Friday, November 11, 2011

» FOSDEM 2012: announcing the devrooms

Just sent out the ack/nack emails for the developer rooms at FOSDEM 2012, the latter part always being pretty tough, but we have to make choices.

On the good side: here is the list of the devrooms for FOSDEM 2012.

Mind you, that list does not include the Distribution Miniconf, which will take place in two rooms during both days and will gather sessions, talks, ideas from many (mostly Linux) distribution projects.

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Tuesday, November 08, 2011

» gpodder 2 vs 3 in Packman

The gpodder project introduced its new major release 3.0.0 today and, unfortunately, it seems like I didn't pay attention to the complete change announcement, as I just bumped the gpodder package in Packman to 3.0.0 (from 2.18).

Now, gpodder 3.0.0 does introduce a lot of changes, notably in the UI but also regarding its database format and requires migrating the database from 2 to 3. It doesn't seem to have all of the features of 2.20 either. So what happens is that when you just upgrade the gpodder package, you end up with something you don't necessarily want to use. At least as of now.

Upstream will still maintain the 2.x branch for quite a while, and gradually port features from 2 to 3 and, hence, it actually makes sense to do it differently. What I have done now is to revert the gpodder package at Packman to the 2.xx branch (and upgrade to 2.20 at the same time).

If you want to use gpodder 3.0.0, then just install the package gpodder3 instead: zypper or YaST2 will tell you to remove gpodder in order to do so, as you cannot have both installed at the same time (they have file conflicts).

Now, if, in between those changes, you already did the upgrade, do one of the following:

  • if you want to keep using 3.x: then run rpm -e gpodder && zypper install gpodder3 (as root)
  • if you want to go back to 2.x: then run rpm -e gpodder && zypper install gpodder (as root)

On a side note, please wait a couple of hours (after this blog post) before doing so, as our main repository server is only synced to some mirrors after 4 hours (after 1 hour for most though).

Sorry for the inconvenience.

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Sunday, November 06, 2011

» Installing Perl Module RPMs on openSUSE

The additional repository devel:languages:perl has quite a slew of Perl module packages in it (over 2000 at the time of writing).

Hence, if you are often using and requiring Perl modules, it makes a lot of sense to add it to your list of repositories, which you can do with the following command (as root):

zypper addrepo http://r.opensu.se/devel:languages:perl.repo

(if you wonder what r.opensu.se is, read up on it here: r.opensu.se).

A little known fact is that when building RPM packages, there is a post-build script that analyzes the files that are part of the resulting package in order to scan for Perl modules. For each of those Perl modules, it adds a Provides with the Perl name of that Perl module, with a specific notation which is like this: perl(Name::of::the::Perl::package).

As an example, if you need the Perl module Net::SMTP::SSL, you just need to do this:

zypper install 'perl(Net::SMTP::SSL)'

Note that you should indeed put that parameter to the zypper install command into quotes, as if you don't, bash will attempt to interpret the braces and give a syntax error.

Now, in this case, it is fairly simple, as the Perl module Net::SMTP::SSL is provided by the RPM package perl-Net-SMTP-SSL (at least on openSUSE/SLE), so you might have been able to derive the name of the RPM package from the name of the missing Perl module on your own. But that Perl module could very well be part of a package with a different name: for example, the Perl module Class::MOP is not in the RPM package perl-Class-MOP but in the RPM package perl-Moose (because it's part of the Moose CPAN module).

And a last little trick: if you only want to find out which RPM package(s) provides specific Perl modules, you may also use this:

zypper what-provides 'perl(Class::MOP)'

(Note that this one only works on repositories that you have in your list of active repositories, which you can see with zypper repos or zypper lr.)

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