jd:/dev/blog

Some people wonder how I develop and manage various features and their requests for awesome.

kill(SIGTTOU, pid)

(man 7 signal)

Welcome to this 8th issue of the DeFuBu contest, the almost monthly championship of the funniest bug reported to the Debian BTS.

The challengers

• Pierre Tramo with #409352 (mplayer_1.0~rc1-12.diff.gz is CHAOTIC)
• Christian Perrier with #230485 (apache2/ssl-cert's debconf abuse makes baby jesus cry)
• Jeroen van Wolffelaar with #409637 (tasksel: [INTL:eo] kelkaj korektoj pri la esperanta traduko.)
• Steve Langasek with #410605 (dpkg: bzip2 code in compression.c incorrectly uses zlib define (Z_ERRNO))
• Josh Triplett with #412460 (magicor-data: Penguins don't have teeth) and #398276 (xdm: don't bundle turning on sit0 irradiating me all day)
• Mike Hommey with #413660 (RFP: mozilla-firefox -- Mozilla's firefox package is required in non-free) and #413714 (iceweasel: {overflow:hidden} ugly chopping characters in half)

How the vote has been done

Four Debian related people voted, Raphael Hertzog, Jeroen van Wolffelaar, Ana Guerrero and Margarita Manterola.

Full ranking

Bugs

• #409637 (tasksel: [INTL:eo] kelkaj korektoj pri la esperanta traduko.) (34 points)
• #412460 (magicor-data: Penguins don't have teeth) (29 points)
• #230485 (apache2/ssl-cert's debconf abuse makes baby jesus cry) (26 points)
• #398276 (xdm: don't bundle turning on sit0 irradiating me all day) (23 points)
• #410605 (dpkg: bzip2 code in compression.c incorrectly uses zlib define (Z_ERRNO)) (16 points)
• #409352 (mplayer_1.0~rc1-12.diff.gz is CHAOTIC) (15 points)
• #413660 (RFP: mozilla-firefox -- Mozilla's firefox package is required in non-free) (14 points)
• #413714 (iceweasel: {overflow:hidden} ugly chopping characters in half) (3 points)

Challengers

• Josh Triplett with (52 points with 2 bugs)
• Jeroen van Wolffelaar (34 points with 1 bug)
• Christian Perrier (26 points with 1 bug)
• Mike Hommey with (17 points with 2 bugs)
• Steve Langasek (16 points with 1 bug)
• Pierre Tramo (15 points with 1 bug)

The winners

• Bug: #409637 (tasksel: [INTL:eo] kelkaj korektoj pri la esperanta traduko.)
• Challenger: Josh Triplett
• Bug reporter: Serge Leblanc
• Voter: Raphael Hertzog with unordered tiercé: #412460, #409637 and #230485

Notes

To participate, simply drop me an email with a bug number or a request to vote, or anything that may help.

About DeFuBu

The first sentence was taken from his platform.

Information about this post.

Welcome to this 7th issue of the DeFuBu contest, the monthly championship of the funniest bug reported to the Debian BTS.

The challengers

• Loic Minier with #407127 (evolution: Dates before 1970 not supported, e.g. for birthdays) and #408989 (epiphany-browser: bugzilla.gnome.org inaccessible)
• Sune Vuorela with #407849 (script for /usr/bin/preloadkde) and #409310 (kmines: Can cheat the timer)
• Josh Triplett with #404915 (iceweasel: Icon resembles booger)
• Jeroen van Wolffelaar with #408424 (apache2: "It works!")
• Florent Bayle with #408524 (If I play piano while my computer starts up, /dev/dsp disappears !)
• Christian Perrier with #408482 (xserver-xorg: please map French Canadian (cf) to Canada (ca) layout)
• Frans Pop with #409018 (base: /etc/ld.so.nohwcap missing)

How the vote has been done

Four Debian related people voted for these bugs, Emmanuel Bouthenot, Mohammed Adnène Trojette, Julien Louis and Jade Alglave.

Full ranking

Bugs

• #408989 (epiphany-browser: bugzilla.gnome.org inaccessible) (28 points)
• #408524 (If I play piano while my computer starts up, /dev/dsp disappears !) (21 points)
• #407849 (script for /usr/bin/preloadkde) and #408424 (apache2: "It works!") (18 points)
• #407127 (evolution: Dates before 1970 not supported, e.g. for birthdays) (17 points)
• #404915 (iceweasel: Icon resembles booger) and #408482 (xserver-xorg: please map French Canadian (cf) to Canada (ca) layout) (11 points)
• #409310 (kmines: Can cheat the timer) (10 points)
• #409018 (base: /etc/ld.so.nohwcap missing) (10 points)

Challengers

• Loic Minier (45 points with 2 bugs)
• Florent Bayle with (21 points with 1 bug)
• Sune Vuorela (28 points with 2 bugs)
• Jeroen van Wolffelaar (18 points with 1 bug)
• Christian Perrier and Josh Triplett (11 points with 1 bug)
• Frans Pop (10 points with 1 bug)

The winners

• Bug: #408989 (epiphany-browser: bugzilla.gnome.org inaccessible)
• Challenger: Loic Minier
• Bug reporter: Tshepang Lekhonkhobe
• Voter: Emmanuel Bouthenot with two first bugs correct: #408524, #408989

Notes

To participate, simply drop me an email with a bug number.

About DeFuBu

With your bug count in the air and your Etch on the ground
Try this trick and spin it, yeah
Your RM will collapse
But there's nothing in it
And you'll ask yourself

Where is Debian?
Where is Debian?
Where is Debian?

Way out in the money
See it dunkin'

I was squasin' for free
Bugs were hiding behind the money
Except the little board
But they told me, he swears
Tryin' to release me me me

Where is Debian?
Where is Debian?
Where is Debian?

Ooooh
With your bug count in the air and your Etch on the ground
Ooooh
Try this trick and spin it, yeah
Ooooh
Ooooh

Thanks to The Pixies.

On sunday, I was looking around at the /proc/cpuinfo on one of my last server. I saw that this Pentium 4 had a lot more of cpu flags that the one on my workstation. I discovered the nx flags and its purpose some days before, but I did not know what the lm flags was for...

Oh my god, that's the 64 bits support. This box is an amd64 and it was installed as an i386. That's like using a knife to kill a kitten when you have an axe!

So, even if the box was 800 km away from me, I decided to reinstall it from scratch, with the help of a serial cable connected on it.

That was so easy. I just love Debian for such things.

• Step one: recompile linux-2.6-2.6.18 with support for 64 bits processors, that was easy, Goswin Brederlow made a patch I used and adapted in #379090.
• Step two: scratch your swap and debootstrap an amd64 sarge in it. Copy blindly your /lib/modules/2.6.18-1-amd64 inside.
• Step three: reboot with your 64 bits kernel on your brand new 64 bits Debian system and launch sshd.
• Step four: ask everyone on IRC WHY THE HELL you get sshd killed with a fucking kernel backtrace on your serial console each time you try to ssh to your box
• Step five: listen everyone advices and dist-upgrade to etch
• Step six: backup all the old data and scratch all your partitions, because you want LVM now. And migrating to 64 bits and LVM at the same time is more dangerous, so more exciting, so more fun.
• Step seven: move your brand new amd64 etch into your old root partition. Believe in you and that you did not forget anything to backup.
• Step eight: create your logical volumes and move your stuff in here, like /var, /usr and then blindly reboot. Thanks god you have a serial console.
• Step nine: apt-get install everything back and upgrade your old sarge conffiles to etch.
• Step ten: wonder why slapd is segfaulting again and again, and then yell after this fucking Berkeley DB files that are not architecture independant. Flame yourself because you don't have a LDIF backup of your LDAP tree.
• Step eleven: install a i386 sarge with LDAP to slapcat your old LDAP tree and restore it.
• Step twelve: Take a break. Have a Kit^Wbeer.

In the end, I'm happy, even if everyone is wondering why I killed a server during 10 hours just because it's better.

I did not find anyone to vote for this month DeFuBu, mail me if you want to!

Dear friends and teammate,

I'm writing to you from the front of the guerilla, near the bug tracking system. I don't know if you will receive this message, because the cabal is trying to make us silent. It's rough these days. Our autobuilders are overloaded. We already succeeded in delaying the freeze, but it's getting harder and harder. The opponent is now avoiding our attacks by ignoring them. I hope we will still be able to win, but we may need backup.

Yours faithfully,

Julien