Search Results: "ron"

3 September 2006

David Nusinow: So Much For One Entry A Day

Too many good responses not to reply now. Both aba and buxy suggest merging the steering committee with the DPL, thus allowing such a committee to be elected democratically. This has its merits, but I'm hesitant for one main reason: Project SCUD was a complete and utter failure from the point of view of many DD's, myself included. There were reasons for it, and I'm sure they're valid, and I'm not blaming anyone, but it does make me distrust that structure for anything useful. The DPL as an office has had the opportunity to create this sort of structure and make it work for a long time now, and it hasn't happened. I'd imagine it's because the DPL is simply bogged down with other things. If the DPL could make this happen, I'd be fine with it, but our past experience suggests that we need a different solution than a non-functional DPL team.

The current setup, with the 2IC, seems to be working very well, but it's not actively going after issues in this way, even though it has the authority to do so. Indeed, I think if the DPL did start exercising his authority in this way, people would complain and threaten to resign and so forth. While many of us might envy Ubuntu's success, I don't think we really want the DPL to become a dictator.

The tech-ctte, on the other hand, works very well when things are brought before it, even moreso now that it's been revitalized. Allowing the DPL to delegate the steering committee would allow fresh faces to replace inactive ones each year, which would be a further check on the committee's powers (which I've done my best to limit to the scope of the problem). Also, by acting as a delegate of the DPL, the committee is essentially a focused extension of whatever team the DPL has assembled. By having a group of people who are focused on this specific task, it allows them to get work done without being bogged down by most of the issues that the DPL faces. I admit that this takes some of the glamor out of being DPL, but there's nothing wrong with having the DPL as a member of the steering committee that I can see, provided the committee is large enough. One possibility I've considered is to make the DPL the chair of the steering committee by default, which would give them the same powers as that of the tech-ctte chair.

As for how the steering committee would work with the release managers, it would, as madduck said, be a fairly close relationship, with some very likely overlap. The RM's are currently loaded up with plenty of work just making the current set of packages and features tight enough to release. Adding the burden of crafting and helping implement a vision isn't something I'd want to force on them. The RM's should be, as they currently are, concerned primarily with getting a high quality release out the door. They would remain the focal point for transitions and RC bug fixes, as well as determining what is actually release critical. The steering committee would give people the power to work towards release goals (hence working closely with the release team) but they don't have the power to say that the release should be held up for any given feature. That power would belong to the release team, the same way it currently does. I'd imagine that any release goals set by the release team would be approved by the steering committee without much effort.

One final issue. The tech-ctte works out in the open, on public mailing lists and the BTS. Team SCUD, as well as the DPL in general, does not really work out in the open. While I think having some things taken behind closed doors is good, I feel very strongly that the steering committee would have to do its work out in the open in the same manner as the tech-ctte. This is a major reason why I don't want the DPL office to take on this power.

Marc 'Zugschlus' Haber: aide 0.11 in unstable

After over two years without a release, and after having release candidates in experimental since October, aide 0.11 was released a few days ago, and I have just uploaded 0.11-1 to unstable. This time, I even haven’t forgotten to use the -v option to svn-buildpackage to have the changelog entries for the package versions uploaded to experimental in the unstable upload notice as well.aide is the Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment, a program which compares the real state of the file system with a database which holds various file attributes such as inode data and/or cryptographic checksums. In 2005, the Debian maintainer of aide, Mike Markley, has accepted me as a co-maintainer, and since I have done the biggest part of the work in the last months, I have adopted the package as responsible maintainer in January 2006. Mike is still listed in Uploaders and can commit to our alioth svn, though.

Marc 'Zugschlus' Haber: Debian loses DPL election, Cabal wins by tiny margin

Anthony Towns will be Debian’s next project leader. I am not happy with that outcome at all. With just a tiny margin, aj has won over Steve. Steve was not my favorite candidate as well, but he’d be better than aj, who in my opinion stands for the cabal that is running Debian from their positions of power for years now. Only 421 DDs have cast their vote, which is 43.3128% of all possible votes. Voter participation has thus been lower than the historic low Germany’s state Sachsen-Anhalt recently had in its Landtag election. More than half of the DDs do not seem to be interested in who makes Debian’s external policy and who represents the project to the outside. On the other hand, debian-vote sees a number of people who are not currently allowed to vote, but regularly contribute to Debian. It looks like the people who could vote don’t, while people who do good things to Debian are not allowed to vote. Bad. But, IMNSHO, the really bad thing is the new DPL itself. I think he has won the election with saying that he will increase Debian’s speed. On the other hand, he is member of ftpmaster, the team that might be one of the biggest causes for Debian’s slow speed. He is generally regarded to be close to the “Cabal”, which of course does not exist. I don’t see how the speed increase is can be accomplished giving this background. However, the vote can easily be interpreted as a vote of confidence in the Cabal, which in itself is a good thing. It shows that even the voting DD’s are comfortable to be ruled by the secret club of most senior DDs. I don’t have to like it, but I’ll have to live with it. aj is also one of the founders of #debian-tech, an IRC channel which has been created as a “nice” channel for technical discussions. The channel has a very strict code of conduct, and people are being removed from the channel if they do not comply. I am really really really afraid of this “be nice or else” attitude being extended to other Debian communications media during aj’s term. Being robbed of the right to speak one’s mind might adversely affect many people’s motivation to spend time with Debian in the future. In a nutshell: This is a sad day for Debian. But, otoh, every project gets the leadership it deserves. And it looks like Debian didn’t deserve any of the better candidates. jftr, I voted 63571824 Be warned: I have a bad history of mis-judging new DPLs just after their election. A year ago, I was quite happy about Branden being elected, and was convinced that things would change during his first term of DPLship. I really believed that he could remove the Cabal from the power, and that Debian would change to a more co-operative environment. I surely hope that I am as wrong this time as I was a year ago. It’ll be more positive this time.

Marc 'Zugschlus' Haber: DHCP challenges

My notebook’s DHCP setup seems to be a challenge for DHCP servers around the world. Looks like almost no server implements the standard in a decently complete way. My notebook has a wired Fast Ethernet, and a wireless 802.11bg network interface. Of course, both interfaces have their own MAC address. I want the thing to work at least at home, regardless of whether wired or wireless is in use, with preferably the same static IP address, and on the office wired network, again, with the static IP address allocated to me there. Configuring this is considerably harder than I expected. At home, I am using a Linksys WRT54G router with OpenWRT, which has dnsmasq as DHCP server. Unfortunately, dnsmasq does not support the case where multiple MAC addresses are statically assigned to the same IP address: Only the first dhcp-host statement in the configuration file is honored, all others are ignored. So we need to resort to using a dhcp client-identifier. In DHCP request option number 61, the client can send an identifier, which the Server can then use to determine the client’s identity and assign a static IP address. The client identifier, according to RFC2132, is to be treated as an opaque string by the DHCP server. This works fine with dnsmasq, solving the issue at home. But it causes more grief in the office network. My office is the kind of place where a non-Microsoft solution is rarely considered. Thus, our network is fully buzzword compliant and the network infrastructure, including DNS and DHCP servers, is based on Windows Server System. I am the only one using a non-MS operating system in my work environment. When I plugged my notebook into the network this morning, I noticed that I didn’t receive my static IP address but a different one from the dynamic pool. After verifying that the Windows guys didn’t touch the DHCP server in the last days, I began to think what I changed locally and naturally remembered configuring the DHCP client identifier. Removed it for testing, got my normal static IP address, so the client identifier was quickly pinned down as the culprit. After my Windows colleagues decided that it must be a client issue, I began investigating how to configure the Windows DHCP server to honor a client identifier. MS Knowledge Base article #172408, “Custom DHCP Client Identifiers for Windows NT”, is a high hit on Google, but is like three years old and shows that somebody at MS has badly misunderstood the DHCP standard - they think that the Client Identifier is a 4 byte number in little endian order. I couldn’t believe that and investigated further. But it looks like the Windows DHCP server really cannot handle free-form client identifiers at all. I tried coding my free-form identifier in ASCII and entering it as MAC address, big endian, little endian, to no avail. So, I have come to the conclusion that MS has - again - only partly implemented a very important protocol for their network software. “Embrace and extend”, my <censored>, DHCP wasn’t extended at all. Looks like they stopped developing after the first developer box had successfully received an IP address, and shipped the resulting code. Woah. If somebody can tell me how to configure the Windows DHCP server to properly handle a free-form string DHCP client identfier, I’ll be most graceful for that information. I finally resorted to setting the DHCP client identifier of my notebook to the MAC address of the wired ethernet interface, which has at least brought my static IP address at the office back. I hope that the dnsmasq at home will successfully grok this or I am - again - back to square one. All software sucks

Martin F. Krafft: Never give up

Scott, the first thing I want to say in response to your post is that you are not alone. I did not know someone was attacked for wearing an Ubuntu shirt in Helsinki, but I did witness at least one "Fuck Ubuntu" incident, and it seemed that Ubuntu jokes and snaps at the new distro were very common. I find this utterly childish and stupid. I am sorry for everyone who was offended. But please don't blame or condemn everyone in Debian or the whole project for the actions of some of its members or followers. You've already linked to my thoughts on the Ubuntu-Debian situation, so I need not cover any of that anymore. I wouldn't want to either, because believe it or not, this article got me flamed by Ubuntu developers just way too many times, in personal mails as well as in forums. Instead, let's look at the now and then this time. I've heard a few developers express their unhappiness with Debian in the past year, much in the same way that you did. Not always was it related to Ubuntu, but quite often it was. There are newcomers to Debian who shake their head in disbelief how anyone can work in a project such as Debian, and there are the veterans among us who seem to concede that Debian has slipped away from their ideals and it's just not fun anymore. It's not hard for me to understand each of them. I've followed Debian for nearly a decade now and thus tracked how it changed over time. We are one of the largest free software projects, and size never comes without problems. So while the Debian project used to be an association of geeks enjoying their focus on technical excellence, the sheer growth of our project called for many other fields to be managed, and we did not always handle this increase in complexity very gracefully. After all, we are all just geeks who want to have fun, aren't we? As a result, several aspects of our project have been said to "stagnate", and parts (and parties) have diverged. As a volunteer developer, it's not always fun to run up against walls and find that your innovativeness is met with stubborness or simple silence. I say "not always" because I think it's really just a matter of perspective. Over the years, Debian has seriously affected my life, the way I look at things, the way I interact with people, and the way I do stuff. I am eternally grateful for much of that. But the learning process has not stopped. What Debian needs is a stronger grasp of the big picture. In joining all the other developers who are already doing excellent work in that direction, what better learning opportunity could there be to approach large-scale project management, away from academia and the corporate world. For me, this is a very interesting perspective of a fascinating project, one that directly relates to my current research endeavour. I was asked recently how we "control the anarchy", and the first thing I said was that "control" was not the right word. Debian is not about control, it's about the flow. If it's not going your way, you can swim against it, you can pull out, or you can try to find ways to change that flow, bottom-up rather than top-down. I think David's idea of a steering committee is an excellent one, and I'd be happy to dedicate time to such an effort. I wouldn't call it "steering" though, as that seems too active. Rather, I envision a group of people dedicated to keeping track of the big picture (obviously in close contact with the release team) to which developers can turn if they need advice. In the last few years, I've often asked myself why the heck I don't just give up, instead of continuously running up against problems that seemed hopeless. Even now, I sometimes think that I should have just pulled the plug, but my answer has always been no, and it looks like it'll remain that way. Why? Because we've come an incredibly long way, and that by itself provide for a lot of motivation. Mostly, however, I decided to hang in there because I tend to like challenges, even if at first I have no idea how to conquer them. When I then look at what some of the people are doing for the project, I come to realise that there are solutions, even if the road is a long one. You (Scott) strike me as a very innovative person, and not only because the problems you and I are looking at tend to overlap to a large degree. I strongly respect you for your work, and Canonical certainly deserves a tip of the hat for providing you with the environment to do so. Sometimes, I even envy you a little, simply because I haven't been able to get down to coding solutions as much as I would have liked to and you've beaten me to the punch on things like HCT or upstart -- even though my work in that area has been mostly vapourware, so there was no real punch to which you've beaten me... I think you'll know what I mean. Yet, scanning some of your older blog posts, I got the impression that you weren't always happy with the way you have to do things at Canonical. And still, you're enthusiasm for working on your projects is astounding; it wasn't hard to come to that conclusion just a week ago, even though we've only talked briefly in Cambridge. Have you asked yourself why that is? I'll go out on a limb and postulate it's because of your innovativeness, because of your urge to push technology further, to implement cool things, and to break free of the cruft that comes with 13 years of Debian and several decades of standards la POSIX and SysV. Debian is too conservative for you, and all the cruft weighs heavy. Ubuntu, on the other handy, is "fluffy" and not afraid to forge ahead, and you've been an active part of it from day one. As much as I hate to see you "with them" rather than with us, I think you've found your place. And so have I. I'm less about coding than I am about integration, and there's work to do. Debian is a massive project with an amazing track record of achievements to look at. And it has problems. Well, great! Let's attack them. Never give up. Another reason why I've stayed with Debian is because there are people who think alike. Three years ago, I would have been able to give you a long bullet lists of hopeless problems in Debian. If you ask me today, I would have problems arguing their hopelessness, for I've seen plenty of developers taking it up with these problems, and in the meritocratic way. Our release team is doing a fantastic job and I've never felt so positive about the promise we made with the next release. People like J rg, Zobel, Rapha l, the two Alex, Meike, Christoph, and the many others I'll leave out only in the interest of brevity (the list is longer and doesn't only span Germany and France) are doing great work, and that is truly motivating. And I ought to mention explicitly our leader, Anthony, who's been doing an excellent job so far. I hope he can keep it up. Also, take a look at our IRC channels. I would have to be lying if I'd say nothing has changed. And the same applies to mailing lists. We still have a reputation to deal with, but if you stop listening to what people say and actually take a look, I think we've come a long way. I'd even say it's become more fun to work on Debian again! I think we owe a lot of that to Debian Women. I am definitely proud to be a member of this community (with which I mean Debian as a whole, not just Debian Women). I think I could continue this blog post endlessly. Let's not. You (Scott) may not be a fellow DD any longer, but you remain a fellow D, and I hope we'll continue to let our cooperation prosper. Now if only you had told me that "getting upstart installable required changes to twelve different packages, including sysvinit itself" when you approached me with what sounded like a simple sponsorship request... I've started to have a go at the "herculian effort", step by step. Seems like an interesting experiment. NP: Eels / Daisies of the Galaxy (it's really hard to find a better band for a grey Sunday morning) Update: Maybe our reputation isn't all that bad, or Slashdot posts suddenly became all useful. A lot of insightful and interesting posts in the first batch of comments...

Evan Prodromou: 17 Fructidor CCXIV

Hard to believe it's been more than a week since I posted on my blog. It's been a fun-filled week; Maj, Amita June and I took a cruise of the Baltic Sea. It was everyone's first cruise, as well as our first time in the area, so we did a lot of travelling -- hitting wt:Lubeck, wt:Visby, wt:Stockholm, wt:Tallinn and wt:Saint Petersburg during the week. Unfortunately, our onboard Internet connection was neither easy to use, reliable, nor cheap, and our time on land was too short (about 8-10 hours per city) to waste in Internet caf s. I did manage to get wireless in Tallinn, which famously has free municipal WiFi, but otherwise I was stuck with exorbitant satellite-feed access on board our ship. Most of my time online was making sure that Wikitravel wasn't crashed while we were at sea. (It's my constant fear -- as soon as I get out of range of easy Internet access, I'm sure that either the servers have gone kaput or there's an exploitable bug in the software. Either way, I'm pretty nervous on most trips. Kind of ironic, in a way.) Suffice it to say that it was really a worthwhile, good time for us. We're back in wt:Copenhagen today. I'm trying to catch up with a couple of Debian developers and NM candidates to exchange wp:OpenPGP key signatures, and trying to plan our scant 23 hours in wt:Zurich starting tomorrow. tags:

Blogue My friend Nicolas Ritoux, an Internet and games journalist in wt:Montreal, has a new blog at http://www.vulusu.ca/ . Vu, lu, su means "seen, read, known" in French, and I think it makes a lot of sense for the name of his blogue. He's got a near-comprehensive view of Internet and video gaming culture, and I think that this blog will be a nice addition to his weekly columns in La Presse. tags:

Matthew Palmer: Music To Hack To -- The Belated Summary

Back in the embarrassingly early part of this year, I wrote a blog entry on music that I liked to listen to whilst cutting code. I solicited feedback, and promised a followup. Technically, I didn't say when I'd be posting a summary, so I don't feel quite so bad about leaving it for 9 months before posting this followup. Firstly, Matthew Davidson gave a lengthy treatise on The Fall, whom I'd never heard of before, and actually haven't gotten around to listening to yet, either (shaaaaame!). It certainly must do the trick for him, though, because he says:
I try to avoid programming wherever possible -- I know how it's done, and really appreciate it when it's done well, but I generally find doing it as much fun as a trip to the dentist. However, put a bit of the Fall on, and I find myself settling into a pretty productive groove without much trouble.
Next up, Decklin Foster pointed me to where I could do my own research -- the Debian Developers group on last.fm. Although I've glanced at last.fm now and then, I've never really gotten into it much. I suppose I should harness the hive mind and find more music similar to that I already like -- you can only listen to your old favourites so many times in a row before they start to wear out. Apparently, my tastes in coding tunes isn't unique -- Roger Barnes shares my preference for the quick-paced abstract:
When I'm coding though, I prefer something fast and electronic. I think this is for two reasons, one is the rhythm tends to get my mind going, and the lack of vocals means that there are no words disrupting my thoughts.
As does François Beausoleil, who says:
I have the same need as you for loud, fast and driving music. Personally, I've been listening to Born to be alive, the first Matrix's theme song, Confusion from New Order of the Blade soundtrack.
Since the original Music To Hack To post, I've been listening primarily to the Chillits 2005 sets whilst coding. In the words of Boing Boing (where I originally found out about Chillits), "Every fall in Northern California, the Chillits music festival brings together a stunning line-up of DJs who spin mesmerizing sets of ambient and downtempo music under the sun and stars." The key word there is "ambient"; I'm not looking for something to listen to so much as I want backdrop to my other activities. The collection of laid-back and thumping tunes keeps a nice work/relax rhythm going while I'm coding. There are some immensely funny bits in some of the mixes, too, like the (hopefully) mock ad for speed ("The little blue diet pill you don't have to be overweight to need!"). Sometimes the tracks go into some area that bugs the shit out of me, which is when I exercise the skip feature of my music player, but most of it is pretty good at blocking out the world and letting you concentrate on the code at hand.

Joey Hess: steering committee

As the person who has, rightly or wrongly, effectively been the one who ended up forcing the decision about what MTA and desktop are the default in Debian, I really like Gravity's idea of a Debian steering committee. I've never felt comfortable making these kind of decisions on my own, and using debian-devel to try to make a legitimate decision (as was done with the MTA and attempted(?) with the default vi) has been a PITA. (I was actually going to rant about this exact thing during my lightning talk @ DebConf, but felt too mellow that day for the rant.) FWIW, I'm not suprised to see Ubuntu people leaving Debian. I've been working to fix many large (technical) issues in the project since I joined it, and I feel like I have, but it's hardly been easy. And while I feel that this means that only the good ideas have survived to be implemented, driving a big change in Debian is still very hard, and so I'm not suprised to see people associated with a distribution that makes change easier feeling happier working on it. But, this pressure for Ubuntu to diverge from Debian makes the chances of merging back many changes seem even more slim, and makes me wonder when it will turn into a total fork. Which concerns I've probably talked about enough before.

2 September 2006

Aigars Mahinovs: Eternal unstable?

More and more early adopters choose to use Ubuntu instead of Debian. Ubuntu has newer versions of the software that matters (XOrg, FF, OOO, Gnome,…) than the stable Debian or, sometimes than even the unstable Debian. Early adopters are the users that are most eager to try new shiny things, do not scream too much if those things break and seem to make good bug reporters. They are the key second level - just below the developers and above most users in the pyramid of software development and use. They are also the people that have a tendency to become developers. That is why I have this feeling that capturing early adopters is essential to development of a thriving free software community. How can that be done? I do not know, but I have an idea that might just work. What I envision is a merger of development processes of Debian, Ubuntu, Knoppix, Skolelinux and all other Debian derrived distributions. The base for this merger would be an eternal unstable line where all developers would be encouraged to put the newest and greatest software - THE place to be if you want to be on the bleeding edge. I see this unstable line being much newer then Debian unstable, but retaining similar level of quality (how? it is a good question). Then there would be a set of tools available to splice packages from this unstable line into a stabilisation and stable branches for each distribution. The tools would be the same for all distributions and the packages would be the same for all distributions, the difference between distributions would be achieved by the way that the packages and their specific versions are chosen, patches applied for a particular distribution and in some ways by the assembly of the final release media. The proper Debian releases in this context would be no different then Ubuntu releases but will be created using different criteria and at different times. The tools must be powerful enough so that release preparations of any distribution (including Debian proper) would not need to slow down the progress of the flow of new features into the eternal unstable line. The infrastructure needed to operate such complex system would be immense. It would need to have some similarities to the systems Debian uses for distribution, release and bug management, it would need to have some similarities to Ubuntu’s Launchpad (just free, understandable, usable and well documented), and I think that it would also need to have some similarities to Gentoo’s Portage system (distros do want to recompile packages with different options and with their own library versions). It would also help if this unstable line could still hold few parallel versions of one package - like the latest release and the cvs version. (However I am pressed to even imagine all the complexities this would bring into apt and bug reporting/debugging.) I think that such structure will not only concentrate the scarce resource that are the early adopters in a place that will benefit all distributions, but will also provide extra dimensionality for social and technical growth for The Debian Project. The Debian Project will turn from a single great distribution to a swarm of wonderful distributions with a strong central spine - the eternal unstable line. An additional benefit to this will be that it will be possible to fork Debian if social pressures require that (like it happened with gcc vs. eggc) for the benefit of all free software users. Like, for example, the David’s steering commitee whould not disturb the Debian main line until it has been proven to work - it could be formed, it could set goals for a branch and feel in total control of their release goals and methods. After the steering commitee makes a successful release, it would be only a matter of a political decision of whether to call that release Debian proper or not. Note: As always this is just an uniformed rant of a relatively passive DD who is blissfully ignorant of pretty much everything, so please tell me if and why it can or can not be done. P.S. While I am in such writelly mood, I should probably write that free software advocacy article for a new journal that I promised them a month ago. P.P.S. If the system is written with it in mind, then each user’s computer could theoretically be a separate distribution which keeps a splice of Debian unstable line (or any subline) with local modifications and possible local compilation options. If done right, this could also provide a ground for merging up with Gentoo. P.P.P.S. After reading trough logs of several bugs on the Launchpad, I have a feeling that Ubuntu is being flooded by much more bugreports then Cannonical is designed to handle (especially for free). I am not pointing fingers here, I am just suggesting that it is another facet of the same problem and that this idea of mine could reduce this load and let Ubuntu developers concentrate on what they really want to do.

Aigars Mahinovs: Wrong partition ordering

If you have a hard drive with two or more logical partitions in one extended partition and then proceed to erase the first of those logical partitions (in GParted), then you will soon discover that the number of the second logical partition changed (from sda6 to sda5 in my case). If you then try to create a partition in the free space and launch cfdisk, you will notice that there is no free space where it should have been. If you then manage to get to GParted and create a partition there, then do not relax, as your perils are not yet over. Upon reboot you will find that the logical partition that is in the beginning of the logical partition got a new number (sda7 in my case) and the your valuable second logical partition is still numbered wrongly (it was sda5 instead of expected sda6). Even more so, if you try to fix it with cfdisk, it bails out with a fatal error of overlapping extended partitions. The fix is to start fstab, press “x” for advanced operations and press “f” to reorder the partitions according to the order on disk (do not forget to enter “w” to write the changes). That fixed the problem. But I have no idea who to bug for this wonderful Mongolian Clusterf*ck of Partition Numbering. And that is only a tiny preview of the immense fun I am having right now by trying out installations of Debian etch and Ubuntu edgy on my Dell M1710. If you want a stable desktop on this computer right now - use Ubuntu Dapper (with nvidia binary drivers). You will have much unneeded fun with IPW3945 wifi and the NVidia video card drivers otherwise.

David Nusinow: Hibernation

So, thanks to Ari I'm all moved in to my new place with Nicole. It's a complete mess and but it's going to be fun being there. I don't have internet at home right now (posting this from work) so I'll be going in to Debian hibernation mode for the most part during this time. Speakeasy is scheduled to come and hook things up on the 13th, which would be a nice post-birthday event. I'll be working on some Debian stuff in the meantime which doesn't require internet access though.

On other matters, reading Scott's post made me sad, though not surprised, much like it felt reading Matthew's post. It's sad to see people go, although they're still in the Debian family more or less. I can only wish them the best and hope that I get to meet them sooner than later.

Scott's post, as well as discussions with Mako, have got me thinking about setting up a committee in parallel to the technical committee: a distribution steering committee. The tech committee would be around to perform the same function it already does, but the steering committee would be the ones to make decisions that don't involve so much in the way of conflict. Questions like default MTA and desktop environment (which are more matters of preference than clear superiority) could be handled by the steering committee. The rationale for separating it from the tech committee would be to have the tech committee act as a check to balance the power of the steering committee. There could be a limited amount of overlap between the two, but not enough to allow a majority in either committee to serve in both. In order for this to work, the steering committee would have to have the ability to override maintainer decisions on matters that affect the entire distribution. If a maintainer had a serious issue with this, they could take it to the tech committee, who would have the final say. Any developer could do work on things mandated by the steering committee, including 0 day NMU's with such features, thereby allowing people to work across packages they don't own easily.

The key to the steering committee would be that it would set active goals for the release. The release team is able to currently set release goals, but they don't do so with any strong authority right now. People who wanted to do something like make upstart the default in Debian, would bring the case before the committee (who would also potentially set their own goals rather than wait around for people), get it approved, and then start working. They wouldn't own the packages they alter, but this would give them the ability to get the necessary work done. It would require a culture and a group of people who were actively interested in making things happen across the entire distro, much like Ubuntu has. I'd love to get some feedback on this to see if people think it's a good idea to pursue creating it. It would require changes to the constitution, but it might give us a mechanism to drive the project forward without resorting to a benevolent dictatorship of the DPL.

Michael Janssen: Late at night when the wires in the walls

After my iBook problems last week, I tried to install Debian on the thing. I have narrowed down the problem to something with the hard drive inside, because the machine seems to run fine and go through most of the installation without any trouble, but once I start using the hard drive, it completely freezes. I successfully ran the hardware test disc which came with it a couple times in extended mode, but I'm not sure that it uses the hard drive in it's tests long enough for it to exhibit the problem. The failure seems to be somewhat random in nature, occuring at different times in the install process. Now I have the unhappy decision of trying to save this laptop which is more than 3 years old, or to attempt to buy a new one. Right now I am leaning toward buying a new one.

Honeywell seems 1.5 times as long this week, mostly because I'm making up for a day which I missed a couple weeks ago. Things have settled down there in terms of software failure, so I'm back at the normal coding which I am doing. The code uses Ogre, which is a handy 3d engine, making it much easier than learning something like OpenGL, and as a bonus adding portability. I am considering building some play applicaitons with the toolkit at home just because it would be fun.

Tonight I need to build a couple presentations covering some papers which were in CVPR this year to present at a reading group at Honeywell. It would be fine except that I am completely unaware of any of the recent history of vision research, so it makes it much harder to build the presentations. I hope I can finish them in a reasonable amount of time so I can watch Eureka tonight.

The TiVo Diet is still working out as expected. I discovered that I don't really have anything to watch on Sunday or Monday of the week. I'm getting much more productive work done than I used to. One downside of the diet is that I tend to not want to just sit and veg at the end of the work day - I think it frustrates [info]ceilingsarecool a bit because I'm always going off to the office to do something on the computer.

I recieved and watched the Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip yesterday. Being an Aaron Sorkin fan, I am excited for another of his shows to broadcast. Judging by the pilot, it should be a decent show.

Sidenote: Planet Debian seems to like one of my weekend weeviews a little too much, and is regrabbing it for the front page every so often. I can't figure out why this is happening, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Otherwise, in a couple more posts it should be off the RSS feed.

Michael Janssen: I can work overtime I can work in a mine

Labor day weekend approacheth, and myself and [info]ceilingsarecool have secured a little getaway for ourselves. It is proving to be a nice way to relax a while before a big rush of work. I have been in all true form not updating the blog lately, so I get to give everyone a big update all at once.

The iBook problems which I mentioned in the last blog entry proved to be fatal to the machine, so I went out and bought a shiny new MacBook to replace it. Given the pricing behind most of the small laptops and the experience that I had with my iBook, I was happy with my decision. I plan to add ram (Apple's ram is so expensive) and replace the hard drive (also cheaper elsewhere) sometime before the end of the year. After I bought the new book, looking through my old receipts I discovered that my iBook is still under AppleCare so I took it in to get it fixed. The Genius Bar at the MOA store was very busy today so we had to walk around the mall and then wait for ages still. However, we successfully got the thing to freeze twice in the presence of a MacGenius(tm) so it is now off to the magic depot in the sky for fixing before I sell it used to someone. It is a nice machine and works great other than the freezing which will be fixed, and I was informed by the MacGenius(tm) that the AppleCare travels with the machine, so if it breaks in the next 8 months or so the buyer can get it fixed for free.

Honeywell this week was pretty hectic and non-normal. There was a deadline which required the working of an application I hadn't planned on having working until the end of the week, so I had to work Monday and Tuesday, putting in 20 hours before mid-week. This made it slightly hard to get anything else done, but still not bad because it means I have a little leeway for next week. The good news is that we got it done, and the even better news is that it's possible to focus on other things which I have more experience in there now.

After the weekend (which I'm sure we'll have pictures from) is the start of the new school year. This means that my schedule is being impacted a lot, and I will need to get used to classes again. With any luck, this semester will be the last time I ever take classes in grad school. I also need to start a paper next week which is due on the 14th, so it's a little tight on the scheduling end. Hopefully I will be able to pull it off, because the conference is in Italy next year and [info]ceilingsarecool has a keen interest in going with me.

But for now, I get a little R&R time before rejoining previously scheduled overwhelming work, already in progress.

1 September 2006

Erich Schubert: Halting SELinux on Debian development "just before it works"

Some good new up front:
I'm down to around 10 audit errors on booting my amd64 system in targeted policy. To achieve this I did some small changes to the udev init script, and some larger policy modifications (mostly treating /dev/.static/dev the same way as /dev) (see webSVN changes view). The bad news:
I'm halting my SELinux development. I'm moving into a new room today, and the box I've recently been using SELinux on is staying with my dad. After all we bought it for him to surf. So I don't have any computer to run SELinux on (my 4+ years old laptop is way to packed already). And that means I can't seriously work on SELinux much anymore. Sorry. It sucks to stop tweaking it right before it's done, but I can't do much about it. [Update: It's not just about the hardware. The hardware is the reason why I can't do much at all, but as you may have seen in one of my previous blog entries, a couple of things in my life are changing right now. I have no idea how much spare time I'll have at my hands. I welcome the offers of sponsorship I've seen, but I can't accept them when I might end up not doing much more anyway. Sorry.]

Scott James Remnant: Upstart can now replace sysvinit

Today I reached another milestone in the development of upstart, the packages in universe can now replace the existing sysvinit package. Before trying this, make sure your installation is up to date as we’ve had to split out some parts of sysvinit into a new sysvutils package. If you’re up to date, and want to try it out, install the upstart and upstart-compat-sysv packages from universe. Note that the first reboot after you’ve installed the packages (from sysvinit to upstart) will be a little tricky… use reboot -f. If your system boots and shuts down normally, everything’s working just fine. Note that both will be somewhat more quiet than you’re used to, unless you have usplash running. Throughout the rest of this entry, I’ll try to answer some of the questions and comments that I’ve received since the last post. Events As I talked about previously, upstart is an event-based init daemon. Events are the primary force for having your services and tasks started and stopped at the appropriate time and in the appropriate order. So what are events and where do they come from? (Note that this part is under development, so may change in later releases). Events are just simple strings that may be sent by any process when something it is tracking the state of changes. They have no state or longevity, and if, when queued, they do not cause any job state changes, then they have no effect unless they are sent again. Jobs can list which events cause them to be started if they are not already running and which events cause them to be stopped if they are running. Multiple start and stop events may be listed, in which case the first to occur changes the job until the next one occurs. upstart itself generates the following system events: The shutdown tool included in the package also causes one of the following events to be sent once the “shutdown” event has been handled: Jobs also generate events whenever they change state, this is the primary source of events for ordering: And as mentioned, any other process on the system may send events through the control socket or just by using initctl trigger EVENT. For now this is just the event string, however it’s intended that the event may include other details including environment variables and even file descriptors. Typical example To clarify how it all hangs together, here’s an example (using fictional names) of how the tasks and events can be arranged to provide race-free mounting of filesystems. By breaking this job into these small tasks, we can see how the pieces fit together. Because everything is now done on events, there are no race conditions; we know that any filesystem listed in /etc/fstab will be checked and mounted. The only reason they wouldn’t be is if there’s an error of some kind, and that means you have larger problems anyway and the system administrator would have a shell to fix it. Of course, the moment they finish checking the filesystem and mount it, the boot process would carry on. There’s no reason that any of these events need to be generated by the upstart daemon itself, it can receive them from any other daemon on the system such as udev, acpid, etc. This keeps the focus of the init daemon narrow. A large part of the future development will be working out exactly what kinds of events we want init itself to generate, what kinds we want to come from elsewhere, and what the contents of an event can be. Getting Involved If you want to get involved with trying to nudge the direction of upstart development, you can join the upstart-devel mailing list at http://lists.netsplit.com/ Or if you just want to grab the source code, tarballs are published at http://people.ubuntu.com/~scott/software/upstart/ and the bzr archive is at http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~keybuk/upstart/main

31 August 2006

Jeff Bailey: Baby Naming (no, not ours...)

I had the pleasure this morning of attending a baby naming ceremony. Aside from being at the thoroughly crazy hour of 07h30, it was a very cool experience.
Sharlene and Hannah Sarah
The Shaar Zion Synagogue is in Hampstead, about 8km from our appt. I was running a touch late because I worked for about an hour before setting off and got caught in conversation. It turned out this was a good idea, since Mount Royal is between there and my place, and I was otherwise planning on biking.

In the search for the entrance I met one of the relatives, who explained how to put one of the skull caps on and we found the sanctuary together. I think as part of the comparative religions bits in YRUU I might've visited a temple before, but I couldn't remember what the customs were. I found a place to sit that was out of the way about the time that they called everyone to worship. They asked people to turn to a page in a book that I didn't have, so I ran out and got one. I was glad I did: The group of teenagers in the row ahead of me didn't and looked mostly bored. The service was sung/chanted/spoken in Hebrew, but the book had both and Hebrew and English texts in it.

Sharlene and Hannah Sarah
The service was quite unlike what I'm used to, and tolerated a fair amount of shuffling around, hugs, greetings and children running around. From what I can tell, the service was the standard morning prayers with the baby naming inserted in the middle. Some other time, I'd love to get a guided tour of what I saw so that I could understand what was happening. The whole occasion seemed so rich with tradition, but at the same time wasn't stuffy or boring.

When the service was done, I joined the group in the basement for breakfast. It was vaguely ironic that when I'm shopping, I usually look for Kosher symbols to help me tell if there's hidden dairy in things, but that breakfast consisted of largely non-vegan items (fish, eggs). I got to meet Glen and Sharlene's wonderful families and am very glad I went.

But it does feel like the attack of the baby things has truly started =)

Joey Hess: metro

I can't resist this one.. here are the metros I've used:

From b3co.com
Not shown: San Jose light rail. Cities I visited but missed the metro: Porto Alegre, Rio, Mexico City, Chicago, LA, Seattle See also: visited countries and states

Simon Richter: You've been programming for too long when...

At the moment I have a strong desire to reinvent the wheel and reuse as much of my old code for that. Because I haven't reimplemented the Factory pattern for nothing.

Ross Burton: qmail Author Considered Dangerous

Thanks to LWN I was reminded of the, erm, interesting license and security guarantee of qmail. Specifically:
In March 1997, I offered $500 to the first person to publish a verifiable security hole in the latest version of qmail: for example, a way for a user to exploit qmail to take over another account. My offer still stands. Nobody has found any security holes in qmail. [...] In May 2005, Georgi Guninski claimed that some potential 64-bit portability problems allowed a remote exploit in qmail-smtpd.'' This claim is denied. Nobody gives gigabytes of memory to each qmail-smtpd process, so there is no problem with qmail's assumption that allocated array lengths fit comfortably into 32 bits.
Erm. Well. I'm not sure what to say. Assuming that array lengths (size_t, IIRC) is a 32-bit type even on 64-bit architectures is wrong. Defending it is insanity. NP: Layered, Antibreak

Clint Adams: Scaramouche, scaramouche, will you do the moviefone

A couple of arrogant fucks once boasted to me of the coed naked T-shirts which they had commissioned for their special hobby (which is far too embarrassing for me to mention even though I do not participate in it). The gist of it was that they were mocking the stupidity of the people who wear coed naked shirts by... wearing them ironically. I tried to explain to the intelligent one of the pair that she wasn't actually mocking the people who wear coed naked shirts because it just so happened that, by virtue of the fact that she had purchased and donned a coed naked shirt of her own design, she had become one of the people who wears coed naked shirts. She didn't seem to comprehend my point. So when I sally forth into the following paragraph, in mockery of bloggers who refer to people by initial, you may wonder whether I am mocking the people who use initials or if I have just become one of those people. For example, both K. and K. are getting married this year, and they're both getting married to men named J. Is that creepy? In contrast, K., who only dates men named J. (which is definitely creepy), is not getting married this year, but you don't need to get married when you're in Europe. Get it? Okay, here we go. Y. calls me up and says, Clint, do you want to go to the opera tonight? Two questions later, I say, Sure. Is there any pre-opera dinner action? I have dinner plans, she replies haughtily, T. was interested in dinner though. Call C . about it. Don't invite C .! I had no intention of inviting either C . or C ., but I called C . C . didn't answer, so I constructed a voodoo doll and stabbed it. After some time, circumstances changed a bit, and in order to accommodate reality a bit, Y. cancelled her dinner plans, and we arranged a meeting place with T. and C . and E. Since none of us were going to end up having time for dinner, Y. said that she'd bring finger sandwiches . There was some discussion of buying wine to go with the finger sandwiches , which I thought was a little silly, and the conclusion was a bunch of vague non-committal grunts. I was surprised when three bottles of wine showed up. I was surprised by the enormity of the finger sandwiches . I was surprised to see M. at our meeting spot. Then M. got a phone call and proceeded to announce that A. was en route. There was some quibbling over whether we should all wait for A. or whether M. should wait while the rest of us got our seats. We concluded that the latter was the sanest option. I opted to wolf down one of the foot-long finger sandwiches and a healthy amount of whichever wine got opened first. A. shows up with a large bag of food. She explains that she had gone shopping at Whole Foods, and as she is still drunk from the margaritas she had started drinking at lunchtime, she had bought a bit too much food. At this point, there is no indication of her drunkenness, though she has bought numerous cheeses, loaves of bread, candies, a giant low-fat or fat-free cake-like abomination, cookies, a several-pound chunk of chocolate, and a sizeable bottle of Orangina. She drinks the Orangina as not to get any drunker, and I cringe in terror as a boor gets on stage and screams about how the fatcats in Washington are trying to purge the Earth of the performing arts and how we've all got to take action to fight that. I consider writing to my elected representatives in the Federal government, but only because the guy on stage is one of them. A. switches from Orangina to wine at M.'s coaxing. Some asshat in front of us starts waving the flag of another country for no reason we can discern. Y. starts hissing about how she needs someone to fetch her a shotgun. It takes far too long for anyone to forcibly stop the flag waver, but it happens eventually. No shotguns were involved. Now, among those not in the know, there are often rumors that A. and I have a thing going. This is because I call her fat and threaten to do possibly-unpleasant things to her breasts, and in return she calls me things I won't mention and threatens to do non-breast-related things to me, and makes obscure Lloyd Alexander references that only I understand. Those in the know, on the other hand, are aware that she cheated on her husband with M., and are somewhat irritated by this because apparently her husband is a really nice guy. I've never been allowed to meet him, so I've no idea. Anyway, we start misbehaving. E. managed to maintain decorum the entire time, but M. and A. started fondling each other and kissing and giggling, and C . started SMSing comments about how these people can't behave themselves, and T. is on IRC complaining about how people are misbehaving. A. grabbed at my cell phone in protest of our rude electronic communication, so I slapped the hell out of her. Do you want me to beat him up? M. inquired from A.'s lap. Being possessive and protective of girls with whom you wish to copulate is apparently a rather popular pastime in the white trash community, because C . had threatened to beat me up on A.'s behalf not two days before. Anyway, to her credit, she said, No, I deserved it. To show my admiration, I beaned her with a wine cork. C . had some hand sanitizer, which we entertained ourselves with while arguing about which opera La donna mobile is from. I wish the consensus had been West Side Story, but the majority opinion was for La boh me. I'll assume that the had something to do with the confusion. Against all odds, they managed to finish the opera despite us and the other miscreants, and we proceeded to leave. On the way out, M. and A. had an utterly inane discussion which would have been utterly forgettable had they not ended each sentence by calling each other baby . Thenceforth, I have addressed them both as baby , which makes them very embarrassed and quiet. Clint, A. whined, Give me your job. You're drunk, I countered. But I'm cute! A. insisted. Oh, I see. You're REALLY drunk, I observed. Meh, she mumbled, no longer on her sluttiness high. Men are dumb. M. declared that I must absolutely go see some museum exhibit I'm sure I don't care about, and A. said, No! We're going to see that! Yes, we are, M. agreed. Okay, baby, I said patronizingly, then went home with T.

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