Catching up
I did a bit of catching up on my Debian backlog over the last week or so. Among the things I got round to:
- I released man-db 2.5.7. This was mostly an “I’ve been meaning to do this for ages” kind of thing to reduce the bug …
I did a bit of catching up on my Debian backlog over the last week or so. Among the things I got round to:
In case it isn’t obvious, in “Ubuntu 9.10 SP1 coming in spring 2010”, “Ubuman” is blatantly lying in attributing a number of statements to me. None of the text there was written by me, and if you thought any of it was true then you should probably make …
If you’re generating one of these shiny new RSA keys, do please remember to generate an encryption subkey too if you expect people to sign it - at least your more obscure UIDs. I’m not going to mail unencrypted signatures around unless I have some out-of-band knowledge that the …
I recently implemented man -K
(full-text search over all manual pages) in
man-db. This was inspired by a similar feature
in Federico Lucifredi’s man
package (formerly maintained by Andries Brouwer). I think I did a much
better job of it, though. The man package just forks grep for every …
Enrico writes about
creating pipelines with Python’s subprocess
module, and notes that you
need to take care to close stdout in non-final subprocesses so that
subprocesses get SIGPIPE
correctly. This is correct as far as it goes
(and true in any language, although there’s a Python bug report …
Joey Hess posted a draft of a code_swarm video for d-i a couple of weeks ago, which reminded me that I’ve been meaning to do something similar for Ubuntu for a while now as it’s just about our archive’s fifth birthday. I have a more or less …
I’ve been a bit surprised by the strong positive response to my previous post. People generally seemed to think it was quite non-ranty; maybe I should clean the rust off my flamethrower. :-) My hope was that I’d be able to persuade people to change some practices, so I …
I hate to say this, but often when somebody does lots of bug triage on a package I work on, I find it to be a net loss for me. I end up having to go through all the things that were changed, correct a bunch of them, occasionally pacify …
A while back, the BBC approached Canonical about providing seamless access to unencumbered BBC content for all Ubuntu users (in the UK and elsewhere). We agreed to approach this by way of a plugin for our primary media player, Totem, and asked Collabora Multimedia to do the plugin development work …
To my horror, I recently saw this online SSH key generator.
I hope nobody reading this needs to be told why this is a bad idea. However, in case you do, here are a few reasons: