I went shopping today, and inadvertently stole a very nice cardigan-like thing from a multinational clothing retailer. Enough anecdotes. Yesterday: NMU'd nut to fix bug #583371. I hear a co-maintainer is sought, so if you're into UPS devices... Downgraded bug #599909 in emacs23. Tempted to upgrade it again now it's reassigned to gtk-qt-engine, though. Asked for a binNMU to fix rep-gtk on kfreebsd-amd64. Today: Filed a binNMU request for sawfish, which should eventually resolve bug #599959 on the back of the librep work I did earlier in the week. NMU'd python-sipe to fix bug #582998, where a non-DD had followed the NMU instructions rather literally; nice try. ;) If any non-DDs need a sponsor for RC bug fixes, do ask me by email. Downgraded bug #599463 in gstreamer0.10-alsa (formerly of mp3splt-gtk). It's now closed. Went ahead and NMU'd aptitude to fix bug #557580 and bug #594505. It'll be fine, honest; if you don't believe me, test the packages. ...

Summary of yesterday: Investigated rep-gtk/librep-dev breakage, and NMUd librep. Got a libtool wishlist bug out of it as well. Cloned bug #584327 in python-rdflib to gcc-4.4 as a reminder to see if mips/mipsel is already fixed. Downgraded bug #580876 in ldc. Wrote a patch for gpib FTBFS, which occurs because of an interesting new cdbs/module-assistant problem. I'm getting to the point where RC bugs actually keep me up at night. Very bad...

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. ...

This evening's RC bug fixes were in magyarispell: Bug #591365 - the myspell-hu dictionary was completely broken. Bug #585132 - turns out everyone was just very confused, and blaming it on the myspell-hu dictionary being completely broken. 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.

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.

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.

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. ...

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. ...

Today I went to HantsLUG at IBM Hursley. I delivered a talk on the Debian Perl team aimed at end users, which was well received - I got a head start by getting people in #debian-perl to review the slides beforehand, which was very helpful. I'm told there will be a video uploaded in a month or so. I also plugged SmoothWall Express on Debian to some new people, and there was interest. My most recent discovery is that I probably need to extend netcfg in the debian installer to allow configuring more than one network interface.

Here in the UK we've had a bank holiday weekend. Usually I would have gone to Cambridge for the Debian BBQ, but this year I joined forces with Thomas Adam for some SmoothWall Express on Debian hacking. There are several challenges involved in moving the SWE3 code from its native distribution to Debian; this weekend we worked around some of the permissions problems. On SWE3, the web server and most of the service daemons run as the user 'nobody'. This means that the web server can write out configuration files as the same user as everything else; it can also read the system log files. When the web interface needs to run a privileged action (like setting firewall rules), it sends a command to 'smoothd', which is a daemon running as root. (Admin ssh access is always directly as the root user.) ...