So the final implementation detail in the embargoing scheme is providing a tool to move stuff from the embargoed and unembargoed queues into the archive. The existing tool the security team use is called “amber” (after the inimitable Amber Benson). amber’s pretty simple: it takes a DSA number, and the .changes files you’re looking at; [...]
One of the most exciting things about working on Debian is that since it’s developed in the open, when you want to make changes everyone sees them, so depending on what you’re working on, the risk of breaking stuff can provide a real adrenaline rush, while you’re just sitting in your chair. So what better [...]
A brief case study in a flamewar diverted. The release managers are currently preparing a followup to the architecture requalification, following the efforts made over the past couple of months. Four ports are currently looking shaky, namely m68k, arm, s390 and sparc. An early draft begins going into the details by saying the following: ARM [...]
At the end of an interesting piece on permissions, Joey Hess concludes: I could give many more examples of subsystems in Debian that exist at different point in the spectrum between locked down unix permissions and a wiki. There seems to be a definite pull toward moving away from unix permissions, once ways can be [...]
Delays suck. I’m actually skipping ahead here, I’d meant to blog about updating the dak codebase into shape for whatever changes were coming up first, but it turns out I’m not in the mood for that. Besides which, most of this entry is preprepared. In the last few entries we went over the background for [...]
The biggest difference between the hypothetical security queues and the existing byhand and new queues is that they need to be autobuilt; it’s not really feasible to try saying whether a security update is acceptable if there’s still some possibility it’s not going to build on half our architectures. Additionally, it means that there are [...]
So having found time to catch up satisfactorily on the implementation, time to get back into the blogging. After working out what you actually want to do, the next step in implementing stuff, in my book, is to make sure you fully understand the context of the stuff you’re trying to change. In this case, [...]
Continuing on from the SCC stuff, which I should probably get in the habit of calling the mirror split, then… At the same time as I’ve been trying to work out ways to fit the mirror split stuff into the AJ market concept, I’ve been pondering on and off what can be done to improve [...]
Who can resist a good rhyme? Or a bad one? So this round of dak hacking turned out to make the AJ Market scheme another notch more confusing — hence the delay in blogging, and the teaser in my last post. The issue leading to the confusion is that the major item on the list [...]
With the recent Kansas Board of Education decision and the results in the Dover, Pennsylvania Board of Education elections, the Intelligent Design debate seems to be all the rage. It’s not really that interesting a debate, mostly being a rerun of the standard evolution versus creationism stuff with some new catchphrases. Even as a religious [...]
One of the things about the whole money thing and free software is the question of whether it’ll take all the fun and spontaneity out of hax0ring. As it turns out, that doesn’t even work when you try; so instead of doing dak work last weekend, like I’d planned and like the market was indicating, [...]
Contrary to expectations, last week’s AJ Market project turned out to be debootstrap, not dak. Just goes to show a single person can make a difference in today’s world: debootstrap popped into the lead from nearly the bottom thanks to a single contribution. (I wonder if it makes more sense to make contributions anonymous or [...]
Hrm, I’m going a bit single issue; I should fix that. But not right now. So it’s been a couple of weeks since I first posted about my little market experiment, which seems as good a time as any to take a look at how it’s working out. On the one hand it’s going fairly [...]
So this week’s project was working on dak, in particular getting the tiffani implemention included. What’s tiffani, you ask? It lets you just download the changes to Sources.gz and Packages.gz files, instead of the whole damn thing — if you have main, contrib, and non-free for unstable in your sources.list, this means your apt-get update [...]
So, this week’s AJ Market project was the first couple of items on my debbugs TODO list, viz: Finish off usertag support Implement usercategory support Both of these are essentially followup for the initial usertags announcement from last month. The usertags cleanup amounted to adding some basic documentation which will hopefully make it to the [...]