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BOM: lintian

As you might have guessed from the previous posts, with BOM (Bug Of the Month) I want to take care of at least one bug from the Debian BTS each month.

Being a nice guy I have a five step plan in case a program does not work as expected.
1) read the manual
2) read the manual
3) ask my favourite search engine about that issue
4) read the manual
5) ask my favourite search engine about that issue
Unfortunately this plan totally failed while trying to understand the output of lintian. For an unknown reason I was always told that an init.d-script was not registered in debian/postinst. But I could see that seemingly missing call to updaterc.d

Looking at the PTS and the number of bugs for lintian, I decided that this might be the next entry. Fairly quickly I found the code where the error must be hidden. A bit shocked I was faced with something like:

  my $opts_r = qr/-\S+\s*/;
  my $name_r = qr/[\w.-]+/;
  my $action_r = qr/\w+/;

  /^(?:.+;|^\s*system[\s\(\']+)?\s*update-rc\.d\s+ (?:$opts_r)*($name_r)\s+($action_r)/xo;

At the sight of that regular expression I just wanted to run away and do some gardening (normally it is the other way around). After pulling up weeds for awhile, I sat down again and tried to decode that expression. Surprisingly it was not as difficult as expected before.

As a result #677142 containing a patch came into existence.

Result: regular expressions look strange but lift their secret after some time of thinking

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DSOM: shotdetect – scene change detector

Similar to DOPOM, that I mentioned in a previous post, I would also like to start DSOM (Debian Sponsoring Of the Month). As I still remember the times when I was looking for a sponsor for my packages, I would like to make that time a bit more pleasant to future DMs or DDs. So each month I pick at least one RFS or something similar and try to make the package fit for upload.

Of course you could also send me an email to dsom@alteholz.eu and advertise your package.

This month I have choosen shotdetect, a scene change detector in movies. It is already available in unstable so more information are available on the PTS page.

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meep in Debian

Currently there are three implementations of MPI  available in Debian. They are openmpi, mpich2, and lam4. After mpich1 had been removed, only the openmpi-version of meep remained (of course the serial version just called meep is also still available). I now closed that gap and uploaded the mpich2- and lam4 version to Unstable. As I have’t found a corresponding version of libhdf5, I had to use the serial version of that lib for these packages.

Further a package depending on mpi-default is now available. So you can either choose a version of meep linked to a specific MPI lib or just use the version that the mpi-default-maintainer thinks is the best version of a given architecture.

This is my first post that was written mainly on a smartphone. I guess I really need to feel boring before I do this again :-).

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DOPOM: ent – pseudorandom number sequence test program

This is my first DOPOM (Debian Orphaned Package Of the Month) package.  I am trying to find an orphaned package every month and take over the responsibilty for it.

As I recently got some Entropy Keys from Simtec Electroniscs to muck around, this package very well fits in my future work.

So what is the entropy of Debian?

$ echo "Debian GNU/Linux"|ent
Entropy = 3.852169 bits per byte.

Optimum compression would reduce the size
of this 17 byte file by 51 percent.

Chi square distribution for 17 samples is 299.24, and randomly
would exceed this value 5.00 percent of the times.

Arithmetic mean value of data bytes is 84.1176 (127.5 = random).
Monte Carlo value for Pi is 4.000000000 (error 27.32 percent).
Serial correlation coefficient is 0.095764 (totally uncorrelated = 0.0).
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SOB: Start Of Blog

This blog shall be about all my FLOSS activities. It might be a bit Debian centric but I promise that other themes will definiteley appear as well. Another part of the blog shall be about tips and tricks that I needed during my working life and which I don’t want to forget again.