The following example demonstrates the features of debimg core, and how it can be used to fetch a some packages. As you will see when you run this example, debimg uses SHA1 filenames for the downloaded files. This may be changed in a future version. There is also an improved version of this example, which creates a repository, but the needed module (debimg.core.repository) is not public yet, because its far from being finished. I expect to complete repository code on Wednesday. ... Read more 》

Today, I have published the first pieces of debimg 0.1. The published code includes the resolver, the compression module and the fetcher module. It is rewritten from scratch, this time with a PEP8-conforming style, and more flexible. Because debimg.core does not depend on any specific configuration format, but is configured solely via parameters, it is more flexible than debimg 0.0. This new code enables people to write their own programs related to Debian images easily. And if you want to, you can use the facilities provided by debimg.configuration and debimg.frontend to write your own program using debimg configuration files (not implemented yet, core needs to be finished first). ... Read more 》

You can not use codenames for pinning packages to a specific release. Everything like this just fails, and can result in apt not finding any candidate for a package. You can see this for example in Bug#512318, and Bug#513864 seems to be related to that one. If you want to target Lenny and you don’t have Etch in your sources.list, pin stable at a higher priority than testing. This means that the pin automatically migrates once Lenny becomes stable (which happens hopefully in 2 weeks). ... Read more 》

Well, I wrote** 2599 lines** of documentation. More detailed I wrote 2599 lines of documentation from Thursday to Sunday. In total, the jak branch of python-apt now has a diffstat (compared to debian-sid) of: Changes: 113 files changed, 5845 insertions (+), 2763 deletions(-) Partly responsible is Ben Finney, whose patches I merged. I also closed 7 bugs not relevant anymore in current versions of python-apt. This is the changelog to from debian-sid to jak: ... Read more 》

News: http://bzr.debian.org/loggerhead/users/jak/python-apt/jak/revision/219 introduced again some new documentation. doc/source/apt/debfile.rst | 6 doc/source/apt_pkg/cache.rst | 540 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++- doc/source/apt_pkg/index.rst | 24 + doc/source/conf.py | 5 doc/source/examples/cache-packages.py | 22 + doc/source/examples/cache-pkgfile.py | 29 + doc/source/examples/missing-deps.py | 51 +++ 7 files changed, 659 insertions(+), 18 deletions(-) You can see them at http://people.debian.org/~jak/python-apt-doc/ Missing seem to be: AcquireFile AcquireItem ActionGroup Configuration MetaIndex PackageIndexFile PkgManager PkgRecords PkgSourceList PkgSrcRecords ProblemResolver TagFile TagSection But the weekend is not over yet. I will blog tomorrow again, and once I’m finished with everything (which may be tomorrow, too). ... Read more 》

I have been working the whole week on python-apt and the result is the jak branch. This implements some of the proposals I made in my last post, but has one very interesting feature: REAL COOL DOCUMENTATION. After Sandro Tosi told me in a comment in my last post that the real big problem with python-apt is a lack of documentation, I immediately started writing it. UsingreStructuredText and Sphinx, we now have a really cool and much more detailed documentation. (Although it is not really finished yet [it contains everything, but there is still room to improve]). ... Read more 》

[as sent to deity@lists.debian.org] Hello, while hacking a bit on python-apt in the last days, I formulated some proposals which I want to present to you. I have already implemented proposals I and VII, started with the implementation of proposal II, and have partially implemented proposal III, all in my local branch. I could implement the rest next week, and this could result in python-apt 0.7.9~exp2 (at least this is my wish, I do not have commit access to the python-apt repository, and this mail is not discussed yet:) ). ... Read more 》

In the last months, I noticed that it was a bad decision to use XFS as my filesystem; and before I realized that ext3 was a bad choice as well. File systems have problems. I can’t use ext3 on my laptop, because it would check the whole disk (120GB) every 30 boots. And this check takes a very long time (15 or 30 minutes, I do not know it exactly). XFS is better, but also problematic because deleting a big directory with a deep hierarchy takes a very long time like 1.5 minutes , whereas ext3 needs a few seconds. Also I still wonder why XFS needs no checks. ... Read more 》

After I tried OpenSolaris 2008.11, I also tried Fedora 10 and Ubuntu 8.10, each for almost one day. Creation of bootable USB stick: For both distributions, I created a bootable USB stick because it is faster to install from USB than from CD/DVD. The creation was easy in both cases. Fedora ships a shell script and Ubuntu a graphical program for this task. Both very equally easy to use. **Booting from USB: **Both distributions booted perfectly from USB. But there was a big difference in boot speed: Fedora 10 booted in about the same time Ubuntu needed to find the USB stick. ... Read more 》

The installation was fast and easy, comparable to the installation of Ubuntu. OpenSolaris seems to have big problems in terms of wireless LAN. I am using a WPA/WPA2 encrypted wireless LAN, and it asked to me to enter my passphrase. I entered it, and nothing happened. I was able to get wireless working via commandline, but this lead me to the problem that domain names were not resolved. I could solve this, too. But none of this was permanently, and it should work the graphical way or tell me it does not work. Maybe this whole thing happened because I have a space in the name of my Wi-Fi network. ... Read more 》