Good morning, and welcome to another day of archive damage, i mean hackery. Well, at least at the time of this writing it is morning and we are starting off into another day of work. As we promised to try to have at least a once-a-day-installation run I am currently processing the queue of uploaded packages, around 4gigabytes from 431 changes files. After that a dinstall will follow to push that all out. Lets see how often we can do this again today, yesterday we managed multiple times. Yesterday my work consisted of getting the ries sync into something nice and acceptable, starting to think of the change to only use the suite codenames in future (long term making lots of code issues easier, but short term a good headache) and doing the groundwork so we can upgrade the security and backports archive to squeeze/pg9 too. Mark finished of the Built-Using flag and then moved on to think about database file tracking changes related to multiple archives/locations. Which sounds simple in so few words but is definitely not simple at all. Torsten started to work on source contents and also on generating the packages/sources files out of our database. Both together is taking a good amount of time, so he continues to work on those today. In the evening we had a meeting with the Debian Hurd porters about the future of their port within the Debian archive. The perceived Hurd situation until then was that every port has to follow certain rules or gets thrown out but Hurd doesn t seem to ever get into a releasable state . Well, we did get a clean view on both sides standpoint and in the end emerged with a solution which works for both sides: The Hurd port stays on FTPMaster until Wheezy is released. Should they have managed to get the port into a state that it is released together with all the others (probably as a technology preview), it is kept in the archive. Should they not manage this, the port will be removed from the main archive and move fully to debian-ports.org. It may then reenter the main archive whenever it is ready to get released with the next release. For today we are all continuing in our parts, Mark is yelling at the insanity of the multi-location thing (something we DO need when we want to merge multiple archives, which we do want), Torsten curses the code for Packages/Sources and while I hope that DSA can find time today to upgrade our security- and backports-archive machines to Squeeze, I try to wrap my head around the code we kindly got provided by Serafeim Zanikolas - the dinstall programming fun task I asked a while ago. Im not sure yet I will succeed. :) And then we will get more arrivals this evening, so more people doing stuff tomorrow.

We're heading to release candidates for phpMyAdmin 3.4.0, so the translators have less time to make the translations better. There are still 13 translations at 100%:

• Catalan
• Chinese (China)
• Czech
• Dutch
• English (United Kingdom)
• French
• German
• Greek
• Russian
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish

There are still lot of translations which would need some love, for example:

• Italian
• Norvegian
• Polish

Recently, new people started to work on Bulgarian and Brazilian Portuguese translations, so we will hopefully have these two on the list soon as well. You can help make translation to your language better! If your language is missing just let me know (either in comments or by email).

Filed under: English Phpmyadmin 1 comments Flattr this!

I am at the next edition of Debian FTPMaster meetings in the LinuxHotel Essen currently. We arrived Sunday evening and will stay until 27th March, giving us again a nice week of time to work on outstanding archive issues. And our todo does list a good number of points. Currently we are 3 persons, all 3 FTPMasters. On Wednesday evening one wanna-build member will join and on Friday evening one FTPTeam member arrives for the weekend. While thats not all of our team it still gives us a good base to work on. And so we already did, starting Sunday evening with unbreaking some fallout from Lenny->Squeeze update of the ftpmaster host as well as discussing some of our agenda points and how to tackle them. Today I started changing our backup strategy. Instead of dumping the whole dak database at dinstall start and end, a 4gb file each time, later compressing and then expiring them, we don t dump them at all anymore. Instead we save the postgres transaction id and let the Debian Sysadmin team do the backup. Which they do anyways, using the PostgreSQL WAL stuff. Which means we can just tell them to please reset the dak db to the place of transaction $BLA . Something that only works as we are switching to Postgres 9.0 and will use replication to sync our DD-accessible machine. Torsten started work by explaining us his ORMObject idea in our database layer, then violently vomitting when I pointed him at some code to fixup. Seems that code isn t all the most beautiful one, so he switched to cleanup in a different place. Lets see if I get him back to that bad code. Mark is playing with our database and trying to get that from 8.4 to 9.0, seems like some stuff we are using isn t all that en vogue anymore in 9.0, so might need adjustments.

This seems an active time for conference planning in two of the projects I like:

1. KohaCon11 is being planned for Thane, India. Registrations are open and I m helping to admin the conference system (OCS). If you d like to talk, submissions are also open now, although how we review and choose has yet to be decided (should be at the next volunteer meeting). If you d like to sponsor the event, please register as a potential sponsor.
2. DebConf12 s location will be picked at an IRC meeting today (Tuesday). Bids from Belo Horizonte, Brazil and Managua, Nicaragua are on the web and you are invited to help choose between them.

Are there any other Free and Open Source Software community conferences you d like to mention?

And so there went a day of work. Minutes done, come back tomorrow

---

Okok, more text: We did lots of stuff. There was breakfast, soon after we had Lunch, and guess, Dinner also. Now, would you please come back tomorrow?

---

Anyways, we did some things. One of those was to have PostgreSQL 9.0 and to enable the replication to the machine any DD can access. Which is, from today on, ries.debian.org. And for the first time ever (since that time ftp-master got closed to the public), DDs can now see the live status of the archive, literally a second after a package got accepted a dak ls on ries will show you that fact. Torsten worked on fixing up old remnants of code and database entries around contents and also tackled a problem between our usage of SQLalchemy and the python multiprocessing module. He also started working on the source contents and was weird enough to get us standardized logging into a dak tool. Mark worked with DSA on the Postgres 9.0 upgrade to fix what was to fix in out database and did some tests with our environment in squeeze and coordinated changes in python-apt needed for multiarch and xz. He then started working on some larger database changes around the built-using feature. I myself started off with getting generate-packages-sources to behave when there is an error instead of silently ignoring that. I also did a bit of groundwork to enable us to do NEW processing adding overrides for all affected binary packages, not just those from the architecture currently uploaded. That will allow stuff like linux-2.6 to pass NEW just once, not once per architecture. That involves a new field in our dsc files and the status of that is tracked in Bug #619131.

I recently deployed my node.js proxy server, removing all traces of Apache2 from my main server. During the course of this transition I discovered:

Bugs in my code

Not unexpected, in all honesty. There were two main issues; the first was relating to how I handled the 304 response, the second was relating to how I performed rewrites for my mercurial repository vhost.

Bugs in node.js

Given how new node.js is there wasn't a huge surprise here either, although I thought I'd been good testing against 0.2.x. As it turned out I needed to run the more recent 0.4.x to avoid a couple of issues:

• HTTP headers are lower-cased
• ECONNREFUSED was not being caught the way that I expected.

In short I have a backported node.js package for Squeeze which is almost worthless. I'll update it in the near future. For the moment:

cd node-v0.4.3/
./configure --without-ssl --prefix=/opt/node-0.4.3 && make && make install
ln -fs /opt/node-0.4.3  /opt/node

Oddities in thttpd

thttpd is what actually runs my websites and I discovered during some extended debugging sessions that it just does not like HTTP requests starting with a doubled "/" character. For example this works fine:

wget http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/

But this fails:

wget http://www.acme.com//software/thttpd/

Previously it seems that Apache was (silently) fixing this up before it proxied requests. Now I have to do it myself, no big thing, but still a surprise.

All in all it was worth it to be able to run:

dpkg --purge libapache2-mod-rpaf \
             apache2.2-common \
             apache2.2-bin \
             apache2-utils \
             apache2-mpm-prefork \
             apache2 \
             libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 \
             libaprutil1-ldap \
             libaprutil1 \
             libapr1

ObQuote: "Bad news. The fog's getting thicker." - Airplane!

The first two months of this year have seen me quite busy preparing for my March-April peak of activity. So, most of these were spent accumulating kilometers, mostly on trail runs with mud, slope, obstacles, etc.

• January: 240km, 21h17', 3000m positive slope
• February: 170km, 15h10', 1900m positive slope

January was meant to accumulate kilometers, which succeeded quite well..:-). Not as crazy as November 2010 (close to 300km) but the point was also testing a few long runs, over 25km and up to 32. February saw my first official race, with Bullion half-marathon. This is a nice race which I already ran last year. It features small roads in the Rambouillet Forest. Not the best place to achieve a personal best because the race is not flat, with two hills in the first half. Moreover, I was just recovering from a small flu, so I wasn't really planning to achieve a PB. Still, I managed to do it in 1h39'49", two minutes more than my PB. Moreover, I managed to do it in a small negative split, with first half in 50'38" and second half in 49'11". More encouraging, I ran a 35km solo trail the next week-end after this and completed it fairly well with the pace I plan for the 50km Eco-Trail. Still, that flu introduced some minor perturbation in this preparation and, thus, I included more activity in early March. I was originally planning to run Paris half-marathon on 6th, but an invitation for a friends 50th birthday made me cancel that one. So, most of the first 3 weeks of March were spent in 15-18km style runs, plus running daily to go to and back from work. The last preparation was today with a short 12km run with all equipment needed for Eco-Trail (backpack, 2lit. waterbag) and the targeted pace (10km/h). So, on Saturday, will be the Paris Eco-trail 50km race from Versailles Castle to Eiffel Tower....through woods in the South and South-West neighbourhood, with 1000m positive slope. This will be my first ultra race, so I'm a little bit in a grey area, here. As a consequence, the only ambition is finishing. I expect it to be in aroung 5h30 or so. Most importantly, I have to keep reserves, as, two weeks later, I'll run my yearly Paris marathon. Two long distance races in two weeks...we'll see if I'm crazy or not..:-) Now, I'm heading for a quiet week: grow glucides reserves, eat pasta, do one or two footings...and wait for Saturday! You may want to watch my blog on Sunday to see whether I survived this first stage.

A bit of history One of the greatest criticisms of Debian is that its release cycles are too long. Debian stable release is seen as often as Ubuntu s LTS release. As a server solution this doesn t present a problem at all, it can even seen as a pro. However, for desktop use and for your average Joe who needs to have the latest software and is unable to get it, this may well present a problem. Of course he can always turn to backports to get what he needs but by the time you have finished reading this very sentence, Joe has already moved to Ubuntu. For those who are completely unaware how things work within Debian, let me try to shed some light. Debian has 3 main branches:

• stable
• testing
• unstable

Unstable , is a branch used mainly by developers, where the latest changes to the software they are working on are made. Usually, after approximately 10 days this software is pushed to testing , branch which is going to become next Debian stable release. For comparison, in the process of a new Ubuntu release at one point in this process, changes from testing/unstable are frozen where Ubuntu fixes bugs until they are ready to release new Ubuntu release. Debian s testing branch is said by some to be more stable then most of the stable distributions out there. Last but not least is stable branch, which follows the (in)famous mantra it s released when it s ready , although last two releases have been released in a more timely manner. Okay, so what is Debian CUT? The idea stretches back more then 2 years, to Joey Hess proposing the idea of Constantly Usable Testing . For users/developers who can t wait ~2 years to see new Debian release, they usually turn to Debian testing branch. To clarify, testing images are released weekly, but most of us in Debian don t recommend you jump to testing by installing it from weekly image, but rather by upgrading from stable. To make the situation even worse, these builds frequently don t work due to all the changes that have been pushed from unstable. But this is where Constantly Usable Testing idea comes in, where the installer is always installable and you re already using what s going to be next stable release. You wouldn t have to worry about whether the next update is going to break your system, but would get regular security updates, while the big updates would come in shape of new testing snapshot versions. Frequency of release of these snapshots is ought to be on monthly basis, so you can plan on seeing the next release on April 6th (exactly one month after the current release, provided of course if there are no showstopper bugs). To sum it all up, you wouldn t have to wait ~2 years before new Stable release shows up, nor (in case you have already switched to testing) would you have to worry whether your next update will break your system. You would get your updates in form of timely (ie: monthly) snapshots until it s time for major milestone which would turn out to be new Debian release. Even though this might be long term goal, in these early stages no one can guarantees this. Rolling release? The simplest way to explain this concept is that there are two types of Linux distributions: one with milestone version numbers and other where new updates keep coming through their rolling release cycles. Some of the rolling distributions are Gentoo and Arch Linux, while on the other side you have RedHat and Suse. Novell announced that OpenSuse is moving to rolling release with project codename Tumbleweed. It s also worth mentioning that Debian already has its rolling counters and perfect examples are: LMDE and aptosid. It is a way to continuously develop software, a way that best fits Debian as a platform where software is continuously developed. Especially because most of its greatest values could get lost with the release of that big stable version . Perfect case of that could be the almost drop of Chromium in Squeeze. Another great example could be Android, which is criticised most for its versioning. Companies are refusing to release new Android versions to their current phones, because they want you to buy new phone with latest Android version, even though your current one is perfectly capable of running latest Android. Personally, I m sure the future will reveal that rolling releases are the future, towards which all Linux platforms should be heading. Perhaps the definition of rolling releases I gave earlier is why I believe this project has such bright future ahead of it. Debian would be somewhat of a hybrid of this definition, it would be rolling release until it s time to mark a big milestone with a version number, and before you know it, we re rolling again. Unofficial Debian Monthly Testing Snapshot Release (version 2011.03 final) Michael Gilbert took on a big responsibility, trying experimentally to prove the feasibility of such a project. He has released a first wheezy snapshot installer (versioned 2011.03) as a test for the development community to try out and evaluate. Please read official announcement along with download links. While you can use this snapshot to have constantly working installer, after it is installed you could move to testing altogether if you wish. Conclusion As I have already mentioned, this project is still in the development/experimental stage, which makes all of this its very conception. Also, apart from rumors of Ubuntu becoming rolling release, if Ubuntu is to get its rolling release this how it s going to get it If you d like to find out more about Debian CUT, I suggest you read Raphael Hertzog s article A constantly usable testing distribution for Debian , and watch the video of Joey Hess CUT BoF on DebConf10 in NYC. Of course, if you d like to get involved into this project, please use the project s mailing list. If you have any comments, please do share, as I d be happy to answer any of your questions.

Recently there has been some major developments in DebConf11 organization. In short, I will list some of the most important.

Website

Official DC11 website has finally been completed and now contains a great deal of information for those interested in attending this years conference. Some of the most notable changes include:

Navigation

Frontpage now contains a small menu with links to most important parts of website, like About, Registration, Contact Sidebar menu is now divided in 3 categories:

• The Conference Links to pages which are directly connected with the Conference like About DC, Debian Day, Registration, Call for Papers, Talk Schedules, Payments Most of these links are hidden at the moment, and will be until the registration is open, to avoid any unnecessary confusion.
• More Information Basic information for attendees like Important Dates, Accommodations, Venue, Visa Everything you need to know about your stay in Banja Luka.
• Practical While these pages have almost nothing to do with the Conference itself, they do provide a vast information about city, getting to Bosnia, some practical information, as well as the Map of the whole city made my me :)

New Pages added

• How Can I Help This page contains some basic information for anyone who wants to help out. Weather by volunteering, sponsoring, or just by adding a banner on their website
  DC11: How Can I Help?
• Contact Instead of just sending visitors to mailto, we replaced it by a page which contains ALL contact information, emails AND phone numbers (which will be added just before DebCamp starts).
  DC11: Contact
• Sponsorship Just like with the contact page, we made a page to be more user friendly to any interested parties or individuals, and contains most important info, such as sponsorship levels and contact address.
  DC11: Sponsorship
• About DebConf11 Actually it s just a page with a content copied from frontpage (which is now used for something else).
  DC11: About DebConf11

New features:

• Documentation Is now used to store all important documents and records for public use and sharing, like brochures, official government documents, important public mails, as well as the recordings of all IRC meeting logs. Can be found at:
  DC11: Documentation
• Frontpage: Navigation To ensure the main goal of website, information availability, frontpage has been redesigned to provide maximum accessibility as well as easy access to any part of the website. DC11: Frontpage
• Frontpage: Latest News To keep the public and attendees well informed of any important events and developments, we decided to add latest news section. Note however, that if you want to stay completely informed of any changes and updates, we still recommend subscribing to our mailing list, which can be found under contact page.
  DC11: Frontpage
• Map of Banja Luka Because of lack of data on Google Maps and Open Street Map, as well as some other minor local maps, we made a small map of almost whole city and added around 60 or 70 locations which we consider to be of importance for our attendees. Such locations include hotels, parking spots, restaurants, bars, clubs, petrol stations, taxi stations, etc. This page uses simple JavaScript and is not dragable . Therefore we added Index Location to auto-locate the needed locations, as well as the legend to clarify the category of locations. Pointing your mouse over a certain location will open a small bubble with some info on that location/object. We should also point out that some of this data may not be 100% correct (ie working hours may be off ). Map is available at:
  DC11: Banja Luka City Map

Bosnian language

Site is now available on Bosnian language for native speaking attendees, should they have problems with English version. Every page is available on both languages, which can be changed by clicking on ba/en flag in upper left corner, or DC11: Bosnian Version.

Design

As you may have noticed, the official page received a small face lift. New header with the Government building, a small token of appreciation for all the help the Government is providing; as well as some minor changes in CSS and color scheme. While talking about design, we d like to thank Leandro G mez for his help with the header.

Sponsorship Sponsorship Levels

As agreed on the meeting, which took place on 22. of February, [Meeting logs], following sponsorship levels will be used for this years conference:

• Steel < 1.000
• Bronze > 1.000
• Silver > 5.000
• Gold > 10.000
• Platinum > 20.000

Main reason for lowering amounts is due to last years results of high increase in the same. As for the benefits of these levels, the only thing changed is t-shirts / bags places; we believe t-shirts are much more noticeable than bags, and have therefore been promoted to Silver, while bags have been downgraded to Bronze. For a full list of requirements and benefits, please visit: DC11: Sponsorship Sponsorship Brochure

Sponsorship brochures have finally been completed and are available for a public distribution. The brochures are available in 3 qualities: low, high and original. Low and high quality brochures, ~6Mb and ~8Mb respectively, are for normal distribution to our sponsors, while original quality, at around 240Mb, is intended for maximum quality printing. Just as with the website, each quality is available in both Bosnian and English. Current version of the brochure is 1.1 and is most likely the final one. These brochures are available at Documentation page: DC11: Documentation >> Documents made by Local Team Or download them directly:

• Sponsorship Brochure LQ [en]
• Sponsorship Brochure HQ [en]
• Sponsorship Brochure OQ [en]
• Sponsorship Brochure LQ [ba]
• Sponsorship Brochure HQ [ba]
• Sponsorship Brochure OQ [ba]

Also, I d like to thank Mirosal Remetic for making a great template and Pablo Duboue for some very valuable suggestions regarding the structure of the brochure.

Visas and Customs Rules

Many questions have been raised regarding Bosnian visa regime. We got in contact with the embassy and they clarified who can enter our country with(out) Visa. The list can be found on DC11 Wiki: Visa regime. It also states, which countries have a privilidge of ID-only entrance. If your country is not listed, that means you will need visa. If you want to know what exactly you need to get one, please visit the this official Government page and chose your country from a drop-down menu. As for the visa itself, as well as the list of Customs Rules, please read DC11: Visa.

Also, thanks to Darjan Prtic for getting the list from the Government officials.

So, what s next?

If you think, that is it for now, you are dead wrong. At this very moment following is being organized and developed:

• Registration Registration Team is currently hacking penta and modifying it for this years needs and conditions. We expect to have registrations open by the end of March / beginning of April.
• Travel and getting to Banja Luka Being one of the greatest obstacle, Travel Team is working hard on finding best routes for attendees and mapping the city
• Sponsorship With final decision and agreement for sponsorship levels and brochures ready for public distribution, Sponsorship Team is now actively looking for new sponsors, global and local, preparing various promotional material, as well as planning our advertising strategy.

Final word

Well, these are pretty much the highlights of some recent and some future developments of DebConf11 organizational team. Mind you, there s a lot more going on, but I tried to give a small summary from the inside. Should you be interested in attending, helping out, sponsoring or just have some questions, feel free to ask them on our mailing list at: debconf11-localteam@lists.debconf.org. I should inform you that this is a public mailing list and its archives are available for a broader public. If you do not wish for your mail to be made public, please direct any enquiry directly to me trough the Contact Form or any other member of Core Local Team, Adnan Hodzic or Velimir Iveljic.

I saw this on my computer screen the other day, and I ve got to say it really warmed my heart. I ll explain below if it doesn t provoke that reaction for you. So here s why that made me happy. Well for one, it was the first time Jacob had left stuff on my computer that I found later. And of course he left his name there. But moreover, he s learning a bit about the Unix shell. sl is a command that displays an animated steam locomotive. I taught him how to use the semicolon to combine commands. So he has realized that he can combine calls to sl with the semicolon to get a series of a LOT of steam trains all at once. And was very excited about this discovery. Also he likes how error messages start with the word bash .

Linux 2.6.38 was just released, with another big update to ASoC including:

• Enhancements to multi-component from Jarkko Nikula allowing multiple devices of the same type to be included in one system (and handling other overlaps between devices) and support cross device DAPM.
• Support from Dimitris Papastamos for compressing the register cache in memory using either an rbtree or LZO, giving substantial memory savings on CODECs with large register maps, especially those that are sparse. This is especially beneficial to modern devices with integrated DSPs. This can be enabled by machine drivers, though CODECs can also provide defaults.
• Addition of trace points around DAPM and register I/O operation, allowing very low overhead logging without interfering with the main system log, useful for collecting verbose diagnostics without interfering with system operation and for always enabled flight recorder style tracking for intermittent problems. I blogged about ASoC trace points in more detail at the time.
• Restructuring of the Samsung CPU support from Jassi Brar, including a number of really good usability improvements. This supports features of more modern CPUs such as the ability to run two audio streams to a single I2S port and includes a number of API simplifications which should also make developing drivers for Samsung systems much easier.
• New CODEC drivers for ALC5621/2/3, WM8737, WM8770 and WM8958.
• Machine support for HP iPAQ H1940, HP t5325 thin clients and OpenRC Ultimate.

Last weekend we've released phpMyAdmin 3.4.0-beta4, hopefully last beta and there are still lot of translations missing. The only new complete translation compared to last week is German, so we now have 13 translations at 100%:

• Catalan
• Chinese (China)
• Czech
• Dutch
• English (United Kingdom)
• French
• German
• Greek
• Russian
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish

There are still lot of translations which would need some love, for example:

• Italian
• Norvegian
• Polish

I'm happy that not only translation status is improving, but some translators also reviewed older translations, so that it is more consistent. The great work in this area was done in Russian. And of course there is still great ongoing effort on Urdu translation. You can help make translation to your language better! If your language is missing just let me know (either in comments or by email).

Filed under: English Phpmyadmin 0 comments Flattr this!

Last fall, Moonshot was steaming forward. We ran into some non-technical obstacles and progress on the implementation was disturbingly quite from the end of October through February. That changed: the code was released February 25. Since then, the project has picked up the momentum of last fall. There s a new developers corner with helpful links for participating in the project, obtaining the code, and preparing for our upcoming Second Moonshot Meeting. Standards work in the ABFAB working group has been making steady progress the entire time. The jabber chat room has been quite active. Developers have been working in three time zones. Whenever In get up there s likely to be interesting progress awaiting me and new things to work on in the chat logs. Today was no exception. Luke moonshooted jabber. This is exciting: it s the first tim our code has been used to authenticate some real application instead of a test service. Other discussion from the chat room not reflected in e-mail is equally exciting. He has Moonshot working with OpenSSH in controlled environments. It appears to require some updates to the OpenSSH GSS-API support. Now is a really great time to get involved in Moonshot. We hope to see you on our lists and in our chat. With last night s news, we need to think towards eating our own dogfood and using Moonshot to authenticate to our own Jabber server and to authenticate to our repository for commits. Right now, there are some security issues with the code (lack of EAP channel binding) that might make that undesirable. However in a very small number of weeks or months I expect we will be there!

Around the first bunch of postings in my Useful but Unknown Unix Tools, Tobias Klauser of inotail and Symlink fame came up with the idea of making a Planet (i.e. a blog aggregator) of all the comandline blogs and blog categories out there. A first Planet Venus running prototype based on the template and style sheets of Planet Symlink was quickly up and running. I just couldn t decide if I should use an amber or phosphor green style for this new planet. Marius Rieder finally had the right idea to solve this dilemma: Offer both, an amber and a phosphor green style. Christian Herzog pointed me to the right piece of code at A List Apart. So here is it, available in you favourite screen colors:

Planet Commandline For a beginning, the following feeds are included:

• Myon s Unix blog category
• Evgeni Golov s Desktop in a Shell column
• My Useful but Unknown Unix Tools column
• My Shell blog category
• The GRML Development Blog
• Chr tertee (Swiss-German)
• Commandline Magic s identi.ca feed

Which leads us to the discussion what kind of feeds should be included in Planet Commandline. Of course, all blogs or blog categories which (nearly) solely post neat tips and tricks about the command line in English are welcome. Microblogging feeds containing (only) small but useful command line tips are welcome, too, if they neither permanently contain dozens of posts per day nor have a low signal-to-noise ratio. Unfortunately most identi.ca groups do, so they re not suitable for such a planet. What I m though unsure about are non-English feeds. Yes, there s one in already, but I noticed this only after including Beat s Chr tertee and his FreeBSD command line tips are really good. So if it doesn t go overboard, I think it s ok. If there are too many non-English feeds, I ll probably split Planet Commandline off into at least three Planets: One with all feeds, one with English only and one with all non-English feeds or maybe even one feed per language. But for now that s still a long way off. Another thing I m unsure about are more propgram specific blogs like the impressive Mastering Emacs blog about mastering the world s best text editor . *g* (Yeah, I didn t include that one yet. But as soon someone shows me the vi-equivalent of that blog, I ll include both. Anyone thinks, spf13 s vim category is up to that?) Oh, and sure, any shell-specific (zsh, tcsh, bash, mksh, busybox) tips & tricks blogs don t count as program-specific blogs like some $EDITOR, $BROWSER, or $VCS specific blogs do. :-) Of course I m happy about further suggestions for feeds to include in Planet Commandline. Just remember that the feed should provide (at least nearly) exclusively command line tips, tricks or howtos. Suggestions for links to other commandline related planets are welcome, too.

Mozilla has been distributing Firefox builds for GNU/Linux systems for a while, and 4.0 should even bring official builds for x86-64 (finally, some would say). The buildbots configuration for these builds uses gcc 4.3.3 to compile the Firefox source code. With the C++ part of gcc, it can sometimes mean side effects when using the C++ STL. Historically, the Mozilla code base hasn t made a great use of the STL, most probably because 10+ years back, portability and/or compiler support wasn t very good. More recently, with the borrowing of code from the Chromium project, this changed. While the borrowed code for out-of-process plugins support didn t have an impact on libstdc++ usage, the recent addition of ANGLE had. This manifests itself in symbols version usage These are the symbol versions required from libstdc++.so.6 on 3.6 (as given by objdump -p):

• CXXABI_1.3
• GLIBCXX_3.4

And on 4.0:

• CXXABI_1.3
• GLIBCXX_3.4
• GLIBCXX_3.4.9

This means Firefox 4.0 builds from Mozilla need the GLIBCXX_3.4.9 symbol version, which was introduced with gcc 4.2. This means Firefox 4.0 builds don t work on systems with a libstdc++ older than that, while 3.6 builds would. It so happens that the system libstdc++ on the buildbots themselves is that old, which is why we set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the appropriate location during tests. This shouldn t however be a big problem for users. Newer gcc, new problems As part of making Firefox faster, we re planning to switch to gcc 4.5, to benefit from better (as in working) profile guided optimization, and other compiler improvements. We actually attempted to switch to gcc 4.5 twice during the 4.0 development cycle. But various problems made us go back to gcc 4.3.3, the main contender being the use of even newer libstdc++ symbols:

• CXXABI_1.3
• GLIBCXX_3.4
• GLIBCXX_3.4.5
• GLIBCXX_3.4.9
• GLIBCXX_3.4.14

GLIBCXX_3.4.14 was added in gcc 4.5, making the build require a very recent libstdc++ installed on users systems. As this wouldn t work for Mozilla builds, we attempted to build with -static-libstdc++. This options makes the resulting binary effectively contain libstdc++ itself, which means not requiring a system one. This is the usual solution used for builds such as Mozilla s, that require to work properly on very different systems. The downside of -static-libstdc++ is that it makes the libxul.so binary larger (about 1MB larger). It looks like the linker doesn t try to eliminate the code from libstdc++ that isn t actually used. Taras has been fighting to try to get libstdc++ in a shape that would allow the linker to remove that code that is effectively dead weight for Firefox. Why do we need these symbols? The actual number of symbols required with the GLIBCXX_3.4.14 version is actually very low:

• std::_List_node_base::_M_hook(std::_List_node_base*)
• std::_List_node_base::_M_unhook()

With the addition of the following on debug builds only:

• std::string::_S_construct_aux_2(unsigned int, char, std::allocator<char> const&)
• std::basic_string<wchar_t, std::char_traits<wchar_t>, std::allocator<wchar_t> >::_S_construct_aux_2(unsigned int, wchar_t, std::allocator<wchar_t> const&)

The number of symbols required with the GLIBCXX_3.4.9 version is even lower:

• std::istream& std::istream::_M_extract<double>(double&)

It however varies depending on the compiler version. I have seen other builds also require std::ostream& std::ostream::_M_insert(double). All these are actually internal implementation details of the libstdc++. We re never calling these functions directly. I m going to show two small examples triggering some of these requirements (that actually generalize to all of them). The case of templates

#include <iostream>
int main()  
    unsigned int i;
    std::cin >> i;
    return i;
 

This example, when built, requires std::istream& std::istream::_M_extract<double>(double&), but we are effectively calling std::istream& operator>>(unsigned int&). It is defined in /usr/include/c++/4.5/istream as:

template<typename _CharT, typename _Traits>
class basic_istream : virtual public basic_ios<_CharT, _Traits>  
    basic_istream<_CharT, _Traits>& operator>>(unsigned int& __n)  
        return _M_extract(__n);
     
 

And _M_extract is defined in /usr/include/c++/4.5/bits/istream.tcc as:

template<typename _CharT, typename _Traits> template<typename _ValueT>
        basic_istream<_CharT, _Traits>&
        basic_istream<_CharT, _Traits>::_M_extract(_ValueT& __v)  
            (...)
         

And later on in the same file:

extern template istream& istream::_M_extract(unsigned int&);

What this all means is that libstdc++ actually provides an implementation of an instance of the template for the istream (a.k.a. basic_istream<char>) class, with an unsigned int & parameter (and some more implementations). So, when building the example program, gcc decides, instead of instantiating the template, to use the libstdc++ function. This extern definition, however, is guarded by a #if _GLIBCXX_EXTERN_TEMPLATE, so if we build with -D_GLIBCXX_EXTERN_TEMPLATE=0, we actually get gcc to instantiate the template, thus getting rid of the GLIBCXX_3.4.9 dependency. The downside is that this doesn t work so well with bigger code, because other things are hidden behind #if _GLIBCXX_EXTERN_TEMPLATE. There is however another (obvious) way to for the template instantiation: instantiating it. So adding template std::istream& std::istream::_M_extract(unsigned int&); to our code is just enough to get rid of the GLIBCXX_3.4.9 dependency. Other template cases obviously can be worked around the same way. The case of renamed implementations

#include <list>
int main()  
    std::list<int> l;
    l.push_back(42);
    return 0;
 

Here, we get a dependency on std::_List_node_base::_M_hook(std::_List_node_base*) but we are effectively calling std::list<int>::push_back(int &). It is defined in /usr/include/c++/bits/stl_list.h as:

template<typename _Tp, typename _Alloc = std::allocator<_Tp> >
class list : protected _List_base<_Tp, _Alloc>  
    void push_back(const value_type& __x)  
        this->_M_insert(end(), __x);
     
 

_M_insert is defined in the same file:

template<typename ... _Args>
void _M_insert(iterator __position, _Args&&... __args)  
    _List_node<_Tp>* __tmp = _M_create_node(std::forward<_args>(__args)...);
    __tmp->_M_hook(__position._M_node);
 

Finally, _M_hook is defined as follows:

struct _List_node_base  
    void _M_hook(_List_node_base * const __position) throw ();
 

In gcc 4.4, however, push_back has the same definition, and while _M_insert is defined similarly, it calls __tmp->hook instead of __tmp->_M_hook. Interestingly, gcc 4.5 s libstdc++ exports symbols for both std::_List_node_base::_M_hook and std::_List_node_base::hook, and the code for both methods is the same. Considering the above, a work-around for this kind of dependency is to define the newer function in our code, and make it call the old function. In our case here, this would look like:

namespace std  
    struct _List_node_base  
        void hook(_List_node_base * const __position) throw ();
        void _M_hook(_List_node_base * const __position) throw ();
     ;
    void _List_node_base::_M_hook(_List_node_base * const __position) throw ()  
        hook(__position);
     
 

which you need to put in a separate source file, not including <list>. All in all, with a small hack, we are able to build Firefox with gcc 4.5 without requiring libstdc++ 4.5. Now, another reason to switch to gcc 4.5 was to use better optimization flags, but it turns out it makes the binaries 6MB bigger. But that s another story.

One of the biggest differences between working on most other OSs and working upstream on drivers for the Linux kernel is that elsewhere the core is usually a fixed thing that has been released and can t really be changed, even if source is available (which may not even be the case). If whatever subsystem you re working in can t cope with the thing you re trying to express then one of the things it s really useful to be good at is working out ways to implement the behaviour that s required behind the back of the subsystem. It s very common to see such code in drivers submitted by hardware vendors, particularly those that are new to Linux, as this is such a big mindset shift. With kernel development the approach is much more to make sure that the core can cope with whatever needs expressing. It s not always done in the core for example, sometimes the issue is due to unusually limited hardware and very likely to never come up again but it s very unusual to see code merged that doesn t at least fit in with the design of the subsystem. This post is inspired by a brief exchange with Thomas Gleixner on linux-kernel who articulated the advantages of doing things this way very well:

 - It's usually simpler and faster as the core code has all the
   necessary information. So that's even an argument which managers
   might understand.
 - Such workarounds, when not caught, tend to spread themself
   magically because driver writers checkout the existing code of
   similar devices and copy/paste/modify^Wuglify them over and over.
 - In the worst case such workarounds make the core maintainence
   harder and in some cases impossible, because they silently imply
   semantics on the core w/o the core maintainer knowing about them.

The last point is the most important one to me as a subsystem maintainer I really don t want to be merging code that is going to create issues with ongoing development of the subsystem. This is all another facet of the policy on stable APIs: APIs are only worth working around if they re fixed, and the assumptions that end up embedded in a workaroud are as much part of the API as the explicit interfaces. It s things like this that make Linux such a pleasure to work on.

again, nothing exciting to report. as you can see below, I've only worked on pkg-perl packages. we get a surprising amount of FTBFS bugs at the moment; many of them caused by changes in depended-upon packages, some also by human errors (like not building in a chroot and missing build dependencies upfront). at least the latter could be avoided quite easily ...

• #605792 src:libconfig-model-openssh-perl: "libconfig-model-openssh-perl: FTBFS: failed tests"
  upload new upstream release prepared by dod (pkg-perl)
• #611365 src:libemail-abstract-perl: "libemail-abstract-perl: failing tests"
  upload new upstream release and bump dependency (pkg-perl)
• #615470 src:libdpkg-log-perl: "libdpkg-log-perl: Can't locate Params/Validate.pm in @INC"
  add missing build dependencies (pkg-perl)
• #615498 src:libpoe-component-irc-perl: "libpoe-component-irc-perl: Can't locate Socket/GetAddrInfo.pm in @INC"
  add missing build dependency (pkg-perl)
• #615499 src:libhtml-autopagerize-perl: "libhtml-autopagerize-perl: Can't locate LWP/Simple.pm in @INC"
  upload fixed package prepared by periapt (pkg-perl)
• #615500 src:libtest-www-mechanize-catalyst-perl: "libtest-www-mechanize-catalyst-perl: Can't locate Test/Exception.pm in @INC "
  add missing build dependency (pkg-perl)
• #615503 libcatalyst-modules-extra-perl: "libcatalyst-modules-extra-perl: Can't locate ok.pm in @INC"
  add missing build dependency (pkg-perl)
• #615504 src:libhttp-browserdetect-perl: "libhttp-browserdetect-perl: failing tests"
  upload new upstream release with different build dependency (pkg-perl)
• #615510 src:nama: "nama: FTBFS with new libyaml-tiny-perl"
  add missing (build) dependency and add notes (pkg-perl)
• #615541 src:libmousex-getopt-perl: "libmousex-getopt-perl: prerequisites not found"
  add missing build and runtime dependencies (pkg-perl)
• #615545 src:libmail-mboxparser-perl: "libmail-mboxparser-perl: failing tests in unstable"
  tag confirmed (pkg-perl)
• #615622 src:libcatalyst-devel-perl: "libcatalyst-devel-perl: Can't locate Test/Exception.pm in @INC"
  add missing build dependency (pkg-perl)
• #615623 src:libmoosex-types-varianttable-perl: "libmoosex-types-varianttable-perl: Can't locate ok.pm in @INC"
  add missing build dependency (pkg-perl)
• #615884 libdbix-class-encodedcolumn-perl: "libdbix-class-encodedcolumn-perl: FTBFS: test failures"
  add missing build dependency (pkg-perl)
• #615963 src:libvendorlib-perl: "libvendorlib-perl: tilde expansion tests failing"
  upload with a patch (pkg-perl)
• #616004 src:libcatalyst-modules-perl: "libcatalyst-modules-perl: Can't locate ok.pm in @INC"
  add missing build dependency (pkg-perl)
• #617255 src:libsnmp-extension-passpersist-perl: "libsnmp-extension-passpersist-perl: Failing t/12-run.t test"
  tag confirmed (pkg-perl)

Four months ago I opted out of daylight savings time. How did it work out?

• I won't need to wake up an hour earlier tomorrow morning, when all the rest of you in America do. This alone makes skipping DST worthwhile.
• I enjoyed midwinter days where the sun set at 6:30. I got an hour more sunlight in my life every day. (I was never up before the sun.)
• I had a few confusing moments. A few visitors were confused by clocks in my house.
• I learned some things about myself, like I enjoy being a little bit out of step with everyone else. I have a powerful capacity to filter the world so that everyone else is wrong, and I'm right.
• While away visiting on holidays, I mentally switched to daylight savings time once. Because I didn't want to be at all out of step with everyone else then. (This did not impact my sleep schedule any more than visiting and needing to get up early normally does, except it was easier to get up early.)
• I felt closer to my friends in Europe, and more distant from my friends on the west coast.
• Technically, setting TZ=JEST+4 caused few problems. Gnome's panel was somewhat inconsistent. One program failed to parse dates another had produced.
• Unexpectedly, I saved some money. Turns out that if you show up in certain restaurants at their 11:15 am (your 12:15 pm), they don't have a lunch special chosen, and will let you pick the lunch special. :)

Tomorrow I will be in sync with everyone else. That might take some getting used to. I plan to keep my timezone setting, and will be doing this again next winter.

forked-daapd v0.13 is available! This release has been in the making for a long time, got delayed for a lot of reasons and had its content changed a few times along the way. Nonetheless, it s here now and if all goes to plan at least a couple releases should appear in the coming months, say before the summer. In this release:

• support for Remote 2.0
• support for per-speaker volume control
• support for RAOP retransmission
• improved compatibility with the 802.11g AirPort Express
• support for sort field metadata
• support for JPEG artwork and more alternative filenames
• fix for Murmur hash on 32bit platforms
• improved mDNS address resolution, making IPv4 usable again
• support for FFmpeg 0.6 (moving away from deprecated APIs)
• DAAP session expiration has been disabled
• misc fixes

Thanks to all the contributors that sent bugs and patches for this release! I know development doesn t go quite as fast as some would like, but keep in mind that I m doing this in whatever free time I have and that the public git tree doesn t tell the whole story. There are several parallel feature branches you don t get to see, for instance. Hopefully 0.14 will appear in a few weeks. Tarballs available at http://alioth.debian.org/~jblache/forked-daapd/ ; GPG signatures made with my Debian key F5D65169.

Getting a birthday present is always nice, of course. This one made me itch to go outside and hunt for nice motifs, though ... Images are straight from the camera, just a bit cropped (look at the EXIF if you feel like it.) If you don't want to look at the EXIF: the beautiful new lens is the Canon Canon EF 70-200mm 1:2.8 L IS II USM (like all manufacturers, Canon likes to collect funny abbreviations at the end of their product names though I feel they're not as bad as some...), and I truly like what I'm seeing so far. That this lens has excellent sharpness goes without saying (especially on the 40D with modest 10MPixel on a crop sensor), see the comparison with the old EF 100-300mm f/4.5-5.6 USM (the piccolo picture.) Beyond sharpness, there's the 1:2.8 aperture, the IS really keeps what it promises (and is absolutely silent), and AF is quiet and ultra fast as well. I've only got it today, so I took only a few shots I'm confident that CA, flare resistance etc. will live up to reputation though. Now I'm really starting about a full frame camera with higher MP count to take full advantage of my lenses (you may remember that I quite like decent equipment; the wideangle is said to be usable for full frame down to ca. 14mm although it's really designed for crop sensor...) The obvious question is if I really can take better pictures just because I'm now lugging around a 6kg bag of stuff ... but honestly, having a telephoto lens without image stabilisation was a pain, so getting the old tele replaced was the obvious next step.Oh yes, and: see you in Banja Luka! :-)