Debian mailing lists' standard policy is to allow posts from unsubscribed users. That of course fits our standards for opened development but has the drawback of allowing a lot of spam to reach our mailing lists. This spam also clutters the mailing lists archives. Since 2009, a working system allows removing spam from the mailing list archives. Today, I would like to put some light on the results of this system :

• Over one million nominations for spams (a "nomination" means that someone reporting that a said post is likely to be a spam mail)
• Nearly fourty thousand individual messages considered for review
• Nearly ALL of these processed by Sandro Tosi, leader of the tireless reviewers team. Let's bend at Sandro.
• Out of these, over thirty-three thousand messages classified as spam and removed from the archives

Results are impressive for mailing lists where a coordinated effort is done over time: the debian-boot mailing list (first coorindated effort, initiated by regretted Frans Pop), the Italian and French mailing lists. You want to help? You can. Reporting spam is as easy as reading Debian mailing lists. When you see a mail that you consider being a spam mail, just bounce it to report-listspam at lists dot debian dotte org. Don't forward it, you need to bounce it ("b" keyboard shortcut in mutt). Alternatively, you can check for this message on Debian mailing lists archives and hit the "Report as spam" button. If you're a Debian developer, you can help in reviewing nominated spam. It takes me about 20 minutes every week. Go to the spam review home page and register for an account there. Then, you'll be able to process through nominated posts. Once a given post is confirmed as spam by at least 3 reviewers with nobody else reporting it as "ham", it is removed the next week from the archive. Feel free to join the game and be part of the Debian moppers team!

And Now For Something Completely Different There are those weird coincidences that flock together and have the power of subverting initial expectations. Something like that has happened to me this week, when I've ended up spending a considerable amount of my IRILL work time (you know, something like 1000% of it) as a Debian Video Team volunteer. Mean as I am, I'm not going to explain the concatenation of coincidences. Suffices to say that most of the video hardware meant to be used at DebConf11 ended up being in my IRILL office. Of course all of it for about 200 kg and 2000 liters was in need of some inventory, packing, and shipment love. Together with Holger, Mehdi, and Etci we have tamed all of it. The following box miscellanea will therefore soon be on its way to Banja Luka:

DebConf11 video hardware

As an undesirable side effect, I had to join Bdale's knows more about ATA than he'd like to -club.
Holger opted not to join the club and I really can't blame him.

A maintenance release version 0.9.5 of Rcpp is now on CRAN and in Debian. This release comprises a number of minor fixes, extensions as well as small additions to the documentation and examples which have accumulated since the last release in April. The complete NEWS entry is below; more details are in the ChangeLog file in the package and on the Rcpp Changelog page.

0.9.5   2011-07-05
    o   New Rcpp-FAQ examples on using the plugin maker for inline's
        cxxfunction(), and on setting row and column names for matrices
        
    o   New sugar functions: mean, var, sd
    o   Minor correction and extension to STL documentation in Rcpp-quickref
    o   wrap() is now resilient to NULL pointers passed as in const char *
    
    o   loadRcppModules() gains a "direct" argument to expose the module instead
        of exposing what is inside it
    o   Suppress a spurious warning from R CMD check on packages created with
        Rcpp.package.skeleton(..., module=TRUE)
    o   Some fixes and improvements for Rcpp sugar function 'rlnorm()'
    o   Beginnings of new example using OpenMP and recognising user interrupts

Thanks to CRANberries, there is also a diff to the previous release 0.9.4:

 ChangeLog                                                 74
 DESCRIPTION                                               10
 R/00_classes.R                                             3
 R/Module.R                                                16
 R/loadRcppModules.R                                       10
 R/populate.R                                              10
 R/tools.R                                                 13
 R/zzz.R                                                    3
 cleanup                                                    2
 inst/NEWS                                                 21
 inst/doc/Rcpp-FAQ.pdf                                  binary
 inst/doc/Rcpp-FAQ/Rcpp-FAQ.Rnw                            62
 inst/doc/Rcpp-extending.pdf                            binary
 inst/doc/Rcpp-introduction.pdf                         binary
 inst/doc/Rcpp-modules.pdf                              binary
 inst/doc/Rcpp-modules/Rcpp-modules.Rnw                     7
 inst/doc/Rcpp-package.pdf                              binary
 inst/doc/Rcpp-quickref.pdf                             binary
 inst/doc/Rcpp-quickref/Rcpp-quickref.Rnw                  59
 inst/doc/Rcpp-sugar.pdf                                binary
 inst/doc/Rcpp-unitTests.pdf                            binary
 inst/doc/Rcpp.bib                                          4
 inst/doc/unitTests-results/Rcpp-unitTests.html            18
 inst/doc/unitTests-results/Rcpp-unitTests.txt             49
 inst/examples/OpenMP                                   only
 inst/include/Rcpp/Module.h                                33
 inst/include/Rcpp/config.h                                 2
 inst/include/Rcpp/internal/wrap.h                          5
 inst/include/Rcpp/module/Module_generated_CppMethod.h   2902  +++++++++++++++++-
 inst/include/Rcpp/stats/random/rlnorm.h                   14
 inst/include/Rcpp/stats/random/rnorm.h                     4
 inst/include/Rcpp/sugar/functions/functions.h              3
 inst/include/Rcpp/sugar/functions/mean.h               only
 inst/include/Rcpp/sugar/functions/sd.h                 only
 inst/include/Rcpp/sugar/functions/sum.h                    4
 inst/include/Rcpp/sugar/functions/var.h                only
 inst/include/Rcpp/vector/Vector.h                          4
 inst/skeleton/zzz.R                                        1
 inst/unitTests/runit.wrap.R                               25
 man/CppClass-class.Rd                                      2
 man/loadRcppModules.Rd                                     6
 src/Module.cpp                                             1
 42 files changed, 3252 insertions(+), 115 deletions(-)

As always, even fuller details are on the Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page

Hello this is the third report regarding my project. As usual, quick
summary first. From my last report I have progressed much little than I
would like but, as stated previously also, I m finishing semester
and between exams and projects it takes almost all my time. However, I m
free of academic duties next week and I ll double the speed on the project. What was done so far

- Started working on the modifications to the Eucalyptus code, as
expected.
I ve almost complete the code for the Libvirt s XML Domain
definition. I ve abstracted the wrapper in order to support a broader
number of arches. Previously it was tailored for supporting x86/amd64
based machines. The idea is to have a list of supported arches and
generate the XML file according that. For ARM some parameters and
elements are different than for the others. This would allow for
people to support another architectures, given they are well supported
by KVM-Qemu.
Started working on changes to util/data.c to make sure the correct
parameters are being passed to the XML generator and to libvirt kvm
calls.
- Define and start to setup the testing / demo environment. Basically
involves having one machine to run KVM as hypervisor so the Eucalyptus
handler uses it to run ARM kvm-qemu images.
- Over this weekend I ll be publising the code changes on my
website. Steffen suggested to create some docs regarding the progress
too. I ll do that once I feel I m on track again for my current
pending work, that s coding. What I ll be working over the next two weeks

- My primary goal is to catch up on the work pace and finish the neccesary
code for Eucalyptus to support ARM images. This means to finish
modifications to:
node/handlers_kvm.c handling nc creation. Little changes are need
here from what I ve indentified already.
util/data. c,h handling instance creation. This is the part where
most of the work shall be done. I ve started to work here already.
- Test the code I ve complete already and send the patches to the teams
involved. To date I m still working on a local environment, because no
usable patches have been generated already, just little pieces here
and there.
- Since this is a sort of gluing project, that is code here and there
and make it work together. I m in the process of finding a machine to
be able to test parts of it once they are complete. I m still
contacting people to get such machine, in anycase I gues I can manage
to get one myself. I can t use my current machine since it involves
reinstalling and working at the OS level.
- For the project s demo I ll use both machines, one as the front-end
and the kvm one for NCs (nodes). That s the goal. What is required after that

- I d like to release a package that includes my changes, so it can be
installed either from official packages or my own packages, this
involves:
Updating the packaging bits to the pkg-Eucalyptus repo.
Talking to upstream about it.
- Write the reference Steffen suggested. I believe that I can finish the first part in one week, because of the
work I ve done in the past weeks to understand the Eucalyptus code. I m
also will be talking more to the Eucalyptus team and also to the
maintainers about such changes. I guess that s all for now.

There are two different uses (within Debian/Ubuntu) of the initialism UDD: Ubuntu Distributed Development and the Ultimate Debian Database. This article talks about the latter. At UDS-O in Budapest a few weeks ago we had a session (video) on DEX: an initiative to improve collaboration between Debian and its derivatives. There's an Ubuntu DEX subproject, and this is what the session was about, thinking up ideas. I thought of something that could possibly yield some results --- my action from the session was:

[laney] measure relative uploads between ubuntu and debian and see if anything interesting pops up: TODO

It seems to me that if we could tell which packages were uploaded with the most frequency to Ubuntu with respect to Debian, then we may be able to figure out why this is and if there's any way we can do the work in Debian instead. Clearly for this to happen we are going to need data! And where better to house a load of data than the Ultimate Debian Database itself? So I wrote some scripts to download the Ubuntu changes, handily made available as mbox archives, chop them around a bit and eventually split them out in a format that UDD can understand. Lucas Nussbaum then kindly integrated the output into UDD itself, and the end result is that an as-near-as-possible complete history of Ubuntu uploads is now available for your creative querying. For example, Wednesday sees the most uploads and Sunday the fewest:

udd=> SELECT EXTRACT (DOW FROM date) AS dow, COUNT(EXTRACT (DOW
FROM date)) AS count FROM ubuntu_upload_history GROUP BY dow ORDER
BY count DESC;
 dow   count 
-----+-------
   3   26739
   2   26699
   1   25361
   5   23497
   4   22154
   6    9687
   0    8752
(7 rows)

I'll lovingly craft a script to generate the data we need for the DEX project in the next few days. But I hope that the data proves useful for other things too. The three tables you want to look at (with \d+ at a psql prompt) are ubuntu_upload_history, ubuntu_upload_history_launchpad_closes (LP bugs closed by uploads) and ubuntu_upload_history_closes (Debian bugs closed, probably not so interesting). Information on how to use UDD yourself is on this wiki page.

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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For some time, I've shown Ad Bard ads on various sites related to free software I run (this blog, Wammu website or phpMyAdmin demo server. I saw it as not that intrusive way for paying fees for hosting of the server which runs this all. Also I found it good idea to promote free software friendly business, but was always a bit skeptical to it's success. Today the service is supposed to be shut down, though the web site still does not mention anything like that so far. But it was announced month ago to the publishers and I expect it to be true. The reported reason is lack of time <quote>to focus on improving the network and selling advertisements</quote>. I've removed the ads from all my servers and I currently do not plan to replace it with anything else for now. So you can enjoy them ad-free even without AdBlock :-).

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I often get requests of persons who would like to contribute to Debian but who don t know where to start. Let s try to answer this question properly so that I can give out this URL the next time that I am asked. The Debian website has a page explaining how to help Debian. While it provides no less than 10 suggestions in a daunting text-only list, it s difficult to know what to do next once you picked up something that you could do. I will try to fix this by providing concrete information for each cases in upcoming articles but in the mean time I propose you another approach to start with. Before answering your question ( what can I do for Debian ), we need to know some information about you. What motivates you? You re a volunteer, you re not doing stuff for Debian because someone told you so. You must have some intrinsic motivation and the ultimate motivation is usually that you re enjoying what you re doing. So what are you enjoying and/or what are your motivations ?

• Is there something that you would like to learn? A new programming language? Packaging? Coding? System administration? A specific software?
• Do you want to interact with smart people?
• Do you like to help users?
• Do you like to fix software just so that it works for you?
• Do you like to build something remarkable and useful for millions of people?

On the opposite, make sure to know what you hate and what you want to stay far away from. Maybe you dislike a programming language so much that you don t want to be involved in a project where you would have to use it, etc. Write down the answers to the questions, you might need them later when you ll ask other Debian contributors how you can help. What are your skills? If you re not interested in learning new skills, then you must obviously select a task where your current skills are sufficient. Again make a list of your skills and in particular of skills that you d like to practice! Here s a non-exhaustive list of skills to consider:

• What languages are you fluent with? Are you confident to write documentation or translate documentation in those languages?
• Are you a programmer? If yes, which languages do you know?
• Can you diagnose problems? Can you debug problems with strace and/or gdb?
• Can you triage bugs?
• Do you know some Debian packaging?
• Are you an artist and/or a web designer?
• Do you know how to work with VCS (subversion, git, bzr, )?

How much time can you spend on Debian? This is the last important information that you need to communicate whenever you re asking someone else what you could do for Debian. There s no point giving you a big task if you can only spend 30 minutes every week. On the opposite if you can work on Debian full time during a week (because you re between 2 contracts or because you re in vacation), it s equally important to know. In general contributing to Debian requires time, you should be ready to spend at least several hours per week and possibly more at the start while you re learning everything. Find something to do At this point you have a generic idea of what you d like to do but you re still missing a concrete objective. Let s try to find one, we ll explore several ways to do this. Scratch your itch The best objectives are those that satisfy your own needs. Here are some examples:

• Did you notice a missing feature? Try to implement it.
• Have you been annoyed by a bug? Try to fix it.
• Did you lose too much time on something because there was no documentation? Write the missing documentation and submit it where appropriate.
• File bug reports for the things that you can t fix yourself. Even wishlist bug reports for new features.
• Do you use software that are not packaged for Debian? Create the package(s) and maintain it/them.
• Do you need a newer version of a package compared to what s in Debian unstable? Contact the maintainer and propose your help to update the package.
• Do you need a newer version of a package compared to what s in Debian stable? Contact the maintainer and propose your help to create a backport.

If you re a good Debian citizen, you have already filed bugs for issues that bugged you. Then you can browse http://bugs.debian.org/from:hertzog@debian.org to find out some ideas of stuff to do (obviously replace hertzog@debian.org by your own email address). Join a team If you don t have a specific itch to scratch, you might want to focus your work on a specific team. Head over to wiki.debian.org/Teams and browse the list of teams. You ll surely find one that works in an area that you like. If you select a packaging team, pick one that works on packages that you re actually using. Some of the teams have instructions for newcomers, follow them when that is the case. Otherwise join the mailing list and the IRC channel, and get a feel of how the team works. See if it suits you, you can follow several teams at the same time and pick the one that you prefer after a few days/weeks. Once you have lurked a bit, if you still don t know how you could help, then just ask on the mailing list. Include all the answers you have collected to the 3 questions on your motivations, your skills and your time available. Focus on a specific package You can concentrate your work on a specific package even if you re in a team, it s often a good idea. But I list it separately because not all packages are team maintained and you might want to help maintain a package where there s a single maintainer currently. I leave it up to you to find a way to select a package that interests you Then head over to the package tracking system: http://packages.qa.debian.org/dpkg (replace dpkg by the name of the package that interests you) Fill in the form in the bottom-left corner with your email and select opts in the drop-down list, then click go . You get a new form where you can select the information that you ll receive, I recommend you to keep everything except upload-binary and to validate the form. From now on, you get the same mails than the maintainer (and a bit more actually), and it s a good idea to inform the maintainer that you subscribed and that you re going to help a bit. Maybe he s willing to grant you commit rights immediately, maybe he will ask you to send patches for a start. The important thing is to create a good relationship. In any case (even if you did not get any answer from the maintainer), you should be free to help triage existing bugs and to help deal with the flow of incoming bugs (including forwarding bugs when appropriate). Help a Debian developer Paul Tagliamonte once blogged Hey, DDs, need help?. He offered his help to overworked Debian developers . His post was missing all the information required (cf motivations/skills/time) but the approach is a good one. The best way to start contributing is to work with existing Debian developers. Even if you just want to be sponsored for your own pet package, you should consider that mentoring is a burden for many Debian developers and that you re more likely to get a sponsor if you have an existing relationship with a Debian developer that you helped. Pick a developer that works in an area that is of interest, and offer him your help. To simplify things even further, I have created a wiki page where you can find out how you can help me and thus build a relationship with me. That s it for now, I hope this article will help you to start contributing. Don t forget to subscribe to my newsletter to not miss future articles for new contributors. Note that you can refer to this article with the following URL: http://raphaelhertzog.com/go/contributing/ (easier to type and remember).

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... is now working. It isn't finished yet; there are still some loose ends. But at least it works; if you combine this kernel with this debian-installer image, you'll be able to install to an NBD target. Known bugs:

• if you install your root device on an NBD device, the installer will attempt to install a boot loader to the local hard disk. Make sure to bring it into expert mode before the tasksel part to avoid overwriting your MBR -- or do what I did, and install to a (virtual) diskless computer.
• Also, due to an issue with the initscripts package, halt will make the kernel panic rather than power down the system but at that point it's safe to switch off the power, anyway.
• The installer currently fails to add a nbdroot= parameter to the kernel command line when installing root to NBD. When you're rebooting into the installed system, you should add something like nbdroot=<server>,<port> to your kernel command line, otherwise the installed system will not find the root device.

Other than that, it should work fine; testing is welcome (but note standard development code caveats apply).

I've taken a tiny step towards getting together a prototype toolset for developing an initial development iteration of the NAS functionality of the FreedomBox. Here's what I am trying to do:

• create a disk image for a system that provides simplistic NAS functionality, with no configuration, including no authentication: just serve whatever disks are available over SMB
• use a TDD approach to developing it

In essence, this means I want to specify the functionality of the system I am building using automated tests. As soon as those tests pass, I will write more tests, and make them pass. When I can't think of new relevant tests, I know I'm done. I'm building a simple tool, systest, that will execute the tests. It is built on top of Python's unittest library, because that makes my implementation simple. I've now developed systest far enough that I can almost automatically do this:

• build a new image, using vmdebootstrap, plus a customization script
• start the image with KVM controlled by libvirt
• run the tests using systest

(The command line would be something like this: ./build-fbxnas && virsh start fbxnas && sleep 30 && ~/systest/systest --target=192.168.122.89 --user=tomjon ~/systest/tests-debian-base-install.py --user-ssh-private-key=tomjon.secret
--log=foo.log --user-password=password1 where build-fbxnas is a wrapper script around vmdebootstrap. But I didn't actually run that command, and it's lacking the virt-install command to actually set up the virtual machine the first time.) systest contains very little code, but to get that far, I had to shave some yaks, and that made writing it rather an unpleasant experience. The tests so far really simple, and don't test NAS stuff at all, just that the basic Debian install works: only the ssh port is open, and basic networking and such things work. However, now that I've gotten this much to work, I can start writing NAS tests. (smbclient may be my next yak. This would be a lot easier if I had ever used Samba for anything real...) systest and vmdebootstrap are on Gitorious. No .debs yet, this stuff is much too raw, but you can run them from the checkouts, no install necessary. PS. If anyone knows how to query KVM or libvirt for the IP address assigned by their internal DHCP server to the virtual machine guest, automatically, without asking the actual virtual machine, please tell.

Two weeks ago, I updated the packages containing the BioPerl modules bioperl and bioperl-run, which allowed to resume the work done on GBrowse, one of the genome browsers available in Debian. As many Perl modules, BioPerl has extensive regression tests. Some of them need access to external services, and are disabled by default as the Internet is not available in our build farm. Nevertheless, they can be triggered through the environment variable DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE when building the package locally. Bioperl successfully passes all off-line tests, and a part of the on-line tests is already corrected its development branch. In contrary, BioPerl-Run fail the tests for Bowtie, DBA, EMBOSS, Genewise, Hmmer, PAML, SABlastPlus, T-Coffee and gmap-run. In some cases, like EMBOSS, it is because a command has been renamed in Debian. In other cases, in particular DBA et Genewise, it is much more difficult to figure out on which side is the problem. Regression tests are essential to determine if a package works or not on ports others than the one used by the packager (amd64 in my case). Even simple ones can be useful. In the case of T-Coffee, that has a rudimentary test that I have activated recently, it showed that the packages distributed on armel are not working at all. Running regression tests when building packages have advantages, in particular to have the results published for each port automatically as part of the build logs. But is also cause problems. First, a package would need to build-depend on every software it can interact with, in order to test it comprehensively. In the example of bioperl-run, it makes it impossible to build on armel as long as t-coffee is broken there. Second, this approach does not help the user to test similarly a program installed on his computer. Maybe the Debian Enhancement Proposal 8, to test binary packages with material provided by their source packages, will solve these two problems.

Sam Hartman is a Debian developer since 2000. He has never taken any sort of official role within Debian (that is besides package maintainer), yet I know him for his very thoughtful contributions to discussions both on mailing lists and IRL during Debconf. Until I met him at Debconf, I didn t know that he was blind, and the first reaction was to be impressed because it must be some tremendous effort to read the volume of information that Debian generates on mailing lists. In truth he s at ease with his computer much like I am although he uses it in a completely different way. Read on to learn more, my questions are in bold, the rest is by Sam. Raphael: Who are you? Sam: I m Sam Hartman. I m a 35-year-old software engineer. I am a principal consultant and co-owner of a small consulting company, called Painless Security. I started using Debian in the mid 1990 s around the time of the bo release. I ended up deciding to join the project as a developer in 2000. Raphael: You re blind and yet you re using your computer as effectively as I am. Can you explain us how you setup your computer ? Sam: I gave a talk at Debconf9 on how my computer is set up; you can watch the video for full details. My main laptop runs Debian. I use the gnome-orca package as my primary screen reader. It speaks the Gnome desktop. It does a relatively good job of speaking Iceweasel/Firefox and Libreoffice. While it does speak gnome-terminal, it s not really good enough at speaking terminal programs that I am comfortable using it. So, I run Emacs with the Emacspeak package. Within that, I run the Emacs terminal emulator, and within that, I tend to run Screen. For added fun, I often run additional instances of Emacs within the inner screens. Raphael: Are there important problems in Debian in terms of accessibility to blind people? KDE documentation talks a lot about accessibility, but at least for blind users, the code completely fails to deliver. That means there are a lot of good packages a blind user cannot use. The non-free Adobe Flash player has some accessibility, but it could be a lot better. The free alternatives have none. The free PDF readers have basically no accessibility. You can use pdftotext, but you cannot actually read a PDF in a graphical application. It s way too easy for a misbehaving program to lock up the entire accessibility infrastructure. Gnash is a big culprit here: if my Iceweasel starts Gnash, there s a good chance that either Iceweasel or the entire desktop will appear to hang from an accessibility standpoint. Other programs, including gksu tend to fail in this way. Some of the more dynamic website features like pop up menus or selection lists are really difficult to find and click without causing them to disappear. This gets better and worse over time as the accessibility support in Iceweasel changes and as websites change. Raphael: What s your biggest achievement within Debian? Sam: I decided to be a Debian developer because I thought that in 2000, Debian support for using enterprise security and infrastructure software was lacking. Back then, any software that included crypto functionality was segregated into a special non-us archive. Some of the software was missing; I started by packaging MIT Kerberos for Debian. Other software had security or enterprise features disabled in the packages. At the height of working on this, I was maintaining krb5, some SASL modules, PAM, some PAM modules,OpenAFS, a version of and Ssh with Kerberos support. I was also involved in the effort to resolve the legal issues so that we could move security software into the main archive. I think this work has been a huge success. In fact, it s been such a success that other people are now doing most of the work. I still maintain the krb5 package. When I started I felt like I was pushing against the flow trying to get people to add patches, sometimes even having to fork a package. However, now, I can maintain just one component and there are enough others who shared my original goal that the work continues. These days, I m working on something that s an evolution of this enterprise security work. I m packaging Project Moonshot for Debian and Ubuntu. Project Moonshot is a response to the wide variety of identity management systems such as OpenID, Oauth, SAML, and the like. Moonshot works to create an identity management approach that works well both for the web and for client-server and other applications. The project is a lot of fun, but the role of Debian in the project is also interesting. One of the things we want to show with Moonshot is how our technology can be effective when it is integrated throughout a platform. To really show the potential it needs to work with as many applications in a given platform as possible. The open and collaborative nature of the Debian community makes it possible to introduce a new technology and have that technology evaluated based on its merits. We don t need huge business relationships or marketing deals to integrate our technology: we need some combination of doing the work ourselves and showing others the benefits of working with us. For someone trying to do innovative work, the Debian model is powerful. Raphael: If you could spend all your time on Debian, what would you work on? Sam: I d really love to work with the embedded Debian folks. The vision of a single source base that could be the stack from devices from small embedded devices all the way up to high-end servers is very appealing. Doing that with Debian involves a number of challenges. However with the right people working on meeting these challenges full-time, I think we could offer something promising. I d also love to have the time to contribute to project infrastructure: working on the release team, helping ftpmaster, that sort of thing. However I don t. I m just happy that so much of my consulting practice involves working on open-source software. Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Sam: There s something really not right about how we transition libraries from unstable to testing. Every time I get involved in a library transition I m shocked at how complicated it is and how disruptive it is both to testing and unstable. We need to look at technology and processes to break up the dependency snarles. For example we don t have good archive tools for keeping old versions of libraries around to ease transitions. If you haven t thought about this issue you ll probably say that I m being overly picky and this can t be the major problem for Debian. However, if you think about how much this impacts our ability to introduce things into unstable around the times of the freeze or about how much it slows the release process, you may begin to appreciate how big of an issue this is. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Sam: There are a number of people who have been role models for me over the years. Anthony Towns really helped me understand a lot of what drives free-software projects and what needs to be true for positive motivation. Joey Hess showed us all that sometimes, social problems do have technical solutions. If the tools are so good that doing the right thing is far easier than any other course of action, quality improves.

---

Thank you to Sam for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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So I got my hands on that new machine, somewhere, somehow, and I had to make myself comfortable on it. The biggest difference in that machine and the ones I used before is the RAID controller, an Adaptec 5405, instead of the 3ware ones I used to have before. That means getting used to new tools, messages and all these things which I ll try to document here.Step 1: does vendor deliver?Well, yes, mostly. There is (mainline) kernel support for the controller, Squeeze s kernel will boot up just fine and I just throw my junk into /dev/sda and it will handle the whole raidy thingy itself. But what is when I want to check the health of the disks, to add a spare or modify the caching? Ask the mighty vendor and it will answer Yes, you can! .So I downloaded that asm_debian_x86_x64_v6_50_18570.tgz, unpacked and faced two debs, one i368 and one amd64. Yes, you could have saved half of the bandwidth if someone would have asked for the arch before, but who cares for some additional 60MiB today? So let s see what it does. Oh no, wait, there is a README ASM_IUG_for_Debian_and_Ubuntu.txt:

1. Make sure to be in root level access.
2. Install the ASM storman .deb package. For example, if the package is storman_6.50-18570_i386.deb,
   then install it using the following command dpkg -i storman_6.50-18570_i386.deb
3. Adaptec Storage Manager will get installed at /usr/StorMan
4. Add the line /usr/StorMan to /etc/ld.so.conf. Then run "ldconfig". This is needed for the arcconf
   utility to find the path of the libstdc++.so.5 library

Well, 1 is obvious, so is 2.
For 3: hum, /usr/StorMan? Ever heard of FHS? Don t think so.
For 4: WTF?! I prefer to get libstdc++5 from my local Debian mirror instead.But at least they provide a .deb, right? Uhm, no, it s an RPM converted via alien :( And don t dare to look at preinst, postinst and postrm (it extracts an own copy of Sun JRE 1.6u16, chmods around wildly on install and does rm -rf something on uninstall, did I see that some days ago on the webs?). Let s get rid of that package as soon as possible, I decided, and just keep arcconf (which will be described later), esp because StorMan itself seems to include some call-home functionality which I d like not to have:

cp -a /usr/StorMan/arcconf /usr/local/sbin/
apt-get remove --purge storman

Step 2: does community deliver?You can, by the way, get (better) packages at http://hwraid.le-vert.net/wiki/DebianPackages from Adam C cile (Le_Vert). I didn t test those much, but I currently use the arcconf package from there, which seems to be exactly what I need: proper dependencies and just the arcconf binary, no Java sh*t.Step 3: monitor the controllerAs this post is about monitoring, not ranting, let s continue. As mentioned before, I only have arcconf installed, which is just a cli to do stuff with the controller. If I understood the docs right, the actual StorMan is able to send notification mails when a disk dies or the controller gets eaten by aliens, but as I don t have StorMan, I have to do things myself.Adam has a aacraid-status package in his repository, which includes some minimalistic shell-daemon to monitor the output of arcconf. It didn t perfectly fit my needs (and had some hickups with my disks which refuse to report a vendor, whyever), so I decided to write something myself (slightly based on what Adam has done in aacraid-status, though).The result is on GitHub: https://github.com/evgeni/aacraidAs you can see the code contains (at the time of writing) exactly ZERO comments and there is no README either, but it s actually quite usable already.

• aacraid.py is the main magic inspired by Adam s aacraid-status, basically just parsing arcconf output
• aacraid-status prints all useful info about all controllers, arrays and disks (the output is pretty much like Adam s)
• aacraidd is a small daemon which will monitor all controllers every (per default) 5 minutes and mail you in case of status-change

I am now running aacraidd and get happy mails when something breaks :) [running = running from /etc/rc.local, no init script yet :)]Step 4: monitor the disks via smartmontoolsThere is one little problem I have with arcconf: it s closed source and does magic to the controller.With the old 3ware controller I was able to monitor the disks with smartmontools/smartd using something like this:

/dev/twa0 -d 3ware,0 -a -s L/../../2/01 -m root
/dev/twa0 -d 3ware,1 -a -s L/../../2/03

This is possible with Adaptect controllers too (not through /dev/twaX obviously). You have to have the sg module loaded, which will result in /dev/sg[012] on my machine, with sg0 being the controller itself and sg1/sg2 the both disks attached to it. Having sg loaded, one can now use smartd with:

/dev/sg1 -d sat -a -s L/../../7/01 -m root
/dev/sg2 -d sat -a -s L/../../7/02 -m root

(-d sat is the important option here!)Thanks to Thomas Krenn Wiki: Smartmontools mit Adaptec RAID Controller for the basic info and ostlogd.spenneberg.net: Adaptec-Raid-Controller S.M.A.R.T.-Healthstatus monitoren for the pointer to the sg module!Step 5: relaxYupp, 4 steps are enough, go relax until the next disk dies (you will be doing something REALLY important that moment according to Murphy).

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Second speaker at today'sseminar,Vladimir Mojica. He is talking about th legal backing for DRM and TPM as well as laws against circumvention. He quotes USA's DMCA as one of the most complete, advanced and forward-minded laws,inviting the audience to push for such a law here. I hope he gets to my (written)question, as today is a very important day in this regard: The Senate has requested the presidency to reject signing the ACTA treaty!
[Update] The Senate is sending Resolution agreeing to prompt the Federal Executive Power titular to instruct the State Secretaries and other dependencies involved in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement not to sign said agreement, as it would hinder free interchange of legal material. It also mentions the ISPs should not become de-facto authorities to define when an intellectual/intangible properties right violation is in course, and that it would be unacceptable for ISPs to monitor the users' activities in the net, or to analize the content of the IP packets. Very good news, in a document very well made, in a precise, legal and coherent(!) way.

Excuse me in advance for any typos. itting in a dark room and posting with a Kindle has its down sides. I have been participating for about 1.5 years on a seminar about the copyright in the ediyorial ambit. This year, the focus is on digital media. Today the first speaker is Dr. Kyoshi Tsuru, General Director of BSA Mexico. He is talking about the beauties and advantages of DRM and TPM. It was interesting to hear how he began by saying how people are afraid of nice, good, protective measures and call it with derogatoey, morally charged ways:Specifically about "self-utelage"measures. It is interesting t hear him in the role I often speak eg. by repeating that piracy is a derogatory,morally charged term for "making illegal copies" Fun to hear how he defends that mainly academicians are disconnected from the real world...

When the programming language Python came out while it seemed like an interesting idea, I didn t really see the point. I already know Perl, PHP and C (plus a few others) why learn another language? So until recently, I didn t Recent frustrations with PHP and how loose it is with things like variables made me have another look at Python and what it could do for me. As just learning a language by itself it pretty boring I decided to write some small programs in the language and used the framework Turbogears to do it. First of all, learning the basics of python from perl or PHP is dead simple. The idea of what a language looks like is not too different between these three so it was a snap to write simple stuff in python. So, what does yet-another language give me?

• Variables must be defined before being used, but assigning them defines them too. This is a nice compromise between PHP where you can check undefined variables and C where it all must be defined first, or else.
• try and except. For code that might fail, use try and then catch the error in except. We ve all been guilty of using the @ symbol in PHP to supress stupid error messages, this does it correctly.
• No PHP extract() or compact(). Actually just no extract function is good enough. That function is pure evil.
• Sqlalchemy A proper you look after the database and ill play with objects database extraction layer thingamy. I don t want to play with databases just let me write code and thats what sqlalchemy does well.
• Testing Turbogears uses nosetests which does functional and unit testing. I do get some annoying artifacts based upon testing but generally its all good.
• Python has help() everywhere and pydoc on the command line. Not sure what variable foo can do? Just type help(foo) or even stick it in your script.
• paster! You can run a development site off the command-line using a simple sqlite database. Don t like it, dump the DB and reinstall it with one command.

It s not one-way though, there have been some challenges. Quite likely these are more my deficiencies than the languages.

• Error messages take up a whole screen and often make it difficult to isolate. It s not quite 10-screens-full ala Eiffel but sometimes the error messages tell you something is going wrong, but not what. Mess up your object versus database table references and you get something rather obscure.
• When is an integer not an integer? The answer is, sometimes. Sometimes they work, sometimes they break. It s probably more to do with what pysnmp is doing with them.
• Documentation some is great, some is downright misleading. It comes down to the writer of the documentation for modules. At least it doesn t have well get round to it like some functions in PHP on their website. Documents that say you can directly iterate dictionaries were another dead-end I wandered down. If you are stuck here, add a .items() at the end of it.
• Deployment. It s not just a matter of taring the files up and sticking them into /var/www/sitename and you re done. There are probably good reasons why, but its just annoying.

Despite the minor problems, python really does give you much much more than PHP and some more than Perl. For me and what I am intending on writing it is worth learning yet another language.

Related articles

• A Python programmer s first impression of CoffeeScript (ssokolow.com)
• Guido van Rossum: 21 Years of Python (perspectives.mvdirona.com)
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forked-daapd v0.17 is out; the main purpose of this release is to add support for libav 0.7. There are also a few bugfixes that made it into this release, but nothing earth-shattering. One More Thing You ll notice an extra tarball and tag in this release, both marked 0.17gcd. With this release, the GCD (Grand Central Dispatch / libdispatch) codebase is making its debut. libdispatch replaces libevent and allows for greater concurrency inside forked-daapd. This makes forked-daapd snappier, which shows when using Remote or a SoundBridge. The filescanner also benefits from this; it now scans several directories concurrently, reducing the time needed for a rescan by making better use of the machine resources. Thanks to Mark Heily s efforts on libdispatch/libkqueue/libpthread_workqueue over the past year, we now have a Linux version of libdispatch that works well enough to support forked-daapd. This codebase will become the primary codebase for forked-daapd once the database performance issue will be fixed. After this point, the current libevent 1.4 codebase will be legacy and won t see any further development (we ll discuss bugfixes in due time). This new codebase comes with new requirements:

• the Clang compiler from the LLVM project is required, due to the use of the C Blocks extension that isn t supported by GCC;
• libdispatch, of course, is required;
• libtre is a new dependency for concurrent regexps;
• glibc 2.13+ is required, or any glibc version containing a fix for glibc BZ#10563.

libdispatch and its dependencies are available in Debian unstable; it s best and easier to use whatever is in unstable, instead of mixing and matching the libdispatch/libkqueue/libpthread_workqueue versions until they all work together. Due to platform support in Clang, the GCD codebase can only be built for and will only run on i386 and amd64, as far as Linux is concerned. Other architectures will have to wait until support for them is added to Clang. FreeBSD is untested and will probably require some modifications to work; recent enough versions of FreeBSD have a native pthread_workqueue implementation and do not need libpthread_workqueue. Packages are available in experimental for Debian users; they ll end up in unstable in a few weeks, before the libevent2 migration happens there. Tarballs available at http://alioth.debian.org/~jblache/forked-daapd/ ; GPG signatures made with my Debian key F5D65169.