• I made some noise about languages eventually dropped from D-I. It had some results..:-)
• Spanish completed level 1 and is back to full 100%
• Ukrainian completes level 1 and just needs a small bit in level 3 to be fully 100%
• Brazilian Portuguese, Traditional Chinese complete level 1

Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files):

• 37 languages 100%: ar bg bn bs ca cs de el eo es et fa fr gu hi id it ja kk kn ko nb nl pl pt pt_BR ru si sk sr sv te th tr uk zh_CN zh_TW
• 6 languages 99%: ast be da km mr ta
• 2 languages 97%: eu fi
• 2 languages 96%: ga he
• 2 languages 95%: dz ro
• 3 languages 93%: hu is lo
• 1 language 92%: ml
• 3 language 91%: pa sl vi
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.):

• 27 languages 100%: be bg ca cs da de eo es fa fr gu he id is it ja kk nl pl pt ru si sk sv tr uk zh_CN
• 3 languages 99%: nb sl th
• 6 languages 98%: ast dz eu hr pt_BR ro
• 1 language 97%: ta
• 1 language 96%: vi
• 2 langauges 95%: el fi
• 3 languages 94%: ar gl zh_TW
• 6 languages 92%: bn bs hu ko ne sr
• 7 languages 91%: ga ka km lt mk mr te
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader)

• 33 languages 100%: be bg bs ca cs da de el eo es fa fi fr ga gl he hr id is it ja kk nb nl pl pt ru sk sr sv th tr zh_CN
• 2 languages 98%: hu uk
• others are 90% or below

Full 100% completeness (hall of fame) for 19 languages: Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, German, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish, Simplified Chinese

Some networks have no connection to the outside except that they allow surfing through an HTTP(S) proxy. Sometimes you are happy and the HTTPS port (443) is unrestricted. The following server-side tools allow you to exploit these weaknesses and get you a shell on your server. sslh sslh is an SSH/SSL multiplexor. If a client connects to sslh, it checks if the clients speaks the SSH or the SSL protocol and then passes the connection to the according real port of SSL or some SSL enabled service, e.g. an HTTPS, OpenVPN, Tinc or XMPP server. That way it s possible to connect to one of these services and SSH on the same port. The usual scenario where this daemon is useful are firewalls which block SSH, force HTTP to go through a proxy, but allow HTTPS connections without restriction. In that case you let sslh listen on the HTTPS port (443) and to move the real HTTPS server (e.g. Apache) to listen on either a different port number (e.g. 442, 444 or 8443) or on another IP address, e.g. on localhost, port 443. On an Debian or Ubuntu based Apache HTTPS server, you just have to do the following to run Apache on port 442 and sslh on port 443 instead:

1. apt-get install sslh as root.
2. Edit /etc/default/sslh, change RUN=no to RUN=yes and --ssl 127.0.0.1:443 to --ssl 127.0.0.1:442.
3. Edit /etc/apache2/ports.conf and all files in /etc/apache2/sites-available/ which contain a reference to port 443 (which is only /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl.conf in the default configuration) and change all occurrences of 443 to 442.
4. service apache2 restart
5. service sslh start

Now you should be able to ssh to your server on port 443 (ssh -p 443 your.server.example.org) while still being able to surf to https://your.server.example.org/. sslh works as threaded or as preforking daemon, or via inetd. It also honors tcpwrapper configurations for sshd in /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny. sslh is available as port or package at least in Gentoo, in FreeBSD, in Debian and in Ubuntu. AjaxTerm A completely different approach takes AjaxTerm. It provides a terminal inside a web browser with login and ssh being its server-side backend. Properly safe-guarded by HTTPS plus maybe HTTP based authentication this can be an interesting emergency alternative to the more common but also more often blocked remote login mechanisms. AjaxTerm is available as package at least in Debian and in Ubuntu.

Happily I never were forced to use either of them myself. :-)

Apache 2.4 being out, I noticed that my good old mod_defensible did not compile anymore. The changes in the new Apache 2.4 API were small for its concern, so it was pretty easy to update this software to make it compile again. Honestly, I'm not sure that this module is really used into the wild, but I still think that it can serve as a good prototype for doing other things so I like keeping it around. :-) All this has been triggered by the Apache 2.4 arrival into Debian experimental. Therefore I've updated the mod_defensible package to use the new dh_apache2, and imported it into Git at the same time.

After quite big delay, Weblate 0.8 is finally ready. There are many fixes and improvements like grouping of Git commits, improved checks or activity logging. All in all this should be feature complete for 1.0 release. Now it's time to stabilize all the features and release 0.9 (AKA 1.0rc) and then we'll be ready to fire 1.0. Full list of changes for 0.8:

• Replaced own full text search with Whoosh.
• Various fixes and improvements to checks.
• New command updatechecks.
• Lot of translation updates.
• Added dictionary for storing most frequently used terms.
• Added /admin/report/ for overview of repositories status.
• Machine translation services no longer block page loading.
• Management interface now contains also useful actions to update data.
• Records log of changes made by users.
• Ability to postpone commit to Git to generate less commits from single user.
• Possibility to browse failing checks.
• Automatic translation using already translated strings.
• New about page showing used versions.
• Django 1.4 compatibility.
• Ability to push changes to remote repo from web interface.
• Added review of translations done by others.

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. Weblate is also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others. PS: If you're about to use Weblate, rather use Git version than tagged 0.8, you will get bunch of bug fixes for free :-).

Filed under: English Weblate 0 comments Flattr this!

When we added s390x to the main archive, coming from Debian Ports, we were unlucky. A new glib release had assumptions that weren't true on 64bit big endian architectures and it entered the archive just a few days before we made the initial import. This weekend we finally got a new major release into Debian unstable that fixed these issues. So we're almost on par with s390 now. It all untangled quite nicely after glib-networking was able to complete its testsuite. Only one build-dependency loop between nautilus and tracker had to be broken manually.

So what's left? There's a bunch of usertagged bugs (with both general FTBFSes and arch-specific issues; kudos to Aur lien Jarno providing a lot of patches) and we still need to file some, like iceweasel segfaulting during its build. That's important because another bunch of packages needs it to build (well, mozjs and/or xulrunner, or some package that needs those).

Please, pretty please, just do it. However, don't forget: Debian localization material is spread in thousands of packages, with dozens of different VCS, hundreds of developers and hundreds of thousands of strings for up to seventy languages. And there are less than 5 people running all this. So, yeah, there are fancy "insert your favourite l10n tool of the day here" everywhere and we should rather be using them. But nobody prevents anybody to build something better than we we have now. Really, nothing. Do-ocracy, as we use to say. Just do it and, in the meantime, suffer with us with what we have.

phpMyAdmin 3.5 should be released this weekend, so let's look at translations status for last time before release. Here comes seventh round of translation status update. Since last update we have one more translation and one less (due to some not translated strings in it) summing up to 11 translations at 100%:

• Czech
• Dutch
• English (Great Britain)
• French
• Greek
• Japanese
• Russian
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish

There are few which are really close to 100% and I hope they will get there till release:

• Chinese
• Danish
• Estonian
• German
• Italian
• Polish

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 3.5 using translation server.

Filed under: English Phpmyadmin 0 comments Flattr this!

In the language introduced yesterday, mutable parameters play the important role of representing the side effects of actions in the type system and thus ensure referential transparency. One of the questions currently unaddressed is how to handle currying in the presence of mutable parameters. In order to visualise this problem, consider a function

    printLn(mutable IO, String line)

If we bind the the first parameter, what should be the type of the function, and especially important how do we get back the mutable parameter? Consider the partially applied form printLn1:

    printLn1(String line)

The mutability parameter would be lost and we could not do any further I/O (and the curried form would appear as a pure function, so a good compiler would not even emit a call to it) An answer might be to put the thing into the result when currying:

    printLn2(String line) -> mutable IO

But how can we explain this? In the end result, do we maybe have to use a signature like:

    printLn(String, mutable in IO io1, mutable out IO io2)

We could then introduce syntax to call that as

    printLn(string, mutable io)

Where as the mutable io argument basically expands to io and io1 for the first call, and for later calls to io1, io2 , and so on. It can also be easily curried by allowing currying to take place on variables not declared as output parameters. We can then curry the function as:

    printLn3(mutable in IO io1, mutable out IO io2)
    printLn4(mutable out IO io2)

If so, we can rename mutable back to unique and make that easier by introducing the unary operator & for two locations, just like Mercury uses ! for it. We could then write calls looking like this:

    printLn("Hello", &io);
    printLn("Hello", io, io1);

How out parameters are explained is a different topic; we could probably say that an out parameter defines a new variable. Another option is to forbid currying of mutable parameters entirely. This would have the advantage of maintaining the somewhat simple one parameter style. The programming language Clean does not provide any special syntactic sugar for having mutable variables. In Clean, the function gets a unique object and returns a unique object (noted by *). For example, the main entry point in a Clean program (with state) looks like this:

    Start:: *World -> *World

In short, the function Start gets a abstract world passed that is unique and at the end returns a new unique world. In Clean syntax, our example function would most likely have the signature:

    printLn :: String *IO -> *IO

You know have to either maintain one additional variable for the new unique object, which gets a bit complicated with time. On the other hand, you can do function composition on this (if you have a function composition operator that preserves uniqueness when available, as should be possible in Clean):

    printTwoLines :: *IO -> *IO
    printTwoLines = (printLn "World") o (printLn "Hello")

Function composition on mutable things however, does not seem like it is needed often enough in a functional programming language with a C syntax. People might also ask why monads are not used instead. Simon L Peyton Jones and Philip Wadler described monadic I/O in their paper Imperative Functional Programming (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/imperative.ps.Z) in 1993, and it is used in Haskell (the paper was about the implementation in Haskell anyway), one of the world s most popular and successful functional programming languages. While monadic I/O works for the Haskell crowd, and surely some other people, the use of Monads also limits the expressiveness of code, at least as far as I can tell. At least as soon as you want to combine multiple monads, you will have to start lifting stuff from one monad to another (liftIO and friends), or perform all operations in the IO monad, which prevents obvious optimizations (such as parallelizing the creation of two arrays) in short dependencies between actions are more strict than they have to be. For a functional language targeting imperative programmers, the lifting part seems a bit too complicated. One of the big advantages of monads is that they are much easier to implement, as they do not require extensions to the type system and the Hindley-Milner type inference algorithm used by the cool functional programming languages. If you want uniqueness typing however, you need to modify the algorithm or infer the basic types first and then infer uniqueness in a second pass (as Clean seems to do it).
Filed under: General

Credit where it is due and I believe it is due for Jakub Adam for packaging eclipse packages. If you use any of the eclipse packages provided the apt repositories for Wheezy or sid, it is very likely you have Jakub Adam to thank for it. I also believe that Miguel Landaeta and James Page deserve praise for their work. Miguel is to thank for the removal of libservlet2.4-java and updating its reverse dependencies not in that order . James Page, on the other hand, has been introducing and updating a lot of packages, noticeably the jenkins packages. Thank you and keep up the good work.

I set aside 15 minutes to find a tool that would allow me to easily post to my identi.ca account via the command line. I'm two hours in and I finally sent my first remote post. Hopefully nobody else will have to spend this much time! There are a lot of tools to help you interact with Twitter via the command line and identi.ca supports the twitter API, however, convincing these tools to use identi.ca was harder than I expected and is woefully under-documented. This hardship is largely self-inflicted since I chose to authenticate via oauth, however, it's not clear to me if identi.ca supports basic auth and if so for how much longer. In any event, oauth seems like a much preferable authetication approach because I don't have to store my identi.ca password in plain text. I decided to use tweepy since it's packaged for Debian and it's written in python. If you are not familiar with OAuth, it's worth reading up on. In short:

• register your application via identi.ca web interface
• retrieve consumer token and consumer secret from identi.ca (via the web)
• using this token and secret, request from identi.ca an application key and secret (you must provide your identi.ca user login credentials before you get these strings)
• and now, configure your application to use the applicaiton key and secret everytime it connects

tweepy has documentation on using setting up oauth, however, I found it hard to follow, especially since it goes back and forth between using it for a web app and using it for a desktop app. Since I'm interested in a desktop app (shell), the web app business was just clutter. I wrote the script below to initialize my app and retrieve the application key and secret. If you are writing a desktop app, this needs to be run once for each user of the app:

#!/usr/bin/python
""" 
This script should be used once to initialize your desktop/command line
application with a oauth access key and access secret. 
Your first step is to login, via the web, to your identi.ca account
and authorize your application. Click Edit next to your username
to edit your profile settings. Then click Connections on the left
side bar. Then, in the right sidebar, click 
"Register an OAuth client application".
When you are done, you will see a page listing your token and secret.
Fill in the consumer_token and consumer_secret variables below with those
values.
"""
""" Fill in these values with values provided in the identi.ca web app when you register your app! """
consumer_token = ""
consumer_secret = ""
import tweepy
host = 'identi.ca'
api_root = '/api/'
oauth_root = api_root + 'oauth/'
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_token, consumer_secret, 'oob')
auth.OAUTH_HOST = host
auth.OAUTH_ROOT = oauth_root
auth.secure = True
try:
  redirect_url = auth.get_authorization_url()
except tweepy.TweepError:
  print 'Error! Failed to get request token.'
  quit()
req_key = auth.request_token.key
req_secret = auth.request_token.secret
print "you don't need these values... just fyi..."
print "auth request key is: " + req_key
print "auth request secret is: " + req_secret
print "Go to this URL for verify code: " + redirect_url
print "enter the verify code from the URL above"
verifier = raw_input('Verify code: ')
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_token, consumer_secret, 'oob')
auth.set_request_token(req_key, req_secret)
auth.OAUTH_HOST = host
auth.OAUTH_ROOT = oauth_root
auth.secure = True
try:
  auth.get_access_token(verifier)
except tweepy.TweepError:
  print 'Error! Failed to get access token.'
print "Store these values in your application. You will re-use them"
print "auth access key is: " + auth.access_token.key 
print "auth access secret is: " + auth.access_token.secret 
print "done with initialization"

Once you have your key and secret, the following simpler application will post for you:

#!/usr/bin/python
import tweepy
post = "I microblog from bash"
consumer_token = ""
consumer_secret = ""
access_key = ""
access_secret = ""
host = 'identi.ca'
api_root = '/api/'
oauth_root = api_root + 'oauth/'
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_token, consumer_secret, 'oob')
auth.OAUTH_HOST = host 
auth.OAUTH_ROOT = oauth_root 
auth.secure = True 
auth.set_access_token(access_key, access_secret)
api = tweepy.API(auth, host = host, api_root = api_root)
api.update_status(post)

This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (227.83 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Dpkg Thanks to Guillem, dpkg with multiarch support is now available in Debian sid. The road has been bumpy, and it has again been delayed multiple times even after Guillem announced it on debian-devel-announce. Finally, the upload happened on March 19th. I did not appreciate his announce because it was not coordinated at all, and had I been involved from the start, we could have drafted it in a way that sounded less scary for people. In the end, I provided a script so that people can verify whether they were affected by one of the potential problems that Guillem pointed out. While real, most of them are rather unlikely for typical multiarch usage. Bernhard R. Link submitted a patch to add a new status command to dpkg-buildflags. This command would print all the information required to understand which flags are activated and why. It would typically be called during the build process by debian/rules to keep a trace of the build flags configuration. The goal is to help debugging and also to make it possible to extract that information automatically from build logs. I reviewed his patch and we made several iterations, it s mostly ready to be merged but there s one detail where Bernhard and I disagree and I solicited Guillem s opinion to try to take a decision. Unfortunately neither Guillem nor anyone else chimed in. On request of Alexander Wirt, I uploaded a new backport of dpkg where I dropped the DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH variable from dpkg-architecture to ensure multi-arch is never accidentally enabled in other backports. One last thing that I did not mention publicly at all yet, is that I contacted Lennart Poettering to suggest an improvement to the /etc/os-release file that he s trying to standardize across distributions. It occurred to me that this file could also replace our /etc/dpkg/origins/default file (and not only /etc/debian_version) provided that it could store ancestry information. After some discussions, he documented new official fields for that file (ID_LIKE, HOME_URL, SUPPORT_URL, BUG_REPORT_URL). Next step for me is to improve dpkg-vendor to support this file (as a fallback or as default, I don t know yet). Packaging I packaged quilt 0.60 (we re now down to 9 Debian-specific patches, from a whopping 26 in version 0.48!) and zim 0.55. In prevision of the next upstream version of Publican, I asked the Perl team to package a few Perl modules that Publican now requires. Less than two weeks after, all of them were in Debian Unstable. Congrats and many thanks to the Perl team (and Salvatore Bonaccorso in particular, which I happen to know because we were on the same plane during last Debconf!). On a side note, being the maintainer of nautilus-dropbox became progressively less fun over the last months, in particular because the upstream authors tried to override some of the (IMO correct) packaging decisions that I made and got in touch with Ubuntu community managers to try to have their way. Last but not least, I keep getting duplicates of a bug that is not in my package but in the official package and that Dropbox did not respond to my query. Book update The translation is finished and we re now reviewing the whole book. It takes a bit more time than expected because we re trying to harmonize the style and because it s difficult to coordinate the work of several volunteer reviewers. The book cover is now almost finalized (click on it to view it in higher definitions): We also made some progress on the interior design for the paperback. Unfortunately, I have nothing to show you yet. But it will be very nice and made with just a LaTeX stylesheet tailored for use with dblatex. The liberation fundraising slowed down with only 41 new supporters this month but it made a nice bump anyway thanks to a generous donation of 1000 EUR by Offensive security, the company behind Backtrack Linux. They will soon communicate on this, hopefully it will boost the operation. It would be really nice if we managed to raise the remaining 3000 EUR in the few weeks left until the official release of the book! The work on my book dominated the month and explains my relative inactivity on other fronts. I worked much more than usual, and my wife keeps telling me that I look tired and that I should go in bed earlier but I see the end of the tunnel: if everything goes well, the book should be released in a few weeks and I will be able to switch back to a saner lifestyle. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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I've recently been making my way through the Proudhon Reader, a collection of writings by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon recently published by AK Press. Proudhon, known as the father of Anarchism is most famous for his declaration: "Property is theft." The simple declaration is based on pages of explanation which, simplistically, can be boiled down to the idea that workers should all equally share in the fruits of their labor. While Proudhon's influence on Marx is hotly debated, this idea is fundamental to Marx's idea around the alienation of labor. If we are working to produce a product that is then owned by the proprietor, rather than the worker, we are alienated from our labor. Many May First/People Link members, such as Palante Tech, Openflows, Union Web Services, and Agaric Design are all committed to fighting this alienation by organizing as worker-run cooperatives. Nobody is the boss, all workers share in all profits. However, Proudhon got me thinking about free software shops that aren't worker-run cooperatives. If you are employed by a for-profit corporation as a worker and your only job is to write code that is released under a free software license, are you alienated from your labor in the Marxist sense? The fruits of your labor might be owned by your company, but they are freely licensed to the world (which, of course, includes you). There is still surplus value accrued to your company (if you do good work for your company, you will be contributing to their reputation from which they will profit). However, if you are primarily writing code, the vast majority of your labor is producing a product that you are fundamentally not alienated from. Proudhon, while sprinkling the word revolution throughout his writings, was notably not particularly revolutionary in his calls for action. He was reformist. Rather than calling for a direct confrontation with capitalism, he called for worker-run collectives to be formed throughout the world to make capitalism irrelevant. While many people point to corporate use of free software as an argument for why free software and capitalism are perfectly compatible, the truth may be more complicated. Fundamentally, and in a non-confrontational way, free software seems to undermine one of the basic tenants of capitalist: worker alienation. Now we just need to work on all the other ways corporate work places are alienating...

Germany is a core area for the Debian Edu and Skolelinux user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany. Who are you, and how do you spend your days? I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universit t' in Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school "Westfalen-Kolleg Dortmund", a second chance school. Here, young adults is given the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective or failed to get a higher school examination being teens. Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at the end of April this year. How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu project? The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project). At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system: Skolelinux. Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin clients. The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for the admin teachers. What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu? It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented! So it was a perfect choice. Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's possible to point teachers and students to programs like OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp. It's of high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of a school and to choose where to get support for this. What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu? Nothing yet. Which free software do you use daily? At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice, Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF Annotator). At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit, LibreOffice. Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools to use free software? Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But that doesn't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.

I'm honored and pleased to be the person who gets to complete ls. This project, begun around when I was born, was slow to turn into anything more than a simple for loop over a dirent. It really took off in the mid and late 80's, when Richard Stallman added numerous features, and the growth has been steady ever since. But, a glance at the man page shows that ls has never quite been complete. It fell to me to finish the job, and I have produced several handy patches to this end:

• http://bugs.debian.org/666198 adds -y (necessary for compatability with old shar archives)
• http://bugs.debian.org/666244 adds -e (entangled directory display option, quite nice)
• http://bugs.debian.org/666684 adds -j (suitable output format for twitter, cell phones, other 21st century media)

The only obvious lack now is a -z option, which should make output filenames be NULL terminated for consuption by other programs. I think this would be easy to write, but I've been extermely busy IRL (moving lots of furniture) and didn't get to it. Any takers to write it? Due to the nature of these patches, they conflict with each other. Here's a combined patch suitable to be applied and tested.

diff -ur orig/coreutils-8.13/src/ls.c coreutils-8.13/src/ls.c
--- orig/coreutils-8.13/src/ls.c    2011-07-28 06:38:27.000000000 -0400
+++ coreutils-8.13/src/ls.c 2012-04-01 12:41:56.835106346 -0400
@@ -270,6 +270,7 @@
 static int format_group_width (gid_t g);
 static void print_long_format (const struct fileinfo *f);
 static void print_many_per_line (void);
+static void print_jam (void);
 static size_t print_name_with_quoting (const struct fileinfo *f,
                                        bool symlink_target,
                                        struct obstack *stack,
@@ -382,6 +383,7 @@
    many_per_line for just names, many per line, sorted vertically.
    horizontal for just names, many per line, sorted horizontally.
    with_commas for just names, many per line, separated by commas.
+   jam to fit in the most information possible.
 
    -l (and other options that imply -l), -1, -C, -x and -m control
    this parameter.  */
@@ -392,7 +394,8 @@
     one_per_line,      /* -1 */
     many_per_line,     /* -C */
     horizontal,            /* -x */
-    with_commas            /* -m */
+    with_commas,       /* -m */
+    jam            /* -j */
    ;
 
 static enum format format;
@@ -630,6 +633,11 @@
 
 static bool immediate_dirs;
 
+/* True means when multiple directories are being displayed, combine
+ * their contents as if all in one directory. -e */
+
+static bool entangle_dirs;
+
 /* True means that directories are grouped before files. */
 
 static bool directories_first;
@@ -705,6 +713,10 @@
 
 static bool format_needs_type;
 
+/* Answer "yes" to all prompts. */
+
+static bool yes;
+
 /* An arbitrary limit on the number of bytes in a printed time stamp.
    This is set to a relatively small value to avoid the need to worry
    about denial-of-service attacks on servers that run "ls" on behalf
@@ -804,6 +816,7 @@
    "escape", no_argument, NULL, 'b' ,
    "directory", no_argument, NULL, 'd' ,
    "dired", no_argument, NULL, 'D' ,
+   "entangle", no_argument, NULL, 'e' ,
    "full-time", no_argument, NULL, FULL_TIME_OPTION ,
    "group-directories-first", no_argument, NULL,
    GROUP_DIRECTORIES_FIRST_OPTION ,
@@ -849,12 +862,12 @@
 static char const *const format_args[] =
  
   "verbose", "long", "commas", "horizontal", "across",
-  "vertical", "single-column", NULL
+  "vertical", "single-column", "jam", NULL
  ;
 static enum format const format_types[] =
  
   long_format, long_format, with_commas, horizontal, horizontal,
-  many_per_line, one_per_line
+  many_per_line, one_per_line, jam
  ;
 ARGMATCH_VERIFY (format_args, format_types);
 
@@ -1448,6 +1461,9 @@
       print_dir_name = true;
      
 
+  if (entangle_dirs)
+      print_current_files ();
+
   if (print_with_color)
      
       int j;
@@ -1559,6 +1575,7 @@
   print_block_size = false;
   indicator_style = none;
   print_inode = false;
+  yes = false;
   dereference = DEREF_UNDEFINED;
   recursive = false;
   immediate_dirs = false;
@@ -1644,7 +1661,7 @@
      
       int oi = -1;
       int c = getopt_long (argc, argv,
-                           "abcdfghiklmnopqrstuvw:xABCDFGHI:LNQRST:UXZ1",
+                           "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvw:xyABCDFGHI:LNQRST:UXZ1",
                            long_options, &oi);
       if (c == -1)
         break;
@@ -1667,6 +1684,10 @@
           immediate_dirs = true;
           break;
 
+   case 'e':
+          entangle_dirs = true;
+     break;
+
         case 'f':
           /* Same as enabling -a -U and disabling -l -s.  */
           ignore_mode = IGNORE_MINIMAL;
@@ -1697,6 +1718,10 @@
           print_inode = true;
           break;
 
+   case 'j':
+     format = jam;
+     break;
+
         case 'k':
           human_output_opts = 0;
           file_output_block_size = output_block_size = 1024;
@@ -1765,6 +1790,10 @@
           format = horizontal;
           break;
 
+   case 'y':
+     yes = true;
+     break;
+
         case 'A':
           if (ignore_mode == IGNORE_DEFAULT)
             ignore_mode = IGNORE_DOT_AND_DOTDOT;
@@ -2510,7 +2539,7 @@
       DEV_INO_PUSH (dir_stat.st_dev, dir_stat.st_ino);
      
 
-  if (recursive   print_dir_name)
+  if ((recursive   print_dir_name) && ! entangle_dirs)
      
       if (!first)
         DIRED_PUTCHAR ('\n');
@@ -2526,7 +2555,8 @@
   /* Read the directory entries, and insert the subfiles into the  cwd_file'
      table.  */
 
-  clear_files ();
+  if (! entangle_dirs)
+     clear_files ();
 
   while (1)
      
@@ -2615,7 +2645,7 @@
       DIRED_PUTCHAR ('\n');
      
 
-  if (cwd_n_used)
+  if (cwd_n_used && ! entangle_dirs)
     print_current_files ();
  
 
@@ -3464,6 +3494,10 @@
       print_with_commas ();
       break;
 
+    case jam:
+      print_jam ();
+      break;
+
     case long_format:
       for (i = 0; i < cwd_n_used; i++)
          
@@ -4418,6 +4452,24 @@
   putchar ('\n');
  
 
+static void
+print_jam (void)
+ 
+  size_t filesno;
+  size_t pos = 0;
+
+  for (filesno = 0; filesno < cwd_n_used; filesno++)
+     
+      struct fileinfo const *f = sorted_file[filesno];
+      size_t len = length_of_file_name_and_frills (f);
+
+      print_file_name_and_frills (f, pos);
+      pos += len;
+     
+  putchar ('\n');
+ 
+
+
 /* Assuming cursor is at position FROM, indent up to position TO.
    Use a TAB character instead of two or more spaces whenever possible.  */
 
@@ -4627,11 +4679,13 @@
   -D, --dired                generate output designed for Emacs' dired mode\n\
 "), stdout);
       fputs (_("\
+  -e, --entangle             display multiple directory contents as one\n\
   -f                         do not sort, enable -aU, disable -ls --color\n\
   -F, --classify             append indicator (one of */=>@ ) to entries\n\
       --file-type            likewise, except do not append  *'\n\
       --format=WORD          across -x, commas -m, horizontal -x, long -l,\n\
                                single-column -1, verbose -l, vertical -C\n\
+                               jam -j\n\
       --full-time            like -l --time-style=full-iso\n\
 "), stdout);
       fputs (_("\
@@ -4667,6 +4721,8 @@
   -i, --inode                print the index number of each file\n\
   -I, --ignore=PATTERN       do not list implied entries matching shell PATTERN\
 \n\
+  -j                         jam output together, makes the most of limited\n\
+                             space on modern systems (cell phones, twitter)\n\
   -k                         like --block-size=1K\n\
 "), stdout);
       fputs (_("\
@@ -4733,6 +4789,7 @@
   -w, --width=COLS           assume screen width instead of current value\n\
   -x                         list entries by lines instead of by columns\n\
   -X                         sort alphabetically by entry extension\n\
+  -y                         answer all questions with \"yes\"\n\
   -Z, --context              print any SELinux security context of each file\n\
   -1                         list one file per line\n\
 "), stdout);

It remains to be seen if multi-option enabled coreutils will be accepted into Debian in time for the next release. Due to some disagreements with the coreutils maintainer, the matter has been referred to the Technical Committee (Flattr me) Traditionally new ls contributors stop once enough options have been added that they can spell their name, in the best traditions of yellow snow. Once ls -richard -stallman worked, I'm sure RMS moved on other other more pressing concerns. The current maintainer, David MacKenzie, was clearly not done yet, since only ls -david -mack worked. But he was being slow to add these last few features, and ls was very deficient in the realm of spelling my name (ls -o -hss .. srsly?), so I took matter into my own hands in the best tradition of free software.

Just for you, and this time in the Pythonesque rendering.

module main:
    import std (range)
    import std.io (printf, IO)
    # print the Fahrenheit-Celcius table for fahr = 0, 20, ..., 300
    function main(mutable IO io):
        Int lower = 0    # lower bound
        Int upper = 300  # upper bound
        Int step = 20    # step
        for Int fahr in range(lower, upper, step):
            Double celcius = 5 * (fahr - 32) / 9
            std.io.printf(io, "%3d\t%6.1f\n", fahr, celcius)

It does not really look like it, but this language is purely functional. It represents side effects using unique types. If you declare a mutable parameter, you basically declare a unique input parameter and a unique output parameter. I m also giving you a list implementation

module std.container.list:
    ## The standard singly-linked list type
    type List[E]:
        Nil                     ## empty list
        Node:
            E value             ## current value
            List[E] next        ## remaining list
 

And yes, both languages should be able to be represented using the same abstract syntax tree. The only change is the replacement of the opening curly brace by a colon, the removal of the closing curly bracket and semicolons, the replacement of C-style comments with Python-style comments and the requirement of indentation; oh and the for statement gets a bit lighter as well.
Filed under: General

due to some new incoming RC bugs, this week was more devoted to fixing bugs in "our" (= the Debian Perl Group's) packages. here's the list:

• #641816 libmusicbrainz3-dev: "libmusicbrainz3-dev should depends on libneon25-dev and libdiscid"
  add missing dependencies, upload to DELAYED/2
• #646649 src:libio-async-loop-epoll-perl: "libio-async-loop-epoll-perl: FTBFS: Failed 1/8 test programs. 1/86 subtests failed."
  upload with patches from Niko Tyni (pkg-perl)
• #656791 approx: "approx: should depend on system-log-daemon"
  add missing dependency, upload to DELAYED/2
• #661799 libcvs-perl: "libcvs-perl: FTBFS"
  upload with patch from Niko Tyni (pkg-perl)
• #663052 leds-alix-source: "leds-alix-source: module fails to compile"
  apply patch from Federico Brega, upload to DELAYED/2
• #663567 wxglade: "wxglade: FTBFS: ImportError: No module named wx"
  send patch to the BTS
• #665233 src:libanyevent-perl: "libanyevent-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  upload patched package prepared by Alessandro Ghedini (pkg-perl)
• #665388 src:libperlbal-xs-httpheaders-perl: "libperlbal-xs-httpheaders-perl: FTBFS: C code doesn't load reliably"
  add patch, upload package prepared by Jonathan Steinert (pkg-perl)
• #666292 src:libmecab-perl: "libmecab-perl: FTBFS: MeCab_wrap.cxx:1826:16: error: 'mecab_node_t' has no member named 'sentence_length'"
  upload new upstream version (pkg-perl)
• #666369 src:fbcat: "fbcat: FTBFS: doc/fbcat.1: No such file or directory at /usr/bin/dh_installman line 127."
  fix targets in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/5, then fixed earlier in a maintainer upload
• #666581 src:latexdiff: "latexdiff: FTBFS: ! LaTeX Error: File ulem.sty' not found."
  finish and upload package with fix prepared by David Bremner (pkg-perl)
• #666638 src:libcpan-mini-perl: "libcpan-mini-perl: FTBFS: test failed"
  use writable HOME during build (pkg-perl)

Just for you:

module main  
    import std (range);
    import std.io (printf, IO);
    /* print the Fahrenheit-Celcius table
        for fahr = 0, 20, ..., 300 */
    function main(mutable IO io)  
        Int lower = 0;   // lower bound
        Int upper = 300; // upper bound
        Int step = 20;   // step
        for (Int fahr in range(lower, upper, step))  
            Double celcius = 5 * (fahr - 32) / 9;
            std.io.printf(io, "%3d\t%6.1f\n", fahr, celcius);
         
     
 

It does not really look like it, but this language is purely functional. It represents side effects using unique types. If you declare a mutable parameter, you basically declare a unique input parameter and a unique output parameter. I m also giving you a list implementation

module std.container.list  
    /** The standard singly-linked list type */
    type List[E]  
        Nil;                    /** empty list */
        Node  
            E value;            /** current value */
            List[E] next;       /** remaining list */
         
     
 

Thus are only excerpts from a document with tens of pages and the reference implementation of the standard library. The incomplete working draft for the language is attached: JAK Programming Language Early Working Draft (28 pages). Update: Fixed the link.
Filed under: General

Just a short announcement: kvpm (short for "KDE volume and partition manager") is now a part of Debian's unstable distribution, Sid, and should enter testing (Wheezy) soon. The big thank you for this goes to Benjamin, upstream author of kvpm who has become also the Debian Maintainer of his software! The story behind packaging kvpm started with Benjamin writing an e-mail to pkg-kde-extras, in which he asked for inclusion of kvpm into Debian. After an initial answer by myself about filing a RFP bug, in case he wouldn't like to package kvpm himself, a discussion in private ensued. There I explained that Debian is a do-ocracy, where things get packaged if some maintainer uses something herself or if the requesting party does the work. Benjamin took up the challenge and packaged kvpm, I helped only with feedback and finally sponsoring the upload. Why do I tell this story? Because I hope it encourages other people to do the same as Benjamin did: package the software they'd like to see become a part of Debian. We, the Debian Developers around the world, are more than happy to assist you. Just ask us (e.g. by e-mail or through IRC (#debian-mentors)).

Review: Agile Project Management with Scrum, by Ken Schwaber

Publisher:	Microsoft
Copyright:	2004
ISBN:	0-7356-1993-X
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	153

Ken Schwaber is one of the two original developers of Scrum and one of the signatories to the Agile Manifesto. Agile Project Management with Scrum is an introduction to Scrum by him that feels aimed primarily at business people (project managers, executives, line managers) rather than at technical people. There's very little about agile software development in general; the emphasis is on business process, team organization, and how the Scrum process looks to the rest of the organization. After an introductory chapter laying out the basics of Scrum, the remainder of the book is primarily case studies. Schwaber presents some principle and then discuss an anonymized case study that illustrates the principle. Each major Scrum role (ScrumMaster, Product Owner, and Team Member) gets their own chapter, interspersed with chapters on planning, reporting, and scaling. Finally, there are some concluding appendices laying out the rules of Scrum in more detail, adding a brief (and very disappointing) discussion of fixed-term, fixed-price contracts, and providing some other supplemental information. This is only the second regular book that I've read about Scrum, but my reading has been a bit out of order. We've been using Scrum for various projects for about a year and a half, I've played both team member and product owner roles, and we've been thinking hard about how to integrate Scrum more into the way we do development. My impression of this book is that it's intended as more of an introduction for people who aren't yet comfortable with Scrum or who are still struggling to make the pieces fit together. I'm therefore possibly not the target audience. Much of this book is a rehash of things someone who has studied Scrum will already know. I'm of two minds about the case study presentation style of this book. On one hand, it does help to make the points Schwaber discusses more concrete, and it's difficult to talk about business process in any other way. They're also more interesting and engaging than Schwaber's straight rule descriptions. But I had difficulty digging into most of the ones here. They're very simple and a little shallow, and I had trouble applying many of them to practical situations I might be in. I would have liked somewhat more detailed stories with more analysis and possible alternatives within the situation, rather than simple illustrations of how Scrum solves the problem that Schwaber had just said it would solve. What I did like about this book is that it provides the background and theory of Scrum as empirical process control much more clearly than any material I'd previously read. Schwaber is good at explaining what empirical process control is and why it's a superior approach, and he gave me new vocabulary and basic concepts to use to talk about Scrum. I also liked the high-level look from a management perspective without getting into the details of story points and velocity estimation (Schwaber doesn't use them at all in this book, relying instead on traditional "days of work" estimates). Much of my previous experience with Scrum was tightly focused on its advantages for estimation and responsiveness to changes, and it's nice to see some of the other advantages of Scrum (developer job satisfaction, improved focus, incremental deployment) highlighted more. Another part of this book I appreciated was the discussion of sprint length. Schwaber doesn't go into the possible alternatives, largely assuming that a month is the best interval, but the discussion of the impact and implications of a month sprint length helped me see the advantages of longer sprints. (To date, we've been doing either one week or two week sprints.) I came away with the feeling that a hybrid model where longer sprints are used for business purposes and then subdivided into shorter sprints for developer coordination might be particularly effective, although that's not an idea that Schwaber presents. This is not a particularly compelling read, particularly if, like me, you're not a huge fan of genericized case studies. Schwaber's writing is clear, but wooden and occasionally awkward, and the book is often dry. But it talks about Scrum from a management angle instead of a developer angle, which is an additional perspective that I found valuable. Possibly worth taking a look if you want more detail about Scrum from a high-level management perspective, although I don't think you're missing a lot by not reading it. Rating: 6 out of 10

It's the World Backup Day today. As the Obnam author, I can wholly agree. (If you think you've seen this before, think of it is a blog post that has been restored from one year ago.)