Fedora Rules

yum in Fedora 12 Beta contain a new cool history feature that make it posible to
see what happed in part transaction and redo/undo past transaction.

Example 1: Showing the past transaction

# yum history
Loaded plugins: presto, refresh-packagekit
ID     | Login user             | Date and time    | Action(s)      | Altered
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    17 | Tim Lauridsen     | 2009-10-26 15:43 | Erase          |    1
    16 | Tim Lauridsen     | 2009-10-26 15:30 | Install        |    1
    15 | Tim Lauridsen     | 2009-10-26 15:27 | Install        |    3
    14 | Tim Lauridsen     | 2009-10-26 15:25 | Erase          |    1
    13 | Tim Lauridsen     | 2009-10-26 15:09 | Install        |    1
    12 | Tim Lauridsen     | 2009-10-26 13:17 | Install        |    6
    11 | Tim Lauridsen     | 2009-10-26 13:13 | I, U           |   28
    10 | Tim Lauridsen     | 2009-10-24 18:50 | Install        |  122
     9 | Tim Lauridsen     | 2009-10-24 18:40 | Update         |   11
     8 | Tim Lauridsen     | 2009-10-23 19:39 | Install        |    2
     7 | Tim Lauridsen     | 2009-10-23 19:30 | Install        |   26
     6 | Tim Lauridsen     | 2009-10-23 18:51 | Install        |    1  <
     5 | Tim Lauridsen     | 2009-10-23 18:49 | Install        |   42 ><
     4 | Tim Lauridsen     | 2009-10-23 18:46 | Install        |    5 >
     3 | Tim Lauridsen     | 2009-10-23 18:34 | I, U           |  189
     2 | Tim Lauridsen     | 2009-10-23 18:14 | Install        |    3
     1 | System          | 2009-10-23 16:35 | Install        | 1136

Example 2: Showing transaction containing the yumex package

# yum history list yumex
Loaded plugins: presto, refresh-packagekit
ID     | Login user             | Date and time    | Action(s)      | Altered
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     2 | Tim Lauridsen     | 2009-10-23 18:14 | Install        |    3

Example 3: Show details about a transaction id.

# yum history info 2
Loaded plugins: presto, refresh-packagekit
Transaction ID : 2
Begin time     : Fri Oct 23 18:14:05 2009
Begin rpmdb    : 1136:908205640b70e31c5b163c091392b42ba71352d5
End time       :            18:14:11 2009 (6 seconds)
End rpmdb      : 1139:711687a3c9f18d3899a1dc5a6285cc4bed4cc037
User           : Tim Lauridsen 
Return-Code    : Success
Transaction performed with:
    Installed    rpm-4.7.1-6.fc12.i686
    Updated      yum-3.2.24-9.fc12.noarch
    Installed    yum-metadata-parser-1.1.2-14.fc12.i686
Packages Altered:
    Install      pexpect-2.3-4.fc12.noarch
    Install      python-enum-0.4.3-6.fc12.noarch
    Install      yumex-2.9.3-1.fc12.noarch

Example 4: Redo a transaction

# yum history info 16
Loaded plugins: presto, refresh-packagekit
Transaction ID : 16
Begin time     : Mon Oct 26 15:30:03 2009
Begin rpmdb    : 1355:1bc4615c42e3a0e781915a708df4880b262d60b5
End time       :            15:30:06 2009 (3 seconds)
End rpmdb      : 1356:d21998bce69db64bb12a14c3abe84e182fd4a19b
User           : Tim Lauridsen 
Return-Code    : Success
Transaction performed with:
    Installed    rpm-4.7.1-6.fc12.i686
    Installed    yum-3.2.25-1.fc12.noarch
    Installed    yum-metadata-parser-1.1.2-14.fc12.i686
    Installed    yumex-2.9.3-1.fc12.noarch
Packages Altered:
    Install      0xFFFF-0.3.9-4.fc12.i686

# yum history redo 16
Loaded plugins: presto, refresh-packagekit
Repeating transaction 16, from Mon Oct 26 15:30:03 2009
    Install      0xFFFF-0.3.9-4.fc12.i686
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package 0xFFFF.i686 0:0.3.9-4.fc12 set to be updated
--> Finished Dependency Resolution

Dependencies Resolved

================================================================================
 Package          Arch           Version                Repository         Size
================================================================================
Installing:
 0xFFFF           i686           0.3.9-4.fc12           rawhide            40 k

Transaction Summary
================================================================================
Install       1 Package(s)
Upgrade       0 Package(s)

Total download size: 40 k
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:
Setting up and reading Presto delta metadata
Processing delta metadata
Package(s) data still to download: 40 k
0xFFFF-0.3.9-4.fc12.i686.rpm                             |  40 kB     00:00
Running rpm_check_debug
Running Transaction Test
Finished Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
  Installing     : 0xFFFF-0.3.9-4.fc12.i686                                 1/1 

Installed:
  0xFFFF.i686 0:0.3.9-4.fc12                                                    

Complete!

Example 5: Undo a transaction

# yum history undo 16
Loaded plugins: presto, refresh-packagekit
Undoing transaction 16, from Mon Oct 26 15:30:03 2009
    Install      0xFFFF-0.3.9-4.fc12.i686
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package 0xFFFF.i686 0:0.3.9-4.fc12 set to be erased
--> Finished Dependency Resolution

Dependencies Resolved

================================================================================
 Package         Arch          Version                 Repository          Size
================================================================================
Removing:
 0xFFFF          i686          0.3.9-4.fc12            installed          100 k

Transaction Summary
================================================================================
Remove        1 Package(s)
Reinstall     0 Package(s)
Downgrade     0 Package(s)

Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:
Running rpm_check_debug
Running Transaction Test
Finished Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
  Erasing        : 0xFFFF-0.3.9-4.fc12.i686                                 1/1 

Removed:
  0xFFFF.i686 0:0.3.9-4.fc12                                                    

Complete!

The have been some discussions on the fedora-devel list on the latest Thunderbird 3 Beta 4 release, because it introduce some new features there make things look and feel different.  It looks like there is 2 kind of opinions.

a). This kind of changes should never enter a stable release of fedora as an update.

b).  Let me have the latest and greatest as long as my system don’t blow up.

I feel most for b), if I was feeling for a),  I would use RHEL/Centos, instead of Fedora.

One of the reasons I use Fedora, is because it evolves over time, not only between releases, but many of the applications also evolves on the current release and of cause we can’t change the low level parts of the system on the current release and use too unstable components, because it will make peoples systems blow up and we don’t want that. But that don’t mean that we can’t evolve and discover new grounds.

If you don’t like some changes in a application like thunderbird, then don’t beat up the maintainer, take it upstream. It is one of Fedora values to follow upstream and if upstream make a change like disable ‘Ctrl-Alt-Backspace’ in X, then Fedora will follow. You can always enable it on your system, if you like an easy way to kill your GUI in a moment of anger.

One of the great things about Fedora and Linux is you have a lot of choices and if you don’t like something, then turn it off or use some other applications there better fits you needs.

I have made a new preview release of Yum Exender NextGen

Get Fedora 11 packages here:

http://timlau.fedorapeople.org/files/yumex/

The mayor change is that the gui is now running as normal user and only the backend doing the yum magic is running as root, so you will see a consolehelper root password prompt, just after the gui is shown. I know that consolehelper is a yesterday thing, but there is no easy to use replacement yet.

The Hard Way:

My old HP printer (C5380)  has decided to not work any more, i has served me well and works nicely under Fedora. It is mostly my wife there is using the printer at home, and only for printing documents, webpages etc. and for photo copying.

I picked up a Epson Stylus SX-100 all in one printer in local supermarket for a very good price, with out checking out how i worked in Linux , how hard can it be, pretty hard

I connnected the printer to a Fedora 11 box and it detected the printer and added a printing queue. Started system-config-printer and tried to print a ‘test page’, but notting happed

Did a lot of googling and found out that people only got it to work with some semi open source drivers from avasys.jp

I found some drivers for Fedora 9 and tried to install them, why does anybody makes drivers for Fedora and put them in the a .tgz and not in a rpm, that is a riddle to me .

Now the test page was printing and i could print from F-Spot and OpenOffice, but printing from gedit and firefox was not working, because some problem with selecting A4 as paper size, even when A4 was selected then the print job was in letter, so the printer didn’t like the job.

The Easy Way:

I removed the avasys driver and removed all the print queues and started to try to make it work with the gutenprint driver as the openprinting.org site said it should work with. I checked out the available gutenprint packages in Fedora 11.

it looked like there was a gutenprint-cups package there should contain some drivers from Epson and others, so i decided to install it:

yum install gutenprint-cups

Then i plugged in the printer and it was detected and created a print queue and everything was working

Fedora 11 has won again !!

I have been working hard on beating Yum Extender NextGen into shape and I really like the result so far.
I have made a new screencast showing the the latest preview release 2.9.0-0.8.

If you what to try it out, then read more here

It will only work in Fedora 11, because I use a lot of latest and greatest Gtk stuff.

I was working on my desktop and this pops up.

Maybe I’m old, but not that old and I can’t read Persian.

(I know it is supposed to be a new feature in F11, but this is going to confuse a lot of people)

Yes, i voted too.
Both in the Fedora Voting system and now on the planet too

I have be working on beating the skip broken functionallty in yum in better shape. The was a lot cases were it has to give up. One of the big problems debugging the code is that,  repo inconsistencies where skip broken is useful, don’t last long and can be hard to reproduce and retest.  So i had been working to make some unit tests in yum,  to reproduce the found issues and make the debug output from skip broken a lot better, so it is easier to see what goes wrong.

The current yum in rawhide (3.2.20) is in very good shape and the upstream 3_2_x branch is even better.

If you run into some situation where ‘–skip-broken’ bails out, then please checkout

http://yum.baseurl.org/wiki/SkipBroken

I have just released Yum Extender 2.0.5, not a lot of changes, but a lot of translation updates, thank to all translators and the transiflex maintainers to make it easy for the translator to submit translations upstream.

It is the first release for a long time and the 2.0.x code base is quite stable at the moment and there will only be made bug fixes to the 2.0.x series, no new fancy stuff.

I have started to work on the next generation of yumex, it will be redesigned from scratch, because i want to solve one of the mayor problems in yumex, that the gui get stuck when there is no callback from yum in a long periode of time. so i has started to design a client/server based yum backend there can run in a separete child process and communicate with the gui frontend, using a generic interface. This separation has a lot of benefit and will make it a lot easier to maintain the gui and make it work with different versions of yum or even other package managers.

Updates:

The updates are rolling again welcome, i updated a couple of my systems and it went very smooth. Thanks for the hard work of the infrastructure team, they did a lot of work to make smooth ride for the users.

Artwork:

I have just installed the background packages with Fedora 10 backgrounds, Martin blogged about, i must say they look so damm good, so i can’t choose the one i like most, great works from the Art team, Thanks.

PackageKit:

The PackageKit yum backed have been hunting me for a while, not because the code is bad, but because of the way a spawned PackageKit backend work, it works by having one small python script for each api call that PackageKit supports ‘search-name, search-file, update-system, install-packages etc’. what the scripts does is to import a shared yumBackend module and call the method that is doing the action. The problem with this approch is that, every time PackageKit does a single action, yum has to be initialized, it don’t take long because of most stuff is loaded from the yum cache, but some features i PackageKit does a lot of calls and then perfomance really hurts.

The way to fix it, was to find a way to not initialize yum on every call,  Then i got the idea what if we could start some kind of dispatcher that listen to stdin for commands and parameters and then call the right methods to do the actions. then we could do multiple actions without initializing yum every time. I did the basics to the backend code so it supported a dispatcher taking multiple commands until it got an exit command. For this stuff to work, some changes needed to be done in the PackageKit C backend, to not just spawn a new script everytime, but keep it alive and just push commands into stdin.
I pinged Richard Hughes one friday afternoon and he liked the idea, so after a couple of hours of hacking, we had the basic pieces kicked into shape. One of the mayor issues was that we don’t what to lock yum for a longer period of time, because it use memory and locks out other application from using the yum API.
So it was made so that the C backend, keep the dispatcher alive until it has been idle for 5s, and then close it time.

The new way of doing thing has been released in PackageKit 0.3.2 currently in rawhide and it will hopefully give the user a better expericens for PackageKit i Fedora 10.yum –enablerepo=rawhide update PackageKit
It is easy to test in Fedora 9 too, just do a

yum –enablerepo=rawhide update PackageKit

It will only pull the updated PackageKit packages, not any other rawhide stuff.