..continuing last year's article. so another year passed by and it's time to look back and see what we did during 2007. probably i miss a lot of stuff but here is my list:

1) ability to go back in the installer to a previous point if you missed something. do you remember the days when one had to reboot if he/she wanted to do so? :)

2) compiz improvements. this is now settled down in current and it's pretty sane. we cleaned up the old compiz and beryl, we have a single compiz-fusion, it has a nice step by step documentation and it works fine both for kde and gnome.

3) asciidoc. i think we highly improved our documentation since we switched from latex to asciidoc. a user manual of 98 pages in a nice pdf format is cute, isn't it? :)

4) newsletters. Alex started to issue newsletters and recently phayz helped out us, so it's alive again. i think it's something great.

5) yugo. 'factory' was our previous i686 build server, it was a very old machine with a cpu of 300mhz and so on. it was time to replace it and now yugo does the job.

6) fwlive. this was an old project but only test versions were available, based on old frugalware versions. now there is a live version of every released version of frugalware, thanks to janny, boobaa and ironiq. great!

7) gnetconfig. the first graphical config tool from priyank. i'm really bad at any graphical programming, so i'm glad to see finally we started to work on guis.

8) gfpm. something users always wanted and now it's here. a true graphical package manager, which is not just a wrapper but properly uses libpacman. awesome.

9) fun. this is our update manager which can sit on the system tray (or whatever i should call kicker not to be kde specific ;) ) and notifies you if there is something to update. i'm sure this is more comfortable compared to watching the -security mailing list for updates or doing a -Syu daily :)

10) syncpkgd2. if you remember, the old method was that there were only clients and they tried to figure out what to build, they built and uploaded the packages. this was very suboptimal: it allowed only one buildserver / arch and it was slow. okay, being slow is the smaller problem, but every buildserver was a single point of failure. nowadays we have two i686 buildservers (thanks to boobaa) and it's theoretically it's possible to have two x86_64 buildservers, too. so even if one i686 buildserver is down, i can be at the beach, sipping a mojito :)

okay, i learned something today :)

you have a client behind a firewall and you have a server somewhere. and you want to ssh from the server to the client. that's exactly why ssh has a magic -R option!

if you do an

$ ssh -R 19022:localhost:22 server

that will mean that you can ssh to client:22 on the server by sshing to localhost:19022 on the server. yes, and it works even if the client is behind a firewall, yay! :)

update:

you probably want to add this to your ~/.ssh/config on the server as well:

Host client
        NoHostAuthenticationForLocalhost yes
        HostName localhost
        Port 19022

so that you can easily just type

$ ssh client

on the server

git-svnimport will be removed in git-1.5.4 and i don't think it's tirival to use git-svn (which is great for bi-directional work) to properly convert an svn repo (with multiple branches) to a git one, so here is a recipe.

first, just use git-svn to create a git-svn repo. it's a git repo but it's a bit weird, it contains metadata which is necessary for bi-directional operations and you won't see the branches by default when you clone it. ah and it's not a bare repo.

in this example i'll convert ooo-build's svn repo (it has several branches and tags, so it's a good example).

mkdir -p ~/git/ooo-build cd ~/git/ooo-build git svn init -s svn+ssh://svn.gnome.org/svn/ooo-build git svn fetch

this will take a while. once it's completed, you need to convert this to a bare repo:

mkdir ../ooo-build.git cd ../ooo-build.git git --bare init git config remote.origin.url ~/git/ooo-build git config remote.origin.fetch +refs/remotes/tags/*:refs/tags/* git config --add remote.origin.fetch +refs/remotes/trunk:refs/heads/master git config --add remote.origin.fetch +refs/remotes/*:refs/heads/* git fetch

and you're done! :)

of course this is an incremental operation, so all you need is to run git svn fetch and git fetch from cron to keep the mirror up to date.

update:

it turns out you can even do this by having only one git repo. it has benefints: you don't have to duplicate the object database. and it has one problem: if you later switch fully to git, then you want to remove the git-svn metadata - doing so is the easiest if you just clone the repo.

so - in case you want this, you have to:

mkdir -p ~/git/ooo-build.git cd ~/git/ooo-build.git git --bare init git --bare svn init -s svn+ssh://svn.gnome.org/svn/ooo-build git --bare svn fetch

and then you can fetch from yourself:

git config remote.origin.url . git config remote.origin.fetch +refs/remotes/tags/*:refs/tags/* git config --add remote.origin.fetch +refs/remotes/*:refs/heads/* git fetch

note: git config --add remote.origin.fetch +refs/remotes/trunk:refs/heads/master it unnecessary as git svn fetch will update this for you (it is different from git fetch)

thanks for devurandom from #git for pointing out that this is possible using git --bare init before git svn init and using git --bare svn fetch :)

it was a while ago when we registered at ohloh.net, but i recently re-visited that page, and i found some nice PR texts there ;)

Over the past twelve months, 18 developers contributed new code to Frugalware Linux.

This is a relatively large team, putting this project among the top 10% of all project teams on Ohloh.

For this measurement, Ohloh considered only recent changes to the code. Over the entire history of the project, 36 developers have contributed.

well, i always considered our team as a nice and good but small team, it turns out that if you count projects, we're not that small! :)

it also creates nice charts about what programming languages do we use, etc, etc. so it's a different approach, compared to cia, but it's interesting.

recently i needed to convert a cvs repo to git, in fact i'm providing a git mirror, so i need incremental updates.

here is the command i needed:

$ git cvsimport -d :pserver:anonymous@tcpflow.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tcpflow -C tcpflow tcpflow

yes, this will do the initial conversion and the incremental one, too. :)

tcpflow is a nice small console application to debug your network data. the usage is simple. just something like

# tcpflow -i eth0

is enough. you're recommended to start it in an empty directory :)

don't be surprised, the incoming and the outgoing connection to a server's given port will be logged to 2 different files ;)

git filter-branch is a new command in git-1.5.3 and today i met a situation where it was really useful. here is the scenario:

i have a 'vmexam' (like soxexam, "vmiklos' examples") repo, random small code chunks, every commit touches only a given subdir. after some time some projects need an own repo and i do versioned releases. this was the case with pyrssi, too

so i wanted to have a new repo with only the pyrssi-related commits and without anything else. this is exactly the case git filter-branch's subdirectory filter is for:

git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter python/cgi/pyrssi HEAD

then in the old repo i just rm -rf'd the code and i had it in the root dir of the new repo. yay! :)

so, here is the situation:

you have a machine behind a firewall and you have an ssh session to a server. and you want to send notifications to you machine. here is what i did, maybe useful for others, too

• you'll need the program called osd_cat, provided by osd
• you'll need to use ssh with the -X option
• if you run programs inside screen, you still won't know the the right DISPLAY number, so do a trick: add

  [ -n "$DISPLAY" ] && echo $DISPLAY > ~/.display

  to you ~/.bash_login

• now you're ready to use osd_cat:

  $ echo -e 'foo'|DISPLAY=cat ~/.display osd_cat --color=blue --age=4 --font=-*-helvetica-medium-r-*-*-*-320-*-*-*-*-*-* --offset=100 --align=right --indent=100

as an example, irssi has osd.pl to use osd_cat for highlight notifications :)

Priyank recently removed Beryl from -current and added Compiz Fusion. so i did a base install then i followed the instructions in xgl's README.Frugalware. a few impressions:

pros:

• i have an i810 card, not nvidia, or anything extra, it's a cheap one. the only effect that was slow for me is when i marked the cube 100% transparent. but all the other effect were really fast.
• compiz initially worked fine only with gnome. i'm a kde fan so i tried compiz with kde and it worked fine. i think this is something new
• thanks to aiglx, i did not have to - in fact - start xgl, no editing in kdm.conf or anything, just xorg.conf

cons:

• i have 4 virtual desktops like:

  1 | 2
  ----
  3 | 4

  compiz translates this to: a simple paper with two side and on each size there is another side on top of the other one. so it says it's not a cube. how crappy

• i can't select to hide windows from other virtual desktops from the taskbar. a basic feature @ kde

conclusion? it's really nice, well done - but for daily work of course i won't enable it :)

here is the problem:

you hava gpg key since 5 years. you had various mail addresses over the time and every mail address is attached to a key. so it'll look ugly, like this.

the problem is that once you pushed a uid (read: email address, attached to a key) to the keyserver, you can no longer remove it. but here is the solution: you can revoke it! :)

how to do so?

it's easy:

$ gpg --edit-key john@foo.org

a list of your ids with numbers are displayed. select a uid:

Command> uid 2

then you can revoke it:

Command> revuid 3 Really revoke this user ID? (y/N) y Please select the reason for the revocation: 0 = No reason specified 4 = User ID is no longer valid Q = Cancel (Probably you want to select 4 here) Your decision? 4 Enter an optional description; end it with an empty line: > Reason for revocation: User ID is no longer valid (No description given) Is this okay? (y/N) y

you can notice that the uid is now listed as "revoked" instead of "ultimate"

now you can exit using:

Command> save

and send it to the key server:

$ gpg --send-key 03915096

of course the uids will be still there, but that bloated list should be now short and tiny :)