Debian

Packet.net offer an ARMv8 server with 96 cores for $0.50/hour. I signed up and tried building Libreoffice to see what would happen. Debian isn't officially supported there yet, but they offer Ubuntu, which suffices for testing the hardware. Final build time: around 12 hours, compared to 2hr 55m on the official arm64 buildd. Most of the Libreoffice build appeared to consist of "touch /some/file" repeated endlessly - I have a suspicion that the I/O performance might be low on this server (although I have no further evidence to offer for this). I think the next thing to try is building on a tmpfs, because the server has 128GB RAM available, and it's a shame not to use it.

[The story so far: I'm packaging pump.io for Debian.] 4 packages uploaded to NEW: node-webfinger validator.js websocket-driver node-openid 2 packages eliminated as not needed: set-immediate - deprecated crypto-cacerts - not needed on Debian 1 package in progress: node-databank Got my eye on: oauth-evanp - this is a fork with two patches, so I need to investigate the status of those. node-iconv-lite - needs files downloaded from the internet, so I'm considering how to add them to the source package dateformat/moment - there's an open discussion about combining Node.js modules, and I'm wondering if these are affected. Thoughts Currently I'm averaging around one package upload a day, I think? Which would mean ~1 month to go? But there may be challenges around getting packages through the NEW queue in time to build-depend on them. ...

I intend to intend to package pump.io for Debian. It's going to take a long time, but I don't know whether that's weeks or years yet. The world needs decentralized social networking. I discovered the tools that let me create this wiki summary of the progress in pump.io packaging. There are at least 35 dependencies that need uploading, so this would go a lot faster if it weren't a solo effort - if anyone else has some time, please let me know! But meanwhile I'm hoping to build some momentum. ...

I've started backporting some Perl modules to wheezy-backports - for starters, libbread-board-perl, which is now waiting in BACKPORTS-NEW. At work I've recently been trying to automate the deployment of our platform, and was originally trying to use Carton to manage the CPAN dependencies for us. It seems like it ought to be possible to make this work using CPAN-only tools. However, in practice, I've seen two strong negatives with this approach: it's a lot of work for developers to manage the entire dependency chain, and it takes forever to get the environment running. ...

Today, as an experiment, I attempted to fix a Debian bug while on the train to work. I use a 3G card from Three.co.uk in my Lenovo Thinkpad x121e, and my commute is from Southampton Central to Fleet (changing at Winchester) - just under an hour. 3G coverage is not 100%, but tends to be better around the major stops. First, I found a bug. I used udd.debian.org to browse for a relatively simple RC bug, and found bug #674992 in actionaz. The fix was outlined in the report already, so there was very little thinking required. Next, I confirmed the FTBFS using cowbuilder. Unfortunately, this required downloading roughly 120MB of dependencies - I have 1GB of data per month, but I couldn't afford to do this every day. I was lucky in that I was near Basingstoke at the time, so had a good HSDPA signal to get the bulk of this. The build had failed before I reached Fleet. In the background, I updated debian/control and debian/changelog with the fix. I was able to set off the build, but had to suspend the laptop until lunchtime before it could finish. Cowbuilder needed to download only a few extra build-deps, as the vast majority were cached from the initial run. On the train home, I checked over the result, signed it and uploaded. In this instance, the built package was small enough to upload, but I could see this being a problem with others. Finally, I sent the nmudiff, although that was delayed briefly by a drop in connectivity before Southampton Airport. Thoughts: firstly, part of me is amazed that this is possible. Secondly, there could be a case for a local Debian mirror on my laptop. Otherwise, an interesting experimental extension to UDD would be "Required bandwidth" - the sum of the recursive build-dependencies plus the upload size of the diff/binaries.

So I was about to configure an FTP server to let a friend upload content for a website... and then I came to my senses and remembered sftp exists. It's supported by the same graphical clients, and avoids me having to figure out SSL certificates and so on. Next problem: we want to both edit the site. Okay, so I create a group, make it the default group for both users... and now I need to set the umask to 002 so that all group members can edit all files. There's no option in the client... ...

Note to self: when disabling Range headers in Apache to fix CVE-2011-3192, be sure to read the updated advisory and also disable Request-Range headers. (Presumably not "Range-Request" as in the summary of that link?) Or just apply the handy Debian update, of course.

Some things I have learnt this week at DebConf: The cost of living in the UK is much higher than in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I feel much better about life when I am being a fun and exciting person, compared to boring and cynical. My laptop is not well-suited to travelling - poor battery life, and poor wifi. However, I have mastered the art of taking only hand luggage. I have quietly resolved to spend more time doing things that I enjoy, that maximise the use of my skills, and which help other people; and spend less time on the opposite. ...

It feels good to be at DebConf again, this time in Banja Luka. This is my fifth consecutive DebConf. Getting here was fairly painful; a flight from Split was delayed, so I had to get a later bus than planned from Zagreb. Still, I met a bunch of DebConf attendees getting the same bus, so at least there was conversation. Packaging-wise, I have been working on adding KiokuDB (and associated backends) into Debian. I wrote a patch for libossp-uuid-perl yesterday to fix a bug with its Data::UUID compatibility; this probably means I'll drop the Data::UUID ITP. Having looked at the code, I don't see how it can be easily fixed for multi-user systems. ...

A new release of Gnash, version 0.8.9, is due in the near future. Plenty of bugs have been fixed, but some users are still going to have problems playing YouTube videos. Here's a short explanation. At some point last year, YouTube started setting HTTP cookies in your web browser, to keep track of which of their video servers is nearest to your machine. This lets them provide a better experience for you (I guess). Here's a diagram of what goes on in your browser: ...