Older blog entries for Marcus (starting at number 84)

The GNOME guys are sooo happy about camera hotplugging and automated desktop icons.

EDIT(especially for Luis): Reviewing my entry after getting some sleep I know think this is too harsh.
Project UTOPIA and especially HAL are the right way to go cross-distro wise (except that I think it is a bit over engineered). A step admittedly the KDE guys are just doing too.
My comment from some entries below regarding non-ptp/non-massstorage cameras is btw back, my patch was rejected. So not all digital cameras will be found by g-v-m in 10.0 for now even though HAL knows them perfectly.

We successfully released php4 and kernel updates and some less critical ones.

After several days of debugging I now can print with that strange 16bit Windows application. Apparently a "Marcus Meissner" broke it in the begin of 2001 due to a rewrite of the PrintDlg16() handling. 4 lines of code added after 5 days of debugging.

Oh, and someone thinks my diary is too depressive. Thanks for the cheering up. :)

Broke some PHP installations with a broken PHP security update, due to a mess-up between use of system pcre in php4 and use of builtin pcre in apache2.

You can compile php4 against the system pcre and in itself it will work fine and use this one... However, when used as an Apache2 module it will not use the system version, but the pcre version in Apache2, which is too old and has a different ABI. -> Crash

Unhappy customers. Unhappy Marcus.

Still trying to get out the kernel update.

New WINE packages for the 20050830 WINE release are done and ready to download over at SourceForge . Just 1 more month to the 0.9 release (just 11 years after the 0.8 release).

Not a good week. Again. The acrobat update was the only one released this week ... Unfortunately not due to a lack of incidents.

• PCRE - the perl compatible regexp libary - came up. Usually such an update is easy, but this library is copied into some other projects... As PHP, Apache2, hypermail, exim, tin... So we need to release updates for some of those too (at least PHP and exim). So restarted the PHP XMLRPC update.
• Kernel update was slightly flawed in one patch, which changed a API ... Redo, delaying this update for at least 6 days.
• other misc updates that just only now got in the queue

Fixed a gnome-volume-manager missing feature. Now you will get autoimport for non-mass-storage and non-PTP cameras too.

Some libgphoto2 hacking on the side. Hopefully more this weekend.

Released Acrobat Reader buffer overflow security update. Like we do every 4 weeks now. So Opensource PDF viewer writers ... Please catch up on the features, but not on the security holes! Or Adobe ... Please deploy some more code reviews and automated overflow checkers... We have them now in Linux, you know.
Bought myself a new workstation, AMD64. Linux installed without a problem. However, the Windows XP I wanted to install had more problems. Just a black screen ... because it has a SATA RAID only. After adding an IDE harddisk it worked fine. You know ... an error message would have been nice.
So not much hacking this weekend, neither at work.

Depressing and all too tiring work week.

Added USB Mass Storage camera handling to libgphoto2.
Basically this is just a camera library to map UNIX paths to a libgphoto2 path, and a special libgphoto2 port supplying those paths.
Everything was present already, what was just missing was to correct hook it together.
So now with "gphoto2 --auto-detect" and a mounted masstorage camera you will get:

disk:/media/usbdisk	USB Mass Storage Camera

Applications tested:

• gphoto2 - works fine.
• f-spot - works fine.
• kio_kamera aka "camera:/" kio slave - works fine.
• digikam - works fine after 2 small patches
• gtkam - broken... but in other ways too
• flphoto - doesn't like it yet.

And it was so easy ... should have done that years ago.

Did not unsubscribe from openSUSE lists. :)

• those who want their packagemanager (apt, whatever) in there right now
• who want to recompile everything in the tradition of -fmake-slightly-faster
• want to have a single CD with all features and a live install. (All on 650 MB ... right.)
• deliberately do not read the FAQs on how to spell SUSE, or what openSUSE is...

We finally released all Mozilla security updates.

galeon is gone in several older products (by means of Obsoletes) and will be in newer products. epiphany we are still working on to find out whether it is really needed at all.

Only some hacking and bugfixing done in my sparetime. Debugged the IKEA Kitchen Planner, who has pretty broken code originally ... Probably requiring to add more exception handlers through WINE. *sigh* I would really like to go and fix the program itself.

Another program I debugged cannot print. Actually it can print, but only an empty page. Tracing it, the program happily prints the actual content into a metafile opened right at the same time as the real print context is open. I have not yet found out what the real problem is there, but after some hours of peering at the relay log I can't say.

James: YaST is written in C++ and YCP (Yast Control Protocol), a interpreted script language (a middle thing between C and tcl and LPC perhaps). It meanwhile also has perl bindings (and likely others can be added too.)

Also, SUSE and Novell ship both KDE and GNOME even favoured now, so this choice is left to the user.

And I don't get the YaST QT vs GTK question? Both are fine GUI toolkits. Oh and did you know that YaST has an ncurses GUI frontend? This is what I use usually.

It took me one day to relax from my hate of Mozilla and GNOME regarding Mozilla browser maintenance timeframe issues. Not a good sign. But at least we will no longer ship galeon and I try to get rid of epiphany too. (We can not supply Mozilla updates without breaking them. And we cannot update them due to their gtk2 version requirements. In distributions which are just ONE YEAR old now!)
I would just like to kill every package using mozilla libraries from the future distros and just have Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird as toplevel apps (where we can easily do version updates).

Thats just the normal problem you get from such massive monsters. What happened to small and just one task?

Carpal tunnel syndrom gone now, after 1.5 weeks of not touching keyboards. Spent most of the time relaxing and reading Cryptomonicon again, and Robert Asprin.

As for comments on some planetsuse.org posts, Seb:

• openSUSE should be seen as "opening SUSE developement to the community" which is probably the best fitting way to describe it.
• package management: You consider this easy to change, but it is not. Changing the package management is a very big effort.
  However you might be enlightened to hear that we will be supporting YUM repositories.
• the ilove rnotify kernel is no longer necessary, all is in mainline now and will be in 10.0.
• As for your suggestions on the development model, just hold your breath.
• SuSE is SUSE is suse is SUSE is SuSE....

Scotty dying is kinda sad... but well, we all grow old and he was pretty old during the movies already.
Speaking of the movies, Mueller (german drugstore chain) had several startrek movies at 5 euro a piece, so I bought ST 2, 3 and 5. Watched ST 2 (Wrath of Khan) ... still not the full speed of the later movies, but starting too. And plotholes you could fly a romulean warbird through.

Did not doo much hacking over the weekend, just some bits of 16bit OLE. 16 bit compound storage handling is pretty broken and either needs to be fixed or thrown away.

Went to visit the Nuernberg Dungeons. A very large underground area of caves built into the sandstone. Several hundred years used for necessary cool temperatures for brewing beer, it was used for bombshelter during 2nd worldwar. Now the caves are mostly unused except for showing tourists round.
Am I the only one thinking 'server rooms'? :)

Long week now over.

Cleared up a bit of the HAL confusion. Apparently all is work in progress, but at least I now do it like Fedora does, so perhaps we can establish a semi standard.

Not much security updates released this week due to internal deadlock caused by releases of some important service packs to our main maintained product.

Worked on a 16bit WINE application and found several regressions and lacking features. Sent patches and caused Alexandre to fix stuff ;)

Hands still hurting to some degree.

Things I hated today... Can't remember.