Release 0.2 Update

This update is a followup for the previous release 0.2 post.

Our target goal for release 0.2 completion was changed to Friday of this week which leaves us some more time to make tweaks to the the system. As it stands, its not too bad. Some of the changes from my previous post include:

Repository RPM:

• passes both rpmlint and mock without any errors or warnings
• metadata_expire value was changed from 1d to 24h; for whatever reason 1d (represents 1 day) didn’t work properly
• bumped version up to 0.3.
• Source RPM is now in the repository

Minefield Spec File:

• icons are now being copied instead of being linked (fix from previous post’s known bugs)
• icons now show up! (fix from previous post’s known bugs)
  I restarted the computer which had the issue; and voila! the icon appeared. This told me that the issue was more than likely a cache problem. I looked up ways to update the cache without restarting and led to a command – gtk-update-icon-cache and update-desktop-database. I added the post and postun sections with the above commands and everything worked.
• Release version is the date of which the package was built in the format %Y%m%d (4 digit year (eg 2010) : month number (eg 11) : day number (eg 25) : 20101125)
• I had posted previously that mock had passed successfully, however after making changes and running mock again; i realized that it in fact didn’t pass. Mock ran correctly without build errors however that didn’t mean it was correct. After analyzing the build.log file; i found that i was missing a BuildRequires. This was fixed.

Minefield RPM:

• Source RPM is now included in our repository. (32bit only however the only difference between 32 bit and 64 bit is the tar ball and the source line in the spec file)

Automation:

• Upon examining the Mozilla ftp server where we get our nightlies. 32bit nightlies are added roughly between 3-4 am pacific and 64bit nightlies are added roughly between 4-5 am pacific. Setting the automation script to run at midnight eastern meant that our repository was 16 hours behind and our RPMs were dated one day ahead. To resolve this; I changed our cron job to run at 8 am eastern time which is 5 am pacific time. We should now be less than an hour behind on the 64 bit version and less than 2 hours behind on the 32 bit version. This fix will go live at Nov 25, 2010 08:00 GMT-5

Known issues:

• Fedora: 12+1 icons; Firefox: 4 icons. All this means is that desktops which use icons other than 16×16, 32×32, 48×48 or 128×128 will have missing icons. This issue will probably remain in the final version.
• Allowing Firefox and Minefield to run side by side; the user must select a different profile. The Firefox option -selectprofile doesn’t work; The option -profilemanager does work however it doesn’t solve the issue. I also tried to create a profile via the RPM and have the menu icon use that profile however when the profile is created with the RPM, it is only created for the user which installed it. I will look into solving this issue however as it looks now, this issue will probably go into the final version unless I can find a solution. A workaround for this is posted on my colleagues blog, here is a snippet:

Simply by creating a new profile and running your initial firefox with the -P <profile-name> and -no-remote command. If you do not have a profile you can add one by running –profilemanager.

Therefore, by running:

run firefox 3.6.3 stable firefox -p firefox -no-remote

then, run minefield:

./firefox -p nightly

I did say in my last post that i would make automation updates however i haven’t really made any. I added the ability to automatically add the latest source RPM package into the repository and that’s about it. I should have stuff to report about automation in a future update.