Diego Búrigo Zacarão’s Weblog

This past week I became a packager for Fedora. It’s been a long time I would like to learn how to do it and I took the new dependencies of the upcoming Transifex 0.7, as an opportunity to make it happen.

I started with packages very simple to be packaged. Actually they were more or less only small Python apps based on Django, but I guess it was a good start.

One thing that I found very good was the Fedora documentation for joining as a package maintainer. I just needed to follow the instructions there and everything went well. If you are planning to become a Fedora packager as well, that page is definitely where you should start.

FWIW, I’ve taken some packages as owner and co-owner so far: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/users/packages/diegobz

Cool

Pyro of the X-Men

In the last weeks we have been polishing the development branch of Transifex for releasing the newest version of the hottest tool for management of translations in the world. If my father was here, next to me, he would say: ‘Ok, less’.

Anyway, the truth is that we are quite excited with the upcoming 0.7 release. We got two Release Candidates in the past days and thankfully we got very good feedback from XFCE, Moblin, Django and Fedora guys. The #transifex channel on IRC (freenode.net) is all about good feelings. A lot of activities and discussions among bugs, enhancements and new features are going there, besides of very cool and helpful guys hanging around.

Do you wanna try out the latest code of the upcoming Transifex 0.7? You are invited to download an image of our appliance which is a whole server that can be executed in a virtual environment and, of course, report things out in our ticket system, once you find any. Og Maciel has been a hero keeping up an appliance of the development branch with daily updates. Thank you, Og!

By the way, for having a preview of what is new in this next release, you can see the 0.7RC2 Release Notes.

Those days me and Ignacio were investigating a weird slowness in a feature of Transifex at http://transifex.net. For some reason there was a query that was taking so long to return the result and we were wondering why?

That was the query:

pofile = get_object_or_404(POFile, component=component, filename=filename)

This query intents to find a PO file with a specific name for a component. Component in this case, in the POFile model, is a generic relation that can be pointed to any object. It is not just a foreignkey to the Component model. Other models can be pointed there too.

The truth here is that, the POFile model does not have a ‘component’ field. It has two others fields instead, called ‘object_id’  and ‘content_type’. Django does a kind of magic and can discover that the ‘component’ field does exist and then relate it to the generic relation present in the model.

That’s really cool, but in the other hand it takes a lot of time. We got the same result using a more specific query and it brought a real gain of performance.

from django.contrib.contenttypes.models import ContentType
ctype = ContentType.objects.get_for_model(component)
pofile = get_object_or_404(POFile, object_id=component.pk, content_type=ctype, filename=filename)

Tags: Django, Transifex

At FISL I saw Toshio doing something with a small paper and…

Diego: Wow… that’s cool and really hard to do.
Toshio: I also can do that even with a Trident paper.
Diego: I doubt it!

So, Toshio shut me up!

Damn it!

Saturday was the last day of 10th edition of FISL. The Fedora booth, as the others days, was well visited during the whole day. From the event aspect, nothing new.

In the end of the day, around 5 o’clock we attended a double talk of Michael Timann until 7 o’clock where it was full! That wasn’t the first time that I saw Michael at FISL. His talks, as I expected, were very good and very valuable to me, personally. As a Fedora contributor I’ve learned some facts about the Fedora’s history that I didn’t know.

Michael’s talks are usually an input of new energy for open sources contributors. The general feeling after his talks was: With the community open source everything is possible, so lets change the world.

Well… changing a bit the issue… lets talk about:

*MY* FUDCon LATAM 2009 thoughts

As I was the only one around here that has already participated in another FUDCon previously in Brno. I took the chance to talk to Dennis and mainly to Toshio about the first FUDCon LATAM. We could see that the model of the FUDCon applied in USA or Europe can not be reflected exactly as it is in the south of America. The reality here is different. We don’t have the same infrastructure and resources to move easily around the continent and the number of developers or people that actually are coding, packaging or doing hacking stuff, still, is not that big.

We took the opportunity of joining the FISL event in order to have more people able to join us at the FUDCon. I would say that it worked pretty well. Some of the talks were completely full and most of the others with a good audience. I guess we can say surely that we have passed the message of what’s been doing in Fedora in the world. Though we missed the hacking part of the FUDCon essence.

On Friday after we had an heads-up in the end of the FUDCon. We’ve talked about this issue and for the next FUDCon we are sure of pushing more for having hacking sessions. We are not talking about just coding, but also practical stuff, like how to actually do something real with tools and issue that the Fedora contributors see often.

For instance, I could say that IMHO this first FUDCon LATAM was more related with a ‘catch up’ among the Fedora contributors and each one of them tried to pass, by using a slot in the schedule, a bit of what it’s been doing around the Fedora sub-projects. That was not bad at all, though. Keeping the FUDCon LATAM connected with bit events for now seems to be the right thing to do. It might bring new potential contributors and an easy way to people gather. So, yes, we are already thinking on the next FUDCon LATAM!

For the end, but not less important, I would like to thank all the Fedora LATAM ambassadors presented or not at FISL. This event for most of us is the unique opportunity to see each other through the year and I was glad to see not just the Fedora guys, but some old and good friends as well. Keep rocking and lets continue working to make Fedora stronger and stronger around the América Latina in the América Latina way.

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