So how does reporting work now in Fedora?
Here's my quick summary of Richard's email and my observation. User experiences a crash and gets notified about it. Than he/she hits report button and that's where abrt creates the micro-report, sends it to the abrt server and waits for the reponse. At this point, the issue is either already known and user gets a link to the server where all the above described infomation can be found including a bug number if there is one already. The bug is created when at least one user who experienced the crash hits Report in gnome-abrt to provide aditional data. At this point abrt creates a full report, which includes the traceback, few stats about your system. All data can be reviewed before submitting and needs to be checked by user. After uploading these data, a bug gets created, linked to the abrt server report and maintainer can decide whether he'll fix the issue, talks to upstream about fixing that particular problem or provides a new version that fixes the problem.
What's new with the recent abrt server update is that if the number of crashes reaches certain treshold (originally 20 but I think Richard raised that number already) the bug gets opened even without additional data from user. This is a try to get atention from maintainers early enough to start investigating before even more users hit the same problem. On the other hand, maintainers get a very little data at this point and without a reporoducer and full backtrace, there's not much they can do with it. That said, if you report an issue, please fire up gnome-abrt, input the additional data, try to find reproducer, try to be the nice community member who helps others - developers, maintainer and users :-)
Thank you
- Google code search was one of them. It was fairly easy to find a code you needed, in a language you preferred. I had also a different use case. It was very easy to find source of the code. I did a lot of hiring in the past and I heavily used Google code search to verify whether the candidate is presenting his own work or whether he's lying. Google code search is gone.
- Google docs API - I build a few apps around Google API. Just to make my life little easier. Well, I'm not really following all google announcement but the API has changed twice since I use it and I'm not able to figure out the recent changes especially to google forms. I stopped using it
- Google finance API is also no longer working as my colleague pointed out
- Google Wave was a nice project, where at least Google allowed community to use sources at the time they closed it. I used that couple times for collaborative document editing. It worked well but I must admit that Google docs do the trick as well. Of course it doesn't support a code syntax highlighting like Wave did
We do that in Fedora as well, we change stuff often, break API, change tooling. I'm worried that sometimes we're trying to solve problems that don't exist and in a sake of something nice, new and shiny we're abandoning tools and API that some people use and it works for them. Please think about them when you do changes.
The conference had two days and during both days it had almost 600 visitors every day. In 3 main lectures rooms we ran the main session - 11 in a row, 3 in parallel, 2 days - that gave us including the lightning talks 75 talks and altogether with labs and meetings almost 100 sessions. We had 120 speakers who had only 5 minutes to get ready for their talk and 45 minutes to show their best. Talking about it, I have to admit that are presenters did fabulous job! All talks that I've attended were well prepared, presenters were able to answer all questions and you could see that the presentations were done by a real pro's :-)
The labs had also great attendance. Since I was little immobile after a skiing injure I haven't attended these but the feedback I got was positive. Seems that all of them got good attendance and again people got what they've expected – they've learned new stuff.
Few other stats. The visitors came from various locations worldwide, just to name few countries – Slovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Austria, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, UK, USA but even from India or China.
The visitors ate 600 sandwiches, 600 peaces of pastry and 300 hotdogs :-) We've tried to make sure they are some refreshments available during the whole conference but as always, it disappeared quicker than we've planned. The Saturday party on club Fleda was attended by 400 people and with the live band and great food people really enjoyed.
Big thanks to all volunteers who helped during the event, who helped the presenters with the equipment and made sure they are always on time, who helped on the Fedora and Red Hat booth. Special thanks to Miro Hroncok for bringing a 3D printer to Fedora booth, Ludek Smid and Jarda Reznik for creating the mobile apps for Android and Nokia N9/N900, Sirko Kemter for the graphics of the conference and Peter Borsa who helped me to setup the devconf.cz site. And big thanks to Jiri Eischmann, who was running around whole day long and since I temporary crippled myself was the main contact point for all issues. Jiri, you rock! :-)
Interested to see pictures?
curl -s checkip.dyndns.org|sed -e 's/.*Current IP Address: //' -e 's/<.*$//'Do you know something nicer?
Hi everyone, the call for participation for Developer Conference 2013 in Brno, Czech Republic is over. And I must admit that it's going to be a really hard taks to pick the best ones for this event. Looking at the list of names and list of talks, everyone who proposed talk is either a good developer, huge linux fan or specialist in his field of expertise. So what do we have on the list ... altogether we have 117 proposed sessions, out of that 21 labs, 20 short talks and 81 presentations! That's amazing number, big thanks to all who sumbitted their proposals. Within next two weeks me and a group of selected people from various teams and projects will go thru this list, get in touch with people where we would like to fine tune the abstracts and create version 0.1 of the February schedule.If you're already curios what we will have for you, here is a list of interesting speakers that are already confirmed to come - some names are quite well known including Dan Walsh, Simo Sorce, Dmitri Pal, "Spot", Pavel Tisnovsky, Jaroslav Reznik, Marcela Maslanova, Lukas Czerner, Jakub Steiner, Lennart Poettering, Harald Hoye, Hans de Geode, Thomas Woerner or Rainer Gerhards. From the list of talks, we have 9 proposed kernel sessions, 18 Core/Fedora/OS sessions, 25 various JBoss sessions, 10 sessions related to Security and Identity management, 13 Virtualization and Cloud topics and various others. Also we list hackfest session on OpenShift, JVM, SELinux, JBoss Developer Framework, QML, CIM and others.
Altogether it's going to be a packed event and I'm really looking forward to it. Book your tickets, stay tuned for more updates.
I have recently talked to a group of developers that are working on various linux, cloud and jboss projects. They have one thing in common. They all used for a certain time Fedora as the main development platform but switched to another distro or even MacOS after some time. My only question to them was - Why can’t you use Fedora for development? The output is quite a long list of various topics, some of them can be easily fixed, some of them deserve more thinking to figure out how to satisfy such needs.
- Disturbing updates, restart needed too often and updates breaking functionality - at least the first part is already fixed but updates that are actually breaking in the middle of release functionality of certain component do happen. Couple people mentioned that relying on some app, library or a function is crucial for their development. They can’t adjust their work environment after every update - these people actually use CentOS as their basis.
- Bad backward compatibility - API changes too often. Several developers mentioned that their development needs to freeze on certain API for a longer time and Fedora is changing to often and even within one release. I must admit that this was mentioned by all three groups and started a long discussions. Most of them agreed that there’s no easy way for them to monitor all API changes on the system and they would have to be monitoring updates closely. At least for core system components they would love to have some API guarantee and also a transition support for a longer time than one release. One idea was fe to introduce a concept of -latest package, where new stuff could be added to distro but as a new package that can be used for testing, but development can continue on the old one.
- Non intuitive package installer - Here are several issue that people mentioned - packaging tool doesn’t have any priority in the search, doesn’t allow to search only in package names, doesn’t intuitively offer development packages, doesn't offer better groups - fe. groups for developers split by a programming language
- Configuration options changes are not documented - two developers mentioned a situation when configuration change wasn’t well documented and it wasn’t obvious why an old configuration file stopped working or didn’t work properly.
- Gnome shell - it’s very hard to develop extensions. There is no decent documentation and the js code very complex - This was mentioned by OS developer who created XFCE plugins. He wasn’t really excited about complexity of the javascript code and was hoping for a more simple way how to access entry points in gnome shell. This guy also mentioned the SDK/API list that Ubuntu offers for Unity as a better documented and easier to consume.
- CTRL+C, CTRL+V inconsistency - this should work everywhere and use the same clipboard. Such a silly think one would say but really drives people nuts :-)
- SELinux crashes some applications for unknown reasons - my favourite topic, why do you turn off SELinux? This actually never happened to me but some people got annoyed by SELinux when it blocked some functionality of an app but didn’t report any warning. Also the discussion was around setroubleshoot and whether it can offer a more easy way how to fiddle with booleans and custom policy files. Again, sounds to me like something that got way better in last two releases.
- Development profiles - an idea that can be easily solved and which I’m in favour of - a granular developer profiles, where a developer would be able to easily install environment for Ruby, Java, PHP, C or other programming language. This would install a default editor, debugger, version control system and basic compiler or -devel packages.
- Very often we were talking about two very different sets of developers - one that profits from various RPM features and one which delivers stuff to different OSes and have specific requirements on the OS. The other group doesn’t use packaged versions of java or ruby and rather installs several non-conflicting Java versions for testing or several rubygems thru rvm.
- Last but not least, multiplatform support. Some developer actively use openbuildservice for their packages to get them ready for various distros. They don’t care about nice and polished spec file, they just one to have the packages available for the distro users.
Overall interesting discussions. If you have some other ideas, feel free to comment. I’m quite sure we’ll try to work some of these within my group at Red Hat and solve them. I'll make sure I'll let everyone know when we start with it.
- Current Location:United Kingdom,
Hey everyone, we've started - the Call of participation for Developer Conference 2013 is OPEN! Submit your talks, lab sessions, hackfest proposals - we need you! This time the Developer Conference will happen in February, during the weekend of 23rd and 24th, again in Brno Czech Republic and again on Masaryk University.
The focus is on development and technical topics. It's developers for developers, admins for admins. On the last conference we had 60 different talks and around 600 participants, all very technical directly given by upstream developers or people who work closely with the technology. I hope we'll get to same numbers and same quality of talks this year again.
