As the local geek I get all sorts of (Linux) questions asked, like "How can you delete the nth line with Sed?" or "Is there a way to search for the following in a file?" (the latter being a request to construct a regular expression for grep). And while I'm pretty sure, you can find answers for such questions quickly with $SEARCH_ENGINE I find myself generally typing the answer into the IM session. This, and just seeing Bernd's post about Vim on Planet Debian, prompted me to start a little, irregular series of posts, to which I can point people, whenever I get asked such questions. I start this off with a tip for Vim, a very powerful text editor. The problem is simple: you get (source code) files with trailing whitespaces (sometimes accumulated in "empty" lines). This makes diffing (and merging) difficult. Thus the question is: how do I prevent that from happening? How do I notice, that I have whitespaces at the end of a line? The solution consists of two lines in your .vimrc:

:highlight TrailWhitespace ctermbg=red guibg=red
:match TrailWhitespace /\s\+$\  \+\ze\t/

If you just want this functionality if syntax highlighting is also active, then you should use

:autocmd Syntax * syn match TrailWhitespace /\s\+$\  \+\ze\t/

instead of the :match line. The regular expression used in both cases matches trailing whitespaces and whitespaces in front of tabs. Of course there are several other options on how to do this or what you might want to highlight, but that would be beyond the scope of this little post.

picture source

Somehow, even though I'd know about it for the longest time, I had never get around to reading George R.R. Martins A Song of Ice and Fire series until I heard about the Game of Thrones HBO series. Then I thought I had better hurry up and read the books as TV adaptations tend to be inferior. (I must say HBO did a pretty good job though.) I was instantly hooked and finished all four books in a week. Today the long-awaited fifth installment called A Dance with Dragons and I immediately got myself a copy. (Nowadays I mostly do my recreational reading with the Kindle app on my Android smartphone.) As before, I'm spellbound. I'm already about 25% through it and loving it. What I love about Martin is that he really gets how traditional, "pagan", "feudal" societies work. Take religion for instance. A lot of Sci-Fi/Fantasy authors if they deal with the subject at all usually give a cartoon version of polytheism that owes more to Christian canards and Dungeons & Dragons than any existing human religion. But in Westeros, one can be simultaneously devout, amoral, superstitious, and cynical in a way that makes a lot of sense to me as a Hindu. Or class. Being a peasant in Martins' world is horrible. Your life is completely at the mercy of Lords and Ladies and can end in an instant. But the upper class despite its wealth and power is trapped in its own way too. They must constantly protect their status from jealous competitors and a reversal of political or military fortune can destroy an ancient noble family just as suddenly as a bad harvest can destroy a family of farmers. Like the other books in the series, this one has a huge cast of characters whose stories weave in and out with each chapter told mainly from one characters viewpoint. This is a tactic which I for one found helpful to keep my attention from flagging but it means you can't really enjoy it unless you've read the previous volumes in order first. I definitely think it's worth the effort though.

Here in Australia we re building out a giant, nationwide fiber network (with degraded service to the few parts of the country that aren t heavily populated like, nearly all of it), known as the National Broadband Network . Many critics of the planned network are saying that it s technology is outdated, and that the future of last-mile Internet access is wireless; that by the time the network is completed, we ll have no need for fibre optic cable to the home, and we ll all just use some magical wireless network for all our Internetting needs. Well, right at this moment, I m sitting in the middle of Australia s largest city, with full bars of coverage being reported by my phone, and getting ping times of over 3 minutes (you heard that right; my record so far is ping reporting time=194001 ms for a reply) and no ability to usefully access the Internet. If wireless is the future, I hope it s a long way away. To misquote a great man, I WANT MY ADSL BACK YOU SON OF A BITCH!

Software in the Public Interest (SPI) will hold its Annual General Meeting today: Wednesday, 13th July 2011 at 20:30 UTC (21:30 UK, 22:30 CET). SPI is the developer association that supports debian, OpenWrt and many other projects. SPI meetings are held on irc.spi-inc.org (the OFTC network). The agenda for the meeting is available at http://www.spi-inc.org/meetings/agendas/2011/2011-07-13/ There are currently no resolutions on the agenda, but there should be some annual reports.

Let's make it clear: Your data is yours and in Google+ official announcement there's the following "You and over a billion others trust Google, and we don t take this lightly. In fact we ve focused on the user for over a decade: liberating data, ...". John Goerzen is wrong.

I can understand people having problems to use a product during its field trial and demanding features. I won't sit and watch people spreading FUD in bold before asking though.

Last, but not least, the following link is easily visible in the Settings and is also listed in the Help pages:
https://plus.google.com/settings/exportdata

Seems like everybody s writing Google+ reviews these days, but most of the ones I ve found seem to be fluff pieces. I haven t used it long, but have some initial impressions to share. First, an analogy. Facebook reminds me of the sleazy guy selling stuff from his car down the street. They do things like change privacy defaults when they think it s good for Facebook, rather than good for you. Google+ reminds me of an Apple product. It s beautiful, easy to learn, but locks everything down and is lacking some critical features. So here goes with the details. The good I think that this can be best summed up by: it s not Facebook. Facebook has, perhaps, set an incredibly low bar but still, this holds. Facebook is the only website I can ever remember using that changes things so much, so often, and so completely that I keep having this feeling of not knowing how to do things. Try maintaining a Facebook page or two and you ll especially feel my pain then. But even the basics: how many times have I accidentally posted a partial comment because I pressed Enter to start a new paragraph (that has only been the button used for that for, hmm, let s see now, decades), and instead it posted the comment. Principle of least surprise, anyone? Google+ has a simple and, on the surface anyway, intuitive interface. However, it does get muddy; more on that below. I m going to spend a lot more space on the bad below, but don t let that diminish my excitement about having a viable alternative to Facebook. I am keen to get rid of that monster. The Bad I ll start of this section with the fact that Google+ is a tightly-controlled walled garden. There is no way to take a copy of your status updates, comments, etc. and back them up with your own devices. If your Google account goes away, so do all your updates about your kids first words. Facebook does have this feature these days. It has broken half the time, but it exists, works, and I use it. Twitter doesn t have the feature built in, but its API makes it pretty easy; you could easily use my twidge program to do this, for instance. But whatever you put in G+ stays in G+. There is no autoposting it to twitter or Facebook, no backups, nothing. I m disappointed in that, given Google s prior attitude about openness to individual data ownership. (Update 7/12/2011: There is a way to get a backup, which I hadn t noticed; see comments below.) Almost as bad, there s also no way to get data in. So I now have identi.ca, twitter, Facebook, and now also G+ accounts. When I post an item in identi.ca, it autoposts to twitter, and then it autoposts from twitter to Facebook. Handy one place to notify people of my public activities. My uploads to Flickr and blog posts also auto-post to Facebook, so people I m friends with there get a picture of what I m doing outside of Facebook without me manually having to link it in. Not so with G+. There is no way to even add an RSS feed for my blog to auto-post to G+ as there is with Facebook. If you use G+, the only way to get stuff into it is with a keyboard. Poor integration with other Google apps is also an issue. G+ is nowhere near Google s first social app. They also have Blogger, Google Reader, Buzz, Gmail, etc. So here s the rub. These aren t integrated well, and when they have tried to integrate them, they ve done an exceedingly poor job of it. As an example: Buzz is a twitter-like service for posting updates. Very similar to what G+ does, right? Well, the best you can do is link your Buzz account to a separate tab on your profile. You can t even have your Buzz updates flow straight into G+, from what I can see. You have a separate list of followers in Buzz from G+. Reader is even worse; it has a sharing feature, but it s not G+ aware, so it goes to a reader inbox. But what takes the cake is the integration with Gmail Contacts. Sounds easy? Not entirely. When you add someone to G+, apparently it sometimes links the record with their entry in Contacts. And the help gives you the handy warning that when you remove them from G+, you have the option of removing them from Contacts, which could impact what you see on a mobile device. It is unclear what happens when it doesn t link the record, or how it decides which record to link (some people have more than one person in a family sharing phone numbers and email addresses, for instance.) One very nice feature of G+ is you can add email addresses, even if they aren t G+ members. Then when you post updates to the circle you ve added them to, G+ offers to send them an email with an update. Very handy. Except the undocumented part is that if you select Your circles (meaning all your circles), rather than individually ticking the box by each circle, they don t get the email. And they also don t get it if you set it Public. You have to select their specific circle, which is a significant difference from how people with G+ accounts are treated. And that s just an example. There are a ton of things that work one way 95% of the time, but have non-obvious exceptions. Some of these exceptions are documented in the help, and some aren t. I m still confused about the integration with Picasa. G+ help says that you can upload unlimited numbers of photos for free (though they will be downscaled at a certain point). Picasa has definite storage limits. But G+ uploads are showing up in Picasa. Do I really get free storage by uploading to the same place via a different tool? Very odd. And finally, a gripe about web standards. I ve been using Firefox/Iceweasel 3.5, which came out in Debian squeeze and is still supported there. It is also pretty darn new by corporate IT standards. And Google Plus refuses to let me log in with it, saying it s incompatible. Perhaps it can t do some fancy animation, but then again I don t really care. Seems Google has forgotten the old RFC adage: be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you generate. If you can detect that my browser won t animate something right, then you could give me a stripped-down version of the page rather than an error message.

Sometimes projects with a long history of committers tend to collect various styles of indentation. Unfortunately not for all programming languages exist specialized tools like indent for C/C++, so we need to find a different way to mass-indent files properly. Using vim is one of them. First you need to create a file (let's call it /tmp/indent.vim) including all the vim commands you want to run on your code. The following piece is a good start:

gg=G
:x!

Now run vim on your source code files, using the created vim script file. The following example reindents all .php files in the current folder and subfolders

find . -name '*.php' -exec vim -s /tmp/indent.vim   \;

If you don't like the result it might be that the indentation settings in you .vimrc don't suit your needs. Of course you are able to add other fancy vim commands to modify your files - like adding or modifying copyright headers.

Transitioning Python modules to dh_python2 is straightforward. I removed LOADS of magic from python-radix. I especially like the complexity reduction in debian/rules, but debian/control also got some fields removed.

Cineast and Free Culture activist Nina Paley wrote some days ago a rantifesto on why the FSF has a double standard: Why are the Freedoms guaranteed for Free Software not guaranteed for Free Culture?, by not following its own very strict rules on software when it comes to culture as a whole. Her post was widely circulated, and got (at least) one reply by fellow Debian Developer Wouter Verhelst, largely agreeing with her, and an anti-rantifesto by Joe Brockmeier Which was promptly answered again by Wouter with a very fun and inspired post, written from the right angle: From the viewpoint of a person who is both a programmer and a musician, and understands the concepts at hand. I'd love to write a longer, better thought post But I'm tired and frankly stressed by many things, so I am just echoing their very interesting discussion to other people who might want to read it. I have been thinking and writing bits on that subject over the last couple of months. An example of that was the talk I gave at the Senate ~6 weeks ago. Following that talk, I wrote a short article for Revista Z calo (a widely circulated magazine mainly dealing with Mexican politics and social issues) called simply Software libre, cultura libre (full text available, but in Spanish only You can try reading an automated translation if it suits you). I wrote the article, mind you, with very limited time, and I'll be the first to recognize the prose was quite poor this time :( Anyway My point is that our nature is to share culture, to build it in a collaborative fashion, and having the Internet as a practically zero-cost, zero loss medium with which we can interchange our creativity with other like-minded people will naturally boost creativity. Free Software emerged before other Free Culture groups just because programmers had privileged access to Internet in the 80s and early 90s; as network access and digital creation tools have got to more people, it's just natural for all kinds of free culture to grow. Software is just a form of knowledge. Code is just a notation for a certain kind of ideas, just as the mathematical or musical notations. I believe (and hope) it's just unavoidable for us all to eventually switch to a mainly free cultural creation system.

Barring a miracle, it looks like I won't be going to Debconf 11 this year which is a shame as that is a part of the world I have yet to visit. Anyway it got me thinking, I've neglected a lot of my Open Source activities this past year or so what with struggling to stay in good financial shape. As Chaturmasa started today in which we take up additional religious duties, I thought it might be a good time to recommit to getting all my projects up to speed again. So during the next four months I aim to (in no particular order)

• Get a fully DFSG-complient Adobe Flex SDK package into Debian either by myself or preferebly by helping someone like Joey who owns the ITP. This will have the additional benefit of finally letting me fix the problems with the yui package and let me move on to yui3.
• Fix up all problems in my CPAN modules and bring them up to the latest standards. Open Source any other bits of perl code I've written where possible.
• Finally getting around to adding the RSS/Atom support to debbugs that I promised to do after Debconf 10. (Yes I've been sitting on this for almost a year. Sorry Don.)
• The book Debian: TFM. Write it.
• Get Debian GNU/Minix into enough shape that other people can hack on it because if it is left to my tender mercies it will never get done. Recent good news is that Minix upstream finally got around to replacing their anemic libc with NetBSD libc so I am holding out hope that things like dpkg will actually work now.
• Make my roguelike game So You Think You Can Dance...ON MY GRAVE? 1. actually playable. 2. "Interesting" in some yet undefined way.

Hopefully by writing this down here in public, I will be able to shame myself into getting most if not all of this done.

Picked up a Doctor Who comic today and saw a nice hat-tip to (or composite ship design plagiarism of) Aliens. The Colonial Marines ship Sulaco , from Aliens, 1986:
The Scavengers ship, from the Doctor Who Spam Filtered story, 2011:
Such a great ship. Not even remotely made to look aerodynamic. And to make this almost related to Ubuntu and Debian, here was my command line to remove exif data from the image I took with my phone: mogrify -strip spam-filtered.jpg

2011, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

i386 systems are dying off and therefore building 32bit Debian packages in 64bit environments is important if you still need packages for i386. For some recent projects I had to set up 64bit-only environments with the need to provide 32bit packages for i386 as well as according i386 Linux kernel packages. 1) Common Debian packages Just prepend the linux32 command to the build commands and use the -a386 option of dpkg-buildpackage(1). So use linux32 dpkg-buildpackage -ai386 , linux32 git-buildpackage -ai386 , linux32 debuild -ai386 , or whatever build tool you prefer to work with. I personally like using git-buildpackage -S together with cowbuilder. When using cowbuilder it s easy to get i386 Debian packages:

# create initial cow base directory, needs to be executed just once:
cowbuilder --create --basepath /var/cache/pbuilder/wheezy32.cow \
   --architecture i386 --distribution wheezy --mirror http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian
# the "debbuildopts -b" says I want a binary-only build, see dpkg-buildpackage(1):
linux32 cowbuilder --build --basepath /var/cache/pbuilder/wheezy32.cow \
   ~/foobar_0.42.dsc --debbuildopts "-b"

2) Debian Kernel packages If you re building your own kernel images you might be aware of setting ARCH for the common make targets, like:

ARCH=i386 make oldconfig

To build a linux-image Debian package you can use upstream s deb-pkg target, like:

ARCH=i386 make deb-pkg

This should provide you according linux-headers, linux-firmware-image, linux-libc-dev and linux-image i386 Debian packages. But if you need the according source and doc packages as well you might prefer make-kpkg of kernel-package instead, using options like:

DEB_HOST_ARCH=i386 setarch i386 make-kpkg --revision "$KERNELVERSION" \
  --cross-compile - --arch=i386 --us --uc --initrd \
  --rootcmd fakeroot kernel-image kernel-headers kernel-doc kernel-source

3) Debian linux-2.6 kernel packages If you re interested in building Debian kernel images the same way as the Debian kernel team does (AKA linux-2.6) make sure to check out the kernel-handbook. After installing essential software packages I had to set up some symlinks for building:

apt-get install build-essential fakeroot devscripts fakeroot
apt-get build-dep linux-2.6
ln -s /usr/bin/gcc-4.4 /usr/bin/i486-linux-gnu-gcc-4.4
ln -s /usr/bin/ld /usr/bin/i486-linux-gnu-ld
ln -s /usr/bin/ar /usr/bin/i486-linux-gnu-ar
ln -s /usr/bin/objcopy /usr/bin/i486-linux-gnu-objcopy
ln -s /usr/bin/nm /usr/bin/i486-linux-gnu-nm
ln -s /usr/bin/objdump /usr/bin/i486-linux-gnu-objdump
ln -s /usr/bin/strip /usr/bin/i486-linux-gnu-strip

Then executing:

apt-get source linux-2.6
cd linux-2.6*
debuild -ai386 -us -uc

provided the according Debian packages (linux-doc, linux-headers, linux-image, linux-libc-dev, linux-manual, linux-patch-debian, linux-source, linux-support and linux-tools). 4) Out-of-tree kernel module packages If you want to build external modules which are available as $MODULENAME-source in Debian (e.g. tp-smapi-source) using module-assistant then use the DEB_HOST_ARCH environment variable, like:

DEB_HOST_ARCH=i386 m-a -v --text-mode -k /home/mika/linux-$KERNELVERSION -l $KERNELVERSION build tp-smapi

If the external module is not available for use with module-assistant then compile the module running:

make -C /lib/modules/$KERNELVERSION/build M=$(pwd)

whereas /lib/modules/$KERNELVERSION/build is pointing to the build directory of your 32bit kernel.

Deutsche Version dieses Postings read the English Version instead Der Leiter der Abteilung Systemadministration einer Firma, welche in diesem Artikel ungenannt bleiben soll, wo der Zufall es will, da ich f r sie arbeite, m chte uns Mitarbeiter dazu zwingen, das Feature der persistenten Historie (also einen niedergeschriebenen Verlauf der abgesetzten Befehle) der Shell (Kommandozeile) auf allen Systemen zu benutzen. Nun hat die mksh dies vern nftigerweise, w hrend immer noch verf gbar, standardm ig aus Gr nden der Privatsph re deaktiviert, und ich finde, dies sollte sich nicht ndern. Es kann ja nicht sein, da man mir beim Arbeiten ber die Schulter guckt; was kommt als n chstes, Video berwachung der B ros? (Seine Argumentation l uft darauf hinaus, da er nachvollziehen/verstehen kann, wie ich (ha! ich! nicht die anderen, nein, ich!) ein Problem das letzte Mal gel st habe; es ist aber nichts anderes als rekonstru eren zu k nnen, wer wann was eingetippt/gemacht hat. Naja, Argumentationen sind eh relativ, andere jagen Flugzeuge in ihre eigenen Verteidigungsministerien, welche gerade zuf llig umgebaut werden ) Ich habe dies nat rlich in die F hrungsetage eskaliert, und unser Gesch ftsf hrer versteht meine Bedenken und m chte nun ein Gespr ch anraunen, um eine L sung zu finden. Die meisten meiner Kollegen im Bereich Systemadministration denken leider nichtmals dr ber nach, obschon ich in anderen Bereichen Gleichgesinnte gefunden habe. Einen Betriebsrat haben wir auch gro er Fehler, ich wei nicht (aber ich s e eh nicht drin, ich hasse Politik jeder Art). Dies l t mich in dringender Not, Argumente wider diese Total berwachung aller (insbesondere auf der Kommandozeile arbeitenden also besonders mich) Kollegen zu finden, idealerweise solche, die durch deutsches Recht gest tzt sind. Wenn ihr solche habt, bitte mailt die schnell an meine eMail-Adresse, welche da nicht junk@mirbsd.org lautet, sondern mit einem tg vor dem Klammeraffen (dies dient der Abwehr unerw nschter Werbemails). Vielen Dank bereits im Voraus! Update 12.07.2011: Wir haben geredet, und wie viele kommentierten keine L sung auf rechtlicher Ebene gefunden, sondern stattdessen, nachdem wir festgestellt hatten, da mir dieses Problem sehr am Herzen liegt, nach anderen L sungen f r das eigentliche Ziel des Chefadmins gesucht; dies z hlt als ein Entgegenkommen auf Seiten der Firma. Ich habe zugestimmt, meine L sungen in kleine Skripte zu verpacken und ins VCS zu committen f r das Herausfinden, wann was auf einem Server ge ndert wurde, im Fehlerfall, denken wir uns gerade ohnehin was aus. Danke an alle, die kommentiert haben!

English version of this posting lese stattdessen die deutsche Version The head system administrator of a henceforth unnamed company I happen to be employed at wants to force us to use the shell s persistent history feature disabled by default in mksh as is sensible, for privacy reasons on all systems, so he can retrace what we do (of course, his wording was more like, so he can reconstruct how I fixed a problem the last time it occurred yeah, sure). Now I ve escalated this to the boss, since this just cannot happen, what ll be next, video monitoring our offices or what and the boss said he sees my concerns and would like a meeting to get an agreement between all parties involved. Most sysadmin coworkers actually don t even think about this, they are sheeple, really; but my project manager (for when I m not a sysadmin but a programmer) and the leaderess of our QA department agree with me, luckily. Now I m in dire need of arguments, especially German-Legalese, to fight this total surveillance of employees, mostly targetted at these who use the command line almost exclusively, which I m a prime example of. Please mail me at my address, which is not junk@mirbsd.org but with tg instead of the waste part here to catch address grabbers (sending mail to that address yields a 24-hour total blacklist of your IPv4 address I ve yet to get enough spam via IPv6 to say filtering it is worth the cost). Thanks in advance!

---

Update 2011-07-12: We talked, and it was agreed to not force a shell history; instead I will now put problem solutions into smallish scripts and commit them into the sysadmin SCM. It was not solved using legal arguments, as many people commented would have been difficult; instead, they acknowledged that I was concerned with this, and we searched for a different solution to the head sysadmin s original concerns (apparently, to figure out how to fix things without reinventing the fix every time, and to find out what was changed on a server in case it breaks).

You might have noticed the release of mksh R40 recently, after more than a year of development. Well, stay tuned for both R40b (with accumulated fixes) and R41 (intent to speed up array handling a lot and prepare for what we postponed to mksh R42 now associative, multi-dimensional arrays). You should also upgrade, if you have not yet done so, to kwalletcli 2.11. Finally, jupp 3.1.15 was left out to the world, including Minix 3 users this time, by special request of one of these on our mailing list. In addition to the MidnightBSD mport which has been there in like forever and the MirPort and the FreeWRT package, in December 2011 a user submitted it to FreeBSD ports, and Benny is going to add it to NetBSD pkgsrc soon, he said. (He also updated their mksh source package. Thanks!) I ve been asked by two people, independent from each other, when I ll upload it to Debian proper, instead of the private-repo packaging. Maybe I should indeed do that, comments?

• Agreement to pay from company
• Going to drive with some apparently speed-loving brits
• Registration accepted
• Dienstreiseantrag prepared
• Sent that beast to the office ticket queue

So yes, this means I m to what used to be Yugoslawia when I was there the last time, although in the Pore region of Istria, Hrvatska. Thanks to my my boss who s sending me there.

The logos of the Debian derivatives registered in the derivatives census are overwhelmingly stored in PNG format, with a handful of JPEG and GIF images. One derivative (LMDE) doesn't have a logo registered in the census. Half of the logo image files have some embedded indication of which program was used to create them or which program they passed through last. Just over half of these were created with some proprietary Adobe or Macromedia program. The one that surprised me was Emdebian's logo indicating it was created in Adobe Photoshop 3.0, but to be fair it looks like several of the Debian logo files were also created in Adobe Photoshop 3.0 so that might just be copied from the Debian logos. Two of the logos have an easter-egg reminding everyone who looks about the obsession some part of Adobe has with rubber ducks. Just under half of them were created using Free Software, with most of those being produced in the GIMP and a few in Inkscape. One of them looks like a derivative work of the KDE logo. Two of them incorporate the Debian swirl indicating their Debian heritage. Two of them in some way incorporate the Tux Linux mascot indicating that they use Linux. One of the logos contains the word Debian and one contains "sid". Three of the logos mention both GNU and Linux and another mentions only GNU. One of them mentions the government organisation sponsoring the distro (LinEx). A few logos consist solely of text and a few have no text, but most combine both elements. Three have some indication of a URL in them. Several of them have some sort of indication of what the distribution's focus is. One has Adobe's XMP XML cruft embedded in it indicating document identifiers and two logos have an embedded ICC profile. One logo has the author's name in it.

During my stay in India, I sent weekly post cards to my girlfriend. Not all of them arrived, but even now, seven weeks after my return, occasionally a card arrives. Yesterday, a card arrived that I have sent on April 30th from Leh, by giving it to the hotel reception. According to the stamp, it has reached the post office in Leh already by June 17th! But even that does not explain the delay completely but another stamp on the card does: Missent to MPC Jakarta 10900 . I have no idea why anyone would think this card was destined for Indonesia, but it s nice to be able to send cards from places where I haven t even been close to.
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Filing bug reports is the most common way for users to contribute. Even if it s not too difficult, I ll give you some advice to improve the quality of your reports. After all, when you go out of your way to report a bug, it is in the hope to see it fixed so let s see how we can make this more likely. 1. Try to reproduce the bug If you can t reproduce the bug, it s next to impossible to find the root cause and thus to fix it. In that case, I would suggest you to wait until you experienced the bug multiple times. Maybe you ll be able to find something that triggers it (or that makes it more likely to encounter it). If the application has a debug/verbose mode, it might be a good idea to enable it until you experience the bug a second time. The generated log might be helpful for the developer to understand what happens exactly. So don t file bug reports straight away unless you can reproduce it. The exception to the rule is when the application gives some useful information like a core-dump, a back-trace or an error message. Obviously if the bug happens during an upgrade, it s difficult to reproduce it (unless you have multiple computers) but you should still report it. Be sure to include all the relevant information (versions of packages before and after the upgrade, logs of the upgrade, etc.). 2. Do your best to identify the faulty package When you report a bug to Debian, you must assign it to a package. While there are pseudo-packages useful for problems which are not directly attributable to a real package, in most of the cases you should report a bug against the specific package that seems to be the cause of the problem you encountered. In turn this often requires you to attribute the problem to a file (for example the executable of the application that triggers the bug). Once you have a filename you can use dpkg -S to identify the corresponding package.

$ dpkg -S /usr/bin/hamster-time-tracker
hamster-applet: /usr/bin/hamster-time-tracker

Note that reportbug accepts a filename as parameter and will do the above conversion for you. If you only know the name of the application (but not the filename of the associated executable), you can use dpkg -S with a pattern to let it return all possible matches:

$ dpkg -S hamster
hamster-applet: /usr/share/applications/hamster-applet.desktop
hamster-applet: /usr/share/gnome/help/hamster-applet/es/statistics.page
[ ]
hamster-applet: /usr/bin/hamster-time-tracker
[ ]

Or you can also verify in the list of installed packages:

$ dpkg -l "*hamster*"
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
  Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
 / Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
 / Name            Version         Description
+++-===============-===============-==============================================
ii  hamster-applet  2.32.1-1        time tracking applet for GNOME

3. Verify that the bug is not already reported and/or fixed If there s a newer version of the software available, it s a good idea to try to reproduce the problem with this version too. Because the developers tend to care only about the latest version, they will want to reproduce it with this version, and they will be annoyed if the problem that you reported is already fixed. That s why bug reports of users of testing/unstable tend to be more useful than bug reports of stable users. In any case, you want to verify that the bug has not yet been reported: filing a duplicate bug is useless and only generates more work for the developers to merge both bugs together. On the opposite, it s highly appreciated to add supplementary information to an existing bug report, even a simple confirmation that the bug still exists on a newer version is useful. Note that reportbug will automatically show you the list of open bugs before allowing you to submit a new one. 4. Use reportbug While the Debian bug tracking system allows anyone to submit a new bug with a simple mail, you should really use a dedicated program like reportbug (or reportbug-ng) because it will automatically include lots of useful information in the generated report (version of dependencies, current architecture, etc.) and will assist you in all the steps. 5. Describe the problem so that the developer can reproduce it Ideally your report should include everything required so that the developer can reproduce the problem on his system. If a given document triggers the bug, attach it. Describe the steps required to reproduce the bug in great details just like you would explain it to your grand-ma. Explain how you expected the program to react and what happened instead. You can learn much more on how to draft a good bug report in this article: How to report bugs effectively. It s a bit long but well worth it if you intend to report bugs and thus interact with developers. 6. Be kind and willing to help When you draft a bug report, keep in mind that you re writing to a volunteer free software developer and not to a customer service. You should be respectful and follow the usual rules of courtesy. Developers attention is scarce and should not be wasted. Be willing to help, if the developer starts investigating your problem, he might need your help to get supplementary information (in particular if he can t reproduce it) and you should be ready to provide it. Thus it s important to keep whatever you need to reproduce the problem. In some cases, the Debian maintainer might be overworked and you can offer your help to forward the bug to the upstream bug tracker, it s always appreciated. If you re reasonably confident that the problem is not Debian-specific, you can do it straight away and set the forwarded field to the URL of the upstream bug report (for example with bts forwarded <bug> <url>). 7. Use the correct severity The Debian bug tracking system lets you set the initial severity of the bug report (in decreasing severity: critical, grave, serious, important, normal, minor, wishlist). Pick the correct severity according to the official definitions but don t misread them. In particular, don t over-inflate the severity: for instance if you lost some data due to a misuse of the software, it s not critical (i.e. rm -rf * doesn t warrant a critical bug against rm). If you use only a tiny part of a software, and that part doesn t work, the package might be unusable for you but it s not unusable for everybody, so it doesn t warrant the grave severity. The important severity is often a good choice in those cases. Do not under-estimate the severity either, if a problem is important enough that it must be fixed before the next stable release (for example a regression compared to the previous release), pick a release-critical severity (i.e. at least serious ). The maintainer and the release manager can always lower the severity if they do not agree with your initial judgment. And now, happy bug-reporting!

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