Archive for December, 2013

5 results.

Updates-testing and final freeze time again

by on 2013/12/01 at 2:05 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux

If you have a Fedora 20 install and updated recently, you may or may not have noticed that the updates-testing repo is now disabled.

It’s enabled for testing during most of the pre-release cycle of Fedora, but as we get close to release time (and we are), updates-testing is disabled.

So, if you are a tester/qa person/wanting to help test in the run up to release you may wish to re-enable updates-testing (a simple: ‘su -c ‘yum-config-manager –enable updates-testing” should do). You can then update and use the excellent ‘fedora-easy-karma’ tool to provide testing feedback.

If you are not interested in testing things out, and want to just have your install more or less as it will be when it’s released, you may want to run a ‘yum distro-sync’. This should downgrade your packages to the base versions from any you have installed from updates-testing.

If you don’t do this you may run into odd problems about packages not available or mismatches when trying to install 32bit packages on a 64bit install or the like.

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Rolling Rolling Rolling…rawhide (2013-12-03 edition)

by on 2013/12/03 at 11:44 am
Posted In: fedora, linux

As of a few days ago, virt-manager is working again in rawhide. 😉 Crobinso tracked down the builds needed (a gtk3 and pygobject3 build). This just goes to show that bugs where there are a lot of interrelated components are difficult to get traction on and get solved. At least some of the delay was also my fault, as I adding the last bug/issue to the previous solved one instead of opening a new bug, and maintainer(s) were not clear that it was still not working.

If you’re a package maintainer, you may have gotten a new bug on your rawhide package that it doesn’t build with “-Werror=format-security”. These will be great to get cleaned up. See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Format-Security-FAQ for all the fun details.

Ran into a fun bug this last week that turned out to be in glibc (as far as I can tell). I built locally a midori package with webkit2/gtk3 which I do from time to time to see how well the port is coming along. The build finished fine, but starting it resulting in spewing: “Failed to create shared memory file /WK2SharedMemory.NNNNNNNNN” and not working. I then tried epiphany with the same result. Digging around with gdb, I finally got that it was failing in glibc. Looking at changes in the rawhide glibc, I narrowed in on some shm_open changes they made recently. I’m still not sure why the code isn’t working right there, but it is not. I filed a upstream glibc bug on it: https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=16274 so far with no answer. Hopefully they will look into it soon.

Otherwise rawhide is rolling along as always. 🙂

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Fedora 20 notes and links

by on 2013/12/16 at 11:28 am
Posted In: fedora, linux

Fedora 20 is released tomorrow! (16UTC)

In the mean time a few notes:

If you have installed a prerelease version at any point in the past:

If you plan on installing or upgrading tomorrow or after:

Looking forward to a great release!

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Holiday geeking so far

by on 2013/12/28 at 12:12 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux

Well, we are a little less than 1/2 way through the holidays here (at least for me), and I thought I would post about some misc geekery I have been working on in between eating too much, watching movies and playing games.

Since about November when we started the crunch to release Fedora 20, I have been adding little things to a ‘toplay’ file. These are things I didn’t have time for but thought were interesting and should look into/play around with. The list is still long, but we aren’t even half way done with holidays, so I hope I get more of them looked into.

So far I have:

  • Upgraded my phone to CM11 nightlies. I put this off because it needed a wipe and I just didn’t want to take the time to mess with it. I took nandroid and titanium backups, then wiped it out and upgraded it. Still a but of tweaking to do, but overall I am liking CM11 and the nightlies have been stable enough for me. I do always make a backup when I update, so I can always go back a day if there’s a big problem. I guess this is similar to running rawhide on my laptop. 😉
  • In the phone upgrade I did not re-install google authenticator, but switched all my one time pad needs over to FreeOTP. A lot of people seem unaware that google took authenticator closed source a while back, but they did. FreeOTP is 100% free and also written by some folks at Red Hat. You can find it in the play store, and code/etc at: https://fedorahosted.org/freeotp/
  • I poked a bit at some broken deps in rawhide, but still need to look at most of them. It would sure be nice to get that list down to well… none.
  • I did some rawhide downgrading and rebooting and isolated the versions of selinux-policy and libselinux in rawhide that are causing tons of things to fail with execmem and execstack errors. Hopefully that will get fixed up soon. In the mean time, running permissive mode. ;( See this bug for more info.
  • Upgraded wordpress plugins and themes and associated junk on my wordpress site. I keep the main package updated (with the Fedora provided package), but I sometimes slack on updating all the other stuff that has to be done manually. As a side note, some of the instructions for some plugins is INSANE, things like “chmod -R 777 to properly install this plugin”. No thanks.
  • Got mostly caught up on updating various of my packages (calibre, xfce4-terminal, new ansible with galaxy commands, etc) and responding to bugzillas.
  • I got all setup for using copr for my latest calibre builds. Please see the copr at: http://copr-fe.cloud.fedoraproject.org/coprs/kevin/calibre/ I’m not sure best how to transition from the fedorapeople repo, as redirects aren’t going to work easily. I might just remove it and place a README there for folks to pick up the new location, or come up with something better as I suspect a number of folks might be migrating like that.
  • Non Linux or Fedora related: Finished Diablo 3, ate far too much good food. 🙂

Hopefully over the rest of the break I can start digging into some packages/applications that I have had on my list for ages… repmgr, CRIU, buildbot, phabricator, and others.

Hope everyone else is having a relaxing holiday season.

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rawhide holiday edition 2013

by on 2013/12/29 at 6:28 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux

This will likely be the last of my week in rawhide blog posts this year. First some thoughts about recent holiday breakage in rawhide, and then some retrospective.

Right as everyone left for the holiday’s this year, rawhide suffered from a number of bugs. Firstly a selinux issue causing lots of things to fail with execstack/execmem errors. This would cause things to not come up right on boot, or at the very least make it so you couldn’t login. Running in permissive mode until this bug is fixed is sadly the workaround at least at the moment.

With the release of Fedora 20, a number of QA folks have moved up to rawhide and run into a number of issues in the gnome stack in particular. Adam Williamson has updated the rawhidewatch blog with several of them. We really need to try harder as a distro to be more careful with builds. yes, particularly in rawhide.

Any of the following are things we should be working to detect and avoid:

  • ABI/API bumps of packages where the maintainer doesn’t announce them in advance. The policy is for the maintainer to announce these in advance and (wherever possible) rebuild affected packages or at least get an ack from maintainers of those that they will rebuild them. There’s just no excuse for pushing a build with no announcement and wandering off.
  • Pushing a critical build or something that requires a bunch of rebuilds you can’t do on a weekend or holiday. If your package is minor sure, work whenever you can, but pushing things like a libpng rebuild on a friday afternoon, or pushing a new gnome build before leaving on holiday for 2 weeks when you know it’s not ready is not ideal.

Things we should be doing more of:

  • Eating our own rawhide-food. If we had more folks running gnome in rawhide they would have seen some of these issues as they happened, not after the fact. In general, more coverage would be great. I think we need to make sure in the fedora.next world to have people actively using the rawhide version of the ‘products’ day to day.
  • Asking for help. If you have a package and it has broken deps and you don’t know how to fix it, please ask on the devel list. There’s people around who are able and willing to help if they know there’s an issue going on that isn’t solved.
  • Announcing/Coordinating. Tell folks when there’s an ABI bump, file bugs when you see broken things.
  • Automation. As always we should look at putting some checks in place for rawhide to help prevent some of the issues we run into, it’s just a matter of deciding on the tooling and finding time to implement it.

So, looking back on the year there have been a number of hiccups and bugs and issues, but overall rawhide has been very usable day to day for me for the most part. I really hope I can help more folks start using it day to day as well to increase our testing and fix things much faster before they go to any ‘stable’ Fedora release. With the fedora.next stuff upcoming I think we will probibly see more folks move to rawhide simply because they want the newest things and f21 isn’t going to be along as fast as it would have been in the past.

Here’s looking forward to another exciting year of rawhide. 🙂

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