My first RC Bug-squashing Day (or rather night):

• bug #552791 – acorn-fdisk – Copyright file does not contain verbatim copy of the license or a pointer to one
• bug #562647 – gidentd – Does not work with ipv4 after recent change in netbase
• bug #558812 – dietlibc – incorrect license in debian/copyright
• bug #531937 – autossh – FTBFS on mipsel due to missing -fPIC

I picked all of them mostly randomly from the list Zack gave me, and except dietlibc they are packages I had not even heard of before. The first one begun easily (track down licencing information, pimp debian/copyright, but I ended up fixing compiler and lintian warnings and even wrote a manpage for it while there (but for this one, I didn’t bump the Standards-Version). The second one was only the second one to complete because the others took longer; it’s basically a change of a dæmon to use two instead of one listening socket, to work with a “doble stack” OS instead of just a “dual stack” OS by not using v4-mapped IPv6 addresses (I considered if to use select(2) or poll(2), or to just fork and have two dæmons running, but that seemed too ressource-consuming to me so I chose the less-complicated poll(2) method, looking at popa3d(8)’s source code (inherited from OpenBSD) in the MirBSD tree since I could not find my network programming book. The third one was basically communicating with upstream; the bug can be blosed with no change to the package. The fourth one took me a while; luckily I have qemu 0.11.0 on MirBSD, and aurel32’s mipsel qemu images helped a great deal; however, cowbuilder --create failed for me, so I ended up waiting almost the entire night for a-g d-u to finish; in the end, it was simply a bug in upstream’s configure.ac which is only exposed due to a toolchain bug on mips(el).

To do: my AM Zack needs to upload the NMUs (after checking, of course); I need to communicate some of the fixes upstream (the gidentd upstream is NXDOMAIN ☹), produce a very small testcase for the mipsel toolchain bug, maybe fix some more mipsel FTBFSen as I have a working qemu instance now, but maybe I’ll do that at the BSP when I can’t find IPv6 bugs or so that I feel I can fix (I also want to do an mksh release which has to be prepared first RSN, and there’s still the need to formally publish the MirBSD-current bi-arch snapshot and make another ISO out of it for BT and prepare the multi-BSD USB stick for allbsd.de…).

Annoyances: a-g d-u could ask me things at the start before working for some four+ hours instead of in the middle, and the same questions several times (PAM restart). The sid kernel doesn’t boot today but did yesterday, the lenny kernel produces this:
Starting the hotplug events dispatcher: udevdudevd[320]: udev: missing sysfs features; please update the kernel or disable the kernel's CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED option; udev may fail to work correctly
(I hate udev.) And, worst of all, these annoying fireworks (some sounded like originating from inside our staircase, I pity the neighbour’s cats) when one wants to hack… Finally, I *loathe* CDBS. Debhelper v5 rules!

Oh, and I also was under the impression that “Firstname LASTNAME” was a French thing, and to a much lesser extent Asian. (@bubulle)

With the Lintian 2.3.0 saturday-after-christmas release (by the way, over here if it’s done twice it’ll really become tradition) I’ve run its spelling tests over all of MirOS CVS repository. The result: 293 kinds of typos in 35857 souce files. (Although there are the case things too. Without them, I have 51 typos in 7206 files. Asides from false positives (I used fgrep -rwl[i], and -i and -w don’t play well together, and -w mis-catches “GTK+” as “GTK”) I probably can’t (API, source code) or won’t fix all of them though.)

However, I have some rather hot asia-style food to eat right now, and will need to get up early tomorrow for work, so I am not applying/fixing them right now. (bsiegert@ and gecko2@ however are enjoying themselves at 26C3, see their wlog entries.)

Note that all of today’s fixes will not make it into the next MirBSD snapshot already, since it’s built (i386) and building X11 already (sparc). On the other hand, the next bunch of WTF *.deb files will have them. I also need to fix makefs upstream for Hurd… and continue the T&S questionnaire… *sigh*

Update: I suppose this is my “Hello, Plänet Debian!” posting (thanks aptituz!)… well, my packages in the archive were already lintian clean, in case someone wonders (I did recheck with 2.3.0 though). My point was, why not use checking tools from one “universe” for another one, viceque versa? (Similar to synergy effects from knowledge.)

I managed to create an avd "Android 2.0-current", with stuff completely built by myself. Now I "just" need to get project/external/mksh.git to be created and writable by me. Or, even better, nuke that NetBSD® ash they're currently using and replace it with a sensible shell, at least mksh-small. Then adb can be built without -DSH_HISTORY (which, with mksh, is required for usability).

I wonder if I could take over Mæmo as well... *grins*

On unrelated side notes, I'm trying to get the "debian" tagged entries aggregated on Plänet Debian, and I'm – again – in the NM process trying to become a DD, with slightly different goals this time. (But I'd also like these porting machines... 'sides, there's still an mksh+dietlibc on hppa bug open...)

I also got HP-UX back at HP PvP (not player versus player though ;) for mksh(1) porting/testing. Sadly, Itanic only, no humppa machines.

In case someone ever needs it, a collection of scripts called BitWeaver → MediaWiki does exactly that and has been released under GNU GPLv2 (only). Cheers!

As I wrote, I asked for flute notes. Well, piano notes are ok too, although I don’t have my electric organ any longer, they can easily be transposed, even if I don’t know the software (could do it by hand though). And I might give midiplay(1) a shot (I bet it’ll sound like PC-Speaker emulation…). Vincent kindly provides more input (apparently one more of these Simtec people, but that’s just my guess).

Since ports/security/ekeyd runs happily on herc and most of my patches were not just applied but even appreciated, thanks Daniel, and the results speak for themselves (I even get stats from daily.local mailed to me every night), and we had some fun discussions, I like it. I think these whom I ordered additional ones for are, too. (I wonder if I should invest into a ten-pack bulk ones and re-sell them at conferences, but the next one is so close to the UK they probably will be there by themselves.)

I must admit I also have the context switching problem (but hey, that’s what you get for being a sysadmin, and our coffee (GEPA, ganze Bohne, im Eimer, fair gehandelt), even if not Café Libertad, who, incidentally, are Debian Wine distributors, is good), but since I’m usually not working for customer projects, I’m rarely time bound, and quite some good ideas have come from distraction (or timeouts, such as personal needs or getting coffee/food/…).

Now I still wish I could split myself in half to get more time for all the projects I have…

Neil, I am happy with my eKey, and I would blog it if I had a blog ☺ (And yours doesn’t allow comments. But then, Daniel’s doesn’t, either.) I’d have liked proper (C flute / piano / voice) notes, though… never got the hang of string instruments.

Of course I still have to make a MirPort for that Lua dæmon, but for now, things work quite well. (I do have a rather large TODO and woke up with headaches and slight cold today.)

Due to heavy load at work, as well as some minor things, I'm either taking back interest altogether, involvement altogether, time spent on projects, or any of these on aspects/particulars of projects.

Sometimes, when you're burnt out, it's best to concentrate on living and on core projects. mksh is one of these for me, as is keeping MirBSD userland and MirPorts infrastructure working well, with small, evolving improvements (no big jumps). Other things, no matter how nice, interesting or useful (to me as well as to others) they are, need to stay back. I poured most of the last seven years of my life into MirBSD.

Sometimes, you want to give back, but it's too much effort, or you cannot afford to spend more time on it. I'll close one of my Debian ITP bugs for this reason. (I also rarely send in patches from ports for this reason, but sometimes point upstream to our CVSweb.)

Sometimes, people like Ulrich Drepper, Marco d'Itri, Gerrit Pape let you realise that every project has its Theo de Raadt-alikes. I've still not ported jupp's latest release to Debian (but an OpenSuSE Buildservice SRPM exists), nor uploaded the current mksh(1) version even to my own wtf repo. I will do so, when I feel like spending private time with Debian again, at least for the etch and lenny (and hardy – for work) branches, as dash and mksh in sid have... issues I predicted ages ago. (For one, I'm still waiting for Gerrit to contact me. Maybe our eMail systems don't like each other? Waldi or formorer will probably pass on any messages, as will the trusty BTS.) I'll probably not open any ITP bugs again and send in much less of the bugs I notice, simply because I don't like being ignored (or flamed, but sometimes, being ignored is worse – which is why Benny works on MirPorts, btw). Maybe, if I feel the need to, my wtf repo will grow instead; DDs or DMs are free to take from there if they like.

Sometimes, one realises that he just doesn't fit in. While Cachewolf is a useful project, working together with Java™ developers that communicate over web fora only and don't even see the need for compatibility with Unix or proper processes most of the time (svn:eol-style comes to mind, and switching the source code to UTF-8 is something I've given up to dream of – I would even have fixed bugs where Ewe wouldn't do UTF-8 right, but I run into a wall of bliss ignorance there) proved impossible for me. I won't budge either: web fora are simply not for me to use. Period. This is my fault (for not fitting in) as well as the fault of some of the rest of the team (for ignoring years of experience, or for simply nicht über den eigenen Tellerrand schauen (however one says this in English, I don't know) and not caring of these who do; for supporting the commercial gc.com site over the three alternatives too). I will continue to use it, maybe the iPAQ H3600 a colleague gave me proves useful, otherwise, MirBSD will do just fine.

So, when I leave or pull back a little, no prejudices. Sometimes with reason, but mostly due to lack of available resources on my part. I hope nobody who has been or will be noticing me ceasing to contribute as much as usual thinks ill that's why.

When R37c was brought out, I fixed a bug on (among others) IA64. The simple memory allocator added a pointer (or two, in Espie's) to the storage, placed before what the user got. Of course, gcc wanted to align the struct not taking this into account, failing evilly. Luckily, another FTBFS was not my fault, but sigsetjmp(3) was merely broken on S/390 with dietlibc; waldi fixed it in the meanwhile, but I uploaded another version of mksh to Debian for now whose mksh-static binary links against glibc instead and added me a TODO bug.

All the testsuite failures are certainly interesting though; the hppa one looks like a bug in ed(1) there; as to the others, either Perl, or binfmt_misc was configured to accept or drop (but not reject) shebangs præfixed with a BOM. Whatever.

Maybe I can now finally go back to working on MirBSD instead? :D
After all, we want a new snapshot (for NetInstall, at least).