debian

Today I got accepted as Debian Developer. I would like to thank the following people (in random order) for their involvment in my NM, mentoring and sponsoring uploads.

Philipp Kern, Michael Schiansky, Daniel Baumann, Héctor García, Norbert Tretkowski, Werner Heuser, Marc Brockschmidt, Lars Wirzenius, Christoph Berg, Jörg Jaspert, James Troup, Martin Krafft (feel yourself added if I forgot you, hopefully not)

Oh and congratulations Holger.

The Chemnitzer Linuxtage event is over and like every year the event was very nice.
From my point of view it's one of the best organized and community driven events in Germany.

Sadly I just saw one talk (libfind) because most time I was busy with meeting all the people I can just see one time a year on this event and finding a way to allow dpkg to merge old and new configuration files.

This year I attended two booths, the one of my favorite live cd grml and the one of debian.
It was the first time for grml having a booth at the CLT and I think the feedback was quite good.

The debian booth was also very cool and well organized (thanks Noel) and I had alot of interesting discussions with different users.
One question which came up was why debian permits root logins in a default ssh installation. I had no answer for this question since I also think it's definitly a security issue. Elmar Hoffmann thought it could have to do with an easy way of scping files for root without using a user temporary.
If someone has an answer, let me know.

For those who not read debian-devel-announce mailing list:
as part of the ongoing BSP Marathon, there will be a BSP in
Berlin, Germany on the weekend September 22nd-24th. The BSP will
be hosted in the office of Individual Networks Berlin e.V.

For further details please have a look at the wiki page. Please add
yourself to the wiki page if you plan to attend on:
http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/de/Berlin

Jens Seidel announced a site to translate debian package descriptions into the German language.
This is pretty easy, you just need to know english, you don't have to subscribe somewhere, you just need your browser and point it to:

http://kleptog.org/cgi-bin/ddtss2-cgi/de/

There are ~ 10000 descriptions missing. Everyone who ever wanted to help debian, this is your chance to easily do some really important stuff.
So if you have some spare time and don't know what to do, take 10 minutes and translate a description

For those who don't read planet.debian.org (and because there is no bug in the BTS, the reportbug package in debian unstable is currently broken.
If you want to report a bug until its fixed use the patch:


[via pkern's blog]
EDIT: bugnumber is #382486

Thijs Kinkhorst gave me on debian-mentors list a cool hint. Christoph Berg wrote a nice small script called dget which is part of the devscripts package in debian. With dget its pretty easy to download source packages from a webserver and dget generetes from the .dsc file the file names of the other files, downloads them and extracts them using dpkg-source.

dget -x http://nion.modprobe.de/debian/note/note_1.3.1-3.dsc
/usr/bin/dget: retrieving http://nion.modprobe.de/debian/note/note_1.3.1-3.dsc
--00:57:24-- http://nion.modprobe.de/debian/note/note_1.3.1-3.dsc
=> `note_1.3.1-3.dsc'
Auflösen des Hostnamen »nion.modprobe.de«.... 81.169.172.197
Verbindungsaufbau zu nion.modprobe.de|81.169.172.197|:80... verbunden.
HTTP Anforderung gesendet, warte auf Antwort... 200 OK
Länge: 576 [text/plain]

100%[================================================>] 576 --.--K/s

00:57:25 (30.52 MB/s) - »note_1.3.1-3.dsc« gespeichert [576/576]

/usr/bin/dget: retrieving http://nion.modprobe.de/debian/note/note_1.3.1.orig.tar.gz
--00:57:25-- http://nion.modprobe.de/debian/note/note_1.3.1.orig.tar.gz
=> `note_1.3.1.orig.tar.gz'
Auflösen des Hostnamen »nion.modprobe.de«.... 81.169.172.197
Verbindungsaufbau zu nion.modprobe.de|81.169.172.197|:80... verbunden.
HTTP Anforderung gesendet, warte auf Antwort... 200 OK
Länge: 42.275 (41K) [application/x-tar]

100%[================================================>] 42.275 166.71K/s

00:57:25 (166.05 KB/s) - »note_1.3.1.orig.tar.gz« gespeichert [42275/42275]

/usr/bin/dget: retrieving http://nion.modprobe.de/debian/note/note_1.3.1-3.diff.gz
--00:57:25-- http://nion.modprobe.de/debian/note/note_1.3.1-3.diff.gz
=> `note_1.3.1-3.diff.gz'
Auflösen des Hostnamen »nion.modprobe.de«.... 81.169.172.197
Verbindungsaufbau zu nion.modprobe.de|81.169.172.197|:80... verbunden.
HTTP Anforderung gesendet, warte auf Antwort... 200 OK
Länge: 3.323 (3.2K) [text/plain]

100%[================================================>] 3.323 --.--K/s

00:57:25 (60.93 KB/s) - »note_1.3.1-3.diff.gz« gespeichert [3323/3323]

dpkg-source: extracting note in note-1.3.1
dpkg-source: unpacking note_1.3.1.orig.tar.gz
dpkg-source: applying ./note_1.3.1-3.diff.gz

Today I saw this in debians fetchmail init script:
su -c "$DAEMON $OPTIONS --nosyslog --nodetach -v -v" $USER <&- 2>&1 && true

Nice!

Because from time to time people ask where are the builds for the AMD64 platform in debian and why there are no builds.
There are builds on:
ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian-amd64/debian/pool/main/m/mutt-ng

My tool of the day is tagpending from the devscripts package which searches all bugs in a debian changelog file
which will be closed with the next upload via the Closes -tag and mark them automatically as pending in the BTS.

Nice tool!

Today I thought about a possibility to make automatical package updates for security issues in Debian. You know the problem that you want to fix your packages as fast as possible if you notice an update by the security team? Sometimes it can be too late if you fix the package 5 hours after release. So apt-cron is no solution.

Correct me if something for this problem exists. No I have the plan to write a daemon which checks the RSS feed or a subscription to debian-security-announce in a specified time interval updates the packages automatically if they are installed. So you will have a minimun delay after the DSA was posted.

Any ideas, flames etc.?