So, last week was a bit bumpy since I was sick for a couple of days, and then had a power outage on Friday and Saturday, thus not being able to keep up with my daily RC bug fixing, but I've been catching up since then.

I've uploaded patches done by Arjan Oosting, for packages that wouldn't compile with autoconf2.6: #379812 (kde-style-polyester), #379813 (kxmleditor) and #379815 (klog).

I uploaded a patch by Martín Ferrari for lilo: #374477 (use MAKEDEV instead of mknod at postinst), and another patch by Martín for courier-authlib #378571 (fixing the permissions of /var/run/courier/authdaemon).

I uploaded a patch by Andreas Jochens for ntlmaps: #379700 (fixing the build-dependency). A patch by Luca Bruno for predict: #379495 (fixing a change of location of forms.h). And a patch by Mike O'Connor for stardict: #379152 (fixing a misuse of size_t that made it fail in 64bit architectures).
Stardict had a problem with rpath that made me get to know the LIBTOOL_IS_A_FOOL hack, and I had to apply that, so that the binaries were not screwed up.

I also uploaded a fixed version of yacas, that included patches from Arjan Oosting (fixing #379261 and #379895) and Braun Gabor (fixing non-RC #295413).

However, it's not like the only thing I've done is upload patches done by others. I've also done some patches myself:

• #379275, fixing fillets-ng's FTBFS.
• #379486, fixing a bashism in cbuild.
• #379200, changing PWD for CURDIR so that sudo works for building bluez-utils.
• #377781, fixing monotone so that it builds with the latest gcc, although it took a new upstream release for it to build in hppa.
• #378173, adding some checks for NULL, so that the new libsdl1.2-image does not make programs segfault
• #381248, dropping PAGE_SIZE in favour of sysconf(_SC_PAGESIZE) in libsdl1.2 so that it builds in powerpc

The amount of bugs currently affecting the next release is 247. It's not a secret that we are a bit behind the schedule (we should be at less than 200 bugs by now). But it's also totally possible to get back on track if we work together on fixing the current bugs and we stop uploading unneeded new releases that trigger new transitions.

Following the trend, these are the bugs I squashed yesterday and today

• #377694 (graphviz), by backporting a lua test for the configure script.
• #377990 (libopengl-perl), by adding a build-dependency for libxi-dev.
• #377991 (freecraft), by applying a patch by Adriaan Peeters.

As the other day, the last bug was actually fixed twice (Bas Zoetekouw also prepared the NMU). The main problem here is that the BTS is being slow, and it's difficult to know that someone else has already fixed a bug.
So I guess that if you are going to join the the "fix one RC bug per day" movement, you'd better join #debian-bugs on oftc, and say which bug you are working on, so that we don't overlap that much.

Following Sesse's example, I decided to start bugfixing one RC bug per day, so, this is the result of my first three days at bugfixing:

• #377652, by fixing the source code to look for rgb.txt in the correct location.
• #377365, by finding out that the bug was not present anymore.
• #377608, by updating to the new usage of libavformat-dev. Actually, both Sesse and I fixed the same RC bug at the same time. :-\

It's quite rewarding to think that if you fix 1 bug a day, from today till November, 30th, you can fix about 140 bugs. With a couple of us doing this, we could tackle not only the RC-bugs but also the important ones (but we have to coordinate, so that we don't overlap again).

When looking at 372148, I found out that my maintainer scripts diagrams had the same bug that Policy currently has.

Also, these diagrams used to document a bug in dpkg, regarding the state a package was left when removed or purged; which was fixed long ago, but I had never had the time to update them accordingly.

Tonight, finally, I've updated them. And I've also made my test-suite package much more tidy, so that now I can publish it for anyone to grab it, and use it to test which maintainer scripts are called in some particular case. The dia sources, the png images, and the packages I used for the tests are all available here.

Following my talk about Optimizing boot time (slides and the raw material now available), we had several discussions along DebConf6 as to how to make parallel booting a real option.

So, Maxy decided to write a small C program called rcpar, that basically has the same functionality of the "shell" concurrency of /etc/init.d/rc, but since it's written in C, it's able to handle the output in a much cleaner way (and it will also handle interactive scripts in the near future).

Darcs repository: http://maxy.com.ar/~maxy/darcs/rcpar

I will probably be uploading an rcpar package to Debian experimental this weekend.

Debconf6 is finally over, and thanks to Maulkin's nice picture, I've got a new hackergotchi and decided to reactivate my blog that had to be taken down due to spam problems

It's not a secret that I'm not really happy about how many things went in Debconf6, but I am happy of having spent those days with so many nice Debian people. It would be great if we could gather more frequently, just to hang out for a while (and maybe play one or two games of Mao).

Anyway, I'm still recovering from almost two weeks of hard-core stress, trying to keep up with everything. I'm still lagging with much of the work that I had originally intended to do during Debconf, and my backlog keeps growing. Hopefully, I'll be able to clear things up soon.