This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (1086.48 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.
Dpkg
I am subscribed to Launchpad’s dpkg bug tracker and I was getting annoyed with the amount of noise I got under the form of bug reports that look like “package foo failed to install/upgrade: package foo is already installed and configured”. Those reports are a combination of a bug in APT and of random other failures (often hardware related like corrupted .deb files, or I/O errors, but sometimes also real problems in other packages) but they always end up assigned on dpkg (because dpkg is outputting an error message complaining about APT’s decision to configure something that doesn’t have to be configured).
I simply don’t have the time required to manually process and inspect all those reports, so I decided to filter them at the apport level with a new “Ubuntu bug pattern” that indicates that those reports are a duplicate of LP#541595. Thanks to this, the dpkg bug count quickly went down from 130 to about 80.
Packaging
I sponsored a new upstream version of ledgersmb. I quickly updated WordPress to version 3.4.2 since it contains security relevant fixes.
I also pushed a small update of nautilus-dropbox fixing #686863 because upstream renamed the binary package that they hand out on their website from nautilus-dropbox to dropbox. Their dropbox package only conflicts with old versions of nautilus-dropbox and not with the version that Debian is shipping and thus I had to add a Conflicts on our side to forbid co-installation of both packages.
Testing wheezy’s installation
I bought a new laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad X230) and used this as an excuse to test Wheezy’s installation process. It worked mostly fine except for two things:
- First I noticed that it would not accept my passphrase for my encrypted partition during early boot… this turned out to be already reported as #619711 but was no longer getting any attention from the package maintainer. After some IRC discussion with Julien Cristau, we prodded Michael Prokop who had apparently already offered to take care of this issue. I tested his updated package and the result got quickly uploaded.
- I had weird networking problems that turned out to be related to the lack of the loopback network (i.e. on localhost). This was the result of a broken /etc/network/interfaces: it had been incorrectly modified by NetworkManager. I reported this in #688355. This issue affects people with IPv6 enabled networks.
Debian France
There’s a resurgence of activity in Debian France. Sylvestre Ledru is leading the organization of a mini-debconf in Paris on November 24-25th. And Tanguy Ortolo is now taking care of some merchandising (Polo shirts, to change from the usual T-Shirt).
I might give a talk during this mini-debconf, possibly about multi-arch.
Misc
It’s been a few months that I noticed a 2 second lag of gnome-shell everytime that smuxi (my IRC client) sent a notification. It’s very annoying, you have the impression that the entire machine freezes.
So I contacted Mirco Bauer on #smuxi and we investigated a bit. It turns out that smuxi is using an old version of the notification protocol where the picture is sent as a bytestream leading to huge dbus messages. This is clearly sub-optimal so smuxi will be fixed to be able to send the path of the picture instead of the picture itself. On the other hand, it’s really a bug of gnome-shell that it freezes during the time it takes to handle the bigger-than-usual dbus message. So I also filed a bug on GNOME Shell (Bugzilla #683829) to get this fixed.
Librement: funding free software work
I started a new project with the goal of helping free software developers to fund their free software work. It’s still mostly vaporware for now but I have a public code repository, a nice logo and lots of ideas.
If the topic is of interest to you, and you’d like to be involved, feel free to get in touch. Otherwise stay tuned.
Thanks
See you next month for a new summary of my activities.
You might want to collaborate with the authors of gittip.
Thanks for pointing me to gittip, I did not know that project. It’s interesting.
I am very glad that you made over €1000. Have you made this much before in terms of donations in a single month?
Hi Thsepang, no, it’s my best month ever. You can see the graph on https://raphaelhertzog.com/support-my-work/
This month is exceptional thanks to a generous donor who gave 1000 EUR but it’s unlikely to be like this each month. Up to now my best month has been 384 EUR. Apart from this month, the level of donations is rather on the low end since a few months. It correlates quite well with a lack of activity on my blog. 😐