edos-builddebcheck
Here at DebConf8,
after my
talk about Mancoosi, I
got in touch with several people interested in the QA implication
of the EDOS/Mancoosi tools.
Me and Ralf have for example been contacted by Ubuntu people
which are setting up theirs equivalent of http://edos.debian.net. A guy working
on a
mirroring tool made an interesting hack using edos-debcheck:
out of a mirror with broken dependencies he can mirrors a subset of
packages which do not suffer of the same problem.
But now to the more interesting development, following a
bug
report by Atomo and discussions with Lucas (the
RC-bug-filing-master), me and Ralf implemented
edos-builddebcheck. You can invoke it
on a pair of Packages/Sources package list, and it will
check whether some packages will FTBFS due to unsatisfiable
dependencies.
The results on Lenny main/amd64 as of today are, ... erm ...,
scary : 49 packages will FTBFS. The RC-bug-filing-master and
Ralf are working on filing them, "don't worry".
You can find edos-builddebcheck in the edos-debcheck
package, starting from version 1.0-7 (in incoming at the time of
writing).
Update yes, ATM
edos-builddebcheck does not know anything about P-A-S
packages, so there are some false positive. Still, 33 source
packages are proper hits.
Yesterday, I was rummaging in my backpack, to make space for a few
things I wanted to put in there and that I wanted to take along with me
on the daytrip. As I was doing so, I found I'd forgotten to remove a
knife from it before leaving for Argentina. Not just any knife, mind
you:
Yet with this monster in my backpack, I managed to pass security in
Brussels International Airport with no issues. At all. Luckily I didn't
have to go through security a second time on a different airport, or I
might have been in serious trouble.
By their own rules, however, they failed. Utterly.
Debian’s freeze sounds like a technical hack to address a social problem, and that disturbs me a bit.
The social problem is: At some point, we need everybody in Debian to make only non-disruptive changes, so everything can converge very fast into a releasable state.
The “solution” we are using is that we are blocking all packages from migrating to testing, and requiring manual review from someone on the release team. Consequences are:
The versioned depends on tk8.5 has been removed in 1:1.5.6.3-1~bpo40+4, but still, this isn't enough:
One of the things of getting too much mail is that you will
get swamped in it, sometimes to the level of not even managing to figure
out there's been replies on your blog for the past several weeks.
Oops.
Apparently quite a number of people answered to my
blog post about the belgian government issues, and I only found out
right before leaving for Argentina. They're now all accepted from
moderation, but that doesn't mean I can't follow up on them anymore.
Most of them just agree with what I have to say, or posit another
opinion (which is fine), but some clearly show a misunderstanding of
what I was trying to say. So, since I don't want to appear as one
posting gibberish, allow me to clarify:
"I could say that some other things about the past deb cle also puzzle me, such as the insistence of some people to get an unconditional split of BHV, thereby destroying all chances of even remotely reaching a compromise." You are saying that you would accept giving in to the demands of the Francophones that the Flemish give up territory. (Think about it, what century are they from? In what other country does one community demand the enlargement of its territory as an exchange for fixing a situation which the constitutional court has ruled to be illegal?)Thanks for asking, but no, I'm not saying that. Let's be clear about this: there's a huge difference between a position that says "we need to split BHV, period" on the one hand, and "we need to give territory to the francophone community" on the other. It should be perfectly possible to, say, have the flemish community come up with some benefit to the francophone community in some respect somewhere that does not include "giving territory to the south of france"; but apparently the "negotiators" think not. To quote just one example: at some point Reinders (MR) suggested that a federal election circle be created to replace BHV, so that francophone politicians could still be elected in flanders, but also the other way around. This proposal was however killed by flemish politicians before the press as "not even negotiable" without even having discussed it. This, and other similar examples, I do not understand. After all, the fact that the constitutional court has ruled the current situation to be illegal does not change anything about the fact that this is still a request from the Flemish part of the country, and not from the Francophones; anyone telling you anything else is simply lying. There's nothing wrong with wanting something and being declared correct in court, of course; but there is something wrong with wanting that unconditionally. Unless you won a war, that is. And then still. Of course, not caring about much of the definitions of many political parties and not being a politician in any way, I ticked off someone who just happens to be a member of one of the parties I don't even like in the first place. Amedee, in case it matters: I didn't call CD&V a "Catholic" party to imply anything, but simply because I'm blissfully ignorant of the difference between Catholic and Christian. And happily so, too, given the CD&V's current behaviour. Oh, and the SP.A is not my favourite party; it's just that they seemed to be the more sensible of the lot during the last elections' campaigns. What's really my favourite party isn't something I'll tell you (or anyone), though.
So, I should be at DebCamp, but I'm back home after driving 800km in one day.
Why? I still don't know.
The main reason for this post is the irrational and unilateral response I got
from the DebConf Orga Team, with no right to replica of any kind, and with
the violence and humiliation we were treated with. I've helped to make
3 DebConf's possible, and have been involved in many ways for the past years
in Debian, so this shocked me deeply.
The short story is that there was an extra bed in the room I was staying in, the
person who was suppose to be in that bed is a close friend of mine, so I asked
if someone else could use it while they weren't, since that meant I could take
the necessary equipment that I managed to get for DebConf, and also introduce
to Debian someone who is very active and well known in our local community
(and also part of the umbrella foundation used for local finance issues).
I was excited about getting there, like every year. Just to make this extra
clear, this person had already booked the full week of DebConf, just not
DebCamp, as he previously thought he couldn't attend. When he found out he
could, he was thrilled to be able to go and help setup. So, I made the mistake
of not notifying the Orga team about the switch. I did this because it truly
was harmless action, where a bed which would otherwise be wasted would get
used, and, I did not notify the Orga team because they've been very
aggressive, inflexible and unhelpful throughout the planning of the
conference. This doesn't justify it, just explains why someone who generally
is helpful decides to take the wrong path to solve something.
Up to here, nothing very exciting. What made this special, is that when one
of the organizers, Margarita Manterola, found out about the switch, instead
of coming to talk to me, even though she's known me for *years*, she went
and informed the hotel that somebody had committed a crime, and checked in
under a different name, as if me or the person that came with me where
some random stranger. All I can say is, WTF?
Let me stress this, the email that was sent out[1] twisted the facts, to the
extent that some of them are a lie, like the problem arrived at check-in,
when it actually happened while we where napping a few hours after we had
arrived, and any effort made by the Orga team with the hotel where wasted,
as it was one of them who had originally created the problem.
Instead of solving this among us as a group, and, again, "solve" is a
bureaucratic thing, because no one was being harmed, Marga decided to
actually *harm* me personally, the person who I had brought, and DebConf
as a group. What got solved? Nothing. I left, along with someone who
would of otherwise been helping out build DebConf, while the Orga team
demanded a ridiculous fee for me to stay in the hotel.
Rules are rules, I understand, but I also understand everybody listens to
downloaded music, people in Germany install[2] nmap, and a very long list
of rules that we tend not to follow because they're unreasonable or
unnecessarily complicated.
Is this really what DebConf is turning into?
All I can say is I'm very sad and shocked that the people I've worked with
for so many years decided to condemn me over such a meaningless issue, and
especially that the local team, Martin Ferrari, Damian Viano, Maximiliano
Curia and Margarita Manterola would do such thing to "one of there own",
and that the international Orga team would mindlessly follow through with it.
I apologized to the hotel, I do want to apologize to the innocent people who
had to deal with this, and, even though my intentions where good and unselfish,
I regret what happened.
Despite all of this, I'm still deeply committed to Debian, have worked during
the year and deserve to relax and enjoy it, so I will be there for DebConf
as a regular attendee.
See you there!
[1] http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20080802.231856.66c7d3fd.en.html
[2] http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/31/1629259&from=rss
#!/usr/bin/make -f
include /usr/share/dpatch/dpatch.make
build: build-stamp
build-stamp: patch-stamp
dh build
touch $@
clean:
dh clean
%:
dh $@
#!/usr/bin/make -f
include /usr/share/dpatch/dpatch.make
build: patch-stamp
dh build
clean: unpatch
dh clean
%:
dh $@
As mentioned earlier, I've uploaded a new
Pyroman release to
Debian. I've also updated the download at the
download page on
alioth for the non-Debian users.There is just one single user-visible change (under the hood I switched some
Python API so you need python 2.4+ now, which was available in sarge already):This version has a new command line option, "--verification-cmd". This can be
used to point to a script file to verify network connectivity. For example, you
could try to send a ping to the next router, or you could ssh to another host,
have it ssh back and touch a flag file in /tmp to signal success.Similar to the --safe option, it is meant as a safety feature to avoid locking
yourself out of your system. But while --safe needs to be used interactively,
this new command could be used when automatically activating new firewall
rules, e.g. triggered by cfengine or some other configuration management. If
the verification command does not succeed, the firewall rules will
automatically be rolled back to the previous state.Note that I didn't get around to add IPv6 support yet. It would definitely be
desirable to add ip6tables support, but I currently do not have any experience
with IPv6, so I'm not sure I'd know how to do things right. Of course I'd
welcome any patches.(In case you havn't read about pyroman yet - it's yet another tool to
configure iptables firewalls. It puts a thin abstraction layer on top of
iptables, but the main benefit is that it uses "iptables-restore" to quickly
mass-set all the firewall rules - other tools tend to invoke several hundred
iptables processes to achieve the same - and if any error occurs it will both
give you a clear indication of which rule caused the error and rolling back
your firewall to the previous state.)
I've made a new release of my sift IMAP utility, which now adds a few new types of rules:
Several weeks ago, the people in charge of maintaining the Windows machines in my institute were desperate because of a series of virus outbreaks - Specially, as expected, in the public lab - but the whole network smell virulent. After seeing their desperation, I asked Rolman to help me come up with a solution. He suggested me to try replacing the Windows workstations by substituting local installations by a server having several virtual machines, all regenerated from a clean image every day, and exporting rdesktop sessions. He suggested using Xen for this, as it is the virtualization/paravirtualization solution until now best offered and supported by most Linux distributions (including, of course, RedHat, towards which he is biased, and Debian, towards I am... more than biased, even bent). So far, no hassle, right?
( I love acronyms :-D )
( I love acronyms :-D )
)
In the meantime, the
accompanying paper is now available, you can take a
sneak peek if you are interested in knowing more about Mancoosi
right ahead. The paper is available in .pdf format
from both my homepage and from the Pentabarf
event page as an attachment (the latter, as all
Pentabarf events, needs login for reasons that I still fail to
understand ...).
Download
Next.
