I'm just old enough to have only discovered the internet at about the time I graduated from high school, and have been using it for about 15 years. Every once in a while though, it comes back and hits me just how cool the whole thing is. Not "yeah, neat", but a serious wow at just how amazing it is to be able to communicate with people the world over. I think the first time that happened was when I had been exploring some of the early nineties internet - gopher and the web with lynx. Which was neat, but not in the "wow" sense. Then I stumbled on to IRC somehow, and since at the time I'd already started taking Italian courses, I thought I'd see if there was an Italian channel. There was, and I think the conversation went something like this:

me: so, where are you guys? someone: Italy, and you? me: Oregon, but, no, seriously, where are you? someone: Italy! me: Seriously?!

It was a very concrete demonstration of the fact, that, thanks to this new thing, I could talk to people all over the world, for free! Of course I've grown used to this, and take for granted that I can call my parents in Oregon via Skype for free, and a lot of other cool things, but once in a while something makes me take a step back and say "cool!". Most recently, a web site I follow that I follow has had an interesting back and forth between Paul Graham and David Heinemeier Hansson, with additional comments by the likes of Paul Buchheit, which, agree or disagree with their modus operandi, is an impressive cast of characters to be able to interact with, and learn from, without moving from my perch up here in the middle of the Tyrolean Alps.

For a university seminar I m currently writing a GUI program to view fractals based on simple iterated function systems (only similaritudes allowed). It supports three different drawing algorithms and you can edit the IFS by dragging squares around on the screen. But this post is not about this program (I might present it later), but how Haskell allowed me to solve a problem very nicely:The first instances of the code had a problem that a lot of GUI programmers know: The drawing of the fractal took quite some time, and during that time the gtk main loop is blocked and the program becomes unresponsive. At first I avoided this problem by manually splitting the drawing function (e.g. by repeatedly increasing the resolution) and kept re-drawing it at higher resolutions in an idle handler, so at least I could interact whenever one resolution has finished drawing. It worked somewhat but it was not easily done for the other, not pixel based, algorithms and it was ugly.So I wanted a way to (a) pause the drawing at any convenient point, to resume it later, and (b) safely abort the drawing if what I m drawing has changed and I need to restart.A common solution to this would be to do the drawing in a separate thread, so (a) is actually not needed, but I did not know if I can safely do (b), and I have heard that threads cause problems with gtk.So I tried to dig deeper for the hidden treasures of advanced haskell programming: I need a monad transformer! I expected the infamous ContT monad transformer to help, but I couldn t figure out how, and I started to create my own monad transformer, called CoroutineT.I tried to figure out what an action of type (CoroutineT IO a) should do, and I came up with this type signature:

pausingAction :: IO (Either (CoroutineT IO a) a)

which means that after the pausingAction is done, it is Either paused (and I get back another pausingAction to run when I want it), or it is done (and I get the result). Note that I m writing IO here, but it can be any monad.The definition of the datatype and the monad instance came mostly from trying to make this type work (yay to haskell s type system, less thinking required), and looks like this:

data CoroutineT m a = CoroutineT  unCoroutineT :: (m (Either (CoroutineT m a) a))  

instance (Monad m) => Monad (CoroutineT m) where
    return v = CoroutineT (return (Right v))
    a >>= b = CoroutineT $ do
          r <- unCoroutineT a
          case r of
            Left  paused   -> return $ Left (paused >>= b)
            Right unpaused -> unCoroutineT (b unpaused)

This translates to english like this: A call to return is not paused. When an action is already paused, further actions should be run after the paused action is resumed. When an action is not paused, further actions can happen now.Like every well behaving monad transfomer, I also need a "runCoroutineT" function to start the coroutine. I probably could have used unCoroutineT directly, but for my use case (GUI drawing) I did not need a return value, so this function is more handy:

runCoroutineT :: Monad m => CoroutineT m () -> m (Maybe (CoroutineT m ()))
runCoroutineT a = either (Just) (const Nothing)  liftM  unCoroutineT a

Nothing surprising here, basically just turning the Either into a Maybe. So it becomes clear how to do (b): We can just throw away the resume action returned by runCoroutineT (if any). The more interesting thing is how we do (a): We need a pause action of type (Coroutine m ()). But how should it work? I did not really try to understand why it works, but by looking at the types, I came up with this:

pause :: Monad m => CoroutineT m ()
pause = CoroutineT (return (Left (CoroutineT (return (Right ())))))

Yes, it sounds like some dance step instructions (read the second line out aloud!), but it works somehow.So here is some example code: I have a pausable IO action that counts from one to ten, pausing after each number. I also have function that resumes an pausable action up to n times:

example n = keepGoingFor n $ do
        liftIO $ putStrLn "This is the coroutine"
        forM_ [1..10] $ \i -> do
            liftIO $ putStrLn $ "Counting to "++ show i ++" while you keep calling it"
            pause
  where --keepGoing :: Monad m => CoroutineT m () -> m ()
      keepGoingFor 0 _   = putStrLn "Here I just abort the run"
      keepGoingFor n cor = do
        resume <- runCoroutineT cor
        case resume of
            Just runAgain -> keepGoingFor (n-1) runAgain
            Nothing       -> putStrLn "Finally stopped"

And here is the output of two different runs:

*CouroutineT> example 5
This is the coroutine
Counting to 1 while you keep calling it
Counting to 2 while you keep calling it
Counting to 3 while you keep calling it
Counting to 4 while you keep calling it
Counting to 5 while you keep calling it
Here I just abort the run
*CouroutineT> example 14
This is the coroutine
Counting to 1 while you keep calling it
Counting to 2 while you keep calling it
Counting to 3 while you keep calling it
Counting to 4 while you keep calling it
Counting to 5 while you keep calling it
Counting to 6 while you keep calling it
Counting to 7 while you keep calling it
Counting to 8 while you keep calling it
Counting to 9 while you keep calling it
Counting to 10 while you keep calling it
Finally stopped

So it does really works fine, and it proved very useful in my GUI drawing problem. For that, I created this nice control structure which works like mapM_, but calls pause every n iterations, and therefore hides the pausing stuff almost completely:

pausingForM_ :: Monad m => Int -> [a] -> (a -> CoroutineT m ()) -> CoroutineT m ()
pausingForM_ period list action = pausing' 0 list
  where pausing' _ []     = return ()
        pausing' n (x:xs) = do action x
                       if n==period then pause >> pausing' 0     xs
                                    else          pausing' (n+1) xs

I have put the complete module (including instances omitted here) in the darcs repository that might later also contain the fractal drawing program.

One week ago, I went to a branch office of Servicio de Administraci n Tributaria, the government office in charge of processing taxes. This year, I plan on doing something quite bold, as my Mexican friends will acknowledge: I will prepare my (quite simple, I hope) tax declaration by myself. I do not want to be held hostage of the accountant guild - So I might end doing some fuckup which in the end costs me money or time. I hope it is not the case.
Anyway... Last week I went to this office, as I needed either a CIECF (Clave de Identificaci n Electr nica Confidencial Fortalecida - Strengthened Confidential Electronic Identification Key) or a FIEL (Firma Electr nica Avanzada - Advanced Electronic Signature). No, please don't believe it is a security token, a card with printed numbers, a one-time-pad or the sort - The CIECF is... A password. Why is it strengthened? Because it has the feature of including a question, in case you forget the key, to allow you to change it. I guess the FIEL is a more reliable device, but I prefer not to even request it.
And as far as the questions go, the emergency questions for CIECF suck. First, I was not even asked the meta-question - I was not told why this information was needed. So imagine the clerk saying: Full name? ... Date of birth? ... RFC (Tax ID)? ... Favorite color? I was there just... Stunned. Why do you need it? Oh, just in case you forget your password. Ok... Don't you have any other questions which I am not prone to answer a different thing, and that are not dead obvious for a casual passer-by? (I guess that at least 1/4 of the public will say blue. Feel like brute-forcing SAT to its knees?) Other questions include your fathers' second family name, your favorite soccer team, your pet's name... It seems they took the first "security dos and don'ts" book off the wall, and started reading backwards.
But anyway, that's the system, and I must play nice with it. So I get back home, and decide to start hacking up my declaration. No, Mr. Policeman, I'm not saying I would try to break into the SAT - I just say it is a complex and non-obvious task to do. Now please release me. Thanks.
And I enter the system. Of course, I tried first with Iceweasel, knowing it would fail (it is documented: MSIE 5.5 recommended). I tried again with Konqueror. I tried, sigh, with MSIE from inside Wine. No luck. Well, even from within qemu's Windows 2000. Wrong password. WTF?! Stranger: It worked with SAT's My portal, although it didn't with the declaration, which is what matters now.
I cannot take the time every day to come to the SAT and move my data - It was a full week until I came back again. I insisted on fully logging in to the system, to be sure the password I entered this time was right. As well as my ber-secret safety question, of course.
And it failed.
Twice.
Until the clerk noticed something strange in the way I typed...
Sir, excuse me..., he muttered, why are you typing such a long password? Well, basically because I value my tax declaration, and I know brute force is a powerful force. (explain it, of course, in simple terms) Oh... No, the password must be eight characters long.
No wonder.
So I entered the first eight characters of my password, which was a true work of prose for their standards, at around 20 characters. And it worked.
Now, for bonus points: What do we gather from the fact that the long password works fine in one system, but in another system it only the short version? Why, but of course! I guess the passwords for every economically active Mexican is stored in their master database in plain text. Isn't it just beautiful?
Anyway, it seems I have a lot of work to do. If all goes as planned, maybe next year I will be for hire as a public accountant? Hmh, does not sound too much like fun, does it?

Meike wonders about Open Source Census and their 45 MB tarball (and several other strange things). The good news is: There is a 270KB ruby thingy which seems to do the same, and even while marked as Expert User Only it seems to run just fine... I think; I lost patience after it scanned my /home for 6 minutes, and I didn't found a possibility to tell it not to scan my /home (which I don't wont him to scan) or /srv (which just contains a lot of files where it won't find anything usefull). BTW: While we are at complaining at them: Please make the system so, that I don't need to register to send you my data. Thanks.

I recently read about the Open Source Census and thought it would be a nice thing to also put my vote in and make sure my operating system of choice was properly represented (currently it doesn't seem to be). After creating an account there, downloading a 45M tgz including among other things a complete java runtime environment, starting the scan tool that takes neither a -h nor a --help parameter and watching it hog 70% CPU for over 20 minutes I lost patience and killed the script. Somehow this whole thing is not exactly inspiring confidence and I start getting an idea why there are currently (Thu Apr 24 12:47:57 CEST 2008) only 53 Debian users who submitted their data. Although it's a pity Debian is (and will probably continue to be) so underrepresented there, I can't say I blame anyone for not taking part.

How to not start a service by default Use case: in my laptop, I sometimes need MySQL, PostgreSQL or Apache in order to test some software that I'm developing, but I do not want them on all the time. The solution is: rm /etc/rc*.d/S*mysql* (thanks to Wouter) update-rc.d will not touch your symlinks as long as there is at least one still around for a package. Also, this leaves the stop symlinks around, so that when I start one of these services for development, it will still be properly stopped on shutdown.

First off, several different people blogged about ubuntu being sexy because of this phallic splash screen: Later on, as noticed on this very blog, ubuntu started working on the release, “Ubuntu Goatse”. And now finally, “Ubuntu Hardon” has been released. I wonder where they will head next. But good luck. Comments have been hard

Brian Aker dropped by and replied to my previous essay by making the following comment:

I believe you are hitting the nail on the organic vs nonorganic open source. I do not believe we have a model for going from one to the other. Linux and Apache both have very different models for contribution but I don t believe either are really optimized at this point. Optimization to me would lead to a system of less priests and more inclusion.

I made an initial reply as comment, and then decided it was so long that I should promote it to a top-level post. I assume that when Brian talks about “organic open source” what he means is what I was calling an “open source development community”. Some googling turned up the following definition from Mozilla Firefox’s organic software page: “Our most well-known product, Firefox, is created by an international movement of thousands, only a small percentage of whom are actual employees.” This puts it in contrast with “non-organic” software, where all or nearly all of the developers are employed by one company. (And anyone who proves talented at adding features to that source base soon gets a job offer by that one company. By that definition we can certainly see projects like Wine, Mysql, Ghostscript (at one time), and others as fitting into that model, and being quite successful. There’s nothing really wrong with the non-organic software model, although many of them have struggled to make enough money when competing with pure proprietary softare competitors, with MySQL perhaps being the exception which proves the rule. In most of these cases, though, the project started more as an organic open source, and then transitioned into the non-organic model when there was a desire to monetize the project and/or when the open source programmers decided that it would be nice if they could turn their avocation into a vocation, and let their hobby put food on the family table. Solaris, of course, is doing something else quite different, though. They are trying to make the transition from a proprietary customer/supplier relationship to trying to develop an Open Source community and what John s candidate statement pointed out is that they weren t really interested in creating an organic open source developer community at all, but they wanted the fruits of an open source community with plenty of application developers, end-users, etc., all participating in that community. We don t have a lot of precedent for projects who try to go in this direction, but I suspect they are skipping a step when they try to go to the end step without bothering to try to make themselves open to outside developers. And by continuing to act like a corporation, they end up shooting themselves in the foot. For example, the OpenSolaris license still prohibits people from publishing benchmarks or comparisons with other operating systems. Very common in closed-source operating systems and databases, but it discourages people from even trying to make things better, both within and outside of the Open Solaris core team. Instead, they respond to posts like David Miller s with Have you ever kissed a girl? . (Thanks, Simon, for that quote; I had seen it before, but not for a while, and it pretty well sums up the sheer arrogance of the Open Solaris development team.) So while Linux may not be completely optimized in terms of less priests and more inclusion, at least over 1200 developers contributed to 2.6.25 during its development cycle. Compared to that, Open Solaris is positively dominated by high priests and with a you may not touch the holy-of-holies attitude; heck, they won t even allow you to compare them to other religions without branding you a heretic and suing you for licensing violations!

Brian Aker dropped by and replied to my previous essay by making the following comment:

I believe you are hitting the nail on the organic vs nonorganic open source. I do not believe we have a model for going from one to the other. Linux and Apache both have very different models for contribution but I don t believe either are really optimized at this point. Optimization to me would lead to a system of less priests and more inclusion.

I made an initial reply as comment, and then decided it was so long that I should promote it to a top-level post. I assume that when Brian talks about “organic open source” what he means is what I was calling an “open source development community”. Some googling turned up the following definition from Mozilla Firefox’s organic software page: “Our most well-known product, Firefox, is created by an international movement of thousands, only a small percentage of whom are actual employees.” This puts it in contrast with “non-organic” software, where all or nearly all of the developers are employed by one company. (And anyone who proves talented at adding features to that source base soon gets a job offer by that one company. By that definition we can certainly see projects like Wine, Mysql, Ghostscript (at one time), and others as fitting into that model, and being quite successful. There’s nothing really wrong with the non-organic software model, although many of them have struggled to make enough money when competing with pure proprietary softare competitors, with MySQL perhaps being the exception which proves the rule. In most of these cases, though, the project started more as an organic open source, and then transitioned into the non-organic model when there was a desire to monetize the project and/or when the open source programmers decided that it would be nice if they could turn their avocation into a vocation, and let their hobby put food on the family table. Solaris, of course, is doing something else quite different, though. They are trying to make the transition from a proprietary customer/supplier relationship to trying to develop an Open Source community and what John s candidate statement pointed out is that they weren t really interested in creating an organic open source developer community at all, but they wanted the fruits of an open source community with plenty of application developers, end-users, etc., all participating in that community. We don t have a lot of precedent for projects who try to go in this direction, but I suspect they are skipping a step when they try to go to the end step without bothering to try to make themselves open to outside developers. And by continuing to act like a corporation, they end up shooting themselves in the foot. For example, the OpenSolaris license still prohibits people from publishing benchmarks or comparisons with other operating systems. Very common in closed-source operating systems and databases, but it discourages people from even trying to make things better, both within and outside of the Open Solaris core team. Instead, they respond to posts like David Miller s with Have you ever kissed a girl? . (Thanks, Simon, for that quote; I had seen it before, but not for a while, and it pretty well sums up the sheer arrogance of the Open Solaris development team.) So while Linux may not be completely optimized in terms of less priests and more inclusion, at least over 1200 developers contributed to 2.6.25 during its development cycle. Compared to that, Open Solaris is positively dominated by high priests and with a you may not touch the holy-of-holies attitude; heck, they won t even allow you to compare them to other religions without branding you a heretic and suing you for licensing violations!

Previously, my journal was managed by Movable Type. Originally, Six Apart seemed like a cool company, but I should have known better than to trust anything that wasn't open source. They started screwing with the license, it was never packaged properly, and then of course it became far too painful to upgrade. I've been wanting to fix this for some time, and have occasionally poked at other blog software. Serendipity looked like a winner for a while, but then I spent two days fighting with it and while I got it to mostly look like what I want, that was demoralizing. I hate spending large quantities of time fighting with someone else's software to get it to do what I want, particularly when I then have to write plugins and additions to get what feels to me like basic functionality. It would be one thing if I had time and inclination to get involved as a developer, but usually what Web 2.0 software developers want to pursue and what I care about are almost entirely at odds. During my recent vacation, I finally realized that I just wanted something that used all the infrastructure I already have. I have a macro language that I like for generating web pages, I have a page design that I like; the journal one isn't bad, but it doesn't match. I don't care about nearly all of the features of blog software. I could use something that's much better-designed (and free software) like ikiwiki, but I don't particularly like wikis either. (That's another story that I should write up sometime.) I really just wanted something that works like my book reviews work and lets me maintain the whole thing in spin. So I just gave up and wrote it. It probably took me more time than it would take to beat some piece of blog software into submission, but now it's done, I know how it works, it knows what I want to do, and I don't have to fight with it again with every upgrade. So this is my first post with my new journal software, with an RSS feed generated by my own code. There will probably be bugs for a while to iron out, but it will also make it far easier for me to maintain multiple RSS feeds with different topics, post reviews to my journal even more automatically, and add automatic posting for other things. The main loss is comments. With this system, my entire web site can be static, which I love. But that means no comment scripts. Since almost no one was commenting on my journal anyway (as opposed to mailing me or discussing posts elsewhere), I think I'm okay with that. Eventually I may mirror my journal somewhere else where there are comments. All of the old posts have been converted over, including old comments. Old reviews with no comments have become redirects to the permanent review pages. Let me know if you see anything weird.

A few news from the campaign of NMU's targeted at bringing po-debconf translation ratio as high as possible for as many languages as possible (and also improve packaging quality quite significantly on many loosely maintained packages).

• Galician translation are going up quickly. Each NMU features updates by Jacobo Tarrio and Galician is now ranked 10th in the translation ratio list. They could even hit the Spanish (Castillian) translation ratio and become the most translated language from Spain..:-)
• Finnish follows the same way. Starting from quite low, Esko Araj rvi bringed it to 13th rank and now above 50%
• Russian is also going up quite fast and could at least reach 70 or even 80%
• Portuguese (non Brazilian) hit the 90% mark and heads up to 100%
• German is very likely to be bringed to 100%. Crossed 97% today.
• French will be bringed to 100%, as it was for Etch. Close to 99% now.

Maintainers are incredibly cooperative (at least those who are active..:-)). l10n NMUs are always welcomed. Some prefer uploading themselves which is of course perfectly OK. I will now also focus my efforts to minimize uncoordinated changes to debconf templates. Those are generally motivated by the will to follow writing style guidelines, which is perfectly OK. I however still suggest maintainers to send call for translation updates *before* uploading packages with modified templates. Will probably soon post that suggestion to -release.

I've implemented last night's design, in debhelper 7.0.0. Currently fully supported are packages that use the autotools, or perl's MakeMaker, or python setup.py, or a simple Makefile. The other classes of packages will be added as bugs are filed about them. I've uploaded a few of my own packages converted to use debhelper 7 with minimised rules files, so there are a range of examples in incoming:

• mr uses a very simple makefile, and a 3 line debian/rules
• aalib uses automake and autoconf, and is a library package of average complexity. The rules file is minimised where possible using dh, but still does complex things in its build and install targets. It's also a good example of how to set up a -dbg package when using dh, and of how to set up /usr/share/doc symlinks between packages when using dh.
• libaudio-mpd-perl is an example of a perl module package using dh. It shows how to override dh default behavior in two ways: Skipping running dh_auto_test, and passing a changelog filename to dh_installchangelogs.

Early adopters, have at it!

Thanks to Richard Jones, from Red Hat, i have been able to be enough motivated to start thinking to do a new release. Richard provide me with a patch which help to get rid of ocaml-ast-analyze and replace it using camlp4 from OCaml 3.10.1. I spent the last week removing problems concerning the merge action of "ocaml-gettext" executable and reworking the build system to get something cleaner. I will spend a few more days to get rid of camlidl and try to see if there is a simple solution to handle UTF-8 in PO file. Probable release date: 2008/04/27....

Nokia will be funding Codethink in the development of a replacement for AT-SPI based on D-Bus. The aim will be to make a cross-desktop accessibility framework that can be used by both Qt/KDE and GTK+/GNOME applications and other applications that currently make use of ATK. Mark Doffman will be heading up the work and is collaborating with Mike Gorse at Novell who has already started working on this, thanks to Novell’s UIA effort. The main architectural aims will be to cut drastically the amount of of IPC used and generally be lighter than AT-SPI is at the moment. We’ll be working to support both ATK and QAccessible. I’ve applied for a project on freedesktop.org to house this, so when those are up and running that’ll be the main place for discussion. In the meantime, feel free to ask questions on the accessibility-atspi mailing list at the linux foundation or for IRC, #a11y on GIMPNet. Thanks for this goes to Nokia and all in the accessibility community that have supported us in making this happen! Update:
I should also note we will also have a very strong focus on supporting automated testing tools, so anyone out there working in that area is more then welcome to join in and tell us what needs fixing with AT-SPI.

simple case Imagine a very simple debian/rules, that should work for most packages w/o modification:

#!/usr/bin/make -f
build:
    dh build
clean:
    dh clean
binary-arch:
    dh binary-arch
binary-indep:
    dh binary-indep
binary: build binary-arch binary-indep

absurdly simple case

AKA debian/rules zen guru level.
#!/usr/bin/make -f
%:
    dh %@

the complex cases Often you'll want to handle configuring by hand. (And maybe, run automake too.)

build:
    dh build --before configure
    #aclocal
    #autoheader
    #automake --add-missing
    #autoconf
    ./configure --kitchen-sink=yes
    dh build --after configure

Here's how to skip two steps in a row (configure and build):

build:
    dh build --before configure
    ./mondoconfig
    make universe-explode-in-delight GROOVINESS=420
    dh build --after build

Another common case is wanting to run some code manually after a particular debhelper command is run.

binary: build
    dh binary --until dh_fixperms
    # dh_fixperms has run, now override it for one program
    chmod 4755 debian/foo/usr/bin/foo
    # and continue
    dh binary

Suppose you hate dh_strip, and just don't want it to run. (This might be a contrived example; if people frequently don't want to run a few commands in a set, it may be better to have -X exclude them.)

binary: build
    dh binary --before dh_strip
    dh binary --after dh_strip

Maybe you want to run a command out of order. This should be no problem:

binary: build
    dh binary --until dh_fixperms
    dh_install foo usr/bin
    dh binary --after dh_fixperms

A separate install target can be added if you like. And maybe you want to run make install by hand in it. (This is tricky because dh binary needs to avoid running dh_auto_install which was skipped over in the install target.)

install: build
    dh install --before install
    $(MAKE) install PREFIX=debian/tmp
    dh install --after install
binary: install
    dh binary

Once you have an install target, you can do this to run some commands manually after the install target runs, and before the remaining steps are run to build a binary.

binary: install
    dh_strip -X foo
    dh_fixperms -X bar
    dh binary --remaining

If the --remaining was left off, dh binary would only run commands in its list after dh_fixperms. With --remaining, it runs commands that haven't run before, avoiding running dh_strip and dh_fixperms again. A more elaborate way to do the same thing, without needing a separate install target is this.

binary: build
    dh binary --before dh_strip
    dh_strip -X foo
    dh binary --after dh_strip --before dh_fixperms
    dh_fixperms -X bar
    dh binary --after dh_fixperms

the dh_auto_* commands dh_auto_* are thin wrappers, with enough intelligence to handle 90% of cases (autofoo, perl/python packages, etc) automatically. These will rarely be run by hand, instead if they don't do what is needed, they can just be skipped.

• dh_auto_configure: Figures out how to run autofoo, ./configure, Makefile.PL, or whatever.
• dh_auto_build: runs make
• dh_auto_test: runs make test or the like (may have a config file specifying if test failures should fail the build).
• dh_auto_clean: runs "make clean" etc
• dh_auto_install: runs "make install" or similar

the dh command dh runs a set of other debhelper commands in order (and prints their names as it does so). The set that it runs is determined by its parameter. The sets of commands are:

• build: dh_auto_configure, dh_auto_build, dh_auto_test
• clean: dh_testdir, dh_testroot(?), dh_auto_clean, and finally dh_clean.
• install: Everything in the build list, plus dh_installdirs, dh_install, dh_auto_install (and probably dh_install* too)
• binary: Everything in the install list, and all debhelper commands used in binary targets.
• binary-arch: Like binary, but runs commands with -s.
• binary-indep: Like binary, but does not run dhstrip or dhshlibdeps or dh_makeshlibs, and runs commands with -i.

Possibly dh does smart optimisations to avoid running lesser-used commands if they will do nothing. (Or not.) Each debhelper command will record when it's successfully run in debian/package.log.debhelper. (Which dh_clean deletes.) So dh can tell which commands have already been run, for which packages, and skip those. Options passed to dh are passed on to each command it runs, which is useful for common options like -v, -X, and the like. For that matter, you can use it for uncommon options as well, since commands will ignore options that don't apply to them. dh has a few options of its own:

• --until cmd: Run commands until and including cmd, then stop.
• --before cmd: Run commands before cmd, then stop.
• --after cmd: Run commands that are listed after cmd.
• --remaining: Run all listed commands that have yet to be run.

cmd can be a full name of a debhelper command, or a substring. It'll first search for a command exactly matching the name, to avoid any ambiguity. For example, "--before dh_installdeb" does not refer to dh_installdebconf. Otoh, "--before build" is much easier to type, and clearer, than "--before dhautobuild". If there are multiple substring matches, the last in the command list is taken. So "--before install" stops before dh_auto_install, and not before the earlier dh_install. Each time dh is run, it examines the log, and finds the last logged command that is in its list of commands to run. It then continues with the following command in its list. (Or the one after --after, if that was specified. Or if --remaining was specified, start at the first command in the list that is not in the log.) So... If you run debian/rules build twice, and it just has "dh build" in it, the second run will be a no-op. The same as if the build target touched a build-stamp. This is generally considered a feature, so I'll consider it a feature in dh too. (To force a rebuild, run dh_clean to remove the log.) If you run debian/rules binary, and a build hasn't happened yet, it will run the build steps first. Even if the rules file is a bit lame (or over-golfed), and doesn't have the binary target explicitly depend on the build target. Ditto for the install target. If a rules file runs a command out of order, it'll need to use --after to get dh back on track. If you manually run a debhelper command at the command line, running debian/rules binary will skip forward until after that command. Similarly, if debian/rules binary is interrupted (or fails), running it again will resume after the last debhelper command run. This is a bit of a behavior change, and could be considered a bug, but is easy enough to work around by running debian/rules clean binary. (Or by manually deleting the log.)

Steven Hanley was pondering how to keep /var/cache/apt/archives empty on the mirror that I help administer. This sounds vaguely similar to mounting the /usr filesystem read-write at the start of an APT run and read-only again at the end. (A practice I used to believe in, but due to various package upgrades making /usr busy for no good reason, and it artificially inflating the maximal mount-count and prematurely causing a fsck at boot, I've discontinued) So, putting

DPkg::Post-Invoke   "apt-get clean";  ;

in /etc/apt/apt.conf (or in a file in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d) ought to do the trick.

It has been some time since I ve blogged about Subversion and how I was finding it useful. I ve been using subversion and svk since about that time and I love it. Svk is really great and although it is more an off-line version control than a distributed one, it goes a long way for a former cvs user like myself. Lately, I ve been considering git (isn t everyone?). It was not until I moved to my own hosting (thus having to maintain two subversion trees: the new one and my company s old one) that the whole having a central repository started bothering me. Merging became complex, since now I have two central repositories, and while svk makes it a lot simpler (I just keep a mirror of the two repositories and use svk to merge between them), I began to realize that there should be a better way I ve watched (again) Linus git lecture at Google Tech Talks and decided I was going to try it. First thing that called my attention was how easy it is to share a repository: just copy the .git directory somewhere public (an http server, for instance), and there you have it. This is much easier than configuring modules for apache, or configuring svnserve (and I ve done that a lot in the past 3 years!). For the subversion-only user (one that has never used svk), the carry-all-the-repository-with-you thing may sound strange, but with svk, I was used to mirror the repository, so that s not an important change to me. I could not compare space utilization (and git is advertised for being more space-efficient) yet, but so far the git repositories seems to be a little smaller. I already found it easy to branch using svk (in fact, I used to do that a lot), but git branching is really a plus! You can switch back and forth inside the same working copy (actually I don t think it s correct to call that a working copy) and merging is rocket-fast! Maybe if svk could easily merge between two distinct users without requiring a subversion repository (think about the defunct svl), I would not have been trying git, but One thing that is really missing is the partial checkout. Actually I liked very much that svn/svk feature , and the clean and natural way which they treat directories and files. I understand git is designed with other priorities in mind, but, right now, that feels like missing to me. Maybe it s just a svn/svk habit. All in all, I found git very interesting I am not ready to switch from svn/svk yet, but I ll try git in small new projects and see if I can get used to it.

...

Leaving aside the obvious failure (asking women to classify themselves into those who are happy to have their breasts groped and those who aren't - and yes, that is the effective choice, since refusing to participate will result in people making conclusions about which of those categories you fit into), there's the whole "open-source breast" thing.

Creating copyrightable works is a choice. Having breasts is not[1]. Attempting to equate the two is not reasonable. Applying "open-source" to things that are not directly comparable to copyrightable works is like applying "Darwinism" to things that are not directly comparable to natural selection operating upon living things. Discussing Darwinistic politics is likely to result in people concluding that you're either a libertarian fuckloon or blame atheists for the death of your cat. Discussing open-source breasts is likely to result in me stabbing you in the fucking eye. Don't make the baby Jesus cry when he sees your horribly mutilated face. Just accept that open source is a useful licensing model, not an entire way of life.

Or: get your hands off my adjective or you'll find my hands on things you really don't want groping, whether you're wearing a badge or not.

(And yes, I realise that this is not the offensive aspect of things. This says it better than I could)

(Previously)

(Previously previously)

[1] There's a set of basically uninteresting exceptions. And by "uninteresting" I mean "If you are trying to argue over this, then you are missing the fucking point"

I originally had the idea for a list to keep track of stuff that doesn't work with Linux something like 12 years ago. I built an initial version, that proved reasonably popular at the time, but then the place it was hosted had some problems, and I was busy with other things. I finally got around to building a new version four or five years ago, and it's been doing ok since then, but with a baby on the way, I've been thinking of things to get rid of, and this is not something I do active work on, so maybe it would be best to find a new home for the site, located at http://www.leenooks.com. Here's the catch:

• Whoever gets it has to promise to maintain it as essentially what it is today - you have to continue to provide information about hardware that does not function with Linux, or only functions with proprietary drivers.
• It does generate some money, that I put towards the server where it's hosted. I wouldn't mind selling it for something, which will hopefully encourage only those truly interested to apply. It could probably generate more money if it were plastered with a bunch of ugly ads, or, hopefully, if more time and effort were put into it than I have at the moment.

It currently runs on my own server, and uses DedaWiki, an open source, Rails-based Wiki, as well as PostgreSQL. You would have to relocate it to your own server. So, if you're interested, contact me: davidw@dedasys.com. If I don't find the right person, no worries; I'll keep maintaining it for a while yet.