PHP Hudson tools

A while ago p@rdus published an easy to use toolset for PHP quality control purposes. Many PHP software tools left the good old hacky script era of PHP some years ago and nowadays quality control becomes increasingly important.

The toolset is primarily intended to provide a basis for the continuous integration setup of the upcoming Horde4 release. It helps to enforce commercial grade quality guidelines for the Horde4 code base and allows to publish this to the outside.

Since the Kolab Server bases a large part of it's functionality on PHP packages it is obvious that the toolset is likely to also play its role in the quality control of the server.

As the name implies the toolset is primarily oriented towards providing the standard PHP QA toolset for the Continuous Integration server Hudson.

The content of the package is a collection of PEAR based packages and an ant script for automated installation. Thus you can basically use the resulting toolset for any other purpose in the field of PHP QA, too.

The included software in detail:

• PHPUnit
• PHP Depend
• PHP Documentor
• PEAR CodeSniffer
• PHP Mess Detector
• PHP Copy Paste Detector
• PHP Code Browser
• Horde Components

The toolset hopefully helps to get you up and running with PHP QA in no time.

Kolab2GentooPrefix

Last time I experimented with Gentoo-Prefix is about half a year ago. I don't know what type of problems I had back then but I remember I did not get far enough. Now - as I'm finally having a tiny bit of spare time for Kolab/Horde again - I did actually get it to compile and run. Nothing more than the base install. But I didn't see anything that would prevent me from trying to get a Kolab server running in such a prefix.

Combine that with the fact that the Kolab server is currently searching for a replacement for OpenPKG... ah, a tiny tiny little wee bit of hope. I don't think it will work out as I would like it to but at least I'm trying.

I believe the Kolab crowd will prefer a native installation method as their next primary platform. But OpenPKG had some significant advantages - even though nobody liked the distribution itself.

It can be installed on many distributions.

It only needs to be tested once and will have this tested stability independent of the distribution it is installed on.

It is a self contained system and the admins know they should keep changes in there to a minimum if they don't want to risk breaking the server.

Gentoo Prefix would allow us to retain these advantages. Ah, back to playing around...

Connecting to the net via a bluetooh mobile...

... using the command line on Ubuntu. These are just the core bluetooth commands and the hint does not deal with specific mobile devices or the settings for your specific provider. It is basically a reminder for myself. First you need to identify the bluetooth address and the channel using sdptool:

sdptool search DUN
Inquiring ...

Searching for DUN on 00:23:F1:21:63:0F ...
Service Name: Dial-up Networking
Service RecHandle: 0x2008003
Service Class ID List:
  "Dialup Networking" (0x1103)
  "Generic Networking" (0x1201)
Protocol Descriptor List:
  "L2CAP" (0x0100)
  "RFCOMM" (0x0003)
    Channel: 1
Profile Descriptor List:
  "Dialup Networking" (0x1103)
    Version: 0x0101

The modem device can now be added with rfcomm:

sudo rfcomm connect DUN 00:23:F1:21:63:0F 1
Connected /dev/rfcomm0 to 00:23:F1:21:63:0F on channel 1
Press CTRL-C for hangup

The tool reports that the modem device can now be used at /dev/rfcomm0. This can now be set in /etc/wvdial.conf to connect to the provider.

A parting gift

I have become increasingly unreliable concerning my activities within the Gentoo developer community during the last year. Now I finally arrived at the point where I consider the only reasonable solution to leave the Gentoo team. The final drop has been the fact that I promised Sebastian the next layman release. But week after week I did not find the time to work on the next version thus failing the promise.

With my commercial endeavours within the Kolab and Horde communities thriving I have to be realistic: The workload won't suddenly fade during the next year(s?). I would have liked to include Gentoo into the portfolio I get paid for but I was unable to achieve that. Chances are that I would be even less responsive concerning Gentoo in the future.

This is no easy decision for me as I do like Gentoo and feel strongly for some of the stuff I did for Gentoo. It is not easy to drop these projects. I would have made the choice earlier in order to clarify the situation if I would not care that much about Gentoo. But I left people with an unresponsive maintainer this way and I'm sorry for that.

There is one final thing I'd like to leave as a parting gift to the Gentoo community.

As some of you may know I wrote a german book about Gentoo. When I initially started the project I asked the publisher if there would be any possibility to produce a free version of that book, too. Writing about free software feels strange to me if the things I write are not free. But books are not software and I had to accept the commercial realities of the project at that time.

But I mentioned above that things for my little one-man-company are going well and so I did buy the rights to my book back. It has now been published under a free license and is available for download here. The latex source for the book is here.

Time to say goodbye. Sigh...

layman moves from subversion to git

In preparation for layman-1.2.4 the repository has been converted from subversion to git. The new repository can be found at git://layman.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/layman/layman

layman-1.2.3 is out

The next layman version has been released and fixes a few minor bugs:

• Support setting the terminal screen width (#253016)
• layman -S fetches each overlay twice (#253241)

I can't seem to get layman bug free these days. I already wanted to mark the newer version stable months ago. Let's hope there'll be a longer bug free period now ;)

layman-1.2.2 is out

The next layman version has been released and fixes a few minor bugs:

• layman -L: better use of screen real estate for source URLs (#251032, submitted by Martin von Gagern)
• Execute subprocesses in a shell. (#235165)
• layman/overlays/git.py (GitOverlay.sync): app-portage/layman - 'layman -S --quiet' yields "git: 'pull-q' is not a git-command." (#247964)

Thanks to all the contributers!

layman-1.2.1 is out

The next layman version has been released and fixes a few minor bugs:

• Fixes for python-2.6 (#237625, submitted by Mike Auty)
• Better locale support (#235165, submitted by A. F. T. Arahesis)
• Handle git+ssh://, ssh:// correctly (#230702, submitted by Donnie Berkholz)
• Do not remove directories if adding an overlay failed (#236945)

In addition there is a feature enhancement:

• Pass --quiet flag down to the version control system (#236165, submitted by A. F. T. Arahesis).

Thanks to all the contributers!

Distributed burden

I just found my old layman article is available for free. It probably has been accessible for a while already but I didn't know, so I thought I mention it here. It has been written for the German Linux Magazin so it is available in German only.

As a response to this little article I got a short e-mail about a week later. Patricia Jung asked me whether I'd be interested in writing a whole book about Gentoo. And I was. As people probably know...

Editing posts in blogger.com without getting them in the RSS again?

Sorry for spamming planet.gentoo.org with old stuff. I simply edited labels on old posts which apparently modified the last edit date and pushed them into the RSS feed again. Any hint on how I can prevent such a thing when blogging via blogger.com?