Kevin's musings

The week started with the f41 mass rebuild finishing up (it actually mostly finished over the weekend, with just a few straggling builds left). For those that don’t know much about it, it’s basically when we (mostly) rebuild every package in Fedora rawhide. This then picks up a number of fixes (like improved compilers/tooling) and also is a chance to confirm that packages actually build currently and aren’t sitting there broken waiting for someone to need to quickly update them and find they cannot. Things were a bit slower this time because we have fewer (but larger/faster) s390x builders, so when say 8 ghc versions are all building at once, smaller things pile up behind them, but it all worked out fine in the end. We again hit a problem that happens it seems like every time now: Someone commits some change to a package to git and then either doesn’t build it, or does, but it fails gating or is otherwise untagged as broken, then the mass rebuild comes along and builds it again. We have talked about some ideas to handle this better, hopefully we will get to implementing something.

Upon looking around, I found that the linux support for the new snapdragon X laptops has been moving very quickly over the last few weeks. Lots of things now work, but of course it’s super early days and you really need to be willing to poke and prod to get things working. Which describes me pretty well, so I ordered a Lenovo Yoga slim 7x to play around with things. Look forward to some reviews and info about what can be made working in the short term in Fedora. Should be a lot of fun.

Did some more flock prep work this week. See the discussion thread if you have thoughts on what we should discuss or any input beforehand on anything.

I thought I would share a bit about how I handle keeping track of tasks. It’s definitely not perfect, but it mostly works for me. I’ve tried a bunch of todo apps/task trackers and they have always felt like they have a lot of overhead. I used taskwarrior for a long while, but adjusting things there was just a lot of work (especially re-occurring meetings/events). So, I went back to something I was using from long ago: a text file. So each week I make a new text file. It lists out the days so I can add tasks that I actually did on those days as I do them, and add things I plan to do/meetings/whatever with a – in front of them. I then have a longer list of todos/pending items below that divided into ready / post freeze / planning and I put things under there to pick from when I have cycles. I also have some todos that are moved from day to day until I do them and the entire thing is copied over the next week and adjusted. The – in front of things allows me to grep those out and output all the done tasks for reports or whatever. It works reasonably well, but the ready list is long and not as well organized as it could be. Anyhow, always room for improvement.