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BOM: bug squashing and new versions during last three months

As announced in my previous DTPOM article the month of May should be a bug squashing month. As everything worked well, I used last three months to decrease the bug count in Debian packages. Unfortunately I don’t remeber everything, so this list might be incomplete:

  • Due to the help of T, who pointed me to a patch which was sent to the fpdns-user emaillist, bug 680077 disappeared.
  • All meep-* packages had a problem with include files installed in the wrong directory. So development of own programs was a bit difficult. This resulted in

    All bugs have been closed in Sid, but the release team doesn’t want to put it to stable!?

  • Package setserial had some open bugs. Most of them resulted from a strange concept of initializing the serial port and could be closed with just some explanations:
  • With the next upload of greylistd to experimental two bugs could be closed:
  • Two uploads of package uucp closed a few ‘simple’ and one RC bug:

Further I created packages for some new software versions:

  • all packages of the mgltools got a new version (1.5.7~rc1~cvs.20130519-1)
    autodocktools, mgltools-bhtree, mgltools-cadd, mgltools-dejavu, mgltools-geomutils, mgltools-gle, mgltools-mglutil, mgltools-molkit, mgltools-networkeditor, mgltools-opengltk, mgltools-pmv, mgltools-pyautodock, mgltools-pybabel, mgltools-pyglf, mgltools-scenario2, mgltools-sff, mgltools-support, mgltools-symserv, mgltools-utpackages, mgltools-viewerframework, mgltools-vision, mgltools-visionlibraries, mgltools-volume, mgltools-webservices

  • autodocksuite is now available in version 4.2.5.1-3
  • saint is now available in version 2.3.4+dfsg-2
  • I uploaded version 1.5.3-1 of python-cogent, but meanwhile even version 1.5.3-2 is available
  • gcal got an update to version 3.6.3-2
  • epigrass got an update to version 2.2.2-2, unfortunately in that version it depends on python-sqlsoup, which is still in the NEW-queue. Thus this package got an RC bug …

From my point of view 17 closed bugs and 29 updated packages within three months are a pretty good result.

The next month will be characterized by solving all problems with epigrass (and of course python-sqlsoup), mgltools-cadd (there must be a better version hidden somewhere in the sources that needs to be activated somehow) and mgltools-sff (why doesn’t it migrate to testing?). Further the TODO-list of the Debian Med UDD needs to become smaller.

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DTPOM: lots of stuff for Debian Med

April has been the month of new packages. I had a look at the task list of Debian Med and tried to finish some (older) packages or created some new ones.

Finally the following packages made it first to “unstable” and after the release of Wheezy, they migrated to “testing” as well:
– uc-echo – error correction algorithm designed for short-reads from NGS
– python-clips – Python module to interface the CLIPS expert system shell library
– visionegg – Python library for 2D/3D visual stimulus generation
– qrisk2 – cardiovascular disease risk calculator

Further there are still some packages waiting in the NEW-queue
– treeview – Java re-implementation of Michael Eisen’s TreeView
– proalign – Probabilistic multiple alignment program

The month of May will be under the banner of bug fixing and new upstream releases. But in case any other package shall be part of Debian, just send an email to blog@alteholz.eu.

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DOPOM: scheme48 – A simple, modular, and lightweight Scheme implementation

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.

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Debian Med advent calendar

I would like to anounce the Debian Med advent calendar 2012. Just like last year the Debian Med team starts a bug squashing event from the December 1st to 24th. Every day at least one bug from the Debian BTS should be closed. Especially RC bugs for the oncoming Debian release (Wheezy) or bugs in one of the packages maintained by Debian Med shall be closed. Anyone shall be called upon to fix a bug or send a patch. Don’t hestitate, start to squash :-).

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DOPOM: a56 – Motorola DSP56001 assembler

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.

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BOM: overflow in ent

Recently I got a bug report for package ent. The internal counter of processed bytes has just type long. In case you feed enough bytes to ent, there will be an overflow after about half an hour (of course that depends on your type of CPU, the bug was reported on architecture i386).

As modern C (C99) introduced a new type long long, I changed the type of some variables from simple long to unsigned long long. The overflow disappeared for now, but it will reappear just some trillion bytes later.

So, are there any recommendations on how to handle such a situation better?

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DSOM: vera++ – Programmable verification and analysis tool for C++

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.

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DOPOM: greylistd – Greylisting daemon for use with Exim 4

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.

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BOM: libctl

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.