In today’s Linux distributions, there are usually two to three levels of package management. In this blog post, I will explain the three levels of package management. 1. Local (dpkg, rpm) The first level of package management is the ’local’ level. This level consists of package management tools that install and/or remove packages via package archives such as .deb or .rpm files and a database of the local’s system state. ... Read more 》

It seems that Google is blocking wikileaks.org in its ‘Public DNS’ servers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4): <div id="_mcePaste">; <<>> DiG 9.7.1-P2 <<>> @8.8.8.8 wikileaks.org ; (1 server found) ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 50227 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;wikileaks.org. IN A ;; Query time: 2457 msec ;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8) ;; WHEN: Fri Aug 27 18:10:43 2010 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 31</div> Update: Sorry Google, for me doubting you. As it turns out, you did no evil, you were just a bit slower than the others. ... Read more 》

APT2 is now called UPS (Universal Package System). The name is inspired by the company that delivers packages in those brown trucks and from the Image Packaging System (IPS) of OpenSolaris; and mvo writing ups after I proposed upt (über package tool) in IRC. It’s definitely better than my first thought which was ‘moo’ (and libmoo). Update: OK, let’s cancel this rename insanity.

As I wrote a few hours ago on deity@l.d.o (see http://lists.debian.org/deity/2010/08/msg00057.html), APT2 is back again. The first time, I tried Vala; but this time I wrote it in C (with the help of GLib, but no GObject) and the cache uses GVariant instead of an SQLite database. It’s really basic at the moment (no solver, package installation/removal), but it will improve. Read operation should be faster than with APT, although writes are slower (this will be fixed by reusing unchanged parts of the cache). ... Read more 》

MeeGo (Nokia/Intel): Openness does not seem to be very important for Nokia and Intel. They develop their stuff behind closed doors and then do a large code drop (once dropped, stuff gets developed in the open). In terms of professionality, it does not look much better: If you look at the meego-dev mailing list, you feel like you are in some kind of a kindergarten for open source developers - Things like HTML emails and top-posting appear to be completely normal for them, they don’t even follow the basic rules for emails and they also appear to ignore any advice on this topic. Oh, and writing a platform in GTK+ while pushing Qt as the supported toolset is not a good idea. ... Read more 》

In the past weeks, I was looking at several build systems. As it turned out, there is not a single sane generic build system out there. Autotools: Autotools are ugly, slow, and require an immense amount of code copies in the source tree. WAF: WAF is not as ugly as autools and it’s faster and does not generate Makefiles or stuff like this. But it has serious issues: It requires one to copy it to the source tarball, has no stable API, and requires Python for building. Furthermore, support for unit testing is broken: It runs the unit tests, but does not abort the build process if the tests fail and does not display why the tests fail. ... Read more 》

Wednesday, after some weeks with a flickering screen (or more precisely, something is causing GTK+ to redraw and the kernel to print ^@ in the terminal when you touch the screen, see http://jak-linux.org/tmp/20100628_002.mp4) in my 3 years old HP Compaq 6720s (which seems to be a software-hardware combination problem, at least it works in Ubuntu); I decided to buy a new laptop. It took me a few minutes to find the Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 15 NVL7VGE; which I ordered at notebooksbilliger.de at around 14:30 CEST using Express. On Thursday morning at 6:40 CEST, the device arrived. ... Read more 》

So, yesterday was my 0x14 (20th) birthday and Germany won the Eurovision Song Contest 2010. Next up is Formula One in Turkey and Sebastian Vettel starting from position 3, hopefully he manages to overtake Hamilton and Webber and win this race. Let’s see…

The 2.30 version of gnome-icon-theme is really one of the worst icon themes I’ve ever seen in the last years. First of all, it does not fit into the system due to the colors chosen. I was always satisfied with the GNOME icon theme, but with the 2.30 release I can’t use it anymore since it makes my system look like a piece of sh**. Secondly, it just does not fit with the tango icon theme. I’m currently using the tango icon theme on my laptop, and after installing g-i-t 2.30, some logos suddenly started to turn black and they just did not fit anymore. ... Read more 》

Last year, in July, I reported an issue to Python’s issue tracker. This issue can be seen at http://bugs.python.org/issue6483. Since then, there has been no action on this bug from the developers. The bug describes that every object stored in a module will not be deallocated if the module is deallocated and it’s m_size = -1 (which it should be if the module has no state). The problem seems to be that Python copies the dictionary of the module but forgets to decrease the reference count of the copy when the module is deallocated. This bug may have serious impact if objects are stored in the module which write status to a file when they are deallocated, because the deallocation functions are never called. ... Read more 》