Search Results: "tar"

2 June 2007

Frank Lichtenheld: packages.debian.org status and development

Copy of a mail I sent to debian-www earlier today. I don't think it warrants posting to -devel-announce, but I post it here to make it visible to people not usually following debian-www. Since I seem to sense an increased stream of offers to help out with packages.d.o coming my way (but maybe that is just wishful thinking ;) I wanted to give a short update on the development of the current code and the status of the infrastructure so that nobody can claim he wanted to help but failed due to lack of information.

Alexander Schmehl: Report from the LinuxTag -- Part I (A bit of DebianDay and my talk)

Before I start with my report I need to fulfill my promise for those who stumble here from kushaldas.in: The URL of the web interface for the package description translation framework is for now: ddtp.debian.net (It's easy: Debian Description translation pproject). There might be some changes after DebConf, our annual conference, which will take place this month. So keep an eye on your language's team mailing list. But more about Kushal Das later. The first part of my report will cover a bit of our DebianDay and of course especially my talk ;) More will follow later. Friday was DebianDay and I attended Holger's talk about debian-community. It's a quite interesting project, trying to solve the problem, that there's not much between real DDs and the rest of the world. It's more low level than the Debian maintainers idea floating around for a while: Look around, you'll see much contributors to Debian, who are not maintaining any package. The idea is basically to have kind of bonuses for contributing to Debian, as a more direct way to say Thanks!. Have look at the website, and think how you could help to get things rolling. After his talk it was my turn. I did a Debian package building for beginners talk... Well, actually it's a workshop stripped down by the practical part leaving only the slides of the introduction. But who cares ;) Again I was surprised how many people where interested in that topic. I always thought it's kind of special and not that interesting, but the room was quite stuffed. Some people where even sitting on the floor. I neither counted how many people attended my talk, nor how many seats where available. I guess I had something between 80 and 120? Perhaps Wolfgang Borgert, who moderated DebianDay, can correct me, if I'm wrong. Since I stripped down a workshop to a talk, I needed to take special care about the timing. Well... I didn't work perfectly. I took a bit too long while answering questions, but I think all in all it was quite right. As usual I took gnujump as example; easy package, works without much tweaking of the templates created by dh_make, and if you have some time left at the end, you can show some additional stuff, like splitting of a -data package. After the talk I got some quite interesting questions; the three most interesting ones were the following: So much for now; I'll write some more about the event in general, a goodie from an old friend from Treuchtlingen (rather short; the german entry is longer), and a small talk I had with an other J rg later... I'm kind of tired right now.

Romain Francoise: Emacs 22.1 released

No announcement yet, but you can read about it on the homepage, and get it here.

2054 days have passed since the previous non-bugfix release (Emacs 21.1, on October 18th 2001). The next release, Emacs 23.1, is thus expected around January 15th, 2013.

Wouter Verhelst: Thecus N2100 arrived

Last saturday, I fetched the N2100 which I had on order since quite a while, put in the two 500G hard disks, and powered it on. Installing Debian to a machine with no console is pretty fun, but luckily the installer makes it all rather easy (there's this thing that allows you to ssh into the running installer and from there start the installation menu; they originally wrote that for installing to an s390 box, but obviously it works for any architecture...). After installing the box, I upgraded the base system against security.debian.org and removed some software that I didn't need, and rebooted the thing. And then... ... nothing. It didn't seem to come up. As it turned out, the stuff which I removed (a horrible solution to a problem that doesn't exist) just hapepned to be responsible for loading the NIC driver module; so after reboot, the box didn't have a network interface anymore as far as the kernel was concerned. Pretty stupid, that. Luckily, fixing that wasn't too hard. Remove the hard disks, put them in another box, edit some files in /etc, put the disk back in the Thecus, boot. There. I now have a wonderfully small system that I'll use as home server, and which will replace rock in that function. Seen as how rock is a power-hungry desktop with five power-hungry hard disks, whereas goa, the new box, is an economic ARM-based system, that'll be good for the environment as well. Isn't that nice. The only downside to this is that I'll now have to do some configuration and migration work, since you can't just put a disk with Debian/i386 on it in an arm box and hope it'll work. But that's okay.

1 June 2007

Matthew Garrett: Further stories of customer service despair

Orange have a fairly decent offer for "unlimited" (1GB a month or so) 3G access. I'm a pay monthly customer on an old tariff that's no longer offered, but there's no mention of any sort of limitations there and they seemed happy to add 3G access to my account. Cue two days of repeated phone calls trying to find out why my entirely 3G phone was refusing to connect to their 3G network. After going through being told it was my phone settings, poor reception, something that I could get fixed at my local Orange store or that it was because they'd entered the wrong start date(!), I finally got through to someone who was actually genuinely friendly and helpful and told that I needed a 3G sim[1]. Oh, and that they wouldn't provide me with one because of the tariff I'm on.

Fucking useless telco.

[1] Something that's clearly documented on their website. Oh, wait.

Edd Dumbill: Launching Expectnation

I'm very pleased to announce the launch of Expectnation, a web application for managing conferences. Expectnation logo What does it do? Expectnation is intended to replace the ad-hoc collection of emails, spreadsheets, documents and hacks that hold together the organization of most conferences. The aim is to improve the quality and reliability of communication between the organizers, speakers and attendees. But it doesn't stop there. What I'm really excited about is the chance to enhance the conference experience through the web. Expectnation is capable of managing the complete web site for a conference, which provides many opportunities for bringing the best of the social software world to augment events. Our tagline is "build your conference into a community", which underpins a key aim: to help organizers make events more relevant and useful to attendees, and to live on beyond the event itself. We do this in two ways: saving time, so you can spend it on improving your conference, and providing online tools to support community building.
Right now Expectnation is able to manage the proposal, review, scheduling and publication of presentations, along with the conference web site and smart emailing to speakers, reviewers and chairs. Over the next two months we'll be introducing our registration module, with optional online payments, and working on extending the social software features available for attendees. Take a look  I'm really excited about letting users get started with Expectnation, and seeing the uses it gets put to. We believe Expectnation will be just as handy for organizing events inside an organization as for traditional conferences. So, if you organize, speak at, or attend conferences of any sort, please check out Expectnation and recommend it to a conference organizer near you!Related links

Matthew Garrett

This thread on the Sun initiative to produce a more Linux-like distribution of OpenSolaris is interesting not so much for the technical goals, but as an insight into the community. The immediate response to the proposal? A set of complaints that it hasn't followed the correct process.

Now, to be fair, there have been other threads discussing the technical and social desirability of such a distribution already and some are still ongoing - it's not like the OpenSolaris community has ignored it entirely in favour of process fetishising. However, it's indicative of a community that's more concerned with procedure than it is with producing high quality software. What I suspect has happened is that Sun felt it was important to ensure that procedures were put in place before creating a community in order to avoid the problem of it immediately turning into low-grade anarchy. The problem with this is that if you create procedures before you create community, the people who end up enforcing the procedures tend to be the sort of people who find enforcing procedures to be the interesting part of the job rather than the ones who see them as necessary evils to enforce moderately sensible community development.

Sun's clearly stuck between a rock and a hard place here. They don't want to be seen to be directing the community too strongly, or they'd end up like Red Hat did with Fedora - you alienate your community by giving them the impression that they have no influence over the direction of the distribution. On the other hand, the rapid growth of the Ubuntu community strongly suggests that having a strong leader can ensure that people don't get too bogged down in procedure at the cost of technical progress.

I suspect that Sun made the wrong call here. Having more corporate influence to begin with might have put off some contributors, but it would also have allowed the development of a functional community at an earlier stage. Sun could then gradually withdraw (as Red Hat have been doing with Fedora) and let the community play a larger role. Perhaps that way we'd hear more about the technical contributions coming out of OpenSolaris and they wouldn't be left with just the same two cards they've been playing for a couple of years now - dtrace and ZFS.

On something of a tangent, I don't think their choice of license has helped a great deal here. Two of the areas where OpenSolaris is most behind Linux are hardware support and desktop/kernel integration. The choice of a GPL-incompatible license strongly discourages any Linux developers from working with the low-level code of OpenSolaris due to the perceived risk of contaminating the Linux codebase at some later point. That rules out a huge pool of skilled developers (I'm going to be potentially controversial here and say that I suspect Linux has a larger skillset here than all the BSDs put together, and quite possibly Solaris added to that) who are writing a good deal of advanced code. Meanwhile we're left with OpenSolaris having even worse laptop support than FreeBSD. These are people who could have added to the community socially as well as technically. Instead you've got a community led by a set of Sun staff who are paranoid about doing anything that might make it look like Sun controls the community. Score.

31 May 2007

Kai Hendry: Chinese font adventures

Sina test rendering, take 2 I wanted to spill the discussion of fonts from Mark’s blog and share what little I know on the topic. So I am localising Webconverger for each locale and learning as I go. My aim is for each locale version to meet the requirements of that locale. That allows some focus, as making a distro that can hit every locale is really hard. On my unstable system, I have somehow have 179 fonts installed. 
monty$ fc-list   wc -l
179
Ok, 50 of them are ttf fonts. ttf fonts are what get used on the Web, so they count the most to Webconverger. I am going to ignore bitmap fonts et al for some simplicity and sanity. I am also not going to talk about hinting and anti-aliasing, though I do have opinions. :) Anyway, 50 ttfs is still too many considering the “free fonts” often don’t really replace the msttcorefonts, which I think they should really try do. The leading free fonts like Bitstream Vera Sans and DejaVu Sans look the same to me (~sans-serif) and are seriously boring. I guess they’re comparable to msttcorefont’s Verdana. Great… one down. :) Though DejaVu Sans has really good i18n coverage, another thing I’m interested in. Unfortunately i18n coverage esp. with China/Japan/Korea (CJK) markets is difficult.
AFAIK there is no CJK msttcorefonts, so general ‘free software’ compatibility with proprietary font faces out there is really bad. There are free CJK fonts though many of these free fonts are really bad quality. Some are OK quality, though they aren’t comparable to the proprietary fonts and hence too often the Web page renders badly. Ouch. Then some people in China prefer some font over another so this problem gets quite complex. Add Korea and Japan to the mix who also use Chinese characters in their own “special way”. I’ve been testing out sina.com.cn and taking screenshots. So I have a Chinese friend and asked him to try a special Chinese specific Debian live build of Webconverger. He says all the Ubuntu geeks use VeraSansYuanTi. However that’s non-free, sigh…. My friend also writes: 
sorry for Chinese there is no best font..
because China government never try hard for this;
all kinds of fonts is some company create;
and u know China had so log history so many great beautiful font style
.. but not become computer free fonts...
I think the opensource evolution model doesn’t work very well with fonts. They need to be super high quality from the outset. Throwing a bunch of fonts at the problem gets us in our current confused situation. I think it would be great if governments could settle on some core fonts instead dictated to by Microsoft, or by whatever proprietary font gains acceptance in other markets.

Kai Hendry: Chinese Web fonts

Webconverger Portal in Chinese I wanted to spill the discussion of fonts from Mark’s blog and share what little I know on the topic and learn from the lazyweb. :) So I am localising Webconverger for each locale and learning as I go. My aim is for each locale to have it’s own Webconverger i18n version. I hope this approach allows some focus, as making a distro that can hit every locale well is really hard. On my unstable system, I have somehow have 179 fonts installed. 
monty$ fc-list   wc -l
179
Ok, 50 of them are ttf fonts. ttf fonts are what get used on the Web, so they count the most to Webconverger. I am going to ignore bitmap fonts et al for some simplicity and sanity. I am also not going to talk about hinting and anti-aliasing, though I do have opinions. :) Anyway, 50 ttfs is still too many considering the “free fonts” often don’t really replace the msttcorefonts, which I think they should really try do. The leading free fonts like Bitstream Vera Sans and DejaVu Sans look the same to me (actually they are the same, thnks Panthera!) and are seriously boring. I guess they’re comparable to msttcorefont’s Verdana. Great… one down. :) Update: Mike Day informs me this is what Red Hat are doing, developing a set of fonts that are metrically equivalent to the key Microsoft fonts. DejaVu Sans has really good i18n coverage, though unfortunately i18n coverage esp. with China/Japan/Korea (CJK) markets is difficult.
AFAIK there is no CJK msttcorefonts, so general ‘free software’ compatibility with proprietary font faces out there is really bad. There are free CJK fonts though many of these free fonts are really bad quality. Some are OK quality, though they aren’t comparable to the proprietary fonts and hence too often the Web page renders badly, as it was designed with some other proprietary font in mind. Ouch! Web designers please use ‘em’ units and this problem such as over lapping text could be avoided. Then some people in China prefer some font over another so this problem gets quite complex. Add Korea and Japan to the mix who also use Chinese characters in their own “special way”. I’ve been testing out sina.com.cn and taking screenshots. Sina test rendering, take 2 So I have a Chinese friend and asked him to try a special Chinese specific Debian live build of Webconverger. He says all the Ubuntu geeks use VeraSansYuanTi. However that’s non-free theft, sigh…. My friend also writes:

sorry for Chinese there is no best font..
because China government never try hard for this;
all kinds of fonts is some company create;
and u know China had so log history so many great beautiful font style
.. but not become computer free fonts…
I think the opensource evolution model doesn’t work very well with fonts. They need to be super high quality from the outset. Throwing a bunch of fonts at the problem gets us in our current confused situation. Update: Henri Sivonen wisely points out that “in the case of DejaVu, adding glyphs to Vera as an open source project seems to work”. I think it would be great if governments could settle on some cultural core fonts for their locality instead of being dictated to by Microsoft, or by whatever proprietary font gains acceptance in other markets.

Clint Adams: Lindsey Buckingham was nowhere to be found

In the middle of the forest on the hill is a ley, and through that ley runs a creek, and across that creek rests a weir, and by that weir stands a detached concrete wall. By that wall is a table of wrought iron, and surrounding that table are three wrought iron chairs, upon which there are no cushions. Were one to query a being seated upon one of these chairs, one might be told that it was a most uncomfortable place for one's hindquarters. In the days of yore, one Philip discovered this place, and this Philip did seek out his friend Paul to show him the glorious place that he had found. Paul was readily impressed, and the two of them appointed themselves the caretakers of this place by the weir in the creek in the ley in the forest on the hill. They built a shed next to the detached concrete wall, and in that shed they placed tools of the sort used for groundskeeping, and eventually they acquired an old riding mower that someone had been in the process of discarding, and they placed the mower also in the shed, and worried about the value of the mower in the shed, they procured a large combination lock for the door of the shed, and installed it hastily. As the trove in the shed burgeoned, Philip and Paul invited more friends to share enjoyment of their place by the weir in the creek in the ley in the forest on the hill. People would come every day and watch them cut the grass and kill the moss on the detached concrete wall. On rare occasions a guest would say, Need any help with that? and Philip would shout back, No, thanks, we've got it all under control! This golden age continued for quite some time, but as with all glorious things, one small event disturbs the balance, things spiral out of control, and despite anyone's efforts, nothing succeeds in restoring the state which many found so very acceptable. HOW IT HAPPEN: Philip had a dream about an angel on the beach. This dream plagued him day in and day out. It plagued him like the wind. Finally, sitting on the detached concrete wall, murdering some moss, he snapped. If I can't get an angel, I can still get a boy, and a boy'll be the next thing to an angel, he announced. The next best thing to an angel, he clarified. A boy'll be the next best thing. Then, to further illustrate the progress of his nervous breakdown, he leapt off the wall and ran into the forest. What? replied Paul, and continued his labors. Need any help? some guests inquired. No, we've got it all under control, Paul answered. The days went by, and Philip remained absent. Paul started to work more slowly, and neglected certain parts of their sanctuary. Soon he only showed up every other day. Hey, guys! Philip shouted, arriving to find most of the regulars there. Sorry I haven't had time to attend to things, but I've been busy. Do you need any help? someone grunted half-heartedly. Naw! Philip answered, I'll just catch up now. Thus he spake, and thus he did. Inspired by Philip's toil, Paul resumed his efforts more heartily, even though Philip disappeared again. The days went by, and Philip remained absent. Paul started to work more slowly, and neglected certain parts of their sanctuary. Eventually he was doing almost nothing at all. Is. There. Something. We. Can. Do. To. Help? asked the peanut gallery. I don't know, Paul snapped. If you want to help, ask Philip. He stormed off.

Ross Burton: Another eds-sync Release

We've just released eds-sync 2.20070531, with some hot new features. I've uploaded a tarball to Maemo Garage which should be visible soon, but for now there is a tagged release in Subversion.

loldebian - Can I has a RC bug?: In case you were wondering

Yes, we had all this free time to post random Debian pics and write lol-captions on them, but we never managed to find time to introduce ourselves, until now, and by popular demmand: loldebian is brought to you by Jacobo and Amaya, in the same spirit as lolgeeks, I can has a Cheezburger and lolcats. No kittens were hurt in the making, and only healthy fun is intended. Do send your contributions our way, and help us make Debian fun again!
(For the gimp-impaired, there’s an online tool that might be helpful: LolCat Buildr)
Now, if you have complaints about flamefests in Debian mailing lists, make sure you check “passive-aggressive notes from roommates, neighbors, coworkers and strangers” and take a minute to realize RL is not that much better at resolving conflict. Happy loling!

Nacho Barrientos Arias: Bye-bye Debconf

Sadly, this is the second year I have to say good bye to Debconf, as I wrote time ago, I wasn’t able to attend Debconf in the selected dates. Yeah, I said “*was*” because some plans have changed recently, and, as you are probably thinking, it’s already too late to ask for sponsorship and start planning the trip. I hope to meet you in the next event and, meanwhile, I’ve a message for all the attendees: Fly well, fly safe, have fun and drink some beer for me!

loldebian - Can I has a RC bug?: Im sitin here

Im sitin here snupin ur pasword Im sitin here snupin ur pasword

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: Announcing darcs-monitor 0.3.1

Darcs-monitor will send email to a specified recipient about new changes added to a specific darcs repository. It can be run as an apply posthook (resulting in near-instantaneous push emails), or periodically from Cron, or occasionally by hand, whatever seems most convenient. This new release (0.3) contains the following changes: The minor update 0.3.1 brings the documentation up to date. Benja Fallenstein and Benjamin Franksen provided some of the features and bug fixes in this release. My thanks to them :) You can get it by darcs at http://antti-juhani.kaijanaho.fi/darcs/darcs-monitor/ (darcsweb
available), or as a tarball at http://antti-juhani.kaijanaho.fi/software/dist/. It depends on mtl and
HaXml and is written in Haskell, naturally. It has been tested only with GHC 6.6 so far. For installation and usage instructions, refer to the README at any of the locations above. Please note that this software is very new and thus can be buggy. As with any email-sending software, bugs can result in major annoyance; user caution is warranted.

Amaya Rodrigo: It's that time of the year again

It s that time of the year again, and I have this silly smile on my face again: Next Friday I will be landing in Edinburgh, just before Debconf officially starts.

2007 has been a bit difficult so far, but I know Debconf will recharge my batteries and I will, again, get intoxicated with the enthusiasm of my fellow DDs. I always find inspiration, motivation and nice technical challenges during Debconf and anticipation fills my heart with warmth.

 
I m really looking forward to seeing the dudes and dudettes again. Hug you in Debconf!


Ganneff Hugging

30 May 2007

Michal Čihař: Troubles forming new API

I just came to another decision point. Curently new Gammu API is quite in good shape (even most of functions are documented), but I think whether it's time to push in also some other big changes, which I would like to see, or just wait for things to settle down before starting other major changes. For application developers (using C API, Python ones won't notice any of those changes), it would be definitely better to do all changes in one big bang. However I'm really affraid of possible impacts on stability, because extreme big changes. I'm still more and more convinced about stabilizing current code and keep those big changes for later time. When talking about this, I should also mentions change I want to introduce :-). First is switch to wchar_t instead of own UCS-2-BE encoding. This will help a lot in possible errors on allocating memory for strings and also allow us to use libc functions for string operations. The second change is even bigger - make all storages scalable to avoid problems with hardcoded limits. But for this change it should be possible to add compatibility API functions, so that users don't have to notice anything.

Simon Richter: Why I like Makefiles

Today was frustrating. I've spent 6 hours trying to find out how to make Borland CBuilder link a static library into a DLL project. Since the target is Windows, this should work, but there simply isn't an option to do that, or I am unable to find it. In other news, mixing code in different object formats is pain.

Paul van Tilburg: Master Project Take 2 and 3

I just realised that I forgot to post about take 2, so I’ll combine it with this post about take 3. The past five months I’ve been busy with examining the effect of restriction on CCS with parallelism. We decided to do this in two steps. First (take 2) we considered interleaving of actions, and then (take 3) we added communication. The case with only interleaving of actions went smoothly; it worked out as a nice extension of the case without parallelism. However, when we looked at the case with interleaving and communication, it started to become troubling. I ran into all kind of complications and the risk of failure I described in a previous post seemed to come true. However, I think we managed quite well to catch a large part of the problems and describe them, and also offer possible solutions. In the end, I’m quite happy of the result. So, today I can present the final version of my Master’s Thesis: “Finite Equational Bases for CCS with Restriction”. Yay! I have just submitted it for reproduction. The final presentation of my project will take place June 5, 2007 at 10:00 in the main building of the university, HG 6.29. If you’re interested and are able to attend, consider yourself invited. I want to thank Bas Luttik for his large amount of feedback, clear explanations and guidance, without him the project wouldn’t have worked out as well as it did now. Almost finished, 6 days remaining…

Biella Coleman: The Canadian Rockies

I am at the nice Wild Flour Bakery in the very stunning Canadian Rockies taking advantage of some time and wireless to get started with a small project whose deadline is fast coming up. So you know all those pictures of Banff/Canmore area lakes donning aquamarine, coral like colors? Well, there is no lying going on. The lakes here are so frikken beautiful and as someone who has spent a lot of time underwater staring at corals and Caribbean Fishies, I think there is something quite nice about how the water in Caribbean and the water in the Rockies look the same. While the lakes in the Rockies are the color they are due to their mineral content, some of the lakes, like the one we hiked to yesterday, are on top of ancient petrified coral reefs. Mountains were once oceans, oceans become mountains… which if you give it some thought, is sort of mind blowing. So, Banff is quite beautiful but in terms of mountain towns, I prefer nearby Canmore or Jasper (which is closer to Edmonton) mostly because they are not quite as ritzy and chock full of tourists (but of course there is a reason for all these tourists). But whatever town you can make it to, I would highly recommend the Canadian Rockies. They are in a class of their own.

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