Le blog d'Emmanuel

I was at the Open Source Experience event in Paris, France last week.

While it was nice to see friends from the FLOSS community, it did feel that the general public decided to stay away, probably because Covid cases are on the rise in France again. I was manning a Perl booth but used the fact that we were 4 people to wander again and ask vendors if they would be willing to support their applications in Fedora. As you can probably guess, results were mixed...

The first person I talked to was Clément Oudot, maintainer of LemonLDAP-NG. He was more than willing to add LL-NG to the Fedora repositories. I then talked to Benoît Mortier, the main developer of FusionDirectory and he was also enthusiastic about doing the same.

My stops at the OCS-Inventory and Bluemind booths proved less fruitful. People on both booths told me they did not have the resources to support a distribution like Fedora that releases every 6 months.

I then found myself at the Dolibarr booth where I had a talk with Laurent Destailleur, Dolibarr's main developer. We talked a lot about Dolibarr's experience with having their software packaged in Debian and the troubles they had over the years with Debian's policies on bundling and upgrades.

Finally, I dropped by the Centreon booth and discussed a number of things (their use of Perl, automatic deployment, distribution support). The Centreon people are looking to diversify the distributions they support and they seemed open to supporting Fedora Server as well as other distributions.

Just so you know, the Fedora-fr community will be present at the 2019 edition of Paris Open Source Summit. This year, POSS will be held on December 10th and 11th from 9am to 6pm and, like every year, will be held at Dock Pullmann, in Aubervilliers. We will have a stand on the associative village (booth A34, to be quite exact).

We will be there to answer any questions about Fedora, offer to burn an image of Fedora 31 on your USB key. We will have Fedora goodies for people who are interested. Feel free to come to the Salon if you have time during the 2 days in question and drop by to say hi if you're there!

Il y a deux semaines avait lieu le Paris Open Source Summit, 2ième édition et les Mongueurs de Perl y tenait un stand.

Je suis arrivé avec le matériel de l'association et j'ai retrouvé Jean. Arrivé au stand, je constate que Jean n'est pas là (en fait, il était allé à l'accueil me filer mon badge alors que j'avais déjà un badge Borsalinux-Fr). Le temps de déplier le totem, de sortir deux numéros de "GNU/Linux Magasine" pour présenter l'article de Laurent sur Perl 6 ainsi que les autocollants, les dépliants et affiches puis lancer Bugzilla en démo sur mon portable et les vidéos des Journées Perl 2015 sur celui de Jean et nous étions prêts pour recevoir du monde.

L'affluence a été plutôt forte la première matinée. Nous avons eu pas mal de passage (le fait d'être à côté de Open Food Facts a du aider). Certaines personnes qui s'arrêtaient devant le stand étaient encore étudiants ou ne l'étaient plus que depuis très peu de temps, avaient entendu parler de Perl 6 et voulaient en savoir plus (quels domaines d'applications, les différences entre Perl 5 et Perl 6, ...). D'autres connaissaient Perl 5 et voulaient savoir ce que ça devenait.

Le jeudi, j'ai passé la main à Richard et je me suis concentré sur le stand Borsalinux-Fr. En revenant sur le stand Mongueurs en fin de soirée, j'ai été surpris de constater que les dépliants avaient tous disparus et qu'il nous restait très peu de d'affiches du tableau périodique. Je ne m'attendais pas à un tel succès.

La journée terminée, Jean a pris les affaires de stand tandis que je prenais les autocollants et nous sommes rentrés bien fatigués.

One recurring subject on the bugzilla support mailing list is the installation of the Perl modules that Bugzilla requires to function. When you are installing on a Linux distribution, the recommended course of action is to use the packages supplied by the distribution. But, on some distributions, these can be of a version lower than what is required by Bugzilla.

One such distribution is RHEL. Version 7 came out in 2014 and its long support life cycle make it popular for people to use it as a base for their bugzilla instance. Using Bugzilla 4.4 is easy because all Bugzilla's mandatory Perl packages are available by default but Bugzilla 5.0 came out after RHEL7 was released and a number of Perl modules aren't available or are outdated. Users then try to install the missing modules themselves, which is something easy to get wrong. I decided to see if this could be made simpler.

My first step was to see if the modules could be supplied in EPEL, a third-party software repository for RHEL and CentOS but some of the modules concerned are in RHEL which makes them impossible to update via EPEL. Another solution is the use of Fedora's COPR, an easy way for Fedora developers to maintain third party repositories for Fedora and/or RHEL.

It took some amount of tweaking to find the package versions that allow you to run Bugzilla 5.0.x without replacing RHEL7's entire Perl stack but the end result is here. Activating a COPR repo is pretty straightforward:

• dnf install dnf-plugins-core
• dnf copr enable eseyman/bugzilla-5.0

At which point, you can install bugzilla just like any other application:

• dnf install bugzilla

The bugzilla package will be updated everytime a new version of Bugzilla is released and its support will end when the Bugzilla developers end support for the 5.0 branch.

As you may not know, I'm a member of Fedora's Perl SIG, the group of people who maintain the Perl ecosystem by providing timely reviews, acting as package co-maintainers and assisting with related security issues.

As it turns, the SIG watches over a lot of packages, over 2600 of them. As you can imagine, this generates a lot of mail, an amount that increases as time goes on and more perl modules are added to the distribution. And this doesn't even take into account mass rebuilds or the fact that all perl modules are rebuilt when a new version of perl is added to rawhide. Over the month of June (when we updated perl to 5.22.x and then rebuilt everything for GCC 5, we got 8000+ emails sent to the list).

Needless to say, it's easy to lose track of information when you're bombarded with this amount of mail. To help cope, I now split the mail received from the perl-devel mailing list into several folders:

• pkgdb mail is sent to its own folder
• bug mail is sent to its own folder
• mail about broken dependencies also has its own folder
• mail about git commits have their own folder
• mail about orphaned packages is sent to its own folder
• everything else perl-devel-related is sent to one folder

At one point, git commits and tarball uploads were separated in different folders but the number of uploads were small enough that I put the two together.

Since I use procmail to filter my incoming mail, here's the relevant stanza in my .procmailrc:

:0:
* ^List-Id: Fedora perl development team
* ^X-Fedmsg-Topic: org.fedoraproject.prod.pkgdb
mailing-lists/fedora-perl-devel-pkgdb

:0:
* ^List-Id: Fedora perl development team
* ^X-Bugzilla-Reason: CC
mailing-lists/fedora-perl-devel-bugs

:0:
* ^List-Id: Fedora perl development team
* ^Subject: Broken dependencies:
mailing-lists/fedora-perl-devel-deps

:0:
* ^List-Id: Fedora perl development team
* ^X-Fedmsg-Topic: org.fedoraproject.prod.git
mailing-lists/fedora-perl-devel-git

:0:
* ^List-Id: Fedora perl development team
* ^Subject: Orphaned Packages
mailing-lists/fedora-perl-devel-orphan

:0:
* ^List-Id: Fedora perl development team
mailing-lists/fedora-perl-devel

A quick note to people who have RPMFusion repos enabled: RPMFusion will no longer be publishing updates for Fedora 20.

In a few days, I'll be closing RPMFusion's Bugzilla bugs against Fedora 20 with the EXPIRED resolution. If you're involved in one of these bugs, please assign it to another version of Fedora so that it will stay opened.

JFTR, I'll be concentrating on making Bugzilla 4.4 availible to the RPMFusion guys so we can finally upgrade our installation and bring it in sync with the version of the bugzilla used by Fedora.

Samedi, on fetait Free Comic Book Day partout dans le monde. De passage dans mon magasin de comics préféré, j'ai profité pour prendre tous ceux qui attirait mon regard. Un petit résumé des mes impressions :

• "Tales of Honor #0" de Matt Hawkins et Linda Sejic. ça raconte les aventures d'une capitaine de vaisseau spatial dans un système solaire au sein du quel s'affrontent deux empires. C'est très intéressant et c'est superbement dessiné par Linda Sejic. Il faut asoluemennt que je trouve le premier recueil de cette série.

• "Futures End #0" écrit par tout un tas de personnes et dessiné par tout un autre tas de personnes. Visiblement, DC continue à sortir des comics qui m'intéressent pas. Des héros pas spécialement sympatiques, un scénario confus (quoiqu'ici, on sent que c'est un peu voulu) et une ambiance trop sombre pour que j'ai envie de me plonger dedans.

• "The Infinite Loop" de Pierrick Colinet et Elsa Charretier. Deux auteurs français pour un comics américain qui narre les aventures d'une voyageuse dans le temps et son co-pilote. Très intéressant graphiquement, le thème de l'amour à traver les temps est prometteur. À suivre.

• "All-new, All-different Avengers" narre les aventures d'une nouvelle équipe des Avengers. Le scénario est bon et bourré d'humour (c'est signé Mark Waid) mais je ne suis pas convaincu par le dessin (signé Mahmud Asrar)

• "Secret Wars #0" attaque la tâche titanesque de résumer ce que Johnathan Hickman a écrit ces trois dernières années sur "Avengers" et "New Avengers". Ça résume les grands lignes sans que ça donne l'impression d'être un gros info-dump.

• "Marvel : 75 ans" commémore les 75 ans de l'univers Marvel. À noter une histoire inédite d'Alias de Bendis et Gaydos et une histoire très Archie-like de Spider-man de Tom DeFalco et Stan Goldberg.

Ceux qui suivent mon actualité de près sont déjà au courant : J'ai changé d'employeur.

Après 5 ans de poste à EDD, j'ai décidé de changer un peu les choses. Du coup, ça fait une petite dizaine de jours que je travaille pour Telino, société de service spécialisée dans la dématérialisation de documents. L'ensemble de l'équipe est hyper-sympa et le parc informatique tourne en très grande partie sur du Linux, ce qui présage de nouveaux défis techniques. Stay tuned...

The french ambassadors have, every time a new version of Fedora came out, organised a release party for it (we skipped Fedora 18 because the timing of the release didn't make it practical to organise an event). We call these the Recontres Fedora ("Fedora Encounters" or "Fedora Meetings") to stress the importance of developers and end-users meeting each other. When Fedora 19 came out at the begining of July, we decided to have a release party but to do it in september so that everybody could be present.

We set up a date with Parinux, the Paris Linux user group and decided to have the event on the first saturday of september. Universcience, who had already given us a huge hand for FUDCon Paris, again helped us out by hosting the event. A wiki page was set up, a ticket was filed for swag and we started looking for speakers for the conferences. Truth be told, I worried quite a bit before the event that it would go terribly wrong. We ended up not getting the swag, speakers were hard to come by and few people signed up to the wiki page.

However, the release party happened with little difficulties. A number of Fedora ambasadors (nobrakal, bertux, bouska ...) came for the event, people came to the event with usb keys which allowed us to copy a Live Fedora iso on them so that they could try Fedora at home. I had to cancel my conference because I was too busy setting up the event to do it but Misc's conferenece on Ansible was very well done and attracted a small crowd.

I'm actually looking forward to the Rencontres Fedora 20.