Talked about UDMA support modularization in the Linux kernel with marcelo, but apparently Andre Hedrick doesn't like the idea. He argues that modularising the UDMA drivers by chipset could encourage OEMs not to go open source -- and we did see this happening before :\
Fixed some very, very stupid bugs in the new xmp prototype. Now protracker mods should play a bit better. Also fixed the pattern loop code after checking the original Protracker 2.1 replayer code.
Got an editorial published in freshmeat. It has been published quite fast, I thought it would take a few weeks and some review rounds before the release. The topic is provocative and I expect to get a fair amount of flames. I chose freshmeat instead of discussing it directly in an RPM or APT forum to gather feedback from end-users -- also not the audience I would get posting an article in advogato (but it would be interesting to have some feedback from developers as well). The main point is the upgrade of RPM packages with Debian's apt-get tool. Many issues are quite subtle and non-Debian people will probably not catch all the implications of simply unpacking the new RPM. The following example show how it should happen:
Preparing to replace mysql-server 3.23.23-2 (using .../mysql-server_3.23.24-1_i386.deb) ...
Stopping MySQL database server: mysqld.
Unpacking replacement mysql-server ...
Setting up mysql-server (3.23.24-1) ...
Starting MySQL database server: mysqld.
Configuration can be interactive (in several levels), but debconf allows it to be non-interactive -- so RPMs would keep the ability to be installed unattended. And packages can be configured after the instalation, either by hand or running dpkg-reconfigure.
I just don't like the idea of unpacking new versions while the old version is running, installing new (potentially misconfigured) or keeping the old (potentially incompatible, or missing some new feature that fixes security problems) configuration files, forgetting to restart the service and sending some SIGHUPs to load bad configuration files afterwards.
Or perhaps I'm just getting too lazy, since Linux is supposed to be hard to use, hard to configure and hard to upgrade, and Debian's well-designed upgrade system is for weenies.