Edrx's Debian page

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Edrx's Debian page

(This page is very old - probably from 2005.)

Debian:

Before anything else:
- apt-get install dict-wn dict-gcide dict-jargon dictd dict
www.debian.org: package search, weekly news, mailing lists
Installation CDs and Live CDs:
- Sarge,
- Debian-br-cdd,
- Ubuntu,
- Knoppix,
- Gnoppix
Why Debian Rocks
Maintainer Scripts
In 2000 I applied to become a Debian maintainer, but the new maintainer queue was closed. For some reason (too much internal politics in Debian? Lack of time due to my PhD studies? I wasn't feeling competent enough? My name wasn't getting through the queue? All of these, maybe) at some point I gave up and I decided to concentrate on my maths, on eev, on Alexander Technique and on Real Life.

Debian-RJ (a local users group):

"RJ" means "Rio de Janeiro", by the way.
The site: http://www.debian-rj.org/
The mailing list (in Portuguese):
- The archive of postings, with many many many absolutely amazing flamefests...
  - Alexander Gemaiel e educação por chineladas: 3387, 3389, 3396, 3433.
  - MCURY, conspirações e moderações: 602.
- subscribe/unsubscribe/etc
Ideas for organizing meetings: in Portuguese, in English
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
http://www.istf.com.br/perguntas/

Free software (makes the world go 'round):

This section should be moved elsewhere, and -
Sorry for the few links in this section, almost everything on my pages is related to Free Software in one way or another.
The spinal column of the free software world: www.gnu.org.
If you are new to the game then go straight to its philosophy section (To do, for me: select some texts).
CIPSGA (in Portuguese only.)

(2005sep09: Old! Old! Old! You've been warned!)

New stuff, aug2004:

(Note: this page is old and has many broken links, and I'm planning to fix it only after doing some urgent work on eev.el, Crim and Hurd... the only block of new things is the first one)...

New stuff, jan2001:

An apt-gettable repository with mktclapp and other packages:
The e-script that debianizes MkTclApp. I've been very careful in doing this package.
Debianizing all the public stuff in my home dir:
- The manifesto: "A brief statement about tourism"
- The shell function I use to remake the deb on twu
- (I need to provide better installation instructions...)
Debianizing Lua (with yada; very alpha)

Messy notes on some Debian hacks:

On installing many flavours of the same version of the Linux kernel
Installing a fresh Potato in another partition without rebooting, running dbootstrap with chroot
On making mini-Debians in one CD: preparation, creating the directories

User stuff:

Main Debian page
Debian News
Debian Mailing Lists - archives by list and month
Debian Mailing Lists - search
Essay: "Clueless users are bad for debian"
Debian mirrors
on using netselect to choose a mirror

Some manuals:

On making new Debian packages:

Debian Documentation Project
http://www.debian.org/~elphick/manuals.html/
Debian New Maintainers' Guide
Sponsorship of future Debian developers
Steps on debianizing a new package (mktclapp):
- Make it compile well.
- Use dh_make to generate a debian/ directory. ((?NMG 2.3 NMG 2.3?), (?NMG 2.4 2.4?))
- Make it compile with debian/rules binary. (?MTAL Makefile Here?) is the final Makefile.
- Adjust the control files in debian/: delete some unneeded files, comment out some dh_xx commands in (?MTAL debian/rules?), etc. See the directories (?MTAL debian/ mktclapp-3.9/debian/?) or (?MTAL {} mktclapp-3.9/?) for the final result ((?NMG 4 NMG 4?), (?NMG 5 5?)).
- It took me a long time to discover that (?MTAL debian/substvars?) must be deleted in packages meant for both Slink and Potato; it is regenerated automatically by dpkg-shlibdeps, that is called from dh_shlibdeps. ((?DPM ^3.1.4 DPM 3.1.4?), (?DPM ^3.1.3?), (?DPM ^3.2.2?), (?DPM 8?), (?DPM 14?))
- Install pgp and configure it, as dpkg-buildpackage will need it to sign the package. Note that pgp2.6 ang pgp5 have different interfaces and slink's dpkg-buildpackage only deals well with 2.6's (and GPG is even harder).
- Use pod instead of troff to make the missing manpages!!! Here are my first notes about pod, and here are the finished manpages: (?MTAL mktclapp.pod?), (?MTAL xmktclapp.pod?).
- Build the source debian package: old notes, real stuff including lintian. ((?NMG 6.1 NMG 6.1?), (?NMG 6.2?))
- Upload the package to a public place ((?NMG 6.3 NMG 6.3?)); I think that I have to go through the new mantainer sponsorship way...
- To do: tell dpkg's friends to index mktclapp's html docs.

Other advanced things:

Threads:

Making Potato CDs:

Why Debian: because of the quality of its packages, for example.

Why not Debian:

(I wrote this around 2001feb15, but it is something I've been thinking for years. The developers of almost every piece of software of today tend to imagine their target audience as being made of "users", in the Windows sense, and this goes against what in my opinion is one of main pillars of the Free Software movement: that free software is not only about distributing tools for free, but mainly about giving to everyone access to the knowledge behind these tools.)

Debian is certainly better than any other OS and distribution in this respect, but, anyway, it (still) has a bit of an "us and them" mentality: users are not encouraged enough to install in their local machines copies of the Debian bug tracking system, of the auto-builders, of the software behind the package repositories and its mirrors, of the mailing list servers, etc; so the mailing lists for the developers are full of questions like "I uploaded a package and closed a bug report the xxx way and yyy happened", and these messages are *NEVER* answered with pointers to the relevant source code. For people who can't deal with black boxes, like me, this makes the system behind debian.org almost impossible to use.

Just some simple examples: a common user isn't able to regenerate the Contents-<arch>.gz file without fetching some obscure scripts from a CVS server; one can't get archives of the traffic in the mailing lists in mbox format, for grepping at home; apt-move, that seems to be one of the standard tools for building mirrors, is absurdly hard to learn.

Please, debpeople: not every Debian user around is a computer pro with infinite bandwidth, or has the social skills to get the answers from the right people, or is just a clicker that doesn't mind the details. We are reading your code but we are not psychic -- please try to remember how you felt before you were allowed into the ivory tower.

(Added later, 2001feb21): the Debian bug count is rising much more than it should. Of course it is, as the difficulty of locating a bug, fixing it, sending a patch, and incorporating this patch upstream isn't decreasing, much on the contrary...