Last week, I managed to successfully bootstrap a Debian GNU/Hurd system from GNU/Linux without having to natively setup the Hurd translators. The latest version of Roland McGrath's ext2-xattr patch seems to work fine now and made this possible. Other exciting news in this area is the apparent maturity of Ognyan Kulev's ext2 patch for large stores. Seems one of the major drawbacks of the GNU Hurd, namely the 2GB partition limit, is mostly resolved now.

Over the last weekend, I finally backported a couple of my chemistry-related packages, as one of the admins of my research group at the university seemed amenable to install them on our group server. Packages so far include chemtool, openbabel and xmakemol. I was not able to backport xdrawchem yet, as it seems to Build-Depend on Qt-3.2, even though upstream claims any version of Qt3 should do.

On Monday, I finally decided to do something about the allegations against the non-free removal and proposed a transition plan for the non-free packages to nonfree.org. No direct offers for help have emerged from the posting yet, but during the draft phase we've already found a host featuring a full-blown katie installation, which covers one of the biggest concerns already.

At the university, I finally had to code a bit for my master thesis. Sadly, it only involved adopting the i/o routines of a Fortran77 program to our needs. Very depressing job.