CakePHP is a nice MVC framework for PHP. Yes, like Catalyst or Ruby on Rails. It has its own DB abstraction layer and two weeks ago, I had to create a models mapping. Our DB has about 20 tables and for each a them, a file was needed to describe its relationship with the rest of the DB. I far as I know CakePHP doesn’t provide a tool for that and so I did mine : cakephp_create_model.pl You’ll need to respect the CakePHP convention for your DB and to edit the top of the file to change the DB authentification informations.

$./cakephp_create_model.pl
Writing destinataire.php
(…)
Writing etat.php

The script can’t detect one to one relationship, you’ll have to add them yourself.

After Ubuntu and Fedora, it’s time to regularise your Debian installation. Please help us by providing evidence to fight piracy.. Breaking News
Hundreds of Debian customers provide evidence to help FBI and China s Public Security Bureau crack $2 billion global software counterfeiting syndicate. The svg file.

Just a few snippets:

Author: eddyp-guest
Date: Wed Sep 26 02:14:15 2007
New Revision: 4959

URL: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/collab-maint/?sc=1&rev=4959
Log:
create a special branch for the svn "mkdir -p" like functionality until all scripts are converted to use this function and more tests are done

Added:
  deb-maint/svn-buildpackage/branches/svnmkdir-p/
    - copied from r4958, deb-maint/svn-buildpackage/trunk/

0 eddy@bounty ~/usr/src/svn-buildpackage/svnmkdir-p $ dpkg-parsechangelog
Source: svn-buildpackage
Version: 0.6.22
Distribution: UNRELEASED
Urgency: low
Maintainer: Eddy Petri or
Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2007 05:24:59 +0300
Closes: 408690 411666 414581 419996 423487 428225 428689 433404 433536 434932 435746 436133
Changes:
svn-buildpackage (0.6.22) UNRELEASED; urgency=low
.
[ Eddy Petri or ]
* IMPORTANT: changed default behaviour of saving the configuration in
.svn/deb-layout by default to avoid stale data to override the
configuration options that were updated in the repository.
(Closes: #414581)
As a consequence, a new option --svn-savecfg was added to allow a
mechanism for easily overriding options locally
.
[ Gon ri Le Bouder ]
* SDCommon::sd_exit: read the parameter correctly is SDCommon::nosave=1
(Closes: #428225)
.
[ Eddy Petri or ]
* s-u: when importing options from ~/.svn-buildpackage.conf, filter in
only the valid options (Closes: #428689)
* s-u: replace retcode with retval for consistency with svn-bp
* s-i: manpage still claimed layout 2 was not implmented (Closes: #433404)
* s-i: now really supports injects for layout 2 (with the disadvantage of
not creating the tag directory)
* s-i: no longer fails on initial checkout (Closes: 411666)
* when using origUrl, make sure the origDir exists before downloading
in it
* s-i: man page: document the missing -o option (Closes: 419996, 435746)
* s-u: complete the man page synopsis section (Closes: 436133)
* s-b: do not require the build deps to be present when exporting
(Closes: 423487); thanks Stefano Zacchiroli for the patch
* SDcommon.pm: enhance the guessing algo of the layout to make svn-upgrade
guess correctly on layout 2 repos; thanks Gregor Herrmann for the patch
(Closes: 434932)
* Makefile: the version of the package is placed quoted in "SDCommon.pm" so
that versions like "0.6.22~bpo40+1" don't cause s-b to barf
* SDCommon.pm: implemented a function that emulates a 'mkdir -p'
functionality for svn; this will allow a fix for #434932
* s-i: based on the mkdir-p functionality create missing directories on
inject (Closes: 433536, 408690)

When packaging games, one of the operations I often have to do to the source code is modifying it so that it uses absolute file and directory names instead of relative ones. When coders develop for Windows, or when they develop their games to be able to play them from their home directory, they just would go that way and won’t care about it, but when the idea is installing the files in the system, the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) must be respected, and thus things will need to be place in their proper directories. For read-only files, this is not a big deal, all that has to be done is replacing the relative file name in the file opening commands with the absolute one, doing fopen(”/usr/share/games/package/dir/file”) instead of fopen(”dir/file”). I usually prefer to do it like fopen(DATADIR “/dir/file”) and set DATADIR from the Makefile, with a -DDATADIR=\”/usr/share/games/package\” switch added to the CFLAGS, and maybe also setting it inside the code if it’s not previously defined (#ifndef and so). There are some files and directories in which doing this is not possible, because they want read-write permissions. This files include saving the configuration, hiscores, new levels created with the game editor, game saves and so. They might be moved to some directory under “/var/lib/”, and create a new group en the system so that it’s writable, and so on. I don’t like that approach a single bit. I prefer to move all tthat data to the user’s directory. This is not as straightforward as it was for read-only data, but it’s not really that difficult anyway. It would be more or less like:

#ifndef _WIN32
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <limits.h>
#include <pwd.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#endif
#ifndef _WIN32
char file[PATH_MAX];
char *home;
struct passwd *passwd;
if (!getuid()   !(home = getenv("HOME"))) 
passwd = getpwuid (getuid());
home=passwd->pw_dir;
if (!home) 
fprintf(stderr, "$HOME is not defined.n");
exit(-1)
 
 
if (strlen(home) > PATH_MAX - sizeof("/.package/settings.ini")) 
fprintf(stderr, "$HOME is excessively long.n");
exit(-1)
 
snprintf(file, sizeof(file), "%s/.package", home);
mkdir(file, S_IRWXU   S_IRWXG   S_IROTH   S_IXOTH) == 0;
strncat(file, "/settings.ini", sizeof(file)-1);
#else
char file[21];
snprintf(file, sizeof(file), "./Data/settings.ini");
#endif
FILE *f = fopen(file, "w");

Sometimes you also need that the files are already created, you can check if they already exist with stat(), and then acting accordingly, either creating them from your C code, or maybe triggering a system() shell call whith whatever is needed.

struct stat stat_buf;
stat(file, &stat_buf);
if (stat(file, &stat_buf) == -1) 
int settings_fd = creat(file, O_WRONLY);
close(settings_fd);
 

NOTE: I’ve updated the code to add some suggestions. Thanks to Gon ri Le Bouder and Nico Golde.

In Debian Games there is a lot of bugs fixed on the svn but not uploaded, in general because of lack of uploader and I was curious to know how other teams deal with this problem:

	Packages	With pending bug(s)	%
Debian Perl Team	374	4	1%
Ruby Extras Packages	59	1	1.69%
Debian Python Module Team	146	10	6.84%
KDE Extras	69	5	7.24%
general	1380	115	8,33%
Debian Games Team	149	29	19,46%

My company, Atos Origin, will provide at least on build server (2 Xeon - 4 core server) for SvnBuildStat. I expect to be able to build KDE-base packages in a decent timing :). SvnBuildStat source are now on Collab-qa SVN repository. It was a Debian Games project before. Not in the topic and thanks to Madcoder I use the awesome Vimperator now. The Firefox Iceweasel extension provide a nice Vim like key binding for the browser. It’s so …errr… wOOt :).

I think SvnBuildStat is reasonably stable now. Feel free to contact me ( goneri on IRC ) if you want to add your Alioth project.

Writing good package descriptions Thanks to Fathi Boudra, I found the link to "Writing Debian package descriptions". Towards the bottom of the page, it contains an excellent checklist to follow when writing one. This entry is to take a note of it, so that I'll find it when I write one myself, and when I report a bug for a description that could be improved.

During the last two week I improved the status package for the Debian Game Team. I rewrote it from scratch with mod_perl + Catalyst. It uses a database to store the build reports and It’s able to build packages from more than one repository. It can also use other computers as build host. But there is still tone of things to improve and this is a short TODO list :

• use uscan to download the tarball or detect missing tarballs (like DEHS)
• improve the visibiliy of the the different builds per architectur
• deal with the Architecture: entry of the debian/control
• clean up the source code and write some doc. It’s my first Catalyst site and there is some part of the code that I need to improve, mainly around DBIx::Class
• add a statistic page
• ask for a svnbuildstat.debian.net, I don’t know if I can since I’m not a DD

http://nana.rulezlan.org/svnbuildstat/. Thanks : Glandium for the bug graphs, Rapha l Semeteys and Walid Nouh for there build hosts and the mentors.debian.net guys for the CSS :).

Jamendo is a CreativeCommon/Free sharing music plateform more and more famous. Yesterday they released a new tool to discover artist that is quite impressive. It’s called Spiral.

root@clp120s105751 # hostname
-d
root@clp120s105751 # uname -a
SunOS -d 5.10 Generic_118833-17 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire
root@clp120s105751 #

Some pictures of the miss

I’m the father of a little girl called Azilis since the 25th of december. She was borned at 9 AM nd weights just 3.220kg. Is there a better present for christmas? Update: 3.220 kilograms = 7 pounds

Like a lot of people who read Of Mice and Men. ‘’Lenny'’ call me up the famous character of the book: “Lennie Small”. This is his description from Wikipedia :

Lennie Small Travels with George. He is a giant of a man who is unaware of his own strength. His mental deficiency culminates in an obsession to stroke ’soft’ materials: this can be understood to represent his need for human contact, which is shown in his obsession with rabbits. George and Lennie are the only characters with both first and last names. There is irony in his last name, as it is “Small” while he is a very big man physically. Lennie is killed by George with a gun.

Please don’t call the next Debian, Lenny! This sux!

Debian Games won a status page : http://nana.rulezlan.org/~goneri/pkg-games/. I expect it to help us improve the global quality. Currently we need DD interested in sponsoring. Feel free to contact us if you’re interested.

Today Ludo pointed me on this picture from Flickr:

I’m famous .

I have decided to add myself to the Uploaders field of amaya, after its maintainer, Anand Kumria, offered me to do so during the Xlibs-dev Transition.
The changelog is quite impressive, due to the excellent work of Regis Boudin, who provided patches for almost any bug on earth.

The Xlibs-dev Transition NMUs are going to be revisited during this weekend, to ensure that after a month, maintainers acknowledged the NMUs and that no new bugs were introduced.