I 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 that built fine with bash and dash, but produced different binary packages (mostly files missing/being added)!

All the bugs (including those that were already filed) have been usertagged. Most of those bugs are quite easy to reproduce and fix, so, if you are bored, send patches!

I was a bit surprised by the high number of problems I found, since Ubuntu has been using dash as /bin/sh for more than a year, even on their buildds. Some packages have been fixed in Ubuntu, but the Debian maintainers didn’t include the fix. But many packages were simply broken in Ubuntu.

Now I’ll try to find time to work on the Build Daemon From Hell idea, and on rebuilds inside qemu.

I 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 best way to improve the process would be to have packages of better quality when a DD first look at them. They would be more likely to be uploaded right away, which frees time for other packages. I think that there’s a lot of room for improvement in the current mentors.debian.net implementation. Here is a small list of features I would like to see.

• Integration of some QA tests in mentors, as soon as the package is uploaded:
  • does the package build cleanly?
  • piuparts test?
  • lintian/linda checks?
• Better list of packages awaiting sponsors, with info including:
  • does the package fixes bugs (number of bugs fixed per severity)?
  • is that package already in Debian?
  • is that package a new upstream version?
  • popcon score
  • how long has the package been waiting?

  This would allow potential sponsors to prioritize requests.

• A commenting system, for each package, so comments for rejected packages are not lost, and the next potential sponsor can double-check
• A way for sponsors to mark some sponsorees as “friends”, so it’s easy to find all the requests from people I “trust” (for some definitions of “trust” ;)
• Maybe, a scoring system, where providing good comments on other’s packages would make you win “karma points”, and improve your classification, which could later be used by sponsors to choose what they are going to sponsor next.

The good thing with this whole list of features is that everybody can help. So, if you are looking for a sponsor and want to help solve this problem, start coding now ;) And if you need me to create nicenameforyourservice.debian.net, just ping me. There’s probably some code to steal from svnbuildstat.debian.net, so contacting its developers would be a good idea.

Christian Perrier is wondering why the official announcement about the Gutsy release does not even contain the word “Debian”.

It’s not new: Debian is virtually nonexistent in Ubuntu’s communication. It seems that the last Ubuntu release to acknowledge its Debian origins was Dapper (June 2006), maybe because that was the “Long Term Support” release.

The fact that there’s no “Ubuntu is based on Debian” paragraph on www.ubuntu.com was raised during Debconf, and it was supposed to get fixed, but it seems that it didn’t happen for some reason (there was such a paragraph before the website redesign).

In other news, I’ve been trying to install Ubuntu Gutsy inside qemu, but it fails miserably while booting the installer. I removed the “quiet” and “splash” options from the kernel cmdline, and discovered that after trying to “mount the root filesystem”, I get dropped into busybox with no error message to google for. Feisty fails as well, but Dapper boots fine. So much for the Ubuntu is an ancient African word, meaning “I can’t install Debian” joke!

From time to time, I try Compiz, to see if how it has evolved. The last time was yesterday (I also switched to the xserver-xorg-driver-ati from experimental).

But as usual, after using it for a few minutes, I can’t help switching back to metacity. I don’t think that Compiz’s visual effects bring anything on the usability POV, and I just find them annoying after the initial “WOW”. Of course, it’s nice to show off, but to do actual work? Are there people really using it all the time?

After that blog post, I decided to write a mail asking a first set of questions. I sent it to developers’ mailing lists of Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, openSUSE, and of course Debian and Ubuntu. I got really interesting answers from everyone, except …. Debian and Ubuntu.

• I want to wait some more before publishing the answers. If you are a Debian or an Ubuntu developer, and were interested in that initiative, please answer ASAP my mails sent to debian-devel@ and ubuntu-devel-discuss@ (respectively). Not having answers from Debian and Ubuntu people would really be a shame, since everyone else I contacted was really helpful and interested.
• I plan to use a mailing list archiving software to publish the mails. Can you recommend a good mbox->html converter, that would work well in a “run once” use case, and that doesn’t take ages to set up?
• Can you think of another distro I should have contacted? At first, I don’t want to include simple derivatives of the “big distros”. I also chose to limit myself to the Linux distros, so I didn’t contact the BSD or Nexenta folks. Both of this could change: my current plan for the future is to try to setup a mailing list+wiki, so everybody could join.