blogTILLuDROP

Whenever I do somethong new on Fedora, it is normally time to report some bugs and one import part of the bug report is to include the name-version-release string of the affected rpm package. To get this string easily, I created an alias for it:

alias nvr='/bin/rpm --qf '\''%{name}-%{version}-%{release}\n'\'' -q'

When I handle new bug reports, then I often need to request this information, because I handle several bug reports for components in Red Hat Bugzilla, where most reported bugs are there because of a bug iin some other package. E.g. people report bugs against radeontool, but it’s a bug of the radeon driver, which is included in xorg-x11-drv-ati. Therefore it would be nice if people would have this useful alias or shell script installed on their system, e.g. as rpm-nvr. Maybe I should create a package like rpm-query-scripts that also provide some other useful queries, e.g. for package reviews.

There is now some easy to read documentation about conditional builds available at the rpm.org wiki.

Today I published my git repository of the tool I started to write to supply a upstream release monitoring service to Fedora. Some time ago Michał Bentkowski wrote a tool called FEVer to do this, but he became unresposive and did not publish the full code of FEVer. Since I missed this service, I started to write a new tool, that can provide the same service, which is currently called “cnucnu”, because of the lack of a better name. It does not have any bugzilla reporting features yet, but they will be added eventually. At the time of this posting, it only supports to check all packages that are listed on the Fedora wiki page of FEVer and to test regular expressions for easy development of one for a new package.

I just wanted to try out preupgrade to update to Fedora 11, but then I was disappointed that it does not verify securely what it is downloading and installing onto my system. And even worse, this is not even announced by preupgrade. It is so strange, on the one hand all rpm packages are signed and even the algorithms used are updated, but on the other hand the signatures are not used. So please be aware that if you use preupgrade, it will not verify that the installed content came from Fedora.

I just registered for BruCON, because the early bird tickets are only available for two more days. Will you come, too? It would be nice to meet some Fedorians there, but I guess I would have more luck at some generic FOSS conference.

I wonder how well known it is that installing mock and adding a user to the mock groups means giving this user root access most of the time. I know the authors of mock now and also some people on fedora-devel, but did you know? In case you wonder how it works, here is one way to do this:

$ /usr/bin/mock --init -r fedora-10-i386
$ /usr/bin/mock --shell -r fedora-10-i386
mock-chroot> chmod u+s bin/bash
$ /var/lib/mock/fedora-10-i386/root/bin/bash -p
# cat /etc/shadow

Since I started packaging, I was always annoyed by rpmbuild’s demand for it’s strange directory structure for input and output files. Therefore I wrote this little script to get a rpmbuild that uses the current directory for all these directories. Maybe there is one missing, because a recent rpm version now uses a BUILDROOT directory. Maybe one can define _buildrootdir for this, but I did not yet have any need for it.


$ cat rpmbuild-currentdir.sh
#! /bin/bash

/usr/bin/rpmbuild –define “_sourcedir .” –define “_rpmdir .” –define “_buildir .” –define “_srcrpmdir .” –define “_speccdir .” “$@”

On Fedora 8 already my bluetooth disable button on my thinkpad was broken somehow. It works fine in grub, but iirc once udev is started, it stops working. Since I nearly never use bluetooth, this does not much harm to me. But since Fedora 9, bluetooth is always enabled during boot and then it sucks, that I am not able to disable it again easily. Talking with an expert about this, he told me, that bluetooth can easily disabled with this command:

echo disable > /proc/acpi/ibm/bluetooth


I was also told, that it is possbible to use acpid to run this command when the key is pressed. Nevertheless I wonder, why this out-of-the box since I buyed the thinkpad working button was broken. Asking on the hal-mailinglist did do get me any reply, so if you know anything helpful, please leave a comment. :-)

On the FESCo meeting on 2008-09-17 the removal of the force-tag make target was decided. But it was also decided to still allow to change cvs tags using

TAG_OPTS=-F make tag

If you want your force-tag target back, simply add this to your ~/.cvspkgsrc file (the first character of the second line should be a tab character):

force-tag: $(SPECFILE) $(COMMON_DIR)/branches
@$(MAKE) tag TAG_OPTS="-F $(TAG_OPTS)"

To ease your life, you can also download this code from my fedorapeople space.

secure:

ssh fedorapeople.org cat /home/fedora/till/public_html/files/cvspkgsrc-force-tag.gmk >> .cvspkgsrc


insecure:

curl http://till.fedorapeople.org/files/cvspkgsrc-force-tag.gmk >> .cvspkgsrc


Don’t forget to check your .cvspkgsrc afterwards.

The Package Review SIG created some webpages that cache bugzilla queries of package review requests. The pages are currently updated every hour and are a lot faster to load than doing direct queries at bugzilla. This is not something new, but it would be nice if 719 of you readers would pick up a ticket from the unassigned list and perform a review. ;-)

Here are the lists:

Unassigned Review Requests – Review Requests in progress – Accepted Review Requests – Rejected Review Requests