I've been ill this week. The only hacking I've been doing is of the cough variety. :) I think I'm recovering, though.
This evening, I finally checked out LibreOffice, to get an idea what's going on - kicked off a build, joined the mailing lists. Some of the easy hacks look quite feasible, but there's always a bit of work to get started. The community looks very welcoming, though, so no problems there.
The various Perl bits in the installer/build system seem an obvious place to get started. I've also got an eye on the mdbtools code - I theoretically maintain the Debian package, and have come close to forking it. But I aspire to be writing "real" patches, of course.
I've been thinking about where I should put my development time over the next year or so, and LibreOffice is likely to be one of those places.
Posted: 30 Oct 2010 01:25 |
My humble RC bug squashing efforts for this week. I've saved them all up, because I don't want to spam Planet Debian too much... or alternatively, because I've been feeling ill Thursday/Friday and didn't do anything at all.
Note that quite a few of these were "cheating" by just closing bugs that someone else had written a patch/comment for, and the mgltools-* ones are in non-free software, so they won't have the same impact on the RC bug stats. Also, I've mentioned the gnucash and sawfish ones before, but they'll definitely be counted in the stats now..
Posted: 24 Oct 2010 02:13 |
I went shopping today, and inadvertently stole a very nice cardigan-like thing from a multinational clothing retailer.
Enough anecdotes. Yesterday:
Today:
Looking at the weekly summary reports, we squashed a net total of 31 RC bugs last week. Of course, it's possible they'll get more difficult as we go along... but I'm hoping to see all the easy ones closed before the BSP two weeks from now.
Posted: 17 Oct 2010 00:04 |
Summary of yesterday:
I'm getting to the point where RC bugs actually keep me up at night. Very bad...
Posted: 15 Oct 2010 08:21 |
I took most of the weekend off, although took a look at an upgrade bug on e16. Turns out Tolimar's got it handled, right? :)
Tonight I put together a tentative patch for bug #557580 on aptitude to make it respect configuration under /etc/apt/preferences.d/ - aptitude is written in C++, and I have had some recent exposure to that language at work. Unfortunately, it means aptitude takes most of an hour to build on my desktop.
Since aptitude is an important package, I'm not yet entirely confident about my patch, and it's already half eleven, I think the NMU can wait a few evenings.
Posted: 12 Oct 2010 23:30 |
This evening's RC bug fixes were in magyarispell:
I'm tempted to go to Paris for the mini-debconf at the end of the month. I've never visited France, despite my French roots - and it turns out it's quite easy for me to get there.
Posted: 08 Oct 2010 22:51 |
I've been mostly working on GnuCash the past few evenings. I added more info and a test case to Bug #593856, so that should fall into place soon.
I turned my attention to ettercap this evening, and Bug #521857 - another easy one, just applying the updated patch. Except when I ran "lintian -F", I got:
lintian -F /var/cache/pbuilder/result/ettercap_0.7.3-2.1_amd64.changes E: ettercap: binary-or-shlib-defines-rpath ./usr/sbin/ettercap /usr/lib E: ettercap-gtk: binary-or-shlib-defines-rpath ./usr/sbin/ettercap /usr/lib
This led me to a Jan 2008 email from Raphael Geissert about packages defining RPATH on amd64. For now, I've rebuilt in an i386 chroot - I'd need some help making a full lintian run on amd64 if I were going to propose a mass bug-filing.
Posted: 07 Oct 2010 21:30 |
My gnucash fix from last night poses an interesting problem - there will be no new gnucash 2.2.x release. So we can fix this potential data loss bug in Debian (probably even in lenny), but what about other distributions? I'm not aware of a formal way to co-ordinate non-security patches like this across distros. (Sure, we can leave it for the vultures on the patch tracker...)
Someone should whip up a whizzy web-app, or whatever.
Posted: 04 Oct 2010 18:17 |
I have developed an affection for crime drama - on Sunday nights, the TV channel Five USA shows something like four hours of CSI, back to back. There's obviously something fascinating about the problem-solving process... and there's always the too-good-to-be-true computer interfaces to laugh at. (I also watch The Mentalist, NCIS and Law & Order, for variety.) And also, on CSI:NY and Law & Order, I get to spot the places in New York I visited at DebConf.
So yes, problem solving. Sometimes the real thing can be even more compelling. And who wants to slump in front of the TV for four hours, anyway? Much better to sit up in front of the computer for... erm... a lot longer.
This was a more challenging bug - I had to break out gdb and everything. Turns out string manipulation with C is still error-prone. First reported upstream in October 2008 - quite a mystery.
NMU to follow later in the week, since there are two other serious bugs open for gnucash.
Posted: 04 Oct 2010 01:15 |
It's been raining this weekend in Southampton. This afternoon's not been too bad - I went for a walk around the city walls. Just a few hundred years ago, the River Test would have come right up to them, and my flat would have been in a defensive moat full of sea water, I think.
I re-read zack's rcbw page, and noticed the section on 'blog posts' - there is also a propaganda element to the idea, in improving Debian's internal culture w.r.t. NMUs.
So with my grey Sunday afternoon, I have uploaded a couple of NMUs for RC bugs:
I am surprised that there are still such easy pickings from the RC bug list at this point in the release cycle. This Debian Developer lark is a piece of cake, innit?
Posted: 03 Oct 2010 18:39 |
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Tim Retout tim@retout.co.uk
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I'm afraid I have turned off comments for this blog, because of all the spam. Let's face it, I didn't read them anyway. Feel free to email me.