Le skyblog de bochecha

It seems I've been doing some unnecessary stuff in my previous post. Once again, when one tries to do something, he should always remember that someone most probably already had the same idea :-)

Someone pointed to me in the comments that Git already provided a way to have a Git-aware prompt in Bash. Here is an attempt to explain how to use it to have the same result as my previous attempt at scripting it.

One would only need to set the following in their ~/.bashrc file:

PS1='[\u@\h \W]$(__git_ps1 " (%s)")\\$ '

This gives you the following prompt:

[mathieu@localhost ~]$
[mathieu@localhost rpmbuild] (master)$

As you can see, when you enter a Git repository, your prompt displays the name of the current branch.

But that's not quite enough. One might want to show the current changes, to help with their workflow. Just add the following in your ~/.bashrc file, right above the previous line:

export GIT_PS1_SHOWDIRTYSTATE=true

Now, your prompt will look like this:

[mathieu@localhost rpmbuild] (master)$ echo "titi" > SPECS/dummy.spec 
[mathieu@localhost rpmbuild] (master*)$ git add SPECS/dummy.spec
[mathieu@localhost rpmbuild] (master+)$ git commit
[mathieu@localhost rpmbuild] (master)$

The above should be pretty self-explainatory, but in case you didn't get it:

• prompt displays the name of the current branch
• a file was modified, the prompt displays a « * »
• the modified file was staged, the « * » becomes a « + »
• staged file was commited, there are no more changes (either staged or unstaged) in the working dir, prompt goes back to only displaying the branch name.

That's better, but something is still missing compared to what I had written:

[mathieu@localhost rpmbuild] (master)$ touch foobar
[mathieu@localhost rpmbuild] (master)$

That's right, untracked files are not shown on the prompt!

The solution came from a second comment on my previous post. All that is necessary is to add the following in your ~/.bashrc file:

export GIT_PS1_SHOWUNTRACKEDFILES=true

Now, you'll get:

[mathieu@localhost rpmbuild] (master)$ touch foobar
[mathieu@localhost rpmbuild] (master%)$

That's it! The exact same fonctionality as what I had hacked in an ugly way, with only the following 3 lines:

export GIT_PS1_SHOWDIRTYSTATE=true
export GIT_PS1_SHOWUNTRACKEDFILES=true
PS1='[\u@\h \W]$(__git_ps1 " (%s)")\\$ '

Nice isn't it? :)

Remark 1: the env vars GIT_PS1_SHOWDIRTYSTATE and GIT_PS1_SHOWUNTRACKEDFILES only need to be set to something not empty. I used « true » because it kinda made sense, but setting them to « iamagitn00bz » would produce the exact same result.

Remark 2: Fedora 11 comes with Git 1.6.2.5 which doesn't support GIT_PS1_SHOWUNTRACKEDFILES in the bash completion script it ships. To make the above work I simply grabbed the file from the Rawhide Git 1.6.4 package. You could alternatively take it in the Git Git repository.

Remark 3: as mentioned in the comments on my previous blog article, there also is the GIT_PS1_SHOWSTASHSTATE env var that can be used to display other things in your prompt. This article was only about replicating the behavior I described before, and this variable is not part of it. But go play with it yourself :)

This week I was at LSM aka RMLL.

I held the Fedora booth there, alone, for the whole 5 days.

The event was really nice, I met a lot of people and tried to do my best promoting Fedora (which must not be a lot). My only regret is that... well, being alone on a booth for a week is really tiring ^^'

Thomas, Patrice and Max joined me on Friday. Max gave a talk on the Fedora Foundations. Apparently, it was filmed, so I'll try to get a hand on the video. Thomas was interviewed by the event radio, and the recording is available online (in french).

Logistic was kind of shaky. We had a really hard time accessing the Internet, both at the event and at the dorm. The event also moved on Saturday, as the university that hosted us the 4 previous days was closed. However, we were welcomed by an elephant on the Saturday place:

All in all, I had a great time, even if I would have loved to go to more than 3 conferences. I had to let the booth unattended to go to those 3, but the Ubuntu-Fr and Mandriva-Fr booth people were really helpful, especially Marianne who made some delicious cookies (I managed to let some for the visitors :-D) and Michael, who even promoted Fedora while I was away :-D.

On the Shomyu side, the event was also quit... surprising. I finally met Sonny from the Mozilla community who had contacted me earlier about it. I also got in touch with Julien from SliTaz who expressed his interest in using Shomyu for their community. The aforementioned Mandriva Michaël told me the same, and even invited me to the soon to happen AFPyro (an « apéro » organized by the french Python association), and asked me if I would be interested in presenting Shomyu at the next PyCon :-D

I also talked about it with some Ubuntu-Fr guys. It seems they are trying to build such a tool themselves (but with GoogleMaps instead of OpenLayers / OpenStreetMap, and I sincerely hope we can share some code or even merge the two projects.

I can't believe what's happening with what started as a rant on the french Fedora mailing-list. Lot's of people seem to have heard of it and are willing to use it. I sincerely hope that at least some will give me a hand, as it will not be ready any time soon if I have to go on alone.*hint hint* :-)

On Sunday, I was at FOSDEM 2009 in Bruxelles.

I couldn't go on Saturday, and as a result, I missed the two talks that were interesting me the much: the ones from Greg and Tomeu about Sugar and Fedora. I hope the presentations will be uploaded on the fp.o page (or somewhere else), so that I can catch up.

I spent most of the time at the booth, which allowed me to meet a lot of Fedora Ambassadors I didn't know. Loved it. Talking with people from different local communities was great, and as we discussed with Yaakov, we (the French community) really need to work in a less insular way and share experiences with others.

Regarding the booth attendance, I was once again incredibly surprised to see how people are attracted by this little green and white alien on the tables. We had 4 XOs, all of them had almost always someone toying with it. The funny thing is it looked like Fedora can be summed up to the XO, as very few people were asking about Fedora specifically, while a lot were interested in the OLPC project.

I had two requests for liveUSB creations, but I failed on the second one. It was one of those keys with a fancy partition (seen as /dev/sr1 on my Fedora 10 laptop) with programs autoruned when you plug the key on Windows (something called "U3 System"). I tried three times to create the liveUSB (both with Live USB Creator and livecd-iso-to-disk), each time, the liveUSB was successfully created but couldn't boot. Could it be this "U3" stuff that prevents booting on such USB sticks ?

Second failure of the day, someone came with an Acer Aspire One, running a custom Fedora 8 (they call it Linpus). He wanted to be able to listen to MP3 files with Amarok, but as Fedora 8 was EOLed some time ago, I couldn't find the necessary packages. Big Fail to Acer: how can you honestly sell computers with an already EOLed system ?

I could only assist to one talk: Cobbler and Koan. The talk was great, and those two look really interesting. I'm looking forward to use them at work.

So this was a great day, filled with encounters with great people, but also exhausting. I have only two regrets: not being able to go on Saturday, and not having gone there in previous years :-D. Thanks to all those who made this event a success for Fedora, and an(two) enjoyable day(s) for its community.

On Sunday, I discovered a bug in shomyu.

The Javascript library TinyMCE was called in the wrong folder (yeah, I know, stupid mistake -_-) which made it impossible to enable rich-text editing in the users descriptions.

This was fixed in master branch and in 0.5. As a consequence, I released version 0.5.1 of shomyu.

I also took the opportunity to make a new demo screencast that shows better the latest features of shomyu (the old one had been made with a very early stage of development).

Get it, try it, love it, and help improving it :)

The french Fedora community is currently using frappr to display the locations of members and ambassadors.

We recently received a reminder from one of us, saying that all french ambassadors should subscribe to our frappr instance and set their location.

What a surprise! frappr is a non-free flash application that doesn't even work with swfdec (and thus I couldn't subscribe). Did I mention it was full of ads ?... :-/

That's why I started to write a free equivalent: shomyu (screencast).

On the technological side, shomyu uses:

• Javascript with the OpenLayers API and geographical data from OpenStreetMap
• Python / Turbogears for the backend, so that if there is interest to integrate it with the FAS (one can dream ^^), it will already fit the other Turbogears apps we have.

I'm about to release the code, I asked for being Fedorahosted.

Comments, feed-back, help, money or drinks are welcome :-)