Tag: DOPOM

Some years ago I heard about Scheme and was fascinated by the (at that time at least for me) strange syntax. As this was not yet the time of WWW, I even bought a book to learn more about it.
Unfortunately priorities changed and I needed to spend my time on other things. As I now found that orphaned package I would like to give it a second try and at least keep it rolling.

Since I first looked at the list of orphaned Debian packages (available at http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/orphaned) some time ago, the package a56 has been the lonely leader of the list.

This package contains a freeware assembler for the 56000 architecture. These chips have been very popular in the 1980s (used in NeXT, Atari Falcon and SGI Indigo Workstations).
Updated versions are still used in today’s devices like some mobile phones (-> http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/homepage.jsp?code=563XXGPDSP)

So, being a bit nostalgic, I adopted this package and brought it to shape. There was even a small bug that I was able to close.

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:

• #375504: don’t expire entries every check:  the fix was contributed by Steven A. Reisman and verified by Jason  Cormie.
• #585231: do not use Python strings exceptions anymore

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.

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:

•  #314219: package configure goes wrong
•  #589620: Cannot set baud rate to 4800
•  #589621: Cannot set baud rate to 4800
•  #618630: setserial does not work with USB serial interfaces
•  #618631: (no subject)
•  #299933: ppp: Cannot convert to /etc/network/interfaces method while serial device
•  #311813: setserial doesn’t work with serial device
•  #410099: setserial dosen’t work in manual Mod.
•  #468420: During install I get: “The update-modules command is deprecated and should not be used!”
•  #518313: installs obsolete /etc/modutils/setserial
•  #375276: don’t mislead by saying “loading saved-state” if none
•  #459912: would be nice if one can disable a fifo via setserial
•  #522622: setserial as a essential package
•  #314963: init.d bails out on detecting /etc/serial.conf

#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 :-).

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).