Arch on Dieter's blog

Pixie: simple photo management using directory layouts and tags.

Mon, 30 Dec 2013 14:46:32 -0400

So you have a few devices with pictures, and maybe some additional pictures your friends sent you. You have a lot of pictures of the same thing and probably too high of a resolution. Some may require some editing. How do you easily create photo albums out of this mess? And how do you do it in a way that keeps a simple and elegant, yet flexible file/directory layout for portability and simplicity?

I couldn't find a tool that I liked, so I rolled my own: Pixie.
It gives you vim-like keybindings to navigate pictures, create edits (stored in a "mirror directory") and add/remove tags to pictures. (Because n:m tag relationships are basically a must for organizing things and don't work on any common filesystem) To generate "album" directories, just define which tags they should(n't) match and run the script that synchronizes an export directory by symlinking (or resizing) the correct files into them. Note the source directory stays unaltered so you can easily keep syncing with devices and/or people.
What used to be a pain in the butt for me is now a pretty pleasant experience.
Does this workflow make sense to you? Is this useful to you? Why (not) ?

Resigning as Arch Linux developer

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 16:50:11 -0400

A few days ago, I resigned as Arch Linux developer.
I'm sad to go, but I felt like my work on Arch became a drag, so it was time I officialized my decreased interest. The Releng team we started more than 3 years ago is now dead, but other developers are showing interest in iso building and installer scripts, so as long as they don't burn out, you'll see new isos again. More information in my resignation mail linked above.

Dieter

Lighttpd socket Arch Linux /var/run tmpfs tmpfiles.d

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 23:05:05 -0400

On Arch Linux, and probably many other distros /run is a new tmpfs, and /var/run symlinks to it. With Lighttpd you might have a fastcgi socket defined something like "/var/run/lighttpd/sockets/mywebsite.sock". This won't work anymore as after each reboot /var/run is an empty directory and lighttpd won't start, /var/log/lighttpd/error.log will tell you:

2012-03-16 09:21:34: (log.c.166) server started 
2012-03-16 09:21:34: (mod_fastcgi.c.977) bind failed for: unix:/var/run/lighttpd/sockets/mywebsite.sock-0 No such file or directory 
2012-03-16 09:21:34: (mod_fastcgi.c.1397) [ERROR]: spawning fcgi failed. 
2012-03-16 09:21:34: (server.c.945) Configuration of plugins failed. Going down.

That's where this new tool tmpfiles.d comes in. It creates files and directories as described in the configs, and gets invoked on boot. Like so:

$ cat /etc/tmpfiles.d/lighttpd.conf 
d /run/lighttpd/sockets 0700 http http

Where are the new Arch Linux release images?

Tue, 17 May 2011 21:29:58 -0400

This is a question I get asked a lot recently. The latest official images are a year old. This is not inherently bad, unless you pick the wrong mirror from the outdated mirrorlist during a netinstall, or are using hardware which is not supported by the year old kernel/drivers. A core install will yield a system that needs drastic updating, which is a bit cumbersome. There are probably some other problems I'm not aware of. Many of these problems can be worked around (with 'pacman -Sy mirrorlist' on the install cd for example), but it's not exactly convenient.

Over the past years (the spare time in between the band, my search for an apartment in Ghent and a bunch of other things) I've worked towards fully refactoring and overthrowing how releases are being done. Most of that is visible in the releng build environment repository. Every 3 days, the following happens automatically:

packages to build images (archiso) and some of which are included on the images (aif and libui-sh) get rebuilt. They are actually git versions, the latter two have a separate develop branch which is used. Normal packages get updated the normal way.
the images are rebuilt, and the dual images get generated
the images, the packages and their sources are synced to the public on http://releng.archlinux.org

Actually things are bit more involved but this is the gist of it. All of this is now run on a dedicated VPS donated by airVM.

I never really completed the aif automatic test suite, somewhere along the way I decided to focus on crowdsourcing test results. The weight of testing images (and all possible combinations of features) has always been huge, and trying to script tasks would either get way complicated or insufficient. So the new approach is largely inspired by the core and testing repositories: we automatically build testing images, people report feedback, and if there is sufficient feedback for a certain set of images (or a bunch of similar sets of images) that allows us to conclude we have some good material, we can promote the set to official media.
The latest piece of the puzzle is the new releng feedback application which Tom Willemsen contributed. (again: outsourcing FTW). It is still fairly basic, but should already be useful enough. It lists pretty much all features you can use with archiso/AIF based images and automatically updates the list of isos based on what it sees appearing online, so I think it will be a good indicator on what works and what doesn't, and that for each known set of isos.

So there. Bleeding edge images for everyone, and for those who want some quality assurance: the more you contribute, the more likely you'll see official releases.

While contributing feedback is now certainly very easy, don't think that only providing feedback is sufficient, it takes time to maintain and improve aif and archiso as well and contributions in that department are still very welcome. I don't think we'll get to the original plan of official archiso releases for each stable kernel version, that seems like a lot of work despite all the above.

As for what is new: again too much to list, here is a changelog but I stopped updating it at some point. I guess the most visible interesting stuff is friendlier package dialogs (with package descriptions), support for nilfs, btrfs and syslinux (thanks Matthew Gyurgyik), and an issues reporting tool. Under the hood we refactored quite a bit, mostly blockdevice related stuff, config generation and the "execution plan" (like, how each function calls each other and how failures are tracked) in AIF has been simplified considerably.

Can we build a simple, cross-distribution installation framework?

Sun, 06 Feb 2011 23:46:18 -0400

Today at Fosdem 2011 I did my talk Can we build a simple, cross-distribution installation framework? Basically, using the Arch Installation Framework as a starting point, along with the notion that most of the code is actually not Arch-specific I adressed other distros to check if there was any interest in sharing workload on the distribution-agnostic aspects of the framework. If other distros with a similar philosophy of little-abstractions/KISS would join, we would all reap the benefits of a simple, yet quite featureful installer. There was some interest, so we'll see what happens.

slides
video