Ian Wienand: CDBS and .install files
Last night, after dropping a package from a control file, I was
wondering why my package.install file for the
remaining package seemed to be ignored (upstream installs a bunch of
stuff that I don't want installed in the Debian package; the symptom
was all that junk was making its way into the package). Turns out it
comes down to the following logic in CDBS:
i.e. if there is only one package, then by default install in
debian/package. Therefore whatever make
install does is what you end up with in your package. Although I
can see the reasoning behind this, it wasn't what I wanted since I
need the package installed into a temporary location
(i.e. debian/tmp) which then uses a .install file to
pull out only those files I want. The solution is simple, override
DEB_DESTDIR to $(CURDIR)/debian/tmp/ in
rules.
I hope this saves someone the half hour or so I spent investigating
why my install file was "corrupt"!
ifeq ($(words $(DEB_ALL_PACKAGES)),1)
DEB_DESTDIR = $(CURDIR)/debian/$(strip $(DEB_ALL_PACKAGES))/
else
DEB_DESTDIR = $(CURDIR)/debian/tmp/
endif
In the past I was not blogging small things if they were not worth a full blog entry on their own (or if I did not have the time to make up a full entry of it :). Inspired by the example of 
On January 26th 2008, the OCaml community has its first meeting in Europe. There was 5 different talks, including one from me. The meeting was pretty constructive and i think some great things should come out of it. In this post, i will focus on the Debian maintainer point of view.
The meeting was organized by me, with the help of Garbriel Kerneis and Vincent Balat. I wish to thank Mme Turgis from ENST/ParisTech who has made possible all this to happen.
Introduction:
I announce the creation of OCamlCore, a SS2L. It will provide commercial support for OCaml and related products. It will also provide community with some resources (including a GForge, a planet, some SCM repository...)
For now, i will open administration to Debian people who wish to help (for root rights) and from the whole community for other task (gforge and general administration). For now, i will choose alone who can administrate and who cannot... This is not a very open position, but this server is also for my company.
Xavier Leroy give us a nice talk that has let us see some future direction:
Good news everyone, first stable 
Your new door to the world the slogan for Bangkok s new
Suvarnabhumi airport tries to get people to stop-over on their
trips between Europe and Asia. The airport s webpage claims that
the airport currently handles 45 million passengers per year, but
that it would scale up to 110 million.
I don t see this happening, at all. Today, leaving for
Melbourne, I waited for an hour in the security queue, as four
flights were leaving concourse E (which has 10 gates) at once:
around 500 passengers were queueing to be scrutinised for
explosive liquids and other stuff a real terrorist would
never consider smuggling on a plane via the standard passenger
processing theatre in four lines behind four security checkpoints
(in fact, that s how I confirmed my estimate: around 30 seconds per
passenger (I timed it), it took me one hour, that s 120 passengers
per queue, so about 500 total, at once).
Four lines, one hour? 45 million passengers. 110 million
passengers? Six lines (there isn t much more space), so 200
passengers per line, 1:40 hours? My new door to the world?
Bangkok?
Of course, this is in large part because of idiot passengers.
While I was waiting in line, they came three times (every 20
minutes) to empty the garbage can where potential terrorists have
to dump their drinkable explosive fluids. We ve had this ban for
over 1 years, for crying out loud! Sure, some people don t (get
to) fly a lot and a few may really not have heard about dangerous
liquids yet (I felt really sorry for an elderly couple who had to
ditch pretty much all their toiletries leaving Zurich for Madrid
and wondering how they would survive there), but then at least
open your eyes and turn on your brain, please.
Unfortunately, the typical Bangkok/Southern Thailand tourist
probably hasn t got brain cycles left between walking and carrying
luggage. If you don t believe me, stop-over in Bangkok and look
around: anything with legs in shorts and flip-flops probably fits
right in, any obscenely and annoyingly loud group as well. For
instance, this circus of 10 en route to London, who joined the end
of the queue (read: about 1 hour to go) after their flight s final
call with millions of shopping bags. They furiously tried to raise
hell, but failed and probably missed their flight.
Observing all such episodes around me made the hour go by fast
I also had ample time left before my gate would close. There was
one situation, however, that made walk over and complain to the
supervisor (the one with the walkie-talkie): a couple from Canada
were similarly faced with the final call for their flight to
Toronto and walked straight up to the top of the lines outside
the ropes. After a short discussion, one of the security attendants
escorted them to the gate without subjecting either their
bags or bodies to the ever-secure screening process.
The supervisor (the one with the walkie-talkie) didn t speak
English. All she did was smile and make motions with her hands
which suggested that I should join the end of the queue.
As I said before, I don t believe that the (minimal) added
security we have at airports today corresponds to or justifies in
the slightest bit the shit we have to go through these days to be
airborne. However, if you make rules, then stick to them and don t
open gaping (= inviting) security holes.
Fortunately, the Canadians later had to surrender their weapons
of plane destruction since, on every gate, another party
of security attendants glove-hand-searched every bag a second
time, with the previous security checkpoint no 100 metres
behind.
I don t see Suvarnabhumi as a successful or scalable airport. If
Bangkok wasn t such a great place 
It's interesting to compare the "marketing features" of proprietary
version control systems and the FOSS equivalents. For example, I
happened to stumble across 
samba.grep.be.
This machine has been my trusty publically-accessible server for
about four years now. It runs my website, including this blog, is my
primary MX, contains my subversion repositories, and my gallery. For
slightly less than the first year of 
Some days ago, my RSS reader found 
Working!
I've been a bit behind with the ISC DHCP v3 package of late. I've had a
package of 3.1.0 for a few months, but I'm becoming more and more reluctant
to make uploads of this package without giving it some rudimentary testing.
Real life has been demanding of late, so I haven't had a chance to do that
testing. Nothing's gone wrong with the package to date, I just feel
negligent not giving it some basic testing before throwing it out there.
So I chucked a spare QFE card in my workstation brutus, put
unstable on the second hard drive, installed Debian unstable on the spare
10G partition of Sarah's old PowerBook, and lashed the two together with a
bit of CAT-5, and voila, instant DHCP client/server testbed.
So now that I'd verified that version 3.1.0 wasn't blatantly broken, I could
have a fiddle with the new support for option 119 (domain-search) that has
people at work very excited. I spent a bit of time off on a wild goose chase
trying to figure out how to configure the DHCP server for this new option
before I realised it was as simple as option domain-search "foo bar
baz"; and then made the necessary tweaks to dhclient-script.
I'm figuring that since one of the blokes who wrote