Debian · I still don't have a title

DebConf 9

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:13:00 +0000

It’s taken me way too long to scribble these few lines, but I’m happy to say that in about one hour, I’ll be driving to Cáceres with Sergio. After seven hours or so, we should appear somewhere in Extremadura.

My priorities for this week are 1) having lots of fun with people I haven’t seen in ages, 2) catching up with all the Debian work I have neglected lately, be it packaging or l10n, 3) enjoying Cáceres and Extremadura’s culture, as it’s the first time I go past Madrid, and this is pretty much uncharted territory for me, and 4) doing some kind of exercise, which means letting bubulle kick my ass, and finding a decent swimming pool around the venue.

See you tonight!

GNOME 2.24 in Debian unstable, and the road ahead

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:32:00 +0000

GNOME 2.26 was released last week, and I couldn’t help adding myself to the long list of celebrating posts in Planet GNOME. Looking at the release notes, it looks like this release adds a good number of very visible features, and also keeps improving on ongoing transitions like gvfs.

The Debian GNOME team is obviously not ignoring this fact and started to work very hard on updating GNOME for squeeze as soon as the lenny freeze was over.

First, the new versions of GLib and GTK+ were uploaded to unstable, and managed to transition to testing very easily. The rest of GNOME 2.24 bits, which had been patiently waiting on experimental for months, has been uploaded with care not to disrupt any of the many transitions the Debian release team is currently dealing with. You can have a quick glance at how things are going in our 2.24 status page, but the summary is that most of GNOME 2.24 is in unstable, with a few notable exceptions which are held back by ongoing testing transitions. Namedly, evolution-data-server is trying to trickle into testing, which is in turn holding the final bits: gnome-panel, nautilus and related packages, but we think this will be over soon.

As soon as GNOME 2.24 is safe in squeeze, we’ll immediately turn our focus to the new GNOME 2.26 release. Our initial plan is to package the trivial bits and leaf packages which can’t break stuff for unstable, and herd the more complex modules via experimental, to avoid breaking unstable at all. There are some exceptions; we plan to keep gnome-session 2.22 in unstable/testing until 2.26.1 is released to avoid getting a broken session saving in Debian.

People might wonder why we insist on hitting what would seem a dead horse by first dealing with 2.24 and not 2.26 directly. The main reason is that these packages had been ready for a long time, and were in good shape to transition to testing quickly and with little pain. Preparing 2.26 directly would mean throwing away a lot of hours of packaging and polishing effort, and it’s not like we’re releasing squeeze any time soon anyway.

Enjoy the hopefully not too bumpy road to 2.26!

natura upgraded to lenny

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:13:00 +0000

natura.oskuro.net, the home server which still serves this blog, has been suffering hardware problems for some weeks. Apparently the hard drive is failing intermittently, so every now the kernel starts spewing out noisy errors about its main disk dying. If I notice this quickly, it can be rebooted and that normally fixes it for a few more days. But if I don’t, it’ll end up giving nasty bus errors which will make remote logins a challenge. Most processes still work, but the filesystem appears to be gone. It’s easy to know what’s going on if you visit the blog’s url and get some 404, and in that case I can only phone my father and tell him to press the reset button (I’ve tried sysrqd, but I need to open the port in the router and haven’t had chance to do that yet).

So it was time to do something about it, and the other day I installed a dirty 40GB drive on the second IDE controller, in case I could find the time to do somethng about it. Being with an endless pharyngitis that doesn’t seem to get cured entirely, I’ve had some time today to look at it. This evening, I was about to transfer all the system to the new disk (it’s half the size as the broken one, and probably slower, but it hopefully has no bad sectors), but I decided to upgrade the system first.

natura was first installed in late 1997 or at the beginning of 1998, using the Debian bo install media on a Pentium 150MHz, and has gone through seven dist-upgrades which, as far as I can remember, have always worked out without major problems.

The upgrade to lenny hasn’t been an exception. The server has gradually lost many of the services it once hosted, so there aren’t too many services to take care of anymore. All the mail services I setup for my father ended up being deprecated as they started to get used to Hotmail, GMail and so on, and the frequent hardware crashes made me switch them to the Linksys based DHCP server. In the end, the problems I saw after the upgrade were very similar to what I faced when I upgraded to etch:

apache2 restored the 000-default symlink in the sites-enabled dir, which resulted in my website showing the classic “It works” message for a while.
Apache’s suexec support had moved to its own package, and was very well documented in the NEWS file, but I somehow failed to notice for some time and kept wondering what was going on.
The Python upgrade again affected my Pyblosxom install. Fortunately it was a minor problem; I just had to add a coding=utf-8 line to the beginning of my config.py to get it working.
dhcp3-server apparently restored its init scripts and got started again. This time, it got removed.

Such an ancient install will clearly have old, obsolete packages. I installed apt-show-versions to find out what didn’t match my package sources. I found I had every single version of cpp, gcc and g++ from 2.95 to 4.3, and a myriad of obsolete libs. But there were also real gems:

defrag 0.73pjm1-7 installed: No available version in archive
figlet 2.2.1-3 installed: No available version in archive
ipmasqadm 0.4.2-2 installed: No available version in archive
isapnptools 1.26-5 installed: No available version in archive
ms-sys 2.1.0-1 installed: No available version in archive
queso 0.980922b-3 installed: No available version in archive
update 2.11-4 installed: No available version in archive

Spaniards will remember “queso” because it was written by Jordi Murgó and became a classic tool to find out what OS was running on a remote host. “update” was apparently needed to flush your filesystems prior to Linux 2.2.8, and “defrag” is obvious, although leaves me wondering why it was needed at the time.

With the upgrade done successfully, next step is trying to get the system transfered to the spare hard drive. For this, I first partitioned it creating a primary partition using up more or less half of the available space, and setup a LVM volume, leaving some free PE’s in the volume group just in case I want to do snapshots in the future, and formatted it using ext3. I then transfered the system to the new disk and now face the boot challenge.

I haven’t created a boot partition and that should be a double problem: the BIOS is buggy and will only boot from the first 1024 cylinders, and my root is on LVM and GRUB legacy might not like it (but I’m not sure). However, I’ve become a big fan of GRUB2, and know I will be able to boot no matter what my BIOS thinks of my disks and regardless the complex root partition setup I throw at it. The plan is to install GRUB onto the new drive’s MBR, and set it up using the ata module, which should allow to ignore what the BIOS says, and read beyond cylinder 1024 or even boot from CD-ROM. However, this isn’t a setup I haven’t tried before, and a single failure will result in me taking a train to fix it on-site.

So, GRUB experts out there, any suggestions? Of course, for now I guess I can install GRUB in the current drive’s MBR and make it boot the old kernel using the new system as root, but that’s dirty and would just postpone the problem.

natura upgraded to etch

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 10:58:00 +0000

Last week I started the final round of Debian upgrades for the servers I maintain here and there, which is mostly complete today. I haven’t been so lucky with upgrades this time, for a long list of different reasons. In the end, the smoothest upgrades were those boxes I upgraded when etch froze or so.

natura.oskuro.net is the box serving these pages. It’s an old, extremely noisy Pentium 150 which I’ve been intending to replace for a while now. I started the upgrade early on Thursday, knowing it’d take a while (natura takes its time only to read the Dpkg database), and it had apparently finished when I was ready to leave the office.

Three issues:

apache2’s enabled modules were forgotten and I had to reenable them again, plus IIRC the default “It works!” site got reenabled, hiding the blog for a little while.
bind didn’t like some change in one of the default configs and I failed to noticed it had not started. After the reboot, the box was unreachable remotely, but that was OK as I had to go visit my dad that night for his birthday, so it was fixed after one hour or so.
Last, my blog stopped working, and while I thought it’d have something to do with apache2.2, I had no time to have a close look as I had to leave to Lleida this weekend. Yesterday I discovered that for some reason, the old tar.gz PyBlosxom install wasn’t liking the new python2.4, so I decided it was about time to move to PyBlosxom 1.3, from the Debian package. Not without the mandatory “It works!” post published in the gazillion Planets, natura was ready to go.

The very same night of last Thursday, I decided to dist-upgrade the box which serves the Spanish Debian website mirror. That’s the only purpose on the box, so you can imagine the upgrade should have been pretty straight-forward. And so it seemed, until, in the middle of unpacking, dpkg died with a horrible I/O error, and I dropped into an unusable remote terminal with no working commands. Fortunately, apache2 was still up and running, and the web service has been working without interruption since the hard drive crash, albeit with no syncs from www-master.

Today, Sergio visited the campus and had a look. It was a XFS crash, which got cleanly repaired using an install CD. We have an empty partition in the box, and will probably move the system to it temporarily, and back to the RAID, but on ext3. When the box was back online, I just had to resume the upgrade process, make mdadm happy and update lilo.conf before rebooting into the new kernel.

This box uses LILO for some obscure reason I can’t remember too clearly anymore. The box has just one partition on a md array, on two SCSI disks on a aic7xxx-based controller. Can anyone hint me why GRUB would have failed on us back in sarge, and if any fixes in the etch version would work any better? Using LILO here is error prone, and basically feels like a step back. Anyway, www.es.debian.org is now back up and running with updated content.

Sindominio.net had its bi-annual upgrading party last monday, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to help much as when I tried to log into the server, I must have caught the system in the middle of some key lib upgrade or something, and again I was locked in a unusable shell which would only segfault. Given my previous experience, I assumed that something had gone wrong and the box would need to be fixed at the console, and after 20 minutes I gave up helping on that front. Until I noticed, quite a long while later that I was still getting mail from the server. I managed to log in to discover the upgrade was done, with just a few bits remaining to be done. The major issues were encountered with our pam and ldap setup, plus nscd kept dying causing quite a lot of mayhem all over the place. Great work from Seajob, Syvic, nogates, apardo and the rest of the people who handled it! With etch, we can finally move back to an official Debian kernel, something we’ve been longing to do for a long time. The only pending upgrade issue is that we need to move from our old jabber server to either the traditional jabberd 1.x or ejabberd; our current implementation is no longer supported in Debian.

The last of the etch upgrades stories involves Sofcatalà’s servers. The box was running on a CentOS 4.4, which was moved away into a subdir just after booting Debian-Installer, and then lobotomised so it would run as a Linux-VServer under a new Debian etch install. I’ll probably write more details about it soon though, as it could be a maybe less scary alternative to Guillem’s debtakeover.

Yay for etch!

What about GNOME 2.16 and Debian?

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 12:08:00 +0000

I haven’t heard too many people asking if GNOME 2.16 will make etch. Maybe everyone just assumes it will, because the latest transitions have been pretty good, or maybe everyone just assumes it won’t because nobody would expect Debian to ship with a current GNOME release, right? Or maybe Debian is immerse in what looks like the beginnings of a civil war, and that is more interesting.

The Debian GNOME team has been preemtively working on GNOME 2.16, though, as the release clock is ticking. Loïc has spent a big amount of time revamping the packaging of GTK+ and Pango, finally resulting in sane source packages people can look at. Joss, Guilherme, Loïc and others have worked on the rest of the Developer Platform packages, which is now ready for testing in experimental. The evolution team has also been rocking and all the associated packages are ready to go in experimental as well.

The GNOME 2.16 status page still shows quite some red for Desktop packages, which are now being worked on, with GTK+ 2.10 in place.

But we still haven’t decided if we can go ahead and attempt a 2.14 -> 2.16 transition in time for etch. Our biggest concern are the known problems of GTK 2.10’s file chooser regarding cancelling of operations. Apparently, other distributions are getting bad bug reports due to these, so we need to be very careful about it. We know there are people working on an upstream fix as I write, but we don’t know when there’ll be a patch for GTK+ and libgnomeui available. If we learn it’s due soon, we might start speaking to our release managers about the possibility of starting a transition. If we have no news, it’ll probably be too late.

Updates on the GNOME 2.8 transition

Wed, 17 Nov 2004 18:25:00 +0000

We’ve spent the last two days carefully selecting what packages we should build and upload in an order that makes life easier for autobuilders.

Yesterday, the first few libraries were uploaded, as well as the user-guide. Some people had problems because a few packages didn’t make it into incoming on time so some bits were uninstallable due to gnome-keyring depending on new atk.

Today, we’ve continued with important libs like libgnome/libgnomeui, libbonobo, eel and gnome-vfs. We’ve also uploaded a few apps now: bug-buddy and nautilus have hit sid and incoming respectively. As nautilus didn’t make it to unstable by a few minutes, you should be careful about doing dist-upgrades today. apt will probably want to remove nautilus entirely, so I suggest you don’t do it. :) That, or you pick libeel, libnautilus and nautilus from incoming, which will also work.

Sadly, in the process of building some of these packages, pbuilder left an active bind-mount of my local Debian mirror and I, trying to get rid of the bogus unclean build dir, recursively deleted the mirror entirely. Of course, this has slowed me down a lot, to the point that I had to ask Sjoerd to sponsor libgnomecanvas for me while I pick up the bits.

Maybe I’m a bit too optimistic, but I hope that maybe tomorrow we’ll be able to finish all the builds, and we’ll just have to wait for the autobuilders to do their work. At first everything went smooth, but they are already stuck in dep-wait failures due to libgnome, nautilus and others not having all the build-deps in place. Hopefully all the buildd’s will retry soon…

A final note, remember not to happily dist-upgrade your unstable box today. Before that, check that nautilus isn’t in your “to be removed list…

tetrinet.debian.net is moving!

Thu, 12 Aug 2004 13:10:00 +0000

Yesterday, mako did something really important. It’s actually something this conference will be remembered for… After much planning and procrastinating, we finally moved the tetrinet.debian.net server (no, this link won’t work with GNOME yet, but GTetrinet surely accepts patches, thanks ;) from my shitty Pentium 150Mhz, crappy ADSL-connected box to his very cool server at yukidoke.org. At the time of this writing, Mako probably hasn’t ported the server configuration from natura to the new box, but it should happen soon. We discussed about resetting the highscores or leaving them as they are, and for now we’ll not touch them. Our past tetrinet Gods can rest happily.

I guess mako and I can try to do some tetrinet contest tonight, in order to kick some ass after the Mao experience. We’ll see.

Enjoy!

Debian installer under control

Thu, 05 Feb 2004 21:10:00 +0000

I just committed the final remaining bits of our Catalan translation for Debian installer. Finally I can be happy when the next beta comes out, as I won’t feel guilty anymore. ;) Thanks to bubulle and vorlon for caring, they really made me get my ass moving and finish my already rotting translation before it was completely useless. I won’t do the documentation myself. I remember doing parts of that for the Woody release notes and I remember it was quite tedious, but hopefully there’ll be plenty of volunteers to do it.

Jeff Bailey asked me yesterday what is the “official” DVD-Ripper for GNOME. I don’t know of any… is there one? If not, I guess it’d be cool to have one, just to piss the MPAA a bit. :) Speaking of that, I read in today’s newspaper that the Oscar Awards Ceremony won’t be totally live on TV, it’ll have a slight delay just in case someone decides to show their penis or breast or butt in the middle. Heh, America is funny.

The Valencian exam went very well: the text was about trains (which I love), and I just had to read a few lines, and then comment a bit about the topic. After two or three minutes, the examiner said it was enough, and told me I’d have news soonish. Woot.

The silly virus appeared to be declining a bit in the last days, but today it hit my mail server very hard again. It’s annoying… that box is a P150 and on normal circumstances it just idles and idles, but now it’s very loaded and hitting swap most of the time, annoying me with the HD noise. If only the stupid windows ~~users~~ developers could get a clue and fix their crap… grrr!

Orkut is getting boring.

ALSA and JACK hell again

Mon, 26 Jan 2004 17:33:00 +0000

The accidental JACK upload to unstable is very probably going to be the next “big blocker” for the unstable -> testing transitions. Not everything is bad: after discovering JACK is waiting on alsa-lib (and a big bunch of other packages that still need to transition to the new libjack-dev) to enter testing, ElectricElf and I decided to upload alsa-lib, alsa-oss and alsa-utils directly to unstable, after EE had filed all the needed bugs against the packages that will now fail to build with the new alsa-lib. Many of the maintainers affected by the API change have already acknowledged their bug report, so we hope the impact of this upload will be quite small.

daf, of Welsh translations fame, wants to join Debian, and I’ll probably help him with advocacy and sponsorship. I learned about this when I asked him if a mozilla-locale-cy package would be interesting, and ended concluding that him doing the package is a much better idea :) He also has ruby-gnome2 packages which we plan to upload soon, as there seems to be demand for them on the (really) old WNPP bug. I’m looking forward to see more Welsh stuff around in Debian, as it already happens in GNOME.

I planned buying an ATI Radeon 9200SE to replace my old Voodoo3 (which works very well still: does DRI ok, etc., but it’s going to break with the hopefully soon to be in unstable X 4.3), and casually learned that Joy was about to buy that same card. Joy has been having a few weird problems in his box since he installed that video card, so I’m probably waiting a bit to see what I do… What I am surely not doing is buying a nVidia card. I wish I would, the choice is quite easy to make with that brand…

Damn rain, nice meta-gnome2

Sat, 24 Jan 2004 09:38:00 +0000

After managing to get up more or less on time quite early, dressing up with the cycling clothes, having copious breakfast and preparing my bike, I rushed out the garage to join my teammates at the meeting point… to find out it was raining quite heavily. Oh well.

20 minutes later, I do my daily checking of Internet stuff and what do I I find?

 - meta-gnome2 is going in after 3 days (hinted by cjwatson)

Hooray! Thanks Kamion, vorlon and aj!

A few Debian updates

Fri, 23 Jan 2004 20:45:00 +0000

I did some Debian stuff this afternoon. In the ALSA front, I had a go at updating alsa-modules-i386 to use the 2.4.24 kernel (for those who wonder where the packages are, they are stuck in the new/ queue). Sometimes, we ALSA Psychos seem to postpone some of our ALSA duties until we’re struck with a RC bug. Then it’s quite likely that we react in like 2 hours. ElectricElf has been working on getting a list of packages that fail to build with alsa-lib 1.0.x, due to its switch to the new API by default. The list is, luckily for us (and the release guys) very short, and we should be uploading the missing bits of ALSA 1.0.1 in a few days, I hope, after we file bugs against these packages warning about the API change and telling people what the (very simple) fix is. The most wanted part of the ALSA 1.0.1 final release, alsa-driver, was uploaded a few days ago and surprisingly we haven’t got any new bugs about it yet.

Mozilla 1.6 landed in unstable last night, making me feel quite uneasy. Yeah, I’m still under the meta-gnome2 syndrome, as it still hasn’t made it into testing (there were problems trying to remove the old gnome-core 1.x package), but it should be sorted soon. For more fun, the arm autobuilder surprised us with a successful retry of galeon, which should make it quite easy to have it in testing soon. I quickly warned Mark about not uploading galeon until it goes in (which will happen in a few days due to libbonobo) and he agreed, and uploaded to a private repository instead. Thanks! Galeon 1.3.12 is another nice step towards 2.0, it fixed many of the small bugs that annoyed me every day. Meanwhile, I quickly uploaded Mozilla Euskaraz 1.6, while I wait until the Catalan Mozilla team makes a final decision on translating or not this version (the guy in charge has no time to do this currently, and said he’d prefer doing 1.7; but who knows if Sarge will have Mozilla 1.7…).

I’m even more sleepy today.

Reorganisation of the Debian Catalan translations

Tue, 20 Jan 2004 20:26:00 +0000

Guillem and I have finally decided what coordination strategy we want to use for Debian’s reborn Catalan l10n team. The Dutch and French teams have a quite organised method that works through e-mail, as we wanted, and provides a way of nicely tracking the status of all the translations that Debian translators need to care about. We have a proposal written which we’ll mail to debian-l10n-catalan@l.d.o tomorrow, let’s see if people like it.

Uploaded GTranslator 1.1.4 to Debian, after applying a patch to remove some GTK 2.3-only (I guess) stuff.

Yesterday I went to bed at 1:30AM, probably managed to get asleep at around 4:30. Excellent…

World Domination Plan delayed a bit

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 19:11:00 +0000

Today I was prodded publicly on debian-l10n-catalan@lists.debian.org about the lack of Catalan translations for Debian Installer… looks like I had slacked for too long, although I had finally restarted my work on this during the last few days. Finishing it isn’t a big problem -it’s not that big-, what was slowing me down was my lack of experience to merge the big full ca.po into the little modules’ po files. I don’t know why, but I hadn’t learned about msgmerge -C, which will do the trick (although it’s still quite time consuming, at least for the first commits which will need changes to probably all the installer modules). Christian Perrier and Steve Langasek (the very famous Catalan-American ;) have offered help to handle this. I’ll probably accept their kind offer tomorrow, when I finish putting my po more or less in shape. All of this makes me wonder something else, though. What is the status of the SGML installer and release notes docs for Sarge? Has work started on this? If so, I should probably find some minion to handle the Catalan translation if we want to have it ready in time.

In short, the Catalan World Domination Plan has been slightly delayed, but just wait… in 10 months or so you’ll find yourselves saying “Bon dia!” every morning!

I need to find some time to do some GNOME commits I have pending, mostly Catalan corrections from Jordi Mas to a zillion modules in the extra and fifth-toe sections. I promise it’ll be done by the weekend.

I also have to do my usual ration of studying, plus some cycling training, plus I have to be in a party in about 2 hours. This weekend is going to be short…

I tried to upload the new mailutils snapshot today, but found out it requires the new gnutls packages which are stuck in the new/ queue. I downloaded the packages from Ivo’s web, but can’t upload until the packages hit incoming. This started a discussion which made us find out a few packages still use gnutls5. Time to change that… On other fronts, StevenK fixed the remaining issues with alsa-driver 1.0.1, and it’s ready for upload. Probably tomorrow. What we can’t upload yet is alsa-lib, that’s going to get hairy thanks to an API change in 1.0.x…

Now, off to cook some Spanish omelet…

Finally, all lined up

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 17:34:00 +0000

After days of annoying different people and mailing lists, meta-gnome2 is finally ready to enter Debian testing during Saturday’s testing run. Yesterday, one of the two required browsers, epiphany-browser, finally made it into testing, while planner, libgda2 and libgnomedb got their missing builds. libxslt is ready to go in tonight, unblocking the way for abiword, too. The only missing bit was sound-juicer, which I demoted to Suggests: for now in the new version I uploaded yesterday. Two days of wait and, hooray, testing will have all the important bits of GNOME installed (for i386 and powerpc, at last). We’ll have to keep looking for a few missing builds for a handful of packages for 3 architectures. Kamion and I are tracking the status daily at the DebianWiki. Many thanks to aj and Kamion for the nice help with most of this, specially with the big jack-audio-connection-kit hinting, and the s390 and m68k guys for not getting too pissed at me when I requested random builds. :) At last I’ll be able to stop looking at build logs every 6h looking for the happy “maybe-successful” tag… not Kamion, who apparently has to nurse KDE in now, good luck. ;)

I also made a quick upload of mailutils, basically to link it against the new libidn11. In the upstream trench, Maildir support landed in CVS on Wednesday, adding to the already available support for mh, mbox and imap mailboxes in GNU Mailutils. Some people have been waiting for Maildir support for many months, and it’s finally here. I hope this makes more people give mailutils-imap4d a go, even if there’s a severe lack of good documentation right now. I’ll upload a new snapshot to Debian unstable in a few days, just in case a mail-eating bug has crawled into the new code.

Thanks to the two persons that mailed me privately about my personal fight against IE’s stupidity. It finally wasn’t a transparent PNG issue, but IE not grokking position statements on the global body block of CSS, or something similar. Ross put me on the right track, and I have it nearly fixed now.

My cold is nearly gone now. I have been training since Monday and except that day when I couldn’t breathe too much, the other sessions have been nice. Of course, I’m sleep deprived again, but that’s a minor side-effect. :)

Last, but not least, tbm, I do not suck!

Big day for meta-gnome2

Sat, 10 Jan 2004 20:18:00 +0000

A few nice things happened in the meta-gnome2 front: yesterday, aj and Kamion kicked jack-audio-connection-kit and alsa-lib into testing, clearing the way for a number of packages like gst-plugins and the packages that depended on it gnome-media, nautilus-media, rhythmbox, etc. Today, aj removed the remaining 7 days of wait for libbonobo, and this is unblocking a new set of packages; and Kinnison did a quick processing of libxslt, which was again stuck on the new/ queue in auric. This will fix the builds of most of the remaining meta-gnome2 problems, so if no new problems come up, it’s should be mostly ready when a few of the affected packages get retried. When/if the “must have” packages are in, I’ll consider doing a temporary upload removing the less important packages so meta-gnome2 can go in, making Sarge’s testing a bit more realistic for people who are doing desktop installs. You never know, given our record of bad luck until now…

When the GNOME mess gets messier...

Wed, 07 Jan 2004 18:22:00 +0000

My cold isn’t getting any better, and patience is not abundant anymore. Pills make me sleepy, and I can’t concentrate too much to do Real Stuff when I sit down to do it.

Day 1 of the GNOME mini-freeze wasn’t too successful. Abiword stumbled upon a new gcc-3.3 ICE, and while libxslt was fixed, it introduced another RC bug which makes builds using that package fail. The new libbonobo had newer shlibs, and the last buildd that needed to build libbonoboui picked that dep, so now both of the libs wait 10 days. Galeon keeps failing with a misterious “errno 3” when the buildd tries to execute gnome-autogen.sh, but just on two arches. I suggested the maintainer to stop autogen’ing galeon at build time, just to see, but it’s weird anyway.

On the bright side, s390 compiled a few of the important packages that were missing like gnome-panel, gnome-applets or libbonoboui, and while they now depend on new libbonobo, it will solve some of the most important problems.

Did two uploads recently, one of them to fix an amusing bug in TWIG, which I have been trying to give away for ages now. Looks like the person in charge of taking it (hi Ignacio ;) is taking action, finally.

Some PlanetGNOME (I guess) reader mailed me a link on a blog entry by Seth Nickell just a few months ago, where he just talked about the same procrastination problem. There’s a nice essay on this there. Thanks for the link, Colin & Seth!

Sorting the GNOME puzzle for Sarge

Mon, 05 Jan 2004 19:50:00 +0000

The Debian Installer folks get a lot of reports about GNOME being completely broken when they install Sarge. This is because tasksel pulls the “gnome-core” meta-package, which suppossedly would install GNOME 2.4, but on testing, gnome-core is still the GNOME1.x-based package, so people don’t even get gnome-session installed.

meta-gnome2 isn’t in testing yet because a lot of its dependencies aren’t in either, for a variety of reasons. So far, we’ve faced a GNOME 2.2 -> 2.4 transition which got a bit more complicated than expected due to a libtool bug. Shortly after, Debian got compromised just when things looked bright. Then, the buildd’s weren’t running. Recently, gcc broke on mips/mipsel, and python2.3 broke completely, making most of our packages unbuildable. jack-audio-connection-kit and alsa-lib are also having problems to enter testing, and that’s also holding a few chunks, but Kamion has a plan for aj to fix this.

I have posted a proposal for a mini GNOME freeze to debian-gtk-gnome, with a list of the current problems and what needs to happen.

In other news, Alioth is finally back, and I’ve been able to commit my pending stuff, and release gnome-mud 0.10.4a-1 to incoming. The ALSA Psychos moved their CVS tree to Alioth today, but we can’t upload 1.0.0rc2 because it looks like upstream changed the build system and the tree refuses to clean now. That’s our only pending issue, so if you’re an Debian ALSA user and want to poke at it, you’re more than welcome. :)