With the demise of Google Reader, many of us have scrambled to find alternatives which cover many/most of the features we were used to. For me, synchronised access from web and mobile counts quite high, and I want the (Android) mobile experience to be pretty pleasant too. So with that, and like many other folks, I had shifted over to Feedly. And before I carry on, let me say that Feedly actually does pretty well. They handled the onslaught of new users; they also listened and changed their UI a little to be more compact and Reader-alike And most importantly, it mostly just works. Until it doesn't. Around the time Feedly shifted folks to their own cloud-based backend, posts from my very own CRANberries aggregator of CRAN package changes for R started to show only truncated posts. See this screenshot from reading Feedly: and compare it with this one from TheOldReader: which contains the diffstat output, nicely marked up and all. Now, it so happens that I am the creator of the very RSS feed I am consuming here, and I wrote it so that I could read the very diffstat output that is now missing. And I know full well that neither the code, nor the hosting (on my own box), nor any other aspect changed. Before confirming this via TheOldReader, I looked at the RSS output, and I tried other frontend and apps --- and it became clear that the bug seems to be at the Feedly cloud storage level. And trying to be a good sport, I submitted a bug report / suggestion, but to no avail (apart from two other chiming in that they see this elsewhere too). Given that I am the coder behind the feed that is displayed in a truncated manner, I am aware that I am using a code stack that is stale (the original Blosxom static web generator) yet which has not posed another problem anywhere in the decade I used it. Nor does the CRANberries feed pose a problem when aggregated and viewed via the TheOldReader code path, or for that matter via Planet R which also carries (parts of) CRANberries. So for now, I have to either pivot out of the CRANberries RSS reading in Feedly and go directly to the webpage (fine, but cumbersome and in need of a working connection) or use a second subscription mechanism. I appreciate what the TheOldReader folks are doing---presumably with a minor fraction of the resources available to Feedly---and may hang with them for now. But it would be awfully nice if Feedly could sleep off its hangover and fix this. In which case I'd be much happier recommending its service.

this week(end) I was more in the "RC bug fix flow" than in the last weeks, & here are the results:

• #665518 src:clipit: "clipit: Including individual glib headers no longer supported"
  add patch from Michael Biebl, upload to DELAYED/2 (NMU originally prepared by Sebastian Ramacher)
• #701406 src:nagios-plugins: "nagios-plugins: ftbfs with eglibc-2.17"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Robie Basak, upload to DELAYED/2, then cancelled on maintainer's request, who uploaded the fixed package himself
• #707393 src:gorm.app: "gorm.app: FTBFS: GormCore/./obj/libGormCore.so: undefined reference to class_pose_as'"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Julian Taylor, upload to DELAYED/2
• #710768 ganglia-webfrontend: "ganglia-webfrontend: please update libgd dependencies"
  drop dependency on libgd2*, upload to DELAYED/2
• #711800 src:python-poppler: "python-poppler: FTBFS: /usr/bin/make: unrecognized option '--prefix --exec-prefix --includes --libs --cflags --ldflags --extension-suffix --help --configdir'"
  apply changes from Ubuntu / Matthias Klose, upload to DELAYED/2
• #713204 src:voms-api-java: "voms-api-java: FTBFS: cp: cannot stat 'target/site/javadoc/apidocs': No such file or directory"
  upload NMU with BouncyCastle patch prepared by Emmanuel Bourg to DELAYED/2
• #713360 src:regina-normal: "regina-normal: FTBFS: CMake Error: The following variables are used in this project, but they are set to NOTFOUND. PYTHON_LIBRARY"
  apply improved patch from Peter Green, upload to DELAYED/2
• #713450 src:oregano: "oregano: FTBFS: ld: sheet/libsheet.a(grid.o): undefined reference to symbol 'floor@@GLIBC_2.2.5'"
  add patch from Petter Reinholdtsen, upload to DELAYED/2
• #713627 src:rox: "rox: FTBFS: ld: support.o: undefined reference to symbol 'floor@@GLIBC_2.2.5'"
  add patch to link against math lib, upload to DELAYED/2
• #713649 src:gdis: "gdis: FTBFS: gdis.h:269:18: fatal error: glib.h: No such file or directory"
  propose a patch

Sometimes, people show up in our IRC channel #debian-systemd or on our mailing list pkg-systemd-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org and ask how they can help. This blog post answers that question. First of all, whatever you end up doing, please coordinate with us first! Saying hi in our IRC channel or on our mailing list and explaining what you intend to do is all we ask for. In the past, people have filed bug reports with service files that are not idiomatic, and we really need to avoid that. Currently, our biggest task is to add/improve systemd support to individual Debian packages, and this is where we can use a lot of help. We have a dashboard which contains two lists:

1. Packages that ship a service file, but don t use dh-systemd yet.
   These need to be updated to get proper maintscripts (e.g. deb-systemd-helper enable/disable calls, possibly start/stop/restart calls).
2. Packages that ship an init script but no service file yet.
   These need a service file plus dh-systemd support.

Adding a service file and dh-systemd support After you picked a service from the second list in our dashboard, first double-check that there is no bug filed against it yet (the dashboard might be a few hours behind). Then, search for a service file, either upstream or in other distributions such as Arch Linux, Fedora, Gentoo, etc. In case there is no service file yet, write one. Please carefully test the service file (e.g. does starting/stopping/restarting and reloading work) and send it to us for review. Be careful to avoid obvious regressions from the sysvinit init script. That is, don t just write a very simplistic service file that breaks a use-case which formerly worked. If in doubt, ask pkg-systemd-maintainers or chose a different package to work on. Afterwards, add systemd support by using the dh-systemd helper, see https://wiki.debian.org/Systemd/Packaging. The last step is to file a proper bug report against the package that uses our usertag and CCs pkg-systemd-maintainers. See http://bugs.debian.org/714190 for an example. Replacing custom maintscripts with dh-systemd Check if the package currently has any direct systemctl calls in its maintscripts and remove them if so (see http://bugs.debian.org/713853 for an example). Follow https://wiki.debian.org/Systemd/Packaging to add systemd support using the dh-systemd helper. Check whether the maintscripts look good and generate a debdiff to highlight the differences between the old and the new version:

debdiff --controlfiles=ALL OLD_amd64.changes NEW_amd64.changes

Then file a bug report which uses our usertag and CCs pkg-systemd-maintainers. See http://bugs.debian.org/713853 for an example. Thanks! Thank you for helping us and Debian in general!

In my previous post, I explained about the age excuse in Britney. In this post, I will cover the slightly more tricky out of date excuse. A simple example of excuse is:

out of date on mipsel: blinken (from 4:4.8.4-1)

In this simple case, Britney simply states that the binary blinken on mipsel has not yet been rebuilt. Generally, the presence of an excuse like this is sufficient to stop testing migration. The exception to this rule is if the architecture has been marked as not keeping up . At the moment we do not have any such architectures. The tricky part of an out of date -excuse is that Britney simply identifies a symptom and not a cause. In the excuse above, it is not possible to determine if the build failed on that architecture or simply has not finished yet. But the part that probably confuses the most, is when Britney lists binaries no longer built from that source:

out of date on i386: libfsoframework0 (from 0.11.0-1.1)

This case actually happens quite often and is (usually) a sign of a transition has been started. The part that confuses many is that the build-state of their package will be Installed (as in It was built successfully and has been uploaded to the archive ). From there they tend to conclude Britney is broken , where The excuse information is a bit unhelpful might be more accurate. Caveats:

1. If the source package has not yet been built on that architecture, these old binaries are interleaved into the regular list of out of date -binaries.
2. The list of excuses are updated twice a day (and there is also a delay between its update and the PTS picking it up). Thus, if the build-state of your package for that architecture has been Installed for less than 24 hours, you may just want double check before jumping to conclusions.

The problem is that the binary still has reverse dependencies in unstable, so it cannot migrate to testing. When the last reverse dependency has been updated, the FTP masters will usually semi-automatically decruft your package and the excuse will disappear. On the other hand, if the binary still has reverse dependencies, you probably started a transition. In that case, your package will be stuck in unstable until all the reverse dependencies are ready (or, at least, rebuilt to use the replacement package). Generally, it is good if the Release Team was involved before you did this (see this page ). In summary, if your package has Out of date on [architecture] in its excuses it can be one (or more) of:

• Your package is not built yet on the architecture. This is a transient problem, wait for the build servers to build your package.
• Your package FTBFS on that architecture. This is usually a permanent problem where you need to investigate why it happened and how to solve it. Sadly, often it can take weeks before someone files a bug against your package for this build failure, so being proactive might be worth your time.
• The binary is no longer built binary. This is usually a transition. If the binary packages listed has no reverse dependencies in sid and testing, then just wait for the FTP masters to decruft your package.

Thanks to the Qt/KDE team, specially to Maxy who has done most of the packaging and uploading, sid users are now enjoying KDE 4.10.5, including the new KDE PIM stuff that we have held out for the Wheezy release.

I started using KMail2 (inside Kontact) a few days after Wheezy's release, getting it from experimental. And I have to admit that I really like it, just like with KMail1.

But my upgrade did have some bumps on the road, so I'm sharing them here so you can now how I solved them.

Mail import worked as we were waiting: it did work. So it was really useful to hold back Kmail1 until this really worked.

Now, I had a problem with my hard disk: whenever KMail started, it would start accessing it without pause. There where two reasons (for what I could test, I haven't looked at the source to really see if there was some other oddity) for this: I had a nepomuk/virtuoso DB created quite some time ago and initial mail indexing.

The initial mail indexing takes lots of time. For 1GB of DIMAP I had to wait like 5 hours (yes, 5 hours) on a 5600 rpm disk to let it fully finish. My desktop machine, with a faster hard drive, took a little less.

As far as people told me, that should have been enough, but my disk kept crawling. So I remembered someone from the team saying something about people with early-created nepomuk/virtuoso databases will have some speed issues. Mine where more than that, buy trying was worth the shot.

I had nepomuk disabled since I tried it the first version due to this exact problem. So I closed my KDE session and removed the nepomuk/virtuoso data:

rm -r ~/.kde/share/apps/nepomuk/

Then I logged back in KDE and waited (again) the 5 hours to let nepomuk re index my mail, this time totally finishing after 5 hours. Starting from that point, I get some one or two minutes of disk trashing some times I log in (not always), but it's actually not that bad. And I heard that in KDE 4.11 this has been improved a lot, so I should see a better behavior from that point on.

Please understand that this was my trial-and-error fix, it may be possible that someone comes with a better solution :-)

As you might (or might not) know, this summer, I have taken on mentoring of a GSoC project by Simon Chopin (a.k.a. laarmen) which goal is to bring fedmsg, the Fedora Infrastructure message bus, to Debian. Most of the work I ll be talking about here is Simon s work, please send all the praise towards him (I can take the blame, though). What is this about? As the project proposal states, the idea is to provide Debian with a unified, real-time, and open mechanism of communication between its services. This communication bus would allow anyone, anywhere, to start consuming messages and reacting to events happening in Debian s infrastructure:

• trigger a test build on a git push to a source repository
• trigger automated testing (piuparts, lintian) as soon as an upload hits the archive
• get a desktop notification when a package you care about gets changed

When we told upstream about our plan of adapting fedmsg to work on Debian, they were thrilled. And they have been very supportive of the project. How is the project going? Are you excited? I know I m excited. Well, the general idea was easy enough, but the task at hand is a challenge. First of all, fedmsg has a lot of (smallish) dependencies, most of them new to Debian. Thanks to Simon s work during the bonding period, and thanks to paultag s careful reviews, the first batch of packages (the first dependency level, comprising kitchen, bunch, m2ext, grapefruit, txws, txzmq and stomper) is currently sitting in the NEW queue. The four remaining packages (fabulous, moksha.common, moksha.hub and fedmsg proper) are mostly ready, waiting in the Debian Python Module Team SVN repository for a review and sponsorship. While we re waiting for the packages to trickle into Debian, Simon is not twiddling his thumbs. Work has taken place on a few fronts:

• Getting fedmsg integrated to mentors.debian.net (actually sending the first messages from Debian s infrastructure)
• Writing a (stop-gap) wrapper to convert some of our mail broadcasts (debian-devel-changes, debian-bugs-dist) into fedmsg messages, until a more proper integration can be done
• Working on reliability of the message transport, following some concerns raised by DSA.

fedmsging mentors.debian.net Package backports mentors.debian.net was chosen because I m an admin and could do the integration quickly. That involved backporting the eleven aforementioned packages, plus zeromq3 and python-zmq (that only have TCP_KEEPALIVE on recent versions), to wheezy, as that s what the mentors.d.n host is running. (Also, python-zmq needs a new-ish cython to build so I had to backport that too). Thankfully, those were no-changes backports, that were easily scripted, using a pbuilder hook to allow the packages to depend on previously built packages. I have made a wheezy package repository available here. It s signed with my GnuPG key, ID 0xB8E5087766475AAF, which should be fairly well connected. Code changes After Simon s initial setup of debexpo (which is not an easy task), the code changes have been fairly simple (yes, this is just a proof of concept). You can see them on top of the live branch on debexpo s sources. I finally had the time to make them live earlier this week, and mentors.debian.net has been sending messages on Debian s fedmsg bus ever since. Deployment mentors.d.n sends its messages on five endpoints, tcp://mentors.debian.net:3000 through tcp://mentors.debian.net:3004. That is one endpoint per WSGI worker, plus one for the importer process(es). You can tap in directly, by following the instructions below. debmessenger Debmessenger is the stop-gap email-to-fedmsg bridge that Simon is developing. The goal is to create some activity on the bus without disrupting or modifying any infrastructure service. It s written in hy, and it leverages the existing Debian-related python modules to do its work, using inotify to react when a mail gets dropped in a Maildir. Right now, it s supposed to understand changes mails (received from debian-devel-changes) and bugs mail (from debian-bugs-dist). I ll work on deploying an instance of debmessenger this weekend, to create some more traffic on the bus. Reliability of the bus I suggested using fedmsg as this was something that already existed, and that solved a problem identical to the one we wanted to tackle (open interconnection of a distribution s infrastructure services). Reusing a piece of infrastructure that already works in another distro means that we can share tools, share ideas, and come up with solutions that we might not have considered when working alone. The drawback is that we have to either adapt to the tool s idiosyncrasies, or to adapt the tool to our way of working. One of the main points raised by DSA when the idea of using fedmsg was brought up, was that of reliability. Debian s infrastructure is spread in datacenters (and basements ) all over the world, and thus faces different challenges than Fedora s infrastructure, which is more tightly integrated. Therefore, we have to ensure that a critical consumer (say, a buildd) doesn t miss any message it would need for its operation (say, that a package got accepted). There has been work upstream, to ensure that fedmsg doesn t lose messages, but we need to take extra steps to make sure that a given consumer can replay the messages it has missed, should the need arise. Simon has started a discussion on the upstream mailing list, and is working on a prototype replay mechanism. Obviously, we need to test scenarios of endpoints dropping off the grid, hence the work on getting some activity on the bus. How can I take a look? a.k.a. Another one rides the bus (Picture Yves-Laurent Allaert, CC-By-SA v2.5 / GFDL v1.2 license) So, the bus is pretty quiet right now, as only two kinds of events are triggering messages: a new upload to mentors.debian.net, and a new comment on a package there. Don t expect a lot of traffic. However, generating some traffic is easy enough: just login to mentors.d.n, pick a package of mine (not much choice there), or a real package you want to review, and leave a comment. poof, a message appears. For the lazy Join #debian-fedmsg on OFTC, and look for messages from the debmsg bot. Current example output:

01:30:25 <debmsg> debexpo.voms-api-java.upload (unsigned) --
02:03:16 <debmsg> debexpo.ocamlbricks.comment (unsigned) --

(definitely needs some work, but it s a start) Listening in by yourself You need to setup fedmsg. I have a repository of wheezy packages and one of sid packages, signed with my GnuPG key, ID 0xB8E5087766475AAF. You can add them to a file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d like this:

deb http://perso.crans.org/dandrimont/fedmsg-<sid wheezy>/ ./

Then, import my GnuPG key into apt (apt-key add), update your sources (apt-get update), and install fedmsg (apt-get install python-fedmsg). The versions are << to anything real, so you should get the real thing as soon as it hits the archive. Finally, in /etc/fedmsg.d/endpoints.py, you can comment-out the Fedora entries, and add a Debian entry like this:

    "debian": [
        "tcp://fedmsg.olasd.eu:9940",
    ],

fedmsg.olasd.eu runs a fedmsg gateway connected to the mentors.d.n endpoints, and thus forwards all the mentors messages. It ll be connected to debmessenger as soon as it s running too. To actually see mesages, disable validate_signatures in /etc/fedmsg.d/ssl.py, setting it to False. The Debian messages aren t signed yet (it s on the roadmap), and we don t ship the Fedora certificates so we can t authenticate their messages either. Finally, you can run fedmsg-tail --really-pretty in a terminal. As soon as there s some activity, you should get that kind of output (color omitted):

 
  "i": 1, 
  "msg":  
    "version": "2.0.9-1.1", 
    "uploader": "Emmanuel Bourg <ebourg@apache.org>"
   , 
  "topic": "org.debian.dev.debexpo.voms-api-java.upload", 
  "username": "expo", 
  "timestamp": 1373758221.491809
 

Enjoy real-time updates from your favorite piece of infrastructure! What s next? While Simon continues working on reliability, and gets started on message signing according to his schedule, I ll take a look at deploying the debmessenger bridge, and making the pretty-printer outputs useful for our topics. There will likely be some changes to the messages sent by debexpo, as we got some feedback from the upstream developers about making them work in the fedmsg tool ecosystem (datanommer and datagrepper come to mind). You can tune in to Simon s weekly reports on the soc-coordination list, and look at the discussions with upstream on the fedora messaging-sig list. You can also catch us on IRC, #debian-soc on OFTC. We re also hanging out on the upstream channel, #fedora-apps on freenode.

This blog post is the third of a series of posts dealing with the results of the Debian systemd survey. I intend to give a presentation at DebConf 2013, too, so you could either read my posts, or watch the talk, or both :-). The second-biggest concern in the survey results was that systemd is not portable to non-Linux systems, for example Debian GNU/kFreeBSD or Debian GNU/HURD. For convenience, I will from now on write kFreeBSD when I really mean all non-Linux ports. systemd not being portable is not an arbitrary decision Some people seem to think that the systemd upstream is just hostile to users of other operating systems when they hear that systemd is not portable. However, keep in mind that Lennart, Kay and other contributors have considerable experience with writing portable software such as Avahi and PulseAudio. The decision to only support Linux in systemd was thus not taken lightly. systemd s design requires many kernel features and certain semantics (e.g. procfs is not enough, /proc/$PID/exe needs to be supported), which are currently only available on Linux. Point 15 of Lennart s blog post 0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html contains an incomplete list of these features. Maintaining portable code increases complexity Since systemd is written in C, the canonical way to write portable code is by using conditional compilation, for example with ifdef statements. That makes the code harder to understand and reason about, but more importantly it blows up the test matrix. It also requires any new change to be tested on all supported systems, which is not feasible for most contributors. I think everybody agrees keeping complexity low is a good thing. What are the implications for our non-Linux ports? We, the Debian project, have two realistic options in my point of view:

1. We stay with sysvinit, the least common denominator, forever.
2. We use a modern init system such as systemd on Debian GNU/Linux.

In case we go with the first option, Debian will diverge more and more from virtually every other Linux distribution. This also means we are stuck with the limited features and capabilities that sysvinit has. A modern operating system needs to be able to adapt to a changing environment and the once static world in which sysvinit was developed has become much more dynamic. In our opinion, the only reasonable choice is the latter option: use systemd on Debian GNU/Linux. How will this work?

• In the short-term future, maintainers add systemd support to their packages. This does not imply dropping sysvinit support. As outlined in my post about the transition, systemd service files can coexist with sysvinit scripts.
• In the mid-term future, both sysvinit and systemd are supported this is the only way we can do a gradual transition, and Debian clearly does not want a flag day.
• In the long term, we could switch the default from sysvinit to systemd on Debian GNU/Linux, in case we agree that s a reasonable decision at that time. Non-Linux ports will still use sysvinit.

For individual maintainers, this means they need to support two init systems. Luckily, systemd service files are usually really simple, but there still is additional maintenance work such as testing whether your service actually starts when using systemd. We think this maintenance overhead is justified due to the advantages a modern init system brings. Of course, not every maintainer can arrange it to install systemd and test his/her package. You are invited to contact us at pkg-systemd-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org at any time and we can help you out. Furthermore, automation can be introduced (and we have a proof of concept) to make it easier to spot mistakes and perform some simple tests, such as whether the service can be started. A concern that was voiced is that as sysvinit usage decreases, the init scripts would bit-rot and stop working at some point. If that happens, we rely on the users to file appropriate bug reports. This is no different from the situation today it is not feasible for maintainers to test every single combination of features all the time. Ports are different and that diversity is good The FreeBSD kernel and the Linux kernel are different, and each kernel provides distinct features that the other kernel does not have. As an example, Linux provides cgroups, which are heavily used by systemd. The FreeBSD kernel in turn offers the packet filter pf , which is not available on Linux. There certainly is value in having common infrastructure. But there also is value in providing the best features that each platform has to offer in case of Linux, that is clearly systemd as an init system IMO. Conclusion systemd is not portable because it relies on features only the Linux kernel provides an example is cgroups, which systemd uses to track processes in a reliable way. Not embracing these features and staying with sysvinit indefinitely is not a viable option if Debian wants to remain relevant for today s demands. In the short term, the migration to systemd will cause additional maintenance effort for individual package maintainers, but it will pay off in the long term.

My second #debcraft project is a crocheted cozy for a phone, with a nice Debian swirl on it.
As the previous one this is a very quick project - I made mine in half an hour - and easy also for crochet newbies.
As I've not mastered yet the tapestry technic in crochet, I opted for a less elegant solution and used a surface slip stitch to add the swirl.
The only downside of this approach is that you'll need a bit of practice before crocheting a decent and regular swirl (it took me a couple of tries to get the hang of it).
My phone is a Samsung Galaxy, so this pattern fits a phone of 6cm x 11cm x 1cm, but you can easily adapt it to yours. This pattern is written in US crochet terms: check this page for a US/UK conversion table. What you will need

• black cotton
• red cotton
• a 3 mm crochet hook

Obviously, the crochet hook's size depends on the weight of the yarn you're using. I used a DK/8 ply cotton yarn. Finished size : 11cm x 8cm x 1cm Stitches used :

• chain stitch (ch)
• single crochet (sc)
• surface stitches

Instructions Ch 15 + 1 for turning. Continue in flat rows, working 15 sc each row, plus one ch at the end to turn.
Continue till the desired dimensions, in my case I ended with a rectangle 22cm long.
Now the fun part: with the red yarn, start creating a swirl with the surface stitches.
Here's a good tutorial on how to do these, with step-by-step photos. Now the last part: use the single crochet stitch to join the lateral seams of the cozy as showed in this tutorial. And you're finished! Pretty easy, wasn't it? For any questions feel free to contact me.
And if you are a knitter or a crocheter, did you know that on Ravelry exists the Debian Knitters group?

Everyone enjoys ASCII screenshots as much as I do, right? So here is the Hurd booting with my mtab-prototype bound to /run/mtab:

INIT: version 2.88 booting
Using makefile-style concurrent boot in runlevel S.
Activating swap...done.
Checking root file system...fsck from util-linux 2.20.1
hd2 : tray open or drive not ready
hd2 : tray open or drive not ready
hd2 : tray open or drive not ready
hd2 : tray open or drive not ready
end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00, sector 0
/dev/hd0s1: clean, 44292/181056 files, 287759/723200 blocks
done.
Activating lvm and md swap...(default pager): Already paging to partition hd0s5!
done.
Checking file systems...fsck from util-linux 2.20.1
hd2 : tray open or drive not ready
hd2 : tray open or drive not ready
end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00, sector 0
done.
Cleaning up temporary files... /tmp.
Mounting local filesystems...done.
Activating swapfile swap...(default pager): Already paging to partition hd0s5!
done.
Cleaning up temporary files....
Configuring network interfaces...inetutils-ifconfig: invalid arguments
ifup: failed to open pid file /run/network/ifup-/dev/eth0.pid: No such file or directory
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client 4.2.2
Copyright 2004-2011 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit https://www.isc.org/software/dhcp/
can't create /var/lib/dhcp/dhclient./dev/eth0.leases: No such file or directory
Listening on Socket//dev/eth0
Sending on   Socket//dev/eth0
DHCPDISCOVER on /dev/eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 4
DHCPREQUEST on /dev/eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPOFFER from 10.0.2.2
DHCPACK from 10.0.2.2
can't create /var/lib/dhcp/dhclient./dev/eth0.leases: No such file or directory
bound to 10.0.2.15 -- renewal in 42550 seconds.
done.
Cleaning up temporary files....
Setting up X socket directories... /tmp/.X11-unix /tmp/.ICE-unix.
INIT: Entering runlevel: 2
Using makefile-style concurrent boot in runlevel 2.
Starting enhanced syslogd: rsyslogd.
Starting deferred execution scheduler: atd.
Starting periodic command scheduler: cron.
Starting system message bus: dbusFailed to set socket option"/var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket": Protocol not available.
Starting OpenBSD Secure Shell server: sshd.
GNU 0.3 (debian) (console)
login:

As you can see, the boot process looks quite clean. In particular, there are no issues left with Debians initscripts. The remaining noise comes from:

• The GNU mach kernel, but that's okay. The FreeBSD kernel writes lot's of stuff by default too, and so does Linux if one increases the kernel log level. Also, some of the stuff might be due to me using qemu.
• Network related issues.
• The default pager. This is the translator paging out memory to swap space.

This is accomplished by my mtab translator prototype. It's work in progress, but I have reworked and broken up my initial prototype. My initial prototype only patched libdiskfs, one of three libraries translator authors can use to write filesystem-like translators. I have made the necessary changes to the other two libraries and patched up any loose ends. This is the translator in action:

% fsysopts /run/mtab
/hurd/mtab /
% cat /run/mtab
/dev/hd0s1 / ext2fs writable,no-inherit-dir-group,store-type=typed 0 0
none /dev/ttyp0 /hurd/term name,/dev/ptyp0,type,pty-master 0 0
none /run /hurd/tmpfs writable,no-suid,no-exec,no-inherit-dir-group,no-sync,size=80484K 0 0
none /run/lock /hurd/tmpfs writable,no-suid,no-exec,no-inherit-dir-group,no-sync,size=5M 0 0
none /run/shm /hurd/tmpfs writable,no-suid,no-exec,no-inherit-dir-group,no-sync,size=259480K 0 0

I also patched the sysvinit package. My version includes and switches to runsystem.sysv that uses /sbin/init to start the system. It also carries all the necessary workarounds for the remaining sysvinit related issues. The resulting Debian/Hurd system is very nice, it is getting more and more similar to what a Debian user would expect:

• For the first time, df without arguments works:

  % df
  Filesystem     1K-blocks    Used Available Use% Mounted on
  /dev/hd0s1      10005504 4671612   4833620  50% /
  none               80484      44     80440   1% /run
  none                5120       4      5116   1% /run/lock
  none              259480       4    259476   1% /run/shm
  

• The mount utility is accompanied by umount.

• /etc/fstab is honored and auto works as an fstype.

• /run and friends are in fact ram-disks.

• /sbin/shutdown works.

• All init scripts are properly started and stopped.

  • Among other nice things this enables one to manage the network configuration using the Debian way via interfaces(5).

• /etc/inittab is honored.

I have rebuild the hurd and sysvinit package and uploaded them into an apt repository:

deb http://teythoon.cryptobitch.de/gsoc/heap/debian unstable main

Please use unstable for now. Also make sure that you have a recovery plan for your Debian/Hurd installation if anything goes wrong. For your convenience there's a seed tarball containing packages with the appropriate sources.list.d snippets and the repository key: https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de/gsoc/heap/debian/seed.tar Currently /hurd/console is not started (I'll add a init script for that later), but for now you have to start a getty on the console. Make sure that your /etc/inittab contains a line like this:

7:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 console

The patched initscripts package contains the runsystem.sysv file and uses the Debian alternatives system to replace the runsystem.gnu variant. It also switches to the appropriate halt and reboot utilities. If you install the package, you must use halt-hurd or reboot-hurd to halt or reboot the system. Running halt or reboot is not harmful though, it just doesn't work. So here I am. I've been coding for the Hurd for four weeks now, and suddenly I'm the guy who wrote umount. My point is, if you ever wanted to work on an operating system, you might want to consider working on the Hurd. It the Debian/Hurd port is very decent and (according to #debian-hurds "Debian GNU/Hurd Doomsday-o-meter") 78.44% of all Debian packages are available, so you've got a familiar environment. Also, if your solution is right and your code is reasonably clean, it is not that hard to get your changes accepted. The list of open issues is long and might contain something that interests you. You could be the one implementing a read-ahead solution to massively improve Hurds overall performance. Also since Hurd is just a Hird of Unix replacing daemons running on-top the GNU Mach microkernel, most of the functionality lies within userspace processes. This makes the whole system very extensible and quite easy to work with. For an overview over the Hurd, see this page. Next week I'll focus on improving my mtab prototype, improving the sysvinit patches and upstreaming the ones that are ready. As always, in case I run out of stuff to do, I'll pick something from my list of issues, most likely the network related issues. In completely unrelated news, my Debian/Linux workstation died with a kernel panic while I was writing this blog entry. It's a good thing Emacs honors "save early, save often". M-x insert-monolithic-kernel-rant-here. This is it for this week, thanks for your attention :)

The Present Extension I ve finally gotten an initial implementation of the Present extension written and running and thought I should write up the current design and status. Present Design The current Present extension consists of two requests:

1. PresentRegion. Puts new bits from a pixmap in a window.
2. PresentSelectInput. Asks for Present events to be delivered.

PresentRegion This request takes a pile of arguments:

 
    PresentRegion
    window: WINDOW
    pixmap: PIXMAP
    valid-area: REGION or None
    update-area: REGION or None
    x-off, y-off: INT16
    target-msc: CARD64
    divisor: CARD64
    remainder: CARD64
    idle-fence: FENCE
 
Errors: Drawable, Pixmap, Match

Provides new content for the specified window, to be made visible at the specified time (defined by target-msc , divisor and remainder ). update-area defines the subset of the window to be updated, or None if the whole window is to be updated. valid-area defines the portion of pixmap which contains valid window contents, or None if the pixmap contains valid contents for the whole window. PresentRegion may use any region of pixmap which contains update-area and which is contained by valid-area . In other words, areas inside update-area will be presented from pixmap , areas outside valid-area will not be presented from pixmap and areas inside valid-area but outside update-area may or may not be presented at the discretion of the X server. x-off and y-off define the location in the window where the 0,0 location of the pixmap will be presented. valid-area and update-area are relative to the pixmap. If target-msc is greater than the current msc for window , the presentation will occur at (or after) the target-msc field. Otherwise, the presentation will occur after the next field where msc % divisor == remainder . If divisor is zero, then the presentation will occur after the current field. idle-fence is triggered when pixmap is no longer in use. This may be at any time following the PresentRegion request, the contents may be immediately copied to another buffer, copied just in time for the vblank interrupt or the pixmap may be used directly for display, in which case it will be busy until some future PresentRegion operation. If window is destroyed before the presentation occurs, then the presentation action will not be completed. PresentRegion holds a reference to pixmap until the presentation occurs, so pixmap may be immediately freed after the request executes, even if that is before the presentation occurs. If idle-fence is destroyed before the presentation occurs, then idle-fence will not be signaled but the presentation will occur normally. PresentSelectInput

 
    PresentSelectInput
    event-id: PRESENTEVENTID
    window: WINDOW
    eventMask: SETofPRESENTEVENT
 
Errors: Window, Value, Match, IDchoice, Access

Selects the set of Present events to be delivered for the specified window and event context. PresentSelectInput can create, modify or delete event contexts. An event context is associated with a specific window; using an existing event context with a different window generates a Match error. If eventContext specifies an existing event context, then if eventMask is empty, PresentSelectInput deletes the specified context, otherwise the specified event context is changed to select a different set of events. If eventContext is an unused XID, then if eventMask is empty no operation is performed. Otherwise, a new event context is created selecting the specified events. Present Extension Events There are three different events for the Present extension:

1. PresentConfigureNotify
2. PresentCompleteNotify
3. PresentRedirectNotify

PresentConfigureNotify This event is moving from the DRI3 extension where it doesn t belong.

 
    PresentConfigureNotify
    type: CARD8         XGE event type (35)
    extension: CARD8        Present extension request number
    length: CARD16          2
    evtype: CARD16          Present_ConfigureNotify
    eventID: PRESENTEVENTID
    window: WINDOW
    x: INT16
    y: INT16
    width: CARD16
    height: CARD16
    off_x: INT16
    off_y: INT16
    pixmap_width: CARD16
    pixmap_height: CARD16
    pixmap_flags: CARD32
 

PresentConfigureNotify events are sent when the window configuration changes if PresentSelectInput has requested it. PresentConfigureNotify events are XGE events and so do not have a unique event type. x and y are the parent-relative location of window . PresentCompleteNotify

 
    PresentCompleteNotify
    type: CARD8         XGE event type (35)
    extension: CARD8        Present extension request number
    length: CARD16          2
    evtype: CARD16          Present_CompleteNotify
    eventID: PRESENTEVENTID
    window: WINDOW
    ust: CARD64
    msc: CARD64
    sbc: CARD64
 

Notify events are delivered when a PresentRegion operation has completed and the specified contents are being displayed. sbc, msc and ust indicate the swap count, frame count and system time of the related PresentRegion request. PresentRedirectNotify This one is not specified yet, but the intent is for it to contain sufficient information for the compositing manager to be able to construct a suitable screen update that includes an application window update. Finishing GLXOMLsync_control At this point, Mesa only exposes the old swapinterval configuration value, it doesn t provide any of the GLXOMLsynccontrol APIs. However, the Present protocol does have the bits necessary to support glXSwapBuffersMscOML in the PresentRegion request. Let s see how the remaining APIs in this GL extension will be supported. glXGetSyncValuesOML This one is easy; it only needs to return the UST/MSC/SBC values from the most recent SwapBuffers request. Those are returned in the PresentCompleteNotify event, so Mesa just needs to capture that event and save the values away for return to the application. We don t need any new Present protocol for this. glXGetMscRateOML This returns the refresh rate of the monitor associated with the specified drawable. RandR exposes all of the necessary data for each monitor, but the monitor each window is going to be synchronized against isn t exposed anywhere, and is effectively implementation-dependent. So, I think the easy thing to do here is to have a Present request which reports which RandR output a window will be synchronized with. glXSwapBuffersMscOML This is the one API which is already directly supported by the Present extension. glXWaitForMscOML This is effectively the same as glXSwapBuffersMscOML, except that it doesn t actually perform a swap. For this, I think we want a new request that generates an X event when the target values are reached, and then have the client block until that event is received. This will avoid blocking other threads using the same X connection. glXWaitForSbcOML Like glXWaitForMscOML, this just needs to trigger an event to be delivered at the right time. Presentation Redirection I m focusing on finishing the above stuff before I start writing the redirection spec and code, but I ve been thinking a bit about it. What we want is for applications that are presenting a new frame within a redirected window to have that presentation delivered directly to the compositing manager instead of having the bits copied to the redirected buffer and have the compositing manager only learn about this when the damage event is received from copying the bits. Once the compositing manager receives notification that there are new bits available for a portion of a window, it can then get those bits onto the screen in one of two ways:

1. Copy them to the back buffer for the whole screen and then present that back buffer to the screen.
2. Present them directly to the screen, bypassing the compositing manager s back buffer entirely.

The first option is what you d do if there were more updates than just a single window; it would update the whole screen at the same time. The second option is what you d do if there was only the one window update to act on, and this would automatically take advantage of page flipping to avoid copying data at all. No need to un-redirect windows for the page flip to work. In both cases, we need to inform the original application both when its pixmap is idle and when the swap actually hits the screen. And we need to make sure the final swap happens when the application requested. For the pixmap idle notification, the current PresentRegion idlefence argument should suffice; we just need to pass the idlefence XID along in the redirection event. Simple. For completion notification, we need to make sure the SBC value for the original window gets incremented and that a PresentCompleteNotify event is delivered. I think that means we want to append a chunk of data to the PresentRegion request so that suitable events can be delivered when the compositing manager PresentRegion occur. I think that just needs to be the window of that original window. To make sure the swap happens at the right time, we just need to have the targetmsc value provided to the compositing manager. I m hoping that having this all event driven is that when a later PresentRegion is redirected that has an *earlier* targetmsc, we can simply queue that as well and things should just work . Current Status I ve got the protocol definitions (both X server and XCB) done, and libxcb supporting the extension. I ve got the X server bits working, but the actual updates are not synchronized to the monitor; they re using OS timers and CopyArea for now, mostly so I can test things without also hacking drivers. Mesa is using the extension, but it only provides the swapinterval value and is not yet supporting the full GLXOMLsynccontrol extension. I ve also got a simple 2D core X application using the extension which is in the shmfd repository in my home directory on freedesktop.org. Availability As always, these bits are already published in my home directory on freedesktop.org in various git repositories.

For quite some time, I maintain set of few scripts to generate dictionaries for StarDict. The generated dictionaries are quite popular, but the scripts become quite horrible over the time. Now I finally found time to cleanup and refactoring, so that they share as much code as possible. As the duplication was quite massive, I was able to reduce code size to 60%, while adding new features and doing better error handling. Also now it should be pretty easy to add support for additional resources, so contributions are welcome :-). The code can be found on GitHub.

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This is part 4 in a series on organizational design and growth. What it means

Getting things done together, as a team, achieving more than the sum of our individual efforts. Why it s important

Once a company reaches a certain size, perhaps with a substantial customer base and ambitious goals for the future, it takes a lot more momentum to move it forward. No one person can do it alone. From product delivery, to strategic decision making, to customer service, no single individual has all of the knowledge, skills or time necessary to perform these functions at the scale and velocity necessary to make real progress. Cooperation is not just a good idea: it s essential to success.

The most important system we re building is the company itself: a system of people working together to achieve common goals. Old status quo

In a startup, everyone embodies the spirit of the pioneer: passion, fortitude, individualism, daring, and the willingness to do whatever it takes to reach the goal. Individuals wear many hats: engineering, product management, marketing, customer support. We often don t even think of them as distinct disciplines. Projects often depend on the resoluteness of a single Jill-of-all-trades to drive them to completion, and the culture may reward this kind of heroism. Thanks to the relatively small scale of the company and its customer base, one person working independently can effect significant change without much risk. If what was delivered wasn t good enough, it could be discarded with no great loss. New status quo

In a growing company, we still need a variety of different disciplines in order to reach our goals, in fact more than ever. A successful product needs to be conceived, validated, designed, built, documented, adopted, supported, and we need to confirm that it satisfies customers over time. These elements are all essential, and each requires deep knowledge, expertise and practice. Good engineering + mediocre product management + inept marketing = total failure. It s not realistic to expect one person to do all of these things and deliver consistently good results, but consistently good results are exactly what we need. The solution is to organize for individuals to do what they do best, and cooperate effectively together. We also need to manage risk more carefully: our customers are depending on us. We have a lot more to lose now, and need to learn how to maintain forward progress while continuing to meet our customers expectations. Delivering sub-par products would damage our reputation and erode their trust. Most of all, we need to be getting better at all of this over time, faster than our competition. Behaviors that help

• When embarking on a new project, recruit others to your cause instead of going it alone. In particular, consider which other teams you may need help from, and ask for their support from the beginning
• Make your work visible to others (for example through a shared work board like Trello). Push context out of your head and into a workspace where others can see it.
• When you run into trouble, make a point of asking for help early. Not only does this help build relationships, it also gets problems solved faster.
• Agree on explicit shared priorities with your immediate teammates, and stick to them until the team agrees to change. Make sure that you re working on things that matter to the people around you, and that they know that s important to you.

Obstacles that get in the way

• Heroism. There is a place for heroism in growing organizations, but save it for responding to exceptional problems. Day-to-day work and objectives should not depend on one person s heroism
• Attributing too much credit to individuals. Feedback and praise are invaluable, but be careful not to excessively recognize and reward individuals for what are fundamentally team efforts. Few things will erode team spirit faster than rewarding someone for other people s work.

A few weeks ago I bought a new Samsung Galaxy Note 2 Android phone. As I predicted in my post about Phone and Tablet Sizes [1] the Note 2 with a 5.55 display is a bit too big for me to have an ideal single handed side grasp (I estimate that about 5.2 would be ideal). But I can stretch a bit and move it around in my hand to touch all parts of the screen with my thumb. Although when doing that I don t have a tight grip, with my previous phone the Samsung Galaxy S3 [2] I could properly wrap my hand around it to grip it tightly while using it with one hand. The Note 2 will be easier for me to drop or for a thief to snatch it from me. While the big screen makes the phone difficult to use with one hand it does allow viewing more data. The ConnectBot SSH client (Play Store link) [3] (F-Droid repository link) [4] works a lot better on a larger screen I ve also discovered that the volume control buttons can be used to change the font size in ConnectBot which is handy as the default is really tiny. Also Klaus Weidner s Hacker s Keyboard (Play Store link) [5] (F-Droid repository link) [6] works a lot better with a larger screen. When I tested the Hacker s keyboard on a smaller phone I found the 5 row layout too difficult to use, but on the Note 2 it works well. As an aside I wish I could quickly and easily toggle between 4 row mode (good for SMS) and 5 row mode (good for sysadmin work) in the Hackers Keyboard. For less serious use the large screen on the Note 2 is good for watching TV. I ve got a collection of mp4s of TV shows that I ve been meaning to watch, now I watch them in bed on my phone. Another advantage of the Note 2 is the battery life. When playing Ingress and doing all the usual email checks etc my Note 2 will last about as long as my wife s Galaxy S3 with it s power case. So without any extra batteries a Note 2 will probably last about twice as long as a Galaxy S3. The Note 2 has more RAM than the S3 I used to use (I had the S3 with 1G of RAM) and it also apparently has a faster CPU. The CPU speed hasn t been an issue for me but the extra RAM is a real benefit, it means that I can usually switch between Ingress and other programs without having to restart Ingress each time. As an aside I think that Google and LG should release a Nexus Ingress 4 phone or some other device that s optimised for Ingress, I m sure it would sell well. Some people make a big deal about the stylus that comes with the Note 2. It is a neat feature to have the device know when the stylus tip is hovering over the screen but it s not very useful for me. If I was going to create art work on a phone (as some people do) then it would interest me, but I m more interested in email and ssh for fine input and my fingers are generally good enough for those tasks. I have got thin fingers, so I think that people with thicker fingers could really benefit from the stylus. I recently bought a batch of stylus pens from Kogan which have a pen at one end and a rubber stylus tip at the other for fat fingered people I know who need to use an Android phone but can t afford a Note or Note 2. I also like the software build on it which is almost the same as that on the Galaxy S3. It seems that many people prefer the apparently stock features on the Nexus 4 but I like the way Samsung does things. Conclusion I m very happy with my new phone. The bigger screen allows me to see things more clearly, this is good for web browsing, reading email, and now that I can use the Hackers Keyboard I can type more effectively. The longer battery life is really good too, although I think that Samsung could have done better if the phone was 3mm thicker then it could have a much bigger battery and have a larger CCD for the camera. I don t think that the phone is really different, at least not for my use. Samsung has promoted it for artistic use and I ve seen evidence to support their claims. But for most people it ll just be a phone with a larger screen and a bigger battery. Some people criticise it for being too big, but it s still smaller than the handsets on most desk phones so it s not big by the standards of old fashioned phones. The increased size has not only allowed me to do the same things more effectively but also allowed me to do things I hadn t tried doing on a phone before such as watching TV. This isn t because of the phone being particularly special in any way, it s just that the change in size gives more possibilities for ways of using it. The Samsung Galaxy Mega is the largest smart phone. The 5.8 version of the Mega has a resolution of only 960*540 (less than the Note and Note 2 not good enough IMHO) and the 6.3 version has the same resolution as the Note 2 of 1280*720. I think that both Mega variants are too big for me, I need to be able to use a phone with one hand. So it seems that the Note 2 is probably the best phone for me right now.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/02/11/phone-tablet-sizes/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/12/21/galaxy-s3-power-case/
• [3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.connectbot
• [4] https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=connect&fdid=org.connectbot
• [5] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.pocketworkstation.pckeyboard
• [6] https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=hacker&fdid=org.pocketworkstation.pckeyboard

And now for something completely different. No, this blog entry isn't about the great Monty Python's, even though they definitely deserve to be brought to the attention of the still unenlightened. This is about something completely different music style wise. This is about Caravan Palace. I was recently introduced to this band, and I must say, they definitely have the swing. Just listen to them and feel your feed starting to move along.

• Suzy: The first video that I listened to, and it definitely got me interested, as you can see.
• Jolie Coquine: The kind of swing our (grand?)parents did listen and dance to. I definitely feel it in my legs, too.
• Dramophone (for Germans): Also quite nice.

I hope you like the selection because I just started listening to them. They might not be the best options, but should get you started to get a feeling for the band. Like always, enjoy!

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So, writing an email client, how did that turn out? Pretty damn well as it happens. My views continue to range from "email is easy" to "email is hard". But I'm now using my home-grown mail-client for 100% of my personal mail-handling. Writing a mail client did seem a little crazy when I started, but the problem breaks down into a few distinct steps and individually they're not so hard:

• Display a list of folders.
• Display a list of messages.
• Display a single message.

Once you've got that you're almost 80% complete. You're just missing things like "delete", "reply", "compose", and those things are pretty simple to implement. I definitely made the right call in making it scriptable with Lua, because I've been able to write so many functions for working with mail. For example marking messages in all folders matching a regular expression. The code is pretty well structured, and now I've got TAB-completion support on all primitives and user-additions I'm finding it a lot nicer to use. The future? I'm not sure. But right now I'm very happy.

The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing party in Oslo. It is organised by the member assosiation NUUG and the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project together with the hack space Bitraf. It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening. Everyone is welcome, and there is no fee to participate. There is on the other hand limited space, and only room for 30 people. Please put your name on the event wiki page if you plan to join us.

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (106.39 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Debian France I handled some subscriptions that we collected during Solutions Linux at the end of last month and I also worked on updating the accounts in preparation of our annual general assembly. As the current president, I wrote a moral assessment of the organization and I helped Sylvestre Ledru (the treasurer) to prepare an overview of our financial situation (which is rather good). The plan for this general assembly included the renewal of 6 of our 9 board members so I tried to motivate some persons to candidate and I m pretty happy to see that we managed to have 9 candidates for 6 seats, a real election for once. And as usual, I updated Galette to version 0.7.4.2 and I filed a couple of tickets (#621, #622). Debian Package Tracking System We re getting close to one month of work on the Google Summer of Code Project that rewrites the Package Tracking System. On average I spent a good 1h30 per day on reviewing the code, giving my feedback, and preparing the user stories for the next iteration, plus a 2 hour meeting each Wednesday afternoon. This is more than I expected but at I m rather happy with the result so far. We have a live test instance updated each week (after the end of the iteration) at pts.debian.net. The web interface is empty because the bulk of the work has been spent on the email interface for now, but it s now feature complete and already has seen some improvements compared to the current implementation (fixing #340863 for example). You can interact with it by sending mails to control@pts.debian.net. The Debian Administrator s Handbook The fundraising for the liberation of the original book in French met its initial target very quickly and we added new targets with supplementary rewards (more ebook from Eyrolles, donation to Debian). All the supplementary targets were met, although the last one took until the last day! Thanks to all the supporters, we now have a French translation of the Debian Administrator s Handbook which is free and we have collected about 2700 EUR for Debian. Debian Packaging I got a couple of release critical bug reports that I had to fix:

• #713636: cpputest FTBFS due to -Werror. Dropped -Werror in Debian and submitted the patch upstream.
• #713527: logidee-tools FTBFS due to reorganizations in the TeXLive meta-packages. Fixed the (build-)dependencies.
• #713947: multiple security issues in WordPress. Packaged new upstream version 3.5.2 into unstable and wheezy-security (and Yves-Alexis Perez took care of squeeze-security).

And trying to anticipate future issues, I filed an upstream ticket on feed2omb (#33) to see whether upstream had plans to support the new pump.io API that identi.ca is supposed to use soonish. Kali Linux I filed a couple of Debian bugs: #711866 to request a new upstream version of w3af in Debian, #711044 to report a missing dependency in LSB meta-informations of the vsftpd init script. I worked on packaging passing-the-hash. Basically this is a fork of several software just to override some NTLM authentication functions. In some cases, I managed to avoid the fork by transforming the patches in LD_PRELOAD libraries that override the specific symbol of the patched functions. Among the forked software, there was winexe which wasn t packaged yet. So I packaged it but we quickly ran into some segfaults (which was already reported to upstream since a few months). I investigated the problem and prepared a patch. It has been submitted to upstream and merged. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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Sometimes it happens that for one reason or another there's a need to use a proprietary application (read: can not be modified due to its licence) that contains bashisms. Since the application can not be modified and it might not be desirable to change the default /bin/sh, dealing with such applications can be a pain. Or not.

The switchsh program (available in Debian) by Marco d'Itri can be used to execute said application under a namespace where bash is bind-mounted on /bin/sh. The result:

$ sh --help
sh: Illegal option --
$ switchsh sh --help   head -n1
GNU bash, version 4.1.5(1)-release-(i486-pc-linux-gnu)

Simple, yet handy.