colouring!
I can't reproduce the issue, and actually thought it was fixed months ago. If anyone gets hold of information why this appears please leave a mail at the Neon mailing list

How seperate is it really?
Let's say it that way: the possability that Neon will cause issues with any existing KDE/Amarok/Qt configuration is close to not existing at all.
This also includes your collection.db

A least 5 people ask us every day when Amarok 2 will be ready and when it will be easy to install without compiling it - since yesterday we can tell them: there you go!

Project Neon makes it possible for YOU and me and everyone (kind of, at least

Neon is meant to provide nightly Amarok builds ....
which means that it generates new Amarok packages for various distributions (currently only Kubuntu, openSUSE is in the queue though) ever day so that everyone can install them for whatever reason (testing, checking out the latest development, ...).
... So the main aim of Neon is clearly to provide a way to install the latest Amarok development version.

After installing amarok-nightly you will find an entry in your application menu, I'd like to call that well integrated with the operating system ;-), but the nifty thing about it is, that amarok-nightly will run without problems along a production system, it is stored in a completely unrelated path and all configurations are (or rather should) be stored in it's own directory.

This makes it possible to check out Amarok 2 once a day while running Amarok 1 to get the usual music entertainment.

More information on Neon and how to use it are available on it's wiki page.

Later I will write a more technical post, explaining how it works and how to get other distributions supported.

Dear Tristan, I like further developed ideas, mostly, and I also like to develop ideas further.

...I just read such a further developed idea and since I like it a lot, I am goint to develop it further (normal process for me).

Tomorrow Amarok, Linux market leader in the Music Application segment, will announce something revolutionary.
We came to the decision that others know better and therefore we will sync our release schedule to Ubuntu, Linux market leader in the Home User Operating System segment. Our current model of partly time-based and partly feature-based release planing is apparently creating enormous inefficiency in the development of our high-quality software. Mainly because of this we will do 2 releases per year, each 2 days before Ubuntu releases a new version, so that the build servers have enough time to build the packages.
In order to join this with our very fast and feature rich development we will provide at least 25% new or changed code in a time-frame of one year (2 releases), we hope that by setting this minimal growth rate we are able to increase our userbase by 213% per year.
To support these alternations quality assurance will be reduced to a minimum as it can cause scaling issues in combination with this new concept.

This is however only the first step. In a long-term view we aim to breakup the underlying project of Amarok and become a 100% part of the Ubuntu project to share resources and create a strong leader in thew newly created market of Music Home User Appliaction Operating Systems. We also want to prevent our users from wasting half their life with compilation, so we will stop releaseing source tarballs but instead only offer Ubuntu DEB-files.

We will also suggest KDE and all the distributions, we have intensive collaboration with, to start a strong binding to the Ubuntu project as well, and possibly become part of it.

Watch out for the announcement and the moving of our structures from KDE/Amarok ones to Ubuntu/Launchpad.

A nice day wishes your soon-not-to-be-anymore-project-manager.

It's that time of April again, Ubuntu/Kubuntu released the all new shiny versions of their distributions. This time the releaes is called Hardy Heron *woohooo*

So, what do we do when a new version is out?
Right, party!
Join the Halligalli Hummel Party(tm) in #kubuntu-devel and celebrate the latest Kubuntu release with us on 24-04-2008 @ 16UTC. Of course as party guest you should use the official party wallpaper -> this svg or png

Make sure not to miss the grand party kickoff!
We also have our own bar and a radio show, sponsored by Amarok, (maybe )

In case you just want to have some information about the release, head over to kubuntu.org

Finally: spread the word by bloging, twittering, talking, giving calls etc
GO GO GO!

It's that time of April again, Ubuntu/Kubuntu released the all new shiny versions of their distributions. This time the releaes is called Hardy Heron *woohooo*

So, what do we do when a new version is out?
Right, party!
Join the Halligalli Hummel Party(tm) in #kubuntu-devel and celebrate the latest Kubuntu release with us on 24-04-2008 @ 16UTC. Of course as party guest you should use the official party wallpaper -> this svg or png

Make sure not to miss the grand party kickoff!
We also have our own bar and a radio show, sponsored by Amarok, (maybe )

In case you just want to have some information about the release, head over to kubuntu.org

Finally: spread the word by bloging, twittering, talking, giving calls etc
GO GO GO!

http://daniel.holba.ch/5-a-day-stats/
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Apparently kubuntu-de.org hit 1000 triaged bugs... as first team ever!!! jump party ... ah well, no time for partying, more bugs are waiting

Still it makes me proud to be part of such a wonderful community, not only Kubuntu-de.org but also Ubuntu as a whole, including all of *buntu.
Thanks to everyone who's showing that Kubuntu is a healthy part of the Ubuntu community!

...so much for the 'Kubuntu is a second class citizen' issue

Ladies, Gentleman, Bots and others, may I introduce to you #amarok.fr on FreeNode.

Yeah, it took me over a year to get this project done, but better late than never, right?
French is now as well as English, German and Spanish one of the Amarok IRC-based support languages *cheer*

Everyone who speaks French, wants to speak French, or just once in his life wants to hang out with the cool guys -> join the channel.

In other news:

• Cebit was quite exhausting, but very worth it
• Project Neon is still having 2 or 3 quite annoying (means difficult to fix) showstoppers
• Amarok 2 nears Alpha
• Amarok 1.4.9 should get rolling somewhat soon as well
• GMail's interface is awful when trying to organize a lot of mailing lists - kde-www has 120 unread mails right now
  

-(~:$)-> wtf snafu
SNAFU: situation normal, all fucked up

Tomorrow it's one week of KDE 4. Well, just yet another week, with no more than 5 hours sleep per day, heavy thinking and a couple of new stress balls.

Probably none notice that I didn't blog about KDE 4, I can't even blame you, everyone else did, so I don't matter (even less then usual )

But I have the best excuse ever: "It's all Kubuntu's fault!"
After I installed the Kubuntu packages of KDE 4.0.0, I was considerable surprised, that the icons were totally screwed, new applications like dolphin and systemsettings didn't have one at all and some others (like) Konqueror, were using the old version. Everyone who knows me, pretty much gets were that led to -> me trying to fix it, but breaking even more instead. I dugg in and didn't precisely get out since Friday, icon fixes are still not finished, but instead I have introduced new build rules and backported fixes and styling improvements, created some concepts on how to improve the status of KDE 3 + KDE 4 coexisting ...

May I say: I hate when this happens! :-@

Anyway, I think 4.0.1 is going to be one useable desktop (at least when you got a KDE3Pim .
The direction is right, KDE 4 just needs more love.

As for Amarok: something really cool is coming up, although my new wrapper script for releases is br0ken

Tomorrow I'll be at LinuxDay in Dornbirn, Vorarlberg, Austria. Beside having a joint "booth" with Kubuntu-de.org (saves me the time of traveling between the party locations I'm also giving a talk about Amarok, the Amarok project and Amarok2 (read TWO).

So, if you are living in western Austria, eastern Switzerland or southern Germany and don't know what to do on Saturday, then come visit us at the Amarok/Kubuntu Party Booth.

Oh, and someone should bring the beer


.

Intel launched lesswatts.org, a collection of tips and tools for extreme powersaving. And I, as someone who loves very long standby times, of course started right away enhancing my gomobile script (I run this script on demand, since it doesn't make much sense to activate all power saving settings just for going downstairs where AC plug is waiting anyway).

I have to admit that I was using powertop since I'm running Kubuntu Gutsy, so I can't exactly recall my battery standby time with stock Kubuntu, but I think it was slightly more than 4 hours. With powertop I managed to increase it by 2 hours (i.e. slightly more than 6 hours), but what I achived with the tips on lesswatts is just _awesome -> 7 hours 44 minutes... with quite decent (meaning for me bearable) settings.

Thats why I want to say "Thank you for the hardware, the drivers and the tuning tool/tips." to Intel.

...next to do: check out all the fine tools, yummy

We are socialing

yepeeeeee, Amarok's project founder Mark just started a discussion about permissions in ubuntu, where www-data seems to have access to a shell. Although he just noted that he wants to cuddle and be a lovely nice person, so letz drop this totally pointless note.

Anyway, the thing is we are going to do a live stream on radio anorak today (2007-08-26 stream link). From about 8 o'clock UTC to about 12 o'clock UTC we are going to present you the finest electronica music the free music world has to offer. Also short notes about current on going discussion will be aired, so check it out if got a chance.

It will be totally awesome

Now, the Amarok Wolf Brigade(tm) actually just wanted to do some VoIPing. It ended up in a big fucking mess, which lead to the awful cognition that Skype is the only usable VoIP software on Linux.

• Wengo: crashing a lot, not logging in properly, not working properly -> I did 52 tries to package it!!!
• Ekiga: pretty sound, shitty GUI, robot voices in conference rooms
  
• Gizmo: crappy sound, crappy GUI, crappy dmix support, funky conference mode
• Jabbin: broken website
• KCall: crappy GUI, didn't work with wengo SIP

Skype on the other hand got conference call, good quality and a nice GUI. this is probably the reason for stories like this:

[markey] this morning I woke up
[markey] slightly disoriented
[markey] then I realized I'm lying flat on the floor
[eean] o.O
[markey] computer keyboard and mouse are on the ground too
[markey] some keys fallen off
[eean] wtf
[markey] must have fallen asleep
[markey] and then slipped from the chair
[eean] dude
[markey] didn't hurt though
[eean] you need to sleep more

So let me tell you: VoIP on Linux sux, except for Skype, which is closed source though.... but hey, we just wanna talk, not save the world from evil Ebay :S

[EDIT]
We also tried twinkle, but unfortunately one does need a SIP account and we were quite disappointed, so we didn't got any further ..... though from screenshots we noticed -> the gui is shit ... and the FAQ is telling strange things about 3-call-conference with horrible how to do that.

Our very own Amarok father (hey markey! told me to blog about photos (since everyone loves photos), therefore I'm introducing to you: LinuxTag content aggregation part un

Report by Kubuntu-de.org crew (english version):
http://www.kubuntu-de.org/english/reflections-linuxtag-2007

Photo collection by Kubuntu-de.org crew:
http://www.kubuntu-de.org/bilder/events/linuxtag-2007

Photo collection by Sven from Amarok (including comments - you really should take a look at it ;-):
http://amarok.kde.org/d/en/index.php?q=gallery&g2_itemId=1122

Amarok introduction by Sven and /me (have to say sorry, I was quite tired):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3769412612065314512&hl=en

Sven's interview with german radio Deutschlandfunk:
http://developer.kde.org/~danimo/dlf-kde-lt2007.mp3

Slides:
http://www.kde.org/kdeslides/index.php#linuxtag2007

Amarok related content is also listed here

Still missing:

• videos from Sven's talk and my workshop (have been told it is unbelivable funny)
• radio interviews with RadioTux
  

I'll inform you as soon as they are available... I'm really looking forward to the videos

Yesterday, without any warning, Emanuel Goscinski asked me whether I'd like to do an interview with kubuntu-de.org. Of course I said yes (after all I am very selfish and like to search myself on Google ).

Anyway, all this resulted in an (IMHO) quite good interview, a tiny little bit too much tech stuff, but otherwise worth reading...

Emanuel however removed one super important question (according to Nightrose it describes me pretty well):

Welche drei Menschen und welche drei Dinge würdest du auf eine einsame Insel mitnehmen (ohne Internetanschluss)?

Ohne Internetanschluss? Vergiss es, ich fahr nicht auf die!

Translation:

Which 3 people and which 3 things would you take with you on an lonesome island (with no internet connection)

No internet connection? Forget it, I'm so not going!

In case you really (?) want to have a look at the complete interview, head over to kubuntu-de.org:

• click ---> here <--- for the english translation
• click ---> here <--- for the german interview

-(~:$)-> wtf snafu
SNAFU: situation normal, all fucked up

Tomorrow it's one week of KDE 4. Well, just yet another week, with no more than 5 hours sleep per day, heavy thinking and a couple of new stress balls.

Probably none notice that I didn't blog about KDE 4, I can't even blame you, everyone else did, so I don't matter (even less then usual )

But I have the best excuse ever: "It's all Kubuntu's fault!"
After I installed the Kubuntu packages of KDE 4.0.0, I was considerable surprised, that the icons were totally screwed, new applications like dolphin and systemsettings didn't have one at all and some others (like) Konqueror, were using the old version. Everyone who knows me, pretty much gets were that led -> me trying to fix it, but breaking even more instead. I dugg in and didn't precisely get out since Friday, icon fixes are still not finished, but instead I have introduced new build rules and backported fixes and styling improvements, created some concepts on how to improve the status of KDE 3 + KDE 4 coexisting ...

May I say: I hate when this happens! :-@

Anyway, I think 4.0.1 is going to be one useable desktop (at least when you got a KDE3Pim .
The direction is right, KDE 4 just needs more love.

As for Amarok: something really cool is coming up, although my new wrapper script for releases is br0ken