recent d-i hacking

Last night was, in retrospect, a fine night, but at the time it sucked. I was about ready to go to bed when a tester came into #debian-boot and reported that his /etc/fstab lacked a /proc entry. It turned out that my changes earlier to partconf-mkfstab had broken partman's /target/etc/fstab generation. Actually, it turned out that said generation was all a nasty hack around the misdesign in partconf-mkfstab. When I corrected that misdesign, the hack broke. So between 2 and 3 am I cursed and fixed this up properly. The nice thing is that the new fstab generation code lines up the columns in the fstab prettily.

Then as I was hoping to finally go to bed, I discovered that base-installer was broken, for reasons to silly to go into here. I fixed that and finally got to bed by 4:30 am.

Today was kinda more of the same. I found a particularly gross bug in netcfg, whose dpkg client killing code failed if the pid of the process was < 1000 or > 9999. Ugh! Then another netcfg bug causing it to write (null) to /etc/resolv.conf.

I've just finished up splitting lvmcfg so it plays better with partman, and I've done a successful lvm install. For once d-i is doing something that I couldn't do by hand (I don't know the lvm tools), and it feels good.

I've not had time to do anything but d-i for days and days, and I am looking forward to the 16th when this will all be over. Of course I'm not the only one working hard on d-i; Anton did many partman improvements today; translators are working hard (entire new Welsh translation added today!); Denis rewrote the cdebconf text frontend for S/390, etc. It's been a very busy day judging by the commits.

Now off to test today's CD images, which should be the first to properly support XFS, since the 2.4.25 kernel deb is finally in testing.

Getting excited already about DebConf4 in Brazil. If you're attending DebConf4, would you be more interested in a talk on d-i (I could go on for hours, see above), or a mostly non-technical talk about speeding up Debian development? Mail me.