24 Sep 2006 (Sun)

00:58:06 # Life Using soap in ruby. In hacking apt-listbugs and getting something usable out of debian.org machines, and to fight against the inertia of not allowing direct access to db-h, I decided to give the SOAP backend a try. Apart from the problem of non-existing documentation and non-functional implementation, with much help from Don Armstrong, I got something working. Due to the fact that only one HTTP request is required for obtaining the bunch of bug reports, it might be actually suited for apt-listbugs. I'm a bit worried about the load, tho'. soap4r was also very much painful to work with, with its lack of useful documentation.

• SOAP specification
• top page for soap4r
• release note for soap4r
• information on bugs.debian.org SOAP interface
• mailing list for soap4r

12:11:58 # Life Updated linux-uvc. I've synced with upstream svn repos, and applied new patch incorporating iMac support. I fixed a problem which it didn't correctly detect iSight, and now it's working again. I'm waiting for success/failure reports from iMac users.

22:02:58 # Life I now have a local version that works with SOAP. apt-listbugs can query bugs.donarmstrong.com for bug details. It's not released, yet.

22:13:55 # Life Summarizing this month's Tokyo Debian meeting. Last weekend was another of Tokyo Debian meeting. It is a monthly meeting held in Tokyo, Japan. 12 people attended. Kobayashi, akedo, Sawada, Komuro, Kitahara, Eto, Nokubi, Takasugi, Maeda, Mitsuka, Iwamatsu, and I. Report follows:

• Introduced the prep work people did. It was about 'what packages needs packaging right now'. We discussed ruby packages in Debian. Looking at perl, even though CPAN is with its quality, there is much manual labor to package individual modules as packages. The concensus among the attendees was to package-as-needed. Using gems for automating packaging might be good, but it would be nicer to be acclaimed for good packaging, possibly exceeding gems.
• We did Debian-weekly quiz. Too many things to give away, we didn't manage to give out all.
• Sawada gave a presentation on 'Debian specific things you are using without knowing'. adduser and ifup people knew much about, but Xsession was more obscure. gdm (or the maintainer Ryan Murray) is not cooperating with other things with regards to handling Xsession in the Debian way, but it's supposed to be that 'startx' and 'Xdm' use the same file for starting up a user's X session. For user account management, people discussed topics such as ID duplication. We really need something like ActiveDirectory. There are existing systems needing transition, so blindly moving to AD would be hard.
• Kobayashi gave a presentation with the title: "Let's be a translator" People were quite surprised that DDTP is finally back up. It was proposed to have a 'try to translate' booth at Open Source Conference next month.
• I talked about basics of using oprofile. Discussed how to use oprofile to profile taking apt/dpkg as examples. I hope to present about optimized versions of apt/dpkg.
• I talked about realksh, as a report of LLGONG.
• After all this, the usual Nomikai at Doma-Doma.