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....