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 Annoyed, I reached for the Debian "potato" CD that was included gratis in my order due to it being outdated at the time Fast-forwarding a few years, whilst my first contribution was trivial, it was Thomas Bushnell's infectious enthusiasm that led me to contribute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

This code: "obviously" prints: Because the default value of the items argument is a mutable list constructed just once when the code is compiled when the function definition is evaluated, and then reused. So, in Python, mutable items in default arguments are a good way to get more fun time with debugging.

I just added a script from Thomas Viehmann to our dak repository to create a few graphic files out of our dinstall cronjob. We now have (click the graph for the full size version)

• one graph that shows the whole dinstall runtime together with the two most timeconsuming parts of it ,
• one graph that shows the most interesting points of dinstall and combines the rest into an other part ,
• and one that shows the rest of them .

These images are now updated at the end of each dinstall run, showing the last 20 runs. Now, if you are an R expert and want to make the graphs look nicer, we always love to get patches. Our git repository is at https://ftp-master.debian.org/git/dak.git/ and you want to look into tools/logs.py,pretty much at the end of the file. (If you dislike git, a copy of the file is available here, and our data input file is also available. You just need to modify the header of the script, changing the path entries and can start playing. :) Yes, at the time of writing this post the two first entries look a little odd. Thats known. Ignore. Thanks.

Thanks to Thomas Viehmann for the patch on both ftp-master side (aka http://ftp-master.debian.org/deferred/ and on "client side" (and for nagging me enough to activate it), http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php shows now again when bugs are fixed in delayed. Thanks!

The last two days saw some updates to the queue daemon. (The queue daemon is that part of our archive software that processes the anonymous ftp uploads and, if they pass basic checks, moves them into the place our archive wants new uploads to be in.) The first big patch to it was written by FTP Assistant Thomas Viehmann, implementing the DELAYED (DEFERRED) Queue. Now, the second one was by me and not even half as much work. As people did like one feature of the unofficial DELAYED upload queue that Tollef did run in the past, namely the possibility to upload using ssh, we now officially provide such a way. While it won’t ever support uploads to the DEFERRED queue, I don’t think thats neccessary. DEFERRED is, as far as I know, used seldomly enough to not warrant the amount of work it would need to support it. As the ssh upload queue daemon is basically nothing more than a simple “ssh to ftp” wrapper (it just takes .changes and associated files and uploads them to the ftp place), people will get two mails for uploads done that way. One saying “Uploaded to ftp.upload.debian.org”, the next will be “Uploaded to localhost”. One equally important thing was changed together with the above two things: We have new names for the upload locations. People shouldn’t use direct hostnames anymore. Use the CNAMEs we provide, ssh.upload.debian.org or ftp.upload.debian.org. Comments: 0

A few days ago I was awarded official Debian Developer status. Many thanks to:

• Thomas Viehmann
• Ana Beatriz Guerrero L pez
• Daniel Baumann
• Christoph Berg
• Thomas Bushnell, BSG
• Stephen Gran
• Steve McIntye
• Neil McGovern
• Cyril Brulebois
• Matthew Johnson
• Sune Vuorela
• Peter Palfrader
• Jonathan McDowell
• Tim Retout

For posterity, my first experience with the Debian development process was with #400550. Never underestimate the importance of giving credit in changelog entries.

Another point release for Etch has been done; now it's the time for the CD team to roll out new images after the next mirror pulse. The official announcements (prepared by Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, thanks!) will follow shortly afterwards. FTP master of the day was Joerg Jaspert, who did his first point release since Woody, as he told us on IRC. We appreciate your work and you spending your time that shortly before going to Argentina. This point release includes the etchnhalf update introducing a new kernel image (based on 2.6.24) and some driver updates. Additionally the infamous openssl hole will be fixed for good, even for new installs. Again I want to present you a list of people who contributed to this release. It cannot be complete as I got the information out of the Changed-by fields of the uploads.

• akira yamada
• Alexander Sack
• Alexander Schmehl
• A Mennucc1
• Andrea De Iacovo
• Andres Salomon
• Aurelien Jarno
• Charles Plessy
• Christian Perrier
• Christian Welzel
• Colin Watson
• dann frazier (indefatigable kernel worker, most sourceful uploads)
• Darren Salt
• Devin Carraway (3rd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Emmanuel Lacour
• Eric Dorland
• Fabio Tranchitella
• Faidon Liambotis
• Fathi Boudra
• Florian Weimer
• Francesco Paolo Lovergine
• Francois Marier
• Frank Lichtenheld
• Frans Pop (thanks for your d-i work!)
• Frederic Peters
• Gregory Colpart
• Holger Levsen
• Jan Wagner
• Jay Berkenbilt
• J r my Bobbio
• Joey Hess
• Joey Schulze
• Josselin Mouette
• Julien Cristau
• Kai Hendry
• Kurt Roeckx
• LaMont Jones
• Laszlo Boszormenyi
• Martin Pitt
• maximilian attems
• Michael Biebl
• Michael Koch
• Mike Hommey
• Moritz Muehlenhoff
• Noah Meyerhans
• Ola Lundqvist
• Otavio Salvador
• Patrick Matth i
• Petter Reinholdtsen
• Philipp Kern
• Pierre Habouzit
• Raphael Hertzog
• Rene Engelhard
• Robert Millan
• Roberto Lumbreras
• Roland Mas
• Romain Beauxis
• Russ Allbery
• Sean Finney
• Stefan Fritsch
• Steffen Joeris
• Stephen Gran
• Steve Kemp
• Sune Vuorela
• Thijs Kinkhorst (2nd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Thomas Viehmann
• Toni Mueller
• Tzafrir Cohen

From the Release Team we had dann frazier (who drove the important kernel part of etchnhalf), Luk Claes, Neil McGovern, Andreas Barth, Martin Zobel-Helas and me working on it. ;-)

Following my first ftpmaster blog post, which got some nice replies, lets have the next, as I didn’t stop working on stuff. Not as much as I hoped, but well, something. So, what was done since then?

• Merged a little patch from Christoph Berg fixing usage of a function - which doesn’t exist in global namespace, so it needs the full name.
• Merged another patch from Christoph - now we write the content of the Changed-By field from .changes files into projectb. To cite him for the reason: This will allow to identify NMUs and sponsored uploads more precisely in tools querying projectb. Broke dinstall with this and as a little side-effect also the merkel copy of the projectb database. Ups. Well, fixed it immediately again. :) There is some old data available, which I could import into projectb, so it would have data for all packages. But there is some weirdness with the dataset I got from Christoph and am waiting for him to provide a solution. Anyway, all new uploads already store this data, so it is only old data missing, currently.
• Merged a small patch from Thomas Viehmann into our archive software which enables it to send a copy of all mails to the person sponsoring the upload. This is in affect for all future uploads, not for any package which already hit the queues (like those in NEW right now). We do
  • only sent the extra copy if it is a sourceful upload, to not spam buildd admins,
  • only sent the mails to sponsors who did not disable their @debian.org address.
  For those interested, the process works similar to:
  • We look if the Debian login attached to the key signing the upload has an active @debian.org address.
  • If that is the case we look for all uids on that key that look like an email address and compare them with the Maintainer: and Changed-By: field in the .changes file.
  • If there is no match, ie. none of the “emails” of the key uids is in those fields, the @debian.org mail is added to the set of valid receivers.
• Changed split-done to only move files older than 30 days and let it run by our weekly cronjob. Also run it once, which moved 120079 files into their $YEAR/$MONTH subdirectories. (split-done seperates the subdir where we store every .changes of uploads accepted. That quickly grows fast, and we all know how bad filesystems perform with such a number of files. The above 120079 files are from November/Dezember 2007 til now, so imagine how many we have in total, as we have them back to 2002).
• Merged a patch I wrote 7 days ago that does a little sanity checking in the Provides field. Do not try to version your provide, that is forbidden and actually breaks software. (See this bug about it.)
• Merged a patch, submitted by Marc Brockschmidt some long time ago, that lets cruft-report also display NBS for experimental. Changed the cron script to use that extra feature.

---

And as in my last blog post, lets add some items to the todo list:

• Enable dak to read a Built-By field from the .changes file. Thats the sanest solution to sponsored uploads. And also better for buildds, they then should no longer overwrite the Maintainer field with the -m parameter when building packages. Exact semantics to be defined, but dak probably would go something similar to
  • Built-By same as Changed-By or Maintainer?” - do not send mail there.
  • Built-By differs from Changed-By or Maintainer and its sourceful? Send mail to it too.
  • Built-By differs from Changed-By or Maintainer and binary-only? Only send mail there.
• Track the Uploaders: field in projectb. That would help the BTS to offer another display.

Having written all this - today (AKA Saturday, when writing this) won’t see code merges by me. I think most of my ftpmaster related work today will be fun with the NEW queue. For some unknown reason people keep uploading packages. Tsss. Comments: 3

[Warning, long post ahead. If you aren’t interested in Debian or it’s internals or my work - skip it. :) ] So as you might have read here, I got the delegation of the debadmin AKA FTPMaster group lately. I’ve got some pressure to not accept this delegation, but the response to my blog post about it had been extremely positive, everyone said I should not deny it. Knowing to have such a support within Debian is something I really appreciate, making it worth to spent time on my various jobs. Now, lets take this and write a little about what happened since I gained that extra group:

• Aj resigned from anything that requires additional group privileges. (As a DD run id ajt on a debian.org machine if you want to verify this).

Work I did since then:

• One of my first action was to finally finish the release transitions support, something which was waiting for it’s final merge for a long time. The release team was waiting for this and did ping us (ftpteam) multiple times, but now it is there. You can read more about this feature in my list mail and my initial blog post. (Oh, and something I have missed about everywhere I wrote about this: This whole transitions thing is based on an idea from Marga!)
• Added a mapping in dak, requested by Luk
• Merged a patch from another ftpteam member, Thomas Viehmann, which fixes daks handling of Format 3.0 (something) uploads. Currently it rejects them, without the merged patch it just crashed.
• Changed our daily cronscript to no longer VACUUM/VACUUM analyze projectb in every run. Postgres >= 8.1 has autovacuum, and its turned on, so we should be fine without extra runs of it. (And while i write daily cronscript or cron.daily - I mean dinstall, right now run twice a day).
• Fixed a breakage in code introduced by Debian maintainers which led to process-accepted (one main part of the daily cronscript) breaking. It was triggered by some octave-$FOO package upload, where the ###censored### did add someone twice into the Uploaders: field. Not helpful, but now we ignore this case and just warn us.
• Added a script to expire old database dumps. We do dump our projectb (the main archive database) twice in every run (beginning/end), which made 4 dumps a day. While old dumps seemed to have been removed on an irregular schedule - the dumps took about 71Gb in total. Which pretty much filled up merkels /org, as they get synced there. Now, my script (reworked version of a script from Florian Reitmeir) works with an “incremental deletion” scheme:

  RULES = [ ‘days’:14, ‘interval’:0 , ‘days’:31, ‘interval’:1 , ‘days’:365, ‘interval’:31 , ‘days’:3650, ‘interval’:365 , ]

  That means we now keep all files from the last 14 days. Then keep one per week. Then one per month and finally one per year for up to ten years. All the rest gets deleted. Space usage of our dumps now: 4.8Gb. Thats 66Gb gained. Source is in dak bzr if you want it, MIT licensed. If you improvie it further I love to see patches.
• Changed the way the projectb copy on merkel gets synced. Up to now it was run from a cronjob which syncs a number of files people want to see on merkel, including the database dumps, then reloads the database using the latest dump. This was run at a “random” time, scheduled to be shortly after dinstall. Problem with such a setup is that it will miss extra dinstall runs and also might import old data, as the timing of the cronjob meant it runs while dinstall on ftp-master is still doing its work. So bad bad. It is now done using the ssh trigger feature I described a while ago. So our daily cronscript now tells merkel when it should sync its database again.
• Coordinated with the qa group we now also push them, when the sync on merkel is done, so they can kick their cronjobs to reread projectb and just run whenever they get told that something changed. Yet another bad timing eliminated. (Well, will be done today). Oh, if you have something that depends on information from projectb / ftp-master and try to schedule it to run after dinstall - talk to me, we might just push you too.
• Started talking with the release team how britney, the script which manages our testing distribution, should be handled in the future. It currently is run fully under control of us ftpmasters (and reading hint files from the release team). Ideally this gets changed so that the release team has the control of the code and whatever gets run with it and then, in some way, maybe using ssh triggers, tells us to import a new dataset for testing. That needs some thinking, as obviously it should be limited to testing and we should make sure it doesn’t break the archive, but I think that is doable.
• Prepared a patch that sanity checks the Provides: field, something we currently don’t do. Mailed our internal team address about 3 days ago, to let others look at it, no response yet.

The above should nicely sum up my work in the past few days. Most of it pretty trivial, but still things that have to be done. I plan to keep doing things, slowly going from the trivial stuff to more complicated ones, but there is lots of stuff ahead. Some ideas, and this is a very incomplete list just from my head, there are tons of things that one could do, include

• Finally allowing dpkg-sig support in .deb files. I once, years ago, made a patch for it, which never got applied. (Mostly my fault here). Need to rewrite that to fit the actual code.
• Add a few more sections to our archive. There are multiple bugs asking for them, and some others also come to mind. Like java, ruby, octave, haskell, debug to name a few, but there might be more needed. (Yes, longterm all sections should die and be replaced with debtags. I just don’t think debtags is there yet?!)
• Maybe finally drop m68k and add other architectures to the archive, like some $foo*bsd one. (Thats for after lenny of course, at the time arm also gets dropped).
• Merge a patch I got from Myon which will keep uploaders in projectb.
• Enable bzip2 support for sources, not only for the binary packages. I have a patch ready, it’s not yet merged. Needs to test if anything breaks in stable if we apply it, before we can think about it. Worst case it has to wait until we are running lenny. (The archive runs on a machine with stable, so allowed features always have to be supported in stable).
• Process the currently waiting requests for pseudo-packages and either reject or approve them. After thats done - talk to the BTS maintainers to hand the management of pseudo-packages over to them, as 99% of the usage of those is in the BTS.
• Get dak to optionally mail the sponsor of a package too, if not already in the list of those getting a dak mail. Which isn’t easy. One proposal is to just look at the gpg keyid and get the Debian uid from it, send mail there. I don’t want this, as people are, unfortunately, able to disable mail receiving for their @debian.org address. Which would give us lots of bounces. No way we like that. Similar problems with “Just take one userid that looks like a mail address from their key”.
• Improve various parts run by our daily cronjob, as that one takes ages (about an hour today). Speed improvements are always nice there.
• Think about having more dinstall runs a day. Like - every 2 or 4 or 6 hours could be nice. But that needs discussion within the ftpteam and also with the mirror people before it can be done. But 6 hours seems to be something nice to have, more might be also ok.
• Coordinate with DSA to enable the continous AKA WAL archiving for our database.
• Make merkels sync be more instant, ie. no longer rely on a push of a database dump whenever dinstall run, but something thats near realtime. Having changes done on ries immediately synced to merkel.
• More (active) ftp-team member, maybe?!

Now, do you have any time to kill? Do you want to help? Some things you could do:

• Go look at our bug page and start there. Someone, I think Don, already started using user categories. It would be nice if someone is willing to keep up with the bugs and put them in categories. And continue to do that in the future.
• Generally help with our bug page. One nice task some people do, and possibly more could also do, is retitling bugs. Especially removal bugs tend to have a wrong title. The format is pretty specific…
• Feel free to submit patches to me. I promise to look at them without too much delay and at least give you a hint what might be wrong or could be done better. And if it makes sense, doesn’t break the archive, works, and is something dak should have - I will also merge it. Of course trivial patches are way easier in that regard, non-trivial ones should go via our ftpmaster address first, to leave others a chance to comment on. Bonus points if you provide bzr trees one can merge from, and the bzr tree you should work with is http://ftp-master.debian.org/bzr/ftpmaster-dak/ - patches/bzr trees against outdated versions won’t have much luck to get looked at. :)
• Keep me happy. However you do it, just don’t hug me. :)

Hello, dear developers. I suppose many of you are currently at FOSDEM, but unfortunately I could not attend the event this year. Here are some news for you anyway! FTP assistants I am very pleased to let you know that yesterday Peter Palfrader (weasel) added Kalle Kivimaa (killer) and Thomas Viehmann (tviehmann) to the list of FTP assistants. I still hope that more people can be added soon to this team, but this is definitely good news. Marketing team At the various conferences I attended I have paid much attention to how other distributions and FOSS projects were promoting their work, and despite us often having t-shirts, stickers and posters like the others, we really miss a few things which would make Debian as appealing as other, dynamic projects. I would like to set up a Debian Marketing Team, whose work would be to organise all the promotional stuff (logos, t-shirt designs, wallpapers, etc.) so that the project can officially endorse good designs, and to make the ultimate decision on visual stuff such as CD covers, splash screens, etc. This team would have official DPL delegation, but I hope that it can also work with non-Debian-developers, as many packaging teams already do, because the non-DDs know better than us how to draw people to Debian. So please let me know if you are interested, even if you are not a DD, and especially if you are not a programmer! I also would like to spend some Debian money on a contest, similar to the FreeBSD logo contest, to create a friendly mascot for the Debian project (in a similar way to the Linux penguin or the GNU gnu) that we can use where the logo is not enough. More on this in a few days. Development news Last month Petter Reinholdtsen (pere) gave some news about his project of improving the init system. This is almost as simple as adding LSB headers to your init scripts, and work is advancing towards this goal, though not as quickly as desirable. If your packages have init scripts, or if you wish to help, I urge you to have a look at the proposal so that we can have it in Lenny. DPL elections The new DPL term is in almost 2 months, but campaign starts next month. I have already stated that I would not run again, and haven't changed my mind. As many, many Debian developers are attending FOSDEM, I hope you can use some real-life meeting time to discuss the people you think would make good DPLs and tell them. Maybe they haven't thought of running (or re-running). Being DPL does have an impact on your real life. If you are still wondering whether to run, or have any personal questions, feel free to ask me, I'll gladly share my experience.

You may remember that, short before the release, Aj had a HTML page for packages in NEW, living in his ~/ajt/new/ on our ftp-master host. It was based on a patch from Thomas Viehmann and got lost with the ries crash. Today I reimplemented it, putting it directly into dak and the ftp-master codebase and webtree. My work is also based on Thomas patch, but I reworked the whole thing a bit. I’ve written a new dak command, show-new, which is based on process-new, the command I always use when I process NEW packages. Obviously not with all that functionality, it doesn’t need any reject capability, but it still has some nice parts. Like

• it only runs on packages and their versions if no html output had been generated in the past
• Automatically removes html files of packages no longer in NEW
• It runs right after generating the NEW overview page, hourly. So it should be similar up-to-date (or outdated) as that page is.

To not duplicate code too much this also meant that various code blocks had to be moved into daklib/ files. If you want to look at it - the NEW Overview, something that I wrote long ago, has links to the per-package-version files. Just click on the version number. I have plans to enhance it even more, like having the lintian output use colors too. To make that easy I filed a bug against lintian asking for it. For the other changes - well. I think the layout can be enhanced, possibly going a bit in the direction of the removals summary page, but that will take some time, as I need to talk to my CSS-masters for it. And while I was changing dak code I did some more changes to it. One patchset already got applied from James, removing the obsolete non-US support. I have a large number of other changes, but have to redo them, much more using bzr branches, so James can more easily pick single changes out of them. The changelog for those applied changes is pretty impressive with its length, I think…

2007-12-30  Joerg Jaspert  joerg@debian.org>
        * dak/dak.py (init): add show-new. This is based on a patch
        submitted by Thomas Viehmann in Bug #408318, but large parts of
        handling it are rewritten and show-new is done by me.
        * dak/queue_report.py (table_row): Add link to generated html page
        for NEW package.
        * dak/show_new.py: new file, generates html overview for NEW
        packages, similar to what we see with examine-package.
        * config/debian/cron.hourly: Add show-new call
        * config/debian/dak.conf: Add HTMLPath for Show-New
        * dak/examine_package.py (print_copyright): ignore stderr when
        finding copyright file.
        (main): add html option
        (html_escape): new function
        (escape_if_needed): ditto
        (headline): ditto
        (colour_output): ditto
        (print_escaped_text): ditto
        (print_formatted_text): ditto
        - use those functions everywhere where we generate output, as they
        easily know if we want html or not and just DTRT
        (do_lintian): new function
        (check_deb): use it
        (output_deb_info): Use print_escaped_text, not print_formatted_text.
        Also import daklib.queue, determine_new now lives there
        Also add a variable to see if we want html output. Default is
        disabled, show_new enables it for its use.
        Most of html, besides header/footer are in examine_package instead
        of show_new, as it makes it a whole lot easier to deal with it at
        the point the info is generated.
        * dak/process_new.py (determine_new): Moved out of here.
        (check_valid): Moved out of here.
        (get_type): Moved out of here.
        * daklib/queue.py (determine_new): Moved here.
        (check_valid): Moved here.
        (get_type): Moved here.
        * dak/init_db.py (do_section): Remove non-US code
        * dak/make_overrides.py (main): ditto
        * dak/process_new.py (determine_new): ditto
        * daklib/queue.py (Upload.in_override_p),
        (Upload.check_override): ditto
        * daklib/utils.py (extract_component_from_section):,
        (poolify): ditto
        * dak/import_archive.py (update_section): ditto
        * dak/symlink_dists.py (fix_component_section): ditto
        * scripts/debian/mkmaintainers: ditto
        * scripts/debian/update-mirrorlists (masterlist): ditto
        * config/debian-non-US/*: Remove subdir
        * scripts/debian/update-readmenonus: Removed.

In the recent past I did some more dak changes. Just to list them here, they are

• Fixing daks handling of keys that have expired subkeys together with non-expired subkeys (or non-expired “master” key). That created silent rejects (only sent to ftpmaster, not to the maintainer) in the past. Now it works, iff the signature is valid. (We check other reject reasons like unknown or revoked key, badsig and some other things that can go wrong before that).
• Internal for the NEW queue I adjusted the lintian call to also show what lintian warnings/errors maintainers try to override - and to have its display in color. lintian now also runs on the .dsc file, not only on the individual changes, which also helps me to spot some more errors in NEW which I previously may have missed
• The script to look at the packages in NEW also had a bug that disallowed to look at copyright files from packages using bzip2 compression in their binary tarballs. It did use some ar p tar xz pipeline, which I changed to using dpkg-deb -x and —fsys-tarfile.
• I removed a check for a dpkg pre-depends for bzip2 using binaries, as the dpkg version from sarge knows how to deal with them.

(Most patches applied by James. Can’t remember if someone else applied one. If so that would be Aj). And - at the end of all this - I will finally update my dak package again. Im not sure I get it uploaded this year, as I’m away tomorrow, but it will get an update fairly soon! Ha.

Listmaster Thomas Viehmann wrote (IMHO) a very good summary for a policy on how to proceed with spam in the public archives of the Debian mailing lists. Some of them might need further discussions. Please help the listmasters and write your own ideas and opinions about his proposal. Also many thanks to Frans Pop, who first drafted some of them listmaster-internally quite a while ago. listmaster

I recently purchased a nice thing: a notebook cooler. Indeed, this was originally meant for my "Freebox HD" box, a TV-over-DSL box provided by the French ISP named "Free". These boxes have a huge problem: overheating that makes them hang when using some of their functions (usually reading videos stored on their internal HD). So, I bought a notebook cooler from Antec and just put my box on it and it doesn't hang anymore. Of course, I tried that thing with my laptop (a Dell Latitude X1 which, as many subnotebooks, can become quite hot). This is really impressive. The temperature reported by ACPI drops from 55-61 Celsius in normal operation (55C while reading mail, 61C while compiling samba) to 45C all time long. The notebook cooler is autopowered through the USB ports of the notebook (of course, that means that it drains some power...about 100mA from my rough estimations). It is about 22cmx30cm and 1.5cm height. Of course, as it includes some fans, it adds some noise to my otherwise silent laptop. I would anyway recommend it especially for subnotebook owners who leave their notebook power for very long time as it certainly help a lot preserving the batteries life (Li-ion batteries don't like heat). Antec has two models of notebook coolers: this other one seems designed for travelling. The device is sold for about 30 euros in France and Antec's web site rates it for $40. I'll probably buy another one to definitely host my laptop and even probably yet another one for my son's Dell Latitude 100L (which also overheats a lot when he plays these stupid MMORPG things..:-) Update: notebook batteries are Li-ion based and those don't like heat either..thanks to Thomas Viehmann for the precision.

Cyrus IMAPd implements annotations to mailboxes and the server. As shipped (in 2.3.7, the current upstream release, the Debian maintenance team on Alioth has preliminary packaging in their SVN, thanks!), the valid annotations are hardcoded. Having run an unpatched IMAPd since my own virtual domain patches were obsoleted by upstream supporting it, I've decided to write up a quick patch to make annotations runtime-configurable.

Accentuation of foreign language by combination with acronyms and general technical idom. So now I can use the linphone software telephone in order to get cheaper rates for calls to a country where they speak yet another langue étrangère. The service provider only mentions kphone, but I had some problems getting the sound to work properly. Also, disabling the esound daemon esd works better than using esddsp as far as latency is concerned. Maybe I'll do a better writeup later.

I got some feedback for the script which tries to find conflicting packages I hacked together after the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. Seems to be a useful tool, so it might be nice to add it to devscripts? Some criticized, that it won't work perfectly, since I only check against files mentioned in Contents-.gz where files / folder created in a maintainer scripts are not listed. I know that, but I don't know a useful way to solve the problem. It's better than nothing, and maybe I'll find later a way to add support for installation time created files. Thanks to Kevin Mark and Marc Bockschmidt who pointed me to some improvements for the script, which reduced the time the script takes dramatically! While my first hack needed for a simple package nearly 15 minutes, the new one is down to one or two minutes. Thanks! So please test it a bit; feedback is alway welcome. You can find the latest version at http://www.schmehl.info/tmp/conflicts". Special thanks to Alexander Wirt and Thomas Viehmann who did proof of concept rewrites in perl and python. Alexanders perl version is quite fast... but needs a huge amount of memory. Thomas' python version is very elegant! You don't need to understand python to understand his script. Nice done, but could need some further improvements; since it takes as much time nearly as my bash script. And since I hope it might be interesting for devscripts maintainer, and I'm not sure if they would like to add a dependency on python, I think my bash script has - for now - the lead :)) The script could still need some improvements. For example tweaking the code a bit; I'm sure many of the things I do with pipes from awk to another awk to sort (or something like that) can be cone my awk itself. I Just don't kno how. And instead of fetching the Contents-.gz from the main server, the script could tread it from the users prefered mirror... and maybe even support for other downloaders than wget.

Second generation package manager - First shellish prototype As you know, I'd like to experiment with prototyping some new interface concepts for package managers. I put together a prototype backend and hacked a cmd-based shell interface for it. You should be able to fetch it with:

bzr branch http://people.debian.org/~enrico/2007-01/popcon/

The files involved are pm.py, pmnew and a very little bit of anapop.py. You run it with ./pmnew. The commands are:

• search Set the search string for tags
• tags Show the list of available tags
• desired Set a tag as desired: only packages having that tag will be shown
• undesired Set a tag as undesired: packages having that tag will not be shown
• nevermind Set a tag as neither desired nor undesired
• filter Limit results to a specific kind of packages (any, devel, games, gui...)
• packages Show the (filtered) list of available packages
• info Show details about a package
• install Install a package
• quit Quit the program

This can be an example session to try:

tags
search toy
tags
packages
tags
desired 1
packages
info 3

If you:

• have popularity-contest installed and running
• are online
• have a writable directory called ~/.debtags

then the list of available packages will be sorted using my recent web interface prototype for popcon-based suggestions. Matt Good and Thomas Viehmann volunteered to have a try at a GUI. This can only be fun.

So finally I got my card reader running on Linux. It was not that hard, but the main problem was caused by the proprietary Linux driver I installed. Thanks to Ludovic Rousseau's Generic CCID driver the reader is able to run just fine with only Free Software. It works even with libchipcard2, but a tiny fix to udev was necessary to fix a permission problem (you might need to adapt the vendor and product id to your local card reader, as shown by lsusb):

/etc/udev/rules.d/smart_card.rules:
BUS=="usb", SYSFS idVendor =="04e6", SYSFS idProduct =="5116", GROUP="chipcard", MODE="0664"

With this tiny fix chipcardd2 correctly opens the card as a non-privileged user. My thanks also go to Thomas Viehmann, who provides an HBCI branch of Gnucash on Alioth. Apart from the application crashing a bit too often, the HBCI part works fine with my card and PIN. The only problem left is the sudden disconnect of the reader when it's not used for a few minutes. Only a restart of chipcardd2 and gnucash resolves the problem temporarily. All my homebanking activities are now properly signed, and the retrieval of transactions works just fine. To credit my bank a bit, I am a customer of 1822direkt, a subsidiary of the Frankfurter Sparkasse, since a few weeks. They provided me with a free checking account, together with a free(!) HBCI card. Transactions are mailed just-in-time (checked for hourly during working hours) PGP-encrypted. (Yes, they are running PGP5i on OS/2. I needed to create a RSA key using PHP5i/Unix without a passphrase. The public key output of PGP5i had to be sent to the bank, and after an import of the resulting public and private key into my GPG instance I was able to read the statements correctly. The mail interface did not cope with GPG-generated keys.)

For the first time in more that 10 days, I slept like a baby last night. It might hurt the xlibs-dev transition, but I hope it actually helps in the long run, I will make less mistakes, bug vorlon and dato a bit less, be more aware and awake. Now I just need to keep a balanced sleeping schedule again. I think have good allies.

I have started a small experiment that is against all rules but might spread some package love. So far, I have been successfully working with Victor Seva, Justin Pryzby, Thomas Viehmann and Nico Golde. Join us if you care about this transition!

On the other hand, I find recent threads in debian-devel, debian-private and several posts in debian-devel-announce very distracting. Although I am strongly opinionated on the subjects being discussed, I'd rather remain semi-silent and work in my "NMU love".