pterjan's diary

  Happy New Year of Automated Rebuilds

I have recently patched Iurt (Mandriva build tool creating a chroot with build dependencies and building a package) to totally rebuild a media more easily.

I have run it on Cooker Main i586, and after switching to tmpfs on a powerful machine, it needs only 42 hours to handle the 2937 src.rpm. That's good news as it means I can run it every week-end even if we use this machine on weekdays. I'll try to improve it more to be able to also run it on Contrib.

I have also updated Youri to handle current output of Iurt. It used to parse it many years ago when Iurt was used to rebuild for x86_64 the packages that where missing there, but x86_64 became a mandatory arch uploaded at the same time in 2005.

So, the results are there and as usual individual results and rss are also available.

The current score is: 137 failures out of 2937 packages (4,66%), quite bad. Let's see next week how it evolves :)

Update: this may not be that bad as some failures were due to temporary issues not related to the package (like name resolution failure breaking python tests). I have restarted the build as we actually are starting a week-end :)

  Update on Mandriva automated rebuilds

The current score is: 174 failures out of 2921 packages, worse than last week. 2 failures to regenerate src.rpm, 74 failures to install build dependencies and 98 failures during build. Over the 74 build dependencies issues, 45 were because usbutils was not available after being updated on Friday and have already been magically fixed.

  USB/IP

My laptop lost USB few weeks ago (it suddenly rebooted, and USB devices are not seen since, including in BIOS).

Last week I was thinking "It would be nice to make USB device plugged on another machine available on my laptop", and then started to search on Google if someone had done it before. I first found some proprietary software (working on Linux too), but after more searching I found USB/IP project, and has been included in staging for one year, and is already available in Mandriva kernel! So I packaged the tools and tried it with my smartcard reader, it works great! :)

  Another update on Mandriva main rebuild

This time it only needed 36 hours instead of 42, maybe because openoffice.org failed :)

So, this week we got 86 failures out of 2927 packages, 1 failure to recreate src.rpm, 18 failure to install build dependencies and 67 failures during build. That's improvement, at last :)

I should stop posting this and work on making things more automated and sending emails to maintainers, but I will probably not work on this soon before a few weeks.

And actually this post is a good opportunity to advertise my nice photo of the week :)

  Scary keyring dialog

When starting Evolution I now get this dialog:

Do you really expect me to enter my password because an unknown application popups this dialog ?

First it means people will give access to their keyring to any app, including any virus. But probably also give the password if some code uses /usr/share/gnome-keyring/ui/gkd-prompt.ui to ask for it...

It really scares me...

  Crazy Italian law

Several articles on the web mention a new Italian law giving to people uploading videos on the Web the status of TV broadcaster, needing a license!

To quote one of them, Article 4 of the decree specifies that the dissemination over the Internet "of moving pictures, whether or not accompanied by sound," requires ministerial authorization., so it seems to include animated gif or Flash animations...

I can understand that Berlusconi fears the competition of Web for its TV channels but how such a stupid law can be written?

The positive side of this law is that Italian websites may become nicer to visit, without Flash ads or menus :)

  Color your man with libcaca

Tonight I fixed a few bugs in the troff output I had added to libcaca few weeks ago. The result looks nice, but I did not use it to update manpages yet :)

  N900's main feature: Linux!

I don't own one and won't comment on its actual features that I don't know. This post is about an ad from Vodaphone UK I saw today on the web. The first feature listed? It runs Linux!

Is Linux now supposed to be known by the public, with a positive image?

Surprisingly, the Vodaphone page for N900 does not mention Linux anywhere. However, it refers to Firefox : The N900 comes with a brilliant browser - based on the same technology as Firefox. Just like Firefox, it lets you open lots of web pages at once.