Working on some document today, it occurred to me, once again, that OpenOffice's method for designing and applying documents styling totally sucks! Granted, this was not the first time that I cam to this conclusion but, today, I've come to realize that OpenOffice's paradigms constantly make me waste time trying to form a mental image of how every style element is suppose to relate to the other one, yet without having the full picture available within a single, easy-to-read document. Also, there is a complete lack of consistency in how style elements work. Some want to be defined in millimeters, while others want to be defined in points, while other still in number of lines. What a mess! In short: to become remotely usable, OpenOffice needs to approach document styling via the "HTML document with a separate CSS style sheet" paradigm. In other words, I need to be able to edit styles globally, as a group and separately from the document content itself, rather than having to click my way through a multitude of dialogs, for each and every type of text elements. To compare this with web design, there, I can focus on the actual content, formatted around semantic text elements (headers, paragraphs, block quotes, etc.) and then decide on the presentation styling as a separate global process by attaching a CSS style sheet, in which the relation between each type of text element and how it will be displayed is crystal clear, because it's handled as a unified style editing process. I think that this is one area in which Free Software could innovate in a positive way, by distancing itself from the Redmondesque practices of Microsoft Word, from which OpenOffice borrows too much. How about having a proper Style Editor application (similar to a CSS editor), within the OpenOffice suite, while Open Writer itself would only be allowed to load the style sheets produced by it and to apply them to semantic text text elements?

I do not like it when people tell Web 2.0 sites to send me invitation e-mail. I won t enumerate the reasons here. But there is one reason for why I don t like you passing on my address to those sites, which is subject of this article: Unlike popular belief, the Web 2.0 is not a money-printing machine. It s a long road until you can actually generate real money with user content. Therefore, some shadey sites are probably selling contact details to advertisers to make ends meet while hoping for the big cashflow. I don t have any data to back this up, and I want to change that:

Please tell all your Web 2.0 sites to send me an invitation! Please use an address in the signmeup.madduck.net domain for that, and make sure to include the domain name of the service to which you sign me up before the @ symbol. Also append a hyphen/dash and a random, short string. More on that in just a sec. For instance, if you are one of those people that believes that letting people know where you are (and have been) at any point in time, tell Foursquare to send an invitation to:

foursquare.com-ponies@signmeup.madduck.net

The reason for the random, short string ( ponies ) is simply so that I can later cross-check that a message receiving spam actually went through a social networking site I intend to catalog the invitation messages.

Thank you for your time. Keep in mind: the more, the merrier. I ll make sure to report back on the outcome of this little experiment right here, so watch this space. NP: Billy Joel: Cold Spring Harbor

I had previously sought alternative, innovative search engines, but none of the proposed options made me particularly happy. About a year ago, I came across DuckDuckGo, and today, I ve been using DDG as my primary search provider for exactly 10 months. The reasons why I switched included

• my dislike of the Google information monopoly and the potential that a single, corporate entity with financial interests, gets to censor the information I see. I am sceptical of their Do-no-evil promise because there s nothing binding about it, and if it gets in the way of money-making, I am sure it ll be discarded at a whim if it even still exists.
• the awareness that my usage augments their database (although I am probably too far away from mainstream to provide useful data), which translates into more funds available to them to further strengthen their market position.
• my belief that the days of index-based searches are over, given how 95% (or more) of user-generated content is bogus. Google undoubtedly optimises the results with obscure, secret algorithms, but that s just not enough for me.
• Of course the name DuckDuckGo was perhaps the strongest reason to switch. :)

I am aware that DuckDuckGo is index-based itself, using the Yahoo API, which, in turns means that DuckDuckGo may already be using Bing data. Sounds a bit like out of the frying pan into the fire, unfortunately. I am still investigating better search solutions, sticking with DuckDuckGo meanwhile. Unfortunately, DuckDuckGo doesn t quite cut the mustard at all times, forcing me to go to Google instead. For this reason I am glad to find that the CustomizeGoogle Firefox extension has not been discontinued, but simply renamed to OptimizeGoogle. This extension allows me to anonymise my identity towards Google, remove click tracking (which Google doesn t want you to know about and hence hide with JavaScript), hide ads, and customise a slew of other aspects of the giant s search engine. It alleviates some of the aforementioned concerns, but not all. Maybe it s time to rethink the way I use the web and lower my search needs. If you are using Firefox, try it out! If you re still using Internet Exploder, you should not, and instead upgrade to Firefox. Users of other browsers might find similar functionality for their application, or might want to switch as well. NP: Tunng: Comments from the Inner Chorus

I got involved with open-source software before I learnt about software development in a university course. Naturally, when my profs tried to teach the waterfall model to me, I couldn t take them too seriously back then. After all, requirements specification design implementation verification maintenance is not really in line with the principle to release early, release often. Furthermore, since water cannot flow uphill, the waterfall model fails to represent development cycles, as they naturally appear, even in behemoth, ancient software nightmares. And yet, when embarking on a new project, I do tend to find myself first thinking about the big picture, instead of churning out the code. I am certainly not the best coder out there, and it might well be that I could benefit from learning to break down problems to get an earlier start on the implementation of components. However, I maintain that avoiding the waterfalls and engaging directly in extreme programming, agile software development, or pair-based approaches right away is not the answer. Rather, the best approach should probably involve a certain level of conceptualisation before code is produced. I am a big fan of test-driven development, and I like the scrum method for the very reason that it involves talking and challenging ideas (although I wouldn t follow the method down to the book). I like to think about trickles in the mountains where water droplets joyfully jump around. * * * When Glyn Moody spoke in his LCA2010 keynote about challenges we (as in society) face, and how open-source seems to have many answers, he dropped the following gem, which spoke right to my heart:

Twitter is the release early, release often principle applied to thinking.

By this simile, journal articles are produced according to the waterfall model. This may well be why they are usually outdated at the time of publication. Microblogging (like Twitter), on the other hand, is primarily used to publish stuff before it s ready, and which would never be published otherwise. With journals on one end, and microblogging on the other, I think the epiphany is found in between as with software development: web logs web applications that allow for easy publishing by anyone (which is a different problem not to be discussed here). Since articles on those platforms usually have at least a title and a body, they require just a little bit more thought than 140 characters of contracted brain farts, spilled into the world faster than it takes one to stand up, stretch, and sit down again. * * * Microblogging seems to be in line with where we re heading: more information, more self-promotion, more access to more people, and all that with lower barriers of entry. It s hard to argue against a trend, but I think we ve taken a wrong turn somewhere. The one specific instance of content is no longer relevant, and there is no more time in the day to read elaborate treatments of subject matters. Instead, what seems to prevail is a constant flow. This flow threatens to replace actual thinking and discourse, both of which require reflection and time a scarce resource used up by ever new, fast-flowing media. It seems to me that those who immersed in this flow are unable to get out, as if sucked in by a maelstrom. I ve seen people enter serious withdrawal within hours of not knowing what s going on in the world. One could miss out on something. If you re following people on one of those microblogging platforms, I challenge you to spend the weekend offline and when the urge hits, ask yourself what you are actually missing. I mean what you are really missing, and by that I mean anything other than the cozy buzz and hum of entertainment washed upon you, preventing you from having to think about what you could be (actively) doing instead. I hope it s not a lot. For else, I fear that this means that future generations will be stuck with this communication culture, just like water droplets can t ever play in the mountain trickle again. NP: Sola Rosa: Get It Together

Scott recently noted that we don t have Klingon available in Ubuntu. Klingon is available in ISO 639, so adding it should be straight forward. Last time I blogged about this three packages needed changing, as well as Launchpad needing a translation team for the language. The situation is a little better now: only two packages need changing as gdm now dynamically looks for languages based on installed locales. libx11 still needs changing a minimal diff would be:

=== modified file 'nls/compose.dir.pre'
--- libx11-1.2.1/nls/compose.dir.pre
+++ libx11-1.2.1/nls/compose.dir.pre
@@ -406,0 +406,1 @@
+en_US.UTF-8/Compose:     tlh_GB.UTF-8
=== modified file 'nls/locale.alias.pre'
--- libx11-1.2.1/nls/locale.alias.pre
+++ libx11-1.2.1/nls/locale.alias.pre
@@ -1083,0 +1083,1 @@
+tlh_GB.utf8:           tlh_GB.UTF-8
 === modified file 'nls/locale.dir.pre'
--- libx11-1.2.1/nls/locale.dir.pre
+++ libx11-1.2.1/nls/locale.dir.pre
@@ -429,0 +429,1 @@
+en_US.UTF-8/XLC_LOCALE:       tlh_GB.UTF-8
 

Secondly, langpack-locales has to change for two reasons. Firstly a locale definition has to be added (and locales define a place a language and locale information like days of the week, phone number formatting etc. Secondly the language needs to be added to the SUPPORTED list in that package, so that language packs are generated from Launchpad translations. Now, gdm autodetects, but it turns out that only complete locales were being shown. And that on Ubuntu, this was not looking at language pack directories, rather at

/usr/share/locale

which langpack-built packages do not install translations into. So it could be a bit random about whether a language shows up in gdm. Martin Pitt has kindly turned on the with-incomplete-locales configure flag to gdm, and this will permit less completely translated locales to show up (when their langpack is installed without the langpack nothing will show up).

On Wednesday I got DAM approval and since Saturday late evening I m officially a Debian Developer. Yay! :-) My thanks go to

• Christoph Berg (Myon) whom I know for more than a decade since we studied together, and who s career in Debian was way faster than mine, but who on the other hand probably knows me better than nobody else in Debian which made him the perfect advocate;
• Bernd Zeimetz (bzed) whom I know from my times at DaLUG and who was the friendliest Application Manager I could imagine he s probably also one of the fastest (8 days from application to AM report :-);
• Luca Capello (gismo), who was the most demanding but also most inspiring sponsor I ever had and who became a very good friend after we found each other over my package conkeror.
• Arne Wichmann (Y_Plentyn) for being my first drop-in center for Debian questions (like can I directly dist-upgrade from 2.0 to 3.0? :-);
• Martin Zobel-Helas (zobel) who was always encouraging me to continue exploring new sides of Debian;
• Gerfried Fuchs (Rhonda) just for being there (and for being a package maintainer with good relations to upstream ;-);
• my coworkers at the IT Services Group of the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich, who always found new challenges in Debian for me to solve;
• and all those others who offered to also advocate me (e.g. Otavio Salvador) or sponsored my packages so far (or at least offered to do so), e.g. Alexander Wirt (formorer), Martin F. Krafft (madduck), Robert J rdens (jordens),

As Bernd cited in his AM report, my earliest activity within the Debian community I can remember was organising the Debian booth at LinuxDay.lu 2003, where I installed Debian 3.0 Woody on my Hamilton Hamstation hy (a Sun SparcStation 4 clone). I wrote my first bugreport in November 2004 (#283365), probably during the Sarge BSP in Frankfurt. And my first Debian package was wikipedia2text, starting to package it August 2005 (ITP #325417). My only earlier documented interest in the Debian community is subscribing to the lists debian-apache@l.d.o and debian-emacsen@l.d.o in June 2002. I though remember that I started playing around with Debian 2.0 Hamm, skipping 2.1 (for whatever reasons, I can t remember), using 2.2 quite regularily and started to dive into with Woody which also ran on my first ThinkPad bijou . I installed it over WLAN with just a boot floppy at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. :-) Anyway, this has led to what it had to lead to a new Debian Developer. :-) The first package I uploaded with my newly granted rights was a new conkeror snapshot. This version should work out of the box on Ubuntu again, so that conkeror in Ubuntu should not lag that much behind Debian Sid anymore. In other News Since Wednesday I own a Nokia N900 and use it as my primary mobile phone now. Although it s not as free as the OpenMoko (see two other recent posts by Lucas Nussbaum and by Tollef Fog Heen on Planet Debian) it s definitely what I hoped the OpenMoko will once become. And even if I can t run Debian natively on the N900 (yet), it at least has a Debian chroot on it. :-) A few weeks ago, I took over the organisation of this year s Debian booth at FOSDEM from Wouter Verhelst who s busy enough with FOSDEM organisation itself. Last Monday the organiser of the BSD DevRoom at FOSDEM asked on #mirbsd for talk suggestions and they somehow talked me into giving a talk about Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. The slides should show up during the next days on my Debian GNU/kFreeBSD talks page. I hope, I ll survive that talk despite giving more or less a talk saying Jehova! . ;-) What a week.

A number of small fixes have been committed to the upstream X.org GIT to improve support for the "Red Cloud" Geode variant (called GX2 for late NSC chips and GX for newer rebranded AMD chips) and we desperately need volunteers to test those changes, before we release a new upstream tarball. If you have some Red Cloud hardware on hand and at least basic knowledge of how to compile software on Linux distributions, please contact me to the e-mail address listed in the ChangeLog. Thanks! PS: if you're on Ubuntu, test packages are available for Lucid via my PPA.

Tollef forced me to take over libpam-passwdqc after I had reported bug #517967. passwdqc is a toolset that can be used to enforce password strength policies at exactly the right place: there s a PAM module, and with the next version, you can also use a library and command-line tools read on below. The toolset gives administrators flexibility in defining the minimum password length based on the number of character classes a user tries to use. It also includes libpam-cracklib functionality and prevents the use of trivial passwords. I appreciate this functionality, so I had little choice but to make the best out of it:

• I uploaded libpam-passwdqc 1.0.5-1 to unstable, fixing a few bugs on the way, and bringing the packaging up to speed.
• I wrote a message to upstream introducing myself and was happy when I got an almost immediate response from two developers, suggesting that development was thriving. Yay!
• Having been pointed to the upstream CVS-Git clone, I based the packaging off the repository, rather than the tarballs. This required me to juggle directories a bit, as well as to repack the tarballs. Oh well.
• Next, I fixed the bug I reported, and now libpam-passwdqc can be installed and configured in a jiffy, thanks to Steve Langasek s impressive work on pam-auth-update. Someone also reported this feature request as LP#314775, but I don t use Launchpad, so someone else will have to triage it there.
• Finally, I imported the latest upstream work into the repository, which had me change the source package name. The benefit of version 1.1.4 in addition to improvements and bugs fixed is that the functionality is now also available through client programs in the passwdqc package, as well as in an independent C library. Due to the new packages, the upload is currently waiting in the Debian NEW queue, so hold your horses for a few days.

Debhelper 7 is really nice. Thanks, Joey.

Linux.conf.au 2010 has come to an end and I am looking back at an intense week of conferencing. A big shout out to the organisers for their excellent work. I think LCA (as well as DebConf) just keeps getting better every year. This does not at all discredit previous organisers, because they were the best at their times and then passed on the wisdom and experience to help make it even better in the following year. The week started off with the DistroSummit, which Fabio and I organised. Slides are forthcoming, as I failed to get them off the speakers right after their talks it s interesting how stress levels and adrenaline can cause one to forget the most obvious things. This is where experience comes in. I ll be there again next year, I hope, to do things better. The theme of the day was cross-distro collaboration, and we started the day a little bit on the Debian-side with Lucas Nussbaum telling us about quality assurance in Debian, alongside an overview of available resources. We hoped to give people from other distros pointers, and solicit feedback that would enable us to tie quality assurance closer together. Next up was Bdale Garbee who talked about the status of the Linux Standard Base. While I am really interested in such standardisation efforts, I realised during his talks that I had considerable difficulties paying attention because as organiser of the conference, I had all sorts of other things occupying my thoughts. I proceeded to tell the audience the room was mostly filled throughout the day with an estimated 40 50 folks, and I d say about half of them stayed throughout, while the other half came in and left the room between talks. I could not get the projector to work with my laptop after the upgrade to Kernel Mode Setting, and thus used the whiteboard to give a brief introduction to vcs-pkg.org, talk about the current state of affairs, summarise the trends in discussions around patch management and collaboration, give an outlook of what s up next, and solicit some discussion. Sadly, just like during Bdale s talk, I found myself worrying over the organisation of the day, rather than actually taking in most of the discussion. Fortunately, others have written about the most important points, so I defer to them. Michael Homer then told us about GoboLinux s Aliens system, which is a way to integrate domain-specific packages with distro-specific package maintenance e.g. how to get APT to handle CPAN directly, or how to let YUM manage Python packages. The ensuing discussion was interesting, and we carried it over to the next slot, because Scott, the next speaker, was stuck in traffic. To summarise briefly: scripting languages have a lot of NIH-style solutions because it works for them, but these are a nightmare to distro packagers. One symptom of the status quo is that complex software packages like Zimbra are forced to distribute all required components in their installation packages, which make distro packaging, quality assurance, and security support even harder. I don t think we found a solution, other than the need for further standardisation (like the LSB), but the road seems to be a long and windy one. Laszlo Peter introduced the audience to SourceJuicer, a new build system used by OpenSolaris. The idea is that contributors submit packages via a web interface, kicking off a workflow incorporating discussion and vetting, and only after changes have been signed-off are packages forwarded to auto-builders and eventually end up in the package repository. This is very similar to upload ideas I ve had a while ago, which I ve started to (finally) implement. Unfortunately, SourceJuicer seems very specific to OpenSolaris, as well as non-modular, so that I probably won t be able to reuse e.g. the web interface on top of a Debian-specific package builder. After the break, Dustin Kirkland stepped up to tell us about his user experience of Launchpad. Unfortunately, I found his talk a bit too enthusiastic. Launchpad undoubtedly has some very cool features and ideas, but it s just one of the available solutions. The dicussion of Launchpad also dominated the next talk, in which Lucas Nussbaum told us about the Debian-Ubuntu relationship. While his presentation showed that the relationship was improving (Matt Zimmerman made the point that there are rather many relationships, rather than one relationship), I was a bit disturbed by the comments of Launchpad developers in the room, ranging from Debian is declining anyway to Just use Launchpad if you want to collaborate with others and not go down . There was a slight aura of arrogance in their comments which tainted my experience of the otherwise constructive discussions of the day. Overall I had a great time. Debian and Ubuntu made up the vast majority of attendants, with only a handful of representatives from other distros present. I wonder why that would be. One reason might be that around 70% of LCA attendants declared themselves Debian or Ubuntu users, and so there weren t many other distros around. Another might be that I still haven t spread the word enough. Let s hope to do better next year! Thanks to all the speakers. We may have organised the day, but you made it happen and interesting! Slides and recordings of the talks will be linked from the archived website when they become available (yes, the archive page does not exist yet either).

The XML-Editor Serna by Syntext has been published as Free Software a few months ago. This was very good news, because there was a lack of a good free XML editors with a good graphical view on DocBook documents, which I needed to recommend to users of zpub. Therefore, I investigated packaging Serna for Debian. I had to patch a few things to make it compile on and64 and to use components shipped by Debian where possible. Today, I could finally close the RFP bug filed by W. Martin Borgert, as the serna package was accepted by the ftp-masters. The first bug (SEGFAULT on startup on lenny) is already filed. I hope this is a good sign, as it shows that there is interest in the package. For my packaging workflow, I used git-svn to import the upstream SVN branch into a git repository. I then use git-dpm by Bernhard R. Link to manage my changes as patches in the new 3.0 (quilt) debian source package. I must say that I prefer this approach to git-buildpackage, as there is only one git branch to publish. I hope that Bernhard uploads git-dpm to Debian soon. Serna is quite a big software project and uses stuff that I know little about (Qt, C++ with python interaction etc.). Also, the package currently bundles the DITA-OT package, which should rather be packaged separately. Therefore, I d be glad if co-maintainers would join the effort.

Coming to New Zealand for an extended period of time, I figured it would make sense to purchase a prepay mobile plan to make it easier to mix with locals. Not knowing better, I went with Vodafone, which I whole-heartedly regret: their website is a massive pain in the ass, their price plans completely over the top, and their customer service representative incompetent and unfriendly. My latest experience eclipsed all previous encounters, and makes me want to tell you about it: Between all the obscure add-ons Vodafone threw at me when I bought this SIM card, two weeks ago I couldn t figure out how my balance had decreased from $30 to $0 when I rarely ever made calls. I wrote an e-mail to their customer service hotline, and it took them a week to get back to me, with the following text:

Due to being a Prepay Customer, unfortunately usage details are not available as per terms and conditions. I have although checked your usage and can confirm that all charges are correct.

Obviously, I wasn t going to accept this claim of omniscience, so when last weekend, $20 disappeared over the course of a day, that was the catalyst for me to reopen the ticket and reply along the lines of:

Only I know when I used my phone and thus only I can determine whether the charges are correct. Please show the full records to me, or else

This seemed to convince the representative, and 8 messages and 11 days after my initial request, I was told I could request the records at $5/30 records. Yes, you read that right: they wanted to charge me to view the records. I thus replied:

I am NOT willing to pay for that. If you are unable to comply with my desire for transparency, then I shall terminate the contract and make sure to inform the media as well as the consumer institute of this conduct. As stated previously, I shall also consult with a lawyer. Charging consumers to view data that is obviously available is a strong indication that you do not want me to see it. I can t imaging why this would be the case other than the data being inconsistent with reality.

That worked, and I finally got an Excel sheet with my usage data, which allowed me to track down the depletion of my account: to lure customers in, they promise free calls to other Vodafone numbers for the first four weekends. There are three problems with that though:

1. Having purchased my card on Saturday afternoon, I was annoyed to find out that the remaining 34 hours of that weekend would be counted as a whole weekend.
2. They don t provide a way by which to find out whether a given number actually belongs to Vodafone or not. The 021 prefix is not enough of an indication.
3. They don t actually tell you anywhere but the aforementioned horrific website that the addon has expired.

So thanks, Vodafone. You ve lost a customer, who should have gone with 2degrees in the first place, who have much lower rates, even though their data coverage doesn t seem as good. I don t need data anyway. I ll still insist on Vodafone providing the data in a Free format. You can find more information about NZ mobile phone providers on the LCA2010 wiki page. NP: Age Pryor: Shank s Pony

RCBW - #18 ... and RCBW is back! Here is this week squashes:

• bug #544879 - clutter - resurrect -doc package, fix gtk-doc related FTBFS
• bug #504980, bug #560513 - cryptonit - add missing #include for gcc 4.4 (bonus point: misc QA fixes)
• bug #504901 - dibbler - no longer valid gcc FTBFS
• bug #504869 - scim-bridge - closed (w maintainer) as unreproducible an already fixed gcc 4.4 bug
• bug #505390 - traverso - add missing #include for gcc 4.4
• bug #562846 - flim - drop Recommends on metamail (now gone)
• bug #526207 - jaula - closed as unreproducible a gcc 4.4 bug (recent flex adds cstdio by itself)

Most of the actually fixed missing include bugs above have benefited from patches by Martin Michlmayr, thanks! Also, this week squashing has benefited from a huge list of bugs which Luk has given me, some of the not-yet-fixed bugs there are a bit trickier than usual (e.g. missing #include bugs which got intertwined over time with const char * conversions bugs, which in turn require some far reaching code changes due to the propagation of function prototypes in unexpected code parts). Since I'll be leaving tomorrow morning for the BSP in M nchengladbach, I'll have a bit of time there to dive a bit more into the issues. Actually, what I fear most now is buying train tickets from Cologne to Moenchengladbach and back, since I'm totally unable to pronounce the name of the latter city (my German sucks, actually there is no such "my German" at all). Luckily, I've been told they've wonderful ticket-selling machines in Cologne See you there, and happy RC squashing!

So I previously mentioned I'd knocked up a simple automation tool, for deploying policies (read "scripts") from a central location to a number of distinct machines. There seemed to be a small amount of interest, so I've written it all up:

• slaughter - Perl System Administration & Automation tool

Why slaughter? I have no idea. Yesterday evening it made sense, somehow, on the basis it rhymed with auto - (auto as in automation). This morning it made less sense. But meh. This list of primitives has grown a little and the brief examples probably provide a little bit of flavour. In short you:

• Install the package upon a client you wish to manage.
• When "slaughter" is invoked it will fetch http://example.com/slaughter/default.policy
  • This file may include other policy files via "IncludePolicy" statements.
• Once all the named policies have been downloaded/expanded they'll be written to a local file.
• The local file will have Perl-fu wrapped around it such that the Slaughter::linux module is available
  • This is where the definitions for "FetchFile", "Mounts", etc are located.
• The local file will be executed then removed.

All in all its probably more complex than it needs to be, but I've managed to get interesting things primarily with these new built-in primitives and none of it is massively Debian, or even Linux, specific. ObSubject: Jaws

a short update on my RC-bug squashing activities:

• #526210 scim-kmfl-imengine: "FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2
• #531715 gcin: "FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include"
  add comment to BTS, later NMU'd by zack
• #534600 spatialindex: "spatialindex: FTBFS with GCC 4.4"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2
• #539543 hubbub: "FTBFS with GCC 4.4: 'cptr' may be used uninitialized"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2
• #546386 fam: "FTBFS with gcc4.4"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2
• #549223 chuck: "fails to build with gcc-4.4/newer eglibc"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2
• #550115 gbgoffice: "FTBFS: invalid const conversion"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2
• #553706 glob2: "FTBFS with GCC 4.4: 'class GAGCore::StreamBackend' has no member named 'getc'"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2

remarks:

• to be honest, these were all easy bugs, I just grabbed existing patches (by Martin Michlmayr, peter green, & several Ubuntu folks).
• reactions so far: one "thank you" mail, no other comments.

RCBW - week #16 ... and here are christmas (for those who care) RC squashes, by yours truly (for those who care too):

• bug #530527 - ipsec-tools - gcc 4.4 strict-aliasing, patch by peter green
• bug #539010 - opensrs-client - stop using deprecated Perl module MD5, patch by Ansgar Burchardt
• bug #539542 - libnsgif - gcc 4.4 strict-aliasing, patch by peter green
• bug #531715 - gcin - gcc 4.4 missing include, patch by Martin Michlmayr (+ lintian overrides for appropriate use of rpath)
• bug #504873 - im-sdk - gcc 4.4 missing include, patch by Martin Michlmayr (bonus: package orphaning, misc QA, kfreebsd patches applied)
• bug #540681 - beast - cast to volatile pointer, patch by Jakub Wilk
• bug #560499 - beast - gcc 4.4 missing includes

and here are the usual notes:

• most of them come from Luk, which this week provided me with a looong list (and of course I was not able to empty it) ...
• ... that list has probably entered the radar of others: let's thank Christoph Egger, gregor hermann, and David Paleino, which contributed quite a lot of RC-fixing NMUs in the past few days (probably others did too, but these 3 got into my way the most )
• I got annoyed by bug #562518 (zlibg b0rkage) for a while: while my main system got saved by apt-listbugs, my cowbuilder environment was not that lucky
• I've tried following a wise advice to speed up pkg building, but it does not work w/ cowbuilder, which insists in creating hard links and hence fail due to cross-device linking. I need to investigate whether this can be fixed without loosing APT cache sharing with the host system
• "thanks" to im-sdk, I discovered yet another patch management system: dbs: how many others are still out there?
• how dumb is a BTS instance which is not accessible by default w/o registration even for read-only purposes?

Hint/request of the week: please add +pending when you do DELAYED/ NMUs, that way filtering out already taken care of bugs gets easier and refreshing a bug log page in the browser will immediately show the new tag at the top.
(Yes, I agree that nmudiff should offer that when passed --delay, I intend to propose a patch for that, but feel free to beat me at it :-P) In other news, christmas vacations are awesome to catch up with books you planned to finish reading months ago ... Update: the patch for nmudiff I've mentioned has been kindly provided by gregor hermann, thanks!

Ever since Linux kernel 2.6.31 was released, my AMD Geode LX800-based FIC ION 603 can no longer boot; I get a fatal kernel crash near the end of the initramfs loading phase. At the crux of the issue seems to be a recently added kernel feature for caching filesystem ACL. I don't even use the ACL feature on my hosts, but there you go; it still crashes the kernel. Sigh. Having filed a bug on Launchpad and reported the issue upstream failed to produce a fix - despite the sustained involvement of two members of the Ubuntu kernel team members to help me narrow down the cause of this fatal kernel crash. Mentioning the issue to OLPC kernel developer Andres Salomon, he commented how he finds the new ACL caching code in the ext2/ext3/ext4 filesystem drivers downright creepy, but added that he currently lacks the time to further investigate the issue. I'm thus wondering if anyone else is experiencing this issue and might possibly have a fix to propose? Alternately, help towards debugging and fixing this issue is extremely welcome, as this bug will seriously affect users upgrading from older Debian and Ubuntu releases based on pre-2.6.31 kernels, when Debian/Squeeze and Ubuntu/Lucid are published in spring. PS: yes, the issue still exists in kernel 2.6.32 also.

The WebKit hackfest is now over, and I think it was a very productive week. Thank you very much to all who attended, to Igalia for organizing the hackfest, and hosting us so well, to Collabora for having sponsored the event, and allowed me to spend the week working on it, and to the GNOME foundation for having payed all of my costs!
Xan blogged about day 0, and also a summary of all that was done, so I ll focus on the stuff he forgot to mention ;D. The hackfest, for me, started on day -1 with me not allowing Xan to go sleep before he had reviewed a couple patches of mine to fix DOM context menu handling. It always bothered me that Epiphany failed to open right-click menus in some pages, or let pages handle the right click. Well, this is fixed now, and Zimbra users can now have their right click menus, and WoW players can remove talent points from their calculators =P. It turns out that many of the attendees don t like pages messing with their context menus, though, and they had some good points to back up their positions (like pages making it hard to save images, for instance), so I implemented a way to force openning the custom menu: Ctrl-rightclick. We wanted to use a GtkInfoBar to display questions regarding the form saving - our initial implementation always saved all credentials, but that didn t sound good enough. Xan and I thought it would be very complicated to make this work, because there were assumptions in the code regarding which widget contains which, but it turned out to be quite trivial - making EphyEmbed a descendant of GtkVBox instead of GtkScrolledWindow, fixing a small number of assumptions, and that was it. The passwords are saved in the GNOME Keyring. It s interesting to point out that GNOME Keyring seems to be unhappy with the number of passwords a browser stores - Xan s daemon was hanging, crashing, and spawning a large number of threads. My daemon decided to take up some 300MB of RAM at one point. It s somewhat funny to see how much a browser pushes the limits of our platform. We are hoping this will improve with the new keyring APIs, and the rewrite that is ongoing. It s nice to see my browser form passwords in seahorse, though, and be able to manage them like any other. One more thing worth of notice, although this post is already a bit too big: one of the main concerns people had during the Hackfest was on making build time smaller. Touching a single file in WebCore causes a debug build of 10 minutes on my laptop. Evan Martin and Benjamin Otte made a push at removing unnecessary includes from WebCore, and WebKitGTK+ files, which brough the build time down a bit. They end up inspiring Aroben, from Apple, to go even further into this, and remove many includes from files all over WebKit. Evan was also able to bring linking time down by making it possible to link libwebkit without having to build all the intermediate libraries, which brought build time down to 1 minute, when touching a single file in WebCore. Behdad and I also started looking into breaking WebCore up into lots of shared libraries for Debug builds, since we don t care too much about speed penalties in those. None of these experiments got committed yet, but I am hoping we will be having a better time hacking on WebKitGTK+ in the near future. It was awesome meeting everyone, by the way! See you around =).

Just had some time in the last two days, and here's the list of uploaded NMUs. So far, I had only one maintainer complaining (again, sorry!), but I must admit that on Sunday I just didn't follow the correct NMU procedure Anyhow, here's what I have:

1. #504824 [libnids] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: #elif used instead of #else
2. #504864 [omnievents] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
3. #504871 [bookmarkbridge] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
4. #504902 [libofa] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
5. #504943 [libassa] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
6. #504963 [libfcgi] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
7. #504970 [italc] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
8. #504973 [libspiff] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
9. #505021 [passepartout] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
10. #505078 [codeine] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
11. #505333 [gloox] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
12. #505372 [bobot++] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
13. #505420 [esteidutil] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
14. #510759 [log4cxx] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
15. #526151 [openmovieeditor] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
16. #551107 [fusecompress] FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include
17. #551718 [eboard] eboard: FTBFS with latest eglibc and gcc 4.4

Some highlights Most of these bugs, if not all, already had a patch attached. Thanks to Martin Michlmayr for his work on this! Regarding fusecompress, after my upload to DELAYED/2, the maintainer promptly replied asking for sponsorship of a package he already had. So this does not really count If you want to participate in this great game too, and improve our loved distribution, you can have a look at this list of possibly easy bugs to fix. Have fun!

In more than 11 years in Finland, I've been politically involved in a couple of political parties on the Right side of the spectrum - mainly because those parties tend to favor a free market economy and a work-oriented immigration. In one case, I was invited by fellow immigrants to attend the meetings of their favorite party's English section, because of my expertise on Immigration legislation and common practices. In an other case, a member of the Finnish parliament invited me to participate in his party's immigrant workgroup, which resulted in my getting involved in a number of proactive initiatives and eventually joining that party as a card-carrying member. Simultaneously, I was approached by no less than 4 Finnish political parties to become a candidate in the municipal elections (in Finland, foreigners who have lived at least 2 years on an A-status residence permit can vote and stand as a candidate in municipal elections). Despite this, I've come to the conclusion that none of these Finnish political parties is genuine: On one hand, there's politicians who claim to know everything about the Immigration question and yet their speeches tell an entirely different story than what immigrants experience. On the other hand, there's politicians who complain about the immigrants' lack of participation in political life, but who quickly add that their personal group of supporters is all they're interested in hearing from. Correlating these facts, it's been found by many politically-involved immigrants that Finnish political parties don't genuinely want to involve immigrants; all they are interested in is acquiring a few extra votes from the immigrant population and in transferring those votes to their party's star Finnish candidate, who often is someone favored by the party's old-timers but disavowed by the majority of grassroot members. In a few more extreme cases, party brasses will sheepishly admit that all they want is a couple of niggers in the candidate list to show a vague sense of adhesion to the multicultural agenda - despite the assurances they have given to often naive immigrant candidates that they "genuinely" hope that they'll be elected. As it turns out, many immigrants are actively involved at the grassroot level and receiving the praises of their Finnish colleagues for their innovative and proactive initiatives. As a result, genuinely interested Finns have joined forces with active immigrants to launch various initiatives for improving Finland's competitive position in the global economy through a thriving cosmopolitanism and a stronger culture of entrepreneurship. For instance, I am personally involved at several public and private sector initiatives. Nonetheless, grassroot initiatives can only ever accomplish so much; without the unflinching support of Finland's significant political players, several key elements of these innovative solutions cannot be implemented. However, given the grassroot's frustrating experiences of the political scene, one cannot help but wonder: Is there any Finnish political party whose actions are coherent with its stated political agenda and in sync with the grassroot initiatives being put forward by the immigrants and their Finnish associates?

RCBW - week #15 Here are last weektoday squashes, by yours truly:

• bug #546585 - cssed - invalid const char* conversion (Ubuntu patch)
• bug #434925 - suikyo - prefer recent emacs in suikyo-elisp
• bug #545515 - mgltools-gle - move to non free due to NC clause (copyright patch by Scott Kitterman)
• bug #548555 - lastfmsubmitd - fix deps in init.d LSB headers (patch by Peter Reinholdtsen)
• bug #554905 - hibernate - fix deps in init.d LSB headers (patch by martin f krafft)
• bug #554494 - pfstools - invalid const char* conversion (Ubuntu patch)
• bug #551718 - eboard - invalid const char* conversion (Ubuntu patch)

Some highlights:

• last week I've been incredibly busy at work to finish up some pre-xmas-holiday duties: hence today I've took half a day of BSP at home to "catch up"
• the above finally convinced me to drop the dates from my reports, they are quite pointless: my personal goal is simply one RC bug per day on average, the actual day of the week is irrelevant
• Lucas strikes back: the huge peek up in the RC bug graph is the result of his last rebuilt, several (most?) FTBFS new bugs are due to the recent switch to gcc 4.4 (err, of course thanks Lucas for his rebuilds, they are a significant part of our QA efforts)
• ... the good news is that Ubuntu has apparently switched to gcc 4.4 already and most gcc-4.4-related issues come with a patch from them. In particular, several of the bugs fixed above thank Fabrice Coutadeur from Ubuntu for his patches
• my Luk's bug feed is empty again ..., pretty please?