Mikal writes: Why do I use Debian? Well, one of the reasons is the bug reporting. People in Mikal’s shoes might’ve noticed a few changes in the Debian bug tracking system (BTS) lately, such as the long awaited roll out of version tracking to help us deal with tracking bugs amongst the multiple versions of […]
I’m giving a talk on debbugs at debconf5. Since they’re trying printed proceedings and are planning on handing them out in advance of the talks, I wrote up a paper that should be useful background material for people interested in hacking on debbugs. This is the abstract: This paper aims to serve as a useful […]
I refer, of course, to the appearance of Bug#313400 in the archive and making unstable bootstrapping break in subtle ways on the very day I make my first debootstrap upload in a year and a half. Bastard. I noticed the bug when converting the sid script to have the nifty detailed progress support Colin Watson […]
Quite some time ago now, I started hacking on cross-strapping support for debootstrap — that is, you start bootstrapping your install non-natively (eg, a Hurd install on a Linux system, a powerpc install on an i386, or a Debian install on a Solaris system), then boot into your half unpacked system, and reinvoke debootstrap to […]
So, one of the current boring, argumentative threads on -devel is Is Ubuntu a debian derivative or is it a fork?. Which is a bit of a weird question, since really every derivative’s a fork, and vice-versa. The real question, of course, is whether Ubuntu is a “good” derivative or a “bad” one — whether […]
James Troup and I are giving a talk at the Debian mini-conf at LCA in six minutes. We mostly finished the slides. What could possibly go wrong?
A couple of days after Ubuntu released warty, I had a look at how warty and sarge compared at least so far as how current their packages were. With hoary freshly released, and some more discussion underway, it seems worthwhile doing another comparison. To review, Ubuntu creates a new release by synchronising various packages against […]
So I get bored occasionally and start analysing things. Some interesting absences from the DPL voting this year seem notable. None of our ex-DPLs have voted (yet): Ian Murdock’s stuck in n-m so has something of an excuse, but Bruce Perens, Ian Jackson, Wichert Akkerman, Ben Collins and Bdale Garbee also don’t appear eligible for […]
So, for various reasons I ran for DPL this year. My platform’s available, and as a bonus feature includes links to about a dozen posts on the -vote list that expand on some points. There’s also David Schmitt’s excellent q-and-a summary, the debate transcript and the full -vote archives. Voting’s ongoing, though according to the […]
Well, admittedly, I haven’t tried reading debian-devel for the past eight hours or so, but there still seems to be a bunch of confusion about the big scary plan to not support all architectures equally. Anyway some people seemed to find some of my followups useful, so continuing the “Today’s list posts”, faux-deli.cio.us-style, Clayton’s blogging […]
Continuing my “Today’s del.icio.us links” variant in my usual indolent fashion, an interesting post from the other week was this one on making apt-get update a bit quicker and more pleasant. It’s based on these ideas from a while ago, but now it actually works. (Well, actually it worked years ago when Ben Bell first […]
With the trend of posting daily del.icio.us links, I’ve been thinking of trying out a “daily mailing list posts”. Maybe I’ll get around to it sometime. Anyway, today’s mailing list post is this one about dodgy uploads of lib packages. It seems to be the season for it, since Matt Zimmerman did the same thing […]
From this week’s LWN: Unless the Debian Project changes its social contract to allow the exclusion of packages on moral grounds, tools like hot-babe will find a home there. Well, gosh, I’m glad that’s settled.
Unsurprisingly, Ubuntu’s release has generated some discussion in Debian. Odds on it won’t create much else. Anyway, Scott (a Canonical employee and dpkg hacker, among other things) writes: Release, release, my kingdom for a release! […] I think he’s missed something major there, and that something major is the reason I think Debian finds releasing […]
Apparently the latest in a long line of folks reinventing wheels to make apt-get update more efficient is Steve McIntyre. I’ve blogged previously on the topic. I don’t really have much more to say than that; in comparison Steve’s proposal requires fancy downloading, changes to apt-ftparchive and changes to the Packages file format in order […]