The Acetarium, where I live, runs what we like to think of as the world's smallest artistic residency program by hosting artists, social scientists, hackers, and free software and free culture folks for periods of 1-3 months. Our most recently graduated resident, Noah, built a lawn scrabble set on the Media Lab ShopBot and held a Scrabble picnic this weekend with some former Acetarium residents and others. I don't really like playing Scrabble, so you can see me working on an essay (and verifying words) in the background. Thanks to Ben Schwartz as I yoinked these pictures from his blog.

I ve actually spent a few hours searching around for a good backup solution for my mailbox until I decided to stick with getmail. What you ll be able to achieve after reading this HowTo and deploying the following setup is:

1. A full backup of your e-mail DATA in the Mbox format. (yes, Gmail s labels / folders as well)
2. Prevent getmail to mark all mails as read after delivering them. (this was a pretty bad issue since getmail was marking all my mails as read even if I did not access my e-mail at all)
3. Keep your backups up-to-date with the latest content from your mailbox. (by default getmail grabs all the DATA from your mailbox and fills up the Mbox / Maildir content keeping deleted mails. So let s say I deleted a mail two days ago, well it ll still appear on today s backups. This behaviour is definitely unwanted)

I ll now move to explain a few details about my new configuration but before moving to tweak getmail s main config file, please do the following change on _retrieverbases.py* :

return self._getmsgpartbyid(msgid, (RFC822) ) to return self._getmsgpartbyid(msgid, (BODY.PEEK[]) )

When done grab the following getmailrc and adapt it to your needs**:

[retriever]
type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever ## or SimplePOP3SSLRetriever.
server = imap.gmail.com ## or pop.gmail.com for POP3.
username = example@gmail.com
password = password ## so-called Gmail s labels should be listed one by one here for getmail to retrieve mail from them successfully. mailboxes = ( INBOX , [Gmail]/Sent mail ,
ubuntu , gnome/example , linux/example ) [destination]
type = Mboxrd
path = ~/.getmail/backup.mbox [options]
delivered_to = false ## No delivered_to header added automatically.
received = false ## No received header added automatically.
verbose = 2 ## getmail will print messages about each of its actions.

When done we should go ahead setting up getmail s directories and config file:

mkdir $HOME/.getmail cp $HOME/getmailrc $HOME/.getmail/ ## Adapt $HOME/getmailrc to whatever dir you put that file into.

But pretty much all the remaining work will be done by a small shell script I wrote:

#!/bin/sh WORKDIR=$HOME/.getmail
date= date +%d-%m-%Y_%H:%M if [ ! -f $WORKDIR/backup.mbox ]
then
touch $WORKDIR/backup.mbox
fi getmail > $WORKDIR/getmail.log
OUT=$?
if [ $OUT -eq 0 ]
then
mkdir -p $WORKDIR/backups/ && mv $WORKDIR/backup.mbox $WORKDIR/backups/backup_$date.mbox ;
else [ $OUT -eq 1 ]
exit 1
fi ## Cleanup older than 3 days backups
find $WORKDIR/backups/* -mtime +3 -exec rm ;
cd $WORKDIR && rm -rf oldmail-* ;

This script will:

1. Run getmail using the getmailrc config file you previously worked on.
2. If the above command will be successful, it ll create a backups dir into $HOME/.getmail and move the latest Mbox file there appending a date and time to its name. (by doing this we are sure next getmail run will happen on an empty backup.mbox file, thus it will just contain the latest content from your mailbox)
3. It ll re-create a backup.mbox file on $HOME/.getmail to avoid the next getmail run to fail.
4. In the end, it ll clean up older than 3 days backups to avoid a too crowded backups folder. (it removes the oldmail file as well since it is useless in our case)

In the end set up a cronjob that will run the above script and generate the backups for you every one hour:

0 * * * * $HOME/.getmail/getmail_run.sh > /dev/null

Feel free to let me know if you ve encountered any issue while following the above HowTo. Enjoy! * /usr/share/getmail4/getmailcore/_retrieverbases.py on line 901. ** More documentation about the getmailrc file and syntax can be found on getmail s documentation page.

Videos are becoming more and more common on the internet, and for some things, like mentos and diet pepsi, they're hard to beat. For things I'm seriously interested in, though, I prefer text. Here's why:

• Text goes at my speed. I read quickly, and certainly faster than people can talk. If I want to slow down and reread something, I can do that too.
• Video, outside of actual video chats, is not interactive, so I don't get the benefits of being there, being able to interrupt, ask questions, and so on, that can make the 'in person' experience superior to just reading about something.
• Text is searchable and indexable. I can search within a page, and it's also more likely to be visible to search engines.
• Text is easy to scan and glance at.
• Given the ease of scanning text, it's also easier to filter: "is this something I want to invest more time in reading?". In the time many videos use for people to simply introduce themselves, I could have already got an idea of a document is worth further perusal.
• Text is easy to manipulate; cutting, pasting, quoting, etc... are all easy.
• I don't have to put on headphones to read text if my wife is sleeping and I'm working late.
• Text has good, and highly visible conventions (various headings and subheadings) for indicating subsections of a large document and what they may be about.

If you don't have any interest in tedious licensing discussion then I recommend not reading this. It's not going to be a great deal of fun.

Having said that:

I'm looking at the Canonical Individual Contributor License Agreement (pdf here). In contrast to the previous copyright assignment, it merely grants a broad set of rights to Canonical, including the right to relicense the work under any license they choose. Notably, it does not transfer copyright to Canonical. The contributor retains copyright.

So here's a thought experiment. Canonical release a project under the GPLv3. I produce a significant modification to it. It's now clearly a derived work of Canonical's project, so I have to distribute it under the GPLv3. I have no right to distribute it under a proprietary license. I sign the CLA and provide my modification to Canonical. The grant I give them includes giving them permission to relicense my work under any license they choose. As copyright holders to the original work, they may also change the license of that work. But, notably, I have not granted them copyright to my work. I continue to hold that.

Now someone else decides to extend the functionality that I added. By doing so they are creating a work that's both a derivative work of Canonical's code and also a derivative work of my code. How can they sign the CLA? I granted Canonical the right to grant extra permissions on my work. I didn't grant anyone else that right.

This wasn't a problem with the copyright assignment case, because as copyright holders Canonical could simply grant that permission to all downstream recipients. But Canonical aren't the copyright holder, and unless they explicitly relicense my work I don't see any way that they can accept derivatives of it. The only way I can see this working is if all Canonical code is actually distributed under an implicit license that's slightly more permissive than the GPLv3. But there's nothing saying that it is at present.

Now, I'm obviously not a lawyer. I may be entirely wrong about the above. But asymmetric CLAs introduce an additional level of complexity into the entire process of contributing that make it even more difficult for a potential contributor to become involved. I've spent far more time than most worrying about licenses and even I don't understand exactly what I'm giving up, which is ironic given that a stated aim is usually that they increase certainty about licensing. Is the opportunity to relicense really worth alienating people who would otherwise be doing free work for you?

With Steve's kind help, I got a place to put my backport debian-installer images at Debian official CD host cdimage.debian.org. Although http://kmuto.jp/debian/d-i/ remains as the site of primary information, you can download or rsync every files from http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/backports/ directly also. Please DO NOT fill any bugs about these images to Debian BTS. They are unofficial, even are provided by Debian official host ;-P

If you thought Debian/m68k was dead and buried and where happy about it, I'm sorry to disappoint you. The reason m68k had died out slightly was not that we'd lost interest, or that we'd been kicked out of the archive, or anything of the sorts, as I've seen people believe. Instead, the reasons were fully technical: glibc past some particular version needs TLS (thread-local storage) support, which hadn't been implemented for m68k yet, and nobody within the Debian/m68k team had the expertise to work on this. That was all. Not so long ago, some people within RedHat had started doing a TLS implementation for m68k, however. This was paid for by one of their customers who needed the ColdFire to work, and therefore it was focused mostly on ColdFire. However, ColdFire is close enough to plain old m68k that it was possible to port this TLS support to plain old without too much effort. Unfortunately, most of our machines were pretty much nonfunctional by that time; so in order to get things to work, we'd have to

• Reinstall some of our machines, fix the others, without a functional installer,
• Do the necessary porting and package integration work,
• Rebootstrap the architecture,
• do other things necessary (such as providing a working installer, etc).

Not quite impossible, but still a lot of work that would need someone to put in quite an amount of time. This wasn't something that people in the m68k port could invest; and I'm also not sure we had the necessary skills amongst the team to do the necessary porting. So the work lay there, and it wasn't being done. Until one Thorsten Glaser, author of a shell called 'mksh' that I hadn't heard of until then, came along, and noted that his mksh package wasn't being built for m68k. Upon investigating, he discovered, as expected, that the port was almost dead. Now most people would leave it at that and decide that they couldn't build for an architecture that wasn't being maintained anymore and that would be perfectly fine but not Thorsten. On the brink of death, he almost single-handedly revived the m68k port, and got stuff to work to such an extent that it is now again possible to build a working and fairly up-to-date Linux/m68k ARAnyM virtual machine. As I'm typing this, my ARAnyM instance is checking out the d-i repository (so I can start building d-i), and building sudo at the same time. Let's see what comes from this.

For several years, Kenshi Muto has been doing some awesome work on updated/backported Debian CDs, producing CDs with support for newer hardware and newer features. I've used them myself in the past to help get awkward machines working, and I know they are a great resource for lots of other Debian users. We've discussed things in the last few weeks, and agreed that it would be useful to host his images on cdimage.debian.org. The best place to look now is http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/backports/. These are unofficial images, so please don't report bugs in the Debian BTS for them.

Recently I received a bug report for psmisc that basically supplied a patch so psmisc works in a cygwin environment. Nothing terribly exciting in that and the changes are pretty uncontroversial. One of the changes is in that instead of using rawmemchr to find the end of the string, cygwin doesn t have that function and so it is replaced by strchr. I ve not seen the function rawmemchr before so I had a closer look. Initially I was a little worried, rawmemchr tries to find the given byte starting at a given pointer but unlike strchr it doesn t stop unless it finds the character. I think the only time this function is safe, or is no more evil than anything else, is when you are searching for the NUL character which is what fuser in psmisc does. Still, the string being checked is coming from getcwd which requires a string or buffer length so perhaps it would be better to use memchr which is a little slower but has a maximum length parameter. If you have code that uses this function, you may just want to check how it is being used because it seems like an old bad gets function that plagued a lot of programs.

If a single man can display so much hatred
think only of how much love we all can display together.

Stine Renate H heim

I wrote a Norwegian post explaining my experience at Ut ya. I had taken this blog for dead, and had entirely forgotten that it was syndicated on Planet Debian. I don t want to let Google Translate make this disaster any worse than it is the translation of bullets into balls being particularly bad so the international attention the massacre has garnered in consideration, I am writing an English translation of my experiences. I feel somehow duty-bound to make people aware of what happened, but I don t want to get into anything else but a sober description of the events and some very brief reflections. There are many details I have chosen to omit. Others have written their experiences of the events at Ut ya. I wanted to write mine down as well, and get it out there . Partly, I want to write this down because I m unsure if I will remember all the details at a later point in time, although I think I d prefer it if I couldn t. I m also writing this because people are asking about my experiences and it s much better to have an URL to give them, lest I have to keep going through the same spiel over and over again. Our former Prime Minister and current labour movement demigod Gro Harlem Brundtland had recently left the island. I had been the cameraman for a video interview of her talking about Ut ya, and I was in the media group room encoding the video into a file suitable for YouTube, when someone else in the room startled and said that Twitter was full of messages about a loud explosion in Oslo. As the newspapers brought us information about the extent of the damages, a consensus arose that an informational meeting was in order. As soon as the current round of talks finished, we were gathered into the main hall. The meeting was duly held, and after the statement was made that a TV feed would be made available, I took it upon myself as the local alpha geek to make it happen. Of course, the situation caused both the wireless network and the GPRS networks to become totally unusable. As I was waiting for someone to set up a password, I took the opportunity to face the consequences of having eaten two bits of a microwavable dish called Hold-It the local equivalent of a Hot Pocket and went to the toilet. As I was in there, I first heard agitated shouting, then screams, then gunshots coming from just outside the toilets. More than anything else, it sounded like a toy gun. I was convinced that someone was making a joke in incredibly bad taste and I stormed out of the booth with the intent of halting it. As I tore the door open, I saw two of my comrades hiding in a recessed corner. Their facial expressions left absolutely no doubt that this was no toy. They signalled for me to get back in the booth. I closed the door, did a mental double-take in utter, complete confusion, and opened it again. They were still signalling. Had they not stood there, I would have run straight into the gunman; they saved my life. I looked out into the hallway, and I made eye contact with a young boy lying in a pool of blood. He was motioning for me to help him. I heard more gunshots from inside the building and retreated back inside. As I was trying to think through my next move, I realized that the decidedly insubstantial wood-fiber door would not resist any kind of bullets. I made my way out into the hallway, with the intent of escaping outside. At that point, I was of course not aware that there was an intention to kill as many as possible, so I thought that the open spaces outside would be a place of relative safety. Of course, this proved to be wrong and my life was probably saved a second time by one of the caf volunteers taking me into a hard-to-spot employee s bathroom. We sat there for ninety minutes. Always ready to make a run for it, ready for just about anything. A peculiar group dynamic arose with these two people with whom I had barely previously spoken. We came to share a strange sense of common destiny and gallows humour. One of them had seen the shooter and described the police uniform. I perceived it to be realistic that we were the only ones aware of the wounded outside the toilet. I tried to reach the emergency services, but all their lines were busy; the terror attack in Oslo had probably clogged their lines. I finally got through to the fire services, who could inform me that the police did know about the situation and were on their way. This was to take 90 minutes and by the time we evacuated, the young boy outside my door had perished. The despair I first saw in his eyes as I passed him, fleeing from one room to the other and the empty, blank stare as we left, are burned into me and they are images I will never in my life forget. Finally, the real police arrived. We walked out. I chose the path through the minor conference hall something I now regret. The sight was simply beyond my capacity to describe fully, and so terrifying that I barely remember the sight only the terror it struck in me. There were several people bunched up in a corner, a big amorphous heap of bodies. Some were conscious and yelled at me not to do anything that could startle the police, others lay still. Their bodies were all covered in blood, and a thick pool of blood extended at least a half-metre in all directions around them. The policeman across the hall was screaming orders at me, but he was screaming so loudly that I couldn t make out his words at first. We were first moved into the camp newspaper s offices. There were about eight of us there, I think, in addition to one girl who lay wounded. Towards the end she was drifting in and out of consciousness. We covered her with sweaters to keep her warm and one of us tried to at least temper her bleeding. The bullet had missed her heart, but by the entry wound it was clear that it was not by far. I do not know who this girl was or how she is now. I sat behind and never saw her face. The wounded were evacuated first. I don t remember how long we remained; I had lost all concept of time. In spite of protests from the group who knew him, one kid was put in handcuffs. At the time I didn t understand why, and the policeman seemed to say something almost to the effect that there was no reason for it at all. I didn t see when they undid his cuffs, but I remember thinking that this treatment made a terrible experience even worse for him. I tried my best to comfort him but knew it would be little help. Later, when things stabilised a little, we were told that he was handcuffed because he had come from an unsecured area. The police was extremely good at carefully explaining what was happening and why; this was a big help and I am grateful for it. Eventually we were moved out into the main corridor of the building, where we joined up into a group of about fifty. Only when I saw the two people who saved my life did any emotion other than mild confusion arise. I broke down shivering in tears in one of their arms. After a few seconds, I came back to my senses and realised that this was not the time. I quickly gathered myself, got the shaking under control, and sat down. We were given some chocolate and soda from the kiosk. I remember making an offhand remark that an inability to find joy in free candy was a sure sign of a bad situation. We all laughed out loud. Gallows humour is a coping mechanism, but in retrospect one almost feels guilty for it. We were shown out in a single file with hands above our heads. I remember an intense concern that someone would slip in the steep, muddy slope and create a misunderstanding. Outside, there were more bodies. Some under improvised covers a tarpaulin from the waffle stand, the deflated bouncy castle but some simply lay there. Everyone I met displayed a courage, a mental discipline and unity of purpose far beyond anything one would ever wish to expect from people this young. Everyone conducted themselves with an attitude that could almost be described as stiff upper lip . Safely across the fjord we were offered blankets. I was asked if I was aware of any injuries, and asked to lift my shirt and show my abdominal region. We were shown into the bus which took us to the hotel used by the survivors and their family. I simply cannot describe in any words the relief I felt when I was able to embrace my living comrades. It was completely unlike anything I had ever felt before in my life. The euphoric feeling was tempered only by the realisation that there would be many I could never see again, comrades whom I had taken great pride in calling my friends, with futures in the service of all mankind, futures I had previously found such great joy in pondering and guessing about. The feeling which continues to upset me the most, is the feeling that so many of my comrades left behind grieving families and friends. Torn away senselessly. I do not know how much more than this relatively sober account of the events on Ut ya I can muster. I would, however, like to offer some reflections. First of all, from the bottom of my heart, I want to thank the police who saved the lives of so many still on the island, the holidaymakers who took aboard swimmers into their boats and the rescue services staffed primarily by volunteers who have spared no effort in trying to soften the blow as much as they can. The opportunity to spend time with those comrades who underwent the same experience as myself has also been an immeasurable aid. I was also so relieved to find my very closest friend among the survivors, which has also been an indescribable help. If I can name a single positive in this tragedy: Had he arrived with his automatic weapon fifteen or twenty minutes prior, he would have arrived during the informational meeting, at a time when the major hall was absolutely jam-packed the death toll would be many times what it ended up being. I am agonisingly aware of the meager comfort this provides to those who have been bereft of their closest, but I do find some solace in this. We cannot sweep under a rug that this was without question! a political attack on the labour movement. But it is thankfully also an attack which has been perceived by everyone as an attack on the Norwegian society, and on a symbol of the wide recruitment to the participatory democracy which lies at our very national soul. I cannot thank the Norwegian people, and indeed the people in other nations who have offered their condolences, enough for their shows of support and shared grief. It really has been a tremendous help to me knowing that so many people feel with us. I also want to thank from the bottom of my heart the rock-steadiness of everyone in both the national and local wings of the Labour Party and Labour Youth in supporting us, and the political milieu in general for their resolute steadfastness saving me from losing yet more that I cherish; our freedoms in a participatory democracy. Our Party has lost many of its very brightest youngsters. Personally I feel an angry spite, a deep restless urge to get the wheels of society going again. I want to show his kind that we will not be broken. We re stronger than that. I will not be frightened into silence and passivity. I want to remember the dead, and honor them by carrying on our common work. I want to end this with a request to everyone who reads this, echoing a statement I read by one of my good friends and comrades: Please, don t let me see any messages of hatred, wishes for the death penalty, anything like that. If anyone should be of the belief that anything will improve by murdering this sad little person, they would be profoundly wrong. All attention now should be plowed into caring for those victims and their relatives who did not share my luck, and not giving an audience to a perpetrator who wants one. Tore Sinding Bekkedal

The trip down from Gratz to Banja Luka was much easier than the day before. After a while you just get used to being sat in a car for ages. Plenty of nice scenery to enjoy through Slovenia. After a while our car's GPS's began to fail, showing us driving through fields, and we were stuck for 1.5 hours in a traffic jam when the 4 lane highway seemed to end. Got around that with some guesswork, and on into Croatia by back roads. The Bosnian border was an interesting experience, all the guards could say in English was "green card! green card!" -- which from an American POV is an unsettling thing to be asked for at a border, especially if they've already taken your passport away -- but at least we were not detained overnight. While drivers were away getting the car insurance settled it descended toward farce as we had to hand roll the cars forward to let trucks get into the country. (Or we thought we did.. one was rolled with the keys in it as it turned out.) Arrived at the Hotel in Banja Luka in the middle of a wedding, which was amazingly loud (I could still hear it from the 5th floor at 2 am). There's also a casino at the hotel, so first impression was garish and loud! ... But now that it's a rainy Sunday, seems much nicer here.

I have released version 0.18 of Obnam, my backup application. From the NEWS file:

• The repository format has again changed in an incompatible manner, so you will need to re-backup everything again. (If this is a problem, tell me, and I'll consider adding backwards compatibility before 1.0 is released.)
• New option --exclude-caches allows automatic exclusion of cache directories that are marked as such.
• Obnam now makes files in the repository be read-only, so that they're that much harder to delete by mistake.
• Error message about files that can't be backed up now mentions the correct file.
• Bugfix: unreadable files and directories no longer cause the backup to fail. The problems are reported, but the backup continues. Thanks to Jeff Epler for reporting the bug.
• Speed improvement from Jeff Epler for excluding files from backups.
• Various other speed improvements.
• Bugfix: restoring symlinks now works even if the symlink is restored before its target. Also, the permissions of the symlink (rather than its target) are now restored correctly. Thanks to Jeff Epler for an exemplary bug report.
• New option --one-file-system, from Jeff Epler.
• New benchmarking tool obnam-benchmark, which is more flexible than the old run-benchmark.
• When encrypting/decrypting data with GnuPG, temporary files are no longer used.
• When verifying, .../foo and .../foo/ now work the same way.
• New option --symmetric-key-bits.
• The chunk directory uses more hierarchy levels, and the way chunks are stored there is now user-configurable (but you'll get into trouble if you don't always use the same configuration). This should speed things up a bit once the number of chunks grows very large.
• New --chunkids-per-group option, for yet more knobs to tweak when searching for optimal performance.
• Local files are now opened using O_NOATIME so they can be backed up without affecting timestamps.
• Now uses the cliapp framework for writing command line applications. The primary user-visible effect is that the manpage now has an accurate list of options.
• Bugfix: Obnam now again reports VFS I/O statistics.
• Bugfix: Obnam can again back up live data that is accessed using sftp. Thanks to Tapani Tarvainen for reporting the problem.

I alse made releases of some dependencies of Obnam. They're all in my code.liw.fi repository, and some of them are also now in Debian unstable.

I have released version 0.18 of Obnam, my backup application. From the NEWS file:

• The repository format has again changed in an incompatible manner, so you will need to re-backup everything again. (If this is a problem, tell me, and I'll consider adding backwards compatibility before 1.0 is released.)
• New option --exclude-caches allows automatic exclusion of cache directories that are marked as such.
• Obnam now makes files in the repository be read-only, so that they're that much harder to delete by mistake.
• Error message about files that can't be backed up now mentions the correct file.
• Bugfix: unreadable files and directories no longer cause the backup to fail. The problems are reported, but the backup continues. Thanks to Jeff Epler for reporting the bug.
• Speed improvement from Jeff Epler for excluding files from backups.
• Various other speed improvements.
• Bugfix: restoring symlinks now works even if the symlink is restored before its target. Also, the permissions of the symlink (rather than its target) are now restored correctly. Thanks to Jeff Epler for an exemplary bug report.
• New option --one-file-system, from Jeff Epler.
• New benchmarking tool obnam-benchmark, which is more flexible than the old run-benchmark.
• When encrypting/decrypting data with GnuPG, temporary files are no longer used.
• When verifying, .../foo and .../foo/ now work the same way.
• New option --symmetric-key-bits.
• The chunk directory uses more hierarchy levels, and the way chunks are stored there is now user-configurable (but you'll get into trouble if you don't always use the same configuration). This should speed things up a bit once the number of chunks grows very large.
• New --chunkids-per-group option, for yet more knobs to tweak when searching for optimal performance.
• Local files are now opened using O_NOATIME so they can be backed up without affecting timestamps.
• Now uses the cliapp framework for writing command line applications. The primary user-visible effect is that the manpage now has an accurate list of options.
• Bugfix: Obnam now again reports VFS I/O statistics.
• Bugfix: Obnam can again back up live data that is accessed using sftp. Thanks to Tapani Tarvainen for reporting the problem.

I alse made releases of some dependencies of Obnam. They're all in my code.liw.fi repository, and some of them are also now in Debian unstable.

Hello I m happy to announce that Perl6 (as rakudo) is now available on Debian unstable. Thanks also to Gabor Szabo for the Perl6 talk he gave at FOSDEM. His talk made me think: Why the hell don t we have rakudo on Debian ? . So I stepped up, pushed to get a recent parrot package, ghedo and I created a pkg-rakudo team on Alioth, and we updated the old rakudo package done by ryan52. Enjoy

In my previous post I expressed a desire to use regular expressions for files that may appear in multiple places in the tree due to bind mounts for /run and /var/run etc [1]. However there is a problem with this idea. The SE Linux file labeling program restorecon reads the file /etc/selinux/$SELINUXTYPE/contexts/files/file_contexts which contains a set of regular expressions to assign labels to files. That file is ordered and the last entry which matches is the one that counts. When the file_contexts file is created the order is based on how many characters at the start of the file specification aren t regular expression meta-characters. For example the entry /.* is at the top of the file (and therefore has the lowest precedence), which makes it the catch-all entry for files that have no other match. So an entry for /var/run/REGEX will have a higher precedence than one for /var/REGEX , this means however that when I replaced the /var/run part with a regular expression then it had a lower precedence and it didn t work properly. I should have remembered this as I did a lot of work on setfiles (which became restorecon) in the early days. I have now developed a new way of solving this and this time I m testing it before blogging about it. I have written the following PERL program to fix the file contexts, this adds multiple lines and uses a distro_debian conditional on them so that they don t slip into upstream use and so that if I lose track of where each patch came from I ll know that I can delete them in future because it only matters to Debian. #!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict; open(LIST, "find . -name \"*.fc\" xargs egrep \"^/(var.*run) (var/lock) (dev/shm)\" cut -f1 -d: uniq ") or die "Can't get file list\n";
while(<LIST>)

my $filename = $_;
chomp $filename;
open(my $infile, "<", $filename) or die "Can't open file $filename";
open(my $outfile, ">", $filename . ".new") or die "Can't open file ". $filename . ".new";
while(<$infile>)

print $outfile $_;
my $newline;
if($_ =~ /^\/var\/run/)

print $outfile "ifdef( distro_debian', \n";
$newline = $_;
$newline =~ s/^\/var//;
print $outfile $newline;
print $outfile "')\n";

if($_ =~ /^\/var\/lock/)

print $outfile "ifdef( distro_debian', \n";
$newline = $_;
$newline =~ s/^\/var/\/var\/run/;
print $outfile $newline;
$newline =~ s/^\/var//;
print $outfile $newline;
print $outfile "')\n";

if($_ =~ /^\/dev\/shm/)

print $outfile "ifdef( distro_debian', \n";
$newline = $_;
$newline =~ s/^\/dev/\/run/;
print $outfile $newline;
print $outfile "/var" . $newline;
print $outfile "')\n";


close($infile);
close($outfile);
rename $filename . ".new", $filename or die "Can't rename " . $filename . ".new to " . $filename;
The next policy thing that I have to work on is systemd. From a quick test it seems that systemd policy changes will be more invasive than is suitable for Squeeze. This means that someone who wants to upgrade from Squeeze to Wheezy+systemd will have to upgrade to Wheeze policy before installing systemd. I think that I will make 0.2.20100524-10 the last version in Unstable based on the 2010 release, I will now start work on packaging the latest upstream policy for Unstable. PS I m not much of a PERL programmer, so if anyone has suggestions for how to improve the above PERL code then please let me know. Please note however that I m not interested in making my code look like line-noise.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/07/22/run-se-linux-policy/

When Marvell originally released the first plug computer, they created their own version of u-boot with support for their new devices. Unfortunately, this version of u-boot is fairly out of date nowadays compared to mainline u-boot and has several problems. Support for plug computers (such as SheevaPlug and GuruPlug) have been integrated into the mainline u-boot (also known as DENX u-boot) in the meantime and Clint Adams has packaged it for Debian. I finally found the time to test Clint's u-boot binary on my devices and have updated the SheevaPlug installation guide accordingly. If you're have installed Debian to a SheevaPlug according to my instructions, I suggest you upgrade. If you boot from a MMC/SD card, you should be aware that the mmcinit command has been renamed to mmc init in order to be consistent with the naming of other commands. You'll therefore have to update your bootcmd_mmc variable in u-boot like this:

Oppdatering: Jeg har skrevet en engelsk versjon av dette som er mer gjennomtenkt. I have written an English version of this post which I have had more time to think through. Det var meningen f rst ha dette som en kladd, for senere g igjennom og skrive mer, men WordPress krangler og jeg orker ikke finne ut av det. Derfor publiserer jeg dette n . Jeg har lenge nsket sette opp en ny bloggmotor men har aldri kommet meg til gj re det og dette er definitivt ikke tidspunktet, s jeg gjenoppliver min gamle, engelskspr klige blogg. Andre har skrevet sine fortellinger om hva som skjedde p Ut ya. Jeg ville gjerne skrive ned min ogs , f den ut. Jeg vil dels skrive det ned fordi jeg ikke vet om jeg vil huske alle disse detaljene senere. P en m te h per jeg ikke det. Dels ogs for at jeg skal slippe m tte beskrive dette hele tiden for alle som sp r. Gro Harlem Brundtland hadde nylig forlatt leiren. Jeg hadde tatt opp en videohilsen fra henne, og var i kontoret til mediegruppen for redigere filen til noe vi kunne laste opp p YouTube. En av de som var i rommet skvatt til og fortalte at Twitter var fullt av meldinger om en eksplosjon i Oslo. Etterhvert som pressen kunne fortelle om hvor angrepet hadde skjedd, ble det mer og mer tydelig at et informasjonsm te var p sin plass. Det ble enighet om at det m tet skulle avholdes etter at bolken med innledninger var ferdig. Informasjonsm tet ble avholdt, og jeg tok p meg som den lokale nerd-in-chief sette opp en laptop som kunne vise NRK Nett-TV s folk kunne f sett hva som skjedde. Det tr dl se nettverket gikk nesten umiddelbart ned, s vi ble enige om at det skulle settes et passord p det. I p vente av at noen andre gjorde det, gikk jeg p do. Idet jeg satt der, h rte jeg f rst agitert roping, s skriking, s skudd. Det h rtes mer ut som en lekepistol enn noe annet og jeg antok at dette bare var en eller annen som kom med en totalt smakl s vits. Med dette i tankene, kom jeg n rmest stormende ut av b sen men idet jeg vrengte opp d ren s jeg to mennesker som signaliserte at jeg skulle komme meg inn igjen. Ansiktsuttrykkene deres levnet overhodet ingen tvil om at dette var alvor. At de var der reddet utvilsomt livet mitt. Jeg var mest av alt forvirret. Jeg antok der og da det var en AUFer som hadde gjort dette, g tt amok. Jeg tittet ut igjen. De to var der fremdeles. Denne gangen s jeg en person som l der p gulvet, i en blodp l. Jeg hadde yekontakt med ham, og han signaliserte tydelig etter hjelp. Jeg tenkte umiddelbart at de d rene ikke ville st imot noen som helst type kuler, s jeg tenkte kun p forflytte meg vekk fra b sen. Min f rste tanke var komme meg utend rs. Jeg l p ut korridoren, og akkurat da kom en fra kaf gjengen mot meg. Hun pnet ansatt-toalettet, og jeg, hun, og en annen kastet seg inn. Det er bare en av de mange tilfeldighetene som jeg i etterkant m innse at jeg antar reddet livet mitt. Vi satt der, i halvannen time. Klare til l pe, klare for egentlig hva som helst. Det ble til en eiendommelig dynamikk mellom oss tre, en slags perpleks galgenhumor. Jeg, ettersom det var helt realistisk at v r gruppe var den eneste som visste om likene i bygget, pr vde umiddelbart f varslet om det. 112 fungerte ikke. 110 fungerte ikke. Til slutt kom jeg igjennom p 113, og de kunne opplyse om at politiet var klar over situasjonen og var p vei. Det skulle ta halvannen time, og da vi ble evakuert l han der d d. Det ekte politiet ankom omsider. Vi gikk ut. Jeg tok veien rundt lillesalen, noe jeg i etterkant angrer p ; det jeg s der vil nok bli med meg en stund. Det l en haug med folk jeg husker ingen ansikter, bare et stort, amorft sammensurium av kropper i en fryktelig stor blodp l noen av dem, jeg mener huske to, var fremdeles bevisste. Vi ble f rst flyttet til Planet Ut ya-kontoret leiravisa hvor det var en jente som hadde blitt skutt. Vi rev opp noen poser med gensere fra lageret og dekket til henne. Der satt vi en stund jeg hadde forlengst mistet tidsbegrepet jeg mener det m ha v rt tolv av oss. En av ungdommene ble trass i protester fra de i gruppa som kjente og gikk god for ham p f rt h ndjern. Jeg forstod ikke helt hvorfor. Senere ble vi forklart at det var fordi han hadde kommet fra et omr de politiet ikke hadde oversikt over. Jeg s ikke n r de h ndjernene ble l snet, men jeg husker ihvertfall at det slo meg som uverdig behandling. Politimannen som hadde vakt p posten der vi var, var veldig dyktig til forklare oss situasjonen. Vi ble flyttet ut til hovedkorridoren, hvor omkring 50 av oss var. F rst idet jeg s og omfavnet de som antakeligvis reddet livet mitt, knakk jeg sammen i gr t. Jeg tok meg fort inn igjen, fikk skjelvingen under kontroll, og etter en del venting ble vi marsjert med hendene p hodet mot fergen. Jeg husker hvor redd jeg var for at noen skulle gli i den bratte, gj rmete bakken og skape en misforst else. Det var flere lik ute. Noen var tildekket p improvisert vis, andre l der bare. Alle jeg s viste mot, ro og beherskelse p et niv langt over det noen nsker forvente fra folk i de aldersgruppene. Det var et samhold og en m lbevissthet som gjorde et inntrykk. Vel over fjorden ble vi tilbudt tepper. Jeg ble spurt om jeg var skadet, og bedt om vise mageregionen. Vi ble loset ombord i bussen, og kj rt til Sundvolden hotell. F lelsen, den totalt utrolige lettelsen av se sine n rmeste venner igjen kan jeg virkelig ikke beskrive. Lettelsen ble temperert av usikkerheten rundt de man ikke s . Det dreier seg blant annet om mennesker som jeg i skrivende stund m anta har mistet livet. Blant dem mennesker jeg tidligere hadde hatt stor glede av vissheten om at kom til gj re fantastiske ting i landets og verdens tjeneste n er de revet vekk. Jeg vet ikke hvor mye mer enn denne litt n kterne rapport av hendelsene jeg klarer komme med akkurat n . Men slik var det ihvertfall jeg opplevde situasjonen jeg kom ut av takket v re en serie tilfeldigheter. Litt kort vil jeg legge til: Redningstjenestene var en stor hjelp. Vel s stor, om ikke st rre, har muligheten til tilbringe tid sammen med de andre overlevende v rt. Vi holder sammen og tr ster hverandre med v r felles erfaring. Ett lyspunkt ser jeg her: Mest av alt er jeg s utrolig glad for at han ikke var fremme tyve minutter tidligere, under informasjonsm tet. Da var hele Ut ya samlet som sild i t nne i hovedsalen, og med hans automatv pen ville d dstallene i l pet av noen titalls sekunder blitt det mangedobbelte av det vi endte opp med. At det er en veldig mager tr st for de etterlatte er jeg inderlig klar over. Mine aller dypeste tanker er med dem alle. Dette var et angrep p hele det norske demokratiet. I forvirrelsen f ler jeg en bitter trass. Vi skal vise hans likesinnede at det er sterkere enn som s . Jeg vil ikke la meg skremme til taushet og passivitet. Jeg nsker minnes de d de, og deretter hedre dem ved fortsette arbeidet de var en del av.

Earlier this week, Conrad Sanderson issued a minor bug fix release 2.0.2 of his Armadillo library which provides templated C++ code for linear algebra. We wrapped that into a new RcppArmadillo release 0.2.26 and shipped it to CRAN. Due to it being summer and the otherwise tirelesss human operator behind the curtain being on a well-deserved vacation, it sat in the incoming queue til this morning---but is now on CRAN. Conrad did not rest either and just yesterday released version 2.1.91 as a first step towards a new 2.2.0 release sometime soon. And also yesterday, we wrapped that new version into RcppArmadillo release 0.2.27. With CRAN being back in full swing, we pushed it over there this morning and it already made its way into the repository. The NEWS entries summarising the changes---which are exclusively upstream---are below:

0.2.27  2011-07-22
    o   Upgraded to Armadillo release 2.1.91 "v2.2 beta 1"
          * faster multiplication of small matrices
          * faster trans()
          * faster handling of submatrices by norm()
          * added economical singular value decomposition: svd_thin()
          * added circ_toeplitz()
          * added .is_colvec() & .is_rowvec()
0.2.26  2011-07-17
    o   Upgraded to Armadillo release 2.0.2 
          * fix for handling of conjugate transpose by as_scalar()
          * fix for handling of aliasing by diagmat()
          * fix for handling of empty matrices by symmatu()/symmatl()

Courtesy of CRANberries, there are also diffstat reports for 0.2.27 relative to 0.2.26 and for 0.2.26 relative to 0.2.25. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

why proprietary relicensing is unacceptable for a Free Software enthusiast The past few months have witnessed a large debate about copyright assignment, which seems to has neared its peak around the time Project Harmony has released version 1.0 of its agreement templates. (Note: I use the expression "copyright assignment" in this post, but I'd happily include into it both actual Copyright Assignment Agreements CCAs and Contributor License Agreements CLAs, as both could be used to permit various forms of proprietary relicensing.) Mark Shuttleworth has been one of the most prominent voices campaigning in favor of copyright assignments (to for-profit companies). A couple of interesting blog posts of his where this is evident are "On balancing economic power in the FLOSS ecosystem" and "The responsibilities of ownership". Voices against the opportunity of increasing the popularity of copyright assignments are aplenty and it is pointless to repeat good arguments which I find fully convincing. If you are interested in the subject, here are a few good reads I recommend:

• "Some thougts on copyright assignment", seminal essay (circa end of 2009) by Michael Meeks that provides a good coverage of copyright assignment basics and effects on the surrounding ecosystem
• Richard Fontana's "The trouble with Harmony"; in particular, I recommend taking a close look at "The illusion of constraint" part

What I would like to add to the debate is the point of view of a Free Software enthusiast, not unlike yours truly. I contribute to Free Software not because it is superior to proprietary software in either its software products or in its development methodology. (It actually is superior in many cases, but that's just not my primary motivation.) I do contribute to Free Software to build a world in which users are in complete control of the software they run. Let's assume we have a broken toaster at home. We are all free to (1) open it up and try to repair it by ourselves. If we don't have the needed knowledge, we are free to (2) hand it over to a person that we trust and who does have the needed knowledge to repair it. That failing, we can (3) ask the toaster producer to repair it for us. Many people like me simply don't accept to live in a world where, once all the toasters will be software-driven, the only repair option will be (3), just because the toaster software is proprietary. (Given various kind of [broken] metaphors have been used to explain copyright assignments, it seemed sensible to propose my broken toaster metaphor in exchange.) When I contribute to some Free Software project, I not only care about being able myself to get a Free Software licensed copy of the whole product (i.e. the original software product + my own contribution). I care that all recipients of the product, present and future, will be able to get that contribution with enough freedoms attached to put them in control of the software that includes it. This desire can be fulfilled with a varying degree of success, depending on the license of the code base I contribute to. For instance, I find more pleasant to contribute to a copyleft licensed code base than to a weak-/non-copyleft licensed one, and more pleasant to contribute to an AGPL-ed web app than to a copyleft web app. It also means that, given the option, I will not allow the code base maintainer to re-license my contribution under terms that allow distributing it without suitable freedoms attached. Different contributors will be ready to accept different re-licensing promises, but the mere fact we are debating all this and that companies like Canonical feel the need of campaigning for copyright assignments is evidence that many contributors like me exists and actually have a problem with allowing downstream relicensing of their contributions. What is feared the most is of course proprietary relicensing. According to my moral horizon this is the case not because the company might end up gaining money out of my code: I wouldn't have a problem with that. The reason is rather that the company will be able to distribute my own code in a way that grants less freedoms to users than those that were implicitly "agreed upon" when the contribution has been written. In that respect, I can't help thinking at harmony agreements as a large scale smoke screen experiment meant to convince volunteers that copyright assignments are something Free Software needs. By exploiting the creative-commons-like "it's easy, just choose one" scheme, Harmony takes the chance of offering misleading options such as the one labeled "any OSI approved license". Via that option, which is seemingly fine, the copyright recipient will be allowed to relicense the contribution under some non-copyleft license (e.g. BSD) and from there do essentially what they want. All in all, companies campaigning for copyright assignments seem to have failed to understand two main points. The first one is that contributors motivated by Free Software ideals want the code to remain free not only for themselves, but for all recipients of the code. I'm not claiming that all contributors to FOSS projects belong to this category, but the fact that there is a considerable amount of such people is undeniable. Hoping that they will be fooled by tricks like the "any OSI approved license" agreement is foolish. The second is that while volunteer Free Software communities do respect companies that provide huge amounts of code contributions, they also expect companies to figure out by themselves which business models make their businesses sustainable. Telling volunteers that current business models are not sustainable without proprietary relicensing is worthless. Volunteers just don't care. They want software freedom guarantees and are not willing to renounce to them in exchange of the wealth of companies, not even under the (implicit) threat that otherwise those companies will be forced to reduce the amount of their code contributions.

---

Update: explain in the initial note why my reasoning here encompasses both CCAs and CLAs. Thanks Tollef for noticing that it wasn't clear.

Thanks to Bdale, uaputl and uapevent are now in Debian!

Lintian now has a warning for debian/rules missing build-arch and build-indep targets. As a dh user, I was surprised that some of my dh-using packages had this problem. And when looking at the source, I remembered how I came to this: GNU make is stupid. Considering the following excerpt of the GNU make manual:

.PHONY

The prerequisites of the special target .PHONY are considered to be phony targets. When it is time to consider such a target, make will run its recipe unconditionally, regardless of whether a file with that name exists or what its last-modification time is.

And considering the following debian/rules:

.PHONY: build
%:
        dh $@

What do you think happens when you run debian/rules build in a directory containing a build file or directory?

make: Nothing to be done for build .

However, an explicit rule, like the following, works:

.PHONY: build
build:
        dh $@

It happens that many of the packages I maintain contain a build subdirectory in their source. As such, to work around the aforementioned issue, I just declared the dh rules explicitely, as in:

.PHONY: build binary binary-arch binary-indep (...)
build binary binary-arch binary-indep (...):
        dh $@

And this obviously doesn t scale for new rules such as build-arch and build-indep. To be future-proof, I ll use the following instead:

.PHONY: build
build %:
        dh $@

I don t know why I didn t do that the first time