2007-12-02: Debian Policy 3.7.3.0
I've just done my first Debian Policy upload. Yay!
After some more prodding and more feelings of guilt, I finally decided to
just make the Policy upload happen without waiting for a sort of consensus
that meant I didn't have to make decisions. And then thankfully Manoj had
some time to do bug triage at the same time, and I think we got a pretty
good handle on all the outstanding bugs. I pushed through a few more
changes that I think are uncontroversial, fixed some final build issues
this evening, and uploaded the monster.
Uploads will get much easier from this point on, now that I have a basic
idea of how the process works. There are already some other changes that
are basically done and should be easy to get into the next release, which
hopefully won't take anywhere near as long. And we should start on the
DocBook rewrite.
2007-12-03: wallet 0.3
Okay, wallet should now be fairly feature-complete for what we need for the
initial release at Stanford. That unfortunately means that it only handles
keytabs and only with the features of our old leland_srvtab system, so a
lot of stuff is missing. But it's a start, and it means that we can start
using it.
The neatest new feature is support for default ACLs, so that wallet entries
can spring into existence as needed based on local site policy. I also
added ACL integration with our NetDB host management system and support for
MySQL as the underlying database engine, as well as better history,
auditing, logging, and other things.
You can get the latest version from the
wallet distribution
page.
2007-12-04: lintian 1.23.37
Wow, this was a huge lintian release.
Marc had a chance to do a ton of work before I started working on it, I
cleaned up a bunch of other bugs that struck my fancy, and there are also a
bunch of new checks and other changes for Policy 3.7.3. This is one of the
biggest lintian changes in a while, which means that lintian development is
proceeding nicely.
Now, off to play cards.
2007-12-05: wallet 0.4
Well, today was mostly a loss, but I did finish committing some changes I'd
been planning on doing for quite a while and getting a new wallet release
out that fixes some oversights in the last release. This release should be
good enough for internal testing at Stanford, although I still need to
write an administrative interface for setting it up in the first place and
doing metadata operations.
The main change in this release is my realization that I had no way of
combining NetDB roles with root instances, which made them useless for my
own group. Doh. But fixed now.
You can get the latest version from the
wallet distribution
page.
2007-12-06: lintian 1.23.38
This was a quick bug fix release to clean up some warnings, particularly
with packages using dpatch, and to not bother everyone who does a backport.
It's rather standard to do a quick bug-fix release after a major lintian
release.
My plan is now to do another feature release shortly after this version
migrates to testing, getting the bug count back under 100 again and
incorporating any simple and obvious contributions that show up in the BTS
by then.
After that, I think it's time for 1.24.0, finally. There are three things
I want to start working on: conversion of the lib directory to a regular
Perl module naming standard (so Lintian::* modules) that can eventually be
installed in the regular Perl module path, marking all tags for
severity/certainty/source and mapping that to the current
error/warning/info with more flexible options, and providing a Perl
interface to all checks for retrieving data out of memory rather than
constantly opening and re-reading files from disk.
We'll see how fast I can work on this. Thankfully, working on lintian is a
lot of fun and really rewarding.
2007-12-06: wallet 0.5
No matter how good the test suite, as soon as I actually install the
software and try to use it, I uncover a bunch of other issues. Most of
them were input validation being too strict, since I don't test all
protocol operations end-to-end. (I really should find a way to do that.
Added to TODO.) There were a few other fairly obvious bugs, though.
But now it's working, I can create and download keytabs, the default ACLs
work, and the ACL verification against NetDB works. So I'm very happy.
I'm about two months behind where I was hoping to be, but finally we can
start migrating towards really using this. I probably need to do another
quick release to include better client configuration and Kerberos support,
but that just sometime before Christmas break.
You can get the latest version from the
wallet distribution
page.
2007-12-07: lintian 1.23.39
Yeah, I'm going somewhat insane with the lintian releases this week.
I was going to wait for the previous version to propagate to testing, but
there were enough annoying bugs (particularly around false positives on the
new Section checks) that I felt like a new release was warranted. There
was also a big patch sitting in the BTS for better doc-base checks.
Those are both taken care of, and in the process I reorganized how spelling
checks are done (against a hard-coded table of common errors) and started
spell-checking the latest changelog and NEWS.Debian entries. That closes a
five-digit bug number! Rare that I get to do that. Ubuntu should also now
no longer need a separate version of lintian.
Now, I still need to send the long-term architecture message to the mailing
list so that people can vet it, but I plan on waiting to do more work for a
while. I should spend some time on Policy instead.
2007-12-08: lintian 1.23.40
Not done yet, and another release tomorrow. People keep finding additional
bugs that are rather annoying and produce a lot of false positives. This
time, I messed up precedence when merging the doc-base patch.
One more release is still needed to clean up more problems with desktop
files for KDE. KDE apparently doesn't use the same desktop file standard
as the rest of the world, so we need to add a few more exceptions. Bleh.
I'm a little frustrated by the desktop file checks; I'd rather stick with
the Debian menu in some respects, and I think the idea that there was a
standard for them was actually rather oversold. Ah well. It's mostly that
I had a scattered and somewhat frustrating day.
Maybe tomorrow I'll actually get back to writing and posting reviews, like
I was intending to today.
2007-12-11: lintian 1.23.41
Well, it's been out there for more than a day, and no one has reported any
show-stopper bugs, so maybe this one can finally be the one that migrates
into testing.
This release fixes more of the desktop file checks, and should clean up a
bunch more KDE warnings. It also should fix any remaining problems with
unescaped angle brackets in the tag descriptions.
2007-12-20: Almost to vacation
This year, I get the entire Christmas shutdown off. No being on call, no
work that I have to do, nothing. Stanford gets to cope without me. I'm
really looking forward to that; I need the time.
I do, however, have to work the rest of this week (although thankfully I
can do it remotely). I was going to work on documentation, but some work
on a new krb5-sync overflowed into today, and we're also working on fixing
the Debian OpenLDAP packages finally. So hopefully I'll get some work in
on that tomorrow, but none happened today.
krb5-sync still isn't out, so I can't upgrade the production KDCs tomorrow.
Oh well, it can happen after the break. Hopefully that release will be
out tomorrow; I ended up fixing more bugs than I expected to.
2007-12-21: Vacation
Made it.
Today was another rather brutal day, and I didn't get any of the work that
I had planned on doing at the end of this week done. But the week is over,
I'm now on vacation for the next twelve days and don't have to do anything
I don't want to do, and then I still have some time of working remotely
before I have to get back into the regular grind.
Don't expect to see a lot of me on-line for the next few days, except maybe
posting book reviews and the like. I need to get away for a little bit and
breathe.
2007-12-24: Happy holidays
I spent the day getting my mother set up with iTunes, quite successfully.
Apple still has a lot to learn about usability for the average person in
the area of error recovery and decent error messages. iTunes hanging
completely when it hits a CD that it can't rip is ridiculous. But they've
put a lot of effort into seamless integration, and it's quite nice in
pretty much every other respect.
I also turned a few more people onto kiva.org,
an Internet microfinance site that lets people make loans directly to
businesses in developing countries. I think this is a brilliant idea and
it's the charity that I've been the most excited about for the last month.
I just put more money into it today; it seemed like the season.
The time away from doing work has worked out quite well, even if I am
painfully aware of all the things out there that I could be doing. But I
think I'll be faster and more productive, and certainly saner, from having
taken a nice, long break.
Now it's off to read a bit more before I sleep. Enjoy the holidays,
however you do or don't celebrate them!
2007-12-25: krb5-sync 1.2
Finally got this released.
The previous version had an incorrect AFS call that caused it to leak file
descriptors and threads, which we've just been living with since I haven't
had enough time to finish testing and do the release, even though I fixed
it some time ago. I worked on this some last week and finished making the
AFS code optional, but I didn't get the release all the way out. Today, I
felt like doing something, so I cleaned up a few more issues and did the
release.
Besides those changes, there's also a new option to krb5-sync-backend to
purge pending changes after a user-provided number of days, which we use to
deal with the stranding of Kerberos accounts in the Registry.
This release also features completely new M4 files for Kerberos v4,
Kerberos v5, and AFS probes, which I'm now going to hopefully be able to
share between all of my packages without having to make code changes.
We'll see how this works; that was the original intention, but I didn't
manage to do it. But I think I have a better structure now.
I also redid the license file and headers for all the files following what
I set up for the wallet, which I quite like.
Someone else is now looking at using this code for a project, so hopefully
releases will be more frequent for a while.
You can get the latest release from the
krb5-sync
distribution page.
2007-12-26: Debian Perl work
I ran into a really annoying networking problem with Stanford's network
yesterday and managed to get myself rather worked up about it. I even woke
up annoyed about it, which was rather counter-productive. But I managed to
kick myself out of it.
Rather than doing various other things that I thought about doing, or
obsessing about problems, I ended up spending the day doing a variety of
work for the Debian Perl group. We have a bunch of packages that need
checking and uploading, and I hadn't done any group work in quite a while.
That was just what I needed today. Nice productive work that wasn't too
difficult.
After uploading several packages and fixing all the packages that had
broken maintainers that were confusing lintian (I need to also fix the
lintian bug), I wrote up my upload procedure and added that to the
group web site, along with
some updates to the quilt and subversion guides.
And then I was on such a good roll that I got a few other things done,
mostly around organizing my to-do list. I'm really happy about that.
2007-12-27: lintian web pages
Today was sort of an odd day. I think it counted as a "do whatever I feel
like" day, but I second-guessed myself all day.
I was going to read some more in my book and then maybe work on Debian
Policy, but I woke up early, got caught up on-line, and then felt like
doing some lintian work. The lintian Subversion repository is still down
(waiting, probably, for the maintainer to get back from holidays —
there's no rush), so it was a good day for a larger project and I kept
having thoughts about how I wanted to rewrite the HTML reporting script.
Particularly since there were several reports today of more problems with
it.
So, I started on that, figuring that I'd be done and could go read in the
afternoon, and then I ended up working on it all day. It was one of those
jobs that grew a lot in the doing. The data structures used by the current
script were all wrong and it had hard-coded HTML in the Perl all over the
place. The new version isn't tested yet, but it uses Text::Template and a
much cleaner (and commented) internal design.
In the process, I not only fixed a ton of bugs but added info and overrides
to the report display, which will make it much easier to look for places
where lintian has things wrong.
So, that was productive, but I didn't do all the other vacationish stuff
that I wanted to do, or make any progress on Policy or INN. And I kept
feeling like I wanted to go do something else, or "should" go do something
else, or something. Still not sure if that was just bad guilt or if I
really would have been happier doing something different.
Sometimes introspection fails. But I got a bunch of work done at the end
of the day, and that makes me happy.
2007-12-28: pam-krb5 3.10
Well, I forgot to update the Debian copyright file and some of the
documentation, but I can get that later.
This release fixes some Heimdal problems due to the workaround for broken
MIT Kerberos 1.6 versions and their option initialization functions, fixes
a few other minor bugs, and adds initial support for building against the
Kerberos that comes with AIX.
You can get the latest version from the
pam-krb5 distribution
page.
2007-12-29: Debian upload day
I finished another book this morning after sleeping in some and decided I
felt like something light but productive for the day. So I went through
all of my Debian packages and did routine uploads to do things like change
Standards-Version, add Homepage fields, and so forth.
That was quite nice. I got a gtimer patch applied that had been sitting
around since September and uploaded five packages. Then I tracked down the
/etc/openafs directory purging bug and confirmed it really was a dpkg bug,
reassigned it, and tracked down the ksu problem with realm referrals. It
looks like the best solution to that will be to largely rewrite ksu to use
modern APIs and call krb5_verify_init_creds.
A nice, productive day, and still a relaxing vacation day. And I crossed
off more things from my to-do list than I thought of and needed to add,
which is always a good sign.
2007-12-31: 2007 in Review
I never plan on doing a year-end retrospective, but seeing lots of other
people doing one sometimes puts me in the mood.
This has been a difficult year, mostly in the places where I always have
trouble. I've bitten off more than I could chew in a few areas, which
means too much stress, and then I drive myself a little crazy. There was a
lot of that this year, particularly with large changes at work and quite a
while of being short-handed. So, I had three colds this year, a batch of
stomach flu, some other minor medical problems, and all the standard signs
of being way too stressed.
This Christmas vacation has been good to start helping with that. I've
been taking the time as a mental reset, trying to clear my head, rebalance
my life, and get back into a good mental spot to tackle the new year. It's
a good short-term fix. The next step is to stick with better time
management, delegate more, let more things go, and focus on doing exactly
what I want to do instead of what I think I should do in my time off.
Some things did go very well this year. Despite a cold and the stress, I
loved the trip to Scotland for Debconf. I doubt I'm going to travel
internationally again for quite a while, but that was a great experience.
Also, looking back on it from the end of the year, I'm fairly happy with my
free software contributions. I did a lot of Debian work, particularly on
lintian, and released a new version of Policy. There's always more to do,
but I did quite a lot.
On social interactions, it was a pretty good year. That's something else
that I want to prioritize a little higher, letting more volunteer work go.
But it's also something that I want to have flow. I think this will come
naturally if I deal with my stress in other ways. But I'm fairly
comfortable with how that part of my life is going.
The year was good for reading. I of course spent the year obsessing over
how many books I'd read after deciding to not care, but I have a plan for
that for the next year. I'll do a year in review later on, after posting
the last couple of reviews I wrote, but I think I'm getting a bit better at
reviewing and I read more than my new target of books for the year.
I didn't do as well at letting myself take time for other entertainments.
Still no DVD catchup, and still not much in the way of playing video games.
This is something that I want to improve next year, since I do enjoy it
and I think my stress is better if I give myself time to relax.
It was a rough year. But the highlight of the year, and one of the most
hopeful signs for next year, is that I have a new manager who is far better
than any I've had before and other management changes that have already
improved things at work quite a bit. That makes me feel very optimistic; I
just have to refocus, relax, be realistic about how much I can accomplish,
and give myself time.
Here's to a 2008 with less stress.
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