I upgraded my home server from Debian stretch to buster recently, which is something I normally do once we’re frozen: this is a system that was first installed in 1999 and has a lot of complicated stuff on it, and while I try to keep it as cleanly-maintained as …
I’ve released binfmt-support 2.2.0. These are the major changes since 2.1.8:
Sometimes I want to deploy Swift, the OpenStack object storage system.
Well, no, that’s not true. I basically never actually want to deploy Swift as such. What I generally want to do is to debug some bit of production service deployment machinery that relies on Swift for getting build …
Weird test failures are great at teaching you things that you didn’t realise you might need to know.
As previously mentioned, I’ve been working on converting Launchpad from Buildout to virtualenv and pip, and I finally landed that change on our development branch today. The final landing was …
I’ve been using Kitten Block for years, since I don’t really need the blood pressure spike caused by accidentally following links to certain UK newspapers. Unfortunately it hasn’t been ported to Firefox 57. I tried emailing the author a couple of months ago, but my email bounced …
I fixed a bug in Launchpad recently that led me deeper than I expected.
Launchpad uses Buildout as its build system for Python packages, and it’s served us well for many years. However, we’re using 1.7.1, which doesn’t support ensuring that packages required using setuptools …
I was recently asked to sort things out so that snap builds on Launchpad could themselves install snaps as build-dependencies. To make this work we need to start doing builds in LXD containers rather than in chroots. As a result I’ve been doing some quite extensive refactoring of launchpad-buildd …
I’ve had a kludgy mess of electronic address books for most of two decades, and have got rather fed up with it. My stack consisted of:
~/.mutt/aliases, a flat text file consisting of mutt alias commands~/.mutt/aliases, Debian’s LDAP database, and Canonical …Today I released man-db 2.7.6 (announcement, NEWS, git log), and uploaded it to Debian unstable. The major change in this release was a set of fixes for two security vulnerabilities, one of which affected all man-db installations since 2.3.12 (or 2.3.10-66 in Debian), and …
The Debian repository format was designed a long time ago. The oldest
versions of it were produced with the help of tools such as
dpkg-scanpackages and consumed by dselect access methods such as
dpkg-ftp. The access methods just fetched a Packages file (perhaps
compressed) and used it as an index …