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.) ...

SmoothWall Express is a GNU/Linux distribution geared towards firewalling, with an installer, a web interface, and some common software like squid that can be useful when running a small business router. It is theoretically the basis for the corporate products of SmoothWall Ltd., who happen to employ me; but all opinions here are my own, and I'm not speaking for them. Unfortunately, the SmoothWall Express kernel is somewhat "stable", which leads to problems installing the distro on modern hardware. There is a new version of Express in the works, but I'm afraid SmoothWall Ltd. currently has a bit of a "code dump" mentality with respect to delivering updates to their community, because they don't recall seeing any significant contributions from outsiders. ...

On my last night in New York, I didn't sleep much. At 6am, I said farewell to Central Park by running round the reservoir, which I hadn't yet done. There was a very nice red sunrise to be seen from the west side. Unfortunately I didn't sleep much on the flight home either. The British accents sounded quite unusual when we landed in Heathrow, and it was quite confusing not being able to find a Starbucks. ...