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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Google+ opened to the small public some days ago, I'm not really going to comment anything about it for now.

The purpose of my post is actually reminding people of another interesting project, Diaspora, which actually fits several of my views over social networking.

I really hope that when Google will release API for its G+, there will be some chance for Diaspora to integrate with it and, most important, an opening for G+ to operate with Diaspora.

Most of us use(d) Facebook, now almost any geek I know is joining G+, some of them rejoicing its advent as an opportunity to leave Facebook for good.
That's not really my intention and I don't think it's the point of the whole social thing.

What about, instead, allowing the whole social sites to inter-communicate, exchanging information and letting users being able to see each other independently of the platform used?

That's clearly not possible so far :-), but it is the reason for which years and years ago (Internet-time rules apply) I got interested in FOAF, last year I crossed my fingers with Diaspora and now I'm doing the same about Google receiving some enlightenment bit and getting the right path about profile sharing.

Hello Creating a configuration model for Config::Model can be a boring task: When a configuration system has a lot of parameters, a lot of details need to be specified to have a complete configuration validation tool. So, all tricks are permitted to make this task more bearable. Let s see how this can be applied to lcdproc. This project requires a configuration file that supports more than 40 drivers. Each driver has it own set of parameters for a total of about 250 parameters. That s a lot to specify.. Fortunately, LCDd.conf template file is written in a way which makes it relatively easy to parse and get all required information to build a model. All drivers are listed in this template file, most parameters have default values and legal values are written in comments in a uniform way. Hence this file (and comments) can be parsed to retrieve information required for the model. This blog will describe how this task can be implemented in Perl using Config::Model modules. The code will be slightly trimmed down to keep this blog (relatively) short. All initialisation code and error checks are removed. You can get the whole script on sourceforge. The main steps are:

1. prepare a parser for LCDd.conf template
2. parse LCDd.conf template
3. prepare a LCDd model skeleton
4. translate LCDd.conf template information in a format suitable to create a model.
5. Write the resulting LCDd model

First, here s the necessary incantation to start properly a Perl program:

use strict;
use warnings;

Then load all required libraries. Their use will be described later:

use Config::Model;
use Config::Model::Itself 1.225;
use Config::Model::Backend::IniFile;
use 5.10.0;
use IO::File;
use IO::String;

Perform some initialisation to avoid upsetting the logging system:

use Log::Log4perl qw(:easy);
Log::Log4perl->easy_init($WARN);

Let s also initialize a model object that will be very useful later:

my $model = Config::Model->new();

Now we can really start the fun part. Step 1: Create a parser for LCDd.conf (INI file)
Problem: LCDd.conf comments must also be analysed to get more semantic information. The comments must be retrieved and associated with the INI classes and parameters found in this file. Fortunately, Config::Model::Backend::IniFile is able to associate comments with the relevant parameters. But Config::Model::Backend::IniFile must store its values in a configuration tree. So let s create a model suitable for LCDd.conf template that accepts any INI class and any INI parameter Dummy::Class is used to store any parameter found in an INI class. The accept keyword with .* regular expression means that any INI parameter will be accepted in each INI class.

$model->create_config_class(
  name   => 'Dummy::Class',
  accept => [
    '.*' =>  
       type => 'leaf',
       value_type => 'uniline'
        ,
    ],
);

Now the Dummy model must provide a configuration class to hold all INI classes:

$model->create_config_class(
    name   => 'Dummy',
    accept => [
       '.*' =>  
           type => 'node',
           config_class_name => 'Dummy::Class'
        ,
    ],
);

Note that an INI backend could be specified directly here. But, some useful parameters are commented out in LCD.conf. Some some processing is required to be able to create a model with these commented parameters. See below for this processing. Step 2: Parse LCDd.conf Now the dummy configuration class is created. Let s create a configuration tree from this dummy class to store the data from LCDd.conf

my $dummy = $model->instance(
    instance_name   => 'dummy',
    root_class_name => 'Dummy',
)-> config_root;

Now, read LCDd.conf:

my $lcd_file
  = IO::File->new('examples/lcdproc/LCDd.conf');
my @lines    = $lcd_file->getlines;

And perform the pre-processing on LCDd.conf mentioned above. Just un-commenting commented parameters is required:

foreach (@lines)   s/^#(\w+=)/$1/  

Store the pre-processed LCDd.conf in a IO::Handle usable by INI backend

my $ioh = IO::String->new( join( '', @lines ) );

Create an INI backend to read the data from pre-processed LCDd.conf and store it in the configuration tree:

my $ini_backend = Config::Model::Backend::IniFile
  ->new( node => $dummy );
$ini_backend->read( io_handle => $ioh );

Step 3: Prepare LCDd configuration model Your attention please. You may remember that we invoked instance on object to create the dummy configuration tree to hold LCDd.conf data. The instance method used the Dummy configuration class. Now, we must invoke instance again on object. But this time, instance will use Config::Model::Itself. This model is Config::Model s way of eating its own dog food. The configuration tree created there will be able to hold LCDd model. Hence the root of this special configuration tree will be called meta_root to avoid confusion with the other configuration root defined above (for the Dummy model). Still with me? Good, let s create this meta tree that will contain LCDd model:

my $meta_root = $model->instance(
    root_class_name => 'Itself::Model',
    instance_name   => 'meta_model',
) -> config_root;

Create the main LCDd configuration class and store the first comment from LCDd.conf as class description:

my $first_comment = $dummy->annotation ;
$meta_root
  ->grab("class:LCDd class_description")
  ->store( $first_comment );

Append my own text in this description:

my $extra_description =
    "Model information extracted from template /etc/LCDd.conf"
  . "\n\n=head1 BUGS\n\nThis model does not support to load "
  . "several drivers. Loading several drivers is probably a "
  . "marginal case. Please complain to the author if this "
  . "assumption is false";
$meta_root->load(
     qq!class:LCDd
        class_description.="\n\n$extra_description"!
);

Add legal stuff in the model:

$meta_root->load( qq!
  class:LCDd
    copyright:0="2011, Dominique Dumont"
    copyright:1="1999-2011, William Ferrell and others"
    license="GPL-2"
!
);

Add INI backend so configuration object created from LCDd model will be able to read user s INI files:

$meta_root->load( qq!
  class:LCDd
    read_config:0
      backend=ini_file
      config_dir="/etc"
      file="LCDd.conf"
!
);

Note that all the load calls above could be done as one call. They were split for better clarity. Step 4:Extracting LCDd.conf information Now that all information from LCDd.conf template file is stored in $dummy configuration tree, it s time to use this information to enhance the skeleton of LCDd model created above. Let s first find all the INI classes defined in LCDd.conf:

my @ini_classes = $dummy->get_element_name;

Now before actually mining LCDd.conf information, we must prepare several subs to handle them. This is done using a dispatch table:

my %dispatch;

First create the default entry which will be used for most parameters. This subs is passed: the INI class name, the INI parameter name, the comment attached to the parameter, the INI value, and an optional value type. It will return a string describing a model for simple elements. For instance: class:"LCDd::MD8800" element:Device type=leaf value_type=uniline default="/dev/ttyS1" description="device to use [default: /dev/ttyS1]" Here s the subroutine invoked by default. Let s create a an anonymous subroutine and store it in the dispatch table:

$dispatch _default_  = sub  
    my ( $ini_class, $ini_param, $ini_note,
         $ini_v, $value_type ) = @_;
    $value_type  = 'uniline';

Now, prepare a string that will be used later to create the ini_class model. This string uses Config::Model s serialisation format described in Config::Model::Loader:

    my $load = qq!class:"$ini_class"
                  element:$ini_param type=leaf !;

Get semantic information from LCDd.conf template comments (written between square brackets):

    my $info = $ini_note =~ /\[(.*)\]/ ? $1 : '';
    $info =~ s/\s+//g;

Use this semantic information to better specify the parameter:

    $load .=
        $info =~ /legal:(\d+)-(\d+)/
           ? " value_type=integer min=$1 max=$2"
      : $info =~ /legal:([\w\,]+)/
           ? " value_type=enum choice=$1"
      :    " value_type=$value_type";
    if ( $info =~ /default:(\w+)/ )  
        # specify upstream default value
        # if it was found in the comment
        $load .= qq! upstream_default="$1"!
           if length($1);
     
    else  
        # or use the value found in INI
        # file as default
        $ini_v =~ s/^"//g;
        $ini_v =~ s/"$//g;
        $load .= qq! default="$ini_v"!
           if length($ini_v);
     

The model (in serialised format) is ready, let s return it and exit the subroutine:

    return $load;
 ;

Now let s take care of the special cases. This one deals with Driver parameter found in INI [server] class. This sub will create a string for an enum element. The possible values of the enum are extracted from the comment found in the LCDd.conf file:

$dispatch "LCDd::server" Driver  = sub  
    my ( $class, $elt, $info, $ini_v ) = @_;
    my $load = qq!class:"$class"
                    element:$elt
                      type=leaf
                      value_type=enum
    !;
    my @drivers = split /\W+/, $info;
    while ( @drivers
            and ( shift @drivers ) !~ /supported/ )  
      # nothing, the work is done by shift operator
      # in loop test to skip all words in $info until
      # 'The following drivers are supported:'.
      # ok, that's a hack
     
    $load .= 'choice='
          . join( ',', @drivers ) . ' ';
    return $load;
 ;

This sub invokes the default sub and add a small feature to the model to ensure that DriverPath ends with / . This is ensured by the match="/$" snippet:

$dispatch "LCDd::server" DriverPath  = sub  
    my ( $class, $elt, $info, $ini_v ) = @_;
    return   $dispatch _default_ ->(@_)
           . q! match="/$" !;
 ;

Likewise, this sub invokes the default sub with the optional 4th parameter that forces the value_type of the element. In this case, we enforce an integer element:

 $dispatch "LCDd::server" WaitTime 
 = $dispatch "LCDd::server" ReportLevel 
 = $dispatch "LCDd::server" Port 
 = sub  
    my ( $class, $elt, $info, $ini_v ) = @_;
    return $dispatch _default_ ->( @_, 'integer' );
   ;

This sub returns a string for a list element with default values:

  $dispatch "LCDd::server" GoodBye 
= $dispatch "LCDd::server" Hello 
= sub  
    my ( $class, $elt, $info, $ini_v ) = @_;
    my $ret = qq( class:"$class"
                    element:$elt
                      type=list
                ) ;
    $ret .= 'cargo type=leaf
             value_type=uniline - ' ;
    $ret .= 'default_with_init:0="\" '.$elt.'\"" ' ;
    $ret .= 'default_with_init:1="\" LCDproc!\""';
    return $ret ;
 ;

Now that the dispatch table is ready, let s really mine LCDd.conf information. First handle all INI classes in the foreach loop:

foreach my $ini_class (@ini_classes)  

Let s retrieve parameters for this INI class from the LCDd.conf template:

  my $ini_obj = $dummy->grab($ini_class);

This will be the name of the lcdproc driver configuration class (e.g. LCDd::imonlcd):

  my $config_class   = "LCDd::$ini_class";

The configuration class will also be created in a serialised format. Let s create config class in case there s no parameter in INI file:

  $meta_root->load(qq!class:"LCDd::$ini_class"!);

Now, loop over all INI parameters and create LCDd::$ini_class elements:

  my @all_ini_params = $ini_obj->get_element_name ;
  foreach my $ini_param ( @all_ini_params )  

Retrieve the value provided in template LCDd.conf:

    my $ini_v = $ini_obj->grab_value($ini_param);

Retrieve the comment attached to the value provided in template LCDd.conf:

    my $ini_comment
      = $ini_obj->grab($ini_param)->annotation;
    # escape embedded quotes
    $ini_comment =~ s/"/\\"/g;

Retrieve the correct sub from dispatch table:

    my $sub = $dispatch $config_class $ini_param 
              $dispatch _default_ ;

Run the sub to get the model string:

    my $model_spec
      = $sub->( $config_class, $ini_param,
                   $ini_comment, $ini_v );

Attach the comment from LCDd.conf as class description:

    $model_spec .= qq! description="$ini_comment"!
      if length($ini_comment);

Then, last but not least, load class specification in the model, and end the loop aroung INI parameters:

    $meta_root->load($model_spec);
   

Now create a an $ini_class element in LCDd class (to link LCDd class and LCDd::$ini_class):

  my $driver_class_spec = qq!
    class:LCDd
      element:$ini_class
  ! ;

Since server and menu are not drivers, they have a special treatment:

  if (   $ini_class eq 'server'
      or $ini_class eq 'menu' )  
    $driver_class_spec .= qq!
      type=node
      config_class_name="LCDd::$ini_class"
    ! ;
   

Here s the treatment for LCDd drivers. Setup the model with a warped node so that a driver configuration class is shown only if the driver was selected in the [server] class:

  else  
    $driver_class_spec .= qq!
      type=warped_node
      config_class_name="LCDd::$ini_class"
      level=hidden
      follow:selected="- server Driver"
      rules:"\$selected eq '$ini_class'"
        level=normal
    !;
   

Now we can load the LCDd driver model in meta root:

  $meta_root->load($driver_class_spec);
 

Step 5: save LCDd model Still with me ? Good. Here s the last part, now that the model was created in memory, let s save it in files. Config::Model::Itself constructor returns an object to read or write the data:

my $rw_obj = Config::Model::Itself
     ->new( model_object => $meta_root );
say "Writing all models in file (please wait)";
$rw_obj->write_all(
    model_dir => 'lib/Config/Model/models/'
);

That s it. Once this script is run, the directory lib/Config/Model/models/ contains a bunch of files:

• The main LCDd model
• All models for the drivers

You can see the resulting editor in my first blog on lcdproc. Conclusion and future steps (with you?) As mentioned at the end of this blog, the result of this model generation process is far from perfect, because the information retrieved from LCDd.conf template are not complete for this task (which is normal since these comments were targeted for users). Now, I d really like to discuss with project developers to improve configuration template to generate better models. For project owner, such an improvement would give them:

• command lines to validate configuration
• graphical configuration editor with integrated help
• Configuration doc generated from the information stored in the template file

Please leave a comment on this blog (or send a message to config-model-users at lists.sourceforge.net) if you are interested in configuration tool generation for a project you contribute to. All the best

This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (195 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Dropbox for Debian This is not free software but Dropbox is very popular and they did only provide an Ubuntu package that did not work on Debian. So I created an official package. I have been in touch with Dropbox developers and they have been very helpful. They ll shortly release a signature mechanism (with GPG) so that we can further improve the package by verifying the origin of the downloaded binaries. SAT Britney At the start of the month, I continued my work on the britney reimplementation (the software that creates testing out of unstable) but I quickly stalled it because the release managers asked the feedback of Stefano Zacchiroli and Ralf Treinen (who have extensive knowledge on the topic with their research work on Mancoosi) and I did not want to invest further work in case they would identify a major flow the feedback came only very late this month and while it was somewhat negative, I still think it s worth pursuing the effort for a bit longer. Converted ftplib to multiarch While dpkg still doesn t support multiarch (no news from Guillem and no visible sign of progress ), unstable got all the remaining bits allowing us to convert libraries to multiarch (see the announce). As soon as the required libc6 landed in unstable, I looked into converting the only library package that I maintain. I had no major problem but I still identified 2 issues in Lintian (filed as #630164 and quickly fixed by Niels Thykier). build-arch / build-indep support For the 42th time in the last 10 years, the idea of using build-arch/build-indep targets in the rules file has surfaced again. I had already decided some time ago that I would accept a patch implementing a new field Build-Features to enable dpkg-buildpackage to use those targets and this time Bill Allombert completed such a patch so I merged it. The technical committee also decided that it would take a final decision on this topic (see #629385). Roger Leigh provided useful input by doing an archive-wide rebuild with the various solutions suggested. Given that the majority would like to make the target mandatory at some point in the future, I provided the dpkg patch for my preferred solution. We would use auto-detection as a temporary measure until all packages have been converted to have the targets. The technical committee has not yet taken any decision even though the discussion stalled since the 12th of June. But that s usual with that body. I m sure it will be solved during Debconf. Misc dpkg work

• Modified dpkg-source --after-build to automatically unapply patches if they have been applied by dpkg-source --before-build.
• Lots of small bug fixes (#628726, #629582, #630996, #631435, #631439, #631547, #632168) and that s just to keep with the flow of incoming bug reports!
• Added 2 supplementary Perl modules to the supported API for the benefit of Lintian.
• Spent an evening to track down the possible causes of an long-standing and annoying assertion failure related to triggers.
• Updated my branch with improved triggers directives to take into account the feedback of Guillem, and merged it.
• While doing this I discovered a design flaw with the usage of prerm failed-upgrade and merged a fix.
• Discussed integration of dpkg-buildflags with debhelper in #544844 and decided of further improvements for dpkg-buildflags as a result.

Hamster applet update Hamster-applet is a GNOME application which did not have a 3.0 release, but it had a development release (2.91.x). I checked out whether it was possible to package this version for experimental and have the applet work with the GNOME fallback mode. Apparently not, the code was not yet updated to be compatible with the newer panel. Instead I uploaded the latest stable version (2.32.1) to unstable. It has some nice improvements in the standalone version (and the name of the executable changed). For usage with GNOME 3, I have created a custom shortcut to start it quickly (with gconf-editor set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_1 to <Mod4>t and /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_1 to hamster-time-tracker because the GNOME 3 control panel does not seem to work to set custom keybindings currently). Translated my professional website into English While I m grateful for all the people who are supporting my work, I m still far from my goal to have one third of my time funded through donations and sales of products on this blog. So I decided to also bring more visibility to my company and in particular to its Debian-related service offering. It was only available in French up to now so I translated it and expanded it a bit. My support page on this blog now also links to my company s website. If your company needs help to create Debian packages, or needs Debian technical support by email, you just found the right partner. BTW, I have discounted prices for individuals and non-profits who would like to benefit from my help to create Debian packages. The Debian Administrator s Handbook This is the title of the upcoming translation of my book. The project now has a dedicated website: debian-handbook.info. You can subscribe to its RSS feed to keep up with the latest news. The full table of contents is online along with a FAQ. I m actively looking for partners to help me promote the fundraising once it goes live. If you can reach a large set of readers interested by a good Debian book, get in touch with me to join the affiliate program. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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At beginning of the last two weeks, I was working on the final package of JTReg. I was working on generating man pages and I finally found a solution. I decided to use help2man to generate the man pages but I had to patch the two scripts jtreg.sh and jtdiff.sh . Basically, these two scripts launch main classes of the jtreg.jar JAR file. The problem with them is that they don t know where they can find the JAR file on Debian. So I patched the two scripts shell so they can locate JAR files in /usr/share/java .
To be able to generate man pages with help2man, I needed to be able to use the scripts. But with jtdiff.sh and jtreg.sh using jtreg.jar which is not in /usr/share/java during the build, I had to find a way to make the scripts work. I decided to patch the scripts (again) and make them depend of some environment variables. So in each script, there are 4 used variables:

• JAVA_HOME, which is the path where Java is,
• JTREG_HOME, which is the path where jtreg.jar is,
• JTHAR_HOME, which is the path where jtharness JAR are, and,
• JAR_HOME, which is the path where other JAR are.

So during the packaging only JTREG_HOME needed to be changed to be able to use the script. Once the scripts patch done, I finally wrote the rules file of the package. Once again, I used javahelper so the rules file contains the following code:

#!/usr/bin/make -f
JAVA_HOME = /usr/lib/jvm/default-java

override_dh_auto_build:
ant -f make/build.xml
dh_auto_build
JTREG_HOME=./dist/jtreg/lib/ help2man \
--name="Regression Test Harness" \
--help-option="-help" \
./dist/jtreg/linux/bin/jtdiff > jtdiff.1
JTREG_HOME=./dist/jtreg/lib/ help2man \
--name="Regression Test Harness" \
--help-option="-help" \
./dist/jtreg/linux/bin/jtreg > jtreg.1

override_dh_auto_clean:
rm -r dist :
rm -r build :
rm jtdiff.1 :
rm jtreg.1 :
dh_auto_clean

%:
dh $@ --with javahelper

As you can see it is not really complicated. The most interesting part is the one when the man pages are generated. The JTREG_HOME variable is set to ./dist/jtreg/lib/ because it is the path where jtreg.jar is once it is built. I also used the help-option option of help2man because the help option of jtreg and jtdiff is -help and not help .
The jtreg package is now on the Debian Java team SVN so anyone can get it using:

svn checkout svn+ssh://$ SVN_USER @svn.debian.org/svn/pkg-java/trunk/jtreg

Thanks to Sylestre Ledru, jtreg is now available in Sid and the ITP is now closed.

The second part of my work consisted in testing Jigsaw and fixed tests if necessary. All the packaging work is now useful since the tests need JTReg to be run. The problem with the current build system of Jigsaw is that it is enough generic to be used on any system. So I had to patch several makefiles. To find them:

cd jigsaw-tests
find . -name 'Makefile' grep '/test/Makefile'

Then, the path to find jtreg has to be modified to match /usr/bin/jtreg . After that it is possible to run the tests with the following command:

make test

Passing all the tests is something which takes a lot of time. After that, I identified 42 (that s a cool number right?) failing tests. Some of them came from the lack of X11 server and other from unreachable network hosts. Some hackers of IcedTea gave me some ideas to fix several tests. They told me to look here and here because I just had the same problems that they had before.
With this, I was able to fix the tests related to unreachable hosts and to the lack of X server. I used Xvfb to fix the X server depending tests.
After running the tests again, only 13 tests were still failing. That is a good result. Tom Marble and me decided to apply the patch of Alan Bateman and re-run the tests to see if it will break something:

cd jigsaw-tests
mkdir patches && cd patches
wget http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~alanb/jigsaw-mp-prototype1/webrev/jdk.patch
cd jdk
patch -p1 < ../patches/jdk.patch
make clean
make sanity
make all
make modules
xvfb-run -e xvfb-errors -a -s -ac make test -k

15 tests failed against 13 before. The 2 new failing tests are:

• java/lang/management/MemoryMXBean/LowMemoryTestConcMarkSweepGC.sh
• java/util/Locale/Bug6989440.java

I didn t go further but I ll try to understand why we have 15 failing tests in few days. All the modifications that I have made on the source code of Jigsaw can be found in a patch format here:

This 2 weeks were also dedicated to the understanding of Jigsaw and its modules. Reading the jigsaw-dev mailing list, I have found some interesting conversation about jigsaw and how to write modules. So I decided to write a module to see how it works. I followed the instruction of the quick start guide but when compiling the module didn t work. So I tried to understand why and then to fix it. I eventually compiled and installed my module and here is how I did it:

mkdir -p src/com.greetings/com/greetings/
mkdir -p src/org.astro/org/astro/
mkdir modules
vim src/com.greetings/module-info.java
vim src/com.greetings/com/greetings/Hello.java
vim src/org.astro/module-info.java
vim src/org.astro/org/astro/World.java
./jigsaw/build/linux-amd64/bin/javac -d modules \
-modulepath ./jigsaw/build/linux-amd64/modules/modules \
-sourcepath src find src -name '*.java'
./jigsaw/build/linux-amd64/bin/jmod create -L mlib
./jigsaw/build/linux-amd64/bin/jmod install \
modules org.astro com.greetings -L mlib
./jigsaw/build/linux-amd64/bin/java -L mlib -m com.greetings

And here it is, we have a nice hello world module. The documentation says to put the module-info.java of org.astro in src/org.astro/org/astro/ but it didn t work for me so I tried to put it in src/org.astro/ and it worked. Also the quick start guide says that we have to use the -modulepath option to specify where the modules are. I first tried to use ./jigsaw/build/linux-amd64/modules/ but javac told me he could not find java.lang so I noticed that there is a subdirectory called modules in ./jigsaw/build/linux-amd64/modules/ so I used it as module path and it worked.

Writing a module and seeing how Jigsaw modules are made started to make me think about the packaging of Jigsaw. Dependencies being available, knowing how to build and test Jigsaw and seeing how modules are made, I think that I will soon try to start the packaging of Jigsaw and getting started with the packaging will be my goal for the next two weeks.

TED has published a list of resources for suicide prevention and to help survivors and their families [1]. Psychology Today has an interesting article by Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D about the recent US Supreme Court decision denying female employees of Walmart the ability to file a class action lawsuit about their poor pay and working conditions [2]. She describes the problem as a focus on rights of the ruling class vs fairness to the workers, it could also be described as prioritising perceived rights of the rich over the rights of workers to fair treatment. It seems to me that her article has relevance to some of the discussions related to the treatment of women in the Free Software community. New Scientist has an interesting article by Ferris Jabr about the use of MRI to discover brain-wave patterns correlated with Autism in sleeping toddlers [3]. This doesn t seem likely to be useful for scanning the entire population as it currently has a false-positive rate of 7/43 (which would make false-positives outnumber true-positives by about 15:1). But it does seem likely to do some good in identifying young children who might be on the Autism Spectrum. Shea Hembry gave an amusing TED talk about how he created art works for 100 fictional artists for his own exhibition [4]. He created a biography for each artist and every one had a unique style of art. Steve Keil gave a passionate TED talk about the benefits of play for children and for adults [5]. He focussed on the benefits for Bulgaria (where his talk was given) but it all applies to all humans. Frederic Bastiat s 1850 essays on economics are interesting, informatice, and well written [6]. Some of the themes such as the supposed economic benefits of maintaining a large army are the subject of political debate today. Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D wrote an insightful article for Psychology Today about the recent US supreme court decision in regard to the Wal-mart case [7]. Her article seems to have some obvious parallels to the situation in the FOSS community. The idea of rights vs fairness, beliefs that are unconscious or unexamined, and the comparison of attitudes towards racial vs sexual discrimination (in terms of not treating sexual discrimination and harassment seriously) seem to all apply clearly. Al Jazeera reports that the Fukushima disaster is worse than is reported in the mainstream western press [8]. Generally I wouldn t be inclined to trust al Jazeera if other news sources were reliable. But unfortunately reliable news related to contentious issues such as nuclear power is quite rare. It will probably be quite a long time before we can be confident that we know much about Fukushima, everyone who knows seems to be lying.

• [1] http://blog.ted.com/2011/06/11/resources-for-suicide-prevention-post-attempt-survivors-and-their-families/
• [2] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/science-isnt-golden/201106/americans-fail-take-sexism-seriously-the-supreme-courts-wal-mart-rul
• [3] http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2011/06/brain-out-of-sync-in-toddlers.html
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/shea_hembrey_how_i_became_100_artists.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/steve_keil_a_manifesto_for_play_for_bulgaria_and_beyond.html
• [6] http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html
• [7] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/science-isnt-golden/201106/americans-fail-take-sexism-seriously-the-supreme-courts-wal-mart-rul
• [8] http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/06/201161664828302638.html

Debian/Society at DebConf11 For DebConf11 which, needless to say, I'll be attending I've accepted to coordinate the Debian/Society track, together with dkg. As it's Daniel who has done most of the work up to now, let me pretend I'm catching up with a brief but very important call for papers. The idea of the Debian/Society track is to collect talks and other events that explore two society-related aspects of Debian:

1. Debian is a society in itself. It is a society formed by a group of people that are connected by relationships, share a (virtual) territory, and are subject to various kinds of self-imposed rules (technical, political, etc.)
2. Debian relates with larger human societies and has an impact on them, mainly but not only through the Free Software artifacts that Debian produces and distributes.

Several talks and events that have already been submitted to DebConf11 do a very good job at presenting one or both of the above aspects. But we are looking for a few more. In particular, we would like to receive submissions of events about:

• Governance models of other FOSS projects, possibly in a compare and contrast way with respect to how we do things in Debian. Are you a member of some FOSS project other than Debian and have given some thought about how well its governance mechanisms work in comparison to Debian's? Are you a geek about FOSS project management and have spent time thinking about how to improve Debian governance, transparency, or the like? We would like to hear from you!
• Impact of Debian activities on the "real" (non-geek) world. Do you have a good story to tell about how Debian has changed your world, or even a small part of it? Are you involved in some Debian (sub-)project which has the ambition of making the world a better place? We would like to hear from you!

If you think you can host the event we are looking for, just head to penta and submit your event providing all associated information (event kind, title, abstract, etc.). Please e-mail me or dkg when you've done so. We're way past the general event submission deadline, but if your proposal is just what we need to fill out the track, we can lobby the Talks Team for its acceptance (we can't guarantee acceptance, though). Daniel Kahn Gillmor
Stefano Zacchiroli

I have bought a Samsung Galaxy S Android phone some time ago. One of the first thing that you try to do with such a phone is to switch to some alternate firmware (the coined term is ROM ), like CyanogenMod. Flashing a firmware is a whole new universe. You are told about a lot of proprietary tools, you need to download a lot of things from MegaUpload and friends and nobody really explains what s going on under the hood. I was a bit lost at first. I will not provide a step-by-step guide since I cannot afford to stay up-to-date. Such a guide is usually posted on some forum. It assumes you are running Windows and provides appropriate download links. You must follow it (and check that it is recent enough). I will just provide you some background to understand those guides.

Android firmwares There are several Android firmwares. Most of them are specific to a given phone (or its close variations). They can be sorted in three categories:

1. Official firmwares from the phone manufacturer include a kernel with appropriate drivers and, usually, a customized interface (HTC Sense for HTC, TouchWiz for Samsung). Some manufacturers will lag a lot behind Android schedule and you may not get all the new shiny features.
2. Modified firmwares are built from the official firmwares. They usually add a lot of hacks on top of the original firmware, remove some cruft but are still closely related to the official firmware.
3. Firmwares built from Android Open Source Project (the open source version of Android) do not share nothing with the official firmware except some bits related to the kernel (drivers, hacks).

Darky ROM Darky ROM is a modified firmware. It takes the original firmware from Samsung, adds a custom kernel (based on the source of the official kernel), adds a lot of hacks, some additional applications and removes some unwanted cruft. This is a very nice firmware which is quite snappy. This is a drop-in replacement for the default firmware: you will only get improvements. The latest version is 10.1 and there is a neat guide on how to install it.

CyanogenMod CyanogenMod is a firmware built from AOSP. It supports several devices and provide an unified firmware on all of them. Support for the Samsung Galaxy S is recent and is not present in the stable build. However, some RC build is now available. Be sure to read the FAQ (most notably the part saying that you need to install from Froyo 2.2 because the bootloader provided by Samsung with Gingerbread 2.3 is not compatible). You can also grab some information from the wiki. The major drawback of using this firmware instead of going for a modified firmware like Darky ROM is that the battery life may suck. I now need to charge my phone every day instead of once every two days. On the plus side, you get a very clean firmware with a lot of features and almost no cruft. For example, the notification bar can be customized and OpenVPN is available out of the box. Moreover, almost everything is open source (if you don t install Google apps). You can see this firmware as an open source distribution for your phone. There is no need to download random files linked from a random forum to make it work. There is no package manager, though. Despite the bad battery life, I prefer this firmware.

Prerequisites Before trying to flash a new firmware, there are some tools that you need to have. Note that you don t need root access to flash a new firmware.

Download & recovery mode Before trying to install any firmware, you must check that your phone can access download and recovery modes. The download mode allows to flash any new firmware, even if the current firmware does not boot at all. As long as this mode is available, there is very little chance that you brick your phone. To access those modes, you need to use the three-button combo . Here are the steps (your phone should not be plugged):

1. Power off the phone (wait for the phone to vibrate).
2. Hold the Volume down button for download mode. Hold the Volume up button for recovery mode.
3. Hold the Home button.
4. Hold the Power button. The phone will start.
5. Once you have the Samsung logo displayed on the screen, release the Power button.
6. Only release the two other buttons when you enter the recovery mode or download mode. The recovery mode displays a menu. The download mode displays a big yellow Android logo.

If after ten tries, you are unable to access those modes, maybe they have been disabled. Keep reading, there is a solution.

Heimdall Heimdall is a tool to flash a new firmware to your phone. This is not a mandatory tool but you will have to use it if something goes wrong. Most guides will tell you to use Odin. It is a leaked Samsung tool running on Windows only. You can use Heimdall instead.

$ git clone https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/Heimdall.git
Cloning into Heimdall...
remote: Counting objects: 423, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (271/271), done.
remote: Total 423 (delta 220), reused 332 (delta 138)
Receiving objects: 100% (423/423), 5.91 MiB   962 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (220/220), done.
$ cd Heimdall/heimdall
$ sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev
$ ./configure && make
[...]
$ sudo cp 60-heimdall-galaxy-s.rules /etc/udev/rules.d
$ sudo /etc/init.d/udev reload

You need to use this tool while in download mode. You can test it, while in download mode, with:

$ ./heimdall print-pit

This will display the partition table of your phone. This is enlightening to know what it contains:

• IBL+PBL is the boot loader, be extra careful with it;
• PIT is the partition table;
• EFS contains some important data like IEMEI, be extra careful with it;
• SBL is the second boot loader;
• SBL2 is the backup of the second boot loader;
• PARAM contains some images used as various stage of the boot process;
• KERNEL is the kernel;
• RECOVERY is the backup of the kernel;
• FACTORYFS contains /system file system which is some kind of root file system;
• DBDATA contains /data file system which is the database to store application parameters;
• CACHE contains /cache file system which contains the Dalvik cache;
• MODEM contains the firmware for the modem.

As we will see, Heimdall is able to flash any of those partitions with flash subcommand.

adb adb stands for Android Debug Bridge. Among other things, this tool allow you to drive your phone through the USB connection. You can get a shell, reboot into download or recovery mode, push files to your Android device, etc. To get this tool, you need to download the full Android SDK.

$ tar zxvf ~/download/android-sdk_r11-linux_x86.tgz
$ cd android-sdk-linux_x86
$ tools/android update sdk
[select Android SDK Platform-tools]
$ platform-tools/adb shell
# uname -a
Linux localhost 2.6.35.7-I9000XWJVH-CL184813 #Dark_Core_2.4 PREEMPT Mon May 16 15:02:38 EEST 2011 armv7l GNU/Linux

The important commands are:

• shell to get a shell on the device;
• reboot recovery to reboot in recovery mode;
• reboot download to reboot in download mode;
• push to put a file on the phone;
• pull to retrieve a file;
• install to install an application from its APK;
• logcat to see the logs and what happens, very useful!

Restore download mode If your phone is missing download mode, you can recover it with the help of adb and heimdall. You need to grab some official firmware and extract boot.bin and Sbl.bin from it.

$ adb reboot download
$ heimdall flash --primary-boot ~/download/boot.bin --secondary-boot ~/download/Sbl.bin

Be extra careful here. You may brick your phone. Double check that you grab the correct files and that they are really for your phone (there exists some variants). It worked for me.

Installing a new firmware While you can switch from one firmware to another without losing your data, it is better to wipe your system and your data before switching firmware. This means that you will lose all your applications and the data inside them (list of contacts, SMS, preferences). However, nothing will ever modify your data in the internal SD card or in the external SD card (which are both inside the phone). They usually contains your music and your photos. There are two ways to install a firmware:

1. via Heimdall, or
2. using the recovery.

Heimdall When a guide tells you to use Odin, you can use Heimdall instead. Odin takes a TAR file. You should untar it and uses its content with Heimdall. For example:

$ ./heimdall flash --repartition --pit s1_odin_20100512.pit \
>                  --factoryfs factoryfs.rfs \
>                  --cache cache.rfs --dbdata dbdata.rfs \
>                  --param param.lfs --modem modem.bin \
>                  --kernel zImage --secondary-boot Sbl.bin 
Claiming interface again...   Success
Setting up interface...   Success
Beginning session...
Handshaking with Loke...   Success
Uploading PIT
PIT upload successful
Uploading SBL
100%
SBL upload successful
Uploading KERNEL
100%
KERNEL upload successful
Uploading MODEM
100%
MODEM upload successful
Uploading PARAM
100%
PARAM upload successful
Uploading FACTORYFS
100%
FACTORYFS upload successful
Uploading DBDATAFS
100%
DBDATAFS upload successful
Uploading CACHE
100%
CACHE upload successful
Ending session...
Rebooting device...

You may be interested to update your modem using Heimdall. This is usually independent of the firmware you want to use. Also, no need to provide a PIT file if you don t want to repartition. Heimdall can read the current one and flash only one of the partitions.

Recovery mode The base recovery shipped with the Samsung Galaxy S does not have a lot of options. Moreover, it may be locked and will accept to install only signed firmwares. Most firmwares come with ClockWorkMod, a more advanced recovery. Once you get it, you will be able to use any ZIP file to install a new firmware. My advice is to try to get ClockWorkMod as soon as possible. If you are root, you can install ROM Manager that will install it for you. If you are not root, most custom firmwares will provide ClockWorkMod. Therefore, you can just install a custom firmware with Heimdall. There exists special firmwares just for this, like EZbase. If you want to install CyanogenMod, be sure to download a Froyo firmware, not a Gingerbread one. Keep in mind that the recovery is located inside the kernel. It is not self-contained in the bootloader (unlike download mode). If you don t want to flash a whole firmware (and lose everything on your phone) just to get the recovery, you can just flash the kernel. The ClockWorkMod recovery comes with an utility to backup your whole phone. This way, you can easily restore your previous firmware if you don t like the current one. This is what is called a Nandroid backup.

Lagfix A lot of guides will tell you to enable or disable lagfix. Samsung shipped the Galaxy S with some crappy filesystem called RFS (which is some kind of enhanced FAT). It is slow and seems responsible for some lags that may happen on the interface. A lagfix is a way to replace this filesystem by something better, like EXT4 or YAFFS2. The process is pretty straighforward and consist to backup all the partition to the SD card, reformat it with another filesystem and restore the backup. The lagfix may be applied automatically with some firmware (like CyanogenMod) or you may request it in the recovery mode (most modified firmwares work this way). In this case, it will be applied automatically on the next boot. You should disable it before installing another firmware with the recovery mode (no need if you install it with Heimdall).

Applications You can find many free (as in free speech) applications for Android. Unfortunately, Android Market does not allow to use this criteria as a filter. F-Droid is an alternate market featuring only FOSS applications. Here is a short selection of free applications:

• ADW.Launcher is a home replacement app. It is very configurable and themable.
• K-9 Mail is a very nice email client.
• Xabber is a XMPP/Jabber client.
• ConnectBot is an SSH client (as well as a terminal).
• DroidWall is an application firewall (using Netfilter). It lets you select which application can access to Internet depending on your connection (wifi or 3G).
• Barcode Scanner decodes 1D/2D barcode including QR codes.
• OsmAnd is a replacement for Google Maps using OpenStreetMap. The free version on Android Market is out-dated. Buy the plus version or download it throught F-Droid.

Another must-have application is Titanium Backup which allows to backup any application with data. Unfortunately, this is not a free (as in free speech) application.

I have bought a Samsung Galaxy S Android phone some time ago. One of the first thing that you try to do with such a phone is to switch to some alternate firmware (the coined term is ROM ), like CyanogenMod. Flashing a firmware is a whole new universe. You are told about a lot of proprietary tools, you need to download a lot of things from MegaUpload and friends and nobody really explains what s going on under the hood. I was a bit lost at first. I will not provide a step-by-step guide since I cannot afford to stay up-to-date. Such a guide is usually posted on some forum. It assumes you are running Windows and provides appropriate download links. You must follow it (and check that it is recent enough). I will just provide you some background to understand those guides.

Android firmwares There are several Android firmwares. Most of them are specific to a given phone (or its close variations). They can be sorted in three categories:

1. Official firmwares from the phone manufacturer include a kernel with appropriate drivers and, usually, a customized interface (HTC Sense for HTC, TouchWiz for Samsung). Some manufacturers will lag a lot behind Android schedule and you may not get all the new shiny features.
2. Modified firmwares are built from the official firmwares. They usually add a lot of hacks on top of the original firmware, remove some cruft but are still closely related to the official firmware.
3. Firmwares built from Android Open Source Project (the open source version of Android) do not share nothing with the official firmware except some bits related to the kernel (drivers, hacks).

Darky ROM Darky ROM is a modified firmware. It takes the original firmware from Samsung, adds a custom kernel (based on the source of the official kernel), adds a lot of hacks, some additional applications and removes some unwanted cruft. This is a very nice firmware which is quite snappy. This is a drop-in replacement for the default firmware: you will only get improvements. The latest version is 10.1 and there is a neat guide on how to install it.

CyanogenMod CyanogenMod is a firmware built from AOSP. It supports several devices and provide an unified firmware on all of them. Support for the Samsung Galaxy S is recent and is not present in the stable build. However, some RC build is now available. Be sure to read the FAQ (most notably the part saying that you need to install from Froyo 2.2 because the bootloader provided by Samsung with Gingerbread 2.3 is not compatible). You can also grab some information from the wiki. The major drawback of using this firmware instead of going for a modified firmware like Darky ROM is that the battery life may suck. I now need to charge my phone every day instead of once every two days. On the plus side, you get a very clean firmware with a lot of features and almost no cruft. For example, the notification bar can be customized and OpenVPN is available out of the box. Moreover, almost everything is open source (if you don t install Google apps). You can see this firmware as an open source distribution for your phone. There is no need to download random files linked from a random forum to make it work. There is no package manager, though. Despite the bad battery life, I prefer this firmware.

Prerequisites Before trying to flash a new firmware, there are some tools that you need to have. Note that you don t need root access to flash a new firmware.

Download & recovery mode Before trying to install any firmware, you must check that your phone can access download and recovery modes. The download mode allows to flash any new firmware, even if the current firmware does not boot at all. As long as this mode is available, there is very little chance that you brick your phone. To access those modes, you need to use the three-button combo . Here are the steps (your phone should not be plugged):

1. Power off the phone (wait for the phone to vibrate).
2. Hold the Volume down button for download mode. Hold the Volume up button for recovery mode.
3. Hold the Home button.
4. Hold the Power button. The phone will start.
5. Once you have the Samsung logo displayed on the screen, release the Power button.
6. Only release the two other buttons when you enter the recovery mode or download mode. The recovery mode displays a menu. The download mode displays a big yellow Android logo.

If after ten tries, you are unable to access those modes, maybe they have been disabled. Keep reading, there is a solution.

Heimdall Heimdall is a tool to flash a new firmware to your phone. This is not a mandatory tool but you will have to use it if something goes wrong. Most guides will tell you to use Odin. It is a leaked Samsung tool running on Windows only. You can use Heimdall instead.

$ git clone https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/Heimdall.git
Cloning into Heimdall...
remote: Counting objects: 423, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (271/271), done.
remote: Total 423 (delta 220), reused 332 (delta 138)
Receiving objects: 100% (423/423), 5.91 MiB   962 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (220/220), done.
$ cd Heimdall/heimdall
$ sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev
$ ./configure && make
[...]
$ sudo cp 60-heimdall-galaxy-s.rules /etc/udev/rules.d
$ sudo /etc/init.d/udev reload

You need to use this tool while in download mode. You can test it, while in download mode, with:

$ ./heimdall print-pit

This will display the partition table of your phone. This is enlightening to know what it contains:

• IBL+PBL is the boot loader, be extra careful with it;
• PIT is the partition table;
• EFS contains some important data like IEMEI, be extra careful with it;
• SBL is the second boot loader;
• SBL2 is the backup of the second boot loader;
• PARAM contains some images used as various stage of the boot process;
• KERNEL is the kernel;
• RECOVERY is the backup of the kernel;
• FACTORYFS contains /system file system which is some kind of root file system;
• DBDATA contains /data file system which is the database to store application parameters;
• CACHE contains /cache file system which contains the Dalvik cache;
• MODEM contains the firmware for the modem.

As we will see, Heimdall is able to flash any of those partitions with flash subcommand.

adb adb stands for Android Debug Bridge. Among other things, this tool allow you to drive your phone through the USB connection. You can get a shell, reboot into download or recovery mode, push files to your Android device, etc. To get this tool, you need to download the full Android SDK.

$ tar zxvf ~/download/android-sdk_r11-linux_x86.tgz
$ cd android-sdk-linux_x86
$ tools/android update sdk
[select Android SDK Platform-tools]
$ platform-tools/adb shell
# uname -a
Linux localhost 2.6.35.7-I9000XWJVH-CL184813 #Dark_Core_2.4 PREEMPT Mon May 16 15:02:38 EEST 2011 armv7l GNU/Linux

The important commands are:

• shell to get a shell on the device;
• reboot recovery to reboot in recovery mode;
• reboot download to reboot in download mode;
• push to put a file on the phone;
• pull to retrieve a file;
• install to install an application from its APK;
• logcat to see the logs and what happens, very useful!

Restore download mode If your phone is missing download mode, you can recover it with the help of adb and heimdall. You need to grab some official firmware and extract boot.bin and Sbl.bin from it.

$ adb reboot download
$ heimdall flash --primary-boot ~/download/boot.bin --secondary-boot ~/download/Sbl.bin

Be extra careful here. You may brick your phone. Double check that you grab the correct files and that they are really for your phone (there exists some variants). It worked for me.

Installing a new firmware While you can switch from one firmware to another without losing your data, it is better to wipe your system and your data before switching firmware. This means that you will lose all your applications and the data inside them (list of contacts, SMS, preferences). However, nothing will ever modify your data in the internal SD card or in the external SD card (which are both inside the phone). They usually contains your music and your photos. There are two ways to install a firmware:

1. via Heimdall, or
2. using the recovery.

Heimdall When a guide tells you to use Odin, you can use Heimdall instead. Odin takes a TAR file. You should untar it and uses its content with Heimdall. For example:

$ ./heimdall flash --repartition --pit s1_odin_20100512.pit \
>                  --factoryfs factoryfs.rfs \
>                  --cache cache.rfs --dbdata dbdata.rfs \
>                  --param param.lfs --modem modem.bin \
>                  --kernel zImage --secondary-boot Sbl.bin 
Claiming interface again...   Success
Setting up interface...   Success
Beginning session...
Handshaking with Loke...   Success
Uploading PIT
PIT upload successful
Uploading SBL
100%
SBL upload successful
Uploading KERNEL
100%
KERNEL upload successful
Uploading MODEM
100%
MODEM upload successful
Uploading PARAM
100%
PARAM upload successful
Uploading FACTORYFS
100%
FACTORYFS upload successful
Uploading DBDATAFS
100%
DBDATAFS upload successful
Uploading CACHE
100%
CACHE upload successful
Ending session...
Rebooting device...

You may be interested to update your modem using Heimdall. This is usually independent of the firmware you want to use. Also, no need to provide a PIT file if you don t want to repartition. Heimdall can read the current one and flash only one of the partitions.

Recovery mode The base recovery shipped with the Samsung Galaxy S does not have a lot of options. Moreover, it may be locked and will accept to install only signed firmwares. Most firmwares come with ClockWorkMod, a more advanced recovery. Once you get it, you will be able to use any ZIP file to install a new firmware. My advice is to try to get ClockWorkMod as soon as possible. If you are root, you can install ROM Manager that will install it for you. If you are not root, most custom firmwares will provide ClockWorkMod. Therefore, you can just install a custom firmware with Heimdall. There exists special firmwares just for this, like EZbase. If you want to install CyanogenMod, be sure to download a Froyo firmware, not a Gingerbread one. Keep in mind that the recovery is located inside the kernel. It is not self-contained in the bootloader (unlike download mode). If you don t want to flash a whole firmware (and lose everything on your phone) just to get the recovery, you can just flash the kernel. The ClockWorkMod recovery comes with an utility to backup your whole phone. This way, you can easily restore your previous firmware if you don t like the current one. This is what is called a Nandroid backup.

Lagfix A lot of guides will tell you to enable or disable lagfix. Samsung shipped the Galaxy S with some crappy filesystem called RFS (which is some kind of enhanced FAT). It is slow and seems responsible for some lags that may happen on the interface. A lagfix is a way to replace this filesystem by something better, like EXT4 or YAFFS2. The process is pretty straighforward and consist to backup all the partition to the SD card, reformat it with another filesystem and restore the backup. The lagfix may be applied automatically with some firmware (like CyanogenMod) or you may request it in the recovery mode (most modified firmwares work this way). In this case, it will be applied automatically on the next boot. You should disable it before installing another firmware with the recovery mode (no need if you install it with Heimdall).

Applications You can find many free (as in free speech) applications for Android. Unfortunately, Android Market does not allow to use this criteria as a filter. F-Droid is an alternate market featuring only FOSS applications. Here is a short selection of free applications:

• ADW.Launcher is a home replacement app. It is very configurable and themable.
• K-9 Mail is a very nice email client.
• Xabber is a XMPP/Jabber client.
• ConnectBot is an SSH client (as well as a terminal).
• DroidWall is an application firewall (using Netfilter). It lets you select which application can access to Internet depending on your connection (wifi or 3G).
• Barcode Scanner decodes 1D/2D barcode including QR codes.
• OsmAnd is a replacement for Google Maps using OpenStreetMap. The free version on Android Market is out-dated. Buy the plus version or download it throught F-Droid.

Another must-have application is Titanium Backup which allows to backup any application with data. Unfortunately, this is not a free (as in free speech) application.

Periodically Free Software people from other countries visit Melbourne on business trips. Usually when someone is sent any distance on a business trip (IE to Australia from anywhere other than NZ) they will stay in a good hotel (4 star or better), this generally means that they have a pool in their hotel. 5 star hotels and the newer serviced apartment hotels tend to have really good pools (1/4 olympic size isn t uncommon). Hotel pools are very under-utilised, their main purpose AFAIK is to boost the hotel star rating my experience is that it s not common to meet other people in a hotel pool. While food and drinks are often banned in the pool area my observation is that the only rule which matters is no glass . So hotel pools are almost ideal for pool parties, you just need to drink from cans or from drinks in plastic bottles that are poured into plastic cups. If any Free Software person finds themself staying in a hotel in Melbourne Australia with not much to do in the evenings or weekends then one option is to call for a pool party. I ve asked on a local mailing list and it seems that there is enough interest for a small party, the local mailing lists can be used to arrange a party. Also one thing to note is that some hotels have outdoor pools, while Australia is generally a warm place the southern parts of Australia (such as Melbourne) get quite cold in winter, an outdoor pool is not going to be fun for the colder half of the year. So getting a hotel with an indoor pool is very important during the April-September period.

As part of trying to help with Freedom Box, I gained access to a Dream Plug The Dream Plug is one of the leading possible platforms for Freedom Box. Computationally it s sexy for a low-power device. There s a 1200 mhz arm with 512m of RAM. As a platform to enable people to create novel applications, it s great. It has multiple USB ports, two ethernets, a built-in 802.11B/G access point, bluetooth, audio, ESATA, Micro SD and full-sized SD. So, whether you application needs storage, networking, audio, or some interesting side device, you re covered. With the optional JTAG adapter it s even fairly friendly to developers: there are options for recovering from most failures and full console access. If you re looking at a reference platform that s still nominally embedded, but that allows you to play around thinking about what your application could do, this is a great option. However, especially for Freedom Box, it s important to remember that the reference board a developer wants is not the same as a cost-reduced product on which to actually deploy something for people to buy. The Dream Plug is wrong for every actual deployment I ve imagined. First, it s huge. If you happen to have free power plugs on your wall with lots of space above and below them, it might be an option. If however, you re like everyone I know and have power strips, constrained spacing, etc, then the industrial engineering will disappoint at every turn. I was hoping for something that kind of looked like an Apple Airport Express. It s significantly larger than that in every dimension. Also, the plug is oriented the wrong way for minimizing the fraction of the power strip it takes up. The power supply part of the device can be detached, although even that is way too huge for a power strip, and the cable between the power supply and the computer is fairly short. You can reconfigure the device without its plug nature: running a cord from a normal power outlet to the power supply. But then if you have to detach the power supply for heat management reasons, you get a cord from the outlet to the power supply and another cord from the supply to the device. Add a few USB or ESATA devices and the octopus of cables begins to resemble some arcane mechanism. (So far, no elder gods have appeared though.) The other issue is that you almost never want all the functionality. You pay for the bluetooth, audio and ESATA in terms of cost, heat and space regardless of whether you use them. I don t have a lot of applications that really take advantage of the full array of hardware. The firmware update mechanism is decidedly not targeted at end-users. The version I obtained had a hacked copy of Debian lenny. No mechanism was provided for replacing the image in a safe manner that did not potentially require the optional highly-non-end-user-compatible JTAG board if something got interrupted. You could either unscrew the device and get to the micro SD card containing the image, or run software to replace the image from within Debian lenny. It s possible to configure the boot loader to run an update image off USB or SD until that succeeds, but doing that is also a non-end-user operation. In conclusion, the name is perfect. This is exactly what hackers need to dream about the power of small computers everywhere. However we must not forget that there s a step required to turn dreams into reality. Just as with any fully proprietary product, Freedom Box will require cost reduction steps, semi-custom boards and actual OEMs to truly be usable. The claim in the previous sentence that the Freedom Box may have proprietary elements is disquieting to some. I think we can put together a software stack that is free with the possible exception of some device firmware. However, my suspicion is that anyone who turns that into a fully realized end-user product will add proprietary elements. I suspect some of the results of the cost reduction process such as resulting semi-custom boards will be proprietary. In many cases though, I suspect some proprietary software elements will be introduced.

Disclaimer: This post only describes what I ve been hacking on those days, and why. I haven t finished yet, and that might be too long of a story for a blog/planet. I m therefore duplicating the problem and the context, and mentioning the parts already documented on the page dedicated to that hack. Challenge: How to send commands to a computer without using an input device? Context: While it s not frequent, I sometimes run into situations where no input devices would work. That can happen because of a new X server with no compatible input devices; or while running a sample Wayland compositor on a console with X still running (not exactly sure what the problem was exactly); or because running gdb on X from within X is a bad idea; etc. Simple, non-bulletproof solutions:

• Obviously, sshing from another machine is the ideal situation. But that requires an extra machine, which might not be available during a train trip.
• Using a smartphone to do that would be nice, but would require buying such a phone.
• Having an extra input device, with an appropriate X configuration (i.e. not taking that input device into account) could also work. But that wouldn t really help with some weird situations involving console, Wayland compositor, and X.

Alternative, viable solution 1: Buying a tiny, open, programmable device, like the Arduino Nano, a few components like a selector and a push button might do the trick. Then, some bits of programming with the open source Arduino environment should make it possible to connect that device to a USB port using a mini-B cable. Some bits going through a serial console and a daemon listening on it would make it possible to trigger a predefined set of actions just by selecting a position and hitting the button. Tada! No drawback for that solution, except the need for thinking about bringing that device everywhere. :) Alternative, viable solution 2: While I m by no means a phone addict, I tend to have it with me more or less all the time, and it can be connected through a mini-B USB cable. Oh, but then, maybe I could turn it into a suitable device as described above? That s a Motorola RAZR V3, it runs Java applications, and there s a SDK available for Linux (32 bits) through the Motorola developer network. That might be enough, so I decided to jump through some hoops to see whether that s indeed feasible. Not because I like it much better than the Arduino-based solution, just because I can. My hack orola page explains how I went from the maybe it s possible idea to the yes, now I know how to build, upload, and run a custom application certitude. It still lacks the actual Java code running on the phone, as well as its Unix daemon counterpart, but for a good reason: they need be written! At the moment the following sections are available:

• Step 1: Enabling Java Application Loader
• Step 2: Getting the SDK
• Step 3: Toying with a trivial project
• Step 4: Getting ready to deploy

I read something about dh_make again a while ago, which made me wonder, besides dh_make, how do people generally bootstrap new Debian packages. I don't think I've ever actually used dh_make for anything but experimenting. For the longest time, copying over the packaging files from some similar package worked pretty well.

Recently, however, I have applied a completely new strategy: I start with nothing, call debuild, fix the error, retry, until it works. This might sound pretty bizarre, but it works pretty well and enhances your understanding of how the packaging tools work.

Here is about how it works:

Start with nothing, call debuild, it complains:

cannot find readable debian/changelog anywhere!

Call dch --create, which says:

Cannot find debian directory!

OK, mkdir debian, call dch --create again, fill in the template. Call debuild again, now it says:

but there's no debian/rules there!

Create a debian/rules, that's easy to do by heart nowadays, at least as a start:

#!/usr/bin/make -f

%:
        dh $@

Call debuild again, now dpkg-buildpackage actually starts, but stops with:

dpkg-source: error: cannot read mypackage/debian/control: No such file or directory

At this point I'm too lazy to figure out what is necessary to put into debian/control, so let's just keep it simple and touch debian/control. At this point dpkg-source gets into a bit of trouble:

Use of uninitialized value $sourcepackage in sprintf at /usr/bin/dpkg-source line 290.

So let's put that in and also follow the subsequent advice to add debian/source/format and the Maintainer and Standards-Version fields. So far we have:

Source: mypackage
Maintainer: Peter Eisentraut <petere@debian.org>
Standards-Version: 3.9.2

The next hint of a message is:

dh: No packages to build.

This means we need a binary package stanza, so I'll just add

Package: mypackage
Architecture: any

Now debhelper complains:

dh: Compatibility levels before 5 are deprecated.

Not sure why it didn't complain about that earlier. Let's stick 8 in there.

At this point I had to do actual work and mess around with debian/rules a bit to get the package to actually build, but a few minutes later I had a functioning provisional package.

The next step is to clean up the warnings from the various dpkg-* workers:

dpkg-gencontrol: warning: missing information for output field Description
dpkg-gencontrol: warning: package mypackage: unused substitution variable $ shlibs:Depends 
dpkg-deb: warning: parsing file 'debian/mypackage/DEBIAN/control' near line 6 package 'mypackage': missing description
dpkg-genchanges: warning: missing Section for binary package mypackage; using '-'
dpkg-genchanges: warning: missing Priority for binary package mypackage; using '-'
dpkg-genchanges: warning: missing Section for source files
dpkg-genchanges: warning: missing Priority for source files

So we add Description, Depends, Section, and Priority.

And finally we have a list of complaints from Lintian to address:

W: mypackage source: debhelper-but-no-misc-depends mypackage
E: mypackage source: package-uses-debhelper-but-lacks-build-depends
W: mypackage source: package-needs-versioned-debhelper-build-depends 8
W: mypackage source: debhelper-overrides-need-versioned-build-depends (>= 7.0.50~)
E: mypackage source: temporary-debhelper-file debhelper.log
E: mypackage: no-copyright-file

The only things I added manually after that were Vcs-*, Homepage, and Enhances.

Now the only things left to do are running the thing through cowbuilder a few times and putting in all the necessary build dependencies, and writing a nice changelog entry.

Note, this method does not replace putting in some thought. But it's an interesting way to get a relatively clean package.

Sometimes there s nothing quite so heartwarming as hearing a 4-year-old that doesn t think anybody is listening. When Jacob is all alone in his room, sometimes he will sing. Maybe it s a song he knows, or fragments of a song he knows. Or maybe it s something he just made up on the fly. It might be about trains, cats, letters, or who knows what. Maybe it will crack him up and he ll keep singing and then laugh. Or maybe it will stop in 30 seconds and he ll go on to something else. Brief and out of tune though it may be, it is still one of the most beautiful sounds I know and I love to hear it. Jacob loves to have other people sing, too. Sometimes I will make up songs while we drive: We are driving, we are driving, we are driving down the road; we are driving down the old country road and we re making some dust, yes a lot of dust Or Jacob likes me to sing the songs in the Winnie the Pooh book he has (the original, pre-Disney version, which has the words for the songs but not a tune, so I make up a little bit different one each time). Very occasionally he will sing with me, but if he does, he doesn t want anybody to comment about it. I sing with the Kansas Mennonite Men s Chorus. We re a group of about 300 singers (all men, though not all Kansan and not all Mennonite) that sing for charity. We ve raised over $600,000 for charity so far. I still remember the first time I went to a KMMC practice 3 years ago. It was my first year singing, and the first practice of the season. We started singing the first song, and wow what a powerful moment. Even at its imperfect first practice state, hearing 300 people sing quietly is a powerful sound and when they get to the top of their lungs, it s indescribable. No CD can ever quite do that justice. Jacob and Oliver come to KMMC concerts sometimes, but this year they took a special interest. Oliver pointed to, hm, perhaps 300 men and said dad for each one. (He was quite far away and probably couldn t pick me out specifically.) Jacob, for the first time, sat quietly engrossed in the concert until we got to Dry Bones (a song involving surprise and lots of homemade instruments) which made him laugh out loud. Then he would hide under his seat from the applause. Last week, KMMC went on tour. This was my first choir tour, and Terah came along while the boys spent time with grandparents in Kansas. We sang in Bloomington, IL, and then in Goshen, IN at the fairly new Sauder Concert Hall. That hall is a few years old, and has been reviewed as once of the best concert halls in the world acoustically. It seats 1100 people and was perfect for this. The 85 or so singers from KMMC that went on tour joined the Indiana and Ohio Men s Choruses to make a combined group of about 200 singers. And what an experience that was. I learned later this was the first event to completely pack Sauder Concert Hall. We ended the concert singing the Mennonite Anthem a souped-up version of the doxology. (You can see a video of a different group singing it to get an idea of what it was). This is often joked about as being part of Mennonite DNA. You can gather a random group of Mennonites and ask to hear 606 (its number in, well, an old hymnbook that we don t use anymore) and you can probably get a fairly well-sounding rendition, from memory, a cappella, complete with 4-part harmony, at the drop of the hat. Mennonite youth have been known to sing it in train stations, airports, soccer stadiums, and with kazoos. At Goshen, we had 200 men on stage, plus a brass band, plus 1100 people in the audience facing us. They were, of course, invited to sing along. (That s one of the rules of 606: you can t exclude anybody because even if you tried, they d still sing, because how can you resist?) So I was up there on stage, singing a song I love, and hearing the 1100 people in the audience sing it to me. I could glance out over the front rows and saw the smiles on so many faces as they sang, and what a moving moment that was. The excitement and thrill of it all hit me so much that I could barely finish the song. The numbers aren t all in yet, but I m guessing that we raised over $15,000 for charity last weekend (the choir members paid their own expenses in advance, so 100% of the money raised goes to international relief efforts.) A 4-year-old singing alone in his room is really heartwarming. I have to say that 1300 people singing a song that touches each one of them is a pretty close second.

My internship is now finished, this means that I will be able to work on my GSoC project a lot more than the previous weeks. I hope to make some good progress in the next days.

This last 2 weeks, I was still studying how Jigsaw works. Even if there is no progress on the Jigsaw packaging I have done some packages that will help later.

I ve spend a lot of time trying to package JT Harness and JTReg.
I ve successfully built JT Harness using CDBS but I ve finally rewritten the package using only debhelper and javahelper. Javahelper was really useful to build JAR files, move them to the right directory, put the Javadoc in the right place as well as the examples. The Debian directory of JT Harness can be found on the Java team SVN.

svn co svn+ssh://$ SVN_USER @svn.debian.org/svn/pkg-java/trunk/libjtharness-java

The source package of jtharness build 2 binary packages: libjtharness-java and libjtharness-java-doc. You can see that by looking at the control file in the debian directory. There are some interesting files in this package, let s take a look at them.

First of all, some of the source files needed to be patched for the package to build. So to accomplish this, there is a couple of patches in debian/patches :

• dependencies.diff, used to locate JAR files in /usr/share/java , and,
• rxtx.diff, done by Tom Marble used to change some imports from javax.comm to gnu.io .

To generate these patches, I ve used the edit-patch command which is a really awesome tool. This command uses a temporary shell where we can edit files we want to patch. When the job is done, CTRL + D terminates the temporary shell and the patch is generated.

There are 4 interesting files which are used to build the binary packages and put the files in the right directories. These files are:

• rules,
• libjtharness-java-doc.install,
• libjtharness-java.jlibs, and,
• libjtharness-java-doc.javadoc.

Of course rules is the most important one. This file tells us how packages are built. A good thing is that rules is quite simple in the jtharness case.

#!/usr/bin/make -f
JAVA_HOME = /usr/lib/jvm/default-java

override_dh_auto_build:
ant -f build/build.xml

%:
dh $@ --with javahelper

We just tell where Java is and to use javahelper ( with javahelper). Overriding dh_auto_build is interesting because since the JT Harness uses Ant as build system we need to give to Ant where the build.xml file is. By default Ant is searching it in the current directory but in jtharness the file is in the build directory. Since the Ant build file is correctly written, the build generates JAR files, Javadoc and examples code. And libjtharness-java* files are here to put the generated things in the right places.
The job of libjtharness-java.jlibs is to tell where to find the JAR libraries. In this case, the intesresting JAR files were javatest.jar and jt-junit.jar . So in the .jlibs file we just give where those files are after being built.
The job of libjtharness-java-doc.javadoc is to tell where the Javadoc is and where to put it. So there is only one line that says the generated Javadoc is in jar-build/javadoc and put it in /usr/share/doc/libjtharness-java/api .
And finally, libjtharness-java-doc.install is used to move the examples. The syntax is same as libjtharness-java-doc.javadoc .

The JT Harness package can be found in Sid now thanks to Sylvestre Ledru who uploaded it for me. So the ITP bug that I created is now closed.

Building the package for jtreg is quite similar. In fact, it probably easier but I m still facing a problem. jtharness is just a library, jtreg does have main classes and generate some binaries. The difficulty here is to generate the man pages for the 2 generated binaries: jtdiff and jtreg. These 2 files are shell scripts which just use jtreg.jar with the correct parameters.

I tried several tools to generate the man pages of each script. Sadly, I can t find a way that does not causes any problems.
My first choice was to use help2man. This tool looked like to be perfect for the job. But I couldn t find how to launch the scripts correctly. The scripts needs jtreg.jar but they also need javatest.jar from the libjtharness-java package. The classpath cannot be set correctly due how the scripts are written. So to use help2man I ll probably have to patch and completely rewrite jtdiff.sh and jtreg.sh in the sources.
My second choice was to use txt2man. During the build of jtreg there is a usage.txt file which is generated and which can be used as a man page. txt2man can take this text file and output a man page based on the text. I thought it was working but when building the package, lintian threw some warnings about syntax errors in the man pages.

W: jtreg: manpage-has-bad-whatis-entry usr/share/man/man1/jtdiff.1.gz
W: jtreg: manpage-has-errors-from-man usr/share/man/man1/jtdiff.1.gz 292: warning [p 4, 3.3i]: cannot adjust line

Finally, few days ago I decided to try rst2man. This tool looks cool and easy to use. But the text that I have to convert into a man page is not a reStructured text so it cannot without patching the usage.txt file for example. I was going to do it but there is no such file in the sources of jtreg. Actually this file is generated during the build but the text had to come from somewhere. And it was from two properties files in the source code.
I m still looking for a good solution to generate the man pages. If someone has any idea just let me know

The debian packaging of jtreg is not in the Java team SVN yet because of the man pages problem. I opened an ITP bug so people know that someone is working on jtreg.

My goal for the next two weeks is to finish the jtreg package, understand how jpkg (which is supposed to create Debian packages) works in Jigsaw and write more examples using the modular JVM.

Things aren t exactly going as smoothly as expected. Here are some explanations. First collateral damage: non-free fglrx and nvidia drivers. We have to admit we didn t think of those when we moved libGL.so.1 (and friends) from /usr/lib to /usr/lib/<triplet> (that s the move we call adding multiarch support ). In the mesa 7.10.3-2 upload, some Breaks statements were added to prevent users from installing new mesa packages if they still have old (without multiarch support) fglrx or nvidia packages. Solution: Sticking to the mesa packages in testing is the way to go until fixed fglrx and nvidia packages are uploaded. Second collateral damage: xserver-xorg-core in testing. The plan was to rebuild the server in unstable against the new mesa libraries, so that it would look into the new /usr/lib/<triplet> directory for mesa drivers. Since no source changes were needed, we went for a binNMU as explained in the previous blog post. That s the usual way to deal with libraries, and does the job very nicely. But that failed in this special case, for the following reasons:

1. The server only has libgl1-mesa-dri in Recommends, so there s no hard dependency here.
2. Usually, rebuilding a package against a new library means getting a dependency on the new library (typically because the binary compatibility has been broken, so the SONAME got bumped, meaning one depends on libfoo42 instead of libfoo41). And that means going in testing at the same time as the new library.

But in this case, rebuilding against the new library just means having a different search path somewhere in libglx.so. So the rebuilt package (2:1.10.2-1+b1) happily reached testing, which still contains the old mesa packages, which ship their files in the old /usr/lib path! Solution: Stick to 2:1.10.2-1 packages (snapshot.debian.org to the rescue), or wait a bit and get fixed packages. To get fixed packages, two things were needed:

1. Getting the server package fixed in unstable: that means adding Breaks against old (pre-multiarch) mesa packages, as seen in 2:1.10.2-2. This will ensure that new server package built against new mesa will not be co-installable with old mesa packages, and both mesa and the server should migrate together to testing.
2. Getting the server built again within testing, so that it gets built against old mesa, so that both mesa and the server in testing remains without multiarch until the packages in unstable are ready to migrate together.

While taking care of that second step, it was discovered that many buildds are still lacking a testing chroot, so there might be some delay until the server is rebuilt in testing (as 2:1.10.2-1+wheezy1). Eager users can use the time travel machine mentioned above to get stuff working again sooner. (As far as I can tell, the last problematic combination which would remain would be 2:1.10.2-1+wheezy1 server with new mesa, but we ll make sure we update the Breaks in the new mesa to make sure that it can t happen. Since it s not as urgent as getting the server in testing fixed, it s only queued for mesa 7.10.3-3 for now.)

I'm writing a blog entry instead of just replying to myself on a mailing list, since this subject might be interesting to a largish portion of the community. Most people assume things just magically work out by themselves and then after a release wonder why it wasn't so.

So, I raised a question on ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list about whether usb-modeswitch should be included in the default Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installation instead of it only being in the universe repository. Reason was simply that firstly, I've read some general wonderings from the community about why it isn't already so. Secondly, without it my 3G modem (Huawei E1552) was first not functional, but right after installing usb-modeswitch package Network Manager worked smoothly with it.

Since I didn't get much discussion going on besides some statements that it doesn't work for everybody and even has caused extra problems for some others (in 9.10), I asked for a small round of comments on the subject on IRC. The channels are logged so I believe I can quote those a bit.

Colin Watson said among else:

"surely we just want the kernel to DTRT [do the right thing] by default ... this is the upstream trend ... it already DTRT for quite a few devices"
"I'd be very concerned about advertising that it's the Way to get things to work, and thus undermining getting things fixed in the kernel"
"I agree that usb-modeswitch is often a way to get otherwise non-working hardware to work ... I'm just not very convinced it's a real properly supportable option"
"but I'm just another user from this point of view, albeit one who ended up in quite a few discussions with various appropriate upstreams last time round :)"

Later on Paul Sladen continued a bit, among else:

"usb-modeswitch is a very long-winded way of sending a single usb-mass-storage command to the device's first profile"
"grep -hr MessageContent usb_modeswitch.d/ sort -n uniq -c sort -rn shows the level of duplication in the configuration files"
"...I do like that it is done in userspace though, as so easy to disable if you wanted something else".

Meanwhile I also IM:d a bit with Antti Kaijanm ki from whom I probably originally coined the idea of following whether usb-modeswitch is integrated into Ubuntu or not. He mainly said that he doubts the feasibility of updating kernel's USB storage quirks in a stable release, compared to having stable release upgrades about the usb-modeswitch-data udev rules. He also proposed discussing maintainability and usability by distros with the Debian maintainer and upstream, although it sounds like Colin might have had some talks already.

So there we are now. Apparently at this point it is hoped that as many quirks as possible are inserted in the kernel, see for example drivers/usb/storage/unusual_devs.h in the kernel. But if you have concerns about if 10.04 LTS will be kept up-to-date regarding 3G modems and want to somehow participate in bringing usb-modeswitch into Ubuntu default installation or simply discuss how to handle the kernel SRUs properly, it's time to stand up and do something.

Should there perhaps be a process with which the usb-modeswitch developers would get the information they are gathering more easily to the upstream kernel _and_ (older) distribution kernels? Is this simply a case of being easier to address an issue with a "hackish" approach, or is the usb-modeswitch actually the right way to go?

Note that I'm no expert in this area, I simply become interested in various subject from time to time :)

-Timo, going to figure out a kernel quirk for his 3G modem

Just a quick heads-up: I ve just uploaded mesa 7.10.2-4, which is multiarch-enabled, thanks to Steve Langasek. As explained in its changelog, this breaks the X server currently in testing and in unstable, but a rebuild is already pending, which will make everyone upgradable. For curious people, those commands took care of scheduling the binNMU, with a proper dep-wait:

wb nmu xorg-server . ALL . -m 'Rebuild against new (multiarch-enabled) mesa.'
wb dw xorg-server . ALL . -m 'libgl1-mesa-dev (>= 7.10.2-4)'

In the meanwhile, if your mirror gets a new mesa without the rebuilt server, your package manager should bail out and refuse to upgrade mesa (or propose to remove the server). So wait a bit, upgrade everything, and enjoy! mesa 7.10.3 (released a few hours ago) should reach unstable tomorrow, so that we can ask our users to track (possible) regressions between 7.10.2-3 and 7.10.3-1 to either 7.10.2-4 (multiarchification), or to 7.10.3-1 (the stable upgrade), thanks to the excellent http://snapshot.debian.org/ service.

This is a follow-up on TDebs with some detail of how existing packages can be adapted to support TDebs.

$ cat debian/package-tdeb.tdeb

[gettextdir] po
[gettextname] package
[po4apodir] doc/po
[po4amandir] doc/package/man/
[po4acommand] po4a-build


What's happening then? Well, the first thing to take into account is that a lot of the values for these settings will be dictated by upstream, which is why it is necessary for maintainers to add this information as a support file in debian/. I tried determining all this information automatically but the script got far too long and still was far from complete.

• gettextdir - usually po but some upstream packages can support multiple po generation, so this allows for those.
• gettextname - the hardest thing to identify reliably, this is the name of the files to be installed in /usr/share/locale/lang/LC_MESSAGES/ and the name of the of the POT file.
• po4apodir - po4a is for documentation translation support, which is more variable, so a po4acommand field is available too.

Other changes
The (currently unsupported in Debian) XC-Package-Type: tdeb option is used in debian/control to mark a new or existing package as a TDeb. To use an existing package, it must comply with the rules for a TDeb including that it must be Architecture: all. The other rules centre around build issues. If any of the files in the existing package would require execution of any part of the normal build process of the package, these would have to be moved out of the package before that package could be a TDeb. The reason is that TDeb generation by translators needs to not require a full build environment for every individual package and must not risk modifying package contents in ways which are related to the build environment. So, unchanged images and other architecture-independent files are OK, any files which need build-dependencies are a problem. I don't know how many packages there are out there with such files. If you have a -data or -common package which contains translated data and that package also includes architecture-independent files, I'd be interested in knowing the name of the packages involved. If those packages also include files which are generated or modified within the package build, I'll be particularly interested in knowing about those source packages.
debconf
The most common use of TDebs during a release cycle is probably going to be debconf template updates by Christian and these are handled without needing a listing in the .tdeb file.
Other formats
I'm looking at QtLinguist support and it should be fairly straightforward using the .tdeb file arrangement.

Once that's done (in a branch, please - these can't be uploaded yet), the package can be tested with the soon-to-be-uploaded emdebian-tdeb package. The old content has been moved into the emdebian-grip-server package and the dependencies of the old version stripped back. The package contains two scripts dpkg-gentdeb and dh_gentdeb which I hope to get included into the respective packages in time for Wheezy. The idea will be that build systems (dh7, CDBS, debhelper-plain etc.) includes a call to the relevant script. (dh_ is just a wrapper around dpkg- in this case). This would allow maintainers to create the first TDeb, get that through NEW and then the fun starts. Once the translation mechanism is set up, I would like a nominated person (likely to be Christian if he agrees) to co-ordinate translation updates for particular packages to allow for a single upload including updates for many translations. This would be package_version+t1_all.tdeb and an appropriate .diff.gz or debian.tar.gz. No binary upload, no impact on testing migrations.

This is mostly theory right now but the scripts do exist in Emdebian SVN.

Still more testing to do but I hope to upload these scripts to unstable in the next few days.

See comments at the end about this 3rd version This is time again for yet another bubulle game: counting the number of developers per country. I already published such analysis in 2010 and 2009. So, here we are with the June 2011 version, sorted by the ratio of *active* developers per million population for each country.

Act: number of active developers
Dev: total number of developers
A/M: number of active devels per million pop.
D/M: number of devels per million pop.
2009: rank in 2009
2010: rank in 2010
June 2011: rank now

Code	Name	Population	Act Dev	Dev	Act/Million	Dev/Million	2009	2010	June 2011
fi	Finland	5374781	21	31	3,91	5,77	1	1	1
ch	Switzerland	7866500	21	26	2,67	3,31	2	2	2
mq	Martinique	397730	1	1	2,51	2,51			3
no	Norway	4964500	12	15	2,42	3,02	5	4	4
nz	New Zealand	4393500	10	15	2,28	3,41	4	3	5
ie	Ireland	4470700	10	13	2,24	2,91	13	9	6
se	Sweden	9354462	19	35	2,03	3,74	3	6	7
lu	Luxemburg	511840	1	1	1,95	1,95	8	5	8
de	Germany	81802000	155	221	1,89	2,7	7	7	9
at	Austria	8404252	15	25	1,78	2,97	6	8	10
fr	France	63136180	91	119	1,44	1,88	12	12	11
au	Australia	22632213	31	57	1,37	2,52	9	10	12
be	Belgium	11007020	15	17	1,36	1,54	10	11	13
uk	United-Kingdom	62008048	67	106	1,08	1,71	14	14	14
nl	Netherlands	16674600	18	37	1,08	2,22	11	13	15
dk	Denmark	5564219	6	10	1,08	1,8	17	17	16
ca	Canada	34480000	27	57	0,78	1,65	15	15	17
hr	Croatia	4429078	3	3	0,68	0,68	20	18	18
es	Spain	46030109	31	51	0,67	1,11	16	16	19
lt	Lithuania	3225346	2	2	0,62	0,62	28	19	20
cz	Czech Rep	10540748	6	6	0,57	0,57	21	20	21
it	Italy	60605053	33	47	0,54	0,78	23	22	22
bg	Bulgaria	7351254	4	4	0,54	0,54	25	23	23
il	Israel	7602400	4	6	0,53	0,79	24	24	24
us	USA	308745538	162	364	0,52	1,18	19	21	25
hu	Hungary	9979000	5	11	0,5	1,1	18	25	26
lv	Latvia	2245357	1	1	0,45	0,45	26	26	27
uy	Uruguay	3494382	1	2	0,29	0,57	22	27	28
jp	Japan	127960000	33	46	0,26	0,36	30	28	29
pl	Poland	38186860	9	13	0,24	0,34	29	29	30
cr	Costa Rica	4253897	1	1	0,24	0,24	31	30	31
pt	Portugal	10647763	2	4	0,19	0,38	27	32	32
sk	Slovakia	5429763	1	1	0,18	0,18	32	31	33
gr	Greece	11305118	2	3	0,18	0,27	33	38	34
ar	Argentina	40091359	7	9	0,17	0,22	34	33	35
sv	El Salvador	6134000	1	1	0,16	0,16			36
tw	Taiwan	23061689	3	3	0,13	0,13	37	34	37
br	Brazil	190732694	20	21	0,1	0,11	36	35	38
by	Belarus	9648533	1	1	0,1	0,1	35	36	39
mg	Madagascar	20653556	2	2	0,1	0,1	44	37	40
cu	Cuba	11239363	1	1	0,09	0,09		38	41
kr	South Korea	48758000	4	6	0,08	0,12	39	39	42
ec	Ecuador	14790608	1	1	0,07	0,07		40	43
cl	Chile	17224200	1	2	0,06	0,12	42	41	44
ro	Romania	21466174	1	2	0,05	0,09	45	43	45
co	Colombia	45925397	2	3	0,04	0,07	41	44	46
ru	Russia	142905200	6	7	0,04	0,05	43	42	47
za	South Africa	49991300	2	9	0,04	0,18	38	48	48
my	Malaysia	27565821	1	1	0,04	0,04			49
ve	Venezuela	29105632	1	1	0,03	0,03	40	45	50
pe	Peru	29496000	1	1	0,03	0,03	46	46	51
tr	Turkey	73722988	2	2	0,03	0,03	47	47	52
mx	Mexico	112322757	2	2	0,02	0,02	49	49	53
th	Thailand	63878267	1	2	0,02	0,03	50	50	54
eg	Egypt	80085862	1	3	0,01	0,04	51	51	55
in	India	1210193422	8	8	0,01	0,01	52	52	56
cn	China	1339724852	7	11	0,01	0,01	53	53	57
ua	Ukraine	45888000	0	0	0	0	48	53	58
			896	1450	61,79%

A few interesting facts:

• There are active DDs in 57 countries
• Martinique pops up at rank 3. As this French overseas "d partement" has its own ISO code, it is counted here separately from France, though Martinique inhabitants are French citizens. That's of course a though case but I consider that David did choose to use "MQ" in his record, which means this is important for him. Let's respect that wish.
• Norway is now ahead of New Zealand. One more DD since last count
• Sweden is ahead of Luxembourg. Two more DDs since last count
• France takes over Australia and Belgium. *seven* more DDs since last count!
• UK is ahead of Netherlands now. Three more DDs since last count.
• Denmark passes Canada and Spain (50% more DDs for DK), while Croatia passes Spain (because Spain lost 3 DDs).
• USA continues to go down (by 3 this time). We're constantly losing developers over there (-3 in one year).
• And we have a new country in this list as Malaysia now has a Debian developer. Along with Martinique (ahem), this makes two new "countries" in this list. No country disappeared.
• For the first time in 12 years, DebConf will be in a country (Bosnia and Herzegovina) that has NO Debian developer. This has to change.
• We have 23 more active Debian developers and 40 more developers overall.

v2 comment: This is the second version of this blog post. I have been pointed that the population I was using for "Ireland" is indeed the population of the entire island, so Republic of Ireland (Eire) plus Northern Ireland (Ulster). We may guess that people listing "IE" as their country are citizens of the Republic of Ireland, so the population to use is that of this part of the island. As a consequence, Ireland is bumped up to 6th rank instead of 9th. v3 comment: Doh. Since I'm doing this survey, I was always adding people using "sv" as country to Sweden. This is a quite common mistake and it was happening in the past. But now, there is only ONE developer who uses "sv" as country, this is Rene Mayorga and he definitely lives in El Salvador, not Sweden. As a consequence, Sweden lost one developer (but keeps its rank) and El Salvador now appears at rank 36. It is not a "new" country as Rene is DD for quite some time.