As it is nearly time to release Debian 8 (codename jessie), I've uploaded a new version of the Linux kernel to unstable which I hope will be the version to go into the initial release (8.0). The changes from the current version in testing are mostly bug fixes:

• Many fixes from stable releases 3.16.7-ckt8 and 3.16.7-ckt9
• New hardware support: early console support on various systems, Xen MCE log, power control on some Allwinner (sunxi) systems, FocalTech PS/2 touchpads
• Security fixes: CVE-2014-8159, CVE-2014-9710, CVE-2015-0275, CVE-2015-2666, CVE-2015-2922
• Fix for data corruption on some Marvell Armada SoCs
• Require upgraded flash-kernel on Kirkwood systems to avoid boot failure
• Use the right fan control drivers on G5 PowerMac
• Fix two instances of boot console noise on x86 (#781953, #781418)
• Fix WARNING when attaching some display devices to i915 GPU
• Fix race condition in thingm driver
• Hide eMMC RPMB partitions which userland doesn't need to see and which often cause hangs
• On 32-bit PowerPC, package the radeonfb module (formerly built-in) for inclusion in the installer

Please test this new version (which should be on mirrors within the next 24 hours) and report any regressions you spot. It's now too late to add new hardware support for Debian 8.0, but we'll probably be able to improve it in subsequent point releases. So, please also report driver changes that should be backported from later kernel versions to improve hardware support, with severity of 'important'. If you can provide precise information about which upstream commits are needed, that makes things easier for us, and you should add the 'patch' tag.

About four years ago, the ISO 9899:2011 "C11" standard was announced. At the time, I had a short look at (a draft version of) the standards document, and found a few interesting bits in there. Of course, however, due to it only very recently having been released, I did not have much hope of it being implemented to any reasonable amount anywhere yet. Which turned out to be the case. Even if that wasn't true, writing code that uses C11 features and expecting it to work just about anywhere else would have been a bad idea back then. We're several years down the line now, however, and now the standard has been implemented to a reasonable extent in most compilers. GCC claims its "support [for C11] is at a similar level of completeness to (...) C99 support" since GCC 4.9. Since my laptop has GCC 4.9, I looked at one feature in C11 that I have been wanting to use for a while: Generic selection.

#include <stdint.h>
#include <inttypes.h>
#include <stdio.h>
void say32(uint32_t i)  
    printf("32-bit variable: %" PRId32 "\n", i);
 
void say64(uint64_t i)  
    printf("64-bit variable: %" PRId64 "\n", i);
 
void sayother(int i)  
    printf("This is something else.\n");
 
#define say(X) _Generic((X), uint32_t: say32, uint64_t: say64, default: sayother)(X)
int main(void)  
    uint32_t v32 = 32;
    uint64_t v64 = 64;
    uint8_t v8 = 8;
    say(v32);
    say(v64);
    say(v8);
 

Output of the above:

32-bit variable: 32
64-bit variable: 64
This is something else.

or, "precompiler-assisted function overloading for C". Should be useful for things like:

#define ntoh(X) _Generic((X), int16_t: ntohs, uint16_t: ntohs, int32_t: ntohl, uint32_t: ntohl)(X)
#define hton(X) _Generic((X), int16_t: ntohs, uint16_t: htons, int32_t: ntohl, uint32_t: htonl)(X)

... and if one adds the ntohll found here, it can do 64 bit as well.

I implemented <? support (including <?php ) script embedding support for *.inc in MirWebseite today; the specific syntax was explicitely requested by Natureshadow. Ugh. My own hacking activities are progressing, even if slowly. I do some other interesting, funny, social, beneficial, etc. stuff in between, though. I ll even have to get some of my DD buddies to sponsor me some QA uploads of packages I formerly maintained, whereever changes are queued up such as better old-format repo compatibility in cvs(GNU) Though some of the stuff I do at work is currently done only there sorry. Also: prepare to be fully enlightened about just what evil (nice picture) Docker is. I especially liked the comparison of containers to a herd of cattle, mere numbers, replaceable, whereas VMs are cats, each with their individual name, lovely petted each day, etc. ObHint: Some may have noticed I do have a Twitter account now. I do not really use it much. I got it because I wanted to rant at someone who only gave Twitter as means to contact them (a European company running a lottery for USA citizens only). But I found one nice thing: @HourlyCats (though @FacesPics and @BahnAnsagen are funny too, and the Postillon anyway). The internet is there for cat content, anyway.
Ahem. Do not contact me there, use IRC, more specifically, the Freenode network, and possibly memoserv to mirabilos instead, I can t fit things into 140 chars, that s just ridiculous. Also, don t follow me. It may contain rants, it s NSFW, and I m not censoring there. As I said: I do not use it. So should you. (But kudos for having a mostly functional fallback site (the mobile one), which even works in PocketIE (Windows Mobile) and Opera 9, though not so much lynx(1) ) odc (from #!/bin/mksh on IRC) is hacking support to use mksh instead of GNU bash for bootstrapping pkgsrc (e.g. on Solaris). Nice! Good luck! propos mksh(1), dear Debian armel and armhf buildd maintainer colleagues, pretty please with strawberries and chocolate ice on top (I just had that on waffles at my favourite ice salon, so I may be biased), do like s390x and update your chroots and wanna-build give-back mksh, as we requested, so the privacy fix makes it into jessie. Thanks in advance! Oh, and Y_Plentyn and I both have been putting more and updated packages into my APT repository. XTaran held a talk at CLT 2015 mentioning it maybe I should write up some docs about how to use it for which purposes (e.g. how to avoid systemd but not get the other packages from it, or how to use it with systemd (trivial but has to be stated, it s freedom of choice after all), etc.)? Besides decent fanfiction (the stories in the Uzumaki Naruto universe seem, on average, to be much longer than those in the Harry Potter one), the weather is becoming good, so I ve already been enjoying going out for some geocaching and will have the bike fixed at the shop RSN (it suffers a bit each winter, as it stands outside, since our basement is mouldy, which is worse than a bit of rust IMHO) to get more activity in. Also planning to head to the GPS Maze in Mainz and, besides what time FrOSCon (including preparation) allows, heading to DebConf for a while.

C11 function overloading About four years ago, the ISO 9899:2011 "C11" standard was announced. At the time, I had a short look at (a draft version of) the standards document, and found a few interesting bits in there. Of course, however, due to it only very recently having been released, I did not have much hope of it being implemented to any reasonable amount anywhere yet. Which turned out to be the case. Even if that wasn't true, writing code that uses C11 features and expecting it to work just about anywhere else would have been a bad idea back then. We're several years down the line now, however, and now the standard has been implemented to a reasonable extent in most compilers. GCC claims its "support [for C11] is at a similar level of completeness to (...) C99 support" since GCC 4.9. Since my laptop has GCC 4.9, I looked at one feature in C11 that I have been wanting to use for a while: Generic selection.

#include <stdint.h>
#include <inttypes.h>
#include <stdio.h>
void say32(uint32_t i)  
    printf("32-bit variable: %" PRId32 "\n", i);
 
void say64(uint64_t i)  
    printf("64-bit variable: %" PRId64 "\n", i);
 
void sayother(int i)  
    printf("This is something else.\n");
 
#define say(X) _Generic((X), uint32_t: say32, uint64_t: say64, default: sayother)(X)
int main(void)  
    uint32_t v32 = 32;
    uint64_t v64 = 64;
    uint8_t v8 = 8;
    say(v32);
    say(v64);
    say(v8);
 

Output of the above:

32-bit variable: 32
64-bit variable: 64
This is something else.

or, "precompiler-assisted function overloading for C". Should be useful for things like:

#define ntoh(X) _Generic((X), int16_t: ntohs, uint16_t: ntohs, int32_t: ntohl, uint32_t: ntohl)(X)
#define hton(X) _Generic((X), int16_t: ntohs, uint16_t: htons, int32_t: ntohl, uint32_t: htonl)(X)

... and if one adds the ntohll found here, it can do 64 bit as well.

I am a console user. I really just started to use X11 again about two weeks ago, to sometimes test an a Qt application I am developing. I am not using Firefox or anything similar, all my daily work happens in shells and inside of emacs, in a console, not in X11. BRLTTY runs all the time, translating the screen content to something that my braille display can understand, sent out via USB. So the most important programs to me, are really emacs, and brltty. This is my desktop, that is up since 179 days. I am sorry, but this doesn't look right, not at all. I am not even beginning to talk about dbus-daemon and systemd. Why the HECK does packagekitd (which I definitely don't use actively) use up more then two hours of plain CPU time? What did it do, talk to NSA via an asymmetric cipher, or what?! I play music via sshfs, sometimes FLAC files. That barely consumed more CPU time then brltty, which is probably the most active daemon on my system, erm, it should be. I don't want to chime into any flamewars. I have accepted that we have systemd. But this does not look right! I remember, back in the good old days, emacs and brltty were my top CPU users.

Follow me on Identi.ca or Twitter or Diaspora* Sysadmins usually know ServerSpec, a tool allowing to check if your servers are correctly configured. The use of automated deployment tools makes deployments easier and easier, but lot of unexpected situations can come up using this tool, especially when more and more servers are implied. ServerSpec allows to verify that the result of your deployments are what you were expecting for and that no exception or unexpected event goes undetected. Backup Checker (Github stars appreciated :)) offers the same kind of controls, but for your backups. Once you have backups, you don t know if they contain what you are expecting for. And this is especially important because having broken backups mean losing your data after a major outage! Moreover if you think you are well protected with backups but they are eventually broken (corrupted archives, archives being filled with empty files, saving useless files ), you will perform your server or database upgrades without being really protected, leading to terrible situations. Backup Checker offers lots of controls over backups:

• check if an archive is corrupted
• control if some files or directories exist inside an archive exist
• check if a file size inside an archive is not null or has a specific size (operators smaller than, equals, greater than supported)
• owner, group, uid, gid of files/directories inside an archive
• and a lot more. Check the official documentation!

Use Backup Checker with Backup-Manager or Rsnapshot Starting from Backup Checker 1.7,if you use a backup tool like Backup-Manager or Rsnapshot, you ll be glad to know that Backup Checker perfectly works with them. The documentation is available on the Backup Checker Community page with the howtos to install and configure Backup Checker with Backup-Manager or with Rsnapshot. What about you? Let us know in the comments what you think of Backup Checker and its features to connect with other backup tools. We would be happy to get your feedbacks about how you use Backup Checker or what you expect from a backup checking solution.

I recently spent some time updating my systemd knowledge and decided to put together some slides that I ll use for a lecture. I m interested in feedback about things that are missing, unclear, etc. Available on slideshare, as PDF, and as LaTeX source.

I intend to make the extra effort of republishing my own research papers as Linked Research, i.e. in a form readable by humans (HTML5), but also embedding meta-data (as RDF) for machine processing. I ve started with Authoritative Linked Data descriptions of Debian source packages using ADMS.SW (a good candidate, as it deals with Linked Data ;). You ll notice the menu which helps select different style sheets for preparing clean printable versions, not far from the LaTeX output usually converted to PDF. I hope this will pave the way to more Linked Research, and less opaque publications. The only hassle at the moment is the conversion from LaTeX to HTML5 which I m doing manually, in Emacs + nxml-mode. Update: Check the preprint links in my publications page, for more papers.

I am happy to let you all know that I'm going to the Open Source Developers' Conference Nordic 2015! It take place Friday 8th to Sunday 10th of May in Oslo next to where I work, and I finally got around to submitting a talk proposal for it (dead link for most people until the talk is accepted). As part of my involvement with the Norwegian Unix User Group member association I have been slightly involved in the planning of this conference for a while now, with a focus on organising a Civic Hacking Hackathon with our friends over at mySociety and Holder de ord. This part is named the 'My Society' track in the program. There is still space for more talks and participants. I hope to see you there. Check out the talks submitted and accepted so far.

Git-cinnabar is a git remote helper to interact with mercurial repositories. It allows to clone, pull and push from/to mercurial remote repositories, using git. Get it on github. What s new since 0.1.1?

• git cinnabar git2hg and git cinnabar hg2git commands that allow to translate (possibly abbreviated) git sha1s to mercurial sha1s and vice-versa.
• A native helper that makes some operations faster. It is not required for git-cinnabar to work, but it can improve performance significantly. Check the Setup instructions in the README file.
• Do not store mercurial metadata when pushing to non-publishing repositories. For Mozilla developers, this means not storing that metadata when pushing to try, which is a good thing when you know each of them makes pulling slower. This behavior can be changed if necessary. Future releases will allow to remove metadata that was created by previous releases but that wouldn t be created with 0.2.0.
• Made the discovery phase of pushes require less round trips (the phase that finds what is common between the local and remote repositories), hopefully making pushing faster.
• Improved logging, which now doesn t require fiddling with the code to get extra logging.
• Made fsck validate more things, and act on more errors.
• Fixed a few edge cases.
• Better handle files with weird names, and that git quotes in its output.
• Extensively tested on the following repositories: mozilla-central, mozilla-beta, mercurial, hg-git, cpython.

What to expect next?

• Allow to push merge commits.
• Improve memory footprint for pushes (currently, it s fairly catastrophic on big repositories ; don t try to push multiple hundreds of commits of a Mozilla-sized repository if you don t have multiple gigabytes of memory available).
• As mentioned above, allow to remove some metadata.
• And more

If you want to follow the improvements more closely, I encourage you to switch to the next branch. I won t push anything there that hasn t been extensively tested on the above mentioned repositories. And as always, please report any issue you run into.

Experiments Last week I discovered The Fan Club s Experiments page. It reminds me of the Debian Experiments community on Google+. I like the concept of trying out all kinds of different things and reporting back to the community on how it works. I ve been meaning to do more of that myself so this is me jumping in and reporting back on something I ve been poking at this weekend. Introducing Squashfs Squashfs is a read-only compressed filesystem commonly used on embedded devices, Linux installation media and remote file systems (as is done in LTSP). Typically, a system like tmpfs, unionfs or aufs is mounted over this read-only system to make it usable as a root filesystem. It has plenty of other use cases too but for the purposes of this entry we ll stick with those use cases in mind. It supports gzip, lzo and xz(lzma) as compression back-ends. It also supports block sizes from 4K up to 1M. Compression technique as well as block size can have major effects on both performance and file size. In most cases the defaults will probably be sufficient, but if you want to find a good balance between performance and space saving, then you ll need some more insight. My Experiment: Test effects of squashfs compression methods and block sizes I m not the first person to have done some tests on squashfs performance and reported on it. Bernhard Wiedemann and the Squashfs LZMA project have posted some results before, and while very useful I want more information (especially compress/uncompress times). I was surprised to not find a more complete table elsewhere either. Even if such a table existed, I probably wouldn t be satisfied with it. Each squashfs is different and it makes a big difference whether it contains already compressed information or largely uncompressed information like clear text. I d rather be able to gather compression ratio/times for a specific image rather than for one that was used for testing purposes once-off. So, I put together a quick script that takes a squashfs image, extracts it to tmpfs, and then re-compressing it using it all the specified compression techniques and block sizes and then uncompressing those same images for their read speeds. My Testing Environment For this post, I will try out my script on the Ubuntu Desktop 14.04.2 LTS squashfs image. It s a complex image that contains a large mix of different kinds of files. I m extracting it to RAM since I want to avoid having disk performance as a significant factor. I m compressing the data back to SSD and extracting from there for read speed tests. The SSD seems fast enough not to have any significant effect on the tests. If you have a slow storage, the results of the larger images (with smaller block sizes) may be skewed unfavourably. As Bernhard mentioned on his post, testing the speed of your memory can also be useful, especially when testing on different kinds of systems and comparing the results:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=1M count=100000
104857600000 bytes (105 GB) copied, 4.90059 s, 21.4 GB/s

CPU is likely to be your biggest bottleneck by far when compressing. mksquashfs is SMP aware and will use all available cores by default. I m testing this on a dual core Core i7 laptop with hyper-threading (so squashfs will use 4 threads) and with 16GB RAM apparently transferring around 21GB/s. The results of the squashfs testing script will differ greatly based on the CPU cores, core speed, memory speed and storage speed of the computer you re running it on, so it shouldn t come as a surprise if you get different results than I did. If you don t have any significant bottleneck (like slow disks, slow CPU, running out of RAM, etc) then your results should more or less correspond in scale to mine for the same image. How to Run It Create a directory and place the filesystem you d like to test as filesystem.squashfs, then:

$ apt-get install squashfs-tools 
$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/highvoltage/squashfs-experiments/master/test-mksquashfs.sh
$ bash test-mksquashfs.sh

With the default values in that file, you ll end up with 18 squashfs images taking up about 18GB of disk space. I keep all the results for inspection, but I ll probably adapt/fix the script to be more friendly to disk space usage some time. You should see output that look something like this, with all the resulting data in the ./results directory.

* Setting up...
- Testing gzip
  * Running a squashfs using compression gzip, blocksize 4096
  * Running a squashfs using compression gzip, blocksize 8192
  * Running a squashfs using compression gzip, blocksize 16384
  ...
- Testing lzo
  * Running a squashfs using compression lzo, blocksize 4096
  * Running a squashfs using compression lzo, blocksize 8192
  * Running a squashfs using compression lzo, blocksize 16384
  ...
- Testing xz
  * Running a squashfs using compression xz, blocksize 4096
  * Running a squashfs using compression xz, blocksize 8192
  * Running a squashfs using compression xz, blocksize 16384
  ...
* Testing uncompressing times...
  * Reading results/squashfs-gzip-131072.squashfs...
  * Reading results/squashfs-gzip-16384.squashfs...
  * Reading results/squashfs-gzip-32768.squashfs...
  ...
* Cleaning up...

On to the Results The report script will output the results into CSV. Here s the table with my results. Ratio is percentage of the size of the original uncompressed data, CTIME and UTIME is compression time and uncompress time for the entire image.

Filename	Size	Ratio	CTIME	UTIME
squashfs-gzip-4096.squashfs	1137016	39.66%	0m46.167s	0m37.220s
squashfs-gzip-8192.squashfs	1079596	37.67%	0m53.155s	0m35.508s
squashfs-gzip-16384.squashfs	1039076	36.27%	1m9.558s	0m26.988s
squashfs-gzip-32768.squashfs	1008268	35.20%	1m30.056s	0m30.599s
squashfs-gzip-65536.squashfs	987024	34.46%	1m51.281s	0m35.223s
squashfs-gzip-131072.squashfs	975708	34.07%	1m59.663s	0m22.878s
squashfs-gzip-262144.squashfs	970280	33.88%	2m13.246s	0m23.321s
squashfs-gzip-524288.squashfs	967704	33.79%	2m11.515s	0m24.865s
squashfs-gzip-1048576.squashfs	966580	33.75%	2m14.558s	0m28.029s
squashfs-lzo-4096.squashfs	1286776	44.88%	1m36.025s	0m22.179s
squashfs-lzo-8192.squashfs	1221920	42.64%	1m49.862s	0m21.690s
squashfs-lzo-16384.squashfs	1170636	40.86%	2m5.008s	0m20.831s
squashfs-lzo-32768.squashfs	1127432	39.36%	2m23.616s	0m20.597s
squashfs-lzo-65536.squashfs	1092788	38.15%	2m48.817s	0m21.164s
squashfs-lzo-131072.squashfs	1072208	37.43%	3m4.990s	0m20.563s
squashfs-lzo-262144.squashfs	1062544	37.10%	3m26.816s	0m15.708s
squashfs-lzo-524288.squashfs	1057780	36.93%	3m32.189s	0m16.166s
squashfs-lzo-1048576.squashfs	1055532	36.85%	3m42.566s	0m17.507s
squashfs-xz-4096.squashfs	1094880	38.19%	5m28.104s	2m21.373s
squashfs-xz-8192.squashfs	1002876	34.99%	5m15.148s	2m1.780s
squashfs-xz-16384.squashfs	937748	32.73%	5m11.683s	1m47.878s
squashfs-xz-32768.squashfs	888908	31.03%	5m17.207s	1m43.399s
squashfs-xz-65536.squashfs	852048	29.75%	5m27.819s	1m38.211s
squashfs-xz-131072.squashfs	823216	28.74%	5m42.993s	1m29.708s
squashfs-xz-262144.squashfs	799336	27.91%	6m30.575s	1m16.502s
squashfs-xz-524288.squashfs	778140	27.17%	6m58.455s	1m20.234s
squashfs-xz-1048576.squashfs	759244	26.51%	7m19.205s	1m28.721s

Some notes:

• Even though images with larger block sizes uncompress faster as a whole, they may introduce more latency on live media since a whole block will need to be uncompressed even if you re just reading just 1 byte from a file.
• Ubuntu uses gzip with a block size of 131072 bytes on it s official images. If you re doing a custom spin, you can get improved performance on live media by using a 16384 block size with a sacrifice of around 3% more squashfs image space.
• I didn t experiment with Xdict-size (dictionary size) for xz compression yet, might be worth while sacrificing some memory for better performance / compression ratio.
• I also want stats for random byte reads on a squashfs, and typical per-block decompression for compressed and uncompressed files. That will give better insights on what might work best on embedded devices, live environments and netboot images (the above table is more useful for large complete reads, which is useful for installer images but not much else), but that will have to wait for another day.
• In the meantime, please experiment on your own images and feel free to submit patches.

Dnsmasq is a very lightweight server that besides the expected DNS caching functionality, it also offers DHCP and TFTP functionality in a single binary.

This makes it very useful if one needs to network boot a system since you can have the TFTP and DHCP part of the setup done easily, and only add NFS for a complete network boot.

Add to that that

One extra nice thing dnsmasq has is that it can mark specific hosts, addresses or ranges with some internal markers, then use those markers as symbolic names to apply settings based for classes of devices.

In the configuration snippet below, there is a rule I set up to make sure I would apply the 'netbsd' label to any system connecting through specific ethernet interfaces (one is the interface of the system, the other is a USB NIC I use from time to time):

#You will need a range for static IPs in the main file
dhcp-range=192.168.77.250,192.168.77.254,static

# give the name 'kinder' to any machine connecting through the given ethernet nics and apply 'netbsd' label
dhcp-host=00:1a:70:99:60:BB,00:06:4F:0D:B1:95, kinder, 192.168.77.251, set:netbsd

# Machines tagged 'netbsd' shall use the given NFS root path
dhcp-option=tag:netbsd, option:root-path,/export/netbsd-nslu2/root
# Enable dnsmasq's built-in TFTP server
enable-tftp

# Set the root directory for files available via FTP.
tftp-root=/srv/tftp

Saving this configuration file in /etc/dnsmasq.d/kinder-netboot will enable this to be used by dnsmasq if this line is present in /etc/dnsmasq.conf

conf-dir=/etc/dnsmasq.d

Commenting it will disable the netbsd part easily.

Hello In my opinion, creating and maintaining Debian copyright file is the most boring task required to create a Debian package. Unfortunately, this file is also one of the most important of a package: it specifies some legal aspect regarding the use of the software. Debian copyright file is scrutinized by ftp masters gatekeepers when accepting a new package in Debian project: this file must accurately describe the copyright and licenses of all files of a source package, preferably using a specific syntax. (Kudos to the ftp-masters team: reading copyright files must be even more boring than writing them). The content of the copyright file must reflect accurately the license of all files. This license is often specified in the comments of a source files. The licencecheck command is able to scan sources files and reports the copyright and licenses declared in there. But it does not summarize this information: a copyright line is generated for each file of a package. licensecheck2dep5 (provided by cdbs package as /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5) does better: the output of licensecheck is consolidated and translated in Debian copyright format. The result is better, but must be heavily edited to be reviewable by ftp-masters team. The new update subcommand of cme (available with libconfig-model-dpkg-perl 2.061 currently in experimental) goes further than licensecheck2deb:

• copyright are coalesced when possible (i.e. 2001,2002,2003-2005 is changed to 2001-2005)
• file entries same copyright owner and license are grouped, group of files may be represented with a wild card ( * )
• license text is filled with actual text for the most popular licenses

For instance, here s the (slightly edited) output of cme run for pan package starting without debian/copyright file:

$ cme update dpkg-copyright -quiet
Adding dummy license text for license public-domain 
for path pan/general/sorted-vector.h
Adding dummy license text for license BSD-2-clause 
for path pan/usenet-utils/MersenneTwister.h
$ cat debian/copyright
Format: https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/
Files: *
Copyright: 1994-2001, Frank Pilhofer. The author may
License: GPL-2+
Files: pan/*
Copyright: 2002-2007, Charles Kerr 
License: GPL-2
Files: pan/data/cert-store.cc
  pan/data/cert-store.h
Copyright: 2011, Heinrich M ller 
  2002-2006, Charles Kerr 
License: GPL-2
Files: pan/general/e-util.cc
  pan/general/e-util.h
Copyright: 2000, 2001, Ximian, Inc
License: LGPL-2
Files: pan/general/locking.h
  pan/general/worker-pool.cc
  pan/general/worker-pool.h
Copyright: 2007, Calin Culianu 
  2002-2007, Charles Kerr 
License: LGPL-2+
Files: pan/general/sorted-vector.h
Copyright: 2002, Martin Holzherr (holzherr@infobrain.com).
License: public-domain
 Please fill license public-domain from header
 of pan/general/sorted-vector.h
[ about 100 more lines including license text for Zlib and several 
  GPL licenses ]

This is a good start, but some modifications must be applied to get a correct license file:

• add missing upstream information (Upstream-Name, Upstream-Contact and Source items)
• remove irrelevant text from some copyright owner (e.g. remove The author may from Files: * entry).
• add some missing license text (e.g. include text from sorted-vector.h comments to specify upstream author s version of public-domain)

These modifications can be done:

• directly after update by running cme update dpkg-copyright --edit
• after update by running cme edit dpkg-copyright
• with your favorite editor

This post has mentioned creation of Debian copyright file, but does not address the problem of updating an existing copyright file when packaging a new version of a software. This will be the subject of a next post. I hope this new feature of cme will save hours of work for Debian packagers. As usual comments and suggestions are welcome All the best

During eastern I had some time to continue working on the Norwegian docbook version of the 2004 book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. At the moment I am proof reading the finished text, looking for typos, inconsistent wordings and sentences that do not flow as they should. I'm more than two thirds done with the text, and welcome others to check the text up to chapter 13. The current status is available on the github project pages. You can also check out the PDF, EPUB and HTML version available in the archive directory. Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if you find any.

Leap second on 31 march

A couple of days ago this appeared in my system logs


Mar 31 23:59:59 kernel: Clock: inserting leap second 23:59:60 UTC


my first reaction of course was "great! they gave us one second more of sleep! MY PRECIOUSSSS", but then I realized that yes, this year there was supposed to be a leap second, but it should have been in June, not in March.

Other people I know noticed the message, but nobody knew anything else about it, and duckduckgoing didn't find anything, so I'm asking the lazyweb: does anybody know what happened?

Update: it seems that this has been traced to a single layer1 ntp server.