This past couple of weeks saw a lot of Debian and Ubuntu work from me in (hopefully) equal measure.
For Debian, I whipped up new versions of
robotour,
xshisen,
libmemcache, and
gtklp; robotour finally installs in
/usr/games
as it should be; xshisen acks NMUs and finally has a sane source package (well, a little bit tipsy still, but at least it’s now fixes the NMU source b0rkage;) libmemcache’s -dev now installs its headers to the right location; and gtklp bumps to a new upstream, with touch-fu replacing
AM_MAINTAINER_MODE
for seamless build. Thanks a lot to my wonderful sponsors
Margarita Manterola,
Sylvain Le Gall, and
Andreas Metzler for the uploads!

On the other hand,
opendchub has migrated to testing, and its
initscript failed (not to mention
missing a manpage)

I’ve fixed the latter, but I still have to figure out how to fix the former; I’ll probably have to consult the reference and add an unprivileged
opendchub system user and configure the daemon to use that, or fix the source and allow flexible redefinition of opendchub’s working/configuration directories (currently hardcoded to
$HOME/.opendchub
). Either way, I have to touch the source and make patches; and I would appreciate it very much if my dearest readers can help out

On the lighter (or heavier, depending on your POV) side, I noticed that
Steve McIntyre posted an
RFH for
cvs, and I’ve decided to help out a bit. Seeing the source, I was pleasantly surprised as the age (and design) of this package, and it would be a blast for me to study this (and fix bugs, prepare patches, and release new versions while at it.

It would also prepare me better for NM as well.

As for my Ubuntu work, I’ve upgraded my Breezy Badger desktop to Dapper Drake last Monday (just in time for
Flight 4,) and I’m quite amazed at the new features of this release. Like many folks I just loved xchat-gnome’s
notification feature (especially when you’re moving in between workspaces very often) and was very much pleased with the speed of
Gnome 2.13.91 (so much so that I’ve departed from my normal Ion3 desktop without regretting it.

But of course, since Dapper Drake is the latest development branch, there were some snags that I got to encounter. One particular bug was with
masqmail, because the 0.2.21-1ubuntu1 version created a
/var/run/masqmail
directory, but since
/var/run
is mounted as a tmpfs in Dapper, masqmail will complain the next time it restarts. Another (probably cosmetic) bug(?) was with
tuxpaint, since it placed a couple of launchers in the Gnome Applications menu, one on Education and the other on Graphics. I’ve yet to see if tuxpaint’s is a genuine bug or just a design decision, but I’ve fixed masqmail’s, and 0.2.21-1ubuntu2 should be on Dapper now, thanks to
Daniel Holbach.

So far I’m loving the new Ubuntu release, and with
FeatureFreeze finally here that means I’ll have to drag my desktop box again to the local internet cafe to do yet another
aptitude dist-upgrade
. Gaah, I need a laptop!