Tue, 07 Oct 2008
What you can do for Lenny
(Update #3)
You probably noticed by now, that Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 aka Lenny
hasn't been released in September. Well, that's a shame, but very easy to
explain: Too many release critical
bugs.
Well, it's pretty hard to estimate, how fast RC bugs will be fixed, and apparently our release team was a bit too optimistic :(
The big question is: What can you do, to help release
Lenny
at
least in this quarter? That's pretty easy: Fix rc-bugs, take care, that
the fixed packages are migrated to Lenny
, do upgrade tests, document
problems in the release-notes. Pretty simple, isn't it?
For users
Even as a simple user
(aren't we all just users?) you may help
getting Lenny
released. Some things you can do:
- If you are running stable (aka
Etch
), you could consider upgrading toLenny
and see, if everything works fine. Currently there are no detailed release notes documenting the procedure, so you best way to test upgrades are to:- Make backups
- Change your /etc/apt/sources.list
- Run aptitude update to get information about new packages
- Run aptitude install dpkg aptitude apt to install the newest package management
- Run script aptitude full-upgrade
- Exit the environment of the script command, by typing exit
The command script will log the entire output of the command in the file typescript. Should something go wrong during the upgrade, please send this file along with your bug report.
Update: If you upgraded succesfully, you should report that, too. There's a template for upgrade reports, which you can use. - Speaking of the release notes: You can take a look at the bugs reported against the release notes and see if you can help there, e.g. by writing a paragraph describing a problem.
- Install the package devscripts (you'll need
the version provided by backports.org, and run the script
rc-alert --include-dists TU --include-dist-op and. You'll get a list of release
critical bugs open for one of the packages you have installed. Guessing
that you have them installed, because you are using them and are
interested in them, you should have a very high interest to get these bugs
fixed :)
You can try to help, by trying to reproduce them and reporting that to the bug report. There are even some easy bugs, where the maintainer hasn't found the time to fix it, yet. Bug 497290 for example didn't need deep technical skills. It just needed someone with some time to collect the needed data for the copyright file. - If you speak a language other than English, you might consider
joining the translation efforts. While it is to late to translate the
debian-installer or the installation guide to a new language for
Lenny
(perhaps for the next release then?), you could start translating the release notes to a not yet supported language. If you are willing to do so (which can be quite time consuming, especially in the final phase), please contact either your localization team or the debian doc mailing list if there's no local mailing list.
See? Even as a simple user
without deeper technical knowledge
you can help us getting Lenny
in shape to be released. If you have
technical knowledge: Very good! You might want to read the next
section, too, and see what applies to you, there :)
For maintainers
It basically boils down to two things: If your packages have RC bugs
open in Lenny
fix them and take care, that the fix will propagate to
Lenny
. If your packages don't have RC bugs open, fix someone else's
RC bug. Surely you don't think, the release team will fix the remaining rc
bugs, do you? And surely you understand, that your shiny rc bug free
packages are kind of useless, if they aren't released?
To search for bugs to be fixed, take a look at the
unofficial rc bugs thingy. The URL lists RC bugs open in both
Sid
and Lenny
. Obviously they should be fixed ASAP. If no
one takes care about these packages, they might be removed from
Lenny
(if possible).
Again: Try to reproduce the bug, try fix it, upload an NMU (or send your patch to the bug report and search for an sponsor). You'll notice, that some of these bugs already have a patch. In that case, your job would be to test the patch, report that to the bug report and offer to sponsor an NMU.
Another interesting list is the
list of rc bugs open only in Lenny
. These bugs have been fixed,
but the fix hasn't propagated to Lenny
, yet. Normally, the release
team will grant freeze exceptions for these packages if possible.
However, if the changes to the fixed version are quite grave or the package
in Sid
depends on a newer package than in
Lenny
that's not possible. In these cases look out for packages
marked as need tpu upload
or similar.
Oh, and if you could refrain from upload new upstream versions of packages to
Sid
, you would make all our lives easier. Some reasons:
- New packages won't reach
Lenny
anyway. - Upload new packages to
Sid
makes it harder to get a fix intoLenny
should a new bug be found. - Uploading a new package makes it harder for other packages depending
on your package to be migrated to
Lenny
. - You are wasting the buildd's time.
And of course you should spend your time fixing rc bugs anyway ;)
Update: Rhonda pointed out, that running rc-alert -d TU -o
and will limit the output to bugs open in both Sid
and
Lenny
, which is the more interesting list of bugs.
Update: script is shipped in the package bsdutils and not in a sepperate package. Thanks to Sebastian Niehaus for notifying!
postet at 17:12 into [Debian] permanent link
Wed, 01 Oct 2008
I'm done
I'm well aware of the irony of becoming a bachelor after getting married.
postet at 11:07 into [Debian/other] permanent link
Tue, 23 Sep 2008
Slightly dramatized...
You know, that you did the right thing, when you leave the company
building on your last working day, and the first thing comming to your mind
is: Free at
last!
postet at 20:04 into [Debian/other] permanent link
Thu, 04 Sep 2008
Debian not complying to licenses
Daniel Baumann writes,
that Debian wouldn't comply to some licenses due to embeded copies of
syslinux binaries in its debian-cd package. To be
exact he wrote: [..] if debian-cd is embedding a syslinux binary with a
different version, it must contain the sources for it [..]
(accentuation by me).
And -- since both debian-cd and syslinux are licensed under the terms of
the GNU General Public Licences 2 (as statet in its copyright
file) -- he is wrong. To comply to the license it is completely okay
to Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to
give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically
performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the
corresponding source code, [..]
. (Section 3b).
To the best of my knowledge we do archive all sources of all uploads
(even if not public accessible, ask an ftp-master for details about
source-morgue
). So we do
comply to the license.
Update: source-morgue
doesn't guarantee all sources to be
present. But all the syslinux sources mentioned by Daniel are present.
PS: Of course that doesn't mean embeding a binary is okay policy wise...
PS2: In future it's planed to have snapshot.debian.org for that; don't know about the state of that, yet.
postet at 21:07 into [Debian] permanent link
Fri, 29 Aug 2008
How to code... not!
The other day I had the "pleasure" to debug some PHP code. It always showed the very useful error message Database Error.
As it turned out, this error message is printed out at over 38 (!) different places of the PHP script I had to debug. It also included several other PHP scripts, which printed the very same error message.
Please, if you are to lazy to print useful error messages, at least make them unique, so the poor soul who got the task to debug your stuff knows more or less where the error happens. Even numbering all your Database Errors would have helped a bit...
postet at 16:39 into [Debian] permanent link