2008-12-01: Back to life
Another eroded sandstone picture for today. I find interesting the
similarity in texture between some of the rock and the wood.
My company left today, after a truly great week of acquiring and playing
with new toys, finishing video games, talking about movies and games and
life, and taking a much-needed break from everything else. I didn't
finish all the work that I needed to do until late Wednesday, but then I
got four days completely away from everything.
Today was the first day back and I didn't start working until around noon,
so it was a late and somewhat long day. But I did get some things done.
It's going to take me a few days to get back into the rhythm of things.
2008-12-02: Settling in
I love bark texture.
Today was the first normal day back to work. As the first day, I'll take
it. I didn't get as much done as I wanted, but I got a full day's work
in, I got a few things done, and I'm back to walking nightly and posting
here regularly. I'm hoping for slowly building momentum.
2008-12-03: Sandstone caldera
Today was the most productive work from home day in a while. I took care
of some fallout from the upgrades yesterday evening, which is now mostly
resolved. There's just one lingering and mostly harmless weird segfault
that hopefully will be fixed after tonight. And then I wrote up a first
draft of how we'll use Puppet environment support to provide a development
and stable tree for our Puppet configuration and migrate clients from one
tree to a newer one.
The new virtualization project also seems to be proceeding nicely, and we
have a working patching procedure that was tested again today.
Of course, all I really want to do is play video games, but I seem to be
getting things done despite that. *heh*
2008-12-15: Cubbyholes
I seem to be reassembling bits of my life from all those holes. Or, since
I've been playing Guitar Hero III lately, trying to get all the notes
playing at the same time. (Although I guess that's more an Amplitude
analogy.)
I set aside all the things I was juggling for the Thanksgiving holiday and
have been picking only a few of them back up (as people might be able to
notice from my quiet here). Reading time has gone into playing video
games instead recently, and most of the rest of my time has gone into
finishing up things for work rather than working on software releases.
Things accomplished recently:
I finally installed Trac for INN. It's currently on inn-new.eyrie.org
but will move to inn.eyrie.org fairly soon (probably tonight). I like
the bug tracking system and its e-mail notifications, and it works
very well with Subversion. I'm not sure about the Git plugin and how
well it would work for smaller projects, but it's the bug tracking
system I like best of what I've tried so far, at least for large
projects.
I uploaded version 13 of the USEPRO draft. This should be close to the last
version. We only have a few more open issues. There's some weird
dispute right now in the IETF about the required legal text in RFCs
that I'm not entirely following; hopefully it will be resolved before
I have to care.
I expect to get back into reading and writing book reviews during
vacation, although I'm taking full advantage of being in the mood to play
video games.
2008-12-15: backport 1.13
I put together a new page for smaller
scripts so that I don't generate new full pages for smaller things I
write and toss up on the web. The first entry is the script I use to
automate the tedium of backporting packages to stable, something that I
end up doing a lot for work.
The script isn't anything particularly exciting or anything that anyone
who's done backports wouldn't know how to do by hand. It just automates
the commands a bit, remembers the version pattern for a few different
(mostly local) backport repositories, and automates a few transformations
that I run into a lot. It's not a substitute for manually doing a
backport and testing, but it works on 90% of packages that I just need to
have on stable for some reason.
I probably won't announce new releases unless I make it substantially
smarter, but I figured I'd announce the first release in case it saves
anyone a few moments.
2008-12-16: Asking the wrong question
I'm posting way too much to debian-vote right now, which I realize and
which I'm going to try to cut back on. (I at least did start the
lintian.d.o upgrade process today, so I got non-discussion Debian work
done.) The reason why I keep reacting, though, is that I'm finding it
frustrating that people seem to be asking the wrong question for resolving
the firmware freeness argument.
We currently have a strong disagreement over what the implications of the
Debian Social Contract and DFSG should be for our release process. Some
Debian Developers believe that releasing lenny as-is requires a special
exception to the Social Contract. Some Debian Developers believe that
releasing lenny as-is is consistent with the Social Contract.
We've tried and failed to achieve consensus. That's the first point of my
frustration: some people don't seem willing to accept that this has
happened. They are apparently having a hard time understanding how anyone
couldn't agree with them, and are therefore repeatedly reopening the
discussion on which we don't have consensus. Once it's clear that
consensus doesn't exist, this is very counter-productive. The discussion
is futile, which frustrates people, and then in that frustration they
become increasingly angry and harsh.
Once consensus fails, all interesting decision-making processes start. A
decision-making process basically reduces to "who decides?". When you
have a dispute and consensus is not possible, some body has to make a
decision. If people believe in the decision-making process, they can then
support, or at least live with, the decision because they respect the
process, even if they disagree with that particular outcome. The most
important output of a decision-making process is closure: you stop
debating and move on. If that doesn't happen, the decision-making process
has failed, even if it makes a decision.
Why does this all matter and why am I going on at such length about it?
It's simply this, which I think is so important I'll highlight it:
Even people who strongly disagree on some issues can work
together cordially and well in the same project provided that they can
agree on a decision-making process in those areas where they
disagree.
Agreeing on how decisions are made in Debian is important because that's
how we continue to work together when we disagree (and we will disagree).
If we can agree on how disputes are resolved, we can all respect and honor
the outcome even if it isn't what we would have wanted, and then move
forward. If we don't agree on how disputes are resolved, we'll keep
re-arguing them rather than accepting the outcome. The discussions will
get more heated, more people will get upset, and more people will not have
fun working on Debian.
What I've been trying to analyze on debian-vote is the "who decides" part
of this question. We have a decision-making process outlined in the
Debian constitution for
non-technical decisions (of which this is one). That process is somewhat
scattered through the document, but bringing it together in one place, it
seems to go like this:
Developers are empowered to make decisions about their own work. That
means that, according to the constitution, the primary people who get
to decide how the SC and DFSG should apply are every Debian Developer
in the tasks on which they're working.
The project leader can define an area of ongoing responsibility and
delegate to a developer or a group of developers responsibility for
making decisions in that area. There are two relevant delegations
here. The ftp team has the delegated authority to determine what
packages may enter Debian given, among other things, licensing and
DFSG issues. The release team has the delegated authority to decide
what goes into the next stable release and when that release happens.
(Let's put aside quibbles over whether or not that authority was
formally delegated; I think that we can all agree in practice that
it's close enough.)
The ftp team has accepted the relevant firmware packages into Debian
main and hence have made a decision in their area of responsibility.
The release team, through the lenny-ignore tag, has decided that the
relevant packages can be part of the next release. Those are delegate
decisions that have already been made, and neither of those teams seem
to want to change their mind.
The final decision-making body in this case, therefore, is the
developers at large, who can override any delegate decision via a
GR. That's what Robert Millan proposed, although he doesn't seem to
have realized he was doing that, and it's not marked as such on the
ballot.
Now that this has happened, we all vote whether or not to override the
delegate decision. The only option on the ballot that does so, by my
reading, is the first one, so if the first option does not win the GR, the
delegate decision is not overridden and both the ftp-master and release
team decisions stand.
This is why Further Discussion means we continue the release as previously
planned. We have a decision-making process, which has been followed, and
the current decision is to release including those packages. In order to
change that decision, it has to be overridden. A result of Further
Discussion on a GR means that GR does nothing, and hence the decision
stands.
The second point of frustration is the decision that option four on the
ballot (delegate to the release team the power to make decisions about how
DFSG issues affect what is included in the release) needs a 3:1 majority.
They have already been delegated the authority to do that as part of their
delegated authority to manage the release. The effect of option four on
the project is therefore identical to Further Discussion; the only
difference is whether we make a positive statement or fail to make a
negative statement. It makes no sense to treat it as supersession of a
foundation document when it just supports the existing decision-making
process in the constitution.
A third point of frustration is the apparent feeling that foundation
documents like the DFSG are outside of the normal decision-making process
described in the constitution. I can find no evidence of this in the
constitution, but more fundamentally, the people arguing this are not
stating what decision-making process they believe does apply other than
"my view of the DFSG is obviously the only reasonable one and hence you
should follow it." This reduces to a plea for consensus, which we've
already established that we don't have, and hence, as mentioned above, is
horribly unproductive to keep raising.
There will never be a policy document that is so clear that everyone will
agree on its implications in every situation. I find it much more useful
to analyze governance processes by looking at who decides disputes rather
than looking at position statements. The decision-making process is what
will determine the outcome of all the really interesting cases.
2008-12-18: Point of departure
Taken this morning at the train station.
Almost time for the year-end vacation, which at this point is much needed.
I still have to work a little bit remotely tomorrow, but that's mostly
going to be devoted to clearing the plate, filing things so that I know
what I'm working on when I get back, and taking care of little stuff that
I can resolve easily.
I don't want to do any more work at all, but I haven't quite gotten in a
week's worth of work yet, and there are a few things I do want to finish
up. Then, two weeks of as close to complete relaxation and fun personal
projects as I can get, probably starting by retreating into books and
games for a few days.
More on Debian developments in a few days when I get a chance to digest
and to send in private things that are better said there than in public.
2008-12-19: podlators 2.2.1
This release is mostly test suite changes, particularly a fix for test
result failures on Windows due to not adding the right line endings on the
output file handle. There is also a fix for backward compatibility in the
deprecated pod2text function.
I still need to redo output encoding handling so that it doesn't assume
PerlIO, but I haven't had a chance yet.
You can get the latest release from the podlators distribution page.
2008-12-19: Vacation begins
Vacation has finally begun. Today was annoying and mostly unproductive,
but I got a few small things done at least. And I'm exhausted and tired
of working and very ready for a break.
I got a couple of hours of fiction reading in today, and expanding that
considerably is the tentative plan for tomorrow. Tomorrow is a day for
doing whatever I want to do without pushing in any particular direction.
Sometime early next week, I'll start making plans for fun things I want to
accomplish, but time for some uncompressing first.
It feels good to put aside all work-related things for more than two
weeks. I'm planning on sticking to that, too.
2008-12-21: Quiet rainy day
More of the eroded sandstone at Jack Point from my trip earlier this year.
It's a quiet, grey day today, a good day for curling up with a book. I've
been poking around online (and listening to Pandora) for three hours or so, fixing a few things with INN, but I
think I'm going to go back to my book. I'm still in the early parts of
vacation, recovering energy and giving my brain a lot of downtime.
Debian discussion has quieted down for the moment. At some point during
this vacation, I'm hoping to take some time to really concentrate on
Debian work, upload a few new packages for the benefit of Ubuntu, and
clean out Lintian and Policy bug queues. But I know that will go better
if I give myself plenty of time to recover energy first.
Likewise for book reviews: I've finished three books now for which I've
not yet written reviews, and I'd like to get caught up by the end of the
year. But my energy reserves haven't filled quiet yet.
In the meantime, you all get pictures; I'll see if I can post one a day
through the end of the year. I've got quite a lot of accumulated
material.
2008-12-21: filter-syslog 1.21
This release is a small bug fix for Ubuntu systems. filter-syslog always
ignores the syslog restart line, but the regex that matched the syslog
version only allowed numbers, periods, and #. Ubuntu adds "ubuntu" to
their version, so I needed to add letters to the regex. Tim Skirvin
reported the problem.
You can get the latest version from the
filter-syslog distribution page.
New packages will be available from my personal repository once I finish
switching over to reprepro. (I got stuck deciding that I wanted to
rebuild all of the existing packages rather than importing any of them,
and in some cases that means making a long-overdue new upstream release.)
2008-12-21: backport 1.15
This revision of my quick script for backporting Debian packages fixes the
parsing of the *.dsc file name to work properly with native packages and
relaxes the restriction on the paths for cowbuilder chroots.
In and of itself, this probably isn't worth another announcement on Debian
Planet, but both are patches from Eddy Petrișor that he sent me shortly
after my first Debian Planet post after trying the script out, improving
the script both for me and for anyone else who might happen to stumble
across it and find it useful for their problem.
I've worked on enough free software that this doesn't surprise me, but
it's a pure delight every time it happens. And it amazes me how much it
happens with little convenience scripts where I doubted that anyone other
than me would care. After reading too many flamewars and arguments, it's
a bright spot of joy to get that sort of mail.
So thank you. It's what this free software thing is all about, to me.
You can get the latest version from my scripts page.
2008-12-22: Real vacation starts
I think this picture captures my mood for the day.
The Monday of a vacation is the first real vacation day. Up until then,
the only difference from a regular weekend is that you know it won't be
over after the weekend. That's a difference, but not as much as having
Monday come and not having to work. Plus, it usually takes me the first
couple of days to recover enough energy to start to enjoy vacation
properly.
I finished the first true vacation book, started during vacation rather
than beforehand, today (Brust's The Lord of Castle Black), and
finally wrote one of my backlog of book reviews for posting tomorrow.
Last night, between being creative, was spent poking at the
news.announce.newgroups archive software to get ready to move it and
control message archiving to a new system.
The last few news.announce.newgroups posts weren't archived due to missing
Archive-Name headers. I need to let someone know about that and then
archive them manually. I'll probably do that tonight.
I also posted a picture of osoberry
that wasn't quite good enough for its own entry but which was good enough
I wanted to make it available.
2008-12-23: Winter sky
For a change, a picture I took today. I was sitting inside reading and
noticed how beautiful the sky was through a window and had to go out and
take some pictures. (Nearly a hundred, of which I kept seventy-five.)
To think that when I started this, I was sure that I wouldn't take enough
pictures to be able to post a picture a day without running out. I think
I have enough to post a picture a day for the next three years now without
taking any more pictures.
2008-12-24: Christmas Eve
I don't know if this is a starting position in Marble Madness or a picture
of me when I'm settled in on vacation with a book or a computer.
Merry Christmas Eve to those who celebrate it. I don't any more and
haven't for years (too much stress and guilt for something that's supposed
to be fun, and I'm not much of a holiday person), but I wish the most of
enjoyment to everyone who does. I would have hunted down a more seasonal
picture, but I don't actually have many winter pictures yet. Maybe I'll
hunt deeper for tomorrow.
I'm not making much progress on all the (entirely optional) things I was
thinking of working on this vacation, but then it's only halfway through
the first week. I am doing a lot of reading, which means I need to pick
up the review writing or I'm going to get rather a lot behind. It's
lovely to get to sleep nine hours or more each night and read for a couple
of hours in the morning before doing anything else.
I hope everyone else reading this is enjoying the holiday season, however
you spend it.
2008-12-26: Relaxing
The neighborhood was full of garbage cans relaxing after a hard day's
work.
I hope you're finding your vacation as relaxing as I am. Today was the
first day, other than a few evenings right at the start, when I got up
feeling like doing things on-line instead of just reading. I've now
caught up on some old Lintian work that had been sitting in my pending
folder and, even more importantly, reorganized and updated my to-do list
so that I have a clearer idea of what I want to do next (and not just for
Lintian).
This was a bad year for reading compared to the last few, and I'm
resisting the urge to try to do a flurry of it right at the end of the
year to raise meaningless numbers. I'll stay over 52 books read and
reviewed for the year, which is one a week and a fairly nice pace. I
won't get to my goal of 80 or even close. In some cases that was due to
months where I was way too stressed or working far too hard, and that's
something that I want to fix for other reasons. In some cases, that's
just because I did other things (video games, photography), and that's
fine and even a good thing.
Next year will be time to strike a new balance.
2008-12-28: Lintian 2.1.3
Over the last couple of days, I've found some time to work on Lintian for
the first time in quite a while. It's been a good feeling both for
getting back to a project that I've done very little on for several months
and finally feeling energized about a coding project. I think after a
week of vacation, I'm starting to recover my energy.
I uploaded Lintian 2.1.3 earlier today and am currently doing a fresh
archive-wide run for lintian.debian.org. This version has several new checks for watch files
from Raphael Geissert, several fixes for the lintian.d.o output, a few
other random bug fixes, and an attempt to tackle unversioned shared
libraries in a more comprehensive fashion.
Shared libraries with an SONAME that doesn't contain a version number
can't be represented in the shlibs system (but can in the symbols system),
so Lintian always reports them as missing from shlibs when they're
installed in public directories. That's not really the right tag, since
they don't belong in shlibs. The more basic problem is that, except for a
few special cases mostly coming from libc, they really don't belong in
public directories. With no versioning in the SONAME, we can't handle
changes to the ABI without completely changing the library name and can't
use the shlibs system to manage them.
Most of the libraries in this situation are actually private libraries for
one particular application. As Policy already says, those libraries
shouidn't be installed in public directories like /usr/lib; they
should be installed in private subdirectories of /usr/lib for that
application. The biggest group of offenders here currently seems to be
KDE; for some reason, unless I'm missing something, this seems to be a
semi-standard KDE way of doing things.
This version of Lintian will hopefully handle this better. Such libraries
won't be expected to be in shlibs files and won't get erroneous tags about
not being listed there. We'll also do a better job of distinguishing
between versioned shared libraries and shared library names that just
contain a hyphen. Such unversioned libraries will get a separate tag
pointing at the portion of Policy that says to put private libraries and
plugins in a subdirectory instead of /usr/lib.
Thanks as always to Frank Lichtenheld, Adam D. Barratt, and Jordà Polo for
all the hard work they've been putting into Lintian. It's gotten much
better over the few months that I've not been able to work on it, which is
making me more excited to get back to it and do more.
2008-12-28: Productivity
I lack inspiration and energy at this late point in the day to pick out
the perfect picture, but I can look at sandstone pictures for weeks. So
here, have another one.
Lintian has grabbed my brain, which is a lovely feeling after having spent
the first half of my vacation wondering when I was going to feel like
doing anything other than reading and poking around on the web. I dug
into another complex problem today, this time around registration of MIME
types in *.desktop files, and spend about three hours getting to the
bottom of it. I'm now working on improvements to the test suite and then
will write up some of my experiences with the new test suite layout (which
I quite like).
I didn't manage to write another review today, but I got a lot of positive
feedback for my Half a
Crown review, which is always rewarding.
Now, off to read more Orwell.
2008-12-29: More Lintian work
I think this rock should be a mascot of something.
Ideally, I'd be varying the photographs up each day, showing a variety of
subjects, so that you all (whoever you are) don't get bored with rocks.
But then I spend the day working on other things and don't have the
remaining cycles to think about it. And like I said, I can post pictures
of sandstone forever.
I spent the day poking at Lintian some more, improving test suite code and
working on incorporating more bug fixes. Each one takes a couple of hours
since I'm adding test suite code and trying to do each one properly. It's
quite a lot of fun, though.
Now, I'm going to see if I can finish uploads of new krb5 and
kerberos-configs packages before I go to bed and request unblocks in the
morning, to sneak a few final things into lenny.
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