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. :)
So Facebook Chat now uses XMPP. And the Empathy development version has some nice integration. This could mean that I can finally chat to non-Jabber using friends on a regular basis. It's been nearly four years since I switched from MSN to Jabber, and I think I lost contact with a lot of people. Facebook chat via AJAX is unreliable, and my visits to the site are quite irregular, so hopefully this will work around both problems. ...
On Tuesday, I released version 0.02 of Net::NationalRail::LiveDepartureBoards to CPAN. So far, no one has complained. This module is probably of interest only to people in the UK; it looks up which trains are next to arrive/depart from a particular station. This release was prompted by a patch sent to me by Ian Dash, implementing a filtering feature I was too lazy to write myself. If someone wants to put a fancy GNOME applet around it, I'd be grateful. ;) I think the next step is to add a nicer OO interface. ...
I wrote a plugin for Hudson today, which integrates Devel::Cover (Perl's test coverage tool) into the build reports. Actually, that's currently an exaggeration. All it does is add a checkbox in the configure page, and a link to Devel::Cover's reports on the build page when it's enabled. I spent the day remembering how to program in Java. Tomorrow I might be in a position to extend it into something more attractive - I'll publish it very soon, but I need to run it past my employer. Watch this space. ...
I can now announce my return to the land of the internet. Of course, I wasn't entirely without visiting rights. It so happens that one corner of my new living room is just within range of a terribly expensive wireless access point. It was slow, and kept dropping out. But I managed at least one upload over it, and some email... I have quite a lot of catching up to do.
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 internet access may be intermittent at home for the next few weeks. (Home is now Southampton, UK.)
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.) ...