Older blog entries for mbanck (starting at number 2)

I've posted the results of the strawpoll on the proper usage of @debian.org email addresses to the debian-project list. It seems most people think it is alright to use them in Debian or Free Software related matters. Most also did not approve to use @debian.org as a general-purpose email address or for stuff completely unrelated to the Debian project and its principles.

It must now be discussed what to draw from the results and whether to update the DMUP or rather amend the Developer's Reference to document best practise on @debian.org usage.

Sometimes, things just happen spontaneously and develop their own dynamics. About a week ago, Roland McGrath promptly committed a contributed fix for two trivial typos in ext2fs to the Hurd CVS, after months of inactivity on GNU Hurd. Some days later, some newbie asked how to compile GNUMach-1.3 on #hurd. It turned out that nobody had yet tried to compile it with gcc-3.3. Alfred M. Szmidt fixed the compile errors and volunteered to maintain the GNUMach-1.x branch, which got abandoned by its maintainers in favor of GNUMach-2.0 (which has stability issues though, and does not get used much). Again, Roland promptly committed the fixes, this time even considering a possible GNUMach-1.4 release. From there, things took off, and Marco Gerards fixed a couple of long-standing and annoying bugs in GNUMach in the last couple of days.

In related news, Gürkan Sengün has made available a public Debian GNU/Hurd box. If you want to explore the Hurd a bit or port some Debian packages, mail him for an account.

Apparently, I finally managed to fix OpenBabel so that the test-suite can be run from a build-dir, too. In the end, I had to revert to C++ (looking up stuff in my book), a complete defeat for my C skills.

At least the last show-stopper for 1.100.2 (from my perspective) has now been fixed. This release should really be pushed out now, this header-bug has been left unfixed for a couple of months too long.