Anyway, Saturday was Barcamp Day.  After the group photo, barcamp proposals/voting was Jared’s speech.  His message was essentially that Fedora is strong and that we need to keep going.  My first barcamp of the day was on Boxgrinder.  Boxgrinder makes automated VM creation easy, something useful for upcoming AutoQA tasks.  During lunch, I had the aforementioned Beefy Mishap.  Afterwards, I went to the Fedora ARM barcamp.  I’ll be honest, it was not entirely motivated by my desire to learn more about Fedora on ARM; they were giving away hardware.  Those of us that wanted some lined up and gave pitches as to why we should get it.  Mine was simple:  I said, “I’m QA.”  Besides Adam Williamson firing me a couple of times, things went well.  I got a few very basic ideas as to where the ARM project is going and what sort of things us QA folks will need to be doing.

After that, I went to see what the Sys Admin Study Group was up to, and sat in there for an hour and hacked.  After that was the State of the Fedora Kernel address.  As I had fairly gathered, there really isn’t anything earth shattering that has taken place in the kernel recently besides the version change.  I wish the clustering barcamp had been the hour before, since I’d have liked to have attended both.  Alas, I’ll ping the barcamp owner.  The last session was Sandro’s QA session.  I went to help him out with that, and things went well, with lots of questions asked and the process explained rather well.

Fudpub was awesome.  One dude I bowled against bowled a higher score than everyone else on the lane combined, but it was still fun.  The food was good, even if the beer selection was a bit lacking.

After Fudpub, I went through a couple of Poker games.  The first I won, the second I lost, twice.  After the second loss, it was time to go horizontal.

Sunday was spent with the Anaconda team’s hackfest.  We hashed out some ideas for testing the new UI and I put in my two cents here and there.  If there is one tiny thing about the new UI you don’t like, that’s probably a result of my input, so blame me.

Sunday afternoon I rode with Will Cohen and Greg DeKoenigsberg.  We took a back road for the first forty miles.  Winding through the mountains of western Virginia with snow on the ground was an awesome sight.  We arrived in Raleigh early enough for me to catch the 7:00 Greyhound back to Fayetteville so that I wouldn’t have to sit around until 11 PM.

Overall, I’m glad I went.  I got a fair bit of work done and learned a lot that is pertinent to my future goals within the Project.  It was nice meeting up with folks I already knew and meeting others face-to-face for the first time.

I kicked things off with the Infrastructure hackfest.  After two hours of that, it was time for lunch, although I didn’t eat anything.  This afternoon, I went to Paul Frield’s Drupal workshop, followed by figuring out where to start working on AutoQA self testing.  After that, I failed a test.  Since then I’ve been sitting in front of the fire place drinking Tatica’s wonderful rum, talking, and hacking AutoQA.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow, for sure.

Oh, wait.

Anyhow, in a couple of days I’ll start my great Fedora quest.  Hopefully I’ll roll a natural twenty and won’t have any issues in travel.  I will be riding with the amazing Andy Grimm and the great Will Cohen.

I plan to attend Paul Frield’s Drupal talk Friday as well as hosting an AutoQA hackfest.  The rest of Friday I plan to attend various hackfests and maybe do something to cloud things up.

Saturday will probably be very cloudy, as I can use all the knowledge I can get in that area.  It looks like there will be a bit of a QA barcamp at some point, and I may show up to that to mommick Sandro some.  Sunday will be largely taken by more QA stuff, especially the hackfest where we’ll be mucking about figuring out the best way to test the new Anaconda.

Well, that’s it.  I’ll let every go back to their visit from the Vogons.

John.

This release cycle I am the Test Day Coordinator.  That means it is my job to help you, my fellow Fedorians, to set up test days for your packages/projects.  We have about two and a half months until Alpha release (1).  The sooner I receive test day proposals, the easier my life will be, and we all know that making my life easier is a Good Thing.  The test day schedule can be found here.

Proposing a test day is very easy.  There is a guide for proposing test days, as well as one for helping with creating the associated Wiki page and actually running the test day.

If you need any help, feel free to email me at jdulaney (AT) fedoraproject.org.

Thanks much
John Dulaney

(1) Fedora 17 Schedule

Please support Fedora’s Internationalization/Localization teams by helping to test translations.

Live images may be found here:  http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/f16-translation/

There are three days to choose from:  30 and 31 August, and 1st September.

Instructions are included on the test day Wiki pages:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2011-08-30_L10n_Desktop

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2011-08-31_L10n_I18n_Installation

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2011-09-01_I18n_Desktop

I personally will be testing French (the question is whether or not it will be a test of my French).

Thanks much for your help!

So, I wind up being rather productive.

There is something substantially different about this year, though.  I am no longer living where I grew up, but rather in what was my Grandfather’s house prior to his passing.  So, this means no more sitting on a lifeguard stand at the beach and pondering Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Anyway, my big project of late is testing AutoQA.

What is AutoQA, you ask?  It is the software suite in development by Fedora’s Quality Assurance team that is designed to test Fedora.  You can read about it here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/AutoQA

Any way, in order to test the test software, several things are needed.  Firstly is a mock-up of the Fedora build system (Koji and Bodhi), although the entire thing is not needed; just the back-ends that actually do the work.  I am using the actual back-ends and interfacing with them as necessary.  Secondly, one needs an instance of AutoQA running to be tested.  This is pointed to our mock-up of the build system as if it was the build system.  No new code needs to be integrated into AutoQA itself to handle this.  And third, test cases with predictable output are needed.

So, how does this mock-up work precisely?

1. Read test case from file (plain text) that describes location of packages to be run through the AutoQA process and the predicted output of AutoQA if those packages were put through the actual build system.  It should be noted that for some tests, almost the entirety of (default) Fedora may be required.  From here, it is not difficult to simulate the hooks that AutoQA uses, although different ones are required for different tests.  Some of them need to be updated after AutoQA is running, which triggers certain tests.

2. Start up an AutoQA instance and pass as options the test we want to test and point it to our packages in our mock build system.

3. Wait for output to be generated and then parse it.  Compare it to expected results.

So, none of this is really difficult.  The hard part is in creating test cases that thoroughly check AutoQA.  We need tests that will pass AutoQA tests, tests that fail them, tests that fail because of one dependency error, tests that test to see what happens if there is a failure in the build system.

Want to help?  We could use it with test creation, and Quality Assurance in general.  It’s a fairly easy way to contribute to a Good Thing (Okay, maybe not so easy with test creation, but testing software in general is not that difficult).  Go to https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA to get started.

John

P.S.  Since I wrote this this morning, I’ve checked my email.  Tim Flink has also been working on this project and has got some of the back end stuff I hadn’t done yet up on Git Hub:

https://github.com/tflink/mock_fedorainfra

In AutoCAD, one can simply hit ‘l’ (or ‘L’, but the extra keystroke is not necessary) on the keyboard to draw a line.  No clicking in the text box at the bottom is necessary.  This makes drawing lines very fast.  In QCAD, one has to click on the text box at the bottom, which is very frustrating.  The alternative is, like in AutoCAD, to click on the little icon in the toolbar.  But wait, rather than then being able to immediately draw a line, one is presented with choices for a bunch of different lines.  When it comes down to it, AutoCAD has the same choices, but they all get their own separate icons.  It’s just one click, and boom, lines can be drawn.

But wait, it doesn’t end there!  When one is done drawing the line(s), one cannot simply hit <Enter> a couple of times and get out of line drawing.  It has to be manually done by the little icons on the left hand side.

Then, we get to splines.  I use splines probably more than lines when drawing ships.  I’ll trace out the stations of a ship with splines, arrange them three dimensionally along the profile, draw in the water lines (which are also splines) and fair everything out to get a nice, smooth hull.  Well, since in QCAD all the points in the splines must snap to existing entities, it makes it difficult to trace things out.

Looking around in QCAD, it isn’t bad feature-wise for a 2D drafting program, and has come a long way since the last time I mucked about with it.  However, the user interface does not present itself very well for a professional draftsman (which definition I fit, even if in the current economy that’s not how I make my living).  For non-professional home/hobby use, it can be made to work, but I wouldn’t even think about doing some of the the things that I do with AutoCAD with it, even 2D (and considering I do the majority of my drafting three dimensionally…).

You know, it’s odd that a Free Software supporter such as myself would choose the proprietary software over the open source.  However, in this instance, the open source program just doesn’t cut it.  QCAD is probably about twelve years or so behind AutoCAD in terms of development.  Sounds like I’ve just given myself a new project…

John Dulaney

<Rant>If you don’t like/want systemd (and I think most distros will wind up with it eventually) then don’t use Fedora 15.  Don’t go shouting on the Devel list about how it shouldn’t be installed by default.</rant>

Now that my anoyances are out of the way, on to SELF.  I reckon I’ll break it down to what I liked:

1. All the cloud stuff.  That will be useful for QAing F16, and that alone is enough for me to have gone.
2. Networking.  I met up with a couple of KDE devs (one of whom also does embedded and alternative architectures, in which I also have interest) that has gotten me to install KDE.  There’s some cool stuff there since the last time I messed with it.  I’ll admit, it’s been a while.  That said, I still prefer Fluxbox in terms of workflow.
3. The Genetics talk was supremely interesting.  I would very much like to learn more on the subject, and may at some point dabble in the code some.
4. I missed Spot’s talk because I was networking, but that was cool (see 2 above; I also talked about real estate (random)).
5. Helping folks understand how Fedora works was decidedly win.
6. Speevan back was fracking awesome, except for the hangover.

There really wasn’t too much I disliked except the aforementioned hangover, but since that was self-inflicted, I can’t complain, can I?  I also managed to bomb my kernel on Friday morning, but it wasn’t difficult to fix (those that were there know what I did).

I tried to introduce Ryan Rix to grits, but he was supremely uninterested.  I consider that the fail of the weekend.

j_dulaney

Hanging out with Sparks, Spot, Southern_Gentleman, jsmith, etc. has been tres interesting.  Last night’s burn party was pretty cool, too, especially the goings-on whilst DVD’s were burning.  Hanging with these folks and the exchange of knowledge that has resulted has been very, very good.

I plan to attend Spot’s talk on how we fail later on, and then afterwards party.

More later.

Anyway, on to the kernel.  It’s running nicely, I haven’t had any issues other than leaving out the FAT driver (as I found out when I tried to use my USB flash drive, oops).  Since I left out the vast majority of the drivers available, the kernel as I’m running it is very small and seems to be a bit faster than the generic F15 kernel.  Of course, I’m not sure how much I’ll wind up using it in practice since for testing purposes I have to use whatever kernel is in the testing repository.

In other news, looks like my friend Larry is going to have a shindig tomorrow, so I’m going to be playing (sadly, not mandolin since that’s in the shop).  I’ll also be recording, so look out for that.  Expect to hear a bunch of folk, blues, some country, etc.  I imagine it will be pretty heavy on the Old Crow Medicine Show.

On the flute, I can sort of bang out something that with some (quite a bit, actually) imagination can be recognized as Yankee Doodle.  I’ll probably bring it and see what I can do about jamming with it.  I’m not quite sure how much I’ll be able to play, since all the notes I know are in the key of G.  Ah, well, I’ll get there, eventually.