From 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
[..]
open("file", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC|O_LARGEFILE, 0666) = 1
[..]
read(0, "p(\361\241,\360-\330~M\245y\10=\274U\201c\207\v\336a\273"..., 1024) = 128
write(1, "p(\361\241,\360-\330~M\245y\10=\274U\201c\207\v\336a\273"..., 128) = 128
read(0, "\362,LW5l.?\242\22\252\223\206\375\10\326\335\316\374\372"..., 1024) = 128
write(1, "\362,LW5l.?\242\22\252\223\206\375\10\326\335\316\374\372"..., 128) = 128
close(0)                                = 0
close(1)                                = 0

Joey 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 cdbs, and hide cdbs usage.

Results, with lists of packages “affected”:

Tool	Packages
debhelper	11434 (95.8%)
cdbs	2665 (22.3%)
dpatch	1714 (14.4%)
quilt	935 (7.8%)
dbs	57 (0.47%)
yada	32 (0.27%)
debmake	2 (0.017%)

(if you want me to check the logs for another tool, just tell me)

My personal opinion on this is that tools that make sense are slowly getting adopted (that probably includes debhelper, cdbs, dpatch and quilt). The main difference between debhelper and the other tools is that the other tools don’t try to solve a problem for everybody. cdbs perfectly makes sense for some packages: the simple ones, where you only have to modify 4-5 lines in the output from dh_make to build properly.

Patch systems are also a good way to track changes made to upstream source, and probably encourage giving back patches to upstream. Note that my stats don’t include packages using cdbs’ simple-patchsys, so there are probably really close to 1/4 or 1/3 of our packages using some sort of patch system. How course, having simple-patchsys, dpatch and quilt sounds a bit stupid. But last time I checked, nobody took the time to blog a comparison of those tools, saying why {quilt,dpatch} is better than {simple-patchsys,dpatch,quilt}. Also, simple-patchsys probably makes a good-enough job for its users, so they don’t see the point in changing.

Of course, it’s easier to bury your head in the sand, and ignore the fact that those tools solve real problems for so many people and packages, and make their lives easier. :-)