As time goes by …
Just recently I heard of a change of the maintainer of chktex. Apparently development goes on as there is already version 1.7.1 available. Even for the old 1.6 branch there have been some bugfixes.
So I uploaded 1.6.6 to unstable and 1.7.1 to experimental. Keep on testing :-).
Some time ago I read about a lottery conducted by the German company Meinberg Funkuhren GmbH & Co. KG. The prizes should be seven DCF77 computer clocks and three GPS time receivers. After the drawing the winners must use their clocks to contribute to the NTP Project. In order to win one just had to give away an email address.
After having done so, I almost forgot the lottery and was really surprised to get a notification that I won a PZF180PEX together with an external antenna and accessories.
After some days everything arrived and I tried to install the hardware. Unfortunately the conditions for reception of the DCF77 signal were really bad at the originally planned location. So I had to install a spare computer at another place with better conditions.
As there is no Debian package available for the driver, I had to compile the software on my own. This raised some issues, which could be resolved rather quickly by the Meinberg support team. At the end I got a beta version of the new software and everything was fine.
Afterwards I reconfigured other external servers to use that internal clock as well. As a result the NTP pool got no new stratum 1 server, but in compensation three stratum 2 servers.
Anyway, thanks alot to the Meinberg team for their generous donor.
This software is a programmable tool for verification, analysis and transformation of C++ source code.
It is mainly an engine that parses C++ source files and presents the result of this parsing to scripts in the form of various collections. Afterwards the scripts are actually performing the requested tasks.
This is a link to the Debian PTS page.
Up to now I didn’t use Twitter at all. There are just very few people whose bedtime is really interesting or whose whereabouts give me any useful information. So although I have an account at Twitter, I didn’t find anything to follow.
On the other hand my bedtime is not really interesting for someone else and my whereabouts give no useful information to anybody. So although I have an account at Twitter, nobody is following me.
As I love to make experiments, it is time to have some fun with twitter now. Each day (or at least almost each day) I will tweet
an entry of the fortunes file (/usr/share/games/fortunes/literature.dat) and wait for any reaction. Do I just create garbage and increase the entropy of the universe? Does anybody recognize it at all? Maybe I will even understand the hype about Twitter?
I was really amazed that a package like greylistd does not have an active maintainer anymore.
Further looking at popcon, this package is only installed on just a few computers. The reason might be that it is only installed on servers that do not take part in popcon.
Anyway, this package needs a maintainer and here I am.
My first upload to ‘experimental’ mainly takes care of lintian warnings and closes a few bugs:
The next step will be to take care of bugs with patches and than reduce the number of other bugs.
Please feel free to help fixing bugs or volunteer for becoming a comaintainer :-).
Here you can find the PTS page.
During my adoption of setserial, I was able to close 9 bugs for that package. So the compulsory exercise is already finished and the free program can start.
As a new version of libctl and meep unexpectedly appeared, the BOM of July shall be the new upload of libctl. Unfortunately the soname changed and the library package needs to go through the new-queue. So the bug is resolved but not yet closed.
As the task list of the Debian Med team is rather long and lots of packages are waiting for action, I again choosed a package from this team.
This month the winner is cluster3, which is needed to analyze genomic datasets.
The DOPOM package for this month shall be setserial. Although the serial interface is more and more replaced by other things like USB or network interfaces, I know at least one application that depends on this oldfashioned stuff.
setserial has 14 bugs, some of them are rather old. So, here we go:
#589620 and #589621 as well as #618630 and #618631 are the same. Great, two done, twelve left
#518313 is easy, since modutils is gone, don’t install that file
#468420 can be closed by not using update-modules
The solution to #375276 is mentioned in the bugreport. In case the serial line is handled by the kernel (= #KERNEL in the config file) just say so.
#589620 might be a misunderstaning. setserial is not meant to set the baudrate but only to set the base_baud. The base_baud depends on the hardware and
might not be set under certain circumstances. So this seems to be a feature instead of a bug.
#618630 might be a problem with strange hardware or the driver not supporting the needed ioctl(). At least with my usb serial devices I could not reproduce that bug
#299933 has been resolved by just waiting. Nowadays the order of init scripts is rearranged and this problem should not occur anymore
#311813 is again an ioctl() issue. setserial uses TIOCGSERIAL and statserial uses TIOCMGET so depending on the kernel one or the other feature might not work
So for the moment only five bugs out of 14 are still left (#314219, #410099, #459912, #522622, #314963), well done :-).
The next DSOM package is cd-discid. The DiscID can be used to query for example the FreeDB database.
It is already part of the archive but needed an upload for a new version. I cheated a bit as I already did all work last month. Timur, the current maintainer, fixed an FTBFS on Hurd and I wanted to upload it before the Wheezy-freeze.
Here is the PTS page.
Besides my already mentioned activities l had some fun with
fasttree (mentioned in a previous post) made it to unstable and will become part of Wheezy.
So let the next month begin 🙂