Answers on a postcard blog comment.

Bonus points for anything involving “Debian Cat”, or “Om nom Novell nom”, etc.

!bug <bug-number>

Print a one-line synopsis of the specified bug. The parser is fuzzy and will find the bug number embedded in URLs, etc.

!madison <source-package>

Print a colourful rmadison output for the specified package.

!qa <source-package>
!overview <source-package>

Prints the URL of the Debian PTS entry for the specified package.

!changelog <source-package>

Prints a URL containing the most recent debian/changelog file for the specified package.

!copyright <source-package>

Prints a URL containing the most recent debian/copyright file for the specified package.

!bug_graph <source-package>
!buggraph <source-package>

Prints the URL of the bug graph for the specified package.

!buildd <source-package>

Prints the URL of the non-experimental buildd status of the specified package.

!popcon <source-package>

Prints the URL which contains the popularity-contest data for the specified package.

!dehs <source-package>

Prints the URL which contains the Debian External Health Status of the specified package.

Some notes:

• Using these commands is easy: “/msg BTS <command>” on irc.debian.org or simply “<command>” on a channel that the bot is lurking on.
• Please don’t spam channels with data from the bot – use a private message. This particularly applies to #debian-devel-changes.
• If you are communicating with the bot in a private message, the leading exclamation mark is optional.
• If you would like the bot to lurk on other channels, please ping me on IRC after gaining a consensus on the channel in question.

As always, patches and suggestions welcome. (Source).

If you would like to try them:

• Ensure you are using Debian sid.
• Add experimental sources to your /etc/apt/sources.list.
• Run:
  • sudo apt-get update
  • sudo m-a update
  • sudo m-a a-i drm
  • sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
• Edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf and specify the nouveau driver in the Device section.
• Restart X. You will need to remove the binary nvidia kernel module.

Editing your xorg.conf may be as simple as the replacing nvidia or nv with nouveau; nouveau won’t be chosen automatically over nv yet. If your xorg.conf has collected a lot of cruft over the years, see this wiki page for some pointers on what you can remove.

For the status of the drivers with your particular card, please see upstream’s compatibility matrix. My experience has been positive; I have been using them for about two months on my dual-head 8600GT (NV50) setup with only a few small issues and a generally superior Gnometris experience.

Some notes:

• If you find bugs (unrelated to the packaging), please report the problem upstream and not in the Debian bug tracker.
• At request of upstream, we are not providing 3D support. Please do not ask for it, as a wontfix tag often offends.
• Bonus points are awarded for removing the non-free nVidia driver; although installation of xserver-xorg-video-nouveau will remove nvidia-glx, purging nvidia-kernel-common and nvidia-kernel-source should remove all the module-assistant generated kernel modules. rms would be proud.

Many thanks to:

• Matthew Johnson (mjj29) for uploading.
• Julien Cristau (jcristau) for advice.
• Christopher Halse Rogers (ROAF) for his Ubuntu packages.
• The rest of the XStrikeForce, who do rather a lot of work you don’t really notice.

Thanks to Silver and zx64.

This weekend I finally picked up my German bow from Devon after it got damaged earlier this year (picture hidden behind this link to protect the squeamish). The repair was done to an amazingly high standard, with the join literally invisible modulo the brass pins on the top.

I stayed with my grandparents, which was delightful as well as educational - I think I’ve located the source of my affection for cats.

Curiously, I think I saw Ian Jackson on the train opposite me on the way back, but I don’t think he recognised me. I should probably wear more Debian t-shirts.

The vast majority of my queries went unanswered, and the responses I did receive were either blatant copy pasta, or requested details I had purposefully laid out in my exposition. Such gross incompetence clearly wasn’t the £5 I saved, so at least I learnt something.

Avoid.

If anyone is interested and on campus on Thursday there is a gratis short concert in the Ensemble Room.

Yours truly playing will be performing Mozart’s Piano Trio in G K. 564 (1788) and Debussy’s Piano Trio in G minor (1880) with Melvyn and Cindy.

Although timetabled to start at 1:10pm, seats fill up rather quickly. Directions.

Due to a number of personal reasons, I won’t be attended Debconf8 in Argentina.

I have removed myself from my (rather undeserved) high place in the sponsorship queue.

(This was one of those pesky “oh, it’ll only take an hour” ideas.)

AptFs is a FUSE-based filesystem that provides a view to unpacked and patched Debian source packages as regular folders on a filesystem. Binary packages are modelled as symbolic links pointing to their respective source package.

This arrangement allows one to:

• Use standard UNIX utilities to perform queries across the entire Debian source tree
• Save keystrokes and time when downloading (and subsequently deleting) source packages
• Do really awesome things easily, like perform static analysis on the archive, count swear words, etc.

The program maintains a sliding window of unpacked packages to perform automatic cleanup of unpacked packages — it would not be very helpful if commands such as

% find /path/to/aptfs

…unpacked the entire archive into your temporary directory.

Source (GPLv3) is available in Git:

% git-clone git://git.chris-lamb.co.uk/aptfs  # or
% git-clone http://git.chris-lamb.co.uk/repo/aptfs.git

Patches always welcome, and shout if you like it; I’ll file an ITP and try and upload it.

I’ve put together a partial timeline of the Debian project using the SIMILE Project’s DHTML timeline component.

This is definately work in progress: I would welcome additional events (by email or merge request please, not via blog comments) regarding:

• Dates of the earlier Debian releases
• Release freezes
• Interesting dates of important packages and tools (Linux kernel, XFree86/X.Org, glibc, aptitude, etc.)

The timeline is available to view here.

Update: Assistance fixing the (non-Webkit) Konqueror issue would also be appreciated.