Project updates, and weirdnesses

So, the weirdness first!

For anyone who doesn't keep in touch with gaming news, the background (that's an early story, from before this was as solidly confirmed as it now is). Last month, it became apparent that unauthorized third parties have gained access to the Sony private key used to sign all Playstation 3 software. The key can pretty much be considered entirely compromised, now; the two hackers publicly known to have access to it are white hatters who steadfastly refuse to use it even to allow piracy, never mind actual nefarious stuff, but it's pretty likely it's either already in the hands of less ethical hackers, or soon will be.

The funny thing is how small a story this is, so far. Even the mainstream tech press doesn't seem to have picked up on it; so far it's mainly a story in the gamer press being reported as "homebrew and 'backups' will soon be possible!"

Now, imagine if Red Hat or Canonical were to screw up this mightily; it'd be an absolute car crash. All hell would break loose all over the Linux and mainstream press. It's possible the Sony story will hit the mainstream news once they get wise to it, but still, it's kind of an interesting difference. This kind of utter and complete security fail would be huge news for a more traditional computing company, but since this is a game console and Sony isn't really thought of in the way RH or Canonical or Microsoft are, it doesn't get the same coverage.

The funny thing is I'm kind of a Sony fanboy; I have two Sony portables, a Sony e-reader, and various other misc bits of Sony kit. They make some awesome hardware. But when they screw up, boy, they seem to screw up big time.

Okay, on to my own stuff: Gwenole Beauchesne very kindly fixed up a few bugs I hit trying to build recent vdpau-video code, so the latest vdpau-video is now up for F13, F14 and Rawhide in my video-experimental repo (yes, I'll note the irony before anyone else does: said repo is unsigned, if anyone pwns my webserver, you're in trouble. And I run Wordpress. So, y'know, watch out. :>) I've also once more revived my work on getting libva into Fedora, so with any luck that review might actually finally get done at some point soon.

I've been pushing along on getting the Fedora 15 test day schedule into shape; X test week has been moved up a bit to late February (so the nouveau test day will be on my birthday, that'll be fun!) and I've created the pages for each of the days. I'll be updating the test cases soon.

Intel's Jesse Barnes is awesome, as just in the last week he's managed to get on top of the messy issues with the new eDP standard for laptop panels, which has been playing all sorts of havoc with owners of Dell E4310s, E6410s and E6510s, and Sony Vaio Zs (and possibly a few other quite new laptop models). I've been tracking Jesse's progress on this work and trying to help co-ordinate feedback and testing with Fedora users, and now Jesse's got a tree which seems to be playing nice for everyone. So those systems should be A-OK for Fedora 15, and even with any luck for Fedora 14, if we get the fixes backported or F14 gets bumped to the 2.6.37 kernel series (which I think may be on the cards).

I've not been able to do a lot of work on Unity lately, mainly because I'm in the UK visiting family and don't have any native Rawhide systems here (and you can't run Unity within a KVM VM), but some good news is that the GNOME developers implemented something for this glib proposal which was written for Unity and sent upstream; the final framework is quite different from what the Unity developers came up with, but it will work fine for Unity, and the Unity team is already at work adjusting bamf to work with the new code. So that's one more barrier to packaging Unity outside of Ubuntu removed, with the help of some great collaboration between a bunch of people, and that's the kind of awesome we need! I'll be able to get back to full steam on Unity when I'm back in Canada near the end of the month.

Finally, the package-specific test case organization proposal seems to be rolling along nicely; I'm happy with the latest drafts and other people seem to be too. The actual policy seems to be mostly done at this point, the next steps are to put it into place officially, and start migrating existing test cases into the new organization scheme, then start writing some new ones. I'll be reaching out to test and devel lists soon to ask people to help out with that.