Package management w/ dnf is fast

Yum feels slow sometimes. That's not new. I was impressed by zif and how much quicker it is. And now, once again I'm impressed how quick dnf is.
Besides beeing quick - dnf is also looking quite clean.
So let's see when it get's into a prominent position, for now you can install it on Fedora 18 by using

$ sudo yum install -y dnf

The commandset is not yet as comprehensive as yums, but the basics are working.

Debugging systemd

There was this issue where oVirt Node wouldn't restart after an auto-install. systemd got blocked by something. These two links helped me debugging this issue.

Upgrading from F16 to F18 - no need for a rolling release ...

It was last week when a couple of issues summed up and forced me to think about how to update my working machine from Fedora 16 to Fedora 18.
Basically I had the choice between running a fresh (after a decent backup)  install or upgrading from Fedora 16, via 17, to 18.
In general I really prefer doing fresh installs - as you get a clean system and old cruft is removed, but this time I tried to avoid to backup all the little pieces which somehow tangent my work environment.
Those pieces ain't mission critical, it's just that re-creating them is boring.
Long story short - I just went the upgrade path, with doing a fresh install being my fallback solution.

I ran pre-upgrade on the Fedora 16, which initially failed (It got confused by the EFI setup), but this could be fixed by manually adding the grub entry for booting up pre-upgrade.
It took a couple of hours until the upgrade was finished. But everything seemed to work. After trying a couple of applications, I installed fedup and - just waited. It felt a bit longer but also finally succeeded.
I was a bit concerned right after the update, because I was confronted with a dracut rescue shell. But a reboot helped.
It seems that there is a time out for lucks prompt, which drops you to the emergency shell in case you don't enter the password in time.

Now, two days later, everything is still working. Only the kerberos client UI is missing and I had to install realmd.
The thing about this is, that I actually didn't expect this upgrade path to work. I expected more hassles.

A package for rust - Mozilla's experimental language

Mozilla has picked up a language to address a couple of common issues in coding. The language they picked is rust.
It doesn't fit into my current environment, but it has some nice features, like lightweight threads (green threads) and message passing support which make it interesting for me to play with. These are two features which I am missing in vala - but they might just be a bit out of scope of vala's focus.

I've only played with rust a little, but to ease Fedora users access to this language I've created an initial specfile which can be used to build the package.
For convenience I'm also providing an rpm.

Rust is currently not suitable for an official inclusion into Fedora's repositories as it builds it's own patched version of llvm, does some stuff with rpaths, …. There is work to upstream the patches, but that's still far in the future.

So - pick it up and install it, look at the quite nice tutorial and get your hands dirty.

# Clone
git clone git://github.com/fabiand/rust-spec.git

# Build requirements
sudo yum install gcc gcc-c++ python perl curl fedora-packager

# Build it
cd rust-spec
rpmbuild -ba rust.spec

Edit: It is assumed that your env is set up for building packages

oVirt Node 2.6.1

Node 2.6.1- a very slim firmware-like Fedora for oVirt Node - has been released.
This minor release was necessary because our major TUI rework introduced a security hole. Get it here.

So whats new about Node 2.6.x?
Well, we've got plugins and a new TUI (a new installer TUI will follow shortly).
More can be found in the release notes.

And whats coming up?
It obvious that a "solid core" or this "firmware like"  properties of Node are well suited for other projects as well (think of OpenStack, Gluster, ...)
So a near term goal is to dro the oVirt specific bits (like vdsm) to make Node more general and easier to use for other projects.
And the new installer shall also land.