This week was successful. I have pushed some changes from November to the repository which change the license to LGPL-2.1+ (which makes bi-directional sharing of code with other projects easier, since most Vala code is under the same license) and implement HTTP using libsoup2.4 directly, instead of using GIO and GVFS for this. I also added a parser for the sources.list format which uses regular expressions to parse the file and is relatively fast. The code needs a current checkout of Vala’s git master to work correctly; as released versions had a bug which I noticed today and Jürg Billeter fixed in Vala 25 minutes later; thank you Jürg. ... Read more 》

If Oracle owned MySQL, it would not make a big difference with regards to competition on the database market. Oracle would then own 2 relational databases. But there is also the BSD-licensed PostgreSQL, the world’s most advanced open source database with several enhanced products from companies. If Oracle closed MySQL, the community would step in. I truly believe that the free software community is strong enough to support MySQL. There already is MariaDB and I believe that this project could serve as the base in case Oracle closes MySQL or stops MySQL completely. The community was strong enough to build complete operating systems and maintain them, so it should not be that hard to support one database. ... 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.e. something in the direction of PackageKit. At a later stage, the Software Center shall replace Synaptic, Update Manager and various other programs related to package management. ... Read more 》

In the ’90s, you had a large machine and several thin clients accessing it by using X11 via network. In 2010, you will have large datacenters providing applications to and storing the data of millions of users. As you might have guessed, I am talking about Google Chrome OS. It seems that the PC era is slowly coming to an end, with devices being increasingly connected ’to the cloud’ and people being always online; and storing their data on Google’s servers. We do emails online using Google Mail, we do navigation online using Google Maps, we edit and view our documents using Google Docs, our newspaper is Google News; and when we want entertainment we open the browser and type youtube.com into the URL bar. Even if we were formatting the hard disk and reinstalling the system, most people wouldn’t even notice; because all there data is stored online. ... 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 10.04 Lucid Lynx just started. For the first time in Ubuntu’s history, the development will be based on the testing tree of Debian and not on the unstable tree. This is done in order to increase the stability of the distribution, as this release is going to be a long term supported release. Ubuntu will freeze in February, one month before the freeze of Debian Squeeze. This should give us enough room to collaborate, especially on bugfixes. This also means that I will freeze my packages in February, so they will have the same version in Squeeze and Lucid (applying the earliest freeze to both distributions; exceptions where needed).

I returned to Germany from my vacation in Greece yesterday, and I just installed my new hard drive into my laptop. The old Hitachi hard drive had some bad sectors after a very long usage time (compared to my other disks) - we’ll see how the new Samsung SpinPoint M7 will work. Another side benefit is the upgrade from 120GB to 500GB which means I don’t have to delete files during the next months. It is also much faster (hdparm -t was 80MB/s, 2 times faster than the old one). ... 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.pm anymore. I tried to manually install the perl packages using dpkg -i, but this did not work. Then I just thought I should just try to unpack it and run dpkg -x <package> / on the perl packages. Now dpkg -i was working again and I could run dpkg -i on the packages again and continue my upgrade using apt-get.

Thanks to those who have tested it (and/or will test it). The results where helpful and resulted in Bug#548443 filed against localepurge and GNOME Bug #596429 against glib. The first one is a case where quotes where used inside a value, although this has never been defined to work, and the second one is a problem with GLib’s GScanner not ignoring multi-line C-style comments although it was configured to do so. I also fixed some bugs in APT2, like the missing build-depends on libgee-dev and the configuration parser now accepts ‘.’, ‘_’, ‘+’ in the option name. I also talked with Eugene about some differences in the way cupt and APT2 handle quotes and about some other parts of the configuration format. Seems this was a good day.

If you have an amd64 system, install the apt2 package from “deb http://people.debian.org/~jak/debian/ unstable/” and run the apt2-config command. Make sure that the parser reports no errors, otherwise send me an email or leave a comment here. One known exception is that all values must be quoted in the configuration file, I have no plans to fix this (probably just deprecate unquoted strings in APT instead). The parser is not as strict as cupt’s parser, but it gives you more help if something wents wrong. We also ignore most semicolons for now (they will be turned into warnings or errors later on). It is using GScanner from GLib for parsing the files. ... Read more 》

Just updated to revision 26808 of Chromium today, and it supports printing now. But it still does not support password encryption it seems. It also has some problems with displaying pages sometimes (buttons missing, style not loaded, etc.). But it improved a lot since I first tried it.