My (very) humble efforts this week: 2009-11-25: #527710 in 'ming' - closed as no longer occurred. Prodded some bugs, especially #555036 in 'bash-completion-lib'; don't remember actually fixing any. :( 2009-11-29: #552680 in 'libtest-valgrind-perl' - investigated and closed. Was actually a previously-closed bug in valgrind. Then bringing up #551926 in pip and python-pip on debian-devel. Less of the instant gratification of NMUs for me lately. But; the Perl packaging team is down to a much lower number of RC bugs now. I'm one step closer to being a DD, apparently. And today I found somewhere to live for the next year; this is actually going to threaten my internet access in the near future, which is a little annoying. But once it's done, I'll actually be working on a desktop machine again, rather than a netbook.

I thought I should share my current favourite Ubuntu patch. While hunting for easy RC bug fixes yesterday, I stumbled across mit-scheme_7.7.90+20090107-1ubuntu1.patch [roughly 9MB]. It contains a Debian .deb to bootstrap the Ubuntu mit-scheme package (bug filed). Nice. Now, to be fair, Debian has a bootstrapping problem for mit-scheme as well - it requires itself to build, but is currently uninstallable in unstable (although zack's on the case). Having looked at the problem, I think the best thing to do in the long term would be to package mit-scheme-c (which appears to be a superset of the upstream tarball for mit-scheme?) and then use that to build the other package. This would also provide a version of mit-scheme for arches other than i386. If maintainer-built binary packages are going to get thrown away at upload time, that would have been the only way to solve the bug, I think. ...

I've been slacking on the RC bugs front. :) Let's see, my last blog post was on Monday 16th, so I'm late... 2009-11-17: #527838 in 'smart' - investigated, closed as fixed. (Blatant cheating.) 2009-11-18: #516338 in 'pornview' - debugged a segmentation fault on amd64 2009-11-19: #551251 in 'libjavascript-perl' - patch written, but need to finish off and release. On Friday I looked at postgresql-pllua and postgresql-plproxy, but they need a bit more work than I originally thought, so I joined the pkg-postgresql team. I'm amazed I wasn't a member before, in fact. :) Now just need to actually update the packages. Then I took the weekend off! Went out, had fun... Yesterday I followed up on bug #516338 above with a delayed NMU, but I believe we're close to a maintainer upload now. 2009-11-24: #553230 in 'libapache2-mod-macro' - NMU diff written. I think it's borderline removal material, since there's only been one maintainer upload ever, but it does have a few popcon votes. ...

This evening I investigated #555941 in libxml-filter-xslt-perl, and was able to downgrade it to "important". I'm working on a proper fix, but it's not RC any more. (Gunnar, I don't mean to make you feel bad! I've been inactive for a while myself - I'm just making up for lost time.) And now for conversation via blog! Clint, I'm inclined to agree about ego, fiefdoms and so on. But I'm unconvinced that personal relationships themselves are harmful. Actually, I was thinking more about "professional relationships" - I don't care much whether mentors take their mentees to an art gallery, provided they work with them over a period of time, and therefore get to know the quality of their packaging. (I was a bit careless in my phrasing last night.) ...

Heh, thanks zack for your welcome. :) I'm afraid I don't make bug fixing look as easy or as organised as you do. Some cheating to finish off the weekend: #548860 was reopened accidentally, #555898 was already fixed in another package, and #555939... actually, that did need a fix, but I just munged the test suite to expect some new error output. Then I spent this morning writing half a testsuite for svn-buildpackage, and this evening just zoning out. ...

On Wednesday, I fixed #551228 in libgstreamer-perl - from the bug log, it looked like it would be an intriguing parallel-build problem, but I reckon it was just a faulty test. Next I applied a patch from the upstream bug tracker for #544894 in libtk-filedialog-perl, which was fine; but then we noticed that there was no explicit copyright notice in the source, so it hasn't been uploaded yet. The code is from 1996, so we would request removal from Debian if it weren't for 'horae' depending on it. Hmm... ...

Hello, Planet! (Thanks to lamby for adding me to Planet Debian.) If you don't know me... I'm not surprised. I do some occasional pkg-perl work, but I've really been slacking (and changing jobs, and moving halfway across the UK). Last week I fixed one RC bug, in libgnupg-interface-perl. Better than none, I suppose. It turned out to be quite interesting; the tests failed when the package was built on the buildds, but not locally. Other people had done the hard work, and figured out that this was happening when there was no tty; I just had to debug why the particular perl variable was getting unset. ...

Part one of an occasional series about SmoothWall Express (SWE). The SmoothWall Express source tree contains two NTP daemons - both ntpd and OpenNTPD. SWE uses the openntpd daemon, but installs the ntpdate and ntpq utilities from the ntpd package. This is justified because openntpd is apparently more lightweight than ntpd. But note that ntpq does not work with openntpd. On my machine, the saving in memory is not massive. As observed in the thread, openntpd needs to run two processes (with one running as root), while ntpd can use Linux capabilities. From a cursory look at the Debian bug tracker, ntp has more bugs, but they don't seem as important as openntpd's. I suspect ntp gets more testing. The latest portable release of openntpd was in May 2006. ...

I spent the weekend in Rugby, not doing very much. I had this morning off work to travel back to Southampton, and it was surprisingly busy. This afternoon I put the transaction scope guards I'd researched on Saturday into my project at work, and then refactored bits of it. According to the project plan I'm meant to be finished soon, but I keep finding more important things to do than implement the final SQL functions. ...

While depositing a cheque using the machine at my local Nationwide branch yesterday, a remarkable thing occurred; the machine looked at the cheque and told me how much it was for.