Dieter_be's spot on the web

I'm back from Canada/Archcon, and it was great. I've been in Toronto for 11 days, and visited Montreal for 3 days.

Archcon

Archcon was small (20-ish people). (That's what you get for doing it in Canada ;), but very nice.
Interesting talks, informal, good vibe, decent logistics and catering.
This year it happened because Dusty and Ricardo actually just wanted to have a conference without worrying too much about the attendance,
next year we should do it again because Arch (conferences) rock(s), and because we need more visitors. More central locations such as Seattle and Europe have been suggested.
Either way, next year both Judd (founder) and Aaron (current overlord) should be there. (this year they both had lame excuses like family reunions and "almost getting married". Congrats btw, Aaron!)

It was an absolute pleasure to meet some more of my fellow devs, and users.
Here is a pic from the group (unfortunately, a few are missing)

As mentioned earlier, I'll be at Archcon in Toronto in a few weeks.
It's a very small conference, and the first of its kind. At the last FrOSCon we have been playing with the idea to hold an informal Arch conference in Europe, but those were just ideas. Dusty and Ricardo beat us with an actual implementation.
This is great, and one of the milestones in Arch Linux history. Which is why I want to be there and help making it better.

I recently did two talks, for which the videos are now online.

• Uzbl lightningtalk @ fosdem 2010
• Open Source Monitoring tools lightning talk @ Kangaroot showcase 2009. This one is password protected. If you were a participant, you should have received the pass

If all goes well, I'll be at ArchCon this summer, where I'll be doing these talks:

• AIF: The Arch Installation Framework
• Uzbl – web interface tools which adhere to the unix philosophy. Whereas in the fosdem talk I had to focus a lot of information into a short timeslot, here I'll elaborate a bit more

We're not sure yet if those talks will get videotaped.

I'll be at fosdem - 10th edition - again this year.

I'll be presenting a lightning talk about uzbl.
Also, Arch Linux guys Roman, JGC, Thomas and me will hang out at the distro miniconf. We might join the infrastructure round-table panel, but there is no concrete information yet.

More stuff I'm looking forward to:

• Arch Linux team interview @ OSNews
• Uzbl @ LWN.net

Apologies for only informing you about the second article now. I assumed most of you follow LWN (you probably should) or found the article anyway.
Of all the articles written about uzbl, no one came close to the quality of Koens work. So even though it's a bit dated it's still worth a read.

Froscon was great.

• It was smaller then I thought, I especially assumed more activity in the devrooms (I'm too used to fosdem which is much bigger), but hey nice conference anyway.
• It was great to meet (some of) my Arch Linux colleagues. Mostly the guys from Germany showed up, and Roman who is from Ukraine.
• We all got an Arch t-shirt/polo of which we could pick the color ourselves. Woohoo. Thanks donators.
• A few people also told me they had tried / were using uzbl (my browser project) so that was really cool.
• I had an interesting chat with Thomas Lange, the author of FAI (a tool to automatically mass-install systems, mostly Debian). I've used it in the past, liked it and was somewhat inspired by it when building AIF. (but some design goals are different).

Here is a picture of my "Arch releng partner" Gerhard (right) and I (left). We've done a lot of work together and it was great to talk face to face for once. Here we're showing (proudly) an Arch Linux Froscon disc (which is a slightly modified version of the 2009.08 core images):

Team photo:

Image gallery

So, the Arch Linux 2009.08 release is now behind us, nicely on schedule.
I hope people will like AIF because it was a lot of work and we didn't receive much feedback. I personally like it to apply my fancy backup restoration approach.
But I'm sure if more people would look at the code we would find quite some design and implementation things that could be improved. (With uzbl I was amazed how much difference it can make if many people all have ideas and opinions about every little detail)

Later this week I'm off to the Counting Cows festival in France, and the week after that (august 22-23) I'm going to FrOSCon in Germany where I will meet some of my Arch Linux colleagues in real life, which I'm really looking forward to.

If anyone wants a ride to froscon let me know. But note I'll try to maximize my time there (leave saturday early and come back late on sunday. I even took a day off on monday so I might stay a day longer if I find more interested people to hang out there)

We're working hard on a new Arch release. (should be done by froscon)

Amongst the slew of fixes and improvements there are also some cool new things I'm working on.
First of all, I worked more on the automatic installations. Now you can easily install an LVM based Arch system on top of dm_crypt for example.
You type this command:

aif -p automatic -c /usr/share/aif/examples/fancy-install-on-sda

Another thing I started working on is a very simple test suite.
Basically, when launching a test, the following steps are invoked

• installation of an arch system with aif's automatic procedure using a certain config file
• installation of a verification script onto the target system and configuration of the target to run the script on boot (DAEMONS variable in /etc/rc.conf)
• if aif ended succesfully: automatic reboot.. and tada!

The verification script will check things like availability (and size) of LVM volumes, amount of swap space, keyboard layout, network and so on.
Here's a picture of a rough first version:

Stay tuned!

Yesterday I finished the first working version of AIF's automatic procedure, along with a sample config for a basic install..

For me personally this means I can start working on the next step towards my goal of having all my systems "metadata" centrally stored (along with my real "data"), and the possibility to reconstruct all my systems in a deployment-meets-backup-restore fashion ( see http://dieter.plaetinck.be/rethinking_the_backup_paradigm_a_higher-level... )

The last few weeks I/we've been quite busy fixing up many things related to aif and the arch release stuff in general. The kernel guys are now at 2.6.29-rc8, so a stable release won't be long anymore and I want to get as much things fixed before 2.6.29 is out, so we can release soon after. (with /arch/setup and /arch/quickinst replaced by aif)

Misc notes:

• Working together with Aaron and Gerhard is great. Our interests and knowledge are diverse, so we each have our place in the releng team, but there is some overlap too. This works out great. Input from them (and the other developers) often brings fixes for stupid things that I've spent too much time on and was still looking over.
• I'm also a "real" Arch developer (this actually means package maintainer) now: I maintain 1 package :)
• The 2009.02 release was a success. I was suprised by the amount of attention it got (maybe because we were the first distro to ship a release that supports ext4). I realised that all those delays to fix some (imho) details was probably the best move after all.
• I've been looking at nixOS, which is a very interesting project. The way I see it, they combine the "functional description" part (which is on many systems handled by puppet/cfengine/kickstart/aif/...) right into their OS core. That, and some other features. It was a bit too unstable when I tried it though.

I don't think I've ever seen so much anxiety/impatience/hope/buzz for a new Arch Linux release. (this is because of 2.6.28 with ext4 support).
The last release was 6 months ago, which is not so good.. also the arch-installer project has been slacking for a while. But the Arch devs have been very busy and many things going on. You know how it goes...

That's why some new people have stepped up to help out on a new release:

My holidays present for Arch devs and users: AIF alpha-0.6 !

* Changes since alpha 0.5:

Recently I started thinking about writing my own automatic installer that would set up my system exactly the way I want.
(See http://dieter.plaetinck.be/rethinking_the_backup_paradigm_a_higher-level...)

I looked at the official Arch install scripts to see if I could reuse parts of their code, but unfortunately the code was just one big chunk of bash code with the main program and "flow control" (you must first do this step, then that), UI-code (dialogs etc) and backend logic (create filesystems, ...) all mangled up and mixed very closely together.
Functionality-wise the installer works fine, but I guess the code behind it is the result of years of adding features and quick fixes without refactoring, making it impossible to reuse any of the code.

So I started to write AIF: the Arch Linux Installation Framework