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Britney in 5 minutes
About 26-28 hours ago in #debian-release on IRC: <nthykier> damn, a britney run in 5 minutes <adsb> they happen <adsb> you've been spoilt by never seeing b1 at her "finest" *cough*...
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Testing migration and package relations
While looking at the dpkg Breaks-field[0]… $ aptitude show dpkg Package: dpkg [...] Version: 1.16.1.2 [...] Breaks: apt (< 0.7.7), aptitude (< 0.4.7-1), dpkg-dev (< 1.15.8), libdpkg-perl (<...
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Python optimization and profiling
For the past 5 days, I have worked on replacing a part of Britney (our beloved testing migration tool). The part I am trying replacing is her “installability tester”, which is probably one of the most...
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Some sponsors are “evil and pedantic”
If you want to enable all Lintian tags, just remember the phrase: Some sponsors are “evil and pedantic” Or on the command-line: $ lintian -EvIL +pedantic ... It works for Lintian 2.5.5 (and newer),...
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Kudos to Jakub Adam, Miguel Landaeta and James Page
Credit where it is due and I believe it is due for Jakub Adam for packaging eclipse packages. If you use any of the eclipse packages provided the apt repositories for Wheezy or sid, it is very likely...
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Lintian 2.5.7 and 2.5.8
The new version of Lintian (2.5.8) can pretty much be summed up as: Its like 2.5.7, only with less false positives and no FTBFS. Especially people annoyed by the hardening flags will hopefully find...
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Parsing bash/shell
I have been avoiding #629247 for quite a while. Not because I think we couldn’t use a better shell parser, but because I dreaded having to write the parser. Of course, #629247 blocks about 16 bugs and...
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Performance bottlenecks in Lintian
Thanks to a heads up from Bastian Blank, I learned that Lintian 2.5.7 and 2.5.8 were horribly slow on the Linux binaries. Bastian had already identified the issue and 2.5.9 fixed the performance...
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Lintian-NG – Accessing Lintian’s collection data with 90 lines
$ LINTIAN_ROOT=. perl lintian-ng ../lintian_2.5.10.dsc Successfully unpacked 1 packages Did you know that source:lintian/2.5.10 contains 3745 files or/and directories (excl. root dir) This useless...
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Wheezy release progress (December)
Wheezy has been frozen for 5-and-(almost-)a-half months now. Last month, Neil sent a mail to d-d-a stating that there were 403 RC bugs left and today UDD claims there are 348 left. My...
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Getting space for more packages
In 2011, I wrote about how small files could consume a lot of space. I meant to do a follow-up on the savings but I forgot about it until now. In 2.5.7, we started compressing some of the collected...
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Introducing “Das Lintian-overrider 2000″
Have you ever tried to add a Lintian override only to get it wrong? Fret not, with the “Lintian-overrider 2000″ such are problems of the past! Simply feed the tag emitted by Lintian to the...
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Wheezy release progress (January)
In December, I wrote a post on the progress of the Wheezy release. Back then, we had 348 RC bugs in testing and today there are about 249 left. A bit of simple math put us at 99 RC bugs fixed since...
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“Das Lintian-overrider 2000″ vs “unjustified overrides”
In January, I did a “TV-shop ad”-style post on a little script called “lintian-overrider” and it prompted Simon to ask: That’s a great tool, but don’t you fear it makes unjustified overrides too easy ?...
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Wheezy release progress (February)
About 5-6 weeks ago, I wrote about the Wheezy release progress, so it is about time for another update. According to UDD, we are down to 204 RC bugs (down from 249, since my last post). It is not...
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Wheezy was brought to you by …
During the Wheezy freeze, the Debian release team deployed 3254 hints[1]. This number may include some duplicates (i.e. where two members of the team hinted the same package), it certainly does not...
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Optimizing autodie
After converting Lintian to using autodie, I was a bit trouble by the effects it had on Lintian’s (start-up) performance. This overhead accumulated to at least a 1s when checking packages. Indeed, I...
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Dealing with a bottleneck, wasted inodes and reducing memory usage
We finally managed to deal with one of the major runtime bottlenecks in Lintian. Previously, our usage of file(1) would sometimes spend a long time classifying various text files. In Lintian 2.5.14,...
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Britney excuses – age
Every package maintainer has probably looked at the “Testing migration” section of their package’s PTS page and wondered: “Okay? What the hell does that mean?”. Or perhaps “Is that something I should...
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Britney excuses –“out of date”
In my previous post, I explained about the “age” excuse in Britney. In this post, I will cover the slightly more tricky “out of date” excuse. A simple example of excuse is: out of date on mipsel:...
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