The Edinburgh Film Festival finished a couple of weeks ago. As ever, I went along and saw a bunch of films and stage interviews. The programme had been a little disappointing, mostly due to feeling a little constricted some things that are usually present were dropped (Mirrorball being the most obvious example) and the late night movies weren t very late night, starting about 10:30 for the most part. That said, it was a lot of fun I was more successful than normal in avoiding duds and there were several things that really stood out. Two films I saw early on that really stood out were Moon and Exam, two low budget indie science fiction films. Moon has had an awful lot of publicity already so I won t repeat what other people have said about it. Exam is a very tight, taut thriller eight people in a room in the final test of a long interview process, one of whom will get the job. Both films looked great a testament to how affordable good CGI has become. I ll be interested to see what follows them now there s some examples of low budget SF out there, and I m not sure what to make of the fact that both of the films were British. Pontypool was also excellent, a zombie movie about the dangers, or possibily salvation, of talk radio. If you see it (which you should) make sure you stay for the end of the credits. Also good was Modern Love is Automatic. It s a low budget indie flick which reminded me an awful lot of The Unbelievable Truth partly in terms of visual design but more in the way it decided to just jump off and handle things in a totally non-naturalistic fashion. It s a really tricky thing to pull off without looking like you just don t care about the audience (witness a lot of experimental films) but it s very impressive when it works and it worked here. On the down side Dario Argento s Giallo had the audience laughing, and I m fairly sure it was an at laugh rather than a with laugh. There came a point in the film where it felt like they d just run out of enthusiasm for the whole thing and were just throwing anything on the screen to tie up the loose ends. Very disappointing at a film festival. That was the only real blip, though overall it was good though there was cost cutting in evidence.

There was a minor hiccup yesterday. Our mortgage broker called me up towards the end of the day in a flap because something had gone wrong on the seller's side of things, and their bank hadn't accepted the transaction or something. I still don't know the full story. Something about them missing a mortgage payment possibly. Anyway, she was able to arrange for funding and closing today, instead of funding yesterday and closing today, so the outcome was still the same. Now the real fun starts. The first thing I did tonight was program the garage door opener into the Prius' HomeLink thingy built into the rear vision mirror. It's always nice to be able to use a feature, even if it's taken 4 years.

I love twitting using TweetDeck. So that, I started to investigate how to install Adobe Air in Debian AMD64 and, it was a real pain in the ass. I have found a way of installing it in Debian AMD64.

First of all, you need to install the following packages:

$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs lib32nss-mdns lib32asound2 lib32gcc1 lib32ncurses5 lib32stdc++6 lib32z1 libc6 libc6-i386 lib32nss-mdns libcanberra-gtk-module

After installing them, we have to create some symlinks from the location of some of those libraries in /emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/ to /usr/lib32/. For accomplishing it, do the next:

$ cd /usr/lib32/
$sudo ln -s /emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/libnss3.so .
$sudo ln -s /emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/libssl3.so .
$sudo ln -s /emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/libsmime3.so .
$sudo ln -s /emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/libnspr4.so .
$sudo ln -s /emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/libnssutil3.so.1d .
$sudo ln -s /emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/libplc4.so.0d .
$sudo ln -s /emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/libplds4.so .

In the case that you have problems with libplds4.so.0d, create the symlink like this:

$sudo ln -s /emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/libplds4.so.0d libplds4.so.0d

Now, it is time to download Adobe AIR (in this case version 1.5).

$wget http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/lin/download/latest/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Once it is downloaded, we have to make the .bin file an executable:

$ sudo chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Then, we can proceed to install it:

$ sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

If you get an error like this:

Error loading the runtime (libnss3.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64)

It means that you haven't done the symlink from /emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/libnss3.so to /usr/lib32/ correctly or that you haven't installed the library which is missed ('apt-file search' is your friend).

If everything goes fine, then the last steps are:

sudo cp /usr/lib/libadobecertstore.so /usr/lib32

Note: make a symlink if you prefer.

And for TweetDeck I had to do this:

Download libgnome-keyring0 for 32 bits (in this example I used the one from SID, if you are using testing, download the one from that release that you are using), extract it with dpkg and copy the libraries to /usr/lib32:

$ wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/gnome-keyring/libgnome-keyring0_2.28.2-1_i386.deb
$ sudo dpkg-deb -x libgnome-keyring0_2.28.2-1_i386.deb libgnome-keyring0_2.28.2-1
$ sudo cp libgnome-keyring0_2.28.2-1/usr/lib/* /usr/lib32/

Then install TweetDeck (http://tweetdeck.com/download/) and Enjoy

Note: If you find any problem, please do not hesitate to write a comment so that I can help you or we can improve this post.

I've recently been fixing up my VDR setup to work with FreeSat and make it brother/parent friendly. I've applied the EPG patches to get the 7 day guide, setup an autologging in user under gdm with vdr-sxfe running and that left getting the remote working. For some reason my old serial dongle wasn't happy with lirc - it got detected ok, and would show some signal when buttons were pressed but didn't work with the old config. The entire hardware of the box has changed, so it seems likely something isn't quite right (in particular the lirc drivers spew out warnings about SMP bits so I should probably try the dongle under a single core setup to rule that out, but there's also a move to 64 bit involved).

The easy solution to have something sorted for Christmas was to pickup a cheap remote from eBay. This ended up being a Cyberlink remote + USB dongle combo. Worked just fine when plugged in, turning up as a normal input device and the obvious keys doing the obvious things. I wanted all the keys to work though, as I'd got used to having a lot of the VDR functions instantly accessible rather than having to work my way through the menus. Various searches suggested I'd need to use LIRC to access the odder keys. That seemed a lot of hassle for something that was doing the decoding itself. Some playing with xev turned up keycodes for a number of the keys, but there were still a few missing (and important ones at that, such as Red/Green/Yellow/Blue). Further digging found me a suggestion of an Xorg keyboard map that would map the KEY_RED etc from the evdev device into something workable under X. And then I found inputlirc via the Debian package. This is really bloody neat - point it at an evdev device and it will present all of the KEY_* codes out as lirc keys. If you pass the -g parameter it makes sure the key presses only go to lirc as well. Exactly what I want and a doddle to setup - no messing with a big configuration file, just edit /etc/defaults/inputlirc to point to the correct /dev/input/by-id/ file, add the -g to the options in that file and restart.

Now the main remaining task is to get it working with BBC/ITV HD.

He might too shy to tell everybody, but the world must know. Luca Capello successfully defended his PhD thesis today at Universit de Gen ve, getting a Tr s Bien mention. I must admit that my last biology lesson was 13 years ago, so I m not sure I can really comment on his work on Vomeronasal Receptors: from Monogenic Expression to Axon Guidance. But I was very impressed by the quality of the experimental process, especially compared to what we do in computer science. Debian was well represented at the defense, since Axel Beckert, Didier Raboud and the Debian kilt were also there. Welcome to the list of Debian Developers holding PhD degrees, Luca!

Luca waiting at the door (again).

Luca ready to start.

The WebKit hackfest is now over, and I think it was a very productive week. Thank you very much to all who attended, to Igalia for organizing the hackfest, and hosting us so well, to Collabora for having sponsored the event, and allowed me to spend the week working on it, and to the GNOME foundation for having payed all of my costs!
Xan blogged about day 0, and also a summary of all that was done, so I ll focus on the stuff he forgot to mention ;D. The hackfest, for me, started on day -1 with me not allowing Xan to go sleep before he had reviewed a couple patches of mine to fix DOM context menu handling. It always bothered me that Epiphany failed to open right-click menus in some pages, or let pages handle the right click. Well, this is fixed now, and Zimbra users can now have their right click menus, and WoW players can remove talent points from their calculators =P. It turns out that many of the attendees don t like pages messing with their context menus, though, and they had some good points to back up their positions (like pages making it hard to save images, for instance), so I implemented a way to force openning the custom menu: Ctrl-rightclick. We wanted to use a GtkInfoBar to display questions regarding the form saving - our initial implementation always saved all credentials, but that didn t sound good enough. Xan and I thought it would be very complicated to make this work, because there were assumptions in the code regarding which widget contains which, but it turned out to be quite trivial - making EphyEmbed a descendant of GtkVBox instead of GtkScrolledWindow, fixing a small number of assumptions, and that was it. The passwords are saved in the GNOME Keyring. It s interesting to point out that GNOME Keyring seems to be unhappy with the number of passwords a browser stores - Xan s daemon was hanging, crashing, and spawning a large number of threads. My daemon decided to take up some 300MB of RAM at one point. It s somewhat funny to see how much a browser pushes the limits of our platform. We are hoping this will improve with the new keyring APIs, and the rewrite that is ongoing. It s nice to see my browser form passwords in seahorse, though, and be able to manage them like any other. One more thing worth of notice, although this post is already a bit too big: one of the main concerns people had during the Hackfest was on making build time smaller. Touching a single file in WebCore causes a debug build of 10 minutes on my laptop. Evan Martin and Benjamin Otte made a push at removing unnecessary includes from WebCore, and WebKitGTK+ files, which brough the build time down a bit. They end up inspiring Aroben, from Apple, to go even further into this, and remove many includes from files all over WebKit. Evan was also able to bring linking time down by making it possible to link libwebkit without having to build all the intermediate libraries, which brought build time down to 1 minute, when touching a single file in WebCore. Behdad and I also started looking into breaking WebCore up into lots of shared libraries for Debug builds, since we don t care too much about speed penalties in those. None of these experiments got committed yet, but I am hoping we will be having a better time hacking on WebKitGTK+ in the near future. It was awesome meeting everyone, by the way! See you around =).

Yesterday morning we went to the title company to do all of the paperwork for the condo purchase. I'm still not entirely clear on the whole process, but basically we signed a ton of disclosures and the loan documents, and the whole lot got notarised. I found the thumbprint requirement rather amusing. So the loan should fund today, and the title change will register with the county on Wednesday, and by tomorrow afternoon, we should have the keys. We then had to do a walk through to sign off that the property hadn't turned into a pumpkin since we put the offer in. It was only the second time I've been able to see the place, so it was good to take another look. Sarah's been doing lots of running around to organise quotes for the kitchen renovation and measure the windows for curtains, so she's seen it many more times. There's going to be a few little odd jobs that need doing around the place. There's a few lights that aren't working (presumably just bulb replacements. There's an outside cupboard that's falling apart. There's a little water feature that I think we'll just get rid of, as the pump is a waste of electricity and it'll just breed mosquitoes otherwise. It's going to be home.

Just had some time in the last two days, and here's the list of uploaded NMUs. So far, I had only one maintainer complaining (again, sorry!), but I must admit that on Sunday I just didn't follow the correct NMU procedure Anyhow, here's what I have:

1. #504824 [libnids] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: #elif used instead of #else
2. #504864 [omnievents] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
3. #504871 [bookmarkbridge] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
4. #504902 [libofa] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
5. #504943 [libassa] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
6. #504963 [libfcgi] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
7. #504970 [italc] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
8. #504973 [libspiff] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
9. #505021 [passepartout] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
10. #505078 [codeine] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
11. #505333 [gloox] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
12. #505372 [bobot++] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
13. #505420 [esteidutil] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
14. #510759 [log4cxx] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
15. #526151 [openmovieeditor] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
16. #551107 [fusecompress] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
17. #551718 [eboard] eboard: FTBFS with latest eglibc and gcc 4.4

Some highlights Most of these bugs, if not all, already had a patch attached. Thanks to Martin Michlmayr for his work on this! Regarding fusecompress, after my upload to DELAYED/2, the maintainer promptly replied asking for sponsorship of a package he already had. So this does not really count If you want to participate in this great game too, and improve our loved distribution, you can have a look at this list of possibly easy bugs to fix. Have fun!

In more than 11 years in Finland, I've been politically involved in a couple of political parties on the Right side of the spectrum - mainly because those parties tend to favor a free market economy and a work-oriented immigration. In one case, I was invited by fellow immigrants to attend the meetings of their favorite party's English section, because of my expertise on Immigration legislation and common practices. In an other case, a member of the Finnish parliament invited me to participate in his party's immigrant workgroup, which resulted in my getting involved in a number of proactive initiatives and eventually joining that party as a card-carrying member. Simultaneously, I was approached by no less than 4 Finnish political parties to become a candidate in the municipal elections (in Finland, foreigners who have lived at least 2 years on an A-status residence permit can vote and stand as a candidate in municipal elections). Despite this, I've come to the conclusion that none of these Finnish political parties is genuine: On one hand, there's politicians who claim to know everything about the Immigration question and yet their speeches tell an entirely different story than what immigrants experience. On the other hand, there's politicians who complain about the immigrants' lack of participation in political life, but who quickly add that their personal group of supporters is all they're interested in hearing from. Correlating these facts, it's been found by many politically-involved immigrants that Finnish political parties don't genuinely want to involve immigrants; all they are interested in is acquiring a few extra votes from the immigrant population and in transferring those votes to their party's star Finnish candidate, who often is someone favored by the party's old-timers but disavowed by the majority of grassroot members. In a few more extreme cases, party brasses will sheepishly admit that all they want is a couple of niggers in the candidate list to show a vague sense of adhesion to the multicultural agenda - despite the assurances they have given to often naive immigrant candidates that they "genuinely" hope that they'll be elected. As it turns out, many immigrants are actively involved at the grassroot level and receiving the praises of their Finnish colleagues for their innovative and proactive initiatives. As a result, genuinely interested Finns have joined forces with active immigrants to launch various initiatives for improving Finland's competitive position in the global economy through a thriving cosmopolitanism and a stronger culture of entrepreneurship. For instance, I am personally involved at several public and private sector initiatives. Nonetheless, grassroot initiatives can only ever accomplish so much; without the unflinching support of Finland's significant political players, several key elements of these innovative solutions cannot be implemented. However, given the grassroot's frustrating experiences of the political scene, one cannot help but wonder: Is there any Finnish political party whose actions are coherent with its stated political agenda and in sync with the grassroot initiatives being put forward by the immigrants and their Finnish associates?

I was trying to dump a large Logical Volume (LV) over ethernet from one machine to another. I found some behavior which surprised me.fun constraints

• I have only a fairly minimal debian installation on each machine (which fortunately includes netcat-traditional)
• The two machines are connected directly by a single (gigabit) ethernet cable, with no other network connection. So no pulling in extra packages.
• I have serial console access to both machines, but no physical access.
• The LV being transfered is 973GB in size according to lvs (fairly large, that is), and contains a LUKS volume, which itself contains a basically-full filesystem -- transferring just the "used" bytes is not going to save space/time.
• I want to be able to check on how the transfer is doing while it's happening.
• I want the LV to show up as an LV on the target system, and don't have tons of extra room on the target to play around with (so no dumping it to the filesystem as a disk image first).

(how do i get myself into these messes?)This entry has been truncated read the full entry.Tags: lvm, netcat

after attending the Munich BSP 3 weeks ago (thanks for inviting me, & thanks especially to Stefan for hosting me) I've tasted blood & started to look at our RC bugs more often. I'm still far from zack's RCBW frequency; but I thought I'd give a short overview anyway; maybe it motivates others to chime in? So here's a list of RC bugs I've touched in the last weeks (not counting some merges in the BTS):

• #375025 libzorpll: "libzorpll: FTBFS on GNU/kFreeBSD (due to unsatisfied Build-Depends on libcap-dev)"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2 (ok, technically not RC)
• #544879 clutter: "Missing libclutter-doc package"
  add comment at turmzimmer and BTS
• #548616 licq: "fails to build with gcc-4.4"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload
• #553009 libzorpll3.0.6: "libzorpll3.0.6: postinst-must-call-ldconfig /usr/lib/libzorpll-3.0.so.6.4.0 by the dynamic library loader. Therefore, the package must call "ldconfig" in its postinst script."
  create post rm,inst and add dh_makeshlibs, upload to DELAYED/2
• #553230 libapache2-mod-macro: "libapache2-mod-macro: missing-dependency-on-libc needed by ./usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_macro.so but the package doesn't depend on the C library package. Normally this indicates that $ shlibs: Depends was omitted from the Depends line for this package in debian/control."
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2
• #553560 chiark-backup: "chiark-backup: file-in-etc-not-marked-as-conffile /etc/chiark-backup/snap/nosnap"
  add file to conffiles, upload to DELAYED/5
• #556214 pyspi: "pyspi: FTBFS: Error: pkg-config could not find x11"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2
• #559077 google-gadgets-common: "google-gadgets-common: needs to depend on shared-mime-info because of postinst"
  add comment at turmzimmer
• #560637 src:libdatetime-format-dateparse-perl: "libdatetime-format-dateparse-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  apply patch from upstream bug tracker, upload (ok, I'm in Uploaders)

remarks:

• so gar I got 4 "thank you" mails, two offers to adopt a package, & no complaints.
• we really have interesting packages in the archive; look at this nice stanza in the PTS: Lintian reports 5 errors and 221 warnings about this package. You should make the package lintian clean getting rid of them.

There is a bit of a fluff online currently about the following clause in the "jsmin" code (whatever that is):

The software shall be used for good, not evil

This seems to have started when Google rejected a project based on that code due to its license being not free or open source according to their standards, and therefore not welcome anymore. The arguments then quickly degenerated into things like 'when did google stop being against evil'. But those are all besides the point. One of the most important properties of free and open source software is that anyone can use it for any purpose; there are no restrictions to using them. The DFSG (and hence, the OSD which was derived from the DFSG) encode this as follows:

No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

You may think "how is 'evil' a field of endeavor", but that is the wrong question. To "use software for evil" can mean any of a number of things, including "nuclear research", "weapons development", "abortion", or, heck "the cash register in a butchery shop", depending on the ethical and moral framework through which the person writing the license sees the world. The ability to give someone a CD or DVD with a bunch of software on there, being able to tell them that they can just use this in any which way they see fit, is a very strong and important feature of the free and open source community. Every time someone comes up with a clause like the above, however, this ability is diluted somewhat; and if it is readily accepted within the greater free and open source movement, then eventually everyone interested in using a piece of software must first check whether they're not trying to use software that forbids someone's pet evil, and we lose one of the greatest strenghts that does exist for free software, but not for proprietary software. The sad thing is, the jsmin author seems to agree. From a video/transcript on which he talks about his absurd license clause is the following quote:

Also about once a year, I get a letter from a lawyer, every year a different lawyer, at a company I don't want to embarrass the company by saying their name, so I'll just say their initials IBM
[laughter]
saying that they want to use something I wrote. Because I put this on everything I write, now. They want to use something that I wrote in something that they wrote, and they were pretty sure they weren't going to use it for evil, but they couldn't say for sure about their customers. So could I give them a special license for that? Of course. So I wrote back this happened literally two weeks ago "I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil."

Or, in other words, all you have to do if you want to use this software for evil is set up a second company, tell Douglas that this second company wants to sell software that uses his software to people who might use it for "evil", even though the first company won't, and you're in business. Because Douglas doesn't really oppose evildoers. So the question is, why is that clause in there in the first place? There are only two possibilities; either Douglas didn't really think about those issues, in which case I hope he will one day see the light and remove the clause; or he did, and decided to go ahead and put that clause there anyway. And that would be evil.

I bought the Bose QC15 noise canceling headphones for my trip back from the US. See my previous posts about Noise Canceling Headphones [1] and Testing Noise Canceling Headphones [2] for the details of my search. I first tried my new headphones in my hotel room and they worked really well at blocking the noise from the nearby road (El Camino Real in Menlo Park) as well as the noise from the heater in my room. At the airport they entirely blocked the sound of the airport air conditioning system (which was surprisingly loud I didn t realise how loud until I tried the headphones). On the flight the headphones worked really well. I used them for hours when they weren t plugged in to any source, just stopping the noise was a huge benefit. I was also able to listen to music (both MP3s on my laptop and the plane sound system) at a relatively low volume with an apparent high quality. The Bose store I visited in Stanford mall has a sound system set up to emulate the noise you experience inside a jet to demonstrate what the headset can do. It really lives up to this demonstration! I recommend them to anyone who wants over-ear noise canceling headphones and can afford $US300 + tax. But one thing to note is that not everyone likes such things my wife didn t like the sound that they generate (the least bad way to describe it is as a soft hiss). This is definitely not something you would want to buy based on reviews alone, it must be tested in-store. The main technical suggestion I can make for improvement to the QC-15 is for it to have slightly softer and thicker padding where it contacts the sides of the wearer s head. I find that my glasses prevent it from making as good contact as I would like, and that when wearing it while eating the contact is significantly broken with every jaw movement which is really annoying. A minor suggestion is that every pair of headphones should have the left and right ear pieces clearly marked, I really shouldn t have to read an instruction manual to discover which way to wear it. One thing that surprised me was the inclusion of business cards for the headset! Here is a picture:

The picture links to a larger picture that also shows the French version of the same text on the other side. I was astonished by this, encouraging happy customers to help sell your products is a reasonable and effective form of product promotion (really this is what I m doing for Bose with this blog post). But giving customers business cards is going too far anyone who wants me to hand out their business cards can offer to pay me to do so (and I probably won t accept). But if such things are considered to be a good idea then here are a few suggestions for other things that they could do:

1. Create a Bose dating site where one can meet people who like music and traveling (this does sound appealing). In about 10 years the children of people who meet that way would start buying audio gear
2. Start a Bose fan club.
3. Create a template that be used by a tattoo parlor to make a Bose tattoo.
4. Sell Bose fan t-shirts to people who aren t dedicated enough to get a tattoo.
5. Register Bose as a religion, that gets tax free status among other benefits.

It s a pity that Bose doesn t make any water-proof noise canceling headphones. It would be something for their marketing people to wear while jumping over a shark on water skis [3]. But seriously the best thing that Bose could do to have their products promoted would be to start by printing the web site for each product on the item, my headset has two patent numbers listed which seem unlikely to provide any benefit for anyone, in that space they could have printed the global.bose.com/qc URL that is on the business card. Of course providing the URL really doesn t do any good when the URL actually is useless. It starts by giving me a page asking which country I am in the correct thing to do is to use geoip to determine the country and then give the user the option of selecting another country if that one is not ideal. Then after I select a country it doesn t take me to a specific page for the product! I could have typed in www.bose.com and got the same result (in terms of US shopping at least) while typing six fewer characters! Next like most corporate web sites the Bose site doesn t appear to be configured for longevity of URLs URLs which are clearly designed for the computer rather than humans are expected to change without warning. This discourages linking to any page that one might discover through web searches or navigating the site, and causes them to lose a lot of potential links. Having specific URLs for all the products (including the obsolete ones) that are designed firstly for humans to read and write would be a good idea. It would be really useful to be able to compare the features of new products with the ones that are going cheap on eBay. For someone who is considering buying a new product now the purchase decision would be easier if they knew that the company would provide resources to help them get a better price on eBay in a few years if they want to upgrade to a newer model. One thing to keep in mind is the fact that the reputation of a company (which makes a dramatic impact on the prices customers are prepared to pay) depends largely on a long history of making quality products. Telling customers about those historic products is one of the most sensible things that most corporations fail to do on the Internet.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2009/12/03/noise-canceling-headphones/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2009/12/04/testing-noise-canceling-headphones/
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_the_shark

How exactly are these packages DFSG-free? (via, via)

It's not that often that I start something from scratch. It's an amazing feeling to start a new project, to start writing something new. I like that. It's creation, it's an artistic part of our computing stuff. I feel like a code artist. And what I like even more is that little feeling that you are going in an unknown land. Some area in this tech world where nobody ever came before you, or only a few pioneers. That the sensation I got starting to using Cython, Python 3 and various other tools. I just spent half of my time trying to fix problems, rather than working on *my* code. Problems in autoconf macro not knowing Python 2.6 or Python 3.1. Problems and limitations in Cython. And problem in Python. That last one was a hard one. I'm still a beginner in the Python world: I barely know anything. And I was trying to use something nobody never did: building an embedded Python with a set of built-in modules. I spent hours trying to find why one type of module importing was badly failing. I finally found the answer thanks to a guy. who has the same problem A guy ? No. A pioneer. What do I say? A hero. He's been my week-hero! Thank you Miguel Lobo because you found the bug I chased for hours and because you even reported it as issue 1644818, including a patch! How not damn wonderful is that? I will not bore you with the technical details of that bug, since nobody cares. Nobody cares, even the Python guys, since that bug has been opened for 3 years, and nobody even reviewed in that time. I found an old thread about that bug where some guys were wanking about how they should do the review, because Miguel pushed for several weeks to have a review, back in 2007. But that bug was in my way. I had to do something. So I prepared my mail reader, mounted my web browser and here I was for a uniq quest: getting a Python bug fixed. At that point, if you did not stop reading earlier, you might get very excited. Don't be, spoiler, it's still not fixed. You'll have to wait the end of the season and see all the episodes I'll have to write to get the end of the story! Let's continue. I had to create an account on the Python bug tracking system. That was a trivial task for a man like me (you bet). Then, I launched a verbal attack, something you rarely see in a bug tracking system. Something I knew would awake any developer caring about their software.

Julien Danjou: Is there any chance to see this *bug* fixed someday?

I had the deep feeling that my quest was starting here. How many days would I have to wait until I get an answer? Time was passing. Minutes were ticking while I was waiting, sat in a comfortable sofa in a softly lighted room. It seemed like all my life was shorter than the delay I had to wait to get an answer. After waiting for hours, suddenly, and only 15 minutes later, I got an answer:

Martin v. L wis: Please ask on python-dev. I may be willing to revive my five-for-one offer.

Martin? Don't know that guy. Who is he? Who is he like? Will he fix that bug? What is this offer? So many question without an answer. But he asked to ask on python-dev, and I said: challenged accepted! I will write a mail to python-dev to get that bug fixed. Which I did. I sent a short (but well written you know, I made efforts) "WTF?" to pyhon-dev. And then the guy asked me to review 5 bugs so he will review and fix this one. And this is how I said that he was pissing me off for blackmailing me to fix a bug that was its "duty". Therefore, this is the end of the story so far. Will that bug be fixed some day? There's a hope, because another guy jumped in and took the bug assignment. To be continued. My conclusion about all that story: that is a little rude to start something new, with new tools, and get quickly into teething troubles. It's even more harsh to enter a community because you just found bugs, and be not very well received when you ask to apply a 10 lines long fix somebody wrote 3 years ago to fix it. I'll probably still use Python :-), but I get a darker image of its community now.

If you are one of the majority of people that have no access to Debians ftp-master host, but still do want to know in which state our main archive update, the dinstall run, is: http://ftp-master.debian.org/dinstall.status to the rescue. This file is now updated during dinstall. It is not telling exactly which function is currently running, that would be too much detail (we have over 50), but it is giving a good overview of the area dinstall is in. There are currently 6 states it reports:

• Startup Here we do an initial backup dump of our database, update various external resources like the i18n/ structure.
• Indices During that part we generate various files you can find in indices/ and prepare everything for the next state.
• packages/contents This part is currently one of the longest running, the actual write-out of our Packages/Sources and Contents files. Expect that to stay around for an hour til two each time.
• dists/ Directly after the packages files. Everything thats needed to finish the dists/ directory, like creating the (much hated) pdiff files and the release files.
• scripts We run various small actions in here, including the final preparation for the mirror tree, making all the changes visible to the world.
• postlock From here on a lot of actions run in parallel. Basically general cleanup and householding actions that do not modify the visible archive.
• all done Who would have thought, we are all done.

The format of the file is pretty simple, it consists of 3 lines, at the time of writing this blog post it looks like

Dinstall start: Sun Dec 20 07:52:01 UTC 2009 (1261295521)
Current action: scripts
Action start: Sun Dec 20 09:12:08 UTC 2009 (1261300328)

It tells when dinstall started, what the current action is and when that one started. In case you want to do some math on the dates it is also provided as an epoch. Have fun.