Archive for the 'PlanetDebian' Category
Ruby packaging in Debian and Ubuntu: Mythbusting and FAQ
Sunday, September 12th, 2010A lot is being said on how Ruby is packaged in Debian and Ubuntu. In this post, I’m trying to go through the most common myths and give my position as a Debian Ruby maintainer. Note that those are my views, not necessarily those of the other Debian Ruby maintainers. Myth: Ruby is completely outdated [...]
SSH ProxyCommand and belier
Thursday, September 9th, 2010Christoph, belier really looks like a hack. It’s easy to use ProxyCommand to connect to hosts using several hops. Let’s say that you want to connect to host c, which can only be reached from host b, which can only be reached from host a. It’s as simple as doing: Host a User logina Host [...]
System calls quizz
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010What is special about the socket, connect, bind, accept, … system calls? How does the errno value get from the kernel to applications? Some system calls return a number of times different of 1 in some cases. Which ones? (Put differently: enter a syscall once, exit more or less than once. Which ones can do [...]
RVM: seriously?
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010There’s some hype in the Ruby community about RVM (Ruby Version Manager). It’s a tool that allows to switch between Ruby versions on the same system (much like what the alternatives system provides for Java on Debian, except that RVM does it either system-wide or per-user). However, when you look at it, RVM looks quite [...]
List of new Debian contributors
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010Since I worked on UDD‘s upload history gatherer during Debconf, I generated the list of new Debian contributors. (By contributor, I mean here someone in the Changed-By field of an upload (so it’s not necessarily the maintainer of the package he/she upload)). It’s quite fun to try to remember the context of your first upload [...]
Debian’s birthday on ubuntu.com today!
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010On extending Debian membership to non-programming contributors
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010Stefano raised again the issue of providing some kind of Debian membership to people that contribute to Debian in unusual ways (not involving deep purely technical skills), like doing translation, documentation, marketing, design, etc. Each time this discussion comes back, people seem to think that we need another membership status for them. But what for? [...]
Ubuntu bugs with patches on the PTS and the QA Packages Overview
Monday, August 2nd, 2010Like the Debian BTS, Launchpad is full of open bugs with patches[1]. They have an ongoing effort called Operation Cleansweep whose goal is to get the number of bugs with patches to zero, by reviewing patches and forwarding them upstream or to Debian. Since it really makes sense to expose bugs with patches to the [...]
Help needed: analyzing and filing installation/removal/upgrade bugs
Sunday, August 1st, 2010I’ve been working on a piuparts-like tool call instest (yeah, crappy name) to test installation, removal and upgrade of packages. Compared to piuparts, it’s simpler and tries to make it easier to file bugs. However, running it on sid still raises ~3000 failures. So I’m seeking help to analyze those failures and file bugs. The [...]
Skipping fsck checks during boot with CTRL-C
Saturday, July 31st, 2010According to Murphy’s law, the fsck check that happens once every n boots always happens at the worst time. By default, using CTRL-C to abort it causes fsck to exit with an error, and the filesystem to be remounted read-only. It’s easy to change that in /etc/e2fsck.conf: [options] allow_cancellation = true