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My Debian Activities in September 2012

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

My Debian Activities in August 2012

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This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (88.41 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

This month has again been a short one since I have mostly been in vacation during the last 2 weeks.

Dpkg

Things are relatively quiet during the freeze. I only took care of fixing 3 bugs: a regression of “3.0 (quilt)” (#683547), a segfault of “dpkg-query -W -f ”” (commit) and a bad auto-completion for French users (#685863).

Testing the upgrade to wheezy

We got several reports of wheezy upgrade that failed because dpkg ran the trigger while the dependencies of the package with pending triggers are not satisfied. Unfortunately fixing this in dpkg is not without problems (see #671711 for details)… so Guillem decided to defer this fix for Jessie. My suggestion of an intermediary solution has fallen in limbo. Instead we now have to find solutions for each case where this can fail (example of failure: 680626).

Another way to avoid those errors is to ensure that triggers are run as late as possible. We can improve this in multiple ways.

The first way is to modify most triggers so that they use the “interest-noawait” directive. In that case, the packages activating the trigger will be immediately marked as configured (instead of “triggers-awaited”) and the trigger will thus not need to be run as part of further dependency solving logic. But as of today, there’s no package using this new feature yet despite a nudge on debian-devel-announce. 🙁

The second way is to modify APT to use dpkg –no-triggers, and to let the trigger processing for the end (with a last “dpkg –configure -a” call). I requested this early in the wheezy timeframe but for various reasons, the APT maintainers did not act on it. I pinged them again in #626599 but it’s now too late for wheezy. I find this a bit sad because I have been using those options for the entire wheezy cycle and it worked fine for me (and I used them for a dist-upgrade on my wife’s laptop too).

It would have been good to have all this in place for wheezy so that we don’t have to suffer from the same problems during the jessie upgrade, but unless someone steps up to steer those changes, it seems unlikely to happen.

Instead, we’re back to finding klumsy work-arounds in individual packages.

Packaging

I prepared security updates for python-django (1.4.1 for unstable,
1.2.3-3+squeeze3 for stable). I packaged a new upstream version for cpputest (3.2-1). I reviewed ledgersmb 1.3.21-1 prepared by Robert James Clay and asked him to prepare another version with further fixes.

I released nautilus-dropbox 1.4.0-2 with supplementary changes of my own to support https_proxy and to display better diagnostic information when the download fails.

With the help of Paul van der Vlis and Michael Ziegler, we did what was required to be able to migrate python-django-registration 0.8 to Wheezy even though it’s a new upstream version with backwards incompatible changes. Thanks to Adam D. Barratt who unblocked the package, we now have the right version in Wheezy despite the fact that I missed the freeze deadline.

Debian France

Julien Cristau reminded the board of Debian France that we have to elect officers (President, Secretary, Treasurer) as the current officers have withdrawn. I was somewhat afraid that nobody would take over so I pinged each member to try to get new volunteers. We now have volunteers (me, Julien Danjou and Sylvestre Ledru) and we’re waiting until Julien finds some time to run the election.

Misc

With the help of DSA, I setup antispam rules for the owner@packages.qa.debian.org alias because I was getting tired by the amount of spam. In the process, they asked me to write a wiki page for dsa.debian.org to document everything so that they can refer to it for future queries. I did it but it looks like that they did not apply my patch yet.

I also tested an upstream patch for gnome-keyring (see bugzilla #681081) that reintroduces the support of forgetting GPG passphrases after a specified amount of time.

Thanks

See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

Happy Birthday Debian! And memories of an old-timer…

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For Debian’s birthday, Francesca Ciceri of the Debian Publicity team suggested that developers “blog about their first experiences with Debian”. I found this a good idea so I’m going to share my own early experience. It’s quite different from what happens nowadays…

Before speaking of my early Debian experience, I have to set some context. In my youth, I have always been a Windows user and a fan of Bill Gates. That is until I got Internet at home… at that point, I got involved in Usenet and made some friends there. One of those made me discover Perl and it has been somewhat of a revelation for me who had only been programming in Visual Basic, Delphi or ObjectPal. Later the same friend explained me that Perl was working much better on Linux and that Debian Linux installs it by default so I should try this one.

I had no idea of what Linux was, but given how I loved Perl, I was eager to try his advice. So I got myself a Tri-Linux CD with Debian/RedHat/Slackware on it and started the installation process (which involved preparing boot floppies). But I did not manage to get the graphical interface working despite lots of fiddling with Xfree86’s configuration file. So I ended up installing RedHat and used it for a few months. But since many of the smart guys in my Usenet community were Debian users, I persisted and finally managed to get it to work!

After a few months of usage, I was amazed at everything that was available for free and I wanted to give back. I filed my first bug report in July 1998, I created my first Debian packages in August 1998 and I got accepted as an official Debian developer in September 1998 (after a quick chat over the phone with Martin Schulze or James Troup — I never understood the name of my interlocutor on the phone and I was so embarassed to have to use my rusty English over the phone that I never asked). That’s right, it took me less than 3 months to become a Debian developer (I was 19 years old back then).

I learned a lot during those months by reading and interacting with other Debian developers. Many of those went away from Debian in the mean time but some of them are still involved (Joey Hess, Manoj Srivastava, Ian Jackson, Martin Schulze, Steve McIntyre, Bdale Garbee, Adam Heath, John Goerzen, Marco D’Itri, Phil Hands, Lars Wirzenius, Santiago Vila, Matthias Klose, Dan Jacobowitz, Michael Meskes, …).

My initial Debian work was centered around Perl: I adopted dpkg-ftp (the FTP method for dselect) because it was written in Perl and had lots of outstanding bug reports. But I also got involved in more generic Quality Assurance work and tried to organize the nascent QA team. It was all really a lot of fun, I could take initiatives and it was clear to me that my work was appreciated.

I don’t know if you find this story interesting but I had some fun time digging through archives to find out the precise dates… if you want to learn more about what I did over the following years, I maintain a webpage for this purpose.

Looking back at 16 years of dpkg history with some figures

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With Debian’s 19th anniversary approaching, I thought it would be nice to look back at dpkg’s history. After all, it’s one of the key components of any Debian system.

The figures in this article are all based on dpkg’s git repository (as of today, commit 9a06920). While the git repository doesn’t have all the history, we tried to integrate as much as possible when we created it in 2007. We have data going back to April 1996…

In this period between April 1996 and August 2012:

  • 146 persons contributed to dpkg (result of git log --pretty='%aN'|sort -u|wc -l)
  • 6948 commits have been made (result of git log --oneline | wc -l)
  • 3133612 lines have been written/modified (result of git log --stat|perl -ne 'END { print $c } $c += $1 if /(\d+) insertions/;')

Currently the dpkg source tree contains 28303 lines of C, 14956 lines of Perl and 6984 lines of shell (figures generated by David A. Wheeler’s ‘SLOCCount’) and is translated in 40 languages (but very few languages managed to translate everything, with all the manual pages there are 3997 strings to translate).

The top 5 contributors of all times (in number of commits) is the following (result of git log --pretty='%aN'|sort| uniq -c|sort -k1 -n -r|head -n 5):

  1. Guillem Jover with 2663 commits
  2. Raphaël Hertzog with 993 commits
  3. Wichert Akkerman with 682 commits
  4. Christian Perrier with 368 commits
  5. Adam Heath with 342 commits

I would like to point out that those statistics are not entirely representative as people like Ian Jackson (the original author of dpkg’s C reimplementation) or Scott James Remnant were important contributors in parts of the history that were recreated by importing tarballs. Each tarball counts for a single commit but usually bundles much more than one change. Also each contributor has its own habits in terms of crafting a work in multiple commits.

Last but not least, I have generated this 3 minutes gource visualization of dpkg git’s history (I used Planet’s head pictures for dpkg maintainers where I could find it).

Watching this video made me realize that I have been contributing to dpkg for 5 years already. I’m looking forward to the next 5 years 🙂

And what about you? You could be the 147th contributor… see this wiki page to learn more about the team and to start contributing.

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