Steve Kemp's Blog

Debian & Free Software

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This is a simple blog relating to Debian & Free Software issues.

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Entries tagged "travel".

The world is not enough.
23rd March 2007

Vienna.

Tomorrow.

:)

Tags: megan, travel, vienna.
But you better not kill the groove
21st July 2007

The rinse tool has been sucking up a bit of my time recently, but happily it now installs:

  • Centos 4 & 5.
  • Fedora Core 4, 5 & 6.

(Debian package for Etch available here. Could be worth uploading to Sid? I'm tempted to do it myself .. at the very least it provides an alternative to rpmstrap and it shouldn't require constant updates... Yay? Nay?)

Each of the seven supported distributions may be installed as either "i386" or "amd64" flavours.

The current CVS version of xen-tools can use rinse as an installation method, so I can now create Xen guests of RPM-based distributions with a single command and a few minutes of patience.

Nothing else exciting is happening right now. My partner is still away in the United States. (Counting fiddler crabs in the Florida Everglades!) Still it isn't all bad - she promised to bring me back a Nintendo DS - and the pictures seem to suggest she's having a fine time. Argh! Pirates!

The only other thing I'm doing right now is working on the alternative dating site. That seems to be picking up steam in two geographical clusters. So I'm now spending a fair bit of time pimping, promoting and advertising specifically in the Edinburgh & London areas.

Tags: ctrl-alt-date, megan, pirates, rinse, travel.
So here it is Merry Christmas
16th December 2007

Lars Wirzenius recently released, and packaged for Debian, a simple script to make release tarballs. He calls it Unperish.

It makes me wonder how many other people use that kind of system?

Of the top of my head the only similar thing I can recall using is Brad Fitzpatrick's ShipIt - another moduler/plugin-based system (Perl rather than Python this time.)

For my needs I tend to just write a Makefile which has a "dist" target, and then I have a simple script called "release". This runs:

  1. make dist / make release.
  2. creates a gpg signature of the release.
  3. scp's the resulting files to a remote source.

All this is configurable via a per-project .release file.

The configuration files are very simple, the script itself is almost trivial but being able to sit in a random project directory and have a new tarball on my webserver just by typing "release" is enormously useful.

There are times when I think I should make it a mini-project of its own, with the ability to auto-build Debian packages, etc. Other times I just think .. well its a hell of a lot better than my previous ad-hoc solution.

At the very least I think I will make the cosmetic change of updating the script to run "make test" if there is a test/ or t/ directory inside the generated tarball.

In real news - tomorrow I leave for a two week holiday with my partner's parents. Yesterday I got back from a night spent with her in York. The Bytemark staff night out. Lots of fun. Over too soon, but lots of fun.

3 comments Tags: brad, bytemark, christmas, lars, randomness, release, software, travel.

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