Much as been done on ctioga since the last release, not even two weeks ago: small bug fixes, tangents improvements, the rebirth of a --subplot option, a saner framework for plot styles... But the most significant improvement in my opinion is the possibility to make non-linear axes: you just need to provide a two-ways transformation between the standard coordinates and the axis coordinates, and ctioga does the rest:

ctioga -N --xpdf --math --math-xrange 2:8 \
  'sin(x)' --xaxis bottom --new-axis biniou top \
  --axis-function biniou 1/x 1/x \
  --lines-color biniou Gray --no-title

As you can see, I did profit to add the possibility of background lines corresponding to the axes' major ticks. The only real trick that is left is to find a decent way to partition the target segment so that they ticks are "natural" (not 0.34759, for instance) and reasonably equally spaced. I thought other plotting programs had dealt with this, but in fact, that doesn't seem to be the case: I'll have to do that myself.

This week I finally realized where problem with random crashes in Wammu and python-gammu lies - python-gammu was using two version of C library - mscvrt.dll and mscvr71.dll. First one came from Gammu and second one from Python. Starting with 1.19.0, Gammu is built with mscvr71.dll and random crashes are gone. Any tester did not report problems with Windows binary, so I decided to make it finally an official release. So after year or more Windows users can finally use up to date Wammu version! Fortunately I can produce this version without even touching Windows. Thanks to tools such as MinGW and Wine, everything from compiling to generating installer can be scripted and done automatically on Linux! So Windows users can now also download current version from http://wammu.eu/download/, enjoy it.

Daniel notes that self-delusion is a necessary component of all voluntary work.
Any human activity can be over-analysed into oblivion, especially if the terms of reference for "meaning" are impacted by a view of the real world that is overly abstract. Even paid work needs some self-delusion because no matter how much money you earn, the old maxims bite back - "you can't take it with you" and "no point earning it unless you can enjoy it".
Before I started with voluntary software work, I was heavily involved in voluntary charity work and the motivation is much the same. "The grand scheme of things" will never be sufficiently affected by any activity such as to provide the sole justification for that activity. The vast majority of people and the vast majority of actions simply are not and cannot become that important. (This is where religion is important for some people, the hope that despite all evidence to the contrary, acts of random kindness have some meaning to the person doing the act instead of just to the recipient.)
Voluntary work is generally for the benefit of others. In free software it is about writing code to solve our own issues in a way that others can use without facing the problems that we had to solve. Writing new code to solve a problem or fixing bugs in existing code to solve a new problem can only help others if the solution is shared. So the validation of that work is in helping someone else accomplish a task without having to spend the time fixing that issue, leaving them time to fix the next one.
Working on free software of all kinds is worthwhile simply because it is a way of helping others.
"When all things are considered", most people working on Debian are the lucky ones. Born into an environment where good education is available and where parents/relatives were able to indulge our fascination with electronic and computerised widgets that had no direct bearing on whether our basic human needs were met with regard to food, warmth and health. Trained at great expense and able to use that training not only to meet our personal financial needs but also to make time available for other unpaid tasks that benefit others who do not have those things. Living in a time of peace and stability, where the more esoteric and "frivolous" tasks can be undertaken without causing hardship or neglect of others. (My nephew frequently sums up this whole idea as like having won the lottery just by existing.)
There is an element of justification that can be derived from such a view - an element of responsibility and duty. After experiencing all those good things and after realising that we have such an opportunity, it can engender a feeling of obligation to do something that justifies what we have already received to balance out those who have the skills to do what we do but, for reasons of birth alone, do not have that opportunity or the means.
That is a form of secular humanism - validation of our own situation in the use of our skills and time to make things easier for those who are less fortunate.
OK, Debian isn't about providing clean water for all, or the redistribution of food and medicines to those without but the organisations that do that work can be assisted indirectly by making the systems used by such organisations work more efficiently, with greater stability and with more flexibility.
Not everyone can (or should) be on the front line of whatever acts of kindness will solve the problem of inequality but there is an obligation on those of us who have received the benefits of inequality to do what we can to make it easier to redraw the balance.
Debian is one such way and it is a truly international way of benefiting others too. It is more beneficial than the charity work that I did previously - chiefly because that was a very local service that was very labour-intensive and so could only benefit small numbers of people.
Improving Debian won't make us more important to the universe, life and everything (the answer to that is 42 as we all know), but it will help others do what they do, it will improve their lives and their ability to spend their time on what they want to do instead of having to fix problems that we have already solved.
Debian, to me, is about sharing solutions. Helping someone else do something that Debian could not do before, without requiring them to fix all the problems that I had to solve to devise the solution in the first place. Sharing not just the solution but the method of the solution and the means to extend the solution to new problems.
We, as Debian developers, have been granted the access and tools to solve these problems for the benefit of those who do not have upload privileges. Those rights come with responsibilities (as always) to use our skills and time to find the solution and without making things more difficult in the process.
In the grand scheme of what I can actually do as opposed to what might be possible if X, Y and Z were different, what I do in Debian and Emdebian is worthwhile. In fact, it is just as worthwhile as my paid non-IT employment in healthcare provision because, within healthcare, I can only help the single person in front of me. In Debian, I can help all those people who I will probably never meet but who want Debian to do something that I am able to achieve.
What is particularly nice about Emdebian is that there are people who tell us that our work is worthwhile by putting up the hard cash to fund work sessions and conferences that bring the various developers into one place. The international aspects of Debian can be a barrier in some ways and things always happen more quickly when the various members of the team can be brought from the four corners of the planet into one place for a week or so. It is these gatherings that boost the motivation and the enjoyment of making progress towards a common goal. Debian can be a solitary world where communication is limited to plain text. Probably the best way to "oil the wheels" in Debian is to get a group of Debian people together and just let them hack.
Voluntary work of all kinds requires personal motivation and working alone with only limited means of communication with others can be quite demotivating. Getting people together is a very useful antidote.

Being fairly interested in this whole mobile phone software thing, it's pretty hard not to sit up and take notice of the iPhone SDK that was just announced. A few thoughts:

• Of course it's nice, polished, and lets you do some interesting things with the phone. That was not too surprising though.
• The "investment fund" seems like something of a response to the Android Developer Challenge, and is certainly an interesting move on Apple's part. Strategically, it certainly alters the focus of the money flowing into the equation. Comparing the two, the dollar amounts in the ADC are much smaller, but they are also more "concrete": N people will get X dollars in time frame T. As an independent developer, that works fairly well for me as something to have a go at and then move on from, win or lose. An investment fund backed by Kleiner Perkins is on a whole different scale and level. The amount of money is huge (they won't even bother with less than 100K), but who knows how that works out in practice, or how much of that is actually 100% committed to iPhone companies. KP aren't the sort of people that are going to just hand that out to any old company that does an iPhone app. They're also going to want to be involved in the companies, which means there won't be too many of them. In short, it brings in all the good and bad aspects of venture capital. In short: in one corner, lots of money for relatively big, organized players, and in the other, small, quick incentives to do cool things that anyone has a shot at. We won't really be able to judge the results until we see how it plays out. (As an aside, I still have some bad memories of the management that KP foisted off on Linuxcare).
• The system for selling applications is smart. You will have one place to go to to get your apps, and as a user you'll have some assurance that they're up to certain quality standards. People will like that kind of thing, and is far nicer than anything JavaME ever had. Instead of multiple, fractured marketplaces, you get one big one. Of course, it also keeps Apple in control of everything, which also has some negative implications as well.
• 37 Signals seem to be wildly ecstatic about Apple's potential, but I'm a bit less sanguine. I don't doubt that the iPhone has a bright future, that much is pretty obvious. However... dominate? First of all, if it's so widespread, it loses some of its cachet, doesn't it? I don't think Apple wants that. I don't see them licensing the system so that other phone manufacturers can use it, so it will only be adapted as widely as Apple sees fit. Cheaper Nokia models are very popular over here in Europe. Will iPhones at those price points (less than 100 euro) be available and competitive with Nokia's offerings? Open and adaptable aren't necessarily things that Apple is known for, which might be the difference between "strong presence" and "dominate", as we saw with Mac vs Windows. Getting 10-15% towards the high end of the market might be what they aspire to, rather than ubiquity.
• I could, however, very easily envision Apple getting into some kind of business niche and dominating that completely, as they did with education for a while. That might not extend to the broader market, though.
• Moving on to other considerations, this one is important to me: apparently, according to the license agreement, you can't run an interpreter that fetches code and executes it, amongst the various other restrictions! That's kind of a deal breaker for Hecl, which counts that ability as one of its strengths. I don't think a port was in the works in any case since Hecl is written in Java. Still, though, that's the kind of annoying restriction that reaffirms my commitment to open source.
• As an aside, I wonder what Sun is up to at this point - between this and Android, they have to be under enormous pressure to release a successor to Java ME, which was a good effort for its time, but is beginning to look dated and limited, even though it is very widely deployed.

I'm an open source guy at heart. I love openness and source code and the freedom to tinker... and while I'll certainly give Apple their due for making some fine products, closed and controlled is simply not for me. Others may feel differently - it's a matter of taste and preferences. So for the moment, my efforts will be focused on Android, which I see as the best, most open thing out there at the moment.

Continuing from where we left off… The lower bound for me becoming a DD was 8th Feb ‘98 when I applied; for comparison, the upper bound as best I can make out was 23rd Feb, when I would have received this mail through the debian-private list:

Resent-Date: 23 Feb 1998 18:18:57 -0000
From: Martin Schulze 
To: Debian Private 
Subject: New accepted maintainers
Hi folks,
I wish you a pleasant beginning of the week.  Here are the first good
news of the week (probably).
This is the weekly progress report about new-maintainers.  These people
have been accepted as new maintainer for Debian GNU/Linux within the
last week.
[...]
Anthony Towns <ajt@debian.org>
    Anthony is going to package the personal proxy from
    distributed.net - we don't have the source... He may adopt the
    transproxy package, too.
Regards,
        Joey

I never did adopt transproxy – apparently Adam Heath started fixing bugs in it a few days later anyway, and it was later taken over by Bernd Eckenfels (ifconfig upstream!) who’s maintained it ever since. Obviously I did do other things instead, which brings us back to where we left off…

---

• Crypto in main: It’s getting hard to remember the days when strong crypto software was classed as munitions and even getting a web browser to do SSL properly was a legal challenge; but for a long while that’s how it was, and as a result we had to keep all our security tools hosted separately to our main, US-based archive. The laws for that changed in early 2000, introducing a new exemption to the prohibition for software whose source code was available royalty-free (I think they called it “public source”). Unfortunately there were still drawbacks: it wouldn’t apply to some stuff in non-free, it wasn’t clear how far you had to go with the source code (is libssl’s source enough, or do you need the source for the apps that use ssl too?), and the biggest problem was you had to notify the export bureau and the NSA for everything you wanted to distribute. And all of that’s couched in the sort of confusing language you’d expect to find in, well, export regulations. So we ended up getting nowhere on merging crypto into the main archive for a long while because we couldn’t be confident of what we actually needed to do. We’d more or less already missed the opportunity to do the merge for the potato (2.2) release because it was frozen more or less exactly when the new regulations came out, and according to my mail archives Ben Collins (DPL at the time) got a team organised to review the legal issues by mid-May 2001. By July 2001, though, we still weren’t really getting anywhere; the lawyer we were talking to was looking at the ENC exception (which was for closed source stuff, and requires an active review by the BXA), instead of the TSU exception (which just requires notification). While it wasn’t terrible legal advice – following the ENC exception had a lower risk of misunderstandings on our part leading to problems later – it wasn’t useful in achieving our aims, ie, getting crypto stuff into main with a minimal level of ongoing effort, as well as a minimal level of risk. So moving onto August, we’d moved on from the lawyer we’d been using for this and other issues, to talking to a lawyer who specialised in export issues (and whose time was being covered by HP). That actually got us somewhere, with the end results being a matter of public record – we got the advice we wanted by November, we got a new incoming system so we could make sure we didn’t publish anything we hadn’t advised the NSA and BXA about, and most of all, we got cryptographic software in main for woody’s release. ssh at standard priority, apt by default checking archive signatures before downloading code to run as root, iceweasel coping with https:// urls out of the box all suddenly became possible, rather than artificially blocked due to pointless legal constraints. Yay! The way we notified BXA/NSA was somewhat interesting – we ended up notifying once for each package, when it passed through NEW: which is easy to automate, and limits the amount of software we block from review by other developers as best we can. OTOH, it also means a lot of notifications: the initial notification was a huge box of paper that got faxed off (there should be pictures somewhere on the net, but I don’t know where), and the vague hope that the ongoing reporting would not only comply with the regs, but manage to be something of a denial-of-service by compliance. As it turns out it apparently got noticed, with the following mail arriving in September 2005:

  From: Encryption 
  Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2005 12:51:02 -0400
  Subject: Addition to Debian Source Code updates
  Dear Mr. Collins,
  Your diligent reporting of updates to the Debian source code to the Bureau
  of Industry and Security has been an excellent example of perspicacity.
  However, you no longer need to do so per the following update to the EAR:
  [...]
  

  (The mails have always been sent with Ben's name attached) That mail was followed by another suggesting a phone conversation; unfortunately nobody seemed to notice the mail, at least until a year later (to the day!) when Joerg pointed out he was getting bounces form the BXA email address we'd been using... (Since then, based on the above mail, we've been recording notifications, but not passing them on; I sent a reply to the mails above indicating that, but didn't receive a response. There's been about 5000 notifications since then)
• Security and the architecture explosion: with crypto-in-main out of the way, along with lots of RC bug squashing, woody was looking good to come out in April or May, but unfortunately that all fell apart because of a lack of automation for handling security updates. Taking a step back, woody managed to introduce five new architectures compared to the previous release -- HP's pets, hppa and ia64; the IBM mainfram arch, s390, and the SGI/embedded mips and mipsel chips. That came just short of doubling our supported architectures (which had been i386, m68k, alpha, arm, sparc and powerpc), and was working really impressively well: testing was watching that they kept in sync, and the buildd network was keeping them all up to date with the latest source uploads, and the toolchain maintainers were making sure new kernels and compilers didn't cause massive breakages. It was great fun to be a part of, and I'm not sure how much is just blurry memories, but from here, it sure feels like it was a golden age on that score... Anyway, all the extra architectures freaked the security team out, given they were already having to worry about ssh'ing to half a dozen machines and manually do builds, and fix them when they broke, and to deal with that there'd been plans afoot for "rbuilder" to get rolled out, which never actually happened. All of which means it escalated from being the security team's problem, to a problem for everyone, particularly the release manager... The result of which meant knuckling down and coming up with a new security build infrastructure, which involved doing a dak install for the security archive, then building on the changes just rolled out for crypto-in-main to allow for packages to be autobuilt before actually being included in the archive, then updating official buildds for all the various architectures to target stable-security and testing-security and prioritise them and upload to the right place. But as stressful and last minute as that was, at least it worked, and woody made it out the door on July 20th 2002 -- and it's a good thing it worked, given woody ended up getting security support until June 30th 2006 -- the usual year after it's successor is released -- for four years support. (The same rule applied to sarge has resulted in two years and ten months' security support; eighteen month release cycles in general should result in two years and six months of support) Since then, with security managed by dak, there's been a few more bits I've been involved in. The most interesting of which (to my mind) was splitting the security upload queue from being completely secret and restricted to folks who are allowed to access updates prior to public announcement, into separate secret and non-secret queues. That was December 2005, and since then we've gone from having Joey Schulze basically being the sole person doing security updates to two separate teams, with ten new members. It's not without it's problems -- particularly for packages that get (mis)classified as NEW, or that get lost on their way for inclusion in the next stable point update, but it's nevertheless lightyears from where we were in April 2002, or even November 2005.
• Playing other people for suckers: with woody released, the whole "redo to release process" thing was essentially done -- it had been implemented, it had worked all the way to getting a release out, and in a fair few respects had improved things. Instead of the eight months of hand-approved uploads for the potato freeze, things had gone it automatically, albeit with gradually stricter constraints, right up until April; and even when the security problems delayed things, the manual updates only lasted a bit under three months. So at that point I was pretty happy, and looking forward to making things work a bit better and basically passing the buck to someone else. The first bit of buck passing that worked exceptionally well was jumping on Colin Watson, who'd been offering some debbugs patches on IRC, and after a delightfully brief discussion with some of the other debbugs folks, got getting him added to the group and able to make changes directly on the site. His advogato post the next day was:

  Yesterday I was invited onto the group that administers the Debian bug tracking system. I can't decide whether to be intimidated or excited. There's a great deal to do: my first couple of major projects look set to be integrating some of the existing QA interfaces to release-critical bug tracking, and developing a tool to help us edit spam out of bug histories.

  There's a lot to be said for grabbing people at the point where they're still intimidated by what they're joining; sure there's a definite risk that they'll break something you'll have to clean up, but that's pretty easy to deal with, and well worth all the extra excitement and energy that comes with a little bit of nerves. I did a talk on debbugs a few years later, at the 2005 DebConf, at which point we managed to entice Pascal Hakim and Don Armstrong into signing up, if I'm remembering right. At the same time Colin rolled out his implementation of version tracking support for debbugs (which I'd specced up a while ago, and helped design, but cannily avoided actually coding). Shortly after, Pasc put together bug subscriptions, and these days Don's pretty much the primary maintainer of debbugs. How cool is that? Passing on release managership was a bit less fortuitous though; it's a big job, and it's not something that you can offer "patches" for, generally. So after a bit of cogitating on just how to do it, I went with an open recruitment call in March 2003, and then a bunch of practical assignments to get the volunteers used to what RM work actually entailed and to see whether they actually like it. The recruitment call was mostly focussed on all the negatives, half to avoid people volunteering to be RM for the power (to decide which release policy wins, to tell maintainers what to do, to drop packages, or to just decide what name/number the next release gets) instead of wanting to actually do the work to get the next release out and keep developers happy; and the other half was the theory that if you make a job look hard, technical, but not terribly risky, it starts looking interesting to the right kind of people. The assignments generally were two parters -- first to introduce some stuff about release management that they mightn't be familiar with, and the second a bunch of problems that needed resolving that'd use those skills. The first set was RC bug fixing, followed by working out why packages aren't getting into testing, followed by dealing with packages with mutual dependencies and removing packages. At some point that evolved into the testing scripts accepting "hints" from the release team as to what packages to try in combination, or which packages to force out of testing. That turned out pretty successful, with Steve Langasek, Colin Watson and Joey Hess becoming official release assistants in August, and Colin and Steve replacing me as RM in mid-2004. It was also pretty satisfying to see Andi Barth do some more release assistant recruiting in 2005 following much the same model, and indeed using much of my mail verbatim. You can't really ask for better than that, I figure.

Geez, this was meant to be briefer...

Between February 29 and March 4, 2008 I attended the Sage Days 8, hosted at the Enthought headquarters in Austin, Texas. This was my 5th time in the USA and it was a marvelous experience, as with all my visits in the states.

As usual, I had some adventures in Atlanta, that interested readers can find at the end of this post. Anyway, on the Austin's airport I met Peter and his wife Crystal, Fernando, Benjamin, Jarrod, Eric and Clement. We went to have a dinner and then me and Clement were staying at Peter's house:



You can see the neighbor's cat and Peter's dog Trinity behind the window. The next day we went to Enthought, that was providing us with a breakfast and a lunch each day - and it was delicious. After the breakfast, we gathered in the room and introduced ourselves. Enthought rents 3/4 of the 21th floor in the Bank of America building, so when I looked left I saw:



When I looked behind I saw:



and in front of me, I saw all the participants (I took photos of all participants together with names). As you can see, there were really good people in there, like Travis (creator of NumPy), William (main author of Sage), Eric (CEO of Enthought), Fernando (author of IPython), Jarrod (the release manager of SciPy), Michael (the release manager of Sage) etc. See also the Fernando's welcome speech and the video of each of us introducting himself.

The views from the windows are terrific. I enjoyed working on each of the 4 sides of the skyscraper with completely different scenery, or when the sun is going down, that's also very cool.

We spent the whole Friday doing presentations, some of which you can find here. Then we went to Eric's house to have a big dinner together.

On Saturday, Sunday and Monday we were all hacking on many different things. I joined Fernando, Benjamin, Brian and Stefan on ipython1, Travis was implementing a new type (gmp integer) in NumPy, William wrote a manipulate command in Sage, Eric did the same in Traits, Gary and Michael implemented parallel testing of Sage, ...

On Tuesday we had final status reports and people left in the afternoon. In the evening we went with Clement to have a dinner and then we visited some bars on the 6th street, having a beer in each.

On Wednesday I visited John and Roy from the Computational Fluid Dynamics Lab at the University of Texas, Austin, who wrote the libMesh library, that I extensively used and also created a Debian package of. It was very influential to see the libMesh "from behind", also John and Roy are cool people (not mentioning the Debian tradition of having good relations with upstream:). Then I visited some professors at the same campus, after which I went into the Capitol and then I took the bus to the Barton Creek Square Mall to buy some ipods and jeans, so that I can say I have jeans from Texas. BTW, the ipod works excellent in Debian - I plugged it in and it just shows on my Gnome desktop. It's true that naively dragging mp3 files on it didn't make it play, but these instructions made it work.

On Thursday I fixed the remaining release blockers in SymPy and made a new release. In the evening, I am going to meet Aswin, he also uses SciPy and also is a friend of Kumar, who is now maintaining python-numpy and python-scipy Debian packages with me (Kumar also knows Prabhu, the author of Mayavi2 hosted at Enthought, so it's all connected).

Anyway, the whole workshop was an excellent experience for me. I learned a lot of new things and being able to speak with people who wrote tools that I use almost everyday is important. We also extensively discussed the future of all the projects (Sage, SciPy, NumPy, IPython, Cython, SymPy). See my summarizing email to the SymPy mailinglist.

Another thing, that I find very interesting is that Microsoft is financing the windows port of Sage, that will make basically anything that uses Python/Cython/C/Fortran very easy to install on windows (just a spkg package in sage). I find it really cool that MS is not only supporting but even financing a truly opensource project.

Finally the promised adventure in Atlanta: we took off the Prague airport on February 28th with a 2 hours delay (due to some paperwork as we were told by the captain). As I had 3 hours in Atlanta for the connection to Austin and I had to go through immigration, it was clear that I'll miss it. But I was not surprised, last time I was flying through Atlanta, they canceled my flight to LA completely. We arrived in Atlanta an hour and a half before my departure, then I was waiting for about an hour at immigration, it was incredibly slow. When I had around 20 min to departure, I had to ask people standing in front of me if they let me in, they were very nice and did. I was leaving immigration 10 min to my departure, then I was running to get my luggage and myself through customs and screening, it was 5 min to my departure when I ran down to the display with departure times. Then I was sprinting like hell to the terminal D to only see the clerk doing some final paperwork with all the people already boarded and the jetway door shut. After a little persuading he let me in too, fortunately there was still one seat left, so I made it. You can imagine my pleasant surprise in Austin when I discovered, that my luggage made it too, considering that I handed it to the Atlanta's airport personnel exactly 10 min prior the departure.

Many of you have seen the net classic If Operating Systems Were Airlines. Today, let's consider what the world might be like if version control systems were airlines...

Before anyone gets mad, this is all in fun, OK?

RCS Airlines: One of the first airlines, from way back when this whole aviation thing was new and exciting. Each RCS flight carries exactly one passenger, which RCS believes is a superior way to fly. Although most RCS airplanes are rusty and battered today, RCS Airlines still retains its historic dedication to security. Each airplane is kept locked as much as possible for safety. Occasionally flights will be delayed for hours because the pilot can't open the locked plane. When this happens, the pilot will frantically try to get the cell phone number of whoever it is that has locked the plane. When the plane finally gets unlocked, you may be tempted to ask why it was locked for so long. Veteran RCS users have learned that the answer is usually disgusting, and never ask anymore. Main competitor: CP/M airlines.

CVS Airlines: Founded on the belief that they could be more efficient than RCS by carrying multiple passengers per flight. They still carry each passenger in a separate RCS-built airplane, but the airplanes fly in a goose-like ",V" formation. Watch out for layovers, though. It can take hours to merge new passengers into the formation properly, and it might take several attempts to take off afterwards.

CVS flights often feature fights over who gets to fly. CVS piloting fights are legendary; rumor has it that OpenBSD got started after CVS airlines refused to allow a passenger to board on the grounds that he had in the past refused to stow his tray table in the upright and locked position.

CVS airlines mostly counts as customers the "over-50" crowd who grew up using CVS and don't like change. Its in-flight magazine features advertisements for balding-reversal treatments and uuencode tools.

Main competitor: AIX airlines.

Subversion Airlines: Started by some grey-haired CVS executives with long, wispy beards, Subversion airlines got started by trying to be "CVS, but better". Subversion airlines was the first major airline to use planes that seat more than one passenger. Unlike CVS airlines, all passengers on a Subversion flight travel in the same plane.

Subversion airlines is famous for its Soviet-like centralized control. All operations must be approved by the Kremlin, and you are allowed, by the grace of the Party Leader, to gaze at the massive airplanes. Those that have served the Party and Airline well for many years are allowed to enter the Great Shrine of the First-Class Comitter, and actually make changes to the airplanes themselves. Plainclothes Subversion Airlines security agents lurk on every flight, and you should not be surprised to be thrown out an airplane window if you make a joke in bad taste about the pilot's flying skills.

Subversion airlines thrives on the concept that "photocopying is cheap". You are encouraged to make photocopies of your ticket, or to photocopy your photo ID, and give copies of each to as many people as you can. At checkin time at the gate, if more than one person arrives with a copy of the same ticket, they are ushered into the "merging room" and each person is given a brick. The door is closed, something magical occurs, and the one person that emerges still able to walk is allowed to board the plane.

Main competitor: Windows airlines with no Administrators allowed.

tla airlines: Founded by one of those eccentric British noblemen, Lord Tom's airline is the utopian philosopher's airline. Chafed by the heavy-handed control of Subversion Airlines, tla airlines wants every passenger to be created equal. As you approach the gate area in the terminal, you will find many philosophers occupying the gate area, extolling the virtues of tla airlines. They compare tla airlines to reaching out and touching the heavens, leaving behind the bonds of a ground-based life, actually merging with the stars. Oh, the gorgeous beauty of it all! The things we will see!

As you see people arriving from another flight, you observe that some of them have burn marks. One of them comments that "merging with the stars doesn't work." Immediately, a dozen philosophers get in a fight with him, claiming that he simply doesn't understand what it means to merge with the stars, and that if he gets his inner being in the proper state first, he'll have a much better experience.

As you board the tla airplane, you obvserve that the jetway is a mile long. The airplane itself reminds you of something of a cross between a gothic cathedral and a level of Doom. There are spectacular archways everywhere, sometimes where they don't really belong. Each archway is supported by ornate curly braces which you don't normally see on airplanes, and frankly, you'd rather not, because they look all pointy and confuse the kids.

As you arrive as your destination terminal, you see it too is full of philosophers, most of them dining.

Main competitor: VMS airlines.

Darcs Airlines: Unlike every other airline, this one uses physicists instead of engineers to design its airplanes. One brilliant Darcs physicist has finally come up with The Theory of Everything, and as such, Darcs knows where you want to go before even you do. Darcs airlines prides itself on customer service, and asks your preference for even the tiniest details about your trip.

Each seat pocket features a copy of the Theory of Everything for your reading enjoyment, but nobody actually understands it.

Occasionally, you will find that Darcs pilots get into angry conflicts with the control tower in mid-flight. This results in the control tower revoking your permission to land. Legend has it that one Darcs pilot of a plane with exceptionally large fuel tanks actually resolved his conflict with the tower and landed two weeks after taking off. Experienced Darcs users board with several parachutes: one for themselves, and a few more for the newbies.

The Darcs physicists claim that the Theory of Everything predicted the pilots would act this way, and that all pilots eventually act this way throughout the entire universe. They toil day and night finding a way to adjust the gravitational constant of the universe, thereby reducing the anger factor of the pilots.

Main competitor: OS/2 airlines.

bzr airlines: Founded by a South African who had been injured by a curly brace on tla airlines, bzr airlines aims to be "tla done right". They have shortened the jetway, gotten rid of the curly braces, chased out the philosophers, and no longer have a vision of merging with the stars. Many that were injured on tla airlines fly bzr airlines, and out of respect for tla airlines, bzr airlines will still honor tla tickets.

bzr passengers consider themselves part of an exclusive club because each flight takes off from a launchpad. They often can be seen standing in the terminal passing out bzr literature, trying to get passengers of other airlines to fly bzr, and can't understand how other airlines continue to exist while people keep walking past their airplanes.

Main competitor: BeOS Airlines.

Bitkeeper Airlines: One of the world's faster airlines, Bitkeeper airlines occupied that obscure gate for rich people at the end of the terminal for many years. Tickets on Bitkeeper Airlines were rumored to cost thousands of dollars, and were rare and jealously guarded. Then for awhile, Bitkeeper Airlines started giving away tickets for free, though they also kept around the expensive tickets for those with discriminating tastes. Free tickets were made widely available, but the 3-point type on the back of tickets said that you were never allowed to think about another airline before, after, or during your flight, and some people claimed they actually saw the small print morphing right before their eyes.

Bitkeeper flights often featured arguments over whether people were harboring secret thoughts of other airlines. If you were caught thinking about another airline, you were expected to scream vigorously while being thrown out the escape hatch without a parachute. All of this commotion tarnished the rarified air that the rich people paid to experience, so one day it was decided that there would be a Great Purge, because obviously all free ticket holders had harbored lustful thoughts of other airlines, so they were all thrown off the airplanes simultaneously. Today, people aren't exactly sure where the Bitkeeper gate is, but everyone suspects it still lurks somewhere.

Main competitor: SCO Airlines.

Mercurial Airlines: The "there's one right way to do it" airline, Mercurial is a sterile, agile, and shiny airline. Every Mercurial airplane looks identical to every other one, shiny and clean. You could swear that all the passengers look alike too, and as you approach the gate, it seems like you too look like everyone else. Mercurial passengers tend to be a happy bunch, who can't comprehend anybody that flies Git Airlines. Specks of dirt and dust confuse the pilots, so it is best to make sure you have showered before boarding. It is rumored that, through bolting on more engines, some Mercurial airlines can fly to as many places as Git airlines can, but most Mercurial passengers are content to not worry about that.

Main competitor: Python Airlines.

Git Airlines: The "there's more than one way to do it" airline, Git flies the world's largest and fastest airplanes. Git Airlines was founded by some priests who were flying for free on Bitkeeper Airlines and survived the fall after the Great Purge. Git airplanes start as spartan, empty cabins, with no carpeting, chairs, or piloting controls. At the departure gate, each passenger is handed a bag containing 173 standard airplane components, accompanied by a 4x5" sheet of information on the theory of flight, written in 1950. Once onboard, the passengers use these components to finish out the airplane for flight: installing chairs, rudder controls, etc. Every flight results in a plane assembled in a different way, and passengers on each flight believe they are flying the world's best airplane. Arguments in the terminal after a flight are common, as passengers from different flights debate the merits of their particular design.

Despite all this, Git planes turn out to be safe, and Git passengers believe they get to their destinations in half the time it takes any other passengers, though sometimes they secretly wonder if the Mercurial flight got there faster. Occasionally, passengers on Git airlines build an airplane that appears to go into a tailspin. When that happens, they simply assemble a tool that lets them go back in time and change history so that it doesn't crash, although it is rumored that if you are a member of the public watching this happen from the ground, it will lead to seizures.

Git airlines takes special pride in the one piece that passengers don't have to assemble: the plumbing. Every Git lavatory is equipped with state-of-the-art never-fail plumbing, and the best porcelain washroom fixtures money can buy. None of these cheap plastic toilets like you get on every other airline. Here, we have fine porcelain fixtures.

During a flight, after passengers use the lavatory, they frequently get into arguments with each other about which style of porcelain toilet is the best. These arguments are only resolved by the Zen-like Git Priests, who insist that only inferior passengers need to use a toilet while in the air.

Main competition: Perl Airlines.

Last week-end, I spent 3 days with Elizabeth and our daughters in a recreation park. Basically doing nothing, just rest and enjoy time passing without a net connection...:-) I just was infortunate enough to have an ankle tendinite and therefore could only run once on a "short" distance while a great running circuit in the forest was available (23km of paths in the woods, sigh). I however had the great pleasure to re-enjoy sauna. I didn't practice it since Debconf 5 where most of the Debian crowd discovered how great are those Finns who invented this. So, we went to sauna two days in a row. Of course, that was a kinda civilized sauna: no fully naked people, no lake to jump into when exiting (but a cold water pool, though) and only 94 degrees at the very maximum (when I could pour water on the stones without looking like a freak)....but, still. That was sauna and that was great. And we also had hammam to make interesting sauna/hammam/sauna combinations. And, guess what: the ankle tendinite is not there anymore. Is sauna also good for that? Are there saunas in Mar del Plata?

On this year’s Chemitzer Linux-Tage (CLT, engl. “Chemnitz Linux Days’) I attended a few talks of which especially formorer’s ikiwiki talk was very interesting. I attended his talk since I found out that ikiwiki is command line wiki compiler in contrary to the thousands of solely web based wikis out there. As a big fan of statically generated content this idea sounded very interesting to me. But just having a short look at ikiwiki’s web page didn’t help to get started and it seemed as if I had not the right idea of how ikiwiki works to get started. So formorer’s talk seemed to be a good possibility to get an idea of how ikiwiki works without much effort. During the talk I noticed that ikiwiki can many things I do with the Website Meta Language (WML), but can do some more things WML can’t do out of the box:

1. It’s not only a framework to generate web pages, it’s more like a content management system (CMS).
2. Versioning is intergal part of ikiwiki without reinventing the wheel: It works out of the box with — beyond others — Subversion, Git and Mercurical (Hg).

And when formorer showed that even Tobi Oetiker uses ikiwiki, I noticed that ikiwiki probably could be a WML killer, since I knew Tobi as a WML fan. And ikiwiki looks very appealing for the WML fan inside me, too… OTOH: Intergrating WML as a backend to ikiwiki could be an interesting idea, though. Hearing what kind of input files ikiwiki can process, I also got the idea of using hnb (Hierachical Notebook) files as input for ikiwiki. hnb files are already XML and so a conversion to XHTML shouldn’t be that hard. But when searching the web for “ikiwiki hnb” I found the blog postings of a few people switching away from hnb, e.g. to vimoutliner. Since I’m an Emacs addict and don’t like vim very much (if I use a vi, I use nvi or elvis), I searched for “emacs hnb” and indeed found someone who switched from hnb to org-mode – of which I never heard before. Unfortunately org-mode doesn’t seem to be in Debian (Update 00:23: Yeah, yeah, I now know it’s included in emacs22, but emacs22 hasn’t made it into kfreebsd-i386 yet, so I didn’t notice. See the comments. :-) but I’ll play around with it a little bit. Unfortunately a first test wasn’t that promising. But we’ll see.

Now playing: Men at Work — Down Under

I had a big fright this afternoon. My friend ludo asked me to shut down my main server (delmak.naquadah.org) for racking one of my new equipement. Delmak is my oldest server, hosting almost everything since 5 years. I knew I will have to shut it down some days, but after 280 days of uptime I was pretty confident everything will be allright. But obviously, it refused to boot again. Fortunately, only the power was burned, and after changing it with a new one, we manage to get delmak booting again. Now I'm really thinking about some better solution to not having everything on a server that can explose any day now.

Update (3/3/2008): We’re also working to bring Google Gears for mobile to Android and other mobile platforms with capable web browsers. Here is my writeup of yesterdays Android Code Day in London. Eclipse 3.3 is needed to get the plugin working. Only eclipse 3.2 is in Debian unstable. Download the Europa release and re-setting up the plugin will do it. I’m no Eclipse fan boy, though the integrated debugger works. The iteration cycles are really short for trying stuff out. Very good. Developers, mainly from a Symbian background grilled Jason Chen over security and wanting C API access. Lot of people didn’t seem to like the idea that users were controlling security. I like Google’s “empowering the users” stance, though I think representatives from operators don’t. I heard that poor argument about users asking their operators for android support. Jason argued well that it’s up to user education to contact the right people. When a computer crashes in the UK, who do people call? VirginMedia? Please! :) How about Breakpad crash reporting on Android?. Jason used the OHA to defend Google from looking like they have all the political power… Hmmmm. :) I can understand the tight rope that Google are walking. They are trying not to fragment their platform before it’s properly released. OEMs, operators will feck it up if they have the chance to play with the source code before a Google co-ordinated release. Once they release Google claim they will release everything under the Apache 2 license. So I asked could we see Android on desktops? Jason said there is nothing stopping you. I hope not. Their opened fonts and multimedia codecs on desktop PCs could really make a big difference for Linux take up, especially in Asian (growth) markets. I have studied and implemented Asian fonts and Android’s font rendering even on that nightmare Website sina looked good to me. Despite the “Symbian developers” giving Jason hell in the beginning I had impression they actually liked Android. It fealt almost staged. Scary. Symbian C++ programmers learning Java and jumping ship! Same old problems with images. People are concerned about how bitmap images will scale on different target screens. There is four ‘skins’ already supported in the emulator (QVGA-L+P, HVGA-L+P). We need scalable images too on the Web. ;) Though there are some workarounds demonstrated which seemed OK to me. During the hackathon, I wanted to write a backup/sync tool. Since only Jason Chen seemed to know Android and there was a filled audience, I didn’t get to ask him how really to go about coding it. Though with the help of Dave from Zyb, we eventually found out about content providers. Took some debugging to find that out, but we got there. Having a working debugger is really really nice. We discovered we needed “android.permission.READ_CONTACTS” in the manifest to make our little application that read out the contact on stdout. Cool, though I’d rather use Javascript and the Web stack. Anyway, Android seemed like a good platform, but I have concerns. My biggest concern is basically where is Google Gears on Android? Jason could neither confirm or deny this, so perhaps they have it. Though gears is an opensource project and you can see code reviews… no Android mentioned. What happens if the Android platform is wildly successful? Then we are going to see two major platforms. The Android platform on mobiles and the Web platform on everything else. I worryingly saw no support for Web application device APIs on Android. Encouraging people to write for their Android/java-esque platform undermines their main Web platform! It’s like Microsoft’s mistake of undermining their own platform all over again. From Android you can use Webkit and the Web stack. But from the Web API stack you can’t seemingly access their Dalvik VM APIs. I disclose I am an employee of Aplix (opinions etc. are my own), also a OHA member. I am actively working on a plugin technology that exposes APIs as familiar JS APIs to Web developers. I have already done a proof of concept implementation of Google Gear’s Location API on mobile devices with Aplix technologies. Google you should really do the same and make Web applications equal citizens on your mobile platform by implementing Gears on Android (if you haven’t already).

As you know I implemented the support of symbols files in dpkg-shlibdeps/dpkg-gensymbols, and I would be very pleased if libc6 could start using it as most packages would then benefit from weaker dependencies on libc6 and be more easily installable on previous versions of the distribution (sid package directly installable on etch in some cases). Some time ago I tried to get the ball rolling by providing a first patch in #462444. Unfortunately the glibc team has not been able to finish the work up to now and the base freeze is approaching… so it would be great if some people could jump in, make the required changes, test and propose a new (fully working) patch. I just sent a message to give some indications on how to get forward, hopefully that will help anyone who wants to tackle this. Thank you for your help! Partagez cet article / Share This

Last week, the Free Software Foundation announced an important new initiative called End Software Patents whose goals are pretty evident from the project's name. So far, the initiative is backed by the FSF, the Public Patent Foundation, and the Software Freedom Law Center. There are several organizations who are taking on specific bad patents but ESP is unique in that it is activitely working toward the abolition of software patents in the United States. While the organization is focused on work in the US, it's deeply important globally -- much of the world's patent law is "exported" from the US. The FSF is stretching extremely limited resources in backing ESP to help it get off the ground because we believe two things:

• First, software patents are a fundamental threat to free and open source software (but not just to free and open source software). The FSF must oppose software patents because they provide a fundamental threat to free software's continued success. That sounds like hyperbole but is unfortunately not.
• Second, we can win this fight. For a whole set of reasons, the successful abolition of software patents is a goal that, while extremely ambitious, is also within grasp. These issues, of course, are much bigger than free software. Companies spend billions of dollars in litigation over software patents that are not novel and that should not exist. ESP can reach out farther than the FSF alone and build a coalition that can destroy software patents for the good of much more than the free software community.

Please read the new ESP report on the state of software patents written by the ESP Executive Director Ben Klemens to understand why we are optimistic. And please, support ESP financially in this fight. ESP's continued work is not ensured past the immediate future. Your support will help endow a bright future for the next generation of software developers and users.

One of reasons to setup my own Jabber server was to be able to store history on server while having data under my control. I use Jabber clients from several locations and having history on the server seems to be logical step. Unfortunately implementations of XEP-0136 are a bit lacking. During install I enabled modarchive, but it was not using up to date specification and there is no client which works with it, so there was no way to view data in it. Recently I found out that rewrite of this module exists - modarchive_odbc. It is implementing current version of XEP-0136 and is using SQL database for storage (so at least writing SQL query to grab data is not that complicated as with Mnesia database used by original version). Migrating of current history went quite good using wswutils, at least I did not notice any problems so far. The only problem is no support from clients. The only reliable way which works for now is Jabber archive web reader, but I'd really like to see integration in Gajim, any volunteers? :-)

On Saturday 1 March, I attended the Constitutional Review Roadshow at Explore@Bristol (pictured). The review is trying to develop the rules for the Cooperative Group after its merger with United. The event wasn't at all what I expected or hoped for. There were relatively few individual members there. I don't know the split, but most of the 60 or so attendees seemed to be elected members of some sort and this was the first chance they'd had to comment since the open consultation ended last year. Some of the elected members had travelled from the Eastern and South East regions. The initial slide "Purpose of Today" stated three aims:

1. bring members up to date;
2. give members the opportunity to ask questions;
3. and aid members in preparing their formal feedback.

I don't feel the event really brought us up to date or aided in preparing formal feedback, because the roadshow appeared to summarise a report which hasn't been published. Some of the elected members had seen it the day before, but no copies were available to use at the event, so we were pretty much in the dark for some aspects. The event didn't give us much opporunity to ask questions either, despite its length. I was expecting more of a consultation event, which was reinforced when I entered the room and saw seats gathered around tables. I did not expect an hour-long lecture followed by three hours or so of whole-group question-and-answer, broken by lunch. Even with the competent chairing (AFAICT), that was an amazingly inefficient way of working, with some people being cut short, but still leaving some people not being heard. It can be summed up by the chairman commenting

"I do not want this to turn into a discussion"

while the big screen next to him said "questions and discussion"! Headlines from the review: similar elected structures to current Group structure, but regional board nominated by individual members; merge regions to produce six new regions (West Midlands and North West, Wales and South West, London and South East, Eastern England and East and South Midlands, Yorkshire and Humber and North East, Scotland and Northern Ireland); add management and non-executive directors to national board; no clue how to fix diversity problems; no view on fees or job spec until structures are defined. I'll go through the slides in detail and post the questions and answers if anyone leaves a comment asking for them. Otherwise, I think I've lost enough time to this for now.

So, sometime over the past few weeks I clocked up ten years as a Debian developer:

From: Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au>
Subject: Wannabe maintainer.
Date: Sun, 8 Feb 1998 18:35:28 +1000 (EST)
To: new-maintainer@debian.org
Hello world,
I'd like to become a debian maintainer.
I'd like an account on master, and for it to be subscribed to the
debian-private list.
My preferred login on master would have been aj, but as that's taken
ajt or atowns would be great.
I've run a debian system at home for half a year, and a system at work
for about two months. I've run Linux for two and a half years at home,
two years at work. I've been active in my local linux users' group for
just over a year. I've written a few programs, and am part way through
packaging the distributed.net personal proxy for Debian (pending
approval for non-free distribution from distributed.net).
I've read the Debian Social Contract.
My PGP public key is attached, and also available as
<http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/aj_key.asc>.
If there's anything more you need to know, please email me.
Thanks in advance.
Cheers,
aj
-- 
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred.
On Netscape GPLing their browser:  How can you trust a browser that
ANYONE can hack? For the secure choice, choose Microsoft.''
        -- <oryx@pobox.com> in a comment on slashdot.org

Apparently that also means I’ve clocked up ten and a half years as a Debian user; I think my previous two years of Linux (mid-95 to mid-97) were split between Slackware and Red Hat, though I couldn’t say for sure at this point. There’s already been a few other grand ten-year reviews, such as Joey Hess’s twenty-part serial, or LWN’s week-by-week review, or ONLamp’s interview with Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond and Michael Tiemann on ten years of “open source”. I don’t think I’m going to try matching that sort of depth though, so here are some of my highlights (after the break).

---

• Starting small: my first package was distributed-net-pproxy, which would claim a bunch of work units which could then be distributed over the local LAN. Useful if you’re in Australia in the mid-90s and being charged by the minute for Internet access. distributed.net didn’t allow general distribution, so I asked for (and received) explicit permission to include it in Debian. (distributed.net had a ten year anniversary last year too)
• Diving straight in: I got sucked in to the mailing lists pretty quickly, and within a couple of months was up to my neck trying to redesign the way we did releases; oddly enough that didn’t turn out quite so easy, but at least it ended up with some concrete proposals within a couple of months, pretty much synchronously with the hamm (2.0) release going out (and, I guess, about a year after I’d started using Debian…). At around the same time was, I think, my first recorded comment about trade offs regarding freeness…
• cruft: My first bit of Debian specific code was cruft (that its name, not it’s value…), which worked okay as a prototype, but got snagged up in debian-policy trying to get packages to make a note of files they’ll put on the system without telling dpkg (eg, /etc/passwd, /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb, etc). That pretty much sapped my interest in it, and cruft stagnated until Marcin Owsiany picked it up in 2005.
• Played for a sucker, part one: a few months later I was messing around doing QA stuff and fixing bugs and as part of that did an NMU of netbase (which at the time directly contained all sorts of important tools like ping and inetd directly). That went something like:

  From: Anthony Towns
  Date: Sat, Nov 21, 1998
  There are a few bugs accumulating against the netbase package which
  you're maintaining. I was wondering if you'd mind if I made an NMU
  to fix some of them for the upcoming slink release?
  

  From: Peter Tobias
  Date: Sat, Nov 21, 1998
  No, please go ahead ... I'm quite busy right now and I would really
  appreciate any help. Please let me know if you need additional information
  about the package.
  

  From: Anthony Towns
  Date: Sun, Dec 6, 1998
  There's an NMU sitting in Incoming now. It fixes a few bugs, viz:
  [...]
  

  From: Peter Tobias
  Date: Fri, Dec 25, 1998
  due to my current job I don't have much time to work on my debian
  packages. In order to have more time for my other debian packages
  I would like to give away the netbase package. Are you interested
  in maintaining this package?
  

  From: Anthony Towns
  Date: Fri, Dec 25, 1998
  Ummm. Sure. I guess. (or, iow, *Eeeeeeeeeeeeek*!!!)
  
  

• ifupdown: As part of maintaining netbase I tried to figure out a way of fixing bugs like 31745 and 39118. Basically, Debian used to do networking by generating a script on install that you could modify by hand, and that was it – so when the commands needed changed between 2.0 and 2.2 (no more “route add -net”), you couldn’t make that upgrade “just work”. Red Hat handled it with “ifup” and “ifdown” commands that would look at a whole bunch of shell-format variables in /etc, which worked but wasn’t elegant, so I came up with something I thought was actually pleasant. It’s fundamental attitude is to be a parser – the networking commands are specifed as compile-time configuration, the description of your network is your runtime configuration, and ifupdown just puts those all together without trying to actually understand what’s going on. To some degree, that works really well – it keeps all the knowledge separate so when you’re writing an /etc/network/interfaces, you’re not worried about how DHCP works; in others it breaks down – in particular if bringing up an interface fails part way through, is it up, or down, or something else entirely?
• bugs.debian.org: I’m not entirely sure why, but in August ‘99 I decided to start running a script to stop old bugs from being permanently deleted:

  From: Anthony Towns
  Subject: BTS and old bugs
  Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 22:33:16 +1000
  To: debian-private@lists.debian.org
  ObPrivate: Erm. I'm not sure. It is only even vaguely relevant to
  developers.
  Since bugs #9705 and #36727 don't seem like being fixed any time soon
  and Darren hasn't managed to convert the BTS to using debbugs.deb yet,
  I've made a little script to stop us from continuing to lose bug
  reports, and am running it in my crontab on master.
  ~ajt/debian-bugs/archive/ contains hardlinked copies of the bugs in
  ~iwj/debian-bugs/spool/db (except split into sub-directories). When
  the bugs get expired from the BTS, the hardlink in ~ajt remains, so
  the file doesn't get lost forever.
  In the week or so I've been running it, some 500 odd bugs expired [0].
  

  Next month I sent Darren Benham a first version of bugreport.cgi, and at some point around then must’ve sent off a pkreport.cgi too; by the month after (October) I’d evidently been added to the debbugs group, because I was merging my archived bugs into the official debbugs directories.
• testing: So a year and a bit later and there had been some more discussions about making major changes to our release process, and since I’d done some more algorithms subjects at university by this point, dove in a bit more seriously. For me, the main challenge seemed to be keeping dependencies consistent, and it turns out validating dependencies and conflicts is an NP-complete problem, and solving that reasonably efficiently seemed like a good first step. By October ‘99 I’d come up with a first pass solution, which I think was still in Perl at the time. A couple more rounds of playing with consistency checking stuff ensued, resulting in some regularly updated lists being generated by December, and by March 2000 or so that had graduated to a simulation of testing as we know and love it today.
• Played for a sucker, part two: so after a few months of maintaining a testing suite while potato (Debian 2.2) was getting finalised for release I figured it’d be useful to get broader release experience, so asked Richard Braakman if I could help out with the last bits of the potato release. At which point he said “sure”, gave me James Troup’s email address for accepting/rejecting packages etc, then buzzed off to a mobile phone related junket in the US, and laid low until the release was actually out… A cunning plan, for sure. Happily, that didn’t take too long – I think I started around June, and potato was finished baking for release at LinuxWorld Expo in August, though it did involve about 2000 lines of archive changes and stuff mailed to James over the period, along with half a dozen mails to -devel-announce.
• Junket: In the middle of that was my first ever debconf – or technically the Debian portion of the 2000 LSM/RMLL in Bordeaux, aka Debconf 0. It was awesome – met heaps of cool people, got to practice my high school French, and enjoy some lovely red wine while gossipping about free software. Also heard RMS sing the free software song live. But the wine was great!
• katie/dak: The biggest problem with the “simulation of testing” mentioned above was it was held together with paperclips and sticky-tape; or less metaphorically, shell one-liners and hardlinks. Since packages would originally get uploaded to unstable, and then move into testing, and then get deleted from unstable, you’d end up at least doubling the bandwidth required to mirror Debian, because each package would get sent to mirrors once for unstable and once for testing. Which is fine for a simulation, but for deployment, well, we needed package pools, which in turned required a rewrite of dinstall. James did all the initial work, apart from some of the schema design and the scarier SQL, and by November had it deployed for the non-US archive, and got it onto ftp-master in December. At which point the time was ripe for hooking up testing into the archive proper, which is about the point that the testing scripts got named “britney” so as to fit in with all silly names in the da-katie suite. I’m pretty sure the rationale was that I did the final coordination of the potato release (archive changes, cd images, announcement, etc), I spent from about 3am to 10am listening to a handful of Britney Spears songs on repeat. The phrase “scarred for life” might come to mind. Since that point, there’s been lots of evolutionary changes to both dak and testing (including a rewrite of the perl parts of testing into python), but it’s all built fairly naturally from that point.
• debootstrap: I’m pretty sure my motivation for writing debootstrap was a mix of just wanting to avoid having to worry about out of date base tarballs for the purposes of keeping testing in-sync, and wondering if it was actually possible to write a script to bootstrap a Debian system from the sort of minimally functioanl environment the installer has to put up with. In the end, it turned out pretty cool – it was used by the final boot-floppies, it’s part of d-i, it makes tools like pbuilder possible, I think it helps embedded folks heaps, it’s spawned some imitators, and generally been a pretty cool exercise in hackery.
• Freedom and purity: About six months earlier, there was a big flamewar and an attempted vote on whether to remove non-free from the archive. I’d written a rebuttal and counter-proposal, but it all ended up collapsing in a heap, due to disputes about the constitution. For some reason I feel like this mail was more interesting than all the previous ones combined… That ended up needing a whole bunch of changes to the constitution: one to make it clear under what circumstances the social contract can be changed, and another on what happens when one option on a vote requires a supermajority while another doesn’t, and working that out ended up taking from October 2000 until October 2003. It was actually kind-of interesting; trying to analyse a good voting system that works in the real world has all sorts of interesting maths to it, and there’s a whole bunch of election methods guys that have studied it in a bunch of depth. And since its elections, you can have fun with all sorts of scenarious of corruption – like what if the secretary’s trying to change the results. In practice, the difference between good and bad election methods seems to turn out to be negligible, but why wouldn’t you have the best one you possibly can? A couple of months after those changes were done, dropping non-free got reproposed, and I did another counter-proposal; this time they were actually voted on, with the counter-proposal winning, by a little under a two-to-one margin. Which means we get to get rid of non-free by making it completely superfluous, rather than just near enough.

Hrm, this is going on longer than I’d hoped. Oh well, to be continued!

I've never bothered to learn the gory details of shell scripting. This is somewhat embarrassing for me, although at the same time I don't feel like I've really suffered for the decision. I know enough of the basics to do some cool things (for loops, if tests and whatnot) but the the syntax is fraught with such problems that it feels like a waste of time to do more. Obviously, others have felt similarly, which is why perl was invented.

I've become more interested in it again recently though, mainly because I've been reading a lot of Kernighan. I don't want to deal with Bourne syntax though, which eliminates the only two shells I've ever spent serious time with in my life, bash and zsh, as well as ksh. I know csh scripting is considered harmful 'n shit, so that's right out.

Since I only want to shell script for local use, I don't need to worry about portability so I can try using more exotic shells. I'm also willing to script in a different language from the shell that I use, so the doors are really open. There's scsh if I want to write scheme, zoidberg if I want to write perl, rush if I want to write ruby.

What looked most appealing is rc though, which has a very nice Bourne-like syntax that's not nearly so warty. It was reimplemented before plan9 was released, and the reimplementation is in Debian, although I ran in to some undocumented differences with the plan9 version very fast. It may be worth trying out the plan9 version at this point to see how that goes.

Any other suggestions from the lazyweb are greatly appreciated. It'd be nice to have this aspect of my toolbox be more solid.

Update:
A disclaimer/warning is needed: UNLESS you KNOW what you're doing, you probably are better off building packages for each of the supported Debian distros.

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I know it sounds cheesy, but I couldn't find a better name.


At my workplace we are packaging software to work for as many distros as possible at one time. As a consequence the .deb packages we produce should work fine on all Debian distros: oldstable, stable, testing, sid.

To make sure we achieve that, we are building them in an oldstable chroot. OTOH, using pbuilder is very demanding on I/O, especially when entering the chroot and when exiting it. That slows down a lot the build system and is time to change that.


One reliable alternative is to use cowbuilder (part of cowdancer package). What is interesting is that cowbuilder relies on the existance of /usr/bin/cow-shell inside the chroot, so the cowdancer package needs to be installed both in the chroot and the host machine.

But cowdancer was not a part of sarge, so, if you try to create a new sarge cow directory with cowbuilder, it will fail at the end saying it didn't found the cowdancer package. Also trying to login via cowbuilder --login will complain it didn't found /usr/bin/cow-shell.


The fix for this is simple, once you figured it out and saw that cowdancer is available in sarge as a backport:

cowbuilder --create --distribution sarge --basepath /var/cache/pbuilder/sarge.cow --othermirror 'deb http://www.backports.org/debian sarge-backports main'

You may prefer to be sure that the only thing from backports is cowdancer and use a more hands-on approach[1]. Also, this will eliminate the need to correct later the apt sources to exclude backports[2].

Write the same command as before, but omit everything starting with --othermirror. Then install by hand the package in the chroot.

twix:/home/eddy# cowbuilder --create --distribution sarge --basepath /var/cache/pbuilder/sarge.cow
twix:/home/eddy# chroot /var/cache/pbuilder/sarge.cow
twix:/# wget http://ftp.de.debian.org/backports.org/pool/main/c/cowdancer/cowdancer_0.23~bpo.1_i386.deb
twix:/# dpkg -i cowdancer_0.23~bpo.1_i386.deb
twix:/# rm cowdancer_0.23~bpo.1_i386.deb
twix:/# exit
twix:/home/eddy# cowbuilder --update

Since after the bootstrap all .deb packages will be in the apt cache in the chroot, you might want to save some disk space:

twix:/home/eddy# cowbuilder --login --save-after-login
twix:/# aptitude clean
twix:/# exit

That's it!


If anything is broken somehow, missing or whatnot, cowbuilder --login --save-after-login is your friend.

[1] the initial bootstrap does not pull from backport anything else but cowdancer
[2] since you want to compile for plain sarge, not sarge+backports ;-)

So today is the third anniversary of my first upload of the ISC DHCP v3 package to Debian. It all started back in the days of the linux.conf.au 2005 organising committee. Bob Edwards, who ran the ANU Department of Computer Science computer labs (which ran on Debian at the time), was constantly complaining about bugs like #286011, once he'd found out I was a Debian developer. So I figured I'd try and do something about it, so I think I emailed the maintainers, who had been fairly inactive (the last upload before mine was in July the year before), and asked if they'd like me to NMU the package. I think Matt Zimmerman emailed me back and told me to knock myself out, and add myself as an uploader while I was at it, and well, the rest is history... I've had fun fixing bugs, trying to clean things up, deal with a pretty archaic upstream build system and get the package up to current Debian standards compliance. One of the highlights was being able to finally get rid of Debian Installer's dependence on the v2 DHCP client package, so we could finally jettison the v2 packages for Lenny (which reminds me, I still have to figure out how to handle the transition from Etch with respect to that). I've been working hard to try and get as many of the patches in Debian's DHCP packages incorporated upstream. Unfortunately, they have a totally unpredictable release cycle, and they have feature releases and bug fix releases. The feature releases are very few and far between, and they won't introduce new features into a bugfix release. Speaking of patches, my personal philosophy is that distribution packages shouldn't differ radically in behaviour or functionality from their upstream source, so I've resisted incorporating some of the more deviant patches from Ubuntu, instead forwarding them directly upstream. There's still a bit of work to be done with the package. The ISC released version 3.1.0 a while ago, and that's the version I'm trying to standardise on for Lenny. It's got new support for a domain-search option, which means people can stop abusing the domain-name option to set a domain search list in their clients. The domain-search option is also honoured by Mac OS X (Leopard), and I dare say Windows Vista probably supports it as well, but I haven't checked. Unfortunately the client-side support for the domain-search option is a bit flaky in 3.1.0, so I'm hoping the ISC will release 3.1.1 real soon now, as I believe most of the flakiness issues are addressed in it. Of course, for Lenny to do the right thing consistently with this new option, #460609 and #465158 need to be resolved also. The last thing I'm trying to sort out for Lenny is the reasonably in-demand LDAP patch. It's been floating around out-of-tree for longer than I've been maintaining the package. Jos L. Redrejo Rodr guez has been kind enough to clean up the patch for me, so that rather than bastardising the standard DHCP package to build a dhcp3-server package that has LDAP support, it basically builds DHCP twice, once with the patch and once without, and the dhcp3-server-ldap package just diverts /usr/sbin/dhcpd3 out of the way and plonks in the LDAP-enabled binary in its place. I hope to upload a new revision of the package that builds this new binary package within the next week (hopefully this weekend). After that's done, and hopefully 3.1.1 has been released, and Lenny is out of the way, I'm going to focus on transitioning away from a versioned set of DHCP packages. The whole "3" in everything was to allow the v2 and v3 packages to coexist. I've sought advice from the release team about this, and they said not to bother, but it feels really gross to have the version 4 package (4.0.0 has been released by the ISC for a while now as well) be still called dhcp3, and to install into /etc/dhcp3 and other such versioned directories. The final thing I want to look into is collaborative maintenance. I've been wanting to do this for a while, but I wanted to get the package into a revision control system (shock horror, it's not currently) and I've been baulking at how to do it the "right" way. I'm pretty sold on using Git for the revision control system, I just haven't figured out the right approach yet. Martin Krafft's articles about it have been interesting, but feel a bit overly advanced, and don't quite suit my situation. I've been hesitant to start using Git, then discover I've done it all wrong, and have to start again. I need to just bite the bullet. My upstream also doesn't use Git, and doesn't make their revision control system publicly available, so I just get the tarballs when they're released. Speaking of upstream, I made the discovery last year that they're just down the road from me in Redwood City, so I've been trying to improve relations by getting the main folks who work on DHCP at ISC to pop up to Google for lunch every now and then, which so far has happened twice, and been good a opportunity to have a chat. In fact, they're keen for Debian to join the DHCP Forum (Debian is already a member of the BIND Forum) and I think they've started talking to the Debian folks responsible for our BIND Forum membership about extending that to cover the DHCP Forum as well. So that's about it. I think after three years of being the sole uploader, I'll formally put myself in as the maintainer and Eloy as an uploader until I get around to implementing collaborative maintenance.

My FOSDEM talk didn't go entirely as planned. I tried to run a demo of the beid packages, but unfortunately they decided to play up again. This isn't the first time; they sometimes have this. It has something to do with OpenSC or OpenCT, I believe, but it's hard to figure out what, exactly. When I got back at the office with the machine that failed to work properly, and tried again, it did work. Heisenbugs suck. Pun intended. Anyway, since things work now, I prepared a screencast showing off what I wanted to show during the talk; it takes about 8 minutes. I was going to edit the talk to hide the spammer who was DoS'ing my mailserver just as I was trying to send an email out, and perhaps to hide away the long waits at times; but I didn't find an easy way to do so, and I got tired looking. If you're interested, have a look. Also, the screencast doesn't include any sound. This is because I couldn't find any piece of equipment on which istanbul would produce correct imagery (it appears to be buggy on powerpc), where the hardware was fast enough to capture and encode both a video at 1024x768 resolution and sound from the sound card (ruling out "anything", the machine on which I tried to do the presentation at FOSDEM), and on which the microphone would actually work (ruling out the amd64 box that was standing nearby). Since I could at least create a correct movie on the last machine, I just forgot about the sound. Instead, I tried to make the screencast show what was going on, by pointing at important tidbits with my mouse pointer. Which kindof worked, but was not ideal. Oh well.