Results tagged “Debian”

Well the latest version of PSmisc is almost finished, so I pushed the tar archive up to the spot for the translators, waiting for the updates before it gets released.

It reminded me that perhaps a lot of people don't know how their programs get translated. Perhaps there are some that could even contribute.  The nice thing about the translation systems is that you don't need to know programming to help.

PSmisc uses the translation project as its method.  The program itself uses gettext for the translation part which makes a single text file called a POT file.  A translator takes this text file and makes a po file, such as it.po for the Italian translation and then translates, which basically means editing the file, reading each first line of a set and writing the translation on the second line.

For the programmer, once it is setup it is pretty simple to use, just mark your translatable lines and follow some simple rules, mainly about not embedding too much in a string.  I've used this system for years for quite a few of my programs and there is little added work for me.

Unfortunately,  translating is hard work and should be a long-term commitment.  Having a look at the translation project's Translation Matrix and you can see that some languages do suffer, though there are some very good results there too.  Particular kudos goes to the Vietnamese group which I think is just Clytie who does a marvellous job and is often the first translation file I get.

For the Debian project, there are many places where translations can occur.  There doesn't seem to be a centralised place for this, but some of the places they use translation work are:

• Translating The Debian website
• Debian Description Translation Project
• Debian debconf (configuration questions when you install packages)
• Translating Debian News

I've made a quick release of dh-make, now up to 0.52.  Besides a minor dh_make.1 manual page fix this release will put the right value in the debian/source/format file.  0.51 will make it a native source package no matter what flags you use.

If you get weird lintian errors about native source formats and version numbers wrong on your brand-new Debian package you just made, you might of been bitten by this bug.

That leaves a few bugs left, there are two I need help with:

• Bug 328692 - If you have a plan ASCII name like me, then your name looks fine in the dh-make generated man pages. This bug requires converting names that aren't plain ASCII (e.g. that use UTF-8) into something groff understands. Someone suggested decomposed unicode but unicode and groff are pretty much a black art to me, let alone combining them.
• Bug 533117 - This one is all about making dh-make make your python packages.  You'll need to understand the new debhelper v7 rules files.  Again, python is not something I use so the bug is stuck here.
  

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• UTF-8: Bits, Bytes, and Benefits (research.swtch.com)

After a long time of testing and just plain other non-software writing stuff, I'm happy to announce Gjay 0.3.0 is released.  This is my first release of Chuck Groom's code and hopefully it will work for you too.

The Debian packages will be out shortly after some building and testing.  If you have a 64-bit computer it now works with 64 bits fine (ie on my amd64).

It still needs some work, I'd like it to interact with more than audacious as the sound player. Also if you know how to in one of the sound libraries stream wav, ogg or mp3 files correctly I'd like to hear from you.  Currently gjay just uses the same old fork to mpg321 method, but idealy I'd like it to use the libraries directly.

OK, ok, i got a chroot and pbuilder now. So that should, I hope stop any more FTBFS bugs about missing depdendencies.

procps got uploaded that fixes some important bugs, but mainly they were small fiddly things. About the most significant enhancement was pmap now has a real working -x flag.  It looks a lot like some of the other pmap programs out there and shows the RSS and Dirty bytes per map. Let me know if its useful or not.

However there still is 48 bugs in the package, so if you're feeling game wander over to procps bug page and have a look around, but here are some more interesting ones, such as why would a process start time be earlier than the boot time? Bug 408879 has this problem

Now, a nice can of worms is in a Linux system, what is free memory?  What should the "free" program report?  Currently free just reports what it sees in /proc, but in Bug 565518 should the slab count be taken out?  I certainly won't be making any Debian-specific changes here as you could get different numbers depending on your distribution, or even worse the age of you Debian system.

procps is also my first attempt at using git-buildpackage which I found very helpful. There was one problem with it and that is how it works with the quilt patch program. If the quilt patches are applied, git doesn't know this and says all the files have changed. I know its how these two programs are supposed to work but its a little annoying.

Work doesn't often send to me places as great as Manilla in the Philippines, but here I am.  It's a reasonably modern place and to me feels more like America than Asia in so many ways, posssibly because of its history.  One thing is for sure, noone follows road rules here.  Red lights are a suggestion and a zebra crossing is just some painted lines that you do need to stop at.

As for food, it's not that different, in fact this sad lot is about what was different:

• McSpaghetti - Was supposedly sugar coated spaghetti but actually was very tame, my son would of loved it.
• Wow Steak from KFC - Neither Wow nor Steak, like a big chicken nugget with gravy and rice
• Halo Halo - A dessert drink which was sugared or preserved fruit, milk and ice.

Generally though the food has been pretty good but nothing I could get at home.

Good news about Gjay, the previous maintainer said it was ok for SourceForge to hand over the control of the program to me so I've set it up in git and started working on it.  Most of the work was getting the code up-to-date to the later gtk APIs and making it work with audacious instead of xmms.  It's almost ready for (re)initial release and there is even an ITP ready to go.

Git is a rather interesting and new (for me at least) version control system.  I've been using cvs for more years than I'd care to think about and svn but while it is a bit different as you'd expect I haven't had it get in my way.  In fact I've been so impressed with Git I have put a few other projects into it, mainly with the collab maintence Debian project for a few of my packages.

It's the late afternoon of the first day of 2010 here, though I suppose its still 2009 for someone for a little while.

After a lot of waiting, JFFNMS release candidate 1 for 0.8.5 got uploaded to sourceforge.  This release is mainly about fixing some database release bugs 0.8.4 had and they're all caused by the fact that working with PHP and database to release code is plain awful.

The problem is tracking changes in your database. So version 1 has 3 tables and 60 rows, version 2 has 4 tables and 90 rows, but what changed?  Everything I've seen so far is a bit of a hack or is real fiddly.  JFFNMS release process is both which is why I'll go and release several versions of C code or Debian packages before trying to crack that nut again.

If you are wondering what JFFNMS is, its a Network Management System. It makes graphs and red/green icons depending on the status of your routers and servers. Written in PHP and web based and of course licensed under the GPL

Time away from work and its been either raining or hot. So I've updated and released some software.  It always seems to happen there is a lot of Free Software development during the breaks.

psmisc got a bunch of updates, including a new program called prtstat which formats the stat file in the procfs for a pid in (hopefully) a nice way.  No sooner had I released the latest update when a bug report came in. It seems fuser -m -k is a little too happy about killing itself. The fix is in the CVS but anoying I missed that.

Next up was the Debian gw6c package. I was asked why it didn't get moved from unstable to testing.  The problem is that while Linux has iproute, kfreebsd does not so the lack of a dependency was stopping it transitioning.  To make matters worse the freebsd template was missing from their package.  After some deb-substvars evilness to fix the dependencies and some dh_install overrides in the debian/rules file it should all be happy when its finished.

Finally, I miss having good random playlists. I'm too lazy to make them myself so I use some random thing which often gives me rubbish.  A program called Gjay used to be in the Debian archive but got removed, mainly because the upstream stopped supporting it.  I can write C (the programming language its written in) and I wanted to use it, so I fixed it.  My version is 64-bit clean, so it works on my amd64 and it works with audacious not the old xmms which is great.  More importantly, it compiles, it runs and it even works properly.
I'm just wondering if I want to release it out to the wider world or not.

While I originally had a blog site on Avogato, I just didnt seem to use it much.  I needed some place that I could put some writing that wasn't quite up to a new whole page with the associated heavy work to format it but it had to go somewhere.

So I'll try to put those middle entries into this place.

Now all I got to work out is how to link the thing to Planet Debian and I'll be set.