Recently I was talking to an employee at Safeway (an Australian supermarket chain) about Linux etc. He seemed interested in attending a meeting of my local LUG (which incidentally happens on the campus of the university where he studies). I have had a few conversations like that and it seems that it would be good to have some LUG business-cards. It shouldn’t be difficult to make something that is similar in concept to the Debian business cards [1] for use by a Linux Users Group (LUG). That way when you tell someone about Linux you can hand them a card that has your name and email address along with the web site for your local LUG. In other news I will be attending a meeting of the Linux Users of Victoria (LUV) [2] this evening and will have some Fair Trade Chocolate [3] to give away to people who arrive early. The chocolate in question is now sold by Safeway for a mere $4 per 100g (not much more expensive than the regular chocolate).

• [1] http://www.debian.org/events/materials/business-cards/


• [2] http://www.luv.asn.au/


• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2006/08/23/fair-trade-is-the-linux-way/

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SatelliteForCaravans is one of my regular references for setting up satellite systems, but that's for when the caravan is stationary, not moving. So, I'm rather stumped by this question - Patrick asked:

"Hey, glad I found your site. I was hoping you could provide us with some knowledge and point us in the right direction(s). Even though our products get installed on yachts, entertainment systems are new to us. We have clients that travel all over Europe and the other continents. I've poked around several of the websites you listed as resources, but not sure where to go next. What systems are out there that will allow traveling boats to pick up both free and paid sat TV all over Europe, both standard and HD, if not other large geographic regions of the world? Minimal equipment is a big deal. Thanks."

Any suggestions? (2007-10-04: 2 comments)

I had one of these devices collecting dust in my basement. I finally got around to reverse engineering a userspace driver for it, which was much easier than I expected. It just shows up as a usb->serial device, and it was mostly a matter of of watching the serial line while hitting buttons. I have started to figure out some of what I need to know to communicate with it in the other direction in order to do stuff like turn on the lights and manipulate the lcd displays. That stuff is not yet, however, functional, but in the spirit of "release early, release often", I've uploaded a 0.0.1 release to the project page on sourceforge. Also included is a python extension which allows you to register callbacks for the various controls on the device. After I get the leds and lcds working, I think the next step will be to write a program to generate synthetic MIDI events when the device is manipulated so I can hook the thing up to something like mixxx. Hopefully someone else has one of these kicking around and might also find this work useful!

I had one of these devices collecting dust in my basement. I finally got around to reverse engineering a userspace driver for it, which was much easier than I expected. It just shows up as a usb->serial device, and it was mostly a matter of of watching the serial line while hitting buttons. I have started to figure out some of what I need to know to communicate with it in the other direction in order to do stuff like turn on the lights and manipulate the lcd displays. That stuff is not yet, however, functional, but in the spirit of "release early, release often", I've uploaded a 0.0.1 release to the project page on sourceforge. Also included is a python extension which allows you to register callbacks for the various controls on the device. After I get the leds and lcds working, I think the next step will be to write a program to generate synthetic MIDI events when the device is manipulated so I can hook the thing up to something like mixxx. Hopefully someone else has one of these kicking around and might also find this work useful!

Keeping pristine upstream tarballs around is a pain. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to keep them in revision control? Except, it would use far too much disk... Here's a solution. It generates an binary delta between the pristine upstream tarball and a tarball created using files checked out of the repository. The delta should be quite small, and any checkout of the repository that has the same file contents as that used to create the delta can be used to regenerate the pristine tarball. Example (which would presumably be more fun and faster if I used git):

joey@kodama:~package/uqm-voice>svn switch svn+ssh://uqm.debian.net/srv/svn/uqm/tags/uqm-voice/upstream_version_0.3
D    debian
A    comm/blackur/black041.ogg
U    comm/shofixt/shofi040.ogg
U    comm/starbas/starb182.ogg
D    comm/slyland/slyla030.ogg
U    comm/chmmr/chmmr035.ogg
U    comm/supox/supox031.ogg
Updated to revision 223.
joey@kodama:~package/uqm-voice> pristine-tar extract ~/uqm-voice.delta ../uqm-voice_0.3.orig.tar.gz

The generated tarball is bit-identical to the 19 MB upstream tarball, though you have to gunzip them both to check this, since the gzip compression differs. The delta file is all of 41k large. The uqm-voice.delta file was created earlier as follows:

joey@kodama:~> pristine-tar stash lib/debian/unstable/uqm-voice_0.3.orig.tar.gz uqm-voice.delta

I've uploaded pristine-tar to incoming.

The tricky part of using a git (or other rcs) archive as distribution source package format is handling pristine upstream tarballs. One approach would be to try to create a git archive that didn't include objects present in the upstream tarball. Then, to unpack the source package, you'd unpack the upstream tarball, convert the files in it into git objects and add them into the .git directory. This way a pristine upstream tarball is available for verification, and it also has the same properties of not needing to re-upload the source for every package release as the current Debian source format. This seems like it might be possible to implement, but you'd need to know quite a lot about git internals to remove the redundant objects from the git repo and regenerate them from the tarball.

---

Another approach would be to keep the pristine upstream tarball in the git archive, and then the source package would consist entirely of the git archive. This doesn't have the same nice minimal bandwidth upload behavior -- unless you can git push your changes to do the upload. Storing a lot of upstream tarballs in git wouldn't be efficient, but I've written pristine-tar to take care of that. :-)

In the last few days we (as in DebConf admins Steve Gran, Mark Hymers and myself) have been doing some DebConf maintenance work. Some time ago one of DebConf’s permanent sponsors, ByteMark sponsored a new machine, krabappel, which we use as a replacement for the older machine we have from them, cmburns. It was neccessary, as good old cmburns had a lot of stuff running and so was always pretty loaded. Imagine it running most of our websites, main mail and dns server and then also having 4 vserver instances on it. Those vserver itself where also running things that do use some resources, like our wiki and the main DebConf7 site, the PentaBarf test-host and our LedgerSMB instance. While it was long decided to move stuff our - we just had to find time to do it. This weekend seems to be it, everything is migrated except cmburns itself, as that needs a fix in the reverse dns entries for the new /28 we got. We are using xen-tools to make installation of new images easy. For that I wrote a script that is used as a role script, automating all that various setup tasks that one can automate easily. Which means that it takes about 5 minutes to get a complete new XEN domain up and running. (Add some minutes to add it to nagios2, munin, our mail setup and to sync the userdatabase.) Mark and Steve also did another migration: gallery.debconf.org is now using gallery2. Still needs a nice layout designed looking similar to our normal DebConf website, but that shouldn’t be too hard to get. While they have been on it they also integrated gallery.debian.net, so that it is back up again. Feel free to use both of them! gallery.debconf.org offers space for all DebConf related pictures, be it the main yearly DebConf (and related) or regional DebConfs, like the one planned for Panama soon. gallery.debian.net is a place where pictures from all Debian related events/parties/whatever can be put. Basically - whenever people working on Debian meet (like a BSP, a work meeting, etc) - feel free to put pictures up there. Just put them into a folder matching the year it happened in… Basic goal is to get a huge set of pictures from people involved in Debian.

19h57:

Subject: Bug#444747: Acknowledgement (git-mergetool completion missing)

Thank you for the problem report you have sent regarding Debian.
This is an automatically generated reply, to let you know your message has
been received.  It is being forwarded to the package maintainers and other
interested parties for their attention; they will reply in due course.

Your message has been sent to the package maintainer(s):
 Clint Adams <schizo@debian.org>

21h24:

Subject: Bug#444747: fixed in zsh 4.3.4-19

This is an automatic notification regarding your Bug report
which was filed against the zsh package:

#444747: git-mergetool completion missing

It has been closed by Clint Adams <schizo@debian.org>.

It seems that the majority of blog traffic (at least in blogs I read) is time-based. It is personal-diary entry posts, references to current events, predictions about future events, bug reports, and other things that either become obsolete or for which it’s important to know the date. For such posts it makes sense to have the date be part of the Permalink URL, and in the normal course of events such posts will tend not to be updated after release. Another type of blog traffic is posts that have ongoing reference value which will (ideally) be actively maintained to keep them current. For such posts it makes sense to have no date stamp in the Permalink - for example if I update a post about installing SE Linux on Etch once Lenny is released (a significant update) I don’t want people ignoring it when it comes up in search engines (or worse having search engines score it down) because the URL indicates that it was written some time before the release of Etch. Wordpress supports Pages as separate entities to Posts, and the names of Pages are direct links under the root of the Wordpress installation. However there is no RSS feed for Pages (AFAIK - I may have missed something) and the Wordpress themes often treat Pages differently (which may not be what you want for timeless posts). Also it is not unreasonable to have Pages and timeless posts. I’m thinking of creating a separate Wordpress installation for posts that I intend to manage for long periods of time with updates (such as documenting some aspects of software I have written). The management options for a blog server program provide significant benefits over editing HTML files. The other option would be to use a different CMS (a blog server being a sub-category of a CMS) to store such things. What I want is a clear way of presenting the data with minimal effort from me (an advantage of Wordpress for this is that I have already invested a significant amount of effort in learning how it works) and editing from remote sites (the offline blog editing tools that are just coming out is a positive point for using a blog server - particularly as I could use the same editor for blog posts and documents). Any suggestions as to how to do this? Then of course there’s the issue of how to syndicate this. For my document blog (for want of a better term) I am thinking of updating the time-stamp on a post every time I make a significant change. If you subscribe to the document feed than that would be because you want to receive new copies of the documents as they are edited. The other option would be to not change the time-stamp and then include the feed along with my regular blog feed (making two feeds be served as one is not a technical challenge). If I was to update the time stamps then I would have to write posts announcing the release of new documents. Does anyone know of someone who writes essays or howto documents in a similar manner to Rick Moen [1] or Paul Graham [2] who also does daily blog posts? I’d like to see some examples of how others have solved these problems (if there are any).

• [1] http://linuxmafia.com/


• [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/

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My week-end's TODO list: continue the reviews for the Smith project (resumed when coming back from holidays: there are 19 reviews under work as of now), work on a few DDTP translations, work on my possible participation to FOSS.in (I already registered....hope I'll be able to get some funding, there are really interesting things to do over there), and work on the samba package (upstream's 3.2.0pre1 released yesterday). As usual, too much things to fit in 2 days...especially with a lot of interesting rugby to see..:-)

I use a rather simple CRM114-based setup to handle spam in my incoming mail. Nothing really funky here as I essentially used examples from the Debian package's examples/ directory. The only personal touch is using a two-step method for this. All mails are received on my home server and delivered to the "bubulle" user there. A non aggressive CRM114 setup runs there for this user. Mails identified as spam are sorted in a specific folder on the server and are theoretically examined regularly. Indeed, this is something I can't do anymore, given the number of identified spams (about 1000 per day, most of them in Debian mailing lists and Debian BTS). After a quick look, this spam is re-teached as being spam to CR114, then stored as backup in a giant mail folder, which allows me to retrieve a possible false positive later. All other mails are left in /var/mail/bubulle waiting for my laptop to grab them. This gives very few false positives, but still lets a lot of spam slip through. This is why I also run CRM114 on my laptop when mail is grabbed from my home server (I use fetchmail between my laptop and my home server, wherever I am). There, spams are again identified (more aggressively than what's done on my home server) by CRM114. The identified spams are sorted in a folder which I routinely investigate carefully for false positives (there are several a day, but the numbers are low because of the prefiltering done on my home server). Spams are teached as spam to CRM114 and, of course, ham is teached as "ham". I recently added the following to my mutt setup so that SPAM/UNSURE/HAM mails are easy to identify in mutt's index:

spam "X-Spam-Status: Yes"                     "90+/SA"
spam "X-CRM114-Status: SPAM"                     "90+/CRM"
spam "X-CRM114-Status: UNSURE"                     "40+/CRM"
set spam_separator=", "
color index red       default    ~H90    # Spam
color index cyan       default    ~H40    # Unsure

With this, messages identified as "Spam" are shown in red in the index, "unsure" messages are showed in cyan and regular messages have their normal colors. This is really helpful as I can spot messages that are "unsure" and very quickly tell CRM114 that they're ham or spam, with:

macro index \es ""s/home/bubulle/Mail/Administration_systeme/Spams\ncrmlearn --learnspam\n" "crm114 learn as spam"
macro index \eh "crmlearn --learnnonspam\n" "crm114 learn as ham"
macro pager \es ""s/home/bubulle/Mail/Administration_systeme/Spams\ncrmlearn --learnspam\n" "crm114 learn as spam"
macro pager \eh "crmlearn --learnnonspam\n" "crm114 learn as ham"

with the "crmlearn" script being:

#!/bin/sh
 grep -a -v "^X-CRM114"   \
 $HOME/.crm114/mailfilter.crm -u $HOME/.crm114/ $1 --force   \
 grep -a "^X-CRM114"

Shortly speaking, for any cyan message I see in mutt, I hit "ESC-h" if I consider it to be ham or "ESC-s" if I consider it to be spam. Finally, all mails identified as spam are grouped in a dedicated mail folder (/home/bubulle/Mail/Administration_systeme/Spams above) which is sent daily to my home server, where it is used to teach CRM114 about spam, then deleted on my laptop. All this makes spam handling pretty easy with a not so complicated setup (the trickiest part is the nightly laptop->home server synchronization).

(or: Why Everyone Should Learn Some Basic Programming) I am an organisational disaster area. I just can't remember "event oriented" information (like "I need to do $foo" or "I need to do $bar at $time"). I think I've accumulated such a huge collection of technical trivia that it's taken over the event planning part of my brain -- although, since I've never been able to remember event oriented information, even before I became a computer geek, it's more likely that I was just built without that bit of the brain. So I guess I'm the perfect target market for some sort of external brain pack (a la "Ratbert the Consultant"). I've tried paper-based organisers (the mighty Filofax), a few pre-written apps, and I even bought an SL-C3200 Zaurus a while ago (although, to be fair, that was really just for the hack factor, regardless of what justification I may have given to others at the time). None have worked, for various reasons. I can't grep paper, and Other People's Apps bug me because they've got their idea of workflow, and I've got mine, and when they don't match up (and they never do) I just get irritated -- not to mention the fact that the ubiquitous relational database, while wonderful in some ways, does tend to get in the way of ad-hoc faffing with your data. But this article is a success story, not a rant (gasp!), so it's safe for you to assume that I've got something that's working for me. My method is real simple -- plain text files, managed by vim-outliner and a simple shell one-liner I've named 'pda', which just runs vim ~/pda/$1.otl. At the moment I've got a monster todo.otl, which is my world's todo list, and a deeply underused calendar.otl. I'm also using vim-outliner to do some project planning, which has been moderately successful, although I'm a bit freaked out by the idea of trying to manage a large-scale project using it. The really, really cool part of this whole shebang, though, is that because all of my data is (structured) plain text, writing little programs to parse the data and do funky things with it is dead simple. For example, in my project outlines, I put estimated, actual, and remaining times in for all tasks (a la Joel Spolsky's Painless Software Schedules) so I can keep track of my estimates and where they differ from reality (because one day I'd like to not Suck at estimating times, and feedback is the only way I'm going to do that). So, about an hour's worth of Ruby gave me "estimator", a script that reads all that data and does a pile of mathematical gubbins about how far over my estimate I am so far (or under estimate, if that were to ever happen), the percentage of the project complete (based on the estimates and number of tasks completed), and things like that. Similarly, today I wrote a small script (run out of cron in the wee hours of the morning) to read my calendar and send me an e-mail if I've got anything in there for today. Since I practically live in mutt, a morning e-mail is going to be far more effective than my trying to remember to check my calendar every morning (especially since, at present, I'm not using the calendar as often as I should, so there's even less motivation to check it). This, in my opinion, is why everybody (literally, every single person) should learn to program at some fairly simple level, like learning to read and write. By using plain text and small scripts, I've got a workflow that works for me, and it's cost me less time than I'd spend learning some large pre-written app and putting all my data into it. Being able to manipulate data like this is, I think, a fairly important tool in the modern world, and I don't think it should be left to any sort of priesthood of developers -- it should be as universal as most countries try to make literacy and numeracy.

Apparently Scott James Remnant in his article on version control systems confuses arch and git. One can only speculate that his short git usage stems from the pre 1.0 days, where you had to use higher level tools (called porcelain) to happily work on git. A funny anecdote is that Scott back in his dpkg hacking year promoted arch heavily. Ubuntu^Wbzr propaganda spreads speed gains as big bonus of the last major releases. In order to be able to do that you have to start with a terrible baseline. Testing bzr on middle sized repos is no fun at all. The bzr pain inside launchpad must be beyond imagination. Nowadays it is much easier to hack on mdadm than on lvm2. The reason is that later project uses rusty cvs. With git it is really easy to contribute back. Either you mail the patches or publish your repository. git will help you along on each way. The other very big bonus of git is the big community around git. It is a community excited around building and delivering the best version control system. The git development does regular surveys on git usages and incorporates back the wishlists. The most "funny" way to use git is to run it as cvsserver. You may believe me or not i have seen git cvsserver emulation usage in the wild.

Package dependency graphs on steroids

How an innocent and simple question can lead to strange development.

I was looking for a simple command that would tell me what the dependency path is from one package to some other package. That is, without having to go by trial-and-error using e.g. aptitude. Actually, I am getting quite annoyed by the fact that I regularly see e.g. gconf2 being pulled in when I install something on my (KDE-based) systems and I wanted to see how exactly they got pulled in. It should be possible to install e.g. xchat without being forced to install gconf2 too, right? For Sarge I had a similar issue with the gimp. Anyway, possibly there already is something to print dependency paths, but I did not find it. As I had some time free after dropping out of the Installer team, I decided to scratch my own itch. To get the paths I decided to recurse through dependencies using grep-available and friends, basically building a tree. An old wish was to play with dot, so I thought it would be nice to visualize the tree and so verify my code (conveniently forgetting about apt-cache dotty...). I soon had something basic working and after that it turned out to be irresistible (and surprisingly easy) to keep adding functionality. The result is that I can now produce graphs like: This is a fairly simple example. A lot of graphs are much more interesting. Oh, yes, it also answers my original question:

$ debtree xchat gconf2
xchat -> xchat-common (D) -> gconf2 (D)

The script is quite flexible and now looks solid enough for a first (Beta) release. After a few optimizations the shell script is even acceptably fast (or at least not slow) on my box. Euhh, what? Shell script? Yes. As I don't really know any of the popular languages used in Open Source, writing this in e.g. perl would just have taken too much time. OTOH, after some three years of working on D-I, I have become quite fluent in shell script. After all, about 80% of the installer (almost all functionality that does the actual installations — including the partitioner) is written in shell, so complex systems in shell are perfectly possible; thanks to Joey we even have a web server in shell! And it keeps surprising me how structured you can work in shell if you try a little. So there. Of course I'd like to see debtree re-implemented in another language, mainly to improve performance. Probably in C++ as that is what apt-cache is written in and its 'dotty' function could be a nice starting point. You'll understand from the above that I'm not going to do this myself, so if anybody is interested in working with me to do this, please contact me. debtree seems like it would be a nice addition to Debian, maybe even alongside apt-cache in apt... Enjoy!

Since today at afternoon I'm officially working as sysadmin of my university linux servers (Debian of course) in the labs. I'm working with Skatox and our main work right now is migrate an ActiveDirectory Server to OpenLDAP and share files in a mixed-domain of Linux and Windows machines (trough Samba for Windows and NFS for Linux) with a lot of desktop limitations (given by the LDAP scheme). Then with this migration we need all the new services in Linux machines: DNS, DHCP and Firewall which are all right now on windows machines. My main question right now is how to regulate the desktop users of windows with LDAP?... I guess I'll find it out later reading more. BTW, all the machines are gonna be installed with debian (testing on desktops and stable on servers). Really, there's a lot of work to do and I cannot publish here all right now, I cannot organize my ideas, but I'll publish how's all going :-) In the middle time I will recruit more debian maintainers now that debian is gonna be used widely there :-)

Davyd Madeley writes about vegetarianism for the environment [1] which is listed in Wikipedia as Environmental Vegetarianism [2]. He links to an article on the Huffington Post [3]. The Huffington Post article in turn links to an article on GoVeg.com about global warming [4]. Mass-produced meat is not only bad for the environment but there are also health issues related to meat consumption (due to bad practices in mass farming, combining the meat of thousands of animals into mince thus increasing the spread of bad meat, and the fact that most people in first-world countries consume significantly more meat than anyone did at any time in history). One thing that doesn’t get mentioned in these posts is the fact that farming is not required to produce meat. In fact the meat that is most healthy (due to lack of carcinogenic chemicals and free-range feeding) and has the strongest flavour (which may be a good or bad thing depending on whether you actually like the flavour of meat) is from wild animals. If you don’t like the taste of meat (which seems to be the case when people don’t like game meat) then why eat it at all? In Australia large numbers of kangaroos are killed because they eat grass more efficiently than cattle (they have evolved over tens of thousands of years to survive in Australian conditions unlike cattle). There are also a number of foreign animals that have run wild in Australia and are considered vermin, this includes rabbit, pig, buffalo, deer and camel (all of which are tasty). Even among native animals there are often times when a cull is needed. If some good seasons allow the population to increase then when there is a bad season the population has to reduce and it’s often better for them to be culled (thus providing plenty of food for the surviving animals) than for all of them to starve. There is a game meat wholesaler I’ve visited a few times that sells buffalo, rabbit, pig, camel, crocodile, possum, emu, kangaroo, and some other animals. All of the meat is from wild animals (apart from rabbit and pig none of those animals can be domesticated). I’m sure that every region has such a wholesaler that will sell to interested individuals if you know where to look (it seems impossible to buy any game meat other than kangaroo retail in Australia). Finally one thing that offends me is people who eat meat but are not prepared to kill the animal. If you aren’t prepared to kill it then you shouldn’t pay someone else to do so on your behalf! Claiming that “the animal was going to be killed anyway” is a pitiful excuse that is only suitable for children. It’s acceptable for children to eat meat without thinking about where it came from. But adults should be able to deal with the fact that eating meat means killing animals - or become vegetarian if they can’t cope with it. The book 3001 The Final Odyssey pioneered the term “corpse food” for eating meat. I believe that the term is accurate and should be used. If you can’t stomach eating corpses then there are many good vegetarian options available. There are many vegetarians in the Linux community. As these issues are getting discussed a lot recently maybe it would be good to have the vegetarians choose some good vegetarian restaurants to have Linux meetings on occasion. Davyd got a bit of negative feedback on his post, maybe if he invited a bunch of his local Linux people to have dinner at a vegetarian restaurant and they enjoyed the food then the reaction to such ideas would be more positive.

• [1] http://davyd.livejournal.com/224276.html


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_vegetarianism


• [3] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathy-freston/vegetarian-is-the-new-pri_b_39014.html


• [4] http://goveg.com/environment-globalwarming.asp

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Your ML-3051N is a lovely little 'network printer. Hopefully, it will serve us well in the next few years as a replacement for the thirteen year old HP Laserjet ML we bought (for about five times the price: a native postscript printer was rather expensive in 1994) a long time ago. And you even mention that it can talk to Linux! But still, I have a few things to talk to you about:

1. as you mention Linux, it's a tad odd that you enumerate various flavours (RH 8 to 9; FC 1 to 3; Mandrake 9 to 10.2; SuSE 8.2 to 9.2) but happen to exclude the two variants that run around here: Debian and its cousin Ubuntu. Besides, the versions of those other flavours are a tad old, no?
2. as you ship Linux software on a cdrom, it is even odder that the install shell script fails (note: spaces between #! and /bin/sh may not be a good idea). Fails not once, but twice: you say /bin/sh, but you meant /bin/bash as you use features of the latter. Oh well, I guess we all made that mistake in our youth. Irregardless, the software never installed. Which is a pity as this would be about the first 'household appliance' I bought with native Linux support. So close, and yet so far.
3. the control panel is a cumbersome way to set a static IP and to turn the odd protocol off.
4. did I really have to install all this windoze stuff on my wife's laptop just to learn that the printer does in fact have a nice web interface? You could have mentioned that with Linux info, no? It is in fact a rather nice and complete web interface.
5. as you supply networking support, do you really have to enable every possible protocol under the sun? I mean slp, snmp, multicast dns, dynamic dns, raw tcp, ipp, ethertalk, netware ...? I still see my cable modem go down 'seemingly randomly' rigth after I print even though I now disabled just about everything but raw tcp to port 9100 as well as ipp to 613. Still, dropping the cable connection just because the printer wakes up is odd, isn't it?
6. Cups, foomatic and all the other printing goodies do not yet know the ML-3050 family, so we are making do with the ML-2151NPS settings for postscript. Works fine, so I won't bother copying the ppd file from the cdrom to the handful of computers around here.

Kind regards, Dirk Updated to fix a markup error. And the shebanh space is standard, I am told.

A new release of xen-shell was made last night, which fixes a couple of minor niggles:

• The --control command line flag simply did not work. Now it does.
• The 'uptime' command works with both new and old Xen versions.
• Shell history persists correctly even on unclean shutdown/exit.

Unless there are great demands for additional features I'm now going to regard this project as complete/finished. Certainly it works well enough for myself and my users. Satisfaction is ...

Seriously. Now that we have been using the request tracker for quite some time, it’s even more obvious that the DSA team is not up to its task. Use login “guest” and password “readonly” if you want to check the RT tickets linked in this article. The facts

• 65 public tickets open (and 5 private tickets)
  • Want to help and seek input from DSA? No response.
  • Want to help and you provide patches and/or solutions? Many are still waiting.
  • Security updates? Who cares…
  • Backup of ftp-master (ries)? No reply (though ftp-master stuff is mirrored on merkel)…
  • New alpha machine? No movement despite the fact that we still have no DD-accessible porter machine.
• 68 tickets closed. Here are some unscientific and manual stats (I counted one each time that someone was involved for the work or for closing the ticket):
  • 27 for James Troup (elmo)
  • 26 for Phil Hands (fil)
  • 13 for me (buxy)
  • 3 for Martin ‘Joey’ Schulze (those I manually forwarded him)
  • 3 for Ryan Murray (neuro)
  • 3 for Matt Taggart (taggart)
  • 2 for Josip Rodin (he handles tickets concerning the mirrors until they have a dedicated queue in the RT)

Note that myself and Matt do not have the needed rights to fix most of the tickets, so we provided help on a best-effort basis. Otherwise we would have done more. The communication problem It’s a multi-level problem. Each of the members has some problems with one or more other members. Joey’s behavior has been part of the recurring problems mentioned: he doesn’t use the RT, doesn’t read the DSA email alias and doesn’t follow the DSA IRC channel but he still does stuff very regularly without reporting anything and obviously problems happen. Ryan and James tried to impose him a rule to document what he does, without success apparently. On the other side, as far as I know, Ryan and James also don’t impose themselves to document everything in a central changelog. Joey has refused to provide me an explanation for his behavior. He just reminded me that he holds grudges against James and Ryan because as ftpmasters they didn’t cooperate well with him while he was stable release manager. In general, outside of all personal griefs that they might have, the DSA members do not communicate very much (at least not on their own official channels). Some examples have already been given concerning the request tracker, but it’s not much more effective on IRC. Most of the traffic on the channel is made up by local admins fixing the problems themselves without any intervention by any DSA. I also use the channel to regularly ping some DSA about simple issues and/or stuff that they usually handle. It used to work somewhat but lately fil has been busy (with the kernel summit and other conferences) and I simply got no answer at all… for example I pinged elmo, neuro and fil several times in the last weeks in the hope that they handle the tickets of the security team (#150, #157, #164) without results. There’s room for improvement. The leadership problem The team has no designated leader and every time that there’s a decision to take, they are blocked. Joey wouldn’t communicate and give his opinion, Ryan is extremely requiring and perfectionist, there’s not much room for compromise… A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Joey and elmo were friends. It’s even Joey who gave root rights to elmo. Nowadays, it’s rather James that is sort-of leading the team but he’s fed up of the situation and hasn’t managed to get out of this mess. He refuses to take drastic measures by himself because he’s not clearly the leader and doesn’t solicit a decision of the Debian leader (or the project) because he believes that the DSA team is not under the scope of the constitution! This can’t last any further. We’ll have to do something about it. Stay tuned.