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Off to LCA2013

While I’ve been involve in Linux and Debian for many (15 or more) years, I’ve only ever been to one “major Linux thing” in all that time and that was manning some stall for Debian about 10 years ago.

Well, let’s call it two because next week I’m off to the Linux.conf.au 2013 conference. I can’t get too terribly excited about the location because its… Canberra, yep my (now) home town and about 4 blocks from my workplace; so no exotic locales for me!

I’m hoping to catch up with some Debian folk while the conference is on. There is at the very least a keysigning party where there are some others from Debian on Wednesday.

PS WordPress update broke the visual editing, I hope it looks ok.

procps 3.3.6 and Mudlet 2.0

Mudlet - Graphical MUD clientYesterday was a busy Debian day for me with the release of not one but two packages.

procps

procps version 3.3.6 was released both as an upstream and a Debian package.  While there were many bug fixes in this release, the main new feature for it was the top inspect feature.

The top inspect feature allows you to run top in the normal way then you can inspect a specific process you have selected within top for more information.  Examples of this include fuser or lsof type output to see what files or libraries are open but really the limit is how clever the operator is and how often you would need this information.  Even scripts can be run off this feature if you have some customised or cooked output you need to see.  Once the output is there, you can search for text.

There will be a small hold-up with the Debian packages as the section for the  library has been moved to libs, where it should be. At least I think that’s why there is a delay.

procps infrastructure

procps currently has only an email list and a gitorious git repository.  While this works most of the time, there are two main problems with this setup.

The first is that the only two ways you can report bugs is send an email to the list or create a git merge request. The email has the problem with tracking and gathering history while the git sets the bar pretty high for reporting something has gone wrong.

Second problem is there is no tarball file repository.  gitorious does have the feature of downloading tarballs of the tag checkpoints, but this is the raw repository.  When you make a tarball with “make dist” there are some generated files included in the tarball that don’t appear in the gitorious ones, which means its not a simple for some as you expect.

So I’ll be creating a project for these two features soon.  Not sure where they will be but I use sourceforge for both these for a few other projects so that might be where they end up.

 

Mudlet

Mudlet, the multi-user dungeon or MUD client, has finally made it to version 2.0!  It looks a lot more stable and polished at least from the scripting side than the previous RC versions but has all the features that we’ve come to expect with it.  The most important thing is that the developers have finally put a line in the sand and said “this is version 2.0″.  The Debian package was uploaded yesterday and should be on its way to your local mirror soon.

 

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debhelper versions – Guilty!

After reading Jakub’s pet peeve about debhelper build-dependencies I decided to check my own and sponsored packages to see how they fare.

find debian/ -type f -name control | xargs grep -h -o 'debhelper (>= 9[^)]*)' | sort | uniq -c
      2 debhelper (>= 9)
      2 debhelper (>= 9.0)
      3 debhelper (>= 9.0.0)
      1 debhelper (>= 9.20120115)

Oops! Something to fix in all subsequent releases.

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pam bugs hurt

I did some upgrades of what seemed like a million packages today on my Debian sid computer.  I was doing this remotely and when I tried to ssh back in I got kicked out after entering my password, hmmm.

OK, so I waited until I could get in front of it and tried to login to the console and was greeted with the message “Cannot make/remove an entry” and kicked out, even as root; double hmmm.

So it was boot into single user time which, thankfully worked. bash loaded ok so it wasn’t a shell problem.  However su failed which means we are into pam problem territory.  I found a bug report that sounded like my problem, but with no clear solution except upgrade in Ubuntu.

 

The solution was pretty simple for me.  It’s something funky with /etc/pam.d/common-sesssion and a simple ‘/usr/sbin/pam-auth-update’ fixed it for me.

 

 

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JFFNMS 0.9.2 Released

JFFNMS Interfaces and Events

JFFNMS version 0.9.2 was released today both as an upstream tar.gz file and a new Debian package.  This version fixes some bugs including making sure it works with PHP5.4.

The biggest change in PHP 5.4 is that you can no longer call by reference.  Previously you could call a function like myfunc(&blah); which would send a pointer to blah and not the item itself. Now the function definition needs to define what it wants rather than change it each time.

 

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