Re: proftpd with the security bug fixed still not in testing due to m68k

[Wouter Verhelst]

First of all, note that -68k is officialy a users'
forum. [EMAIL PROTECTED] is the m68k porters' mailinglist. Cc changed
accordingly.

On Thu, 3 Jan 2002, Josip Rodin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> It seems the lack of a m68k package for proftpd 1.2.4-2 is stopping proftpd
> from propagating into testing, and the change between -1 and -2 is a
> security fix.
> 
> However, the package should exist, as shown on:
> http://buildd.debian.org/fetch.php?&pkg=proftpd&ver=1.2.4-2&arch=m68k&stamp=1009311868&file=log&as=raw

This package was built by Kullervo. Since kullervo's admin, Roman Hodek,
is away for the holidays (and thus not signing packages), this package has
not been uploaded yet, together with ~135 other packages.

Since this one is urgent, I've sent a signed .changes to kullervo. Don't
ask me to do them all ;-)

-- 
wouter dot verhelst at advalvas dot be

"Human knowledge belongs to the world"
  -- From the movie "Antitrust"

BitKeeper

[Matt Zimmerman]

(crossposted to debian-legal for input on the license; please direct
followups to -devel or -legal as appropriate)

Has anyone looked into packaging BitKeeper (www.bitkeeper.com)?  The
license[0] is obviously non-free due to usage restrictions, but people seem
to like it, and some of the licensing restrictions are arguably in defense
of other kinds of freedom.  I am not interested in packaging it at this
time, but I might file an RFP unless someone knows of a reason why it can't
be packaged for non-free.

[0] http://www.bitkeeper.com/Sales.Licensing.Source.html

-- 
 - mdz

Re: BitKeeper

[Thomas Bushnell, BSG]

Matt Zimmerman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> Has anyone looked into packaging BitKeeper (www.bitkeeper.com)?  The
> license[0] is obviously non-free due to usage restrictions, but people seem
> to like it, and some of the licensing restrictions are arguably in defense
> of other kinds of freedom.  I am not interested in packaging it at this
> time, but I might file an RFP unless someone knows of a reason why it can't
> be packaged for non-free.

Bitkeeper is (as you note) not free.  Not only the usage restrictions
are a problem, but also the requirement that changes you make may be
distributed by BitOwner "under any license".

However, I can see nothing which would preclude its inclusion in the
non-free collection (provided the maintainer does not make any of the
kinds of changes to the software that would violate the license).

Since I object to the existence of the non-free collection, I can't
actually recommend any course of action.

One strategy would be to bring down all the Open Logging servers, and
keep them down for six months.  Then it reverts to the GPL. :)

Thomas

Re: bogus maintainers?

[Bas Zoetekouw]

Hi Thomas!

You wrote:

> >From http://www.debian.org/devel/people, I see:
> 
>   Maintainer, Unknown Kernel Package  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>   main:   kernel-doc-2.4.5-r4k-kn04, kernel-source-2.4.5-r4k-kn04
> 
> What's up with this?  This is not a legitimate maintainer address IMO.

Probably the script that generates this page is broken: it's a locally
built kernel using make-kpkg.

-- 
Kind regards,
+---+
| Bas Zoetekouw  | Si l'on sait exactement ce   |
|| que l'on va faire, a quoi|
| [EMAIL PROTECTED] | bon le faire?|
|[EMAIL PROTECTED] |   Pablo Picasso  |
+---+ 

Re: EURO and CENT signs in the console keymaps

[Hamish Moffatt]

On Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 11:08:32PM +0100, Mikael Hedin wrote:
> Eduard Bloch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 
> >  - the Norwegian and Swedish keymap (relative to US layout: <4>)
> 
> All my keyboards (swedish) have it on AltGr + e.  Shift + 4 is still
> the ¤-symbol (currency).

Excuse my ignorance but I have no keys labelled AltGr. Which is it?

Hamish
-- 
Hamish Moffatt VK3SB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

Re: EURO and CENT signs in the console keymaps

[Zephaniah E. Hull]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 07:46:02PM +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 11:08:32PM +0100, Mikael Hedin wrote:
> > Eduard Bloch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > 
> > >  - the Norwegian and Swedish keymap (relative to US layout: <4>)
> > 
> > All my keyboards (swedish) have it on AltGr + e.  Shift + 4 is still
> > the ?-symbol (currency).
> 
> Excuse my ignorance but I have no keys labelled AltGr. Which is it?

The right alt key.

Zephaniah E. Hull.
> 
> Hamish
> -- 
> Hamish Moffatt VK3SB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

-- 
1024D/E65A7801 Zephaniah E. Hull <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
   92ED 94E4 B1E6 3624 226D  5727 4453 008B E65A 7801
CCs of replies from mailing lists are requested.

Here's your cable.  We made it fifty feet long, just in case.  In case
what, in case tectonic movement makes the serial ports farther apart?
  -- Carl Jacobs on ASR.


pgpUMx2336zFX.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: how to move a config file during package upgrade

[Eric Van Buggenhaut]

On Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 03:17:09PM +0100, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
> Previously Thomas Lange wrote:
> > my package fai will have a new location for its configuration file
> > /etc/fai.conf. The next version will use /etc/fai/fai.conf. How can I
> > handle this in a preinst script during an upgrade ? Any examples would
> > be fine.
> 
> Move it in the preinst.
> 

This'll surely give you problems if the installation is aborted for
any reason, you have no way to unwind.

So copy your file to the new location in preinst and delete the file in the old 
location in the postinst.

This is what I did for crafty:

- from preinst:

#! /bin/sh
# preinst script for crafty
#

case "$1" in
install|upgrade)
# In the beginning Crafty did not allow for a global resource file.  So,
# a "/etc/craftyrc" file was hacked.  Later, Crafty added support
# for a file called "/etc/crafty.rc".  This move is simply to bring
# users of earlier packages up to speed with the new packages.
#
if [ -e /etc/craftyrc -a ! -e /etc/crafty.rc ]
then
echo "Moving /etc/craftyrc to /etc/crafty.rc"
#We first copy the file, it'll be removed in postinst. This allows us to
#unwind if install/upgrade fails or is aborted.
cp /etc/craftyrc /etc/crafty.rc
fi

abort-upgrade)

if [ -e /etc/craftyrc -a -e /etc/crafty.rc ]
then
rm /etc/crafty.rc
fi

;;

*)
echo "preinst called with unknown argument \`$1'" >&2
exit 0
;;
esac


- the postinst:

case "$1" in
configure)

#In previous versions, crafty used /etc/craftyrc as a global config file. It's
#now been moved to /etc/crafty.rc
#We remove the file we copied in preinst
if [ -e /etc/crafty.rc -a -e /etc/craftyrc ]
then
rm /etc/craftyrc
fi
;;

abort-upgrade)
#If upgrade fails, then let the files where they were before install/upgrade
#(cancel the 'move' stuff initiated in preinst).
if [ -e /etc/craftyrc -a -e /etc/crafty.rc ]
then
rm /etc/crafty.rc
fi
;;
   *)
echo "postinst called with unknown argument \`$1'" >&2
exit 0
;;
esac

-- 
Eric VAN BUGGENHAUT "Hay tampones y tampones..." (Eva Serrano)
Andago
\_|_/   Av. Santa Engracia, 54
   \/   \/  E-28010 Madrid - tfno:+34(91)2041100
a n d a g o  |--http://www.andago.com
   /\___/\  "Innovando en Internet"
/ | \   [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Bug#127461: ITP: SkunkWeb - An extensible and easy to use web application server

[Dave Swegen]

On Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 07:36:11PM +, Rob Bradford wrote:
> On Wed, 2002-01-02 at 15:50, Dave Swegen wrote:
> > package: wnpp
> > severity: wishlist
> > 
> > 
> > License: GPL v2
> > 
> > URL: http://skunkweb.sourceforge.net
> > 
> > Description:
> > 
> > SkunkWeb is a web application server written in python. It enables easy
> > use of components and templates using a combination of python, HTML, and
> > its own markup language STML. Components can output HTML or python
> > objects.
> > 
> > It provides an easy and powerful component caching mechanism, as well as
> > providing for remote component inclusions. It can be run using either
> > either its own http server, or can be called from apache using an apache
> > extension module.
> > 
> I spent ages talking to the developers to try and get them to make their
> build system at all FHS compliant, so that i could then package it. I
> deliberately did not ITP it due to massive packaging headaches prior to
> the changes. I hope you succeed in creating a great package from it. It
> is a really nice app, contact me if you need help testing the package.
> 
> I had hoped on using it for some development work over at Debian Planet.
> 
> Have fun...

Oh, I intend to :) It looks like it's going to be, umm, interesting. As
far as I can tell it will produce three packages (skunkweb,
libapache-mod-skunk, and skunkweb-doc). Something of an increase from my
current package xmahjongg...

I got an email from Jacob Smullyan (it also went to the skunk list)
where he mentioned that the config script had been split up.

In the meantime I'll put up any pre-upload packages onto
people.debian.org.

Cheers
Dave

Re: EURO and CENT signs in the console keymaps

[Allan Sandfeld Jensen]

On Wednesday 02 January 2002 23:08, Mikael Hedin wrote:
> Eduard Bloch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> >  - the Norwegian and Swedish keymap (relative to US layout: <4>)
>
> All my keyboards (swedish) have it on AltGr + e.  Shift + 4 is still
> the ¤-symbol (currency).

I suppose swedish and danish keyboards are alike. The euro should be on 
AltGr+5 but is often drawn on AltGr+e since this is the international 
standard. (AltGr+3 is £, AltGr+4 $ and AltGr+6 is apparently ¥ in X11, but I 
have never seen the later drawn on any keyboard).

Re: EURO and CENT signs in the console keymaps

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

"Zephaniah E\. Hull" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> > Excuse my ignorance but I have no keys labelled AltGr. Which is it?
> 
> The right alt key.

And for those of us that type using 10 fingers, what is the compose
sequence?  =e, $e, |e don't seem to work.

Jan.

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien   | http://www.lilypond.org

Re: Preparing a Proposal: 3 DD needed for every NEW package

[Lars Bahner]

On Tue, 2002-01-01 at 12:51, Egon Willighagen wrote:
> Yes, wether it is after 1 or 2 releases... IMHO, i think it is important that 
> the Debian Project should decide what is good for the distribution... all 
> packages that do not meet 'our' standard can be moved into "unstable"
> and being in unstable for some time, they move into the section
> "unmaintained", which is not part of the dist, but is part of the Debian 
> archive...

Wouldn't packages suspected of being unmaintained be better off just but
into an "unmaintained" section or be given a priority of "orphaned" or
"unmaintained"? That way the package won't be moving about in the
archive, only the override file is altered. This also gives an easy to
pick up indication to the user community that something is happening to
the package that might affect quality. The effect will be immediate upon
the equivalent of ``apt-get update'', to more or less degree depending
on whether section or priority was changed.

Thus, first the package is given a lower priority. "orphaned" if that is
the case or something like "outdated", if the package is just seemingly
ageing. Secondly, the package is moved to another section:
"unmaintained". Thirdly, after awhile with nothing happening and no one
reporting on it the package can actually be moved to unstable;
whereafter it possibly dies.

If the package is indeed in use someone is bound to write an anxious
email or file a bug report along the way, letting us know they are using
it.And, of course there should be some sort of reporting to developers
about which packages are moving this way.

Perhaps membership to this, supposedly, very low traffic list could also
count as a criterion of who is active and who is MIA?

-- 
Lars Bahner,
http://lars.bahner.com/

Nihil est sine ratione cur potius sit, quam non sit.


pgpupWjbDoHJY.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: BitKeeper

[Peter Makholm]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Thomas Bushnell, BSG) writes:

> Bitkeeper is (as you note) not free.  Not only the usage restrictions
> are a problem, but also the requirement that changes you make may be
> distributed by BitOwner "under any license".

Thats not non-free in any way. The Freedom DFSG describes is not
freedom for the developers but for the users and such restriction
doesn't apply to ordinary users. The NPL (and MPL IIRC) has the same
requirements.


> One strategy would be to bring down all the Open Logging servers, and
> keep them down for six months.  Then it reverts to the GPL. :)

Please don't even suggest such actions not even in jokes. It would be
very sad to see Open Source fanatics use terorism to spread the use of
open source.

-- 
Når folk spørger mig, om jeg er nørd, bliver jeg altid ilde til mode
og svarer lidt undskyldende: "Nej, jeg bruger RedHat".
-- Allan Olesen på dk.edb.system.unix

Re: EURO and CENT signs in the console keymaps

[Bas Zoetekouw]

Hi Jan!

You wrote:

> And for those of us that type using 10 fingers, what is the compose
> sequence?  =e, $e, |e don't seem to work.

-E and =E work for me. 

BTW: is there any particular reason why the sequences differ between
console and X?

-- 
Kind regards,
+---+
| Bas Zoetekouw  | Si l'on sait exactement ce   |
|| que l'on va faire, a quoi|
| [EMAIL PROTECTED] | bon le faire?|
|[EMAIL PROTECTED] |   Pablo Picasso  |
+---+ 

Re: Processed: Fixed in NMU of tkstep8.0 8.0.4p2-4.1

[Adrian Bunk]

On Fri, 28 Dec 2001, Debian Bug Tracking System wrote:

> Processing commands for [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
>
> > tag 126700 + fixed
> Bug#126700: tkstep8.0: never removes alternative
> Tags added: fixed


Why on earth do you make a NMU for my package less than 24 hours after the
original bug report and without asking me before doing so???

It's clear that the bug you fixed needed to be fixed but it's definitely
wrong to NMU without contacting me as the maintainer first.

Additionally I see that you did other changes to unix/tkstepConfig.sh that
aren't even mentioned in the changelog!

NEVER DO THIS AGAIN!
Adrian

Re: Quake 2 sources GPL'd

[Adrian Bunk]

On Sat, 22 Dec 2001, Branden Robinson wrote:

>...
> In fact, I would consider it acceptable in general to move everything in
> contrib to main as long as it each package was forced to be priority
> extra until it was suitable for general-purpose use as packaged in main
> (including any dependencies, of course).
>...

If I understand it correctly you suggest to move e.g. the package below to
main? I always thought that the reason for contrib was to make a place for
free software that needs non-free software/data/... to run. If we move
these packages to main this would mean to put software to main that is
either not installable or that doesn't run without installing additional
software/data/... The priority extra doesn't help that e.g. a user who
wants to use only software from main will see the fact that some of the
packages he tries to choose e.g. in dselect aren't installable. That's
something I consider worse for our users than the current state with a
contrib section for exactly these packages.

<--  snip  -->

Priority: optional
Section: contrib/web
Installed-Size: 28
Maintainer: Ryan Murray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Architecture: i386
Source: netscape4.base
Version: 1:4.77-2
Depends: navigator-smotif-477,netscape-java-477,netscape-base-4
...
Description: Meta package that depends on other packages
 This package depends on the real netscape packages, so as to
 make things easier for people to install.
meta-package: yes

<--  snip  -->

cu
Adrian

[no subject]

[test]

Re: BitKeeper

[Junichi Uekawa]

Peter Makholm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> cum veritate scripsit:

> > Bitkeeper is (as you note) not free.  Not only the usage restrictions
> > are a problem, but also the requirement that changes you make may be
> > distributed by BitOwner "under any license".
> 
> Thats not non-free in any way. The Freedom DFSG describes is not
> freedom for the developers but for the users and such restriction
> doesn't apply to ordinary users. The NPL (and MPL IIRC) has the same
> requirements.

Please elaborate.

The license in discussion sounds quite non-free.
It takes away the freedom to rewrite the software.
It demands the software derived from it to pass the regression
tests that they provide.

Please come back when you have read the DFSG and the corresponding 
license in question.


regards,
junichi

-- 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] : Junichi Uekawa   http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer
GPG Fingerprint : 17D6 120E 4455 1832 9423  7447 3059 BF92 CD37 56F4

Re: BitKeeper

[Peter Makholm]

Junichi Uekawa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> Please elaborate.

There is nothing in the DFSG saying the a licens can't require you to
give the original autor all rights to you changes. So that single
part of the license I refered to does not makes it even more or even
less non-free.

-- 
Når folk spørger mig, om jeg er nørd, bliver jeg altid ilde til mode
og svarer lidt undskyldende: "Nej, jeg bruger RedHat".
-- Allan Olesen på dk.edb.system.unix

[Fwd: URGENT AND CONFIDENTIAL]

[Erling Berge]

419 on the loose again,
Erling Berge
-- 

Professor, Ph.D., Department of Sociology and Political Science, 
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 
NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway 
tel.: +47 73591721 e-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 
homepage:  
--- Begin Message ---
3/5   RIDER HAGGARD
CLOSE, JO, BORG
SOUTH AFRICA.
Fax: 871-762-919761. 
Tel: 871-762-919760.
E mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
 

   
URGENT  AND CONFIDENTIAL  
   (RE:  TRANSFER OF ($ 152,000.000.00 USD  
]ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY TWO MILLION DOLLARS   

Dear sir,

We want to transfer to overseas ($ 152,000.000.00 USD)
One hundred and
Fifty two million United States Dollars) from a Prime
Bank in Africa, I want to ask you to  quietly  look
for a reliable and honest person who will be
capable  and fit to provide either an existing bank
account  or  to set up a new  Bank a/c  immediately to
receive this money, even an empty a/c can serve to 
receive this money, as long as you will remain honest
to me till the end for this important business
trusting in  you and believing  in God that you  will
never let me down either now or in future.

I am Mr,John Onwudi.the Auditor General of prime
banks in Africa, during the course of our auditing  I
discovered a floating fund  in an account opened in
the bank in 1990 and since 1993 nobody has operated 
on this account again, after going through some old 
files in the records I discovered that the owner of
the account  died without a [heir]  hence  the money
is floating and  if I do not
remit this money out urgently it will be forfeited for
nothing. the owner of this account is  Mr.  Allan P.
Seaman, a foreigner, and an industrialist, and  he
died,  since 1993. and  no
other person knows about this account or any thing
concerning it, the account has no other beneficiary
and my investigation proved to me as well that Allan
P. Seaman   until his death was the manager  Diamond
Safari  [pty]. SA.  
  
We will start the  first transfer with fifty two
million [$52,000.000] upon successful transaction
without any disapointment from your side, we shall
re-apply for the payment of the remaining  rest amount
to your account,

The amount involved is (USD 152M) One hundred and
Fifty two million United States Dollars, only I want
to first transfer $52,000.000 [fifty two million
United States Dollar from this money into a
safe foreigners account abroad before the rest, but I
don't know any foreigner, I am only contacting you as
a foreigner because this money can not be approved to
a local person here, without valid international
foreign passport, but can only be approved to any
foreigner with valid international passport or drivers
license and foreign a/c  because the money is in us
dollars and
the former owner of the  a/c  Mr. Allan P. Seaman is 
a foreigner too, [and the money can only be approved
into a foreign a/c 

However, we will sign a binding agreement,  to bind us
together   I got your contact address  from the Girl
who operates computer,  I am revealing this to you
with believe in God that you will never let me down in
this business,  you are the first and the only person
that I am contacting for this business, so please
reply urgently so that I will inform you the next step
to take
urgently. Send also your private telephone and fax
number including the full details of the account to be
used for the deposit.

I want us to meet face to face to build confidence and
to sign a binding
agreement that will  bind us together  before
transferring the money to any account of  your choice
where the fund will be safe. Before we fly to your
country for withdrawal, sharing and  investments.

I need your full co-operation to make
this work fine. because the management is ready to
approve this payment to any foreigner who has correct
information of this account, which I will give to you,
upon your positive response and once I am convinced
that you  are  capable  and will meet up with
instruction of  a key bank official who is deeply
involved with me in this business.
I need your strong assurance that you will never, 
never let me down.

With my influence and the position of the bank
official we can transfer this
money to any foreigner's reliable account which you
can provide with assurance that this money will be
intact pending our physical arrival in your country
for
sharing. The bank official will  destroy all documents
of transaction
immediately we receive this money leaving no trace to
any place and to build confidence  you can  come
immediately  to discuss with me face to face after
which I will make this remittance in 
your presence and three of us will fly to your country
at least two days ahead of the money going into the
account.

I will apply for annual leave to get visa immediately
I hear from you that you are ready to act and re

Re: bogus maintainers?

[Josip Rodin]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 09:23:50AM +0100, Bas Zoetekouw wrote:
> > >From http://www.debian.org/devel/people, I see:
> > 
> >   Maintainer, Unknown Kernel Package  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >   main:   kernel-doc-2.4.5-r4k-kn04, kernel-source-2.4.5-r4k-kn04
> > 
> > What's up with this?  This is not a legitimate maintainer address IMO.
> 
> Probably the script that generates this page is broken

How the hell were you able to draw that conclusion? The script may be
broken, but that it would randomly insert local data into the web pages,
well that's just too stupid even for that script. :P

-- 
 2. That which causes joy or happiness.

Re: bogus maintainers?

[Bernd Eckenfels]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 03:47:41PM +0100, Josip Rodin wrote:
> > >   Maintainer, Unknown Kernel Package  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

> How the hell were you able to draw that conclusion? The script may be
> broken, but that it would randomly insert local data into the web pages,
> well that's just too stupid even for that script. :P

it is obvious that the script which generated kernel packages reads the
address from /etc/kernel-pkg.conf and that the person generating this
package has not yet configured it.

The question is, if the installer does check the maintainer field in the
.deb against the changed file?

Greetings
Bernd

Re: EURO and CENT signs in the console keymaps

[Yann Dirson]

On Tue, Jan 01, 2002 at 01:41:33PM +0100, Eduard Bloch wrote:
> I tried to include the support for Euro and Cent in the console keymaps.
> Cent is not a problem. It is allmost unknown and AltGR-e could be surely
> used for this. But Euro is a problem - keymaps have different location
> of the ?. I cannot found good and trustworthy informations on the net,
> so more user feedback is required. What I have so far:
> 
>  - Most keyboards have AltGr-e as Euro
>  - the French keymap (relative to US layout: <]>)

AFAIK the keystroke you refer to, on my old french keyboard, produces the
latin1 symbol known as "currency sign", which just happen to have the same
position in latin1 (\xa4) that the euro symbol has in latin15.  Many people
use a latin15 font with a latin1 keyboard, hence this coincidental mapping.

There are french keymaps somewhere that should give better euro support I
guess.  There's already an entry in the BTS.

-- 
Yann Dirson<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> |Why make M$-Bill richer & richer ?
Debian-related: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> |   Support Debian GNU/Linux:
Pro:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> |  Freedom, Power, Stability, Gratuity
 http://ydirson.free.fr/| Check 

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 08:06:33PM +0900, Junichi Uekawa wrote:
> On Wed, 2 Jan 2002 21:36:24 +1100
> Mark Purcell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > My question still remains.  If we require a big recompile, when/ how are we 
> > going to bother to advise the maintainers of these packages? It has been 
> > stated that we are talking about 300+ packages :-(
> 
> Mass NMU, setting Build-Depends to libpng-dev version that is for libpng3
> sounds like a way to go.

What about people's local binaries linked against libqt2 and libpng2?
I maintain that "fixing" this in the applications is wrong; if at all
possible, libqt2 should be more careful with the png namespace.

> It might be easier to set libpng3 to conflict with libpng2, so that 
> until libpng2 is removed from the system libpng3 does not enter,
> which would make the problem more obvious.

That would be utterly wrong.

-- 
Colin Watson  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: BitKeeper

[Brian Ristuccia]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 02:52:01AM -0500, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> (crossposted to debian-legal for input on the license; please direct
> followups to -devel or -legal as appropriate)
> 
> Has anyone looked into packaging BitKeeper (www.bitkeeper.com)? 

We have a package here which we build from the various binary shars
available on Bitmover's FTP site. I can share with you if you'd like, but
it's really trivial.

> The
> license[0] is obviously non-free due to usage restrictions, but people seem
> to like it, and some of the licensing restrictions are arguably in defense
> of other kinds of freedom. 
>

Yep. It's annoying. The license (and the enforcement code in the software
itself) has a number of practical issues which make using BitKeeper very
unpleasant at times even if you pay Bitmover to disable the logging stuff. 

> I am not interested in packaging it at this
> time, but I might file an RFP unless someone knows of a reason why it can't
> be packaged for non-free.
> 
> [0] http://www.bitkeeper.com/Sales.Licensing.Source.html
> 

It's probably OK for non-free. 

-- 
Brian Ristuccia
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: EURO and CENT signs in the console keymaps

[Wichert Akkerman]

On Tue, Jan 01, 2002 at 01:41:33PM +0100, Eduard Bloch wrote:
>  - Most keyboards have AltGr-e as Euro

As far as I know most keyboards don't have an AltGr key..

Wichert.

-- 
  _
 /[EMAIL PROTECTED] This space intentionally left occupied \
| [EMAIL PROTECTED]http://www.liacs.nl/~wichert/ |
| 1024D/2FA3BC2D 576E 100B 518D 2F16 36B0  2805 3CB8 9250 2FA3 BC2D |

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Steve M. Robbins]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 09:17:01AM -0600, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 08:06:33PM +0900, Junichi Uekawa wrote:
> > On Wed, 2 Jan 2002 21:36:24 +1100
> > Mark Purcell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > > My question still remains.  If we require a big recompile, when/ how are 
> > > we 
> > > going to bother to advise the maintainers of these packages? It has been 
> > > stated that we are talking about 300+ packages :-(
> > 
> > Mass NMU, setting Build-Depends to libpng-dev version that is for libpng3
> > sounds like a way to go.
> 
> What about people's local binaries linked against libqt2 and libpng2?
> I maintain that "fixing" this in the applications is wrong; if at all
> possible, libqt2 should be more careful with the png namespace.

By the way, "imlib1" is in the same boat as libqt2: I recompiled
imlib using libpng3 and loads of GNOME binaries started failing to
load icons.  So this issue affects all of GNOME as well as KDE.

-Steve

-- 
by Rocket to the Moon,
by Airplane to the Rocket,
by Taxi to the Airport,
by Frontdoor to the Taxi,
by throwing back the blanket and laying down the legs ...
- They Might Be Giants

Re: Processed: Fixed in NMU of tkstep8.0 8.0.4p2-4.1

[LaMont Jones]

> Additionally I see that you did other changes to unix/tkstepConfig.sh that
> aren't even mentioned in the changelog!

Here is the complete diff between what I uploaded, and what was in the
archive.  Dunno what change you're seeing in tkstepConfig.sh, but it
was there in 4p2-4.

lamont
=
diff -ur tkstep8.0-8.0.4p2-4/debian/changelog 
tkstep8.0-8.0.4p2-4.1/debian/changelog
--- tkstep8.0-8.0.4p2-4/debian/changelogThu Jan  3 12:49:21 2002
+++ tkstep8.0-8.0.4p2-4.1/debian/changelog  Thu Jan  3 12:49:35 2002
@@ -1,3 +1,10 @@
+tkstep8.0 (8.0.4p2-4.1) unstable; urgency=low
+
+  * NMU
+  * remove alternative for wish in prerm, per policy.  Closes: #126700
+
+ -- LaMont Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>  Thu, 27 Dec 2001 20:57:25 -0700
+
 tkstep8.0 (8.0.4p2-4) unstable; urgency=low
 
   * Removed the obsolete .dwww-index files. (closes: #96027)
diff -ur tkstep8.0-8.0.4p2-4/debian/prerm tkstep8.0-8.0.4p2-4.1/debian/prerm
--- tkstep8.0-8.0.4p2-4/debian/prermThu Jan  3 12:49:21 2002
+++ tkstep8.0-8.0.4p2-4.1/debian/prerm  Thu Jan  3 12:49:35 2002
@@ -3,6 +3,7 @@
 case "$1" in
 upgrade) ;;
 *)
+   update-alternatives --remove wish /usr/bin/wishstep8.0
# removes /usr/lib/tkstep from /etc/ld.so.conf
fgrep -v '/usr/lib/tkstep' /etc/ld.so.conf > /etc/ld.so.conf.new
if cmp -s /etc/ld.so.conf /etc/ld.so.conf.new; then
=

Re: EURO and CENT signs in the console keymaps

[Edward Betts]

Eduard Bloch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>  - Most keyboards have AltGr-e as Euro
>  - the French keymap (relative to US layout: <]>)
>  - the Hungarian keymap (relative to US layout: <\>)
>  - the Norwegian and Swedish keymap (relative to US layout: <4>)
> 
> Did I miss anything or is something wrong?

I bought my i386 laptop in the US with a US qwerty keyboard. Soon after I
bought it the keyboard sunk slightly near the plus key, it did not affect my
typing, but it was visible, so I did not bother getting it fixed. Moved back
to the UK and it was coming close to the end of the one year warranty period.
Sent the laptop off so they could fix some other problems that had shown up,
and asked for the keyboard to be fixed whilst they were at it. I knew that the
policy was to replace with local parts, so when I got the laptop back I was
not surprised that it had a UK qwerty keyboard, took me a while to get used to
the new layout, but not a problem.

The Euro is on the `4' of my keyboard, I think it should display a Euro when
used with the `Alt gr' modifier. Most UK keyboards that have been made in
the last few years have a Euro symbol in the same place. 

I have only seen one exception, my Dad bought a new computer last month, and
it has the Euro symbol on the `e' key, otherwise it is similar to other UK
keyboards I have seen (it has a £ symbol) and so on. The machine is running
Windows, and `Alt gr' + `e' gives an accented `e' of some kind, while 
`Alt gr' + `4', gives the Euro (nasty looking character in the typeface it was
using). So I guess it is just some cheap keyboard, made abroad, and they put
the euro symbol in the wrong place.

-- 
The enemy's gate is down

Re: An alarming trend (no it's not flaimbait.)

[Karl M. Hegbloom]

 If a package has gotten very stale, and nobody has taken up
 maintainence, isn't that a pretty good indication that nobody is
 using it anyhow?

 What about taking packages like that and removing the binary .deb,
 but leave the last source package in the archive...  there should be
 a way through some interface such as "aptitude" or a web page to find
 it by searching, perhaps.  But this only for software deemed worth a
 read of the source code or potentially useful in real life.

 We must admit: there is plenty of cruft in the archive.  A lot of
 stuff nobody really uses.

-- 
mailto: (Karl M. Hegbloom) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.microsharp.com
phone://USA/WA/360-260-2066
jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Sponsor for gkrellm-newsticker

[Darren Salt]

I demand that Hereward Cooper may or may not have written...

> I'm looking for a sponsor for gkrellm-newsticker.

> The upstream can be found at
> http://www.tu-ilmenau.de/~tisa-in/newsticker.html The debian package can be
> found at http://www.zadok.uklinux.net/debian

> Gkrellm-newsticker scrolls headlines retrieved from news sites such as /.
> and debian planet on your gkrellm system bar. It has support for the common
> RDF news format.

I tried building this here (testing; libcurl-ssl is installed), and hit a
problem with the build dependencies.

Fair enough, libcurl-dev wasn't installed, but the problem persists on
installation of libcurl-ssl-dev (but 'debuild -d' helps). So either:

 * gkrellm-newsticker should Build-Depend on libcurl-dev | libcurl-ssl-dev
   (versioning as already given in its debian/control file), or

 * libcurl2-ssl should provide libcurl2;
   libcurl-ssl-dev should provide libcurl-dev;
   and an appropriate bug report should be filed.

Checking other packages (in unstable)...

These Build-Depend on either:
  tclcurl   0.9.2-1
  php4  4.1.1-1
  libcurl-easy-perl 1.1.8-1
  came  1.2-1

These don't:
  logjam3.0.1-2

It looks as if both logjam and gkrellm-newsticker have it wrong, *but* I
think that it'd be easier to use the Provides option.

(For some reason, packages.d.o doesn't seem to want to return 'came' in the
package search results...)

-- 
| Darren Salt   | linux (or ds) at | nr. Ashington,
| Linux PC, Risc PC | youmustbejoking  | Northumberland
| No Wodniws here   | demon co uk  | Toon Army
|   I don't ask for much, just untold riches...

It is impossible to enjoy idling unless one has plenty of work to do.

Re: An alarming trend (no it's not flaimbait.)

[Craig Dickson]

Karl M. Hegbloom wrote:

>  If a package has gotten very stale, and nobody has taken up
>  maintainence, isn't that a pretty good indication that nobody is
>  using it anyhow?

Is it? Is the average Debian user both able and willing to be a
maintainer, and sufficiently aware of ongoing developments that he would
both know that the package is out of date, and how to go about doing
something about it (in terms of the process for taking over an abandoned
package)?

Craig

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Ed Tomlinson]

I use debain.  As a debian user I am quite distressed at how this
bug is being treated.  I have watched the bug reports on this issue
and have created one (See 127215).  From my perspective the problem
seems to be the libpng3 changes the dependencies of qt2 and hense kde.
It seems the fix is not to revert/fix libpng but to fix the qt
dependencies however I get the impression that frustration is setting
in.  ie. did not create the bug so I should not fix it.  From a user
POV this is scary.  With something as complex as debain or even just
the kde tree this type of bug should be expected and _fixed_ quickly
even if the person repairing the bug is doing damage control.

Once the bug is _fixed_ then the developers can and should improve 
processes to make this sort of problem less apt to occur.

I would not consider it a bug if qt2 had failed to upgrade until all 
dependent apps had recompiled packages available - my system would
not have broken...  This would have also put pressure on package
owers to recompile.  As it stands now there seems to be little incentive
to recompile.  Look at 127215 - its closed but nothing is fixed.

Ed Tomlinson


Mark Purcell wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 01, 2002 at 06:50:03PM +0900, Junichi Uekawa wrote:
>> On Tue, 1 Jan 2002 19:39:07 +1100 Mark Purcell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> 
>> > The solution is rather simple, requiring recompilation to
>> > get the correct linkage to libpng3, but it would of been nice to
>> > see some dicussion on debian-devel before the upload of
>> > libpng3 to unstable 'broke' all our pacakges.
>> 
>> Do you call that solution pretty simple?
> 
> Well it is simple once you know about it.  I have two complaints as
> a maintainer of a couple of libpng dependant packages.
> 
> 1.Why hasn't there been any discussion on debian-devel to actually
> let maintainers know that there is this major backwards incompatibility
> issue,
> which is going to create all sorts of user problems.  The only reports I
> have seen sofar are Bug#126808 and Bug#126904.  Have a look in debian-kde
> 'where have my icons gone threads' to guage the amount of confusion this
> issue is causing.
> 
> 2.What measures are in place to prevent such a monster change
> as caused by the uncontrolled introduction of libpng3??
> 
> This is a big issue, I'm stll suprised there has been zero discussion
> about this and the implications for developers of libpng dependant
> packages.
> 
>> We have around 300+ packages depending on libpng2,
>> which amounts to more than 1000 rebuilds.
>> And we don't have the incompatibility information in
>> our dependency system, which means that it will fail to trickle
>> into "testing".
> 
> The incompatibility as I see it from here is that any application
> which depends on libpng2, is only good with libpng2 <= 1.0.12-2 and
> upon recompiling will be dependant on libpng3.
> 
> libqt 2.3.1-18 has been recompiled and now depends on libpng3, but almost
> every other package needs to be recompiled as well :-(
> 
> I understand that Philippe Troin, libpng maintainer, is currently on
> vacation.  Perhaps someone more knowledgeable about the libpng issues
> could comment as this is only what I have been able to gather from the
> outside looking in.
> 
> Mark
> 
> 

Re: bogus maintainers?

[Bas Zoetekouw]

Hi Josip!

You wrote:

> > >   Maintainer, Unknown Kernel Package  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > >   main:   kernel-doc-2.4.5-r4k-kn04, kernel-source-2.4.5-r4k-kn04
> > > 
> > > What's up with this?  This is not a legitimate maintainer address IMO.
> > 
> > Probably the script that generates this page is broken
> 
> How the hell were you able to draw that conclusion? The script may be
> broken, but that it would randomly insert local data into the web pages,
> well that's just too stupid even for that script. :P

What I meant was: the page was apparently generated from local data
(from a local /var/lib/dpkg/available perhaps?).


-- 
Kind regards,
+---+
| Bas Zoetekouw  | Si l'on sait exactement ce   |
|| que l'on va faire, a quoi|
| [EMAIL PROTECTED] | bon le faire?|
|[EMAIL PROTECTED] |   Pablo Picasso  |
+---+ 

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Thu, 03 Jan 2002, Ed Tomlinson wrote:
> and have created one (See 127215).  From my perspective the problem
> seems to be the libpng3 changes the dependencies of qt2 and hense kde.
> It seems the fix is not to revert/fix libpng but to fix the qt
> dependencies however I get the impression that frustration is setting

Yes. Actually, we have the same problem with every library that links with
another library that is likely to be used by an app.

The best example is libdb*, but there are others. libtiff, libpng, libsasl,
libz...

You either make sure EVERYthing is linked against the same library versions
(and good luck with binary compatibility with other distributions for
anything that has a shared library), or you must tell any libraries that
link to other libraries to use --symbolic dynamic linking, or you must use
versioned symbols.  Maybe there is a fourth way, but I don't know of any.

Implementing any of the fixes is bound to be painful.

> in.  ie. did not create the bug so I should not fix it.  From a user

We actually need a Debian-wide (well, probably a LSB-wide) fix for the
problem. The same kind of breakage is expected to hit us again and again
until we do that.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh

Re: bogus maintainers?

[Josip Rodin]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 08:37:31PM +0100, Bas Zoetekouw wrote:
> > > >   Maintainer, Unknown Kernel Package  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > > >   main:   kernel-doc-2.4.5-r4k-kn04, kernel-source-2.4.5-r4k-kn04
> > > > 
> > > > What's up with this?  This is not a legitimate maintainer address IMO.
> > > 
> > > Probably the script that generates this page is broken
> > 
> > How the hell were you able to draw that conclusion? The script may be
> > broken, but that it would randomly insert local data into the web pages,
> > well that's just too stupid even for that script. :P
> 
> What I meant was: the page was apparently generated from local data
> (from a local /var/lib/dpkg/available perhaps?).

And I said it _was not_.

The broken package really was in sid, my few-days-old sid still has it.
It's been fixed in the meantime. The devel/people page will be regenerated
shortly.

-- 
 2. That which causes joy or happiness.

Re: EURO and CENT signs in the console keymaps

[Ari Makela]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 11:08:48AM +0100, Allan Sandfeld Jensen wrote:

> I suppose swedish and danish keyboards are alike. 

I think they are almost identical. AFAIK the only difference is that 
'ä' and 'ö' have changed places on the keyboard. And, of course, the
Danes do not use 'ö' but ø but that's a little different thing.

Finnish and Swedish keyboards are identical as Finnish Linux users well
know: at least Corel and RH have had several times broken Finnish
keymaps (fi instead of the correct fi-latin1). So the Finnish users have
used the Swedish keymaps.

> standard. (AltGr+3 is £, AltGr+4 $ and AltGr+6 is apparently ¥ in X11, but I 
> have never seen the later drawn on any keyboard).

me neither. I must show my ignorance: I don't know what it
is.

BTW, I'm the author of the quite bad LDP Euro Char mini howto. I wrote it
because I could not find anything better. I'll try to update it RSN as
my mini HOWTO worked in one way I excpected it to: I got some good help
and links. 

-- 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w --  Ari Makela <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://arska.org/hauva/ #

Finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] for GPG public key.
Before you ask by email: http://arska.org/do_not_ask_by_email/

Re: EURO and CENT signs in the console keymaps

[Ari Makela]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 04:23:24PM +0100, Wichert Akkerman wrote:

> As far as I know most keyboards don't have an AltGr key..

In North America that's probably correct (what would they do with it?) 
but it's essential with European languages with the possible exception of 
British English.

In the Nordic keyboard mappings too many important characters ( {[]}\$ to
mention a few) are behind AltGR (the right alt). It's quite common that
Nordic programmers use US mappings when they code or some home brewd
version of US keymap.

-- 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w --  Ari Makela <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://arska.org/hauva/ #

Finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] for GPG public key.
Before you ask by email: http://arska.org/do_not_ask_by_email/

Re: bogus maintainers?

[Gerfried Fuchs]

* Josip Rodin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2002-01-03 21:06]:
> On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 08:37:31PM +0100, Bas Zoetekouw wrote:
>> What I meant was: the page was apparently generated from local data
>> (from a local /var/lib/dpkg/available perhaps?).
> 
> And I said it _was not_.
> 
> The broken package really was in sid, my few-days-old sid still has it.
> It's been fixed in the meantime. The devel/people page will be regenerated
> shortly.

 And to be honest - you could have tried to check the Packages file you
get from debian archive.  The info was in that file, too.  It was a
(two) broken uploads that shouldn't have happened.  But hey - that's
unstable. What would it be like if unstable wouldn't make up for his
name

 I tracked one of the packages down (apt-get source helps) and found
Martin Schulze as the responsible person.  But that was quite some
days (weeks?) ago - are those package-pages still online or were your
report lagging behind?

 HTH,
Alfie
-- 
[It is] best to confuse only one issue at a time.
  -- K&R

Re: BitKeeper

[Stephen Zander]

> "Peter" == Peter Makholm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Peter> There is nothing in the DFSG saying the a licens can't
Peter> require you to give the original autor all rights to you
Peter> changes. So that single part of the license I refered to
Peter> does not makes it even more or even less non-free.

If fact, you could argue that the above is just a special case of the
rights bestowed to you by the GPL.

-- 
Stephen

"A duck!"

Re: BitKeeper

[Thomas Bushnell, BSG]

Peter Makholm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Thomas Bushnell, BSG) writes:
> 
> > Bitkeeper is (as you note) not free.  Not only the usage restrictions
> > are a problem, but also the requirement that changes you make may be
> > distributed by BitOwner "under any license".
> 
> Thats not non-free in any way. The Freedom DFSG describes is not
> freedom for the developers but for the users and such restriction
> doesn't apply to ordinary users. The NPL (and MPL IIRC) has the same
> requirements.

OK, perhaps the relicensing rule is not non-free; I'm less sure of
that.  But the outright prohibition of certain modifications certainly
kills it.

> > One strategy would be to bring down all the Open Logging servers, and
> > keep them down for six months.  Then it reverts to the GPL. :)
> 
> Please don't even suggest such actions not even in jokes. It would be
> very sad to see Open Source fanatics use terorism to spread the use of
> open source.

1) Regardless of whether various legislatures have redefined the word
   "terrorism" to include illegal breaking into computers, I don't
   accede to their craziness.  Wrong, perhaps, but not terrorism.

2) It's a joke.  It would be very sad to see Open Source fanatics
   begin to treat everything as so deadly serious.

Re: bogus maintainers?

[Josip Rodin]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 09:28:22PM +0100, Gerfried Fuchs wrote:
>  And to be honest - you could have tried to check the Packages file you
> get from debian archive.

What, you want the devel/people script to check the validity of the emails
in the Packages files?

> But that was quite some days (weeks?) ago - are those package-pages still
> online or were your report lagging behind?

[EMAIL 
PROTECTED]:/org/ftp.debian.org/ftp/pool/main/k/kernel-source-2.4.5-r4k-kn04]% 
dpkg -I kernel-doc-2.4.5-r4k-kn04_20010801d_all.deb|grep Maint
 Maintainer: Unknown Kernel Package Maintainer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:/org/ftp.debian.org/ftp/dists/sid/main/binary-mipsel]% 
grep-dctrl -F Package -s Maintainer kernel-doc-2.4.5-r4k-kn04 < Packages
Maintainer: Unknown Kernel Package Maintainer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

There is nothing wrong with the script. It is merely showing what's in the
Packages files.

I will repeat that once again: there is nothing wrong with the script. It is
merely showing what's in the Packages files.

-- 
 2. That which causes joy or happiness.

Re: An alarming trend (no it's not flaimbait.)

[Darrell Rene Dupas]

no it isnt flame bait but it is newbie bait!
there is an good discussion on this very topic at the following url
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
take care. i am not a maintaner yet! someday hopefully
dd
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Karl M. Hegbloom wrote:
If a package has gotten very stale, and nobody has taken up
maintainence, isn't that a pretty good indication that nobody is
using it anyhow?
Is it? Is the average Debian user both able and willing to be a
maintainer, and sufficiently aware of ongoing developments that he would
both know that the package is out of date, and how to go about doing
something about it (in terms of the process for taking over an abandoned
package)?
Craig

Re: bogus maintainers?

[Gerfried Fuchs]

* Josip Rodin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2002-01-03 22:31]:
> On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 09:28:22PM +0100, Gerfried Fuchs wrote:
>>  And to be honest - you could have tried to check the Packages file you
>> get from debian archive.
> 
> What, you want the devel/people script to check the validity of the emails
> in the Packages files?

 Sorry that you misunderstood me. I meant that the info are/were in the
Packages-File and come from there. No need to assume for the people
there might be a broken /var/lib/dpkg/available on the Webserver or a
broken script.

> I will repeat that once again: there is nothing wrong with the script. It is
> merely showing what's in the Packages files.

 That's exactly what I was trying to say ;)
Alfie
-- 
"Wer sich die Netiquette ansieht, wird feststellen, dass sie keine
Zaehne hat, nicht wie ein Joch aussieht und sich auch nicht wie eine
Knute anfuehlt." (Christoph von Nathusius in de.soc.netzkultur)

Re: EURO and CENT signs in the console keymaps

[Samuel Tardieu]

On  3/01, Ari Makela wrote:

| In the Nordic keyboard mappings too many important characters ( {[]}\$ to
| mention a few) are behind AltGR (the right alt). It's quite common that
| Nordic programmers use US mappings when they code or some home brewd
| version of US keymap.

A keyboard that is handy to enter text but not to enter programs
encourages good practices: think and document a lot before you even start
coding, and when you do, code only what you strictly need :-)

Re: An alarming trend (no it's not flaimbait.)

[Craig Dickson]

Darrell Rene Dupas wrote:

> no it isnt flame bait but it is newbie bait!

Not if you read it correctly. Try again.

> there is an good discussion on this very topic at the following url
> http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

I was talking about Debian policy and procedures, not general open-source
practice, with which I am sufficiently familiar.

Craig

Re: BitKeeper

[Peter Makholm]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Thomas Bushnell, BSG) writes:

> OK, perhaps the relicensing rule is not non-free; I'm less sure of
> that.  But the outright prohibition of certain modifications certainly
> kills it.

I only talked about the relicensing issues. I'm sorry it wasn't clear
by my quoting (I can see that my quotes could easily be misunderstood)

> 1) Regardless of whether various legislatures have redefined the word
>"terrorism" to include illegal breaking into computers, I don't
>accede to their craziness.  Wrong, perhaps, but not terrorism.

I think I learned the word terrorism in relation to the European
terrorism in the 70's. I am quite aware that it has nothing to do with
the paranoia of today.

You idea reminds me about that kind of terrorism.

-- 
Når folk spørger mig, om jeg er nørd, bliver jeg altid ilde til mode
og svarer lidt undskyldende: "Nej, jeg bruger RedHat".
-- Allan Olesen på dk.edb.system.unix

Re: EURO and CENT signs in the console keymaps

[Andreas Rottmann]

Hi!

I'm using this discussion for the RFC for a bug/feature I'm
experiencing regarding the EURO-symbol. I still didn't get the
euro-sign to work in console, but that doesn't bother me because I do
almost everything under X.

When I use a iso8859-15 font in xterm, the euro will display
correctly, but I can't enter it on the commandline, it only
beeps. However, when I use 'read' and then enter AltGr-e, it works ok.
However if I set LANG or LC_CTYPE to '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' it no longer beeps,
and nothing shows up using 'read'. Also an emacs started with that env
setting doesn't do anything on AltGr-e (without that setting,
everything's OK: ¤, see ;-)).

Does anybody experience something similiar? I want to set LC_CTYPE to
[EMAIL PROTECTED], because that enables the EURO-sign in gnucash.

Thx for any hints,
Andy
-- 
Andreas Rottmann | [EMAIL PROTECTED]| [EMAIL PROTECTED] | 
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Georg-Rendlweg 28| A-5111 Bürmoos | Austria   | Europe
http://www.8ung.at/rotty | GnuPG Key: http://www.8ung.at/rotty/gpg.asc
Fingerprint  | DFB4 4EB4 78A4 5EEE 6219  F228 F92F CFC5 01FD 5B62

Re: EURO and CENT signs in the console keymaps

[Miquel van Smoorenburg]

In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Ari Makela  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 04:23:24PM +0100, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
>
>> As far as I know most keyboards don't have an AltGr key..
>
>In North America that's probably correct (what would they do with it?) 
>but it's essential with European languages with the possible exception of 
>British English.

Well, in the Netherlands almost everyone uses a US keyboard. I don't
think I can remember when I last saw a Dutch keyboard, if ever. If
I need a é or an ë, which are about the only accented characters we
use, I use the compose key. Which isn't on the keyboard either, so
it's application dependant. In vim it's ctrl-k.

That kind of sucks. Is there a standard compose key in X?
[clickety click trying out all kinds of keys combo's]

Wait, on my 104-key kbd the right windows key acts as a compose key!
Hmm, I can compose almost any accented character with it, except,
ofcourse, a Euro symbol .. would have expected that under e= but
it doesn't work.

My head hurts ..

Mike.

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Adrian Bunk]

On Thu, 3 Jan 2002, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:

>...
> We actually need a Debian-wide (well, probably a LSB-wide) fix for the
> problem. The same kind of breakage is expected to hit us again and again
> until we do that.

This kind of problem does only occur if we ship several versions of a
shared library at the same time (in this case libpng2 and libpng3). As
soon as there's only one version of such a library in the archive (IOW:
libpng2 is removed from the archive) all the packages depending on this
library that still link with the old version of the library become
uninstallable which means that they need to be recompiled. This prevents
us from all the obvious or silent breakages we do see otherwise.

cu
Adrian

Some thoughts about problems within Debian

[Adrian Bunk]

Hi,

I had several discussions with people on Debian lists that became very
emotional. They thought that they were right in a discussion and I thought
that I was right and nothing but anger resulted from these discussions.
Several times the "opponents" in these discussions are people that are
longer in Debian than I am and that do a damn good work in the area(s)
they are working for Debian and I do acknowledge this even when they call
me a troll. I try to summarize the most important points below - not
because I consider it important that I'm right but because these are IMHO
very serious problems in Debian. Please read it, try to understand it and
 make your own opinion of whether I'm right or wrong.

When I see problems somewhere I tell them even in the case when I don't
know a solution - IMHO pointing to a problem is something valuable to help
improving something. I do often try to see the point of view of the people
we are doing our work for - our users.

Everything I mention below isn't meant to offend against anyone
personally.


Debian becomes bigger and bigger. We do currently have over 900 people
maintaining over 8000 binary packages [1] and there are currently over 350
RC bugs in packages that are in testing [2] plus many more in packages
that were either removed from testing or never made it into testing.
Debian is well-known for high-quality releases and I consider it important
to preserve the high quality though we have so many different people
maintaining so many packages.

One important thing are more frequent releases. We don't have to release
as often as other distributions but IMHO it's needed to have a new stable
release at about once a year. Currently the software in our stable release
is two years old and I see several distributors and magazines already ship
woody CDs instead of potato CDs although we are still several months away
from releasing woody - and if people encounter problems with the packages
they find there this does in the long term harm the good reputation of the
quality of our packages. There are many reasons why you need packages you
can't find in potato. Sometimes it's only that you want to use Gimp 1.2
but often there are important reasons like e.g. support for kernel 2.4 or
Euro support in some applications. Using testing isn't an alternative on
many production systems because testing reduces the probality of bugs but
it could still happen that e.g. your X does no longer start after your
latest upgrade to testing.

In Debian a package normally belongs to exactly one maintainer. The
possiblity to overrule the technical decision a maintainer makes and to
force a maintainer to e.g. implement a proposed solution from a bug report
is mostly theoretical. This maintainer-centric approach gives very much
power to a maintainer and I think that there also an obligation for a
maintainer to take care of his packages.

Most of us who work for Debian do this in our spare time. But I do
personally disagree with the "you can't force a volunteer to do anything"
argument I heard in several discussions. These were discussions about
things where some work of the maintainer who is responsible for his
package would save work for other people who do volunteer work for Debian
or to improve the general quality of Debian for our users.
Examples are e.g.:
- Old RC bugs that are easy to fix.
  These bugs need someone to do a NMU and I'm often negative surprised in
  bug squashing parties how many RC bugs that are open for more than one
  month are easy to fix because there's e.g. only a missing build
  dependency. This makes it harder to get Debian in a state to release and
  it takes time at bug squashing parties to fix these bugs - time you
  could otherwise use to try to fix other bugs. Additionally one buggy
  package might prevent many other packages from entering testing which is
  very frustrating for the maintainers of the packages that don't make it
  into testing because of this.
- Make debconf mandatory for all packages that interact with the user
  while installing/removing a package in woody+1.
  One positive effect would be for the user that he doesn't has to answer
  questions several times during the installation of the packages - he can
  instead go to drink a cup of tea after he answered the debconf questions
  that come en bloc. Another positive effect is that this makes life
  easier for everyone working on automatic installations of Debian.
Don't misunderstand me: I know that a package maintainer also has "real
life" things to do that might have higher priorities for him personally.
On the other hand he is responsible for the packages he maintains and IMHO
this implies that we can expect from a maintainer that he tries to fix RC
bugs in his packages at least once a month and to try to fix the other
bugs in his packages from time to time [3]. If it's generally agreed that
all packages should comply with with something that is generally
considered important I think it's OK to 

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Thu, 03 Jan 2002, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Jan 2002, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> >...
> > We actually need a Debian-wide (well, probably a LSB-wide) fix for the
> > problem. The same kind of breakage is expected to hit us again and again
> > until we do that.
> 
> This kind of problem does only occur if we ship several versions of a
> shared library at the same time (in this case libpng2 and libpng3). As

Or if the user needs to have different versions of said library because of
some closed-source (or not easily recompilable) library.  However, it is a
major pain in the backside for every library for which the upgrade path is
not trivial.

> uninstallable which means that they need to be recompiled. This prevents
> us from all the obvious or silent breakages we do see otherwise.

Just as far as Debian itself can. It does nothing for binary compatibility
issues (which given our long release schedule for stable are NOT that simple
to ignore).

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh

Re: An alarming trend (no it's not flaimbait.)

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Thu, 03 Jan 2002, Craig Dickson wrote:
> Karl M. Hegbloom wrote:
> >  If a package has gotten very stale, and nobody has taken up
> >  maintainence, isn't that a pretty good indication that nobody is
> >  using it anyhow?
> 
> Is it? Is the average Debian user both able and willing to be a

Obviously not. It is a pretty good indication that no developer is using it
anymore, but just that.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh

Re: debian-devel-digest Digest V102 #11

[spam_filter]

>--

>Content-Type: text/plain

>debian-devel-digest Digest Volume 102 : Issue 11

>To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>with a subject of "unsubscribe".  Trouble?  Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]

>Today's Topics:
>  Re: bogus maintainers?[ Bas Zoetekouw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled a  [ Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <[EMAIL 
> PROTECTED] ]
>  Re: bogus maintainers?[ Josip Rodin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Re: EURO and CENT signs in the conso  [ Ari Makela <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Re: EURO and CENT signs in the conso  [ Ari Makela <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Re: bogus maintainers?[ Gerfried Fuchs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Re: BitKeeper [ Stephen Zander <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Re: BitKeeper [ [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Thomas Bushnell, 
> BSG ]
>  Re: bogus maintainers?[ Josip Rodin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Re: An alarming trend (no it's not f  [ Darrell Rene Dupas <[EMAIL 
> PROTECTED] ]
>  Re: bogus maintainers?[ Gerfried Fuchs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Re: EURO and CENT signs in the conso  [ Samuel Tardieu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Re: An alarming trend (no it's not f  [ Craig Dickson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Re: BitKeeper [ Peter Makholm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Re: EURO and CENT signs in the conso  [ Andreas Rottmann <[EMAIL PROTECTED] ]
>  Re: EURO and CENT signs in the conso  [ Miquel van Smoorenburg <[EMAIL 
> PROTECTED] ]
>  Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled a  [ Adrian Bunk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Some thoughts about problems within   [ Adrian Bunk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]

>--

>Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 20:37:31 +0100
>From: Bas Zoetekouw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org, debian-www@lists.debian.org
>Subject: Re: bogus maintainers?
>Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>Content-Disposition: inline

>Hi Josip!

>You wrote:

>> > >   Maintainer, Unknown Kernel Package  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> > >   main:   kernel-doc-2.4.5-r4k-kn04, kernel-source-2.4.5-r4k-kn04
>> > > 
>> > > What's up with this?  This is not a legitimate maintainer address IMO.
>> > 
>> > Probably the script that generates this page is broken
>> 
>> How the hell were you able to draw that conclusion? The script may be
>> broken, but that it would randomly insert local data into the web pages,
>> well that's just too stupid even for that script. :P

>What I meant was: the page was apparently generated from local data
>(from a local /var/lib/dpkg/available perhaps?).


>-- 
>Kind regards,
>+---+
>| Bas Zoetekouw  | Si l'on sait exactement ce   |
>|| que l'on va faire, a quoi|
>| [EMAIL PROTECTED] | bon le faire?|
>|[EMAIL PROTECTED] |   Pablo Picasso  |
>+---+ 

>--

>Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 17:48:53 -0200
>From: Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
>Subject: Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng
>Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>Content-Disposition: inline

>On Thu, 03 Jan 2002, Ed Tomlinson wrote:
>> and have created one (See 127215).  From my perspective the problem
>> seems to be the libpng3 changes the dependencies of qt2 and hense kde.
>> It seems the fix is not to revert/fix libpng but to fix the qt
>> dependencies however I get the impression that frustration is setting

>Yes. Actually, we have the same problem with every library that links with
>another library that is likely to be used by an app.

>The best example is libdb*, but there are others. libtiff, libpng, libsasl,
>libz...

>You either make sure EVERYthing is linked against the same library versions
>(and good luck with binary compatibility with other distributions for
>anything that has a shared library), or you must tell any libraries that
>link to other libraries to use --symbolic dynamic linking, or you must use
>versioned symbols.  Maybe there is a fourth way, but I don't know of any.

>Implementing any of the fixes is bound to be painful.

>> in.  ie. did not create the bug so I should not fix it.  From a user

>We actually need a Debian-wide (well, probably a LSB-wide) fix for the
>problem. The same kind of breakage is expected to hit us again and again
>until we do that.

>-- 
>  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
>  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
>  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
>  Henrique Holschuh

>--

>Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 21:06:01 +0100
>From: Josip Rodin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

Re: debian-devel-digest Digest V102 #11

[spam_filter]

>--

>Content-Type: text/plain

>debian-devel-digest Digest Volume 102 : Issue 11

>To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>with a subject of "unsubscribe".  Trouble?  Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]

>Today's Topics:
>  Re: bogus maintainers?[ Bas Zoetekouw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled a  [ Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <[EMAIL 
> PROTECTED] ]
>  Re: bogus maintainers?[ Josip Rodin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Re: EURO and CENT signs in the conso  [ Ari Makela <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Re: EURO and CENT signs in the conso  [ Ari Makela <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Re: bogus maintainers?[ Gerfried Fuchs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Re: BitKeeper [ Stephen Zander <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Re: BitKeeper [ [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Thomas Bushnell, 
> BSG ]
>  Re: bogus maintainers?[ Josip Rodin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Re: An alarming trend (no it's not f  [ Darrell Rene Dupas <[EMAIL 
> PROTECTED] ]
>  Re: bogus maintainers?[ Gerfried Fuchs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Re: EURO and CENT signs in the conso  [ Samuel Tardieu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Re: An alarming trend (no it's not f  [ Craig Dickson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Re: BitKeeper [ Peter Makholm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Re: EURO and CENT signs in the conso  [ Andreas Rottmann <[EMAIL PROTECTED] ]
>  Re: EURO and CENT signs in the conso  [ Miquel van Smoorenburg <[EMAIL 
> PROTECTED] ]
>  Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled a  [ Adrian Bunk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]
>  Some thoughts about problems within   [ Adrian Bunk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ]

>--

>Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 20:37:31 +0100
>From: Bas Zoetekouw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org, debian-www@lists.debian.org
>Subject: Re: bogus maintainers?
>Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>Content-Disposition: inline

>Hi Josip!

>You wrote:

>> > >   Maintainer, Unknown Kernel Package  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> > >   main:   kernel-doc-2.4.5-r4k-kn04, kernel-source-2.4.5-r4k-kn04
>> > > 
>> > > What's up with this?  This is not a legitimate maintainer address IMO.
>> > 
>> > Probably the script that generates this page is broken
>> 
>> How the hell were you able to draw that conclusion? The script may be
>> broken, but that it would randomly insert local data into the web pages,
>> well that's just too stupid even for that script. :P

>What I meant was: the page was apparently generated from local data
>(from a local /var/lib/dpkg/available perhaps?).


>-- 
>Kind regards,
>+---+
>| Bas Zoetekouw  | Si l'on sait exactement ce   |
>|| que l'on va faire, a quoi|
>| [EMAIL PROTECTED] | bon le faire?|
>|[EMAIL PROTECTED] |   Pablo Picasso  |
>+---+ 

>--

>Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 17:48:53 -0200
>From: Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
>Subject: Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng
>Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>Content-Disposition: inline

>On Thu, 03 Jan 2002, Ed Tomlinson wrote:
>> and have created one (See 127215).  From my perspective the problem
>> seems to be the libpng3 changes the dependencies of qt2 and hense kde.
>> It seems the fix is not to revert/fix libpng but to fix the qt
>> dependencies however I get the impression that frustration is setting

>Yes. Actually, we have the same problem with every library that links with
>another library that is likely to be used by an app.

>The best example is libdb*, but there are others. libtiff, libpng, libsasl,
>libz...

>You either make sure EVERYthing is linked against the same library versions
>(and good luck with binary compatibility with other distributions for
>anything that has a shared library), or you must tell any libraries that
>link to other libraries to use --symbolic dynamic linking, or you must use
>versioned symbols.  Maybe there is a fourth way, but I don't know of any.

>Implementing any of the fixes is bound to be painful.

>> in.  ie. did not create the bug so I should not fix it.  From a user

>We actually need a Debian-wide (well, probably a LSB-wide) fix for the
>problem. The same kind of breakage is expected to hit us again and again
>until we do that.

>-- 
>  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
>  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
>  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
>  Henrique Holschuh

>--

>Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 21:06:01 +0100
>From: Josip Rodin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 02:07:57PM -0500, Ed Tomlinson wrote:
> I use debain.  As a debian user I am quite distressed at how this
> bug is being treated.  I have watched the bug reports on this issue
> and have created one (See 127215).

If a bug I filed had been treated that way, I would have reopened it
immediately. Closing a bug out of hand just because you don't agree with
where it has been filed is completely wrong.

See #126829 for my arguments about this.

-- 
Colin Watson  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Adrian Bunk]

On Thu, 3 Jan 2002, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:

> > This kind of problem does only occur if we ship several versions of a
> > shared library at the same time (in this case libpng2 and libpng3). As
>
> Or if the user needs to have different versions of said library because of
> some closed-source (or not easily recompilable) library.  However, it is a
>...

Closed-source programs and libraries are not a problem if the library we
are talking about is copyrighted under the terms of the GPL (like libpng).

cu
Adrian

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Thu, 03 Jan 2002, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Jan 2002, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> > > This kind of problem does only occur if we ship several versions of a
> > > shared library at the same time (in this case libpng2 and libpng3). As
> >
> > Or if the user needs to have different versions of said library because of
> > some closed-source (or not easily recompilable) library.  However, it is a
> >...
> 
> Closed-source programs and libraries are not a problem if the library we
> are talking about is copyrighted under the terms of the GPL (like libpng).

But binary-level compatibility is.

This is a difficult problem to solve, true. But it is not one we can simply
ignore. Not to mention it makes unstable a hell to use from time to time,
which is certainly annoying :-)

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Steve Langasek]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 11:47:08PM +0100, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Jan 2002, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:

> > > This kind of problem does only occur if we ship several versions of a
> > > shared library at the same time (in this case libpng2 and libpng3). As

> > Or if the user needs to have different versions of said library because of
> > some closed-source (or not easily recompilable) library.  However, it is a
> >...

> Closed-source programs and libraries are not a problem if the library we
> are talking about is copyrighted under the terms of the GPL (like libpng).

My reading of /usr/share/doc/libpng2/copyright is that the *packaging* 
has been placed under the GPL, but that the library itself is 
distributed under a BSD license.  Is this not the case?

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer


pgpwXiSuETq98.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Ivan E. Moore II]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 04:41:59PM -0600, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 02:07:57PM -0500, Ed Tomlinson wrote:
> > I use debain.  As a debian user I am quite distressed at how this
> > bug is being treated.  I have watched the bug reports on this issue
> > and have created one (See 127215).
> 
> If a bug I filed had been treated that way, I would have reopened it
> immediately. Closing a bug out of hand just because you don't agree with
> where it has been filed is completely wrong.
> 
> See #126829 for my arguments about this.

first off the package "kde" is a meta package that has no binaries so
there is absolutely no problem with that package.  The bug report was closed
with a comment of "file it against the proper packages please".  What is
so wrong about this?  Absolutely nothing.  

I don't have the time to sit there and file bug reports on behalf of a user.
Especially since the problem is known and is being dealt with.  If I felt
it was not being delt with I would spend the time to do this on my own however
please tell me where I stated I would do the work for our users?

Ivan

-- 

Ivan E. Moore II
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://snowcrash.tdyc.com
GPG KeyID=90BCE0DD
GPG Fingerprint=F2FC 69FD 0DA0 4FB8 225E 27B6 7645 8141 90BC E0DD

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Sam Couter]

Ivan E. Moore II <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 
> please tell me where I stated I would do the work for our users?

When you signed up as a Debian Developer.
-- 
Sam Couter  |   Internet Engineer   |   http://www.topic.com.au/
[EMAIL PROTECTED]|   tSA Consulting  |
OpenPGP key ID:   DE89C75C,  available on key servers
OpenPGP fingerprint:  A46B 9BB5 3148 7BEA 1F05  5BD5 8530 03AE DE89 C75C


pgpXD1o5yaum6.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: Some thoughts about problems within Debian

[Adam Heath]

On Thu, 3 Jan 2002, Adrian Bunk wrote:

> Hi,
>
> One important thing are more frequent releases. We don't have to release
> as often as other distributions but IMHO it's needed to have a new stable
> release at about once a year. Currently the software in our stable release
> is two years old and I see several distributors and magazines already ship
> woody CDs instead of potato CDs although we are still several months away
> from releasing woody - and if people encounter problems with the packages
> they find there this does in the long term harm the good reputation of the
> quality of our packages. There are many reasons why you need packages you
> can't find in potato. Sometimes it's only that you want to use Gimp 1.2
> but often there are important reasons like e.g. support for kernel 2.4 or
> Euro support in some applications. Using testing isn't an alternative on
> many production systems because testing reduces the probality of bugs but
> it could still happen that e.g. your X does no longer start after your
> latest upgrade to testing.

This is a troll paragraph.

Sure, everyone agrees.  This has been hashed over and over and over.  Talking
about it doesn't help.  Solve the problem.

Re: Some thoughts about problems within Debian

[Thomas Bushnell, BSG]

Adam Heath <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> Sure, everyone agrees.  This has been hashed over and over and over.  Talking
> about it doesn't help.  Solve the problem.

Yeah, but I read Adrian's mail as attempting to prod people into
trying to think of solutions.

The 'testing' release is an attempted solution.  It's too soon to say
how successful it will be, but I, for one, am quite hopeful.

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Ivan E. Moore II]

On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 10:22:56AM +1100, Sam Couter wrote:
> Ivan E. Moore II <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > 
> > please tell me where I stated I would do the work for our users?
> 
> When you signed up as a Debian Developer.

no. I did not.  No where did I state I would submit bug reports for our users,
provide all the necessary information on behalf of users, or anything of 
the sort.  I am a Debian Developer, not a secretary.

Ivan

-- 

Ivan E. Moore II
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://snowcrash.tdyc.com
GPG KeyID=90BCE0DD
GPG Fingerprint=F2FC 69FD 0DA0 4FB8 225E 27B6 7645 8141 90BC E0DD

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Thomas Bushnell, BSG]

"Ivan E. Moore II" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> no. I did not.  No where did I state I would submit bug reports for
> our users, provide all the necessary information on behalf of users,
> or anything of the sort.  I am a Debian Developer, not a secretary.

It is the responsibility of every Debian maintainer to forward bugs
upstream.  That is, indeed, one of the most important tasks a Debian
maintainer can perform.

Having forwarded a bug, you should then leave it open until a fix is
integrated into the package and uploaded.  

Re: Some thoughts about problems within Debian

[Fabian Fagerholm]

On Fri, 2002-01-04 at 00:24, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> Most of us who work for Debian do this in our spare time. But I do
> personally disagree with the "you can't force a volunteer to do anything"
> argument I heard in several discussions. These were discussions about
> things where some work of the maintainer who is responsible for his
> package would save work for other people who do volunteer work for Debian
> or to improve the general quality of Debian for our users.

I agree. After all, it's voluntary to volunteer.
But it should be very clear what is expected of you, and what you are
willing to contribute. At the moment, much is expected, but the
willingness can only be observed afterwards, day by day.

Recent discussions on this and other lists are showing signs of the
debian (and possibly the free software) community wanting to change the
way development is done. Where before we had chaos and charismatic
people hacking away into the night, we now have people striving for
orderly development of mature systems. It is time not only to become
hackers of code, but also hackers of project management, hackers of
quality assurance and hackers of user interfaces.

But fresh ideas require new participants - only it has become so much
more difficult to get involved. Not only do you have to possess almost
cs major skills to keep up, the debian project is so large that it is
very difficult for a prospect maintainer to grasp the whole picture and
find her own place. I sense countless lurkers reading this list and
others, trying to get a glimpse of what debian is all about, and if it's
something to get involved in. I count myself as one of them.

Think of it as getting a job at a very large company. What if you knew
nothing of the people working around you, nothing of the internal
structure of the company, nothing of what you are expected to do? There
are many able programmers and would-be-maintainers that cannot find a
place to start.

What the people writing about this matter seem to be after is
- what is expected of a maintainer?
- how does the debian project fit together?
- what can I do?
- what must I know to be able to do this?
- where do I go to ask if I must know something?

I think the real "debian problem" is not about maintainers MIA, orphaned
packages or slow release cycles. The real problem is about lack of
smooth introduction of new participants, and a complicated, undocumented
internal structure. It is about unclear goals - what is the target
audience or audiences of debian?
If these matters were clear, more people would concentrate on writing
missing documentation (where is the "debian system administrators guide"
or the "debian desktop user's guide"?) finding MIA maintainers, fixing
RC bugs, figuring out what "roles" the debian system can play and see to
it that it does a good job on each.

I have no answers, and I have no suggestions at this moment for the
above - because I don't know what's expected, or where to start.

fabbe

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Thomas Bushnell, BSG]

"Ivan E. Moore II" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> first off the package "kde" is a meta package that has no binaries so
> there is absolutely no problem with that package.  The bug report was closed
> with a comment of "file it against the proper packages please".  What is
> so wrong about this?  Absolutely nothing.  

It is the wrong procedure.  The correct procedure is to refile the bug
against the correct package, which takes no more time than closing it.

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Ivan E. Moore II]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 03:37:24PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> "Ivan E. Moore II" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 
> > no. I did not.  No where did I state I would submit bug reports for
> > our users, provide all the necessary information on behalf of users,
> > or anything of the sort.  I am a Debian Developer, not a secretary.
> 
> It is the responsibility of every Debian maintainer to forward bugs
> upstream.  That is, indeed, one of the most important tasks a Debian
> maintainer can perform.
> 
> Having forwarded a bug, you should then leave it open until a fix is
> integrated into the package and uploaded.  

your right..but we are not talking about that.  We are talking about a
bug report filed against a meta package where the user wanted me to submit
bugs for each of the 40+ packages he listed.

I am not a secretary.  If the user wants all those bugs filed he can do
it himself.

Ivan

-- 

Ivan E. Moore II
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://snowcrash.tdyc.com
GPG KeyID=90BCE0DD
GPG Fingerprint=F2FC 69FD 0DA0 4FB8 225E 27B6 7645 8141 90BC E0DD

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Ivan E. Moore II]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 03:40:26PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> "Ivan E. Moore II" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 
> > first off the package "kde" is a meta package that has no binaries so
> > there is absolutely no problem with that package.  The bug report was closed
> > with a comment of "file it against the proper packages please".  What is
> > so wrong about this?  Absolutely nothing.  
> 
> It is the wrong procedure.  The correct procedure is to refile the bug
> against the correct package, which takes no more time than closing it.

dude.  get a fucking clue.  What is the right fucking package when the user
says "please report this bug to the maintainers of the following 40+ packages"?



-- 

Ivan E. Moore II
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://snowcrash.tdyc.com
GPG KeyID=90BCE0DD
GPG Fingerprint=F2FC 69FD 0DA0 4FB8 225E 27B6 7645 8141 90BC E0DD

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Thu, 03 Jan 2002, Ivan E. Moore II wrote:
> I am not a secretary.  If the user wants all those bugs filed he can do
> it himself.

*NO*.

If a user wants all those bugs filled, he should mail -devel and ask about
it. Just like we urge developers to do before mass-filling bugs.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 04:19:02PM -0700, Ivan E. Moore II wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 04:41:59PM -0600, Colin Watson wrote:
> > If a bug I filed had been treated that way, I would have reopened it
> > immediately. Closing a bug out of hand just because you don't agree with
> > where it has been filed is completely wrong.
> 
> first off the package "kde" is a meta package that has no binaries so
> there is absolutely no problem with that package.  The bug report was closed
> with a comment of "file it against the proper packages please".  What is
> so wrong about this?  Absolutely nothing.  

'bts reassign 127215 libqt2'

... since it was clearly libqt2 breaking backward compatibility.

Anyway, I've run out of time for this evidently pointless discussion,
unless you're willing to have the technical committee comment, in which
case I will attempt to write up a summary.

> I don't have the time to sit there and file bug reports on behalf of a user.
> Especially since the problem is known and is being dealt with.

It's being dealt with by breaking partial upgrades rather than reverting
the thing that actually caused the breakage. From the bug report:

| Much of kde stopped working when the libpng verson changed and qt2 was
| updated to start using it. 

Anyway, I've said what I think of this strategy elsewhere.

-- 
Colin Watson  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Some thoughts about problems within Debian

[Miquel van Smoorenburg]

In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Adam Heath  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Sure, everyone agrees.  This has been hashed over and over and over.  Talking
>about it doesn't help.  Solve the problem.

Debian is too big.

Split it up in 'core' (must fit easily on one CD) and 'added value'
(the other 21 CDs). Release seperately. Release often. 'core' must
have all packages up-to-date, 'added value' simply uses the packages
from the previous release for packages that have RC bugs filed
against them.

Now I'll go back hiding in my shell since I obviously have
no idea what I am talking about ;)

Mike.

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Adam Heath]

On Thu, 3 Jan 2002, Ivan E. Moore II wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 04:41:59PM -0600, Colin Watson wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 02:07:57PM -0500, Ed Tomlinson wrote:
> > > I use debain.  As a debian user I am quite distressed at how this
> > > bug is being treated.  I have watched the bug reports on this issue
> > > and have created one (See 127215).
> >
> > If a bug I filed had been treated that way, I would have reopened it
> > immediately. Closing a bug out of hand just because you don't agree with
> > where it has been filed is completely wrong.
> >
> > See #126829 for my arguments about this.
>
> first off the package "kde" is a meta package that has no binaries so
> there is absolutely no problem with that package.  The bug report was closed
> with a comment of "file it against the proper packages please".  What is
> so wrong about this?  Absolutely nothing.

To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
reassign  foo
thanks

In other words, you loose.  Go home, have a nice day.


rant: I hate maintainers that do not use the features of the bug system, and
insist on making users do more work.

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Adam Heath]

On Thu, 3 Jan 2002, Ivan E. Moore II wrote:

> your right..but we are not talking about that.  We are talking about a
> bug report filed against a meta package where the user wanted me to submit
> bugs for each of the 40+ packages he listed.

Anthony Towns was working on a clone command last weekend for the bts.

Size of file changes when uploading to ftp servers.

[Eric Van Buggenhaut]

Hi,

I'm a bit puzzled, I upload some weeks ago a package to non-us
ftp-master server. I just realize the size of the file has changed
between my local copy and the file available at packages.debian.org :

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Format: 1.0
Source: crafty
Version: 18.12-4
Binary: crafty
Maintainer: Eric Van Buggenhaut <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Architecture: any
Standards-Version: 3.5.2
Build-Depends: sharutils, bzip2, g++, debhelper (>> 2.0.0)
Files:
 a17786648540376c79cbfbaf0bdc7823 362565 crafty_18.12.orig.tar.gz
  75337cc8ad3a21e3eb46e31fa24d5393 1000617 crafty_18.12-4.diff.gz
   ^^^

  -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
  Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux)
  Comment: Pour information voir http://www.gnupg.org

  iD8DBQE8BMhz4VLuWbCehTARAq1UAJ4kj3Gak8z5nUXhOCthoWEdWExDsgCfWyLy
  oMVdb+45L+FYR38yMDdw8Tc=
  =G2qz
  -END PGP SIGNATURE-
  
And on my system:

[EMAIL PROTECTED] less debian/crafty/*18.12-4*dsc
Format: 1.0
Source: crafty
Version: 18.12-4
Binary: crafty
Maintainer: Eric Van Buggenhaut <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Architecture: any
Standards-Version: 3.5.2
Build-Depends: sharutils, bzip2, g++, debhelper (>> 2.0.0)
Files:
 a17786648540376c79cbfbaf0bdc7823 362565 crafty_18.12.orig.tar.gz
 fb8740eea8c993d911521da4e3585edf 1000616 crafty_18.12-4.diff.gz
  ^^^

Anyone understands this ?

-- 
Eric VAN BUGGENHAUT
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Some thoughts about problems within Debian

[Gustavo Noronha Silva]

On Thu, 3 Jan 2002 23:24:12 +0100 (CET)
Adrian Bunk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> One important thing are more frequent releases. We don't have to release
> as often as other distributions but IMHO it's needed to have a new stable
totally agreed, I hope debian-installer will be one of the solutions to
this... but we, the maintainers, have a great responsibility on this!
I noticed that many people ran to upload new upstream versions of their 
packages when the first woody freeze announce was released, and I think 
there's something wrong with this... why wait so much? if one does this 
the package won't get tested for many months, etc... 

> Most of us who work for Debian do this in our spare time. But I do
> personally disagree with the "you can't force a volunteer to do anything"
> argument I heard in several discussions. These were discussions about
I have one simples thought about this "you can't force a volunteer to do
anything" argument: if you don't want to do things right, give them up...
there are people willing to do it out there... you chosed to be responsible
for that package/task, nobody forced you, then do it right

> - Make debconf mandatory for all packages that interact with the user
>   while installing/removing a package in woody+1.
>   One positive effect would be for the user that he doesn't has to answer
>   questions several times during the installation of the packages - he can
>   instead go to drink a cup of tea after he answered the debconf questions
>   that come en bloc. Another positive effect is that this makes life
>   easier for everyone working on automatic installations of Debian.
totally agreed too, debconf is a great step on Debian's evolution...
it should be a 'must' on policy IMO... would someone with some experience
on doing ammendments care to write one?

> On the other hand he is responsible for the packages he maintains and IMHO
> this implies that we can expect from a maintainer that he tries to fix RC
> bugs in his packages at least once a month and to try to fix the other
> bugs in his packages from time to time [3]. If it's generally agreed that
and if he cannot, he should orphan the packages, of course

> perfectly). But if you look closer you'll see that it will harm Debian as
> a whole if popular packages like e.g. evolution that are currently not in
> woody won't make it into the stable release (many users will say: "What?
> Debian has so many thousand packages but this popular package that is in
> every other distribution isn't in the recently released Debian 3.0?").
yes... that 'will be removed from woody' is no good for Debian as a whole,
that's why this is not a good way to force maintainers to do things...

[]s!

-- 
Gustavo Noronha Silva - kov 
*-* -+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+-+
|  .''`.  | Debian GNU/Linux:  |
| : :'  : + Debian BR...: +
| `. `'`  + Q: "Why did the chicken cross the road?"  +
|   `-| A: "Upstream's decision." -- hmh  |
*-* -+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+-+

Re: Some thoughts about problems within Debian

[Gustavo Noronha Silva]

On 04 Jan 2002 01:33:35 +0200
Fabian Fagerholm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I think the real "debian problem" is not about maintainers MIA, orphaned
> packages or slow release cycles. The real problem is about lack of
> smooth introduction of new participants, and a complicated, undocumented
> internal structure. It is about unclear goals - what is the target
> audience or audiences of debian?
smooth introduction? you never heard of policy, maint-guide, developers'
reference, web pages, etc, have you?

target audience has nothing to do with this... here are the problems:
Debian needs updated and good documentation, Debian needs good packages,
Debian needs smooth integration between packages, Debian needs to solve
the bugs listed in the BTS's pages... work is something that is not
missing here...

and come on, a person who is really willing to concentrate on writing
missing documentation is probably reading this list and knows of all
this stuff


> If these matters were clear, more people would concentrate on writing
> missing documentation (where is the "debian system administrators guide"
> or the "debian desktop user's guide"?) finding MIA maintainers, fixing
I've been trying to start a guide with this name (debian desktop user's
guide), but in portuguese... lack of time is a real problem...

[]s!

-- 
Gustavo Noronha Silva - kov 
*-* -+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+-+
|  .''`.  | Debian GNU/Linux:  |
| : :'  : + Debian BR...: +
| `. `'`  + Q: "Why did the chicken cross the road?"  +
|   `-| A: "Upstream's decision." -- hmh  |
*-* -+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+-+

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Ivan E. Moore II]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 06:09:31PM -0600, Adam Heath wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Jan 2002, Ivan E. Moore II wrote:
> 
> > your right..but we are not talking about that.  We are talking about a
> > bug report filed against a meta package where the user wanted me to submit
> > bugs for each of the 40+ packages he listed.
> 
> Anthony Towns was working on a clone command last weekend for the bts.

so your last email just falls flat as it wouldn't work.

-- 

Ivan E. Moore II
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://snowcrash.tdyc.com
GPG KeyID=90BCE0DD
GPG Fingerprint=F2FC 69FD 0DA0 4FB8 225E 27B6 7645 8141 90BC E0DD

Re: Size of file changes when uploading to ftp servers.

[martin f krafft]

also sprach Eric Van Buggenhaut <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2002.01.04.0101 +0100]:
>   75337cc8ad3a21e3eb46e31fa24d5393 1000617 crafty_18.12-4.diff.gz
>   fb8740eea8c993d911521da4e3585edf 1000616 crafty_18.12-4.diff.gz
>^^^
> 
> Anyone understands this ?

they have different md5 sums too. but it's gzip'd, so it's shouldn't
have been a clear-text modification.

could you get the one from the server and do a bytewise diff to find the
change?

-- 
martin;  (greetings from the heart of the sun.)
  \ echo mailto: !#^."<*>"|tr "<*> mailto:"; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
  
no cat has eight tails.
a cat has one tail more than no cat.
therefore, a cat has nine tails.


pgpQ1DggoUss7.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: Quake 2 sources GPL'd

[Branden Robinson]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 01:12:01PM +0100, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Sat, 22 Dec 2001, Branden Robinson wrote:
> 
> >...
> > In fact, I would consider it acceptable in general to move everything in
> > contrib to main as long as it each package was forced to be priority
> > extra until it was suitable for general-purpose use as packaged in main
> > (including any dependencies, of course).
> >...
> 
> If I understand it correctly you suggest to move e.g. the package below to
> main?

No, the issue is moot.  If your example was meant to be reductio ad
absurdum, point taken.

But try less absurd scenarios next time.

-- 
G. Branden Robinson|   The only way to get rid of a
Debian GNU/Linux   |   temptation is to yield to it.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] |   -- Oscar Wilde
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |


pgpuEFsBGXpqv.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: EURO and CENT signs in the console keymaps

[Branden Robinson]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 12:39:31PM +0100, Bas Zoetekouw wrote:
> BTW: is there any particular reason why the sequences differ between
> console and X?

Yes.  XFree86 and console-{tools,data} have completely different
upstreams.

-- 
G. Branden Robinson|   The key to being a Southern
Debian GNU/Linux   |   Baptist: It ain't a sin if you
[EMAIL PROTECTED] |   don't get caught.
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |   -- Anthony Davidson


pgppI8iapok24.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: BitKeeper

[Branden Robinson]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 01:13:13PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> OK, perhaps the relicensing rule is not non-free; I'm less sure of
> that.

I don't think it's obvious from a casual reading of the DFSG that such a
requirement is non-free, but perhaps it should be.

-- 
G. Branden Robinson| Exercise your freedom of religion.
Debian GNU/Linux   | Set fire to a church of your
[EMAIL PROTECTED] | choice.
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |


pgpNhJA9inbQx.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Adam Heath]

On Thu, 3 Jan 2002, Ivan E. Moore II wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 06:09:31PM -0600, Adam Heath wrote:
> > On Thu, 3 Jan 2002, Ivan E. Moore II wrote:
> >
> > > your right..but we are not talking about that.  We are talking about a
> > > bug report filed against a meta package where the user wanted me to submit
> > > bugs for each of the 40+ packages he listed.
> >
> > Anthony Towns was working on a clone command last weekend for the bts.
>
> so your last email just falls flat as it wouldn't work.

What doesn't work about it?

The user in question thought that 40+ bugs on 40+ packages needed to be filed.
You closed the bug, saying the user should file those bugs.

Instead, the bug should have been reassigned to the package that caused the
incompatibility(qt2, for not changing it's soname).  There should not be
multiple bugs filed at all for this problem, as one thing is to blame.

Clone(which doesn't exist) should not be used in this case.

Re: Some thoughts about problems within Debian

[Fabian Fagerholm]

On Fri, 2002-01-04 at 02:23, Gustavo Noronha Silva wrote:
> smooth introduction? you never heard of policy, maint-guide, developers'
> reference, web pages, etc, have you?

I have. That is not what I call a smooth introduction. For a person who
can devote, say 24 hours per month to working on a project like debian,
it will take ages to read and understand those documents. This does not
mean that the documents are useless. Also, there are many good ideas in
those documents that could be taken further - for example the debian
mentors, which could be extended from a simple mailing list to a more
direct mentoring approach.
Many operating systems have accompanying "certification" courses. These
serve the need of gathering a knowledgeable user base to run the systems
(MCSE, Sun cert, Cisco cert and so on). Why not try something similar,
but less formal and on-line, in debian?

As for the web pages, there is room for improvement. You don't need to
comment on this; I know, I shouldn't complain and should do something
about it. I'll try to do that.

> target audience has nothing to do with this... here are the problems:
> Debian needs updated and good documentation, Debian needs good packages,
> Debian needs smooth integration between packages, Debian needs to solve
> the bugs listed in the BTS's pages... work is something that is not
> missing here...

Agreed to 99%. But I maintain that target audience is of importance for
coordination. There's a big difference in making, say, an email server
compared to a desktop system. The former may assume a certain level of
confidence in mail systems and computer systems in general - it's ok to
have debconf ask some complicated questions, or requiring the sysadmin
to edit configuration files. The latter would require quite a different
approach, and could not make the same assumptions about the user's
knowledge level.
It may be possible to make a one-size-fits-all system which can fulfill
the requirements of both the above examples, but we are already seeing
some specialization occur, for example with the debian multimedia
distribution. So target audience is important: how do you define "good
documentation" and "good packages" if you don't know who is going to
read the docs, and install the packages? There's more to it than having
no spelling errors and as few bugs as possible.

> and come on, a person who is really willing to concentrate on writing
> missing documentation is probably reading this list and knows of all
> this stuff

I miss your point here.

> I've been trying to start a guide with this name (debian desktop user's
> guide), but in portuguese... lack of time is a real problem...

Perhaps you'd like some assistance? I don't know portuguese however, so
some translation would have to be done... =)

Cheers,
fabbe

Re: Some thoughts about problems within Debian

[Colin Walters]

On Thu, 2002-01-03 at 18:33, Fabian Fagerholm wrote:
> What the people writing about this matter seem to be after is
> - what is expected of a maintainer?
> - how does the debian project fit together?
> - what can I do?
> - what must I know to be able to do this?
> - where do I go to ask if I must know something?

One very important characteristic of a hacker is self-motivation.  You
have to find those problems you want to solve, and solve them.  Since
hackers are almost invariably volunteers, you can't be forced into doing
something that you're not interested in.  If you haven't found your
place yet, that's fine; it will come.  

So, I don't think you're going to get anyone to answer the above
questions for you; the answers differ for each person.

> I think the real "debian problem" is not about maintainers MIA, orphaned
> packages or slow release cycles. The real problem is about lack of
> smooth introduction of new participants, and a complicated, undocumented
> internal structure. It is about unclear goals - what is the target
> audience or audiences of debian?

The target audience is everyone who uses a computer.

Re: Size of file changes when uploading to ftp servers.

[Bernd Eckenfels]

On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 01:01:26AM +0100, Eric Van Buggenhaut wrote:
> ftp-master server. I just realize the size of the file has changed
> between my local copy and the file available at packages.debian.org :

it has not, the checksum has:


>   75337cc8ad3a21e3eb46e31fa24d5393 1000617 crafty_18.12-4.diff.gz
> 
>   -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-

is the signatue valid or not? if yes you have probably regenerated your
local copy since you did an upload.

>  fb8740eea8c993d911521da4e3585edf 1000616 crafty_18.12-4.diff.gz

Greetings
Bernd

Re: Some thoughts about problems within Debian

[Adam Majer]

On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 03:22:09AM +0200, Fabian Fagerholm wrote:
> On Fri, 2002-01-04 at 02:23, Gustavo Noronha Silva wrote:
> > smooth introduction? you never heard of policy, maint-guide, developers'
> > reference, web pages, etc, have you?
> 
> Many operating systems have accompanying "certification" courses. These
> serve the need of gathering a knowledgeable user base to run the systems
> (MCSE, Sun cert, Cisco cert and so on). Why not try something similar,
> but less formal and on-line, in debian?

IMHO, that comes from experience and not memorizing some manuals. IMHO, these 
certs are useless pieces of paper. You 
learn things by fixing bugs and reading how others fixed bugs..

> As for the web pages, there is room for improvement. You don't need to
> comment on this; I know, I shouldn't complain and should do something
> about it. I'll try to do that.

IMHO, there is a _huge_ amount of servers that are not connected from main 
page... As of a week ago I could not find 
any links to qa.d.o, nm.d.o, buildd.d.o, etc It would be nice to have them 
at d.o/devel

> Agreed to 99%. But I maintain that target audience is of importance for
> coordination. There's a big difference in making, say, an email server
> compared to a desktop system. The former may assume a certain level of
> confidence in mail systems and computer systems in general - it's ok to
> have debconf ask some complicated questions, or requiring the sysadmin
> to edit configuration files. The latter would require quite a different
> approach, and could not make the same assumptions about the user's
> knowledge level.
> It may be possible to make a one-size-fits-all system which can fulfill
> the requirements of both the above examples, but we are already seeing
> some specialization occur, for example with the debian multimedia
> distribution. So target audience is important: how do you define "good
> documentation" and "good packages" if you don't know who is going to
> read the docs, and install the packages? There's more to it than having
> no spelling errors and as few bugs as possible.

IMHO, the questions asked by installation scripts are very clear.. For even a 
novice admin that is... After all, 
isn't admins or admin-wanna-bees what are installing a new system anyway? IMHO, 
I don't think that there is anything 
too cryptic being asked for desktop installation...

dpkg-cross maintenance status

[YAEGASHI Takeshi]

Hi,

Is there anyone who utilize dpkg-cross?

According to BTS, it seems that dpkg-cross has been left unmaintained
for more than 1 year...

I want to add SuperH support to dpkg-cross (I've just reported as the
wishlist, Bug#127723), and there are several bugs I want to fix too.

Is there any hope that these wishes will be heard?

--
YAEGASHI Takeshi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

Re: dpkg-cross maintenance status

[Thomas Bushnell, BSG]

YAEGASHI Takeshi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> According to BTS, it seems that dpkg-cross has been left unmaintained
> for more than 1 year...

Have you asked the maintainer?

Re: dpkg-cross maintenance status

[Matt Taggart]

YAEGASHI Takeshi writes...

> Is there anyone who utilize dpkg-cross?

I used it for bootstrapping Debian on hppa, it's *very* useful. I didn't need 
to make too many changes. I still need to submit a patch for hppa support. At 
the time I was too distracted by having a native toolchain to spend time on 
dpkg-cross patches :)

The things I changed for hppa are available at,
http://cvs.parisc-linux.org/build-tools/dpkg-cross/

> According to BTS, it seems that dpkg-cross has been left unmaintained
> for more than 1 year...
> 
> I want to add SuperH support to dpkg-cross (I've just reported as the
> wishlist, Bug#127723), and there are several bugs I want to fix too.

The SuperH changes are probably more important since the need to xcompile debs 
is higher given most native platforms are fairly limited. That said I'd still 
take a limited native platform over dpkg-cross. Debian was not meant to be 
xcompiled :(

For now maybe you could just publish them somewhere and submit a pointer to 
the BTS. If the maintainer isn't responsive you can follow the proper NMU 
procedure I guess.

-- 
Matt Taggart
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Some thoughts about problems within Debian

[Lex Spoon]

Fabian Fagerholm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Fri, 2002-01-04 at 02:23, Gustavo Noronha Silva wrote:
> > smooth introduction? you never heard of policy, maint-guide, developers'
> > reference, web pages, etc, have you?
> 
> I have. That is not what I call a smooth introduction. For a person who
> can devote, say 24 hours per month to working on a project like debian,
> it will take ages to read and understand those documents. This does not
> mean that the documents are useless. Also, there are many good ideas in
> those documents that could be taken further - for example the debian
> mentors, which could be extended from a simple mailing list to a more
> direct mentoring approach.

I just went through this process, and it actually seemed pretty smooth. 
It took about 20 hours (rough guess) to read through the docs the first
time and assemble some feeble .deb's.  Okay, maybe 30 hours.  Then, I
found a mentor from the mailing list, and took about 10-20 more hours
turning those .deb's into something good.

This all seems right on par.  That whole time seemed productive, and I
don't think I could have gone any faster and still learned to produce a
high-quality package.

Also, having a mentor was *extremely* helpful.  Most of the things
pointed out during that second phase were very easy to learn, but I
wouldn't have noticed them myself.  Having an expert's quick eyeball is
very good for learning the ropes!




-Lex

Re: EURO and CENT signs in the console keymaps

[Joey Hess]

Branden Robinson wrote:
> > BTW: is there any particular reason why the sequences differ between
> > console and X?
> 
> Yes.  XFree86 and console-{tools,data} have completely different
> upstreams.

And of course a little consistency and uniformity is too much to ask for
in the unix world until it's mandadted by some dead-tree standard for which 
you have to pay a few hundred bucks.

-- 
see shy jo

Re: EURO and CENT signs in the console keymaps

[Branden Robinson]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 11:12:25PM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> Branden Robinson wrote:
> > > BTW: is there any particular reason why the sequences differ between
> > > console and X?
> > 
> > Yes.  XFree86 and console-{tools,data} have completely different
> > upstreams.
> 
> And of course a little consistency and uniformity is too much to ask for
> in the unix world until it's mandadted by some dead-tree standard for which 
> you have to pay a few hundred bucks.

Well, that need not be the case here.  All we need is a gizmo that
generates console keymaps from XKB description files, and then loads
them.

-- 
G. Branden Robinson|If you wish to strive for peace of
Debian GNU/Linux   |soul, then believe; if you wish to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] |be a devotee of truth, then
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |inquire. -- Friedrich Nietzsche


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Re: EURO and CENT signs in the console keymaps

[Joey Hess]

Branden Robinson wrote:
> Well, that need not be the case here.  All we need is a gizmo that
> generates console keymaps from XKB description files, and then loads
> them.

That would be cool, and if I knew anything at all about either of the
maps, I'd be jumping to write it.

-- 
see shy jo, overly fond of his compose key

libpng transition

[Steve M. Robbins]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 05:48:53PM -0200, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On Thu, 03 Jan 2002, Ed Tomlinson wrote:
> > and have created one (See 127215).  From my perspective the problem
> > seems to be the libpng3 changes the dependencies of qt2 and hense kde.
> > It seems the fix is not to revert/fix libpng but to fix the qt
> > dependencies however I get the impression that frustration is setting
> 
> Yes. Actually, we have the same problem with every library that links with
> another library that is likely to be used by an app.

So the consensus is that the libpng/libqt2 fiasco is due to 
having application A linked to shared libs L and M, while
libL is also linked to (a different version of) libM:

   A -+-> libL ---> libM (version x)
  `-> libM (version y)

where version x is not compatible with y, right?


> The best example is libdb*, but there are others. libtiff, libpng, libsasl,
> libz...

Those would be examples of lib "M".  Examples of lib "L" include the
infamous libqt2 and imlib1, so the issue is of interest to anyone who
uses KDE or GNOME.  

So: how should we best handle a major version change in libM?
What do other "L"-type libraries do???


> You either make sure EVERYthing is linked against the same library versions

If we go this route, how do we gracefully handle a bump in
SONAME for libM?  If an application is rebuilt with the new
version of libM, it will break.  If libL is rebuilt with the
new version of libM, then all applications using libraries L
and M will break.  Clearly libL and all the application packages
have to cooperate on the transition.

One idea is for libL to rebuild and declare versioned conflicts with
all its applications (that's what python recently did, isn't it?).
But that balloons the size of the conflicts list for a popular library
like libqt2.  There must be a better way! (?)


> or you must tell any libraries that
> link to other libraries to use --symbolic dynamic linking, 

That sounds plausible --- is it really as simple as this?  The info
page for "gcc -symbolic" says "Only a few systems support this option."
Are all Debian systems covered?


> or you must use versioned symbols.

What does this mean?  Would it apply to libL or to libM?
How would one implement this?


> We actually need a Debian-wide (well, probably a LSB-wide) fix for the
> problem. The same kind of breakage is expected to hit us again and again
> until we do that.

I agree.  Suppose we limit our scope to Debian for the moment:
what is currently done by the other lib"L"-type libraries
in Debian?

-Steve

-- 
by Rocket to the Moon,
by Airplane to the Rocket,
by Taxi to the Airport,
by Frontdoor to the Taxi,
by throwing back the blanket and laying down the legs ...
- They Might Be Giants

Re: libpng transition

[Thomas Bushnell, BSG]

"Steve M. Robbins" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> If we go this route, how do we gracefully handle a bump in
> SONAME for libM?  

We have no way.  We have an ungraceful way, however: create a flag
day, when all the relevant applications need to be recompiled.

Another way is to bump the soname on libL at the time you bump the one
on libM.  People are usually against this, since in fact the libL
interface hasn't changed at all.  I'm not sure whether that would
actually solve all the problems.

> > or you must use versioned symbols.
> 
> What does this mean?  Would it apply to libL or to libM?
> How would one implement this?

Using version symbols avoids the problem by making it not necessary to
bump the libM soname in the first place.

Re: Bug#127252: -unstable compiled against the wrong libpng

[Junichi Uekawa]

"Ivan E. Moore II" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> cum veritate scripsit:

> > It is the wrong procedure.  The correct procedure is to refile the bug
> > against the correct package, which takes no more time than closing it.
> 
> dude.  get a fucking clue.  What is the right fucking package when the user
> says "please report this bug to the maintainers of the following 40+ 
> packages"?

Try "general" or "project" or some of the meta-package.
Which seems to be forwarded to debian-devel.

regards,
junichi

-- 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] : Junichi Uekawa   http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer
GPG Fingerprint : 17D6 120E 4455 1832 9423  7447 3059 BF92 CD37 56F4

Re: Proper way for a i586-pc-linux-gnu (k6-2) to build for the same

[Andrew Hurt]

Well.  I somehow installed p-buildr from stable onto a testing 
system--don't know?

Installed p-buildr for testing, and there were no problems at all.
Couldn't tell if I had successfully optimized a build afterwards (the 
build went well, though).

thanks,
ah

Re: 2 package(s) to rebuild on i386/stable

[Ryan Murray]

On Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 11:05:06PM +0100, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
> auric: has packages from testing/unstable installed

That's why there is vore.

> debussy: only reachable through a gateway machine if you happen to
>   have an account on it

Machine is marked as down for this reason.

> kubrick: down

untrue.

> lully: down

Machine is marked as intermittent failures, and has been down for some time.

> pandora: has packages from testing/unstable installed

There are several other stable i386 machines as well...

> tervola: down

And is marked as such on the page.

I guess I fail to see what is so "deceptive" about the page.  Most of the
packages that are from testing/unstable are involved with ssh, and would
not affect builds with the correct build depends installed.

-- 
Ryan Murray, Debian Developer ([EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED])
The opinions expressed here are my own.


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