Just spent some time bringing bzr-avahi up to play nice with current bzr. This gives it integration with bzr-dbus (and thus bzr lan-notify) and bzr commit-notify (in the bzr-gtk plugin)

Looked two third parts of movies this weeks. Started off with "Ocean's Thirteen". Was pretty nice and funny, including the usual strange dialogues between Danny and Rusty. The style of some parts of it was a bit too 70ties and psychadelic for me, though. Pretty worth watching anyway.
The second third part had been "Shrek the Third". Was quite worth it, and the way they picked on the King Arthur story and some other fairy tales was well done, too. Now I'm just looking forward to yet another third movie; though that one was originally planed and not done just because the previous ones were a success: The Bourne Ultimatum—I hope it will let me enjoy the evening, too. :)

We celebrated Leif's dedication a couple weekends ago on June 17th at the Unitarian Church of Montr al. I got permission from Diane Rollert, our minister, to post the text of it.

(LJ-cut used to keep it from being too long)


Dedication of Leif Alexander Bailey, June 17, 2007

To the Child:
Leif Alexander Bailey, you have come with stardust in your hair, with the rush of planets in your blood, your heart beating out the seasons of eternity, with a shining in your eyes like the sunlight.

Your parents have brought you here to be dedicated, to celebrate the joy they have and to count themselves blessed that you are a part of their family.

As you grow, may you come to love what it is that your parents and this community of Unitarian Universalists value. May you learn to count the number of your days, to weigh their meaning, to gather into your mind the wisdom of your ancestors, to know why we call one thing right and another wrong, and to treasure beauty, mercy and justice in the deepest places of your being.

To the Congregation:
A dedication in the Unitarian Universalist tradition is one of the few sacred rituals we share together as a community. It is a covenant, a promise of love and care, that the entire community bestows upon a child.
Although Leif and his parents are leaving us to pursue new lives in San Francisco, they have chosen to dedicate Leif here in this church that has meant so much to them. Their travels may take them far away, but in this act of dedication today, we will covenant to continue to hold a place of care and concern in our hearts for Leif as he grows. Do you, as this religious community called the Unitarian Church of Montreal, take upon yourselves the privilege and the responsibility of helping to nurture the character and spirit of this child even at a distance?

Congregational Response:
We who are members of this congregation rejoice with this family in the promise of this child. We pledge him now the love and care of this community.

To the Parents:
Angie and Jeff, parents of Leif, please repeat after me this pledge. Leif, we pledge to help you to realize the best that is in you. We will seek, to the best of our ability, to instruct you by our teaching and by our example. We promise to love you with an unselfish love.

To the Child:
Leif, I dedicate you to the service of goodness, beauty and truth. I touch you with this water, which is a symbol of purity, and with this rose which is a symbol of your unfolding life, on your brow, your eyes, your lips, your heart and your hands, that your thoughts, your vision, your speech, your love and your generosity may be dedicated to the care of the earth and its people. We dedicate you that the transcending power of all that is divine may be present in you all your life long.


Closing Prayer:
Spirit of Life and Transcending Source of Love that connects us all, bless this beautiful child Leif this day and all the days of his life. As we rejoice in the promise of Leif s life that stretches out before him, let us remember those no longer with us, especially Leif s grandmother Glennis Bailey who left this earth too soon to meet her grandson, but whose memory and spirit will continue on through him. May Leif continue to serve with strength as his life unfolds so that the richness and wonder of life may be abundantly his. May peace dwell in his heart,and understanding in his mind. May courage strengthen his will and may the love of truth forever guide him.

From Gareth Bowker, Jaded World View: "Tardorrist (n) - would-be terrorist without sufficient intelligence to build and detonate an explosive device."

It seems to me that we need to have syndicated feeds for Linux job adverts. To start this I have created a new blog for Linux job adverts, it will have categories for the states and territories of Australia (with a feed for each category) and I will also create Planet installations that take feeds from the blog as well as any other Linux jobs RSS feeds. I will create the Planet installations when I have feeds to add. If your company regularly advertises Linux jobs in Australia then please create an RSS feed of the adverts and I will syndicate it. If your company occasionally advertises Linux jobs then you can email them to me. As of this moment there are no positions advertised, but I hope that to change soon.

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Five years ago, I started work on OfflineIMAP. I couldn't find any mail reader that offered good IMAP support and a good feature set. Rather than write my own mail reader, I simply wrote OfflineIMAP and used it with mutt. OfflineIMAP does a bi-directional sync between an IMAP server and local mailboxes. This lets you work offline, and also speeds up reading since each new message doesn't have to be downloaded from the network on the spot.

I kept hoping that OfflineIMAP would become obsolete soon, as mail readers got better. Back in 2004, two years after writing OfflineIMAP, I looked at mail readers. In 2005, after some more frustrations with mail readers, I wrote a comparison. I wound up sticking with mutt and OfflineIMAP each time.

I've gone out looking at mail readers again. Here's what I've found.

KMail
Overall a nice reader, KMail has almost every feature and setting I want. It has "disconnected IMAP" folders, which download every new message in folders to the local disk as part of the routine mail checking. It then caches local changes and syncs them to the remote on the next mail check. This boosts interactive performance and permits offline operation -- very similar to OfflineIMAP. KMail has keyboard shortcuts for most things, and keyboard shortcuts can be added or changed for most other things as well.

KMail also integrates with the KDE calendar and addressbook, which I already use. That's nice, too.

I have two big gripes about it though.

Back in 2004, I noticed that KMail crashes a lot. By 2005, it was worse. Sadly, KMail still has a tendency to crash. I've seen an average of 1-2 crashes per day, due to SIGFPE, SIGSEGV, and I think also SIGILL. This doesn't make me happy at all. Especially to see that it's no better on that in three years. Just don't try emptying trash while your mailbox is being synced, for one thing....

Gripe #2 is that there is absolutely no way to select a different alternative in a multipart message without using the mouse. Simply no way using the keyboard. It's also cumbersome, though possible, to view attachments using the keyboard -- you have to press Enter to open the message in its own window, then tab to the attachment.

KMail also sometimes works a bit sluggishly -- for instance, when you delete a message, you first see strikethrough through it, then it disappears. It doesn't feel very "snappy".

Evolution
Evolution has a decent core. It is easy to get set up and has an extensive set of keyboard shortcuts. It does IMAP downloading and syncing like Kmail, and it does it by default. It doesn't offer all that much flexibility in configuration, but probably enough.

Here's my gripe. There is no way for it to show a total message count next to each folder in the folder list. It will show an unread message count, but not a total message count. You have to click on each folder individually to see a total message count. I can't figure out why this is missing from Evolution. It's one of the main benefits to switching from mutt, and so I didn't bother looking at Evolution any more past there.

Thunderbird / Icedove
By default, it isn't all that capable of a mail reader. There aren't that many configuration options, and the keyboard shortcuts -- while existing for most things -- are cumbersome.

The Nostalgy extension helps with the keyboard shortcuts significantly. You still can't change some of them (Ctrl-L for forward, anyone) -- at least not without an extremely cumbersome process involving editing text files.

Thunderbird can do automatic IMAP downloading and syncing like KMail and Evolution, but for some inexplicible reason, only for your INBOX. In fact, Thunderbird won't even check for mail in folders other than INBOX unless you set an undocumented configuration option. It seems to assume that nobody does server-side mail filtering.

If you want IMAP downloading for offline use or performance, you have to manually invoke a download operation. There is a Sync on Arrival extension, but it isn't compatible with Thunderbird 2.0. From reading comments online, there are a lot of people frustrated about that.

So Thunderbird strikes out as well.

mutt + OfflineIMAP
The good thing about this combination is performace. mutt is extremely fast, and OfflineIMAP works faster than anything else for IMAP downloading. mutt is also far more configurable than anything else.

There are some annoyances about mutt.

#1 on that list is the lack of a folder list. There is just no way to see a list of folders along with new or total message counts. You can press c, Enter to go to the next folder with unread mail, which is something, but not enough. There have been numerous abortive projects over the years to address this, but for whatever reason, mutt itself doesn't have this yet. Probably the most promising current project is this one.

#2 is HTML mail. I don't mind the lack of default support for HTML mail. That's to be expected. There are some things that do bug me involving viewing HTML mail. First off, sometimes people attach graphics to messages that also have an HTML component. Viewing these graphics doesn't represent a security risk, but mutt doesn't make them available to a browser for viewing -- you have to manually save them if you want to view them. Also, you normally don't want to load graphics from the Internet for HTML mail. The only way to accomplish that with mutt is to set your browser to lynx or something; just using Firefox to view a HTML component will load all of that.

#3 is handling of embedded URLs. xterms can pass mouse clicks, and it would be nice if mutt made URLs clickable like other mail readers do.

#4 is the IMAP support. No support for caching, fragile, etc. That's why I use OfflineIMAP. That works, but it's a hassle.

#5 is printing. Printouts from mutt just spew the text of the message at the printer. No page numbers, formatting, nothing. muttprint makes that situation a bit better, but the integration is flaky and weird.

Conclusions
I'm not sure what I'll do. None of these are really where I want them to be, though mutt and KMail are probably the closest.

Arnaud and I finally managed to release Ruby D-Bus “Almost live from DebConf 7” 0.2.0. The release was planned for DebConf 7. However, I didn’t manage to get it ready in between all the talks, meetings, and other social stuff. Ruby D-Bus is an implementation of the D-Bus protocol in pure Ruby. After starting the development in February, it soon became apparent that several other projects were out there with about the same goal, such as Pure Ruby DBUS and R-Bus. Our approach is to have an API that is close to the old Ruby D-Bus bindings. While the other, similar projects seem to have a slightly different goal, we still invite them to come to some sort of merging so that no duplicate effort is put into three or four separate projects with almost the same result. The 0.2.0 release is our first real public release. We have a large subset of the features working and documented. The main focus of this release was to improve the API documentation and the tutorial. The 0.2.0 release is a release for exploratory purposes. We invite everyone interested to have a look at the API and inner works and provide us with feedback and/or patches. This means that the API can still change a bit over time based on feedback and tweaks performed by ourselves. So don’t built a big application on it just yet if you’re not willing to make some changes later on. For more information, see our project (Trac) page.

Yesterday, two small cute games, both coded in python and pygame, finally entered the repositories. Both were submitted to the PyWeek Python Game Programming Challenge. Bouncy the Hungry Rabbit is a game targeted to small children, in which you play a hungry rabbit in a garden with yummy veggies and a farmer who’s not keen on you eating them Whichwayisup is a kinda traditional 2D platform game with a slight rotational twist, which means that up and down, left and right are constantly changing as you go ahead in the game. One of the interesting things about this game is that it is, AFAIK, the first package in Debian licensed under the CC-by 3.0 (Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license).

I want to know when we will get interesting talks like this happening! Competing on the basis of speed.

I had been using fvwm2 for some 10 years when around the beginning of this year, I thought it might be time for a change. My config was originally copied from some SuSE templates and then heavily tweaked over the years, but recently broke more and more in subtle way with new fvwm upstream versions, e.g. moving windows suddenly required a different mouse button. Probably the config was just slightly out of spec and fvwm got "fixed", but it was annoying. The "tiled" window managers I had seen on others' desktops made me curious, so I gave ion3 a try some months ago. The overall appearance was all cool, but it tried a bit too hard to squeeze all windows into tiled windows - of course there's the floating workspace, but creating one was weird, and moving windows even weirder. And if only the (default) key bindings were more vi-like... I admit I never really bothered to read the documentation - probably everything would have been much nicer otherwise. Then there was the big license "wtf" with ion, at which point I started looking around further. dwm looks clearly too l33t to be serious, so wmii was the next choice, 3.1 to be exact. vi key bindings, a nicely configurable status bar, easy workspace switching and window moving. wmii doesn't have horizontally split windows (windows are always in columns), and no "tabbed" windows, though. It didn't warp the pointer to the currently active window (something I got used to with fvwm), but some config tweaks mostly fixed that. This time, I read the documentation, but there's only a 10 page pdf beginners document, but there's not much to configure anyway. Then came lenny. Testing and unstable currently feature version 3.6 which is a big disappointment. It is broken (the default config is unusable), and even after fixing that, it looks like they removed all the little details that I liked. The status bar is still there (though with a new location in the virtual filesystem), the color cannot be changed anymore (unless changing some other color as well). The windows used to have slim 1-pixel (configurable) borders. Now they still have, but the border will be expanded if the window chooses a different size - xterm always rounds down to the next character size, so all my terminals have fat surroundings now. The last-active window in a inactive column still had some markup so I knew which window Alt-Left/Right wound return to, now I have to guess. I wouldn't mind fixing my 3.1 config for 3.6, but I don't think I will, given these issues look unfixable. The 3.1 wmiirc file looked like a sh script, the 3.6 uses eval and a bunch of functions that frighten me. On a positive note, it is now possible to create new workspaces by just selecting them, which is much handier than start-program, wait, move-window-over, move-workspace. I guess I will give ion (2, 3?) another try...

Anonymous: “So the problems started happening when we added the 7th wireless stack to the [Linux] kernel…” (Via Greg K-H.)

More weekend stories: on Friday, we had a Geek Lunch at La ka to welcome Tara Hunt to Montreal. She's in town for a few days for Montreal Jazz Fest, and she asked to meet some people in the local Web/BarCamp/hacker scene. Lunch was good and interesting people came. Austin Hill made it, as well as Patrick Tanguay, Fred Ngo and Ben Yoskovitz, and Niko. I was especially glad to see Seb Paquet, who I don't get enough time with. All in all a good time was had. tags: montreal barcampmontreal tarahunt

Rest of the weekend Friday night John Usher came over for our weekly Pizza Night and we had beers until very late indeed. Saturday I got a nice glass desk for my office, and we got a big square wooden coffee table off of Montreal Craigslist. We went down to the Pont Jacques Cartier to see the fireworks on Saturday night, part of the International Fireworks Competition. Except there weren't any fireworks on Saturday night. Doh! Long walk home. Yesterday, Canada Day, we had our new neighbours Jake and Magda over for a get-to-know-you brunch. Jake is a structural engineer, and Magda is a professor of history at UQ M. They're expecting a baby any day now, so we figured it was a good idea to hang out with them before the madness begins. I made a couple of quiches, a big green salad, and some banana bread. It was a good meal. tags: montreal fireworks johnusher canadaday

It seems that I've held up -at least for half a year- what I stated back in January - I come by bike to work almost every day, and really enjoy the time spent on two wheels. My times have -of course- improved, as has my dominion of the bike - I make ~10 minutes each way (must be a bit more on my way to work than on my way back, as it is uphill).
My city's government seems to be seriously promoting people to consider using the bicycle as means for regular transport and not just as a recreational device - I see some of its measures as quite silly, but some are just perfect. One week ago, while I was on the plane from Edinburgh, we had the first Ciclot n, a 32Km ride open to everybody (and of course, Nadezhda was among them). Over 70,000 people took part, reportedly, and it seems it will be held monthly. Besides that, yesterday we had the paseo dominical in Coyoac n very close to my house - What's that? Something similar to the ciclot n, only much smaller (14Km), much less publicized, and in a different place of the city every Sunday. Well, we started up the day at 8 AM by cycling from Metro Copilco to Miguel ngel de Quevedo, Av. Universidad, R o Churubusco, Divisi n del Norte and Henriquez Ure a back to Metro Copilco. We later learnt that around 10,000 people took part. 14 Km, 30 minutes - not bad, and quite enjoyable!
We didn't go for the second round, because we wanted to be by ~10 AM at Reforma, probably the city's most emblematic avenue, to be part of the demonstration marking one year of the electoral fraud. But... Well, we didn't want to just leave the bikes at home and go by metro - What can we do? Yes, take the open streets. We followed a bit of the path we had taken a bit earlier, then took Minerva, Insurgentes until Reforma (~45 minutes). And once we got to the meeting point, we didn't want to step down and crawl the bikes along... So we both found out that not only we dared take the main streets where people are not really used to cyclists and where taxi drivers will often try to make a point that if you don't own a car you should use a taxi and not a bike - We were able to cycle most of our way to Z calo, going slowly and moving through people, in what seemed to be almost an unthinkable feat for me just a couple of months ago. We can now control the bike, we can even be almost still while riding it, and not crash into anybody!
Of course, the way back was similar - We took our bikes across Obrera, Doctores, Algar n and lamos, then took Av. Universidad all the way down to Copilco, and -after some three hours riding, with my arms quite red and of course somewhat dehydrated and sore-butted- got home.
It feels great to have a well-deserved siesta! And... Well, biking is just too enjoyable. I guess we had ~45Km yesterday, plus some ~5 extra zig-zagging through the crowd. It rules.

Eweek has an article on a new 1TB Seagate drive. Most home users don’t have a need for 1TB of storage (the only way I’ve ever filled a 300G drive is by using it for multiple backups) and enterprise customers generally want small fast drives (with 100G drives still being sold for servers). One interesting thing to note about this is the fact that the new drive is described as being able to sustain 105MB/s (although I suspect that is only for the first few zones of the disk - see my ZCAV results page for graphs of the performance of some typical disks). The previous disks that I have seen have topped out at about 90MB/s. However even if the drive could deliver 105MB/s over it’s entire capacity it would take almost 3 hours to perform a backup - increases in IO speeds have not been keeping up with capacity increases. Another interesting thing is the potential for using the same technology in low power 2.5 inch disks. While a 1TB disk isn’t going to be much use to me a 300G 2.5inch disk that uses less power will be very useful - and it might be possible to perform a backup of such a disk in a reasonable amount of time! The latest trend in PCs seems to be small form factor (SFF) and low power machines that don’t have space for two drives. If you want RAID-1 on your home machines for reliability then that isn’t very convenient. But two 2.5 inch disks can fit in less space than a single 3.5 inch disk and therefore all the SATA based SFF machines that are currently being shipped with a single 3.5 inch disk can be upgraded to a pair of 2.5 inch disks - this will be convenient for me when those machines start going cheap at auction next year! Even for servers the trend seems to be towards 2.5 inch disks. I recently bought a 2U HP server that supports up to 8 hot-swap SFF disks, I wonder how the performance of 8*SFF disks would compare to 4 of the bigger and faster disks. The next thing we need is a method of backing up large volumes of data. The 650M data CD came out when a 150M disk was considered big. The 4.7G data DVD started to become popular when 45G disks were considered big. Now almost everyone has 300G disks and 1TB disks are becoming available yet the best commonly available backup method is a double-layer DVD at 9.4G - it seems that the vast majority of home users that make backups are using cheap IDE disks to do so. Fortunately there are some new technology developments that may improve the situation. Call/Recall has developed technology that may permit multiple terabytes of storage on an optical disk. It’s yet to be seen whether their technology lives up to the claims made about it, but we have to hope. The current storage situation is getting unmanagable.

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Nokia's N800 internet tablet is an intriguing device. When I originally got one a few months back I tried to treat it purely as a consumer object, just using the installed apps and things available through the obvious point-and-click channels.As a consequence it served mainly as a portable (and expensive) internet radio, streaming me the cricket commentary from the BBC. And when I upgraded my wireless network I somehow managed to make it WPA2 only, knocking the N800 offline. An offline N800 is an almost thoroughly useless device, so it went into the drawer and I forgot about it.Ultimately you can't leave something that expensive unused, so I dragged it out again, fiddled the wi-fi router into compliance, and decided not to deny my hacker nature this time. The N800 is Linux underneath, so who could resist?
The result is two-edged, really: I'm a lot happier with the device, but on the other hand must conclude that the N800 is still a bit far from being consumer-ready.Must-have softwareSo, what things did I install this time around that made the device happier?Claws Mail is a nice email client that works well with my IMAP accounts, which all use SSL and TLS, have lots of messages and a deep folder hierarchy. I don't really want to write much mail on the N800, but an easy reading interface is a bonus.The FM radio is something I can't believe I missed before. I had no idea this was in there, but plug some headphones into the N800 and they act as the antenna for an FM receiver. Desperately cute and old-world, a bit like when laptops still used to have parallel printer ports.I had previously ignored Maemo Mapper, thinking it was useless without a GPS, but it turns out to work very nicely as a dedicated client for Google Maps, as well as several other mapping sources. Must-do geeky bitsTry as I might to like the touch screen, the first thing I had to do with the device was find a way of not using the stylus to do sysadmin type tasks on it.So, first stop is to get a terminal up, figure out how to use the root account, install a SSH client and server, and get my pubkey onto the N800. Now I could shell into it and use a decent keyboard.On my local network I hate maintaining DNS if I don't have to, so the next thing I wanted was Zeroconf support in the shape of avahi. One of the quickest ways to get this going is to install the Canola media application, which uses Zeroconf to find shared music.With these basics in place, the N800 supports APT package repositories familiar to Debian and Ubuntu users, so the device becomes a lot less weird and much more manageable. I felt the same pleasant familiarity as I did with the NSLU2. Things to look forward toThe N800's video camera is neat, but nobody I know uses Google Talk for conferencing. Fortunately it seems that Skype for the N800 is just around the corner. Initially, video support is unlikely, but I imagine that if Skype on the N800 proves popular, it won't be far off.The N800 is something I don't mind having kicking around the kitchen or nursery, so staying in touch with my family while I'm travelling will become a lot more fun.
Also, I'd like to get NFS running on the N800, but that requires the installation of a new kernel, which I've not quite yet had the time to do. Once that's done, all my media, photos and storage will be handily available. 

Long fun weekend here. Last Thursday, Maj's brother Brian appeared on our doorstep unexpectedly. He'd been driving across the country from Santa Barbara for a few weeks, stopping to see friends and go camping and rock climbing along the way. Every few days he'd call our home number to tell us when he'd be coming in... but our home phone has had mixed-up wiring since our move on June 1. So his arrival was a really pleasant surprise. That night we went out to dinner at Ouzeri, the upscale Greek restaurant around the corner. We had been trying to connect with Matt Biddulph and Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, who are visiting Montreal for a month. Matt and I were introduced at South by Southwest by connector Ben Cerveny, and Maj and Alex met separately and serendipitously at Montreal Pecha Kucha. So we did a big dinner at Ouzeri to talk and have fun. Boris Anthony came along, which made for a really great time. We had a lot of good wines at Ouzeri -- they have the best-known Greek wine cellar in town. We started off with an Ayiotiriki white (in a cool bottle), then a Naoussa, then a Rapsani. All very tasty. Dinner was a mix of appetizers, moussaka, and a big grilled shrimp platter. Boris got a nice-looking slice of lamb, too. Oh, and we got Ouzeri's trademark saganaki: a big raw cheese, doused with ouzo and cooked flamb at the table. Amita June doesn't like sitting at the table too much, so we took a walk outside so she could burn off some energy. A little bored, I twittered about where we were. Within 20 minutes, both Hugh and Niko cruised in to join us. Power of the Internet, dot dot dot. We finished dinner and decided to take the talk on the road. Everyone came over to our house at 4690 rue Pontiac and we... uh... opened another bottle of wine and hung out and talked for a couple of hours. By the time the bars were open and active on Mont-Royal, everyone streamed out and Maj and I put Amita to sleep. Good time! tags: montreal ouzeri mattbiddulph alexandredeschampssonsino borisanthony bencerveny greekwine hughmcguire niko

Three, count them, three local root exploits discovered so far via the source scan of the Debian archive. More to follow.

• DSA-1326-1: fireflier-server
• DSA-1327-1: gsambad
• DSA-1328-1: unicon-imc2
  • This is an interesting one because the library itself isn't setuid, but it is linked to by the setuid application zhcon.
  • Which makes this exploit an instant root attack.

Right now my biggest irritation is the amount of time it takes to report bugs in packages which don't have security issues - just bad coding. It takes me a fair while to do it, since I either have to install the package and use "reportbug", or lookup version numbers and submit manually. I should think of a better way of doing it.

My courgette plants started taking over the world a while back and covered the raised bed I made in green. I had some of the courgettes a week or two ago and went out today and found more. Some have been rotting slightly on the plants so I removed those too but I'm really excited that the tiny, tiny plants I put in ages ago have turned into giant courgette plants and now have started producing things I can eat! Obvious but satisfying.

I just released new version of Gammu. This release adds various fixes to AT phones driver and fixes various other crashes. Full list of changes:

• Initial support for Motorola phones (bug #15 and #310).
• Avoid work on uninitialized buffer when checking firmware.
• Use HTTP/1.1 requests for getting firmware and version info.
• Improve charset handling for AT phones.
• Fix crash on broken CPMS response.
• Fix reading of memory not starting from 1 (thanks to drgerafe).
• Fix pressing of keys on phones who do not support IRA charset.

Gustavo writes about python, it’s webbrowser module, os.fork and parsing bugreports from our BTS via html. This all sound very familiar, so here are some hints from me:

• You don’t have to fork a new process just to call a browser, try threading instead: thread.start_new_thread(webbrowser.open, (url,)). No need to clean up the child process after it has finished, just call start_new_thread with the function and it’s parameters and forget it.
• Python’s webbrowser module is nice, but it often fails to find the right browser. The problem is to find the users (read: not the system’s) default browser across the different desktop environments. xdg-open from the package xdg-utils (from freedesktop.org) seems to do a very good job. Rng doesn’t use it yet, but I’m definitely planning to replace the webbrowser call with xdg-open. Rng uses it and falls back to python’s webbrowser.open()-call if xdg-open failed.
• If your project suffers from changes in the html code of our BTS, try SOAP instead. It provides all the infos in machine readable format and also comes with backwards compatibility: the namespace for debbug’s SOAP interface is Debbugs/SOAP which always calls the latest versions of the remote functions. But you can also use Debbugs/SOAP/V1 (Version 1 currently matches Debbugs/SOAP). This will ensure that changes in debbugs SOAP interface don’t affect your implementation.