Author Archive

Josselin thinks it's the most stupid world record, my take is that it is only a useless one.

World records are interesting when they are challenged, not when they are set. And the fact is Firefox will become the world most downloaded software in a day in the world because nobody else tried to set this record before. Most Guinness records are such records, by the way: they're set, not challenged.

Speaking of stupid records, and how they are set (... or not), I quite like the following story, which happened live on french television. Some years ago, a guy wanted to set the record for spitting a greenpea as far as he could (*that* is a stupid record). The Guinness records guy was there, obviously, so that the record could be homologated. I don't remember the numbers, but it's not very important after all. Anyways, the guy sets his record, he is happy, and for fun, the TV show host tries. First try, first win, he broke the record that had been set a few seconds before ; without even trying to beat it.

Coming back to the Firefox record, it's useless to set a record you already know is not an absolute record. Microsoft service packs and affiliated are downloaded massively the day they are released, Microsoft just never considered submitting it to the Guinness book. And if they'd have tried, they would have set it at least an order of magnitude higher than Firefox will set it. Then Firefox would have needed to come up with a catch phrase like "the most downloaded free (as in free speech, because a MS service pack is free as in free beer) software" to get its moment of fame.

So, how long before Microsoft tries to break it, with, say, IE8 ? And what will be the new marketing trick for Firefox 4.0 (after a full page in NYT for 1.0, "get your name in Firefox" for 2.0 and a Guinness record for 3.0) ?

The fact is, the 3.0 release is just exactly the same code base as version 3.0rc3, which only has a MacOSX-only fix more than 3.0rc2, which is what we have in unstable, already.

... you receive more than a thousand "Mail Delivery Error" messages in a few hours. Needless to say I sent none of the original emails which I'm getting these error messages for...

... is not much different than turning 29. Maybe turning 0x20 will make a difference...

For 10 days now, I've had ADSL problems. Basically, there is something fishy somewhere between my end and the DSLAM. That can be anything, and for the moment, all I can do is wait for either my ADSL provider or France Telecom, whichever is responsible for the problem, to fix this. Anyways, my network connectivity is sometimes working (though quite slowly, especially on uploads), but more often not, with sometimes connectivity for a few seconds (enough to download small files or pop mail).

The glandium.org server being behind this ADSL line, it means that you're probably not able to see this post. Or maybe a feed-reader/planet/whatever got it while the line was somehow working. Note I've been able to setup another MX server, so that mail sent to my domain go somewhere I can fetch them. Don't worry about sending me messages, they will reach me. Just that it may take time for me to be able to see and/or answer them.

Anyways, the main downside is that it makes it harder to handle the upcoming xulrunner transition.

On the other hand, the upside is that I finally could take some time to work on ext3rminator again, basically rewriting the code from scratch for reasons I'll explain when it will be ready for a release. It's good to see that some new APIs in libext2fs, added since 2002~2003, when I first wrote ext3rminator, make some of the work easier. It's still sad there is nothing to handle reading the journal. Not that it's difficult (though not documented much), but that would downsize my code some more ;).

Update: It seems to be back to normal.

How do you see this message in python2.5 changelog:

* Add README.db4 describing the db4.6 -> db4.5 change (Steve Greenland). Closes: #469770.

when apt-listchanges has been broken by the db4.6 -> db4.5 change ?

I uploaded xulrunner 1.9~b5-1 yesterday, and today was webkit's turn, with an upload of svn revision 31841, which happens to be the last revision on trunk as of writing.

Thanks to Mark Rowe, the most problematic crashers I experienced with webkit while preparing this upload have been fixed in revisions 31821 and 31787. This had the side effect to delay the upload enough that we now have the benefit of improved SVG animations support, and CSS gradients.

For those who like numbers, you can take a look at the Sunspider results for xulrunner 1.9~b5 (running mybrowser ; very similar results to what I got with 1.9~b4), and Sunspider results for webkit r31842 (when you compare to previous results for webkit r27674, there are significant improvements).

For another kind of numbers:

~/git/xulrunner$ git diff upstream/1.9... | filterdiff -x b/debian/* -x a/configure | diffstat | tail -1
36 files changed, 507 insertions(+), 291 deletions(-)

Compared to:
~/git/xulrunner$ git diff upstream/1.9...1.9+b4-1 | filterdiff -x b/debian/"*" -x a/configure | diffstat | tail -1
53 files changed, 932 insertions(+), 466 deletions(-)

~/git/webkit$ git diff upstream... | filterdiff -x b/debian/* | diffstat | tail -1
1 file changed, 4 deletions(-)

Compared to:
~/git/webkit$ git diff upstream...0+svn27674-4 | filterdiff -x b/debian/* | diffstat | tail -1
17 files changed, 61 insertions(+), 18 deletions(-)

Somehow, I prefer to work on webkit...

I'm preparing a new upload for WebKit, which will be targetted at unstable. It is much easier to deal with than Gecko, fortunately, so it won't take several months to get something in shape. The main "difficulties" here is that I'm dropping the Qt WebKit package, since this will be provided along Qt, and the upstream build system for the Gtk port switched from qmake to autotools, which is not a really bad thing ; so, nothing impossible.

Note that switching to autotools also means using libtool, which means no way to use -Wl,--as-needed anymore :-/. Yes, libtool, by trying to be smart, puts it almost at the last position in the arguments list, making it useless.

It finally happened, sorry for the delay. 1.9b4 is currently being uploaded to experimental. Yes, I know, this is not 1.9b5, which was released a few days ago. This is because I wanted to do some more work on 1.9b5 and didn't want to delay the upload any longer.

Now, for the uninteresting statistics, following are the diffstats, excluding directory debian/ and configure:

for version 1.8.1.13-1: 113 files changed, 1393 insertions(+), 824 deletions(-)
for version 1.9~b4-1: 53 files changed, 932 insertions(+), 466 deletions(-)
for work in progress version 1.9~b5-1: 39 files changed, 848 insertions(+), 423 deletions(-)

(the latter will obviously evolve)

It smells like an april fool, it looks like an april fool, it tastes like an april fool, but it's not an april fool.

Would there have been a better day than today to announce such a great news ?