Today was a travel day, coming back home from the holidays, so I'm rather stunned that I managed to do yet another software release. But there were a few minor bugs in afs-monitor that didn't take long to fix, and I talked myself into making a release rather than spending more time updating the coding style. afs-monitor is a package of check scripts for AFS servers. They're designed with Nagios in mind, but they should work with most monitoring systems that can call external checks in a similar way as Nagios. This is a bug fix release that fixes a relatively serious problem with check_afs_quotas. It has been there since the beginning, but was reported to me by three separate people in the past month; it's weird how those sorts of things come in spurts. It also teaches check_afs_bos about some standard bos output for a feature I don't use (scheduled jobs). You can get the latest version from the afs-monitor distribution page. New Debian packages (as nagios-plugins-afs) have been uploaded to my personal repository. (If anyone would find it useful to have those in Debian proper, drop me a note and I'll do that.)

Sorry, a post about MacOS again, but this is a problem my boss has been faced with, and judging by what google searches gave us as clues to go on, I thought it would be useful for others to know about this.So here it is: for a couple of weeks, my boss's Mac had been slowing down very painfully, to the point that he was just sitting in front of it waiting for web pages to show up or applications to start... We tried a whole bunch of things, such as disabling spotlight, dropbox, and even the time machine, but nothing worked. Finally, he had a look at Disk Utility that said that the disk was gone beyond repair. Fortunately, a new colleague suggested to restore from the Time Machine, holding Command-R during startup. It took ages (over a slow network), but now the machine is up again, without any slowing down.

Finally, I've found some time to update phpMyAdmin packages in Debian to 3.5 series. For long it was not possible due to licensing reasons, but recently this issue was resolved upstream by using jqPlot instead of Highcharts. While packaging new version, I've also replaced all embedded libraries to use corresponding packages from Debian. I've done some testing and everything seems to work fine, but still this frightens me as some versions are slightly different than upstream. Anyway new version is available in experimental for now. Ubuntu users can get it from phpMyAdmin PPA.

Filed under: Debian English Phpmyadmin 9 comments Flattr this!

One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in general, is that there is a great package management system with the ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my machine. Even if the package to use it is easily available from the Linux distribution. When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages I need to talk to it. When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the yubikey-personalization package. The information required to do this is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together. Some years ago, I proposed to use the discover subsystem to implement this. The idea is fairly simple:

• Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program starting when a user log in.
• Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new hardware is inserted into the computer.
• When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed packages.
• Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered package, and make it easy to install it.

I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the discover database to find packages and PackageKit to install packages. Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the draft package is now checked into the Debian Edu subversion repository. In the process, I updated the discover-data package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version 2.2013.01.09 to unstable. I also discovered that the current discover package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present. I ported it to use libusb as a fall back option to get it working. The fixed package version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable because of the freeze). With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is inserted):

For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install program(s)" button should to be implemented. If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings from hardware to Debian packages. Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l' list the package you would like to have installed when a given hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using reportbug if it isn't. Or, if you know of a better way to provide such mapping, please let me know. This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that should be considered before it is ready for production use. Is dbus the correct way to detect new hardware? At the moment I look for HAL dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop. Are there better events to use? How should the user be notified? Is the desktop notification mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a popup instead? How should packages be installed? When should they not be installed? If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian, please send me an email. :)

Brace expansion is well known and handy, but sadly it is not required by POSIX:2001. Shells that don't support it will simply and silently leave it as is.

If you use it to shorten commands, as in "echo Debian GNU/ Linux,kFreeBSD ", you have to spell it out or use some sort of loop.

When using brace expansion for sequences you will usually have to fall back to using the seq command or using loops. " 1..9 " can be replaced with "seq -s ' ' 1 9", " 1..9..2 " to "seq -s ' ' 1 2 9", and so on.
If you use brace expansion for sequences of characters then seq won't be of much help.

I must note that the seq command is not required by POSIX:2001, however.

Remember, if you rely on any non-standard behaviour or feature make sure you document it and, if feasible, check for it at run-time.

I promise that the software releases will decrease in velocity soon! Work is starting up again and will involve longer projects, so I won't be able to keep releasing something daily. I'm still finishing up some fallout from my personal revision control migrations. postfaq is my script for posting Usenet FAQs, inspired by the venerable auto-faq. This release adds support for generating the Last-Modified subheader from the modification timestamp of the FAQ file. Previously, information for that subheader was only taken from an embedded RCS/CVS Id string. It also adds a new -d command-line option that changes the default directory for storing status files. You can get the latest version from the postfaq distribution page.

Earlier this morning, JJ announced what we had been working on for the last few weeks: the Rcpp Gallery. Now, as our luck will have it, the Rcpp-devel list received his message but did not transmit it for an apparent mail system outage at WU Vienna: no sign at the Gmane archive of rcpp-devel or in the personal mailboxen of myself or anybody I spoke to. Hence, so far, and preceding this blog announcement, the only way word got out was via this earlier tweet of mine from about 12 hours ago. The Rcpp Gallery is really the brainchild of JJ. It builds on what he contributed over the last few months in not one but two implementations: Rcpp Attributes. These are described in a vignette of their own. They provide very powerful new functions like sourceCpp which allow the easiest-yet way to get compiled code into R---see for example these posts from my blog about simulating pi in essentially five lines of R or five lines of C++, or this post about using the GSL with ease from R. The Rcpp Gallery also builds on Yihui's excellent knitr package which gained the ability to process C++ code just like R code, as well as some Ruby / Jekyll magic to build a website on the github infrastructure. I helped a little on the side by (at long last) learning how to do prettier websites thanks to Boostrap and its theming extensions. So what does it do, and what is it for? Have a look around the Rcpp Gallery site. Each post is based on a single C++ (or Markdown) file which gets digested by knitr and Rcpp, with the actual output shown alongside the marked up code and explanatory text. Raw sources are available, just pass them into the sourceCpp() function from a current Rcpp release and you should have the same output. Our idea is to have this as a repository for useful code: from simple and introductory to fancy and featureful. We already seeded it with several dozen posts covered anything from lesser known but powerful STL idioms, to Rcpp sugar, to tieing in Armadillo or GSL, random number generation and of course benchmarking---as we do love performance. The entire content is in this github repository, and our page on how to contribute details how you can get involved. We are looking forward to what is to come. In many ways, we are only just getting started.

A friend wrote me a simple question today. My response turned out to be longer than i expected, but i hope it's useful (and maybe other people will have better suggestions) so i thought i'd share it here too: Angela Starita wrote:

I'd like to save my work in a location where I can access it from any computer. I'm wary of using the mechanisms provided by Google and Apple. Can you suggest another service?

Here's my reply: I think you're right to be wary of the big cloud providers, who have a tendency to inspect your data to profile you, to participate in arbitrary surveillance regimes, and to try to sell your eyeballs to advertisers. Caveat: You have to trust the client machine too But it's also worth remembering that the network service provider is not the only source of risk. If you really mean "accessing your data from any computer", that means the computer you're using to access the data can do whatever it wants with it. That is, you need to trust both the operator of these "cloud" services, *and* the administrator/operating system of the client computer you're using to access your data. For example, if you log into any "secure" account from a terminal in a web caf , that leaves you vulnerable to the admins of the web caf (and, in the rather-common case of sloppily-administered web terminals, vulnerable to the previous user(s) of the terminal as well). Option 0: Portable physical storage One way to have your data so that you can access it from "any computer" is to not rely on the network at all, but rather to carry a high-capacity MicroSD card (and USB adapter) around with you (you'll probably want to format the card with a widely-understood filesystem like FAT32 instead of NTFS or HFS+ or ext4, which are only understood by some of the major operating systems, but not all). Here is some example hardware:

• MicroSD USB adapter ($5)
• 16GB class 10 MicroSD card ($20)

Almost every computer these days has either a microSD slot or a USB port, while some computers are not connected to the network. This also means that you don't have to rely on someone else to manage servers that keep your data available all the time. Note that going the microSD route doesn't remove the caveat about needing to trust the client workstation you're using, and it has another consideration: You'd be responsible for your own backup in the case of hardware failure. You're responsible for your own backup in the case of online storage too, of course -- but the better online companies are probably better equipped than most of us to deal with hardware failure. OTOH, they're also susceptible to some data loss scenarios that we aren't as individual humans (e.g. the company might go bankrupt, or get bought by a competitor who wants to terminate the service, or have a malicious employee who decides to take revenge). Backup of a MicroSD card isn't particularly hard, though: just get a USB stick that's the same size, and regularly duplicate the contents of the MicroSD card to the USB stick. One last consideration is storage size -- MicroSD cards are currently limited to 32GB or 64GB. If you have significantly more data than that, this approach might not be possible, or you might need to switch to a USB hard disk, which would limit your ability to use the data on computers that don't have a USB port (such as some smartphones). Option 1: Proprietary service providers If you don't think this portable physical storage option is the right choice for you, here are a couple proprietary service providers who offer some flavor of "cloud" storage while claiming to not look at the contents of your data:

• wuala
• spideroak

I'm not particularly happy with either of those, though, in part because the local client software they want you to run is proprietary, so there's no way to verify that they are actually unable to access the contents of your data. But i'd be a lot happier with either wuala or spideroak than i would be with google drive, dropbox, or iCloud. Option 2: What i really want I'm much more excited about the network-accessible, free-software, privacy-sensitive network-based storage tool known as git-annex assistant. The project is spearheaded by Joey Hess, who is one of the most skilled and thoughtful software developers i know of. "assistant" (and git-annex, from which it derives) has the advantage of being pretty agnostic about the backend service (many plugins for many different cloud providers) and allows you to encrypt your data locally before sending it to the remote provider. This also means you can put your encrypted data in more than one provider, so that if one of the providers fails for some reason, you can be relatively sure that you have another copy available. But "assistant" won't be ready for Windows or Android for several months (builds are available for Linux and Mac OS X now), so i don't know if it meets the criterion for "accessible from any computer". And, of course, even with the encryption capabilities, the old caveat about needing to trust the local client machine still applies.

The Age has an interesting article about how Apple supposedly killed the Netbook [1]. It s one of many articles with a similar spin on the news that the last two companies making Netbooks are going to cease production. The main point of these articles is that Apple decided that Netbooks were crap and killed the market for them by producing tablets and light laptops that squeeze them out of the market. Is the Macbook Air a Netbook? According to the Wikipedia page the Macbook Air [2] weighs 1080g for the 11 version and 1340g for the 13 version. According to Wikipedia the EeePC 701 (the first EeePC) weighs 922g and the last EeePC weighs 1460g [3]. The last EeePC produced is heavier than ANY Macbook Air while the first (and lightest) EeePC is only 158g lighter than the 11 Macbook Air. The 11 Macbook Air is 300*192*17mm (979cm^3) in size while the EeePC 701 is 225*165*35mm (1299cm^3) and the biggest EeePC was 266*191*38mm (1931cm^3). So the 11 Macbook Air is 13% wider than the widest EeePC but takes less volume than any EeePC. The 13 Macbook Air is 325*227*17mm (1254cm^3) which is still less volume than any EeePC. The Wikipedia page about Netbooks defines them as being small, lightweight, legacy-free (in terms of hardware not software) and cheap [4]. The Macbook Air clearly meets all the criteria apart from price. The Apple US web site offers the version of the 11 Macbook Air with 64G of storage for $999 with free shipping, for comparison the EeePC 701 was on sale in stores for $500 in 2008. The CPI adjusted price for the EeePC 701 would be at least $550 in today s money. The Macbook is a bit less than twice as expensive as the EeePC was, but that s more of an issue of Apple being expensive a few years ago companies like HP were also selling Netbooks that were more expensive than the EeePC. Unless having an awful keyboard is a criteria for being a Netbook I think that the Macbook Air meets the criteria. As an aside, a relative recently asked me for advice on a device that is like a Macbook Air but cheaper. Does anyone know of a good option? Is Netbook Production Ceasing? Officeworks currently sells an ASUS Notebook that has a 11.6 display and weighs 1.3kg for $398, it s got a metal body that looks a bit like a Macbook Air (which is the latest fashion and is good for heat dissipation). That s not advertised as a Netbook or a Eee product but it s cheap, lighter than the heaviest EeePC, and not much bigger than an EeePC. It seems that the general prices of laptops other than Apple products (which have always had higher prices) have been dropping a lot recently. There are lots of good options if you want a laptop that costs $500 or less. Even Thinkpads (one of the most expensive and best designed ranges of laptops) are well below $1000. Do the Articles about Netbooks Make Sense? The claims being made are that Apple skipped Netbooks because they couldn t make a good profit. This disregards the fact that the iPhone and iPad (which are very profitable) are in the high end of the price range that was occupied by Netbooks. While Apple does make a good deal of money from the iPhone App Market it would be possible to make a Netbook with a lower production price than an iPhone because making things smaller requires more engineering work and often more expensive parts. This also disregards the fact that there are a range devices which work as an iPad case with keyboard, an iPad with such a keyboard meets most criteria for being a Netbook, so Apple is one iPad keyboard device away from selling Netbooks. It s interesting to note that I haven t yet seen an article about the profits from Netbooks which didn t make an issue of the MS-Windows license fees. The first Netbooks only ran Linux but later on they switched to Windows, that had to make a big impact on profits. An article about Netbooks which just assumes that everyone has to pay a MS license fee is missing too much of the Netbook history to be useful. I wonder if anyone could make products that are as profitable as the iPhone and Macbook Air if they had to pay for MS license fees and design their hardware to work with MS software (as opposed to Apple who can change their software to allow a cheaper hardware design). The articles also claim that Netbooks give a bad user experience. When I bought my EeePC 701 it was the fastest system I owned for loading OpenOffice, SSD random read speeds were really good (writes sucked but that didn t matter so much). The keyboard on an EeePC 701 is not nearly as good as a full size laptop but it is also a lot better than using a tablet, I ve used both a 10 Android tablet and an EeePC as a ssh client and there is no comparison. When I m going somewhere that requires random sysadmin work (or other serious typing) and I can t carry much weight then I still take my EeePC 701 and I don t consider taking a tablet. The low resolution of the screen is a major issue, but it s about the same as a Macbook Air so that s not an advantage for Apple. I knew some people who used an EeePC 701 for the majority of their work, I couldn t do that but obviously some people have different requirements. I now use my phone for many tasks that I used to do on my EeePC (even light sysadmin work) so my EeePC sometimes goes unused for months. But it s still an important part of my collection of computers. It works well for what it does and I don t feel any need to buy a replacement. When it wears out I ll probably buy something similar to an 11 Macbook Air to replace it unless there s a good option of a tablet with a detachable keyboard. My plans for computer ownership for the near future are based on a reasonably large Android phone (currently a Samsung Galaxy S3 but maybe a Galaxy Note 2 or similar next year), a small laptop or large tablet with hardware keyboard (currently an EeePC 701), a large laptop (currently a Thinkpad T61), and a workstation (currently a NEC system with an Intel E4600 CPU and a Dell U2711 27 monitor). A reasonably small and light system with a hardware keyboard and solid state storage is an important part of my computer needs. If tablet computers with hardware keyboards replace traditional Netbooks that s not really killing Netbooks but introducing a new version of the same thing. But a good way of getting web hits on an article is to claim that a once popular product is dead.

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/ajohhp3
• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macbook_air
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eeepc
• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook

So I got an iPod Nano (6th generation) for Christmas this year, just in time since my trusty old iPod Mini started beg for retirement after almost 8 years of usage. Since my old iPod was working like a charm all those years I expected a smooth sailing when I plugged in my new iPod Nano. Gnome recognized it correctly and mounted the device. The iPod showed up in Rhythmbox as I was used to and I started to fill it with some music. Everything worked as expected: Rhythmbox copied the music to the iPod without complaining and after unmounting the iPod and starting it it was emtpy. Whait, what? Why is it empty? Didn t I just So I tried again, and again with the same result. Half an hour later I found out that libgpod (the iPod driver for Linux) supports all iPods except the iPod Nano 6G. Bummer. Apparently Apple changed the algorithm to calculate the checksums of the files on the device and since that algorithm is unknown you cannot successfully write on it with free software. That means technically this device is unusable for Linux users since iTunes doesn t run on Linux. However, there seems to be a way to use the iPod Nano with libgpod if you are trusting this guy and willing to use his binary (only!) file with libgpod (which I am not). And somehow the guys over at Spotify managed to get the iPod Nano running in their Linux client but they don t provide the code either. Being already more than two years old, I don t have much hope that the iPod Nano will work on Linux with libgpod in the foreseeable future. On the bright side I can say the device is not totally useless as it comes with FM radio

The previous release of my module to handle terminal escape sequences for text attributes and color worked fine on every version of Perl except for 5.6.2. This is the sort of thing that bothers me, since I'm trying to support every version of Perl from 5.6 on, but I don't have that old of a version around to test with any more. Thankfully, David Cantrell (who ran a CPAN tester on that version) was kind enough to investigate further and found that the Exporter in that version requires any tags be listed before functions. After that tweak to one of the test cases, it appears to work properly (so the module itself was fine). This release also adds the minimum Perl version to the module metadata. You can get the latest version from the Term::ANSIColor distribution page.

I don t care how silly it is, but the fact that I, for 62 days in a row, I pushed something, closed something or did something worth $EFFORT on GitHub is pretty great. I m pretty happy with that.

I ll be speaker at the Open Source Data Center Conference 2013 in Nuremberg/Germany on 17th and 18th April, talking about Continuous Integration/Delivery in the data-center. I was speaking at OSDC back in 2009 and very much enjoyed the conference so I m totally looking forward to OSDC 2013, hope to see you there!

Have you ever tried to add a Lintian override only to get it wrong? Fret not, with the Lintian-overrider 2000 such are problems of the past! Simply feed the tag emitted by Lintian to the Lintian-overrider 2000 and it will show you the correct format for the override plus the file to put said overide in. Furthermore, it will show you variants that you may (or may not) want to use instead.

$ echo "W: login: setuid-binary bin/su 4755 root/root"   \
     lintian-overrider --alternative-forms
  --8<-- debian/login.lintian-overrides --8<--
# If you want to override all (present and future) variants
# of this tag, use:
#  setuid-binary
setuid-binary bin/su 4755 root/root
# Alternative forms...
#   login: setuid-binary bin/su 4755 root/root
#   login binary: setuid-binary bin/su 4755 root/root
# For architecture specific overrides, use one of:
#   login [i386-any amd64-any other-archs] binary: setuid-binary bin/su 4755 root/root
#   login [!i386-any !amd64-any !other-archs] binary: setuid-binary bin/su 4755 root/root
  --8<-- End of debian/login.lintian-overrides --8<--

No more fiddling with that stupid syntax. Just feed it to the Lintian-overrider 2000 and instantly you will get the overrides you want! If you sometimes make a copy-waste mistake or just feel life is too short manually update those files, the Lintian-overrider 2000 is the tool for you! With its --source-dir command line option, your lintian overrrides are updated automatically! The Lintian-overrider 2000 can also automatically maintain your Lintian overrides for you! It is simple, just do:

$ lintian -o <path/to/your/changes-file.changes>   \
      lintian-overrider --there-are-no-issues --source-dir <path/to/unpacked/source-tree>

Alioth is ready to take your git clone (or HTTP GET) request, so go order your copy now! </tv-shop-ad>

And we're all going to be back in Brisbane soon enough. April 1st is the date I'd like to be back by. Movers are scheduled to come on the 14th and pack up all our stuff, and as soon as the house sells, we're good to go. The last seven years have been an experience. I've loved living in this country, and this isn't the way I wanted to be leaving it, but sometimes (as I know well enough from painful experience) life doesn't always give you what you want. I am looking forward to building a new life for myself with Zoe in Brisbane.

I've just confirmed my flight and hotel bookings for FOSDEM 2013, so I'm looking to meet all great people there again. This year my schedule is not that packed as I have no talks (Weblate lightning talk was not accepted) and also there will be no big phpMyAdmin team meeting, so get in touch if you want to discuss anything with me. As most of the rooms still don't have a schedule, I can't give you hint where I will be present, but I definitely won't miss Friday beer event and Dieter's talk about phpMyAdmin in MySQL room. The rest pretty much depends on who I will meet :-).

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

Dear lazyweb. I remember that not so long ago someone on planet.debian.org shared info about he/she s talk about packaging Debian with link to both video of the talk and sources of presentation. Since I would like to prepare similar talk for some local Polish OpenSource conference I d be thankful if someone could remind me a link in comments. TIA.

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (836.78 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Debian Packaging I uploaded Zim 0.58, WordPress 3.5 (and I had to file a ticket about the availability of sources of minified javascript files again) and another security update for python-django (696535). Speaking of python-django, I forwarded one bug report of Anders Kaseorg concerning Django s bash completion (#695811). I also sponsored the upload of ledgersmb 1.3.25-1. Other Debian work I contributed some patches to improve debian-installer support in live-build. I also added a work-around for bug #652946 in live-installer and committed a fix for this same bug in a jessie branch of partman-target. I also prepared a bugfix for a counter-productive behavior of choose-mirror (#695261, it was not possible to override the codename of the release to install via preseed if you install from a CD with a full base system). I discovered an oddity in the Packages.diff/Index file for the architectures armhf and s390x, I reported it to ftpmasters in #696792. (All those issues were discovered while working for a customer) Debian France I spent quite some time on Debian France this month again. I started by setting up an internal gitolite to manage our accounting/administrative documents. Then I updated galette, the web application that we are using to manage our database of members. In the process, I filed two bugs that we discovered. I immediately tested Galette by registering 4 members that joined during the former mini-Debconf in Paris. We have plans to automate the membership renewal process so we have opened a Paypal account. This month we also cleared the last steps so that I and Sylvestre Ledru have full control on the Debian France bank account. I also registered the new officers at the Tribunal d instance de Sarreguemines . Salt bug reports During the last mini-debconf, I discovered Salt (thanks to Julien Cristau!) and since I had to switch some servers of mine, I took this opportunity to upgrade to wheezy and try out salt at the same time. It took much more time than expected but the result is pleasant. The configuration of all my servers is now well documented/specified in a central Git repository, and moving services is much easier than before. In the process, I filed quite some bugs (#2865, #2851, #2866 and #2875), most of them have been fixed in the 0.11.1 release that just happened. Thanks I wish you a happy new year and all the best for 2013! See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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faq2html is my version of that script that so many different people have written: a tool to convert text files into HTML for the web. This script is specifically tuned to the way that I format text files and has a lot of special logic to deal with my eccentricities, so I have no idea how well it would work for anyone else. This release adds a new -l option, which says to add a subheading to the HTML output giving the last modified date based on the file modification timestamp. Previously, these subheadings were only added in some situations and based on RCS/CVS-style Id keywords in the file. Since I'm converting my personal repositories to Git, that was going to stop working. You can get the current version of faq2html from my web tools distribution page. With this update, I was able to convert my FAQs repository from Subversion to Git, which means that I only have one personal repository left in Subversion (PGP::Sign, which I will probably convert to Git shortly). That leaves a few CVS repositories, and therein lies a problem. There are a few places where I'm still using CVS for a conventional package or for some random files, and those can move to Git without much trouble whenever I get around to it. But most of my remaining use of CVS is for storing individual scripts that, if I distribute them at all, I distribute individually. And, for that, CVS seems to have a lot of advantages that are hard to implement with Git:

• CVS maintains per-file revision numbers that I can manipulate if I want during check-in. This means that the revision control system maintains a reasonable release version scheme for me without having to do any additional work. I use the CVS-generated version numbers, with the occasional manual bump to a new major revision, for all of my scripts.
• CVS Id keywords expose both the version number and last modified date to the file itself. Nearly all of my scripts have a bit of boilerplate Perl code that uses this to generate -v output showing the version number and last modified date. This is a nice feature; when you have a running script, you can always figure out its vintage. Maintaining this information in the script by hand is a pain.
• CVS revision history maps directly to version numbers. This lets me generate, automatically, nice changelog pages like this one for my backport script. Without that concept of per-file version numbers for a script repository, I would have to determine the mapping of changes to version numbers manually somehow.

I'm not at all sure what I'm going to do about this. Some of my scripts currently maintained in CVS, such as all the AFS tools, should move into larger packages that are more conventionally distributed, with a separate README file and similar machinery, and I'm slowly in the process of doing that. But many of my scripts are small programs that don't fit into any larger whole and don't warrant that sort of treatment. Honestly, I'm moderately tempted to just keep using CVS for scripts, since everything newer goes to repository-wide instead of per-file version numbers (for exceptionally good reasons when working on a unified piece of software, rather than a conglomeration of individual scripts), and I'm unenthused about writing my own machinery using Git hooks and smart Git log and diff parsing. But the CVS command-line interface is awful and the CVS repository format is even worse. If there are any brilliant ideas that I'm missing, I'd be interested in hearing about them in email (or other blog posts on Planet Debian or somewhere else I read). If I come up with some solution or get any great advice, I'll post a follow-up.

I'm still working on perl-cross-debian (just uploaded 0.0.2) and there's more to do on that with upstream but part of the reason to work on perl cross-building is to do what I can to help with the ARM64 port.

So, I went back to Wookey's talk at DebConf12 which leads to the current list of cross-build results for arm64 and started through the list.

coreutils is listed as failing but that was an archive error (MD5sum hash mismatch), so that just needs a retry. I don't have access to that buildd, yet, so nothing I can do there.

Next on the list (excluding those just waiting for build-deps) was klibc.

  aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc -Wp,-MD,usr/klibc/.__static_init.o.d  -nostdinc -iwithprefix 

include -I/ PKGBUILDDIR /usr/include/arch/x86_64 -Iusr/include/arch/x86_64 

-I/ PKGBUILDDIR /usr/include/bits64 

-Iusr/include/bits64 -I/ PKGBUILDDIR /usr/klibc/../include 

-Iusr/klibc/../include -I/ PKGBUILDDIR /usr/include -Iusr/include 

-I/ PKGBUILDDIR /linux/include -Ilinux/include 

-I/ PKGBUILDDIR /linux/arch/x86/include -Ilinux/arch/x86/include 

-D__KLIBC__=2 -D__KLIBC_MINOR__=0 -D_BITSIZE=64 -fno-stack-protector -fwrapv -m64 -Os 

-fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables -fomit-frame-pointer -falign-functions=1 -falign-jumps=1 -falign-loops=1 

-W -Wall -Wno-sign-compare -Wno-unused-parameter -c -o usr/klibc/__static_init.o usr/klibc/__static_init.c

aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc: error: unrecognized command line option '-m64'

make[4]: *** [usr/klibc/__static_init.o] Error 1

Turns out that this is a build failure I understood, at least initially. A little digging and a trivial patch was begun:

--- a/usr/klibc/arch/arm/MCONFIG

+++ b/usr/klibc/arch/arm/MCONFIG

@@ -30,6 +30,13 @@

 ifeq ($(CONFIG_AEABI),y)

 KLIBCREQFLAGS += -mabi=aapcs-linux -mno-thumb-interwork

 else

+# aarch64

+ifeq ($(CONFIG_AARCH64),y)

+KLIBCREQFLAGS +=

+KLIBCOPTFLAGS += -mgeneral-regs-only

+else

 KLIBCREQFLAGS += -mabi=apcs-gnu -mno-thumb-interwork

 endif

 endif

+endif

+

Alongside a trivial change to debian/rules

ifeq ($(DEB_HOST_ARCH),arm64)

DEB_MAKE_ENVVARS := ARCH=arm CONFIG_AARCH64=y CPU_ARCH=armv8-a CPU_TUNE=generic

endif

OK, then things get a bit more awkward,

....

code/debian/cross/klibc/klibc-2.0.1/linux/arch/arm/include -Ilinux/arch/arm/include -D__KLIBC__=2 

-D__KLIBC_MINOR__=0 -D_BITSIZE=32 -fno-stack-protector -fwrapv -fno-exceptions -Os 

-march=armv8-a -mtune=generic -mgeneral-regs-only -W -Wall -Wno-sign-compare -Wno-unused-parameter 

-c -o ../foo.o usr/klibc/arch/arm/crt0.S

usr/klibc/arch/arm/crt0.S: Assembler messages:

usr/klibc/arch/arm/crt0.S:19: Error: operand 1 should be an integer register --  mov r0,sp'

usr/klibc/arch/arm/crt0.S:20: Error: operand 1 should be an integer register --  mov r1,#0'

Hmm. Assembly, well, yes, I've done assembly before, I know what mov should normally do, sp is likely to be the stack pointer .... where's my AARCH64 assembly PDF again... PRD03-GENC-010197 ...

OK, so maybe the r0 and r1 should be x0 and x1, hmm, that at least doesn't raise assembly errors. So a tentative change:

--- a/usr/klibc/arch/arm/crt0.S

+++ b/usr/klibc/arch/arm/crt0.S

@@ -15,9 +15,13 @@

 #ifdef __thumb__

 	.thumb_func

 #endif

-

+#ifdef __aarch64__

+_start: mov x0, sp

+	mov x1, #0

+	bl __libc_init

+#else

 _start:	mov	r0, sp

 	mov	r1, #0

 	bl	__libc_init

-

+#endif

 	.size _start,.-_start

Next stage, however, leaves me quite a bit more lost:

....

klibc-2.0.1/linux/arch/arm/include -Ilinux/arch/arm/include 

-D__KLIBC__=2 -D__KLIBC_MINOR__=0 -D_BITSIZE=32 -fno-stack-protector -fwrapv -fno-exceptions -Os 

-march=armv8-a -mtune=generic -mgeneral-regs-only -W -Wall -Wno-sign-compare -Wno-unused-parameter 

-c -o usr/klibc/arch/arm/setjmp.o usr/klibc/arch/arm/setjmp.S

usr/klibc/arch/arm/setjmp.S: Assembler messages:

usr/klibc/arch/arm/setjmp.S:32: Error: unknown mnemonic  stmia' --  stmia r0, r4,r5,r6,r7,r8,r9,r10,fp,sp,lr '

usr/klibc/arch/arm/setjmp.S:33: Error: operand 1 should be an integer register --  mov r0,#0'

usr/klibc/arch/arm/setjmp.S:34: Error: operand 1 should be an integer register --  mov pc,lr'

usr/klibc/arch/arm/setjmp.S:42: Error: unknown mnemonic  ldmia' --  ldmia r0, r4,r5,r6,r7,r8,r9,r10,fp,sp,lr '

usr/klibc/arch/arm/setjmp.S:43: Error: unknown mnemonic  movs' --  movs r0,r1'

usr/klibc/arch/arm/setjmp.S:44: Error: unknown mnemonic  moveq' --  moveq r0,#1'

usr/klibc/arch/arm/setjmp.S:45: Error: operand 1 should be an integer register --  mov pc,lr'

make[5]: *** [usr/klibc/arch/arm/setjmp.o] Error 1

So now I'm out of my depth of AARCH64 assembly (apart from the recurrence of mov r0 vs mov x0 etc.). If the above is useful then maybe someone can work out what is wrong with setjmp.S or whether AARCH64 just means that klibc needs to gain a arch/arm64/ directory and not try to duplicate each entire assembly block within #ifdef clauses.

I don't really know where else to put an incomplete investigation like this, so it's here for anyone to find.

(Oh, and if you're reading those arm64 cross-build logs, then a few hundred occurrences of ldconfig: /usr/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/*.so is for unknown machine 183. in every build log (success or fail) is apparently entirely normal until more packages get fixed. Really slows down scanning the build log.

I may try busybox or libusb next. libusb looks like a classic "you might have told me to cross-compile but I'm going to use g++ anyway because I know best" cross-building problem, indicative of yet another BDBS. sigh.

Resources:
Getting started with 64-bit ARM development
ARMv8 images for developers
AArch64 for everyone, Marcin Juszkiewicz
Howto/HelloAarch64 - Linaro wiki
AArch64 gcc options