silent rules with automake 1.11

It seems that automake 1.11 made it into unstable and, besides other features, that means silent rules like linux does since quite some time.
For the impatient, in configure.ac:

AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE

m4_ifdef([AM_SILENT_RULES], [AM_SILENT_RULES([yes])])

Then after a round of automake/configure the make invocation will be like

make[3]: Entering directory `foo'

  CXX    source1.lo

  CXX    source2.lo

  CCLD   lib1.la

[...]

Credit note: the autotools mythbuster guide

mozilla ubiquity commands for debian

I'm an avid user of mozilla ubiquity but I couldn't find any commands related to debian to replace those of yubnub. So, prodded by zack I've produced some like bts or pts.
The command feed is located at ubiquity-commands (don't be scared by the "this-code-can-be-evil" subscription page) with the actual code maintained under ubiquity-commands.git.
Note that there's *much* room for improvement so it would be nice to have a common set of commands for the various debian web resources.

you don't control your hardware, proprietary drivers do (rant)

Trying to associate with 00:1c:58:10:1d:30 (SSID='ALMAWIFI' freq=2417 MHz)

Associated with 00:1c:58:10:15:b0

                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ WTF?

In other words, my broadcom card won't let me choose the access point to connect to, instead the driver picks one for you (my guess: the one with the best signal) except that autentication on that AP doesn't work.
I'm fine with machines trying by default to be smarter than me, I'm less fine when there's no way to convince said machine to do something supposedly not smart.

don't exit bash on /etc with uncommitted changes

As explained before by Zack, it might happen that you co-administer a machine and have /etc under some VCS (which you should anyway by using etckeeper).
There are a few problems like detecting the identity of the committer and don't leave /etc with uncommitted changes so I recently came up with a slighly different solution than the one we thought two years ago (besides switching from bzr to git).
Take committer name/email from ~/.gitconfig of the user owning the tty or GIT_CONFIG or GIT_CONFIG_LOCAL if they are set.
Trap a function on shell's EXIT rather than loop on .bash_logout which applies only to login shell.
The resulting code to be put in /root/.bashrc:

git_functions="/path/to/git-etc-common"



# export GIT_* variables

if [ -f "$git_functions" ]; then

  . "$git_functions"

  git_export_env

fi



case $- in

*i*)    # interactive shell

  check_uncommitted(){

    if [ -f "$git_functions" ]; then

      . "$git_functions"

      if ! git_etc_status; then

        echo "Uncommitted changes to /etc found, please commit them"

        bash -$-

      fi

    fi

  }

  trap check_uncommitted EXIT

;;

esac

Where git-etc-common is to be found here.

RSSes for NEW available on ftp-master

The two RSS feeds previously at http://people.debian.org/~filippo/NEW_rss/ have been moved to a more proper location on ftp-master and the script (tools/queue_rss.py) merged into dak thanks to ganneff.

JFTR the script scans a directory with .changes files (which happens to be NEW in this case) and generates the said feeds, it is not tied to ftp-master and requires python-pyrss2gen and python-debian.

remote notification with irssi

I, like many others leave an IRC client always connected on a remote machine and my client of choice is irssi.
One good feature of graphical clients like xchat is the message notification when someone addresses you, which has the nice property to turn IRC from "pull" mode (you have to watch for notifications) to "push" mode (you get notified).
Notifications was the feature I missed the most from irssi so I hacked a solution:
Grab interesting messages from irssi and push them through an ssh tunnel, read them on the local machine and finally display them using libnotify. Implementation results follow:
- rnotify.pl is a script for irssi which pushes interesting messages to a local port
- notify-remote is a shell script to read messages on stdin and display them through notify-send
- esaurito the shell script to put it all together

On the importance of checking the source

if you have documentation: check that and then the source
if you don't have documentation: check the source
if you don't have the source: change project and choose a sourceful one
if you change project: prefer those with documentation

in other news, this blog comments are now powered by recaptha, a very cool project.

you know you are a nerd when..

... looking at your computer clock which reads "Jan 1" you think the clock has been mistakenly reset, or the battery is gone.

new /home

Its been quite some time since my last entry but this time is well worth writing. Back in September when Italian Debconf took place, Zack offered me a room in his place in Bologna, I happily accepted and since 19 October there's an house packed with DDs (yes, actually two). Are there any other experiences about DDs sharing the same flat? This is going to productive for both, the first product in fact is a nice trick to add a little automation if you are versioning /etc with bzr, see Zack's post for more infos.

NEW queue goes RSS

I wondered for some time since DC6 about having an RSS feed for packages in the NEW queue, finally I have found some time to put together a python script to generate two RSS feeds, one for packages landing in NEW and one for packages leaving NEW.
Caveats: a package leaving NEW doesn't mean it will hit the archive, it could be rejected. Packages by buildds are included. The feeds are generated once an hour.

as usual, comments/ideas/fixes are welcome: filippo (at) debian (dot) org