On MirBSD and other sane OSes, you can just press ^T (Ctrl-T) when dd(1) runs; this sends it a SIGINFO (cf. sigaction(2)) which asks it to display (progress) information to the tty. This includes kFreeBSD, btw.

Update 07.01.2012 – this also works on Hurd. Linux neither has SIGINFO nor (cooked mode tty) support for it.

There’s also pv:

	dd if=/dev/mapper/vg01-${customername}--hudson bs=1048576 | \
	    pv -pter -B 1048576 -s 85899345920 | \
	    xz -0 >/mnt/ci-${customername}-snap-20120105-lenny.img.xz
 

I used this At wOrk today to back up a Jenkins VM before upgrading its underlying operating system for evaluation. Here, the -s flag is the total size (in bytes; don’t forget to multiply by 1024 when reading from Linux’ /proc/partitions) so pv can calculate a total and an ETA; -B is the same as bs; and xz is the currently best compressor to use, in any situation, unless you must stay compatible to gzip(1)-only systems. (Except that it’s not under an Open Source licence.)

clpbar might also be worth looking into. XTaran points out sid has this as bar.

PSA: Last of June, 2012, will be a leap second.

This is both a release announcement for the next installment of The MirBSD Korn Shell, mksh R40b, and a follow-up to Sune’s article about small tools of various degrees of usefulness.

I hope I don’t need to say too much about the first part; mksh(1) is packaged in a gazillion of operating environments (dear Planet readers, that of course includes Debian, which occasionally gets a development snapshot; I’ll wait uploading R40c until that two month fixed gcc bug will finally find its way into the packages for armel and armhf. Ah, we’re getting Arch Linux (after years) to include mksh now. (Probably because they couldn’t stand the teasing that Arch Hurd included it one day after having been told about its existence, wondering why it built without needing patches on Hurd…) MSYS is a supposedly supported target now, people are working on WinAPI and DJGPP in their spare time, and Cygwin and Debian packagers have deprecated pdksh in favour of mksh (thanks!). So, everything looking well on that front.

I’ve started a collection of shell snippets some time ago, where most of “those small things” of mine ends up. Even stuff I write at work – we’re an Open Source company and can generally publish under (currently) AGPLv3 or (if extending existing code) that code’s licence. I chose git as SCM in that FusionForge instance so that people would hopefully use it and contribute to it without fear, as it’s hosted on my current money source’s servers. (Can just clone it.) Feel free to register and ask for membership, to extend it (only if your shell-fu is up to the task, KNOPPIX-style scripts would be a bad style(9) example as the primary goal of the project is to give good examples to people who learn shell coding by looking at other peoples’ code).

Maybe you like my editor, too? At OpenRheinRuhr, the Atari people sure liked it as it uses WordStar® like key combinations, standardised across a lot of platforms and vendors (DR DOS Editor, Turbo Pascal, Borland C++ for Windows, …)

ObPromise: a posting to raise the level of ferrophility on the Planet aggregators this wlog reaches (got pix)

My dear MirBSD co-developer Benny did not only get his Doctor title but also recently married. There will be another post detailing this, including better photos of the two Doctors and the cake (with a Dæmon she made herself) on the wlog, but this is some fun beforehand:

Apparently, it is forbidden in France to drive GPL cars. (Without safety valve – but you have to admit the picture was fun. And we were like ＷＴＦ？ since the thing actually meant is LPG in German. Just like UTC is CUT (Coordinated Universal Time) in English, TUC (Temps Universel Coordonné) in French…)

I’m also working on improving our xterm(1) and GNU screen config, and other things. Explaining acronyms on our webpages is also coming some time. Benny is importing weird stuff from TNF for better pkgsrc® support, so there is activity. Just we’ve got dayjobs and a life… and mksh(1) still rocks (pdksh got orphaned in Debian today).

Would MTAs please stop sending hi-bit7 messages to other MTAs which do not advertise 8BITMIME! Recode it to QP or BASE64, damnit! The receiving MTA is entitled to strip the set bit7, which kinda makes things hard to read (while I know how to deal with blvde Stra_e, the advent of UTF-8 makes that blC6de StraC?e, introduces C0 control characters and makes typographic quotation marks into NUL-containing octet sequences (as their UTF-8 representation contains 0x80 octets) which let every sensible MDA terminate the line there). I even filed in the Debian BTS against the BTS (might be Drexim's fault, though).

Would MUAs please default to Quoted-Printable!

And mail hosters should use the same server when retrying delivery, to benefit greylisting. Or at least publish a list of outgoing IPv4 addresses they use for sending. Or use IPv6. Oh, and STARTTLS, while we are on my wishlist.

It's a sad day when the percentage of correctly encoded eMail messages in my INBOX is smaller than that of my Spambox...

No I don’t really know any SQL. In fact, even at vocational school, where we focussed on database normalisation anyway, I tried hard to avoid the topic. Feel free to access here my entire knowledge about SQL ☺ (I did use Amaya, Arena and Arachne though. Liked only Arachne out of these three, and then, only under DOS, not its Unix version. Maybe the WWW could be named AAA instead? But then, lynx(1) is the one true browser…)

Ah, well. While at it… the entirety of my Perl knowledge is here: perltoc(1) with quick links to perlfunc(1).

The entirety of my (X)HTML and ECMAscript knowledge, DE: SELFHTML; although, the spec and DTD helped; and to write my notes on JSON, I took a peek at the formal ECMAscript spec as well… à propos, does anyone know a (good enough) indent(1) equivalent for ECMAscript, as I am trying to strip down some, inherited (GPL, yes) code for a hobby project, but Geo-people seem to produce illegible code?

Our MirBSD online manual pages and other assorted BSD documentation (except of course the merely copied ncurses, lynx etc. documentation and the texinfo generated HTML pages) has just gained a major facelift. They look alike in lynx(1) – best web browser ever – and less(1)/man(1) now, and remind of a DEC VT420 on a CSS capable Buntbrause.

Thanks to our contributor XTaran for aid with the colour scheme!

Since these are generated from catmanpages, heuristics are used for things like where should bold/underline begin/end (since nroff(1) is not always the brightest… but working on that), and hyperlinks can only be generated for other manpage references (whose targets may or may not exist, for example if they aren’t part of MirOS base/XFree86®). But on the other hand, Valid XHTML/1.1 and CSS speaks for itself ☻☺

Another cat posting, about 100 KiB worth of images embedded so follow to the main article to read it, I don’t want Planet readers to suffer from traffic overuse.

Hot and humid (it’s rained a bit overnight, but has almost dried up quickly) seems to be cat weather. I went to buy breakfast at the local bakery when three cats lay around the house door in a half circle – my two black friends from the last posting and their human can opener’s third owner. When I came back I wondered whether the small guy wanted to travel:

The big guy has hidden indoors, but needed only very little coaxing to head back outside in a measured speed:

The car’s owner arrived when I closed the door behind that cat, and not only did the little guy jump off… but also did the third cat… get out from under the car. Huh…

As written about here earlier, cats have a nice life. I walked into my home seeing three cats in a row, all black: two lazing around, the third (with white spots, and belonging to a different neighbour from the other two) ambulating. I went up and got my PocketPC with the already mentioned camera application to take a shoot. Sadly, the more shy cat went away, but I got some pictures of the other two – here they are, internet photo stars ☺ follow the hyperlink to get a large version.

Later I came back from geocaching (2 GC.COM-only, 1 OC-only *yay!* found, one not found due to not taking any hardware with me) the bigger guy lazed around in the bush next to where I usually park my bike. Lucky…

Oh well – someone came into the #cvs channel on IRC without a clue, again. I’ve made a nice picture to show “the competition” (rival, whatever) to newbies (warning, sarcasm ahead)…

SCNR.

But trying to “cvs co” a websvn repository view… honestly!

Yes, I’m biased. And known to be proud of the things I use.

On Day 0, we were at my favourite Jugoslawian restaurant, and during eating and verpeiling, Andi took some pictures:

Take special note of the fun expressions everyone has…

Day 2, nothing of note at the conference itself – according to Jana, the only interesting talk (that tcpdump(8) GUI) was cancelled, and everything else was PHP and Web 2.0 crap. The food also was different, at least what I got, from Day 1. But it wasn’t as hot as on the previous day, and we did more socialising. I also managed to get the MirBSD ISO distributed some more.

Then I took my fellow DDs Enrico and madamezou geocaching for their first time, together with benz; they then took a Travelbug I found on Day 1 (with rsc) to Italy so it’ll end up in Rome, a next step on its mission.

Other rarely-seen people, such as Dr. Pfeffer, made an appearance, but overall the second day was quite relaxed. Ah, and Benny is a Doctor in Germany now as well.

On Monday, I slept quite a bit ☺

	14:31⎜*<* Signoff: XTaran (*.net *.split)

… doesn’t prevent me from telling him…

	14:39⎜<mira|AO> XTaran: n̲i̲e̲ n̲i̲e̲ n̲i̲e̲ n̲i̲e̲ n̲i̲e̲ n̲i̲e̲ n̲i̲e̲
	     ⎜empfiehlt man k̶i̶l̶l̶a̶l̶l̶, i̲m̲m̲e̲r̲ nur p̲k̲i̲l̲l̲!

“Now playing: Monzy — kill dash” ⇒ good idea… ☺

By the way, you were probably looking for this…

     -x      Require an exact match of the process name, or argument list if
             -f is given. The default is to match any substring.
 

… excerpt from the pkill(1) manual page, where you can see it stems from grep(1) clearly.

Yes, this website (and thus the RSS export) is Lynx on uxterm -fn -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--18-120-100-100-c-90-iso10646-1 -fw -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-ko-18-120-100-100-c-180-iso10646-1 on XFree86® optimised. Your browser might not do combining.

Built the ISO in the morning, today. Finally. Whew. It was much too warm in the mēnsa, and why did I have to get up so early anyway? Real Conferences™ don’t start before 10 o’clock, and there are no sensible activities before 11 o’clock anyway…

Talked to a lot of people, introduced my favourite Fedora Packager to Geocaching. Now my throat is sore and I’m tired. Social Event was not my case, as usual. (And even the vegetarian food now costs money as opposed to, I think, two years ago.) At least dry and not too loud. Still, best thing of FrOSCon is the Friday Evening Jugoslawian Food Mealtime ;-)

Once upon a time, there was Deb and Ian. That was about exactly 18 years ago. We don’t talk about the 0.939000 format any more, but they eventually settled on:

	$ ar rc pkg_1.0_all.deb debian-binary control.tar.gz data.tar.gz
	$ hexdump -C pkg_1.0_all.deb | head
	00000000  21 3c 61 72 63 68 3e 0a  64 65 62 69 61 6e 2d 62  |!<arch>.debian-b|
	00000010  69 6e 61 72 79 20 20 20  31 33 31 33 36 38 33 35  |inary   13136835|
	00000020  32 39 20 20 31 30 30 36  20 20 32 30 30 20 20 20  |29  1006  200   |
	00000030  31 30 30 36 34 34 20 20  34 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  |100644  4       |
	00000040  20 20 60 0a 32 2e 30 0a  63 6f 6e 74 72 6f 6c 2e  |  `.2.0.control.|
	00000050  74 61 72 2e 67 7a 20 20  31 33 31 33 36 38 33 35  |tar.gz  13136835|
	00000060  32 39 20 20 31 30 30 36  20 20 32 30 30 20 20 20  |29  1006  200   |
	00000070  31 30 30 36 34 34 20 20  31 33 39 31 20 20 20 20  |100644  1391    |
	00000080  20 20 60 0a 1f 8b 08 00  00 00 00 00 00 03 ed 59  |  `............Y|
	00000090  eb 6f db 36 10 f7 d7 f0  af b8 3a 5e 9b 74 b1 f5  |.o.6......:^.t..|
 

By then, systems were a.out(5), and everything was good. (Of course, if you look at the mtimes, you’ll notice I faked this. But it’s really equivalent to the real thing.

But oh horror! GNU binutils, not always everyone’s friend, switched from using BSD style “Unix Archiver” libraries in ar(1) to SYSV style libraries on elf(5) systems:

	$ ar rc on-elf debian-binary control.tar.gz data.tar.gz
	$ hexdump -C on-elf | head
	00000000  21 3c 61 72 63 68 3e 0a  64 65 62 69 61 6e 2d 62  |!<arch>.debian-b|
	00000010  69 6e 61 72 79 2f 20 20  31 33 31 33 36 38 33 35  |inary/  13136835|
	00000020  32 39 20 20 31 30 30 36  20 20 32 30 30 20 20 20  |29  1006  200   |
	00000030  31 30 30 36 34 34 20 20  34 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  |100644  4       |
	00000040  20 20 60 0a 32 2e 30 0a  63 6f 6e 74 72 6f 6c 2e  |  `.2.0.control.|
	00000050  74 61 72 2e 67 7a 2f 20  31 33 31 33 36 38 33 35  |tar.gz/ 13136835|
	00000060  32 39 20 20 31 30 30 36  20 20 32 30 30 20 20 20  |29  1006  200   |
	00000070  31 30 30 36 34 34 20 20  31 33 39 31 20 20 20 20  |100644  1391    |
	00000080  20 20 60 0a 1f 8b 08 00  00 00 00 00 00 03 ed 59  |  `............Y|
	00000090  eb 6f db 36 10 f7 d7 f0  af b8 3a 5e 9b 74 b1 f5  |.o.6......:^.t..|
 

Can you spot the difference?

Of course, ELF is what you want™, so there is little choice. Unix Archiver libraries are system dependent, and no format has ever been normed, but DEB files use it as format… so what is one to do?

	$ GNUTARGET=a.out-i386-linux ar rc with-aout \
	> debian-binary control.tar.gz data.tar.gz
	$ md5sum pkg_1.0_all.deb with-aout on-elf
	248f78d42f8ca8f2a3560f9800b2bf01  pkg_1.0_all.deb
	248f78d42f8ca8f2a3560f9800b2bf01  with-aout
	09eca70c9b11b6b55bbadcab5c3201fb  on-elf
 

“OK, and what do I do on my Debian/m68k system?”

ar(1) uses bfd, and GNU binutils can not only forcibly set the target emulation but also show them:

Wow. While binutils share no single supported working target, they can be built multiarch, or (on MirBSD) with --enable-targets=all --enable-64-bit-bfd. Doesn’t help if you want to stay portable: GNUTARGET=srec is common on all Debian (sid) binutils versions (single or multiarch), but errors out on older binutils. The a.out-* targets are not common. Sure, you could hack around things, but… this is tedious. If you follow things or know me a little, you might already have guessed that I wouldn’t let that stand.

pax(1) to the rescue. On MirBSD, we use paxtar, which has cpio(1) and tar(1) front-ends and supports multiple formats (4 cpio and 2 tar variants) and has already been extended a lot and is lovingly called paxmirabilis (mirabilos’ peace in Latin) – it has options to anonymise archives: set uid and gid to zero, set mtime to zero, (for ustar) only write the numeric uid and gid to the archive, (for cpio formats) serialise inodes and device information, write content of hardlinked files only once (breaks partial extraction but saves a lot of space, e.g. 2 MiB off the Grml initrd.gz). And, recently, the ability to append a trailing slash to pathnames of ustar members which are directories (GNU tar does it – and I thought some Debian utilities check for it). So why not… (the -M dist and fakeroot set the uid/gid to 0)

	$ find debian-binary control.tar.gz data.tar.gz | \
	> mircpio -oHar -Mdist >with-mircpio
	$ mirpax -w -M dist -f with-mirpax -x ar \
	> debian-binary control.tar.gz data.tar.gz
	$ mirtar -M dist -A -cf with-mirtar \
	> debian-binary control.tar.gz data.tar.gz
	$ GNUTARGET=a.out-i386-linux fakeroot ar rc with-aout-ar \
	> debian-binary control.tar.gz data.tar.gz
	$ md5sum with-*
	a466e2fd57cdee141fe585a43245548f  with-aout-ar
	a466e2fd57cdee141fe585a43245548f  with-mircpio
	a466e2fd57cdee141fe585a43245548f  with-mirpax
	a466e2fd57cdee141fe585a43245548f  with-mirtar
 

Voilà. I got it, and even appending is possible. It supports the BSD format with special focus on DEB files, and deals with long filenames, but not symbol or filename tables (used by ranlib(1) or strange formats, respectively, but since we don’t create *.a files to use with some native linker/binder/loader, we don’t need that anyway).

On extraction (oh, and listing!) it deals with SYSV style filenames as well.

	$ mirtar tvf on-elf
	-rw-r--r--  1 tg       tg          4 Aug 18 16:05 debian-binary
	-rw-r--r--  1 tg       tg       1391 Aug 18 16:05 control.tar.gz
	-rw-r--r--  1 tg       tg      18135 Aug 18 16:05 data.tar.gz
	$ mirtar tvf with-aout
	-rw-r--r--  1 tg       tg          4 Aug 18 16:05 debian-binary
	-rw-r--r--  1 tg       tg       1391 Aug 18 16:05 control.tar.gz
	-rw-r--r--  1 tg       tg      18135 Aug 18 16:05 data.tar.gz
 

One of the real benefits is that you can use the front-ends interchangably – for example, “mirtar tzf foo.cpio.gz” would work (which GNU tar can’t do), and mircpio’s ustar implementation, unlike GNU cpio’s, is not horribly broken.

Of course, there are some drawbacks: it’s not GNU tar or GNU cpio, so there are absolutely zero --long-options. Some of their features are missing (but tar’s -O is implemented now), so it’s no replacement (but very well usable alongside it). The format called pax, committee-designed to replace ustar, isn’t yet supported ironically, but that’s on the TODO.

So, what do you think?

	tg@frozenfish:~/Debs/dists/sid/wtf/Pkgs/mircpio $ ll *.deb
	-rw-r--r-- 2 tg freewrt 78140 Aug 17 11:04 mircpio_20110817-0wtf2_amd64.deb
	-rw-r--r-- 3 tg freewrt 72262 Aug 17 11:00 mircpio_20110817-0wtf2_i386.deb
	-rw-r--r-- 1 tg freewrt 67446 Aug 17 18:21 mircpio_20110817-0wtf2_m68k.deb
 

Should I upload this to Debian proper?

As for the licence: 3-clause UCB (and 2-clause BSD, which is a subset of it), so no problem. I’m asking because the other package which I had been using for a long time and not uploaded, jupp, got uploaded recently (during DebConf) on user input (people wondered why it did not yet exist in Debian proper). I guess the old saying “if it’s not in Debian, it doesn’t exist” holds true in many parts of the OSS world.

It’s up to date wrt. standards btw, and lintian-clean save for two pedantic-class warnings (no upstream changelog file, no homepage link) which aren’t fulfillable (could link this wlog entry as homepage).

If you know Alioth you’re familiar with the software formerly known as SourceForge, formerly known as GForge, currently known as FusionForge. My employer both uses it and contributes to it, we run an adapted (mostly themed, prototyping new functions that often end up in FusionForge itself, and backporting functions from FF to our “production codebase”) version.

I’ve backported the extratabs plugin to appease project managers and other non-technical people while we move our codebase to FF 5.1, and I did so on an installed version of the plugin rather than the source because the latter was tightly integrated with rather heavy packaging style changes.

	[…]
	dh_builddeb
	# create fusionforge-plugin-extratabs binary package
	toplev=$$(pwd); cd plugins/fusionforge-plugin-extratabs; \
	p=$$(print -r -- $$(sed -n '/^Package: /s///p' C/control | head -1)); \
	v=$$(print -r -- $$(sed -n '/^Version: /s///p' C/control | head -1)); \
	a=$$(print -r -- $$(sed -n '/^Architecture: /s///p' C/control | head -1)); \
	d=$${p}_$${v}_$${a}.deb; \
	rm -f $$toplev/../$$d control.tar.gz data.tar.gz; \
	(cd control; find . | fgrep -v /.svn | sort | \
	    mircpio -oC512 -Hustar -M0x0B -Mgslash) | gzip -n9 >control.tar.gz; \
	(cd data; find . | fgrep -v /.svn | sort | \
	    mircpio -oC512 -Hustar -M0x0B -Mgslash) | gzip -n9 >data.tar.gz; \
	mirtar -M dist -Acf $$toplev/../$$d debian-binary cont*gz dat*gz; \
	rm -f control.tar.gz data.tar.gz; \
	cd $$toplev; dpkg-distaddfile $$d non-free/devel optional
 

The hardest part of extending debian/rules with that was to get the autobuild and dpkg-distaddfile call right. This works, even though I’d call it a temporary kludge. (No need to tell me I should have used && – I know. And I only shell out to mksh(1) because the “inner” part was already there from before, when I still used ar(1). This was slightly edited for the wlog.)

In the meanwhile, apt-extracttemplates can deal with SYSV style filenames in DEB files – on Debian sid, but not on Kubuntu hardy, which some people are using as Desktop OS still…

This year without our friends from Grml, but The MirOS Project (all two active developers and our Booth Babe gecko2@) will of course attend FrOSCon, nicknamed Froschkon, again.

We’ll have a pre-event meal time at my favourite Jugoslawian Restaurant on Friday (20:00 CEST) – contact me privately for the coördinates if interested. On Saturday and Sunday we’ll staff a booth and answer questions about the many projects we have (more or less) running, including but not limited to paxmirabilis (aka MirCPIO), The MirBSD Korn Shell aka mksh(1), jupp the editor, and developers’ private projects such as slowly undermining Debian or Google-Go. While slow we are still working on World Domination. And teaching people good shell programming by example code.

We might even bring CDs, but I’m still working on the ISO… last night’s build aborted because the OS grew a bit making the floppy image not fit any more. (Solution, drop ping(8) and rtsol(8), but re-add sf(4) and bce(4) now that they fit again.)

Sometimes, when you develop WUIs (Web UI), you really have to test them against a variety of browsers, not all of which are available for the operating system installed on peoples’ desktop PCs, or working in Wine. (For theming QA, Wine is also a #FAIL, but for technical QA, MSIE 1.5, 3.0, 5.02, 5.5, 6.0 work fine, and MSIE 7.0 can be used under rare circumstances.) In these cases, you use VMs running certain operating systems. One VM had an interesting idea of which hardware you can “safely remove” a couple of days ago when I was hacking it anyway:

(originally published on 2011-01-26, but reposting so the people on Plänet Debian can have some fun)

While helping a cow-orker setting up an encrypted hard disc (basically, putting / and swap into LVM inside cryptsetup, and /boot outside), mirabilos managed to discover an entirely new side of Kubuntu 10.10 on his voyage…

… wo noch nie ein Debian Developer zuvor gewesen ist… oder?

(Only a reboot helped at that point. Earlier, the dialogue box was shown only once, but upon re-entry of the partitioning clickibunti d-i tool, neither button did anything save redrawing this… interesting, informative and intuitive error message.)

The pictures are hypertext references to large versions. Of course, your photographer (me, although Samuel helped to set up the PocketPC’s camera application correctly, 10x) also had some Kruškovac ☺ (imported from Croatia into Bosnia)…

Of course we were not above closing Front Desk either ☻☺

jupp 3.1.17 uploaded today, mostly thanks to user input suggesting I improve things, especially the syntax highlighting. (Maybe more to come.) I like users who don’t complain but give helpful comments and send in patches even.

Since the Debian FTP masters complain that the NEW queue is empty for the first time in ages, I also uploaded jupp to Debian proper (got requests, several, from actual users – independent of each other). I originally thought I were the only user, it’s not worth it, maybe too close to joe (which segfaults a lot more and has some ugly things, so I cherry-picked the better features of it instead of rebasing jupp), but it’s had a package in mports (MidnightBSD ports) for ages, users submitted one to FreeBSD® last year and keep it updated, there’s even a WIP package in pkgsrc®, and who knows where else or how many people are using my OpenSuSE Buildservice package or have had installed the previous DEB package I uploaded to my play repo. So now I feel it worth to upload.

I even invested some major packaging rework, such as splitting the build-arch and build-indep parts from each other, and importing the upstream source into the packaging VCS, as I have learned in the “packaging with git” talk here at DebConf. (No guys, I will stick to CVS as git doesn’t give me anything.)

Been hot and dry today (although the sky is now back full of dark clouds), so I had a headache most of the morning until way past noon. Better now though, and I found a place where I could get Cevapi, which are really some sort of quick imbiss / fast food here (no Đuveč pirinač though, and she didn’t have any Ajvar nor did she speak any language other than the local, but that wasn’t a problem, only a bit dry because I didn’t give in and took the offered Ketchup). Bought a 1ℓ bottle of Kruškovac (from Hrvatska, though) and some small plastic glasses, then.

I wonder how many people would, now, be willing to give Bosna i Hercegovina a try as holiday region (which might have been the intent of having a Balkan DebConf). I’m sure I do.

To all attendees: the hotel will give you some kind of stamped hardpaper card which states where you stayed on the trip, and for how long – give that to the border guards when exiting Bosnia.

Sitting in Бања Лука, Република Српска, Босна и Херцеговина (Banja Luka, Republika Srpska, Bosna i Hercegovina) let’s just say the country is pretty nice. People are okay, the beer is not called “Nektar” by accident, and the Mark (subunit Fennig, funnily enough) is worth 1 DM. Price niveau is below Germany (even when we had the DM) in some things, below or at modern European in others. In short, very affordable. They don’t accept paper money though, it’s really hard to get coins in most places, and they only want those. The food is okay, and my hotel is very luxurious. It’s also got LAN.

The weather is not so nice at the moment though: raining a lot, and expecting 30°C too-hot sun in two days. And there are still no Geocaches in the area.

Anyway, DebConf is going on, I’m acclimating and trying to get people, faces, nicknames and realnames connected. And accents. (And pronunciation of names – for example, Ian differs totally from what I’d use.) We even have working wire network (LAN) most of the time ;-)

We’re indeed still working on resurrecting m68k, but that’s no news. More on that later, I’d say.

mksh R40b (nowadays with filled in user’s caveats (for R40, too!) and packager’s upgrade hints) has just been released. This is a should-have upgrade, fixing a number of – admittedly some obscure – bugs, changing things begun in R40, improving upon others. Thanks to the PLD Linux guys for spotting all these errors; thanks to them and phpnet.org both for adopting mksh so well.

I have also fixed a bug in nroff(1) which will lead to an even nicer looking HTML manpage mksh(1) (after the next rebuild and upload of a MirBSD snapshot – scheduled RSN).

jupp 3.1.16 took on the task of merging Debian joe changes (aiming at an upload). I also split the jupprc file into three versions (2.8 generic/DOS, 3.1+jupp and 3.7/Unix) because of the differences in the baseline executables making rc files partially mutually incompatible (think Insert key), annoyingly warning (think syntax, hmsg), or less usable (joe’s new menu system).

jupp 2.8.2 is a companion to jupp 3.1.16 – mostly because of the new help window “character map” ☺

Binaries for jupp should be updated RSN too.

Considering Banja Luka is arriving quickly, the “r” in RSN should be taken with a few grains of salt. I’ve also scheduled working on the pcc Debian package for the next future; updating lynx and maybe others like OpenSSH in MirBSD is also due; cvs(1) will receive more of my time, but before the next Upload I’d like to fix LP#12230 once verified.

Builds for Debian/m68k are also still running. I note I did in fact not manage to make a new base image, yet (but 2.6.39 kernels miss a patch, anyway, so waiting for 3.0 is ok). It’s still using gcc-4.4 because nobody tests gcc-4.6 and gcj-4.6 FTBFS due to SIGSEGV, but that’s ok in my books. rsyslog is broken but sysklogd works.

The #ksh|Freenode page finally got a well-deserved link to Planet Commandline. Throw more my way!

Acronyms and translations, too. (Got Norwegian and Rumanian covered in the meantime. No idea whether any RTL languages will work in that beast. But I’m young and need the money)

Since I’m writing a wlog entry anyway… let me thank Gunnar for a nice summary on the current Free Culture discussion; my comments on Nina’s site seem to be eaten, but let me support it fully, although, of course, I normally use a copycenter style licence, which is specifically written for general works of authorship under copyright law, not limited to software. I did in fact have that in mind. Maybe some people will like it (it’s less than one Kibibyte long) either generally or just for their everyday random musings (they can then keep CC-BY-SA for the “big works” if they so desire).

Wouter, grass background makes green headlines illegible. I’ve never liked, and never installed manually, cups either. (Benny tells me that Apple’s new version refuses to talk with a non-Apple cups, kinda defeating the whole idea I think.) Port 9100 is JetDirect (probably with an HP in front and some subset of ©®™ trailing) and just nice. (Being able to talk ESC/P with your printer like print '\033K\x07\0\x3E\x81\x99\xA5\xA5\x81\x3E' >/dev/lpa too rocks though, IMHO. Yes, mine can, and I still can. /dev/lpa is BSD.)

Kai, thanks for your vimrc lines:

	:highlight TrailWhitespace ctermbg=red guibg=red
	:match TrailWhitespace /\s\+$\| \+\ze\t/
 

Automatic removal is harmful, though – I just fell into the trap since jupprc contains needed whitespace at EOL… but manual removal (bound to ^K] in jupp) rocks. And I like that your solution uses such strong a colour – vim users are the single most represented offender group for actually leaving the redundant whitespace at EOL there, and it should hurt their eyes. (Sadly there is some vehement disagreement preventing them from inclusion in grml-etc-core – but that’s why I re-post them here.) Ah, and jupp can of course display whitespace visibly (although it uses ‘·’/‘→’, replacing the arrow with ‘¬’ if no UTF-8, not ‘»’), accessible with ^Ov.

Steve, want to put up a checklist for sites? We can “crowdsource” the… testing… to maybe get some interesting results…

Some other people would get more comments if they were idling in IRC (Freenode) or allow comments on their blog, specifically without too high an entrance barrier – OpenID is ok, but many other things, and ECMAscript, are not; but I can’t really say that loud because our wlog is static HTML compiled from a flat plaintext data source so it doesn’t allow such either. I often forget what I wanted to add if I can’t get it out quickly enough (especially at work). Sowwy…

Me like the cat picture postings (Amayita, Tiago, ¡Gracias!).

You might have noticed the release of mksh R40 recently, after more than a year of development. Well, stay tuned for both R40b (with accumulated fixes) and R41 (intent to speed up array handling a lot and prepare for what we postponed to mksh R42 now – associative, multi-dimensional arrays).

You should also upgrade, if you have not yet done so, to kwalletcli 2.11.

Finally, jupp 3.1.15 was left out to the world, including Minix 3 users this time, by special request of one of these on our mailing list. In addition to the MidnightBSD mport – which has been there in like forever – and the MirPort and the FreeWRT package, in December 2011 a user submitted it to FreeBSD® ports, and Benny is going to add it to NetBSD® pkgsrc® soon, he said. (He also updated their mksh source package. Thanks!) I’ve been asked by two people, independent from each other, when I’ll upload it to Debian proper, instead of the private-repo packaging. Maybe I should indeed do that, comments?

• √ Agreement to pay from company
• √ Going to drive with some apparently speed-loving brits
• √ Registration accepted
• √ Dienstreiseantrag prepared
• √ Sent that beast to the office ticket queue

So yes, this means I’m to what used to be Yugoslawia when I was there the last time, although in the Poreč region of Istria, Hrvatska.

(First posting to Plänet Commandline! Tag: pcli)

Vutral asked in IRC how to synchronise two shells’ environment while they’re running. As you may know, POSIX systems cannot change a process’ environment vector after it has been started, only the process itself can. Well, the shell can, and we’ll use a variety of things for this.

This trick assumes you have $HISTFILE set to the same pathname in both shells (obviously, they run under the same user). It uses export -p to render the current list of exported variables, then transforms the list from newline-separated to a single big one-line export statement.
Then it transforms all remaining newlines (which will be part of a single-quoted string, since that’s mksh(1)’s export format) into the sequence '$'\n'' which means: terminate current single-quoted string, append $'\n' and open up a new single-quoted string immediately; concatenate these three.
Now, $'\n' is just a fancy way of saying newline, and part of mksh because David Korn (yes, the Korn in Korn Shell) strongly suggested to me that this functionality be included – but, as we can see here, it pays off.
Finally, the so transformed string is prepended by unset \$(export); which, when executed, will cause the shell to unset (and unexport) all currently exported variables. The shell parameters that are not exported, i.e. not in the environment, are not affected by this code (except for $x and $nl, but… whatever).
This string is then passed to read -s (plus -r and clearing IFS to enable raw mode), which means, read into the parameter $REPLY (which we conveniently don’t use – but it’s trashed too, thus) but store into history at the same time.

Ah hah! Now, the persistent history feature comes into effect! After running the below statement in the “source” shell, switch into the terminal running the “destination” shell, press Enter once on the empty line (Ctrl-U to empty it if it wasn’t), then Cursor-Up (↑) to recall… voilà, an insanely large line with the previously created string sorta expanded… and press Enter again to run it. Now your set of exported parameters is the exact same (minus if you exported IFS, nl, x or REPLY) as in the “source” shell.

I’ve added extra spaces and a linewrap below, this is really just one big line:

Of course, this makes a nice function, for your ~/.mkshrc or somesuch.

*buntu Hardy kann zur Zeit nicht installiert werden (der Kernel (in main) dependet auf Pakete aus restrictet, das ist aber zum Installationszeitpunkt nicht aktiv und sowieso unfrei; und wieso ist eigentlich das hardy-updates Repo im d-i eingeschaltet und nicht erst hinterher?).

Lustiger aber: „Einige Pakete konnten nicht installiert werden. Das kann bedeuten, dass[sic!] Sie eine unmögliche Situation angefordert haben oder dass[sic!], wenn Sie die Unstable-Distribution verwenden, […]“

gecko2s Kommentar dazu nur, daß unstable bei *buntu stable heiße. Ich habs dann auf LTS korrigiert (ist nicht das erste Mal – und sowieso, wieso tauschen die in einer stabilen Version PostgreSQL-Majorversionen aus?) und dabei haben wir’s belassen: Debian unstable = *buntu LTS.

Naja, wie wir das letztens Simon gesagt haben (Upgrade innerhalb einer Version von *buntu auf einem Server hat grub durch grub2 ausgetauscht): Mit Debian wär’ das nicht passiert!

I’m online again. (In case you didn’t notice, duh…) Seems as if we (the Telco/ISP guy and me) just needed to look at it hard enough for it to go away – first he could dial in, using my account data, which I probably should change now, then herc with ppp(8) and pppoe(8) was working (although at about 50 KiB/s down, he showed me 508 KiB/s – a rate I had never achieved – with his WiXP), then I took my notebook, which worked with pppoe(4). Now herc’s working again. (Maybe altq(9) can explain the slowdown? Hm, from debian.netcologne.de I get 500 so it looks okay.)
But eurynome isn’t, oh the joy. Luckily, gecko2 who administers its host system just woke up.

Things we do want to see: the Telco/ISP guy accepting that I run MirBSD on a P-233MMX box with Hercules graphics card and a 9″ monitor with no comment other than considering its age (and that it usually runs 24/7) as partial cause for the bug. Thanks, Netcologne!

Things we don’t want to see:
Mar 26 10:40:02 blau /bsd: signal 11 received by (screen:16857) UID(2999) EUID(2999), parent (screen:19111) UID(2999) EUID(2999)
“Suddenly the Dungeon collapses!! - You die...” (luckily, I get it about once a year only)

ObCoffeeSpices: Marrakech (Cumin, Allspice, Cumin Aroma) – though, due to its relative strength compared to the others, the only coffee spice I have left. And another hint: pre-warming the coffee cup with hot water, so it doesn’t cool down too fast with the amounts of milk I put in, rocks.

I just wore the Squeeze Release (FOSDEM, Spacefun) T-Shirt to the bakery and got asked by a neighbour: “Oh, a Debian fan?” “Developer, even” – now imagine the typical “informed interested guy” talk for a conference booth of your OS of choice here. How proud he was to get his wife and himself Windows®-free at home; how he likes to tinker a bit (if he’s got any time left), which has become harder with Windows; how his time constraints have him at OpenSuSE currently but asked how squeeze is; and the usual complaints at places like $ork where they have to use Windows® and MSIE (apparently you can’t centrally manage Firefox, eh, good someone tells me, because that’s what we do…). Wow. Anyway, it’s spring, so people, wear your shirts. (Hrm, what do I make of the fact that this is my only Debian shirt – although I’m thinking how to get Tartan Trousers if money were no issue – and nobody had ever commented on my various BSD, FOSDEM, FrOSCon, etc. wear…)

Two DNF out of four geocaches, well… one was too muggled, the other was no longer there, judging from the previous visitors’ log entries. Cached with natureshadow and bought his book on how not to cycle across Germany.

CLT was a blast, and it’s refreshing to attend an event without having to drive a booth of our own. Talked to lots of people. Since the boss was paying, even did some mingling in that area.

My ADSL line has been hiccupping ☹

Will drive to Chemnitz now. Maybe meet me there. No booth, just visiting to meet everyone again, rather spontaneous.

Rhonda suggested I document how to use the LLS (Launchpad Login Service – their implementation of an OpenID provider) as Delegate, which basically means, you can put something up on your webpage, which can be a simple static (X)HTML page like mine (a /index.htm is especially nice, a /~user/index.htm works too), and use its URI and not https://launchpad.net/~me to login. For example, this often hides the LLS from view e.g. in blog comments, such as those where Canonical is being criticised ☺ – but it’s also yours, easier to type and to change if you switch service providers.

The basic idea is to go to your Launchpad user page and view its page source. Look for openid relation links in the header – on Rhonda’s the value we’re looking for is “cyLQbcp”, and you see it several times.

Now you put this on your web page:

	<!-- begin: OpenID delegation to LP -->
	 <link rel="openid.server" href="https://login.launchpad.net/+openid" />
	 <link rel="openid.delegate" href="https://login.launchpad.net/+id/cyLQbcp" />
	 <link rel="openid2.provider" href="https://login.launchpad.net/+openid" />
	 <link rel="openid2.local_id" href="https://login.launchpad.net/+id/cyLQbcp" />
	<!-- end: OpenID delegation -->
 

Of course, insert your, not Rhonda’s, ID. Do note that we don’t copy the X-XRDS-Location tag (that breaks things for some unknown reason), but otherwise, what we insert on our page is pretty much a copy of the info on the user page (maybe it’s a Delegate page, too?).

As usual, try at your own risk, bug Canonical if it breaks. It works with AO3, Gerrit Code Review, and others though (interestingly enough, better in Lynx than GUI browsers because I stay logged in across Lynx sessions (and just have to confirm sending “my information” to the accessing site), whereas I have to re-login to the LLS in every GUI browser session).

As with the LLS generally, “to access a site which is not recognised” is expected and worked on with low urgency (mostly cosmetical, I think).

mksh-current has just gained an experimental recursive parser for command substitutions, fixing RedHat BZ#496791 and decades-old complaints about the pdksh codebase, compared to AT&T ksh93. (GNU bash could also do the example, but not some other things mksh(1) parses fine now.)

This means that things like the following work now.

	# POSIX, should “always” work
	echo $(case 1 in (1) echo yes;; (2) echo no;; esac)
	# POSIX optional, works now in mksh, works in GNU bash
	echo $(case 1 in 1) echo yes;; 2) echo no;; esac)
	# GNU bash seems to choke on comments ending with backslash
	# a comment with " ' \
	x=$(
	echo yes
	# a comment with " ' \
	)
	# No non-recursive COMSUB parser can pass all of the above
	# tests and these below at the same time (some extensions)
	echo $(typeset -i10 x=16#20; echo $x)
	echo $(typeset -Uui16 x=16#$(id -u)
	) .
	echo $(c=1; d=1
	typeset -Uui16 a=36#foo; c=2
	typeset -Uui16 b=36 #foo; d=2
	echo $a $b $c $d)
	# the ‘#’ is especially tricky, that’s why the above cases
 

Next on my TODO is the complete rewrite of the read built-in command, as well as its documentation. I think that the (reduced) goals for mksh R40 will have been met by then, except porting to LynxOS and MPE, but we’re working on it, and re-testing Syllable and Plan 9). Of course, a release implies testing on a lot of the supposedly supported platforms, so it won’t be out “immediately”. Though, associative arrays have been removed from the R40 goals, so that I can at least get a new release out. Note that Debian and OpenSuSE Buildservice users have been provided with somewhat well-tested mksh-current snapshots for a while already, and Gentoo users can use the “live ebuild”; there’s always compiling from source too…

Warning: this is a rant against BSD (specifically FreeBSD®, but don’t let me get started on DragonFly, who think it’s wise to drop all shells except ash from the base system and rely on pkgsrc® – yay let’s compile a dozen packages just to get a shell with tab completion, not to mention boxen with no network access – for the task – although others seem to go into that direction too…; you know, there’s BSD, and then there’s FreeBSD…) – don’t like, don’t read.

If you want to change something in the BSD world, you gotta fork your own BSD – no other way around the thickheads. Ok, back then, I ran into a particularily thick one, but others tend to not be much better. Users share the thickness. If you want to change something in the GNU/Linux world, just make a package, have someone upload it, prod (or pay, Hanno got a Radler) people to do it, or just upload it yourself.

At the BSD booth at FOSDEM, despite me bringing the Windows® Mobile 6 Professional devive, strictly for Geocaching mind you, Macintosh boxen had a share of more than 50% – I didn’t manage to tip the scale. At the Debian booth, almost everyone had a “I want to buy a new laptop some day, but it just keeps on working and doesn’t break” pre-Lenovo IBM laptop. No hyping of Google either. (Last year’s CLT saw BSD people advocating pro-Schily – the guy with the broken encoding in his name – shockingly.)

Honestly, tcsh, FreeBSD® people? Sorry. While I agree that there is merit on having the same script and interactive shell, as someone has pointed out (copy-paste examples into the command line), there’s those zsh users who use mksh or GNU bash for scripting. Or just POSIX shell. And that’s with an interactive shell which can be used for scripting. On the other hand, the C shell (both csh and tcsh) cannot.

And what’s with pretending the accent gravis is non-combining, called “backtick” (such a thing does not exist); and advocating it? Sorry, if your csh/tcsh doesn’t handle the POSIX $(…) you should just drop it. (By the way, there is a convention that example command lines are prefixed with %  for csh and $  for sh (or #  but we write $ sudo  instead, these days). Use it. Or leave it. If you have examples that substitute another process’ output, be specific.) It’s funny to see how one person tries to defuse my arguments against csh by telling me “it’s just an interactive shell”, while the other argues that people copy-paste between them, to which that was my response. Read the thread!

And please, get your facts right. “I would prefer that the standard shell be at least Bourne-compatible.” You don’t want Bourne (“^” instead of “|” for pipes), you want POSIX. That GNU bash is called the Bourne-Again Shell in one of their usual semi-bad puns doesn’t help the global perception of such things any. Also, the root shell and /bin/sh are disjunct.

(Plus, why change the root shell, use sudo(8), plain and simple.)

ObNote: in jupp (should I package that for Debian, btw? rather upload, packages are ready…) the ‘`’ key is used as præfix for Ctrl-X (`X) or to directly enter numerical (decimal, octal, sedecimal/hexadecadic) ASCII, 8-bit or Unicode codepoints. Yay!
And even the FSF has seen the light; for a few releases already, GCC uses “'…'” instead of “`…'” for quoting in messages, even without locales. Great job there! (LC_MESSAGES=en_GB.UTF-8 usually works, too, though.)

ObDisclaimer: I have an (yes, Google…) Alert on the word “mksh”, so I know when it’s being discussed. This obviously includes certain fora. Also, I’m a shell implementer and bound to know a certain amount of details. Plus, mksh’s build script runs with pretty much any Bourne/POSIX/Z Shell which has functions and not too many bugs. I wrote it. Go figure. No lowly trolling.

FWIW, mksh(1) has the cat(1) builtin both because Android has no cat(1), and as speed hack. Almost all other shells have worse speed hacks, like a printf(1) builtin. And recently, builtins have become direct-callable, so this actually reduces the overall system footprint. (Its inclusion also provides for some other possibilities, internally.) And as two final side notes, if you haven’t seen this: determine which shell we are run under (CVS) and I still offer a prompt conversion service (send me any GNU bash or oksh $PS1 and I’ll send that to you in mksh(1) syntax – optionally with adjustments/improvements, like cwd uses only up to 1/3 of screen width).

Eh. Why does mksh built with (a patched: mkstemp(3) added) klibc work suddenly, unexpectedly?

To reproduce, I just uploaded mksh_39.3.20110218-1.dsc and you can run DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=mksh-static=klibc,dietlibc,eglibc dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot to verify it, once you have mkstemp(3). (I will probably send a smaller implementation of that in, later.) I have that and the open fix and the m68k patch applied, nothing else… where did my bug go?

ObQuestion: what’s the legal (copyright/trademark) status of the Atari logo (the one in rainbow colours, with three things going up, right and left “leg” looking like an umbrella stand’s)?

I just need to work more on bilocality. While I did find two geocaches, one at the South/Noon Train Station (taalverwarringen…), one in the buurt of the University, I did manage to miss the AW building completely and utterly. Wow. Except, that Haiku guy came over to talk for a bit (nice). And I drew. An Atari logo with swirl, for that weird stuff I recently have been found doing.

More mksh-current news coming soon, stay tuned. In the meanwhile, I met bonsaikitten IRL (at FOSDEM, yes, too) who kindly made a “live ebuild”, i.e. a source package building -current.

Finally let’s say a big thank you to the person mostly manning our booth, gecko2, and to Benny for talking to people, getting That Other Packaging Thingy working, and pimping the website a bit.

Dear Opera Software A.S.A.

It’s nice that you employ SecureAPT for your package repository, however, the effect is slightly lost by you replacing the key each year, never signing any of them, and putting them up on an http but not https site.

Update 18.08.2011 – please refrain from putting a file /etc/apt/sources.d/opera.list inside your binary DEB packages, as well. As a system administrator, we may very well have mirrored the binary packages, and do not want accesses to external APT repos, for a shitload of reasons. Honestly. (Lintian could warn about it…)

If you don’t get the message, please contact me. Or any of my fellow Debian Developers. Thank you very much.

❧ Who’s not? ☺ Same procedure as every year.

(okay, lolando prefers skiïng but…)

Anyway. A cow‐orker told me that Belgium again/still has no gouvernment, and they have been asked to grow out their beards until they do. I found “evidence” on the ’net but won’t link it here, also it’s on German… anyway. Let’s all join in. (Besides, I now have an excuse to not shave, maybe even my grandmother will accept this one…)

RT said on IRC that mksh will probably work on MSYS.

My Debian/m68k stuff is coming around nicely, but I still haven’t gotten around to do everything planned, plus I need to grow a new kernel and eglibc, after the latest uploads, and the 2.6.37 based one panics. Also I’ve got to take care to not overwork myself. (And make a MirBSD ISO for FOSDEM.) But hey, it’s been not working for some time and better now. And slow anyway ☺ yet we’re progressing. Does anyone know how to debug that a C programme only calling res_init(3) segfaults?

Benny is apparently not just working on making NetBSD® pkgsrc® available on MirOS BSD (picking up my work from 4+ years ago) but also replacing The MirPorts Framework with it. Sad, as I got a request for a gajim MirPort over a cocktail just this evening…

When doing porter uploads, one must not forget to pass -m"My Name <my@email.addr>" to dpkg-buildpackage, e.g. with --debbuildopts for cowbuilder. Thanks Aurélien and sorry to everyone who got the upload mails.

(How are the rules for sponsored uploads? I get conflicting info on these, and indeed, the one I sponsored never showed up on my QA DDPO page…)

I’m almost finished with “sort of re-bootstrapping” Debian/m68k (I can use etch-m68k as well as what was in unstable at the moment as dependencies, so it was not that much, still, 305 binary packages build from 84 source packages, most for unstable (very few for unreleased, with very responsive maintainers, thanks all, who will include the patches in their next uploads) is a bit… including rebuilds with newer versions, more patches, more testing or newer dependencies installed. I’ll probably upload on Sunday evening, as I’ll be off for 2-4 days at least from then (see below). Ingo tried to test on real hardware, but as Murphy wants a hard disc failed… we’ll still try to get something done over the weekend. If you want to have a look, see my repository index (sources.txt contains a sample sources.list file, 0-NOTE.txt some hints, including the right debootstrap/cowbuilder magic and speed tricks). I’ll need to learn how to use LVM and set up a buildd now…

I’ve not been in much of a hacking mood recently – all these visits to the dentist leave me in unrest and disturb my equilibrium. Hence, not much activity even in mksh even if there was need, almost none in MirBSD. This is only temporary, but I won’t attend OpenRheinRuhr, or, if I come at all, it’ll be for socialising only and probably only one day. Benny’s done with his Doctor (in France, no idea whether it’s one in Germany as well) of Chemistry and has returned to hacking some (World of) Google-Go(o) code. I expect MirBSD activity to slowly raise once we can come back. Please accept our apologies.

I’m currently working on something which will eventually amount to a re-bootstrapping of sorts of the Debian/m68k (Linux) port – patches to the Linux kernel, gcc, etc. are prepared (some have been accepted into upstream or the packages already). I will probably have more, once the compile processes finish, anyway (even emulated, it’s slow).

I think that, once I get past that TLS (thread-local storage, needed by eglibc) migration, I will try to find out a list of packages needed for debootstrap (AFAICT: all packages marked Essential, or of priority important, and all marked Build-Essential (for the *-builder variant), and their dependencies (although I’ll substitute sysv-rc with file-rc, which is better and needs less deps)) and pull arch:all from sid, then build the rest myself using a consistent snapshot of sid possibly with patches going to unreleased. Then I can use cowbuilder to make cleaner packages, which can eventually be uploaded (once I get enough to get a buildd running – kernel, bootloader, etc) – binNMUs are way to go here I suppose. I will only upload once it’s self-hosted, installable (seen by edos-debcheck), clean, etc. (i.e. I’ll rebuild all binaries) and probably keep a bootstrap repo around (until m68k caught up) so that unstable (possibly amended by unreleased for a while) will not again become uninstallable, e.g. if arch:all packages change their dependencies (Python, gcc-defaults are some I’ve seen). That bootstrap repository is needed anyway because debootstrap can’t install from two separate repositories (unstable+unreleased for example).

Progress is slow because I try to keep as close to official packages as possible, refuse to cross-compile, and try to produce uploadable if possible packages all the time. Getting patches into packages, so that I can build from unstable, instead of debian-ports.org unreleased, has proven time-consuming and occasionally frustrating as well. Although I would like to thank the people who helped me on the way already. (I am not naming any in fear of forgetting some, but you know who you are ☺) They are among the Debian (gcc, kernel, m68k) and Linux-68k crowd.

(Why does genattrtab in gcc-4.4 take 3½ hours when it took less than half an hour in gcc-4.3 anyway?)

I’m also still working on mksh and some Python ISO hacks for mika and some minor stuff, and further cleaning up MirBSD.

Well, did I mention dentists are sadists?

mksh was merged into Android (both AOSP and Google’s internal master tree) in the night 24/25th August, and is expected to be the one shell to rule them all, for Gingerbread.

mksh(1) now also has a cat builtin, for here documents mostly. It calls the cat(1) command if it receives any options. The shell is nevertheless smaller than yesterday because of improved string pooling.

There’s another reason to use the MirOS OPTU-16 encoding instead of PEP 383, on which I already wrote: try passing a wide-char filename to a function such as MessageBoxW, or create a filename on a system using wide chars, such as FAT’s LFN or ISO 9660’s Joliet, or one that only allows Unicode (canonically decomposed – ü → ü – out of all things) like HFS+. OPTU-8 at least maps to somewhat reserved codepoints (would, of course, be better to get an official 128 codepoint block, but the chance’s small of getting that in the BMP). Still.

Oh well, the torrents. I’ve remade them all, using one DHT seed node and OpenBitTorrent as tracker and put them on a very rudimentary BT page that will be completely redone soonish. Please re-download them. I currently do not believe f.scarywater.net will return.

Finally, I fell victim to a selling-out and may have just bought a Windows Mobile 6 based phone (Glofiish X650) and an SDHC card and an extra battery with double capacity. Well, at least it’s said to run CacheWolf well. I still would like to have something like Interix, Cygwin, UWIN, coLinux, or maybe some qemu-for-WinCE variant that runs Android, Maemo, Debian/armhf (or armel or arm) at near-native speed (and is usable – the device sadly doesn’t have a hardware keyboard, but it comes with SiRFstar Ⅲ GPSr). It only has 64 MiB RAM, like the Zaurus SL-C3200 and the jesusPhone, though. ☹ Any chance to get MirWorldDomination onto that device as well?

Tomorrow, eight years ago, is the date we now use as birthing point for MirOS. The thing is, we did not really want to create a BSD of our own, fork, or whatnot. We were mostly happy OpenBSD users (really happy before the first eMail exchange with its developers, where Theo de Raadt did indeed stand out but was not the only one – just the one with the authority to deny us), improved it locally and submitted patches and ports. We were flamed for that or, worse, ignored. I begun putting up my “OpenBSD patchkit” on my homepage (back then, at Tripod) and still tried to feed things to upstream and OpenBSD. Then, at some point, Theo de Raadt made it clear he did not want me and the patch kit had grown (from one 4M file into several of them), so I ended up doing a “cvs -d /cvs init” and went from there. Benny’s story is similar – he laughed at me while trying to get ports added to OpenBSD, then discovered his ports were added to the MirPorts Framework and getting commit access there was easier than getting some random developer to commit something of his to OpenBSD. (This trend ended there though… every single person I approached since has become OpenBSD ports committer – I wonder whether they used my invitation letter to blackmail Theo?) It’s often thought that there was a clash of opinions between Theo and me. I think while we might disagree in certain aspects or priorities things should have, in the end we both wanted the same thing, I just was promised to never become a member of the OpenBSD project, so it’s really just “them” being uncooperative. (They (Henning and others) did burn the T-Shirt I gave Theo as a gift some day for making OpenBSD what it was. I won’t comment on that, again, now.)

FrOSCon was a blast. I had two booths of my own – MirBSD and FreeWRT – as well as shares of Debian and Grml. Well, MirBSD was run by Benny and gecko2 because I just didn’t have any time for it, despite XTaran’s help with the FreeWRT booth. All I did was the initial setup of both booths, while at the same time answering about three questions regarding FreeWRT in parallel. Wow. What a little small, open hardware can do to you. XTaran and I had fun and we’ll do FreeWRT booths again; I managed to flash my two FON2100 devices (“La Fonera” – the FON2200 can use the same image, says nbd of OpenWrt) and will fix the port’s remaining few bugs I found; XTaran will try to push the WL-500gPv2 development. The social part was nice as well, although I think the greek restaurant in the city will not be visited by me again. Anyway, if you didn’t attend FrOSCon, your own fault…

Since the BitTorrent tracker used by MirOS is down, here’s the link to the [updated 2010-08-28] current (FrOSCon 2010 Edition) snapshot’s torrent, Triforce as usual. We’ll probably rewrite torrent files for all our ISOs and publish them on the MirBSD website. I’m currently considering OpenBitTorrent plus one or two DHT seed nodes with no statistics. Maybe with webseed. (Need to update the libtorrent/rtorrent MirPorts first, though…) Other options would be different trackers or running one of our own. I will announce the outcome as news entry, once done.

On the plus side, the review process of mksh(1) in Android continues, and I fixed the realpath builtin to behave even more POSIX-ish.

The FrOSCon 5 - 21./22. August 2010 booth plans have finalised, I am rather content:

	┌──┐              I ❦ STANDPLAN FROSCON 2010
	│ F│reeWRT
	├──┤
	│ M│irBSD
	│  │
	├──┤
	│ D│ebian
	│  │                 C = Collectd
	├──┼────┐
	│C │   G│rml
	└──┴────┘
 

This is especially good, as XTaran will be shared among (at least) Debian, Grml, FreeWRT; same for me plus of course MirBSD; kimnotyze is FreeWRT but may help with MirBSD; benz and gecko2 probably are MirBSD but gecko2 could help with FreeWRT, tokkee was interested in FreeWRT too… anyway.

Some days, you just love software.

	Aug  6 13:55:01 blau firesomething-bin: stack overflow
	    in function VFY_EndWithSignature
	Aug  6 13:55:01 blau /bsd: signal 6 received by
	    (firesomething-bi:1146) UID(2999) EUID(2999),
	    parent (sh:9059) UID(2999) EUID(2999)
 

Thus, let me reïterate it for all of you:

Well, now that the Debian Release Managers have sent their freezing bits around… *shudder*… Squeeze is frozen. Well, at least everything I have my hands in has migrated. I’m still… not persuaded. I also can’t decide which looks worse (KDE 4 or Win 7), tending towards KDE 4…

Why does all the horrid software (Solaris, Java™, OpenSSO, MySQL, etc.) tend to end up at Oracle at the moment? Let me quote from some Debian mailing list:
>>What happened to the Unix philosophy?
>Modern Solaris engineers
Is that similar to high-speed horse carriages?

My RPM repository has been pimped a bit – I ported some stuff from my DEB repository and updated them in both (rdate(8) and ntpd(8), specifically). Still ought to work more on them, but currently MirBSD base is most important, although I’m dying for mksh associative and multi-dimensional arrays, as well as more sh(1) conformance assorted bug fixes.

Well, there’s a life besides the computer. I’ve taken today off, wanting to hack on MirBSD’s most urgent problems (but probably end up doing that tomorrow), slept long, and will meet with cnuke@ and gecko2@ for Greek style dinner. The latter will almost certainly end up with a long-time work contract at the same place where I run a lot of things already, so congratulations. In the meanwhile, bsiegert@ has almost become a Doctor of Chemistry, and my brother’s finished his Maths and Economics diploma.

Also, I’ve put up the logo of the company where my new dedicated server is hosted; they reduce the monthly fee in exchange for this, so humour me and pay them a visit. They’re IPv6 pioneers, actually. (The server is now installed but not completely set up yet, and I have yet to begin moving services; it’ll be better than the VM eurynome is, but the clock could use the new timekeeping subsystem in the kernel as well as socket send (ÆrieBSD) and receive timestamps as it’s off by 0-1000 ms.)

Speaking of kernel stuff, yesterday I considered moving wscons(4) to UTF-8 again (since everything is CESU-8, we need to take raw octets into account also). I’ve seen OpenBSD begun importing Citrus… *shudder* Anyway, that’s my part, but I’d like volunteers for backporting things like the timekeeping stuff (and possibly more hardware support), and writing a pivot_root like thing (explained on some mailing list already) so we can use ramdisc root to do loopback root.

FrOSCon 5 - 21./22. August 2010 is approaching rapidly. I’m a bit envious at some of the tracks (I mean, really, geocaching (ok, I did the surrounging caches over the last years but still), learning python by means of game programming, etc. really sounds interesting – and I know people who could benefit from a non-kids version of that as well) but this year’s FrOSCon is nothing for me to curse about either: I managed to get both a booth for The MirOS Project (MirBSD, mksh and other subprojects) as well as one for Waldemar’s FreeWRT (although wbx@ – if he comes – won’t join there since he forked his own fork since its conception). Booth staff are, currently: tg@ and bsiegert@ (Developer), gecko2@ (Staff) for MirOS, tg@ and “XTaran” abe@ (Developer), kimnotyze (Hacker) for FreeWRT. (XTaran will probably be helping Debian/Grml too.) This year, it’ll be my job (after 2 years of aptituz) to keep the Altbier-Fraktion watered, I’m thinking one crate of Schlösser Alt and one crate of Hannen Alt?

Have a look at the Program and don’t tell me you won’t come! It will rock! (Except there won’t be Formorer’s Chilli, but that’s no reason, there’s enough other stuff in manageable distance.)

Besides interesting booths and talks, FrOSCon is still looking for helpers who will not only get free entrance but also catering during operation.

Well, I suppose I should be happy that mksh is actually used…

• [tg] Correct shf buffer I/O routines to avoid a memory corruption bug discovered by Waldemar Brodkorb and other bad effects
• [tg] Fix NULL pointer dereference during iteration loop when checking for alias recursion; discovered by Michal Hlavinka

That’s OpenADK (Waldemar’s fork of FreeWRT, which is Waldemar’s fork of OpenWrt), and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, respectively. Popcon in Debian and its derivates is also pleasant.

I could use some help bugfixing this though:

	(sleep 3; exit 12) &
	bgprocpid=$!
	sleep 6
	# background process is done by now
	wait $bgprocpid
	# POSIX mandates that, since $! was asked
	# for, wait is to reply its errorlevel

Somehow, JF_KNOWN is never set – and I can’t debug this with gdb(1).

(There’s also a dashism in some *buntu start scripts that does pretty much the same except it uses “wait %1” there. In fact it doesn’t even seem to use $! – no idea whether we can support that at all in a POSIX shell – which dash clearly isn’t… – without keeping track of background processes forever.)

I’ve got some interesting results using r1.1 of an example test programme (r1.2 got cleaned up and more output) on various systems, regarding ASLR. The 1.1 revision tests everything mksh R40+ will use (except there will probably no larger than page sized allocations) for its LCG PRNG. On OpenBSD (MirBSD, ÆrieBSD) malloc(3) uses in fact mmap(2), which is randomised. (Though -pie doesn’t yet work as it’s supposed to.) Some OSes are better than others… but look for yourself. (Read on to continue, not part of the RSS for size reasons. This wlog entry may be updated – with bumped date – unperiodically.)

MirBSD-current/i386

tg@blau:~ $ mgcc -static x.c
x.c:0: note: someone does not honour COPTS correctly, passed 0 times
x.c: In function `foo':
x.c:27: warning: function returns address of local variable
tg@blau:~ $ ./a.out
0xa9332000 0xaba65000 0xa0ae7000 0xcfbed990 0xcfbed994
tg@blau:~ $ ./a.out
0xa91b4000 0xa02b1000 0xa1602000 0xcfbf8680 0xcfbf8684
tg@blau:~ $ ./a.out
0x9f731000 0x9cb2a000 0xa94ca000 0xcfbf5840 0xcfbf5844
tg@blau:~ $ ./a.out
0x9c2af000 0xa6a0b000 0xa4ce1000 0xcfbefac0 0xcfbefac4
tg@blau:~ $ ./a.out
0xa3b61000 0xa96de000 0xa96df000 0xcfbedcc0 0xcfbedcc4

Debian Ätsch/i386

tg@frozenfish:~ $ gcc -static x.c
x.c: In function ‘foo’:
x.c:27: warning: function returns address of local variable
x.c: In function ‘bar’:
x.c:33: warning: function returns address of local variable
tg@frozenfish:~ $ ./a.out
0x80b2a20 0x80b2a30 0xb7745008 0xbf985ce0 0xbf985cd4
tg@frozenfish:~ $ ./a.out
0x80b2a20 0x80b2a30 0xb7726008 0xbfb911b0 0xbfb911a4
tg@frozenfish:~ $ ./a.out
0x80b2a20 0x80b2a30 0xb7784008 0xbf83d040 0xbf83d034
tg@frozenfish:~ $ ./a.out
0x80b2a20 0x80b2a30 0xb77e8008 0xbfc0f840 0xbfc0f834

tg@frozenfish:~ $ sid
I: [sid chroot] Running command: “mksh -l”
tg@frozenfish:~ $ gcc -static x.c
x.c: In function ‘foo’:
x.c:27: warning: function returns address of local variable
x.c: In function ‘bar’:
x.c:33: warning: function returns address of local variable
tg@frozenfish:~ $ ./a.out
0x80c86a8 0x80c86b8 0xb77c3008 0xbfaa1900 0xbfaa18f4
tg@frozenfish:~ $ ./a.out
0x80c86a8 0x80c86b8 0xb77d2008 0xbfcc0260 0xbfcc0254
tg@frozenfish:~ $ ./a.out
0x80c86a8 0x80c86b8 0xb77c1008 0xbfbe2120 0xbfbe2114

uname: Linux frozenfish 2.6.18-6-686 #1 SMP Fri Feb 19 23:40:03 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux

Solaris 8/sparc64

tg@stinky:~ $ gcc -static x.c
x.c: In function `foo':
x.c:27: warning: function returns address of local variable
tg@stinky:~ $ ./a.out
595f0 59bf0 59d00 ffbefbb4 ffbefb5c
tg@stinky:~ $ ./a.out
595f0 59bf0 59d00 ffbefbb4 ffbefb5c
tg@stinky:~ $ ./a.out
595f0 59bf0 59d00 ffbefbb4 ffbefb5c
tg@stinky:~ $ gcc x.c
x.c: In function `foo':
x.c:27: warning: function returns address of local variable
tg@stinky:~ $ ./a.out
20950 20f50 21060 ffbefb3c ffbefae4
tg@stinky:~ $ ./a.out
20950 20f50 21060 ffbefb3c ffbefae4

MidnightBSD/amd64

mirabilos@stargazer:~ $ gcc -static x.c
x.c: In function 'foo':
x.c:27: warning: function returns address of local variable
x.c: In function 'bar':
x.c:33: warning: function returns address of local variable
mirabilos@stargazer:~ $ ./a.out
0x800603080 0x800605040 0x800700000 0x7fffffffe62c 0x7fffffffe62c
mirabilos@stargazer:~ $ ./a.out
0x800603080 0x800605040 0x800700000 0x7fffffffe63c 0x7fffffffe63c
mirabilos@stargazer:~ $ ./a.out
0x800603080 0x800605040 0x800700000 0x7fffffffe62c 0x7fffffffe62c

uname: MidnightBSD stargazer.midnightbsd.org 0.3-CURRENT MidnightBSD 0.3-CURRENT #1: Thu May 27 22:13:45 EDT 2010 root@stargazer.midnightbsd.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC amd64

Debian sid/mipsel

(QEMU, thanks to Aurélien! Debian unstable from approx. Jan 2010)

root@debian-mipsel:~ # gcc-4.4 -static x.c
x.c: In function 'foo':
x.c:27: warning: function returns address of local variable
x.c: In function 'bar':
x.c:33: warning: function returns address of local variable
root@debian-mipsel:~ # ./a.out
0x4aa740 0x4aa750 0x2aaa8008 0x7fa417e8 0x7fa417d8
root@debian-mipsel:~ # ./a.out
0x4aa740 0x4aa750 0x2aaa8008 0x7fc67708 0x7fc676f8
root@debian-mipsel:~ # ./a.out
0x4aa740 0x4aa750 0x2aaa8008 0x7fb68238 0x7fb68228
root@debian-mipsel:~ # ./a.out
0x4aa740 0x4aa750 0x2aaa8008 0x7fc586c8 0x7fc586b8

uname: Linux debian-mipsel 2.6.32-trunk-4kc-malta #1 Mon Jan 11 03:45:08 UTC 2010 mips GNU/Linux

Gentoo GNU/Linux on amd64

gcc-4.4.4, glibc-2.11.2-r0, 2.6.35-rc4 x86_64

0x20cc010 0x20cc030 0x7fef0c497010 0x7fff32148fec 0x7fff32148fec
 0xa35010  0xa35030 0x7f575d0e4010 0x7fff0dd7220c 0x7fff0dd7220c
0x1f90010 0x1f90030 0x7f8657107010 0x7fff6116813c 0x7fff6116813c
 0x9dd010  0x9dd030 0x7f1eab0a6010 0x7fff3dcc638c 0x7fff3dcc638c

Conclusion

Not everyone does ASLR… but there’s enough variety (and with eglibc’s AT_RANDOM even proper entropy) inside for our purposes. On OpenBSD and MirBSD, we’ll still use KERN_ARND as it’s extremely cheap entropy (code paths checked on both) but not for every call of $RANDOM. On things like Debian/m68k mksh(1) ought to have gained a possibly noticeable speed-up.

Bordeaux was very nice (and towards the end much cooler… it’s actually hotter here at more than 50½° north – too warm to think, or do anything) but the LSM/RMLL was very french. They’ll be in Straßburg and Lüttich the next two years so we can probably be expected to attend. I don’t think I can eat duck (which, in south-west france, is a vegetable) or like all that classic french multi-course food so much, but I had enough Couscous Merguez and Thé à la menthe fraîche… and similar good stuff. Many people spoke English and actually asked me whether I do (probably they couldn’t bear me trying to spea^W^W^Wbutchering the language of the Grande Nation) and in general were a friendly bunch. I did see some people with machine guns in the city on the last day, though. No idea what/why… didn’t dare asking ☻

Just another reason to boycott flying: Mario Lang (one of the speakers) was apparently held on the airport and treated as a terrorist due to his Braille line… they thought it was a bomb or somesuch thing.

Read on for more…

Travelling with the Thalys and TGV was nice (but I loathe the Métro parisienne… they should build a ring train like the Berlin S-Bahn and just put another stop before Paris Nord and Montparnasse for people who just want to switch trains to take the ring train to the other line). And I want air conditioned trams in Germany too!

I met Uriel (invited him for some food and talked lengthy with him and some 9grid guy), XTaran (who was rather busy organising things), and a number of other people. Did some PGP keysigning as well. There’s now an experimental MirOS presence at Launchpad, not sure what exactly we’re going to do with it but, as Canonical does not care (as Jonathan said in his talk – great slides, by the way, really impressive), there’s no harm in having it. Some Perl guy from America (USA… just to make sure ☺) wanted a photograph of me with a sign “I love CVS” just so people back at home would believe him he’s met such a person *grins* of course I plugged in a little advertising but cvs(GNU) is honestly good. The forge hacking session was a little under-visited (but still a success in terms of getting more communication and maybe collaboration underways, especially thinking of common interfaces, DC, semantic web, OSLC-CM) and since the room was (in contrast to my hotel room and the trams!) not air conditioned we didn’t get much hacking done. The Debian booth was about 40% of one FOSDEM style table wide… and subsequently crowded. There were more people (of course, I was trying to get mksh into Haikuports, Mandriva, and other things; talked about KDE 3.5.11 (Trinity), Qt 3 vs Qt 4, and kwalletcli, and in general to a not-so-usual bunch of suspects – like I said, LSM/RMLL really is pretty french-only).

It is too hot, but I still committed src/etc/rc,v version 1.110 which you want to upgrade your /etc/rc to before upgrading mksh(1) in MirBSD. (All in the name of better performance on platforms such as Debian/m68k and not raiding Linux’ inferior RNG… but it does simplify things.)

I could probably write more but at the moment just want to lie down and die until it gets cooler… even the rain didn’t help. My feet hurt (Montparnasse-Bienvenue didn’t help) too.

The current version of mksh had use of arc4random(3) removed, including “set -o arc4random”, to speed it up (on some architectures, a lot) – this will break some existing scripts (such as /etc/rc *cough* on MirBSD…). Hence I decided to publish the next version of mksh(1) as R40 based upon current development, and defer plans for associative arrays (and multidimensional arrays) for mksh R41. There’s also already the change to Build.sh arguments, so this suits me quite fine.

(Read: if running MirBSD, don’t upgrade mksh at the moment.) There will be a new MirBSD snapshot once this is fixed, maybe a few more changes to the shell for better POSuX compliance, and the recently mentioned patent on LFNs (long filename) in FAT will be taken into account with a patch to msdosfs.

I’ll travel to LSM/RMLL 2010, the Libre Software Meeting (Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre) tomorrow until the weekend, to hack some on FusionForge (this is worktime for me), visit XTaran, Uriel, and maybe a couple of other “usual people”.

Thundersday, between 10:00 UTC and 12:00 UTC, eurynome will be shut down by gecko2@ due to power supply maintenance on the host system data centre.

We have a new mirror in the Americas, thanks a lot to Mike 'Fuzzy' Partin! Benny will mention it on the webpages once it’s working.

Wenn Du denkst, MirBSD wäre langsam und sein Installer in irgendeiner Art und Weise doof, dann installiere mal Debian (etch, neuere Versionen können nur noch sun4u und sun4v, kein sun4m mehr) auf einer SPARCstation 20.

Lahm wie Sau, das Teil. Und der Installer ist schwarz auf weiß – was nicht so schlimm wäre, wenn der Cursor (und die dialog-Markierungen) nicht ebenfalls schwarz auf weiß wären…

Ich bin ja mal gespannt, ob das durchläuft.

In response to a planet.d.o series (mentioned in #grml on IRC) of postings: In a sensible shell, Esc+# not only pushes it back but also re-enables the command. Try it out: l s Esc # Cursor-Up Esc #

tg@blau:~ $ #ls
tg@blau:~ $ ls

The command sticks in the history, and is not immediately shown in the next interactive input line, which I consider a plus in most use cases. Anyway, try mksh (just a-g i it), there are a lot of goodies. I found out about Ctrl-O only a year or so ago myself…

I wonder why schizo didn’t write about how to do it in posh tho ☺

Some things are ugly.

Waldi’s suggestion fails.

db4.6_upgrade: Program version 4.6 doesn’t match environment version 4.4
db4.6_upgrade: DB_ENV->open: DB_VERSION_MISMATCH: Database environment version mismatch

Can’t start it manually.

debian-sks@dev:~$ /usr/sbin/sks recon
Fatal error: exception Bdb.DBError(“Program version 4.6 doesn’t match environment version 4.4″)

The log only shows:

2010-05-09 16:59:29 Opening log
2010-05-09 16:59:29 sks_db, SKS version 1.1.0
2010-05-09 16:59:29 Copyright Yaron Minsky 2002, 2003, 2004
2010-05-09 16:59:29 Licensed under GPL. See COPYING file for details
2010-05-09 16:59:29 http port: 11371
2010-05-09 16:59:29 Malformed entry
2010-05-09 16:59:29 Malformed entry
2010-05-09 16:59:29 Malformed entry
2010-05-09 16:59:29 Malformed entry
2010-05-09 16:59:29 Malformed entry
2010-05-09 16:59:29 Malformed entry
2010-05-09 16:59:29 Malformed entry
2010-05-09 16:59:29 Malformed entry
2010-05-09 16:59:29 Malformed entry
2010-05-09 16:59:29 Malformed entry
2010-05-09 16:59:29 Malformed entry
2010-05-09 16:59:29 Malformed entry
2010-05-09 16:59:29 Malformed entry
2010-05-09 16:59:29 Opening KeyDB database
2010-05-09 16:59:29 Shutting down database

The solution is ugly as hell, too:

root@dev:/ # su – debian-sks
debian-sks@dev:~$ cd DB
debian-sks@dev:~/DB$ db4.4_checkpoint -1
debian-sks@dev:~/DB$ db4.4_recover
debian-sks@dev:~/DB$ db4.4_archive
log.0000002839
log.0000002840
log.0000002841
log.0000002842
log.0000002843
log.0000002844
log.0000002845
debian-sks@dev:~/DB$ db4.6_archive -d
debian-sks@dev:~/dump$ cd ../PTree/
debian-sks@dev:~/PTree$ db4.4_checkpoint -1
debian-sks@dev:~/PTree$ db4.4_recover
debian-sks@dev:~/PTree$ db4.4_archive
debian-sks@dev:~/PTree$ db4.6_archive -d
debian-sks@dev:~/PTree$ logout
root@dev:/ # /etc/init.d/sks start
Starting sks daemons: sksdb.. sksrecon.. done.

Wow, our internal keyserver works again. Thank you, Debian…

This solution courtesy of Uwe Hermann, although it was for Suckwürstchen.

Quite surprisingly, I’ll attend the Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2010 in Eastern Germany. This is a happenstance, I managed to get fast transportation (via my boss) and accomodation (in a hotel). I will try to help staffing the booth of Debian this time (so I cannot be called Traitor any longer). Schedule, due to the spontaneousness of this, no, though. I may not even be there on Sunday, dunno…

No RCBD (or night) though, some real life and a new release (with fix of an FTBFS-on-hurd-i386 bug) though:
RMD160 (/MirOS/dist/mir/makefs/makefs-20100306.tar.gz) = f65bd8ef5cf3306a9112587dd4915b6255e479fe
This version pulls in NetBSD® changes (Acorn Archimedes support, for one), but I’ve also coded support for boot-info-table (J�rg compatible), as well as setting the PVD dates (used by GNU GRUB 2 for “UUID”s).

On MirBSD, cdio(1) can now be used to burn (TAO) and blank (quick) CD-RW media (I backported some OpenBSD changes) too.

My ex-AM now sort-of mentor Zack asked for help of an Autoconf/Libtool guru with an RC bug... well, The MirPorts Framework taught benz and me, under consumption of a bottle of wine, how to deal with that stuff. So I've fixed #559822 (CVE-2009-3736, another of them...) and NMU'd.

Sort of a PITA, considering gettextize runs interactively, and there's a lot of files to remove in debian/rules:clean for a double-build to not add nonsensical files to the .diff.gz; but I did it in the end.

Yes, my rant was more against the things I encountered during keysigning, not keysigning itself. However, I still feel X.509 doesn't have these problems, and nothing I can think of will persuade me to think PGP/MIME better than Inline PGP. (Especially when the recipient's key contains a notation that he wants the latter, but not the former.)

Jonathan does have some good points about the (PGP) Web of Trust.

Again, that wlog entry of mine was a rant; I had let the topic stew over night, trying to get the anger out, but on the next day it just wanted to get out of me, I merely wanted a good old rant. I think I'll not include Planet Debian next time I do rant, though (it's not the place to do so).

The Command-Line Interface for the KDE Wallet, Version 2.02, has been released and dput into Debian unstable. (The lenny-backports version will follow.) It took me quite a while to reproduce, then track down, the bug; having unrelated problems at the same time didn’t help either…

Update: This wlog entry uses aggressive tone because I somehow needed to vent frustration from using some of the tools. I should probably provide some constructive critics, too... but this is a rant. Be warned.

Keysigning is useless. I boot up a suitable live GNU/Linux system, install signing-party, take the trouble that is to set up caff, transfer my secret key from the secure box, sign. I think caff providing the keys in a different order than they're given on the command line sucks and just run caff once per key. I did even start Postwreck. But no, people just don't accept any mail from "EHLO grml" systems, and I still cannot control my reverse DNS despite having a static IPv4 address (and IPv6, which looks to be unused). People also pretend I'm on dial-up. Great!

I will no longer participate in any (mass) PGP keysigning but will continue to do so on a per-person basis. Probably sign but one uid, either apply common sense and upload it to t̲h̲e̲ keyserver, or mail the entire signed key to one address.

By the way, how crazy is it that I need to use the deprecated $CONFIG{'mailer-send'} to pass an envelope-from to the mailer? It also suffers from the same delusion as e.g. nmudiff, namely that my Debian box is a fully set up workstation able to send out eMail and configured correctly. At least, it, unlike a number of others, does not assume I use mud (Mutt). grml…

Oh, and caff does a protocol violation (by always sending out GnuPG/MIME and not offering the standardised Inline OpenPGP), I think people just don't care about such. (There is a notation people can use to signal they want PGP/MIME, Inline PGP – which is called "partitioned" – or both (and which order of priority) but, alas, despite Inline PGP being the only one useful for the MUAs without integratin, and being more widely spread than that PGP/MIME crap, the followers of the latter do some (FSF-style?) kind of vendor lockin by not speaking anything else.

Anyway. I'm all for X.509 except there seems to be no sane CA (Startcom is... trouble, even with Opera; CAcert.org is dying). I'll just buy a certificate (not from Verisign though) for www, and roll my own again (I can do it, I have experience with that actually).

On an unrelated side note, still waiting for an OpenSSL patch for that recent TLS extension...

ObRant: password policies, be they required characters or any kind of length restrictions, suck. People I will eventually end up with less secure passwords on such systems, because even if some of mine may appear to be derived from some kind of dictionary (what language that is I'd be interested in, though...) they aren't, and I have my schemes. You got to have them with a gazillion of passwords used. And I probably will forget them more often (and sending them via eMail is also not a solution).

Unrelated notice: mksh R39c with bug fixes coming RSN.

(Updated 24.02. because I was, rightfully, told the language, and the title, were too strong. I also would like to excuse for going so low as to write an ad-hominem attack, which I've since redacted.

Yesterday, I arrived in Bruxelles, coming from the Issy/Paris FusionForge meeting which will be described more later by Roland on Plänet Forge. Please tell Ohlol if you use it, for more visibility.

There is a new inter-forge mailing list as well, see the info page. People from Coclico and the various *forges may want to subscribe there (forge developers, not so much users (hosters) or end-users (hosted project developers/users) though).

At FOSDEM, Benny and I (and maybe gecko2) will be running the MirBSD booth, so no Debian staffing for me, sorry. But I will be there. Also please do ask me about mksh – the MirBSD Korn Shell etc.

There are flyers in German (not updated), English and French too! (One of the *forge guys did install mksh(1) after reading it, in fact.)

Don't you people dare miss the two talks: from Benny about how to package with autotools and libtool correctly and from XTaran explaining Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. Benny's also famous for his talk about Painless Perl Ports with cpan2port; XTaran's famous for a whole bunch of other things.

I still have some catching up (wlog entries, keysigning, webpages, etc.) to do, please bear with me. I don't really have a proper work environment with me.

There's a chance I will not be attending the Beer Event in the Delirium Tremens café (last year's still remembered). Benny will certainly be there, though.

Could someone please order nice weather? I still need to eat some lunch and find a supermarket to shop for the weekend!

I got an eMail tonight. I guess this means I can say hello officially now. (Everything else is details, waiting and fixing some bugs and technicalities, or so.) Thanks to everyone involved, I learned a lot already. Oh, and I had a look into madduck's book (the old sarge edition, which I got for free recently) and found a nice graphic explaining what non-native English speakers (I even had Latin first, and 3 programming languages!) don't, from the Debian constitution.

Congratulations XTaran for making it as well, even visible on the website already!

Please don't file an "Please package mksh R39b" bug again, I am aware there's a new version ;-) as I'm upstream too. I'm just short of time at the moment, and I'd like to put out high-quality packages. Besides, the webpage needs fixing first (while the checksums and the changelog for the release are there, no proper announcement is yet, and I'd like, for this version, to add a "upgrading caveats" section, since due to bugfixes and better standards compliance some scripts need to be updated; some of the pdksh behaviour favoured Bourne over POSIX even!

The MirOS Project will have a booth at FOSDEM 2010, business as usual. If you thought otherwise, you’re crazy ☺

I know I should write a wlog entry about the BSP, write more, release mksh R40, fix the TaC of it and the kwalletcli webpage (thanks again, it’s now in Debian sid!) etc.pp but I also need to prepare an ISO for FOSDEM, etc. Heck, I should prepare a talk for FOSDEM, but I’m not going to. If I need to stand there and talk, I’ll talk, not hold a presentation. I’ll just see what people are interested in, talk about The MirOS Project, and improvise.

I’m busy, and there’s only so much computing you can do in a day. This does include the dayjob. At least, my NMUs are in Debian now and probably can help people (and I submitted info about other bugs too).

Anyway, watch the news in the months to follow… can’t talk about everything now.

Marc Fleury, JBoss founder joins the ranks of Tonnerre, me, and other people requesting that MySQL (and MariaDB!) please finally die. Everyone, don't even fork it. Use a real database instead. Or, at least, SQLite. Really.

We're going to FOSDEM 2010 (of course – I've been at every FOSDEM that was not just an OSDEM, Benny and gecko2 are regular attendees as well, as are other projects of mine such as FreeWRT and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, by proxy). There will be a recent MirBSD snapshot I've yet got to build, with the new floppy format ustarfs (idea, but no single line of their stinking ridiculously huge code, stolen from NetBSD®) and other improvements (albeit less than I wanted to get done by then). The days before, I'll attend the first FusionForge meeting to break up the French Cabal, with my work hat on. That is also my first time in France (outside of the Elsaß). People, make a good impression on me to overcome the classic prejudices ;-)

This weekend I'm going to meet my Debian Application Manager zack, have some good beer (ugh... first this, then Paris, then good belgian beer...) and fix some bugs, all while learning even more. Sounds like fun, but I almost feel overwhelmed, in contrast to the years of much less travelling from my past. I've also started sort-of mentoring Simon, one of our apprentices at work, into the Debian processes. (On an unrelated side note, formorer recently said bpo will become bp.d.o soon. Great!)

Please don't laugh at this excuse for a webpage, as I've yet to fill it in, but my CLI for the KDE Wallet is hereby deemed ready for public consumption, with a bug-fix release 2.01 (bugs actually found during preparation of a port to Debian sid and KDE 4, which is much much worse than KDE 3, plus it looks so absolutely disgusting I'm not even sure Windows® Mistda is worse). I hope the package will end up in NEW soon (and once progressed to testing I may be able to make the KDE 3 variant official via lenny backports; my WTF *.deb repo will hold them until then.

There are more webpages I need to fill in... mksh's TaC, arc4random (which needs some major redesign as well) and BSD::arc4random, the RANDEX protocol (entropy exchange over IRC) and its plugins and patches, ...

Not just Mac OSX (and, I hope, iPhoneOS) will soon come with mksh(1), but also Android (I prepared patches to make it /bin/sh, which works quite well – although I need to find out how to make a hardlink so that #!/bin/mksh scripts will run) and Maemo, for which I wrote an mksh package in a garage project, which also needs some love w.r.t. testing on actual devices, menu integration, etc. (Please contact me if you can help with either of the three.) We also have «lewellyn:#ksh» making a package for the new OpenSolaris system (thanks again). People persuading Apple to put it on the jesusPhone are also welcome. (This does not mean I endorse any of these – right now, I'd probably get the most of a WinCE PDA with built-in GPSr, WLAN and maybe GSM/GPRS.)

English and French native speakers, please review, and Dutch native speakers may contribute a translation of, our flyers. (Source code for these is not available, sorry. Benny makes them in Quark on System 7 in Basilisk II, used to be Classic until Apple yanked it. But still, they use only free fonts, free imagery or such the MirOS Project is allowed to use, and beat every single other FOSS project flyer I've ever seen by far!)

There's probably more I could write, I bet I forgot half of it anyway, but I'll leave it at that for now. Get yourself a nice cup of hot chocolate, pour an Espresso into it, and enjoy the mix with a piece of cake (I'd say strawberry or mousse-pear but all they had was cassis-créme) and pity me for not knowing any French next month.

The MirBSD Midi-ISO (bi-arch manifold boot) and NetInstall for both i386 and sparc have been upgraded to the 20091226 snapshot (sorry for the delay). A separate news announcement will be done when a full ISO (MirBSD + MirGRML) is done.

Other than that, I have fixed a couple of things all over the place, jupp for example. The planned release of mksh R39b is still not done though, as I’m only human as well, and too much hacking isn’t something one can do without relaxing some in between.

On the Debian front, my RCBD #1 was continued, here’s #1½ results:

• Carry over from day #1
• 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
• New ones
• bug #563522 – acorn-fdisk – cleanup patches
• bug #563525 – gidentd – cleanup patches

Explanations: I did go overboard during the first patching session, but I suppose this is what the NM learning period is for too. The autossh maintainer said thanks and will probably integrate my patches, so I don’t need to NMU. I could close the dietlibc bug. The other two didn’t look as good, I had to separate the fix for the RC bug (and other required fixes, such as ftp-master rejects – there were none though) and my other fixes; I submit the former as NMU diffs again and pointed Zack to the .dsc files, and opened the aforementioned two new bugs with the rest of the diffs, so the proper maintainers can take and apply them.

There’s questioning if gidentd should be removed (see the PR for more); the acorn-fdisk upstream (arm-fdisk it’s called there) is not actively developing but will receive patches; the autossh maintainer said thanks but I didn’t yet hear back from upstream.

The binutils as intel_mode bug was fixed upstream and in experimental for my case, but I had to reopen things because the variant documented in binutils-current still doesn’t work, so others (who use the new, more intel-like, syntax) don’t run into it.

Luk sent me a request to do more mipsel-FTBFS-due-to-toolchain-bugs workarounds. Will do (but can’t promise to do so before the upcoming BSP.

Robert Millan incorporated something like manifold-boot into GRUB 2, after I described it to him (the debian-bsd@ people are currently sorting out some heisenbugs with it, though). Now there’s three variants (but then, this helps spotting bugs that don’t appear in all implementations).

sendmail 8.13.4 is out, I wonder when OgreBSD will upgrade… I could do it myself again, but this time it’s not that urgent. Still waiting for the TLS extension, though…

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).