Well, I thought all SF.net projects pages were dead as a doornail until I saw this evidence project page. Now that’s some damn fine way of introducing your project. These geeks are a one creative bunch. ;o)
Wednesday, 30 January 2008
GNU Debian upgrade-system script deborphan purge workaround
Posted on 09:46 by Unknown
Upgrade-system is a great Bourne shell script that helps to upgrade and keep your sytem clean of obsolete libraries and packages with a single command. It has one small side-effect.
The Upgrade-system program uses deborphan to find the orphaned packages on your system. The package maintainer Martin-Ãric Racine (q-funk at iki.fi) mentions the problem with deborphan in /usr/share/doc/upgrade-system/NEWS.gz file thus.
UPGRADE-SYSTEM is configured to remove all Perl/Python/Ruby extensions and development libraries that are NOT listed as another package’s dependency, which is a sensible default behavior for laymen’s workstations.
But what if the layman user is using a script that needs say one such language extension that is not listed as another package’s dependency? One solution is to this issue is to use deborphan’s keep file management feature. Deborphan maintains a list of packages in /var/lib/deborphan/keep that are never purged.
For example lets take one such package that gets purged by deborphan. The libzip-ruby1.8 is a library package for handling zip archives with ruby programming language .
Lets add this package to deborphan keep-back file.
$ deborphan -A libzip-ruby1.8
Check out the deborphan keep file contents with -L (list) to see if our package is added.
$ deborphan -L
libzip-ruby1.8 ( <——here it is ;o)
librmagick-ruby
libhtml-htmltokenizer-ruby
libpty-ruby
libprogressbar-ruby1.8
libtk-ruby
libtest-unit-ruby
libgems-ruby
libhttp-access2-ruby
libcurses-ruby
Next time you launch ‘upgrade-system’ command all the files listed in deborphan’s keep file will not be purged from your computer.
These are complete list of deborphan’s keep file management options from its manual page.
- -A,—add-keep (Add packages to the list of packages which are never to be reported, regardless of their state. You may specify ’-’ to use standard input. Note that package names are case-sensitive.)
- -R,—del-keep PKG1…PKGn (Remove packages from the list of packages which are never to be reported. You may specify ’-’ to use standard input. If there are no dependencies for this package next time deborphan is invoked, it will be reported again.)
- -L,—list-keep (Show the list of packages that are being kept back.)
- -Z,—zero-keep (Purge the entire list of packages that are being kept back. The only option possible in combination with this option is -A.)
- -k,—keep-file=FILE (Use FILE to store the list of kept-back packages.)
Coders And SysAdmins
Posted on 09:44 by Unknown
I recollect writing a comment on Linux.com SysAdmin to SysAdmin: It’s the documentation, stupid! article published couple of years ago.
Well, my friends. Its quite sad that often we coders are mis-understood. The whole spirit of FLOSS development could be described with a small example. “When child is given a colorful toy train, he is facinated by its color and doesn’t know that its a train untill he puts it into his mouth. Sometime later he realises that its a toy not food and figures out how to make it run. Like all human, what starts a mere fantasy turns into interest and later into finding new way to make the play more fun with the toy train.” The early GNU/Linux hackers were of the same breed.They use a toy, master it and hack/enhance it.That’s how it has been down the years. The young sysadmin should keep this in mind before blasting the poor coders. Ho’ by the way nobody payed us to this job anyway ;oP
Brian Jones, the author of the woeful letter to developers hit the bull eye, the problems pointed out by him are still to be addressed.
New CD Writing Tools in Debian "Etch"
Posted on 09:43 by Unknown
From this weeks Debian Weekly News
Jörg Jaspert called for testers of the new cdrkit and the new wodim program. They will be shipped with etch and replace the old cdrtools collection. This “fork”: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debburn is the result of several nearly endless discussions about incompatible licenses used upstream which not only Debian suffered from. Other vendors are invited to participate in this effort as well.
Hacker High School
Posted on 09:38 by Unknown
From a Slashdot article
“Hacker High School, an initiative from the non-profit Institute for Security and Open Methodology , pioneers of the OSSTMM have received some media coverage for their Hacker High School Program . It’s a license-free open-source program that provides security and privacy-awareness teaching materials to teachers. Here’s the link to the BBC stream and article about the project.”
Also mentioned on a thread on BSD-INDIA .
Do Get started with the program and read the lessons online. Do join the project mailing-list help them.
BitTorrent 4.20.x python2.4 packages on Debian
Posted on 09:37 by Unknown
BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution file sharing tool written by programmer Bram Cohen. His reference implementation is written in Python and is available for download on bittorrent.com
The current stable BitTorrent version 4.20.4 debian package for Python2.4 depends on python (>= 2.4).
Package: bittorrent
Version: 4.20.4
Section: net
Priority: optional
Architecture: all
Depends: python (>= 2.4), python-wxgtk2.6, python-twisted (>= 2.0), python-cryp
to (>= 2.0), python-psyco, python-zopeinterface
Conflicts: bittorrent (<< 4.20.4), bittorrent-gui (<< 4.20.4)
......
Maintainer: BitTorrent, Inc. <bugs@bittorrent.com>
Source: bittorrent
Description: Scatter-gather network file transfer
BitTorrent is a tool for distributing files. It's extremely
easy to use - downloads are started by clicking on hyperlinks.
Whenever more than one person is downloading at once
they send pieces of the file(s) to each other, thus relieving
the central server's bandwidth burden. Even with many
simultaneous downloads, the upload burden on the central server
remains quite small, since each new downloader introduces new
upload capacity.
.
Homepage: http://bittorrent.com/
The policy on my debian/sid system is still points to 2.3.5-11.
$ apt-cache policy python
python:
Installed: 2.3.5-11
Candidate: 2.3.5-11
Version table:
*** 2.3.5-11 0
990 ftp://ftp.jp.debian.org unstable/main Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
The workaround until debian packages moves over python2.4 as its default version is download the source the source and build your own debian package.
Uncompress the source
$ tar zxvf BitTorrent-4.20.4.tar.gz
Edit the BitTorrent-4.20.4/debian/control file depends line.
Depends: python2.4 (>= PYTHONVERSION)
Build and install the debian package.
$ sh build_nix_pkg.sh deb
$ dpkg -i BitTorrent-4.20.4/dist/bittorrent_4.20.4_python2.4.deb
Debian NEW and BYHAND Packages
Posted on 09:32 by Unknown
A post by Goswin von Brederlow
From: Goswin von Brederlow
To: debian-curiosa_at_lists.debian.org
Subject: Nothing NEW in Debian
Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2006 22:45:25 +0200
Hi,
a momentous occasion. Never seen before in a million years (or 5 or so):
There is nothing NEW1 in Debian. :)
MfG
Goswin
1 http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html
Perhaps a RSS/XML feed of “Debian NEW and BYHAND Packages”: http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html summary page would be a good idea.
PS: Perhaps I don't need to mention that the post was a rant on Debian state of affairs.
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