Raphaël Hertzog: Save disk space by excluding useless files with dpkg
Most packages contain files that you don t need: for example translations in languages that you don t understand, or documentation that you don t read. Wouldn t it be nice if you could get rid of them and save a few megabytes? Good news: since dpkg 1.15.8 you can!
dpkg has two options --path-include=glob-pattern and --path-exclude=glob-pattern that control what files are installed or not. The pattern work the same than what you re used to on the shell (see the glob(7) manual page).
Passing those options on the command-line would be impractical, so the best way to use them is to put them in a file in /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/. Beware, the order of the options does matter: when a file matches several options, the last one makes the decision.
A typical usage is to first exclude a directory and then to re-include parts of that directory that you want to keep. For example if you want to drop gettext translations and translated manual pages except French, you could put this in /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/excludes:
# Drop locales except French path-exclude=/usr/share/locale/* path-include=/usr/share/locale/fr/* path-include=/usr/share/locale/locale.alias # Drop translated manual pages except French path-exclude=/usr/share/man/* path-include=/usr/share/man/man[1-9]/* path-include=/usr/share/man/fr*/*Note that the files will vanish progressively every time that a package is upgraded. If you want to save space immediately, you have to reinstall the packages present in your system.
aptitude reinstall or apt-get --reinstall install might help. In theory with aptitude you can even do aptitude reinstall ~i but it tends to not work because one package is not available (either because it was installed manually or because the installed version has been superseded by a newer version on the mirror).
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This brief announcement was published in the 
Dear Lazyweb, how do all y all using virts recreate the build
machine setup periodically? I have tried and failed to get
In the last years I noticed a growing trend of people pushing for "new" rules about what is appropriate or not for single developers or for the project as a whole. In too many cases even just considering these ideas to be an obvious fact... I prefer to not give specific examples because these would divert the attention from the main topic and would be affected by my own biases.
At this point I believe it is useful to remember that all ethical issues which are not explicitly covered by the Social Contract are just the developers' own opinions. It may even be a good idea, but other developers are not and should not be compelled to agree with it no matter how good or important you believe it is.
You are entitled to having your own ethics and even ranting about it on Planet Debian, but I am entitled to not caring at all without this making me a worse Debian Developer. Let's try to be grown ups and not be excessively annoyed by other people's choices.
This is why I want to convey this simple message to the people who keep preaching about what is proper for me or for Debian: please fuck you. If I want to receive lectures about what is right or wrong then I surely know where I can find a priest.
For some reason, now I see fit to mention that I have an 
if I'm not mistaken, more & more people are trying to hunt down RC bugs
nice! here are my contributions during the last weeks:
If you use 
I ve just release pommed v1.35, adding support for the October 2010 MacBook Air machines.
Kernel support for these machines has been submitted during the 2.6.37-rc cycle, so it will appear in 2.6.37 or 2.6.38 depending on maintainers, merge window and patch readiness.
The machines have new keyboard assemblies (WellSpring IV and IVa) requiring new quirks in the HID layer, new trackpads, need sound & applesmc configurations of their own and the backlight module needs to know about them. So, make sure your kernel has all of that, otherwise your machine will be hard to use and pommed will not work at all.
Update: #603395 filed against linux-2.6 with all the needed patches attached. It looks like we ll have all of this in Squeeze, thanks to our kernel team.
I finally got around to clearing out my ~/Programming and publishing a number
of the silly toy projects I've built up over the years that might be useful to
someone, somewhere. A brief overview of what I've basically thrown over the
wall to GitHub:
(Mainly for my own information, so I can find this again
later!)
I'm running Debian Squeeze on my Lenovo Thinkpad X200 laptop, using
the amd64 version so that I can make the most of the 64-bit
CPU. However, I also need a range of 32-bit apps too for now,
typically proprietary rubbish like the Flash plug-in for
Firefox^WIceweasel. So I set up a 32-bit chroot with a small Debian
installation in there too. (Roll on multi-arch!) That's been working
ok for a while, except that I couldn't get working audio in my
browser. I didn't really pay much attention to that until recently: I
wanted to watch some videos on YouTube and the sound mattered!
After some digging, it became clear that Iceweasel inside the
chroot just wasn't talking to the currently-running pulseaudio server
outside the chroot. I had installed all the required libs in the
chroot too, but still no joy. After some searching (thanks to the
folks on the Archlinux wiki
for 
.
The 
I'm about to release new 
The new version 0.2.9 of