Older blog entries for cjwatson (starting at number 2)

We had a small Debian UK meeting last night. Rather quiet - just a few people who were coming up to Cambridge for university interviews, the usual Cambridge geek crew, and a few others who could make it here on short notice. Still, there were some people I hadn't met before who with any luck will get more involved in the future.

Ripped out large chunks of man's logic and started replacing it with code that doesn't date from 1994 and that might actually be maintainable (then again, that's pretty much the story of my work on man so far). All this so that case-insensitive lookups will work.

My bug count seems to be climbing again, as I can't make any more changes to stuff in Debian base until Anthony pushes the magic button to branch off that bit of woody. I'm still not fully convinced that I understand how the branching is going to work with the new staged freeze, but I suppose it should be OK as long as nobody screws with shared library dependencies in unstable/base after the branch.

Well, I was less drunk, at least to the extent that I remember how I got home. :)

Went through a bunch of LDP documents this morning and got the free count up even more than I'd hoped. I think that if we give the benefit of the doubt to various documents we can have over 75% of the HOWTOs in main. The situation looks a lot brighter than it did a couple of days ago.

I spent most of last night and today getting flamed on Slashdot over the news that a lot of the LDP documents aren't DFSG-free and so the Debian doc-linux package, which I maintain, will have to be split into main and non-free portions. Naturally all the Slashmonkeys jumped on this, probably not helped by the exaggeration of the deadlines involved in the story itself. I've given up wasting my time trying to correct people's misconceptions and plain lies - the code is going to be enough work as it is.

On the upside, licensing debacles like this usually cause a few more people to pick free licences. And it actually turns out that the problem isn't as bad as we first thought it was: newer versions of the LDPL are free, which probably puts another 15% or so of the HOWTO collection into main. Work progresses on trying to decide what goes where.

We have a Christmas party at work (paid work, that is) tonight. Wonder if I'll be any less drunk than I was by the end of last year's?