$ zcat Sources.gz grep -o 'debhelper (>= 9.0[^)]*)' sort uniq -c sort -rn
47 debhelper (>= 9.0.0)
13 debhelper (>= 9.0)
4 debhelper (>= 9.0.0~)
3 debhelper (>= 9.0~)
Hey, wake up!
debhelper is no longer using such versioning scheme.
Simple (>= 9) would be both shorter and less silly.
I was at FOSDEM over the last weekend, so here's my report for two weeks
now:
master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.*
here's the list of RC bugs I've worked on during the last week:
This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (130.30 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects.
Dpkg work
The month started with fixing newly reported bugs to prepare the 1.16.1.1 release:
$(shell ). Fixed that by manually exporting the required variables.
WordPress packaging
WordPress sounds similar to python-django. I m also only a backup maintainer but Giuseppe has been inactive for many months and I had to step in August because I wanted the new upstream version. I discovered a bit late that I was not subscribed to wordpress bugs and thus the release critical bug #639733 (that I introduced with my new upstream version) went unattended for a rather long time. Once aware, though, I quickly fixed it.
I also took the opportunity to start a discussion on debian-devel about how to deal with embedded javascript libraries and proposed a mechanism of opportunistic replacement with symlinks . WordPress is my testbed package for this mechanism, you can check out its debian/dh_linktree that implements the replacement logic.
The discussion has not been very interesting but at least I learned that Debian now requires that each source package shipping minified javascript files includes the original files too. It s somewhat of a pain since it s not a license requirement in many cases (many of those libraries are not under the GPL), but just a Debian requirement that many upstreams are not complying with. WordPress is affected and Jakub Wilk thus opened #646729 which is going to be a long-standing RC bug. To give good measures, I spent several hours investigating the case of each javascript file in the WordPress source package and I filed a new ticket on the upstream bugtracker.
Dropbox packaging work
A few months after the introduction of nautilus-dropbox to Debian and Ubuntu, I can say that the decision to only support the download of dropbox in the postinst has been a mistake. Because of this decision I had to make the postinst fail if the download failed. Even if the error message is relatively clear, this lead to many (mostly automated) bug reports on the Ubuntu side. Various other problems cropped up on top of this (trying to start dropbox while the package was not configured would result in an error because the user did not have the required rights to install the software, reinstalling the package while dropbox was running would result in a failure too, etc.).
I have fixed all those issues in the version 0.7.0-2 of the package. Now if the user has to install dropbox, it will use PolicyKit to request the root rights. The postinst will no longer fail if the dropbox download fails since it can be run later by the user. And I fixed the download code to remove the replaced file before unpacking a new file (insead of overwriting the existing file). All this work has been forwarded upstream.
The Debian Administrator s Handbook Update
I m glad to tell you that the translation will happen because we reached the minimal funding goal on October 22th with the help of 380 supporters.
Now the fundraising continues, but this time the goal is the liberation of the resulting book. For this to happen, we need to reach 25000 EUR in the liberation fund. So far we re at 37% of this goal with 9400 EUR in the liberation fund (which means that 59% of the money raised has been put in the liberation fund).
Click here if you want to contribute towards the liberation of this book. With (less than) 27 days left, it s going to be a challenge to meet the goal, but we do like challenges, don t we? Misc work
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Together with Jeremiah Foster, we have created a small POD document that hopefully will help aspiring developers. The file currently explains how the source code is divided, some core concepts and how to run specific tests in the test suite. The plan is to make it available on lintian.d.o along with a link to the git source code (#639974).
Last time, I mentioned we have gotten rid of collection/fields by a simple improvement to our Lintian::Collect API. Turns out the same improvement could also be used on collection/source-control-file. This means we no longer create a file per field in the d/control of the source package.
To avoid (any more) confusion, Lintian will now inform you if the package carries an override for a non-overridable tag (except if you use --quiet). On a related note, Lintian will now error out if it sees an unknown field in a vendor profile. Previously it would just silently ignore the field.
There is one more change I would like to highlight and this one is probably best served with an example:
$ lintian --show-overrides ../lintian_2.5.2.dsc
N: We build-depend on cdbs for the test suite
O: lintian source: unused-build-dependency-on-cdbs
N: We build-depend on quilt for the test suite
O: lintian source: quilt-build-dep-but-no-series-file
N: We don't have a patch system for lintian itself
O: lintian source: patch-system-but-no-source-readme
1.10 to 1.11. That means X drivers (for input and video) need to
be rebuilt against the new server, which is happening through
binNMUs. That also means the X stack from sid might be uninstallable
for a few hours, but impatient people can still use the stack from
wheezy in the meanwhile.
Please refrain from reporting uninstallability bugs. That s expected,
can t be avoided, and only for a few hours (assuming no driver starts
to Fail To Build From Source).
Many thanks to the following people, who joined the let s do a
pre-upload crash test effort:
Yesterday I finally found the time to update gimp-plugin-registry, the (hopefully!) largest and best collection of plugins for The GIMP. As usual here comes a short summary of the changes:
Yesterday I finally found the time to update gimp-plugin-registry, the (hopefully!) largest and best collection of plugins for The GIMP. As usual here comes a short summary of the changes:
)
nmudiff should offer that when
passed --delay, I intend to propose a patch for that,
but feel free to beat me at it :-P)
In other news, christmas vacations are awesome to catch up with
books you planned to finish
reading months ago ...
Update: the patch for nmudiff I've
mentioned has been kindly
provided by gregor hermann, thanks!
Next.