Black Sun

On sunday ends the Call for Participation of the SIGINT 2012 in cologne, Germany. So if you have something important to say: hurry up before its too late!

Sometimes it helps if your baby thinks it is a good idea to get you up at 05:00 in the morning, so I was able to do some listmaster stuff today. I worked on several bugs and I added the following new mailinglists:

• debian-user-slovenian
• debian-sprints
• debian-dug-by
• debian-experimental-changes
• debian-experimental-changes

Thanks for this work should go to melissa.

I thought it would be a good idea to get some fresh blood into Debian, so my wife and I decided to "create" Melissa. Melissa was born on Monday 25th at 00:47h and was 54cm large and weighed 4200 gram. Of course she already has her first Debian shirt ;).



Full size images are available via http://apu.snow-crash.org/~formorer/melissa

After a long time I decided to replace my old 1024D/BC7D020A key. I created a transition document which is signed with the old (BC7D020A) and the new (9DE23B16) key. If your policy allows it it would be nice if you could sign my new key too - of course only if you signed my old key. 

If you want to use psql with libreadline instead of libedit there is a small, nifty, trick:

LD_PRELOAD=/lib/libreadline.so.5 psql

The backports team is proud to announce the next generation of backports:
squeeze-backports. From now on all contributors will be able to upload
backports of packages available in wheezy (testing) to squeeze-backports.
Additionally the previously announced lenny-backports-sloppy is now officially
open for uploads.

To ensure the basic principle that a system consisting of lenny plus
lenny-backports can be upgraded to squeeze proper, the handling of the
lenny-backports branch has changed. From now on uploads to lenny-backports
need manual approval from a backports team member similar to the handling of
the proposed-updates queue within the regular archive. Feel free to upload
packages here, especially security updates to previously backported versions,
but please ensure the versions are lower than those in stable /
stable-security.

If you feel the need of newer versions for lenny than which are available in
squeeze, please do upload them to lenny-backports-sloppy. The rules for this
suite are practically the same as for squeeze-backports: Do base your uploads
on packages available in testing (wheezy) and build them in the appropriate
environment.

Please remember when using lenny-backports-sloppy you can't easily upgrade to a
plain squeeze. This suite is specificly meant to contain newer versions than
squeeze. While the aim is to only carry packages that will also be provided in
squeeze-backports for upgrade possibilities, we can't guarantee that, so be
careful.

User visible change to squeeze-backports

As the apt maintainers had been so kind to introduce a new archive wide option
in squeeze, the usage of backports.debian.org is easier than ever before:  In
the past you had to explicitly configure pinning for the backports repository
to enjoy the full feature set including upgrades to new versions of packages
you had installed from there. As this is cumbersome, errorprone and a nuisance
this new setting got introduced. With this feature backports get handled in a
way that updates for packages installed from squeeze-backports will happen out
of the box.

And last but definitely not least, let us send a big "thank you" to all
contributors that backports.debian.org enjoys to have - you made it possible to
serve more than 1400 binary packages through 837 source backports since
lenny-backports got kicked into life. Keep up the good work.

Thank you very much!

# date -d '2009-03-04' +%s

   1236121200

There is no need to harm python.

In the last days I was able to work on the listmaster backlog for new mailinglist requests. 

From time to time I have to boot an iso or even a floppy. Unfortunately my X200 doesn't have a CD-Rom or a Floppy. Grub isn't able to boot isos and floppy images on its own, thats the point where syslinux comes into play: from version 4.x the syslinux memdisk driver is able to boot most iso and floppy images. The syslinux wiki has some details about the supported image types.

Yesterday I had to boot an iso image and instead of editing grub.cfg by hand I decided to create a snippet for grub.d to automate things. If you drop an .iso or an .img into the IMAGES path and run update-grub2 afterwards you get a nice boot entry that boots the floppy or iso image.

The only thing you have to do is to install syslinux and copy /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk to /boot.

And here it comes:

#!/bin/sh
set -e

IMAGES=/boot/images
. /usr/lib/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib
if test -e /boot/memdisk ; then
    MEMDISKPATH=$( make_system_path_relative_to_its_root "/boot/memdisk" )
    echo "Found memdisk: $MEMDISKPATH" >&2
    find $IMAGES -name "*.iso" -o -name '*.img' | sort | 
    while read image ; do
        IMAGEPATH=$( make_system_path_relative_to_its_root "$image" )
        case "$image" in
            *.iso)
                echo "Found iso image: $IMAGEPATH" >&2
                cat << EOF
menuentry "Bootable ISO Image: $(basename $IMAGEPATH | sed s/.img//)" {
EOF
                prepare_grub_to_access_device ${GRUB_DEVICE_BOOT} | sed -e "s/^/\t/"
                cat << EOF
    linux16 $MEMDISKPATH iso
    initrd16 $IMAGEPATH
}
EOF
                ;;
            *.img)
                echo "Found floppy image: $IMAGEPATH" >&2
                cat << EOF
menuentry "Bootable Floppy Image: $(basename $IMAGEPATH | sed s/.img//)" {
EOF
                prepare_grub_to_access_device ${GRUB_DEVICE_BOOT} | sed -e "s/^/\t/"
                cat << EOF
    linux16 $MEMDISKPATH raw
    initrd16 $IMAGEPATH
}
EOF
                ;;
        esac
    done
fi

P.S. I got the idea and some code snippets from several blog and wiki entries in the net and just added the iso part, so thats not all my code :)

The Backports Team is pleased to announce the availability of a new
suite on backports: lenny-backports-sloppy. Please read carefully
before considering using or uploading to it what this entails.

The Background

You might want to ask: What's that? Let me explain it. During the etch
release discussions popped up on the backports list with two clashing
groups:

• One that expected to always be able to upgrade from sarge + sarge-backports to etch without backports,
• others that wanted new versions of packages flowing in even after the release and were happy to upgrade from sarge + sarge-backports to etch + etch-backports.

The standing at that time was to accept packages that were in testing
after the release, which wasn't etch anymore but lenny.

The same discussion started again before the lenny release, and given that
we are facing the upcoming squeeze release we started internally to discuss
how to noise down these long and tedious discussions, because both groups
of people had valid opinions that shouldn't get ignored. So this is where
the idea for lenny-backports-sloppy comes from.

The Change

lenny-backports-sloppy will please the group that is happy to upgrade from
lenny + lenny-backports to squeeze + squeeze-backports. lenny-backports is
meant only for packages from squeeze, even after the release. Technically
that means it will get locked down for uploads after the release of squeeze
and require manual approval (for e.g. point release update versions, or
security updates that happen during the squeeze release cycle), while
lenny-backports-sloppy will accept packages from wheezy. Uploading to
lenny-backport will have to get approved by the Debian Backports Team after
the squeeze release, just like uploads to lenny are currently approved by
the Release Team.

While lenny-backports-sloppy is created already and working we ask you to
NOT upload packages there without prior discussion with the Backports Team.
This is meant to ensure that the Uploader is aware about the expectations
that come along with that: The package should have a good chance to get
included in the next Debian release aka wheezy, and that the Uploader is
willing to look after the package in the upcoming squeeze-backports suite
after the release of squeeze to ensure upgradeability.

In case of questions, feel free to ask either directly on the
debian-backports@lists.debian.org mailinglist, or contact
team@backports.debian.org privately.

We are also pleased to annonce that the first upload to
lenny-backports-sloppy already happened. From now on you will be able
to install Postgresql 9.0 (which is not targeted at squeeze) from
lenny-backports-sloppy.

How to use

If you want to use lenny-backports-sloppy you will have to add both
lenny-backports and lenny-backports-sloppy to your sources.list. Backports
from lenny-backports-sloppy may depend on packages in lenny-backports.


deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports lenny-backports main
deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports lenny-backports-sloppy main