And there, another day come and passed, still no real breakage, only some small things here and there. We are doing something wrong, definitely. Ok, granted, providing everyone who has experimental in their sources.list with a free upgrade path due to us suddenly forgetting that apt actually really wants this NotAutomatic: yes flag in the release instead of just looking it up in our database, later on doing the same to all of the backports user (accidently, happens when you have identical codebases), does count enough for a small icecream. But we didn t have anything serious, which is great. Alex finished patching dak rm in a way that we can now actually close all bugs attached to a (source) package we remove and was thinking of enhancing it to actually also be able to close wnpp bugs attached to it (think of O: bugs for example). Mark had design work on g-p-s, which actually is how do we generate packages and sources and how to move the config sanely into a database . Sounds easy, but trust me, it isn t, when you consider all the special cases Debian has. He also jumped in helpfully whenever there was a question around some coding and stuff, at one time turning up with the insanity/genius/younameit code that allows us to transfer even more of dak.conf into the database. This gets us a good way along the way that should end up with a dak.conf consisting of only the database details and nothing else. My job today looked similar like yesterday. Merge code I got, eat, remove lots of values from dak.conf. This weekend besides totally missing out on Baklava, had us change our dak code quite a bit: 46 files changed, 982 insertions(+), 1060 deletions(-). Besides that we do have about 18 points on our meeting notes, a mail going off to one debian lists sometime the next days summarizing it a bit more.

Wanted to post this yesterday, but somehow didnt work out, so here we go now Another meeting day passed, another lot of commits into our repository, another day without entirely breaking the system. But wait, one more chance to break it today, maybe we finally manage. :) Yesterday we got volatile sorted out for Squeeze (Lenny stays like it is, seperate). Its now a suite on ftp-master, and we have all the neccessary information and workflow around it defined. At least so far that we can operate the suite, we don t define what gets into it, we just take that from the volatile team (or, I think, in future, from the SRMs) in a kind of textfile similar to how testing works. Besides having Alex unbreak our bts categorize script, Mark fixing up our BYHAND processing and implementing the volatile stuff I mentioned above, we also merged a patchset from Luca that allows us to provide the packages.debian.org service with a tree containing changelogs, copyright files, NEWS.Debian and README.Debian. Metadata basically. Which they extracted in the past, and that was taking up quite a lot of resources. Much easier if we provide it and they just use it. This is now done for both, the main archive as well as the backports archive. As soon as I upgrade the security archive it will also be done there, which should additionally enable packages.debian.org to display those files for all archives (run by FTPMaster). This update is scheduled for the upcoming week, DSA already gave me the needed bits and pieces on a host so I can do it without breaking security during the process. We currently export this metadata set only to the packages.debian.org host. We do want to provide it to more, but I am waiting for a reply from DSA as to which machine I should use for the open access to those files. When I have that reply it should be available for you all. As a sidenote from that: If you need to compute any data that has to do with the Debian archive (information out of source/binary packages or something around it) and if you do that with your own scripts - you are most likely doing it wrong. Talk to us. We might be able to help you extracting the data you need and keep it updated. Recent examples for that are the above changelogs, but also things like the package-file-mapping snapshot uses to easily determine which file belongs to which source/version, but also information like the Maintainers index, the Uploaders index and whatnot. The simple way is - ask us. We are processing a shitload of data, it might not be too complicated to let your set fall out somewhere at the side, but if you never ask you will never find out Today we start working on some internals of dak and will have some more discussion on agenda points like data.debian.org and the git source format. We already had some words on other points, but those are ones which will take a long time more to fix, like generally reworking the internals of our database to enable us having multiple archives with pretty different access levels inside one machine. (Think of security archive on ftpmaster host. You want to ensure embargoed security issues actually stay embargoed until they are released. Means a good set of neccessary changes inside the database to handle this. We have ideas, but getting them implemented will take a bit).

---

And of course we had been out for food too, helps to stay alive. Turkish restaurant. All nice and well - until they told us they have NO BAKLAVA. Args. Suckers. They ruined this year! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. I wish them a windows OS for their live! If not worse! (Can it be worse than windows?) ;-)

Given the impending deprecation of vservers, I've decided to make the switch to KVM on my laptop. Although lxc is a closer approximation to vservers, I decided to go with KVM due to it's support in Virtual Machine Manager. My first step was to confirm that my CPU would support kvm:

egrep -o "svm vmx" /proc/cpuinfo

If that command outputs either svm or vmx (depending on whether you have Intel or AMD hardware) then your CPU supports virtualization. I'm working on a host machine called chicken, which has a logical volume called vg_chicken0. All vservers on chicken operate on a root filesystem that is backed by their own logical volume. In this post, I'll describe the steps to convert the vserver hobo (which operates on a filesystem mounted on the host in /var/lib/vservers/hobo and is backed by the logical volume called vg_chicken0-hobo_root). Both chicken and hobo are running debian squeeze. vservers don't have a kernel installed or grub. KVM virtual servers need both. I was hoping I could simply enter the vserver, install both a kernal and grub and be ready to go. However, grub installation will fail miserably because grub can't figure out how to install on the underlying disk (which is hidden from the vserver). Next, I tried launching a kvm instance, passing a debirf generated ISO with the -c (cdrom) option. However, grub recognized that it was being installed onto a device that did not have a partition table (the logical volume was directly formatted with a file system). So, since I had disk space to spare, I created a new logical volume:

lvcreate --size 5GB --name hobo_root_new vg_chicken0

I then added a gpt partition table (why not prepare for the coming 2TB disks?) and created two partitions. One partition for grub2 and one for everything else:

parted /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root_new mklabel gpt
parted /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root_new unit s mkpart biosboot 2048 4095 
parted /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root_new set 1 bios_grub on 
parted /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root_new unit s mkpart primary 4096

When prompted for the end of the last partition, choose: -1 and accept the adjustment. I had to eyeball cat /proc/partitions to figure out which dm device was the second partition (dm-19). I then created a file system:

mkfs -t ext3 /dev/dm-19

Mounted it:

mount /dev/dm-19 /mnt

And rsync'ed the data:

rsync -a /var/lib/vservers/hobo/ /mnt/

With the data in place, I chroot'ed and installed the packages I needed. When prompted, I chose not to install grub to the disk, because I wanted to wait until I had an environment in which the proper disk would be available to grub as it will when the virtual server boots (see below):

chroot /mnt
mount /proc
aptitude install linux-image-2.6-amd64 grub2
umount /proc
exit

Then, I cleaned up:

umount /mnt
umount /var/lib/vservers/hobo
lvremove vg_chicken0/hobo_root
lvrename vg_chicken0/hobo_root_new hobo_root
dmsetup remove /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root_newp1
dmsetup remove /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root_newp2
kpartx -d /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root

And I removed it from /etc/fstab. Next, I created a new kvm virtual server, using the disk /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root and passing a debirf cd image with -c: virt-install --name hobo --ram 512 --disk /dev/mapper/vgchicken0-hoboroot -c /usr/local/share/debian/ISOs/debirf-rescuesqueeze2.6.32-5-vserver-amd64.iso After logging in, I installed grub2 (aptitude update; aptitude install grub2) and then I installed grub:

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/
grub-install --no-floppy --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda

After running grub-install, edit /mnt/boot/grub/device.map so it reads:

(hd0) /dev/sda

Then, rerun grub-install command. I tried generating the grub.cfg file, but got an error message indicating that grub-probe would not detect the device providing / (because I was running on a ram file system from debirf). I added the following to /mnt/etc/fstab:

/dev/sda2  /     ext3 errors=remount-ro 0 1
proc       /proc proc defaults          0 0

And then re-generate the initrd image:

chroot /mnt
mount /proc
update-initramfs -u

So, I rebooted the virtual machine by typing:

exit
reboot

This dropped me into a grub shell. I manually typed:

root (hd0,gpt2)
linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda2 ro
initrd /initrd.img
boot

Once booted, I logged in a completed the task with:

update-grub

I ve been sitting on this one since more than a month. I ve contacted upstream on the 19.08.2010 and the Debian maintainer on the 02.09.2010. No reaction from them till today, and no, my spamfilter does not eat mail ;) Still, I won t tell you the name of the software (but you could easily guess or check ) So let s put the grey hat on and begin ;) Foreword: when I write spam-filter, I mean some DNSBL/SPF/blah filter, not SpamAssassin, crm114 or other content-based filters. common spam-filters There are plenty of spam-filters out there which work after the following schema:

for check in checks:
    if check(mail) == BAD:
        reject(mail)
        break

And the checks often look like this:

def check(mail):
    errors = False
    result = some_magic(mail)
    if not errors: return result
    else: return GOOD

Here some_magic is a function that do the actual checks (DNSBL lookups etc) and which stores possible happened errors in errors. If an error occurred, it s safer to say the mail was good (or at least not bad) than bad. the problem This looks like a sane approach on the first sight: iterate over all checks and execute them until a mail is found to be spam (and the corresponding check did not end up in an error (imagine some weird DNS error for DNSBL or SPF checks here)). But then the author realizes that the errors might be global , like with DNS: when the first check notices that it can t resolve anything (ie. it ran into a DNS timeout three times in a row), the second check (which also utilizes DNS queries) will most probably result in an error too. After this he adds a global counter for DNS errors and skips all the checks that use DNS if this counter is >=3. Great idea , you say, saving resources is good . Bad idea , I say The reason is simple: DNSError != DNSError. Why? The local resolver might be broken, then every DNS query will end up with an error and DNS-based checks should be really disabled. The first three (out of eg. ten) DNSBLs might be down, but that s not a reason to skip the other seven and the SPF check. Etc Now let s assume all configured DNSBLs are working properly, so is the local resolver and the checks are:

checks = [check_HELO, check_SPF, check_DNSBL]

How could one attack this filter? the attack Set up the following zone

spam.example.com IN NS ns1.example.com
spam.example.com IN NS ns2.example.com
spam.example.com IN NS ns3.example.com
spam2.example.com IN MX mx1.spam.example.com
spam2.example.com IN MX mx2.spam.example.com
spam2.example.com IN MX mx3.spam.example.com
spam2.example.com IN MX mx4.spam.example.com
ns1.example.com IN A 10.1.1.1
ns2.example.com IN A 10.2.2.2
ns3.example.com IN A 10.3.3.3

and greet the to-be-spammed-MTA with EHLO client1.spam.example.com
What happens? The spam-filter tries to resolve client1.spam.example.com in check_HELO to check whether the hostname matches the IP-address the connection is coming from, fails three times (there are no reachable DNS servers in 10.0.0.0/8) and continues with the next two checks, but these are skipped because of previous DNS errors. As no checks could identify the mail as being spam, the mail is delivered to the users mailbox. With some creativity this can also be used in SPF records (via spam2.example.com), sender-domains etc. conclusion If you want to save resources by skipping DNS-based checks after another (DNS-based) check failed don t! Think whether this is really the same error you are seeing Additionally this can be used as a sort of DoS against the not said software: according to the logs each of my tries needed between 30 and 36 seconds (!) to complete imagine some hundred simultaneous requests the end You think I did something wrong with that post? Throw the first stone then, I don t care.

So a while back I blogged about maintainable test suites. One of the things I ve been doing since is fiddling with the heart of the fixtures concept. To refresh your memory, I m defining fixture as some basic state you want to reach as part of doing a test. For instance, when you ve mocked out 2 system calls in preparation for some test code that represent a state you want to reach. When you ve loaded sample data into a database before running the actual code you want to make assertions about that also represents a state you want to reach. So does simply combining three or four objects so you can run some code. Now, there are existing frameworks in python for this sort of thing. testresources and testscenarios both go some way towards this (and I and to blame for them ), so does the zope testrunner with layers, and the testfixtures project has some lovely stuff as well. And this is without even mentioning py.test! There are a few things that you need from the point of view of running a test and establishing this state:

• You need to be able to describe the state (e.g. using python code) that you wish to achieve.
• The test framework needs to be able to put that state into place when running the test. (And not before because that might interfere with other tests)
• And the state needs to be able to be cleaned up.

Large test suites or test suites dealing with various sorts of external facilities will also often want to optimise this process and put the same state into place for many tests. The (and I m not exaggerating) terrible setUpClass and setUpModule and other similar helpers are often abused for this. Why are they terrible? They are terrible because they are fragile; there is no (defined in the contract) way to check that the state is valid for the next test, and its common to see false passes and false failures in tests using setUpClass and similar. So we also need some way to reuse such expensive things while still having a way to check that test isolation hasn t been compromised. Having looked around, I ve come to the conclusion we ll all benefit if there is a single core protocol for doing these things, something that can be used and built on in many different ways for many different purposes. There was nothing (that I found) that actually met all these requires and was also tasteful enough that folk might really like using it. I give you fixtures . Or on Launchpad. This small API is intended to be a common contract that all sorts of different higher level test libraries can build on. As such it has little to no policy or syntatic sugar. It does have a nice core, integration with pyunit.TestCase, and I m going to add a library of useful generic fixtures (like temporary directories, environment isolators and so on) to it. I d be delighted to add more committers to the project, and intend to have it be both Python 2.x and 3.x compatible (if its not already my CI machine isn t back online after the move yet, I m short of round tuits). Now, if you re writing some code like:

class MyTest(TestCase):
    def setUp(self):
        foo = Foo()
        bar = Bar()
        self.quux = Quux(Foo(), Bar())
        self.addCleanup(self.quux.done)

You can make it reusable across your code base simply by moving it into a fixture like this:

class QuuxFixture(fixtures.Fixture):
    def setUp(self):
        foo = Foo()
        bar = Bar()
        self.quux = Quux(Foo(), Bar())
        self.addCleanup(self.quux.done)
class MyTest(TestCase, fixtures.TestWithFixtures):
    def setUp(self):
        self.useFixture(QuuxFixture)

I do hope that the major frameworks (nose, py.test, unittest2, twisted) will include the useFixture glue themselves shortly; I will offer it as a patch to the code after giving it some time to settle. Further possibilities include declared fixtures for tests, and we should be able to make setUpClass better by letting fixtures installed during it get reset between tests.

There are corners of the Internest where foolish people congregate, and invent stories. These foolish stories are then read as gospel by trusting people, and reposted, until the original made-up source is concealed from view. As an attempt to stem this flow of disinformation, here are some commonly held but incorrect beliefs about the Mono framework, and an explanation of the reality of the situation, as far as I understand it. The next Mono version is co-developed with Microsoft There is a grain of truth behind this one, but it s a gross mischaracterisation. Mono 2.8, when it ships, will bundle, for convenience, a number of Free Software libraries, which are released by Microsoft under a license considered Free Software by the Free Software Foundation, the Ms-PL. These are:

• System.Web.Mvc and System.Web.Mvc2: ASP.NET MVC, a library for writing ASP.NET web pages with a model-view-controller design, similar to Rails for Ruby. This is not news System.Web.Mvc has been bundled in Mono since Mono 2.4.2 (June 25th 2009). System.Web.Mvc2 has been bundled in Mono since Mono 2.6.7 (July 14th 2010).
• System.Numerics: Mono re-uses Microsoft s implementation of BigInteger.cs from the Dynamic Language Runtime (see below). This is indeed new to Mono 2.8, as it is part of .NET 4.0 (Mono 2.8 targets .NET 4.0 compatibility by default).
• System.Data.Services.Client: The OData SDK client library. This is indeed new to Mono 2.8.
• System.ComponentModel.Composition: The Managed Extensibility Framework, a library for writing and using plugins. This is similar in scope to the existing Mono.Addins project. This is indeed new to Mono 2.8, although it was added to Mono Trunk in 2009.
• System.Web.Extensions: Microsoft Ajax, a library for using Ajax inside ASP.NET projects. This is not news MicrosoftAjaxLibrary has been bundled in Mono since Mono 1.2.6 (11th December 2007).
• Microsoft.Scripting.Core and Microsoft.Dynamic: The Dynamic Language Runtime is a framework permitting implementation of dynamic languages (such as Python or Ruby) on top of the core .NET runtime. It is used for IronPython and IronRuby, amongst others. The DLR has very recently changed license from Ms-PL to Apache 2.0, but the version bundled in Mono is still under the older license. This is not news the DLR has been bundled in Mono since Mono 2.6 (14th December 2009).

So, to summarise, there are five Free Software libraries written by Microsoft under the Ms-PL included in Mono 2.8 but only two of those five are new, and none of them were co-developed in any meaningful sense. Mono development is dead There have been reports that Mono development has ended, on the basis that no commits have been made to Novell s Subversion server for a few weeks. However, these reports miss one minor detail Mono has moved to Github.com. There were 35 commits from 9 different people to the main mono.git repository (of dozens of repositories under the main Mono project) in the last 2 days, at time of writing far from dead. Mono lacks features found in Microsoft.NET Mono lacks libraries found in Microsoft.NET, such as the Windows Presentation Framework GUI toolkit. In terms of features, i.e. things implemented at a compiler or runtime level, Mono is typically more advanced. This is helped in no small part by Mono s Free Software development model, allowing experimentation and what if changes to the core runtime which a sluggish corporate behemoth like Microsoft cannot accommodate. To give three real-world examples, Mono allows embedding of its compiler as a service, and provides a REPL shell this is a planned feature for .NET 5.0, but has been available for years in Mono; Mono.Simd provides a number of data structures which will run on any version of Mono or Microsoft.NET, but will use optimized CPU extensions like SSE when run on a sufficiently new version of Mono, on an appropriate architecture as far as I m aware, there is nothing like this available or planned for Microsoft.NET. Mono is able to produce fully compiled, static executables which do not need to JIT anything at runtime this is used for iPhone compilation, for example, where JITters are not permitted. There is no comparable feature in Microsoft.NET. Clearly, Microsoft.NET can only be thought of as more featureful if one defines features in terms of does it have lots of libraries? in terms of functionality, Mono is ahead. Mono can sneak onto your system without your knowledge If you don t have the mono-runtime package installed, you can t run Mono apps. It is possible to install some Mono apps alongside the awful-yet-popular mononono equivs package, since the popular equivs script fails to place Conflicts on the correct packages (F-Spot will be blocked, Tomboy will not). No package in Debian or Ubuntu embeds its own copy of the Mono runtime, and we have no plans to make any changes to packaging which would allow execution of any C# application without mono-runtime installed. If one is using a different OS, then things may be different e.g. The Sims 3 for Mac & PC uses embedded Mono, which you wouldn t know about without looking. Canonical are pursuing a pro-Mono agenda, and are responsible for it being pushed in Debian Mono development has been happening in Debian for longer than Canonical has existed the first upload was made in April 2002. Ubuntu is made primarily from software already available in Debian deemed of sufficient quality, and when F-Spot and Tomboy became parts of the default Ubuntu desktop system in 2006, both pieces of software were already available in Debian and deemed of sufficient quality. Nobody working on Mono in Debian is paid by Canonical actually, that s not entirely true, three packages related to accessibility are officially maintained by someone who was hired by Canonical after doing the initial packaging work when he worked for Novell. But the Mono runtime itself, Canonical have no influence over its direction in Debian. As for a pro-Mono agenda , they ve always taken an extremely pragmatic approach to language choice, never showing any real preference for one language or another when it comes to app selection. They don t exhibit any overt anti-Mono policies, which is not the same thing. The names of people contributing to Mono in Debian are not secret check the pkg-mono team page on Alioth. The System.Windows.Forms namespace is protected by Microsoft patents The truth is, nobody knows for sure if SWF, or any other part of Mono, or any other framework such as Vala or Python, is covered by Microsoft patents. The way the US patent system is contrived, it is actively dangerous to check whether something contains any patents when you write it, as you are liable for triple damages should it later emerge that there WAS a patent, even if your searching missed the fact. You cannot patent an API or namespace only a specific implementation of a software concept, in those countries where software patents are permitted. There has never been any evidence shown that Mono s implementation of SWF, or indeed any part of Mono, infringes any Microsoft-held patents, because if that were the case, then the code would be rewritten to avoid the issue much like the approach taken by Linux kernel developers when a patent becomes apparent. The belief within the Mono community is that the core parts of Mono as defined in ECMA334/335 are safe (they are covered by the Microsoft Community Promise patent grant); any of the Ms-PL libraries mentioned above is definitely safe (Ms-PL includes an explicit patent grant); and the rest of the package is likely safe too (on the basis that it is a named component of the Open Innovation Network s list of protected software and on the basis that there s unlikely to be anything patentable in one of many implementations of basic ideas like database connectors). Nobody knows for sure, because that s how the system works. But, again, nobody knows for sure that Microsoft patents don t apply to other frameworks such as Python there is simply a belief and an assumption that they do not. MonoDevelop contributors removed GPL code from MonoDevelop, in an attack on the GPL This is somewhat disingenuous, given MonoDevelop is LGPL. The MonoDevelop team excised the remaining GPL code (and there wasn t much of it) in order to grant greater Freedom to developers. Previously, the entire MonoDevelop IDE was a GPL combination, meaning any add-ins for the IDE also needed to be GPL, regardless of developer choice. Now, any developer can write an add-in for MonoDevelop, using the license of their choice, whether another Free license like the Mozilla Public License, or a proprietary closed-source add-in. They are still welcome to produce GPL add-ins, if they want to, as well. Mono won t run random Microsoft.NET apps anyway, so isn t really cross-platform Actually, this one is often true. When developers write apps for Windows primarily, they rarely take the time to think is this the correct way to do it? and will often plough on with an assumption about the Windows way of doing things. It might be simple things like filesystem assumptions (assuming a case-insensitive filesystem, or assuming a backslash is used to separate directories, not a forward slash). It might be more involved, such as using P/Invokes into Windows-specific C libraries, when a more cross-platform alternative is possible. So, often, random applications for Microsoft.NET won t run on Mono. The reverse is also true F-Spot or GNOME Do are fairly heavily tied to Linux (or to UNIX-like OSes with X11, at any rate), through the libraries they invoke being fairly platform-specific. You can write platform-specific Java, with one quick piece of JNI, too. It should be noted, however, that Mono makes the chance of .NET applications being ported to Linux (and/or Mac) much more likely, since even in the worst case scenario, a company only needs to fix a portion of their source to make it cross-platform. The Mono team have a tool called MoMA, which will scan an application and its libraries, and give you detailed reports on the app s portability. This info is used at both ends by app vendors who want to become more portable, and by the Mono team who want to fill in the most frequently encountered blanks. And, it should be stressed, writing cross-platform apps is entirely possible if one desires it e.g. the IRC client Smuxi is pure cross-platform C#, and the executables compiled on Mono on Linux will run fine on Microsoft.NET on Windows. Portability in this direction is important too consider how many people have been introduced to Free Software thanks to availability of Free apps on Windows like OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Pidgin or GIMP. You can download Tomboy for Windows, and work is ongoing on fixing Banshee portability issues (which are mostly caused by gStreamer). Mono on Android is a terrible idea which will be super slow There are two efforts to enable developers to write Android applications with Mono a paid proprietary product from Novell called MonoDroid, and an untitled porting effort by big-name Android hacker Koushik Dutta. I have no insight into MonoDroid since it hasn t been released yet, but Koush did some benchmarks of his work which exhibited some remarkable figures compared to Dalvik (and even compared to Sun Java for ARM). Those numbers haven t been updated to reflect the Froyo Dalvik JITter, but Mono on Android is still very exciting from a performance perspective. Mono isn t really Free Software The source code is all available under Free Software licenses. So, um, yes it is. We don t need Mono because we have $LANG By the same logic, we don t need $LANG because we have Mono. By all means, use the language of your choice other developers will use the language of their choice too. If you want to use Vala or Python or Java, then by all means, go ahead. It doesn t mean there s no room for more languages, better suited to other usage patterns. Haskell is great for some types of development, so is Fortran, and so is C#. You might not need Mono because of $LANG, but there are others in the world with different needs. Mono apps are all slow, and crash your computer, and stuff No userland app can crash your Linux system, unless there s a bug in the kernel, or you have some severe problems with your hardware. If you ve ever observed a crash as a result of running a Mono app, then it s really coincidence that Mono is tickling whichever part of your system is busted. As for slow startup time may well be slower than for apps written in C or Vala. There s a delay due to the JITter needing to compile all the libraries used by the application (we may AOT the most common libraries in a future Mono package version, at upstream s recommendation). Once an app is running, it should be fast compared to a Python app, and memory-light compared to a Java app. The new garbage collector in Mono 2.8 should also offer significant improvements to performance, especially under heavy workloads. Ubuntu s default GTK+ themes require Mono This is my favourite recent nonsense to emerge from the Internest. There are reports mostly restricted to IRC and blog comments, that (paraphrasing here) removing Mono removes the Ubuntu themes . Here s the reality: in Ubuntu 10.04, a new visual style was implemented throughout the distro. As part of this, small icons (e.g. notification area icons) were set to be black-and-white by default, and colourised when attention is needed (e.g. the power-off icon turns red when a reboot is needed, the messaging indicator turns green when there s a new message). All of these new monochrome icons are in a package named ubuntu-mono . Removing the ubuntu-mono icon package will also remove the new Ubuntu GTK+ themes, in the light-themes package. So there s your explanation: the themes have a dependence on some monochrome icons, not on the Mono framework.

Note: The title is intentionally unclear; it can be read both as virtual failures and failures of virtual hardware , and I'm not sure which one is the better for the cases below. One of the funny things about virtualization is how virtual hardware fails. It often happens that my NFS-stored virtual machine images suffer an NFS glitch or something, at which point one can see in the kernel logs:

kernel: mptscsih: ioc0: attempting task abort! (sc=ffff880018320100)
kernel: sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 38 00 00 08 00
kernel: mptscsih: ioc0: task abort: FAILED (sc=ffff880018320100)
kernel: mptscsih: ioc0: attempting target reset! (sc=ffff880018320100)
kernel: sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 38 00 00 08 00
kernel: mptscsih: ioc0: target reset: SUCCESS (sc=ffff880018320100)
kernel: mptscsih: ioc0: attempting task abort! (sc=ffff880018320100)
kernel: sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 38 00 00 08 00
kernel: mptscsih: ioc0: task abort: FAILED (sc=ffff880018320100)
kernel: mptscsih: ioc0: attempting task abort! (sc=ffff88001eefcc00)
kernel: sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 98 01 a7 00 00 08 00
kernel: mptscsih: ioc0: task abort: FAILED (sc=ffff88001eefcc00)
kernel: mptscsih: ioc0: attempting target reset! (sc=ffff880018320100)
kernel: sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 38 00 00 08 00
kernel: mptscsih: ioc0: target reset: SUCCESS (sc=ffff880018320100)

While the NFS transient issues are probably a real bug, I have this image of a state machine inside the driver trying over and over the same error paths, in a futile attempt at fixing the hardware , and not locking onto/matching the real hardware behaviour. Or, this most recent case during boot and resource probing:

kernel:  e1000: 0000:00:08.0: e1000_probe: The EEPROM Checksum Is Not Valid
kernel:  /*********************/
kernel:  Current EEPROM Checksum : 0x031a
kernel:  Calculated              : 0x031a
kernel:  Offset    Values
kernel:  ========  ======
kernel:  00000000: 08 00 27 f6 f3 9b 00 00 ff ff 00 00 00 00 00 00
kernel:  00000010: 00 00 00 00 08 44 1e 00 86 80 0e 10 86 80 40 30
kernel:  00000020: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
kernel:  00000030: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
kernel:  00000040: 00 00 61 70 0c 28 c8 00 c8 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
kernel:  00000050: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 06
kernel:  00000060: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
kernel:  00000070: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 1a 03
kernel:  Include this output when contacting your support provider.
kernel:  This is not a software error! Something bad happened to your hardware or
kernel:  EEPROM image. Ignoring this problem could result in further problems,
kernel:  possibly loss of data, corruption or system hangs!
kernel:  The MAC Address will be reset to 00:00:00:00:00:00, which is invalid
kernel:  and requires you to set the proper MAC address manually before continuing
kernel:  to enable this network device.
kernel:  Please inspect the EEPROM dump and report the issue to your hardware vendor
kernel:  or Intel Customer Support.
kernel:  /*********************/
kernel:  e1000: 0000:00:08.0: e1000_probe: Invalid MAC Address
kernel:  e1000: 0000:00:08.0: e1000_probe: (PCI:33MHz:32-bit) 00:00:00:00:00:00
kernel:  e1000: eth0: e1000_probe: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Connection

This is an emulated Intel NIC under VirtualBox. I have never seen it before, and it went away after a reboot. The most funny thing is the This is not a software error! message well, it definitely is :), but the driver has no way to know that. I think that these software-driven failures probably trigger some obscure error handling paths; I assume that the usual failures for real versus virtual hardware are quite different in nature, and that recovery is again different. This leads to using the wrong strategy for recovery, but fortunately nothing is really broken, just in the wrong state Since I'm not familiar with low-level driver details, I might be wrong of course; I'm just speculating on what I think goes on inside the driver. I'm not even mentioning virtual clock issues, as those are no longer funny

Last month I gave a presentation on the interaction between Android and kernel upstream at Linuxcon. The video for that is now available here (requires registration). Contrary to stories you may have heard, I do not dropkick anyone through a window.

There's some parallels between the Android/upstream scenario and Canonical's approach to upstream. Mark wrote a lengthy defence of Canonical's focus on components that they feel need development, while not putting development effort into things they feel are good enough already. That's pretty consistent with the discussions I had with him at the Ubuntu development meeting in Oxford over six years ago. Back then the focus was on taking all the excellent software that already existed and concentrating on providing it as a single polished and integrated product. It was successful - what's easy to forget now is that the first release of Ubuntu was massively more usable out of the box than any other Linux distribution available at the time, and it's absolutely undeniable that its release spurred increased efforts on the part of competitors. But I don't think the same focus is being applied any more.

The most obvious (and most controversial) example is the Ayatana project. Ayatana's a pretty explicit statement that Canonical don't view the existing Gnome UI as being suitable for their vision of the Linux desktop. That's absolutely fine. However, unlike many of the papercut projects, Ayatana is a set of complete reimplementations of functionality that behave differently to their upstream equivalents. There's no meaningful sense in which that's not a fork of Gnome. And, let me emphasise, I don't think that's a bad thing.

Let's go back to Android. While we talk about how much we'd have preferred it if Google had interacted with upstream before implementing wakelocks, the realistic outcome is that there's no way that we'd have accepted them even if they'd been posted years before hardware shipped. If there'd been a productive outcome to that aspect of the conversation it would have involved Android having a very different power management policy. Sometimes you're not going to convince people that something is better without implementing it and seeing how well it works. The problem with wakelocks is not that they exist or that Google feels they work better than the alternative, but that they end up integrated into drivers in a way that can cause divergence between mainline and Android.

Ayatana potentially has the same outcome. At some level, well-integrated applications have to be aware of the environment in which they're running. The application indicator patches are an example of that. Carrying conditional code increases maintenance burden, reduces test coverage and is a net loss in the long run. If upstream Gnome never gains support for this functionality, and if Ubuntu continues to depend on it, then Canonical have a delta that they'll have to carry forever. That benefits nobody.

Forking because you believe that your approach is better is a completely valid development model, but in the long run can cause problems if you don't have a long-term strategy for how to resolve that fork. For all we criticise Google's ability to get Android code into the mainline kernel, they've put orders of magnitude more effort into doing so than Canonical have in terms of getting Ayatana's code into mainline Gnome. This isn't a function of Google's relative size - the Android kernel team is on the order of 10 people. It's not enough of a difference to explain the disparity.

Canonical would be perceived as much better team players if there was an indication of their long-term plan in terms of Unity and the Ayatana projects and getting that code into mainline Gnome and integrating with the Gnome shell. It's completely unsurprising that they're viewed with distrust until that happens.

I always wondered why backups of my sever using duplicity are so huge, but simply looking at list of files to include seemed to be correct. However I should really spend more time by reading documentation, because now it was obvious to me that the file list is simply wrong. What a small difference in file list:

- /var/lib/vservers/
+ /var/lib

Versus the old one:

+ /var/lib
- /var/lib/vservers/

So I don't forget it, since recent sudo package resets environment even for $HOME, the working sudoers (5) for me is:

Cmnd_Alias PBUILDER = /usr/sbin/pbuilder, /usr/sbin/cowbuilder
Defaults!PBUILDER env_keep+=HOME You may have to adjust the commands, YMMV.

The Exoclimes conference ended on an interesting perennial problem: what should we call these things we work on? The climate folks pointed out what the astronomers have grown used to: the telephone numbers we use as planet names. The two most studied Hot Jupiters, for example, are HD209458b and HD189733b. Come on, we could do better than that. In fact the naming worries started earlier when Frank Selsis asked people to avoid calling the planets he works on "super-Earths" (or should that be Super-Earths?). Dimitar Sasselov had accidentally kicked up a kerfuffle in the media a few weeks back by calling them "Earth-like" planets, when he meant "Earth-sized" planets. Selsis pointed out non-scientists will interpret "super-Earth" to mean "like Earth, only Better!", when we mean its just a bigger ball of rock and ice than Earth. But what to call them? Well, at least one planet already has a name, sort of: HD 209458b is frequently called 'Osiris'. And there is a published list of possible planet names. But Osiris the Egyptian god is more famous than Osiris the planet, confusing google. And people are going to assume things based on the planet names: are we really going to name a planet Vulcan? One suggestion was that if we found a system with seven planets we could call them after the Seven Dwarfs, but this was ruled out: don't mention the war (but dwarfs could also mean brown dwarfs!) At the end of the conference, there was show of hands: who agreed with naming planets? of about 100 present, all in favour, none against. The delegate to the IAU commision on the matter, which had voted against, duly noted. Perhaps we will name them then. Tags names, exoplanets, astronomy

When I blogged about microblogging using Twitter a while ago, I got some suggestions regarding Identi.ca in the comments. I did not know about Identi.ca at that time, but decided to give it a try. Identi.ca is a service like Twitter based on StatusNet, an open source microblogging platform. After using both services in parallel for a while, with constant frustration about the unreliable Identi.ca -> Twitter gateway, I now finally decided to completely drop my account on Twitter.

Unfortunately something got miserably wrong while playing with the Identi.ca -> Twitter gateway last week, I somehow lost all my subscribers and subscriptions, so please resubscribe to my account.

[Nothing related to Debian here, move on if you don't care about my recurring obsession with the end of the world, Cassandra pains, or Big Phat Living Room Revolution yearnings].

Although I am still looking for a community of anarcho-primitivists that want to accept me joining their frugal living, and simply slip off the social construct, the system, the fucking face of earth, call it what you will, I could find some comfort in my favourite feminist blogger's take on the subject of my midlife crisis regarding ecology, capitalism, patriarchy, child bearing, overpopulation, meat consumption and all the rumination of consuming thoughts that (still) make my life miserable and have kept me running away from human contact for a year.

[Emphasis mine]

At what point does human culture depart from the Natural? With the invention of computers? TV? Cars? The cotton gin? Electricity? Taco stands? Gunpowder? The printing press? Written language? Shoes? Crop cultivation? Yurts? The wheel? Did humans become unnatural when the good old days of picturesque, endless agrarian toil, feudal oppression, unchecked disease, ignorance, and death from dysentery at 35 turned into the bad new days of urban post-industrial capitalism where a pound of fair-trade organic coffee costs $12.99 and your email inbox is full of spam?

ah. Everything humans do, or have ever done, is natural. We can t do anything else. The idea that modern culture is un-natural is nostalgic and inaccurate. Living off the grid in a yurt is good in some absolute sense, whereas driving an SUV from a suburban bungalow to the stripmall is bad ? Come on. This a romantic, but misguided view. The cosmic reaction to a 20 Ford Expedition is the same as to a sanctimonious Prius: bupkis. The universe doesn t give a fuck about you or your lifestyle choices. It doesn t give a fuck about the economy, oil spills, or civil unrest in Blargistan. It doesn t give a fuck about katydids. Eventually our whole planet will be erased from space, and the galaxy won t bat an eye. The inevitable extinction of our species (imminent, according to research here at Spinster Laboratories) via the exhaustion of available resources is as natural as a fresh-picked peach. As Andre 3000 and other dude philosophers have observed, nothing is forever.

Yes, yes, when people use the word natural what they really mean is free of chemical additives and maybe some of the assorted hippie concepts that go with that narrative. Barter economies, home furnishings made from bamboo, vegan cookbooks, living in the country. While I would argue that it is just as natural for people to put chemical additives in things as it is to not put chemical additives in things, I admit that it is appealing to fantasize that the source of human misery is an unnatural isolation from Nature, and that doing yoga on an organic rubber mat and drinking organic spinach smoothies will put me back in sync with the cosmos.

But alas, I m already in sync with the cosmos, and so are you. In other words, this is it. This is what we ve become, and this is what we get. Which is not to say that a person can t fantasize about a verdant paradise full of songbirds and polar bears and Bengal tigers, untouched by human influence. Only, that world isn t a world we could actually live in. The minute you add contented children, lazy from a carefree day at the swimming hole, eating ripe plums on the porch at sunset to that scenario, natural history changes, and it s right back to our scorched-earth dystopia. Our giant brains use up resources, it s as simple as that.

As long as we re still here, though, we might as well try to make the best of it.

http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2010/06/19/heads-up-art-week-starts-on-monday/

Though the comfort is somewhat ephemeral, because deep inside, I know she's wrong, I know another way is feasible, but I have given up already, I have very well come to terms with extiction, I get an enormous pleasure from the thought of the very well deserved human mass suicide-by-cop^Wnature, and in fact, I trust and hope it will save me personally from facing the hard times ahead, as I am a damn coward, paralized by fear, hopeless about the flock ever getting it (is it so hard, really?), while doing as much as I can but completely overwhelmed by the need of changing a world everyone seems to like just as it is. I can certainly empathize with much more disturbed ways of airing similar anguish, among many other examples, such as The Unabomber, or The Weather Underground. I don't even want to go there as I know violence all too well and it is not fun to be on the receiving end. But I see the screaming desperation behind the motives of acts I am not at the liberty to discuss here. I wonder if consumption of resources in the form of books will numb the disorder or make it worse and what sort of medical arrangement the stablishment has for it. As you click away the previous links will mean nothing to you because a)it is Wikipedia after all, and b)you probably don't even understand what the problem of eating animal corpses is, humans are omnivores after all, and what is all this nonsense about dropping language altogether.

WTF, there was no comfort after all, and I am still a nutjob.

I recently moved withing Canonical from being a paid developer of Bazaar to take on a larger challenge Technical Architect for Launchpad. Its been two months now, and its time to put my head up out of the coal face, have a look around and regroup. When I worked on Bazaar, every day when I started work got up I was working on a tool anyone can use, designed for collaboration upon sourcecode, for people writing software. This is a toolchain component right at the heart of the free software world. Bazaar and tools like it get used everyday to manage, distribute and collaborate on the sourcecode that makes up the components of Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and so forth. Every time someone new starts using Bazaar for a new free or open source project, well I felt happy happy that in my small part I m helping with this revolution we re carrying out. Launchpad is pretty similar to Bazaar in some ways. Obviously they are both free software, both are written in Python, and both are sponsored by Canonical, my employer. And they both are designed to assist in collaboration and communication between free software developers albeit in rather different ways. Bazaar is a tool anyone can install locally, run as a command line, GUI, or local webserver, and share code either centrally (e.g. by pushing to Launchpad), or in a peer to peer fashion, acting as their own server. Launchpad, by contrast is a website which (usually) folk will use as a service in their browser, from the comand line FTP (for package building), ssh (for Bazaar branch pushing or pulling), or even local GUI programs using the Launchpad API service. This makes it more approachable for first time collaborators, but its less able to be used offline, and it has all the usual caveats of web sites : it needs a username and password, it s availability depends on the operators on the team I m part of. So there s a lot less room for error: if we do something wrong, the system is unavailable, and users can t just apt-get install an older release. With Launchpad our goal is to to get all the infrastructure that open source need out of the way, so that they can focus on their code, collaboration within their team and almost uniquely collaboration with other teams. As well as being open source, Launchpad is free for all open source projects to use Ubuntu is our single biggest user they use it for all bugtracking, translation and package building, and have a hugefraction of the total storage overhead in the database. Launchpad is a pretty nice system, so people use it, and as a result (on a technical basis) it is suffering from its own success: small corner cases in the code turn up every day or two, code written years ago to deal with a relatively small data set now has to deal with data sets a thousand or more times larger (one table, for instance, has over 600,000,000 rows in it. For the last two months then, I ve been working on Launchpad. As Technical Architect, I need to ensure that the things that we (users, stakeholders and developers of Launchpad) want to do are supported by the structure of the system : the platform(s) we re building on, the way we approach problems, coding standards and diagnostic tools. That sounds pretty dry and hands off, but I m finding its actually very balanced. I wrote a presentation when I started the job, which encapsulated the challenges I saw in front of the team on this purely technical front, and what I thought I needed to do. I think I was about right in my expectations: On a typical day, I ll be hands on in a problem helping get it diagnosed, talking long term structural changes with someone around how to make things more efficient / flexible / maintainable, and writing a small patch here or there to help move things along. In the two months since I took on this challenge, we ve made significant headway on the problem of performance for Launchpad : many inefficient code paths have been identified and removed, some new infrastructure has been created as is being rolled out to make individual pages faster, and we ve massively increased the diagnostic data we get when things go wrong. We ve introduced facilities for responding more rapidly to issues in the software (but they have to be rolled out across the system) and I hope, over the next 4 months we ll reach the first of my performance goals: for any webpage in Launchpad, it will complete rendering in 99% of the time. (Note that we already meet this goal if you measure the whole system, but this is biased by some pages being very frequently hit and also being very small).

At some point in the past my bookmarks broke in such a way that I wasn't able anymore to alter in any way the bookmarks, deletions, additions, reorganisation, nothing worked.

Way before this event I set up a git repo in my .mozilla directory and committed everything in the directory (except obvious cache files and such) in the repo. I didn't make a cronjob with this since I didn't thought of a proper way to make sure the browser wasn't started (the data might have been inconsistent at commit time), and, since most of the time I have the browser started, it seemed rather useless to try to automate for a very, very small window of time when the browser data would be in a consistent state. As a consequence, I did occasional manual commits in the git repo.

When the bookmarks issue appeared I realised that my last git commit was so old that it didn't made any sense to try to restore since I would have had lost bookmarks, passwords and plugins. So I made a checkpoint commit os the broken profile and resorted to all sorts of manual attempts at fixing the issue, but all my efforts of playing with the bookmarks.* files proved to be useless.

I concluded that icewesel/firefox 3.5.x was using some other mechanism and decided to dig into the issue at some latter time when time allowed me to analyse and fix it. Today was that day.

I began by creating a backup for the bookmarks via the Bookmarks Manager export function. After a hickup, it managed to save a proper bookmarks.html file. I tried to import that file, but the breakage remained.

Then I decided I should prepare for the worst, installed an addon which allowed me to save all stored passwords and created a new account (started firefox from the command line with 'firefox -ProfileManager') with the intention to transplant files from the old files into the new one. Short after that I realised that it would be smarter to commit the new profile, too, import the bookmarks from the backup file and replace the touched files back into the old profile.

After the import and closing the browser, git informed me that the modified files were:

XPC.mfasl
XUL.mfasl
cookies.sqlite
localstore.rdf
places.sqlite
pluginreg.dat
urlclassifier3.sqlite

At this point the modification of the binary .mfasl files looked very ugly to me, but I had a hunch that the only relevant file to my problem was the places.sqlite file and I went on to check the contents of the file with sqlitebrowser. After inspecting also the urlclassifier3.sqlite file (whose contents were unreadable), I decided to give it a try at simply placing the places.sqlite file in the old profile and see if the problem would be fixed that way. After all, I had the whole profile's state in git so any breakage could have been undone easily.

I started firefox using the old profile and the problem was fixed. Yay!

Now I have my bookmarks back and a suggestion for the mozilla people: please don't keep useless files like bookmarks.html in the profile once they become outdated, they are misleading.

P.S.: I still have to think of a way to make automated sane commits. Maybe I'll try to make an iceweasel/firefox addon. This could be a nice idea since I could learn something new, too.

There has been much made of recent reports that roughly half of Americans have an unfavorable view of Islam. And as usual, there are those who will try to claim that Muslims really aren t all that bad, and that Sharia is just set of nice, abstract principles which are all about the protection of life, family, education, religion, property, and human dignity. And on the other side, we have people pointing out that using Sharias as justification, there are countries which are stoning women and chopping off poor people s hands and then forbidding Muslims from arguing about whether such things are just. Worst yet, some of the more public moderate Muslims , such as Iman Rauf, refuse to criticize organizations such as Hamas, on the ground that he is a bridge builder , and it wouldn t help to criticize Hamas s terrorist activities as being anti-Isalmic. OK, so let s grant for the sake of argument the claims that Shariah really is far more than just criminal sanctions, but mainly about exhorting people to live a moral life, and that of the 1,081 pages of the two-volume Arabic text which Sherman A. Jackson (the Arthur F. Thurnau Prfessor of Arabic and Isalamic Studies at the University of Michigan) used to study Shariah, only 60 pages were devoted to criminal sanctions (i.e., the stoning and the cutting off of hands), and only 19 were devoted to Jihad. Let s even further grant the claims made by Humaira Awais Shahid that most Muslims reject Political Islam and are not even arabs. OK. But that case, wouldn t there be more Imans publically disavowing the people who advocate terrorism and suicide bombs as not being Islamic? Not all of them are bridge-builders, are they? And if so, some of them might be better deployed towards saying what Islam is not, and saying that perhaps people who espouse those beliefs are being profoundly unIslamic and saying this loudly outside of their Mosques. Oh, I understand that many Muslims feel that they shouldn t be asked to repudiate the sins of a few crazy terrorists ; just as all Christians shouldn t be held accountable for disturbed crazy rants of a small-time pastor from Gainsville, Florida. But at the same time, it seems to me that Islamic leaders should be eager to say, loudly, that what is being done in the name of their religion in Iran and Nigeria is wrong, and to denounce it. Maybe, some would say, that they are doing that and the media isn t paying attention to them. Well, the Media is surely paying attention to people like Iman Rauf, and he refuses to denounce Hamas! I would gently suggest to those Islamic leaders who feel that they and their faith haven t been given a fair shake, to hire a better PR agency; and make sure that active denunciations of that which they claim does not represent true Islam is shouted from the rooftops; published in press releases; made in press conferences. And actively denounce your fellow Muslims that you feel are shaming your religion, instead of complaining about American Islamophobia. Trying to pretend that there is absolutely no truth in why Americans might be afraid of terrorists who have been hiding under the mantle of your religion is not going to help your cause. There may be truth in the fact that many Americans don t know as much as they should about Islam and Shariah. And there may be truth that American unswerving support of Israel, despite the fact that they acted in profound and unjust ways against the Palestinians, is not only morally and ethically wrong, but has hurt American interests. I certainly believe that to be to true; I am no friend to fundamentalists of any stripe, whether they are Christian, Jewish, or Islamic; and I think the Jewish fundamentalists have almost completely taken over the Israeli political discourse. But all of that is irrelevant if the goal is reduce people e negative views towards Islam. And in any case, if you really believe that attacking innocents, and coercing religion by threatening Muslims who have fallen away from their faith with the death penalty is wrong, then it s wrong regardless of whether those innocents happened to vote for politicians who have been influenced by way too much money from AIPAC. So instead of trying to lecture Americans about their uncritical support of Israel, why not just stand witness to the fact that killing innocents is wrong, and that people who do that are not Islamic, no matter what they claim or how impressive their turban might happen to be? And maybe it might be a good idea to speak out against those who would lend support, whether moral, or financial or logistical, to people who do these unIslamic things in the name of Islam? And it may not be enough to say it once; it needs to be said again and again. Which is why it s important to hire a good PR agency. No related posts.

I thought it's about time to write a short report on my RC bug squashing activities again; nothing spectacular, but maybe it motivats others *hint*

• #558272 libdate-calc-perl: "Date::Calc::Decode_Month(): argument is not a string"
  upload package prepared by ansgar (pkg-perl)
• #578458 src:libcoro-perl: "libcoro-perl: FTBFS: E: Caught signal 'Terminated': terminating immediately"
  more mails to the BTS (pkg-perl)
• #590652 src:megahal: "megahal: build depends on obsolete Tcl/Tk 8.3"
  sponsor QA upload prepared by ansgar
• #591111 src:libdbd-sqlite3-perl: "libdbd-sqlite3-perl: FTBFS: failed tests"
  upload package prepared by carnil with a patch from ntyni (pkg-perl)
• #591678 greylistd: "greylistd-setup-exim4 causes excessive callouts and cause the server to be blacklisted"
  add a comment in the BTS
• #592506 libtest-harness-perl: "libtest-harness-perl: Serious regressions in 3.20-1 solved in upstream Git, probably blocker for stable"
  propose removal from testing (pkg-perl)
• #593145 chrony: "chrony: fails to configure on installation"
  fix init script and upload to DELAYED/2, later cancelled on maintainer's request
• #594708 emerillon: "emerillon: FTBFS due to librest transition 0.6 -> 0.7"
  tag and comment on the BTS
• #596257 libanyevent-perl: "libanyevent-perl: architecture specific constants in an arch:all package"
  upload as arch:any, analysis by ntyni (pkg-perl)

Second Sunday in September -- time for the annual Chicago Half Marathon now in its fourteenth edition (and I have been running it in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 making this and the JPM Chase Corporate Challenge the races I've run most often). And the course was altered this year, alongside with an earlier start as the Bears have their season home opener today. So we started north towards 57th, then running down to 67th, turning east towards the lake at around three miles --- and having the remaining ten miles along the lakefront running up to 31st (the usual turn) and back down to 63rd. I like this course better; let's hope it sticks. Race conditions were fantastic. We had a rainy and gray day yesterday but today is pure bliss. Temperatures around 60 degrees at the 7:00am start, no wind, sunshine and not a cloud in the sky. The race itself went well. I had a pretty brutal running year suffering most of the time from some archilles tendon inflammation. It has gotten better in the last few weeks possibly thanks to some heel cups I now put in the shoes. But I had exactly one run longer than ten miles since the Boston Marathon. So I lost a lot of speed, as well as endurance and was a little nervous as to how I'd do. And considering all this, it went pretty well. I fininished in 1;41:50 or a 7:47 pace. While is easily the slowest half in a number of years, at least I got to run it evenly, pain free and with a negative split (== faster second half) and some gas left for a fast last half mile or so. So maybe I don't have to retire from running just yet. We'll see if I get some speed back in 2011.

A lot is being said on how Ruby is packaged in Debian and Ubuntu. In this post, I m trying to go through the most common myths and give my position as a Debian Ruby maintainer. Note that those are my views, not necessarily those of the other Debian Ruby maintainers. Myth: Ruby is completely outdated in Debian and Ubuntu There s a culture in the Ruby community of always using the latest bleeding-edge version. There s also a culture (though this one has recessed a bit, I think) that it s perfectly fine to change APIs in incompatible ways if it makes the software slightly better. In Debian (and Ubuntu) stable releases, we try to provide a rock-solid version of Ruby that won t be allowed to change API during the support lifetime of a release. Bugfixes for important bugs can be applied, but that s basically all. So it s not surprising that Ruby in released versions of Debian and Ubuntu is behind the latest upstream version. In development branches, we are following the latest upstream versions quite closely. Debian 6.0 squeeze , to be released by the end of the year, includes Ruby 1.8.7-p302, and will include 1.9.2-p0 (the currently of Ruby 1.9.2 in squeeze is currenty a SVN snapshot from beginning of august). There are people interested in installing a packaged Ruby that just works, and other people interested in installing their own version of Ruby (through RVM and such). People in the Ruby community tend to forget about the first category, and consider that, because they install Ruby from source or with RVM, that should be the solution for everybody. We need the Ruby community to respect that different people have different ways of using Ruby, and to stop recommending that everyone using Debian and Ubuntu should install Ruby from source. We also need to leverage the backports services for both Debian and Ubuntu to provide a way to install the latest upstream version on stable releases. The only reason why we are not doing it yet is lack of time. Myth: Ruby is split into a myriad of packages in Debian In the past (pre-2005), a decision was made to split some libraries from the standard library into separate packages. This was motivated by:

• the size of some libraries, like REXML
• the fact that some libraries, like OpenSSL, readline, gdbm and tk require other library packages to be installed
• licensing concerns about shipping some code (a .so) linked with OpenSSL, and some other code (another .so) linked with readline, in the same package.

Most of the split was undone a very long time ago, and the readline and openssl splits were undone this year. The current package in Debian squeeze has:

• ruby1.8: binaries (ruby itself, irb, rdoc)
• libruby1.8: the standard library, except ruby-tk
• libtcltk-ruby1.8: ruby-tk (merging it with libruby1.8 would add several megabytes)
• ri1.8: contains both the ri binary and documentation
• ruby1.8-dev: development headers (to build applications or gems linked against the Ruby C API), and statically built version of the library
• ruby1.8-elisp: Ruby emacs mode
• ruby1.8-examples: Examples
• libruby1.8-dbg: debug symbols

It is always possible to merge more packages, but merging any of the other packages would significantly increase the size of what you get by default, and might discourage people to use it in some contexts (disk space is not always cheap. Think embedded systems and smartphones). Myth: Rubygems is crippled in Debian There are two differences in the rubygems Debian packages. First, gems are installed in /var/lib/gems, not /usr/local/lib/gems. That is because rubygems are seen as state for the Rubygems package, not independant software installed separately. A change for this is currently being discussed, and should be done after the squeeze release. (I don t think that it s reasonable to push that change now). A consequence of installing to /var/lib/gems is that gems binary are outside of $PATH. After the change, gems binary would also be installed in /usr/local/bin. Second, gem update --sytem is disabled in the Debian package, because that would replace code from the Rubygems Debian package with code downloaded from the Internet, and can break your system in subtle ways. We have changed this (in SVN, not in any package in the archive yet) to allow gem update --system if a specific environment variable is set, which gives us the opportunity to display a warning message. Myth: Ruby is slow on Debian Ruby is built with the pthread threading code, because not using it breaks many native Ruby libraries (Ruby-gnome2, for example). And other Linux distributions are doing the same. There are some very old benchmark results floating around in some blogs that show that the pthread code has a performance impact of about 20%. There are been patches for that for a long time (applied in Ruby Enterprise Edition), but they were never properly sent back. Actually, all the discussions about this issue were rumors and blog posts, and there wasn t even a bug report about it! After the bug was reported properly, it was fixed in a timely manner. The fix is not yet included in the Ruby 1.8.7, but is being applied as a patch to the Debian package since 1.8.7.299-2. (So the Debian package is actually newer and faster than upstream Ruby in that regard). What makes Ruby so difficult to maintain in Debian? The main problems we have with Ruby are portability issues. The only officially supported platform for Ruby is IA32 (i386 in Debian), and everything else is best effort. It means that it is not even supported officially on x86_64/amd64! Debian supports a dozen of architectures, and the Ruby package has to work on each of them. Ruby 1.8 is mostly OK nowadays thanks to the help of Debian porters, but we still have serious problems with 1.9.2, since the test suite fails on sparc, hppa, ia64 and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. Why doesn t Ruby use the alternatives system on Debian? The alternatives system provides a way to switch between different software providing the same functionality. Currently, if you want to use Ruby 1.9.2, you need to use the ruby1.9.1 executable (1.9.1 = ruby compatibility version here). The alternatives system would allow to switch ruby to ruby1.9.1 on a system-wide basis. However, the situation of applications and libraries working only with Ruby 1.8 should be clarified: those should use /usr/bin/ruby1.8 instead of /usr/bin/ruby. Another problem is that the way to specify packages dependencies still need to be determined. There s nothing impossible to do about that, it just needs someone to do the work. Where do we go from here? The Ruby developers (or expert users) community is generally very hostile towards Debian. Many harsh words and insults are used in discussions mentioning Debian in the ruby-core@ mailing list, and there are frequent recommendations to avoid the Debian packages and install from sources, which is quite demotivating (Actually, what prompted that blog post is someone calling Debian-specific changes unforgivable). This atmosphere makes it hard to recruit people, and the Debian Ruby teams are completely understaffed, which is clearly the major blocker to improving the situation further. We are 3 co-maintainers for the interpreter packages, and I m the only Debian Developer that is really active on a regular basis in the pkg-ruby-extras team (that does libraries and applications packaging). We desperately need help, but at the same time I have no time to improve our documentation and make it easier to join the team. While I haven t reached a final decision yet, I am also likely to stop doing Ruby work in Debian after squeeze is released, as I am getting increasingly tired and demotivated.

I've heard, over the years, of people spending insane amounts of money on office chairs. On the one hand I accept that you spend a lot of time sitting in chairs when you're working upon a computer. On the left I find the idea of spending 750+ on a chair a little insane. For the past few years I've had a kneeling chair over time this has gotten pretty "squished" and "flat". (Specifically the part where my knees go.) So I decided to get a new chair. What did I buy? a large rubber ball! It's a little weird to walk into the room and see this green ball in front of the keyboard, but it's actually pretty great to sit on. I'm gonna ignore all claims of "excercise" and "healthyness". Sure I find myself shifting around slightly to retain balance, but I'm not at all convinced that such small movements, even over the course of many days, will make any appreciable different to my muscles. Anyway .. That is all I have to say today. ObQuote: "Don't tell anyone we went to war over a woman. " - Mongol (2007)