go fix your ancient Homepage pseudo-fields, you lazy
maintainer!

... or I'll kill a kitten for each homepage URL I found in long
package descriptions.

Homepage pseudo-fields are gone since long, the proper way to
document upstream homepage is now to use a
real Homepage field in the source stanza of
debian/control.

When seeing this:

... I couldn't help thinking at the forthcoming cheese and
wine party at debconf8 (which I love,
but still the strip is hilarious )

strip from wulffmorgenthaler, see it
in its
original context

Mancoosi paper for DebConf8 now available

As previously
announced, I'll be attending DebConf this year, as I did for
the past 3 years.

Beside the usual projects and ideas one carries with himself on
his way to a DebConf, this time I will also be there to present
part of my everyday work in the Mancoosi project. Very briefly
(and a bit too simplistic) Mancoosi is working on pushing forward
the research and technology needed to deliver better package
managers to the users of open source software
distributions.

revamping w3-recs: new specs, misc improvements

After quite a lot from my
initial adoption, I've spent some time to update
w3-recs.

New python-debian feature: Dependency Parsing

Since
my merge commit of this afternoon python-debian
has grown dependency parsing support.

(But first things first: you know about python-debian,
don't you? If you don't, and you always wanted to program with
Debian-related files with Python, then shame on you!)

Thus far, playing with Packages-like files using
dictionary-like objects was already as simple as (quoting from
/usr/share/doc/python-debian/examples/deb822/grep-maintainer):

sooner or later in a bibliography I should add ...

Quoting from the bibliography of a paper from the ACM SIGMOD conference:

[11] Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, and Lee Van
Cleef. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly / Il Buono, il Brutto,
Il Cattivo (The Man with No Name). Produzioni Europee
Associate (Italy) Production, Distributed by United Artists
(USA) 1966.


... one of the things I would have killed for having written by
myself.

Gunnar, have a look at
this: . So your example using the Penta website was just a bad
one, and I personally agree with the "INVALID" resolution of
your
bug report. In fact, showing a partially encrypted
connection as an insecure one is an overall advantage for (l)user
securities, as with the browser interfaces we are used to use, we
don't know which parts are actually sent encrypted and which are
not. As you can see in the example above a fully encrypted

What's the weather like in Debian?

One of the cool things developed during EDOS (now Mancoosi) has been edos-debcheck.
Using it it is possible to check (incredibly quickly) whether some
package in a given distribution cannot be installed according to
its dependencies. When there are such packages it usually means
that the distro is buggy s it is shipping uninstallable packages
(there are some corner cases, but they are rare).

OCaml 3.10.2 meets Lenny

As per title: OCaml 3.10.2 (... and friends of course) today has
entered testing, as such it will be released with Debian Lenny.
Yay.

This transition was the second binNMU-based and went flawlessly
(while the first one was hit by a bug in the script generating
binNMU/dep-wait requests automatically). This way transitions are
way easier to handle, and would probably be real PITAs now that we
have about 120 OCaml-related source packages to care about.

Kudos to all who helped, Luk -release side, and the other fellow
Debian camlers.

Measurnig maintainer scripts LOCs

After some discussions which touched them in various (Debian and
non-Debian) mailing lists, I got interested in having a closer look
to maintainer scripts. The first question I was asking myself is
«how big they are?».

Catching up: some OCaml in Debian news

Hei, it looks like I stopped giving updates about OCaml news in
Debian, time to catch up.

2 hot news basically:

Some more stats: $VCS distribution for Debian packaging

I've set up yet another stat page, this time it's about the distribution of $VCS
for Debian packaging. It's as trivial as you can imagine: it
gets all the Vcs-XXX fields out of unstable
Sources and plot how many packages are using a given
$VCS.

Jane St. (OCaml) Core in Debian

As recently announced, core
has landed. It is an alternative/extended OCaml standard
library developed by Jane
Street Capital. At first sight it looks like ground breaking: a
well-engineered standard library fixing several shortcomings of
OCaml legacy standard library, both in terms of missing
functionalities and syntactic sugar (e.g. the monadic operators
which everybody was basically re-defining from scratch in
their own code).

After a day-n-half of work I'm proud to announce that
core is now available in Debian. It took me a
while as we were missing several of core dependencies.

PTS bit of the day: show testing transitions

Tiny teeny PTS bit
of the day: the PTS now provides information about testing
transitions.

If your package is part of an ongoing transition its uploads to
unstable will be blocked by DAK. The PTS informs you about that and
points to extra information and upload alternatives.