I’ve managed to go for eleven years working on Debian and nearly eight on Ubuntu without ever needing to teach myself how APT’s resolver works. I get the impression that there’s a certain mystique about it in general (alternatively, I’m just the last person to figure …
As is natural for an LTS cycle, lots of people are thinking and talking about work focused on quality rather than features. With Canonical extending LTS support to five years on the desktop for 12.04, much of this is quite rightly focused on the desktop. I’m really not …
The Ubuntu Technical Board conducts a regular review of the most popular Ubuntu Brainstorm ideas (previous reviews conducted by Matt Zimmerman and Martin Pitt). This time it was my turn. Apologies for the late arrival of this review.
Unity supports Lenses, which provide …
I’ve released man-db 2.6.0 (announcement, NEWS, ChangeLog), and uploaded it to Debian unstable. Ubuntu is rapidly approaching beta freeze so I’m not going to try to cram this into 11.04; it’ll be in 11.10.
I spent most of last week working on Ubuntu bug 693671 (“wubi install will not boot - phase 2 stops with: Try (hd0,0): NTFS5”), which was quite a challenge to debug since it involved digging into parts of the Wubi boot process I’d never really touched before. Since I …
I’ve released libpipeline 1.1.0, and uploaded it to Debian unstable. The changes are mostly just to add a few occasionally useful interfaces:
pipecmd_exec to execute a single command, replacing the current
process; this is analogous to execvp.pipecmd_clearenv to clear a command’s environment; this …The Ubuntu Technical Board is currently conducting a review of the top ten Brainstorm issues users have raised about Ubuntu, and Matt asked me to investigate and respond to Idea #25301: Keeping the time accurate over the Internet by default.
My first reaction was “hey, that’s odd - I thought …
I just found out by chance that Fedora 14 switched from their old man package to man-db. This is great news: it should now be the beginning of the end of the divergence of man implementations that happened way back in the mid-1990s, when two different people took John W …
In my previous post, I described the pipeline library from man-db and asked whether people were interested in a standalone release of it. Several people expressed interest, and so I’ve now released libpipeline version 1.0.0. It’s in the Debian NEW queue, and my PPA contains packages …
When I took over man-db in 2001, one of the
major problems that became evident after maintaining it for a while was the
way it handled subprocesses. The nature of man and friends means that it
spends a lot of time calling sequences of programs such as zsoelim <
input-file | tbl …