Peace, Love and C++

Hy: recent developments and some work from doctormo

Fri, 17 May 2013 21:58:04 -0400

Thanks to DoctorMo for the hilarious photo. It’s just so good.

We’ve got Classes working, the usual fixes from the ‘crew, and native macros. Huzzah!

I’ve had to take the site down for now (well, stop updating it) because of a vulnerability I introduced (macros allow arbitrary code to run), which means, if anyone’s keen, they should add the sandboxing code to the Hy Site as well!

More coming soon!

Hylang updates

Wed, 08 May 2013 21:05:36 -0400

We’ve got all sorts of spiffy changes lined up and another major release! We’ve got Hy version 0.9.7 released. The website is updated with the latest cut of the hylang, and y’all should check it out.

Sadly, we’ve not attracted any women interested in hacking on hy, so I’d like to re-iterate that I’m quite disappointed to see that, and encourage female hackers to check out the source and see what they can do with it.

As always, the source is over at https://github.com/hylang/hy - star it, hack it, fork it, use it!

Me, as an Ubuntu Community Member

Wed, 01 May 2013 21:04:37 -0400

Recently, some folks have brought it to my attention that I’m not so good at making my work with Ubuntu known.

I’d like to clarify my role. Yes, I’m still an Ubuntu member. Yes, I’m still active. Yes, I care about Ubuntu. A lot. To insinuate otherwise is wholly wrong. I’ve been with Ubuntu for just about 5 years now, and to misrepresent that would be a damn shame.

I mostly do work in Debian these days, where I make sure packages upstream support Ubuntu, and work to help create a solid Debian, which provides a strong base for Ubuntu to work from.

Every Debian developer is also an Ubuntu developer, because one way to contribute to Ubuntu is to contribute to Debian.

- SABDFL

I also spend time to make sure Ubuntu / Debian relations remain strong, and that Debian folks know they can count on a friendly face to interface with the Ubuntu’ers, or the Ubuntu’ers knowing they can count on a friend to help.

To be clear; I’m not active in the Ubuntu community channels anymore. I’m still very much active with Ubuntu on the whole.

Hope that clears things up for folks.

Recent Hy developments

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 20:51:51 -0400

With some new patches from just oddles of interested hackers, there are some hot new changes, including a major mode for emacs and a hot new bot.

I’m currently blocking stuff while I’m in the middle of the compiler, but new feature development will be wide open soon!

Check out Hy, play with the source, install it with pip, and consider doing awesome stuff!

Fixing the theme situation in Jessie

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 23:20:05 -0400

Hello, World,

As many of you know, I fell into helping get the artwork for Wheezy into place. While I don’t want to do this (in the long run), I feel the urge to get it into shape for Jessie.

I’d like to do a small request for methods to improve the theme packaging. I’ve posted a suggestion, but I never really got happy with it.

The problem is basically the deb makes no sense because making thee deb make sense would result in insanity ;) — stuff like proper dependencies to allow the Plymouth theme to work can’t be done, since it’d require a dep on Plymouth, which means it requires all installs with desktop-base to have it installed.

Thanks, lazyblog!

Hy’s got a new home (and team!) As some of you interested...

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 23:47:23 -0400

Hy’s got a new home (and team!)

As some of you interested folks know, I’ve been hacking on Hy, and I’m proud to announce it’s new home at hylang.org and future deb repo at gethy.org.

I’ve posted this as an image for one very important reason - Hy is now a full community based project. There’s been in insane reaction to hy, and I’d like to keep it sustainable.

So, come hack with us on #hy on freenode, or just help us come up with more puns.

As always, try hy, and see if you don’t have some feature requests!

Here’s my talk from PyCon 2013 (I tried to queue it up to...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 21:07:16 -0400

Here’s my talk from PyCon 2013 (I tried to queue it up to where I start (@ 16:14)

A bit more giggley then I intended, but apparently it’s endearing.

If anyone’s actually interested in Hy, check out #hy on irc.freenode.net, star the code @ git.io/hy - it’s actually pretty feature complete. If you want to play with it, check out the magic repl

I’ve been pondering taking it a bit more serious, so there is even a bit of documentation thanks to Chris Webber (hey, thanks!).

Rock on!

Debian Stable (Or: When to switch)

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 21:26:20 -0400

I’ve noticed something funky when looking over the Release Critical page on the BTS

Look! There’s a cross-over between the Stable bug count and the Testing bug count around 6/2012. Since then, Stable has actually been more buggy the testing.

What should we (as a project) do? Why is stable so unloved during the freeze? Do we have too long a freeze?

Hilariously, this makes me think I should be suggesting users to switch from stable to testing when the “crossover” happens during the release cycle.

Has there been previous discussion of this?

Debian as part of the GNOME OPW

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 19:50:00 -0400

As some may have seen, zack put out a note about the GNOME OPW.

The GNOME OPW program, as some of you may know, is the GNOME Outreach Program for Women. Debian has been considering participating this year, and I think it’s something we should focus on this year.

So, please, if you have ideas, please feel free to send along ideas on that thread — it’d be amazing to get this going (in conjunction with) GSoC this year.

Also, if you have any GSoC ideas, please do also add those!

GNOME OPW allows for things that are non-technical, so feel free to post non-technical things too (publicity team, www team, I’m looking at you!)

Hy: The joke just got pretty serious

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 19:54:00 -0400

(btw, the source is on github)

During the sprints at PyCon in a spare moment after some awesome OpenGov hacking, I ended up doing the unthinkable:

rpython support in Hy.

Yes. That’s right. Lisp —> Python —> C —> x86 instructions.

The thanks here goes to Romain Guillebert - who is a really funny rpythonista and took the time to sit down and help me with this frankly insane idea.

It works, though. I filed a bug on shipping rpython bits from PyPy’s Debian package (hi, tumbleweed!), which should make building this a skitch easier.

Finally, and unrelatedly, I also just got a .hy —> .pyc compiler working (huzzah!) which means no one will ever know we wrote anything in Lisp, ever.

As always, play with the REPL, star the code or have a laugh with it.

Let me know what you hack up!

I’ll post the lightning talk I gave after it’s posted :)

hilariously debuggable lisp: Hy

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 21:05:00 -0400

If anyone wants to check out some new Hy stuff, check out the REPL 3.0 at hy.pault.ag

Also, check out the GitHub Repo, and star it, or consider contributing to it.

Hang tight, this is technical — Hopefully you’re a rockn’ Pythonista already. If not, hang on!

Right, so, here’s the Hython we’re working with:

;;;; testing.hy
(import-from sunlight openstates)


(defn get-legislators [state]
  "Get some Legislators from a state"
  (kwapply (.legislators openstates) {"state" state}))


(defn print-legislator-count [state]
  "Print the Legislative count for a state"
  (print (len (get-legislators state))))

And a Python script to run it:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import hy
import testing
# import pdb; pdb.set_trace()

testing.print_legislator_count("ma")

Which outputs (correctly): 198.

Now, let’s try and debug this sucker:

I added import pdb; pdb.set_trace() to the top of the Pythonic script (after the imports), to drop into a pdb shell:

> /home/tag/tmp/invoke.py(8)()
-> testing.print_legislator_count("ma")
(Pdb)

Here’s where we are:

(Pdb) l
  3     import hy
  4     import testing
  5     
  6     import pdb; pdb.set_trace()
  7     
  8  ->  testing.print_legislator_count("ma")
[EOF]

OK. Let’s step into it.

(Pdb) s
--Call--
> /home/tag/tmp/testing.hy(12)print_legislator_count()
-> (defn print-legislator-count [state]

Whoh! Right! We’ve just invoked Lisp. Let’s step through the Lisp code:

> /home/tag/tmp/testing.hy(14)print_legislator_count()
-> (print (len (get-legislators state))))
(Pdb) 
--Call--
> /home/tag/tmp/testing.hy(7)get_legislators()
-> (defn get-legislators [state]
(Pdb) 
> /home/tag/tmp/testing.hy(9)get_legislators()->[ (SNIP) ]
-> (kwapply (.legislators openstates) {"state" state}))
(Pdb) l
  4     (import-from sunlight openstates)
  5     
  6     
  7     (defn get-legislators [state]
  8       "Get some Legislators from a state"
  9  ->    (kwapply (.legislators openstates) {"state" state}))
 10     
 11     
 12     (defn print-legislator-count [state]
 13       "Print the Legislative count for a state"
 14       (print (len (get-legislators state))))
(Pdb)

Rockn’. This worked hilariously well.

-> (kwapply (.legislators openstates) {"state" state}))
(Pdb) state
'ma'

Whoh, right there. Look at that! Python’s pdb has access to Hy’s bits! Neat :)

(Pdb) openstates

(Pdb) s

And. just to prove it’s actually Python :)

(Pdb) s
198
--Return--
> /home/tag/tmp/testing.hy(14)print_legislator_count()->None
-> (print (len (get-legislators state))))
(Pdb) s
--Return--
> /home/tag/tmp/invoke.py(8)()->None
-> testing.print_legislator_count("ma")

Whoo! From Python to Lisp and back!

Now, for fun, here’s some pudb action:

And, now, some bpython voodoo:

Hopefully this is the start of something wicked neat! :)

Ubuntu: The Community

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 19:38:00 -0500

Alas. The blogosphere has been slammed with discontent.

Count me as one of them.

It’s been a long time since the last position (I’ve held) of significance in Ubuntu, a LoCo Council Member, which I left with a heavy heart.

I felt, at the time, that Ubuntu, “The Community” was no longer in control of Ubuntu “The Distro”.

Technical opinions of Ubuntu community members started to get disregarded (starting with the gawd-awful Yahoo search switch), and it continued to get worse as Canonical stopped becoming a contributor to Ubuntu and started becoming it’s sole guiding force.

In comes the mess called Ubuntu One — which, for the record, is a wrong name, it’s not Ubuntu in any sense, it’s not Community driven, it just uses Ubuntu as one of it’s platforms.

Trading on Ubuntu’s good name started this mess.

Slowly, like the ship of theseus, Canonical started to swap out bit by bit until nothing was left without Canonical assignment.

I always assumed it was so that selling the code for another company to use the code for non-free purpose was the reason. Oh well.

Look at us now: Starting off on an ill-thought out path because others are unwilling to say they just didn’t understand the whole problem.

This is a long way of saying:

Ex-Ubuntu’ers: You’re welcome in Debian. I’ve set up #ubuntu-expats on oftc. Please join us. You’re welcome there.

Working in Debian has been an absolute dream; it feels like contributing to Ubuntu in the early days.

Come. Have a say. Re-join a Community that isn’t just “Like us on Facebook”.

I still consider myself an Ubuntu Community Member, but I don’t think there’s any community left.

Firehose - wanna hack?

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 11:27:00 -0500

As folks know, I’ve been hacking on Firehose. I’ve been debating doing some work to modify / extend / replace DACA, and I could use some help writing new wrappers around static check code, so, who wants to hack?

Any UI folks? I could use a UI to view Firehose data, something spiffy and colorful.

Hackers? Send in some wrappers for your favorite static checking code. Send in pull requests or email me with a pointer to the repo :)

Hack on, folks!

Here was a talk I gave at Boston Python a few weeks ago. Check...

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 08:34:00 -0500

Here was a talk I gave at Boston Python a few weeks ago. Check it out, and feel free to follow along with the slides, and take a look at the source.

Sorry about the major futzup at 40 minutes in, and small mistakes throughout — first time giving this talk!

(link to the video for those on the planets)

GSoC Project Idea: Debian Android app

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 14:56:14 -0500

Hello, World!

There are details coming out soon with regards to GSoC:2013, so all this is without any official hat of any sort on.

However, I had an idea, and I was wondering if there were people interested in mentoring it.

For a long time, I’ve wanted a Debian android application — one that will use API calls to fetch PTS info, BTS info, and intercept bug URLs to display Debian related information on the native interface.

It’d also be neat to set a profile (e.g. my emails) and get notifications when things happen that I care about.

Anyone know how to code for android and interested in GSoC?

My #dplgame 4

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 21:21:12 -0500

In no particular order, here are my 4 picks for the DPL thunderdome:

algernon
gregoa
rra
KiBi

I hope they all run. Really.

Linting with Firehose

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 22:13:12 -0500

Hey y’all,

As some may have seen, I’ve taken a shine to a project called Firehose, and plan on helping this format support Debian. I really enjoy how it’s looking so far, and plan on slowly building out scripts to output this format.

The idea here is I’d use it to help with debuild.me, and eventually support larger archive runs.

More to come.

Hy: The Next Generation

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 20:31:40 -0500

As many of you know, I’ve been spending some time hacking on a Lisp variant that’s fully hosted in Python. If you want to read more about it, check out the slides I prepared for Boston Python’s meetup — in particular, pay attention to the “magic REPL”.

I’ve been pondering what to do next, and the natural instinct is for me to take a step back, and properly implement a few things I’ve forgotten. Namely: Macros. Yes. Macros. It’s a Lisp without Macros.

I’ve hit a few stumbling blocks in it’s implementation, and it’s been holding me up. I’m mostly concerned with how Hy should treat quoted forms, in particular I’m concerned about loosing the distinction between a vector and a list, since both convert into Python lists.

There is of course the option to encode Lists as:

`(list foo bar baz)

but that seems wrong.

I’ve also got some concerns about “derefing” values in a quoted form — I think this is just going to result in a lot of special casing for Macros.

More to come soon.

dput-ng/1.4 in unstable

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 22:31:12 -0500

Changes:

dput-ng (1.4) unstable; urgency=low

   [ Arno Töll ]
   * Really fix #696659 by making sure the command line tool uses the most recent
     version of the library.
   * Mark several fields to be required in profiles (incoming, method)
   * Fix broken tests.
   * Do not run the check-debs hook in our mentors.d.n profile
   * Fix "[dcut] dm bombed out" by using the profile key only when defined
     (Closes: #698232)
   * Parse the gecos field to obtain the user name / email address from the local
     system when DEBFULLNAME and DEBEMAIL are not set.
   * Fix "dcut reschedule sends "None-day" to ftp-master if the delay is
     not specified" by forcing the corresponding parameter (Closes: #698719)
 .
   [ Luca Falavigna ]
   * Implement default_keyid option. This is particularly useful with multiple
     GPG keys, so dcut is aware of which one to use.
   * Make scp uploader aware of "port" configuration option.
 .
   [ Paul Tagliamonte ]
   * Hack around Launchpad's SFTP implementation. We musn't stat *anything*.
     "Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting wabbits" (Closes: #696558).
   * Rewrote the test suite to actually test the majority of the codepaths we
     take during an upload. Back up to 60%.
   * Added a README for the twitter hook, Thanks to Sandro Tosi for the bug,
     and Gergely Nagy for poking me about it. (Closes: #697768).
   * Added a doc for helping folks install hooks into dput-ng (Closes: #697862).
   * Properly remove DEFAULT from loadable config blocks. (Closes: #698157).
   * Allow upload of more then one file. Thanks to Iain Lane for the
     suggestion. (Closes: #698855).
 .
   [ Bernhard R. Link ]
   * allow empty incoming dir to upload directly to the home directory
 .
   [ Sandro Tosi ]
   * Install example hooks (Closes: #697767).

Thanks to all the contributors!

For anyone who doesn’t know, you should check out the docs.

Debian BSP this weekend; Cambridge, MA (MIT/SIPB)

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 20:41:09 -0500

If anyone’s in the area, there will be a Debian BSP this weekend at SIPB’s MIT office.

Hope to see everyone there!

Check out details @ http://sipb.mit.edu/iap/#7