Search Results: "nate"

18 March 2008

Steve Kemp: I feel like Wedding-Day Barbie

I spent a while yesterday playing with an OpenGear serial console device. It presents an interface to a number of devices via TCP. Unfortunately it is a little flawed for our purposes. We'd like to be able to telnet directly to a serial console of a connected device, like so: 
telnet $ip 2000+N
That would give us the serial console of the device in port N. However rather than dropping us straight into the serial console it instead presents a login: + password: prompt. We'd like that removed. The solution according to the manual is to enable the use of RFC 2217 - but that will be a pain. Apparently downloading the CDK will allow a new firmware to be built, and I could fix this problem. Unfortunately the firmware produced by this built fails to flash - failing with an error "Error: Firmware is for a different product". Sigh. Still I have got a partial solution. / is mounted read-only. But /etc/config is writable and /etc/config/rc.local is executed at boot-time. My file contains this: 
#!/bin/sh
if [ ! -d /tmp/bin ]; then
  mkdir /tmp/bin
fi
# fake login which won't prompt for username / password
echo '#!/bin/sh' > /tmp/bin/login
echo 'pmshell -l $4' >> /tmp/bin/login
chmod 755 /tmp/bin/login
# fake inetd which exists with the modified PATH so our
# fake login will be invoked.
echo '#!/bin/sh' > /tmp/bin/inetd
echo 'PATH=/tmp/bin:$PATH /bin/inetd $*' >> /tmp/bin/inetd
chmod 755 /tmp/bin/inetd
# use our inetd
kill -9  $(ps -f   grep [i]net  awk ' print $1 ')
/tmp/bin/inetd &
Suprisingly this solution works, but it is nasty. If anybody has any success rebuilding firmware for a CM4148 (running stock 2.3.1u3 firmware currently) I'd appreciate pointers. Unfortunately the source contained upon the opengearweb.org website also fail to flash, when rebuilt. ObQuote: Shooting Fish

16 March 2008

Joey Hess: The Lost Ring

I've been sucked into this alternate reality game, "The Lost Ring", which involves 6 people who woke up with amnesia in labyrinths around the world, blindfolded, with a tattoo "Trovu la ringon perditan". It involves a lost Olympic sport, lots of Greek mythology and history, and lots of puzzles and detective work. Currently 26 pages of a codex are being tracked down from hiding places all around the world, with ones in Cardiff and Austin recovered over the past few days, one in Shanghai that I hope will be reached soon, and a location just discovered in Stockholm (in a bread store!), that someone needs to go check out. (Update: Jon read about it in my blog and went and got photos! page 1 page 2.) This is the first time I've played an alternate reality game, but the way the story is told, through blogs, podcasts, youtube videos, email with the characters, and recovered documents like this, is quite compelling. Also interesting is all the use of Esperanto, as well as characters who speak Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese, so that translation is an ongoing part of the game.

15 March 2008

Daniel Leidert: Diploma exams are calling: Please read if you want to NMU my packages

Because my diploma exams are getting nearer, I have to reduce my contribution to the Debian project for the next two months (up to mid/end of May). There is fortunately currently not much to do for me and also no need to NMU my packages. But please read the following notes, if you (still) think there is a reason for a NMU: GCC 4.3 transition Done. All related packages have been fixed. My sponsor just needs to upload psicode to fix the last outstanding bug. PS: Also the build-twice-in-a-row release goal will be reached by the upload of the apbs update by my sponsor. gfortran transition Almost done. mpqc already reached the buildds. ghemical has been uploaded, but waits for mopac7 and libghemical, which are in NEW because of the new library names. apbs and psicode already have been transitioned. Other bugs Ok, I’ve closed almost all relevant bugs in my packages. There are a few outstanding bugs that should be examined for Lenny and can be fixed in NMUs - preferable via delayed NMU queue and an information to the debichem group:
#420795: chemical-mime-data: Unknown media type in type ‘chemical/x-*’
Upstream bug tracker for shared-mime-info contains some more information, how to deal with this. Patches/ideas welcome.
#438694: gabedit: Crashes when loading any XYZ format file
Looks tricky. Maybe an OpenGL issue related to some video card drivers. Not sure.
#442223: openbabel: some connect information lost when convert from pdb to txyz
Nothing examined yet to solve this bug.
#464867: extrema: conflicts with psi3 package
Hope, my team will cover this asap.
#465723: mopac7 — please do not use g2c.
There is currently a workaround using f2c to solve this bug. But MOPAC7 has been written in FORTRAN and we can use gfortran and drop f2c completely. See the report for more information. This is something I would like to see in Lenny.
For the xmlto package it was planned to add the dblatex toolchain for PDF/PS/DVI creation because passivetex will very probably never have a comeback in Debian and docbook-xsl/fop is not fully main and cannot create DVI output. In the case you want to help, feel free to add this feature by NMU to experimental (maybe with version 0.0.21~dblatexX.Y). A first patch is available in bug report #416622. New upstream releases It is possible that there will be a new upstream release for docbook-xsl in the near future. DO NOT consider uploading it by NMU if you did not test it! This upcoming release ships manpage stylesheets, that have been rewritten in large parts. So regressions can be expected. Fortunately Michael Smith and me agreed, that we should test it carefully, before the release is done. Unfortunately I will not have the time to do it. So if you consider uploading it, please get in contact with Michael (xmldoc) and offer your help testing it. He added (and I hope, many Debian packagers and packaging groups will like that) some kind of regressions tests. These tests build the manpages from several Debian packages: e.g. samba, apt, aptitude, git, fglrx and some more. There are further some new supported features, that should be added to the manpage example shipped with the Debian package. I also planned to split the source package (atm, docbook-xsl and docbook-xsl-doc tarballs are merged together for Debian) as soon as docbook-xsl-ns is packaged - which I wanted to do with the next upstream release. So consider all of the above notes if you plan an NMU to upload a new upstream release and in question, mail me and wait for my answer (which will need some days). In all other cases, new upstream releases should be easier to handle. ITPs All my ITPs are delayed. However if you plan to still upload one of these packages, you should consider the following notes:
docbook-xsl-ns
See the above note about docbook-xsl and the source package split.
html-xml-utils
Already in a good shape, but I sent upstream some patches to improve the manpages. Version 4.6 of the html-xml-utils should contain these patches and this version should be uploaded into Debian. With this version, Bert Bos will probably also decide, which prefix will be used for the binaries (they have very generic names atm; the prefix will probably be hx- or hxu-). Waiting for this releaes therefor is IMHO a good choice.
DocBook 5
I already found a problem that need to be addressed in the package: Where to install its catalog? You will see, that there is already a catalog file in /usr/share/xml/docbook/schema/dtd/ shipped by the docbook-xml. Now I’m not sure, what to do here. Upstream ships one catalog file for all supported schemas (RNG, DTD, W3C schema and schematron), so maybe the catalog file can go into /usr/share/xml/docbook/schema/. Really not sure atm. The answer to this question might affect the Debian XML policy and should be made carefully.
QA work/fixes Several lintian warnings have already been fixed in the SVN repositories used for my packages but have not yet been uploaded. I really only plan to reduce my work during the preparation and the exams. So whatever you do, please try to make it easy for me to continue my packaging work after the exams :)

Mike Hommey: Xulrunner 1.9beta4 *not* approaching experimental

I appear to have underestimated the remaining work needed to get xulrunner in a pleasant enough shape for an upload. Which means the package won’t be ready this week-end. It’s always when you come closer to the goal that it gets farther… And I still haven’t decided once and for all if I would still version the libxul library. The problem is the following: there are two different ways to link or load libxul: dependent glue or standalone glue. The first one dynamically links embedding applications to both libxpcom and libxul, while the second links to a static library (well, dynamic, in Debian, because there is no reason why we should need to binNMU all reverse dependencies whenever we fix something in the glue), which dlload()s libxul. From Mozilla POV, embedding applications are supposed to use the standalone glue. Considering we will more than probably have both schemes in use within reverse dependencies, I’m not sure I still want to bother diverging from upstream by keeping SO versioning on libxpcom and libxul… That unfortunately means that we will go back to the previously sucky situation where reverse dependencies have to put a dependency on the Gecko runtime themselves. A debhelper might help, though. I will keep SO versioning on libmozjs, though, because it has some reverse dependencies, and a changing ABI. The good news, anyways, is that I was able to build and run Iceweasel on top of the xulrunner pre-package. I also ran sunspider on both this Iceweasel 3.0b4 and Iceweasel 2.0 ; the difference is really impressive: 3.0b4 is almost 4 times as fast ! For reference, the Webkit currently in unstable (which is quite old, actually), gives these results. The one in experimental unfortunately crashes. By the way, I’m planning to package a new Webkit snapshot soon after I’m done with xulrunner and Iceweasel, we’ll see then how it performs. While speaking of tests, both Iceweasel 3.0b4 and Webkit from experimental pass the Acid 2 test (contrary to Iceweasel 2.0), and have both quite good results on the Acid 3 test: 61 for Webkit from experimental, when it doesn’t crash (but current trunk has been reported to score 91 !), and 67 for Iceweasel 3.0b4 (compared to 52 for Iceweasel 2.0). Update: Interestingly, built with upstream optimization flags (-Os-freorder-blocks -fno-reorder-functions) instead of -O2, it is slighly slower, though it might be better on some older hardware, or other architectures (I’m testing on x86-64).

Daniel Burrows: Full upgrade and conflicts

Erich Schubert wonders how to improve the handling of conflicts in package managers, particularly in aptitude full-upgrade and apt-get dist-upgrade. From the point of view of the package manager, conflicts are a bit tricky to deal with. The problem is that a conflict only really tells you not to install two packages at once; it doesn't tell you which package should end up on the system by default. Worse, aptitude has two approaches to this:
  • When a package is marked for installation in the visual interface or listed on the command-line, then if Aptitude::Auto-Install is enabled, aptitude will automatically resolve conflicts in favor of that package. The same applies to packages that are upgraded by pressing U or by full-upgrade.
  • When aptitude's dependency resolver encounters a conflict, it considers both resolutions to the conflict to be equally valid. If there are no other reasons to choose one package over the other, it will be unpredictable which one gets removed first, and even when there are reasons to choose, the user may not understand what they are.
I don't think it's possible to always make upgrades predictable. But I think that even just making Auto-Install stick to installing packages and not removing conflicts would be a plus. Installing obvious dependencies up-front is good because it means less work for the resolver and a more predictable starting point. Many trivial dependency problems can even be completely solved this way. But removing conflicts is a lot trickier and should probably kick the problem into the full resolver. Unfortunately, the code enabled by Auto-Install is all deep in the guts of libapt. I've tried to avoid duplicating this code so far, but it does seem like I periodically run into cases where it doesn't do exactly what I need, so maybe I'll have to eventually. :-(

Daniel Burrows: aptitude 0.4.10 released

I've just released version 0.4.10 of aptitude, a terminal and command-line package management tool for Debian. This release has many user-visible changes (see the changelog below). It also fixes an annoying and much-reported segfault. The Debian packages of this version are built against the new version of cwidget, which is sitting in NEW, but if you're impatient you can compile it by hand by dropping the versioned dependency. The dependency is there to ensure that we don't get dependency skew across architectures (aptitude depending on libcwidget0 on some archs and libcwidget1 on others) and doesn't represent an actual build requirement of aptitude.
[12/15/2007] Version 0.4.10 Oscillating Reindeer
  • New features:
    • In command-line mode, if the resolver fails to produce a solution for whatever reason, then instead of aborting the program entirely aptitude will now display a prompt at which you can fix the dependency problems by hand. Enter r at this prompt to try to automatically fix dependencies again.
    • safe-upgrade will now install new packages to fulfill dependences (but it will never remove packages, downgrade packages, or install a version that's not the default). The option --no-new-installs will disable this behavior.
    • Updates and commands that install, remove, or upgrade packages will now display a brief summary of what changed. For instance: 
      There are now 64 updates [+10], 3 new [+1].
      Unfortunately, this change requires reading the cache after an update is complete. Passing -q will disable this behavior, but also make the update progress bar less attractive. More work on resolving this tension between features and performance remains to be done.
    • Add an option --allow-untrusted to override trust warnings. (Closes: bug #452201, bug #452541)
    • Recommended packages are now hidden if quiet mode is enabled. (Closes: bug #452202)
    • The options Aptitude::ProblemResolver::Trace-File and Aptitude::ProblemResolver::Trace-Directory allow you to generate a minimal cut of the cache that allows a problem resolver run to be reproduced. The eventual aim is both to simplify bug reporting and to generate a corpus of automatic test cases for the resolver (although more work needs to be done to accomplish the latter).
    • When run in command-line mode, instead of displaying many separate and sometimes duplicative groups of packages (e.g.: installed, auto-installed, auto-installed in a light cream sauce, etc), aptitude displays packages in a few exclusive categories and uses tags (like the existing purge tag) to provide more state information. For instance: 
      $ aptitude -s install wesnoth
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  wesnoth wesnoth-data a  wesnoth-music a 
$ aptitude -s remove freeciv-data
    (... dependency resolution ...)
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  freeciv-client-gtk a  freeciv-data freeciv-server a  ggzcore-bin u 
  libggz-gtk1 u  libggz2 u  libggzcore9 u  libggzdmod6 u  libggzmod4 u
      Here a indicates that a package was automatically installed or removed, and u indicates that a package is being removed because it is unused. Hopefully this will be less confusing than the old format.
  • Bug fixes:
    • Crashes and serious errors:
      • Track down and fix a SEGV triggered on the first action after a cache reload (sometimes). There are multiple bugs where this might have been the root cause, but it's confirmed that it was the cause of at least bug #454695, bug #454700, bug #455349, and bug #453362. Bug bug #455865 is almost certainly the same issue, and bug bug #352278 may be another manifestation of it.
      • If StepLimit is set to 0, refuse to solve dependencies instead of going into an infinite loop. (Closes: bug #451311)
    • Minor bugs:
      • Return a failing exit code after jumping from the command-line to visual mode if the last install run failed. (Closes: bug #282408)
      • Return a failing exit code from aptitude update if any download fails. (Closes: bug #233129)
    • Cosmetic and UI bugs:
      • In addition to Enter, Space will now activate checkboxes and radio buttons. (Closes: bug #451765)
      • Abort the program if we get EOF at the resolver prompt instead of claiming the resolver failed.
      • Command-line searches will now only print each result once. (Closes: bug #450798)
    • Documentation bugs:
      • The options menu documentation now minimally describes the new configuration interface.
      • The documentation of the configuration file options has been placed back in alphabetic order after apparently suffering bitrot over the years.
      • Corrected the documented default of Parse-Description-Bullets to match reality.
      • The manpages for aptitude-create-state-bundle and aptitude-run-state-bundle are now generated using DocBook, which should produce higher-quality and more consistent typesetting, as well as making the manpages more maintainable and allowing translators to easily produce localized versions of the manpages.
  • Internal changes:
    • Removed some unit tests that really tested cwidget.
  • Translation updates:
    • French (Christian Perrier)

Daniel Burrows: The power of self-delusion

Groklaw has a link up to an interesting interview regarding behavioral economics. I haven't listened to the podcast, but the posted text is quite interesting. This line, in particular, struck a chord with me:
Feeling that your work is useful, even if you know it's an illusion, has motivational power with respect to that work.
This resonates with some thoughts I've been turning over in my head lately. Back when I was in college, I thought my work in Debian was useful and I was really excited to work on it. I'd sit around thinking up new ways to improve the system and spend all my spare time hacking code to implement my ideas. Then I graduated, and went into the real world, and got a job, and suddenly I discovered that working on Debian was not so much useful as it was worthless self-indulgence with no value to anyone but a small and marginal group of individuals. This sent me into a funk for a good year or so, during which time I released a few bugfix uploads for aptitude but didn't do much else free-software-related. I spent my time on the bus reading science fiction novels and computer science textbooks. However, at some point last year I realized a couple things:
  1. In the grand scheme of things, the work I do for pay is no more important than the work I do for free. It might be more important to the people who pay for it, but to most of the world I simply don't matter no matter what hat I'm wearing, and I need to learn to live with it.
  2. At the end of your life, you're dead and no-one asks you whether you made yourself miserable enough by doing useful stuff, so you might as well do things you enjoy instead.
  3. The only practical effect of my delusions regarding Debian was that I spent my spare time hacking code and enjoying it, instead of playing video games and feeling like a loser.
  4. If there's any chance that I might ever have a kid, I certainly want to write free software now, while I don't have one. Based on observing my coworkers who have kids, it's pretty much impossible to be both a free software hacker and a parent: after the paid job and the kid, there isn't much time left over for writing code.
So, I decided to try deliberately believing a false thing: namely that my Debian work is valuable and worthwhile. And hey, it worked! I still know that what I'm doing is worthless, but I can convince myself otherwise for stretches of time, and I have enough fun while I'm working on the project that I consider it worth a small amount of unreality. It sure beats the heck out of computer games (which I still spend a distressingly large amount of time on). The doublethink aspect of it creeps me out, but I can't argue with the results. The one problem is that this state of deluded motivation seems to be a bit fragile and is vulnerable to being popped by rude shocks. In December, I found myself mentally composing a letter in which I resigned from Debian to go spend my free time on stuff that was more gratifying, or at least where the expectations and (more importantly) level of abuse were commensurate with the pay and hours. As usual, I had enough sense to not follow through, and everything seemed less dire in the morning, but it was still weeks before I could bring myself to begin to think about spending my free time working on Debian. Presumably the only way to avoid this is to find something to do in my spare time that I enjoy and that is actually meaningful to the world. But since I don't know of any activity that meets these criteria, I'll keep my self-delusion for the time being, thank you very much. At least I know I'm doing it -- I suspect that most people don't.

14 March 2008

Michal Čihař: Nvidia is bad, Intel is good?

Intel is always seen as good guy, who is writing open source drivers, releasing at least some specifications for hardware. Unfortunately it is not always the case. If you want to use their new embedded solution - Menlow CPU and Poulsbo chipset, they provide you lot of crap. Basically what you get is a zip file containing several Microsoft Word documents, badly formatted text files (end of lines at each 80 chars), PDFs and some zip and tar archives. If you look to one of these archives, you will get binary graphical installer, which will install license, uninstallator and yet another set of tarballs. These tarballs finally contain binary and source packages you need to make graphics work on this platform. Maybe somebody did this to practise various ways of compressing and distributing things, but it is really amazing how many times you need to decompress several archives to actually get to the things you want. Unfortunately at the end you will find out that libgl1-mesa-dri-psb binary (DRI driver for graphics) has no sources and Intel is not willing to give them to you. Bad luck if you have slightly different distribution than one of these which are supported (FC6, Midinux-build9, ubuntu-gutsy, ubuntu-hardy) and the provided binary simply crashes.

13 March 2008

Andrew Pollock: [life] Disrupted

So my flight from SFO to AKL was nice and uneventful. I even managed to sleep for about 6 hours. The flight landed about 30 minutes early in Auckland, but alas, the connecting flight had some sort of "engineering" problems, and was delayed from a 6:30am departure, past 7:30am, and then the next thing I knew they were handing out bits of paper saying the flight wouldn't be departing until 10pm and we were all getting shuttled off to a hotel for the day. So I don't really know what happened to the flight, but the same flight number is now departing this evening. Fortunately I didn't have a huge amount to do today in Brisbane (but I have no idea what Nick had intended to do today). I currently estimate I'll get into Brisbane at around 11:30pm tonight. I've got plenty of reading I was planning on doing on the flight, which I didn't do any of, so I can keep myself occupied. I'm also going to try and catch up with Rowan and Kelly. Oh, and it was good to be able to have a shower. It sure beats sitting around in Auckland International all day. I think this is the first time I've had a delay like this. The moral of the story? Direct flights, hang the expense!

Romain Francoise: Emacs in bzr: initial impressions

So, since Emacs is apparently switching to bzr, I thought I'd try it out. The first thing I noticed is that cloning the repository is very slow. So slow that I killed it, thinking that it was stuck, but it wasn't. It turns out that the official page recommends downloading a tarball instead, so I did that.

Once I had my local Emacs branch, I tried a simple bzr log to see how recent the repository was. It sat there for a whole minute before even starting to show something. Apparently, all the history commands are slow... This is with a hot cache:
$ time bzr log >/dev/null
bzr log > /dev/null  44.89s user 0.58s system 99% cpu 45.563 total
$ time bzr version-info
revision-id: cvs-1:monnier-20080313012033-9ewl8gg4q3bw01z3
date: 2008-03-13 01:20:33 +0000
build-date: 2008-03-13 20:14:17 +0100
revno: 87445
branch-nick: sandbox
bzr version-info  6.41s user 0.14s system 99% cpu 6.549 total
$
Six seconds just to show me the current revision?!

Compare with my favorite scm, in a repository that contains the same history, also converted with cvsps:
$ time git log >/dev/null
git log > /dev/null  1.81s user 0.05s system 99% cpu 1.862 total
$ time git show >/dev/null
git show > /dev/null  0.02s user 0.00s system 85% cpu 0.023 total
$
Fortunately, other bzr commands such as status, diff, commit are pretty fast so this might be a problem with the conversion process, or something. At least I hope so, because as is it's completely unusable!

Mike Hommey: Recovering files from ext3

Carlo Wood wrote a nice piece of documentation about how to recover files from ext3, based on his experience after deleting 3GB. This actually happened to me 5 years ago, now, and is how ext3rminator came to exist. I’ve been meaning to update it for a while (and journal parsing has been on the top of the TODO list for a while), but package maintenance is unfortunately time consuming. And I have a big tendancy to do something else, too (like coding on git).

12 March 2008

Andrew Pollock: [life] Crazy wedding trip

I'm getting on a flight to Brisbane, via Auckland, shortly. My mate Nick (yes, that one), is remarrying, and asked me to his Best Man, and I could hardly say no, given he was my Best Man (and we've been friends for years) So I'm flying out of SFO tonight, arriving in Brisbane on Friday morning, going to the wedding on Saturday, and flying home on Sunday morning. Fortunately with the time difference, I'll arrive on Sunday, so I get to walk around like the living dead for a day, and then go back to work. Yep, I'm a sucker for punishment. I've never been Best Man before, so I'm nervous. My speech is pretty short and sweet. Fortunately someone else is being Master of Ceremonies.

Neil Williams: Serial over USB, broken laptops and screen

Well, after many failed attempts, here I am on my problematic HP laptop with a USB key mounted, a balloon3 board booted under an Emdebian root filesystem and visible over USB-to-serial using /dev/ttyUSB0 via screen.
Thanks to Daniel's tip about screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200, my USB to Serial converter (Maplins with a Prolific PL2303 chipset) is working on my problematic HP laptop.
The proviso is that I have to reboot to enable all this stuff - allow the laptop to hibernate and all this USB stuff just disappears. :-(
The only remaining problem is the wireless - I haven't decided yet whether to patch the current stock Debian kernel (I've had enough problems without getting into more kernel issues) - I may simply buy a replacement external wireless unit or just not use wireless until the b43 driver is capable of working with the Broadcom Corporation BCM94311MCG wlan mini-PCI (rev 02).
The magic runes for enabling USB are to add some more options to the grub boot list (on the 'kernel' line):


 noapic nolapic noirqfixup

minicom still doesn't like serial over USB (on this laptop, it adds an extra line feed and then refuses to pass on any keyboard entry to the device in a similar manner to the powerpc laptop) but screen works nicely. Thanks Daniel.
With noirqfixup added, I can also plug in other USB things like a USB mouse and actually see them work. This is all good news because apart from adding these mysterious runes to Grub, this is a completely standard Debian box running Sid and with no particular configuration changes or tweaks in the system setup.
This means that I can now get on with uploading the emdebian-tools package split to Debian unstable, adapting the Emdebian root filesystem for balloon3 to support USB networking by default and suggesting screen as an alternative to minicom in the control information for the new emdebian-rootfs package. (The package split is now in Emdebian SVN - main trunk - if you are interested.) I'm also downgrading my old G4 iBook to running Lenny instead of sid and it will now stay running Lenny as Debian stable when Lenny is released. It just makes it easier to not have to keep downloading massive updates on the brief occasions that I now use the iBook.
Now if I can just work out why hibernation forgets 'noirqfixup', I'll have a usable HP laptop....
Not bad for a machine that I once considered as a complete non-starter.

11 March 2008

Steve Kemp: Cecile, this is what I like to call "quiet time"

So early this evening I looked for more bugs to fix in the Debian packages I use the most, instead of doing security work. (Because I'm waiting for buildds..) Anyway I figured I'd take a peak at the mutt-patched package - since I have my own patched backport for Etch these days. I'd like to get into the habit of making sure it stays current, but honestly I'll probably forget in a few months. One bug #464189 caught my eye. It is asking for a couple of patches, neither of which I'd heard of. One of them is obviously extremely useful though - it is designed to change the sidebar in such a way that it only displays mailboxes with unread messages in them. I hunted high and low for the patch and had to admit defeat. So I wrote my own, and now my backported package contains a suitable patch. In other news I made a new release of the chronicle blog compiler, which I'm now using in a few more places. All in all it has been a busy day and I got a fair amount of hacking done! The other thing, that I can speak about, which I did today was package the Perl Lingua::Identify module so that my spam filtering service can offer users the opportunity to reject mails written in, say, Russian, or Italian. I'm tempted to give them up to Sarah for adoption, as she was making noises at the weekend about joining Debian (then again so was Jacob Appelbaum). The only issue is that I think she should use the Debian Perl group to get involved, and I've not seen any sign of activity there from her since she first mentioned joining it. Sarah: Consider this a reminder! Update: Feel free to nominate any *crash* bugs you'd like me to attempt to fix. Providing they're not in video or audio playback code! Could be a fun challenge.. ObQuote: Cruel Intentions.

Jonathan McDowell: My DG834G considered dead

I tried again this weekend to OpenWRT my Netgear DG834G ADSL router with SVN r10500. Less joy this time; it boots the kernel and says something along the lines of "Please wait while OpenWRT does its thang", prints a message about loading the FPU emulator and sits there. However I'm pretty sure this isn't OpenWRT's fault; trying to flash the router back to the stock Netgear image is failing. ADAM2 does the erase ok, but once it gets to trying to do the flash it just sits there even when left for hours. I don't know if this is because the flash blocks are going or some other reason, but I think I can be fairly sure the hardware is on the blink. I'll try again to turn it back into a normal device, but somehow I don't rate my chances. So, having broken my primary ADSL router I fell back to my WGT634U + Speedtouch USB combo. I'd found my other frog and hoped it might prove more stable, but no. Got a maximum of about half an hour of connect time. Which leads me to believe the original Speedtouch just isn't very good at either ADSL Max or a full 8Mb/s (yes, I live in the middle of nowhere but in general I get full ADSL Max connect speeds). I gave up at this point (it was Sunday night) and on Monday decided to have a look for cheap routers on eBay. And then I remembered I had a BT Home Hub lying around. It's locked to BT by default, but I knew there were various discussions on putting Thompson Speedtouch 7G firmware on it that would open things up. It meant finding my Windows box and booting it (Wine wouldn't cut it unfortunately due to magic network voodoo or something) in order to do the upgrade, but I now at least have a stable 8Mb/s connection again. The Home Hub is running Linux but it's a Broadcom chipset with no source for the ADSL drivers that I'm aware of, so I don't hold a lot of hope for hacking it. However I have a D-Link DSL-502T on its way (for less than a tenner) so I haven't given up on AR7 yet.

Norbert Tretkowski: Security support for sarge-backports to be terminated

Security support for Debian 3.1 (aka sarge) will be terminated on March 31st this year. We decided to terminate the security support for sarge-backports at the same time, there will be no more updates after March 31st.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the sarge-backports archive.

MJ Ray: Current Issues / Post Office Protest 1230 Friday

The Murky reports that protestors will be seeing how long it takes to walk from the under-threat Kewstoke Post Office to the next nearest in Milton at 1230 on Friday.  While it's under two miles, it involves a 25% gradient 100+m hill.

Conservative MP John Penrose will be there. The Murky also reports Lib Dem candidate Mike Bell's campaign which points out Weston is losing more Post Offices than Bristol, proportionately.  I suspect that's related to the above-average number of pensioners and the Government taking services away from the post offices.

10 March 2008

Jan Wagner: bit nagios-plugin bugsquashing, stalling policyd-weight and my first perl module package

Last week I did again some work on nagios-plugins. After the announcement of Dann Frazier to upload NMU to fix a trivial bug, I thought it’s time again to give some extra care to the package. So I prepared 1.4.11-2 fixing the important bugs and uploaded it. I also commited some minor fixes to the svn, so these issues will get fixed by the next upload. Since the development of policyd-weigh stalled and unfortunately maybe get stuck, I was looking for an alternative, which maybe found with postfwd. It’s quite flexible but it also will take more time (and care!) to get a reliable configuration, which maybe effective as policyd-weight (still) is right now. While checking the dependencies for postfwd I noticed that Net::DNS::Async isn’t available in Debian (yet). So I decided to create a package starting with dh-make-perl, join the Debian Perl Group and let it review. Damyan Ivanov was so kind to review and upload it, Gregor Herrmann did also give some much useful hints. Thanks to both! And yes, I also found time to step forward with NM, since I was overloaded the last weeks with usual work and life. Thank to my AM to be so appreciative.

9 March 2008

Cyril Brulebois: Funny build systems

While rebuilding packages FTBFS'ing with gcc-4.3, I stumbled upon various quality/sanity levels for code & build systems: from very clean to not-so-nice, dirty, and even scary. Fortunately, upstreams are sometimes funny and want to make us smile. This one succeeded. clanlib.png That one is clanlib, bug #454818. Like pusling already pointed out, there's still a lot to do with RC/RG bugs (although some of them are just prospective/incomplete patches, ls -1 *_gcc-4.3.diff wc -l reports 133 right now). Introductory reading for GCC 4.3: Porting to the New Tools. Please fix your bugs, prepare NMUs and so on, instead of just trolling like/with a bird.

Chris Lamb: Timeline of the Debian project

I’ve put together a partial timeline of the Debian project using the SIMILE Project’s DHTML timeline component. This is definately work in progress: I would welcome additional events (by email or merge request please, not via blog comments) regarding: The timeline is available to view here. Update: Assistance fixing the (non-Webkit) Konqueror issue would also be appreciated.

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