Do we need a zsh-static package in Debian? //at 11:17 //by abe

Dear Planet Debian,

the Debian Zsh Packaging Team (consisting of Michael Prokop, Frank Terbeck, Richard Hartmann and myself) wonders if there’s still a reason to build and ship a zsh-static package in Debian.

There are multiple reasons:

• None of us packagers really use it. (A weak reason, yes.)
• Low popcon: “installed” peak at ca. 150, decreasing; “vote” peak at ca. 40, decreasing as well.

• The statically compiled Zsh has some annoying restrictions (#354631 et al) for over 9 years now, which only can be fixed if some other packages change:

  To cite Clint Adams, long time Debian Zsh package maintainer: the problem is that user/group lookups are disabled in the -static build because glibc’s NSS ABI is unstable and static binaries still need to load NSS modules dynamically.

  One solution here would be to compile against dietlibc, but for that we’d need an ncurses library built against dietlibc (#471208), too.

So we ask you, the Planet Debian reader:

Do you need Debian’s zsh-static package?

If so, please send an e-mail to us Debian Zsh Maintainers <pkg-zsh-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org> and state that you use zsh-static, and, if you want, please also state why or how you’re using it.

Thanks in advance! Mika, Frank, RichiH and Axel

PDiffs are still useful //at 03:26 //by abe

… probably just not as default.

I do agree with Richi and with Michael that disabling PDiffs by default gives the big majority of Debian Testing or Unstable users a speedier package list update.

I’m though not sure, if disabling PDiffs by default would

• also have an performance impact on our mirrors — it surely would have a traffic impact on the mirrors;
• really bring a benefit for Debian Stable users as Debian Stable changes seldomly and hence there are not that many PDiffs to download and apply — at least I can’t remember being annoyed by PDiffs anywhere else than on Debian Testing and Debian Unstable. Even the repositories with security updates don’t change that often.

Additionally I want to remind you that PDiffs per se are nothing bad and should be continued to be supported:

• Because there are still areas, even in “civilized” countries, where only small bandwidth is available and where using PDiffs reduces the download time a lot. Yes, also in Germany. BTDT. Only until recently there was no Fibre, no DSL, very bad UTMS reception and otherwise just EDGE at my parents’ home. (LTE was available far too expensive until recently.) And I was very happy about not having to download 30 MB or such just for seeing if there are updates at all, because 25 kB/s was the fastest download rate I could get (peaks, not average).
• Because it seems to be in fashion with big ISP near-to-monoplists, especially in Germany, to cut off your nice bandwidth if you transfer too many Megabytes. Keyword “Drosselkom”. If you happen to be a customer of such a shitty ISP, you may be happy to reduce your traffic amount by using PDiffs instead of downloading the full package list every time.

So yes, disabling PDiffs by default is probably ok, but the feature must be kept available for those who haven’t 100 MBit/s fibre connection into their homes or are sitting just one hop away from the next Debian mirror (like me at work :-).

Oh, and btw., for the very same reasons I’m also a big fan of debdelta which is approximately the same as PDiffs, just not for package lists but for binary packages. Using debdelta I was able to speed up my download rates over EDGE to up to virtual 100 kB/s, i.e. by factor four (depending on the packages). Just imagine a LibreOffice minor update at 15 kB/s average download rate. ;-)

And all these experiences were not made with a high-performance CPU but with the approximately 5 year old Intel Atom processor of my ASUS EeePC 900A. So I used PDiffs and debdelta even despite having a slight performance penalty on applying the diffs and deltas.

Next Debian Meetup in Zurich //at 20:16 //by abe

The first Debian meetup in Zurich last month was quite a success and I look forward to further Debian meetups in Zurich — every first Tuesday of the month.

The next meetup will be

on Tuesday, 2013-Dec-03 starting at 18:30 CET
at St. Gallerhof, Konradstrasse 2, 8005 Zurich

Please note that this is a different location than last month.

Everybody who is interested in Debian is welcome to join us. Registering is not necessary.

There was also some interest in Debian meetups in other Swiss cities, namely Bern and somewhere around Lac Leman. In case you want a Debian meetup elsewhere in Switzerland, too, or if you’re interested in any Debian meetup in Switzerland, feel free to join the Swiss Debian Community Mailing List and help organising other Swiss Debian meetups.

New SSH-related stuff in Wheezy //at 15:28 //by abe

Mika had the nice idea of doing a #newinwheezy game on Planet Debian, so let’s join:

There are (at least) two new SSH related tools new in Debian Wheezy:

mosh

is the “mobile shell”, an UDP based remote shell terminal which works better than SSH in case of lag, packet loss or other forms of bad connection. I wrote about mosh in more detail about a year ago. mosh is also available for Debian Squeeze via squeeze-backports.

sshuttle

is somewhere between port-forwarding and VPN. It allows forward arbitrary TCP connections over an SSH connection without the need to configure individual port forwardings. It does not need root access on the server-side either. I wrote about sshuttle in more detail about a year ago.

To be continued… ;-)

Suggestions for the GNOME Team //at 23:01 //by abe

Thanks to Erich Schubert’s blog posting on Planet Debian I became aware of the 2012 GNOME User Survey at Phoronix.

Like back in 2006 I still use some GNOME applications, so I do consider myself as “GNOME user” in the widest sense and hence I filled out that survey. Additionally I have to live with GNOME 3 as a system administrator of workstations, and that’s some kind of usage, too. ;-)

The last question in the survey was Do you have any comments or suggestions for the GNOME team? — Sure I have. And since I tried to give constructive feedback instead of only ranting, here’s my answer to that question as I submitted it in the survey, too, just spiced up with some hyperlinks and highlighting:

Don’t try to change the users. Give the users more possibilities to change GNOME if they don’t agree with your own preferences and decisions. (The trend to castrate the user was already starting with GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 made that worse IMHO.)

If you really think that you need less configurability because some non-power-users are confused or challenged by too many choices, then please give the other users at least the chance to enable more configuration options. A very good example in that hindsight was Kazehakase (RIP) who offered several user interfaces (novice, intermediate and power user or such). The popular text-mode web browser Lynx does the same, too, btw.

GNOME lost me mostly with the change to GNOME 2. The switch from Galeon 1.2 to 1.3/2.0 was horrible and the later switch to Epiphany made things even worse on the browser side. My short trip to GNOME as desktop environment ended with moving back to FVWM (configurable without tons of clicking, especially after moving to some other computer) and for the browser I moved on to Kazehakase back then. Nowadays I’m living very well with Awesome and Ratpoison as window managers, Conkeror as web browser (which are all very configurable) and a few selected GNOME applications like Liferea (luckily still quite configurable despite I miss Gecko’s about:config since the switch to WebKit), GUCharmap and Gnumeric.

For people switching from Windows I nowadays recommend XFCE or maybe LXDE on low-end computers. I likely would recommend GNOME 2, too, if it still would exist. With regards to MATE I’m skeptical about its persistance and future, but I’m glad it exists as it solves a lot of problems and brings in just a few new ones. Cinnamon as well as SolusOS are based on the current GNOME libraries and are very likely the more persistent projects, but also very likely have the very same multi-head issues we’re all barfing about at work with Ubuntu Precise. (Heck, am I glad that I use Awesome at work, too, and all four screens work perfectly as they did with FVWM before.)

Thanks to Dirk Deimeke for his (German written) pointer to Marcus Moeller’s interview with Ikey Doherty (in German, too) about his Debian-/GNOME-based distribution SolusOS.

unburden-home-dir uploaded to Sid //at 02:54 //by abe

Most popular web browsers cause quite a lot of I/O on a user’s home directory and their cache’s also take up quite some disk space – with Google’s Chrome/Chromium you can’t even configure how much disk space should be used for the cache.

This causes unnecessary network traffic and no more makes sense if the home directory itself comes over the network, e.g. via NFS or Samba. And on laptops it spins up the disks and unnecessarily costs battery power and therefore lowers the potential battery life.

Such caches also costs scarce disk space on SSDs or flash cards as common in laptops, netbooks and other mobile devices, and often get backed up without any real use.

To take some of this burden off our NFS servers at work I started to develop an Xsession.d hook which moves off such caches to the local disk and puts in symbolic links instead into the user’s home directory when the user locally logs in.

This hook quickly became a standalone Perl script named unburden-home-dir and the Xsession.d hook just a wrapper around it. Due to some unsolved issues I didn’t feel it’s good enough for Debian Unstable, so I uploaded it just to Debian Experimental back then.

Pietro Abate’s recent blog posting about unburden-home-dir on Planet Debian gave me the right kick to make another try to solve the remaining issues.

And the mental distance gained over the time indeed helped and I could fix the remaining issues. So I added some polish to the package and uploaded it to Debian Unstable.

If you used the previous version from experimental, you have to take care of a few things:

• Previously some configuration files sported unburden_home_dir as base name while others used unburden-home-dir as base name as that’s also the package name. Now all configuration files use the package name, i.e. unburden-home-dir as base name.
• “Conffiles” under /etc/ should be renamed by dpkg automatically, but per-user configuration files ($HOME/.unburden_home_dir and $HOME/.unburden_home_dir_list) must be manually renamed to $HOME/.unburden-home-dir and $HOME/.unburden-home-dir.list.
• By adding UNBURDEN_HOME=yes to $HOME/.unburden-home-dir every user can decide himself if he wants the Xsession.d hook to be used when he logs in under X. On managed workstations with many users this eases testing of unburden-home-dir with just a few users a lot.

You can follow the development of unburden-home-dir also on GitHub and on Gitorious as well as on Ohloh.

Enjoy!

aptitude-gtk will likely vanish //at 01:06 //by abe

As Christian already wrote, there’s an Aptitude revival ongoing. We already saw this young team releasing aptitude 0.6.5 about 6 weeks ago, more commits have been made, and now we’re heading towards an 0.6.6 release quickly.

But this revival mostly covers the well-known and loved curses interface (TUI) of aptitude and not the seldomly installed GTK interface, which unfortunately never really took off:

While aptitude itself (i.e. the curses and commandline interface) is installed on nearly 99% of all Debian installations which take part in Debian’s “Popularity Contest” statistics, aptitude-gtk is only installed on 0.42% of all these installations.

One reason is likely that aptitude-gtk still hasn’t all the neat features of the curses interface. And another reason is probably that it’s still quite buggy.

Since nobody from the current Aptitude Team has the experience, leisure or time to resurrect (or even complete) aptitude-gtk, the plan is to stop building aptitude-gtk from the aptitude source package soon, i.e. to remove it from Debian for now.

Like the even less finished Qt interface of aptitude, its code will stay in the VCS, but will be unmaintained unless someone steps up to continue aptitude-gtk (or aptitude-qt, or both), maybe even as its own source package.

So if you like aptitude-gtk so much that you’re still using it and want to continue using it, please think about contributing by joining the Aptitude Team and getting aptitude’s GUI interface(s) back in shape.

Another option would be to find a mentor so that resurrecting (one of) aptitude’s GUI interfaces could become (again) a potential project at Debian’s participation at Google’s Summer of Code.

Please direct any questions about aptitude-gtk or aptitude-qt to the Aptitude Development Mailing List. Or even better, join the discussion in this thread.