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NAS 1.9.2 in unstable

Just uploaded this at the weekend, and it was a really nice one to do too. Every single one of the Debian patches that I used to make to the source for NAS has now been accepted upstream, so our diff is now just the Debian packaging metadata. W00t!

23:45 :: # :: /debian/packages :: 1 comment

CVS and the "feature branch"

CVS is a fun package to maintain. Hang on, I'll start again. <fx: raises sarcasm hand> CVS is a fun package to maintain.

It's to be expected, I suppose - it's a package with a lot of history, and lots of technical users who generally know what they want and have strong opinions on how things should work. This means that unexpected behaviour tends to be noticed and reported fairly quickly. The fact that there is so much history and so many users makes fixing some of the core bugs and issues very difficult to fix - any change in behaviour is likely to annoy people, especially those that have written scripts to work with CVS.

I made a decision quite a while ago to go with the CVS "feature" branch (aka 1.12.x) instead of the "stable" (1.11.x) branch for a few reasons, the most important being the addition of PAM support for authentication. I'll freely admit that this was a somewhat selfish decision (I maintain a CVS server at work that needed PAM), but until recently it seemed to be the right move. Now I'm not so sure. There have been one hell of a lot of changes in the 1.12.x series, including many to the standard interfaces that people use. That alone wouldn't be a problem, but there's no sign yet of those features being frozen and 1.12.x being stabilised. The way things are looking now, we're going to be shipping sarge with a development snapshot of CVS, and I'm not very happy with that.

I also never find enough time to fix the bugs reported against CVS, and there are many. I'm going to try and get some of the "cvs login" bugs triaged soon, so I can check what's going on and get some patches upstream. It's quite likely that some of the older bugs in that area are already fixed, but they can be difficult to reproduce at the best of times.

Why are there never enough hours in the day?

12:52 :: # :: /debian/packages :: 1 comment

Final sarge edition of debian-cd uploaded; ideas for debian-cd v3?

Debian-cd is probably like a lot of the infrastructure packages that we use, in that the packaged versions are generally out of date and therefore not very useful for Debian developers. But we should still package them, as that way our users get neatly-packaged stuff easily available instead of having to fight cvs/svn to download them.

debian-cd 2.2.18 should contain all the various local patches and tweaks that most of us have been using over the CVS version for the last few months, and I'm about to upload it with urgency=medium so it will make the sarge release. It shouldn't cause any issues for the build daemons, as it's binary-all anyway.

Once sarge is released, I want to get stuck in and make some large changes to the way debian-cd works. Obviously, the first of these will be to use JTE (which is too big a change to go in so close to a release IMHO). Secondly, I'd like to refactor and clean up the code to a large extent. Unlike some people, I don't think that debian-cd is particularly in need of replacement - it just needs some cleaning up. The steps required to build debian CDs are always going to be long and complex (and generally messy), and pretending otherwise doesn't help.

I have some basic ideas on how I want to do things, but nothing really worthy of comment just yet. Watch this space!

17:37 :: # :: /debian/packages :: 1 comment

NAS 1.6d into unstable
It's nice when upstream are friendly and competent and accept (juat about) all your Debian patches into their releases. It makes moving to a new upstream release really easy. And Jon is slowly moving over to using automake and friends instead of imake, which will make versioned symbols easy. Yay!

01:35 :: # :: /debian/packages :: 0 comments