• I have started looking into SELinux on Debian recently. SELinux provides mandatory access control for Linux, which gives you great control over which process may do what with which files, other processes, network connections etc. I've still got a lot to learn and read (more posts will probably follow), but if you're inclined to try it yourself here are a few tips:
  • First, read the SELinux and especially the SELinuxSetup pages in the Debian wiki. Also checkout the SELinuxStatus page.
  • There are currently a few bugs I noticed, which cause some trouble: bug #369852 prevents a correct install of the selinux-policy-default package, but the work-around mentioned in the bug report works fine. I reported bug #372543 yesterday, but there's an easy work-around for that, too.
  • I had to change "SELINUX=enforcing" to "SELINUX=permissive" in /etc/selinux/config (at least for now), otherwise my system won't boot up anymore because of SELinux denied permissions (I think). I'm pretty sure this is either a bug or me doing something wrong, but I haven't figured out yet what that is.
• Robert Nunnally (a.k.a Gurdonark) has created a photo collage video (YouTube, requires Flash) for Marco Raaphorst's "Blowing Snow" song. He used some of the Creative Commons licensed photos from my photoblog for the video.
• Wow! Today the number of people subscribed to my music podcast (via RSS) exceeded 200 for the first time! Thanks everyone for listening!
• GNU/Hurd 1.0.0 has been released. Finally! And they've built it on top of an interesting "middleware"...

will be held in Barcelona, Spain on June 22nd and 23rd, 2006, [Update: Registration Required] [...] Of course, I can't find any way to get there for those [cont. with links]

Have asked about cvschangelogbuilder because of perl and previous contact with maintainer. Won't sponsor [cont...]

The first of my New Model Advocate sponsorships to get a package into the archive is Simon Boulet, who takes over rsnapshot after the previous maintainer went MIA and I became temporarily disconnected from the package tracker (kudos to luk for stepping in). In this first round, we've learnt about the keyring, lintian, the bug tracker and bits of package-building - and I mean *we*'ve learnt: I've found out some stuff I didn't know before, which I'll use in the future. Thank you and welcome, Simon Boulet. [cont. with links]

May 2006 traffic discussed bacula cdbs cxxtools db3 db4.2 EiffelStudio ipv6calc ircd-irc2 java*-runtime/compiler libapache-mod-proxy-html libfaad* libx264* libjlha-java maxdb-doc opensaml postgresql sharpmusique sork-* sun-java5-jre tetex tremulous wget xfonts-utils [link to my index]

Benjamin Seidenberg's Blog: New Anti-Spam Measures uses a simple maths test, which should work, but it produced a rambling SQL error for me. I emailed it as requested and got an error back saying Command died with status 1: "/usr/share/doc/spamassassin/examples/filter.sh" That may block all spam, but also blocks other mail, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. [links in permalink version]

Heard this report on the Radio 4 Six O'Clock News about attackers who used a virus to encrypt someone's documents and leave a ransom note. Of course, that was on Microsoft Windows, but [cont. with links]

Free Culture UK is publishing a newsletter and wants your event details, which will be syndicated to a number of publications. Details of how to submit events [cont...]

When returning home after shopping today, I nearly fell down an open pit which covered more than half the width of the cycle track. WTF? Aren't open roadworks meant to ... [cont.]

summary of the problem I've re-read most of the calm and useful posts (yes some exist if you look hard :D) in the java-tro^H^Hhread. Yes, the pro-java-in-non-free are right if we omit to mention all the difficulties it will imply if such a removal has to happen for a stable update^[1] removing java from our mirrors do terminate the license solve most of the issues. Though, two major concerns remains:

1. clause 2.f (you agree to defend and indemnify Sun and its licensors from and against any damages ... and so forth) is IMHO unacceptable, even for non-free, because debian isn't in a position where it can risk to see that clause exercised by Sun ;
2. section 4 (and others of the same sort) makes the existence of java in non-free depending of Sun's mood: exercising clause 4 is trivial they just have to imagine a new kernel feature our kernel should support that we can't provide to terminate the license retro-actively. Many instances of that problem exists in the license.

The first problem in itself seems obvious, and none of the arguments of the pro-java-in-non-free have put me at rest. The second problem is a real concern because it means that our java support can be discontinued without possible clean upgrade path back to java-package. If Sun could not retire our right to redistribute one given version of java, then we could repackage the last version we can distribute with some debconf dialog to warn the user his java package won't be upgraded again, and that he must fall back to make-jpkg. But here, if Sun decides it, Sun can make the package simply disappear. And given the number of users that will concern, this is not a problem to be taken lightly.

I honnestly believe that putting java into non-free, whereas we already have java-package that allow a quite satisfying integration of Sun's JDK/JRE into a debian instance, implicitely means that we are confident that java will stay in here forever (or for a significant enough time). And I see nothing that can guarantee such a fact, and I see too many things that can prevent this with a probability significantely greater than 0. Yes there I know there is a FAQ about those issues, where Sun promise they won't use their power to hurt people. But if they don't itend to, why did they put those clauses in the license ? With all the good will I can provide, that does not makes sense to me. If you put landmines in your garden, well, that's for a purpose, not for the garnishment. debian issues And then, I've a couple of questions there, for which I've seen no real answer:

• why did that announce has been hurried like that ? yes Sun hadn't published their license, but I still don't understand how it can explain such a hurry.
• will debian switch to python 2.5 directly, so that we can skip one transition ? (that could explain why some maintainer have more time to dedicate to non urgent non-free packages, whereas some other would need its plain attention for etch)
• a more polite version of the previous question is: why do some people have been working soooo fast on this, when those people have other very real problems to deal with for etch ? that looks like a childish schedule, that puts shiny-public-things first^[2] instead of the problems that block a lot of DDs in their allday's work (some complains about NEW beeing stuck and it is, and was even before Debconf , other complain about the python2.4 transition that lags since ages, and other examples exists )
• why did only 3 persons worked on that, for a package that :
  • is well known ;
  • will obviously make noise, given to its history wrt the free software world ;
  • has a license that seem to have some obvious problems ;

and I'll skip the questions I don't want to ask, or more precisely I don't want/fear to read the answer to:

• why does this come 1 week after that ubuntu made it clear they had some things going on with Sun ?

Disclaimer Don't get me wrong. I've been really happy when I've seen that java entered non-free (even if I don't like the language but that's another story and is off topic here), because that meant that progress had been done in the good direction, and that's a thing I just have to praise. But then I've heard people complain about the damn license, and went read it. And then, I've been really disappointed, and I felt betrayed by those three people:
yes, I'm a DD, but I'm also a Debian User, and I trust my fellow developpers to bring to debian packages that don't have license issues, and will be supported enough^[3]. As a user, I feel betrayed because nothing that I expect from a package that is in debian (even in non-free) can be guaranteed for the java package.

I was disappointed to receive at work a survey from Norfolk County Council which seemed to essentially ask me to support expansion of Norwich airport. Within the questions asked, there was no way to answer the survey to ask for the airport to be kept under control. The survey said it was a "Shaping the Future Business Travel Survey", but it was very aviation-centric. Maybe not "Shaping the Future" but definitely "Shaping the Answers" [cont...]

The 2006 Tour of Britain will be calling at Glasgow (29 August), Castle Douglas, Blackpool, Liverpool, Yorkshire, West Midlands, Rochester, Canterbury, Greenwich and central London (3 September). This year, the tour takes the chance to road-test some of the Tour de France and Olympic routes, so the London stage is a bit more than a tiny circuit in Westminster. [cont with links]

Today I continue my backlog-clearing series of link lists with ones about blogging and podcasting, including style, technicalities and legalities. If you blog or podcast and want to learn from others, I hope you'll enjoy some of these: [continues with links on my site]

So it’s finally OK to mention it now; Java has made it explicitly possible (read legal) to distribute the Sun Java JRE/JDK on a GNU/Linux distrubtion. The new license is for Java SE 5 on Linux only, called the Operating System Distribution License for Java, or DLJ for short. You can read the license in text or pdf form. The FAQ for the DLJ is also available in text and pdf. Heck, go through the README for the JRE and JDK while you’re at it. So what does that mean? Well, GNU/Linux distrubtions like Debian can now package a Java runtime environment or Java development kit in their repositories. That was previously not possible due to restrictions present in Java licensing. Users still have to accept the Java SE 5 binary code license that is totally not free and has the same restrictions Java has always had, but this at least makes packaging and supporting Java less painful for distributions. Sun is coordinating the efforts via a java.net project, jdk-distros. This is an unprecedented level of cooperation from Sun with external parties in anything related to Java. I consider myself fortunate to have been a founding member of the project. It has been a pleasant and refreshing experience to meet a few optimistic and forward-thinking people from Sun who have a keen interest in Free Software; a big thanks to Simon Phipps and Tom Marble. I was encouraged that they allowed our contributions to be covered under the MIT license. If you would have told me that a month ago I would have laughed at you. The Debian announcment should be posted on the debian-devel-announce list today. I am sure this will draw both praise and ire from the Debian community. That’s cool, though; the rich diversity is part of what makes it such a vibrant organism.

Simon Phipps: “Yes, you can now apt-get install sun-java5-jre and have it install without fuss on Debian and Ubuntu.” Great news. We’re one step closer to a Java/Linux combo that’s more than just Java bolted onto the side of Linux (admittedly, there’s still a bit of that here, though at least it’s attached with standard componentry now rather than the old bubble gum and bailing wire). Why is tighter integration important? Because the alternative, namely Windows and .NET, offers a tightly integrated combo that “just works”. The more a developer has to do (like, say, ship a bundled runtime because that runtime isn’t guaranteed to be available on a key platform), the more attractive the alternative looks. The real question is: Will this be enough? I’ve long contended that open-source Java is a red herring—the real challenge for Java on Linux is ubiquity, not licensing, and licensing is really only an issue because it gets in the way of ubiquity. Time will tell if this step represents the boost Java needs to become to Linux what .NET is to Windows. I don’t know though. For that to happen, the major Linux distributions have to not just add Java to the menu of available software, they have to add Java to the default configuration (much as Perl and Python are default components today), and I just don’t see Red Hat, Debian, or Ubuntu doing that till Java is open source. Still, I’m optimistic we’ll get there. Question is, will we get there in time? P.S. - How about making some of the Java platform components available via APT too? If I’m developing an application that uses, say, JavaMail, I have to go to the web, download it, figure out that it depends on the JavaBeans Activation Framework (JAF), download that, set up my classpath appropriately depending on where I downloaded them, etc. It would be great if I could just apt-get install javamail and have exactly the environment I need without additional effort.

I've collected rather too much material for blogging, so over the next few days, I'll be publishing lots of links. I start today, the day of an SPI board meeting on irc.oftc.net #spi, with the trademark and copyright link list. [continues with links on my site]

The good news: I'm back home for at least nearly a week now. The bad news: my head hasn't noticed I've stopped moving and I still feel like I'm moving, so it's hard to concentrate on work.

At the SPA CLisp talk today, Nick Levine mentioned the number of "road to lisp" posts out there. So, I'm writing this on the train home to describe why I'm a schemer. I started [continued...]

Reduced blogging presents: thoughts from the kohacon2k6 trip:- [cont.]

Then, two days later, my "reply to these" mail folder vanishes. [...] I restored from backups, but I probably lost some mail. Resend if you're waiting on a reply from me, please. [...] it was that system which made me never use ReiserFS in paid production.