• Kenshi Muto has released custom debian-installer images for Lenny with Linux kernel 2.6.32. The images are available only for i386 and amd64.
• The GPG key signing coordination pages are now hosted in the Debian Wiki. Read first the coordination page before register your key signing request.
  If you registered to offer keysigning to others, take a moment to check if your data is up-to-date.
• If you are a user of debian-ports.org, there is a new archive signing key.
• For Python developers, the latest upload of http://packages.debian.org/sid/python-stdeb 0.5, includes pypi-install for installing packages from the Python Package Index . Read more in this email from debian-python.
• Upcoming Bug Squashing Parties: Tokyo, New York city and M nchengladbach (Gemany).

I ve been around Debian for some time, however am not a official Debian Developer and I can t become overnight because country I live in (Bosnia) and I have no one to sign my key. I doubt I could easily do it in Croatia or Serbia my neighboring countries. This is definitely another reason why I m pursuing to have DebConf11 in Balkans (read: Bosnia). I didn t get my key signed on DebConf9 since I hesitated whether to keep my old DSA 768 bit key or not. However by the end of this month I m planning to visit some friends on TUWIEN and planing to meet up with some DD from Vienna and get my key signed. Btw I d like to use this opportunity to call all DD residing in Vienna (Rhonda?) to contact me So what am talking about after all? Thunderbird 3.0 was released 29 ago, Icedove 3.0 is in experimental but only arm and i386 arch. and I m using amd64. After I kept bothering nice people at #debian-buildd they told me to make my own, and once I built my own I don t have permissions to upload it to ftp-mater there s no sense I upload it through mentors

So I m making my Icedove amd64 packages available if you want them: http://foolcontrol.org/deb/icedove-3.0_3.0~rc2-2_amd64.deb
http://foolcontrol.org/deb/icedove-3.0-gnome-support_3.0~rc2-2_amd64.deb
http://foolcontrol.org/deb/icedove-3.0-dbg_3.0~rc2-2_amd64.deb I didn t even change the maintainer name, I kept it all as original package, except it s now available for amd64 architecture, hopefully we ll see these on Debian servers as well

• 802.1q (VLANs).
• 802.1ax (link aggregation) between the pair of switches in a chassis.
• 802.17 or another simple Ethernet ring protocol, but I can live with a decent 802.1d implementation (STP) as well.
• IGMP and MLD snooping, while not yet a mandatory requirement, would be appreciated.

Why link aggregation? It is the only simple solution for having complete fault tolerance without configuring the STP in the servers (which is annoying, because Linux does not implement portfast) or even worse OSPF. That's it. I do not need routing protocols or even L3 routing at all, just a simple switch. But apparently the vendors would rather sell me an high end device...

Over the holidays I investigated how to cross-compile GTK applications for Windows, and managed to port screen-message. I also created an Inno Setup based installer for it that includes the necessary GTK DLLs. You can grab it from the screen-message homepage. The installer optionally binds screen-messages to the key combination Alt-Ctrl-S.
I would have published the binary much earlier if starting the application had not always given the error message

The application failed to initialize properly (0xc000007b). Click on OK to terminate the application.

on Windows, while it worked fine under WINE. It took me a while to find the cause, as there seems to be only one mention of it in the internet: One must not use MinGW s strip.exe utility on DLLs not created with MinGW, it seems. I added a make installer target to the Makefile to create the installer. If you are curious about how that works, have a look at the source.

Being a bit of a freak I actually tend to read my boot output. Well, when I'm not using that time to go grab a cup of coffee first thing on a Monday morning. However I don't always find Debian's default output as clear as I'd like (especially when I haven't had that coffee yet, or when I'm half watching a remote machine boot over its serial console). ISTR that RedHat had much nicer boot output (I'm talking about text based here, not the fancy Plymouth stuff) with a row of OK/FAILED etc down the right hand side that made it nice and obvious what was happening. Of course we can do that with Debian, at least for packages that use the lsb-base logging functions. Drop the following into /etc/lsb-base-logging.sh and enjoy a slightly prettier boot. I'm slowly filing wishlist bugs with patches for those bits and pieces I use that don't use lsb-base for their init script logging.

# Colour our init scripts output
# int log_end_message (int exitstatus)
log_end_msg ()  
    # If no arguments were passed, return
    if [ -z "$ 1:- " ]; then
        return 1
    fi
    retval=$1
    log_end_msg_pre "$@"
    # Only do the fancy stuff if we have an appropriate terminal
    # and if /usr is already mounted
    if log_use_fancy_output; then
        RED= $TPUT setaf 1 
        GREEN= $TPUT setaf 2 
        YELLOW= $TPUT setaf 3 
        NORMAL= $TPUT sgr0 
        $TPUT hpa $(( $TPUT cols  - 12))
    else
        RED=''
        GREEN=''
        YELLOW=''
        NORMAL=''
    fi
    if [ $1 -eq 0 ]; then
        /bin/echo -e " [   $ GREEN OK$ NORMAL    ]"
    elif [ $1 -eq 255 ]; then
        /bin/echo -e " [$ YELLOW WARNING!$ NORMAL ]"
    else
        /bin/echo -e " [ $ RED FAILED$ NORMAL  ]"
    fi
    log_end_msg_post "$@"
    return $retval
 
log_action_end_msg ()  
    log_action_end_msg_pre "$@"
    if [ -z "$ 2:- " ]; then
        end=""
    else
        end=" ($2)"
    fi
    /bin/echo -n "$ end "
    # Only do the fancy stuff if we have an appropriate terminal
    # and if /usr is already mounted
    if log_use_fancy_output; then
        RED= $TPUT setaf 1 
        BLUE= $TPUT setaf 4 
        NORMAL= $TPUT sgr0 
        $TPUT hpa $(( $TPUT cols  - 12))
    else
        RED=''
        BLUE=''
        NORMAL=''
    fi
    if [ $1 -eq 0 ]; then
        /bin/echo -e " [  $ BLUE DONE$ NORMAL   ]"
    else
        /bin/echo -e " [ $ RED FAILED$ NORMAL  ]"
    fi
    log_action_end_msg_post "$@"
 

(This is mostly for my own future reference, because I keep trying to search for details on it and not finding exactly what I want. I forget where I even found the basis for this, though there are lots of similar snippets out there. I've not tried it with a concurrency based boot so it may well look horrible under that.)

So, while Richard is busy doing research and arranging or facilitating several Debian workshops, here I am, gulping down Idlis and Dosas by the dozen. It's been a fun visit, and I got to visit several places in my native state, but since my visit to Mumbai is rather short, I won't be able to say hello to several friends this time (Sorry Kartik). Maybe this would happen only when I am back in India on a permanent basis; let's see...Here are some general guidelines for travelers which I'd like to share:

• They say it doesn't snow in Dallas. Don't believe them. I had to stay overnight at Dallas, and then embark on a trip in the other direction (trans-Pacific) to get home. It wasn't a really fun journey.
• If you're ever rerouted due to flight delays, ensure you travel by a similar route, or else, ensure that you're not a vegetarian/vegan. If you fly to Tokyo and Hong Kong, for instance, be sure that you've specified your meal choices well in advance. Of course, you can live on fruits and bread, but you'll really be doing yourself a favour by not missing your flights in the first place; I don't know how I have wronged the weather gods this time.
• Ensure that you don't keep too many valuables (which Customs might be suspicious of) in your checked-in baggage. This is important, especially to get through situations where you find that your baggage doesn't arrive with you (my baggage came a day late, and, thankfully, cleared customs quickly since my clothes were duty free, thanks to the many heavy duty cycles they've gone through in washing machines).

It's been a really fun trip, and I am sure I'll enjoy the rest of the trip, till I get back to my old routine and resume work.Finally, in keeping with the spirit of a blog I try to understand (albeit, in vain, I must accept), I duplicate the concept of a post from that blog, here is an up-to-date list of airports in which I have sat, but never left except by way of airplane:

• LGW
• IDR
• EWR
• CLT
• TKO
• HKG

More updates later. Bye for now.

The shiny new 0.2.1 release of RInside, a set of convenience classes to facilitate embedding of R inside of C++ applications, just went out to CRAN; sources are also at my RInside page This is a maintenance release building on the recent 0.2.0 release which added Windows support (provided you use the Rtools toolchain for Windows). In this release, we changed the startup initialization so that interactive() comes out FALSE (just as we had done for littler just yesterday) and with that no longer call Rf_KillAllDevices() from the destructor as we may not have had devices in the first place. A few minor things were tweaked around the code organisation and build process, see the ChangeLog for details. The new release should hit CRAN mirrors tomorrow, and is (as always) available from my machine too.

I wrote a plugin for Hudson today, which integrates Devel::Cover (Perl's test coverage tool) into the build reports. Actually, that's currently an exaggeration. All it does is add a checkbox in the configure page, and a link to Devel::Cover's reports on the build page when it's enabled. I spent the day remembering how to program in Java. Tomorrow I might be in a position to extend it into something more attractive - I'll publish it very soon, but I need to run it past my employer. Watch this space. In other news, I volunteered to package Hudson for Debian, and then discovered just how many dependencies it has. This should keep me going until squeeze+1, I think.

I love unicode. You should too. For the unicode-lover out there, Joachim Breitner recently created an xscreensaver hack called unicode and uploaded it to debian. [1] I didn't like the default colourscheme of black text on a white background, so I hacked it to support colour configurability. The patches are in the Debian package as of version 0.2-1. If you're using xscreensaver, you can configure it using the xscreensaver configuration dialog for a subset of the available colours. If you want different colours, you can edit ~/.xscreensaver by hand. Gnome screensaver, however, does not have a configuration UI, opting instead to present a simpler interface and also allow administrators to lock down the screensaver configuration if desired. You can still configure the screensaver on unlocked systems without a GUI. Here's how to do it. [2] At a terminal:

mkdir -p .local/share/applications/screensavers
cp /usr/share/applications/screensavers/unicode.desktop .local/share/applications/screensavers
editor .local/share/applications/screensavers

There's an Exec line in the file that should look like this:

Exec=/usr/lib/xscreensaver/unicode -root

Change it to look like this:

Exec=/usr/lib/xscreensaver/unicode -root -background <bgcolor> -foreground <fontcolor>

Swap the two colours with any X11 colour of your choice. Make sure to quote any multiple-word colour names. I like black as a background, with white or firebrick or another non-jarring bright colour as the font colour. If you want, you can also change the "Name" field in the file, but it's not necessary for things to work. Now, open up gnome-screensaver-preferences and select the new screensaver. Lastly, leave your laptop strategically with the screensaver on to geek out all your friends with your unicode prowess. [1] Thanks Joachim! [2] There is actually another way to do it, if you prefer to interact graphically. For the other method, get /usr/share/applications/screensavers/unicode.desktop, edit it to your taste, and then drag-and-drop it onto gnome-screensaver-preferences, which will automatically put it in the right place in .local. You may need to restart gnome-screensaver preferences in order to see the new screensaver in the selection box. The feedback isn't very good.

A new littler release (now at 0.1.3) just went out of the door this evening. littler provides r (pronounced littler), a shebang / scripting / quick eval / pipelining front-end to the the R language and system. This version adds a few minor behind-the-scenes improvements:

• interactive() now evaluates to false as you'd expect in a non-interactive scripting front-end. To restore the previous behaviour, new switches -i or --interactive have been added.
• Some of the 'cleanup' functionality described in Section 8.1.2 on 'Setting R callbacks' from the R Extension manual have been adopted.
• Example scripts install.r and update.r received an update based on lessons learned from the R 2.10.0 roll-out and package rebuilding.
• A few build issues were improved, a minor manual page formatting bug was fixed.

As usual, our code is available via our svn archive or from tarballs off my littler page and the local directory here. A fresh package is in Debian's incoming queue and will hit mirrors shortly.

Had you been on our yard tonight, you would have seen a strange sight. Me, dressed warmly (but not quite warmly enough), jumping on the icy and snowy hood of my pickup. Some maniacal fit? An obscure part of my 3-day-long taking out the trash routine? Not exactly. Before I tell you why I was doing such a strange thing and almost in the dark I feel compelled to take a detour through ancient Greek poetry. You heard right. I ve been reading ancient Greek poetry lately. Those Greeks were forever running around receiving signs and portents from the gods. If ever a bird flew by carrying a live snake, and you saw the snake bite the bird while looking over your left shoulder, you knew Zeus was telling you not to attack the enemy that day. Or something. And if you, fool that you are, attacked the enemy that day anyway, you should be not in the least surprised to find a spear through your shoulder in just a few pages time. If ever someone received a sign from Zeus in modern times, surely it was I, tonight. I say that because, as I was trying to close the hood on my pickup after charging its battery, the hood nearly snapped in two. The hood is supported by some spring-loaded brackets in the back, so to close it, you have to push down on the front. I did so, and was surprised that it was going down so easily. Then I realized, apparently in the nick of time, that only the front was going down. The back was staying put, aiming up in the air as ever. So I tried to straighten the hood back out. I then tried to get it down by pulling at it halfway back, but just couldn t get enough leverage to make it budge. So what next? Why, jump on it of course. I got it most of the way closed that way, then jumped/slid down, latched it in front, then crawled back up there to push down the sort of rusty mountaintop that had formed halfway down the hood where it was buckling. OK, sorted. So to recap By this point, I ve had the battery charging for 24 hours, inflated the tire, removed the bungee cord around the brake pedal, removed the battery charger, coerced the hood shut. Time to start it. I hop in, pump the accelerator a few times, and turned the key to start. I heard the sickening aaaaaaaaRRRRRRRRRRRRuuuuumphhh . of a weak battery. So it wasn t charged enough to crank fast enough to have any hope of starting in winter. So I go get the car, pull it up close, being careful to leave myself enough room to maneuver between it and the electric fence. I get out the jumper cables. Then it occurs to me: I have to open the hood again. DOH! I open it just a bit, and hook up the jumper cables. It turns over a bit faster. For just a bit. I get a small sputtering of life from it, but it fades faster than an enemy of Hector at the battle for Troy. So I have Terah come out and put her foot on the accelerator of the car while I try to start the pickup. This too proves futile. So I disconnect the jumper cables, close the pickup s hood with significantly less care than a 31-year-old rusty and nearly-broken hood deserves, roll the window back up, and go for plan B: 4 trips to the road with stuff in my car trunk, and leave the giant cardboard boxes that are covered with snow in the pickup bed for next month. Obviously I have displeased the gods. Forgotten to offer up a sacrifice to Penzoil, feared goddess of internal combustion, perhaps? Or perhaps it was just a sign that I need a new pickup? I m so convinced of the latter that I didn t even bother to replace the bungee cord. Postscript Terah walked in, and said, Ah, I thought I heard you writing a blog post. Yep. It s about pickups and the Greek gods. <very slight pause> Oh, of course it is.

Bosnian bid for DebConf11 is Banja Luka, we had wiki page that wasn t changed since DebConf9 in C ceres this year. Reason we didn t have it changed for so long is that we didn t want to post anything before we had official/first hand answers to all our questions. Therefor we present you with wiki page for Banja Luka! http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf11/BanjaLuka Our team was working (still is) incredibly hard in order to get it all sorted. Slowly but surely we are taking our bid process to the final stage, where we are planing to finalize the actual funds needed for the DebConf11 to take place and that would be from us If you have any questions about something that wasn t mentioned on the wiki please do let me know.

For a long time it has been obvious that in all cases anti-piracy technologies discourage purchases and in many cases encourage piracy. I first discovered the significance of this in about 1991 when I attended a public lecture by a senior employee of Borland and a member of the audience claimed that the Borland product he bought didn t function correctly due to anti-piracy measures. The Borland employee firmly stated that Borland did not use anti-copying technology on any of it s products, didn t have any plans to do so, and the problem in question must have been caused by something else. Of all the hostile questions that were asked, this was the only one that caused the speaker to appear agitated so it was obviously an issue that was considered to be important within Borland. In the late 80 s anti-piracy measures were mostly based around creating floppy disks that couldn t be easily copied (violations of various aspects of the disk formatting standards). This meant that you couldn t make a backup copy of the data, so it wasn t uncommon for people to seek pirate copies of their commercial software for daily use to avoid wearing out their valuable original floppy disks. Then the dongle was invented and people who bought software sometimes sought pirate copies so that they could use their printer and their commercial software without having to change plugs on their PC. But in those cases the benefits to uncrippled software to the users were small. Now a large part of the battle on copy protection concerns DVDs. If you had a DVD of a recent movie and an MP4 which would you rather watch? Would you prefer to be forced to watch some anti-piracy rubbish for a couple of minutes at the start of the movie (with fast-forward disabled) or would you prefer to just start watching it? Would you prefer to be able to pre-program the sections of the movie that you watch (as some parents desire to skip the sex and/or violence in movies for their teenagers) or would you prefer to be forced to watch the movie straight-through with only a manual fast-forward to skip sections? Would you prefer to have a DVD that can t be played properly on many (most?) computers because of the CSS encoding or an MP4 that plays on everything from PCs to mobile phones without an issue? Would you rather have 100 movies in the spare space on your laptop hard drive when you travel and 1000 movies on your desktop system or the much smaller number of boxed DVDs that you can store? I think that in most cases a pirate MP4 will give a better experience than a DVD. So the question is, why pay for a DVD when in most cases you get a lesser experience than you will get from a MP4 file downloaded by bittorrent? One reason for buying the DVD is to support the film industry. But I doubt that such a profitable industry will get much sympathy in today s economy. Another reason is the morality, some people consider piracy to be theft (it isn t by definition theft requires that for at least a moment the property be completely in the possession of the thief) and therefore avoid it. One technical reason for buying a DVD is the fact that it may have multiple languages supported, it will have subtitles, it may have an audio track with the creators giving a commentary, and it may have extra scenes that were cut from the main release. I believe that work on adding subtitles to the video file formats is a work in progress, so it s only a matter of time before the DVD rips include all this extra data. Really the content creators should focus on making a product that meets the needs of users and that they want to pay for. Pirating books is technically possible, but almost no-one does it. Some successful authors such as Charles Stross freely publish significant parts of their work and Cory Doctorow freely publishes all his work in electronic form. Books just work well, they meet the needs of users and people want to buy them. Sure they can sell them second hand, lend them to other people, and it s technically possible to pirate them, but they remain profitable. On my documents blog I have a page of links to free short stories that I liked [1] and a page of links to free books [2]. It seems to me that creators of other copyright content should consider how they can be of service to their customers. We are all familiar with corporations and misguided individuals who get whiny about the supposed losses due to piracy. Bruce Everiss has unfortunately joined this trend and demanded the disconnection of Internet users based on unproven accusations of game piracy [3]. I don t know whether the game buying experience sucks as badly as the DVD buying experience, but based on the reports of locked-down consoles that have to be cracked before they run Linux I expect that the modern game industry is doing at least as badly as the movie industry. They need to provide things that users want! One thing to note is that a Windows or console game player who uses pirate games will probably buy some games at some future time, while someone like me who uses free software both by principle and because it gives a better user experience will probably never pay for a game (I haven t got time to play all the free games so I probably wouldn t even buy a Linux game).

• [1] http://doc.coker.com.au/fiction/free-short-stories/
• [2] http://doc.coker.com.au/fiction/free-books/
• [3] http://www.bruceongames.com/2010/01/05/304149300-stolen-from-activision/

Well that is the end of my time off, tomorrow it is back to work. However my break started with snow and it seems its finishing that way.


Unfortunately despite my previous enthusiasm this weather is becoming a little tedious. Schools have been closed today so I had to child mind instead of getting anything done.

Speaking of getting things done...I have completely failed to do anything productive whatsoever for the last couple of weeks. I have played some computer games, watched some TV read some books and listened to music and you know what? Aside from a tiny guilty feeling, I have thoroughly enjoyed myself.

I suppose I should apologize for not contributing to all those open source projects that could have used my help, but that would imply remorse which I seem to be lacking. Oh well

Mentioning music, I have acquired a selection of new music over the holiday which I ought to talk about. In no particular order:

• Iron and Wine - "Our Endless, Numbered Days"
• Paramore - "All We Know Is Falling", "RIOT" and "Brand new eyes"
  
• Phoenix - "Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix"
• Lady Gaga - "The Fame Monster"
• The xx - "XX"
• Muse - "The Resistance"
• Cymbals Eat Guitars - "Why There Are Mountains"
• St. Vincent - "Actor"
• Carter Burwell - "Twilight-The Score"
• The Darkness - "Permission to Land"
• Oasis - "Stop the Clocks"
• Chameleon Circuit - "Chameleon Circuit"
• Hank_Green - "I'm So Bad at This" and "So Jokes"

Unfortunately none of it was outstanding which sometimes happens when I take a punt on a large pile of new music. On the upside none of it was particularly bad either, so a kind of "no win" deal. Though on re-listening the "XX" album is starting to grow on me and the albums from the DFTBA label are so inexpensive they are more than worth it.

5 years ago I founded my own company Freexian SARL with the goal to make a living out of my free software experience. I marketed the company as being specialized on the Debian distribution in the hope to combine my Debian work and my professional work. Given that Freexian is still alive I think I met the first goal. My free software experience allowed me to complete many projects: a large number of development projects for embedded devices running a custom Linux distribution (usually built with debian udebs), the development of a Debian derivative (SLIS) and some recurring tasks of remote system administration. However, even if I use Debian daily for all my work, very few of the projects that I complete for customers have direct results in terms of improvements for Debian (except some bugreports and some related fixes). And even when I m able to contribute something back to Debian, it s usually not in areas that I care about. My focus within Debian is on the technical and organizational infrastructure of the project: as a dpkg/dpkg-dev maintainer I try to improve the packaging infrastructure, as a QA member I maintain the Package Tracking System to ease collaboration, as an Alioth admin I ensure all DD can host VCS repositories for their Debian related projects, as a developers-reference co-maintainer I try to share good packaging practices, etc. Given this bias, it s difficult to find customer projects that would let me contribute in those areas. Thus I think I need to try another approach: the simplest solution would be to find sponsors for some of my own Debian-related projects (if you have something else to suggest, please leave a comment either in the blog or by mail). That said finding sponsors looks like a difficult task in itself. While I can imagine (for example) a company using Debian on embedded devices that would like to sponsor the rewrite of update-alternatives in C in order to get rid of the perl dependency in the dpkg package (if you know such a company, get in touch with me!), I don t see who would have an interest in sponsoring the time that I need to contribute new sections to the developers-reference manual. But who knows maybe I should just try and publicly solicit sponsorship for some of the projects that I care about. In any case, suggestions and comments are welcome! Partagez cet article / Share This

Once a month, I take our recycling to the road. This is something far more annoying than most city-dwellers may suspect. For one thing, the road is about 1/4 mile away. Over a month, we fill up at least three large plastic trash cans full of recycling. If I walked each of those there to be picked up, then walked them back to the house after, I d have walked 3 miles. So, I use our $75 pickup to get the trash to the road. The process is a long one, and it starts two days before the recycling is due to be picked up. Monday, 5:30PM: Find an outdoor extension cord in the basement. Put on snow-suitable shoes. Go outside, plug the extension cord in at the elevator. Grab the battery charger, hook it up to the pickup. Unfurl and untangle the extension cord, plug it in. Blog about it if desired. Tuesday, 5:30PM: Go outside. Disconnect the battery charger, coil up the extension cord. Plug in the air compressor and get it going. Run the hose to the tire that keeps going flat and hope it reaches. Fill up the tire. Return the air compressor hose to the elevator, turn off the air compressor. Go to pickup and actually get in. Remove the bungee cord from the brake pedal that is holding it up, preventing the brake lights from being on 100% of the time and draining the battery even faster. Start pumping the accelerator. It s not a fuel-injected engine, after all. Crank the engine. Stop cranking, pump some more, trying to avoid the hole in the floor under the accelerator. Eventually get it started, hopefully. Roll down the windows to prevent the exhaust fumes from getting too strong. Drive the stuff to the road. Unload the three cans, plus all the extra cardboard from Christmas that didn t fit in them and is now soggy and snow-covered. Drive the pickup back to the yard. Park it. Replace the bungee cord on the brake pedal so it ll start again tomorrow. Wednesday, 5:30PM: Dress warmly yet again. Go to the pickup, hoping the tire is still inflated and the battery is still charged. I m going to be optimistic and assume they are. Hope that the pickup starts after only a few minutes of pumping. Go back to the road, only to find that the Kansas wind has scattered the trash cans and their lid all over the county. With luck, I ll be able to find them on foot. Sometimes, I have had to get in the pickup and drive down the road to find all my lids. Stash all of this in the pickup, drive it back to the yard, park, replace the bungee cord, and close it up for another month. I m promising myself that when I upgrade to a better pickup, it ll be one worth at least $200.

Debian's package manager dpkg has the perhaps unique feature that it distinguishes between removing and purging a package. Removing it removes the program files but keeps the configuration files (and sometimes the logs) around, purging it really removes everything. While this distinction undoubtedly has some uses, I have found that I almost never make use of it. I think in about six years of using Debian I have actually needed a remove-but-not-purge functionality about five times, during some really tricky upgrades (and using Aptitude instead of APT might have helped, not sure) and once when I wanted to build a package that had a build dependency that conflicted with a package I had installed (cowbuilder came later).

I think many people don't fully realize this distinction, and thus aged systems will often contain dozens or hundreds of removed-but-not-purged packages lying around. Great fun cleaning that up. And therefore, at some point in the distant past I have switched all my APTs to purge by default, using the configuration setting Apt::Get::Purge "true";. At the time I thought this would be daring, but I have never looked back. The one time a year that I don't want to purge I override this by hand.

Later, APT actually got an apt-get purge command, but there is no apt-get autopurge and no apt-get dist-upgrade-and-purge (or whatever) to purge the packages it wants to remove. This can be worked around by carefully adding --purge to all invocations of apt-get, but who will remember that. And of course apt-get remove is hardwired into my fingers.

How do other people handle this? Are there undiscovered reasons removing is the better default? How do you clean up packages that were forgotten to be purged?

I have just noticed that Red Hat added Ext4 support to RHEL-5 in kernel 2.6.18-110.el5. They also added a new package named e4fsprogs (a break from the e2fsprogs name that has been used for so long). Hopefully they will use a single package for utilities for Ext2/3/4 filesystems in RHEL-6 and not continue this package split. Using commands such as e4fsck and tune4fs is a minor inconvenience. Converting a RHEL 5 or CentOS 5 system to Ext4 merely requires running the command tune4fs -O flex_bg,uninit_bg /dev/WHATEVER to enable Ext4 on the devices, editing /etc/fstab to change the filesystem type to ext4, running a command such as mkinitrd -f /boot/initrd-2.6.18-164.9.1.el5xen.img 2.6.18-164.9.1.el5xen to generate a new initrd with Ext4 support (which must be done after editing /etc/fstab), and then rebooting. When the system is booted it will run fsck on the filesystems automatically but not display progress reports which is rather disconcerting. The system will display / contains a file system with errors, check forced. and apparently hang for a large amount of time. This is however slightly better than the situation on Debian/Unstable where upgrading to Ext4 results in an fsck error on boot which forces you to login in single user mode to run fsck [1] which would be unpleasant if you don t have convenient console access. Hopefully this will be fixed before Squeeze is released. I now have a couple of my CentOS 5 DomUs running with Ext4, it seems to work well.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2009/12/01/transition-ext4/

I just uploaded WICD 1.7.0~b3 to experimental. This was supposed to be the last pre-release before the official one, but a ~b4 has just been released, adding one more patch I'm keeping in debian/patches/. Luckily enough, my previous big hacking to split the source code (to make it easier for packagers to have separate binary packages) has been merged upstream! So one less patch for me to maintain It would be cool if experienced people (this is not (yet) for the faint of heart!) could test this package, before 1.7.0 gets released as stable and I upload it to sid. Or maybe you could just want to help us Let's find bugs now!