Dato pointed out on my post yesterday that I had omitted to link to the Ikea catalogue. And then it hit me - I am completely failing to monetize this blog! (Sadly, Ikea aren't in a position to give me any kickbacks right now.) Since my money would be spent on innovative Swedish design in any case, I present a new microdonations system: Flattr-pack. I'll add a "Flattr-pack this!...

Today I bought two Ikea boxes. Possibly the best £8 I have ever spent - I still have a load of bits of paper to sort out, but now they're all hidden from sight in a sleek, black and chrome rivet-effect container. More than simply reclaiming my sofa from the piles of notes, they seem to point to a higher truth; they fit their purpose in a way that is hard to articulate, like some platonic Form....

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....

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. #598619 in x11vnc NMU'd, after one false start, but at least I learnt something. #586849 and #586838 in mgltools-{utpackages,geomutils} confirmed fixed. Patch written for #592417 in mgltools-utpackages. Verified and NMU'd patch for #410130 in cryptonit....

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....

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....

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....

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....