Last year I was the organizer of the Debian booth at the FrOSCon in St.Augustin, Germany and I was so happy with the conference that I decided to take part in the second invocation of the conference. So I took over some tasks and here I am. The next FrOSCon takes place on August, 25th and 26th 2007 in St. Augustin, near Bonn, Germany. And will again be hosted by the faculty of computer science of the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in collaboration with the student body and the Linux/Unix User Group St. Augustin. Yesterday the Call for Papers started that will end on June 4th. Everybody is invited to take part and we are happy if we would get flooded by as many Papers as possible to make an even better FrOSCon as last year :).

Based on Bart Trojanowski’s blog article “etc snapshots with git” I removed one further item from my todo list: maintain /etc with mercurial on my Debian systems. First step is creating the repository and securing access to the repository. As mercurial stores all its files within one single directory named .hg you won’t have any further directories within /etc besides /etc/.hg, rocking - right?

cd /etc
hg init
chmod og-rwx .hg

Ignore a few files:

cat > .hgignore << EOF
syntax: regexp
(^)*.dpkg-new
(^)*.dpkg-old
(^)blkid.tab( .old)
(^)mtab
# add other files if necessary, depends on your setup...
EOF

Now commit the current state:

hg add
hg ci -m "initial checkin"

We want to commit the changes automatically when using apt-get/aptitude so let’s write and include a wrapper for it:

cat > /etc/apt/hg-snapshot-script << EOF
#!/bin/sh
set -e
caller=$(ps axww   mawk '/aptitude apt-get/  for (i=5; i<=NF ; i++) printf ("%s ",$i); printf ("n")  '   head -1)
hg add 1>/dev/null
STATUS="$(hg st)"
if [ -n "$STATUS" ] ; then
   echo "hg-snapshot-script: found changed files:"
   hg st
   hg ci -m "snapshot from $LOGNAME after: $caller"
else
   echo "hg-snapshot-script: nothing to be done"
fi
EOF
chmod +x /etc/apt/hg-snapshot-script
cat >> /etc/apt/apt.conf << EOF
DPkg  
  Post-Invoke  "cd /etc ; ./apt/hg-snapshot-script"; ;
 
EOF

Finally track the two files too:

hg add
hg commit -m "apt will track /etc automagically using hg"

That’s it. Oh BTW: users of subversion might want to point their browser to /etc under svk (by Enrico Zini).

In a previous entry, I explained how you can be assimilated to an Ubuntu developer without even being an official Debian developer, and of course without prior notice. I am now quite ashamed: I have just discovered that this was already discussed some time ago (read: months before my post), and led to the following results:

• If the package is in universe or multiverse, the Maintainer field will be set to Ubuntu MOTU Developers

• If the Maintainer field is modified, the old value will be saved in a field named XSBC-Original-Maintainer

However, packages where my name appears either in the Maintainer or in the XSBC-Original-Maintainer field still “belong” to me in Launchpad (see https://launchpad.net/~julienv/+packages for example).
However, I am not responsible for the bugs of these packages (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/~julienv/+assignedbugs) Now that my blog is syndicated on Planet Debian, I ask it again:

Am I supposed to look on Launchpad for bugs reported against the packages I maintain in Debian?

Obviously, if a bug wasn’t reported by a Debian user, it might mean nobody suffers from it, but fixing it could avoid future bug report anyway (except if this particular bug is very specific to Ubuntu). In order to improve the Debian maintainers’ work, I think it would be great that the PTS integrates the bugs in Launchpad in a simple way. This would allow us to easily subscribe to the bugs, and eventually get a notice if the bug is fixed, or at least allow us to be aware of the issue.

With the Etch release pending for 2/4/7 [0], dpkg-cross 1.36 has gone into experimental, at least until the preliminary armel support has been tested more widely. See #414085. I'm going to have a go at an armel toolchain using the updated emdebian-tools too.

[0] That's UK format, Day/Month/Year.

The design is now agreed with the weavers, but unfortunately I misunderstood the price-list, so the prices I've been quoting for hand-sewn 8-yard kilts, and machined lady's 4-yard kilt-skirts were too low -- the correct prices for those and a couple of other things being:

Hand-sewn, 8 yard kilt:	£420.00
Machined, 4-yard, skirt-kilt (lady's):	£237.50
Machined, 6-yard kilt:	£270.00
Waistcoat:	£113.00

I'm sorry about quoting prices without making absolutely sure they were correct, the reason was that I was quoting the prices for standard weaves from stock, and it turns out that the custom weaves are more expensive. That said, note that the machined kilts are £80.00 cheaper than the previously quoted price (for hand-sewn), and that these are perhaps more appropriate to the use to which many of us will be putting the kilts anyway (hand-sewn are really an evening dress item, after all) Even so, I'll probably still fork out for the full 8-yards, on the basis that my dinner jacket is falling to bits after 20 years wear, so I need something new anyway. In case you're wondering what on earth I'm talking about, this has been discussed elsewhere. Just to make sure there are no other nasty surprises, if you are of a more rotund nature, you may find that it will take some extra material to encompass your circumference -- as an example, a 7 yard machined gents kilt will cost an extra fiver to stitch, and an extra £25.00 for the yard of cloth, so will come in at £300.00 rather than the usual £270.00 Confused? Well, so was I --- The designer's sending me a fuller price list, which I will ensure than anyone on the list of currently interested people is fully conversant with before we put the order in, so don't panic that I'll spend your money without giving you a final chance to come to your senses ;-) I hope that doesn't result in everyone changing their minds, but I'll understand completely if it does. Alternatively, you could decide that this is an opportunity to save yourself £80.00 by opting for a machined kilt (which AIUI are still made to measure, but just have proportionately less work and material in them) Anyway I'll post any further developments here so as not to continue spamming the lists. So, if you're interested in getting hold of any of the above despite the new prices, and have not yet told me you need to mail me now! -- the order will probably go in at the end of the week.

... this is the problem

I just casually saw Norbert post about the ion3 querelle. This a very unfortunate example of collapsing interactions among upstreams and maintainers. My general advice (but for suggesting to use wmii or dwm instead of ion3 :-)) is avoiding packaging of development branches, but this is a decision which sometimes is difficult to take: some programs seems in development for years and stable releases could result largerly unusable or limited. Surely our - and generally speaking any distribution - release cycle and maintainance are not adequate for many on-the-edge software out there.

When upstreams releases [a]periodical milestones, those could be packaged, but upstream will not support them: we have already our problems in supporting regular releases for security independently by upstream for mainstream programs, without adding pieces of casual crap around.

Packaging a casual snapshots is out of question IMHO, but for using it in sid/experimental, so I can understand the upstream opinion, because many users report problem to upstream instead of maintainers. I see definitively no silver bullet anyway, but for maintainers' capability of understanding what should be packaged or not and opening an unbreakable communication channel with upstreams to be up-to-date in respect with upstream roadmap.

... or why PHP sucks so much?

It is quite common (at least for me) finding abused web applications on shared hosts around. The most typical case is finding some kind of IRC bot running as www-data and a few unauthorized files around used for phishing, cross-site scripting or what else. That motivated me to try playing with mod_chroot in order to minimize the possibility of webapps abuse from our friendly kiddies^Wcrackers. Mod_chroot is a nice tiny Apache module whose purpose is the confinment of webapps within a limited tree, where nothing but a few files and dirs are available to try exploits and abuse badly written code.

Unfortunately, I found that mod_chroot poses one major problem (among others, see its CAVEATS doc): the sucking mail() function is not working out of the box, because PHP folks - God knows why - decided to implement that stuff by calling a local /usr/sbin/sendmail program within a shell call. The most sane option is simply ignoring the issue and living happy with a disabled local mail() function. A nice solution in that case is using a PEAR Mail module, which is able to send mails via SMTP in much more elegant way. Unfortunately, there are quite a good number of morons out there, and that could be not a viable option if you are the system administrator of a bounce of shared hosts which are exposed to those morons, who absolutely need a working mail() function.

After a few googling around, I did find that many people had the same problem, but none found (or explained) a working and neat solution for a working mail() implementation, so I'm writing some notes about that. My implementation is based on a nice tiny program (mini_sendmail) which has the great advantage of not requiring a configuration file or a spool directory to work. It also works without suid bit on, which is a good thing as well. It is statically compiled by default, so it simplifies things a lot. In order to have mail() working you need also to install a (statically compiled) shell, e.g. bash-static as sh under the /bin directory of your chroot tree (a more tiny shell would be appropriate). I commented out the silly username autodetection code in the mini_sendmail.c source, because it creates some problem within an empty chroot tree (it failed with a "can't determine username" message with or without the /etc/passwd file available).

Now, the next step is using an entry like

sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -fwww-data@your.domain -s127.0.0.1

in your php.ini file. You can also use another IP address if your SMTP server is not your localhost or you used some more exotic routing setup. Having a suitable /etc/hosts is also useful. A final trick is adding a var/lib/php4 or what ever directory is required to store PHP session files. No other files should be required in order to have all working. Of course, you have also to use inet sockets for any required connection (e.g. mysql) but this is typically the default in etch. I would also suggest to add only ad hoc statically-compiled binaries within the chroot tree when required, else you will need to store all required shared libs: in that case you will need to find binaries requirement by using ldd and chroot to find loading/running errors by means of an usual trial-and-error cycle.

I need a wireless keyboard for the media box, suitable for use while sitting on the sofa. I currently have an RF Logitech device which I picked up for free at an ALUG meet. It lacks a mouse (it supports one, but as a separate device that I don't have) and the range is such that it's a bit flaky when I sit on the sofa. I'd like something that has a range of at least 4m and has a built in trackball (or I'm sure I'd cope with a trackpad). This seems easy enough to find, but everything seems to be RF and I'm a bit wary. How good is the security on these? Does it even exist? Or will my neighbours be able to sniff my every keystroke? I'd much prefer an IR keyboard, but finding one that's available in the UK for a reasonable price (I found one for £69.99 plus VAT + P&P) seems tricky. LinITX sell an MCE Wireless Keyboard that apparently I might be able to get working with lirc and my existing receiver, but something that just plugs into USB or PS/2 ports and means I can access the BIOS etc would be preferable. Anyone got any pointers?

I added the edit comments plugin to this blog. After you leave a comment, you’ll have about 12 hours to come back and make changes. Authentication is based on IP address. It’s surprising that so few blogs implement such functionality, given how common it is to leave embarrassing typos or misspelled URLs in comments. One patch is needed for the plugin to work with the latest Wordpress release. Specifically: $location = add_query_arg('jal_edit_comments', '', $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']); needs to be changed to: $location = add_query_arg('jal_edit_comments', FALSE, $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']); I’m sure this will be added to the mainline source soon. I had to fish the fix out of the 300+ comments on the page for the plugin. In other “this blog” news, I simplified the sidebar appearance and made all the long lists collapsed by default with CSS. Hopefully it renders well on all browsers. Lately, I’ve come to doubt the utility of “lists in sidebars” at all. Perhaps a person’s latest content preferences (books, film, music) aren’t that interesting after all. Incidentally, since I made the transition to Wordpress, I’ve found it much easier to keep this blog active. Less time spent on administrative issues, and the web-based (rather than ssh–>vim) posting just makes a lot more sense these days. Comment spam is virtually nonexistent. I can get an entry up in five minutes on the train in to work without hassle. Wordpress has also greatly reduced server load (perhaps because I had an inefficient blosxom setup). I recommend it. If you are already a Wordpress user, as a public service announcement I’ll repeat the announcement from about two weeks ago: Wordpress 2.1.1 may be dangerous:

Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.

Erich Schubert comments on the issues relating to getting big changes into Debian. This is something that I had also noticed. I started work on SE Linux in Debian in 2001 and continued it actively until 2003 when I joined Red Hat. Less than a year after I joined Red Hat there was a Fedora release with SE Linux fully integrated and shortly after that there was a release with SE Linux on by default. The reason for this was that Red Hat management supported the idea of SE Linux and everyone had to accept it. There was no option for a package maintainer to refuse to support SE Linux.

Recently in a discussion on debian-devel one DD (who I won't name in this blog post) advocated removing SE Linux support from dpkg. I then asked him whether he had the same attitude towards non-executable stack
(Exec-Shield/PaX/OpenWall), Poly-Instantiated directories, and PIE executables. When he expressed interest in having those features I pointed out that one of the enemies of security in Debian is the fact that every person controls their little area and has no requirement to work towards common goals (apart from the most obvious ones of making the system work).

This means that instead of having a little cooperation from other developers anyone who wants to get a significant change included will have to fight hundreds of battles.

SE Linux is a classic example of this. Debian could have had SE Linux support long before Fedora, but instead it gets it long afterwards.

The same battles occur with regard to all the other security measures I mentioned (and some others I didn't). We could made Debian the most secure Linux distribution, there are many people who have the skills and the interest in doing so.

If you want features such as exec-shield, then you are missing out - largely because the people with the skill and time to work on them are too busy fighting trench-warfare rather than actively coding.

Now while I strongly object to most incarnations of the "you can't force a volunteer to do anything" meme that infects Debian I do agree that we can't force developers to write new code. We can however strongly discourate an antagonistic attitude towards new features. If someone proposes a feature
that you don't plan to use but which doesn't hurt you then there's no reason to attack - you can just ignore it. If someone sends in a patch that adds a feature which is requested by many people but you personally don't use, then if it has little or no down-side (linking against a couple of shared objects as is the case for many SE Linux enabled programs provides no measurable overhead) and the code is good it should be merged!

The real problem is that some DDs are more concerned about what is best for them personally (in the most short-term manner) than about what is best for the users.

(yes, I know how to type, but my keyboard is degrading. Apparently, I didn't know how to read yesterday) There were a number of replies to my post about upstart and other init-implementations yesterday. Since it apparently didn't come through properly: yes, I do know about upstart-compat-sysv, and yes, I'm obviously using it. That wasn't the point. The point is that using upstart-compat-sysv is a workaround which allows to migrate to upstart, rather than to support it in parallel. Debian has always been about choice; giving people the choice to use upstart rather than sysvinit and vice versa is something we should do. Ubuntu has chosen to use upstart rather than sysvinit, and that's their prerogative; but Debian as a whole cannot (and will not) make that choice. The point of the exercise was to figure out a way to allow people to say "I want upstart", and bang—everything gets migrated to event.d scripts. But if they then decide that they don't like upstart after all, they should be able to just reinstall sysvinit, and bang—everything gets migrated back to regular SysV initscripts. That currently isn't possible, and upstart-compat-sysv doesn't offer that.

[ Warning: Long post follows ]
Just today, I read that H01ger is happy he can wear just a T-shirt somewhere in Northern Germany. Well, from my point of view, much the opposite has happened. And I'm not just happy - I'm fucking proud!
About four years ago, Nadezhda went almost every weekend to hike to the mountains with the Grupo de los Cien people. I'll sidetrack a bit to speak about them: Grupo de los Cien is a group of mountain lovers (no relation with the enviromentalist group which later took the same name) that, since the 1950s, have built and maintained the high mountain shelters in Central Mexico. It is a group, by the way, with which Nadezhda fell completely in love - and now it's up to me to find out why ;-) But lets go back to the main topic.
Almost every week, she came back delighted and loaded of energy from a mountain hike. Almost every week, I told her I wished to go with her, of course, if they went to a simpler route. Of course, lugging around over 130Kg of humanity is no easy deal. And, after over a year and because of many problems that came together at once, she stopped going to the mountain as well. She always kept an eye on their friends, but so far had not been able to return to the mountain.

Ok, so last week she heard the group was organizing volunteers to go fix the Ayoloco 2 shelter. She signed up, and invited me. I was afraid, but accepted the challenge - Of course, full of fear.
Being this a historical event (at least in my life), I cannot but offer you some of the photos I took. And, yes, I've just started playing with Flickr. Lets see if it works for me ;-)
Saturday, 5 AM, we woke up. 5:50AM, we met part of the group near Daniel's house, in Condesa. 7 AM, we were having a nice breakfast (tamales and coffee, yum!) in Amecameca, still 28km from La Joya. From Amecameca, we went to Paso de Cort s, where we met the rest of the group, and from there we went by a little, bumpy and unpaved road until La Joya. Somewhat around 20 people started the hike at around 9 AM.


According to Google Earth, La Joya (just South of the Iztacc huatl - white woman or sleeping woman in N huatl) is at 3995m - And, of course, to start at that altitude is not easy. The air is very thin, and walking a little bit too fast quickly makes you feel the blood pumping, trying to get some more oxygen. I often remembered how my Bolivian friends behave in Potos , walking slowly even when in a hurry :)

We first went down a little valley, then up. The first portion of the hike was on soft, wet sand, with some grass (what we call zacate - Strong, hard grass, not what you commonly see in a garden). I soon learnt that was a blessing, as it was by far the easiest part. Then we went up a steep and quite rocky area - It started getting tricky for somebody not used to trusting his own feet. And it was steep, yes. This was the first time (of many, of course) I started thinking whether I should head back.

We reached what I foolishly thought was the summit, only to find a steeper, longer way to go. It started getting common to find little deposits of snow/ice (I don't know the exact term in English - it's called aguanieve in Spanish, literally snow-water. [[Update]: Thanks to the now-DD H01ger, I now know that aguanieve in English is called sleet]. I understand it's a bit harder than snow, but still much lighter than hail). We crossed a completely rocky section - No sand to hold the rocks to their place. That meant being extra careful (and thus, extra slow).

But just afterwards, in case it was not enough, Mother Nature answered my pleads for some sand - we crossed a section made exclusively of loose sand. And, please, if you have ever walked upwards on sand, imagine doing so at over 4000 meters. I was taking so much care of how and where I stepped that I strayed not more than 5 meters down of the path the group was following - Being able to climb back to the right path was really not easy. This was the point that not only I was thinking about heading back, but I'm sure Nadezhda thought I would abort the mission. She cheered me up, took some pictures of me as soon as I got out of the sand trap, and we were able to move on.

After the sand, some more rocks, and we started feeling the chilly wind. We entered a cloudy region - Humidity does get the coldness into your bones! We could not really see where was the rest of the group, so we proceeded the best way we could. Fortunately for Nadezhda and me, just behind us came the very experienced Mario Corsalini and led us. And, yes, we finally saw the Ayoloco 2 shelter.

I was by then exhausted, after some four hours of ascent. I ate one of my apples - The sweetest apple I have tasted so far. After resting a bit, and realizing I was almost frozen (we were at 2 Celsius under, with constant chilly, humid wind)... Then I started working with the guys, reinforcing the shelter, while Nadezhda and some other people painted the inside with. People started eating - of course, I joined them. And, after some time up there, we started going back down. Miguel ngel, a volunteer in the Izta-Popo park, walked a good portion of the descent with me, giving me tons of help and tips. Thank you, thank you, really. The descent is, of course, much easier - We were chatting most of the time, and we made only around two hours back. The weather was quite nice on us - We had some aguanieve falling every now and then (yes! Yes! many of you guys have heard/read me bitch on how I had never seen snow falling before - Ok, this is not exactly snow, but I think it qualifies as my first experience ;-) ), but aguanieve does not make you wet, as it bounces off the clothes. When we approached La Joya we started having some light rain. We hopped in the cars, and then the rain really began.
But even if this was not enough: Grupo de los Cien was celebrating the 83th birthday of one of its senior members, Poncho Rico. No, being 83 years old is not an excuse for skipping this memorable hike.

We went to Anatolio's house, very close to Amecameca, and had a delicious dinner, cake and drinks.
Nadezhda: Thank you. So, so, so very much. Thank you for being so patient with me, for dragging me up the Sleeping Woman. Thank you for getting me into this so very important and beautiful experience. I hope this will be the first of many. There is still a very long way for me to go before I'm really up to the challenge, but believe me: This will not be my last time on the mighty mountains.

To whom it may concern... Daniel and Rob are holding a party in June to celebrate their Civil Partnership. Yay! And I'm invited. Double-yay! Unfortunately, it's the same weekend that Debconf 7 finishes. And it's in in deepest, darkest Wales, almost at the opposite end of the UK from Edinburgh. Less yay...! As Daniel is a DD, I'm guessing (and he has confirmed) that quite a few of the party guests will be at Debconf. That means there will be quite a number of people will be needing to get from one end of the country to the other on Saturday 23rd June. As I'm a mug for this kind of thing, I'm looking into organising travel for a group. If you're looking at making this trip, mail me if you're interested in travelling together. Options at the moment include hiring a minibus and driving the whole distance, or maybe flying from Edinburgh to somewhere much closer (Bristol or Cardiff) and sharing a vehicle from there. Let me know...

(Update: Yes, Gunnar, the policy says that the debian/rules file must be a makefile, so if you do something else, you have a serious bug because of a policy break. Of course, probably there is nothing that should stop one from using, let's say bash, or python or perl, from a technical PoV.)

Erich has a wish list for Lenny.

What draw my attention was the very first "define and deploy a standard way of packaging software, that can be used for like 90% of packages", later he mentions rationale "other distributions (e.g. *BSD ports, Gentoo?) are ahead of us in this respect, having a standard way of packaging and building things and keeping track of changes."; these two quotes contain the real essence of Gentoo's success in the area of fast development.

A half a year ago I did an experiment in packaging a rpm, a deb and an ebuild for the same piece of software. What I observed back then made me think a lot about the entry level knowledge needed for a person to create a decent package for those types of package systems.

With the risk of being flamed by many people that will miss my point, I will tell you from the start that the deb would have been the most painful if had to start from scratch. Second would have been the rpm due to lack of good/updated documentation and the clear winner in lack of pain points was the ebuild. In reality places were switched between the deb and the rpm.

And before I start, please understand that what I want to point out is that the building system in debian is showing its age and we should do something about it, and is not about pointing people to documentation; it is about making things behave more sanely by default and not about having to read a whole day to understand why the package fails to install a file you just added then to find that you had to add the destination path to a debian/dirs file etc...


The deb had to be the most difficult. Not because I didn't do it before, or because it was hard, but because there are a lot of things that need to be done because the package management is not smart enough to do it by default (i.e. class inheritance does not exist, like is the case for the ebuilds or the macros for rpms).

The Debian approach is backwards, is reversed with regard to the others and the way it should be by default, to allow easier understanding of the packaging. You can, by default, make a package that is tweaked a lot. There is no concept (if you don't count cdbs which is boo-ed a lot by some people) or possibility to just say "make this package a package that is a standard linux app with the regular ./configure && make && make install recipe". And I don't count such a recipe the templates based on dh_make, that is way too verbose. A new maintainer wannabe has difficulties understanding why are those lines in there, and what they do, and most importantly, why is that order correct and no other. Another question which is legitimate is "is that the minimum or can that be trimmed"? (Follow debian-mentors and see how many people leave the .ex files just because they are afraid they will not know how to generate them again.)

Even the rpm has a concept of standard stuff to do for a package, there are some macros that implement that. And that is more logical for an untainted mind (as in not yet debianized) than what we have in the dh_make template, or worse, a clean and new debian/rules file. Why should one care to learn the ways and philosophy of make just to make a small package?


Let me tell you something that will feel like knife stab for many people in our community: the clear winner was the ebuild, not because I was smart or exciting, but because:

• it was dead simple to make a working one
  
• the documentation is really verbose and complete
• there is a default behaviour for every ebuild, even for a minimalist ebuild
• if your ebuild has a special need, the ebuilt can override the default behaviour by redefining the function (target, in debian/rules-speech), but you don't need to, in most cases
• there are some already defined classes which can be inherited to obtain a tweaked default behaviour (imagine typical cmake build system, typical autotools build system, typical kde build system - and iirc, this can include build dependencies)
• all the information about the package is centralized in one file which is human readable from the start, plus that is obvious, or one can understand fast what a field/function/variable means from the start, without digging through the documentation continuously
  

I did the ebuild in one day's work (it was less, but some will not believe me, so I'd say 1 day is reasonable enough) starting from absolutely 0 knowledge about the packaging system (if you don't count knowing to emerge package as knowledge).

What is done properly in the portage system is the fact that there are some default classes which your ebuild can inherit to behave more like a certain type of packages (base - a generic recipe, gnome, kde, games, sourceforge - they download tarballs directly, if needed - ...)

Why this is not possible for deb right now? Simple, we have it as a rule in the policy that the debian/rules file is a makefile. So even if one would implement a class-like model for deb packages, you'd still have the debian/rules file as a make file...

Gentoo implemented initially portage's default behaviour (and as a consequence, the "classes") in shell, later they migrated some parts to python and the whole portage is implemented in python now (while classes are implemented in bash). I am not saying that we should put python in essential, God forbid, probably the emdebian guys would stab me :-), I am saying that possibilities exist, alternatives should be possible.

I know, some will just say "show me the code", "making such a change over the entire archive is insane" or "the makefile is a really good way to do things like installing and building, after all, that's what it was designed for". Yes, all of these will miss the point, which is having nothing-to-do as a default policy for a package is a bad policy, it should be an empty/default package will use a standard recipe to build itself, and that recipe should be implemented in the build system.


And if you still don't believe me, just look at these few ebuilds and tell me you'd not be able to write them after a quarter after seeing one the first time and skimming over the docs or/and knowing what a regular gentoo user knows (what a keyword is, what is a slot). Also compare with the debian counter parts and don't forget the different building aids that we have.

http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo-x86/games-arcade/amphetamine/amphetamine-0.8.10.ebuild?view=markup
http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-games/packages/trunk/amphetamine/debian/rules?op=file&rev=0&sc=0
http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-games/packages/trunk/amphetamine/debian/control?op=file&rev=0&sc=0
http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-games/packages/trunk/amphetamine/debian/postinst?op=file&rev=0&sc=0

http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo-x86/games-arcade/holotz-castle/holotz-castle-1.3.8.ebuild?rev=1.3&view=markup
http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-games/packages/trunk/holotz-castle/debian/rules?op=file&rev=0&sc=0
http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-games/packages/trunk/holotz-castle/debian/control?op=file&rev=0&sc=0


http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo-x86/games-arcade/late/late-0.1.0.ebuild?rev=1.10&view=markup
http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-games/packages/trunk/late/debian/rules?op=file&rev=0&sc=0
http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-games/packages/trunk/late/debian/postinst?op=file&rev=0&sc=0
http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-games/packages/trunk/late/debian/postrm?op=file&rev=0&sc=0


http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo-x86/games-arcade/ppracer/ppracer-0.3.1.ebuild?rev=1.15&view=markup
http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-games/packages/trunk/ppracer/debian/rules?op=file&rev=0&sc=0


One more thing, the ebuilds mostly need not be updated when an upstream release occurs, they just need to be copied and given a different filename.

I was the maintainer of minit for some time, and spent some time adding some runit-like functionality to minit I then called "enitdir". It worked similar to runit (IIRC, maybe it was a different init). Basically you had a directory for each runlevel, which contained symlinks to all services supposed to be running. There is a symlink called "current" or something pointing to the current runlevel. enitdir monitored this symlink and the directories contents via dnotify, so it supposedly was both very fast and efficient at noticing changes there. Switching runlevels was as easy as "ln -snf current foobar"; starting and stopping services worked by removing the symlinks in the current runlevel or manually calling minit (for non-persistent changes, restarts, etc.) (I think I never uploaded a package with any of this, the minit packages remained really close to upstream. I intended to do a fork/rewrite named enit, but never got around to it. Many of my ideas are addressed by upstart.) However this didn't solve some integration issues. First of all, not all packages back then were using invoke-rc.d; this should be a lot better nowadays. But the major issues lie within handling multiple inits on one system. There is a hook that applications could use to prevent init scripts from running (which might be the answer to Wouters iniscripts post). It's called "policy-rc.d". However there are some things wrong with this approach: it doesn't really support the installation of multiple inits or handles the problems of switching between inits in any way. Basically, the moment we need to switch inits (and thus service startup/stopping behaviour!) is during reboot. While the old init is still running, any start/stop operations MUST still use the method appropriate for the current init system. Otherwise, major bugs can occur, especially with smarter init systems that respawn services. E.g. the user runs "apt-get install sysvinit mysql-server". Lets assume sysvinit has a debconf prompt 'make me the default init' and the user says yes. Next mysql-server is upgraded, during which it calls the sysvinit way of stopping the service (i.e. /etc/init.d/mysql-sever stop), then does some dangerous things to the database, then restarts the server. However, a smart init such as minit (when equipped with appropriate service files) will notice the mysql-server process dying and immediately restart it (notified by kernel, efficient and fast) while the upgrade script is still messing with the database files. Boom, there goes your database. I guess you got the point. So we probably need a smarter invoke-rc.d script. It should support

• init detection - figure out which init is running, e.g. by comparing the inode of /proc/1/exe to the inode of /sbin/init.* (current init doesn't need to be named /sbin/init, but note that this magic might break on upgrades. Fallback to readlink(/proc/1/exe) maybe?)
• different init behaviours. The current policy-rc.d hook is pretty much a yes/no hook. Instead it should call the appropriate init-specific invoke tool.

Such an invoke tool could then for example look like this:

if [ -e "/etc/enit/service/$1" ]; then
    enitctl start $1
else
    /etc/init.d/$1 start
fi

You get the idea, having the policy script figure handle compability for services that don't have an appropriate service description for this init system yet. (Yes, s/start/$2/ or something, above is pretty dumb, but helps bringing my idea over).

As I'm nearing the completion of my PhD, I'm starting to write about the findings from my research. The aim of my PhD is to investigate quality improvement in free software projects. After some exploratory studies about quality in free software, I decided to focus on release management as one problematic area in which improvement is possible. My approach is to study the development process of projects and to investigate ways how these processes can be improved. The hope is that such improvements will lead to increased levels of quality in the software produced by free software projects. With regard to release management, I'm focusing especially on large and complex projects, in which hundreds of volunteers need to be coordinated during release preparations. I've been looking particularly at time based release management since my exploratory studies have shown that there is significant interest in this release management strategy. The main question of my research is how and why time based release management works for large free software projects. In my first series of postings, I will introduce the seven free software projects I have studied in depth during my research. For each project, I will briefly summarize what problems the project faced in the past, what changes they have implemented to address these problems, and what outstanding problems they still have.

This morning when walking through a shopping center car park on my way to work a grannie came fairly close to squashing me. She accellerated her Mazda 323 backwards as hard as possible and hit a purple Magna. The back ends of both cars were seriously damaged, and the Mazda (which received the worst damage) was possibly a write-off (it doesn't take that much damage to make an old car an insurance write-off). The damage was surprising given that there was only about 4 meters between the cars before the crash, the roar of the engine however did indicate that full accelleration was being used. The area between the vehicles was where I had just walked a few seconds earlier...

I phoned the police and waited until they arrived. They might end up forcing her to have a driving test, but it's most unlikely that she will lose her license. One of my relatives passed such a test more than 10 years after I refused to ever be a passenger in his car.

What is needed is periodic testing of all drivers with the same standards as used for initially getting a drivers license (currently the standards are much lower). I would probably have to practice my parallel parking before such a test (it's something I hardly ever do) but I expect that I wouldn't have any difficulty in passing - as would all good drivers.

Eddy Petri or wrote quite an interesting text about the shortcomings of the .deb packaging format, specially comparing it to Gentoo's ebuilds. And, basically, it all comes down to this phrase:

Why this is not possible for deb right now? Simple, we have it as a rule in the policy that the debian/rules file is a makefile. So even if one would implement a class-like model for deb packages, you'd still have the debian/rules file as a make file

Now... Is debian/rules really expected to be a makefile, or it is just customary for it to be so? Look at the very top of your rules files - you will see they (at least, almost) always start with #!/usr/bin/make -f - That means, of course, that you can omit the fact they are makefiles. While packaging/debugging, I often run -say- fakeroot debian/rules build && fakeroot debian/rules clean. That, my friend, is closer to the invocation you often use for a shell script than for a makefile. I don't know if we have tools that rely on having rules called via make (and that should be easy to correct if needed), but I really don't see it problematic at a first glance to create packages based on something different than a makefile.
Recently, I've been tempted by CDBS. I still don't fully understand its flow, and it's still mostly a dark-magic beast for me, but at least I am comfortable using it for my everyday packaging work (hey, pkg-perl group, I'll be bugging you again with my weird ideas soon ;-) ), but it surely has the advantages you quote in your message: It takes part of the complexity away. Of course, it introduces some extra bits. By using CDBS, the packaging entry level is considerably lowered - but the real understanding of properly maintaining a package becomes somewhat more difficult.
Or is it just me clinging to the comfort of having learned my way around writing debian/rules?

Have been feeling rather unwell for the past couple of days, so I decided, while I feel like death warmed up, how could hacking at Valgrind possibly make it worse?

I took Tilman Sauerbeck's extended version of Dave Airlie's valgrind-mmt, and cleaned up a couple of minor bits -- changed the offset to be specified in hex, added support for repetitions (e.g. 'repeated 255 times', instead of the same line 256 times over), and also added support for the in*/out* family on AMD64, which was quite entertaining as I've not really touched either assembly or Valgrind before. Got it working in the end, despite libVEX's best efforts to frustrate me, and ended up feeling slightly better as well. Huzzah.

Anyway, 'sudo valgrind --tool=mmt --offset=0xc1000000[0] /usr/bin/Xorg :0 -ac > x.log 2>&1' will trap all MMIO accesses made by X or its VBIOS, provided you run the BIOS through x86emu instead of lrmi.

Postscript: spent a few minutes after writing this trying to figure out if there was anything I should've said, and didn't. Now, hours later, I realise there was one minor detail omitted: the URL. gitweb is just there, and the anonymous clone URL is git://people.freedesktop.org/~daniels/valgrind.

[0]: Get the base address with lspci -v. Your video card should have two PCI regions, of which one is big (your main video memory), and the other one is 32 or 64kB (the MMIO space, i.e. the bit you want).