update manager to become more modular

In my last post I wrote about how I got accepted for GSoC09 and am going to work on update manager. Now I couldn't wait for the actual GSoC09 coding period to start and created my own update manager branch right away and started hacking.

So far I have only written a few lines of code, but my mentor Michael Vogt and me came to the conclusion that whilst working on the internals of update manager it might be a good idea to make the whole program more modular.
Right now all the different functions of update manager (being the UI/frontend and the package manager interface/backend) are mixed up in various files, which makes not only reading the code harder, but also extending update manager more difficult. This was reason enough for me to have a look into making update manager more modular in its design and some of my efforts can already be seen in my update manager branch.

If you have any comments on the proposed backend interface or see major problems with it, please let me know, I would really appreciate some input on that. Also, the UI and the distribution-specific code interfaces are next on my list, before beginning to actually move existing code around. I hope to be able to finish that work before the GSoC hacking period starts, so I can concentrate entirely on my task of making update-manager distribution independent.

Summer Of Code 2009: Working for Debian

Yesterday Google announced the students and projects that have been accepted for Google Summer Of Code 2009 and guess what: my project was accepted. This means I will be working full-time on FOSS this summer.

So I guess it's about time to introduce my project to you: Distribution-independent update manager, mentored by Michael Vogt (mvo).

Okay, I believe some of you might wonder what this project is all about, as update-manager is in the Debian package archive already. There is a problem with update-manager though. As you see in the package's version number (it contains ".debian") update-manager has been adapted for use in Debian. Also, Debian contains update-manager 0.68 right now, whilst upstream (Ubuntu in this case) has released 0.111.6 (actually there were quite a few upstream versions meanwhile). The reason Debian is nowhere near being up-to-date with upstream is that right now a lot of effort has to be put into porting update-manager to Debian every time a new upstream release is made, because certain Ubuntu-specific functionality breaks update-manager in more or less severe ways on Debian.

This leads me directly to what my project is about: making update-manager (Ubuntu-) distribution-independent, but not package manager independent.
There are 6 main goals for this project, which I will be working on in the order below.

• Analyzing the code and identifying Ubuntu-specific parts.


• Creating a distribution-plugin interface and moving the Ubuntu-specific parts into a distribution-plugin, creating a core package that is distribution-independent.


• Creating a special notification for important/security related updates and providing the code that handles updates from security.debian.org as such.


• Creating a backend-plugin interface, moving the synaptics backend into a backend-plugin and optionally create a python-apt based plugin.


• UI redesign, providing a simpler interface to average joe, whilst allowing more experienced users to optionally display more information.


• Automatic downloading & installation of updates. This is still up to discussion, as automatic downloading is already provided by software-properties (-gtk and -kde) and automatic installation can be handled by unattended-upgrades. Both packages are part of Debian already.

Please note that this list should not be considered final and may be extended or modified over time. It exists to give you an overview of what exactly my project is about and how I am planning on carrying out the tasks.

Finally I wanted to let you know that I will keep you posted on the progress I am making, via this blog. Alternatively a blog aggregator for Debian's GSoC students has been set up over at http://soc.alioth.debian.org/feeds/blogs/, where you can not only find my posts, but those of all of Debian's students.

Python everywhere: computer games

This is the second article in my series Python everywhere and covers the use of Python for in computer games. The first article of this series covered the use of Python for the conficker worm scanner tool and can be found here.

Problems running PHP as a separate FastCGI process

As some of you might have noticed this webserver has not been that responsive in the past few hours and I have been working hard on getting that fixed. I finally identified the problem and was able to fix it.

The root of the problem was my setup running PHP as a separate FastCGI process. Unfortunatly it seems as if PHP can only handle 500 requests per FastCGI process and then seems to lock up.
The old setup of this site didn't cause such problems and it seems the problem lies in not setting the PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN and PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS environment variables with the new setup.