I recently worked on the following RC bugs:

• #696187 squid-cgi: CVE-2012-5643: cachemgr.cgi denial of service
  NMUed the upstream patches after nearly 2 months of no maintainer reaction on the bugreport.
• #684645 sendmail-bin: Order of fcntl and dotlock in maillock
  Coordinated with the soon-to-be maintainer and explained (in private) that the upload should only contain a minimum amount of changes in order to be unblocked.
• #690075 unblock: dnsmasq/2.63-4
  Pinged the maintainer about the current situation.
• #693208 clang: unable to link trivial test program on armhf
  Reproduced the issue, now building clang on qemu-armhf This takes quite a while.

It is getting hard to find RC bugs to work on. If you have access to ia64 hardware, have a look at #694971 Epiphany browser crashes within JSC::JSArray::increaseVectorLength() or #697172 sporadic crashes of epiphany browser due to a thread-unsafe favicon database. Both have patches available that just need to be tested.

I just uploaded wit-2.10a to Debian experimental (it has to pass the NEW queue first, though). WIT (Wiimms ISO Tools) is a set of command-line tools to manipulate Wii and GameCube ISO images and WBFS containers. It is useful (for me) to store backups of my Wii games on a USB hard disk drive. This saves me the optical disc juggling, doesn t wear off the discs as fast and gives faster load times. Here is an example session where I format one partition of the USB hard disk with WBFS and then copy my old WBFS image over to it:

$ wwt format -v --force /dev/sde3
wwt: Wiimms WBFS Tool v2.10a r0 x86_64 - Dirk Clemens - 2013-01-02
FORMAT BLOCK DEVICE /dev/sde3 [172 GiB, hss=512]
** 1 file formatted.
$ wwt add --part /dev/sde3 /media/sde1/wbfs/The\ Legend\ of\ Zelda\ Skyward\ Sword\ \[SOUP01\]/*.wbfs
*****  wwt: Wiimms WBFS Tool v2.10a r0 x86_64 - Dirk Clemens - 2013-01-02  *****
WBFSv1 #1/1 opened: /dev/sde3
 - ADD 1/1 [SOUP01] WBFS:/media/sde1/wbfs/The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword [SOUP01]/SOUP01.wbfs/#0
* WBFS #1: 1 disc added.
wwt add --part /dev/sde3   0,02s user 7,66s system 2% cpu 5:02,68 total
$ wwt list
ID6     1/500 discs (4 GiB)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
SOUP01  The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Total: 1/500 discs, 4176 MiB ~ 4 GiB used, 171444 MiB ~ 167 GiB free.

I recently worked on the following RC bugs:

• #669513 gnat-4.4: FTBFS: unsatisfiable build-dependency
  Closed, no longer reproducible with the version in testing.
• #694810 plib: CVE-2012-4552
  Uploaded an NMU to unstable.
• #684130 digikam: crash when starts
  Closed, not reproducible with the version in testing.
• #645133 simile-timeline: source package should use proper source
  Repackaged the orig tarball to generate all files at build-time (instead of using the pre-minified files).

I recently worked on the following RC bugs:

• #689769 ample: ships a /var/run/ample folder: Policy 9.3.2
  Uploaded a patched version to DELAYED/5.
• #694810 plib: CVE-2012-4552
  Provided a patch, asked for instructions from the security team.
• #694972 imposm: missing source for imposm/cache/kc.c
  Uploaded a repackaged version to DELAYED/5.
• #672926 oidentd: Missing dependency on net-tools
  Uploaded another version which fixes my mistake of shipping changes to debian/ as a patch and hopefully gets an unblock.

I recently worked on the following RC bugs:

• #694976 sigit: doesn't work on amd64
  Filed a removal request.
• #694796 kscd: crash with no optical drive
  Downgraded severity, it s not RC.
• #672926 oidentd: Missing dependency on net-tools
  Merged the patch, added the dependencies, NMUed.
• #694024 zutils: Don't print the file name if only one file is grepped
  Provided a patch. Reviews welcome.
• #694972 imposm: missing source for imposm/cache/kc.c
  Provided further analysis.

I recently worked on the following RC bugs:

• #694892 tvtime: package installation creates /root/.tvtime
  Sent a patch which fixes the issue. Needs a second pair of eyes plus possibly an NMU.
• #684604 eclipse-rcp: eclipse 3.8 hangs on splash screen with "Loading Workbench" after update from 3.7.2
  Pinged reporter(s) about test files which are offline by now.
• #673790 python-prettytables: Broken API on new version
  Investigated the current state, then re-assigned the bug to the only still-broken package python-cloudservers. People who (can) use python-cloudservers and want to change it to the current python-prettytables API can help here.

Dear Lazyweb, I recently investigated #694670 - kscd does not play any CD essentially, at least on my machine, phonon-based applications such as kscd won t play Audio CDs when your CD drive is not called /dev/cdrom, but e.g. /dev/cdrom5 because I have had multiple CD drives connected to my machine. Now, I am not very deeply involved into KDE or phonon in particular. Therefore, I am asking: Is there anyone who could have a look into this issue? It should be easy to reproduce, you can simply append "5" to "cdrom" in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-cd.rules and reboot afterwards. As an outsider, I am somewhat baffled by the complexity of C++, phonon, gstreamer, etc. All these layers of abstraction are not that easy to debug, at least not for me. Good blog posts about digging into this issue are appreciated :-).

I recently worked on the following RC bugs:

• #677861 lftp: FTBFS[kfreebsd-i386]: error: conflicting declaration 'typedef __int32_t gl_intptr_t'
  I provided some analysis. By rebuilding lftp s configure script with recent autotools, this should be fixed.
• #676229 gnustep-make: should depend on a chosen version of gobjc, not just "gobjc"
  This issue was fixed by an upload, but not marked as closed. I tried to reproduce it and failed (as expected), so I closed the bug.
• #694091 bcrypt: Tries to load whole file into memory regardless of the size
  I patched bcrypt to use a window of 256K over the input and output file instead of loading it into memory. I also fixed the offset types so that it works with files > 2 GiB on 32-bit platforms.

I have to say that I find the BTS to be very hard to read from the perspective of a newcomer who wants to help squashing RC bugs, both from a technical and a social standpoint. As an example for the technical side: blocking bugs are very easy to miss, so innocent bugreports which seem actionable turn out to just wait for another bug with lots of discussion. Also, it seems like the best interface to the BTS for RC bugs is UDD, so RichiH s RC report was quite helpful. For the social side: Bugreports often are in a state in which it is not clear what the next course of action is, e.g. #634261 (the bug is not considered RC, but still has severity: grave) or #684633 (dropping from testing suggested but not clear whether a removal request has been filed or not). I m aware that this is very vague critic. I suppose what I am missing is a way in which we can make the list of RC bugs more actionable. When I am browsing through RC bugs, I often open bugreports and figure out that there s nothing I can do. Possibly a way to improve this situation is by letting people claim ownership of a bug and then filtering for un-owned bugs and those which have an owner but have not seen any activity for some period of time.

Reading about Michael Stapelberg s codesearch I bet a lot of people had the same idea. I just had to post a screenshot of it: It seems we have a lot to fix

I hereby announce a new Debian project: Debian Code Search. Debian Code Search is a search engine for program source code within Debian.
It allows you to search all 17000 source packages, containing 130 GiB of
FLOSS source code (including Debian packaging) with regular expressions. You can use the search engine at http://codesearch.debian.net/
Here are a few sample queries:

• workaround package:linux
• XCreateWindow
• AnyEvent::I3 filetype:perl

The corresponding thesis (and source code, of course) will be released soon
(2013-01-15 being the deadline, but I hope I can do it earlier).

I recently worked on the following RC bugs:

• #691125 ejabberd: package installation creates /root/.erlang.cookie
  I tracked down the cause of this and provided a patch. Now I also know how piuparts works in detail :-).
• #691180 connman: Connman won't run due to missing libxtables.so.7
  Since this bug does not affect testing and it doesn t look like iptables 1.4.16.3-1 (a new upstream release) will go into wheezy (no freeze unblock filed), I tagged this with wheezy-ignore. I hope this was right, if not, feel free to correct me.
• #684645 liblockfile1: Order of fcntl and dotlock in maillock
  I identified the piece of code which does locking the wrong way. Since I m not familiar enough with either sendmail or NFS-safe locking, I did not send a patch. In case you have experience with this, please have a look!

mbiebl has recently uploaded systemd 44-5 to Debian unstable. If you are already using systemd, you should definitely upgrade to this version, it fixes a lot of little annoyances. This is especially important if you are using libvirt >= 0.10.2-4 or if you experienced a hanging boot when your network cable is attached.

I recently worked on the following systemd-related issues:

• #686115 - CanReload is set to yes unconditionally for legacy SysV services
  I wrote a patch which uses a heuristic to figure out whether a SysV init script supports the reload option or not. Not perfect, but a whole lot better than defaulting to "yes" :-). This should also fix #650382 - force-reload translated to reload for SysV services.
• #688635 - Don t kill libvirt VMs when restarting libvirt
  I ported a patch from the Fedora systemd packaging which avoids killing all processes of a cgroup when restarting a service. This is necessary for libvirtd, otherwise all virtual machines get killed when you restart libvirt-bin.service. libvirt-bin 0.10.2-4 (experimental) ships systemd service files.
• #635777 - 90-seconds delay on reboot/shutdown when postfix is installed
  I tracked down the cause of several 90-second delay on shutdown causes and provided a patch (which is a workaround ).
• #624599 - systemd: DHCP hook scripts calling invoke-rc.d causes boot hang
  I tracked down the cause of a deadlock at boot time when dhcp hooks call invoke-rc.d (as does samba). Several workarounds are known but we have not yet taken any action.

Hello Planet Debian. This post serves as a confirmation that my feed/blog setup is working. I am a DD since a few months and will blog occasionally about my Debian activities.

Hello Planet Debian. This post serves as a confirmation that my feed/blog setup is working. I am a DD since a few months and will blog occasionally about my Debian activities.