It starts as a happy new year indeed

Well, would you really be surprised if i say that the begining of 2014 looks as promising (and as busy of course) as the end of 2013 was ?

While travelling to Linux.conf.au in Perth (28 hours door to door but could it be a better start for 2014 !) I had some time to look at Project-Builder.org, subject of my conference on Monday and also to MondoRescue.

For Project-Builder.org, I’ll publish a new version for LCA (0.12.3) which will fix rpmbootstrap for lastest Fedora (18-20), Mageia 3 and also other recent distros. Also as SVK is now broken on Mageia 3, I’m using git-svn to work on my laptop when remote, and thus pb supports it now. Some various fixes since last year release will also be done (better printing with VM/VE name for logs, improved ntp support, pbdistrogetparam command to easy shell interface…), but globally the software is pretty stable for my usage, so now it’s your turn to tell me what would be useful for you in it. I also need to make a newer presentation for Monday with a short demo.

For MondoRescue I’m not ready yet to publish a final version, so I have made for now a first beta for the 3.2.0 version. First this will be a new 3;x version as there are lots of changes in the code that may make it less reliable due to the adoption of dynamic memory allocation instead of static in a lot of functions. If I compare 3.0 and 3.2:

• 3.0
• total mr_asprintf usage : 646
• total sprintf usage : 674
• total strcpy usage : 560
• total fgets usage : 79
• total malloc_string usage : 367
• total MAX_STR_LEN usage : 370
• 3.2
• total mr_asprintf usage : 1223
• total sprintf usage : 166
• total strcpy usage : 388
• total fgets usage : 28
• total malloc_string usage : 129
• total MAX_STR_LEN usage : 221

Which means that a lot has been done in code changes between 3.0 and 3.2. But also a lot remains to do if we want to have no malloc_string nor MAX_STR_LEN at all. And also if I made mistakes in the mr_malloc/mr_asprintf/mr_free usage, the commands will crash. THat’s why I need your tests here ! I’ve made a full bakup restore cycle (which has revealed some issues that I fixed), but I’m far from being confident in the result.

Another consequence is that this version will probably have less fixes than previous ones as most of the time has been passed on code modernization.

And it will require new mindi and mindi-busybox versions. And these versions should finally work for systemd crazyness of removing /bin and /sbin (which broke MondoRescue for a too long time now). And you’ll need new perl modules in order to have it work correctly as I finally rewrote some bash mindi functions into perl to have what I consider better code.
Which means Fedora 18-20, Mageia 3 should work out of the box (at least my Mageia 3 now works correctly).

And expect again more pacthes to MondoRescue durnig the 28+ hours back home at the end of next week 😉

So I wish to all readers a happy new year 2014 and hope it will start for you as it has for me !

Tags: Event, Fedora, LCA2014, Linux, Linux.conf.au, Mageia, Mondorescue, Open Source, perl, project-builder.org