Well, I’m currently writing a PHP and SQL application at school, so here are some of my thoughts on the problems I encounter. PHP is crap Many PHP applications are low quality applications. The problem is that PHP makes it hard for developers to write good applications. PHP developers tend to use many global variables, global code, and not many classes or functions. And when writing applications for the web, PHP makes it easy to mix PHP and HTML, in my opinion even too easy. ... Read more 》

Python 3.1 is still in experimental, but python-apt already has a fully working Python 3 version. With the patch being available in the ‘jak’ branch, python-apt Bug#523645 can be closed soon. And this is not the only change. Memory usage has been decreased by 10MB by creating the Package() objects on the fly instead of pre-creating all 25000 ones. All classes which previously supported the has_key() method now support contains, which allows you to write ‘key in mapping’. ... Read more 》

So, I have started to port python-apt to Python 3. Most things work already, but there is one single problem. I can not access the attributes of the objects, only their methods. In Python 2.5, everything works perfectly. In Python 3.1, the same code produces an error. An example is apt_pkg.GetCache().Packages. I defined the slots tp_getattro and tp_methods. In Python 3.1, tp_getattro seems to be ignored. If you want to help, http://bzr.debian.org/loggerhead/users/jak/python-apt/py3k/changes for browsing the branch and http://bzr.debian.org/users/jak/python-apt/py3k/ for branching it. ... Read more 》

I have just uploaded a version of python-apt 0.7.10 to unstable ( my first upload of python-apt, all previous uploads were done by Michael Vogt). This release is mainly a bugfix release, but also brings new features like apt.package.Version.uri and apt.package.Version.fetch_binary().I also added a Breaks: debdelta (« 0.28~) because debdelta 0.27 is not working anymore since python-apt 0.7.9 and I expect that this problem will be fixed in 0.28, which could then use the new apt.package.Version.uri API to fetch the uris of the packages). ... Read more 》

With version 0.7.9 “change has come” to python-apt, and I will tell you now what the new stuff is about: 1. Introduction of the documentation As you may know, python-apt 0.7.8’s only documentation was available from the source code and to some parts from the docstrings. This changed in python-apt 0.7.9exp2, when I introduced a complete documentation written in reStructuredText, and generated using Sphinx. This documentation has even improved in the final 0.7.9 release, and I will push it to the online mirror at http://apt.alioth.debian.org/python-apt-doc/ soon (it currently still has 0.7.9exp2). ... Read more 》

(This is a more or less a TODO list for my Debian packages and other stuff I’m working on) Already done New package: metatheme-gilouche Today I uploaded the new package metatheme-gilouche, which builds the binary package gnome-theme-gilouche. The Gilouche theme has been created by openSUSE and is used there as the default theme in GNOME. For users of gnome-app-install, this theme provides a “better” style for your main menu. It contains icons (replacing industrial-icon-theme), GTK+, and Metacity themes. The package is currently NEW, once it is in the archive, I will request removal of industrial-icon-theme. And once this package reaches Ubuntu, Ubuntu’s Bug#96042 is closed. ... Read more 》

Today, I wanted to shrink a partition by 5GB, and move it 5GB to the right. Well, I expected that it would take some minutes, but now it seems to take more than 5 hours, because GParted moves around the whole 87GB of the resized partition. This is what happens: * Check file system for errors (30min) * Resize the file system (30min?) * Resize the partition * Check file system for errors (30min) * Move the file system * Read-only Simulation (!!!!!!!!!!!!!) * Do it (~5 hours) It really should tell me that it takes such a long time. I mean, why does it have to copy all 87GB, when all I want to do is get 5GB moved to the front? It should free these 5GB on the filesystem, move them to the end of the filesystem, decrease the partition size and finish. ... Read more 》

Looking at the amd64 CD images of Lenny, I just saw that there is the package ‘gnome’ on disk 1, while some of its dependencies are on disk 2. I don’t think that this is good. Same also applies to K3B on disk 3, and openoffice.org-kde on KDE-disk 1. In my opinion, all packages which are located on a disk X, should only depend on a disk N (N<X). This means that the package gnome would be moved to disk 2, or its dependencies to disk 1. ... Read more 》

Much happened since the last time I wrote about debimg. The project is now registered on Alioth and has a mailing list. On the code side, there have also been several changes. First of all, the repository module has been merged into the master branch. This was the first step towards the creation of the image building, which happened today by introducing the ‘image’ module. The code should be treated as Beta quality, but the project as a whole is Alpha, because the application utilizing debimg.core is still missing. As always, I hereby encourage to try out debimg, have a look at the examples, and help to develop it. ... Read more 》

While most of the bindings are LGPL licensed, modules like pygst are licensed under the terms of the GPL-2+. This means, together with the fact that you need to use pygst for any application wishing to use these binding, that you can not create proprietary or non-GPL-compatible programs using the GStreamer Python bindings. You can read more about this in the Debian Bug Tracker in Bug#516190. I expect that this should be forwarded to upstream but I haven’t checked their bug tracker yet.