Gustavo Franco announced the debianart project.

For those who can remind it better I setup a CNAME for this: art.debian.net.

Actually it points to art.modprobe.de which then redirects the virtualhost to debianart.org because there are some web server setup limitations on the provider side of debianart.org, but this should work

Ak just released newsbeuter-0.4.
Now I guess newsbeuter is the most feature-rich RSS reader available for text-mode. Not even raggle has more (AFAIK).

Here are the new features:

• introduced configuration option to disable cache cleanup


• introduced configuration option to set the HTTP user-agent header to a custom value


• significant speed improvement for reload and cache cleanup


• added Italian translation


• added an "include" configuration command to make it possible to separate the configuration into several files


• introduced global configuration file /etc/newsbeuter/config


• added support for Snownews/Liferea extension scripts

The support for extension script rocks, now you write shell scripts which generate output, newsbeuter uses as input for example!

I already uploaded the package to Debian unstable. While the buildds still compile, get it from incoming.

Note to self: Installing build chroots on Debian quick&dirty (here testing and unstable).

Package: schroot
Description: Execute commands in a chroot environment

schroot allows users to execute commands or interactive shells
in different chroots. Any number of named chroots may be
created, and access permissions given to each, including root
access for normal users, on a per-group basis. Additionally,
schroot can switch to a different user in the chroot, using PAM
for authentication and authorisation. All operations are logged
for security.
.
Several different types of chroot are supported, including normal
directories in the filesystem, and also block devices. Sessions,
persistent chroots created on the fly from files and LVM snapshots
are also supported.
.
schroot also integrates with sbuild, to allow building packages with
all supported chroot types, including sessions.
.
schroot shares most of its options with dchroot, but offers vastly
more functionality.

$ apt-get install schroot cdebootstrap
$ mkdir -p /home/chroot/ sid,testing
$ addgroup sbuild && adduser nion sbuild

$ cat > /etc/schroot/schroot.conf EOF
[sid]
description=Debian sid (unstable)
location=/home/chroot/sid
priority=3
groups=sbuild
root-groups=root
aliases=unstable,default
run-exec-scripts=true
run-setup-scripts=true

[lenny]
description=Debian lenny (testing) 32-bit
location=/home/chroot/testing
priority=3
root-groups=root
groups=sbuild
aliases=testing,lenny
run-exec-scripts=true
run-setup-scripts=true
EOF

$ # the necessary setup apart from binding directories will be done by schroot now
$ # stable chroots are added in the same way

$ cat >> /etc/fstab EOF
proc /home/chroot/sid/proc proc defaults 0 0
/home /home/chroot/sid/home none bind 0 0
proc /home/chroot/testing/proc proc defaults 0 0
/home /home/chroot/testing/home none bind 0 0
EOF

$ cdebootstrap --arch i386 testing /home/chroot/testing/ http://ftp2.de.debian.org/debian/
$ cdebootstrap --arch i386 sid /home/chroot/sid/ http://ftp2.de.debian.org/debian/
$ # you need to add (if you are not using unstable)
   Suite: lenny
   Config: sid
   to /usr/share/cdebootstrap/suites, unfortunatly it wasn't added before the etch release.

$ mount /home/chroot/sid/proc && mount /home/chroot/sid/home
$ mount /home/chroot/testing/proc && mount /home/chroot/testing/home

Et voila
$ schroot -c sid
build:~#

You don't need to be root to execute this and you have your home directory available in the chroot because of the mount bind.

The host used for bootstrapping is automatically added to your sources.list in the chroot but you need an apt-get update to install packages afterwards. Suggestions welcome.

Today I read an interview on Golem and there was a question about Debian's relationship to Ubuntu.

Mark Shuttleworth answer includes the following statement:
"Wir wollen so effizient wie m glich mit Debian zusammenarbeiten und investieren daher auch, beispielsweise indem wir alle an Ubuntu-Paketen durchgef hrten nderungen an den jeweiligen Debian-Maintainer zur ckgeben."

Which says that they want to co-work with Debian as efficient as possible and that's why they also invest in Debian for example with sending all the changes on Ubuntu packages back to the Debian-maintainer.

I am sorry, I never really said my opinion about Ubuntu in public since I think this wouldn't be really productive for the problem but that is just a lie in my opinion.
I won't state any further here but I never ever received a patch for the fetchmail package from Ubuntu.

Today I stumbled over the copyright file for Debian for revoco because of an RFS (request for sponsor).

To quote from http://mentors.debian.net/debian/pool/main/r/revoco/revoco_0.3-1.diff.gz

License:
In revoco.c is written, a bonobo has written the code,
so no copyright applies.

I got the following mail from the owner of the bonobo, after asking
about the licence of the code (the mail is in German, English tranlation
follows):

[...]
English translation:

> In revoco.c it's written:
> Written November 2006 by E. Toernig's bonobo - no copyrights.
> For German law that is wrong, you have written it,

Why do you think so? It was written by my bonobo!

> so it is your copyright.

No. If any, so of the bonobo. But because the creations of animals
are not "protected" by the copyright-laws,
it is public domain (or maybe "bonoboware?).

[...]

> Would it be possible, to put revoco under the BSD (oder GPL, LGPL) licence,
> so all the Linux-users can use it?

My bonobo does not know anything about liences. If you want to
enter something for Debian, "public domain" would be the best.

Thanks E.Toernig, this made my morning

The LSB functions in Debian can do fancy and non-fancy output. However, the output is not really fance compared to grml, gentoo and Ubuntu. They have these nice, colored ok or fail messages in brackets
If you are like me and you always want to have the coolest bling bling Try this patch:


Of course this only works for init scripts including and using the lsb functions (should be most of them).

For those who want to attend some kind of party, due to the Debian 4.0 release we meet to drink some beer:
Today (09.04.2007, sorry for being a bit lit with the announce) at:
The Old Emerald Isle
Erkelenzdamm 49
10999 Berlin
U1/U8 Kottbusser Tor

I recently had a nice discussion on a mailinglist about #!/bin/bash vs #!/bin/sh as the shebang line in shell scripts.
In general I support to use #!/bin/sh, maybe there are some corner-cases in which it makes sense to use #!/bin/bash, I am not a shell programmer.
But since the guy from shellscripts.org (btw why shellscripts and not bashscripts?) told me that I have to use a bashism to
alter a variable outside the scope of a loop because of the created subshell and in my opinion this is a common misunderstanding I blog this.



results in 123 because the loop has its own subshell and no access to foo outside of its scope.



is the proposed bashism to solve this issue, it will result in 456.



Also results in 456 and is sh-compliant (or at-least runs in ksh93 which is the reference implementation for the POSIX standard.
What also surprised me is that this is not running in bash, dash but in zsh
I reported this as a bug in bash and dash for Debian, please correct me if I am wrong.

I recently had a nice discussion on a mailinglist about #!/bin/bash vs #!/bin/sh as the shebang line in shell scripts.
In general I support to use #!/bin/sh, maybe there are some corner-cases in which it makes sense to use #!/bin/bash, I am not a shell programmer.
But since the guy from shellscripts.org (btw why shellscripts and not bashscripts?) told me that I have to use a bashism to
alter a variable outside the scope of a loop because of the created subshell and in my opinion this is a common misunderstanding I blog this.



results in 123 because the loop has its own subshell and no access to foo outside of its scope.



is the proposed bashism to solve this issue, it will result in 456.



Also results in 456 and is sh-compliant (or at-least runs in ksh93 which is the reference implementation for the POSIX standard.
What also surprised me is that this is not running in bash, dash but in zsh
I reported this as a bug in bash and dash for Debian, please correct me if I am wrong.

The elections are over, congratulations to Sam Hocevar!

Today I experienced segfaults when I try starting opera (yeah it's unfree, closed-source, but better than firefox ; )

If you experience something like this:
zsh: segmentation fault opera

Then this might be interesting for you. Opera stopped working with new X libs (I had my dist-upgrade today, but this problem is not Debian specific) and starts coredumping.
The opera desktop team released a hotfix for this which works (at least for me).

You can grab it on: http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2007/04/06/hotfix.
See http://bugs.debian.org/417816 for more information.

UPDATE:
There is a hotfix2 now. The Opera team writes "A few users reported some sideeffects". I don't know what sideeffect is exactly here but I noticed random crashes with the hotfix. I guess that's what they wanted to say
Get it on http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2007/04/07/hotfix-2

UPDATE: the hotfix2 also randomly crashes Another workaround should be to set the color depth in xorg.conf to 16 but that also sucks. From what I know so far is some kind of unicode issue. So yeah it's unfree, closed-source and you have to wait a bit for a fix

UPDATE: The issue should be fixed with: http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2007/04/08/all-good-things

Now thats what I'd call really good QA work, testing with release snapshots of GCC. Thanks Martin!

Today I found Feed43 which is a site offering the creation of RSS feeds for sites without one.

It is not that flexible that it could follow links and get their content like I did it with the Heise feed but you are able to parse all the information you want in a very easy way. You just specify the text on the site and put tags like % everywhere you want to extract information and then you just create a template for the output where you insert these tags.

I used Feed43 to create a feed of the Debian QA site for Orphaned packages with wrong maintainer site since I like
to do uploads for them if I am somehow bored but I don't want to go to the website every time.

The result is: http://feed43.com/orphaned-packages.xml

And what is really cool, you are even able to edit this feed using: http://feed43.com/feed.html?name=orphaned-packages

Ok there is a small advertisement in every article like "-- Delivered by [1]Feed43 service" but I can live with it.

Clifford just released version 0.8 of his Structured Terminal Forms Language/Library stfl.

STFL is a library which implements a curses-based widget set for text terminals. The STFL API can be used from C, SPL, Python, Perl and Ruby. Since the API is only 14 simple function calls big and there are already generic SWIG bindings it is very easy to port STFL to additional scripting languages.

A special language (the Structured Terminal Forms Language) is used to describe STFL GUIs. The language is designed to be easy and fast to write so an application programmer does not need to spend ages fiddling around with the GUI and can concentrate on the more interesting programming tasks.

The new version just fixes (finally you will be able to use page-up/down in newsbeuter) some minor issues but also includes proper locking for mutexes now which was needed for newsbeuter.

Just uploaded to unstable, test please

Today I wanted to learn for my examns and thought I'd make a quick dist-upgrade before, looked at the packages, found nothing important to make a backup and DANG

All installations with debconf usage didn't succeed like here for example:

dpkg: error processing samba-common (--configure):
subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of smbclient:
smbclient depends on samba-common (= 3.0.24-6); however:
Package samba-common is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing smbclient (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured

I straced, asked in #debian-devel, read source code and really didn't find the problem.
Thanks Mika for noticing the same problem before I did and the fix was sooo easy.
ln -sf /bin/bash /bin/sh

Never ever link /bin/sh to zsh on Debian

I just uploaded newsbeuter 0.3 to unstable (get it from incoming until it hits the archive).

The release is mainly a bugfix release but there are also some cool new features and improvements.
- The html rendering especially encoding issues are fixed now.
- Everything is stored as UTF-8 internally and gets converted on-the-fly.
- libidn is not needed anymore
- gettext support (at the moment just german translation, translators wanted)

And last but not least podcast support.
For this there is a new tool included in newsbeuter named podbeuter. When updating feeds newsbeuter searches for podcast files and
adds them to a download queue. podbeuter then is the download manager to do automatic or manual downloads of the podcasts.



Have fun and test it.
Oh and YVFI we hang around in #newsbeuter on freenode now

warez.debian.net ;-P

warez.debian.net. 2804 IN A 127.0.0.1

Thanks Marco this made my day.

Today I got accepted as Debian Developer. I would like to thank the following people (in random order) for their involvment in my NM, mentoring and sponsoring uploads.

Philipp Kern, Michael Schiansky, Daniel Baumann, H ctor Garc a, Norbert Tretkowski, Werner Heuser, Marc Brockschmidt, Lars Wirzenius, Christoph Berg, J rg Jaspert, James Troup, Martin Krafft (feel yourself added if I forgot you, hopefully not)

Oh and congratulations Holger.

The Chemnitzer Linuxtage event is over and like every year the event was very nice.
From my point of view it's one of the best organized and community driven events in Germany.

Sadly I just saw one talk (libfind) because most time I was busy with meeting all the people I can just see one time a year on this event and finding a way to allow dpkg to merge old and new configuration files.

This year I attended two booths, the one of my favorite live cd grml and the one of debian.
It was the first time for grml having a booth at the CLT and I think the feedback was quite good.

The debian booth was also very cool and well organized (thanks Noel) and I had alot of interesting discussions with different users.
One question which came up was why debian permits root logins in a default ssh installation. I had no answer for this question since I also think it's definitly a security issue. Elmar Hoffmann thought it could have to do with an easy way of scping files for root without using a user temporary.
If someone has an answer, let me know.

The famous Wikipedia online encyclopedia starts to suck. Well at least the German, haven't looked at other languages.
First they (ok in particular one wikipedia guy) wanted to delete the article about my favourite live cd grml (crux linux for example is deleted).

Ok could be just an action of some random idiot. But then I read an article in Tim Pritlove's weblog that they also deleted an article about Julia Seelinger a young politician of the green party in Berlin because of their so-called "relevance criterias".

And there are many other discussions about deleting articles, for example here.

WTF has happened to wikipedia? Is there any valid argument to delete an article apart from the argument that the content itself is totally wrong?
Isn't disk storage cheap enough today to keep these articles?
Wasn't one of the goals of wikipedia to catch up all the human knowledge?

Really, I can't understand this bureaucracy currently happening in wikipedia but if some random fools start to delete articles with these arguments I
wouldn't wonder if people stop writing and editing articles for the Wikipedia. It also sad for the people who put their efforts into wikipedia and wrote the articles.

Just sad.