So following Florian’s chastisement of my “threatening” fellow Debian developers, Charles Plessy becomes annoyed by a bug in apt-file (its default configuration expects curl, but wget is what’s installed on most systems), at which point Luk Claes then starts threatening to NMU whether the maintainer likes it or not. Naturally that’s not the correct thing […]
Have you ever found yourself reading slashdot (what? you don’t read slashdot? well, play along) and coming across a banner ad (what? you block ads? well, play along) for the nth time and finally just, you know, snapping? Sadly, today it happened to me. To the tune of a ditty by Salt n’ Pepa at […]
And thus the entrapment’s completed, With the motion so newly anointed. Wichert, Jason, and Guy? They’re deleted! Steve, Andy and I? We’re appointed! Inspired by Mr Srivastava: <Manoj> congrats vorlon, aba, aj (*snigger suckers *snigger)
A friend o’ ne’er do wells, Got flashbacks to a time in the car; This master of izzard shells, Was headed for dinner, huzzah! In a car with those friends did he sit, Seeking something to consume. Through the streets of San Fran’ do they flit, Hunting the sacred legume. But out the car leapt […]
In late November, I did up a proposal to provide a way of making some of the interesting posts hidden away on the developer-only debian-private mailing list more public — mostly on the basis that secret discussions aren’t good for Debian, and that there’s some really fascinating discussions on topics which continue to come up, […]
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 […]