I spent far too much of today cleaning up an upgrade bug to do with conffiles, which I suspect also affects other packages that have attempted to work around dpkg conffile prompts when moving conffiles between packages. If you maintain such a package, please review your code to make sure …
Joey writes about the lack of new tools that fit into the Unix philosophy. My favourite of such things I’ve written is sponge. It addresses the problem of editing files in-place with Unix tools, namely that if you just redirect output to the file you’re trying to edit …
Joey has been
campaigning
for a while to get everything in the archive changed to depend on debconf |
debconf-2.0 or similar rather than just debconf, in order that we can
start rolling out cdebconf as its replacement. Like most jobs that
involve touching the bulk of the archive, this …
Working on free software has made me fairly revision control system-agnostic; I can’t afford to get too wedded to any one system because as soon as I do somebody will invent something new and I’ll have to convert again, so I just work with whatever other people on …
Sometimes following up on a bug takes you a lot further than you expected. Debian bug #337041 looked like it was going to be fairly straightforward once I upgraded coreutils to figure out what the new IUTF8 flag actually did, since the SSH2 protocol already supports transferring termios flags around …
New year, new blog. I’ve had a LiveJournal for a while, but don’t write very much in it, and many of its readers wouldn’t be interested in me talking about Debian and such anyway. I think the best solution is for me to keep technical posts here …