Ruby release blockers for Lucid and Squeeze
March 7th, 2010 by lucas
For the first time since I got involved in Ruby maintenance in Debian & Ubuntu, we are seriously at risk of not being able to release working Ruby interpreters in both Ubuntu Lucid and Debian Squeeze, because of two pretty serious issues.
Ruby 1.8(.7.249) randomly hangs with eglibc 2.11
That issue was found by Google folks, because Puppet was hanging. After a lot of (quite heated) discussion, it was found that the problem is caused by something in eglibc 2.11: the problem can’t be reproduced in a Debian unstable chroot (with eglibc 2.10), but is reproducible if you just upgrade glibc to 2.11 (which is in Debian experimental).
It is not clear at all whether it is a glibc bug, or a ruby bug: Ruby has shown in the past that it was making some assumptions on the behaviour of pthread. It is possible that a valid change in glibc conflicts with an assumption made by Ruby.
Still, I wonder why Ubuntu chose to release with eglibc 2.11, while Debian still only has 2.10 in unstable, and Ubuntu doesn’t really have a lot of people with deep glibc knowledge. (Update: I assumed we would release squeeze with 2.10, but the eglibc maintainers plan to release 2.11 in squeeze.)
That issue is tracked in Launchpad as bug 520715 (which was reassigned to eglibc), and in Ruby’s redmine as bug 2739. Debian Squeeze isn’t affected by that issue, but we are likely to get bitten as well after Squeeze if a solution isn’t found by then.
As Ruby maintainers in Debian/Ubuntu, we can’t do much about this issue, because it requires either a lot of glibc knowledge, or a lot of understanding of the Ruby threading code.
Ruby 1.9(.1.37{6,8})’s test suite hangs on Sparc
The development branch of Ruby (declared stable by the interpreter developers, but not considered as such by the third-party libraries developers) also has interesting issues. Its test suite hangs on sparc, but only (apparently) on specific CPUs/kernel versions. Here again, it is not clear whether it is a Ruby issue, or a kernel issue, for the same reasons as above. It is also possible that it is fixed in Linux 2.6.32, but the Debian build daemons run the lenny kernel, so we can’t check that. This is tracked as Debian bug 565765, and is not tracked in Ruby’s redmine, because Sparc is not supported by the upstream Ruby developers.
This issue really requires Sparc knowledge (and access), so as Ruby maintainers, again, we can’t do much, besides coordinating and poking the various people that can help.
Check your PTS subscriptions with UDD!
March 1st, 2010 by lucas
The Debian Packages Tracking System has a great feature: you can subscribe to packages that matter to you, and be informed of all uploads, bugs, testing migrations, etc.
However, when (co-)maintaining a lot of packages, it is easy to forget to subscribe. And then you might miss important information about your packages (uploaders don’t receive bugmail by default, for example).
Since PTS subscriptions are now imported into Ultimate Debian Database, it is easy to find out if you missed some subscriptions. It’s just a matter of going to http://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/pts-check.cgi and entering your email!
And for those concerned with privacy, it should be noted that the unauthenticated access to UDD only gives you the hash of the subscribers’ emails. You need to be a DD, and use the guestdd account to see the email addresses (which DDs can already see on master.d.o).
Phone number change
February 24th, 2010 by lucas
My phone number changed. If you have the old one, substract 25898392 from it and you will get my new one!
Debian Squeeze, Ubuntu Lucid and Ruby 1.9.2: NO!
February 10th, 2010 by lucas
Apparently, there’s some hype in the Ubuntu community about Ruby 1.9.2, so let’s clarify: it would be totally irresponsible to try to ship Ruby 1.9.2 in Debian Squeeze or Ubuntu Lucid.
Ruby 1.9.2 has not been released yet:
- June 2009: The release schedule for 1.9.2 was announced
- mid-July 2009: Ruby 1.9.2 preview 1 was released
- September 2009: 1.9.2 preview 2 was tagged in SVN, but not announced
- September 2009: The release plans were cancelled
- October 2009: A meeting was announced to discussed new release plans, but I don’t think that the outcome was made public
- Ruby 1.9.2 has not been branched off trunk yet
That’s where we stand now. Even if surprises are possible, it’s very unlikely that Ruby 1.9.2 will be released before Lucid’s release (or, what the real requirement is, before Lucid’s freeze). So we are sticking with 1.8.7 and 1.9.1 (1.9.0 will go away before the release).
If you can point to specific commits that fix real bugs in 1.9.1, and could be backported to the Debian package, feel free to notify the Debian Ruby maintainers.
Slides from my FOSDEM talk on Debian and Ubuntu
February 9th, 2010 by lucas
I’ve just put the slides of my talk on Debian and Ubuntu online.
Don’t hesitate to post comments to ask for clarifications where needed (it might be difficult to understand some parts of the slides without being in the room).
Clarifications:
- In slide 15, I wrote that Ubuntu had a newer X. During the presentation, I think I said that I wasn’t sure if it was still the case. Indeed, it’s no longer the case (and hasn’t been for a long time ; Ubuntu has been mostly following Debian for X). I apparently remembered a change a long time ago that was picked by Ubuntu from the Debian X svn/git (xlibs-dev removal, I think), and that caused a number of FTBFS in Ubuntu. However, clearly, the best example of such changes made first in Ubuntu are newer GCC versions.
Going to FOSDEM
February 5th, 2010 by lucas
Yes, I’m going to FOSDEM. And this year, I decided to innovate by starting the obligatory FOSDEM flu before leaving to FOSDEM.
I’m doing a talk on Sunday, on Debian and Ubuntu (Distributions room, H.1308, 13:45). It might not be on your schedule (but is on the printable schedule) since it was decided quite late.
Re: How free is the Nokia N900?
January 26th, 2010 by lucas
Following my questions on the freeness of the Nokia N900, I received quite a lot of comments. I’m trying to summarize the most important points here.
- Maemo is not 100% free software. There are some proprietary components. The Free Maemo wiki page lists them all, and there are some explanations on Why the closed packages.
- The Mer project (install notes for N900) aims at providing a 100% free alternative to Maemo.
- It’s possible to rebuild/upgrade the kernel, however the newest kernel build-depends on a fiasco-gen package that is not provided. It is being worked on.
- Nokia is sponsoring someone to work on Maemo derivatives.
For all the details, see the comments and Tollef’s blog.
How free is the Nokia N900?
January 25th, 2010 by lucas
Dear readers,
So, I’ve been looking into buying a Nokia N900. However, what it provides regarding freedom is still not completely clear to me. And given that it is significantly more expensive than other smartphones, I’d like to make sure that it’s not a loss of money :-)
- Can I download the full source, recompile it, build a firmware from it and re-install my Nokia N900 from scratch? Is the process documented? It seems that you need to accept a EULA to download updated firmwares, and I couldn’t find the source for them. What exactly is available from firmware that is not available through normal repositories? (Are normal repositories only for “extras” apps, or is the base system also installable / upgradable from them?
- What’s the content of /etc/apt/sources.list? What exactly is http://repository.maemo.org/pool/maemo5.0/nokia-binaries/? What does Nokia need to hide? :-)
- Would it be possible to develop a Centos-like distribution, installing the Maemo firmware, but then upgrading everything to rebuilt versions using an unofficial repository? Are there some applications that are not packaged, or that would break if re-installed that way?
- Could I install Debian or Ubuntu on the N900? Is the process documented? Is it possible to dual-boot between, say, Maemo5 and Debian? (I’m not talking about setting up a chroot, of course)
- Besides the non-free telephony stack, are there any other “antifeatures” I should be aware of?
Thanks.
Simpler GnuPG-encrypted password store
January 23rd, 2010 by lucas
Roland blogs about his GPG-encrypted password store.
When I read the title of his blog post, I thought he would be writing about the gnupg.vim Vim plugin. But he didn’t, so I’ll take care of that: The gnupg.vim plugin provides transparent editing of GPG-encrypted files. It’s as simple as vim foo.gpg, enter your GPG key if you are creating the file, and you are done.
Doctor Capello!
December 22nd, 2009 by lucas
He might too shy to tell everybody, but the world must know. Luca Capello successfully defended his PhD thesis today at Université de Genève, getting a “Très Bien” mention.
I must admit that my last biology lesson was 13 years ago, so I’m not sure I can really comment on his work on Vomeronasal Receptors: from Monogenic Expression to Axon Guidance. But I was very impressed by the quality of the experimental process, especially compared to what we do in computer science.
Debian was well represented at the defense, since Axel Beckert, Didier Raboud and the Debian kilt were also there.
Welcome to the list of Debian Developers holding PhD degrees, Luca!
 Luca waiting at the door (again). |
 Luca ready to start. |