There are lots of conspiracy theories flying around about python-central. However, the fact is that python-central is an original Debian tool. I'm really very unhappy to see Matthias hard work always being refused as "Ubuntu foo". In reality, he puts lots of time and energy into Debian, and we thank him very little for that. Even more, the major drawback of the competiting python-support is that it refuses to handle the real issues. Of course, reality is complex. But it is way worse if one writes a tool that just breaks if a package earlier in the dependency chain decides to change from python scripts to extensions (i.e. c-code linked with python). Furthermore, the maintainer of python-support first agreed on some common solution for both tools (i.e. the new python policy), and now suddenly removed his approval, and creates another competiting way. I'm all for competition between software, but I'm not too happy with competition of policies - because policies describe how different packages work together, that means, it is an interface description. In the end, my summary is that I recommend to use python-central. And I'm thankful that Matthias did a careful and good analysis how this implementation is done. Update: I learned that in python-support 0.3 the bug is fixed that changes in the dependency chain can cause breakage (as the tool adjusted partly to the results of the discussion in Mexico); this is not yet true for the version in testing (but that's only transitionary, so I don't mind so much).

I've just had a pigeon (I think) fly into my study window, making a rather large bang, and then fly off again. It's the first time I've notice this large a bird do it, but there have been several instances of something sparrow like doing the same. At first I thought it was some kids throwing something at it, until I managed to actually see the bird flying off again afterwards. Are their magnetic direction sensors adversely affected by all the technology in this room perhaps? :)

Yesterday, a new version of python-support has been uploaded. It now supports extensions in a way compatible with the stupid idea of building them for several versions at once (which is now, unfortunately, the policy). Furthermore, it allows to do it without cluttering the control file with incomprehensible (and unparseable) XC-Foo-Bar fields. You just need to set up a debian/pyversions file containing the list of supported versions, and, if you want to use dh_python for dependency generation, a debian/pycompat. Thanks a lot to Rapha l Hertzog for finding elegant solutions and introducing them in dh_python.

Joey Hess is complaining about the way things are handled in debhelper, and from his point of view this is perfectly understandable. We've all sucked on this matter, and we could uselessly argue about who is responsible for the mess, but the harm is already done. dh_python has become even more complicated than it already was, and now requires a supplementary helper script depending on the packaging tool. Fortunately we've managed to make it not too complicated for package maintainers, and Marc Dequ nes' work on cdbs will do a lot in that matter.

Update: I removed any references about Andreas Barth's complaints on Planet Debian. Anyone encountering issues with python-support is welcome to report them in the BTS, which is the right place to track them.

Yesterday I booked a flight with TACA from Caracas to MEX, via SJO. I’m flying on May 12th. (so hopefully I can arrive for Debian Day) and returning on May 25th., in the same flight. The flight is gonna take 6 hours from Caracas. Ana (from Debian Venezuela) will be flying with me in the return flight.Nos vemos en Mexico!

I was at a client today when I remembered that David was due to arrive to Caracas circa 1430, so I called him to his brand-new-venezuelan-GSM-cellphone and I found out that he was in problems. In big, dark, awful problems. As I told in previous posts, he went to San Crist bal (near the border with Colombia) to visit his girl and know the city. He departed from Caracas in a bus on Friday night and arrived on Saturday morning. He spent the whole weekend there, and in Monday he was due to leave San Crist bal through the Mayor Buenaventura Vivas Military Airbase, in a civilian airplane. He arrived just on time for his flight, rushing to take the plane on time, and he was stopped by two so-called Inmigration Officials who demanded to see his passport. He recently got a new one from the Passport Office in Mexico City, so he had a brand new passport with the Venezuelan Entry Stamp (Mexicans don’t need a visa to enter Venezuela)
ONIDEX, the National Office for Inmigration. Praised for lots of people for fighting against Passport Corruption, kidnaps people in San Cristobal. The Officials told him that his passport was a fake, and they told him that, from this time on, he was under arrest. They made him leave the Airport quickly and took him in a civilian vehicle with no identifications. They started the trip to San Crist bal City (1 hour away from the Airport in a very scary road) and they kept telling him that his passport was fake (they claimed that the Passport didn’t have the watermarks, and stuff) Soon their position changed and a common practice in Venezuelan officials started: extorsion. They told him that there were “several ways to fix the problem”, and asked him what was in his backpack (which had a laptop, but he denied it): they were demanding money, and David wasn’t prone to do that.
National Guard. Doesn’t have a /proc/clue about anything. They drove David to the Inmigration Office in San Crist bal and told him that they “made” some tests to the passport and they determined that the passport was fake. They told David that their “Commander” told they that he should be deported into Colombia, since he was a “very important member of a Cartel that they were willing to capture”
DISIP: the Venezuelan Political Police. They were helpful in this episode, but they’re not angels. Finally, hours after that charade of Officials telling him funny laws, stupid suppositions and wanting him to give them money, they left David in the Bus Terminal in San Crist bal, where he was able to talk to Ana, from Debian Venezuela, which picked him up and went back to the Airport. The two “Officials” weren’t there anymore, and he had a last problem with the National Guard which had stupid suppositions about his trip, and stuff (this is common, but at least it’s not illegal) before he was able to get into the plane. Being in Caracas, I was really worried. Between Ana, my mother and me we were able to move several people to check David status in the Airport (my mother called four members of the Venezuelan FAA, I called the Venezuelan CIA and Ana called the Vicechancellor) and this probably saved David’s life and money, since the “Officials” might have been scared by the movement of people caring about David. He’s safe now, back in Caracas, in home. He has all his stuff and his health is OK (yet he was scared when he arrived, which I fully understand) Why am I writing this post? I’m really concerned about what happened to David, and I want to make a public statement on this. Somehow, we venezuelans got used to this kind of practices in our Country. Probably 40 years of pseudo-democracy with messy governors helped, maybe it’s a matter of education and culture. I don’t really care about this, but I do care about what they’re doing with the people in my Country. Today, President Chavez declared that a dance against corruption was going to start. I think it’s the fourth time he’s making something about corruption, and he’s failing. There’s a gang of people in San Cristobal, Mr. President, who tries to rob and scare the visitors. They should be in jail. They arrested somebody illegally. It’s forbidden in our Constitution to arrest somebody without having proofs to do it (we have one of the best Constitutions in the World, experts say, but we don’t have people who obey it). If you’re going to arrest an alien, you need to have a Public Prosecutor in place, writing down a legal document and guaranteeing the safety of the detained. This people should be in jail.
Stop Corruption! Though, as my mother later said to David, two awful Venezuelan people kidnapped David, but probably twenty Venezuelan people quickly acted to find out what was happening. We might be a Third World Country, but we use to be able to get out of our problems by our own. And, hell it’s rewarding. I want to apologize in the name of all venezuelans to David and to make a clear statement against corruption: we venezuelan won’t tolerate more corruption. We’ve grown between that, buying places in a line to get our National ID Card, paying one million bolivares to get a Passport appointment. We’re sick of this. This is not the great Venezuela we live in. Please, losers, shoot yourselves. Or eat rat poison, whichever makes less stains.

There are lots of conspiracy theories flying around about python-central. However, the fact is that python-central is an original Debian tool. I'm really very unhappy to see Matthias hard work always being refused as "Ubuntu foo". In reality, he puts lots of time and energy into Debian, and we thank him very little for that. Even more, the major drawback of the competiting python-support is that it refuses to handle the real issues. Of course, reality is complex. But it is way worse if one writes a tool that just breaks if a package earlier in the dependency chain decides to change from python scripts to extensions (i.e. c-code linked with python). Furthermore, the maintainer of python-support first agreed on some common solution for both tools (i.e. the new python policy), and now suddenly removed his approval, and creates another competiting way. I'm all for competition between software, but I'm not too happy with competition of policies - because policies describe how different packages work together, that means, it is an interface description. In the end, my summary is that I recommend to use python-central. And I'm thankful that Matthias did a careful and good analysis how this implementation is done.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on extending the dbconfig-common packages to support the SQLite database format. My primary motivation for this is so that I can start using dbconfig-common to manage the database(s) for the PHPwiki packages which currently only support SQLite out of the box. The main changes that were required were to separate out the debconf questions that are only relevant for remote and authenticated database types. These changes were committed yesterday. I plan to make the remaining changes required to bring the SQLite support up to scratch over the next few days, so hopefully dbconfig-common 1.8.18 with SQLite support will be uploaded before too long. NM Application
In other news, Alexander Wirt finished off my NM Report, so now I’m waiting for the front desk to review it and send me on to the DAM. It’s great to be making progress and a big thank you to Alexander for taking me through the process, testing my knowledge and sponsoring my packages.

Right it is 23:43 and I’m just back from a dodgy metal night - picture the winners of the Eurovision song contest but with a lesser budget. Normally this would be described upon my real blog which contains adult language, and a mixture of random trivia, sadism, and geekyness in more detail than is displayed here. (You might think this is a hard mix, but I’ll tell you it isn’t suprising if you’ve ever programmed Gtk 2.x in raw C ) Anyway the reason I went to the gig in the first place was that last year one of my partners was a bass-player, and she was often playing gigs in different locations. Unfortunately for the duration of our relationship I managed to never actually hear her play. Not deliberately - it was just the way things worked out. We kinda tailed off seeing each other because I was sleepy and she lived in a different city. Actually this is a common theme with me. I once lived with a concert chello player and for the entire 2.5. years of our relationship I managed to never hear her play, or practise (and we lived together!). Again not deliberate, it was just the way things worked out. (Even now I don’t think she’s ever heard me play the guitar.) Later I had a relationship with a Swedish dentist and for the duration of our relationship I refused to let her look inside my mouth [mostly ]. It was only after we’d ceased being .. close .. that I let her extract some wisdom teeth of mine. Of course she was Swedish, living abroad, and all her friends were Swedish too - so I had a lot of Swedish “friends” around that time. Maybe one day I’ll even meet a genuine blonde Swede. (I can say “hello”, “goodbye”, “I love you”, “marry me”, and “you’re cute” in Swedish!) (I’m not a slut; I just know what I like.) Anyway .. enough side-tracking. The only reason this is coming up at all is because I think context is important when writing about people that aren’t known - I hate seeing people in blogs write about “J”, or “C”, with no hint of the nature of the relationship, or why we should know/care about their actions - people are important, and if you’re going to bring them up you should explain who they are, and why they are relavent. The fact that I’ve drunk 5 bottles of cider now is also helping extend this entry If it helps I almost promise not to mention these people again. So, to recap, I’m at this metal gig, and damn they were a fantastic band. Miranda (the woman I was “with”, previosuly if not recently) was a total camera-slut, and she was technically extremely competant. I guess I shouldn’t have been suprised but I was. So, why do I mention any of this? Well I was standing outside before the band started as it is illegal to smoke in public enclosed places in Scotland (since Marche this year) and this obviously rules out smoking in a pub in the basement bar. (The bar was unstaffed since the bands playing tonight were “too loud”. Sucky having to walk upstairs to find beer.) So .. stood outside, totally under-dressed for the occasion. Almost everybody else in the (very sweaty) basement bar was dressed in monochrome and I had shiny white shoes and colourful t-shirt. Still I was one of the tattoo’d + pierced people so all was good. “Excuse me, you look like Steve Kemp”. For the first time ever somebody recognised me from my planet debian hackergotchie. Neat huh? And now it is 23:58 and I’m going to listen to some nice Rammstein and go sleep. Tomorrow I must do some Debian work, and tidy a friends flat - since they just moved out and want their deposit back. In the future I will try to keep the entries here more on-topic, unless people actually care about this kind of entry …

Many advances have been made in agile software development. Frameworks such as Ruby on Rails embody agile principles by making software easy to write, easy to test, and above all, easy to change.If only we could say the same for the infrastructure on which we develop and deploy web applications. Not every application can be a Rails one, especially where it's been up and running for years. The systems we deploy on often rely on configuration files scattered all over the filesystem, and can be complex results of years of change.By extension, the systems we develop on often don't exactly mirror where we deploy. If we're lucky and careful, then we have a staging server which mirrors the live environment, but that's not too much of an advantage. Among other things, we need ways to evolve and refactor the live environment, and have our development environments easily track that.I'd like to call such an environment "agile infrastructure". Infrastructure that doesn't hamper developers, and allows live configurations to change and evolve. Infrastructure that allows new things to be tried with minimum cost, and can provide the best information possible to help future planning.Tools enable techniques, of course. It's a lot easier to be agile if you're programming in Rails rather than plain old PHP. So what are the tools enabling agile infrastructure?
Techniques I've found usefulWhile there's a long way to go, I'd like to describe some of the techniques I've been using to help create a flexible environment for developing a sizeable PHP/MySQL application.Operating systemAn operating system must be easy to bring into a known state with minimum interference. For this, I've found Ubuntu or Debian to be an ideal choice. Two of the main reasons include the constancy of stable releases and the fact that it's rare you need to stray outside the distribution's servers to get the software you need.DeploymentDeploying an application shouldn't break the cleanliness of your OS build. I prefer to package deployed applications into .deb files. This enables me to build on several advantages of the package management system:

• configuration file handling: deployed machines can keep individual config in /etc, which is preserved over software update.
• no random state: you know for sure exactly the state of the deployed application, no random files left hanging around.
• natural workflow: packages take a little bit of effort to build and deploy, which means it focuses developers on getting them right. If things do go wrong, it's very easy to roll back one version.

Source controlThe case for source control, thankfully, doesn't need making these days. Yet not every source control system is created equal. Developers shouldn't be constrained by source control, it should be cheap and easy to try new ideas and merge these in later.Not only cheap branching, but also easy merging, is required to keep development agile while still retaining the benefits of source control. Many people flock to Subversion these days, predominantly because it fixes some of CVS' more egregious misfeatures. However, merging can still be pretty difficult in Subversion.I prefer to use a system allowing easy merging, such as svk or bazaar. Because so many of us use laptops these days, disconnected operation is also a huge boon. Bazaar-NG offers both repository-oriented and completely decentralized operation, giving the best of both worlds. It also wins the competition for least setup overhead.VirtualizationPreviously a high-powered technology, cheap virtualization is now with us. Many identical virtual machines can be quickly created to enable testing and experimentation. Deployment to virtual machines can enable hardware independence for applications, reducing another big headache.Large organisations have it within their reach to bring new hardware online easily, and have invested much in management systems for it. Virtualization brings this in reach of small and one-man development teams.Desktop-based virtualizationSystems such as VMWare and Parallels untether developers from their desks. I use the OS X desktop daily for its productivity software, but an Ubuntu virtual machine for a large proportion of development work. A simple keypress lets me flick between the two. The advantages of multiple desktops to hand for web development are well known. (In fact, thanks to WINE and IES4Linux I can run Internet Explorer cheaply too from the same virtual machine).
Xen virtualizationAfter the initial novelty wears off, one of the most tedious tasks in the world is bringing new machines online. Combined with the tendency development environments have to get crufty as new ideas and tools are tried out, this makes for increasing disparity between the development and deployment environments.Wouldn't it be nice just to take a clean machine off the shelf, check out the source, and pick up again? Using Xen for Linux, this cheap virtualization is possible.Sadly, Xen isn't yet a packaged part of Ubuntu, but getting it up and running on Ubuntu Dapper isn't too hard. Warning: here's where things get pretty deep. Skip this bit if you're not interested in the nitty-gritty.I followed these steps:

• Followed instructions in the Ubuntu wiki to get the first domain (vm) up and running
  
• Installed the xen-tools package, which provides wrappers for easily creating virtual machines
• Adjusted some of the xen-tools configuration (/etc/xen-tools/hook.d/20-setup-apt) to set up for Ubuntu rather than Debian
• Once the virtual machine was made, adjusted its config to allow for the kernel initrd and configure the network bridge I was using
  

Getting over the DNS mountainIf you want it to be easy to bring new virtual machines up and down, you need to adopt a different approach to managing your DNS. You need to know how to predictably connect to a virtual machine. Yet it's going to get very boring and error prone to manage the IP address space manually in your DNS, or even to map the MAC addresses of your virtual machines in your DHCP configuration.
Help is at hand in the form of mDNS (also known as Rendezvous / Bonjour / ZeroConf). In the host machine, and in each virtual machine, I ensured the avahi-daemon and avahi-utils packages were installed, providing mDNS services. (You should also check that mdns is present in the hosts entry of /etc/nsswitch.conf).What all this does is allow the machines (virtual or otherwise) on the network to resolve names using mDNS. So if I create 3 VMs, alpha, beta and gamma, I can access these right away using the hostnames alpha.local, beta.local and gamma.local.Hey presto! Easily make machines appear and disappear without any need for sysadmin involvement. All the extra steps to add avahi installation can be easily scripted with xen-tools, to reduce the number of commands needed to birth a new machine to one.With this ease of creating new machines, it's much more straightforward to experiment with server topology and conduct experiments on server environments.ConclusionAgile development is necessarily constrained by the infrastructure on which it is conducted. The infrastructure itself is constrained by the tools and platforms of choice.By appropriate tool choice we can reduce the commitment and overhead of infrastructure. This enables developers to get on with the job they do best, and makes experimentation and evolution of infrastructure much simpler.When programming, it's dangerous to fall in love with your code, as the best solution may often involve throwing half of it away. The same hazard exists with infrastructure, with bizarre and awkward effects propagating back into code and operations. Get yourself a low commitment, agile environment, and you'll be able to keep up with the pace. 

Good News My parents were in town for the day and I got to meet them for lunch. After that we went shopping to a garden center, since they happened to mention they needed some trays for holding plants. I bought a couple of new plants for my house - including a nice looking Dragon Plant: Dracaena bicolor Bad News *plonk* I’m suprised Mutt doesn’t have integrated killfile support, but managed to add it via a couple of additions to my ~/.procmailrc file - one for senders, and one for message references to catch threads of disinterest.

Hi, for the debian boot process project, the last days I looked at the SUSE, Mandriva and Fedora distributions to analyse their boot process. The most interesting so far was SUSE being LSB compliant and having insserv/startpar to set and ajust the dependencies for parallalel booting. The insserv/chkconfig combinations seems to do the same as FreeBSD's rcorder although rcorder checks dependencies in two stages: with root filesystem and with all mounted filesystems.

Fedora looks like a regular sysvinit process although it contains LSB information in the initscripts that is read by chkconfig to set dependencies in the /etc/rc.d directories. Nevertheless, the dependencies don't adjust to added/substracted scripts.

Finally Mandriva 2006 doesn't seem to have pinit/prcsys in their default configuration so it seems to have a standard sysvinit.

BTW, the first deliverable is being written in latex (with pdf and html versions generated together) and available here.

Programming, windows style
I'm now in the thick of a bunch of win32 programming at my Honeywell part-time job. I don't mind it that much, but I continue to be amazed that Microsoft's IDE is still the one used most often. The autocompletion is nice, but that's about the only good thing about it. I am continually annoyed that the IDE doesn't know which definition of a function I want to use, and only seems to pop up it's hints when it decides. Add this to the fact that most win32 libraries aren't apparently setup in a way so you can put their source in the repository, and I have a lot of admin work which I'm not particularly thrilled to do. 10% programming, 90% random crap. I'm beginning to understand why the average lines of code per day is so low. I can't really complain that much though, I knew the tools we'd be using when I accepted the job.

Programming, rails style
I have been working with Ruby on Rails lately, mostly to make some new web applications which aren't released yet. Things which are possibly in the works:

• MoneyDelta - credit card and savings balance tracker - figures out how much money you are making (or losing) each day based on how the interest is actually calculated. In the end it will probably have a little graph and possibly small things you can do in order to avoid interest and how much you would save in the long run.


• DeadSimpleCMS - CMS built mostly for Diana's use. It lets you specify layouts (not done yet) and content which goes into the layouts. In a very very early stage of development, but it is actually live on a site right now. As the name would imply, the point is to be very simple.


• Gathr - scholarly conference management software. Accepts papers, assigns reviewers based on degrees of connection to avoid conflicts of interest, generally tries to make the whole conference thing easier.

I also have a couple of smaller applications which won't really go anywhere, and an internal application upgrade from php. I really enjoy building web applications in the Rails framework, and I have honed my skills at Ruby enough that I actually use it for small scripts when I get frustrated with bash. I tend to do my Ruby Coding in TextMate and with Locomotive on the iBook, although I may do some on the Debian machine soon.