For nearly two years, I have been pondering about a good and failure-resilient DNS setup to implement for my own domains. In the last days, I have set the first prototype into use. No, I haven’t dared to touch zugschlus.de, my most important domain, yet. This is planned for the weekend. So, if you experience difficulties in accessing any of my Internet services, please inform me and allow me to fix the issue. However, zugschl.us, marc-haber.de and a number of less important test domains have already been moved to the new, svn-driven Scheme and delegation has been changed to the new DNS servers, dns1.nosuid.net, dns2.notwork.de and dns3.mxonly.de. q.bofh.de, my old main DNS server, continues to run as a slave for a transition period, and it continues to feed the slave servers run by various commercial and non-commercial entities that have kindly been serving the zones in the last years. The new servers are all run by myself. dns1 and dns2 are dedicated servers (“real” machines that both have other duties as well) located at two different ISPs/hosters located in different parts of Germany, while dns3 is a vServer located in the US (which only does DNS due to its rather severely limited amount of memory). The three domains the servers are located in are in two different top level domains, are registered through two different registrars and are not used for anything besides DNS (and providing the host name for ivanova.notwork.de, one of the DNS servers and the machine hosting this blog). The two .de-Domains mxonly.de and notwork.de are MX only domains, which means that they are not delegated outside of the .de zone but their resource records are directly written to the .de TLD zone. This reduces the chance of the domains becoming unavailable due to failures in the delegated servers (because there are none), and we depend on .de being available anyway. A downside of MX only domains is that the number of registrars that support them through their automatisms is rather limited. The .net zone is served by the registrar’s name servers since .de is the only TLD I know of that has reasonable prices and offers MX only domains. One can argument that the .net zone is a weak point here, but I suspect that I’m reasonably safe with the MX only .de domains that the .net domain is only a paranoid safety catch anyway.

I was in a multiple-car accident yesterday. I've been having to tell this story a fair amount in person and on IRC, so I thought I'd blog about it. Short version: it was a fender-bender. I'm doing fine, nobody was hurt, Michelle wasn't in the car, and 75% of the cars involved were driven away from the scene — including mine, by me. Want the long version? Well, I'm gonna tell it anyway. I had just pulled to a stop at a traffic light, heading northbound on Keystone Avenue where it intersects 106th Street, in Hamilton County. The line of cars at the light was pretty long, and people love to try hauling ass on the stretch between 96th Street and 106th. Apparently the person behind me was one of them. The line of cars stopped in the left lane (where I was) at the light was pretty long, and much shorter in the right — the cars over there were still moving at a good clip. I looked in my rearview mirror, thinking "if someone's trying to match pace with the cars in the right-hand lane, they're gonna need to brake pretty hard to stop." It was about 1815, so it was starting to get dark. A pair of headlights approach. Fast. Oh boy. I don't stop right up on people's tails, so if I'm hit, hopefully I won't go into the car ahead. I look forward again. Yeah, there's some room here. Screech. I didn't tense up; I felt a strange sense of calm and curiosity, as I'd never been in a car accident before. I bought my car, a Volkswagen Golf, in part because of its fairly good safety ratings. It has lots of air bags, and I always use a seat belt. Plus, in this instance I figured I wouldn't get hit a high speed. "Strange Deja Vu" by Dream Theater, from the Scenes from a Memory CD, was playing. Normally I listen to All Things Considered while commuting home, but I was annoyed because when I got in the car, I heard Nina Totenberg signing off a report, which means I'd just missed some Supreme Court coverage. Damn. Anyway. BONK. I got hit. Ouch. My teeth had chomped together too hard. Maybe they should install rubber mouthpieces in the doors of cars so you can grab them right before a crash. You know, car crashes never sound like the stock sound effects that have been around for about 50 years. I guess that's because they build cars to crumple these days instead of act like steel shrapnel bombs. Damn that Ralph Nader. My wreck doesn't sound cool and stuff. And I get to walk away, well, get back in the car and drive away, instead of my wife collecting on my life insurance policy. But I digress again. A middle-aged woman in a Honda Civic skidded into me, and knocked me into the Buick Park Avenue ahead of me, which in turn tapped the minivan ahead of him. I blinked a bit and tried to reorient myself, and then turned off the CD player. We all got out of our cars. The woman in back was very distressed, and immediately and repeatedly said the thing your insurance card tells you never to say after an accident. Oh well. Being a middle-aged woman, she'd probably have to wreck a school bus full of children — twice — before her premium would go up. Mine, on the other hand — we'll see. Called 911. Reported the incident. Tried to call my wife, but she decided not to answer. I later found out she was gabbing it up with my mom. Isn't it nice when your wife gets along with your mother? I COULD BE BLEEDING OUT ON THE COLD ASPHALT, BUT YOU TWO JUST KEEP ON TALKING. Michelle and I have the same model of cell phone, and we have call waiting with caller ID, so I know she knew it was me. Anyway, I try a couple of times, then give up and leave voice mail. Turns out the guy in front, in the minivan, was a Deputy Prosecutor for Hamilton County. He said something about being experienced in car wrecks, but I don't clearly remember it. Anyway, perhaps in part because he decided he was only "tapped" and didn't need to file an insurance claim, and perhaps in part out of professional courtesy, when the cops showed up, they let him go very quickly, so I didn't get any of his information. Everybody was fine, polite, and decent about the whole thing. The couple ahead of me, whom I got knocked into, didn't have their insurance info on them (or maybe this is a euphemism for "don't have insurance"). But, except for the deputy prosecutor guy, who was outta there, we all traded names, addresses, and phone numbers. I hope the Debian Project doesn't mind that I used my Debian Project Leader business cards for this purpose. These people (and the Carmel Police Department) now have my GPG key fingerprint. Uh oh. Anyway, that's about it. Appointment tomorrow with the insurance agent, to get help filling out INDIANA OPERATOR'S VEHICLE CRASH REPORT, State Form 38656 (R6/7-91) Stock 301 Effective 1-92, which has to be filed with the Indiana State Police within ten business days, or my driver's license will be suspended. Aww, yeah. Gotta move fast, because on Friday I leave for Mérida, Spain, to attend the 2nd Annual Open Source World Conference in Extremadura. Also have an appointment with the claims adjustor tomorrow. Then I'm hoping to just leave my car at the dealership so they can work on it over the week when I'm gone. My wife and my mom, those talkative two from a couple of paragraphs ago, will be coming along with me. My mom's got a jones to visit Spain, and I've had a jones to take my wife to Europe. We'll have a couple of extra days to see what Spain is like — I'll be there from 22 October to 28 October. I hope one day to visit Barcelona and hang out with some proper anarcho-syndicalists.

The host hosting blog.zugschlus.de, ivanova.notwork.de, was down due to a network failure in the hoster’s network for a few minutes today around 2 pm CEST. After returning, I found a lot of my syndicated articles anew on Planet Debian, known as the “flood” phenomenon. Is it possible that the Planet software does react in a non-graceful way when an RSS feed cannot be pulled? Mako, can you investigate this?

The main series has now finished. I've a few more emails to answer yet and a few more useful links that I've been sent. Someone suggested summarising the series and I think that's a good idea: 1. Switch off instead; 2. Understand your building; 3. Section your building; 4. Vent at night; 5. Close against the sun; 6. Use plants and fans; 7. Water the pavement and hang out the washing; 8. Don't use air-con, but if you must, use it wisely. If you can read French and would like to learn more, try Fra cheur sans clim' by Salomon and Aubert from Terre Vivante. Hope you enjoyed it and good luck not melting this summer!

Ivan never has enough, and has gone ways further on his Escriu b quest. Following up on my previous post on the X.Org Catalan changes, he has posted a list of characters that he still misses in our layout, in order to type really correct, orthotypograpically-wise, Catalan. Ivan, the king of nitpickers. :) Toni also posted a mini-HOWTO on how to get your geminated l's look a lucinants .

English (Queen's English) is the only real language.

After this required short announcement by our main sponsor, Daniel Stone, lets go ahead and explain something of interest to the many Catalan X.Org users out there. Ivan and I have been looking at the issues that block a GNU/Linux user from using the compound geminate L, , instead of the more usual L L spelling. The and characters are unfortunately not included in ISO-8859-1, so fonts were the first big problem we faced. When modern X desktops started using True Type fonts by default, the de-facto free font in most distributions became Bitstream Vera as soon as they were licensed under a Free Software license back in 2003. Bitstream did not include the Unicode glyphs U+013F and U+0140, but some time after, chatting with daf, I learned he was working on Olwen, a Vera extension which would add proper Welsh coverage. He promptly added the Catalan glyphs, but Olwen never got widely exposed in distributions. Luckily, things are changing lately. Due to the lack of bugfixes or new releases of Vera, the list of Vera derivatives like Olwen started growing. The DejaVu project is building a font family, based on Vera, which merged many of these smaller purpose Vera derivatives, including Olwen. DejaVu, is, as far as I know, slowly replacing Bitstream Vera as the standard free, high quality true type font in free desktops. With the font blocker easily solvable now, the next problem was making the input easy. Some terminals, such as GNOME's or rxvt, allow you to insert Unicode typing a Unicode code point. The Spanish layouts don't provide a shortcut for it though, and if you try to do Level3-Shift+l, you'll get a Polish character, , that is of no use in neither Catalan, Spanish, Galician, Basque or other languages in the Spanish state. We wanted to replace that with , but when we had a look at it last Saturday night during our stay in Bruxelles, we couldn't find what the name for Unicode's U+0140/U+013F was in XKB-speak. So, as I said, on Sunday I went looking for Daniel and Keith to see if we would be clued up. The solution is easy: there is no name mapping, but you can use Unicode in 0x100XXXX notation directly in your X config file to make it work. He tried in his laptop, and why not, generated a patch for X.Org 7.0's xkeyboard-config. Daniel can't be that good, so he forced me to spread lies about the English language in this blog entry if we wanted the patch committed. :) Support for X.Org 6.8 and 6.9 isn't planned, unless you bribe your X maintainer to add a tiny patch. This has been implemented as an "es" keyboard extension (named cat ) because other systems don't have that feature in the Spanish layout, and X.Org wants to remain compatible with the rest. We'll have to add a

        Option          "XkbVariant"     "cat"

option to our keyboard section in xorg.conf. If you're not using X.Org 7.0, you might want to try:

xmodmap -e "keycode 46 = l L U140 U13f U140 U13f"

but I don't know if that'll work in all systems. To test in your keyboard, that'll probably be AltGr+l or AltGR+L . What we need to do now is to add support for the character in more fonts, alternative spellings for words using the ela geminada (ie, col labora and co labora ) in dictionaries, wordlists..., and of course, teach users about the avalability of this, and promote its usage.

I'm so glad I finally decided to attend FOSDEM this year, as last weekend in Bruxelles was so cool it reminded me of the unforgettable week in Helsinki for DebConf 5 last summer. I travelled early on Friday with Ivan Vilata, the dude who dragged me into the Catalan translations world, and about 12:30 we were finding our way through Bruxelles airport. We had barely no problems getting to Ra l's place in Boulevard Louis Schmidt, thanks to the detailed HOWTO he provided a few days before. We dropped our bags in his appartment and went out with him and Virginia after a well deserved mini-nap. On our way to the Grand' Place, where we'd hook up with the Softcatal crowd and the rest of FOSDEM people, we stopped in A la Morte Subite, where we Ivan and I started our personal training on Belgian beers. The Roy d'Espagne is an excellent name for a place where to meet our friends from Catalunya. I didn't know that was a formal meeting point that kickstarts FOSDEM, so I was really impressed when I got to the second floor and found the place was packed with Free Software people, many of them I already knew in person. Reaching Softcatala's table near the window took about 15 minutes, and after saying hi to most people, we decided we could use a quieter place to have dinner, and then go back.

The Grand' Place was bombed by seb128 in 1695 Ra l and Virginia, our official guides during the weekend, chose a Vietnamese restaurant in the Stock Exchange area they frequent, and for little money we got an enormous meal. Back at the Roy d'Espagne, I tried to say hello to most Debian people I saw around, while at the same time I tried to be with my hosts and the Catalan people. A while after, I spotted tbm and azeem downstairs, who I finally met. I talked to Michael for a long while, and at some point we left as we didn't want to miss the last tram. Ivan, luckily, only snores rarely, so we slept for a while, and then took the tram to the Universit Libre du Bruxelles. The main room was already packed for RMS's keynote, which was pretty good. After that, we went to several talks here and there, while I kept meeting some people around the place. Ivan and I left when the show ended and we met with Virginia and Ra l at the centre. This time, we hooked up with Xevi and Jes s Corrius from Softcatal , as Toni Hermoso had abandoned us for a cheap dinner with the Mozilla.org people. We were taken to a packed bar/restaurant (don't remember the name right now), which had a few interesting features: they wouldn't sell any Coca-Cola, would not accept credit cards in protest for the high fees Visa charges on small businesses, and something I wouldn't expect to see in 2006, their chart of prices hadn't been rounded up when they switched to the Euro. So some plate would be 9.72, others 12.43, etc. After dinner we had a few beers at the Th atre de Toone, located in some tiny alley in the centre and being pretty tired, we went back home at 23:30 or so. Sunday was a busy days, due to the number of interesting Debian and GNOME talks going on. I'd highlight liw's talk on Piuparts, Enrico's on debtags and fjp's on Debian Installer in the Debian room, and kris' on the future of GTK+. There was also a cool demo of Novell's XGL. During a dead slot, I approached Little Daniel and keithp to see if he could point me at some mapping between UTF-8 and XKB symbol names. But Daniel was cool enough to solve a problem a lot simpler than expected. :) jdub's closing talk was just fantastic, and telling him "See you in Vilanova, we left the University, for our last dinner around Bruxelles.

jdub clues the audience about some basic acronyms We managed to rescue madduck from the Debian UK beer trap and went to an Italian for dinner, this time with Josep and Mia, from Softcatal , making a nice mix of German, Valencian/Catalan, and Swedish at our table.

Mia, Josep, Ra l, Ivan, Martin and Jordi after pizza Ra l took us around the city centre and told us about the underground river, the remaining city wall's tower, and the church that leaned against it. That night's beer lesson happened in the "2000 beer bar". We all had a 7 Trappist Westvleteren Bleu 8, apparently "the best beer of the world". It was pretty good, actually. Our weekend in Bruxelles was about to end. After not that much sleep, Ivan and I took a tram and a bus to the Airport, arriving in Val ncia around 10AM, and after seeing the best view of the Pyrenees ever, which were absolutely covered with snow, as well as many other places in the Pa s Valenci and Teruel due to massive snows during the two days we were out. FOSDEM is probably a "can't miss" yearly event now. Thanks to all the organisers for their hard work to make it happen. You rock.

Joey replies to my post from yesterday with his own example of leaving:

The technical details remain as irrelivant today as they were at the time, the relevant problem being that developers who are not involved in the installer development rarely consider how their actions can affect it. When a policy gets int the way of solving a problem, it’s time to leave, that’s all.

His posted logs suffer from unescaped angle brackets so aren’t very easy to follow; and also from the fact that for rather obvious reasons they don’t include any of the conversation that took place after he left. Extended logs and the other side of that story below the fold: Read the rest ...

So, I guess this is an example of the sort of self-recusement from debian-tech that aj is <a href="http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/blog/2006/02/28#2006-02-28-debiantech">referring to: @1130344829 <joeyh!joey@kitenet.net> aj: sigh, did you realy have to break d-i yet again right as we're trying ot release it?
@1130344847 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> ?
@1130344881 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> joeyh: (also, please try to avoid making things overly personal on this channel, cf the charter)
@1130344919 <joeyh!joey@kitenet.net> fine, did one have to ignore the d-i release and make a package upload with lots of changes that broke d-i internalls. Yes one did
@1130344928 <joeyh!joey@kitenet.net> for at least two values of one
@1130344967 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> joeyh: please explain what you're talking about, in technical terms
@1130344989 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> joeyh: if you do so, it might get fixed
@1130345337 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> joeyh: hello?
@1130345448 <h01ger!~holger@bone.digitalis.org> joeyh, i guess you're referring to the debootstrap-upload of aj ?! /me wonders why an upload to unstable breaks the d-i beta, isnt that build+based on etch ?
@1130345451 <joeyh!joey@kitenet.net> sorry, busy fixing the beakage
@1130345474 <Sledge!steve@217.147.81.17> looks like a debootstrap change is causing problems in CD builds
@1130345481 <joeyh!joey@kitenet.net> well, there has not been a usable combination of apt, debootstrap, and d-i in testing for well over a week
@1130345634 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> so you're saying i didn't break it just as you're trying to release?
@1130345720 <joeyh!joey@kitenet.net> no you broke it just as the fixed NMU was ready to go into testing
@1130345758 <h01ger!~holger@bone.digitalis.org> .oO( ah )
@1130345783 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> sigh
@1130345792 <neuro!~rmurray@h24-80-164-222.sbm.shawcable.net> ...and we're still waiting for the technical details
@1130345813 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> joeyh: second warning. this channel's for technical discussions, eg "here's what broke: ...", not accusations, eg "you broke it" "why'd you have to break it" "yes one did".
@1130345869 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> joeyh: if you want, there's still time to put 0.3.1.9 into testing
* Logging finished Wed, 26 Oct 2005 12:58:19 -0400
It's worth noting that the d-i release in question was etch beta 1, which eventually released 2 weeks after the above conversation. Probably my fault for not being a big believer in ridigly defined topics for communications channels. After all, I still filter all of my 20-some Debian mailing lists into a single folder; I'll happily talk about anything on the one irc channel (typically #debian-boot) that I nowdadys limit myself to; and so #debian-tech seemed like the obvious place to bring up the issue since aj, sledge, and other relevant people were active on it at the time. The technical details remain as irrelivant today as they were at the time, the relevant problem being that developers who are not involved in the installer development rarely consider how their actions can affect it. When a policy gets int the way of solving a problem, it's time to leave, that's all.

Last November, Uwe Schindler filed a bugreport against the linux-2.6 package. His Alphastation crashed from time to time in handle_irq_event() from arch/alpha/kernel/irq.c. The solution was to switch Alpha to the generic irq framework, which finally happened yesterday, with two patches (generic part, alpha part) from Ivan Kokshaysky. I added those two patches to 2.6.15-2, which we plan to upload to unstable within the next few days.

Last November, Uwe Schindler filed a bugreport against the linux-2.6 package. His Alphastation crashed from time to time in handle_irq_event() from arch/alpha/kernel/irq.c. The solution was to switch Alpha to the generic irq framework, which finally happened yesterday, with two patches (generic part, alpha part) from Ivan Kokshaysky. I added those two patches to 2.6.15-2, which we plan to upload to unstable within the next few days.

Debian QA

I just noticed that my debian QA page shows “pending uploads”. Neat. Nice to see that since I recently sponsored a couple of minor bugfixed packages by Niv Altivanik, he does a good job at making packages so it isn’t a problem.

Flamefests

Too many mails, we all know why. I’m often curious why so many people take part in these “debates” who I do not recognise. Just looking over my debian mailfolders I see literally 50+ names with @debian.org email addresses which I swear I have never heard before. Either I don’t notice peoples addresses/names as much as I thought I did .. or they have too much free time for taking part in these …. discussions.

Some of the books I read in 2005:

Bruce Feiler, Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses
Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and other pieces
Bob McCulloch, My Fare City: A Taxi Driver's Guide to Edinburgh
Origen, On First Principles (translated by G. W. Butterworth)
Sin-leqi-unninni, Gilgamesh: a new English version by Stephen Mitchell
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe: from paganism to Christianity 371–1386 AD
M. A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross
Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Otto Friedrich, The Kingdom of Auschwitz
Nicholas Barton, The Lost Rivers of London: a study of their effects upon London and Londoners, and the effects of London and Londoners upon them
Anton Chekhov, The Steppe and Other Stories (translated by Ronald Hingley)
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
Otto F. A. Meinardus, Coptic Saints and Pilgrimages
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
R.W.B. Lewis, Dante: a life
Miles Glendinning and Aonghus MacKechnie, Scottish Architecture
Arturo P rez-Reverte, The Flanders Panel
John Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B (second edition)
Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: the battles for Scripture and the faiths we never knew
Plato, Timaeus and Critias (translated by Desmond Lee)
Albert Camus, The Outsider
Tim Wallace-Murphy and Marilyn Hopkins, Rosslyn: guardian of the secrets of the Holy Grail
Ginevra Lovatelli, Secret Rome
Dauvit Brown and Thomas Owen Clancy (editors), Spes Scotorum: Hope of Scots: Saint Columba, Iona and Scotland
Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII (translated by Walter Hamilton)
William Chester Jordan, Europe in the High Middle Ages (The Penguin History of Europe)
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women (translated by Virginia Brown)
Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World
Georges Perec, A Void (translated by Gilbert Adair)
Saul Bellow, The Victim
Franz Kafka, The Trial
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream (translated by Joscelyn Godwin)
Italo Calvino, Our Ancestors (The Cloven Viscount; Baron in the Trees; The Non-Existent Knight) (translated by Archibald Colquhoun)
Eusebius, The History of the Church (translated by G. A. Williamson)
Flynt Leverett, Inheriting Syria: Bashar's trial by fire
Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (City of Glass; Ghosts; The Locked Room)

Last November, Uwe Schindler filed a bugreport against the linux-2.6 package. His Alphastation crashed from time to time in handle_irq_event() from arch/alpha/kernel/irq.c. The solution was to switch Alpha to the generic irq framework, which finally happened yesterday, with two patches (generic part, alpha part) from Ivan Kokshaysky. I added those two patches to 2.6.15-2, which we plan to upload to unstable within the next few days.

Holger Levsen wrote me with news from "the lost video" from debconf-es II. It has a special meaning for me, as my old boss and dear friend, Salvador Garcia, talks about the reasons we must continue looking for new software options continuosly. Holger gets the VHS tape and i didn't remember about it. Thanks, Holger.

Finally my ipw2200 runs with the correct firmware version in 2.6.14. Uff.

I have spent this two last nights reviewing some packages from two future NM, Ivan Forcada and Javier Ballesteros. They are swscanner, ksalup and mgm. Sponsoring packages is really hard. If they were my own packages i have not to explain what i see inadecuate, but i think is worth enough because they have much ilusion and desire to contribute something to the project. Amaya talk in debconf-es II about "El sponsor, ese animal esquivo" was really funny. I am thinking about creating an Amaya's Fun Club, as she made with Branden ;-)

Be careful with alcohol in the last night of the year. We call it in Spain "Noche Vieja".

Fun for all.

grep-dctrl has proven, at least for me, an utterly useful tool; I suspect this will probably be the case for many others as well. (As I side comment, I believe it’d be nice for AMs to make sure their applicants do at least know about the existance of grep-dctrl, and ideally have basic knowledge about how to use it.) Many times, though, using its grep-available form is not fine-grained enough, and one needs full control over the distribution to make the search in. A valid workaround for this is to run grep-dctrl over /var/lib/apt/lists/whatever; I’ve been using this for some time now, with shell aliases like grep-sid or grep-s-etch (for sources), but sometimes I wanted a grep over two dists, or several components (e.g., main and contrib), or a set of arches. For this, I decided to write a grep-dctrl wrapper that, relying on the structure of a normal mirror, allows to run a search over any combination of dist/component/arch. At home, where I do not have a local mirror, I have populated /org/ftp.root/debian/dists with a pool of symlinks towards /var/lib/apt/lists, and whenever I need more than i386/source, I can run it on any debian.org machine with a local mirror, e.g. merkel. For example, to know which packages in sid but also present in testing are still kdelibs4c2a-untransitioned, but ignoring hppa and m68k, I’d run on merkel the following:

  % grepd sid:main,contrib:alpha,arm,i386,ia64,mips,mipsel,powerpc,s390,sparc \
          -Fdepends -e 'kdelibs4(c2)?(  , $)' -ns source,package  
    unique-sources   xargs madison -s testing   awk ' print $1 '

In case somebody finds it of interest, the script is available here, together with the dirty hack that is unique-sources, needed since not all binary packages have a Source header (sigh). NP: Jacques Brel, Au suivant

2.6.14-1 was uploaded to unstable already (it's waiting in NEW currently), but it will fail to build at least on alpha, because an include statement in include/asm-alpha/barrier.h is missing. Al Viro sent a patch against 2.6.14-rc5 to the kernel mailinglist two days ago (and Ivan Kokshaysky corrected it), which unfortunately wasn't included into the final release. I added the mentioned patch to 2.6.14-2, but there's no ETA for a new upload yet.