My first RC Bug-squashing Day (or rather night):

• bug #552791 — acorn-fdisk — Copyright file does not contain verbatim copy of the license or a pointer to one
• bug #562647 — gidentd — Does not work with ipv4 after recent change in netbase
• bug #558812 — dietlibc — incorrect license in debian/copyright
• bug #531937 — autossh — FTBFS on mipsel due to missing -fPIC

I picked all of them mostly randomly from the list Zack gave me, and except dietlibc they are packages I had not even heard of before. The first one begun easily (track down licencing information, pimp debian/copyright, but I ended up fixing compiler and lintian warnings and even wrote a manpage for it while there (but for this one, I didn’t bump the Standards-Version). The second one was only the second one to complete because the others took longer; it’s basically a change of a dæmon to use two instead of one listening socket, to work with a “doble stack” OS instead of just a “dual stack” OS by not using v4-mapped IPv6 addresses (I considered if to use select(2) or poll(2), or to just fork and have two dæmons running, but that seemed too ressource-consuming to me so I chose the less-complicated poll(2) method, looking at popa3d(8)’s source code (inherited from OpenBSD) in the MirBSD tree since I could not find my network programming book. The third one was basically communicating with upstream; the bug can be blosed with no change to the package. The fourth one took me a while; luckily I have qemu 0.11.0 on MirBSD, and aurel32’s mipsel qemu images helped a great deal; however, cowbuilder --create failed for me, so I ended up waiting almost the entire night for a-g d-u to finish; in the end, it was simply a bug in upstream’s configure.ac which is only exposed due to a toolchain bug on mips(el).

To do: my AM Zack needs to upload the NMUs (after checking, of course); I need to communicate some of the fixes upstream (the gidentd upstream is NXDOMAIN ☹), produce a very small testcase for the mipsel toolchain bug, maybe fix some more mipsel FTBFSen as I have a working qemu instance now, but maybe I’ll do that at the BSP when I can’t find IPv6 bugs or so that I feel I can fix (I also want to do an mksh release which has to be prepared first RSN, and there’s still the need to formally publish the MirBSD-current bi-arch snapshot and make another ISO out of it for BT and prepare the multi-BSD USB stick for allbsd.de…).

Annoyances: a-g d-u could ask me things at the start before working for some four+ hours instead of in the middle, and the same questions several times (PAM restart). The sid kernel doesn’t boot today but did yesterday, the lenny kernel produces this:
Starting the hotplug events dispatcher: udevdudevd[320]: udev: missing sysfs features; please update the kernel or disable the kernel's CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED option; udev may fail to work correctly
(I hate udev.) And, worst of all, these annoying fireworks (some sounded like originating from inside our staircase, I pity the neighbour’s cats) when one wants to hack… Finally, I *loathe* CDBS. Debhelper v5 rules!

Oh, and I also was under the impression that “Firstname LASTNAME” was a French thing, and to a much lesser extent Asian. (@bubulle)