python-apt 0.8.0~exp2 bug fix release On Tuesday, I uploaded python-apt 0.8.0~exp2 to experimental, fixing about 10 bugs reported in Ubuntu and Debian bug trackers. It should know even convert integers correctly on all architectures, previously we could have passed long via varargs where int was expected. Bugs Until Thursday, I went through the bug list in Launchpad and closed/fixed/reassigned/merged about 100 bugs in APT and python-apt. APT & python-apt updates for squeeze Today, I uploaded updates of apt and python-apt to stable. ... Read more 》

Internship / APT stuff This week was a rather busy week. I’m currently doing a (unpaid) 1 month internship as part of my education. Thanks to Michael Vogt and his boss at Canonical Ltd, this internship takes place in IRC and is dedicated to Debian and Ubuntu stuff, primarily APT-related things. The first two days were spent on multi-arch support in python-apt: On Monday, I released python-apt 0.7.100.3, introducing initial minimal multi-arch support (just enough to not break anymore, but no really new multi-arch-specific API). ... Read more 》

As some already know, is that I use sbuild to build all my packages in clean chroot environments. For this, I use the ‘aufs’ “mode” of schroot, that allows you to setup a chroot with one read-only base directory and one writeable overlay where changes are written to. One thing I had problems with was the time required to install build dependencies due to disk I/O. Given that I have 4G RAM in my computer, I decided to use a tmpfs as the writable overlay. ... Read more 》

Today, Nokia and Intel announced the merge of Maemo and Moblin into the MeeGo project. This is sad, because it will end the era of the Debian-based mobile operating system Maemo and replace it with a system using RPM and probably some other evil stuff as well. In fact, dpkg & apt-get where two of my main reasons to buy the N900. And another question is why yet another name. Moblin was already a well-known name and they shouldn’t have changed the name just because they switch the servers and add some Nokia developers. ... Read more 》

I have just uninstalled hal from my laptop running unstable, and everything still seems to work, including suspend & resume.

I just uploaded python-apt 0.7.93 to unstable with support for Python 2.6 and Python 3.1, meaning that there is now a single development branch again. This uploads brings developers the new API with real classes in apt_pkg (you can now use pydoc to view documentation), C++ bindings for making apt-pkg applications scriptable (although they should be considered experimental), a test suite (although aptsources fails in one test for now) and many new context managers for enhanced Python 3 coding fun. ... Read more 》

I just uploaded aptdaemon 0.11-1 and software-center 1.1debian1 to Debian unstable. They are currently waiting in NEW, and will hopefully pass it in a short time. I plan to replace gnome-app-install with software-center for Squeeze, but you can currently have both installed. Ubuntu Software Center (or just ‘Software Center’) is a new graphical user interface for installing and removing applications; replacing gnome-app-install. Under the hood, it uses aptdaemon which exposes an interface to APT via D-Bus; i. ... Read more 》

Yesterday, I uploaded command-not-found 0.2.38-1 (based on version 0.2.38ubuntu4) to Debian unstable, using the “3.0 (quilt)” source format. All steps worked perfectly, including stuff like cowbuilder, lintian, debdiff, dput and the processing on ftp-master. Next steps are reverting my machine from Ubuntu 9.10 to my Debian unstable system and uploading new versions of gnome-main-menu, python-apt (0.7.93, not finished yet) and some other packages. In other news, the development of Ubuntu 10. ... Read more 》

Today I wanted to upgrade my “sid” system again (like I do 1-3 times per day, especially when I have nothing else to do). First of all, I was hit by a bug in APT “Could not perform immediate configuration (2) on perl”. I worked around it by running the latest git commit of cupt, which then started to upgrade my system. At some stage however, after upgrading parts of perl it seems, the progress stopped and perl complained that it could not find English. ... Read more 》

cupt is a new package manager written in Perl by Eugene V. Lyubimkin, who previously contributed to APT. And more than all, the project makes no sense at all. First of all, there is a language issue. Implementing a package manager in Perl has some major drawbacks. One of the features of APT was it being written in a lower-level language (i.e. C++ which really is below Perl), making it possible to write applications like synaptic and python bindings which in turn lead to applications like gnome-app-install or Ubuntu’s new Software Store. ... Read more 》