Modern daemon implementations can be run in a variety of ways, in a range of contexts. The daemon software itself can be a useful tool in environments where the associated traditional system service is neither needed nor desired. Unfortunately, common debian packaging practice has a tendency to conflate the two ideas, leading to some potentially nasty problems where only the tool itself is needed, but the system service is set up anyway. How would i fix it? i'd suggest that we make a distinction between packages that provide tools and packages that provide system services. A package that provides the system service foo would need to depend on a package that provides the tool foo. But the tool foo should be available through the package manager without setting up a system service automatically. Bad Examples Here are some examples of this class of problem i've seen recently:

akonadi-server depends on mysql-server

akonadi is a project to provide extensible, cross-desktop storage for PIM data. It is a dependency of many pieces of the modern KDE4 desktop. Its current implementation relies on a private instantiation of mysqld, executed directly by the end user whose desktop is running. This means that a sysadmin who installs a graphical calendar application suddenly now has (in addition to the user-instantiated local mysqld running as the akonadi backend) a full-blown system RDBMS service running and potentially consuming resources on her machine.Wouldn't it be better if the /usr/sbin/mysqld tool itself was distinct from the system service?

puppetmaster depends on puppet

Puppet is a powerful framework for configuration management. A managed host installs the puppet package, which invokes a puppetd service to reconfigure the managed host by talking to a centralized server on the network. The central host installs the the puppetmaster package, which sets up a system puppetmasterd service. puppetmaster depends on puppet to make use of some of the functionality available in the package. But this means that the central host now has puppetd running, and is being configured through the system itself! While some people may prefer to configure their all-powerful central host through the same configuration management system, this presents a nasty potential failure mode: if the configuration management goes awry and makes the managed nodes inaccessible, it could potentially take itself out too. Shouldn't the puppet tools be distinct from the puppetd system service?

monkeysphere Build-Depends: openssh-server

The Monkeysphere is a framework for managing SSH authentication through the OpenPGP Web-of-Trust (i'm one of the authors). To ensure that the package interacts properly with the OpenSSH implementation, the monkeysphere source ships with a series of test suites that exercise both sshd and ssh.This means that anyone trying to build the monkeysphere package must pull in openssh-server to satisfy the build-depends, thereby inadvertently starting up a potentially powerful network service on their build machine and maybe exposing it to remote access that they didn't intend. Wouldn't it be better if the /usr/sbin/sshd tool was available without starting up the ssh system service?

Good ExamplesHere are some examples of debian packaging that already understand and implement this distinction in some way:

apache2.2-bin is distinct from apache2-mpm-foo

Debian's apache packaging recently transitioned to split the apache tool into a separate package (apache2.2-bin) from the packages that provide an apache system service (apache2-mpm-foo). So apache can now be run by a regular user, for example as part of gnome-user-share.

git-core is distinct from git-daemon-run

git-core provides the git daemon subcommand, which is a tool capable of providing network access to a git repo. However, it does not set up a system service by default. The git-daemon-run package provides a way for an admin to quickly set up a "typical" system service to offer networked git access.

vblade is distinct from vblade-persist

vblade offers a simple, powerful utility to export a single file or block device as an AoE device. vblade-persist (disclosure: i wrote vblade-persist) provides a system service to configure exported devices, supervise them, keep them in service across system reboots, etc.

Tools are not Services: a ProposalLet's consider an existing foo package which currently provides:

• the tool itself (say, /usr/sbin/foo) and
• sets up a system service running foo, including stock foo daemon configuration in /etc/foo/*, startup scripts at /etc/init.d/foo, service configs at /etc/default/foo, etc.

I suggest that this should be split into two packages. foo-bin would contain the tool itself, and foo (which Depends: foo-bin) would contain the service configuration information, postinst scripts to set it up and start it, etc. This would mean that every instance of apt-get install foo in someone's notes would retain identical semantics to the past, but packages which need the tool (but not the service) can now depend on foo-bin instead, leaving the system with fewer resources consumed, and fewer unmanaged services running. For brand new packages (which don't have to account for a legacy of documentation which says apt-get install foo), i prefer the naming convention that the foo package includes the tool itself (after all, it does provide /usr/sbin/foo), and foo-service sets up a standard system service configured and running (and depends on foo). Side Effects This proposal would fix the problems noted above, but it would also offer some nice additional benefits. For example, it would make it easier to introduce an alternate system initialization process by creating alternate service packages (while leaving the tool package alone). Things like runit-services could become actual contenders for managing the running services, without colliding with the "stock" services installed by the bundled tool+service package. The ability to create alternate service packages would also mean that maintainers who prefer radically different configuration defaults could offer their service instantiations as distinct packages. For example, one system-wide foo daemon (foo-service) versus a separate instance of the foo daemon per user (foo-peruser-service) or triggering a daemon via inetd (foo-inetd-service). One negative side effect is that it adds some level of increased load on the package maintainers if the service package and the tool package both come from the same source package, then some work needs to be done to figure out how to split them. If the tool and service packages have separate sources (like vblade and vblade-persist) then some coordinating footwork needs to be done between the two packages when any incompatible changes happen. Questions? Disagreements? Next Steps? Do you disagree with this proposal? If so, why? Unfortunately (to my mind), Debian has a long history of packages which conflate tools with services. Policy section 9.3.2 can even be read as deliberately blurring the line (though i'd argue that a cautious reading suggests that my proposal is not in opposition to policy):

Packages that include daemons for system services should place scripts in /etc/init.d to start or stop services at boot time or during a change of runlevel.

I feel like this particular conflict must have been hashed out before at some level are there links to definitive discussion that i'm missing? Is there any reason we shouldn't push in general for this kind of distinction in debian daemon packages? Tags: daemons, packaging, policy

Here are some notes about bootstrapping a Centos or Fedora chroot from Debian. It should also work from Ubuntu with minor changes, but I haven t checked. The following should really be done in a chroot, since some commands will install files in your /etc or elsewhere, ignoring the --installroot passed to yum. The following instructions are for Centos, but replacing all occurences of centos with fedora should work.

• apt-get install yum rpm python-m2crypto
• apt-get install -t experimental rpm (needed because some packages, like bash, require features not available in unstable s rpm package error message about rpmlib(BuiltinLuaScripts)).
• mkdir -p /tmp/centos/var/lib/rpm
• rpm --root /tmp/centos --initdb
• Go to http://rpm.pbone.net or http://www.rpmfind.net, search for centos-release or fedora-release, and download the rpm for the version you want.
• rpm -ivh --force-debian --nodeps --root /tmp/centos centos-release*rpm (that populates /tmp/centos/etc with information about the centos repositories)
• yum --installroot /tmp/centos/ install yum . That fails because of missing GPG information in /etc/pki. Do ln -s /tmp/centos/etc/pki /etc/pki, then again yum --installroot /tmp/centos/ install yum.
• mount -t proc foo /tmp/centos/proc
• mount -t sysfs foo /tmp/centos/sys
• chroot /tmp/centos /bin/bash --login
• cd /var/lib/rpm && rm * (simplest way to avoid problems between db versions for Debian s RPM and centos RPM)
• rpm --initdb
• yum install yum (again, to restore the rpm db)
• yum install vim-minimal less
• That s all!

Update: Jaldhar Vyas pointed me to mach, and Paul Wise to mock. Both packages are available in Debian, but use config files for each release shipped in the package. Unfortunately, both packages are out of date, and don t include Fedora 9 or newer. Also, mock doesn t support Centos.

Anyway, both packages could use a new maintainer. Don t hesitate to jump in!

Hot from the oven: FusionForge 4.7 was just released. The release notes follow. If you have local enhancements based on a previous version of GForge, now is the time to port them to the 4.7 codebase and submit them, so they can be merged in time for the next version! Release notes for FusionForge 4.7 This is the first public release of FusionForge. FusionForge is based on GForge, and started as an identical copy, with only a name change to avoid confusion with the proprietary versions of GForge (known as GForge Advanced Server or GForge AS). As such, it benefits from mature code and known-good infrastructure, and builds on it for the future. This 4.7 release is focused on bringing the recent evolutions out to the community in an official stable release. This should provide a solid base as a starting point for community-based development, making it easier for enhancements to be maintained. The FusionForge name was chosen to reflect this: this is a community effort, and we hope to hear about your improvements. Contributing these improvements would make their future long-term maintenance easier for everyone. Major changes since previous versions (of GForge) include:

• Support for PHP5.
• Support for PostgreSQL 8.x.
• Translations are now managed by gettext.
• Support for several configurations running on the same code.
• Improved security, no need for PHP register_globals.
• Available as full install CD.
• New wiki plugins (using MediaWiki or phpWiki).
• New online_help plugin.
• New phpwebcalendar plugin.
• New project hierarchy plugin.

Things to keep in mind when installing:

• FusionForge is based on GForge, and the renaming is quite recent. So the code still contains lots of references to GForge. This will be fixed as time passes.
• Full text search using the primitives provided by PostgreSQL 8.3 isn't quite complete yet.
• Not all plugins are packaged for all distributions yet.

Things to keep in mind when upgrading:

• Since internationalisation was changed from a hand-made system to standard gettext, locally customised translations will no longer override standard ones. This will be addressed in a future release.

For more up-to-date information, please visit http://fusionforge.org/ or http://fusionforge.fusionforge.org/ -- you can even join us on IRC from there! -- The FusionForge development team

Order Without Law is a fantastic book by Robert Ellickson published in 1991. In a way, the book is an in-depth case study of the irrelevance of law. Subtitled, "how neighbors settle disputes," Ellickson shows how people solve complicated problems in an archetypal area of liability law without knowledge of the law. Ellickson shows that even when people know exactly what the law says, they often ignore it in favor of community norms and, in his examples, models of "neighborliness." Specifically, the book is about how neighbors in northern California settle disputes related to damage caused by roaming cattle, how neighbors construct and share costs of fences, and how, although the law is frequently debated in relation to classifying land as either open or closed to free grazing, the law tends to take a back seat to unwritten norms in the way that problems are actually solved. There is order and a shared understanding of rules in Ellickson's account; it just has very little to do with the law. As part of his description, Ellickson goes into some detail about the types of damage that cattle cause. For example, Ellickson describes how bulls, will often break down barbed wire fences and go on rampages impregnating heifers, eating vast amounts of food, and destroying crops and equipment. When I was on a long bike trip through northern California a few weeks ago, I was sitting under a tree waiting for my cyling partner to catch up. A giant black bull nearby noticed me. Shorting, mooing, and shaking ribbons of slobber from its mouth, it lumbered toward me. Only a rather weak-looking barbed wire fence separated us. All I could think about was Order Without Law.

Over the last few years, I've been pretty immersed in the world of wikis. A wiki is like a collaborative web site; it lets several people view and edit a web page and link to other pages, maybe new pages that they themselves create. Wikis let tech-savvy people all over the world collaborate on a single web page, a single document. That's a pretty powerful idea, really. The obvious thing to do once an idea like wikis appears is to attempt to cram all of humanity's knowledge into it. Well that's just crazy enough to work. Wikipedia is the gold standard of wikis. It's a collaborative encyclopedia with lots and lots of articles. As the gold standard, it influences people's thinking about wikis in ways that might not be quite true. If Wikipedia were the only wiki you'd ever heard of, you might think that wikis are used to create encyclopedias. If that were true, you'd really only need one of them. If Wikipedia were the only wiki you'd ever heard of, you might be under the false impression that all wikis everywhere are editable by anyone. So if you create a wiki page, it's no longer yours. Other people can scribble on it. Well, some kinds of documents perhaps just aren't suitable for being edited by anyone, and the good news is that you can build a wiki for you and your classmates, or you and your coworkers, and you can decide who gets to edit what. I want to think about a few distinct uses for wikis in different contexts. The most common use is of course to create a knowledge repository; a collection of information written by people who know what they're talking about. That's what Wikipedia is, mostly. That's what the Haskell Prime wiki (which I run) is. And the excellent wiki about the game of Go, Sensei's Library, is also a knowledge repository. But there are other uses for wikis that are pretty cool. I often have to work on proposals with my coworkers. One (horrible) way to do this is to write the first draft in MS Word, email it to everyone, who might edit it and email it back. Of course, only one person can actually edit it at a time, otherwise I have to figure out what everyone did and merge their changes by hand. That's what we, in the computer industry, call teh suck. A better way to do this is to use a version control system, which lets multiple people work on a document at one time. Of course, if you're editing evil document formats like Word, still only one person can edit it at a time, but at least you cut out email, so things are a bit better organized. But wikis are actually a really great way to work on a document with another person. Two or more people can each collaborate on the document using the wiki software over the web. What becomes of the document at that point depends on its ultimate use. Maybe you have to convert it to MS Word or PDF at the end. That's a bit of a bummer. So there are two uses of wikis that I've mentioned: building a knowledge repository, and collaborative writing. Google started a service for collaborating on documents called Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which is probably useful for collaborative writing, but not knowledge repositories. They also acquired a wiki startup a few days ago, so they are clearly trying to get all over this space. There's another very interesting use of wikis that I'll call situation awareness. You can get a really vivid picture of this use of wikis if you take a look at the wikipedia article on the July 2005 London bombings. By the way, I didn't discover this excellent example of situation awareness using wikis. I saw it in the slides for a talk, but I don't know the original source at this point. If you go to that link, you'll see an excellent and up-to-date encyclopedia article about the London bombings. It's not a news article. Go to Google News and try to find a news article from a major news source which is this detailed, up-to-date, and well organized. Most articles you'll find are a snapshot, taken at a particular point in time (when the article was published) that most likely contains an account of the latest developments, and usually brief background in case you missed previous stories. The wikipedia article isn't a snapshot, it's an article that explains things in a logical order, which isn't necessarily chronological. Each wikipedia article contains a link to its own history. You can look back over time and see the article evolve. If you look at the early edit history of that London bombing article, you'll notice something fascinating. The article was created shortly after the bombing, with an account of the information that was known at that time. Within an hour, many people had edited the article, adding information they know about. If you were refreshing that wikipedia entry over & over (or if you were subscribed to it using RSS), you'd see not an account of just the latest developments, but an evolving, logical understanding of the attacks. The article started evolving right away, and it continues to evolve to this moment. That's what I'm calling situation awareness. Don't get me wrong, the mainstream news media is quite good at situation awareness. They do it a bit differently, and their articles or TV stories don't become integrated into a knowledge repository like wikipedia. I've enumerated three somewhat overlapping uses for wikis that I think are pretty interesting to examine:

Knowledge Repositories, which are a lot like encyclopedias,

Collaborative writing, which is a bit like a more elegant version of emailing word documents, and

Situation awareness, which isn't so different from the news; it draws from the news as a source, it can also be authored by the eye-witnesses themselves, and each story becomes an integral part of a knowledge repository. I don't claim that these are an exhaustive, nor are they a partition: Wikis are also used for bug tracking and as web discussion forums, for instance. What other categories can you think of? Email me if you have ideas.

I've been working with RPM macros quite a bit lately, and I've noticed some interesting properties. Though mostly obvious after the fact, they are surpisingly underdocumented. Macros don't seem to deal with floating point values. This works:

%define five 5
%if 0% ?five  <= 5
  %define string A
%else
  %define string B
%endif

While this causes a parse error:

%define five 5.3
%if 0% ?five  <= 5
  %define string A
%else
  %define string B
%endif

Quoting integers makes comparisons lexical. This will evaluate to false:

%define five 5
%if "0% ?five " == "5"
Perhaps the most frustrating one for me was that commented out macros are expanded. This has surprising results if your macro expands to multiple lines. Say my spec file includes the following:
%description
#%foo                                                                           
blah

And foo happens to expand to multiple lines:
%define foo one\
two\
three

My description will end up being:
Description :
two
three
blah

June is the last month before summer holidays, and at this phase in my study, courses take a lot of time: practical assignments, seminars to give, multiple exams. And mid-June, I'll be attending DebConf in Edinburgh, including delivering a talk about Mole, the subject of my Google Summer of Code project. In the period of April/May students participating in the Summer of Code project had the time to get more familiar with the project they were going to work for. Because I'm already somewhat familiar with Debian, I opted to organize an Etch release party together with some friends, because, well, what better way is there to get to know the community? During the past two weeks I've been really starting with the project. I updated the wiki page, added a new development page where I keep track of my work listing the subtasks I'm working on and their status. The first month will be mostly work on the internals, but starting with the second month I'll also be working on the web interface, meaning that there should be some stuff to show off. At the moment I'm refactoring some bits of Mole that are currently implemented in a hacky way, in order to make it all as extensible as it should be. This includes defining a config file format for mole tables, so that it's no longer necessary to modify the python code for new tables. It also involves some better way of stacking tables to each other, so that the package file extraction code can be moved away from the core of mole into a separate worker to keep mole itself pure and simple and generally applicable. I'll post irregular updates to my blog. I'm looking forward to seeing a lot of you again this Thursday, when I'll arrive in EDI!

I was reading xkcd by clicking on the random link when I noticed that the same cartoons were coming up again and again. I was wondering if this was Confirmation bias on my part or a duff random number generator on the server's part. Randall Munroe is a science geek, and I figured what he would do is test this idea... One python script and 12,000 (approx) requests later, I had a file full of numbers and started trying to remember some statisics. I threw together a quick bit of python to work out the mean and standard deviation (its here). The mean value is 97.4155602788 and the standard deviation is 171.040683155. If they are uniformly distributed from 1 to 361, the expected mean would be 104.211323761 and the standard deviation would be 181.0. So I was lost in thought for a while. However, the following quick check threw some light on the difference.

>>> data = [int(x) for x in open('numbers.data')]
>>> for x in xrange(0, 361):
...   if x not in data:
...     print x
... 
0
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360

So comics numbered about 338 don't appear. And recomputing the mean and standard deviation for 1 to 337 gives a mean of 97.2830920561 and a standard deviation of 169.0, which is about the mean and standard deviation the data gives. I'm now waiting for someone who actually knows stats correcting me in where I went wrong. The conclusion? I suffer from confirmation bias :-(. For those who like pretty pictures, here is one, courtesy of the Google charts API and pygooglechart: code here

For some time now I'm using a dual monitor setup with my Radeon 9200 SE (RV280). Basically this works quite well, except that I need to enter these commands manually:



Without these settings krandr is unable as well to detect both monitors properly. And it's not remembering the settings when I close/save the session by logging out. I tried to add the above code lines in ~/xinitrc as well as in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc, but they are not executed as after a restart of X I end up with the wrong monitor being the primary instead of the DVI display.

My xorg.conf is this:



So, dear lazyweb, what's wrong with this setup and how can I fix it?

A quick reminder about the meeting about forming a Koha foundation in a few hours. The agenda and information links are on the wiki. I d really like to see everyone invoved in koha development there, or you could leave comments here for me to take to the meeting. Someone will link a summary and the transcript from the wiki after the meeting.

As of yesterday, Padre 0.46 has been released! thanks to everybody who contributed to this release! Here s the list of new changes for this version:

• Fixed Smart highlighting to show a pale green round box instead of an ugly squiggle
• Run script waits now after completion for key to continue when run in an external win32 window
• Padre now supports the following extensions:
• For Perl 5, .pmc and .plx
• For Perl 6, .pl6, .pm6, .p6l and .p6m
• Help search handles now http:// and perldoc:// links
• Enabled Syntax Check tab is now shown when there is a problem without losing editor focus
• Handle Recent files Padre crash when it is called with a file that no longer exists. The entry is deleted and a message box is shown
• Added a extract subroutine function
• Handle Open all Recent Files Padre crash when setup_editor is called with a file that no longer exists
• Fixed Padre auto converts EOLs automatically
• Pod::Perldoc 3.15 is required now. Allowing help on $. and similar.
• Fixed Arabic/Hebrew developer/translator names in Padre s about box
• Made beginner-error-checks work

We re including the Perl 5 operators reference, from COWENS s project here, thanks to him for his work on that. Also note that the new extract subroutine refactoring tool may have some rough edges, but it should work fine. And there seems to be a new bug installing this release on Unix-like systems when $DISPLAY is not set (hopefully we ll fix this for the next release).

The NYT has an interesting article about research into treating insomnia over the internet [1]. I wonder how many other psychological issues can be effectively treated over the net. From next year all Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate sold in Australia will be made from fair-trade cocoa [2]. Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate is the most popular type of chocolate sold in Australia so this is a significant market shift. For a long time Cadbury has sold fair trade chocolate under the name Green and Black. Of course we now have to wait for Cadbury to use fair trade cocoa in all their other chocolate varieties. Mike Rowe gave an interesting TED talk about the value of manual labour [3]. He suggested that there should be a PR campaign for skilled manual labour jobs and noted that his observation (through his work on his Dirty Jobs TV series) was that the people who do some of the less popular jobs appear to be happier. The GapMinder.org web site has some interesting analysis of statistical information on countries and regions [4]. It is based on the work of Hans Rosling who is well known for his high quality TED talks [5]. Unfortunately the web site requires Flash, I will probably try it out with Gnash some time. Miru Kim gave a TED talk about her work photographing herself nude in abandoned buildings and industrial spaces [6]. Among other things she photographed herself lying naked on a pile of bones in the crypt underneath Paris which is fairly dangerous. I ve visited the crypt, it s an interesting experience but I was very careful to touch nothing you never know which of the bones came from victims of smallpox and other nasty diseases. Strangely they have an ongoing problem of visitors stealing bones, when I visited there were several bones at the exit that had been confiscated from visitors some of which had mummified flesh attached Steinar H. Gunderson wrote a good description of the basics of how the TCP protocol works [7]. He also links to a web page he wrote that will measure your potential TCP throughput and give you information on the link. This is really handy if you are behind some sort of firewall and want to know what is being done to your TCP stream when it s in transit. Apparently Christian couples tend to use a shared email account to reduce the risk of cheating [8]. It s hardly a surprise that Christians have a much higher divorce rate than atheists and agnostics [9]. The NY Times has an interesting article about iPhones overloading the AT&T network [10]. Recently I ve been having some problems sending MMS with my Three phone, some relatives who use Three have been having connection problems in certain areas with marginal signal quality, and the download speed of my Three data connection is significantly reduced (used to be ~70KB/s, now I m lucky to get 20KB/s). I suspect that the new smart phones that are being sold are largely to blame. But the up-side is that when they engineer their network to work properly with the smart phones then my Internet use (ssh and basic web browsing) will work really well. Michael Tieman wrote an interesting blog post about software patents which compares them to Land Mines [11]. Of course this analogy falls down badly while the US is still leading the world in manufacturing land mines. Rebecca Saxe gave an interesting TED talk about how brains make moral judgeents [12]. In her research she did some tests with using magnetic pulses to decrease the function of the region of the brain that allows people to judge the others and she was able to significantly affect the results of judgement tests. Brendan Scott analyses the netbook wars and concludes that it has been a significant loss for Microsoft [13]. ArsTechnica has an analysis of the real word-processing requirements [14], they suggest that in most cases MS-Word (and other word-processor) documents could be replaced with HTML or Wiki pages for a better end result.

• [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/health/11slee.html
• [2] http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25985054-29277,00.html
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.html
• [4] http://www.gapminder.org/
• [5] http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.html
• [6] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/miru_kim_s_underground_art.html
• [7] http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2009-08-30-11-33_trying_to_understand_tcp_performance.html
• [8] http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/christian-couples-share-email-accounts-to-stay-faithful-20090907-fdaw.html
• [9] http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_dira.htm
• [10] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/technology/companies/03att.html
• [11] http://opensource.org/node/465
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_judgments.html
• [13] http://brendanscott.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/netbooks-microsoft-a-turning-point/
• [14] http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/08/microsoft-word-1983 2009-rest-in-peace.ars

I've just uploaded version 2.2 of debmirror, which introduces yet another new feature: mirroring the i18n/Translation files that contain translations of package descriptions. Many thanks to Joerg Jaspert for his quick response to my request to include those files in the Release file. Joerg also implemented the change needed to use the diffs for Contents files but that requires a fairly big code restructuring in debmirror. The package has jumped from version 1.0 to 2.2 in just three weeks (closing 28 bug reports in the process), but I think the changes justify that. Here's an overview.

• Automatic creation and update of suite->codename symlinks (1.0) This also means it no longer makes any difference whether you tell debmirror to mirror sid or unstable.
• Option to cache the mirror state between runs (2.0) This significantly reduces the trashing of the hard disk during mirror updates and cleanup, and improves the efficiency of individual runs. The disk trashing has always been the main reason I did not want to do more than one update per day for my local mirror. Now it hardly matters how many runs I do: almost everything is done based on the cache data. To ensure the mirror stays consistent the cache has a (configurable) maximum life time after which a full check of the mirror will be done, if desired including an md5sum check of all files.
• Significant speed increase for parsing Packages/Sources files (2.0) For my mirror that stage now takes seconds rather than minutes. Additional speed increases should be possible in the stage that fetches the Packages and Sources files.
• Mirroring of "current" Debian Installer images (2.0) Which architectures and suites should be mirrored can be specified independently from the rest of the mirror.
• Mirroring additional files from specific directories (2.1) This allows mirroring of "trace files", of the contents of the ./doc and ./tools directories (which are needed if you want to create CD images using debian-cd, and of the ./indices directory. The transfer method used for this is always rsync, independent of the transfer method used for the rest of the archive. This is a restriction, but rsync is also the only usable option for files for which no real index or checksums are available.
• Mirroring translation files (2.2) As debmirror is primarily intended to be used for local, often partial, mirrors, it is of course possible to mirror only selected languages. Interested only in German and French translations? Simple, just use:

  --i18n --exclude='/Translation-.*\.bz2$' --include='/Translation-(de fr).*\.bz2$'
  

  I've used '(de fr).*' so that also country-specific variants (e.g. fr_FR) will be included.

---

If you're currently using the Lenny version of debmirror and would like to use the new features: the package from unstable can be installed on Lenny without any problems. The changes have been well tested, but I would advice to do use --dry-run after the upgrade to check there are no unexpected problems. One area where you may experience problems is when using debmirror for other archives than the official Debian mirrors. If you do encounter issues then please file a bug report.

---

Note that debmirror is not intended to be used for official mirrors. There are different scripts available for that from the Debian mirror team.

Over the last months, I have been asking people in KDE irc channels and in Debian KDE channels wether they have heard from Matthew Rosewarne, on irc known as Mukidohime. No one had. Very recently, I uploaded one of his packages with the following changelog entry:

* Switch Maintainer field to krap team and remove Matthew, he seems absent.
We hope he comes back.

Apparantly he was absent. Permanently. Elizabeth Krumbach writes some nice words in his memory. I remember Matthew for his work on several KDE related packages in Debian, always doing a job that was better than I expected. And I especially remember him at Akademy 2008 where he to much joy brought a black horse whip for the chairman of a talkroom. And he even brouht a spare pink horse whip for when the black one broke. Especially Adriaan had a good use of that. And at last, I will bring a image of Matthew showing off his equipment to Aaron Seigo. Condolences to his family. Matthew will be missed.

Although Django is well packaged for Debian, I've recently come to the conculsion that the packages are really not what I want. The problem is that my server runs Debian stable, while my development laptop runs unstable, and Django revisions definitely fall into the "unstable" category. There really is no way to use a system Django 1.1 on one side, and a system Django 1.0 on the other. After a bit of work, I think I've got something together that works, and I post it here in the hope it is useful for someone else. This info has been gleaned from similar references such as this and this. This is aimed at running a server using Debian stable (5.0) for production and an unstable environment for development. You actually need both to get this running. This is based on a project called "project" that lives in /var/www

1. First step is to install python-virtualenv on both.
2. Create a virtualenv on both, using the --no-site-packages to make it a stand-alone environment. This is like a chroot for python.

   $ virtualenv --no-site-packages project
   New python executable in project/bin/python
   Installing setuptools............done.
   

3. The unstable environment has a file you'll need to copy into the stable environment - bin/activate_this.py. The stable version of python-virtualenv isn't recent enough to include this file, but you need it to essentially switch the system python into the chrooted environment. This will come in handy later when setting up the webserver.
4. There are probably better ways to keep the two environments in sync, but I simply take a manual approach of doing everything twice, once in each. So from now on, do the following in both environments.
5. Activate the environment

   /var/www$ cd project
   /var/www/project$ . bin/activate
   (project) /var/www/project$
   

6. Use easy_install to install pip

   (project) /var/www/project$ easy_install pip
   Searching for pip
   Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/pip/
   Reading http://pip.openplans.org
   Best match: pip 0.4
   Downloading http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/p/pip/pip-0.4.tar.gz#md5=b45714d04f8fd38fe8e3d4c7600b91a2
   Processing pip-0.4.tar.gz
   Running pip-0.4/setup.py -q bdist_egg --dist-dir /tmp/easy_install-Wu9O-U/pip-0.4/egg-dist-tmp-xjSdxq
   warning: no previously-included files matching '*.txt' found under directory 'docs/_build'
   no previously-included directories found matching 'docs/_build/_sources'
   zip_safe flag not set; analyzing archive contents...
   pip: module references __file__
   Adding pip 0.4 to easy-install.pth file
   Installing pip script to /var/www/project/bin
   Installed /var/www/project/lib/python2.5/site-packages/pip-0.4-py2.5.egg
   Processing dependencies for pip
   Finished processing dependencies for pip
   

7. Install setuptools, also using easy_install (for some reason, pip can't install it). There is a trick here, you need to specify at least version 0.6c9 or there will be issues with the SVN version on Debian stable when you try to get Django in the next step.

   (project) /var/www/project$ easy_install setuptools==0.6c9
   Searching for setuptools==0.6c9
   Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/setuptools/
   Best match: setuptools 0.6c9
   Downloading http://pypi.python.org/packages/2.5/s/setuptools/setuptools-0.6c9-py2.5.egg#md5=fe67c3e5a17b12c0e7c541b7ea43a8e6
   Processing setuptools-0.6c9-py2.5.egg
   Moving setuptools-0.6c9-py2.5.egg to /var/www/project/lib/python2.5/site-packages
   Removing setuptools 0.6c8 from easy-install.pth file
   Adding setuptools 0.6c9 to easy-install.pth file
   Installing easy_install script to /var/www/project/bin
   Installing easy_install-2.5 script to /var/www/project/bin
   Installed /var/www/project/lib/python2.5/site-packages/setuptools-0.6c9-py2.5.egg
   Processing dependencies for setuptools==0.6c9
   Finished processing dependencies for setuptools==0.6c9
   

8. Create a requirements.txt with the path to the Django SVN for pip to install, then and then install it.

   (project) /var/www/project$ cat requirements.txt
   -e svn+http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/tags/releases/1.0.3/#egg=Django
   (project) /var/www/project$ pip install -r requirements.txt
   Obtaining Django from svn+http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/tags/releases/1.0.3/#egg=Django (from -r requirements.txt (line 1))
     Checking out http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/tags/releases/1.0.3/ to ./src/django
   (project) /var/www/project$ pip install -r requirements.txt
   Obtaining Django from svn+http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/tags/releases/1.0.3/#egg=Django (from -r requirements.txt (line 1))
     Checking out http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/tags/releases/1.0.3/ to ./src/django
   ... so on ...
   

9. Almost there! You can keep installing more Python requirements with pip if you need, but we've got enough here to start.
10. Create a file in /var/www/project called project-python.py. This will be the Python interpreter the webserver uses, and basically exec's itself into the virtalenv. The file should contain the following:

    activate_this = "/var/www/project/bin/activate_this.py"
    execfile(activate_this, dict(__file__=activate_this))
    from django.core.handlers.modpython import handler
    

11. Now it's time to start the Django project. I like to create a new directory called project, which will be the parent directory kept in the SCM with all the code, media, templates, database (if using SQLite) etc. In this way to keep the two environments up-to-date I simply svn ci on one side, and svn co on the other.

    (project) /var/www/project$ mkdir project
    (project) /var/www/project/project$ mkdir db django media www
    (project) /var/www/project/project$ cd django/
    (project) /var/www/project/project/django$ django-admin startproject myproject
    

12. Last step now is to wire-up Apache to serve it all up. The magic is making sure you specify the correct PythonHandler that you made before to use the virtualenv, and include the right paths so you can find it and all the required Django settings.

    DocumentRoot /var/www/project
    <Location "/">
        SetHandler python-program
        PythonHandler project-python
        PythonPath "['/var/www/project/','/var/www/project/project/django/'] + sys.path"
        SetEnv DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE myproject.settings
        PythonDebug On
    </Location>
    Alias /media /var/www/project/project/media
    <Location "/media">
        SetHandler none
    </Location>
    <Directory "/var/www/project/project/media">
        AllowOverride none
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
        Options FollowSymLinks Indexes
    </Directory>
    

With all this, you should be up and running in a basic but stable environment. It's easy enough to update packages for security fixes, etc via pip after activating your virtualenv.

This isn t a problem which many companies have to deal with. It s simple for lots of them: ignore things like climate change except when laws or public relations (or employee relations?) require otherwise. As far as the company is concerned, the aim is to make money. Not so for the third sector. One of the cooperative principles is to work for the sustainable development of our communities through policies approved by our members (taken from Statement on the Co-operative Identity). I think climate change is real, a threat to sustainable development and can be minimised by human action. But have I got policies approved by TTLLP members about it? Nope. There s usually something more urgent to work on. Not so for the co-operative group. They re supporting The Wave in London on Saturday 5 December 2009 with subsidised transport and more. Will you be there? What do you think of it? If you re a young people , you can also make your views known at Play to Stop - Europe for Climate (the EU and MTV - together at last!).

Linux 2.6.31 was released today. This was a fairly busy release for the ASoC subsystem, with updates including:

• DAPM supply widget, for automatically managing things like charge pumps and gateable clocks which may be used by more than one widget.
• Core support for setting up constraints for symmetric sample rates (for systems with a shared LRCLK).
• Support for a range of new CODECs: STAC9766, WM8940, WM8960, WM8988, and WM9081
• New CPU support too: MPC5200 AC97 and the I2S interface of the Stretch S6000.

Plus lots of updates and fixes to existing code, especially to the OMAP and TWL4030 drivers.

Following suggestions by some other koha developers and with an increasing amount of silence from long-time koha community supporters liblime, we ve called an IRC meeting next Tuesday. We re concerned that our community is currently not sustainable: the withdrawal of any vendor could seriously damage the project. Moving some of the core project resources to a foundation should ensure its continued stewardship. From my own point of view, our co-op internally tries to keep its TruckNumber high and we d like to use a foundation to make sure the Koha project TruckNumber stays high. There are several groups set up for the koha project and some that existed before: can any of them help to make Koha sustainable? Right now, I think TTLLP is the only Koha hoster which isn t a private for-profit corporation. That seems a bit scary for a 10-year-old project. It s time to fix this. The agenda and information links are on the wiki. Hope to see everyone invoved in koha development there!

It's been sitting in my browser for so long that I've forgotten where I got it from, but I've just finished reading The Rise and Fall of Wordperfect Corporation, written by W. E. "Pete" Peterson, one of the very early employees of the company, and one of the top people there for many years. It's a really interesting book, giving some insights into what it was like in the early days of "the microcomputer revolution", and with some solid observations of how to (and how not to) run a software company, and manage a very rapidly growing organisation. I'd recommend it to computer historians, software development managers, and business owners.