As the main reason why I got Nokia N950 is that I promised to write some applications for that, I started to look deeply at available options how to write them. Unfortunately there are too many options and all documentation I've found is pretty confusing. The short story is that you should use Qt for user interface. However it is not that easy as it looks, you can use regular Qt, which can be run on the phone, but looks ugly in the end (maybe I did something wrong, but it did look completely different to anything else running in the phone). You can use Qt Quick, which is easy to write (simple UI definition and JavaScript variant for code), but it does not seem to support much of the widgets. And then there is Meego Touch library, which seems like a best option, however not mentioned at all on Nokia developer website. Looks like I need to learn few more things before actually starting to code.

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If a single man can display so much hatred
think only of how much love we all can display together.

Stine Renate H heim

I wrote a Norwegian post explaining my experience at Ut ya. I had taken this blog for dead, and had entirely forgotten that it was syndicated on Planet Debian. I don t want to let Google Translate make this disaster any worse than it is the translation of bullets into balls being particularly bad so the international attention the massacre has garnered in consideration, I am writing an English translation of my experiences. I feel somehow duty-bound to make people aware of what happened, but I don t want to get into anything else but a sober description of the events and some very brief reflections. There are many details I have chosen to omit. Others have written their experiences of the events at Ut ya. I wanted to write mine down as well, and get it out there . Partly, I want to write this down because I m unsure if I will remember all the details at a later point in time, although I think I d prefer it if I couldn t. I m also writing this because people are asking about my experiences and it s much better to have an URL to give them, lest I have to keep going through the same spiel over and over again. Our former Prime Minister and current labour movement demigod Gro Harlem Brundtland had recently left the island. I had been the cameraman for a video interview of her talking about Ut ya, and I was in the media group room encoding the video into a file suitable for YouTube, when someone else in the room startled and said that Twitter was full of messages about a loud explosion in Oslo. As the newspapers brought us information about the extent of the damages, a consensus arose that an informational meeting was in order. As soon as the current round of talks finished, we were gathered into the main hall. The meeting was duly held, and after the statement was made that a TV feed would be made available, I took it upon myself as the local alpha geek to make it happen. Of course, the situation caused both the wireless network and the GPRS networks to become totally unusable. As I was waiting for someone to set up a password, I took the opportunity to face the consequences of having eaten two bits of a microwavable dish called Hold-It the local equivalent of a Hot Pocket and went to the toilet. As I was in there, I first heard agitated shouting, then screams, then gunshots coming from just outside the toilets. More than anything else, it sounded like a toy gun. I was convinced that someone was making a joke in incredibly bad taste and I stormed out of the booth with the intent of halting it. As I tore the door open, I saw two of my comrades hiding in a recessed corner. Their facial expressions left absolutely no doubt that this was no toy. They signalled for me to get back in the booth. I closed the door, did a mental double-take in utter, complete confusion, and opened it again. They were still signalling. Had they not stood there, I would have run straight into the gunman; they saved my life. I looked out into the hallway, and I made eye contact with a young boy lying in a pool of blood. He was motioning for me to help him. I heard more gunshots from inside the building and retreated back inside. As I was trying to think through my next move, I realized that the decidedly insubstantial wood-fiber door would not resist any kind of bullets. I made my way out into the hallway, with the intent of escaping outside. At that point, I was of course not aware that there was an intention to kill as many as possible, so I thought that the open spaces outside would be a place of relative safety. Of course, this proved to be wrong and my life was probably saved a second time by one of the caf volunteers taking me into a hard-to-spot employee s bathroom. We sat there for ninety minutes. Always ready to make a run for it, ready for just about anything. A peculiar group dynamic arose with these two people with whom I had barely previously spoken. We came to share a strange sense of common destiny and gallows humour. One of them had seen the shooter and described the police uniform. I perceived it to be realistic that we were the only ones aware of the wounded outside the toilet. I tried to reach the emergency services, but all their lines were busy; the terror attack in Oslo had probably clogged their lines. I finally got through to the fire services, who could inform me that the police did know about the situation and were on their way. This was to take 90 minutes and by the time we evacuated, the young boy outside my door had perished. The despair I first saw in his eyes as I passed him, fleeing from one room to the other and the empty, blank stare as we left, are burned into me and they are images I will never in my life forget. Finally, the real police arrived. We walked out. I chose the path through the minor conference hall something I now regret. The sight was simply beyond my capacity to describe fully, and so terrifying that I barely remember the sight only the terror it struck in me. There were several people bunched up in a corner, a big amorphous heap of bodies. Some were conscious and yelled at me not to do anything that could startle the police, others lay still. Their bodies were all covered in blood, and a thick pool of blood extended at least a half-metre in all directions around them. The policeman across the hall was screaming orders at me, but he was screaming so loudly that I couldn t make out his words at first. We were first moved into the camp newspaper s offices. There were about eight of us there, I think, in addition to one girl who lay wounded. Towards the end she was drifting in and out of consciousness. We covered her with sweaters to keep her warm and one of us tried to at least temper her bleeding. The bullet had missed her heart, but by the entry wound it was clear that it was not by far. I do not know who this girl was or how she is now. I sat behind and never saw her face. The wounded were evacuated first. I don t remember how long we remained; I had lost all concept of time. In spite of protests from the group who knew him, one kid was put in handcuffs. At the time I didn t understand why, and the policeman seemed to say something almost to the effect that there was no reason for it at all. I didn t see when they undid his cuffs, but I remember thinking that this treatment made a terrible experience even worse for him. I tried my best to comfort him but knew it would be little help. Later, when things stabilised a little, we were told that he was handcuffed because he had come from an unsecured area. The police was extremely good at carefully explaining what was happening and why; this was a big help and I am grateful for it. Eventually we were moved out into the main corridor of the building, where we joined up into a group of about fifty. Only when I saw the two people who saved my life did any emotion other than mild confusion arise. I broke down shivering in tears in one of their arms. After a few seconds, I came back to my senses and realised that this was not the time. I quickly gathered myself, got the shaking under control, and sat down. We were given some chocolate and soda from the kiosk. I remember making an offhand remark that an inability to find joy in free candy was a sure sign of a bad situation. We all laughed out loud. Gallows humour is a coping mechanism, but in retrospect one almost feels guilty for it. We were shown out in a single file with hands above our heads. I remember an intense concern that someone would slip in the steep, muddy slope and create a misunderstanding. Outside, there were more bodies. Some under improvised covers a tarpaulin from the waffle stand, the deflated bouncy castle but some simply lay there. Everyone I met displayed a courage, a mental discipline and unity of purpose far beyond anything one would ever wish to expect from people this young. Everyone conducted themselves with an attitude that could almost be described as stiff upper lip . Safely across the fjord we were offered blankets. I was asked if I was aware of any injuries, and asked to lift my shirt and show my abdominal region. We were shown into the bus which took us to the hotel used by the survivors and their family. I simply cannot describe in any words the relief I felt when I was able to embrace my living comrades. It was completely unlike anything I had ever felt before in my life. The euphoric feeling was tempered only by the realisation that there would be many I could never see again, comrades whom I had taken great pride in calling my friends, with futures in the service of all mankind, futures I had previously found such great joy in pondering and guessing about. The feeling which continues to upset me the most, is the feeling that so many of my comrades left behind grieving families and friends. Torn away senselessly. I do not know how much more than this relatively sober account of the events on Ut ya I can muster. I would, however, like to offer some reflections. First of all, from the bottom of my heart, I want to thank the police who saved the lives of so many still on the island, the holidaymakers who took aboard swimmers into their boats and the rescue services staffed primarily by volunteers who have spared no effort in trying to soften the blow as much as they can. The opportunity to spend time with those comrades who underwent the same experience as myself has also been an immeasurable aid. I was also so relieved to find my very closest friend among the survivors, which has also been an indescribable help. If I can name a single positive in this tragedy: Had he arrived with his automatic weapon fifteen or twenty minutes prior, he would have arrived during the informational meeting, at a time when the major hall was absolutely jam-packed the death toll would be many times what it ended up being. I am agonisingly aware of the meager comfort this provides to those who have been bereft of their closest, but I do find some solace in this. We cannot sweep under a rug that this was without question! a political attack on the labour movement. But it is thankfully also an attack which has been perceived by everyone as an attack on the Norwegian society, and on a symbol of the wide recruitment to the participatory democracy which lies at our very national soul. I cannot thank the Norwegian people, and indeed the people in other nations who have offered their condolences, enough for their shows of support and shared grief. It really has been a tremendous help to me knowing that so many people feel with us. I also want to thank from the bottom of my heart the rock-steadiness of everyone in both the national and local wings of the Labour Party and Labour Youth in supporting us, and the political milieu in general for their resolute steadfastness saving me from losing yet more that I cherish; our freedoms in a participatory democracy. Our Party has lost many of its very brightest youngsters. Personally I feel an angry spite, a deep restless urge to get the wheels of society going again. I want to show his kind that we will not be broken. We re stronger than that. I will not be frightened into silence and passivity. I want to remember the dead, and honor them by carrying on our common work. I want to end this with a request to everyone who reads this, echoing a statement I read by one of my good friends and comrades: Please, don t let me see any messages of hatred, wishes for the death penalty, anything like that. If anyone should be of the belief that anything will improve by murdering this sad little person, they would be profoundly wrong. All attention now should be plowed into caring for those victims and their relatives who did not share my luck, and not giving an audience to a perpetrator who wants one. Tore Sinding Bekkedal

In my previous post I expressed a desire to use regular expressions for files that may appear in multiple places in the tree due to bind mounts for /run and /var/run etc [1]. However there is a problem with this idea. The SE Linux file labeling program restorecon reads the file /etc/selinux/$SELINUXTYPE/contexts/files/file_contexts which contains a set of regular expressions to assign labels to files. That file is ordered and the last entry which matches is the one that counts. When the file_contexts file is created the order is based on how many characters at the start of the file specification aren t regular expression meta-characters. For example the entry /.* is at the top of the file (and therefore has the lowest precedence), which makes it the catch-all entry for files that have no other match. So an entry for /var/run/REGEX will have a higher precedence than one for /var/REGEX , this means however that when I replaced the /var/run part with a regular expression then it had a lower precedence and it didn t work properly. I should have remembered this as I did a lot of work on setfiles (which became restorecon) in the early days. I have now developed a new way of solving this and this time I m testing it before blogging about it. I have written the following PERL program to fix the file contexts, this adds multiple lines and uses a distro_debian conditional on them so that they don t slip into upstream use and so that if I lose track of where each patch came from I ll know that I can delete them in future because it only matters to Debian. #!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict; open(LIST, "find . -name \"*.fc\" xargs egrep \"^/(var.*run) (var/lock) (dev/shm)\" cut -f1 -d: uniq ") or die "Can't get file list\n";
while(<LIST>)

my $filename = $_;
chomp $filename;
open(my $infile, "<", $filename) or die "Can't open file $filename";
open(my $outfile, ">", $filename . ".new") or die "Can't open file ". $filename . ".new";
while(<$infile>)

print $outfile $_;
my $newline;
if($_ =~ /^\/var\/run/)

print $outfile "ifdef( distro_debian', \n";
$newline = $_;
$newline =~ s/^\/var//;
print $outfile $newline;
print $outfile "')\n";

if($_ =~ /^\/var\/lock/)

print $outfile "ifdef( distro_debian', \n";
$newline = $_;
$newline =~ s/^\/var/\/var\/run/;
print $outfile $newline;
$newline =~ s/^\/var//;
print $outfile $newline;
print $outfile "')\n";

if($_ =~ /^\/dev\/shm/)

print $outfile "ifdef( distro_debian', \n";
$newline = $_;
$newline =~ s/^\/dev/\/run/;
print $outfile $newline;
print $outfile "/var" . $newline;
print $outfile "')\n";


close($infile);
close($outfile);
rename $filename . ".new", $filename or die "Can't rename " . $filename . ".new to " . $filename;
The next policy thing that I have to work on is systemd. From a quick test it seems that systemd policy changes will be more invasive than is suitable for Squeeze. This means that someone who wants to upgrade from Squeeze to Wheezy+systemd will have to upgrade to Wheeze policy before installing systemd. I think that I will make 0.2.20100524-10 the last version in Unstable based on the 2010 release, I will now start work on packaging the latest upstream policy for Unstable. PS I m not much of a PERL programmer, so if anyone has suggestions for how to improve the above PERL code then please let me know. Please note however that I m not interested in making my code look like line-noise.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/07/22/run-se-linux-policy/

Oppdatering: Jeg har skrevet en engelsk versjon av dette som er mer gjennomtenkt. I have written an English version of this post which I have had more time to think through. Det var meningen f rst ha dette som en kladd, for senere g igjennom og skrive mer, men WordPress krangler og jeg orker ikke finne ut av det. Derfor publiserer jeg dette n . Jeg har lenge nsket sette opp en ny bloggmotor men har aldri kommet meg til gj re det og dette er definitivt ikke tidspunktet, s jeg gjenoppliver min gamle, engelskspr klige blogg. Andre har skrevet sine fortellinger om hva som skjedde p Ut ya. Jeg ville gjerne skrive ned min ogs , f den ut. Jeg vil dels skrive det ned fordi jeg ikke vet om jeg vil huske alle disse detaljene senere. P en m te h per jeg ikke det. Dels ogs for at jeg skal slippe m tte beskrive dette hele tiden for alle som sp r. Gro Harlem Brundtland hadde nylig forlatt leiren. Jeg hadde tatt opp en videohilsen fra henne, og var i kontoret til mediegruppen for redigere filen til noe vi kunne laste opp p YouTube. En av de som var i rommet skvatt til og fortalte at Twitter var fullt av meldinger om en eksplosjon i Oslo. Etterhvert som pressen kunne fortelle om hvor angrepet hadde skjedd, ble det mer og mer tydelig at et informasjonsm te var p sin plass. Det ble enighet om at det m tet skulle avholdes etter at bolken med innledninger var ferdig. Informasjonsm tet ble avholdt, og jeg tok p meg som den lokale nerd-in-chief sette opp en laptop som kunne vise NRK Nett-TV s folk kunne f sett hva som skjedde. Det tr dl se nettverket gikk nesten umiddelbart ned, s vi ble enige om at det skulle settes et passord p det. I p vente av at noen andre gjorde det, gikk jeg p do. Idet jeg satt der, h rte jeg f rst agitert roping, s skriking, s skudd. Det h rtes mer ut som en lekepistol enn noe annet og jeg antok at dette bare var en eller annen som kom med en totalt smakl s vits. Med dette i tankene, kom jeg n rmest stormende ut av b sen men idet jeg vrengte opp d ren s jeg to mennesker som signaliserte at jeg skulle komme meg inn igjen. Ansiktsuttrykkene deres levnet overhodet ingen tvil om at dette var alvor. At de var der reddet utvilsomt livet mitt. Jeg var mest av alt forvirret. Jeg antok der og da det var en AUFer som hadde gjort dette, g tt amok. Jeg tittet ut igjen. De to var der fremdeles. Denne gangen s jeg en person som l der p gulvet, i en blodp l. Jeg hadde yekontakt med ham, og han signaliserte tydelig etter hjelp. Jeg tenkte umiddelbart at de d rene ikke ville st imot noen som helst type kuler, s jeg tenkte kun p forflytte meg vekk fra b sen. Min f rste tanke var komme meg utend rs. Jeg l p ut korridoren, og akkurat da kom en fra kaf gjengen mot meg. Hun pnet ansatt-toalettet, og jeg, hun, og en annen kastet seg inn. Det er bare en av de mange tilfeldighetene som jeg i etterkant m innse at jeg antar reddet livet mitt. Vi satt der, i halvannen time. Klare til l pe, klare for egentlig hva som helst. Det ble til en eiendommelig dynamikk mellom oss tre, en slags perpleks galgenhumor. Jeg, ettersom det var helt realistisk at v r gruppe var den eneste som visste om likene i bygget, pr vde umiddelbart f varslet om det. 112 fungerte ikke. 110 fungerte ikke. Til slutt kom jeg igjennom p 113, og de kunne opplyse om at politiet var klar over situasjonen og var p vei. Det skulle ta halvannen time, og da vi ble evakuert l han der d d. Det ekte politiet ankom omsider. Vi gikk ut. Jeg tok veien rundt lillesalen, noe jeg i etterkant angrer p ; det jeg s der vil nok bli med meg en stund. Det l en haug med folk jeg husker ingen ansikter, bare et stort, amorft sammensurium av kropper i en fryktelig stor blodp l noen av dem, jeg mener huske to, var fremdeles bevisste. Vi ble f rst flyttet til Planet Ut ya-kontoret leiravisa hvor det var en jente som hadde blitt skutt. Vi rev opp noen poser med gensere fra lageret og dekket til henne. Der satt vi en stund jeg hadde forlengst mistet tidsbegrepet jeg mener det m ha v rt tolv av oss. En av ungdommene ble trass i protester fra de i gruppa som kjente og gikk god for ham p f rt h ndjern. Jeg forstod ikke helt hvorfor. Senere ble vi forklart at det var fordi han hadde kommet fra et omr de politiet ikke hadde oversikt over. Jeg s ikke n r de h ndjernene ble l snet, men jeg husker ihvertfall at det slo meg som uverdig behandling. Politimannen som hadde vakt p posten der vi var, var veldig dyktig til forklare oss situasjonen. Vi ble flyttet ut til hovedkorridoren, hvor omkring 50 av oss var. F rst idet jeg s og omfavnet de som antakeligvis reddet livet mitt, knakk jeg sammen i gr t. Jeg tok meg fort inn igjen, fikk skjelvingen under kontroll, og etter en del venting ble vi marsjert med hendene p hodet mot fergen. Jeg husker hvor redd jeg var for at noen skulle gli i den bratte, gj rmete bakken og skape en misforst else. Det var flere lik ute. Noen var tildekket p improvisert vis, andre l der bare. Alle jeg s viste mot, ro og beherskelse p et niv langt over det noen nsker forvente fra folk i de aldersgruppene. Det var et samhold og en m lbevissthet som gjorde et inntrykk. Vel over fjorden ble vi tilbudt tepper. Jeg ble spurt om jeg var skadet, og bedt om vise mageregionen. Vi ble loset ombord i bussen, og kj rt til Sundvolden hotell. F lelsen, den totalt utrolige lettelsen av se sine n rmeste venner igjen kan jeg virkelig ikke beskrive. Lettelsen ble temperert av usikkerheten rundt de man ikke s . Det dreier seg blant annet om mennesker som jeg i skrivende stund m anta har mistet livet. Blant dem mennesker jeg tidligere hadde hatt stor glede av vissheten om at kom til gj re fantastiske ting i landets og verdens tjeneste n er de revet vekk. Jeg vet ikke hvor mye mer enn denne litt n kterne rapport av hendelsene jeg klarer komme med akkurat n . Men slik var det ihvertfall jeg opplevde situasjonen jeg kom ut av takket v re en serie tilfeldigheter. Litt kort vil jeg legge til: Redningstjenestene var en stor hjelp. Vel s stor, om ikke st rre, har muligheten til tilbringe tid sammen med de andre overlevende v rt. Vi holder sammen og tr ster hverandre med v r felles erfaring. Ett lyspunkt ser jeg her: Mest av alt er jeg s utrolig glad for at han ikke var fremme tyve minutter tidligere, under informasjonsm tet. Da var hele Ut ya samlet som sild i t nne i hovedsalen, og med hans automatv pen ville d dstallene i l pet av noen titalls sekunder blitt det mangedobbelte av det vi endte opp med. At det er en veldig mager tr st for de etterlatte er jeg inderlig klar over. Mine aller dypeste tanker er med dem alle. Dette var et angrep p hele det norske demokratiet. I forvirrelsen f ler jeg en bitter trass. Vi skal vise hans likesinnede at det er sterkere enn som s . Jeg vil ikke la meg skremme til taushet og passivitet. Jeg nsker minnes de d de, og deretter hedre dem ved fortsette arbeidet de var en del av.

Lintian now has a warning for debian/rules missing build-arch and build-indep targets. As a dh user, I was surprised that some of my dh-using packages had this problem. And when looking at the source, I remembered how I came to this: GNU make is stupid. Considering the following excerpt of the GNU make manual:

.PHONY

The prerequisites of the special target .PHONY are considered to be phony targets. When it is time to consider such a target, make will run its recipe unconditionally, regardless of whether a file with that name exists or what its last-modification time is.

And considering the following debian/rules:

.PHONY: build
%:
        dh $@

What do you think happens when you run debian/rules build in a directory containing a build file or directory?

make: Nothing to be done for build .

However, an explicit rule, like the following, works:

.PHONY: build
build:
        dh $@

It happens that many of the packages I maintain contain a build subdirectory in their source. As such, to work around the aforementioned issue, I just declared the dh rules explicitely, as in:

.PHONY: build binary binary-arch binary-indep (...)
build binary binary-arch binary-indep (...):
        dh $@

And this obviously doesn t scale for new rules such as build-arch and build-indep. To be future-proof, I ll use the following instead:

.PHONY: build
build %:
        dh $@

I don t know why I didn t do that the first time

Currently Debian/Unstable is going through a transition to using /run instead of /var/run. Naturally any significant change to the filesystem layout requires matching changes to SE Linux policy. We currently have Debian bug #626720 open about this. Currently the initscripts package breaks selinux-policy-default in Debian/Unstable so that you can t have initscripts using /run if the SE Linux policy doesn t support it. A patch has been suggested to the policy which uses a subst file, basically that causes the SE Linux labeling programs to treat one directory tree the same way as another. The problem with this is that it depends on a libselinux patch that is not in any yet released version of libselinux (and certainly won t be in a Squeeze update). The upside of such a fix is that it would work for policy that I package as well as custom policy, so if someone wrote custom policy referring to /var/run it would automatically work with /run without any extra effort. I think that the only way to do this is to just have regular expressions that deal with this in the file contexts. It s a bit ugly and slows the relabel process down a little (probably no more than about 10%) but it will work and work on Squeeze as well. One thing I really like to do is to have the SE Linux policy for version X of Debian work with version X+1. This makes upgrades a lot easier for the users. Ideally upgrading a server could be a process that involves separate upgrades of the kernel, the SE Linux policy, and user-space in any particular order because upgrading everything at once almost guarantees that something will break and it may be difficult to determine the cause. At this time I m not sure whether I ll add a new policy using the subs file before the release of Wheezy (the next stable release of Debian) or just keep using regular expressions. I can have the Wheezy policy depend on a new enough libselinux so it won t be a problem in that regard (a new upstream version of libselinux with the subst feature should be released soon). In any case I need a back-port to Squeeze to use regular expressions to make an upgrade to Wheezy easier. for n in $(find . -name "*.fc" xargs grep var/run cut -f1 -d: uniq) ; do
sed -e "s/\/var\/run/\/(var\/)?run/" < $n > $n.new
mv $n.new $n
done
for n in $(find . -name "*.fc" xargs grep var/lock cut -f1 -d: uniq) ; do
sed -e "s/\/var\/lock/\/((var\/run) (run) (var))\/lock/" < $n > $n.new
mv $n.new $n
done
for n in $(find . -name "*.fc" xargs grep dev/shm cut -f1 -d: uniq) ; do
sed -e "s/\/dev\/shm/\/((var\/run) (run) (dev))\/shm/" < $n > $n.new
mv $n.new $n
done I used the above fragment of shell code to change /var/run to /(var/)?run , /var/lock to /((var/run) (run) (var))/lock , and change /dev/shm to /(var/run) (run) (dev))/shm . It involves a reasonable number of changes to policy (mostly for /var/run), but hopefully this will be acceptable to the release team for inclusion in the next Squeeze update as the changes are relatively simple and obvious and the size of the patch is due to it being generated code. There is one final complication, Squeeze currently has selinux-policy-default version 2:0.2.20100524-7+squeeze1, but initscripts in Unstable breaks versions <= 2:0.2.20100524-9. So I guess I could submit a proposed version 2:0.2.20100524-9+squeeze1 to the release team to fix this. I would really like to have the Squeeze policy work with initscripts from Unstable or Wheezy. Any suggestions for how to deal with this? Update: I wrote the above before testing the code, and it turned out to not work. I ve written another post describing a better solution that I have now uploaded to Unstable. I still have to sort something out with an update for Squeeze.

The Wrong Answer story from these tales from the interview brings back some memories I ve written this code (well, I got halfway through it before I realised precisely how stupid an idea it was), and I ve counselled more than one developer against trying it again (always unsuccessfully, much to my chagrin and that of anyone who had to deal with it in the future, I m sure). The reason people do it is twofold:

1. It s more fun to write this sort of code than the sort that actually solves a real problem; and
2. Schema manipulation in SQL databases sucks rocks. There s usually limited (or at least painful) introspection capabilities, and manipulating the schema is annoying and usually is deeply balls, performance wise.

If the resources that have been spent building these databases-on-databases over the years were instead redirected into fixing problem 2, above, then it probably wouldn t be a problem any more. On the other hand, problem 1 would still exist, for which the only solution is regular beatings. Remember: always whack your programmers on the back of the head at least once a week. Even if you don t know why, they do.

At last DebConf, with the help of Gregor, I've tried to summarize some BoF organization best practices in a sort of HOWTO. As promised, although with 1 year of delay, we have just moved the DebConf BoF HOWTO to a more stable place on the DebConf wiki. In doing so, we have also integrated some of the feedback received last year. If you've proposed a BoF at DebConf11, please take a minute to have a look at it and let us know your comments. As usual, your feedback and contributions to improve the text are more than welcome!

From time to time I get e-mails about my wine-unstable packages being uninstallable. Most often it turns out, that the problem stems from using e.g. oldstable (Lenny) instead of at least stable (Squeeze). The same problem arises, if you wish to install the wine-unstable packages on a platform for which I don't offer binaries. In either case you need to build the package from source, which isn't as difficult, as many think. This entry in my ongoing tips mini-series of posts is thus going to detail how you setup pbuilder and afterwards use it to build a package. Please note, that I'm just focusing on pbuilder here and ignore things like cowbuilder. Preparations The following steps are needed just once, in general. Some would be needed again, if you want to create a second base.tgz, e.g. for a different distribution.

1. Install pbuilder with your favourite package manager, e.g. aptitude: aptitude install pbuilder
2. Become root
3. Configure pbuilder. Have a look at /etc/pbuilderrc, /usr/share/doc/pbuilder/examples/pbuilderrc and the manual page for pbuilderrc for reference. If you want to change some settings made in /etc/pbuilderrc, create a /root/.pbuilderrc and override any settings you don't like.
4. Create the base.tgz (the chroot environment for your builds). In the easiest case all your settings are made in the configuration files and you just need to run pbuilder --create, which creates the base.tgz in /var/cache/pbuilder, unless you changed the configuration.
   You should also note, that you can override certain settings, like the distribution or the path to (and name of) the base.tgz file created. See the manual page for pbuilder for all options and when they can be used.

Build a package The following steps are needed for every build:

1. Download the source package, you want to build. No matter how you fetch them (dget, apt-get source, ), you should end up with three files, one of them ending in .dsc.
2. Become root.
3. Update your base.tgz file: pbuilder --update. Again, see the manual page for further options. (You can skip this step, if you just created the base.tgz or you just updated it for another build.)
4. Build the source package: run pbuilder --build /path/to/source-package.dsc (obviously you need to replace the last argument with a real path)
5. If you haven't changed the configuration of pbuilder in that regard, then your binaries end up in /var/cache/pbuilder/result. Install the binaries, you want, from there (with dpkg -i).

Now you should be able to build your own packages from source! And to answer one question, that some of you might have now ("Why use pbuilder at all and not just build the package with dpkg-buildpackage directly?"): because pbuilder allows you to reliably build in a clean environment. That can safe you a lot of trouble, especially if you modified the source package. And it helps to keep the number of installed packages on your system down.

One of the first things that I worked on here at DebConf11 is supporting the HTML target in gnome-terminal. This means that if you copy a part of the screen and paste it into some application that handles HTML (such as evolution or my blog s edit field), attributes such as color and boldness are preserved. Here are some examples: A man page

MAN(1)                           Manual pager utils                           MAN(1)
NAME
       man - an interface to the on-line reference manuals
SYNOPSIS
       man [-C file] [-d] [-D] [--warnings[=warnings]] [-R encoding] [-L locale] [-m
       system[,...]] [-M path] [-S list] [-e extension] [-i -I] [--regex --wildcard]
       [--names-only]  [-a]  [-u]  [--no-subpages]  [-P  pager] [-r prompt] [-7] [-E
       encoding]   [--no-hyphenation]   [--no-justification]   [-p   string]    [-t]
       [-T[device]] [-H[browser]] [-X[dpi]] [-Z] [[section] page ...] ...
       man -k [apropos options] regexp ...
       man -K [-w -W] [-S list] [-i -I] [--regex] [section] term ...
       man -f [whatis options] page ...
       man  -l [-C file] [-d] [-D] [--warnings[=warnings]] [-R encoding] [-L locale]
       [-P pager] [-r prompt] [-7]  [-E  encoding]  [-p  string]  [-t]  [-T[device]]
       [-H[browser]] [-X[dpi]] [-Z] file ...
       man -w -W [-C file] [-d] [-D] page ...
       man -c [-C file] [-d] [-D] page ...
       man [-hV]
DESCRIPTION
       man is the system's manual pager. Each page argument given to man is normally
       the name of a program, utility or function.  The manual page associated  with
       each  of these arguments is then found and displayed. A section, if provided,
 Manual page man(1) line 1 (press h for help or q to quit)

A coloured diff from git

commit 55c514ae6a714abcfa818c33f00a2c051412c3d9
Author: Joachim Breitner <mail@joachim-breitner.de>
Date:   Thu Jul 21 12:08:56 2011 +0200
    Refactor vte_terminal_determine_colors_internal
    
    to work on VteCellAttr instead of VteCell, and use it in
    vte_terminal_cellattr_to_html.
diff --git a/src/vte.c b/src/vte.c
index 8bcc95d..7d4a6f1 100644
--- a/src/vte.c
+++ b/src/vte.c
@@ -6532,19 +6532,18 @@ swap (guint *a, guint *b)
 
 static void
 vte_terminal_determine_colors_internal(VteTerminal *terminal,
-                                      const VteCell *cell,
+                                      const VteCellAttr *attr,
                                       gboolean selected,
                                       gboolean cursor,
                                       guint *pfore, guint *pback)
  
        guint fore, back;

Midnight commander

  Links     Datei     Befehl     Optionen     Rechts
 <  ~/build/gnome-terminal/vte  .[^]> <  ~/build/gnome-terminal/vte  .[^]> 
 'n        Name            Gr e  Modifikations 'n         Name            Gr e  Modifikations 
 /..                      BERVZ. 20. Jul 18:23 /..                       BERVZ. 20. Jul 18:23 
 /.git                       4096 22. Jul 12:42 /.git                        4096 22. Jul 12:42 
 /autom4te.cache             4096 22. Jul 11:20 /autom4te.cache              4096 22. Jul 11:20 
 /doc                        4096 22. Jul 11:20 /doc                         4096 22. Jul 11:20 
 /glade                      4096 22. Jul 11:20 /glade                       4096 22. Jul 11:20 
 /gnome-pty-helper           4096 22. Jul 09:47 /gnome-pty-helper            4096 22. Jul 09:47 
 /perf                       4096 22. Jul 11:20 /perf                        4096 22. Jul 11:20 
 /po                         4096 22. Jul 11:20 /po                          4096 22. Jul 11:20 
 /src                       12288 22. Jul 12:41 /src                        12288 22. Jul 12:41 
 /termcaps                   4096 22. Jul 11:20 /termcaps                    4096 22. Jul 11:20 
  .gitignore                  935 22. Jul 11:20  .gitignore                   935 22. Jul 11:20 
  AUTHORS                      41 20. Jul 18:25  AUTHORS                       41 20. Jul 18:25 
  COPYING                   35068 22. Jul 11:11  COPYING                    35068 22. Jul 11:11 
  ChangeLog.pre-git        433051 20. Jul 18:25  ChangeLog.pre-git         433051 20. Jul 18:25 
  HACKING                     905 20. Jul 18:25  HACKING                      905 20. Jul 18:25 
  MAINTAINERS                 118 20. Jul 18:25  MAINTAINERS                  118 20. Jul 18:25 
  Makefile                  30512 22. Jul 11:20  Makefile                   30512 22. Jul 11:20 
  Makefile.am                1247 22. Jul 11:11  Makefile.am                 1247 22. Jul 11:11 
  Makefile.in               28812 22. Jul 11:20  Makefile.in                28812 22. Jul 11:20 
  NEWS                      43910 20. Jul 18:25  NEWS                       43910 20. Jul 18:25 
  README                      496 20. Jul 18:25  README                       496 20. Jul 18:25 
  aclocal.m4               377874 22. Jul 11:20  aclocal.m4                377874 22. Jul 11:20 
 *autogen.sh                  610 20. Jul 18:25 *autogen.sh                   610 20. Jul 18:25 
 
 BERVZ.                                        BERVZ.                                         
  10G/104G (9%)   10G/104G (9%)  
Hint: To look at the output of a command in the viewer, use M-!
~/build/gnome-terminal/vte $
 1Hilfe   2Men     3Ansicht  4Bear~ten 5Kopieren 6Ver~ben 7Mkdir    8L schen  9Men s   10Beenden

These changes are discussed in GNOME Bugzilla bug #365121 and can be downloaded in my git repository. Unfortunately, I later found out that I was not basing my work on the current development version, which has changed considerably, so we will see how and when my changes will actually make it into GNOME. Also note that my blog s HTML editor actually modifies the HTML code, so looking at the source of this page does not give you the code that I generate. Update: I ported my changes onto the vte-next branch, so they could be merged now. Please follow the bug report if you want to know more.

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Short version arrival was quite easy, the arrival wiki page is now up-to-date and my photos are uploaded every day to this Flickr set. I had a small problem departing from CDG to Zagreb after scanning my suit twice and complaining that it had too many electronic devices, they had me remove my Nexus S, Nokia N950 and Kindle 3 from the suit pockets and then scanned that all lot again. After that another security guy asked me to open my suitcase and started squishing my Ligo cheese and declaring in a grave voice that it was too soft to be legal . As I kept calm and explained the DebConf cheese party to him, he looked around, put the cheese back in the bag and said ok, ok, off you go . So I still have that softness for the party. I heard an even better anecdote from our next years hosts when they were travelling trough Germany, a border official asked a typical so, what are you here for? question. They answered that they were in transit for an IT conference and gave him the invitation letter. He read the letter, nodded and then said: DebConf, huh? So, who was the author of the Linux kernel? and when after the initial shock they gave the right answer, they were immediately waved trough. Now that s what I call good border security. I met up with the guys in the Zagreb airport caf , which was immediately after exiting the secure zone. We waited for dkg to arrive and get his baggage. The passport check too a couple of minutes, but the baggage claim looked to be taking almost a half an hour. After that was sorted out, we took out some local money in one of the 5 ATMs around and went to the bus. We were waived to just put our bags into the bus luggage space and get on, the driver went around to sell us tickets just before we drove off. It was one of the most comfortable and well air-conditioned buses I have been on in a long time. We were in the Zagreb bus station in less than half an hour. Then a funny part started an old man came up to dkg and immediately asked Are you going to Banja Luka? , and when he said yes, the man started dragging us along to the bus station saying that there is a bus to there that will leave in a couple minutes, but we were in luck, so we should follow him right to the bus. Driven by curiosity, we went on. The man dragged us to the far side of the bus terminal bus stops where there was a minibus with Bosnian number plates, but no official designation as a passenger transit bus and no other passengers. They asked a reasonable 120 kuna for the trip, but they looked very shady to me, so we refused. I think that if we agreed and we were lucky enough that they actually did get us to Banja Luka, the price would have risen along the way, for example using the highway tolls as an excuse. After getting cursed at by the old man and being demanded to buy him a beer for his efforts, we went upstairs to the real bus station where we were told that there were two buses to Banja Luka: one at 15:00 and another at 16:30, but that those two buses arrive in Banja Luka almost at the same time, so we got us tickets for the latter bus and went to a local bar to get some food and drinks. I somehow managed to get sausages in deepfried bread that for some reason cost almost triple of a hamburger and fries that others got, but it sure helped to pass the time and after all those 9 was not a bad price for a good meal. We were a bit surprised by the bus drivers asking us to pay 1 (or 8 kuna) for bags to be put into bus bag storage, especially as we for several minutes could not quite understand what they want of us as neither of them spoke either English, Russian or German. I don t remember when was the last time I crossed a real (i.e. non-Shengen) border in a bus, so getting out of the bus and walking one-by-one to the border official was a new experience. On the other border of two bus drivers collected the passports an then brought them back later, so that was less painful. And by then we were in Bosnia! And of the things that greeted us was a billboard for the casino in Banja Luka Hotel Bosna. By the time we got to Banja Luka, dkg had already made friends with an official from Croatian ministry of regional development that sat behind us on the bus and knew English very well (after living in Canada for some time). The bus station in Banja Luka looked almost abandoned like the bus stopped in the field with only a few taxi drivers and a bunch of buildings some distance away showing that this was indeed part of civilization. The taxi drivers would take you to the venue for 8-10 KM 5 or 50-100 kuna (if their meter is broken and you look to be really ignorant of the exchange rates). If you walk on a bit, there is a bus station with an ATM taking Visa cards and a bit further on a bus stop that will take you to the centre of the city for 1.5 KM. The train station looked fully abandoned when we went there, only a news kiosk was working there. The bus driver reacted well to the name Hotel Bosna and wave toward it when we passed by it. It is hard to miss, especially the blinking Casino sign or the white pillars with black letters Hotel Bosna on top. You just get off at the bus station Central and walk back a couple hundred meters. Then see all you Debian friends drinking in the cool bar and walk around the corner to the main entrance of the hotel to check in. The rooms are looking really great this is the best DebConf location that I have been to (I was not in Argentina). Soft beds with linens changed daily, nice air conditioning, towels (changed daily, if used), good shower, It is lacking in the speed and power of its free WiFi and in some place there is a clear impression that the hotel was built as a top of the line hotel a couple decades ago, but somehow has fallen into a disrepair since. Or it is simply used much more than expected. So far I would say that the DebCamp is running full steam two hacklabs have desks, chairs, power and network connection, one of them even has sufficient air conditioning. The network works great for me so far, at least in the venue. The hotel wireless is barely usable to read a blog post, preferably without photos. The food is being served well and on time. So far for lunch and dinner you walk up to the reception and get a food ticket based on your room number and go to the M level for the food (the M level is between the ground floor, labelled as PR , and first floor) where for breakfast and dinner there is a buffet, but for lunch you sit at a table and they bring you food. Vegetarians should clearly say vegetarian while pointing at themselves to get the special vegetarian option. So far food has been very good, except that that they often run out of popular items, such as fries, in the buffet. You can also ask for beer and other extra drinks with your food, but know that they cost extra up to 2.5KM for a beer, for example.

you have to put options scsi_mod scan=sync somewhere in /etc/modprobe.d/ and regenerate the initrd.
(thanks to Michal Ludvig in http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2010/11/msg00369.html)Just happened to me on my Sun Netra T1-200 after the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze, which threw me back into busybox of the initrd when it could not find the root-fs (on raid) and where mdadm -A /dev/md0 worked just fine to confuse me.

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See previous post for the rationale. I ve then started migrating my mail using evolution. First I ve installed dovecot and set it up so as to store my mail inside my $HOME/Maildir/ dir. Evolution will run dovecot on demand through a pipe, instead of through network access like with regular remote IMAP servers. So dovecot won t be started as a daemon. I ve been inspired by Roland s setup for this (even though I not using offlineimap). Inside Evolution, I ve configured a second mail profile, for this local IMAP server, using the custom command to connect to server :
"MAIL=maildir:$HOME/Maildir /usr/lib/dovecot/imap" I ve migrated my existing mail folders using copy to function on all top-level mail folders from the local evolution storage, to copy them to the IMAP folders. Note that some folders that include a dot ( . ) need to be renamed, as the dot is a path separator for IMAP. I ve adapted Evolution s vfolders definitions so as to take into account the active remote folders instead of the local ones, and that s it, the mail is migrated. I m using fetchmail + procmail to fetch mail from remote servers and to deliver it to the Maildirs, using dovecot s deliver program, with something like : DELIVER="/usr/lib/dovecot/deliver" :0: w
$DELIVER I ve migrated the filters of evolution to server-side Sieve rules so that dovecot s deliver sorts incoming mail in the right Maildirs. The dovecot config needs to be adapted to activate the sieve plugin (dovecot-sieve Debian package), in /etc/dovecot/conf.d/15-lda.conf : protocol lda
# Space separated list of plugins to load (default is global mail_plugins).
mail_plugins = $mail_plugins sieve
log_path = /tmp/dovecot-deliver-errors.log
info_log_path = /tmp/dovecot-deliver.log

The original Evolution filters rules were stored in $HOME/.config/evolution/mail/filters.xml, so I wrote a quick python DOM parsing tool to extract the (long) list of definitions and generate Sieve rules for the $HOME/.dovecot.sieve config file (in which folder hierarchy uses a . path separator instead of a / ). The sieve-test program can be used to check is sieve rules function as you want. Now this is all setup, I only need to configure notmuch to index all the Maildirs. But this is left to another post.

I'm someone who sometimes has a beard, and sometimes doesn't. Today, I'm someone with a fairly long beard, although it's not (yet?) one of the likes of andrew or maddog. I don't think it looks very well on me, but you can blame the government (or lack thereof) in Belgium. How?! What?! Yes, the government. A while back, a movie critic working for the RTL (a Francophone Belgian TV station) decided to keep his beard until the Belgian government took the oath of office. He was quickly joined by an actor, and then by a Flemish radio presenter (dutch, with pictures). And then by a whole bunch of people. I didn't join them, initially. But after a while, when my beard was starting to get long again, people started asking me, 'is that for the government?' And initially I said no. But people kept asking. Since it seemed like a good excuse for not having shaven that long, after a while I just decided to say 'yes' for the heck of it. And now, after having said so for quite a while, I've kindof grown to the idea. Which, I guess, means that if the impossible happens, and someone back home manages to form a government that will take the oath while I'm still in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I'll have to go out and buy some razor equipment. But I don't expect that to happen. Today, exactly 400 days after the previous election (yes, it's really been that long), it still doesn't look as if there's going to be an agreement on anything. I wish there was something positive or funny that I could report on in this whole thing, but it doesn't look like it. Sigh.

Yesterday's blog entry garnered a lot of attention and some responses (in the form of e-mails, which is totally fine). Two of them deserve, as far as I'm concerend, their own little entry in the mini-series I kicked off. So, here we go: First up was reader Sylvain "ythier" Hitier, who suggested adding

set list lcs=eol: ,tab: -,trail: 

to your .vimrc and making use of the :list option. The above line will highlight tabulators, trailing whitespaces and the end of a line. And it'll allow you to differentiate the three.
A warning though: you would want to deactivate this, in case you want to do copy and pasting with your mouse. [UPDATE] Sylvain just sent me a little key binding for C&P he's using to toggle the highlighting:

function CutPaste()
  setlocal paste! nu! list!
endfunction
map <F10> :call CutPaste()

[/UPDATE] The second really nice idea came by courtesy of Thilo Six to my attention:

" automatically delete trailing whitespace & Dos-returns     2
fun! <SID>MyDeleteTrailingWhitespace()
  if ! &bin
    let l:l = line(".")
    let l:c = col(".")
    silent! :%s/[\r \t]\+$//
    call histdel("search", -1)
    call cursor(l:l, l:c)
  endif
endfun
autocmd BufWritePre,FileWritePre * call <SID>MyDeleteTrailingWhitespace()

The above snippet will automatically delete trailing whitespace and carriage returns as added by a lot of Windows programs.
Again a little warning: the function is executed automatically, so be sure you have only replacements included in the regular expression you really want to get deleted! Thanks a lot for all the input I've received!

He he , after6 months of hard labor (just kidding, it wasn t difficult) I m now a brand new Debian Developer. I plan to continue the work I did before, mainly Perl module packaging, helping getting a recent rakudo in Debian, and improving configuration tools (as upstream author). I wish to thanks heartfully all the people that helped me before and during the new maintainer process:
gregoa, xoswald and the whole pkg-perl team. Too bad I can t go to Banja-Luka. All the best

One of the ways in which EFI is *actually* better than BIOS is its native support for multiple boot choices. All EFI systems should have an EFI system partition which holds the OS bootloaders. Collisions are avoided by operating system vendors registering a unique name here, so there's no risk that Microsoft will overwrite the Fedora bootloader or whatever. After installing the bootloader the OS installer simply sets an NVRAM variable pointing at it, along with a descriptive name and (if they want) sets the default boot variable to point at that. The firmware will then typically provide some mechanism to override that default by providing a menu of all the configured variables.

This obviously doesn't work so well for removable media, where otherwise you'd have an awkward chicken and egg problem or have to force people to drop to a shell and run the bootloader themselves. This is handled by looking for EFI/boot/boot(architecture).efi, where architecture depends on the system type - examples include bootia32.efi, bootia64.efi and bootx64.efi. Since vendors have complete control over their media, there's still no risk of collisions.

Why do we care about collisions? The main reason this is helpful is that it means that there's no single part of the disk that every OS wants to control. If you install Windows it'll write stuff in the MBR and set the Windows partition as active. If you install Linux you'll either have to install grub in the MBR or set the Linux partition as active. Multiple Linux installations, more problems. It's very, very annoying to handle the multiple OS case with traditional BIOS.

This was all fine until UEFI 2.3 added section 3.4.1.2 of the spec, which specifies that in the absence of any configured boot variables it is permitted for the firmware to treat the EFI system partition in the same way as removable media - that is, it'll boot EFI/boot/bootx64.efi or whatever. And, if you install Windows via EFI, it'll install an EFI/boot/bootx64.efi fallback bootloader as well as putting one in EFI/microsoft.

Or, in other words, if your system fails to implement the boot variable section of the specification, Windows will still boot correctly.

As we've seen many times in the past, the only thing many hardware vendors do is check that Windows boots correctly. Which means that it's utterly unsurprising to discover that there are some systems that appear to ignore EFI boot variables and just look for the fallback bootloader instead. The fallback bootloader that has no namespacing, guaranteeing collisions if multiple operating systems are installed on the same system.

It could be worse. If there's already a bootloader there, Windows won't overwrite it. So things are marginally better than in the MBR days. But the Windows bootloader won't boot Linux, so if Windows gets there first we still have problems. The only solution I've come up with so far is to have a stub bootloader that is intelligent enough to scan the EFI system partition for any other bootloaders and present them as a menu, and for every Linux install to just blindly overwrite bootx64.efi if it already exists. Spec-compliant firmware should always ignore this and run whatever's in the boot variables instead.

This is all clearly less than optimal. Welcome to EFI.

Earlier this week I saw a request for help from the Israeli community to fix an RTL issue in the Ubuntu installation. Although the request is in Hebrew, the screenshots speak for themselves and show the cropped text on the right side of the screen. There s a combination of a few problems:

1. Some of the text has LTR directionality, probably due to sentences beginning with an English word. This could be worked around by some translation changes or forcing directionality with RLM characters.
2. The text is aligned to the left. This might be due to the sames reasons above. Maybe it s also possible to override the alignment of RTL languages regardless of the directionality.
3. The text is cropped on the left side. Seems that just mirroring the English positions isn t enough to get good results. (I didn t check the code to see if that s actually what is done, but that s one of the common ways I saw to handle support for RTL programs).

LP bug #798768 was reported a month ago, but it seems to repeat LP bug #560114 reported in April 2010. Any help with these issues will be more than welcome. Of course, I ll be glad to help in any possible way (sorry, I don t write code) and I m sure this also applies to the members of the local community.
Filed under: Ubuntu

So, the "Harmony Project" launched their set of contributor agreements and tools last week. Colour me unimpressed... There's a claim on their website that they are a "community-centered group", but I don't see any list of people and organisations who contributed to this work. That bothers me. Regarding their aim to "assist organisations which use contribution agreements", I don't think that there is anything of value here for the Free Software community at all. Free Software developers don't need contribution agreements, and in my opinion encouraging their use like this is only going to cause further splintering of the community. We've managed for a very long time without them, why start now? As a developer, I personally don't believe in contribution agreements at all. If I contribute code to a project, it will be under the terms of a good Free Software license or not at all. That's all that's needed. There's a fair body of opinion out there on this - see pieces from Bradley Kuhn, Richard Fontana and Dave Neary for more discussion. What do you think?

3 months ago, I was positive I would be attending DebConf 11 in Banja Luka, but as the time to buy tickets and plan the trip came closer, I began to realise I don't have lots and lots of vacation, and I probably prefer spending them doing something that absolutely rocks my world. I've always enjoyed the Debian conferences when I've been lucky to be there, but last year's experience in the Pyrenees was nothing a DebConf can compare to, and I've decided to spend time seeking similar experiences this summer. With much regret, because I love meeting the wonderful people that make up Debian and DebConfs, I have to say that after all and once again, I won't make it.