Woohoo! Déjà Dup squeezed into Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04, just before Feature Freeze.
Still not in Debian (or any other distribution that I know of), but it’s a start.
Déjà Dup in Ubuntu
2
Category Archives: Software
UDS Debriefing
Phew, I meant to write this a million years ago.
I went to UDS Jaunty, got the shirt, came back. It was at the Googleplex, but seemingly the backwater part of it. The food wasn’t amazing, and we weren’t allowed to really wander around. So it was just a bunch of conference rooms. With weird cameras that would move by themselves and that you couldn’t turn off.
And Mountain View, California is no Prague. There wasn’t much nightlife, and you needed a car to get anywhere. So the locale as a whole was disappointing. Next time, let’s do New Orleans!
It was neat to see how forward-thinking most of the sessions were. I felt like it was more about planning for Jaunty+1 than Jaunty. Really long-term views, with an eye towards what first steps can be done by Jaunty.
I attended the Jaunty Backup session. You can even see the videos from the session, although no one was moving the camera around as people spoke, so I’m perpetually off stage right.
The session was inconclusive, and I fear I spent too much of its time talking about Déjà Dup, but I was there to evangalize I guess. I haven’t heard back, and the spec writeup seems like it’s willing to wait until Jaunty+1, as none of the current solutions are ideal.
Which is good. Throwing Déjà Dup together in time to meet Jaunty deadlines would have been tight. But honestly, I think it’s coming along fantastically. The recently released 5.0 is really hot, and could have served as a decent first draft for Jaunty.
Besides the backup session, I did a lot of work in our secret OEM Services room, and attended the odd session. It was fun.
Déjà Dup News
Since releasing Déjà Dup 1.0, I’ve been hard at work on the recently-released 2.0. Most of that work has actually been on the underlying duplicity command line tool.
It lacked proper error reporting (didn’t separate errors from other informative console output) and didn’t indicate progress (so I could show a progress bar). I needed to add some sort of interprocess communication, so that a launching program could get useful feedback.
I proposed D-Bus as a good IPC mechanism on the duplicity mailing list, which was followed by a suprising (to me) amount of pushback. I guess D-Bus has a bad reputation as being overengineered/bloated? We eventually went with a text format that you could ask duplicity to write to a given file descriptor or filename. Something like this:
ERROR 2 . You messed up the foo, . please reset your bar.
That change got into the recently released duplicity 0.5.03. My patch to add progress feedback is in CVS, and presumably will be in 0.5.04.
Now I’m turning my attention to translations. Déjà Dup displays some messages from duplicity directly, and it would be nice to have them translated. I hope to submit a patch to gettextize duplicity, but I’m not sure what the best place to outsource translations are these days. I’ve not been very happy with the Translation Project, and Launchpad Rosetta is nice, but not necessarily the best choice if you aren’t already using Launchpad. If you have any ideas, please let the mailing list know.
Meanwhile, I’ve got plans for world backup domination. I’ve filed a Request For Packaging with Debian. We’ll see how that goes. It’s taken a while for the various projects I know personally: gmult (21 months), xpad (6 months), dav-text (34 months).
I’ve also noticed that there’s going to be a session during the next Ubuntu Developer Summit about a backup solution for Jaunty. Well, well, well, Ubuntu. Have I got a solution for you. Now, Déjà Dup isn’t ready for prime-time use by bajillions of people. But I did start it because I didn’t think anything else was either. If I have six months, and possibly more help, maybe I could get it into shape.
Déjà Dup First Release
I’ve been working on a secret project the past few weeks, and I’ve finally released the first version: Déjà Dup. It’s a frontend for the backup command line program duplicity.
The goal is to be a very easy-to-use backup program aimed at those (like me) who know they should backup but are too lazy. The “right way” to backup is often, off-site, and encrypted. But who has time to set that up?
Déjà Dup will make it easy to:
- Backup on a regular schedule (doesn’t do that yet)
- Backup into “the cloud” and defaults to Amazon S3 storage
- Encrypt your backup
The development is done on Launchpad. Feel free to contribute!
Two New Releases
Xpad
Xpad 3.0 is released. The release itself is rather minor: I fixed an xpad-is-waking-up-40-times-each-second bug noticed by Sergej Schwarz. Thanks, Sergej!
The more interesting changes are operational. I’ve moved the project largely to Launchpad, following my successful move of Multiplication Puzzle. Code and tarballs are up. The mailing list isn’t yet, but it will come. Translations will be done there too, now that I’ve been kicked out of the Translation Project.
As part of the move away from Sourceforge, I decided to move the main xpad website to this domain. I simplified it a bit, to give it the same look and feel as the rest of the site. I don’t think much was lost. The previous site was sort of crufty.
I also relicensed the code to be GPL v3 and changed the versioning scheme to match Multiplication Puzzle’s: feature or major bug fixes get a major version bump, translation and packaging fixes get a minor version bump. The previous scheme didn’t make sense anymore.
Multiplication Puzzle
Multiplication Puzzle 7.0 is released. This finally brings my vision for 6.0 to fruition. I added the ability to guess letters by either pressing keys on the keyboard or dragging and dropping digits to letters. I worked around the nasty gdk bug by just forcing a larger drag icon and making most of it transparent. So the user never knows they’re dragging around a 64×64 icon. Yay!
I also added a Hint menu item that will tell you one digit and added a game timer, for extra urgency.
Xpad, Multiplication Puzzle No Longer Using Translation Project
Sadly, xpad and Multiplication Puzzle are no longer participating in the Translation Project. The TP is a great service that matches up FOSS maintainers with translation teams.
Skipping the nerd drama, suffice it to say that there were creative differences. It is current TP policy to kick out any projects that accept user translations for languages for which TP has not provided any. Given the choice of deleting a translation or leaving the TP, I chose to leave.
Which sucks, because they did provide good translations. I will try launchpad‘s translation infrastructure for gmult, and see how that goes. If it goes well, I might move xpad over to launchpad.
So translators, please visit the gmult translation page and translate away!
Dell Mini
W00t! One of my projects at work is finally public! I’m actually a little late to the party, as Dell announced it last week, but better late than never.
The Dell Mini is a neat little netbook that my team has been working on. It has a custom UI and a lot of system integration work to make it a more consumer-friendly device. The wikipedia page has links to reviews, which seem to be positive.
I’m pretty proud of it, and it’s been really great to have been able to work on it.
GTK+ vs Qt
Right after I started at Canonical, I met Mark Shuttleworth at UDS.
He asked me about Qt vs GTK+, and I nervously said that I preferred the GTK+ stack, finding it more complete. He was surprised, having heard the opposite from others. I recently asked an interviewee about Qt and GTK+, and he also said that he preferred Qt’s abstractions.
Bollucks.
On a widget-level, they’re both about the same. They both have data structure libraries, nice MVC layers, and a similar suite of built-in widgets. Pre-GIO, Qt had a leg up with a file IO abstraction. But that’s about all Qt had.
What GTK+ brings to the table is policy abstraction and system integration. The GTK+ stack gives us icon themes, system tray applets, how to launch files like the system does, printing support, and recently used file support. Qt doesn’t have a compelling answer for the above.
I wish I had said all that when Mark asked. 
Multiplication Puzzle 6.3
I realize I’ve been spamming my blog with Multiplication Puzzle announcements, so I’ve decided to only post major releases on this blog from now on. All releases, major and minor, will now be announced on the brand-spanking new launchpad project page (after this point release).
That’s right! Multiplication Puzzle has by and large moved to launchpad for hosting rather than mterry.name. It’s a little less me-centric and they provide some nice services, like a bug tracker and bzr hosting.
Well, this release is 6.3, and it is another translation update: updated fr, new da, io, and ru.
Multiplication Puzzle 6.2
Multiplication Puzzle 6.2 is out. It features updated id, it, and zh_CN translations and a new user-written hu translation.