Yesterday, I arrived in Bruxelles, coming from the Issy/Paris FusionForge meeting which will be described more later by Roland on Plänet Forge. Please tell Ohlol if you use it, for more visibility.

There is a new inter-forge mailing list as well, see the info page. People from Coclico and the various *forges may want to subscribe there (forge developers, not so much users (hosters) or end-users (hosted project developers/users) though).

At FOSDEM, Benny and I (and maybe gecko2) will be running the MirBSD booth, so no Debian staffing for me, sorry. But I will be there. Also please do ask me about mksh — the MirBSD Korn Shell etc.

There are flyers in German (not updated), English and French too! (One of the *forge guys did install mksh(1) after reading it, in fact.)

Don't you people dare miss the two talks: from Benny about how to package with autotools and libtool correctly and from XTaran explaining Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. Benny's also famous for his talk about Painless Perl Ports with cpan2port; XTaran's famous for a whole bunch of other things.

I still have some catching up (wlog entries, keysigning, webpages, etc.) to do, please bear with me. I don't really have a proper work environment with me.

There's a chance I will not be attending the Beer Event in the Delirium Tremens café (last year's still remembered). Benny will certainly be there, though.

Could someone please order nice weather? I still need to eat some lunch and find a supermarket to shop for the weekend!

I got an eMail tonight. I guess this means I can say hello officially now. (Everything else is details, waiting and fixing some bugs and technicalities, or so.) Thanks to everyone involved, I learned a lot already. Oh, and I had a look into madduck's book (the old sarge edition, which I got for free recently) and found a nice graphic explaining what non-native English speakers (I even had Latin first, and 3 programming languages!) don't, from the Debian constitution.

Congratulations XTaran for making it as well, even visible on the website already!

Please don't file an "Please package mksh R39b" bug again, I am aware there's a new version ;-) as I'm upstream too. I'm just short of time at the moment, and I'd like to put out high-quality packages. Besides, the webpage needs fixing first (while the checksums and the changelog for the release are there, no proper announcement is yet, and I'd like, for this version, to add a "upgrading caveats" section, since due to bugfixes and better standards compliance some scripts need to be updated; some of the pdksh behaviour favoured Bourne over POSIX even!

The 2010-01-30 snapshot was uploaded to /MirOS/current/ with i386 (actually had to restart due to cid 1004B6372DA2A612787, then manually incorporate cid 1004B6448D51D101C96 and re-do the floppy, and then, cid 1004B64C58E652566A6+1004B64C5FC627C5254 and especially 1004B64D0994DA8A990 are still not honoured), sparc (built 2010-01-25 though), MirOS bsd4grml and MirOS bsd4me (with another number of commits). If I had more time, I'd probably rebuild them both. As things are, I consider pimping all four of {i386,sparc}/{,x}etc10.ngz before making the FOSDEM Live-ISO. Maybe even put the re-built boot.fd into base10.ngz and re-do all of the ramdisk kernels, floppies and CDs. Ugh.

The MirOS Project will have a booth at FOSDEM 2010, business as usual. If you thought otherwise, you’re crazy ☺

I know I should write a wlog entry about the BSP, write more, release mksh R40, fix the TaC of it and the kwalletcli webpage (thanks again, it’s now in Debian sid!) etc.pp but I also need to prepare an ISO for FOSDEM, etc. Heck, I should prepare a talk for FOSDEM, but I’m not going to. If I need to stand there and talk, I’ll talk, not hold a presentation. I’ll just see what people are interested in, talk about The MirOS Project, and improvise.

I’m busy, and there’s only so much computing you can do in a day. This does include the dayjob. At least, my NMUs are in Debian now and probably can help people (and I submitted info about other bugs too).

Anyway, watch the news in the months to follow… can’t talk about everything now.

Marc Fleury, JBoss founder joins the ranks of Tonnerre, me, and other people requesting that MySQL (and MariaDB!) please finally die. Everyone, don't even fork it. Use a real database instead. Or, at least, SQLite. Really.

We're going to FOSDEM 2010 (of course – I've been at every FOSDEM that was not just an OSDEM, Benny and gecko2 are regular attendees as well, as are other projects of mine such as FreeWRT and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, by proxy). There will be a recent MirBSD snapshot I've yet got to build, with the new floppy format ustarfs (idea, but no single line of their stinking ridiculously huge code, stolen from NetBSD®) and other improvements (albeit less than I wanted to get done by then). The days before, I'll attend the first FusionForge meeting to break up the French Cabal, with my work hat on. That is also my first time in France (outside of the Elsaß). People, make a good impression on me to overcome the classic prejudices ;-)

This weekend I'm going to meet my Debian Application Manager zack, have some good beer (ugh... first this, then Paris, then good belgian beer...) and fix some bugs, all while learning even more. Sounds like fun, but I almost feel overwhelmed, in contrast to the years of much less travelling from my past. I've also started sort-of mentoring Simon, one of our apprentices at work, into the Debian processes. (On an unrelated side note, formorer recently said bpo will become bp.d.o soon. Great!)

Please don't laugh at this excuse for a webpage, as I've yet to fill it in, but my CLI for the KDE Wallet is hereby deemed ready for public consumption, with a bug-fix release 2.01 (bugs actually found during preparation of a port to Debian sid and KDE 4, which is much much worse than KDE 3, plus it looks so absolutely disgusting I'm not even sure Windows® Mistda is worse). I hope the package will end up in NEW soon (and once progressed to testing I may be able to make the KDE 3 variant official via lenny backports; my WTF *.deb repo will hold them until then.

There are more webpages I need to fill in... mksh's TaC, arc4random (which needs some major redesign as well) and BSD::arc4random, the RANDEX protocol (entropy exchange over IRC) and its plugins and patches, ...

Not just Mac OSX (and, I hope, iPhoneOS) will soon come with mksh(1), but also Android (I prepared patches to make it /bin/sh, which works quite well – although I need to find out how to make a hardlink so that #!/bin/mksh scripts will run) and Maemo, for which I wrote an mksh package in a garage project, which also needs some love w.r.t. testing on actual devices, menu integration, etc. (Please contact me if you can help with either of the three.) We also have «lewellyn:#ksh» making a package for the new OpenSolaris system (thanks again). People persuading Apple to put it on the jesusPhone are also welcome. (This does not mean I endorse any of these – right now, I'd probably get the most of a WinCE PDA with built-in GPSr, WLAN and maybe GSM/GPRS.)

English and French native speakers, please review, and Dutch native speakers may contribute a translation of, our flyers. (Source code for these is not available, sorry. Benny makes them in Quark on System 7 in Basilisk II, used to be Classic until Apple yanked it. But still, they use only free fonts, free imagery or such the MirOS Project is allowed to use, and beat every single other FOSS project flyer I've ever seen by far!)

There's probably more I could write, I bet I forgot half of it anyway, but I'll leave it at that for now. Get yourself a nice cup of hot chocolate, pour an Espresso into it, and enjoy the mix with a piece of cake (I'd say strawberry or mousse-pear but all they had was cassis-créme) and pity me for not knowing any French next month.

The MirBSD Midi-ISO (bi-arch manifold boot) and NetInstall for both i386 and sparc have been upgraded to the 20091226 snapshot (sorry for the delay). A separate news announcement will be done when a full ISO (MirBSD + MirGRML) is done.

Other than that, I have fixed a couple of things all over the place, jupp for example. The planned release of mksh R39b is still not done though, as I’m only human as well, and too much hacking isn’t something one can do without relaxing some in between.

On the Debian front, my RCBD #1 was continued, here’s #1½ results:

• Carry over from day #1
• 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
• New ones
• bug #563522 — acorn-fdisk — cleanup patches
• bug #563525 — gidentd — cleanup patches

Explanations: I did go overboard during the first patching session, but I suppose this is what the NM learning period is for too. The autossh maintainer said thanks and will probably integrate my patches, so I don’t need to NMU. I could close the dietlibc bug. The other two didn’t look as good, I had to separate the fix for the RC bug (and other required fixes, such as ftp-master rejects — there were none though) and my other fixes; I submit the former as NMU diffs again and pointed Zack to the .dsc files, and opened the aforementioned two new bugs with the rest of the diffs, so the proper maintainers can take and apply them.

There’s questioning if gidentd should be removed (see the PR for more); the acorn-fdisk upstream (arm-fdisk it’s called there) is not actively developing but will receive patches; the autossh maintainer said thanks but I didn’t yet hear back from upstream.

The binutils as intel_mode bug was fixed upstream and in experimental for my case, but I had to reopen things because the variant documented in binutils-current still doesn’t work, so others (who use the new, more intel-like, syntax) don’t run into it.

Luk sent me a request to do more mipsel-FTBFS-due-to-toolchain-bugs workarounds. Will do (but can’t promise to do so before the upcoming BSP.

Robert Millan incorporated something like manifold-boot into GRUB 2, after I described it to him (the debian-bsd@ people are currently sorting out some heisenbugs with it, though). Now there’s three variants (but then, this helps spotting bugs that don’t appear in all implementations).

sendmail 8.13.4 is out, I wonder when OgreBSD will upgrade… I could do it myself again, but this time it’s not that urgent. Still waiting for the TLS extension, though…

Wow. Cleaned up mksh, did NMUs for T&S 1, tested nwcc, validated mksh-current (what will be the base of R39b) on HP-UX, but there’s still a lot of things I need to do. A new MirBSD snapshot awaits, more ports fixes, new LLVM, I’ve got to fix the typos I found, and much more. And it’s already this late. At least I feel like I’ve achieved somewhat much ☺ I somehow need to put an order or priorities to tasks.

The 26C3 gang has also returned, with delays that seem funny to those not involved… and tonight snow came back as well. Benny still works on the pkgtools configuration stuff. I wonder how much effort it would be to patch both pkgtools and apt to play together optionally… we wouldn’t lose that what pkgtools already have as high-level functionality, gain some of dpkg’s low-level functionality (must be reimplemented though), and for these who want, a (GPL’d…) high-level tool for binary package management.

FreeWRT is also slowly gaining a little more traction, even from its founder (who asserts that FreeWRT 1.0-stable is the only OS for WRT-like devices that does WDS correctly, and feeds us patches). I still think we need MirWRT ☺ with a ports-like instead of buildroot-based system, but will never have enough time and interest to do that…

And: our website source code is in fact superiour to many others ☻ and quite extensible and flexible…

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)

I’m almost there: i386 and sparc have compiled complete. Now I “just” need to do some release engineering (consider whether to re-roll the ports10.ngz dist set; creating the combined manifold Midi-ISO, various things with checksums and signatures, announce and upload) then we’ll have a new snapshot. Finally, I also plan to create a big ISO to replace the “wtf ist hallowe’en” edition. No new MirGRML but nevertheless bugfixes for grub.cfg (memtest and vga modes).

The other side is that I didn’t have to do much for this, luckily; I was still suffering from some kind of cold+stomach ache. I hate that. I bought vitamines etc. for $alot € yesterday to fight it better though.

OpenBSD can build the kernel with pcc now, nice. I thought ÆrieBSD was the one with switching to a GNU-free toolchain goal though…

With the Lintian 2.3.0 saturday-after-christmas release (by the way, over here if it’s done twice it’ll really become tradition) I’ve run its spelling tests over all of MirOS CVS repository. The result: 293 kinds of typos in 35857 souce files. (Although there are the case things too. Without them, I have 51 typos in 7206 files. Asides from false positives (I used fgrep -rwl[i], and -i and -w don’t play well together, and -w mis-catches “GTK+” as “GTK”) I probably can’t (API, source code) or won’t fix all of them though.)

However, I have some rather hot asia-style food to eat right now, and will need to get up early tomorrow for work, so I am not applying/fixing them right now. (bsiegert@ and gecko2@ however are enjoying themselves at 26C3, see their wlog entries.)

Note that all of today’s fixes will not make it into the next MirBSD snapshot already, since it’s built (i386) and building X11 already (sparc). On the other hand, the next bunch of WTF *.deb files will have them. I also need to fix makefs upstream for Hurd… and continue the T&S questionnaire… *sigh*

Update: I suppose this is my “Hello, Plänet Debian!” posting (thanks aptituz!)… well, my packages in the archive were already lintian clean, in case someone wonders (I did recheck with 2.3.0 though). My point was, why not use checking tools from one “universe” for another one, viceque versa? (Similar to synergy effects from knowledge.)

I finally have a wristband for 26C3. The wristband is what is controlled on the entrance. I had preordered the ticket and paid by bank transfer, and the receipt with the barcode only arrived on december 25. In earlier years, you came on the 26th, crashed in the hackcenter, and at some point, when there were only ten people in the queue at the cash desk, you got your ticket easily.

Well, this year, things were a little different. First, there was a semi-public ticket presale. What's more, rumors about a very limited number of tickets were floating around. And finally, while the cash desk was said to open at 2000, the software was not ready by then (!) and the opening was deferred to 2130. The "fast line" cash desk for people with presale tickets was only opened around midnight, when I had already given up hope and joined the huge queue of several hundred desperate hackers. (Thanks, btw, to ScottyTM for pointing out that the "fast line" had been opened.) Finally, I was told that my ticket "did not exist in the system", that I was an evil cracker for trying to enter with a fake ticket, and that I should check back on the 27th. Great.

The end was happy and somewhat anticlimactic: I checked back this morning, there was no queue, and my presale ticket was accepted without any problem. Most of the talks I saw today were about network neutrality, censorship and related topics. I found the talk by Jérémy Zimmermann from La Quadrature du Net especially interesting. Part of the talk was an introduction to lobbying: calling your EuroParl representative, sending e-mails and insisting on your point "raises the political cost of certain decisions".

In addition to OpenOffice 2.0 (Linux-i386 on MirBSD) and the Lotus SmartSuite Millennium, I downloaded SoftMaker Office 2008 for Linux-i386 (on MirBSD) and Windows® (free serial numbers until end of 2009, since SoftMaker Office 2010 (for Windows®) is out). This was pretty easy: extract tarball, throw away installer, extract the second tarball in /opt/SMo (along with /opt/OOo), and it Just Works™ (with ports/emulators/fedora installed).

So now I have three choices for creating documents (although I won’t use OOo for it, I think it’s unreadable), and three for reading files in MS Office format, and two (OOo and SMo) for reading documents in some weird .ZIP-like format (OASIS or something), if they get sent to me. I’ll toy around with SoftMaker Office 2008 on both platforms and will see how it compares to Lotus WordPro.

So this is basically positive press to show another Linux-i386 blob that works as-is on MirBSD/i386 with compat_linux(8) — thanks! Others make this much more difficult.