Older blog entries for thom (starting at number 37)

chakie/mascot: Not completely true - modules kinda work, but you need the new module utils (called module-init-tools in Debian)

jfleck: no. Apache is a pretty good counter example, also Debian

sej: Wouldn't it be great if we could? But, it's pretty infeasible - the whole point of having a person integrated into the debian community to package the package is that:

They care about the software they're packaging

They're in contact with their upstream

They failover gracefully. If they don't have the time to keep up, they should ask for a co-maintainer to help; or for someone to take over the package, or even to orphan it and hand it over to the QA group.
It's great that you're willing to help out with Debian specific bugs, and I bet alot of maintainers wish for upstream like that.

sej: Well, it's an interesting problem. From Debian's point of view, why should we contact upstream? If the RM had to contact upstream before any changes, for any package (and remember, Debian currently contains (iirc) over 10K packages), rather than just announcing them to the only Mandatory mailing list for debian maintainers, he'd never get anywhere. That's what the maintainer is for, to act as a two way buffer between upstream and debian. Of course, the system breaks down when the developer is busy or MIA, but that's tricky to work around or solve.

Hrrm. and once again, it's been ages.

Debian:

So edd got his Debian account, which is cool. I've had to take a temporary break from doing Application Management (and handed gwolf over to a new AM) as between work and being "not too well" -- to the point of now having been teetotal on doctors orders for 3 weeks -- I had no time and less energy.
I'm still working on apache2 and related packages, but mostly in work time. The packages are now getting pretty mature, with a lot of input from debian's user community. I was breaking Debian's BuildDaemon system for a bit, but that is now sorted.

Personal:

As part of the cure for the variety of malaises I have, the doctor ordered exercise and diet. I'm currently 6'1" and 100kg (16 stone) so I guess that's fair enough. So on Thursday, I went down to Ealing Rugby Club to do my first rugby practise session for over a year. Sadly, I had forgotten that Thursday night means full(ish) contact. It is now close to midnight on saturday and i still ache. Everywhere. Still, I feel a lot better for even one session, so I'll keep at it.
I went to GameOn at the Barbican last saturday with RossBurton and his girlfriend, Vicky, which was a really good day out! Lots of really cool old kit, including a PDP-1, a pong machine, and all kinds of atari, sinclair and other gear which really took me back to my childhood. Tempest2000 on the Atari Jaguar is still awesome!

Music:

Just picked up a bunch of cds from HMV, including the new Death In Vegas album, which is, if anything, even stranger than the contino sessions, but very good. I also grabbed the Kosheen and White Stripes albums, and White Lilies Island. Seems like they're all pretty good. Been playing with GNUMP3d at work, and it's genius. The debian package is very well done, and the whole install took seconds from apt-get install gnump3d to a working server.

Response:

mglazer: Well, you seem to be disliked (I won't stretch to hated - very few people deserve to be that, and certainly not a person whose only "crime" is to be deluded and misinformed) and wrong, so that's not a great combo, although probably deserved given the xenophobia you repeatedly display. Calling a people whose culture is over a millenia older than yours "savages" is innane and ridiculous, and shows that you have no understanding of the situation. Rather than spreading hate, why not try to find some empathy with the tragedy of a people who find themselves in a position where they believe their only recourse is to kill themselves and many other innocents? And who were put in that position by the victorious Allied powers (so, read "USA,UK") at the culmination of world war 2, when they forcibly created a Jewish state. (I'm not commenting on the issue, merely how it came to be. I don't want to become embroilled in an arguement over which culture has the oldest claim on the land; or anything like that)
Note that I'm not condoning acts of terrorism, merely commenting on a side of the story that many people miss.
You should also note that the "Judeo/Christian" ethic that you praise so highly is (at least the Christian bit), directly or indirectly responsible for many of the bloodiest and most criminal acts of the last thousand years, including the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and the conquest and decimation of many cultures in South America, India, Africa, and the Pacific by the major European powers, all of whom were to some extent "Christian".

Woah. So quite a lot has happened recently.
After continual beating via IRC and advodiary i finally cleared space in my schedule and did a full Bluez upload.
I now have commit karma on aprlib. Getting the email from the PMC about this reduced me to shocked speachlessness for quite a while ;-)
Apache2 is now in Debian unstable, which is kinda cool - there is already one package depending on it, so people are obviously interested...
I was lucky enough to make it to Toronto for DebConf at the beginning of the month, which was awesome.

ilan:

• they're aussie/kiwi accents, not english.
• the queen of naboo is elected, as was set up in Ep I.
• there are literally millions of droids in the universe. the last two digits are plotted as identifiers, and the first two are model numbers. so you work out how many possible droids there are that would look the same. Also, droids get memory wipes and upgrades, and these can change the designators.

Debian

So, I'm sponsoring edd's BlueZ packages.
I'm also still hacking fairly extensively on the Apache2 packages. The package now does 4 complete build cycles, one for each MPM, which takes a while on my poor laptop. I can only imagine how long the m68k buildds are gonna take!

Employment

It's finally happened. WOOHOO!
My employers look like a good bunch of people, and they actually understand the importance of Free software.

ErikLevy:

WRT Apache2 performance, see this email from Brian Pane and read the rest of the thread - you might be pleasantly surprised.

I wish certain people would wait to see what the proposed idea would actually look like before jumping up and down and crying.

dyork Congratulations to you and your wife.