Clickable DepWaits and Edos results in pgstatus

A long time ago, Stéphane Glondu implemented an alternative to the Buildd status pages. It was implemented in OCaml and had some unique features. I think that my favorite one was the ability to click on package names appearing in DepWaits.

What you see on the image below is a simple example where the package gnome-shell Dep-Waits on a single package. This prevents buildd daemons to start the job as long as the specific version of the specified package or some new package are available. So, each package name in that field became now clickable and points to its buildd status page.

Similarly to Dep-Waits, results of edos-debcheck, which is used to spot installability issues of build dependencies, are now clickable too.

If you are a porter or if you are tracking down a build issue, I am sure you'll appreciate these two new features. Enjoy! As usual, if you notice some bugs or have some feature requests, please let me know.

Android's Calendar app

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5484

Such a basic/important app and such a stupid bug... 3 years and not fixed yet? Seriously? and people claim Android is ready for lambda users?

</rant>

Adding useful links on bugreports pages

I'm a heavy user of Debian's Bug Tracking System (especially during this period of the year ;)) and I quite like it. And as a Debian developer, I have to check multiple sources when looking at some source package. Namely, I mainly check the following sources:

• Packages Tracking System — gives almost all information concerning a source package (maintainer, available versions, number of bugs, etc…)
• Buildd Status Pages — build status for the package on each architecture
• and sometimes Popularity Contest numbers

All this is great since you can move from the first one to the second one (and vice-versa) just by clicking with your mouse. It becomes less handy when you are looking at any bug report. In fact, the BTS doesn't link back to the previously mentioned services [1]. So, you have to copy/paste the name of the package or start a new tab and write down the address of the desired service. All this is not very nice for a lazy person like me :)

A few days ago, I remembered that I was already using GreaseMonkey and thought : "Hey, it would be nice to hack quickly something using GM to add the missing links". After a few tests, I've come up with a (very simple, yet extremely useful to me) user script that I called Debian BTS extra links [2]. It adds what I've been missing for years. If you are lazy and don't want to install right now, you can check the following pages to see what it adds:

• A regular bug report page
• A modified bug report page

The userscript will add links to PTS, Buildd status pages and Popcon near every pkgreport.cgi?src= link. Simple and useful. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I do.

Of course, I've submitted a bug (#679282) against the pseudo package bugs.debian.org kindly asking its maintainer to add a link to (for now) the PTS. But I know that they are busy so I'm not expecting a result soon. Fow now, my simple and dumb userscript WFM.

[1] This is partly true since it links back to the PTS on main pages (pages that list all bug reports of a given set of packages).

[2] Only tested with a recent Iceweasel (from experimental) and Chromium (from unstable).

P.S.: If you do wonder, #4300 is the least bug number known to the BTS. Well, or at least, the result of running ls -1 /srv/bugs.debian.org/spool/archive/00/ | sort -h | head -n1 on bugs.debian.org.

I'm going to DebConf 2011

I'm really happy to be able to attend DebConf11. It will be my third DebConf. I hope it will be as productive and enjoyable as past editions :) I'll arrive on July 20th and stay until the end of DebConf.

See you all there soon!

First Tunisian Debian mirror

It seems that Tunisia hosts a new shiny complete Debian mirror since a few days. It's available at http://debian.mirror.tn. It even has all release architectures, which was a good surprise. Possibly, this new mirror will get its ftp.tn.debian.org some day if it implements all the requirements (which are listed here). As far as I know, this is the second complete Debian mirror in Africa. The first one is hosted in South Africa. Algeria hosts a Debian mirror too, but has i386 only. http://debian.mirror.tn had even a complete debian-cd/ directory when I had a look at it last Friday, but it disappeared over the week-end. I do wonder if it will come back at some point. It would make a lot of people happier, in my opinion.

This new mirror is hosted by ATI (Tunisian Internet Agency), a government agency which organizes anything that has something to do with Internet :) (IP addressing, interconnection of ISPs, mail gateways, main registrar of .tn domain extension, …). During Ben Ali's era, they were known for Internet censorship. But, it seems that censorship was controlled directly by the palace. Since the revolution in Tunisia, ATI tried to clean his name and start a "new life".

At the same location, they also host other mirrors among which we can find: Ubuntu, Mozilla, Eclipse, CPAN, Apache and Fedora. So, I think I'm not mistaken to say that there is a real intention to support Free Software. I hope they'll be able to go further and provide hosting for Free Software Clubs/Groups in Tunisia, or even help to organise FOSS events.

Anyway… It's nice to know that I'll have a decent Debian mirror to use this summer from Tunisia :)

The revolution continues… stay tuned!