Monthly Archives: May 2004

Rhythmbox rockin’

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So Jorge bribed me with the possibility of a bounty for completing iPod support in rhythmbox, the music application we both use. It took me a few hours to get productive, mostly because I had to learn enough about arch, the source control versioning system that the rhythmbox developers use, to check out and create my own working source tree. Then I realized my iPod was HFS+ formatted, so I had to recompile my kernel to add support for that file system, so I could copy off the boot sector and reformat the drive with fat.

I’m still learning what all glib has to offer, so this was a good place to jump in. I managed to load a custom popup menu based on the source (in this case, the iPod). I also almost have it reading the actual name of the iPod, instead of just calling it “iPod”.

I know I’m not the only one hacking on the rhythmbox code to add iPod support and features. I’m still not used to this arch system, but from what I’ve read merging changes is fairly seamless. I figure I’ll follow the rhythmbox-devel mailing list and quietly hack away at my own little tree until I have it working reasonably well. I’m sure I can get Jorge and a few other of the #linux guys to test things out for me.

Tomorrow is Memorial Day, which means another day off of work for me. Four days in a row. I sure needed the time away from the office. The last two weeks at work have been stressful. It was nice to forget about that for a few days and work on my own stuff.

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apt-checkpoint 0.1 released

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I’m happy to announce that apt-checkpoint 0.1 has been released..

I’m excited about this, partially because this is the first “open source” project that I’ve gotten to a releasable state but also because it’s just a damn handy utility. I pimped the project in #debian-devel (on irc.freenode.net) today. A few people said things like “that’d be useful for me” and “this is a good idea, i’ll try it out in a chroot later. actually it will be really useful for chroots when you want to revert changes.”, while another sputtered “packages are not required to support downgrading at all” and “while [ 1] ; do dpkg –get-selections | awk ‘{print $1}’ | grep -v apt | xargs dpkg –purge; done.” and “Use a file system with snapshots.”

Of course, there are various ways of manually downgrading packages. The problem with his suggestion is that, while technically feasible, is not a clean solution. I shouldn’t have to pipe commands back and forth to accomplish what should be a seamless, automated task. Linux isn’t just the playground the technologically elite. Linux needs to be user-friendly, while still allowing us technophiles to get our hands dirty. apt-checkpoint, while rough and cludgy, is just an example of the kind of usability people need. They should be able to upgrade and, if something breaks, seamlessly rollback, akin to restore points in Windows (which are used for the exact same reason).

A few people have already started to play with apt-checkpoint. Hopefully I’ll get some good feedback from them, and a stable 0.2 release will be ready in the near future.

Making progress feels good

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I’ve made some awesome progress on apt-checkpoint lately. There are four primary commands that apt-checkpoint recognizes: create, view, diff, and rollback. Right now, all but rollback are functional. Rollback will probably be the most difficult, which is why I saved it for last.

I’m going to get a project page up in the next few days. I applied for one at SourceForge, but then Jorge pointed me over to Alioth, so I’ve applied there as well. To be honest, SourceForge looks like it has more features, but Alioth is a Debian-run service, which might be better for me in the long-run, considering I want to become a Debian Developer. I guess I’ll wait and see who approves my project first and see how impatient I am.