Mono 2.0 lands today, thank you all for 1559 days of making Linux better by bringing us all this wonderful technology.
All possible congratulations to you fine gentlemen (and ladies) working on Mono on this excellent release.
As a bonus Paul Johnson the Fedora maintainer has announced that he plans to push 2.0 to F9 once it has proven itself in rawhide for a bit. Hopefully giving us a policy in the future of having the same superior up to date version available to all of our users.
The first week is now over, lots of beer (way to much beer, I keep forgetting at 27 I should not drink with the 18 year olds.. their livers are young and fresh) and I still find the whole place a bit confusing but then again my sense of direction was never all that well centered.
Pleasant discovery number 1. my assigned study group consists of one german war driver (debian/kde), one Foresight Linux developer, a young Windows guy who despite his selection of OS is extremely nice and then naturally me. This is honestly one of the first places I have been where Linux users outnumber Windows users.
Pleasant discovery number 2. The college network admin is very nice not to mention funny. In the introduction to the network he mentioned that all their Linux machines run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, so anywhere I go on campus I turn to see machines available with a Linux OS. There are also Mac and Windows machines but I suspect they are fairly few in number. During his talk he mentioned that the university used to run Fedora but that they had to switch to RHEL due to the upgrade cycle which apparently caused them considerable problems with management (who tend to get upset when things change every year or so just because the admins think new is shiny). That didn’t stop him from recommending Fedora to the freshmen for their personal machines which in my book makes him a hero.
Another discovery, we will be taught Java as the primary programming language on these RHEL machines, I am not a big Java fan and would have liked .NET via Mono better. That being said, I am looking forward to these classes, the BlueJ environment seems very backwards to me though, this is the first programming book I have ever read that does not start with hello world and talking about constructs and operators.. very odd indeed but I am told this is because the Nano Tech people also need to take this course and they find programming hard so we need the point and click approach.
I found one thing changed in me the past 5 days, Monday before I started I began writing an impassioned case for turning the Fedora releases into rolling updates. So that the maintainers would only be forced to maintain 1 GNOME stack e.g. in a scheme where Development was used for the unstable releases and post release a service pack would be issued to updates-testing for GNOME. Mono and such when the SIGs were happy with the stability and had been able to push everything at once. What changed largely is that now I have much less time, I want my machine to work, I wish development would slow down a tad and I suspect I have become boring. I don’t have time to test things on a weekly basis, I just want my OS to work and have suitable components – this also presents a problem for me in that I run Fedora since we tend to push a whole lot of stuff and cause all manners of regressions, e.g. now on F9 my DVD tray acts mighty fun and several other things broke with upgrades as well. I still want the latest applications available though, when I install Banshee it should be the most recent we have in our repos. Upstream in those cases do not support anything except the stable releases and not having them is doing everyone is disservice. All in all I am much more conflicted on the issue of updates now than I was before.
Today, inspired by a bit of free time while the washing machine does it’s thing I poked at rawhide. Specifically I was interested in why.. once again.. my iPod had stopped working in Banshee. The component responsible for this is Podsleuth, a neat little C# ditty which does all the magic for us.
First roadblock, the new rpm version is stricter with the fuzz so rebasing one patch was required. Then Podseluth needed to be adapted to the new sg3_utils, a simple little patch later and we now compile (many thanks to Dan Horak for pointing out my typo).
Now it still doesn’t actually run but the original 2 issues being fixed it now exposes another bug wherein it seems we cannot find HAL on dbus. This I am still trying to figure out but not at all bad for idle poking while I wait for the laundry to finish.
Just a friendly little message, I will be in Brazil on vacation from the 3rd of June till the 25th. I will have internet access but since I stepped down as a package maintainer nobody should notice.
That is right, I am officially unimportant now.. Well that is I will continue to do ambassador work and breaking Fedora in new an interesting ways as well as reviewing packages – I’d like to do my part to finish the merge reviews and of course I still hope more Mono review requests will fall into my lap (so far only one but a challenging one), there is an adundance of cool Mono technology we still lack such as notify-sharp, MonoTorrent, tasque, giver and monsoon – if you package them up, I will review them, if you go on vacation I will look after them, anything short of actually maintaining software – which is probably the best arrangement for all involved including our users whose interests should come before my own in this aspect.
Another reason to stop devoting time to stop maintaining software in Fedora is that in September I hope to start a CS course at my local university and I would like to not be distracted by Fedora in that way. When bugs pile up I feel first obligated to look at them, comment and try to fix them, then they overwhelm me and suck up all my time. Needless to say I loved my time with Fedora as a package maintainer, even though it was not without frustrations and my thanks go to the kind people to picked up my packages such as Adel and Nigel. I owe you people beer.
I am torn on one subject, I am on Planet Fedora, and now that the new easy scheme has been enabled, I get more control over what posts people see here. Looking at my stats articles on Fedora get the most hits and they are most relevant to the planet so since I started tagging and catagorizing my posts I might funnel only technology posts here. In the same breath the original idea of planets was giving a look into the life of a project and that includes personal stuff. Currently I try to limit that since it’s not of relevance, seperating it would allow me to devote more time blogging on other matters without fear of flooding the planet… I can’t decide on what would be the best approach.
The mighty Miguel reports that Moonlight saw it’s first release. First person to package it for Fedora gets a free review!
Yes I am lusting it’s goodness.
The Fedora package review process is rather encumbered with a number of bottlenecks, primarily from lack of hands to do the work. However the review process does help to ensure the high standard of our packages. As there are few people willing to review Mono packages I will make a standing offer to review your Mono package. I do this because I think Mono and Mono applications are great and I wish dearly that Fedora becomes the best platform for using and developing Mono applications on. I’m hoping by doing this we will be able to more effectively pass through the review process. I actively use a lot of Mono technology and I am active upstream as a tester for many Mono related projects so I also hope to stay active in your bugreport stream.
To take advantage of this offer simply add my email (gnomeuser at gmail dot com) to the cc line of your review request and I will automatically be notified.
