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).

[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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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).

My employer moved offices to Park Gate about a year ago - there's a coffee/sandwich place just down the road, which I generally walk past to get my lunch. And it's got a sign outside: I can't believe I didn't notice that swirl sooner. It will join my picture of the FreeBSD naughty toys machine from DebConf7. In other news, Debian squeeze is being released as I write this. It's been a fun two years.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

I was up early this morning for the 17km run with bubulle over the George Washington Bridge and back. We had an interesting diversion near the start, as we tried to go cross-country through a woodland path that slowly disappeared. I was quite happy to have finished at the same time as the "real" runners... and grabbed a bagel with cream cheese for breakfast. During the day I attended a few talks from the Java track.

I'm going insane in this country - the accents, the jaywalking, the food, the money, the poverty in the heart of Manhatten... suddenly I appreciate the UK much more. So I have purchased an electric kettle, and set it up in the Carman basement, for the moment. I have also splashed out on a teapot, and one mug. (So far I haven't found any other mugs in the place, so bear that in mind if you wish to join me - $2.

I've started to build up to actually doing some development-related activities. Maybe. But first, we've got QR Codes dotted around the hacklab and on our namebadges if we're taking part in the keysigning - I persuaded zbarcam (from the zbar-tools package) to reveal their mysterious secrets. I'm looking into packaging some Java libraries that use maven. Fun. I think I'll be attending some of the talks in the Java track, although I feel like I'm three years late to the party.

So apparently the route I took round Central Park is 9.7km, which explains a lot. This morning I checked out Morningside Park, but it's really too small for running - there's a loop of about 400m at one end, and you can go down the long bit to 123rd St, but it gets boring very quickly. Most of the park is taken up with a big hill and stairs. I'll try Riverside Park on Thursday, or find a shorter loop at this end of Central Park.

Yesterday my brother and I checked out of the youth hostel - it was a nice place, but I think it would have been better if we'd had the time to focus on the youth hostelling experience. As it was, I felt like we were just interlopers peeking into a world where we didn't belong. We headed across Central Park and visited the Met, which is huge - and noted with some satisfaction all the things that came from England.

Well, I made it to New York, along with my brother. Yesterday we walked down most of Manhatten Island - we've been staying in the youth hostel on 103rd street, and made our way on foot as far as Battery Park. Along the way, we visited McDonalds (twice) and Starbucks (was that two or three times?), both featuring free wifi and air conditioning. We went up the Rockefeller Tower as well, and got a few photos out of that.

The daemon feature of Emacs is great. But when should the daemon be started? At one time I used an '@reboot' line in my crontab. But when you want to use things like Tramp mode (for editing files on remote servers transparently), you very quickly wish that emacs could talk to your ssh-agent. So if you accept that you will be running a desktop environment (not always true), you can add the daemon to your equivalent of "

This weekend I've been messing about with gstreamer pipelines so that I can spam the world with YouTube videos. Go me! Let's see if it shows up on Planet Debian. Next weekend I'll be teaching my brother how to triage Debian GNOME bugs. :)

I'm now a Debian Developer. :) My thanks go to Ben Hutchings, gregor herrmann, Chris Lamb, Christoph Berg, Steve McIntyre, Brad Smith, Jonny Lamb, Chris Boyle, everyone at credativ, and everyone else who helped me with Debian over the last... almost six years? Actually, I've been a DD since the weekend, but have been too absorbed to write about it. In other news, I'm moving house today... I'm more or less packed now.

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 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Well, I'm nearly at the end of DebConf - I'm missing the last day of talks, so travelling home tomorrow. It's been a really good experience - I mean, DebConf is always fun, but this time I feel like I'm getting more involved myself, and a bit closer to the heart of the community than I did before. In practical terms, the two-week holiday has helped me feel more laid-back - I even got complimented on how I always look relaxed, which was amusing.

This week, I've more or less finished my NM questions; I looked again at a problem in dak which turns out mainly to be caused by some edge cases in debconf (the package), so filed a bug there. Then looked at conglomerate, and came up with patches for a couple of bugs there as well. I'm quite looking forward to just being able to NMU these kind of things. With all this hacking, I've stayed up until around 4:30 for the past few nights - I really didn't mean to, it just happened.

Yesterday I almost updated mdbtools. Then I went to a debian perl team meeting, and promptly spent 24 hours trying to improve the speed of working with 1300+ git repositories. It's a bit tricky. This afternoon, I looked at some pkg-perl RC bugs... but they're tricky as well. I then updated the postgresql-autodoc man page, and sent it back upstream. Hopefully, next release the Debian package will not need any patches.

DebConf is in Spain this year, in Cáceres. Getting here involved a plane to Madrid, navigating the metro system, a 3.5 hour train journey and then a walk to the accommodation at 2am. This year I had actually looked at a map before arriving in the city, although hadn't bothered to bring one with me. Or note the exact address I was heading for... At night, it is still pleasantly warm here.

The new kernel mode setting feature in Linux 2.6.29 is relatively easy to enable, although at this point there does not seem to be much in the way of documentation. Ingredients You will need: linux-image-2.6.29-1-686 or similar (or later) The xserver-xorg and related packages from Debian experimental, unless you're reading this in the distant future, at which point X.org 7.4 will be in unstable. An intel graphics card which uses the i915 driver.

I haven't taken much time on cooking for the past couple of nights. Last night I just used a sweet-and-sour sauce from a jar, and had chicken with quick-cook rice. I don't think that counts as cooking - more like a ready meal by stealth. As a concession, I bought whole chicken breast fillets and diced them myself. It seems to help if you use a sharp knife. This evening I cooked an omelette (with three eggs - there's a standing joke in the family concerning my brother once having cooked a one-egg omelette) and frozen veg, so I must have been done in under five minutes.

Flymake is an emacs minor mode that runs a syntax check tool over source files as you write them, on the fly. Essentially it calls the compiler for the relevant language and then parses the warnings. Because this is so obviously useful, I have it turned on by default in .emacs: ; Highlight syntax errors (require 'flymake) (add-hook 'find-file-hook 'flymake-find-file-hook) Recall also that I use emacs to view page source in Epiphany.

I tried to look at an RC bug this evening: bug #502657 on netmaze. It looked so easy - a segmentation fault, a backtrace... no. The package doesn't even build on sid, doesn't support the 'nostrip' option, and hasn't had an upload for two years. When you get past those stumbling blocks, it's a 64-bit compatibility problem that would probably need quite a large patch. So, in the end, I've increased the RC bug count by one this evening, in suggesting to the maintainer that netmaze should not be released with lenny.

I got a concerned phone call from my mother following my previous blog post, asking whether I owe Debian money. Fortunately, I believe I am fully paid up for all the T-shirts and BBQs that Steve McIntyre has given me. I have decided that the interest payment on my outstanding debt to Debian must be made in the form of RC bug fixes. I suck at RC bug fixes. They are generally boring, but of great value to the community.

Credit cards can be very useful, provided you pay off your outstanding balance at the end of each month. If you do not, the debt can pile up, and will be sticking with you for a very long time. Credit is a tool - it lubricates the economy. Without it, production would grind to a halt. However, it is very important that creditors lend only as much as debtors can afford to repay.

After much anticipation, the free-as-in-freedom version of Sun's Java JDK has arrived in Debian's `main' section. There are still a few bugs in the packaging, but these will be ironed out before the lenny release. Various other useful packages still need to adapt to its presence, but many will be able to move from the `contrib' section into `main' as well. Going forward, this makes Sun's Java platform quite attractive for developing future free software applications.

An update to Debian's gnu-standards package is now in incoming. This package contains the GNU Coding Standards and the Information for GNU Maintainers document. It is now in the `main' section rather than `non-free', so is officially part of the Debian system. This has taken several months; at the end of December I asked whether the maintainers' document could be relicensed. RMS evidently approved, because the licence was changed in January.

Blue and White G3 PowerMac on eBay, collection only: £10. Train fares to and around London: £26. Fixing an annoying PowerPC f-spot bug: priceless. It weighs 13kg, apparently, and my arms still ache. Thanks to Anton and Dan for letting me stay at their place on Saturday night, and use their fast net connection to download Debian packages.

The bank holiday formed a welcome break after a hard week at work writing and fixing a Linux kernel module. On Friday afternoon version 0.4.3.1-1 of f-spot was uploaded to Debian, and then yesterday a new version of postgresql-autodoc. We've found a release-critical bug in f-spot already, of course. Most of the rest of my time was spent hacking on Angel, a project which we haven't formally announced yet.

I spent my weekend in Cambridge at the Debian bug squashing party. It was good seeing people again. I even squashed a bug, but then spent Saturday forwarding non-RC bugs upstream, and kernel hacking today. :) Walked back to Cambridge station - about 40 minutes, along the river for part of the way, and it was a nice evening. Living where I do, I don't walk as much as I used to.

Lamby reckoned I wouldn't be able to resist using the DebConf8 blog sticker thing. And he was right. My horrendously expensive plane tickets arrived last week.

Yesterday evening, I finally found the patch for a bug in mono-addins that had been affecting f-spot extensions for a while - rebuilding the f-spot Debian package with no changes and reinstalling would cause the built-in extensions to disappear. In the end, the patch was just two lines long, and had been applied in mono-addins SVN (and in the copy of mono-addins that f-spot bundles). One less RC bug for lenny.

Today I created a git repository for enscript's Debian packaging. The upstream repository is in git as well, of course. Next I need to work on pulling any distro fixes I can find into upstream, and getting a new bugfix version released. This should hopefully obsolete most of the Debian patches.

Some news that's overdue to be blogged: a few weeks ago, I picked up the Debian package 'enscript', and fixed some of the easier bugs in it. This has been uploaded to unstable, thanks to Myon, who rocks. Having looked at the package, I realised that further work on it was unfeasible without a new upstream release. GNU Enscript had been unmaintained for a while, so I wrote to the GNU project and asked whether I could set up a Savannah project for it.

With this morning's update of the 'base-files' package, I now have a shiny new copy of GPLv3 in /usr/share/common-licenses/. I'm slightly concerned that a lot of packages will still be pointing to the GPL symlink, when they are GPLv2 only, not v2 or later. Oh well.