Search Results: "Daniel Baumann"

19 December 2016

Chris Lamb: 10 years of Debian

Today marks the 10-year anniversary of my first contribution to Debian GNU/Linux. I will not recount the full history here but my first experience with Debian was a happy accident. I had sent off for a 5-CD set of Red Hat from The Linux Emporium only to discover I lacked the required 12MB of RAM. Annoyed, I reached for the Debian "potato" CD that was included gratis in my order due to it being outdated at the time Fast-forwarding a few years, whilst my first contribution was trivial, it was Thomas Bushnell's infectious enthusiasm that led me to contribute more, eventually becoming a Google Summer of Code student under Daniel Baumann, and finally becoming an official Debian Developer in September 2008 with Thomas Viehmann as my Application Manager. (Some things may never change, however I still struggle with the bug tracker's control@ interface.)
The response I got to my patch always reminds me of the irrational power of providing attibution. I've always liked to tell myself I'm above such vanities but perhaps the truly mature approach would be to accept that ego is part of the human condition and as a community take steps to avoid handicapping ourselves by underestimating the value of "trivialities" such as having one's name listed. I've since been fascinated by the number of maintainers who do not attribute patches in changelogs, especially from newcomers or when the changes are non-trivial a handful in particular have stung me fairly deeply. I would certainly concede that it adds nothing technical and can even be distracting, but it seems a reasonable concession that dramatically increases the chance of future efforts or, frankly, is simply a kindly gesture of thanks and good will. Given our level of technical expertise, I fear we regularly suffer from not having sufficient empathy for newcomers or first-time users who lack the context or orientation that we possess. Anyway, here's to another ten

9 November 2015

Ben Armstrong: The passing of Debian Live

Debian Live has passed on. And it has done so in not happy circumstances. (You can search the list archives for more if you are confused.) I have reposted here my response to this one thread because it s all I really want to say, after all of the years of working with the team. I d like to add as a postscript, that while the focus of this article was to remain positive in the face of Daniel s announcement of the closure of his project, that event has left a lot of users confused about the status of live support in Debian going forward. Read my posts here and here addressing that confusion.
On 09/11/15 12:47 PM, Daniel Baumann wrote:
> So long, and thanks for all the fish[7].
>
> Daniel
>
> [7] http://live.debian.net/project/downstream/ Enough bitter words have been said. I don t want to add any more. So: I m proud. Indeed, that long list of downstreams does speak to the impact you ve had in inspiring and equipping people to make their own live images. I m proud to have been a small part of this project. I m thankful. I m thankful that I was able to, through this project, contribute to something for a while that had a positive impact on many people, and made Debian more awesome. I remember the good times. I remember fondly the good times we had in the project s heyday. I certainly found your enthusiasm and vision for the project, Daniel, personally inspiring. It motivated me to contribute. Debconf10 was a highlight among those experiences, but also I had many good times and made many friendships online, too. I m sad. I m sad, because although I made some attempts to liaise between Debian Live and the CD and Installer teams, I don t feel I did an effective job there, and that contributed to the situation we now find ourselves in. If I did you or the project injury in trying to fulfill that role, please forgive me. I m hopeful. I m hopeful that whichever way we all go from here, that the bitterness will not be forever. That we ll heal. That we ll have learned. That we ll move on to accomplish new things, bigger and better things. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you, Debian Live team. Ben
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2 September 2014

Daniel Baumann: Public Perception

I noticed at DebConf 14 that people still think I would maintain many packages in Debian. This is not true for several years. Here is to clarify once and for all I maintain 17 packages: Not more, not less, and I also do not intend to upload any new packages to Debian.

2 March 2013

Raphaël Hertzog: My Free Software Activities in February 2013

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (78.31 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Debian packaging I wanted to update publican to the latest upstream release but I stopped after a few hours of work during which I filed two bugs that a modicum of testing should have caught before release. So I decided to wait for the next minor release. I uploaded python-django 1.4.4 and 1.4.5, new upstream maintenance and security releases which thus went into wheezy. I also prepared a stable update of Django (1.2.3-3+squeeze5) which required me to backport the last 2 sets of security patches. I uploaded a new revision of wordpress to fix a problem with TinyMCE (#700289) and to update/add many translation files (#697208). Bug reporting and misc fixes Live-build issue. I experienced some intermittent failures when building HDD live images with live-build on armel. Daniel Baumann directed me to the problematic piece of code (the oversizing of the image size was not enough) so I committed a small fix by increasing the oversizing factor to 6%. Live-config issue. I also reported another issue that I diagnosed in live-config (#701788), namely that the script which setups sudo was failing when the default user is root. git-buildpackage issue. I filed #700411 after noticing that git-import-orig imported the debian directory provided by upstream. Those directories are not used with 3.0 (quilt) source package and their presence in the upstream branch is thus harmful: any change to the upstream debian directory will result in conflicts when you merge a new upstream release in your packaging branch. rubygems integration. Later I had to package a bunch of ruby applications that were using Bundler and I wanted to reuse as many packaged ruby modules that I could. But for this, those modules had to provide the required rubygems meta-information. I filed #700419 to request those on rake-compiler and with the help of C dric Boutillier (and others on #debian-ruby), we identified a bunch of ruby modules which could get those with a simple recompilation. I filed bin-nmu requests in #700605. Misc bugs. simple-cdd offers to select profiles to install but I noticed that the associated debconf template was not translated (#700915). The startup scripts (provided by initscripts) in charge of activating the swap are supposed to handle a noswap kernel command line option to disable swap. In #701301, I reported that the option was not working correctly if quiet was present first in the command line due to spurious break statements. Debian France Administrative work. We were late for some legal procedures so I wrote the report of the last general assembly and sent it to the Tribunal d instance of Sarreguemines to record the changes in the administrative board. I also completed the special register of the association, it s a notebook that is legally required and that must document any important change in the governance structure of the association (new members of the board, headquarters change, new bylaws, etc.). Galette developments. Debian France is funding a few enhancements to the Galette free software that we re using to manage the association. I am in touch with the Galette developer to answer his questions and ensure that his work will meet our needs. Librement I have been looking for talented developers who have a genuine interest in my Librement project. I want to fund the initial development of the project but I don t have the means to fund it entirely. So I really wanted to find developers who would find an interest beside the money that I would pay. I got in touch with the team of developers from Scopyleft and they look like very good candidates. But they re heavy users of the Scrum development method and asked me to play the role of product owner . So I started to describe the project with user stories (i.e. create the backlog in the Scrum jargon), you can have a look at them here on trello.com. If you re interested by the topic of free software funding, feel free to review and to send me your comments. My goal is clearly to have a minimal viable product with the first iteration(s) that I fund and then use the platform itself to fund further developments of the project. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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17 July 2011

Daniel Baumann: Debian Live Autobuilds

Right now I am sitting in the train to the airport for going to DebCamp/DebConf 11 in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. During DebCamp amongst other things I am going to work on finishing up the last bits on getting daily/weekly Debian Live autobuilds back for wheezy. This spring Jimmy Kaplowitz offered to help with the task of overseeing the debian-live autobuilder and to coordinate necessary bits with cdimage.debian.org. Having them on cdimage.d.o became recently possible as Steve McIntyre offered to make a VM available for us (live-build requires root privileges, and naturally, you would not want to let that run on the host system itself, that is why in the past it was not possible to build them on cdimage.d.o). The remaining issues are, and this is why the autobuilds are not yet back since spring, that live-build still needs two things: a couple of tweeks for wheezy, and the autobuild stuff need to be properly integrated into live-build itself. That will happen as an additional binary package live-build-cron with a bunch of debconf questions, so that everyone and his dog can setup a debian-live autobuild server on his own machine. The initial upload (which will not yet work, do not bother to try) was uploaded to experimental this week and cleared the new queue, now looking forward to get this all finished up and resulting in a live-build uploaded to unstable by the end of the week. In the second week, Jimmy arrives, I will be introducing him to live-build and the various little things to watch for and hopefully manage to persuade him to take over the autobuilds maintenance. Having all images that are based on packages solely from the stable/testing/unstable archives moved to cdimage.d.o is freeing up ressources on live.debian.net which did the job in the past since etch. Ben Armstrong volunteered to help with overseeing the live.d.n instance of live-build-cron that will build more then once per day images for si, with the only difference that they will not use live-* from the archive but the latest snapshots from our git snapshots repository. This will be a big help for the development as eventually we will be autotesting these images for various things. Last but not least, thanks to both Jimmy and Ben for all your kindness, patience and help with this during the last couple of months. We have interesting times ahead.

13 July 2011

Daniel Baumann: Debian Live 6.0.2 Images

Two days before the 6.0.2 squeeze point release a user reported that usb-hdd images are not bootable for him. We could not reproduce that for several days but thanks to David Endler, we found out a few days ago that the reason for this is the following commit: Setting partition flags after creating the filesystem, workaround for bug in parted where we result in having the partition type set to linux otherways. The original problem was that in some situation the code resulted in having a wrong partition type and that can let to confusion for some bioses. For other reasons, the applied workaround has the side effect to cause parted to not set the bootable flat at all anymore and by that creating an even bigger problem - most crappy bioses these days require the bootable flag to be set and refuse to boot from a device otherwise (Missing Operating System). Or in other words, the fix solved the original problem but created another one that is affecting much more bioses. Rather than doing a hasty and suboptimal build of 6.0.2 with the commit reverted (and wasting resources for a 6.0.2a build some time later), we have looked into fixing the original problem properly without causing side effects. Images for the 6.0.2 squeeze point release will therefore be published in the next couple of days.

4 July 2011

Daniel Baumann: Re: Dealing with missing locales on remote hosts

Vincent, the right way to deal with missing locales on remote hosts is to not deal with them at all. On Debian wheezy and newer systems, eglibc contains the C.UTF-8 locale in the libc-bin package. This together with unsetting AcceptEnv (or when customized, removing LANG and LC_* from it) in sshd_config allows to get rid of locales on servers entirely (if you really require locales, then you would have installed locales-all anyway and the problem would not exist in the first place). Some time ago, I have backported the C.UTF-8 changes (1, 2, and 3) and applied to my build of eglibc for Debian squeeze. More information about C.UTF-8 can be found in #609306.

3 July 2011

Rog rio Brito: Installing Meego on the N900

My last cellphone was a dumb phone. I seem to remember that it was called something like Samsung Voicer. It didn't have those hip things like SIM cards. OK. Fast forward to December of 2010, and after a long hiatus, I decided to get a new phone. It was this shiny Nokia N900. The biggest thing that made me want this one was that some people at DebConf 10 were praising it for having a Debian-like distribution in it, and that it worked very well. I saw that Phil Hands was enthusiastically talking about the bargain of getting one in New York and that it would have cost him many pounds in the UK and, so, he was happy with it. Ot vio Salvador also got one in NY and during one of the nights of that DebConf with him, Tiago Vaz, Daniel Baumann, and Chris Lamb, I asked him to call my parents here in Brazil and he let me use his N900. I had more time with it and played a little bit with the command line, opened the stock media player and played a beautiful trailer of 9 (2009 film), leaving me a very good impression. I bought one, and, indeed, it is a very good machine that can even make phone calls. The ability to run Linux on it (even if it contains some non-free pieces of software) was decisive in me getting it. It runs this distribution called Maemo 5 which is loosely based on Debian. But now, Maemo is not the "cool thing" to run, regarding Linux on these portable devices. Meego is. But with the advent of many Internet forums has brought many people writing some long, convoluted howto documents for things that would be better done as, say, providing a script or, better yet, preparing a package. In the case of getting Meego running on the N900, only three things are required:
  1. Install uboot-pr13 while in Maemo.
  2. Uncompress the MeeGo 1.2 Community Edition for Nokia N900 image to a SD card.
  3. Turn the phone off, plug in the SD card, and PUT THE BACK COVER on the phone.
The last bit of the third step is crucial, as, otherwise, the SD card won't be detected and you will get kernel panics with the device trying to mount the root filesystem from a device that is not there. As an aside, the official documentation tells us one should uncompress the available pre-made images and write them with dd to the device. In my experience, it is completely unnecessary to use it and, in fact, it is so 6 times slower than using a simple shell redirection. That is, instead of:
bzip2 -d < mg-handset-armv7nhl-n900-whateverwhatever-mmcblk0p.raw.bz2   dd bs=4096 of=/dev/mmcblk0
you can get better results with the simpler:
bzip2 -d < mg-handset-armv7nhl-n900-whateverwhatever-mmcblk0p.raw.bz2 > /dev/mmcblk0
I actually used lbzip2 instead of bzip2, but that shouldn't matter. The use of the small block size for the dd command is probably the culprit, but I don't see the need to write the uncompressed data in chunks this small. If there is a problem, I would love to be informed of that. As trying it with uboot and a SD card doesn't mess with your "safe" Maemo installation, this is a good way to play with the successor of Maemo. Perhaps, if we give good feedback to the project, we can influence the direction that it is taking. It will surely be nice to learn about this new "consumer-oriented" distribution.

16 February 2011

Daniel Baumann: Progress Linux 1.0.0~pre1 (artax)

The Progress Linux project is pleased to announce the availability of the first prerelease of the upcoming Progress Linux 1.0 (artax). The images are available for download at: http://archive.progress-linux.org/progress-images/artax/ A full list of changes may be viewed at: http://www.progress-linux.org/releases/artax/1.0.0_pre1/

7 January 2011

Daniel Baumann: Booting images from within EXTLINUX

Similar as people are doing with a seperate package for grub, Debians extlinux package as of version 2:4.03+dfsg-5 (and if you want a graphical boot menu, you will need syslinux-themes-debian version 4-1 or newer; both uploaded to experimental) handles booting images through memdisk out of the box now. After you have upgraded your packages, just do: Booting images from within EXTLINUX Update: After some more testing, EXTLINUX_MEMDISK defaults to true now.

14 October 2010

Daniel Baumann: Adding support for Lzip compression to reprepro

Today, I prepared a patch to reprepro to add support for debian packages using Lzip compression. A patched reprepro of squeeze for amd64 and i386 can be fetched from here. An example package using Lzip compression, lzip itself, is here (for this example, the package is build as 3.0 native on purpose). Hopefully the patch will be merged so lzip compressed binary and source packages can be handled with reprepro.

13 October 2010

Daniel Baumann: Adding support for Lzip compression to dpkg

Today, I prepared a patch to dpkg to add support using Lzip compression. A patched dpkg of squeeze for amd64 and i386 can be fetched from here. An example package using Lzip compression, lzip itself, is here (for this example, the package is build as 3.0 native on purpose). Hopefully the patch will be merged so we can make use of lzip compressed binary and source packages in Debian.

12 September 2010

Daniel Baumann: dosfstools 3.0.10

dosfstools did not correctly handle LFN (see Debian bug #596329 for more information) and had some false positives with bad filenames (see Debian bug #596327 for more information). Todays release of version 3.0.10 fixes this. Source tarballs can be downloaded as usual from its homepage.

31 August 2010

Gustavo Franco: Frans Pop

It feels like it was yesterday that I was talking all things d-i with Felipe (faw) and Otavio during the last International Free Software Forum and discuss d-i without mentioning Frans Pop and Joey Hess at least a couple of times is definitely not the same thing.

Otavio convinced me to help and I promptly synced with him and Daniel Baumann to deliver an alpha quality syslinux-installer udeb; that was during debconf a bit after the forum, that they've all attended and I couldn't.

I feel I can't let it pass without a post, now that we've put out a notice about our loss. RIP Frans. :/

25 August 2010

Christian Perrier: [life nolife] Debconf 10 was...

...awesome. OK, I'm writing this while I'm still in USA, but there are so many things to say about these weeks that I can't write them in only one blog post. And, still, this one will be quite long as it will talk about hacking, running and sightseeing...:) Let's start about hacking: after all, this is the first reason for being there in US, isn't it? I cam to DebConf with a very long TODO list and, for the first time in seven DebConfs, I'm pretty happy with what I achieved from it: As one can see, a lot of planned work happened while I still could maintain the usual flow of recurrent work with localization (Smith reviews, l10n NMUs). Some asked me why I didn't propose l10n sessions this year. Indeed, I wasn't feeling I could sustain animating them and I had no clear idea about which topic I could bring to be discussed. Last year, these sessions slightly killed my free time and I wanted to keep some this year for "impromptu" things. I didn't attend many talks, sorry for the speakers. The most I attended were during Debian Day, which I found highlyinteresting and motivating, just like Eben Moglen's talk. Marga's talk was also one I wanted to attend, though I regreted that things went mostly out of control during the talk (too many comments from the audience to allow Marga pushing her important points). As usual, I invested a big part of my time in "social" activities, the most proeminent being of course the Cheese and Wine party, which turned ut to be a great success. The help of my son Jean-Baptiste and the tremendous support of Michelle Lynn Hall helped a lot, though I still regret that we screwed about accessibility. I also ran a lot..:-)..that may be counted as social activities as I organized several group runs. The one I'm proud of has been participating to a local race, namely the Van Cortland Track Club Summer Series of cross-country running, in Bronx. We went there with no less than 10 DebConf participants and 1 kilt (hey, Luca!). All of us completed the race (that had 170 runners for 5 kilometers) and No l K the even finished 17th scratch and 2nd in his age/gender category. Besides that, we had a great run/sightseeing to Georges Washington Bridge (that links New Jersey and Harlem and offers an unusual view of Manhattan "from behind"). All this with a 17km run. We also ran several times in Central Park, and No l and me happened to go to Coney Island for the Day Trip by doing half of the trip by running (all around Manhattan and over the Broolyn Bridge), for about 20km. Then we "showered" in the Atlantic Ocean....:). At the end of DebConf, I think that I had my record broken with 112km run in 10 days and only one day *without* running. What about sightseeing? Well, this blog post is too long and we reach the end of Interstate-90, close to Albany, so that will be for an upcoming blog post. Aug 25th update: back home, so now I can publish this blog post...

3 August 2010

Rog rio Brito: First post from DebConf 10

Even though I am late with this post, it is nice to say that I am writing here from this year s DebConf10, in NYC. Today (well, yesterday) was the day of the Cheese and Wine party and I think that it was cool, at least for the moments that I were there. This post, though, isn t technical in any sense. I only talks shortly about my impressions of the community, as this is my first DebConf ever (despite the fact that I have been using Debian since the late nineties). I was very pleased to have met Bdale Garbee. I saw him the other day arriving with Keith Packard, but I just didn t want to disturb them at that point. We only talked for, say, 2 minutes, and his was one of the nicest receptions that I had here. And there were some other people that were equally easy to approach, nice to talk with and, to my surprise, knew my name after some brief moments (yes, this does make a difference, especially when you are in a strange country, when you don t know anybody with whom you have worked for some years). Being involved in the organization stuff, one would think that Jimmy Kaplowitz would be so busy, but he was so kind. I had longer conversations with T ssia Cam es, Tiago Vaz (as always) and some other people that I had not yet had the pleasure of meeting in person. In particular, Daniel Baumann (who apparently is now crazy about our FISL and wants to drink all Guaran that he can get :-) ), Chris Lamb and Ot vio Salvador and his mom. Those people are so cool and it is nice to discuss some legal issues among different continents in the lounge of their building at late night. :-) Too bad that I am allocated to the other building. :-) I am forgetting many other people (hey, it is 2 am here in NYC), but I would feel guilty if I had not mentioned at least three people more: Martin Michlmayr, Phil Hands, and Reinhard Tartler (who is uploading lame to the debian repository, as the patents regarding it are expiring or expired already). Thanks! P.S.: I just created an account on flickr that I hope to populate with some photos that I took here. And even with a nice squirrel. :-)

27 July 2010

Daniel Baumann: The World's most powerful Wireless Network Card

About two weeks ago I got a Wifly-City G2000, the world's most powerful 802.11bg wireless network card. It features 2000mW which is 10 times more than the legally allowed limit of 200mW in Switzerland (or 2 times more than the allowed 1000mW in the USA, 5 times more than the allowed 400mW in Brazil, or 20 times more than the allowed 100mW in the EU). Contents The adapter is sold as a set named Wifly-City AVATAR-4PA with some accessories.
click on the images for full resolution The box prominelty lists Linux compatibility and contains the following part: The adapter has a Realtek 8187L chipset. This is particulary nice since there is no firmware needed for this chipset (therefore no questinable binary-only firmware blob). Also, it works out of the box with any Linux as of kernel version 2.6.30 and newer. I tested it on lenny with kernel backports, vanilla squeeze and vanilla sid. In all of these setups, it works out of the box without any configuration whatsoever - just plug it in and it works. I know that this is how it is supposed to be but still, I am always surprised again when things just work. For those who care, this is the output of dmesg when plugging in the card...
[...]
usb 1-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 6
usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=8187
usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 1-1: Product: RTL8187_Wireless_LAN_Adapter
usb 1-1: Manufacturer: Manufacturer_Realtek_RTL8187_
usb 1-1: SerialNumber: xxxxxxxxxxxx
usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
phy1: Selected rate control algorithm 'minstrel'
phy1: hwaddr xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx, RTL8187vB (default) V1 + rtl8225z2, rfkill mask 2
rtl8187: Customer ID is 0xFF
Registered led device: rtl8187-phy1::tx
Registered led device: rtl8187-phy1::rx
rtl8187: wireless switch is on
usbcore: registered new interface driver rtl8187
ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan1: link is not ready
wlan1: direct probe to AP xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (try 1)
wlan1: direct probe responded
wlan1: authenticate with AP xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (try 1)
wlan1: authenticated
wlan1: associate with AP xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (try 1)
wlan1: RX AssocResp from xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (capab=0x411 status=0 aid=5)
wlan1: associated
ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): wlan1: link becomes ready
wlan1: no IPv6 routers present
[...]
...and this is the output of lsusb:
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 0bda:8187 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8187 Wireless Adapter
Special Offer I have played with the card for some time now and am really pleased with it. It works nicely with all the standard tools (aircrack-ng, kismet, etc.). The only bummer is that the card is quite expensive. Fortunately, we could arrange a good deal for Free Software people where the store selling it does not make any money on it: instead of 89 USD you can get it for 68 USD (including everything). If you are interested in getting one and you are comming to DebConf 10 in New York between 2010-07-25 and 2010-08-08, you can write an email to Ralph Amissah or speak to Ralph personally during the event. 1 I have no idea why they are shipping with a Y cable because the adapter does not need one. However, it does not disturb and in case I ever need an Y cable, I now have one :)

20 June 2010

Daniel Baumann: Debian Live Web Images Builder

Richard Nelson, an outstanding debian-live contributor and team member since many years, has setup an instance of the live-helper CGI scripts that are included within live-helper. This webbuilder lets users get their own customized images without the need of having to install live-helper and build them on their own. It's available at live-helper.debian.net. Apart from having some better looking html form and adding an online-help that will be worked on soon, it's working great. Thanks you, Richard.

16 December 2009

Daniel Baumann: Syslinux Themes for Debian

10 days ago, I uploaded syslinux-themes-debian. It is sitting in the NEW queue ever since, and aparently I cannot rely on it being accepted anytime soon (it can be installed from the repository mentioned on the maintainers homepage, though). However, while being still a first working version only that needs some improvements (especially until it could be used as a generic ressource for any other tool to make use of it, like live-helper or debian-cd, eventually), here's a screenshot from the squeeze theme, credits and a big thanks for the awesome graphics to Agnieszka Czajkowska. Syslinux Theme Debian Squeeze

30 November 2009

Daniel Baumann: EXTLINUX as Alternative Bootloader

In September, the Debian GRUB maintainers took a step further in the long way of deprecating grub in favour of grub2. From my personal point of view, grub2 is not the way to go. Mostly because of these reasons: Back in Juli, when I was listening to the talk of Giacomo Catenazzi at DebConf 9 about bootloaders in Debian (high (618MB), low (110MB)), I was reminded that I really should getting EXTLINUX splittet out of Debians syslinux packaging and made available as an alternative bootloader within Debian. Last week I hacked together an initial working version and uploaded it to experimental. Note that the two comands extlinux-install and update-extlinux do not have all the safety belts yet, the theme-ing mechanisms are not integrated yet (I'll upload a syslinux-themes-debian soon), and that the layout of the generation of the config files in /boot/extlinux may could change (debian-wise, not upstream-wise). For me, it works already well though, I'm using it on my main desktop and notebook. If you want to help finding bugs or submitting wishlist bugs for additional stuff to be added, and recovering from an unbootable system is not a problem for you, you're welcome to try it out:
	# apt-get install -t experimental extlinux syslinux-common
	# sed -i -e 's ^postinst_hook =.*$ postinst_hook = update-extlinux ' \
		-e 's ^postrm_hook =.*$ postrm_hook = update-extlinux ' \
		/etc/kernel-img.conf
	# mkdir -p /boot/extlinux
	# update-extlinux
	# extlinux-install DEVICE
Update: Rather than having /etc/kernel-img.conf modified by users, bootloader packages should add symlinks to their update scripts to /etc/kernel/postinst.d and /etc/kernel/postrm.d. Uploaded new version to experimental. Thanks maks for mentioning it.

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