After everybody though that Midnight Commander is dead and the next release of it will be released together with hurd, it is very cool to announce that a new team of developers are active again.

We've taken over officially the development in December and now, after two months of work a new version of mc is available: 4.6.2. This is mostly a bugfix release addressing several very nasty bugs which are also present in the debian package. Here the notes what has changed in this release:

• MC Core
  • Changed HQ url to point to new website www.midnight-commander.org (Closes: #137, #138)
  • Added a micro helper library in order to go slowly avay from glib (Closes: #157)
  • Use static strings as section entries in ~/.mc/history WARNING!: This will break old files (Closes: #50)
  • Fixed a repaint issue when clicking on the "View" Button instead of using F3 (Closes: #35)
  • Removed obsolete autoconf macros (Closes: #133)
  • Fix escaping for command line completion (Closes: #147)
  • prevent mc from segfaulting when getting invalid timestamps on files (Closes: #96)
  • Fixed a keybord issue when running mc via a putty console (Closes: #203)
  • setted pty fd to closeonexec (on subshell) (Closes: #174)
  • Fixed file renames, when copying/moving is performed into deleted directories. (Closes: #181)
  • Add an option to show executables first in the panels (Closes: #173)
  • Fixed concatdirand_file if there is a parameter = NULL (Closes: #180)
  • Allow out-of-tree builds (Closes: #224, #208)

• Editor

  • Syntax highlighting for:
    • debian files (debian/changelog, debian/control, debian/copyright, ..) (Closes: #142)
    • updated sh syntax highlighting (Closes: #143)
    • updated pascal syntax highlighting (Closes: #65)
    • differentiate between c and cpp files for highlighting (Closes: #16)
    • updated python highlighting to support python 2.6 (Closes: #216)
  • Removed some unneeded variables (Closes: #168, #151)
  • Do use a ro test if a file exists (Closes: #206)
  • Fixes some missbehaviour in regex matching (Closes: #207, #211 )
    • start at front of line and not on cursor position
    • . shouldn't match a newline

• VFS

  • Fix some bashisms in some extfs scripts (Closes: #146)
  • Fixed various problems with symlinks and files with chars which needs escaping over fish (Closes: #10, #87, #149, #53)
  • Added 7zip extfs descriptor (Closes: #92)
  • Switched from o3totxt to odf2txt as o3totxt is outdated (Closes: #218)
• Locale
  • Updated german translation (Closes: #167)
  • New Belarussian translation (Closes: #170)
  • Updated russian translation (Closes: #159)

As you see.. quite a long list of fixes Have fun and check the new release out right here!

This morning after getting up I stumbled over exciting news: Google designed it's own browser called Chrome. As a marketing-gag they published a small comic about this new browser where presenting all exciting features.

While clicking through this comic I noticed something strange: Google seems to think that Europe is still in the middle of WW2, like many Americans do...

(Hint: Have a look at the german borders)

As I wrote in my mail to debian-devel@l.d.o I would like to ask for help for porting mc to link dynamically against libsmclient so that I can enable the native smb support again. I've disabled this support with the last upload to unstable. Please see the informations below for the reasons:

Here some background informations: mc still uses a very old samba lib to make the native smb support possible. This lib was included in 1996 and wasn't updated until now. Since the layout of the configuration file has changed and new features was added, this old lib had very much problems parsing this file. Furthermore I fear that there are untracked and unfixed security issues within this lib which were discovered from 1996 until now.

My plans are to link mc dynamically against the libsmbclient0, but since there are several other big tasks to work on, I don't know exactly if I've enough time to work on this big issue. If someone is interested in working on a fix for this or for any other issue listed here please contact me, so we can coordinate.

Thanks in advance

Cowdancer is activly developed in debian, that's very nice. it's really a cool tool to build packages for unstable but also for backporting efforts. I'm using it on a daily basis to build debian etch packages of lustre. However three days ago cowdancer stopped working with my etch chroot after an upgrade of my unstable system:

dpkg-source: info: building lustre in lustre_1.6.5~rc3-1.dsc
dpkg-genchanges -S >../lustre_1.6.5~rc3-1_source.changes
dpkg-genchanges: including full source code in upload
dpkg-buildpackage: source only upload (original source is included)
chroot: cannot run command `cowdancer-ilistcreate': No such file or directory
W: cowdancer-ilistcreate failed to run within chroot, falling back to old method
 -> Running in no-targz mode
I: using fakeroot in build.
Current time: Sat May 17 12:18:30 CEST 2008
pbuilder-time-stamp: 1211019510
 -> copying local configuration
 -> mounting /proc filesystem
 -> mounting /dev/pts filesystem
 -> policy-rc.d already exists
Obtaining the cached apt archive contents
Installing the build-deps
cowdancer: .ilist size unexpected
cowdancer: .ilist size unexpected
Can't open perl script "/usr/bin/dpkg-architecture": Cannot allocate memory
 -> Attempting to satisfy build-dependencies
 -> Creating pbuilder-satisfydepends-dummy package
cowdancer: .ilist size unexpected
cowdancer: .ilist size unexpected
cowdancer: .ilist size unexpected
cowdancer: .ilist size unexpected
cowdancer: .ilist size unexpected
sh: /tmp/satisfydepends-aptitude/pbuilder-satisfydepends-dummy/DEBIAN/control: Cannot allocate memory
E: pbuilder-satisfydepends failed.
Copying back the cached apt archive contents
 -> unmounting dev/pts filesystem
 -> unmounting proc filesystem
 -> Copying COW directory
 -> Invoking pbuilder
 -> Cleaning COW directory
Command /bin/sh -c pdebuild "--pbuilder" "cowbuilder" "--" "--basepath" "/var/cache/pbuilder/etch.cow" failed

After some research I found that a change of cowdancer (something related to .ilist) is responible for this issue. After that I asked on #debian-devel if someone else had this problem and were told that removing an re-creating the chroot will help. But that results in the same error msg. After that I decided to wrote a bugreport against cowdancer, since this is in my eyes a major defect in this software to do not support the latest stable release. I filled this report as RC Bug and got very fast a answer:

severity 481344 wishlist
retitle 481344  provide cowdancer etch backport
[ ... ]

I think this is the wrong way to fix a problem in unstable with a backport of a software. Providing a fallback for older debian releases would be the better way. Is anybody else having this problems?

I'm writing this blog entry as a reaction of Lucas Nussbaums one. More or less one year ago I also was a New Maintainer who completed the process after 3 months (Started in February and ended in May). My Intention was to become as fast as possible a Developer and I was very motivated. (I helped Lucas with filling the build twice in a row bugs in this time). The FD approves me quite fast... (I'll guess I was only waiting for two weeks?) but the next to steps (Approval of DAM and creation of the account) took very long.

After waiting for 3 months I was quite demotivated and doing only necessary things in order to update my packages... it was very frustrating. But now I'm finally a DD, since 6 months. For those who doesn't want to calculate: I was waiting for DAM about 4 months. When I saw that I was again highly motivated and started again to work on Debian a bit more, because I thought that the account creation can't took long...this was an error:

I was approved by DAM in the middle of October... and got my account in Dezember... again waiting for a simple action.

I can really understand New Maintainer who are directly MIA after being a DD. Waiting a half year for account creation is much too long.

In my eyes there is only one possible solution for this issue: Since DAM and the Account Manager have also many other tasks which consumes there time, I would suggest to give them assistants...every manager needs at least one assistant ;-). This would speed up the process and people who are doing actually a great job doesn't get frustrated by waiting, but can actively work on Debian. I hope that the new DPL will find a solution for this really big issue during his time.

Some weeks ago I post about a spam contest where I participate. This contest is now running for several weeks. (It will be finished after 5 weeks). The aim is to get as most as possible spam to the emailadress . (My is winnie@qsc218.credativ.com).

Atm I'm the second... I've ~140 spam mails and only 1 virus in my mailbox Noel, who is on the first has ~150 spam mails and ~10 viruses in his mailbox :-S

The winner of this contest will get a free t-shirt (with a cool text on it).

Yeah... it would rock if you can distribute this emailadress a bit more, so that I recieves more spam Thanks!!

Today is the first day where we are really here and could work. After some initial troubles with the network setup here, we've managed that everybody was able to get internet access.

There are some goal we would like to archieve during this worksession, these goals are:

• remove blocker bugs of our long standing issue #311188
  • bind9 patch
  • dhcp3 patch
  • slapd patch
  • switch syslog daemon to use rsyslog
• improve our dokumentation
• general hacking on ltsp
• further work on cdd-dev

After the first day the bind9 patch is completed and the dhcp3 is almost ready. Hopefully are the other days here in this nice town also so productive! I'll add some photos of this meeting after it is over to my gallery.

Yesterday I made the switch from kde3 to kde4. But before I dumped all installed packages into a file ( if I have to restore) and backuped my configuration files for kde.

After some fiddeling with kde4 and the dependencies I had a full kde4 installed. My problem was that:

apt-get -t experimental install kde4

won't resolve all dependencies... So my apt-get line was quite long. (After I was finished, I thought that maybe pinning would be a better idea).

In general kde4 is usable, but there are some quite annoying things:

• konqueror can't show websites via ssl with a ssl name which doesn't match the servername (the https:// protocoll will die)
• It is not possible for me to choose another delimiter than the default one for the shortcuts in konqueror. (I'm used to have as delimter only a blank, but the default is a colon.)
• Sometimes konqueror (very rare!!) can't contact klauner anymore.. a restart of konqueror fixes this issue.
• Sometimes plasma crashes and restarts directly afterwards, but I'm not able to reproduce this atm.

But of course there are quite many improvements, I'll list here only those which I consider very useful

• kopete is now able to show the away messages of people using ICQ6 (I wasn't able to read them before)
• konqueror renders some websites now better than before
• The new menu structure is quite cool
• And of course: the plasmoids...it's quite sad that most plasmoids are in playground atm (calc, weather). It would be cool if it would be possible to package them as extragear-playground or something similiar.

Some things which are definitly missing in kde4 (which have to be ported to qt4) are kpowersave and knetworkmanager. Furthermore kontact and amarok, but there is work in progress.

I've created a small contest together with several other guys. We'll try to get as much as possible spams on a emailadress. The people with the most spam and viruses on his emailaccount will win. I think a good starting point is to publish here, we'll see.

Some other things which could end in having success are:

• write the emailadress into the footer of each emailadress as spamtrap.
• subscribe to several websites
• write some guestbook entries with this emailadress

If you have other ideas how to get as much as possible spam to this address please write a Comment to this post to the Discussion page. Thanks in advance

The emailadress which should recieves as much as possible spam is: winnie@qsc218.credativ.com.

Today I was very nerved by searching for patches for mc. Every distribution has other patches for the same thing, The best point to show this are the utf8/slang patches. There are many different approaches which have different qualtity. Furthermore are in every distribution fixes which are missing in other ones. And I was really pissed by that :S

In order to find a solution I contacted several other maintainers of mc (opensuse, mandriva, mandrake, fedora, ubuntu) and get a reply from several of them. Maybe we'll start to use one repository to start to unify our patches.

My goal with this is to get better patches into debian (and into the other distributions), sharing patches between distributions and unifying them to submit them to upstream. Maybe this will help to get patches from distributions faster into the upstreams CVS.

We'll see what will happen. I'm looking forward to the result of this initiative