La Salle Debain

You did it!. The results are in and Barbie is going to become a Computer Engineer. Though I should note that in the vote amongst girls who are members of barbie.com, TV Anchor got the most votes. Bah!

With Guantanamo Bay about to be shut down, and President Obamas' first year in office complete, what do the American public think of him?

How did this happen? Well, once upon a time, the USA was really racist. Then a light skinned African American with no negro dialect entered the presidential contest and the country entered a new post-racial era. Unfortunately not everyone had the audacity to hope. Things got so bad, people wanted to cut obamas nuts off but the change we sought within us prevailed and became president. Unfortunately some parts of the US are still filled with overweight Jesus and gun loving Walmart shoppers who insist on voting Republican even though that party doesn't exist anymore. Why? Racism. It's the only possible explanation

I am passing on a message from my daughter Shailaja. She would like you to go here and vote for computer engineer. (Or news anchor if you want to annoy her father.)

I am pleased to announce that Marco Nenciarini has joined the Dovecot maintainer team. One of his first contributions was converting the package to the 3.0 (quilt) source format which all the cool kids are doing these days.

One ongoing problem we have is that Dovecot does not (yet) have a stable ABI for plugins. This affects dovecot-antispam as described in bug #544588 The short term solution is binNMUs but obviously a better long term solution is needed. One idea I've had is to include dovecot-antispam as an additional tarball within the dovecot source package now that 3.0 (quilt) gives us that capability. This way, dovecot-antispam will be rebuilt (with the right dependencies) whenever dovecot is. I have previously experimented with multiple tarballs and it works although at the moment all the debian build tools (devscripts, *-buildpackage etc.) don't fully support it. I expect that will be rectified soon enough but there is a philosophical issue as well. dovecot and dovecot-antispam though related, are two seperate upstream projects with seperate versioning, maintainers etc. Does it make sense to lump them together? I say yes; conceptually they belong together. (dovecot-antispam is useless except as a dovecot plugin.) In fact we have many source packages like this, that only exist as workarounds for a flaw—the lack of source dependencies in the packaging system. However when I brought this up on IRC, there was some disagreement.

So I put it to this august assembly, should source packages combine related but distinct upstream sources or not?

3.0 format source packages can now be uploaded to the Debian archive. (Note: despite the title of this post, this is not the "Wig and Pen" format which is 2.0. See dpkg-source(1) for a detailed description of all the source package formats.) I tried converting my libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl package with mostly good results.

l-a-b-p-b-p is an aggregation of perl modules (in .tar.gz format) from CPAN. There is no upstream, this is a Debian only package. Currently the source looks something like this:

   
build-area/
    libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl-0.5/
        debian/
            [all the standard stuff: control, rules, etc.]
        tarballs/
            CGI-Application-Dispatch-2.16.tar.gz
            CGI-Application-Plugin-AutoRunmode-0.16.tar.gz
            CGI-Application-Plugin-ConfigAuto-1.31.tar.gz
            ...
            [rest of modules]

The files in the tarballs directory are unpacked at build time to create the binary package. This works but has all the disadvantages of "tarballs in tarballs."

By adding a file called debian/source format with the single line:

   
3.0 (quilt)

...dpkg-source is directed to use that format. Now I can rename each upstream tarball to

   
<package name>_<package version>.orig-<upstream tarball name with .'s replaced by -'s>.tar.gz

...and organize the source like this:

   
build-area/
    libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl-0.5/
        debian/
            [all the standard stuff: control, rules, etc.]
    libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl_0.5.orig-CGI-Application-Dispatch-2-16.tar.gz
    libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl_0.5.orig-CGI-Application-Plugin-AutoRunmode-0-16.tar.gz
    libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl_0.5.orig-CGI-Application-Plugin-ConfigAuto-1-31.tar.gz
    ...
    [rest of modules]
    libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl.orig.tar.gz

Each module is now a seperate file in the debianized source with MD5sum etc. The only problem I am having is with the last file. libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl.orig.tar.gz makes no sense for me because there is no upstream yet dpkg-source insists on it. I can make a dummy easily enough but this is an unnecessary annoyance so I filed bug #554488. Raphael Hertzog responded quickly. He is considering adding a --create-empty-orig option to dpkg-source which would solve the problem nicely.

Jersey City needs a candy stimulus.

Were you waiting to find out my opinions on choosing a desktop Linux distro? Sure you were. Now your wait is over.

Best wishes to everyone in Debianland for a happy and prosperous Gujarati New Year (Vikram Samvat 2066, called Plava)

This year the local mandirs continued their recent trend of coordinating their Diwali/new year plans and there was a big mela planned. Unfortunately the weather didn't really cooperate but the kids got to manhandle some explosives and after all isn't that the reason for the season?

Presentwise, I got a DIY 4-shelf bookcase from Sears, the Catalyst Book plus a much-needed woolen hat.

I've decided that I am going to quit my job. It's a soul-sucking dead end but in these tough economic times it pays bills so I've agonized about this for a long time. This was supposed to be the year we moved out of Jersey City but it has yet to happen. And it never will unless I take some sort of decisive action. So I'm going to do it. Wish me luck!

I haven't written about politics since the election for several reasons. First and foremost, Obama won fair and square. While I might wish the other guy had won, I can't whine and pout or threaten to move to Canada like some people. The vox populi chose and that choice has to be respected.

Secondly, one of the worst aspects of the current American political scene is the paranoid obsession with personalities in which the president is not just an implementor of policies good or bad, but personally responsible for the entire state of the cosmos. It started with Nixon, started getting alarming with Clinton and reached batshit levels of insanity with George W. Bush. But just because the left does it it, doesn't mean we have to follow suit. Although I figured Obamas policies would end up a trainwreck, I wanted to see what he actually did before calling him on it.

The Nobel comittee isn't hoping and changing with me. In a decison that is bizarre even by the lax standards of a prize that long since jumped the shark, the President is to receive the Nobel Peace prize for...not being George Bush? It's difficult to see what substantive reasons they could have for their choice. But apparently one of these days he is going to make “ extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples...democracy and human rights are to be strengthened. ”

Well let's see now:

• There was the ridiculous episode with Russia and the reset button.
• From India to Israel to Poland and the Czech Republic Obama has antagonized allies and lowered the goodwill built up by Bush (ya rly).
• The Obama Administration did nothing to support Iranian protesters rising up against blatant election-stealing by their theocratic oppressors. Neither was there so much as a squeak when the protests were brutally put down. This by the way is the same Iran with which the administration continued sham negotiations even after they knew it was pursuing nuclear weapons. (Hey guys! Remember when nuclear non-proliferation was a goal of "multilateral diplomacy"?)
• Oh but wait, there is one errant country whose villany will not be allowed to go unchecked by US might: Honduras, where the countries constitutional court and parliament (or was it teh J00z?) acting to stop a Chavez style demagogue from stealing himself another term kicked him out. Instead of supporting this attempt at preserving the rule of law in a fragile corner of the world, the US inexplicably bought into the propoganda that it was a coup despite the Congressional Research Service saying that it wasn't. Luckily Honduras is treating Obama diplomacy as all other countries do and ignoring it.
• Obama is the first president since 1991 to refuse to meet with old and busted Peace Prize winner the Dalai Lama

Perhaps I am being a little unfair in not taking into consideration all the great things the president is going to do real soon now. It's just that I'm worried that this might be an attempt to sway him in the task of winning the war in Afghanistan (and more likely than not carrying it into Iran and Pakistan.) I take solace in the knowledge that heretofore Obama has shown a refreshing inclination to throw people under the bus when they are no longer convenient. If he can do that to the guy who says he wrote his book than some silly Norwegians won't be a problem.