Search Results: "florian"

26 July 2008

Philipp Kern: Stable Point Release: Etch 4.0r4 (aka etchnhalf)

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. 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. ;-)

5 May 2008

Adrian von Bidder: apt-p2p in the LAN?

Going just from the title of Cameron's post about his apt-p2p tool: How about automatically running a zeroconf-enabled webserver serving /var/cache/apt/archives (and any mounted local repositories?) during install and while aptitude is running (and, if the user allows, as a daemon by default on a running system) and of course a corresponding sources.list line and apt retrieval module. This would hugely improve installation time for people with just a few machines who are too lazy to set up their own apt cache. Obviously, the details would be tricky, but since there is a security chain from Release.gpg to the .deb, downloading packages from untrusted peers shouldn't be a problem, even if the package name / version pair is not really unique (or even if someone actually tries a spoofing attack.) (There's a thought: running a tftp / dhcp server with a fai network boot in addition would be a step towards world domination, too, closely followed by automated hacking tools to install Debian on all computing devices on the network. Support call: “My printer only prints one page saying debian:~# after power on and then stops.”) Update 2008-05-07: Both Nijel and Florian Ludwig himself pointed out his apt-zeroconf project, which is unfortunately not very actively developed at the moment. Yet another thing I should/could do if I had the time.

1 May 2008

Pablo Lorenzzoni: "Important by Association"

Here is a story people are bugging me to tell here: Since 2003, every year in fisl s last day we, Debian Brasil, hold a party to celebrate Debian s anniversary (I know it s on August, but it s probably the only opportunity we ll have to gather all the gang together so we do it in advance anyway). It s always something that draws everybody s attention in the conference I wonder if the pieces of cake we distribute have anything to do with it Anyway, this anecdote happened during fisl9.0 s party. I was there, helping by distributing cake and blowing our whistles when Jon Maddog Hall got there to check what s going on. I met Jon around 2001, in OpenBeach, an event that happens in Florian polis every year (and that Jon likes to attend)... he s the most pleasant guy, with lots of stories to tell. Since this years fisl was so intense, I barely had time to talk to him in fact, that was the first time we saw each other this year. We hug each other and were asking how s each other life s going and so, when Jon got his camera out of his pocket and asked some guy in the crowd to get our picture. I did the same. We exchanged some compliments and he left saying that he still had to work in his talk. Jon is quite a character. In fisl, every time he wanders around his picture is taken over one hundred times (I actually saw some father taking pictures of him holding his child like he were running for Senate or something, one time). So he left with some people around him and I think he d not seen what happened next. I turn towards Debian s booth, to resume the cake delivery when some guy in the crowd asked me to take a picture with him. And then another one and another. I believe my picture was taken another two or three times before I got to the booth. I can t believe! I was about to tell people Hey! I am nobody! Stop taking pictures with me What were they thinking? I imagine something like I don t know who this guy is, but if Maddog took a picture with him, he must be some one! was crossing their minds. When the party was over I went back to the Organization Committee room and told this story LTSP s Jim McQuillan (another good friend) told me I was Important by Association , and everybody just kept laughing at me because of that. I haven t got the time to tell Jon about it I hope he s reading. I think I am going to check what pictures people are uploading about fisl, to see if I can find myself on any ;-)

22 April 2008

Joerg Jaspert: FTPMaster

[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: Work I did since then: 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 Now, do you have any time to kill? Do you want to help? Some things you could do:

12 April 2008

Philipp Kern: Wrapping up Sarge into a nice package

We escorted Sarge to its last home. 3.1r8 is done, thanks to all the people who made it possible. A big thanks goes to James Troup, our ftpmaster of the day doing all the grunt work of getting a new point release out of the door. To bring in a more personal feeling of who makes this all possible, here is a list of people contributing uploads to 3.1r8 (mostly people from our fabulous Security Team): I would also like to thank dann frazier, Luk Claes, Martin Zobel-Helas and Neil McGovern for helping with the preparation of the point release.

4 January 2008

Christian Perrier: Das Leben der Anderen

I don't often blog about movies we watch, but if you have the opportunity to see that one by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, just go ("The lives of Others" in en and "La vie des autres" in fr). It's been ranked as "2007 movie" in many occasions and I'd vote for it as well even though, technically, I watched it only yesterday. Again, just go and watch it (if not done already, of course: you've maybe been less lazy than we were....or you're German..:-)).

21 November 2007

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Several new Rmetrics packages

Debian has provided Rmetrics packages for financial engineering and computational finance since the Rmetrics release for R 1.9.0 in the summer of 2004. Over the years, Rmetrics has gotten more granular and changed from a handful of packages to two handfuls --- and the most recent release extended this trend even further to almost two dozen packages as shown in this chart. Dependency chart for Rmetrics packages Rmetrics now comprosises over twenty individual packages. Eleven new packages were added in the 260.72 release for R 2.6.0, and they required eight other new packages from CRAN. While I would have preferred a more spread-out approach than the shotgun approach of having to introduce all these new packages at once (which took the last four weeks), I am in support of the reorganisation which should make maintenance more easy going forward. So to get all of these packages onto a Debian box, a quick sudo apt-get install r-cran-rmetrics is all it takes. Currently supported only in the always-fresh unstable flavour, but hopefully soon in testing too. A big Thank You goes to the Debian FTPmasters. Of the 20-some packages that I added to Debian during this Rmetrics expansion, many were added within a day or two. Lastly, thanks also to Florian Hahne, Robert Gentleman and Elijah Wright for much appreciated help with R's Rgraphviz and graph packages to create the chart above. It only takes a handful of lines to create the basic graph, and another few lines for the colours and titles. The code is available on request, of course, but you need the current development versions of the BioConductor packages Rgraphviz and graph (which are not in Debian yet).

19 August 2007

Alexis Sukrieh: The road to libdevel-repl-perl, part 2

Thanks to Florian Ragwitz, who packaged libpadwalker-perl 1.5-1, there is no blocker anymore that prevents libdevel-repl-perl from entering sid: By the way, the author of Devel::REPL, Matt S Trout, looks pretty happy to see his module entering Debian. I’ve just uploaded libdevel-repl-perl, this upload closes the exciting work session we did during all the weekend with Damyan Ivanov, in order to get the module into debian. All its dependencies are now in the Perl group’s hands. That was fun. Team maintenance rocks!

16 August 2007

Alexis Sukrieh: Perl Console 0.2 Debian package

The first version of the debian package of Perl Console has been uploaded to the NEW queue. For those who are waiting for it, I’ve also uploaded the package here. Thanks to the patch sent by Antonio Terceiro, the version 0.3 will be properly packaged ala Perl (namely with the famous Makefile.PL, MANIFEST and friends). I plan to adress the multi-line issue for 0.3 (mainly handling code with loops or conditional structures), as Florian Ragwitz underlined, it could be worth using Devel::REPL instead of rewriting the wheel.

24 June 2007

Dirk Eddelbuettel: New OpenMPI packages

Debian had OpenMPI package since early last year when Florian Ragwitz made some initial stabs at packaging. The package has seen a number of NMU and patches since then, but was generally getting cobwebs ... which was too bad because OpenMPI seems to have some wind behind its sails upstream. Unfortunately, little of that got packaged for Debian. After some discussions on and around the debian-science list, a new maintainer group was formed on Alioth under the pkg-openmpi name. Tilman Koschnick (who had already helped Florian with patches), Manuel Prinz, Sylvestre Ledru and myself have gotten things in good enough shape in reasonably short time. And I have just uploaded a lintian-clean package set openmpi_1.2.3-0 to Debian, where it is expected to sit in the NEW queue for a little bit before moving on to the archive proper. The changelog entry (which will appear here eventually) shows twelve bugs closed. Our plan is to provide a stable and well maintained MPI implementation for Debian. OpenMPI is the designated successor to LAM, and apart from MPICH2, everybody seems to have thrown their weight behind OpenMPI. So we will try to work with the other MPI maintainers to come up with sensible setups, alternatives priorities and the likes. If you are interested in MPI and would like to help, come join us at the Alioth project pkg-openmpi. Last but not least, thanks to Florian for the initial packaging, and to Clint Adams, Mark Hymers, Andreas Barth, and Steve Langasek (twice even) for NMUs.

23 February 2007

Christian Perrier: German bump: fr: 99.928%, cs: 93.662%, de: 83.592%, sv: 80.372%, vi: 77.949%

Big bump for stats of german debconf translations This is somewhat expected: most of the NMUs I'm doing today include german translations. It seems that the german l10n team had a great activity between October 2006 and January 2007, which is the period of time I'm fixing remaining bugs for right now. Today's uploads: localization-config, xmcd (switch to po-debconf and a lot of translations). And I finally couldn't resist and I posted a call for new translations for my geneweb pet package. 23 translations and already one more came (Tamil). On The Road to 100%, we're now missing Florian Weimer's debsecan.

14 November 2006

Joachim Breitner: Infoning in Ghana

I m running a computer club at the school in Ghana where am volunteering as a Free Software advocate at the moment (as you probably know already). At first I tried to spread a little bit of general hacker attitude by introducing an internal wiki and blog, and by explaining what Free Software is. Then some students indicated interest in a programming course, so I held python lessons in the club (Sessions 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10). Unfortunately, interest was declining over time, and while the first lessons had over ten participants (not to speak of the 20 at the very first one), it soon fell to around four. There was also some fluctuation, students leaving, others joining (and then of course lacking the lessions from the earlier sessions).So today, with four students who only recently joined, I started something new: I introduced the game infon, by fellow entropianian Florian 'dividuum' Wesch. It is a networked battle area where bugs compete over food and fight each other. Suitable for the computer club makes it the fact that the bugs are not directly controlled, but the players write their intelligence (using the simple language lua) and only upload code to the server. They can even do this while the game is running and it was a very fun game to play at GPN5 in Karlsruhe. You can read my infon-tutorial, and it s mostly non-SOSHGIC specific.I got them far enough to type the code that I presented as an example, to get it running, and to extend it slightly. I am only hoping that they will dig in a little bit deeper until next week. I think that you can only be successful in learning programing or similar things if you spend some time doing it besides the classes, and I did not see that happening when I was doing python. Maybe I was going too fast or the text-only way of doing it was discouraging, but I did expect them to starting having their own ideas at least after we were programming a simple text-based maze in the club.

22 October 2006

Florian Ragwitz: Audio::XMMSClient::XMLRPC

I just uploaded Audio::XMMSClient::XMLRPC 0.01 to the CPAN. It's basically an XMLRPC interface to the xmms2 daemon. It ties all Audio::XMMSClient functions except for the signal and broadcast stuff to an XMLRPC API which is quite similar to the Perl API of Audio::XMMSClient. It will be available from from CPAN in some hours and can be grabbed from the Pause incoming queue in the meantime.

18 October 2006

Steve McIntyre: LiMux - bringing Debian to Munich's local government

As promised yesterday in my report about the Munich BSP, I'd like to talk some more about LiMux, the project being run within the City of Munich to replace all of their desktop Windows systems with Linux. The team kindly offered us the use of their offices in central Munich as a base for the BSP last weekend, and on Sunday afternoon they gave us a demonstration and answered lots of our questions. The following is from my (known-faulty) memory...

Jan-Marek, LiMux and Florian Jan-Marek and Florian talked us through their setup. They're using FAI to automate installation of systems, along with LDAP to store lots of configuration information and GOsa as a user-friendly front-end to that configuration. They've integrated these to enable some very clever management features so that all aspects of the city-wide system can be maintained from one central point. As new machines are introduced onto the network, they can be configured into one class or another: simple desktop clients up to so-called "depot" servers, used as seeds for further clients. Individual user profiles can be tweaked, giving users access to new applications as they are needed. Shared resources like network storage and printers are set up automatically from the LDAP database. Access to USB storage devices can be controlled on a per-device, per-user basis for security. That's quite an impressive feature list. Most of the work has been in configuration and systems work rather than custom packages on the clients themselves - the vast majority of the packages installed come straight from the standard Debian archive, with some backports (like a newer version of KDE). Building on top of standard packages means that they have access to a huge amount of Free Software without having to do all of the work themselves. A small team (10-ish at the moment, growing to 100 or so in the future) can effectively deploy and manage desktops and associated servers for a huge number of users - they're expecting to be supporting on the order of 30,000 systems 2 years from now. The team have just recently made their first stable release and are starting to roll it out across the city, one department at a time. There are the familiar issues involved in the deployment, of course. For example, users don't want to help test pre-release versions to help nail bugs, but then complain loudly when they find bugs in the first release. And in such a large project to migrate from predominantly Windows (NT4!) desktops to KDE on Linux, a major part of the effort needed is in user training. There is quite a bit of support and custom work needed to convert people's MS Office macros over to working on top of OpenOffice. And there are still quite a number of users who will remain using Windows for specific applications that still don't have Linux equivalents yet. Apparently the "Wine Cellar" group will help on that front. *grin* In terms of collaborating with Debian, the LiMux team are expecting to help in a few ways. As bug reports are filed against their applications (apparently very few so far), they'll be pushed upstream along with (hopefully) fixes for them. They will also be devoting some full-time developer effort to security work; it would be good for both sides if this effort can be shared.

Tux in
the office! It was quite striking to see Tux, the Linux penguin, as a visible logo in local government offices! The team have clearly made some excellent progress on this exciting project, and I'm sure that I can speak for all of Debian in wishing them the best of luck in the future. I'll be watching with interest...

15 October 2006

Florian Ragwitz: Random seeking on gzip streams

After asking the lazyweb on how to seek on gzip streams I got a very useful and comprehensive reply by Paul Sladen. As my previous searches on this topic didn't turn up to much useful things I'd like to publish Pauls reply (with his approval) here to help other people having the same problem as well:
Paul Sladen:
Seeking on compressed streams is a little like reading sectors from a harddisk; to read one byte requires reading a much large sectors. Two things are needed, the sector size and the sector length. On a hard-disk the sector length is nominally 512 with the mapping between an offset and sector start often as simple as: $offset >> 9. In compressed streams, the relationship between stream position and sector start is non-linear. Using a non-linear mapping is more involved as searching a lookup table is required. Mapping between an uncompressed position instead cannot be calculated and a 'zmap' table listing all sector start position and corresponding on-disk points needs to be created. The size of a sector must be determined aswell. Bzip2: It is fairly easy to seek on compressed bzip2 streams. In a Bzip2 stream, each block is totally separate and self contained---have a look a the 'bzip2recover' program. 'bzip2recover' scans through a bzip2 stream locating each block/'segment' (normally 900kB of input, so ~200kB of compressed output), then copying each segment to separate bzip2 file. Gzip: Seeking on gzip streams is somewhat more involved; Gzip uses a dictionary design where back-references are made to uncompressed data within the last 32kB ("the window"). The only safe place to start reading a 'sector' in a gzip stream is somewhere where that the dictionary size is zero. An empty dictionary occurs at the start of a stream, or where the stream has been 'reset'. Gzip resets: A gzip 'sector' (the length required to be read, to safely decode a byte) could be the full length of the file-size, or could occur more frequently. A gzip sector start occurs when the stream is reset---resetting the stream more frequently leads to more sector starts, but a reduction in compression thanks to less use of the sliding dictionary. Trade-off. The "gzip --rsyncable" is an example of stream resetting; in this case the stream is reset (and the dictionary closed) each time that the sum of the last 4096 octets of input data, modulo 65536(?) equals a magic number (zero normally). In exchange for the extra reset/start points, you get a size increase of 4-5%, but a better "hit rate" for random access. Gzip reset point lookup tables: More likely you'd want to reset the stream every eg. 4096kB of input, then save the corresponding position of the output stream for a give input position. This lookup table of start positions needs to be stored somewhere. 'squashfs' does in a separate file; 'zsync' in the zmap. (If you wanted to define a standard, these reset points could be stored in the 'extra' or 'comment' fields at the start of a gzip file; storing them with a suitable header would enable some degree of seeking for sufficiently intelligent readers---files could be post-processed to add this data). Storing a LUT takes space; adding extra reset points and storing the LUT data for these extra points takes more space---but I found storing the LUT as a set of double-deltas cut it down; could be gzipped aswell. Gzip partial resets: A gzip stream doesn't just contain 'reset' points, but also 'partial reset' points, a partial resets the huffman tables, but doesn't reset the dictionary. It's safe to stop reading at a partial reset (which effectively shortens the sector length). Whilst not normally possible, partial reset points /are/ able to be used as a starting point /if/ you can populate the previous uncompressed 32kB that forms the dictionary window from another source---'zsync' does this when reconstructing a file, however 'zsync' only does construction in a linear fashion, from the start of a file. Further Reading: Magic words to search for: zsync, squashfs, apt-sync, succinct Succinct is my unfinished project. Succinct involves many parts, one of which covers what you're doing. It might be good to break separate off seeking of compressed streams into a separate project---many small pieces make big problems easier! What I might do is store the LUT in the EXTRA field of the gzip header (limited to 64kB though). Though, within 64kB it would always be possible to construct a useful LUT; based on the final length of the input data, it would be possible to reduce the granularity of the LUT such that it only mentioned 50%, 30%... even 5% of reset points. The LUT itself could be gzipped for extra gain. Hope that's useful, -Paul PS. In all the cases (except one) that I mentioned gzip, I probably meant 'zlib' or 'deflate'! :)
In a later mail Paul also added the following:
Paul Sladen:
BTW, in my search around a bit later for something I turned up two more things that might be interesting: dictzip, examples/zran.c in the zlib source 'dictzip' is a similar idea to what I suggested at the end of the previous email. A lookup table is built and stored in the EXTRA section at the start of the gzip file and the utilities ('dictzcat' et al) then use this look-up table for random-access on the data. 'dictzip' are still slightly wide of the mark, forcing a flush/chunk every 58969 bytes. That number is chosen so that even in the worst case, the compressed version will never be more than 216 in length. However I think their math is slightly wrong as even in the worse case, gzip only generates 5 bytes per 32kB for an uncompresed store. -> ~65514 by my reckoning. Squashfs uncompressable chunks by setting the top bit of the file offset to indicate a true store. Their lookup table format appears to be flexible enough that I /might/ be able to create a table by scanning an existing stream rather than re-encoding. Depends about the 64kB limitation. Mmm.
Thanks Paul!

13 October 2006

Florian Ragwitz: Plat_Forms: The web development platform comparison

http://www.plat-forms.org/index.htm
Plat_Forms is an international programming contest. It aims at comparing different technological platforms for developing web-based applications: Java EE, .NET, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby-on-Rails
I really love the idea behind that project and after some Perl people complained they now also accept submissions from Perl developers. So if you live in or around Germany and would like to do some propaganda for your favorite web framework, apply right now, as long as your favorite web framework is based on Perl. :-)

Florian Ragwitz: Seeking on gzip streams?

Dear Lazyweb, do you know anything that implements seeking on gzip/zlib streams? Seeking forward is easily done by reading the data up to the requested position, which isn't nice, but works well. Seeking backwards may be implemented by something like this:
inflateEnd (&stream);
fseek (input, 0, SEEK_SET);
inflateInit (&stream);
/* read up to the requested position */
This will be terribly slow for some cases, but well.. I'm just wondering how seeking with SEEK_END could be implemented without inflating the whole stream at first.

30 September 2006

Florian Ragwitz: xmms2_0.2DrGonzo-1

The xmms2 project released 0.2DrGonzo recently. I've prepared packages for it, but as the new release adds two new plugins I needed to add two new binary packages. Therefor it'll need to go through the NEW queue again. In the meantime you can grab the source package and build it yourself for your architecture:

Florian Ragwitz: Perldition, a small Blog and CMS, written in Perl

Until a few days ago my website was driven by PodCMS, which allowed me to manage all of the content as directories and files containing Pod (Plain Old Documentation). Unfortunately that wasn't quite flexible enough and didn't allow some features, like comments, tags and trackbacks, to be implemented easily. Also Pod sucks for some sort of content, as there's no satisfying Pod2Html module on CPAN as it seems. Therefor I decided to create something new. The new system has all features the old one had, but now allows to create content in lots of formats such as: Other markup formats are possible as well, as the API for the formatting plugins is quite easy and usually just a thin wrapper around a CPAN module which does the actual translation to HTML. Beside allowing new formats to write the content in, it also adds the following features: In conclusion I'm pretty happy with the new software. I'm just very disappointed by quality of the generated HTML that the various Pod2HTML modules on CPAN produce, so I'll probably end up in writing something myself, based on Pod::Parser. PS: The URL to rss feed changed. Please use http://perldition.org/blog.rss.

26 September 2006

Florian Ragwitz: My most often executed shell commands

$ history 1 awk ' print $2 ' awk 'BEGIN  FS=" "   print $1 ' sort uniq -c   sort -r  head -10
On my laptop:
   1557 vi
    710 perl
    692 man
    661 cd
    648 ac
    513 sudo
    510 grep
    499 rm
    388 ls
    180 wajig
On weedy.perldition.org, my server:
   1967 sudo
   1052 vi
    810 cd
    766 l
    352 screen
    316 perl
    250 ..
    213 wajig
    212 find
    194 rm
.. expands to cd .., l is shorthand for ls and ac is my alias for apt-cache.

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