trains are my coding anti-cryptonite

Another weekend trip to my parents' meant another successful svn-buildpackage coding session.

I worked on expanding the svnMkdirP functionality to svn-buildpackage and checked svn-upgrade. So when the testing is done (don't know when that will happen :-( ) I'll merge the work done in the svnmkdir-p branch[1] into trunk and ask for a sponsor - I don't think that will be a problem :-P.


If you want to test, don't try trunk yet[*], your should try the svnmkdir-p branch[1]. Don't forget to bump down the version.


BTW, svn-buildpackage 0.6.22 should close .....


0 eddy@bounty ~/usr/src/svn-buildpackage/svnmkdir-p $ dpkg-parsechangelog | grep ^Closes | sed -r -e 's#Closes:##' -e 's#[0-9]{6}#1 +#g' -e 's#\+$##' | bc
13

13 bugs.

Here are the bastards:

1. 408690
2. 411666
3. 414581
4. 419996
5. 423487
6. 428225
7. 428689
8. 433404
9. 433536
10. 434932
11. 435746
12. 436133
13. 436554

[1] svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/collab-maint/deb-maint/svn-buildpackage/branches/svnmkdir-p or svn://svn.debian.org/svn/collab-maint/deb-maint/svn-buildpackage/branches/svnmkdir-p

[*] the branch is not yet merged into trunk because it needs more thorough testing

Invariant sections...

Thanks to Holger's post I saw this really educational comic strip.

To those who don't get the joke: the invariant sections could put you in that exact position. Please read the chapter about "Invaraint sections" from the "Draft Debian Position Statement about the GNU Free Documentation License(GFDL)"

svn-buildpackage pending changes

Just a few snippets:

Author: eddyp-guest
Date: Wed Sep 26 02:14:15 2007
New Revision: 4959

URL: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/collab-maint/?sc=1&rev=4959
Log:
create a special branch for the svn "mkdir -p" like functionality until all scripts are converted to use this function and more tests are done

Added:
  deb-maint/svn-buildpackage/branches/svnmkdir-p/
    - copied from r4958, deb-maint/svn-buildpackage/trunk/

0 eddy@bounty ~/usr/src/svn-buildpackage/svnmkdir-p $ dpkg-parsechangelog
Source: svn-buildpackage
Version: 0.6.22
Distribution: UNRELEASED
Urgency: low
Maintainer: Eddy Petrișor
Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2007 05:24:59 +0300
Closes: 408690 411666 414581 419996 423487 428225 428689 433404 433536 434932 435746 436133
Changes:
svn-buildpackage (0.6.22) UNRELEASED; urgency=low
.
[ Eddy Petrișor ]
* IMPORTANT: changed default behaviour of saving the configuration in
.svn/deb-layout by default to avoid stale data to override the
configuration options that were updated in the repository.
(Closes: #414581)
As a consequence, a new option --svn-savecfg was added to allow a
mechanism for easily overriding options locally
.
[ Gonéri Le Bouder ]
* SDCommon::sd_exit: read the parameter correctly is SDCommon::nosave=1
(Closes: #428225)
.
[ Eddy Petrișor ]
* s-u: when importing options from ~/.svn-buildpackage.conf, filter in
only the valid options (Closes: #428689)
* s-u: replace retcode with retval for consistency with svn-bp
* s-i: manpage still claimed layout 2 was not implmented (Closes: #433404)
* s-i: now really supports injects for layout 2 (with the disadvantage of
not creating the tag directory)
* s-i: no longer fails on initial checkout (Closes: 411666)
* when using origUrl, make sure the origDir exists before downloading
in it
* s-i: man page: document the missing -o option (Closes: 419996, 435746)
* s-u: complete the man page synopsis section (Closes: 436133)
* s-b: do not require the build deps to be present when exporting
(Closes: 423487); thanks Stefano Zacchiroli for the patch
* SDcommon.pm: enhance the guessing algo of the layout to make svn-upgrade
guess correctly on layout 2 repos; thanks Gregor Herrmann for the patch
(Closes: 434932)
* Makefile: the version of the package is placed quoted in "SDCommon.pm" so
that versions like "0.6.22~bpo40+1" don't cause s-b to barf
* SDCommon.pm: implemented a function that emulates a 'mkdir -p'
functionality for svn; this will allow a fix for #434932
* s-i: based on the mkdir-p functionality create missing directories on
inject (Closes: 433536, 408690)

software for managing finances

Dear lazyweb,

I decided to track our (mine and my finceé's) expenses more closely and I am in search of some software for this task.

The requirements for the software:

• not to hard to use (I don't want to read a whole manual to know how to use it)
• possibility to assign a category for a given expense (so I can locate problematic type of expenses)
  
• can easily extract statistics (e.g.: top last month's expenses, expenses split per category)
• appropriate for domestic (small scale) accounting
• available in Debian (or will be soon :-) )
  
• preferably GNOME/GTK based

I have never used such software before, so I am a total noob in this area. Please be gentile if I might have naively described the problem.

Thanks in advance!

svn-buildpackage:development, RFH

Although slow, development on svn-buildpackage still continues. Sorry for the delays, but both myself and Eduard Bloch have been unable to assign more time to svn-buildpackage development in the last few months.

From the changelog of the trunk package (unreleased 0.6.22):

  [ Eddy Petrișor ]
* IMPORTANT: changed default behaviour of saving the configuration in
.svn/deb-layout by default to avoid stale data to override the
configuration options that were updated in the repository.
(Closes: #414581)
As a consequence, a new option --svn-savecfg was added to allow a
mechanism for easily overriding options locally

BTW, did you know that svn-buildpackage is maintained in collab-maint and welcomes contributions and committers/reviewers (especially those)?

In case you want to help, this is the place to start from:

svn co svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/collab-maint/deb-maint/svn-buildpackage/trunk

or

svn co svn://svn.debian.org/svn/collab-maint/deb-maint/svn-buildpackage/trunk

If you don't have commit access to collab-maint yet (just make a request on the alioth tracker and that will be fixed ;-) ).

hmm, I was here before

I am stumbling again on the problem of not being able to install libgnome-dev and libsvn-dev side by side, namely bug #429025.

For some reason, I was under the impression that the bug was fixed... but apr-util is behind :-(.

is easy to let yourself manipulated

There is this guy whose blog I found about a week ago. He does some really nice and funny sketches mostly with issues regarding Bucharest and things he finds out/encounters.

The fact that he is smart to see some of the rudeness happening in Bucharest doesn't help him notice he is manipulated by the press (and himself) and writes:

"La 6 ani de la 11 septembrie 2001, Osama bin Laden a scos capu' din vagauna cu o noua inregistrare video in care da lumii intregi 2 alternative: convertirea la Islam sau moartea!"

Which translates approximately to:

"Six years after September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden shows his face out from his hiding place and makes a new video in which gives the whole wolrd 2 alternatives: converting to Islam or death!"

(I won't take into discussion the correct translation of the message from Osama, if the message is authentic, if Osama is payed by somebody interested in keeping the conflict open, if Osama's forces are actually active in Iraq, if Bush is Osama himself, if we're actually living in 1984 and Osama is already dead but the American manipulative government is using all sorts of recordings from him to keep people inside a cage and fed them propaganda, < insert your theory/idea here >....)

He links to this article, whose title might make one to think what the guy said is true (according to the article)...

But, if read carefully is clear that there are a few twists (in order of apparition):

• the alternatives were given to the American people ("urged the American people")
• the alternatives were for the ending of the war in Iraq ("there are two ways to end the war in Iraq")
• the first alternative is escalation of the conflict, not death; that would translate, IMHO, into "we will be fighting in Iraq and you can give up, but we will not", so I'd say surrender/retreat/keep fighting and probably die are all viable alternatives for the first one
• apparently he says converting to Islam is an alternative ("The second way, he continues, is to reject America's democratic system and convert to Islam.")
• but, if we read on we see that he actually says just to acknowledge that democracy is not at all a successful model, unless by success one thinks in terms of a system that achieves the interests of the corporations ("It has now become clear to you and the entire world the impotence of the democratic system and how it plays with the interest of the peoples and their blood by sacrificing soldiers and populations to achieve the interests of the major corporations")
• and more importantly, converting to Islam is not actually a condition, but there is an invitation to do that ("I invite you to embrace Islam,")

So, the conclusion is that it's really easy to fall into the trap of believing what the titles and headlines suggest, rather than what the articles actually say, especially if you keep your head open only to single stream of ideas (I guess you, my dear reader, are smart enough to see what I mean here).


Disclaimer, my analysis might be off, my English sucks, I might be Osama, I might be Bush, I didn't saw the recording, there's a cat on a freezer...

dpkg i18n going backwards?

Now in dpkg I found this:

dpkg: no, cannot proceed with %s (--auto-deconfigure will help):\n
%s

Before there was something like:

dpkg: no, cannot remove %s (--auto-deconfigure will help):\n
%s


This is going backwards wrt to i18n since one of the basic rules of i18n is to have complete sentences, while keeping the verb covered behind some parameter is not a good way of doing that.

debian lenny on my laptop

I did this Friday night:

cat /etc/debian_version
lenny/sid

The good:

• the upgrade was pretty painless, including the kernel upgrade (I just spent about an hour to resolve/force the upgrade path for some packages since aptitude was stubbornly refusing to upgrade since some recommends were not satisfied)
  
• the kernel doesn't seem to need any options to make the headphones work
• I can use a free driver for the wlan (bcm43xx instead of ndiswrapper)
• as a bonus, now I can suspend-to-disk while the wlan interface is turned on (with ndis+2.6.18-5 the system hanged during suspend)
  

The bad:

• the two icons I got on the desktop for the crypto partition I have mounted under /crypto are still both there (the worse thing is that I don't remember/can't find the bug number)
  
• suspend-to-ram still doesn't work - I suspect flgrx being the culprit
  
• there are now two icons for xchat in the systray. Should I be removing xchat-systray? Apparently yes, although there are a few things that xchat-systray had which are not available in the native systray thingie:

This is xchat-systray's menu:


And this is xchat's native menu:
By the way, the Hide menu entry there hides xchat itself, not the tray icon.

---

Update:
one more bad: this is still not fixed.

---

Update++:
I am a moron: apparently this is a known problem and a workaround exists. Now I can have my sincle xchat-systray icon :-) .

handy stuff for reformatting text

<eddyp> anyone knows of a quick way to reformat a text to a certain with in vim?
<eddyp> width, even
<liw> !fmt -w 42
<pkern> Something along the lines of gq I think.
<pkern> {Visual}gq says :help gq
<eddyp> liw: ":%!fmt -w 42" should be correct
<eddyp> thanks
* eddyp notes the fmt command for future reference
<liw> fmt is a pretty handy command at times
<ricky> Wow, that is handy.
* seanius is a fan of the J and fmt combo
<pkern> (gq has the advantage that textwidth is obeyed. And fmt could be specified with formatprg.)
<eddyp> pkern: that gq is handy, too
<eddyp> "gggqG" and bam, everything is refromatted
<eddyp> does anyone mind if I post this on my blog?
<eddyp> pkern, liw, seanius, ricky ?
<liw> eddyp, nah
<pkern> eddyp: Please enlighten me why you could possibly need our approval (apart from copying the log verbatim perhaps).
<eddyp> pkern: exactly :-)
<eddyp> verbatim copy; irc is the best source of documentation :-)
<ricky> eddyp: Go ahead :)
<pkern> eddyp: Then please correct the obvious mistake of mine: ":help gq says {Visual}gq", hah. And I disagree on the usefulness of IRC logs as documentation. :-P
<ricky> As a side note, the -u option seems cut words at spaces properly, which I'd been looking for :)
<seanius> eddyp: if you find my armchair opinions valuable for some reason, then by all means :)

ok, worries over...

She's back...

Dear lazyweb...

Why do I get these errors in a real etch system and I don't in a pbuilder login environment? Missing build-deps?


# Add here commands to compile the package.
/usr/bin/make
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1'
/usr/bin/make -C doc
make[2]: Entering directory `/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc'
docbook2man uclean.sgml
Using catalogs: /etc/sgml/catalog
Using stylesheet: /usr/share/docbook-utils/docbook-utils.dsl#print
Working on: /home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml
nsgmls:/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml:1:59:W: cannot generate system identifier for public text "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook V4.1//EN"
nsgmls:/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml:35:0:E: reference to entity "REFENTRY" for which no system identifier could be generated
nsgmls:/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml:1:0: entity was defined here
nsgmls:/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml:35:0:E: DTD did not contain element declaration for document type name
nsgmls:/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml:37:9:E: element "REFENTRY" undefined
nsgmls:/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml:38:15:E: element "REFENTRYINFO" undefined
nsgmls:/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml:39:12:E: element "ADDRESS" undefined
nsgmls:/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml:40:15:E: element "EMAIL" undefined
nsgmls:/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml:42:11:E: element "AUTHOR" undefined
nsgmls:/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml:43:19:E: element "FIRSTNAME" undefined
nsgmls:/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml:44:17:E: element "SURNAME" undefined
nsgmls:/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml:46:14:E: element "COPYRIGHT" undefined
nsgmls:/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml:47:11:E: element "YEAR" undefinednsgmls:/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml:48:13:E: element "HOLDER" undefined
nsgmls:/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml:50:12:E: element "DATE" undefinednsgmls:/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml:52:10:E: element "REFMETA" undefined
nsgmls:/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml:53:17:E: element "REFENTRYTITLE" undefined
nsgmls:/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml:55:15:E: element "MANVOLNUM" undefined
nsgmls:/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml:57:13:E: element "REFNAMEDIV" undefined
nsgmls:/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml:58:12:E: element "REFNAME" undefined
nsgmls:/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml:60:15:E: element "REFPURPOSE" undefined
nsgmls:/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml:62:17:E: element "REFSYNOPSISDIV" undefined
nsgmls:/home/eddy/usr/src/perso/build-area/svn-buildpackage-0.6.22~bpo40+1/doc/uclean.sgml:63:16:E: element "CMDSYNOPSIS" undefined

I am worried about my apartment mate

The last record of her laptop being on is:

syslog.4.gz:Aug 20 01:01:30 ritter dnsmasq[1984]: DHCPACK(eth0) ... endirra

I haven't seen her since, and her phone is off. I tried calling her before, but when it was on, she didn't answer. What is weird is that in the past, she didn't always answer the phone (or better said, seldom did).

Also, when she had a crush on some guy, she left for a whole week without saying anything...

But now I am worried.

my nslu2 runs an eabi kernel

Thanks to Riku Voipio's advice, my slug now runs an EABI kernel with OABI compat support. As a bonus I have the latest 2.6.18-5 abi kernel :-) .

Things to remember when trying to do the same with your slug:

• running make menuconfig (somehow) with the debian/arch/arm/config-ixp4xx file as config will, most definitely disable the compilation of the internal driver
• before flashing a new linux image, check that the drivers for the network interfaces you expect to be up after reboot are present in the deb
• arm iptables will fail with an eabi kernel, even if it has oabi compat support, you will need to install iptables in the armel chroot; so if you use iptables at all, you need to pass that invocation to the iptables binary from the armel chroot
  

I just chroot-ed into an armel chroot and rrdtool made some nice and meaningful graphs.

Instead of:


I got:



Some complaints:

• migrating to armel will probably be a pain, if care is not taken to migrate settings, scripts and everything in /etc
• the load spikes up just to make these graphs :-(