Search Results: "ed"

17 April 2013

Joey Hess: Template Haskell on impossible architectures

Imagine you had an excellent successful Kickstarter campaign, and during it a lot of people asked for an Android port to be made of the software. Which is written in Haskell. No problem, you'd think -- the user interface can be written as a local webapp, which will be nicely platform agnostic and so make it easy to port. Also, it's easy to promise a lot of stuff during a Kickstarter campaign. Keeps the graph going up. What could go wrong? So, rather later you realize there is no Haskell compiler for Android. At all. But surely there will be eventually. And so you go off and build the webapp. Since Yesod seems to be the pinnacle of type-safe Haskell web frameworks, you use it. Hmm, there's this Template Haskell stuff that it uses a lot, but it only makes compiles a little slow, and the result is cool, so why not. Then, about half-way through the project, it seems time to get around to this Android port. And, amazingly, a Haskell compiler for Android has appeared in the meantime. Like the Haskell community has your back. (Which they generally seem to.) It's early days and rough, lots of libraries need to be hacked to work, but it only takes around 2 weeks to get a port of your program that basically works. But, no webapp. Cause nobody seems to know how to make a cross-compiling Haskell compiler do Template Haskell. (Even building a fully native compiler on Android doesn't do the trick. Perhaps you missed something though.) At this point you can give up and write a separate Android UI (perhaps using these new Android JNI bindings for Haskell that have also appeared in the meantime). Or you can procrastinate for a while, and mull it over; consider rewriting the webapp to not use Yesod but some other framework that doesn't need Template Haskell. Eventually you might think this: If I run ghc -ddump-splices when I'm building my Yesod code, I can see all the thousands of lines of delicious machine generated Haskell code. I just have to paste that in, in place of the Template Haskell that generated it, and I'll get a program I can build on Android! What could go wrong? And you even try it, and yeah, it seems to work. For small amounts of code that you paste in and carefully modify and get working. Not a whole big, constantly improving webapp where every single line of html gets converted to types and lambdas that are somehow screamingly fast. So then, let's automate this pasting. And so the EvilSplicer is born! That's a fairly general-purpose Template Haskell splicer. First do a native build with -ddump-splices output redirected to a log file. Run the EvilSplicer to fix up the code. Then run an Android cross-compile. But oh, the caveats. There are so many ways this can go wrong..

The first and most annoying problem you'll encounter is that often Template Haskell splices refer to hidden symbols that are not exported from the modules that define the splices. This lets the splices use those symbols, but prevents them being used in your code. This does not seem like a good part of the Template Haskell design, to be honest. It would be better if it required all symbols used in splices to be exported. But it can be worked around. Just use trial and error to find every Haskell library that does this, and then modify them to export all the symbols they use. And after each one, rebuild all libraries that depend on it. You're very unlikely to end up with more than 9 thousand lines of patches. Because that's all it took me..
The next problem (and the next one, and the next ...) is that while GHC's code output by -dump-splices (and indeed, by GHC error messages, etc) looks like valid Haskell code to the casual viewer, it's often not. To start with, it often has symbols qualified with the package and module name. ghc-prim:GHC.Types.: does not work well where code originally contained :. And then there's fun with multi-line strings, which sometimes cannot be parsed back in by GHC in the form it outputs them. And then there's the strange way GHC outputs case expressions, which is not valid Haskell at all. (It's missing some semicolons.) Oh, and there's the lambda expressions that GHC outputs with insufficient parentheses, leading to type errors at compile time. And so much more fun. Enough fun to give one the idea that this GHC output has never really been treated as code that could be run again. Because that would be a dumb thing to need to do.
Just to keep things interesting, the Haskell libraries used by your native GHC and your Android GHC need to be pretty much identical versions. Maybe a little wiggle room, but any version skew could cause unwanted results. Probably, most of the time, unwanted results in the form of a 3 screen long type error message. (My longest GHC error message seen on this odyessy was actually a full 500+ kilobytes in size. It included the complete text of Jquery and Bootstrap. At times like these you notice that GHC outputs its error messages o.n.e . c.h.a.r.a.c.t.e.r . a.t . a . t.i.m.e.)

Anyway, if you struggle with it, or pay me vast quantities of money, your program will, eventually, link. And that's all I can promise for now.

PS, I hope nobody will ever find this blog post useful in their work. PPS, Also, if you let this put you off Haskell in any way .. well, don't. You just might want to wait a year or so before doing Haskell on Android.

16 April 2013

Aigars Mahinovs: na 6 internets

na ir slavena ne tikai ar savu akmens m ri valsts zieme os, bat ar ar Di o nas Ugunsm ri apk rt visam s valsts Internetam, kas blo visu p c k rtas un iebremzina visu p r jo. Man pirm person g saskarsme ar o pakalpojumu notika jau anhajas lidost , kad tri vien izr d j s, ka valst blo ts ir ne tikai Facebook, bet ar Twitter, kas iev rojami apgr tin ja manas iesp jas tri un viegli apzi ot visus, ka es esmu v l joproj m esmu dz vs un vesels. P c p ris eksperimentiem izr d j s, ka, lai ar no telefona nav pieejama Google+ m jas lapa un nav lejupl d jama Google+ (un WhatsApp) programma uz Android, tom r, ja t s jau ir telefon , ie abi servisi turpina no telefona str d t. T p c es s ku rakst t ce ojuma piez mes Google+ un da as dienas p c ce ojuma s kuma man pat izdev s nokonfigur t If This Then That servisu, lai tas pa em manus Google+ ierakstus un uztaisa no tiem Twitter ierakstus (kas jau t l k pa citiem kan liem izplat s uz Facebook un Draugiem un ar par d s k ned as kopsavilkums aj blog ). Google+ ir savi plusi, bet ar savi m nusi. Galvenais m nuss, ko es aj ce ojum paman ju ir tas, ka Google+ Android aplik cij nav iesp jams sagatavot vair kus ierakstu melnrakstus (v lams katru ar savu geolok ciju) bez Interneta var rakst t tikai vienu ierakstu un t ieraksta GPS koordin tes b s t s kur viet p c tam Internets par d sies. Es jau uzrakst ju Googlei par o probl mu. Galvenais pluss Google plusam (no pun intended) ir Instant Upload ja bild t fotogr fijas ar Android telefonu, s fotogr fijas autom tiski tiks aug upiel d tas un par d sies jaun ieraksta izveides interfeis , kur t s var pievienot ierakstam ar vienu klik i bez jebk das gaid anas. Diem l tas nestr d ar norm laj m kamer m. Pagaid m

Ta u es neb tu sts datori is, ja es nepam in tu uzlaust vai apiet o nelielo nas probl mu, ne?

Visvienk r akais veids k apiet nas Lielo Ugunsm ru ir izmantot jebk du VPN, kas at auj ne tikai piek t VPN t kla resursiem, bet ar at auj laist visu trafiku caur o VPN savienojumu. dus VPN piesl gumus var nopirkt, vai (ja ir Linux serveris vai routeris rpus nas) izveidot pa am. Man gad jum tas bija ar vienu klik i iesl gts OpenVPN uz Fonera routera, kas st v man s m j s. Diem l na ir sav da. Blo to lapu, portu un protokolu saraksts main s gan da dos rajonos, gan ar atkar b no t vai Internets ir mob lais vai wifi vai ar piesl gumu, gan ar vienk r i no dienas dien . Liel da gad jumu blo to lietu sarakst iekr t ar VPN savienojumi. Bie i vien ar priv tie. Man kaut k ne iet, ka mana m jas IP adrese ir nas ugunsm ra sarakstos, ta u da reiz ar tam VPN pievienoties es nevar ju. Un t d s situ cij s, lai apskat tu k du YouTube video, atliek tikai viens, eni ls risin jums sshuttle! is eni lais r ks izveido ko l dz gu VPN savienojumam caur parasto SSH portu un protokolu. Uz lok l s ma nas ir nepiecie ams Python un root ties bas, bet uz servera ir vajadz gas tikai ties bas palaist Python programmas. sshuttle pats aizs ta sevi uz serveri un palai s tur, pat ie ifr un p rs ta visus savienojumus un ar DNS piepras jumus, ja vi am to paprasa. Var p rs t t konkr tus t klus vai visu trafiku. Un trums man pieredz tas ir bija pat tr ks par parasto VPN. Kopum Interneta blok de un t visp r gais l nums ir viens oti spec gs m nuss nai. Aizskrienot mazliet uz priek u st st jum pateik u, ka Hong Kong das probl mas nav tur Internets ir lielisks! L k t ds t zeris san ca

Wouter Verhelst: The devops "installer"

puppet and similar things are very nice tools for managing your systems. Rather than doing the same thing 100 times, it's much more interesting to spend some time describing how to do something, and then have it done hundreds of times automatically. However, I'm starting to see a distressing trend lately. I'd like to say that puppet is not an installer, nor is it a replacement for one. Here's why:

By giving me a script that calls puppet to install your software from the interwebz, you're making it very hard for me to install your software in case I'm running behind a paranoid firewall that I don't have access to.
By giving me a script that calls puppet to install your software, and sets up things so it will try to run puppet agent against your server (presumably to keep my installation up-to-date), you're making it much more difficult for me to manage that system as part of my larger network, which is already being managed with puppet.

Please, pretty please, with sugar on top: just provide packages. If that can't be done, just provide clear installation instructions and/or a puppet module that I can include or something. Don't assume I'm a system administrator not worth his paycheck. Thanks. note: the gitorious example above is just that, an example. I've seen more cases of people doing similar things, not just gitorious. Surprisingly, it's mostly from people who're on the ruby kool-aid. I hope that's not related... Update: (2013-04-18) despite my usage of buzzwords in the title of this post, I did not mean to imply that any of the above has anything to do with devops. Instead, what the post is supposed to say is that you should not fall into the trap of believing that devops methods, which may work wonderfully internal to your organization, will therefore also work wonderfully for processes outside your organization.

Michal Čihař: Weblate 1.5

Weblate 1.5 has been released today. It comes with lot of improvements, especially in performance, reporting and support for machine translations. Full list of changes for 1.5:

Please check manual for upgrade instructions.
Added public user pages.
Better naming of plural forms.
Added support for TBX export of glossary.
Added support for Bitbucket notifications.
Activity charts are now available for each translation, language or user.
Extended options of import_project admin command.
Compatible with Django 1.5.
Avatars are now shown using libravatar.
Added possibility to pretty print JSON export.
Various performance improvements.
Indicate failing checks or fuzzy strings in progress bars for projects or languages as well.
Added support for custom pre-commit hooks and commiting additional files.
Rewritten search for better performance and user experience.
New interface for machine translations.
Added support for monolingual po files.
Extend amount of cached metadata to improve speed of various searches.
Now shows word counts as well.

You can find more information about Weblate on it's website, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Ready to run appliances will be soon available in SUSE Studio Gallery. Weblate is also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others. If you are free software project which would like to use Weblate, I'm happy to help you with set up or even host Weblate for you.

Filed under: English Phpmyadmin Suse Weblate 0 comments Flattr this!

Stefano Zacchiroli: bits from the DPL for March-April 2013

Dear Project Members,

   "Now that I have your attention, I would like to make the following
delegations:"

... nah, scrap that. In my last day in office I first of all owe you a report of DPL activities for the last reporting period of this term, i.e. March 8th until today. Here it is! Highlights

At LibrePlanet (see below) I've discussed at length with Karen Sandler as GNOME representative the possibility of Debian participation in the FOSS Outreach Program for Women. I've then proposed that we do participate and, as you might have read on d-d-a, we're now doing that. Many thanks to the volunteer co-organizers for Debian participation in the program: M nica Ram rez Arceda, Ana Guerrero L pez, and Patty Langasek.
A couple of years of work with the auditors has come together. At elgar.debian.org:/srv/accounting.debian.org/ledger/ you can now find Debian monetary transactions for the 2010-2013 period. Note that: 1) They are not all of our transactions, most notably because we haven't yet managed to get access to all our bank transactions at SPI (while we do have access to other transactions there, e.g. donations). Given the relevance of the missing transactions for our budget, this is a blocker for producing meaningful public periodic reports of Debian finances. This is clearly annoying, but I'm confident that our feedback to SPI over the past years has helped them better understand our needs and improve. I hope this could be finally solved during the next DPL term. And, 2) Donor names have been anonymized in the ledger files, in wait of a donation system that allow to express privacy preferences. Complete donation information is available in the companion ledger.git repository, which is accessible to auditors only. I'd like to thank the Debian auditors, and in particular Martin Michlmayr, for their amazing work on this over the past 3 years.
As you might have noticed, we now have an official Debian Project blog, finally entering the brave new Web 1.5 era I've only helped "politically" here and there with this over the years, and I'm happy to see it live. Your thanks for this should go to the blog editors---Francesca Ciceri and Ana Guerrero Lopez---and to DSA for making it real. A proper delegation for the editors is pending and I'm confident the next DPL will pick it up.

Talks Over the past month or so I've attended and spoken on behalf of Debian in the following occasions:

"Debian: 20 years and counting" talk at the New York Linux User Group; slides are available. Many thanks to Brian Gupta and Tom Limoncelli for inviting me.
"Debian and GNU" talk at LibrePlanet 2013; slides are available. Many thanks to John Sullivan and the Free Software Foundation for inviting me to talk at their main conference. My presence there has also been a chance to reassess the status of collaboration with FSF (see John's brief summary) and discuss further technical collaboration with the Trisquel maintainers.
"Legal issues from a radical community angle" keynote at the yearly workshop of FSFE's European Legal Network; slides are available. The talk has also been covered by a LWN feature article last week (the link should become unembargoed for non-LWN subscribers starting tomorrow).

Assets I've approved the budget for the following forthcoming sprints:

6th Debian Groupware Meeting (~500 EUR)
DSA sprint (~3'000 EUR)

Also, we've bought a 3-year warranty pack for the disk array that powers ftp-master.d.o (~900 USD). On the income side, Brian Gupta has started an interesting matching fund experiment, in order to raise funds for the forthcoming DebConf13. The matching fund will be open until April 30th, so your help in spreading news would be welcome. Many thanks to Brian for the idea and to his company, Brandorr Group, for funding it. DPL helpers Three more DPL helpers IRC meetings have been held; minutes are available at the usual place. Legal Spring Cleaning I've finally cleaned up the pile of pending legal matters (but I'm sure new ones will show up for the delight of the next DPL :-P)

one is merely internal for trademark@d.o: our procedures for (n)acks on incoming requests has now been vetted by our legal advisors
the second one is relevant for our mentors.debian.net service: one of the blockers to officialize it as mentors.debian.org have historically been DMCA-related concerns. We now have a DMCA policy for (wannabe) mentors.d.o, which I've shared with the service maintainers and DSA. This specific part should no longer be a concern.
the last one concerns the possibilities of playing DVDs with Debian. We now have legal guidelines on how to include installer packages that allow to do so; that should allow us to have a decent solution for our users in the Jessie time frame.

Once again, I'd like to thank SFLC for the pro bono and very high quality legal advice they keep on offering to Debian. Miscellaneous

I've mentioned last month that, as a Debian representative, I've joined a working group by the Italian public administration (PA) that should define procurement rules for software in the PA at large, together with representatives of other well-known FOSS initiatives (e.g. KDE, FSFE). The first meetings have now been held and I've participate in some, for the moment on my own budget. I'll check with the next DPL the feasibility of keep on doing so on in the future.

Now, before I get sentimental, let me thank Gergely, Lucas, and Moray for running in the recently concluded DPL election. Only thinking of running and then go through a campaign denote a very high commitment to the Project; we should all be thankful to them. Then I'd like to congratulate Lucas for his election. I've known him for a long time, and I can testify about his clear vision of the role Debian has to play in Free Software and on what Debian needs to improve to do so. Best wishes for the term ahead, Lucas! Finally, I'd like to thank you all for the support you've shown me over the past 3 years. Serving as DPL is a great honor, but also a very demanding job. Thank to you all, and to how cool Debian is, it has been for me an incredibly rewarding experience. I had no idea what I were doing when I embarked on this adventure, but in hindsight I don't regret any of it. See you around, as I don't plan to be anywhere far away from Debian anytime soon. Cheers.

PS the day-to-day activity logs for March and April 2013 are available at the usual place master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.20130 3,4

Petter Reinholdtsen: First Debian Edu / Skolelinux developer gathering in 2013 take place in Trondheim

This years first Skolelinux / Debian Edu developer gathering take place the coming weekend in Trondheim. Details about the gathering can be found on the FRiSK wiki. The dates are 19-21th of April 2013, and online participation for those unable to make it in person is very welcome, and I plan to participate online myself as I could not leave Oslo this weekend. The focus of the gathering is to work on the web pages and project infrastructure, and to continue the work on the Wheezy based Debian Edu release. See you on IRC, #debian-edu on irc.debian.org, then?

Craig Small: Removing itools

For very many years I have been running a set of tools on my website that basically runs whois or nslookup queries and presents them in a standard format. I have decided today to shut this part of the website down as the code running those components is very old and I ve not maintained it for years. Back when I initially wrote the tools, in 1995 or so, there wasn t many alternatives to this site but that has long changed. So thanks for those who emailled me over the years; its been an interesting journey.

Michal Čihař: phpMyAdmin translations status

phpMyAdmin 4.0-rc2 is out and if your want to have your language in final release, it's last moment to start working on translation. So let's look at which translations are at 100% right now (new ones are bold):

Almost complete:

As you can see, there is still lot of languages missing, this might be your opportunity to contribute to phpMyAdmin. Also you are welcome to translate phpMyAdmin 4.0 using translation server. If your language is already fully translated and you want to help as well, you can translate our documentation as well.

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NOKUBI Takatsugu: 8th Kernel/VM Explorers

I attended The 8th Kernel/VM Explorers(Japanese) in 13 Apr. The event focuses on OS kernels and/or Virtual Machines architecture. I think seeing figure or graph will be interesting.

Johannes Schauer: botch - the debian bootstrap software has a name

After nearly one year of development, the "Port bootstrap build-ordering tool" now finally has a name: botch. It stands for Bootstrap/Build Order Tool CHain. Now we dont have to call it "Port bootstrap build-ordering tool" anymore (nobody did that anyways) and also dont have to talk about it by referring to it as "the tools" in email, IRC or in my master thesis which is due in a few weeks. With this, the issue also doesnt block the creation of a Debian package anymore. Since only a handful of people have a clone of it anyway, I also renamed the gitorious git repository url (and updated all links in this blog and left a text file informing about the name change in the old location). The new url is: https://gitorious.org/debian-bootstrap/botch Further improvements since my last post in January include:

greatly improved speed of partial order calculation
calculation of strong edges and strong subgraphs in build graphs and source graphs
calculation of source graphs from scratch or from build graphs
calculation of strong bridges and strong articulation points
calculate betweenness of vertices and edges
find self-cycles in the source graph
add webselfcycle code to generate a HTML page of self-cycles
allow to collapse all strongly connected components of the source graph into a single vertex to make it acyclic
allow to create a build order for cyclic graphs (by collapsing SCC)
allow to specify custom installation sets
add more feedback arc set heuristics (eades, insertion sort, sifting, moving)
improve the cycle heuristic

In the mean time a paper about the theoretical aspects of this topic which Pietro Abate and I submitted to the CBSE 2013 conference got accepted (hurray!) and I will travel to the conference in Canada in June. Botch (yeey, I can call it by a name!) is also an integral part of one of the proposals for a Debian Google Summer of Code project this year, mentored by Wookey and co-mentored by myself. Lets hope it gets accepted and produces good results in the end of the summer!

Hideki Yamane: make package modern 40% faster

Does your package still use old debhelper style? How about considering to make it modern.

I've tried to make fontforge package cleanup and use dh style since it fails with -j4 build option. And as the result, its debian/rules file become 1/3 (187 53) and it reduces build time 40% with parallel option.

before

real 5m13.605s

after

real 3m24.121s

(both cowbuilder on tmpfs)

15 April 2013

Matthew Palmer: splunkd, Y U NO FOREGROUND?!?

I am led to believe that splunkd (some agent for feeding log entries into the Grand Log Analysis Tool Of Our Age ) has no capability for running itself in the foreground. This is stupid. Do not make these sorts of assumptions about how the user will want to run your software. Some people use sane service-management systems that are capable of handling the daemonisation for you and automatically restart the managed process on crash. These systems are typically much easier to configure and debug, and they don t need bloody PID files and the arguments about where to put them (tmpfs, inside or outside chroots oh my) and who should update them and how to reliably detect that they re out of date when they crash without causing race conditions and whether non-root-running processes should place their PID files in the same place and how do you deal with the permissions issues and bugger that for a game of skittles. In short, if you provide a service daemon and do not provide some well-documented means of saying don t background , I will hurt you. This goes double if your shitware is not open source.

14 April 2013

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2013/14-15

2 weeks passed, & I worked on exactly 2 RC bugs *cough*

~~#656166~~ firmware-b43legacy-installer: "firmware-b43legacy-installer: unowned files after purge (policy 6.8)"
ship empty directories in packages, upload to DELAYED/5, later moved to 0-day with maintainer's permission
~~#704870~~ opus: "opus: cve-2013-0899"
add pointers to upstream bugs/commits, later NMUd by another DD

Richard Hartmann: Release Critical Bug report for Week 15

This week: Monday 47, Tuesday 47, Wednesday 41, Thursday 39, Friday 37 Addendum: the bug count was at 37 around Friday noon and that's what I am tracking with the short stats above. The UDD bugs interface currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

In Total: 717
- Affecting wheezy: 39 That's the number we need to get down to zero before the release. They can be split in two big categories:
  - Affecting wheezy and unstable: 32 Those need someone to find a fix, or to finish the work to upload a fix to unstable:
    - 11 bugs are tagged 'patch'. Please help by reviewing the patches, and (if you are a DD) by uploading them.
    - 2 bugs are marked as done, but still affect unstable. This can happen due to missing builds on some architectures, for example. Help investigate!
    - 19 bugs are neither tagged patch, nor marked done. Help make a first step towards resolution!
  - Affecting wheezy only: 7 Those are already fixed in unstable, but the fix still needs to migrate to wheezy. You can help by submitting unblock requests for fixed packages, by investigating why packages do not migrate, or by reviewing submitted unblock requests.
    - 2 bugs are in packages that are unblocked by the release team.
    - 5 bugs are in packages that are not unblocked.

How do we compare to the Squeeze release cycle?

Week	Squeeze	Wheezy	Diff
43	284 (213+71)	468 (332+136)	+184 (+119/+65)
44	261 (201+60)	408 (265+143)	+147 (+64/+83)
45	261 (205+56)	425 (291+134)	+164 (+86/+78)
46	271 (200+71)	401 (258+143)	+130 (+58/+72)
47	283 (209+74)	366 (221+145)	+83 (+12/+71)
48	256 (177+79)	378 (230+148)	+122 (+53/+69)
49	256 (180+76)	360 (216+155)	+104 (+36/+79)
50	204 (148+56)	339 (195+144)	+135 (+47/+90)
51	178 (124+54)	323 (190+133)	+145 (+66/+79)
52	115 (78+37)	289 (190+99)	+174 (+112/+62)
1	93 (60+33)	287 (171+116)	+194 (+111/+83)
2	82 (46+36)	271 (162+109)	+189 (+116/+73)
3	25 (15+10)	249 (165+84)	+224 (+150/+74)
4	14 (8+6)	244 (176+68)	+230 (+168/+62)
5	2 (0+2)	224 (132+92)	+222 (+132/+90)
6	release!	212 (129+83)	+212 (+129/+83)
7	release+1	194 (128+66)	+194 (+128/+66)
8	release+2	206 (144+62)	+206 (+144/+62)
9	release+3	174 (105+69)	+174 (+105/+69)
10	release+4	120 (72+48)	+120 (+72/+48)
11	release+5	115 (74+41)	+115 (+74/+41)
12	release+6	93 (47+46)	+93 (+47/+46)
13	release+7	50 (24+26)	+50 (+24/+26)
14	release+8	51 (32+19)	+51 (+32/+19)
15	release+9	39 (32+7)	+39 (+32/+7)
16	release+10
17	release+11
18	release+12

Graphical overview of bug stats thanks to azhag:

Vasudev Kamath: Handling C++ symbols that vary across architectures

Disclaimer I'm no symbol expert and dealing with symbol files for first time from the time I started packaging. What I did here is depending on some suggestions I got in #debian-mentors. If you think what I did was wrong please enlighten me :-). Problem Recently 2 of my library packages pugixml and ctpp2 got accepted into Debian archive and when buildd tried to build them on remaining architectures other than one for which I uploaded (amd64) builds failed. This was expected as symbols file which I generated was for amd64. As usual I got 2 serious bug reports #704718 and #705135. Solution First I was not sure how to handle this. I read article on symbols files handling by rra [1] and tried to use pkgkde-symbolshelper tool only to quickly figure out that I need to use pkgkde_symbolshelper addon for dh sequencer. But this was not possible for me as I was using CDBS for packaging. I did a quick chat on #debian-mentors and some one suggested me to tag symbols which vary across architecture with (c++) tag. First I was not sure but after reading dpkg-gensymbols man page understood that I need to replace the entire mangled symbols lines with de-mangled version tagged with (c++) in the beginning. But this was hectic job searching for each deleted symbols and replacing it. So I thought of writing a script to do the job and after struggling for 3 days (yeah I was bit dumb that I didn't read manual date: "2013-04-14 18:39:20 +0530" pugixml and ctpp2 package using it, which is now waiting for Jonas for uploading it. Here is the script

#!/bin/bash
set +x
if [ $# -lt 3 ]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 failed_buildlogs_directory symbols_file package_version"
    exit 2
fi
    
BUILD_LOG_DIRECTORY=$1
SYMBOLS_FILE=$2
PACKAGE_VERSION=$3
VERSION_TO_REPLACE=" $PACKAGE_VERSION\""
for LOGFILE in $(ls $BUILD_LOG_DIRECTORY/*.build); do
    for i in $(grep '^-\s_Z' $LOGFILE   perl -pe 's/-//g;'); do
        if [ $i = $PACKAGE_VERSION ];then
            continue
        fi
        demangled_version="\""$(echo $i" "$PACKAGE_VERSION   c++filt)"\""
        tagged_version="(c++)"$ demangled_version%$VERSION_TO_REPLACE "\" "$PACKAGE_VERSION
        escaped_tagged_version=$(echo $tagged_version   sed 's/\&/\\\&/')
        sed -i "s#$i $PACKAGE_VERSION#$escaped_tagged_version#" $SYMBOLS_FILE
   done
done

So basically to make this work we need all buildlogs to be downloaded from buildd's again this was easy thanks to rra for developing pkgkde-getbuildlogs :-). Once you have build logs directory run the above script as follows

cppsymbol_replace.sh path_to_buildlogs path_to_symbol_file upstream_version

After replacing symbols I tried to build package on i386 chroot and build passed successfully but lintian told me that there are symbols which have Debian version appended to it and this might lead to date: "2013-04-14 18:42:42 +0530" back to mentors :-). It is this time I really understood concept of mangled names generated by compiler and why it vary across the architecture ;-). This time some one by nick pochu suggested me to pass option -v with package version to dpkg-gensymbols to make it generate symbols with package version and not Debian version. The following probably needs to be done if package uses dh sequencer but I'm not sure as I've not tested it. If wrong please correct me.

override_dh_makeshlibs:
    dh_makeshlibs -- -v$PACKAGEVERION #package version needs to be either extracted using parsechangelog or manually fed

If you are using CDBS this is pretty simple. Just add following to rules

DEB_DH_MAKESHLIBS_ARGS_$(pkgname) += -- -v$(DEB_UPSTREAM_VERSION)

I noticed that when I provide (c++) tagged de-mangled name dpkg-gensymbols simply replaces it with proper mangled name but the deletion doesn't trigger an error in dpkg-gensymbols. This script me allowed to replace 128 symbols which were very tricky and long with de-mangled and tagged version in ctpp2, so I hope it should work across different packages without any problem. Only silly mistake I did was occurrence of & symbol in function making sed go mad which I took one full day to debug :facepalm:. So that's it folks, if you see something wrong in what I did please let me know through the comments. [1] http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2012-01/008.html

Bits from Debian: DPL election is over, congratulations Lucas Nussbaum!

The Debian Project Leader election has concluded and the winner is Lucas Nussbaum. Of a total of 988 developers, 390 developers voted using the Condorcet method. More information about the result is available in the Debian Project Leader Elections 2013 page. The new term for the project leader will start on April 17th and expire on April 17th 2014.

Andreas Metzler: balance sheet snowboarding season 2012/13

All in a below average season. Although we had lots of snow in December, my first day on-piste was December 22nd. Riding in snowstorm or thick fog is just not my kind of thing. The christmas holiday season was absurdely warm, getting rid of most of the snow again. I managed 7 snow-days from December 22nd to January 1st, but this was more sport than fun. Really sunny days were rare in the whole winter. Due to minor injury and minor illness I had to take long breaks from snowboarding (just two snow days in the periode from January 8th to February 15th!). Early easter cut the season short. This year I ended up in skiline.cc's top-100 list for both most meters of altitude in a single day and the whole season which shows that other people had a short season, too. On the plus side, we had enough and good snow. This is also evident from the balance sheet below, I almost always went to Diedamskopf where there is almost no artificial snow. Here is the balance sheet:

	2005/06	2006/07	2007/08	2008/09	2009/10	2010/11	2011/12	2012/13
number of (partial) days	25	17	29	37	30	30	25	23
Dam ls	10	10	5	10	16	23	10	4
Diedamskopf	15	4	24	23	13	4	14	19
Warth/Schr cken	0	3	0	4	1	3	1	0
total meters of altitude	124634	74096	219936	226774	202089	203918	228588	203562
highscore	10247m	8321m	12108m	11272m	11888m	10976m	13076m	13885m
# of runs	309	189	503	551	462	449	516	468

13 April 2013

Andreas Metzler: New Toy

Ski-lifts are closing tomorrow, but I have the perfect thing to look at for the next 8 months:

Steve Kemp: A mixed week with minor tweaks

As previously mentioned I was looking to package pwsafe for Wheezy, as this is one of the few tools that I rely upon which isn't present. There are now packages available, with the source on github. I've also been doing some minor scripting because I've run into a few common problems recently:

run-parts: run-parts is a simple utility which will run every executable in a directory, more or less. In Debian-land run-parts is the mechanism for /etc/cron.daily and /etc/cron.hourly - and that is where I've had problems recently. Imagine you run a backup via cron.daily. Further imagine that you run a post-backup rsync and that this might take many many hours. If your backup takes >=24 hours you're screwed. To that end I've patched my run-parts tool to alert and exit if a prior invocation is still running.
silent-run: I think everybody has this script - hide all output when running a command, unless the command fails. Looking today I see chronic from Joey's excellent moreutils does this. D'oh.

I think I've done more, but I cannot remember. In conclusion software is both easy and hard - easy because these two trivial changes were within my reach, but hard because years after encountering GNU/Linux we still have to add in the missing pieces. Still could be worse, I spent four/five hours yesterday evening fighting with MS-SQL server, and that is time I'm never going to get back.

Andrew Shadura: A bit more on TrueCrypt

Few days ago I was discussing my last blog post with a colleague of mine, Luka Tvrd , and he s mentioned that it actually is possible to harmlessly decrypt the TrueCrypted filesystem in online mode, resize it, and encrypt it back again. Well, I decided to try, because I have had some problems with that setup. Apart from init script reordering I had to make (not covered in the post, as I did it later and haven t found time yet to write about that), I ran into a trouble while trying to enable swapping. As the only partition I had was formatted into NTFS, placing a swap file there isn t the best idea ever. I actually tried doing so, but after two deadlocks I had in few hours I had to rethink that. Indeed, as NTFS is implemented in the user space using ntfs-3g, as soon as this process gets swapped out, the system is left helpless. The swap is on the file system driver of which is in the swap, which is on the file system driver of which is well, you get the idea. Basically, I got rid of ext3-on-the-loop, and now I have real ext3 in a LUKS container, plus a separate swap partition. Now the other problem is: I still have an encrypted NTFS filesystem which I occasionally need to access, but I don t want to type the pass phrase twice Something to think about.

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