Hi, I'm Joey. You seem to know who I am, here at this (future) DebConf. I'm familiar with your work in Debian, I probably know broadly what packages you maintain; you've fixed some bugs I filed, and vice-versa. Maybe we collaborated on something or other, exchanged some emails (I'm joeyh@debian.org), worked on something in svn. I might even sometimes hang out in a channel with you on irc (I'm joeyh there), and with occasional difficulty, I can probably connect the nickname you use there with your email address. Maybe we met once or twice at previous DebConfs or elsewhere. Maybe I signed your GPG key. Hell, maybe we saunaed together.
And I'm trying to get a look at your nametag, and it's too far away; I need
to update the prescription on my glasses. Yes, I might know you on email,
irc, and other tcp based protocols, but I have to confess, right now,
standing in front of you, I have no idea who you are. And Real Life lacks
both google and grep-available. Please, please don't take this the wrong
way. Please try to see it as an opportunity to help me connect the you I
know with the real you, to merge those two currently completly separate
concepts in my head together into one heady cocktail. Some of my best
friends here started out this exact same way. Please mention your name,
irc nick and/or two or three of the things I should know you for.
And please don't be offended if it takes me two or three tries before the association sticks. Once I finally really do make the connection, it'll be unbreakable (that's why I'll be so happy to see Manoj after 6+ years!) but in all other ways my wetware stinks at this.
(I'd print this out on a card, but it's too long, so I'll just write the URL to the blog entry in on my nametag, I guess..)
So, we have xen-3.0 in Debian. We have libc6-xen. We even have prebuilt xen kernels in packages like linux-image-2.6.16-1-xen-amd64-k8, (and, in incoming, linux-image-2.6.16-1-xen-686).
Only thing we appear to be missing is a simple debian-specific guide for putting all this together into a working Debian xen machine. I think it goes something like this:
- apt-get this
- debootstrap that
- chroot and apt-get the other
- edit this config file thusly
Anyone able to fill in the specifics?
I'm also interested to see if there will be any use for d-i in all of this, maybe to make the steps involved in setting up Debian in DomU automatable, or to let admins of new xen instances install things to their liking.
Oh and BTW, why isn't packages.debian.org being updated to see new packages lately?
I seem to have overflowed some proposal submission field in comas, it won't let me submit any more proposals. I was just filling in a couple of BoF sessions that we should have at DebConf, and after the debian-installer and zeroconf/mdns BoFs, it's had enough of me.
Maybe someone who's not gone over quota might want to submit this Bof:
Title: wiki.debian.org BoF
Anstract: How many times have you used wiki.debian.org this week? www.debian.org? If you can't remeber the last time you saw the Debian homepage, but you pound on RecentChanges hourly, this BoF is for you. Naturally the topics discussed there will be evolved on the wiki http://wiki.debian.org/WikiBoF
Living in the country is odd sometimes. People come by, take the keys out of the key holder[1] in your truck, drive it up to Washington DC, joyride around hauling trailers, then half a week later, return the truck in dead of night with a new jack added in.
At least that's my experience..
[1] That's the little drawer in the dshboard that for some reason has the cigarette logo on the front of it.
I thought that yesterday (Thursday) was Friday up until I noticed it was still Friday when I got up this morning. Had to check 2 computers to believe that. I hate it when that happens, but ok, it happens.
So, I fell asleep really early this evening, just as it was getting dark, glad to finally see the end of the Friday. Only to wake up at 9:30 pm, and it's still freeaking Friday.
Aaargh!
Today I went over to Brian's to work on some problems with the dilab. The remaineder of this blog entry is unlikely to be interesting to anyone except possibly sparc and mips porters, but I wanted to write it all down.
First thing I noticed was that the internal network was very slow and lossey. I isolated this to its switch, which must be broken. Brian lent me a 7 port hub, which I put the more demanding machines on, leaving the others on the switch, and hopefully this will clear up some of the network issues I've been seeing during tests, until I can install a proper new switch.
Unfortunatly, this still didn't clear up the proliant's failure to use its emulated network CD drives, which I'd hoped it would. Still working on figuring out why that's broken.
As I was testing out all the machines after that to make sure they still worked, I heard a very strange sound from one of the X-10 appliance modules (#3). Sounded like a CD drive failing to open. I think its relay must be fried, after 1.5 years of turning on and off half a dozen times a day. So I had to move the raq 1 on that over to a different power module (#1), and moved the ia64 that was on that one over to a non-controlled power port.
The raq 2, that handles d-i daily mipsel builds, was hung with "booting Debian" on its LCD, and power cycling didn't help, unfortunatly it lacks a serial console to see what's wrong. So I pulled it and took it home, will have to investigate it and try to get a stable system on it. Until then mipsel d-i dailys are still down, until ths takes them over.
Finally, I took a look at the 2.6 kernel issue on the sparc ultra 5, which worked with 2.4 but not 2.6. Luckily Brian knows a lot about suns and a lot about serial (used to be my sysop, and still is in a way), and he diagnosed it as having the port running too fast, dropping it down to 9600 fixed that problem.
So, shopping/todo list from the day:
- I need 1-3 more X-10 appliance modules or tranceivers.
- I need a new 16 port switch. That'll be the third one, the lab's already eaten two now.
- I need at least one more serial null modem cable for the raq 2.
- Need to diagnose the raq 2.
- Still need to figure out why ILO on the proliant doesn't like my web server's CD images anymore.
- The a-500 is still not seeing its PCI bus.
- Need to rewire the whole rack with better patch cables and also moving all these wires around has created a bit of a mess.
Would whoever uploaded this like to talk to me?
Probably you are the uploader of the following file(s) in
the Debian upload queue directory:
ikiwiki_1.1+git.dsc
This looks like an upload, but a .changes file is missing, so the job
cannot be processed.
If this adds git support to ikiwiki, I'm very interested.
Some highlights of DebConf6 so far:
- Peoples' understanding and appreciation of the confession.
- The view from the Parlimentary tower, tripled mountain ranges.
- Getting first kill in assassins using said view. (Sorry you-know-who.)
- Using g-i for the first time, right before integrating it onto the official d-i images.
- Finally meeting Manoj again, after something like 7 years!
- Helping netboot and recover the drive in Biella's laptop, and watching her watch us in her awesome participatory anthropology way.
- Eating cactus, fried tortilla soup, and street stand tacos.
- Non-predictable, non-religious disucssions on Debian and Gentoo and what each can learn from the other with Yuri Vasilevski.
- Amazing French cheese and lots else at the cheese tasting party.
- Such excellent bandwidth and low latency and being possibly the only one here who sees it that way.
- Finally placing what being in Mexico is really like on the continuum between Honduras, Brazil, the South, California, and Europe, puncturing another mental stereotype.
(Written mostly for my family since hundreds of others are probably writing their take on the same for Planet Debian.)
So glad tonight wasn't another slow dinner for 300 geeks, but instead a masterpiece that couldn't have been orchestrated better on purpose.
Sitting in the center of a Debian "swirl" of tables in a big echoing metal-roofed meeting hall with two rough stone walls. At the "DPL table", which means we get to eat last. A mariachi band comes in in a bit of a hurry, horns playing way too loud but still fun. And quickly after there's a sound like a thousand tapping drums underneath the music as rain starts coming down, drumming on the roof.
A couple of songs, a couple of burts of rain. One time the band is up on the stage, reach the climax of their music perfectly timed with a torrent of rain that concludes it, washes it away and drowns it out.
Just to add to the flavor, a scene develops in front of the stage. If you ignore what's really going on (which I won't go into), it's right out of a Mexican telenovela: One tall guy with multicolored hair and some others remonstrating a guy who subtly reminds me of the Mexican clown that would be characterised as the "tramp". And then they push him right across the room to the door, with him gesticulating broadly all the way, but seeming beneath it all to be going along, miming out the scene.
A croud develops over there, and for a minute the croud dynamics seem about to get ugly, but the band does their best to drown it out and soon there's a bunch of people dancing in line to the buffet. And the weather does its best too, as a whole side of the wall begins to fountain water down inside the building, pouring down, exciting and beautiful and completly unexpected.
And then we sit down to eat. And then the power goes out. Pitch blackness for seconds, then it's a strobe show with one camera flash after another, the odd laptop or PDA or laser pointer breifly lighting up the scene.
The lights come back on slowly, in stages, like theater lights at the end of a show. By now I'm so hyped up on Mexico and drama and disaster and life that I get up and go all over the room, chatting with lots of folks about how amazing that was, how it couldn't have been scripted better, how it's like the Debian release process, what the pictures from the blackout will look like, and just reacting to the catharsis.
And outside it's a cool and gorgeous night in the street washed clean, I'm really happy right now to be in Mexico.
At DebConf I whined at Mark Shuttleworth about my fears that Ubuntu is reducing Debian to a supermarket of components (an analogy that was introduced entirely innocently by someone else during an unrelated talk). At least, that seems to be the kind of comment that I later heard some Ubuntu people characterize as whining. Anyway, NewsForge ran an article about DebConf that included a mention of that, and I had to follow up with a comment explaining a bit more about the problem. I'll reproduce it here:
The problem with everyone treating Debian as a supermarket is that it ends up with Debian == sunsiteWmetalab. Giant un-integrated collections of software are not particularly interesting in a lot of ways.
My main motive for contributing to Debian is to make Debian the best distro I can; I don't mind if others use that work, especially if stuff gets contributed back. But it's long been clear to me that the most important added value to Debian is not adding another package to the shelf, but finding new ways to integrate our software together. When you're working mostly above the level of individual software packages, to have your work mostly appreciated on the basis of "component contained in Ubuntu" is not very motivating.
If that motive goes away I fear Debian could be left with mostly developers who are happily motivated with just packaging another peice of software. While there's nothing wrong with feeling that way and working on that basis, we don't want to lose the people who want to work on things that cut across sets of packages, like speeding up the boot time, improving the installation experience, making the distribution attractive for speakers of $language, making sure Debian supports as much hardware as best it can, porting Debian to interesting new architectures, integrating Xen and SE Linux with Debian, making a useful default desktop install, etc.
Some of these are exactly the areas in which Ubuntu is apparently better than Debian, and in most of those cases, contributing individual patches back to Debian is simply not enough for Debian to share Ubuntu's improvements. It puts Debian at best in the position of wasting a lot of time trying to play catch-up and figure out how a collection of patches to different packages fits together into a coherent overall improvement.
I've collected a few pics from DebConf6, from various sources since per usual, I didn't bring a camera.
Madduck, the thing you're not seeing in your examples, which is pretty painfully obvious to people who do write a lot of shell code is that the shell starts a subshell for any shell code on the right hand side of a pipeline. So when you do:
echo -e "1\n2\n3" | while read i; do
blah
done
You're running the whole while loop (not just its body) in a subshell, just as if you'd written:
echo -e "1\n2\n3" | (
while read i; do
blah
done
)
This is indeed occasionally annoying.
(BTW, any posix shell will behave the same way. I'm suprised zsh doesn't, but then I don't generally write significant code for zsh since it's so different.)
(PPS, can I delete Biella's drive now?)
I knew when I blogged about all the breaky bits having already broken off the slowly dying laptop that I was asking for trouble, but I'm still suprised what broke off next: The Enter and "D" keys no longer stay attached. I guess these must be the keys that I use and abuse the most of them all. The Enter key is worn so thin that it's got a crack in the middle.
This makes using the laptop an interesting experience, even with key remapping used to make some other keys take their place.
I have already ordered the replacement laptop, unfortunatly my timing was horrible, I didn't want to make a large purchase while in Mexico, and then was too busy until too late Friday, and I've had to wait all weekend and Monday for confirmation of the order. Maybe tomorrow..