Assigning a value to a variable when executing a command is a way to populate the command's environment, without the variable assignment persisting after the command completes. This is not true, however, when a special built-in is the command being executed.

POSIX:2001 states that "Variable assignments specified with special built-in utilities remain in effect after the built-in completes".

Not only this is tricky because it depends on whether a utility is a special built-in or not, but the bash interpreter does not respect that behaviour of the POSIX standard. That is, special built-ins are not so "special" to the bash interpreter.

This leaves two things to take into account when assigning to a variable when executing a command: whether the command is a special built-in, and whether bash is interpreting the script.

Now, the list of special built-ins is rather short and it would be a bit unusual to perform variable assignments when calling them, except for some cases: "exec", "eval", "." (dot), and ":" (colon).

It is important to note that ":" and "true" differ in this regard; the former is a special built-in, the latter is just a utility. Watch out for this kind of differences when using ":" or "true" to nullify a command. E.g.

Compare

$ dash -c '
method=sed
# some condition or user setting ends up making:
method=true
# later:
foo=bar $method
echo foo: $foo'
foo: 

To (redacted for brevity):

$ dash -c '
method=:
foo=bar $method
echo foo: $foo'
foo: bar

These Open Source Days were kind of a mixed experience. The social part Things started off quite nicely; the speaker dinner was very pleasant and the people at my table interesting to talk with. The way back to the hotel and breakfast on Saturday were even more interesting; talking with Amelia Andersdotter, a member of the European Parliament for the Swedish Pirate Party, about anti-trust measures, privacy protection, lobbyists, and creating the right incentives for companies to actually protect user data was fun and engaging. My own claim to fame is that I told her that while Microsoft is willing to sign UEFI payloads for x86, they refuse to do so for ARM which she didn't know. From my understanding, their interpretation is that any anti-trust rulings apply to PCs only, and not general computing devices like tablets. It will be interesting to see how that plays out in the long run, especially once ARM processors start appearing in laptops and desktops as main CPUs where Microsoft clearly still has a near monopoly. It was fascinating to discuss all those issues with someone who's actively involved with legislation, mainly because her style of talking was markedly different from what I am used to. One point which she stressed repeatedly is that the most important skill within the context of political work in the EU is to be able to track down, read, and then reference all the content that's being produced in Brussels and Strasbourg. Maybe that tidbit is useful to people who want to try themselves at political activism. She nicely, and maybe unknowingly, emphasized that point by always referring to specific papers, directives, and studies after making any point. Statement of opinion, reference to supporting document. Statement of opinion, reference to supporting document. Statement of opinion, reference to supporting document. Rinse, repeat. It's no secret that I'm continuously disappointed by the political process in general and politicians in particular. Yet, I have to say that this encounter had a lasting and positive impression on me. Amelia has an incredible amount of energy and genuinely cares about the issues which too many other politicians ignore completely. It's good to know someone like this is on our side. If you're Swedish, please inform yourself about her and consider voting in her favour. Other than that, I met several other people, new and old. This year's OSD felt a lot more relaxed and there were more informal and spontaneous conversations going on in hallways and at tables. Even though I failed to have any intense discussion of Mercurial vs git this year, all those conversation were still really interesting. The "workshop" I already knew that the room assignment for my workshop on Saturday afternoon would be a last-minute thing. What I didn't expect was that the final confirmation by Copenhagen Business School would be given on Friday evening. Mixed with a very cumbersome process to update the slides of the CBS-owned and -operated information beamer in the lobby, this resulted in the official schedule showing my room as "Workshop" instead of "SP 214". The official schedule repeatedly stated that people had to pre-register for the workshop which was a left-over from last year where they actually had to plan the amount of hardware kits needed; the registration itself was was very well hidden behind a rather generic link you saw exactly once after purchasing your ticket. Add to this that my room was literally in the farthest corner of the building and on the top floor and things start to turn sour real quick. All other rooms were either close to the main entrance or on the ground floor. Helpers at the front desk had a lot of people asking where my room was and gave out directions, yet... ...the grand total of six people who arrived were all telling me how they couldn't find the room and almost gave up on finding it. As more people asked for directions than turned up at the workshop, this means that even with directions, the room was really hard to find. Myself, it took me two attempts to find the room after which I was led there by one of the helpers who wasn't completely sure we were going in the right direction, himself. Still, I managed to get everyone who had a laptop and access to a UNIX-based system set up with working mr and vcsh repositories they can work from as well as a demo git-annex repository to play with. Sadly, not everyone had a laptop, or access to UNIX, or the tools installed, or even an idea where to install them from, even though I had noted these "requirements" in the description. Next time I do this workshop, I will need to make sure to include information on what distributions have the relevant packages and how to find and install the software on Max OS X in the workshop description. Feedback from the very few people who actually managed to find me was very good and one of the attendants asked if I would be willing to hold the workshop again at another conference in Denmark. I am still awaiting details on this, but I would obviously enjoy having the chance to reach more people. At least I fared better than the guys who did the workshop on "Binary exploitation 101" in yet another room. Two guys held a workshop with a total attendance of... one... I know the organizers of OSD were really unhappy with how this turned out and I believe them when they say that something like this will never happen again. It's the second year that this team is running the conference, running conferences is an incredible amount of work, and things were smoother this year than last year. Iterate and improve, etc. The talk Saturday evening, Alex offered me the chance to hold a reparation talk on Sunday morning to compensate for the botched workshop. Said talk was scheduled for the first slot and not really announced (but the schedule on both www and the beamer was changed over night). Additionally, this was merely an updated and extended version of the talk which I already held at OSD 2012 so at least part of the visitors knew most of what I had to say, already. To be honest I didn't expect too much, but more than twenty people turned up which is a very decent turnout, all things considered. Same as with the workshop, feedback was extremely positive and I was told afterwards by Bryan that several people mentioned my talk as one of the highlights, or even the highlight, of OSD when he was talking to them. To make things even better this talk has, finally, been videotaped; I will update this blog with a link as soon as the video is online.

Review: Commitment Hour, by James Alan Gardner

Series:	League of Peoples #2
Publisher:	Eos
Copyright:	April 1998
ISBN:	0-380-79827-1
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	343

This is the second book in Gardner's League of Peoples universe, following Expendable, but it is largely unrelated to that novel apart from taking place in the same universe. Expendable follows the portion of humanity that has left Earth and embraced the universe and the advanced technology of the League. Committment Hour is set on Earth, in one of the remaining low-tech settlements that have become a backwater of humanity. Earth is governed by the Spark Lords, who appear to be a sort of scientific artistocracy empowered by the League of Peoples (Gardner gets into this more in later books in the series), but the community in this book is largely left alone. The protagonist of Committment Hour is Fullin, a resident of Tober Cove. The Tober Cove community has a very unusual interaction with gender. Every year, all inhabitants under the age of twenty (starting at the age of two) are taken away by what are viewed locally as gods. When they return, they have the opposite gender. They live their childhoods alternating gender every year, including a mandatory pregnancy (created on one of those trips by the gods) and childbirth. Then, at the age of twenty, rather than being gender-swapped like the other children, they choose the gender that they'll live with for the rest of their life. Fullin is (at least at the start of this book) currently male, but as the book opens on the eve of the day of his final gender committment, he's still undecided on what gender he'll choose. A review of this sort of book immediately requires a significant caveat: this story is all about social constructions of gender and about the implications of one specific transgender scenario. As a cisgender man who fits comfortably within society's normal gender construction, I'm not going to do the best job of judging how well it deals with those issues. It was on the long list for the Tiptree Award, which is a fairly good sign that it does okay, and a quick Internet search didn't uncover any significant dislike, but it's quite possible that I would miss places where it fell short. That said, I found Gardner's presentation of gender fascinating, in large part because Committment Hour is told from deeply inside Fullin's perspective and Gardner treats the Tober Cove gender swapping mostly as the unremarked normal. Fullin and the other inhabitants are quite aware that gender doesn't work for them the way that it does for everyone else, but they consider their gender process entirely sensible and can't imagine how weird life would be without the chance to experience both genders and to have carried a child. And Gardner has several aces up his sleeve that let him, by the end of the book, position Tobin Cove's experience as a very specific and local experience that would not necessarily generalize to gender in society at large, which I thought was an ingenious way to avoid overreaching and excessive generalization. This is not a gender utopia; Fullin's world is rather patriarchal and strongly gender essentialist. The village was, in the past, ruled by a sort of religious fantatic who laid down very firm rules about the roles of men and women, and the village largely stuck to them, but since anyone can choose which gender they want to become, the gender essentialism is also undermined in an interesting way. It becomes more akin to a choice of careers rather than an innate quality, albeit with only two choices and with a permanent decision at the age of 20. Gardner complicates the situation further by introducing a neuter gender (at least that's what the characters call it; by physical description, hermaphrodite would be a more accurate description). People actually have three choices on their twentieth birthday, and although the Patriarch who ruled Tober Cove outlawed and banished all "neuts," it's still a choice. Near the start of Committment Hour one of those who chose the "neut" gender returns to Tober Cove in the company of a Spark Lord (thus making "it" the pronoun used by the natives untouchable and somewhat immune to the normal local prejudice). Committment Hour follows Fullin and his close friend and possible future wife or husband through their last day before their committment hour, a day complicated by the incessant curiosity of the observing Spark Lord and his companion. Gardner has some rather neat world building and some revelations in store; this is the sort of book where, by the end, the curtain has been fully pulled back and the audience gets to peer into the machinery. But most of the book is about the social and societal structure of Tober Cove, about how it feels to swap back and forth between genders (and how specific that is to Tober Cove's unique situation), and how this complicates interpersonal interactions. It's an immersive sort of book that puts the reader in Fullin's head and shows his (and her) comfort with the Tober Cove culture and discomfort with the life choices that he faces as part of committment. As with everything by him I've read, Gardner's tone in writing is unique and can take a bit of getting used to. His stories tend to have a light, almost flippant attitude with frequent touches of absurdist humor, which can give the erroneous impression that he isn't taking his story seriously. But there is depth beneath that tone. Fullin may treat some questions flippantly, but he gives them serious thought and works through the consequences. And I was delighted by how Fullin completely scuttled the Spark Lord's arrogant assumption of superiority around his scientific understanding of things Fullin treats as mythological. Committment Hour is different fare than the typical SF novel, with a lot of focus on an unusual domesticity and small village politics. The technology and the world building are mostly saved for the climax, although are quite satisfying when they finally come. It's primarily a thought-provoking treatment of gender that avoids overreaching by grounding the story in a specific situation. I found it a bit slow in places, and occasionally wanted the characters to stop being stupid and stop dithering, but I ended up enjoying it rather more than I expected. Mildly recommended. Rating: 7 out of 10

the number of RC bugs concerning wheezy is going down, & here are my small contributions:

• #690152 src:bsaf: "bsaf: FTBFS: Test org.jdesktop.application.TaskMonitorTest failed"
  some triaging, later severity downgraded
• #699230 mahara: "Mahara: [CVE-2011-3642] (Flowplayer upstream) unpatched vulnerability"
  some triaging, then removed from testing
• #701115 owncloud: "owncloud: multiple vulnerabilities (oC-SA-2013-003, oC-SA-2013-004, oC-SA-2013-006)"
  sponsor NMU with security fixes by Prach Pongpanich, upload to DELAYED/2
• #701131 sa-learn-cyrus: "sa-learn-cyrus: directory vs. symlink conflict: /etc/mail/spamassassin"
  install file into "real" directory, upload to DELAYED/2

Last year, I invited you all to walk the plank with me, to follow me on a road, a road that even I was unsure where it led. I had a vision, I had ideas, but I had little to show for a plan. Even worse, some of my ideas, some of the things I've thought I knew, turned out to be wrong this past year. While my original plan was to pursue the goals I set out in my previous platform, I did none of that, and before I get to the meat of the platform, I owe you an explanation why: After walking the plank last year, I spent some time swimming to the shore, determined that no matter what, I will get things done. But how shall I do that? And when, with whom? Those questions needed an answer, therefore I took on a coat of an ordinary hacker, and started a journey to find the answers.That is how the past year's been spent: looking and learning. I was - and still am - following every major Debian list, I'm on IRC, absorbing all the information that fits into my tiny mind. I see now, that there's a lot more to be done than I thought last year, that some of the assumptions I made then, were wrong. And having spent a long time learning, it is my hope, that I did learn, and that this time, the plans I came up with will serve the same goal I had last year, better.That goal is as simple as growing Debian from a community of mostly technical folk to something much bigger, a community of enthusiastic, bright-eyed people who all want to do their part of making the world a better place. Big words, big task.The problemOne of the most fundamental problems with the project is that it is old, and hasn't grown up yet. We're still very focused on technical merit - don't get me wrong, that is important too, but there's much more we can do than that! We have tremendous amounts of talent, but pretty much every team is suffering from lack of people, and we seem to be slow and ineffective in recruiting new contributors (either from within the project, or outside of it), and even worse at keeping them motivated. This is not new, I worried about it last year, and I'm not the only one to see things this way, respectable members of the project expressed their pessimism publicly too.This is our biggest issue. We can be excellent at the technical level, but not being able to keep people motivated, failing to find new contributors is hurting us more and more, and it is my firm belief that without quick improvement in these areas, it won't be just me virtually walking the plank.On the flip side, we have every tool in our possession to steer ourselves into a better, brighter direction. We have excellent hackers, we have people who are terrific at communication, we have people who inspire others (just see the pattern on the dpl-game!), we have everything we need. Read on then, dear reader, and see my plan!Dancing on a tightropeTo tread on a path we have not taken so consciously before, we need to have a vision to strive for. A vision for the project as a whole, and a vision for ourselves, to see where we'd like to be a few years from now.As Stefano put it so well in his platform last year, Debian is a very unique member of the larger Free Software ecosystem - go and read his description, it can hardly be written better. This is the same vision I share, where Debian grows up to be much more than hundreds of talented people putting together a distribution. I want to see Debian becoming more than that, something that attracts not only the technical geniuses, but those who wield the power of speech and inspiration too, for these traits rarely go together.I envision a project, where people recognise each other's strengths, and make use of these strengths; where we can - and will - turn to each other, and work closely together, to achieve such good balance of skills of all kinds, as we already achieved in creating and maintaining the distribution itself.Let's dance!But alas, a vision is useless without a plan. That is a mistake I made last year, one that I will not repeat again. The approaches I choose may seem strange, or weird at first, but rest assured, they were carefully considered, and most of them tried out in a smaller setting. CommunicationWhat I've seen and experienced over the past year (and thinking back, far more than that - I just didn't know where to put the experience at that time) is that written communication is rarely the best medium to reach out to people. In this age we live in, written text reaches those who were already curious, it rarely reaches those who're still waiting for enlightenment. And even if it does, more often than not, there is no direct channel between the writer and the reader, which hurts not only the latency of the communication, but the quality too. Not to mention, that - however sad it may sound - the recipient is often too shy to engage.What does help, is face to face time. Events, where we can reach out to people, and receive immediate feedback, where we can notice the shy ones, and help them. Where we can immediately adapt to expectations.For this reason, I feel it necessary to encourage and help local teams in every possible way, to organise hackfests, code retreats, and all kinds of events that they feel will attract the bright-eyed youth (be them 20 or 80, it's the spirit that counts) we so direly need. These events need not be technical at all: a session about Debian publicity, about representing the project in press or on conferences is just as useful (if not more). Along with hackfests, we could - and should - have events focused on improving communication, for that is just as important.With strong focus placed on non-technical matters, I believe we can step on a path of rapid progress: my experience shows that techies and non-techies can inspire one another very well, much more than two techies would. With a focus on areas we are lacking in, we are indirectly improving those we are already good at. Inspiration & motivationBut finding new contributors, be them technically-sawwy or not is only part of the task, and the easier one too. It is much harder to keep people interested and motivated over a long period of time, than to find them once.On one hand, I would like to rely on those members of our community, who we all hold in high esteem (including, but not limited to those mentioned during the dpl-game). They know what keeps them going, they know what drives them away, we need to learn from that. I'd like to hear them speak more often, on conferences, if possible, as they are, I believe, a much more credible source than any elected official, at least in some situations.I'd also like to hear everyone's voice, from old members to the newest ones, I'd like to read - and if so need be, conduct - interviews with people who recently became Debian Developers, to hear about their experience, to learn what they think is good or bad, because a fresh view is just as important as a decade long experience.On the other hand, we need to act on the issues discovered too. We already know that quite a lot of trouble stems from lack of time, overburden and eventually burn out. We know the solution to this: recruit more people, and utilise the resources we do have better. Part of that can be solved by expanding our numbers, but for the other part, we may need deeper changes. What those may be, I cannot tell yet, there simply wasn't enough time to dig deeper, and I'm likely not the best person to undertake the task, either. I am, however, confident that we'll discover the solution as we travel along.The first step is gaining knowledge, without this, no further plans can be made. RecruitmentI already touched the recruitment part earlier, at least the how of the approach. What I'd like to expand on is the why, in particular: why encourage recruiting non-packaging contributors, when we are building a distribution, and we're lacking packaging manpower too?Let me answer those questions separately.First of all, I still like to think - but perhaps I am wrong - that we have an unbelievable amount of packaging manpower, which we fail to use to its full extent. We can use more, we always will be able to. But it also helps if we manage to put our existing resources to better use.And that is where non-packaging contributions come in. If we improve our skills in areas we're lacking in, that in turn, will improve the general quality of the project, which in turns improves morale, and a vibrant, well functioning, welcoming community attracts even more people, and keeps us motivated in the long run too.Mouse on the tightropeWith all that out, you may be wondering who I may be, and why you have not seen my name over the mailing lists in recent years. I'm not a terribly vocal person anymore, not a hot-headed teen I used to be some ten years ago. Most who know me, know me by my online nick name, algernon, and in most cases, I prefer that in real life too, for silly reasons I'd rather not dive into (but the primary one being that people have a hard time correctly pronouncing my name, and I have a hard time recognising my name unless pronounced the way I learnt it). Nevertheless, my name is Gergely Nagy, and I'm a recovering hacker, who intends to become a bachelor of (hungarian) arts, by majoring in Hungarian grammar & literature sometime in the next three to five years.Over the course of the past year, I also strived to observe and learn from exceptional leaders at my day job, because there, I have the advantage of meeting with them face to face, to interact with them on a daily basis. Fortunately for me, there are people among them from whom I learned a great deal about not only motivation, but about behind-the-scenes politics too - both a valuable lesson.And while I still have a tremendous amount of things to learn, I like to believe that I can do that. I know I can learn technical things extremely quickly (my day job depends on that, I would be out of a job if I failed at that), I'm positive that I can do the same in other areas as well, at least as long as it doesn't involve extreme amounts of economics. That proved to be a major barrier in the past.But back to the more important point: my organising, presentation and leading skills. I'm a co-organiser of the Budapest Clojure User Group meetups, I started to encourage GSoC participation at my day job last year (we participated thanks to OpenSUSE who gave us a slot), and I'm driving it this year, aiming to become a mentoring organisation of our own. I'm doing regular talks and presentations, participate in code retreats, meetups and other similar events where I can both practice and learn the art of interacting with people, and the fine art of organising events.

Last year, I invited you all to walk the plank with me, to follow me on a road, a road that even I was unsure where it led. I had a vision, I had ideas, but I had little to show for a plan. Even worse, some of my ideas, some of the things I've thought I knew, turned out to be wrong this past year. While my original plan was to pursue the goals I set out in my previous platform, I did none of that, and before I get to the meat of the platform, I owe you an explanation why: After walking the plank last year, I spent some time swimming to the shore, determined that no matter what, I will get things done. But how shall I do that? And when, with whom? Those questions needed an answer, therefore I took on a coat of an ordinary hacker, and started a journey to find the answers.That is how the past year's been spent: looking and learning. I was - and still am - following every major Debian list, I'm on IRC, absorbing all the information that fits into my tiny mind. I see now, that there's a lot more to be done than I thought last year, that some of the assumptions I made then, were wrong. And having spent a long time learning, it is my hope, that I did learn, and that this time, the plans I came up with will serve the same goal I had last year, better.That goal is as simple as growing Debian from a community of mostly technical folk to something much bigger, a community of enthusiastic, bright-eyed people who all want to do their part of making the world a better place. Big words, big task.The problemOne of the most fundamental problems with the project is that it is old, and hasn't grown up yet. We're still very focused on technical merit - don't get me wrong, that is important too, but there's much more we can do than that! We have tremendous amounts of talent, but pretty much every team is suffering from lack of people, and we seem to be slow and ineffective in recruiting new contributors (either from within the project, or outside of it), and even worse at keeping them motivated. This is not new, I worried about it last year, and I'm not the only one to see things this way, respectable members of the project expressed their pessimism publicly too.This is our biggest issue. We can be excellent at the technical level, but not being able to keep people motivated, failing to find new contributors is hurting us more and more, and it is my firm belief that without quick improvement in these areas, it won't be just me virtually walking the plank.On the flip side, we have every tool in our possession to steer ourselves into a better, brighter direction. We have excellent hackers, we have people who are terrific at communication, we have people who inspire others (just see the pattern on the dpl-game!), we have everything we need. Read on then, dear reader, and see my plan!Dancing on a tightropeTo tread on a path we have not taken so consciously before, we need to have a vision to strive for. A vision for the project as a whole, and a vision for ourselves, to see where we'd like to be a few years from now.As Stefano put it so well in his platform last year, Debian is a very unique member of the larger Free Software ecosystem - go and read his description, it can hardly be written better. This is the same vision I share, where Debian grows up to be much more than hundreds of talented people putting together a distribution. I want to see Debian becoming more than that, something that attracts not only the technical geniuses, but those who wield the power of speech and inspiration too, for these traits rarely go together.I envision a project, where people recognise each other's strengths, and make use of these strengths; where we can - and will - turn to each other, and work closely together, to achieve such good balance of skills of all kinds, as we already achieved in creating and maintaining the distribution itself.Let's dance!But alas, a vision is useless without a plan. That is a mistake I made last year, one that I will not repeat again. The approaches I choose may seem strange, or weird at first, but rest assured, they were carefully considered, and most of them tried out in a smaller setting. CommunicationWhat I've seen and experienced over the past year (and thinking back, far more than that - I just didn't know where to put the experience at that time) is that written communication is rarely the best medium to reach out to people. In this age we live in, written text reaches those who were already curious, it rarely reaches those who're still waiting for enlightenment. And even if it does, more often than not, there is no direct channel between the writer and the reader, which hurts not only the latency of the communication, but the quality too. Not to mention, that - however sad it may sound - the recipient is often too shy to engage.What does help, is face to face time. Events, where we can reach out to people, and receive immediate feedback, where we can notice the shy ones, and help them. Where we can immediately adapt to expectations.For this reason, I feel it necessary to encourage and help local teams in every possible way, to organise hackfests, code retreats, and all kinds of events that they feel will attract the bright-eyed youth (be them 20 or 80, it's the spirit that counts) we so direly need. These events need not be technical at all: a session about Debian publicity, about representing the project in press or on conferences is just as useful (if not more). Along with hackfests, we could - and should - have events focused on improving communication, for that is just as important.With strong focus placed on non-technical matters, I believe we can step on a path of rapid progress: my experience shows that techies and non-techies can inspire one another very well, much more than two techies would. With a focus on areas we are lacking in, we are indirectly improving those we are already good at. Inspiration & motivationBut finding new contributors, be them technically-sawwy or not is only part of the task, and the easier one too. It is much harder to keep people interested and motivated over a long period of time, than to find them once.On one hand, I would like to rely on those members of our community, who we all hold in high esteem (including, but not limited to those mentioned during the dpl-game). They know what keeps them going, they know what drives them away, we need to learn from that. I'd like to hear them speak more often, on conferences, if possible, as they are, I believe, a much more credible source than any elected official, at least in some situations.I'd also like to hear everyone's voice, from old members to the newest ones, I'd like to read - and if so need be, conduct - interviews with people who recently became Debian Developers, to hear about their experience, to learn what they think is good or bad, because a fresh view is just as important as a decade long experience.On the other hand, we need to act on the issues discovered too. We already know that quite a lot of trouble stems from lack of time, overburden and eventually burn out. We know the solution to this: recruit more people, and utilise the resources we do have better. Part of that can be solved by expanding our numbers, but for the other part, we may need deeper changes. What those may be, I cannot tell yet, there simply wasn't enough time to dig deeper, and I'm likely not the best person to undertake the task, either. I am, however, confident that we'll discover the solution as we travel along.The first step is gaining knowledge, without this, no further plans can be made. RecruitmentI already touched the recruitment part earlier, at least the how of the approach. What I'd like to expand on is the why, in particular: why encourage recruiting non-packaging contributors, when we are building a distribution, and we're lacking packaging manpower too?Let me answer those questions separately.First of all, I still like to think - but perhaps I am wrong - that we have an unbelievable amount of packaging manpower, which we fail to use to its full extent. We can use more, we always will be able to. But it also helps if we manage to put our existing resources to better use.And that is where non-packaging contributions come in. If we improve our skills in areas we're lacking in, that in turn, will improve the general quality of the project, which in turns improves morale, and a vibrant, well functioning, welcoming community attracts even more people, and keeps us motivated in the long run too.Mouse on the tightropeWith all that out, you may be wondering who I may be, and why you have not seen my name over the mailing lists in recent years. I'm not a terribly vocal person anymore, not a hot-headed teen I used to be some ten years ago. Most who know me, know me by my online nick name, algernon, and in most cases, I prefer that in real life too, for silly reasons I'd rather not dive into (but the primary one being that people have a hard time correctly pronouncing my name, and I have a hard time recognising my name unless pronounced the way I learnt it). Nevertheless, my name is Gergely Nagy, and I'm a recovering hacker, who intends to become a bachelor of (hungarian) arts, by majoring in Hungarian grammar & literature sometime in the next three to five years.Over the course of the past year, I also strived to observe and learn from exceptional leaders at my day job, because there, I have the advantage of meeting with them face to face, to interact with them on a daily basis. Fortunately for me, there are people among them from whom I learned a great deal about not only motivation, but about behind-the-scenes politics too - both a valuable lesson.And while I still have a tremendous amount of things to learn, I like to believe that I can do that. I know I can learn technical things extremely quickly (my day job depends on that, I would be out of a job if I failed at that), I'm positive that I can do the same in other areas as well, at least as long as it doesn't involve extreme amounts of economics. That proved to be a major barrier in the past.But back to the more important point: my organising, presentation and leading skills. I'm a co-organiser of the Budapest Clojure User Group meetups, I started to encourage GSoC participation at my day job last year (we participated thanks to OpenSUSE who gave us a slot), and I'm driving it this year, aiming to become a mentoring organisation of our own. I'm doing regular talks and presentations, participate in code retreats, meetups and other similar events where I can both practice and learn the art of interacting with people, and the fine art of organising events.

Partially because of Markdown being Github s markup format of choice, I enjoy writing documents in simple markup formats more and more. There s though one common annoyance with these formats compared to writing plain HTML The Annoyance They need to be rendered (i.e. more or less compiled) before you can view your outpourings rendered, e.g. in the web browser. So the workflow usually is:

1. Saving the current file in your favourite editor
2. Switch to terminal with commandline
3. Cursor up, Enter
4. Switch to your favourite web browser
5. Hit the reload button

Using a Specialized Editor with Live Preview One choice would be to use a specific editor with live rendering. The one I know in Debian (from Wheezy on) is ReText (Debian package retext). It supports Markdown and reStructuredText. But as with most simple GUI editors, I miss there many of the advanced editing commands possible with Emacs. Using Emacs Markdown Mode Then there is the Markdown Mode for Emacs (part of Debian s emacs-goodies-el package), where you can get a preview by pressing C-c C-c p. But for some reason this takes several seconds, opens a new buffer and window with the rendered HTML code and then starts (hardcoded) Firefox (which is not my preferred web browser). And if you do that a second time without closing Firefox first, it won t just reload the file but will open a new tab. You might think that just hitting reload should suffice. But no, the new tab has a different file name, so reload doesn t help. Additionally it may not use my preferred Markdown implementation. Meh. Well, I probably could fix all those issues with Markdown Mode, it s only Emacs Lisp. Heck, the called command is even configurable. But fixing at least four issues to fix one workflow annoyance? Maybe some other time, but not as long there are other nice choices Using inotifywait to Render on Write So everytime you save the currently edited file, you immediately want to rerender the same HTML file from it. This can be easily automated by using Linux inotify kernel subsystem which notices changes to the filesystem, and reports those to applications which ask for it. One such tool is inotifywait which can either output all or just specific events, or just exit if the first requested event occurs. With the latter it s easy to write a while loop on the commandline which regenerates a file after every write access. I use either Pandoc or Asciidoc for that since both generate full HTML pages including header and footer, but you can use that also with Markdown to render just the HTML body. Most browsers render it correctly anyway:

while inotifywait -q -e modify index.md; do pandoc -s -f markdown -t html -o index.html index.md; done
while inotifywait -q -e modify index.txt; do asciidoc index.txt; done
while inotifywait -q -e modify index.md; do markdown index.md > index.html; done

This solution is even editor- and build-system-agnostic (But not operating-system-agnostic.) inotifywait is part of inotify-tools, a useful set of commandline tools to interface with inotify. They re packaged in Debian as inotify-tools, too. Using mdpress for Markdown plus Impress.js based Slides The ruby-written mdpress is a special case of the previous case. It s a commandline tool to convert Markdown into Impress.js based slide shows and it has an option named --automatic which causes it to keep running and automatically update the presentation as soon as changes are made to the Markdown file. mdpress is not yet in Debian, but there s an ITP for it and Impress.js itself recently entered Debian as libjs-impress. Nevertheless, two dependencies (highlight.js, ITP ed, ruby-launchy, ITP ed) are still missing in Debian.

Previously, my workflow regarding replying to bugreports outside my own packages was very uncomfortable: I first downloaded the mbox archive from the BTS, then imported that in claws-mail, hit reply all, remove submit@, add bugnumber@, then send the email. Therefore, I decided to hack up a little elisp function to automate this process for notmuch. It first downloads the message from the BTS, adds it to the notmuch database, then calls notmuch-mua-reply on the message and fixes the To: header:

;; Removes submit@bugs.debian.org from the recipients of a reply-all message.
(defun debian-remove-submit (recipients)
  (delq nil
	(mapcar (lambda (recipient)
		  (and (not (string-equal (nth 1 recipient) "submit@bugs.debian.org"))
		       recipient))
		recipients)))
(defun debian-add-bugrecipient (recipients bugnumber)
  (let* ((bugaddress (concat bugnumber "@bugs.debian.org"))
	 (addresses (mapcar (lambda (x) (nth 1 x)) recipients))
	 (exists (member bugaddress addresses)))
    (if exists
	recipients
      (append (list (list (concat "Bug " bugnumber) bugaddress)) recipients))))
;; TODO: msg should be made optional and it should default to the latest message in the bugreport.
;; NB: bugnumber and msg are both strings.
(defun debian-bts-reply (bugnumber msg)
  ;; Download the message to ~/mail-copy-fs/imported.
  (let ((msgpath (format "~/mail-copy-fs/imported/bts_%s_msg_%s.msg" bugnumber msg)))
    (let* ((url (format "http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=%s;mbox=yes;bug=%s" msg bugnumber))
	   (download-buffer (url-retrieve-synchronously url)))
      (save-excursion
	(set-buffer download-buffer)
	(goto-char (point-min)) ; just to be safe
	(if (not (string-equal
		  (buffer-substring (point) (line-end-position))
		  "HTTP/1.1 200 OK"))
	    (error "Could not download the message from the Debian BTS"))
	;; Delete the HTTP headers and the first "From" line (in order to
	;; make this a message, not an mbox).
	(re-search-forward "^$" nil 'move)
	(forward-char)
	(forward-line 1)
	(delete-region (point-min) (point))
	;; Store the message on disk.
	(write-file msgpath)
	(kill-buffer)))
    ;; Import the mail into the notmuch database.
    (let ((msgid (with-temp-buffer
		   (call-process "~/.local/bin/notmuch-import.py" nil t nil (expand-file-name msgpath))
		   (buffer-string))))
      (notmuch-mua-reply (concat "id:" msgid) "Michael Stapelberg <stapelberg@debian.org>" t)
      ;; Remove submit@bugs.debian.org, add <bugnumber>@bugs.debian.org.
      (let* ((to (message-fetch-field "To"))
	     (recipients (mail-extract-address-components to t))
	     (recipients (debian-remove-submit recipients))
	     (recipients (debian-add-bugrecipient recipients bugnumber))
	     (recipients-str (mapconcat (lambda (x) (concat (nth 0 x) " <" (nth 1 x) ">")) recipients ", ")))
	(save-excursion
	  (message-goto-to)
	  (message-delete-line)
	  (insert "To: " recipients-str "\n")))
      ;; Our modifications don t count as modifications.
      (set-buffer-modified-p nil))))

In case you want to get updates, you can find the latest version of this code in my configfiles git repository. To add a single message to the notmuch database and get its message ID, I have written this simple python script (using python-notmuch), located in ~/.local/bin/python-import.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# vim:ts=4:sw=4:et
import notmuch
import sys
if len(sys.argv) < 2:
    print "Syntax: notmuch-import.py <filename>"
    sys.exit(0)
db = notmuch.Database(mode=notmuch.Database.MODE.READ_WRITE)
(msg, status) = db.add_message(sys.argv[1])
print msg.get_message_id()

If you have any improvements, I d love to hear about it. If it s useful for you, enjoy.

Alas. The blogosphere has been slammed with discontent. Count me as one of them. It s been a long time since the last position (I ve held) of significance in Ubuntu, a LoCo Council Member, which I left with a heavy heart. I felt, at the time, that Ubuntu, The Community was no longer in control of Ubuntu The Distro . Technical opinions of Ubuntu community members started to get disregarded (starting with the gawd-awful Yahoo search switch), and it continued to get worse as Canonical stopped becoming a contributor to Ubuntu and started becoming it s sole guiding force. In comes the mess called Ubuntu One which, for the record, is a wrong name, it s not Ubuntu in any sense, it s not Community driven, it just uses Ubuntu as one of it s platforms. Trading on Ubuntu s good name started this mess. Slowly, like the ship of theseus, Canonical started to swap out bit by bit until nothing was left without Canonical assignment. I always assumed it was so that selling the code for another company to use the code for non-free purpose was the reason. Oh well. Look at us now: Starting off on an ill-thought out path because others are unwilling to say they just didn t understand the whole problem. This is a long way of saying: Ex-Ubuntu ers: You re welcome in Debian. I ve set up #ubuntu-expats on oftc. Please join us. You re welcome there. Working in Debian has been an absolute dream; it feels like contributing to Ubuntu in the early days. Come. Have a say. Re-join a Community that isn t just Like us on Facebook . I still consider myself an Ubuntu Community Member, but I don t think there s any community left.

When Walt Disney said that he almost certainly did not have software developers in mind. However it is still good advice, especially if you have no experience with a piece of software you want to change.

Others have written extensively on the topic of software as more than engineering and the creative aspects, comparing it to a craft, which is a description I am personally most comfortable with. As with any craft though you have to understand the material you have to work with and an existing codebase is often a huge amount of material.

While developing NetSurf we get a lot of people who talk a lot about what we "ought" or "should" do to improve the browser but few who actually get off their collective posteriors and contribute. In fact according to the ohloh analysis of the revision control system there are roughly six of us who contribute significantly on a regular basis and of those only four who have interests beyond a specific frontend.

It has been mentioned by a couple of new people who have recently compiled the browser from source that it is somewhat challenging to get started. To address this criticism I intend to give a whirlwind introduction to getting started with the NetSurf codebase, perhaps we can even get some more contributors!

This first post will cover the mechanics of acquiring and building the source and the next will look at working with the codebase and the Netsurf community.

This is my personal blog, the other developers might disagree with my approach, which is why this is in my blog and not on the NetSurf website. That being said comments are enabled and I am sure they will correct anything I get wrong.
ResourcesNetSurf has a selection of resources which are useful to a new developer:

• Main website
• Development wiki
• Git Repositories
• Continuous Integration System
• Developers mailing list
• IRC
• Ohloh

Build environmentThe first thing a new developer has to consider is their build environment. NetSurf supports nine frontends on several Operating Systems (OS) but is limited on the build environment that can be used.

The developer will require a Unix like system but let's be honest, we have not tried with anything other than Linux distributions in some time or MAC OS X for the cocoa frontend because its a special snowflake.

Traditionally at this point in this kind of introduction it would be traditional to provide the command line for various packaging systems to install the build environment and external libraries. We do have documentation that does this but no one reads it, or at least it feels like that. Instead we have chosen to provide a shell fragment that encodes all the bootstrap knowledge in one place, its kept in the revision control system so it can be updated.

To use: download it, read it (hey running random shell code is always a bad idea), source it into your environment and run ns-apt-get-install on a Debain based system or ns-yum-install on Fedora. The rest of this posting will assume the functionality of this script is available, if you want to do it the hard way please refer to the script for the relevant commands and locations.

For Example:

$ wget http://git.netsurf-browser.org/netsurf.git/plain/Docs/env.sh
$ less env.sh
$ source env.sh
$ ns-apt-get-install

Historically NetSurf built on more platforms natively but the effort to keep these build environments working was extensive and no one was prepared to do the necessary maintenance work. This is strictly a build setup decision and does not impact the supported platforms.

Since the last release NetSurf has moved to the git version control system from SVN. This has greatly improved our development process and allows for proper branching and merging we previously struggled to implement.

In addition to the core requirements external libraries NetSurf depends on will need to be installed. Native frontends where the compiled output is run on the same system it was built on are pretty straightforward in that the native package management system can be used to install the libraries for that system.

For cross building to the less common frontends we provide a toolchain repository which will build the entire cross toolchain and library set (we call this the SDK) direct from source. This is what the CI system uses to generate its output so is well tested.
External LibrariesNetSurf depends upon several external development libraries for image handling, network fetching etc. The libraries for the GTK frontend are installed by default if using the development script previously mentioned.

Generally a minimum of libcurl, libjpeg and libpng are necessary along with whatever libraries are required for the toolkit.
Project Source and Internal LibrariesFrontend selectionAs I have mentioned NetSurf supports several windowing environments (toolkits if you like) however on some OS there is only one toolkit so the two get conflated together.

NetSurf currently has nine frontends to consider:

• amiga
  This frontend is for Amiga OS 4 on the power PC architecture and is pretty mature. It is integrated into the continuous integration (CI) system and has an active maintainer. Our toolchain repository can build a functional cross build environment, the target is ppc-amigaos.
• atari
  This frontend is for the m68k and m5475 (coldfire) architecture. It has a maintainer but is still fairly limited principally because of the target hardware platform. It is integrated into the continuous integration system. Our toolchain repository can build a functional cross build environment for both architectures.
• beos
  This frontend is for beos and the Haiku clone. It does have a maintainer although they are rarely active. It is little more than a proof of concept port and there is no support in the CI system because there is currently no way to run the jenkins slave client or to construct a viable cross build environment. This frontend is unusual in that it is the only one written in C++
• cocoa
  This frontend supports the cocoa, the windowing system of MacOS X, on both PPC (version 10.5) and X86 (10.6 or later). The port is usefully functional and is integrated into the CI system, built natively on Mac mini systems as a jenkins slave. The port is written in objective C and currently has no active maintainer.
• framebuffer
  This frontend is different to the others in that it does not depend on a system toolkit and allows the browser to be run anywhere the projects internal libnsfb library can present a linear framebuffer. It is maintained and integrated into the CI system.
• gtk
  This frontend uses the gtk+ toolkit library and is probably the most heavily used frontend by the core developers. The port is usefully functional and is integrated into the CI system, there is no official maintainer.
• monkey
  This frontend is a debugging and test framework. It can be built with no additional library dependencies but has no meaningful user interface. It is maintained and integrated into the CI system.
• riscos
  This frontend is the oldest from which the browser evolved. The port is usefully functional and is integrated into the CI system. There is an official maintainer for this frontend although they are not active very often. Our toolchain repository can build a functional cross build environment for this target.
• windows
  This frontend would more accurately be called the win32 frontend as it specifically targets that Microsoft API. The port is functional but suffers from a lack of a maintainer. The port is integrated into the CI system and the toolchain repository can build a functional cross build environment for this target.

UPower for regular users Major desktop environments usually provide a user-friendly menu to suspend your computer. Internally, if seems to use something called UPower, which uses something called PolicyKit, which in turn may or may not use another piece called ConsoleKit (do not ask me what all these pieces are and how they relate to each other, I do not know and I do not want to know). For the regular user, the result is the following: when they click on that button, it suspends their computer.UPower for command line users However, if you are using a more unusual desktop environment, for instance a simple, light window manager, you will not have such a button. And no, UPower does not provide a simple command line tool to suspend your computer (they probably consider that command line is out of fashion ). Well, in case you need it, here is a way to suspend your computer from a command line or whatever: just alias it or bind it to a key shortcut. It uses some dark DBus magic:

$ dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest='org.freedesktop.UPower' \
    /org/freedesktop/UPower org.freedesktop.UPower.Suspend

If you prefer to hibernate your computer, that is, to suspend it, not to RAM but to disk:

$ dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest='org.freedesktop.UPower' \
    /org/freedesktop/UPower org.freedesktop.UPower.Hibernate

As you can see, for some reason it requires some duplication of information: the name org.freedesktop.UPower appears three times in that command line: in the destination , object path and interface member , whatever that could mean. Again, do not ask me why, I know nothing about that and I do not want to. Notes

1. Actually, UPower does provide a command line tool called upower, but the only thing it does (monitoring power sources) is not really useful for that matter.

hey, the amount of RC bugs (affecting wheezy) is dropping significantly, mostly thanks to the work of the release team, if I'm seeing this correctly.
here are my small contributions for the last week:

• #656877 flash-kernel: "flash-kernel is not being run for kernel upgrades with unchanged ABI version"
  mark as fixed in relevant version
• #690152 src:bsaf: "bsaf: FTBFS: Test org.jdesktop.application.TaskMonitorTest failed"
  add some info to the bug log
• #697221 motion: "motion: No longer has support for mysql"
  propose alternative solution
• #699258 src:libio-async-loop-glib-perl: "libio-async-loop-glib-perl: FTBFS: test failed"
  disable unreliable tests (pkg-perl)
• #701115 owncloud: "owncloud: multiple vulnerabilities (oC-SA-2013-003, oC-SA-2013-004, oC-SA-2013-006)"
  check supplied patch and add a debdiff for testing-proposed-updates
• #701182 avelsieve: "avelsieve: Uses deprecated/removed session_unregister PHP function"
  upload the upstream patch to DELAYED/2 (the package is removed from testing but still)

when francesca started her DPL game, I also started thinking about people I'd like to encourage to stand as a DPL candidate. unfortunately my initial "short list" contained 18 names, which doesn't fit the game's rules very well. after waiting a bit, 9 of them were mentioned by others already, so I can leave them out here (which also means no public hug, sorry, please complain to the inventor of the game!). from the remaining 9, I've now chosen my Fantastic Four (in alphabtic order of first names):

• David Bremner
• Gaudenz Steinlin
• Michael Prokop
• M nica Ram rez Arceda

in my opinion, the DPL task is mostly about managing, & those four people are in my experience all very good at organising projects & dealing with people, & are therefore well suited for this task. let's see if they feel motivated to take on the challenge! (the nomination period has already started, so don't hestitate!)

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (78.31 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Debian packaging I wanted to update publican to the latest upstream release but I stopped after a few hours of work during which I filed two bugs that a modicum of testing should have caught before release. So I decided to wait for the next minor release. I uploaded python-django 1.4.4 and 1.4.5, new upstream maintenance and security releases which thus went into wheezy. I also prepared a stable update of Django (1.2.3-3+squeeze5) which required me to backport the last 2 sets of security patches. I uploaded a new revision of wordpress to fix a problem with TinyMCE (#700289) and to update/add many translation files (#697208). Bug reporting and misc fixes Live-build issue. I experienced some intermittent failures when building HDD live images with live-build on armel. Daniel Baumann directed me to the problematic piece of code (the oversizing of the image size was not enough) so I committed a small fix by increasing the oversizing factor to 6%. Live-config issue. I also reported another issue that I diagnosed in live-config (#701788), namely that the script which setups sudo was failing when the default user is root. git-buildpackage issue. I filed #700411 after noticing that git-import-orig imported the debian directory provided by upstream. Those directories are not used with 3.0 (quilt) source package and their presence in the upstream branch is thus harmful: any change to the upstream debian directory will result in conflicts when you merge a new upstream release in your packaging branch. rubygems integration. Later I had to package a bunch of ruby applications that were using Bundler and I wanted to reuse as many packaged ruby modules that I could. But for this, those modules had to provide the required rubygems meta-information. I filed #700419 to request those on rake-compiler and with the help of C dric Boutillier (and others on #debian-ruby), we identified a bunch of ruby modules which could get those with a simple recompilation. I filed bin-nmu requests in #700605. Misc bugs. simple-cdd offers to select profiles to install but I noticed that the associated debconf template was not translated (#700915). The startup scripts (provided by initscripts) in charge of activating the swap are supposed to handle a noswap kernel command line option to disable swap. In #701301, I reported that the option was not working correctly if quiet was present first in the command line due to spurious break statements. Debian France Administrative work. We were late for some legal procedures so I wrote the report of the last general assembly and sent it to the Tribunal d instance of Sarreguemines to record the changes in the administrative board. I also completed the special register of the association, it s a notebook that is legally required and that must document any important change in the governance structure of the association (new members of the board, headquarters change, new bylaws, etc.). Galette developments. Debian France is funding a few enhancements to the Galette free software that we re using to manage the association. I am in touch with the Galette developer to answer his questions and ensure that his work will meet our needs. Librement I have been looking for talented developers who have a genuine interest in my Librement project. I want to fund the initial development of the project but I don t have the means to fund it entirely. So I really wanted to find developers who would find an interest beside the money that I would pay. I got in touch with the team of developers from Scopyleft and they look like very good candidates. But they re heavy users of the Scrum development method and asked me to play the role of product owner . So I started to describe the project with user stories (i.e. create the backlog in the Scrum jargon), you can have a look at them here on trello.com. If you re interested by the topic of free software funding, feel free to review and to send me your comments. My goal is clearly to have a minimal viable product with the first iteration(s) that I fund and then use the platform itself to fund further developments of the project. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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Review: Asimov's Science Fiction, June 2011

Editor:	Sheila Williams
Issue:	Volume 35, No. 6
ISSN:	1065-2698
Pages:	112

Sheila Williams's editorial is about a new ebook-only anthology of Asimov's stories, with some discussion of electronic sales. This sort of business editorial is what she's best at writing, although in this case I'm far enough in my reading that I'm reading it through a bit of a time machine. Silverberg's essay is about popular bubbles and is mildly interesting, although I've read quite a lot about this at greater length. I think he misses the plot at the end, though, where he brings in the 2008 collapse and works on focusing the blame on speculators rather than those selling the fraudulent investments. James Patrick Kelly has a surprisingly graceful introduction to fanfic that does a better job at conveying the underlying enthusiasm than most mainstream coverage. The review column this month is Peter Heck's workman-like survey of recently released books of interest. "The Cold Step Beyond" by Ian R. MacLeod: Most of MacLeod's writing I've read has focused on lush world-building, usually with a mix of magic and industrial revolution. This felt like a departure: a character study of a heavily-modified warrior and monster hunter against a clearly science-fictional background. The protagonist has no memory of her past beyond her training in a religious institution, and is as much machine as woman. She is on one of her first missions to hunt dangerous monsters. But she's given almost no direction, and rather than encountering a monster, she encounters a feral woman with an ancient ray gun. MacLeod has a very SFnal twist waiting in the wings, but what I liked best were the character dynamics and the interplay of duty and self-determination. (8) "All the News That's Fit" by Carol Emshwiller: This story follows Emshwiller's normal pattern of telling the story of an outsider and representative of outsider culture trying to understand a society, but her protagonist here is both more alone and more proactive than her average protagonist. She lives in a distant mountain village only rarely visited by a traveling reporter who brings news from outside. When he doesn't come, she goes out looking for him, at first to rescue him if he ran into trouble and later to find the news herself. Much of the story has the reader worrying nervously for her as she observes the large city while clearly having no idea how to live there. The ending provides an interesting and (at least for me) unexpected twist on the rural person coming to the big city, but it was marred by a level of anger from the protagonist that I never thought was well-motivated. (6) "Walking Stick Fires" by Alan DeNiro: There is a science fiction subgenre that, for lack of a better term, I'll call post-apocalyptic surrealism. This is an entry in that strange subgenre, featuring two alien bikers having mostly unmotivated adventures with strange objects and even stranger creatures on an Earth that's apparently been invaded and mostly devastated by multiple parties. Like a lot of post-apocalyptic surrealism, it never makes much sense. It reminded me of Rucker but with a bit more characterization and less hand-waving math. (4) "Apocalypse Daily" by Felicity Shoulders: I really liked the premise for this story. The protagonist is a concept designer for a social-oriented MMORPG, but one where only scores and resources carry over rather than the whole world. The goal of the game is survival: the world ends regularly, globally or locally, in a huge variety of ways, and one scores points and earns resources for further iterations by finding ways to survive that catastrophe. The game is structured to encourage cooperation, at least at first. But Katrina gets into a mildly paranoid workplace conflict with someone else on her team, leading to some significant changes in the underlying expectations of the game. Unfortunately, while the background and idea are quite solid, the direction the story goes is predictable pessimism, the conclusion doesn't say much that I found interesting, and I ended up detesting the protagonist. I would have preferred a more unique psychological twist. (6) "The Fighter" by Colin P. Davies: This is a rather short story, essentially an idea study in the context of a police stop of a futuristic entertainment fighter. This is another one of those depressing takes on a common SF trope. I didn't entirely follow the world-building, but it was all dark and pointless enough that I didn't really want to dig further. (4) "Kiss Me Twice" by Mary Robinette Kowal: I've read a few police procedurals featuring AIs before, but this is by far the best one I've read. Huang is a detective, and like all the detectives he makes extensive use of the police department AI. Unlike most of the detectives, though, he treats her as a full partner and close to human, and she reciprocates with a Mae West persona and a closer relationship with him than most of the department. They're in the middle of investigating a murder when there is a raid on the police department and the AI herself is stolen. The rest of the story entangles their investigation with the theft of the AI. The police AI is, of course, restored from backup, but that's the first time that's ever happened to her, and she's shaken by it, and more disturbed by the knowledge that there are two copies of her running. The mystery angle of the story is reasonably satisfying, but the AI characterization and Huang's careful feeling-out of their relationship and appropriate behavior on his part is the best part of the story. This is a great story: long, satisfying, and thoroughly excellent. I'd happily read more fiction in this universe. (8) Rating: 7 out of 10

By now I am a long time happy user of tmux instead of screen. I started using it somewhere in 2011 and by now I only have one usage of screen left over (direct ttyS0 access for one serial). As usual I have a custom config for it, and if you are interested there is a link for you: tmux.conf. But the more interesting part and why I blog is that I also wrote a little helper around tmux. Ingeniously called tm. And a colleague said I should let other people use it too and place it somewhere accessible. So, err, here it is. Or better, the usage output of it, the actual script has a link somewhere below.

---

tmux helper by Joerg Jaspert <joerg@ganneff.de>
Call as: tm CMD [host]...
CMD is one of
 ls          List running sessions
 s           Open ssh session to host
 ms          Open multi ssh sessions to hosts, synchronizing input
 $anything   Either plain tmux session with name of $anything or
             session according to TMDIR file
TMDIR file:
Each file in $TMDIR defines a tmux session.
Filename is the commandline option $anything
Content is defined as:
  First line: Session name
  Second line: extra tmux options
  Any following line: A hostname to open a shell with in the normal
  ssh syntax. (ie [user@]hostname)
Environment variables recognized by this script:
TMPDIR - Where tmux stores its session information
         DEFAULT: If unset: /tmp
TMSORT - Should ms sort the hostnames, so it always opens the same
         session, no matter in which order hostnames are presented
         DEFAULT: true
TMOPTS - Extra options to give to the tmux call
         Note that this ONLY affects the final tmux call to attach
         to the session, not to the earlier ones creating it
         DEFAULT: -2
TMDIR  - Where are session information files stored
         DEFAULT: $ HOME /.tmux.d
TMWIN  - Where does your tmux starts numbering its windows?
         This script tries to find the information in your config,
         but as it only checks $HOME/.tmux.conf it might fail.
         So if your window numbers start at anything different to 0,
         like mine do at 1, then you can set TMWIN to 1

---

It is mainly useful for using tmux as a ssh-multiplexer and replacement for clusterssh though its happy to do any other tmux session too. As the help text may already have told you, you can use it to list existing tmux sessions (oh, wow!). Honestly, that one is there because tm ls is shorter than tmux ls More interestingly, tm s HOSTNAME opens a tmux session with the first window being a ssh shell to HOSTNAME. Should you later type tm s HOSTNAME again, it will attach to the existing session. But the real kicker for me (and colleagues) actually is the ms subcommand of it. ms being short for multi-session, it is my way of no-longer using clusterssh. Basically you type tm ms HOST1 user@HOST2 and it opens a session with one tmux window consisting of two panes. Showing you host1 and host2 at the same time. And the input to both is synchronized, that is - all your input is send to both of them. You aren t limited to just two hosts, do as many as you wish. Actually, I have no idea if tmux has an upper limit, but I did already have more than 100 hosts open at once. The major limitation there is not tmux - but simply the available screenspace, as all hosts are shown in ONE window! (The one advantage of clusterssh, it uses one xterm per host) This is quite helpful in all kinds of administration work involving clusters - imaging installing a package on 5 hosts of a cluster, you usually want it on all of them - or any kind of situations where one wants to run one command on many systems. As I m already said, I m lazy. And so there is a way to easily define multisessions that one uses regulary, by creating files inside the directory behind $TMDIR, usually $ HOME /.tmux.d. They are simple text files and let you easily define sessions you can then (re)open with a simple tm whateveritsname. And if you want the whole script by now: tm

This post is just a status update for the Openstack packaging, after the next version froze last week. The Openstack bi-annual summit of next April will take place this year in Portland, Oregon, and if everything goes as plan, Grizzly will be released just before the summit. Grizzly will be out a bit before the next Ubuntu in April, as releases are following the one of Ubuntu. Openstack uses town names for it s release names: Austin, Bextar, Cactus (2011.1), Diablo (2011.2), Essex (2012.1), Folsom (2012.2), Grizzly (2013.1). I started to seriously work on the Openstack packaging in October, and never stopped working on its packaging until now. Slowly, but surely, preparing all the packages and their dependency python modules. One package at a time, working all this every day. Folsom works now pretty well and can be used in production, and I maintain it for security (along with Essex, which is in Wheezy). Then Grizzly was frozen last week, on the 22nd of February, with the G3 release. As I already worked on packaging the G2 release in January, managing the packaging of G3 was fast. On late Sunday, I had a repository with Grizzly built, and its corresponding python (build-)dependencies. But while just building your own repository is easy, having all the dependencies in Debian is a lot more work. As of today, if I include all the python modules, I have (at least) touch around 50 packages in total when working on Openstack. Many of them were simply built from scratch. The only python dependency that needs an upgrade in Experimental, so that all dependencies are satisfied, is a new version of pep8. The rest of is new python modules that were not in Debian, and which are currently waiting in the NEW queue for ftp masters approval: python-pecan, python-tablib, python-wsme and websockify. Some of these python modules have been waiting there for a long time, like python-pecan (it s been waiting in the NEW queue for more than 35 days now), some like websockify and python-wsme have been uploaded only this week. I really hope it can be possible to have all of Grizzly in Debian before the next Openstack summit (this depends mainly on the ftp-masters). Note that I do not intend to apply security patches in Grizzly until it is released as the new Openstack stable. So use my private Grizzly repository as your own risk. I intend to fix this by working on some constant integration to have nightly builds, like many people are doing with Openstack. If you want to try it out: deb http://archive.gplhost.com/debian grizzly main

About 5-6 weeks ago, I wrote about the Wheezy release progress, so it is about time for another update. According to UDD, we are down to 204 RC bugs (down from 249, since my last post). It is not quite the 2.4 RC bugs per day actually it is about 1.1 RC bug a day. Unfortunately, we do not appear to be fixing bugs faster than we are reporting them at the moment. If you look at Richard Hartmann s post from last week, then we had 206 RC bugs left. Even worse, we appear to have regressed between week 7 and 8 of this year (194 to 206). If you want the Wheezy release to happen soon, please consider helping us by providing bug fixes that comply with the Wheezy freeze policy. If the pace of RC bug fixes do not pick up, the alternative is that the release team deals with the bugs. Note that deals generally falls into one of 2 categories. Either we defer/ignore the problem for Wheezy[1] or we remove affected packages from Wheezy/testing. Particularly, if we have to remove packages, they may take reverse dependencies with them as collateral damage. I do not like these tools anymore than you do. But if the RC bugs fixes are not coming in, it is the only two tools we have left. [1] Meaning that at best the bug fix will occur at Wheezy point release at worst, not at all.

Also this year I registered a booth in the name of the Debian Project at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. Unfortunalety this is the second time in the row, that we seem to be short of manpower while preparing the booth. Actually just one person was able to commit his available time. A general offer was announced by 3 people (including me). This makes me a little sad, cause CLT is a very community driven event which is really nice organized. I always liked to chat and discuss with very interesting people from other projects and visitors. As the CLT runs a 6 track lecture program with commonly very good lectures, it is not possible to get the booth running into good shape with such a small amount of volunteers. If you feel you are interested into visiting the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage and want to make our booth a success like last years for the Debian Project, please have a look into my announcment and our coordination wiki. So please ... let come more brave people into our band wagon! Don't wait to long! Registration period for (possibly sponsored) Booth tickets (read here) ends on 4th March, many thanks!