Today in bug report #369411:

"I do oppose an NMU as you haven't actually explained why this patch is
necessary. Ubuntu doesn't have this patch and yet has been building
32-bit alsa for several releases without problems."

While Ubuntu has this patch included for 3 weeks now. I have written this patch to fix an RC bug in Debian...

I gave a talk about Debian GNU/kFreeBSD at FOSDEM 2006. It tooks me time, but I finally have made the slides available.

Yesterday I have setup a kfreebsd-amd64 (ie GNU/kFreeBSD on an amd64 CPU) build daemon. Its name is shockley.aurel32.net (all my machines are named related to electronics), and it has Sempron 2600+ CPU.

As you can see on the photo, it is still missing a decent case. There are actually two machines on the the photo, the motherboard in the case is maxwell's one (one of the kfreebsd-i386 build daemon), while the one on the top front is shockley's one. That's a bit strange, but the amd64 motherboard needs a power supply with a P4 connector, while the other one only needs a small power supply.

Thanks to Ingo Juergensmann, the kfreebsd-amd64 architecture is now listed on http://buildd.net. As you can see on the graph, this machine is very fast (it only runs for 24 hours!).

Thanks to Ingo Juergensmann, the kfreebsd-i386 architecture is now listed on http://buildd.net. That means that Debian developers can now easily check the state of their packages, and if they fail to build, to find why.

The requirement to appear on http://buildd.net was to use wanna-build and make its output available somewhere on the web. As I was still using a set of (very) ugly shells scripts to handle the build-daemon, I spent a part of the last days to setup wanna-build, and to understand how it works. With wanna-build a lot of thing is automatic, and almost everything could be controled via the mail interface. That would save me some time that I could invest in porting packages to GNU/kFreeBSD.

The machine on the photo below is currently somewhere between France and Switzerland. It runs Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, and will be accessible to all Debian developers. Thanks to Gürkan Sengün, the ETH Zürich will host it.

I am running a build daemon for the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port. It was a bit overloaded by the high number of packages to build since the CXX ABI transition has begun. I decided to use the old mainboard of my main computer to upgrade it from an AMD K6-2 500 to an Athlon XP 1800+. I also had to buy a new box since the old mainboard was an AT one, whereas this mainboard is an ATX one. The hard disks (an old 8.4 GB IDE disk for the system and an old 4.3 GB SCSI disk for the build daemon stuff) are still a bit slow, that is probably the next thing I'll upgrade.

It runs for a few hours now and has already reduced the backlog. Currently 83% of the Debian packages are built for the kfreebsd-i386 architecture.

As others I am very unhappy with the outcome of the release meeting. This "proposal" has been made by people that have key responsabilities in Debian, and without asking other people, except the DPL candidates. By the way, I feel silly that such persons sign this "proposal" as DPL candidates, whatever is their opinion.

In short the proposal says: "We've got problems to release with 11 architectures, let's drop 8 of them." A lot of users who choose Debian because it was the only distribution out of there to provide serious support for the architectures they care for, for various reasons. That's the end of the Universal OS, and that's sad.

It's seems that the actual teams found they are overloaded, so as they don't want to share their powers and call for help (even worse, they refuse help), they prefer to drop architectures.

The criteria given to keep architectures seems to have been choosen after the list of architectures itself. And actually none of the architectures in Debian fulfill them (all the four proposed architectures, i.e. i386, ppc, amd64 and ia64, only have one build daemon). And when you ask the technical point behind each criterion, nobody answers...

I don't say there isn't any problems, but there is a difference between a reasonable answer to these problems, and dropping most of architectures we support. If they are problems with build daemons, the solution is to solve them (hint: more build daemons and more admins would be a good start).

But actually I doubt the number of architectures is the real problem for Sarge. One of the main problems since August (at least that is what is announced in every "Bits from the release manager"), is the testing build daemons. Why it lasts so long? Why offers for help have been refused?

And don't forget the social contract: "Our priorities are our users and free software"

I have just uploaded a new version of simulpic. This software is a simulator for Microchip PIC16F84 microcontrollers. The initial version was a student project of the University of Pisa, and the development has stopped 8 years ago. Well, not really stopped as they were some patches in the Debian package.

Recently, a new upstream has decided to continue this project and to add some functionalities. He has just released a new version, the first one for more than 8 years! That demonstrates the power of Free Software.

Over the last few months, it seems that the number of silly bugs is increasing. Of course, in most of the cases, the severity of such silly bugs is set to critical. I won't list all that silly bugs (it would take too long :) ), but I'll take two examples, that are very recent as they occured today yesterday.

The first one is the bug #289666 titled "sane only work as root on 2.6.10 (2.6.*)". The bug reporter explains that the module scanner.o has been removed from the kernel and thus he, and all other users, should use the root account to scan a document. He think it is a critical security bug. I don't know why Julien Blache wrote a README to explain how to be able to scan as user! The command is very simple: adduser user scanner.

The second annoying bug was filled today on OpenOffice.org. It is bug #289800 and is titled "openoffice.org: please enable autosave per default". Basically, the user was writting a text on OpenOffice.org, and its machine crashed. As he hasn't saved the document, and as autosave was not enabled, he lost it. Surely not a critical bug. Maybe the user should learn all to click on the save icon instead of sending bug reports!

Maybe we should do something to avoid these annoying bugs. A kind of greylisting, which first sends back an email to the bug reporters (asking them if they have read the documentation, if they have verified that the bug has not been already reported, if they are using the latest version) and then that waits for a key contained in the email to be returned to validate the bug. This could also avoid people using invalid email addresses.

Yes, such a system looks like a bit silly... just as some of the bug reporters.

My ADSL line was opened yesterday, so I am back on the Internet! Actually during the last two months, I still had an Internet connection, but only though a 56k modem, not really useable for maintaining Debian packages or for doing an "apt-get upgrade" on my machines (and a bit costly).

I am in my apartment for a month, and it tooks two weeks to get the invoice of my telephone line, one more week to get the ADSL line and one more week to get my modem from the post.

The connection is an ADSL2+ connection, so there is enough upload rate to be able to host websites. I moved all my websites to my home server, and I am just waiting the activation of the reverse DNS to be able to host an SMTP server.