For those who have asked youself sometimes, when watching any of the Spanish sucess in any kind of sports (but football), why when Spanish athem is sounding no one signs anything, or why, when sound system breaks, people sings "ti-to-ti-to-ta-ri-ro-ri-ro-rit-to-ti..." you have to learn that Spanish Athem has no lyrics. Of course, it had, but was removed when democracy imposed over other darker options 30 years ago. Today, I have seen that, from a mistake, the old lyrics were used by a Romanian ship in a competition at Barcelona. You can see (and listen to it) below.

I cannot understand why this can be considered fascist by reading the lyrics. But listening to it I have felt again that we need lyrics. We cannot go out at the world mumbling our athem, as we cannot sign it. Recently, Spanish Olimpic Comitee requested lyrics to be written. I strongly think that they will be some king of "flower power" lyrics, to avoid hurting anyone (which is impossible)

For those who have asked youself sometimes, when watching any of the Spanish sucess in any kind of sports (but football), why when Spanish athem is sounding no one signs anything, or why, when sound system breaks, people sings "ti-to-ti-to-ta-ri-ro-ri-ro-rit-to-ti..." you have to learn that Spanish Athem has no lyrics. Of course, it had, but was removed when democracy imposed over other darker options 30 years ago. Today, I have seen that, from a mistake, the old lyrics were used by a Romanian ship in a competition at Barcelona. You can see (and listen to it) below.

I cannot understand why this can be considered fascist by reading the lyrics. But listening to it I have felt again that we need lyrics. We cannot go out at the world mumbling our athem, as we cannot sign it. Recently, Spanish Olimpic Comitee requested lyrics to be written. I strongly think that they will be some king of "flower power" lyrics, to avoid hurting anyone (which is impossible)

I said I was going to upload the packages I don’t have time to finish for the moment, but that are in good shape, meaning they compile without problem in latest SID, and are just lacking man pages, icons and so, here’s the next round of them:

• JFS: Development environment for a fuzzy logic programming language.
• Pop’em: small and addictive puzzle game from Free Lunch Design featuring many different game modes and graphical themes. Your goal is to remove as many balls as possible by connecting locating groups of the same color. Source code downloadable here.
• Zombiepox: Throw brains at the zombies and turn them back into humans. As you progress
  you get help from your fellow humans in the fight against the zombies. Source code downloadable here.

So, my official training for DebConf8 has just started! What is this training about? Well, since a couple of weeks ago, I had seen a little Argentinian restaurant two blocks from my place. It is not new to find Argentinian places on the area, specially on La Condesa, where lots of foreigns reside within Mexico City. Argentinians are known in some circles, because they usually take their dogs for walking on Parque Espa a, Parque M xico and the neighborhoods nearby (not that Mexicans don’t walk dogs, it’s just a bit more stereotyped for Mexicans to put dogs on the roofs of buildings and not taking very good care of them). Anyway, since I live on Roma Sur, which is just crossing Insurgentes avenue away from La Condesa, it is also a crowded neighborhood (which is more like a family-kind area), the nearest Argentinian place was this, Che Charr a. I had no idea where I could have a nice cheap lunch, so I headed there. The prices were not nuts, but it wasn’t cheap as eating in the street, of course. Che Charr a is a small place, they have like five tables inside, and two or three outside on the sidewalk. I ordered a Bah a Blanca meal, which was basically, three empanadas (you could choose between ham and cheese, meat, chicken and corn/cheese), a couple of cups of fresh water and a dessert flan (which name I just can’t remember, but it was Argentinian typical). The Mexican part couldn’t be left aside, that’s why they offer chimichurri or spicy sauce Besides, they give jamaica-water (which is some kind of juice of a Mexican flower, which is delicious, DebConfers could probably had some on DC6, I bet you can only find it here). At the end, I ordered a black-chocolate alfajor, which was extremely delicious, but cold, since it was on the fridge. So, that’s my training: Getting ready for DC8/Argentinian food! After a quick chat with ASCIIGirl, I’ve decided to take this a bit further, I’ll be going to Che Charr a or other .ar restaurants, at least once every two/three weeks and have something different each time, take pictures of places/dishes, etc. My official Argentinian food training! Who joins the challenge?

(Or the unfortunate story of why I am not yet participating in the Debian games or perl teams.) I'm a big fan of both the Debian games and perl teams. The games team keeps finding new and interesting games and flowing them into Debian. The perl team is responsible for a rather amazing quantity of perl modules. Since I maintain both some games and some perl modules, I've looked at participating in both teams from time to time. I think it's odd that the reason I haven't been able to do so in both cases comes down to something as basic as how they use their subversion repositories.

---

In the case of the perl team, they have a fairly standard use of subversion, as explained in their guide. The problem is repository layout. They chose to use the "package/ trunk,tags,branches " layout rather than the " trunk,tags,branches /package" layout. This means that it's not easy to check out the source for every package in the repo all at once. Having all the sources checked out is a prerequisite for many kinds of work that span all packages. In my work on the d-i packages, which are in a repository using the latter structure, I often grep all the packages for a problem, and fix the problem in every package. To manage this with the debian-perl repo, I'd either have to check out the whole thing, with who knows how many gigabytes of tags, or I'd have to construct and maintain an svn:externals list that checked out the trunk of every package. (Open offer to the perl team: I'd be happy to reorganise your repo for you.)

---

The games team uses the " trunk,tags,branches /package" repo layout, which is nice. But they have a policy of not keeping all upstream files in subversion at all. They prefer to only keep files that are patched in subversion, to save space. That looks on the surface to be a nice space optimisation, especially for space-hungry game data, but from what I tell, what it saves in space, it loses in complexity and maintainer time. And my time is much more valuable than alioth's disk space. It's also very debatable how much space this saves at all for games. I keep uqm and all its data files in one subversion repo. I have 4 years of history of all of upstream's changes to the files in there, and it takes 165 mb of data. Which sounds like a lot, but the files in trunk alone take 170 mb to check out (not counting .svn directories)! And the games team is also storing upstream tarballs in a directory on alioth. One tarball per release, often multiple releases per game, 2.0 gb of tarballs in all. Would it really use much more space in svn? Even if it used 10x the space somehow, is 20 gb even worth worrying about? I think not. (Open offer to the games team: I'd happily do the grunt work of checking in upstream sources for all the games in your repo.) (Update: I realized after posting this that while the space gains on alioth might be illusory, there is certianly a space gain for people checking the whole repo out. What's really needed is a way to keep all the upstream sources in svn, but check them out only when wanted, and check out all the debian directories for cross-game work. Hmm..)

---

I also checked out one other big package repo, collab-maint. The policy for collab-maint's repo uses the same structure as the perl team's repo. However, I doubt I'd ever want to check out all of collab-maint or do group maintenance across it, so that's not a big deal. The documentation also recommends not storing upstream sources in svn, although I've found a lot of packages in the repo that do. I could probably dump in ~100 mb of subversion history for 50-odd packages without anyone caring ... right?

---

It's interesting that all three of these big subversion repos have their own custom policies for how to use their repo. Having different policies for each repo results in more complexity and a higher learning curve. I wager that 99% of all the packages in these repos are pretty stock in their packaging and can be pretty easily understood and worked with by most Debian maintainers. We've have de-facto standards and policies that they all use. Until you get down to the repos, which, despite using subversion each seem to need to go their own way for some reason.

Last night, after what seemed an eternity; Annabelle and I finally got on a night train to Spain; and arrived in Portbou, Spain 8 hours later. Surprisingly enough; we actually managed to sleep on this train; possibly because for some reason we got lucky and had a 6 bed compartment to ourselves. We proceeded to eat breakfast at the same cafe my sister Orla and I had had breakfast at the year before; and used internet to check how best to get to Valencia. So; the final plan is to sit on this train I'm on right now (for three hours); to Barcelona, spend the day in Barcelona, and take the night train to Valencia. And meet one of pixie's friends. Should be interesting!

I've been playing some computer games this week, which I don't often do. I finally tried a modern version of this Wesnoth game that everyone in Debian was playing a while ago, and have been enjoying working through the stories in it. I played glest for a few hours, and really enjoyed the 3d graphics, especially when it rained. I'm no good at real time strategy games though, and ordering units around contantly becomes wearisome. Globulation 2 might partially manage to avoid that problem, I'll have to try it a bit more sometime. Transcend is an amazing thing. After finishing a level, I found myself avoiding going on to the next level for a long time so I could spend time messing around with the thing I constructed while playing the game -- and wished there was a way to save my creation. The graphics are reminiscent of kalidoscopes and flowers. It subverts tradition, it has the trappings of a spacewar descendent, but instead of Star Control, the game turns out to be about music growing. Like tetris, it's abstract enough that I can zone out while playing it and get into a different mental state; and I can even pick which kind by making different kinds of music as I play. Wow, wow, wow.

Cultivation is a video game written by Jason Rohrer about a community of gardeners growing food for themselves in a shared space. Jason is also author of Transcend, a retro-style, abstract, 2D shooter already in Debian repositories. The game is cross-platform, and has been released in the Public Domain. Cultivation is quite different from most other games. It is a social simulation, and the primary form of conflict is over land and plant resources. There is no shooting, but there are plenty of angry looks. It is also an evolution simulation. Within the world of Cultivation, you can explore a virtually infinite spectrum of different plant and gardener varieties. All of the graphics, sounds, melodies,and other content in Cultivation are 100% procedurally generated at playtime. In other words, there are no hand-painted texture maps. Instead, each object has a uniquely “grown” appearance. Every time you play, Cultivation generates fresh visuals, music, and behaviors. Cultivation is certainly an unusual game, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good, in Jason’s words. From experience, some people absolutely love it, while others absolutely hate it. It’s intended to be an “art game” after all, and mixed reactions go with that territory. When two sides are fighting, they often ruin the commons for everyone. The game is a metaphor about that kind of situation. Too much fighting destroys the island for everyone. I’ve already finished the packaging of this game, and I hope it gets into Debian repositories soon.

I just noticed that hotplug has been removed from unstable, claiming that it has been 'superseded' by udev. On the few occasions that I did try udev, it's always failed for me; as such, I'm still using hotplug on my machines. It's just way more reliable, in my experience; and I don't need automounting of CD-ROMs, or user-space scripts doing setup of kernel-space device nodes, anyway. There are also still some 2000 machines using hotplug, according to popcon.debian.org. That probably includes me, but I don't have 2000 systems. So I have a dillemma, here: either try udev again, or pick up maintenance of hotplug. Or figure out whether it's possible to use udev's hotplugging abilities without its /dev management. That would rock.

Started with a cleanup of the account database, to get the official Developers count back to some reality. The first run did include about 400 people, where one or more of the listed categories applied. It started very good - my first run of my script just generated a bounce for every single mail I tried to sent. Turns out its not ok to have “To: user@debian.org user@debian.org>” in your mail text, the setup on master.debian.org doesn’t like this. Oh yes, it really helps to use the right variable for the username part, which doesn’t have the domain appended. Oh well. Then I got that part right, and master did accept all my mails. Just so that I could discover another mistake in my script. Only a cosmetical one, but it helps if you set the From address to the wat alias, not your own, after you finished testing, in case you want to have replies go there directly. Tsss. Now I have to bounce those mails there. Anyway, those are minor things noone, especially the people who got a mail, need to care about, it all just works for them if they reply. And I already got about 40 bounces back, so already nearly 40 accounts to disable. Not all 40, because a few contain enough information so i can try a resend of the mail to a little modified recipient address. The rest is just so that I can’t do anything about them. Well. Ok. There are two people that are using one braindead idiot wanna-be antispam solution which requires you to send some token somewhere to get your mail delivered. Usually I just delete mails then and dont care if they lose, as they obviously do not want to receive mail. I am not sure if I should do it in this case, even if I would like to. After all its their lack of sanity that they do not receive mails… I also got around 60 replies to the pings, with a good number of them resigning from Debian and some others that reconfirm they are active (and mostly point me to their activities). The next WaT run will start about 4 months after this one. Now - 4 months after the previous is over (which would be 6 months from now) or after it started? Probably the first and then have 3 runs a year or something similar. I’m still looking at my scripts to gather the data to enhance them in a way that makes it easy. Like - If someone replies with “Im active” in this run I would like to recheck this if the same user is still a possible WaT target a few runs later.

Like most geeks, I run my own mail server. The burden of administering it is much less than the increased flexibility in filtering incoming mail, let alone dealing with SPAM. My mail server configuration has remained pretty static the entire time, and controversially, I’ve always used qmail. The reason for this dates back to my first sysadmin job in the mid-to-late nineties, and the decision in those days did tend to be sendmail or qmail; with the security conscious choosing the latter. qmail’s delivery system is a little odd, everything on the left hand side up to the first “-” is considered a user, and everything after can be used for filtering. The default local delivery component takes this into account, so e-mail to scott-foo can be filtered by the /home/scott/.qmail-foo file. This gives a pretty natural way to deal with mailing lists; you subscribe with a unique address for that list, and all the mail goes into the right folder automatically. This has served me reasonably well over the years, with heavy patching across the daemon to add features such as LDAP integration, and SPAM filtering that I wanted. Unfortunately it’s been getting to burdensome to maintain. Since it’s not true open source software, and is effectively abandoned upstream, it’s not as up to date as I’d like. SPAM filtering tends to take place in the local delivery loop, rather than at SMTP time; and due to the strange delivery system, it’s unreasonably hard to perform any kind of sender verification or greylisting. Since every special address is filtered differently, it’s quite hard to add common filtering unless it’s pre-planned and you use addresses with a common prefix. The clincher has been dealing with super-sites like Launchpad which send huge amounts of different e-mails to a single address, and no facility to separate that from your published contact address. I needed a better mail server. So I’ve now moved to exim. I was surprised by how quickly I was able to pick it up, I did the migration in two day outages. The first to simply migrate delivery and stash the mail in one big folder, and the second to customise the delivery and filtering to my liking. I’ve also re-subscribed to mailing lists with single addresses again, so now I have a single filter rule which happily can filter Launchpad mails around as well. Happily I’ve been able to make a change I’ve wanted to for a while, home and work e-mail is separated into different Maildir/ trees; and mailing list subscriptions made with the most appropriate address. The magic of dovecot lets me create a fake scott+canonical user that uses the alternate Maildir tree, while still retaining my user permissions, etc. Overall I’m pleased with the new setup, and how the migration went. SpamAssassin needs some tuning as a little SPAM is still getting through, but otherwise it seems to be working well.

As you probably already heard, the GPL, version 3 has been released, together with the LGPL, version 3. I haven't yet read the licenses in detail, so I cannot say much about them, but more information is available in the (updated) GPL FAQ. The compatibility table from the GPLv3 Discussion Draft FAQ can be pretty helpful, too. There's a Why Upgrade to GPLv3? text and even a video of Richard Stallman (Ogg Theora, transcript available) introducing the GPLv3, the rationale behind it and some of the changes in this new version. (One nice advantage of the GPLv3 I like is that it's compatible with the Apache license now, btw.) Probably the most interesting GPLv3 resource at the moment is Palamida's list of projects which already switched to the GPLv3, which includes a number of GNU tools (sed, tar, ed, bison, texinfo, cpio, coreutils) and some other major projects such as Samba. Currently the page lists ca. 140 projects which switched. It'll be interesting to see how the adoption proceeeds. My guess is that in a few months it'll be hard to build distributions or embedded (GNU/Linux-based) hardware devices without GPLv3 code...

Status Page for OCaml Transitions Today my spare time (not necessarily driven by me) produced the OCaml package status page. Even if a lot of improvements have already been requested by other fellow caml-ers (i.e. more work to do), I'm kinda happy about the result ... I've even enjoyed using Genshi more than in the past. Unfortunately the page reminds me that there's still a lot TODO before starting to upload OCaml 3.10.0 packages to unstable. Damned status pages!

Yet another master piece of work in cooperation with the Ubuntu kernel team and Super Davem. We finally got all userland and kernel bits and pieces into the archive to install Ubuntu Gusty in an LDOM guest. The installer works smoothly (except a bug i found in the partitioner and in software installar that are not sparc specific) and it is pretty fast too. Only netboot/netinstall is available at the moment but that's plenty compared to the knowledge people need to run this kind of infrastructure in it's early release stages. LDOM is not considered yet very stable and there are a bunch of workarounds required in Solaris to run Linux properly. I will post them sometime soon when I feel more confident that they will not break more than what they fix. It is really big satisfaction to see so many pieces falling together nicely in such short time. Well done everybody.

… is that more than one are likely to have the same crazy ideas. A while ago, when I was fooling around with VMware ESX and wrote diskimgfs (which I hope to be able to release some day), I found another implementation of the same root idea (without partition level access, though) in dm-userspace. A few months ago, Sam posted his code for a SSH/HTTPS port sharing program, idea of which had been on my mind since a few weeks earlier. And now that I’m playing around with git, I was thinking about having a FUSE filesystem to access a git repository. Guess what, it already exists. And it actually happens quite often. This is also one of the reasons there are so many implementations of the same things (another being the NIH syndrome).

Via ateaseweb, OKX: A Tribute to OK Computer: an album of song-by-song covers of Radiohead's OK Computer. My Brightest Diamond (mentioned here a few weeks back) magnificently covers Lucky. Free download!

Well, I've hinted at it and told enough friends, I should get around to posting it: As of the end of this month, I'll be moving on from Canonical. By my calculations, I was something around employee #30, the first support tech, and I've had a great chance to build the support organisation up to where Linux Format magazine rated us as tied with RedHat ahead of Novell in this August's issue.

So what's up?

Well, those of you following along might remember a cute little bundle of joy entering my life. A couple of months in, I've realised that I can't stay on top of being with him and growing a 7x24 operation at this critical time in Canonical's growth. I'll be taking the month of August to be with Angie and Leif, and in September will start a new job with Google in the Open Source Program Office. I don't know the details of what I'll be doing there (The Google Omert , as one friend called it... *g*), but Google as a company is well aware of what happens with brand-new parents and the mad readjustment of priorities.

Angie and I are currently selling our place in Montr al in prep for moving to San Francisco at the end of August. I want to make sure I see people before we go, and if you're interested in buying the place, give us a call. =) Also, if you're in the Bay Area, a vegan, a parent, into Yoga/fitness, speaking French, etc., we'd love to meet you for tea sometime!

It turns out that if you want to use includes in your .spec file and want the files to be included in the .src.rpm you have to declare those scripts as supplemental sources.

So instead of:
Name: foo
Version: x.y
Release: z
Summary: foo package
Group: Applications/System
Source: foo.tar.gz
Packager: Eddy Petrisor
BuildArch: noarch
BuildRoot: $RPM_BUILD_ROOT
....


You have to have:

Name: foo
Version: x.y
Release: z
Summary: foo package
Group: Applications/System
Source: foo.tar.gz
Source101: foo.pre.sh
Source102: foo.post.sh
Source103: foo.preun.sh
Source104: foo.postun.sh
Source105: foo.changelog
Packager: Eddy Petrisor
BuildArch: noarch
BuildRoot: $RPM_BUILD_ROOT
....

In case you want to have the scripts separated in different files and you use them all.

Note: the number in the "SourceXXX" is arbitrary but must be unique.

But mentioning the files as being Source... means you have to write:


%post
%include ../SOURCES/foo.post.sh

%preun
%include ../SOURCES/foo.preun.sh

%postun
%include ../SOURCES/foo.postun.sh


Instead of:


%post
%include foo.post.sh

%preun
%include foo.preun.sh

%postun
%include foo.postun.sh


Which should have been more reasonable...

RPM, please die... or grow some 21st century features... or some sense!!!


Update: Thanks to a few people, I was pointed out I am still not thinking in terms or RPM.
The proper way of writing the include without them looking odd is something like:

%post
%include % SOURCE102