This service is providing the API(s) based on which other developers can write tools to query details of build-ids. We Have build-id in every ELF we build from Fedora 8, but there was no good way to query them. More details on why we need the service can be found at the wiki page.

For now it is handling only primary architecture builds. Within last 4 days we have around 118k build-id(s) in the database.

I am working on a small command line client for the same, called darkclient. Hope to have the first release out in next week.
API details can be found at the home page of the service.

Why you need it ?
Say you are writing unittests for your favourite application  and in some function you are using xmlrpclib module to interact with a web-application. Now for testing you can easily mock that interaction out, which will help to run your code in fast and easy way. Mocking database calls can be another example.

Example:

import unittest
import xmlrpclib
from mock import patch

class TestFoo(unittest.TestCase):
    """
	A simple test
    """
    @patch('xmlrpclib.Server')
    def test_first(self, mock_xmlrpc):
        m = mock_xmlrpc.return_value
        m.multiply.return_value = 6
        server = xmlrpclib.Server("http://kushaldas.in/")
        res = server.multiply(2, 3)
        self.assertEqual(res, 6)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    unittest.main()

In Fedora you can just yum install python-mock.

UPDATE: flickr set can be found here.

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The main target of the workshop was to show/teach the basics of the python programming language. I hear mostly students asking “How to start working on a project?” but as the learning curve is not so easy in most of the things, they run away. The only students we have from India who are contributing to any FOSS projects are the people who came in their own interest. I found programming with python can be an easy entry point for the general students and they can become better programmer in life. This is the main reason behind my python workshops in different places.

No need to buy books, great online community, projects working on different dimensions, all of these can generate interest in the students.

Coming back to my workshop, I generally try to follow my own book (which I have to update). Slowly going through simple examples and showing that it is not difficult. I ask the students to solve the lab works they do in any programming lab in python. This will help them to understand the basics of the language. The workshop lab was supposed to have 30 students, but many more came so I had to ask them to seat in groups in the computers (most of them was running Fedora ). The basic feedback I got, states that it was easy, but how the students are going to use this, I have no clue. Btw, most of the students in my workshop were from Pune University Maths department, I told them to attend Ramki’s workshop in the second half as his workshop was about explaining how to solve mathematical problems.

At the end of the workshop I showed few applications written in python and talked about job opportunity in market. 2 students contacted me after the event.

Full set of the event photos can be found here.

Coming month, I will be in Durgapur, doing another python workshop , I will also conduct a Django workshop.

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We already had a nice python script to parse the log and create gpx files. But for me , every time “cat”ing the device and then convert the log is a difficult task.

Sparcy , which can get the data from the device and convert them into gpxfor you. If you already have the raw data, you can convert them to gpx too. People from #osm helped me a lot to understand how latitude and longitude calculations are done.
RPMs are available here.

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Download from here.
Warning 18MB , may crash your browser and system, download and view with a desktop image viewer.

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