Archive for the 'Debian/Ubuntu' Category
mailing list for cross-distributions collaboration
Saturday, March 1st, 2008A few months ago, I asked a set of questions on development mailing lists of a few GNU/Linux distributions. This resulted in very interesting discussions. As promised back then, all the answers from all distros I contacted can be read on the web or as an mbox file. Also, Freedesktop.org kindly agreed to host a [...]
dd + /dev/random fun
Friday, February 8th, 2008From Adrien Lebre, who seems to be having fun working on kDFS: $ dd if=/dev/random of=file bs=1024 count=2 0+2 records in 0+2 records out 256 bytes (256 B) copied, 0.000705717 s, 363 kB/s $ ls -l file -rw-r–r– 1 lucas lucas 256 2008-02-08 17:53 file Can be easily explained using strace: open(“/dev/random”, O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 0 [...]
Re: a problem with tools
Friday, January 25th, 2008Joey has a problem with tools used over dpkg-dev’s core tools to help maintainers maintain their debian packages. I was wondering about the adoption of those tools, so I simply grepped the logs from my last rebuild for “^Setting up $TOOL “, which is more accurate than looking at build-deps, since someteam-pkg-tools could depend on [...]
Fixing build failures with dash is cool.
Sunday, January 20th, 2008The bad thing with fixing build failures with dash is that there are still a lot of open bugs. (Remember, the 0-day NMU policy applies to those, so it’s a good opportunity to improve your NMU karma. And I will sponsor your NMUs if you can’t upload!). The good thing is that you sometimes run [...]
Help us get rid of dash build failures in Debian!
Wednesday, January 16th, 2008Following my rebuild of all packages using /bin/dash as /bin/sh, we now have a nice list of bugs. Those bugs are cool: The relaxed NMU rules apply to them, since they are part of the dash release goal. Which means that they can all be fixed using 0-day NMUs. Most of them are really easy [...]
Rebuilding the archive with dash as /bin/sh
Saturday, January 5th, 2008I rebuilt all Debian packages twice. The first time with bash as /bin/sh, and the second time with dash as /bin/sh. About 120 packages built fine with bash, but failed to build with dash. I filed all the bugs that weren’t filed already. Then I debdiff’d the resulting binary packages, and found about 40 packages [...]
Ubuntu giving back to Debian: facts and numbers!
Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008I’ve always been annoyed by the discussions about “is Ubuntu really giving back to Debian?”. Debian Developers usually don’t see a lot of “giving back”, and Ubuntu Developers complain about Debian Developers ignoring their bug reports and patches. So, a few months ago, I proposed that Ubuntu developers use a usertag when they report bugs [...]
Is it hard for new contributors to help Debian? Can we improve things a bit?
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007Debian could use more manpower, but is it actually easy for new contributors who would like to help to do useful things, and get the impression that they actually improved Debian? There are several problems here: Find bugs that are not too hard to fix. I don’t know about your packages, but in mine, there [...]
SC07, MIT Fab labs, and empowering people
Tuesday, November 13th, 2007This morning’s SuperComputing’07 keynote was a talk by Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at the MIT. He mentioned the MIT Fab Labs, a project to bring “Personal Fabrication” to people around the around. At our own level, that’s something I find very exciting with Free Software: it empowers people to [...]
Better mentors.debian.net/REVU to improve our sponsorship workflow?
Wednesday, October 24th, 2007I recently sponsored several uploads, and was asked to sponsor even more uploads, and that got me thinking about our sponsorship workflow. It’s a clear bottleneck in Debian, and discourages many new contributors, which obviously sucks. It’s important to note that the same problems exist in Ubuntu (their equivalent to mentors.debian.net is named REVU). The [...]