Erich: I do sometimes wonder why we don’t relax the definition of “safe” upgrades to include installing new packages but still not removing old ones. I know that many of my uses of dist-upgrade are just for when something grows a new dependency that I didn’t previously have …
I’ve spent some quality upstream time lately with man-db. Specifically, I’ve been upgrading its locale support. I recently published a pre-release, man-db 2.5.0-pre2 mainly for translators, but other people may be interested in having a look at it as well. I hope to release 2.5 …
If your key has so many UIDs and such a combinatorially exploded number of
signatures on it that it takes gpg minutes just to start up in
--edit-key mode, then I probably won’t bother signing it. HTH, HAND.
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 …
More on the Google Summer of Code: as well as the project I’m mentoring for Debian, I’m mentoring Evan Dandrea (no blog yet?), writing a migration assistant for Ubiquity.
I haven’t talked much about Ubiquity, mostly because I’ve been far too busy writing it. Ubuntu has …
I’m mentoring Matheus Morais in the Google Summer of Code, porting d-i to the Hurd. We’ve exchanged a few mails and he has in hand all the preliminary (but not yet functional; wouldn’t want to make it too easy :-)) patches I’ve put together in the past …
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 …
Hot on the heels of Joey’s tale of getting rid of base-config (the second stage of the installer) in Debian, we’ve now pretty much got rid of it in Ubuntu Dapper too. The upshot of this is that rather than asking a bunch of questions, installing the base …