Archive for the 'debian' Category

I'm back from Japan. Time went too fast... Met a lot of people we hadn't seen for a while, had a great time. Only problem is that I'm totally jetlagged. Woke up at 3am this morning, and decided to actually do something after trying to sleep some more for an hour.

The downside of holidays is the 4000+ mails (excluding spam) that got in my mailbox. I've already gone through most of the new bug reports and have been able to vote for the last GR that was issued while I was away.

One of the most annoying problem that was raised during my vacation is this Firefox trademark issue. We've been avoiding to change the package name for a while. We got agreements to use the Firefox name when we had to drop the "Mozilla" part of "Mozilla Firefox", and now it seems they (again) changed their mind.

I really think we should go with the iceweasel name because this name is already widespread as the "debian may rename firefox this way" name. It is even in wikipedia.

On other news, we bought a MacBook and a Nikon Coolpix S6 for Miki, and a (already broken) PSP as well as some books for me. I'll write more on these in coming posts.

Yesterday, I uploaded Firefox 2.0b2 in experimental. Please give it a try and checkout if some of the bugs in firefox are fixed by this new release. Same kind of help welcome with the version in unstable. When the bug count is more than 200, it gets painful to do bug triage, so any help on that matter will be very much appreciated by Eric and I.

In other news, work has started on seamonkey. Unfortunately, I'll be away for a little while, so I'll have to leave quite an amount of the work to Alexander Sack, but I'm pretty sure he'll be able to handle it. Anyways, we hope to be able to work out a full featured package for etch so that people using mozilla on sarge will get a correct upgrade path.

I also uploaded yesterday a new xulrunner release that (finally) provides some of the NSS tools, so that administrators can handle keys/certificates databases for mozilla products. It is still in NEW, but should reach unstable soonish (let's just hope the ftp-masters won't reject the new package).

After quite some work on packaging it, Firefox 2.0b1 is finally being uploaded to experimental.

It is linked to the system libmyspell instead of the bundled one, and can use system dictionaries like Thunderbird already does. I'm also working on using the system libsqlite3, but it first requires some build changes in the debian sqlite3 package and some more work to see if it's really feasible... you see, they like to take external libraries and modify them so much as adding symbols, changing some internals... and these changes only exist in the mozilla codebase... (the 2 main examples of that being expat and sqlite3)

It also includes a working DOM Inspector which upstream didn't include in their release because they are in the process of moving the component in the core.

I also had to fix some more the build system so that some things would be installed by make install (they tend to forget it), others would just be installed (mistakenly removed rules...) or make clean would do its work: cleaning (they tend to forget to flag files for removal when they create it in a Makefile). All that makes me wonder what their review/super-review thing is worth.

Anyways, please give it a try, especially if you reported a bug on earlier versions, it would be helpful if you closed bugs that are fixed by this release (don't forget the 'Version:' in the closing message so that the BTS version tracking would do its work).

Update: Upstream Firefox 2.0b1 has a working DOM Inspector. It only appears it just doesn't build correctly the way we build Firefox... might be some missing changes to the Makefiles. Again. *sigh*

Update 2: It was trickier: missing something to make the inspector symbols public instead of having a hidden visibility...

Update 3: It was actually my fault. /me goes hiding under a rock. And I managed to remove a comment to this post when removing spam... *sigh*. I think I need to take a break.

Then, help spread Firefox and get creditted in Firefox 2. Now, what I think is really amazing is how much effort they spend to credit those helping to spread Firefox, but not those helping to fix it.
Don't get me wrong, I don't care about being creditted myself for the several patches I sent and more, but I'm pretty sure a lot of people who sent patches like me are not creditted either.
It's already a PITA to get patches applied (some patches are still waiting to be reviewed or applied)...

Update: At least, they credit in the CVS logs.

Imagine an application that writes in its application directory, and if it fails to write there, write in a user profile directory.

Imagine a wide-spread operating system where the default settings allow any user to write almost anywhere on the file system.

Enjoy the result (Comment #7 gives a good overview of the problem).

Xulrunner finally reached unstable on sunday, and it already needed some adjustments. I forgot a conflict, misnamed the libsmjs-dev package, the hppa assembler code got somehow duplicated, so xulrunner failed to build on hppa, and some preference files needed to be moved around the packages.

It also fails to build on alpha, but that's not my fault.

I also changed the way we identify a Debian built xulrunner in the user agent. I replaced the "Gecko/yyyymmdd" string with "Gecko/Debian/x.y.z.t-r". That has several advantages over the previous "Gecko/yyyymmdd Debian/x.y.z.t-r" string:

• It shortens the already long user agent string so that additions such as product name are not painful,
• removes pointless information (the date in the original string indicates the date of the build, not that of the API),
• keeps the "Gecko" string (which some site might want, seing how Apple and Konqueror did put a "like Gecko" string),
• and finally avoid confusion with other Debian release informations that may be present in the product specific part (I think Galeon puts one, for instance).

That needed 2 updates, because I realized in between that while you can set the general.useragent.product and general.usergagent.productSub variables, they are not actually taken into account until you change them a first time... The HTTP protocol initialization in xulrunner forces the respective values Gecko and yyyymmdd... I just completely removed that part of the code in xulrunner.

I took advantage of this needed fix to work even more on the package, enabling the typeaheadfind module, needed by galeon and epiphany, removing some old perl code that does nothing except producing useless errors during the build, and, last but not the least, enabling the "flat style" chrome, meaning that instead of being stuck in .jar files, everything is just here in a standard tree.

It appears upstream provides a way to build such trees (option --enable-chrome-format=flat to configure), but it's useless because it doesn't install the trees when running make install. In addition to that, the configure script still requires zip, even if it doesn't use it, except for some obscure .jar files in libnss, that are not installed either. So after disabling the build of these useless files and removing the zip strict requirement if we build flat chrome, and fixing the script responsible for installation of the chrome files, everything got much better.

These changes have been applied to firefox as well, so stay tuned, it's for next upload.

Having highjacked spidermonkey, I did some bug triage there as well. It appeared they could all be closed by the fact libmozjs0d is there. I still need to make some triage in my patches to xulrunner and send upstream those that I still have not sent, if they are of any interest there.

Apart from this xulrunner stuff, I also did some bug clean-up on libxml2 and libxslt, which I've been somehow neglecting for some time.

I'm currently working on a way to display japanese characters on web pages, on a computer where japanese fonts are not installed. It involves a server-side image generator for glyphs, for which I needed the .ttf files for appropriate fonts, like kochi-mincho.

So, i just apt-get installed ttf-kochi-mincho, and it told me it wanted to install a bunch of stuff I don't care about. I ended getting the .ttf files directly from the sourceforge site... I don't want to clutter my server with X packages.

The question is: why do fonts need to depend on xutils (not all but quite some) and defoma (all of them, apparently). Couldn't they just recommend defoma and run the font registration thingy only if it is present ? If not present, nothing would be lost, since defoma's installation would trigger font registration. On the other hand, I don't understand nor see why some need xutils at all...

Martin said:

Firefox and OpenOffice.org seem to be two flagship products of the F/OSS world. At the same time, they are probably the two best examples of programmes orthogonal to the Unix philosophy. Does that mean that the Unix philosophy is the wrong way? Holy Shit!

No, Martin, that doesn't mean anything about the Unix philosophy. It only means Windows developers don't have a clue about Unix.

You know, nothing can be perfect from the first time, so I had to fix a few issues in a new upload. Well, for you, it makes no difference, since 1.8.0.1-1 never reached the archive, but these changes were needed so that epiphany and friends could properly build against xulrunner.

I also started filing wishlist bugs with patches to build some packages against xulrunner as soon as it gets into the archive. Galeon is undergoing. Next one might be kazehakase. Stay tuned.

Update: Patches for galeon, kazehakase, and devhelp sent.

Checking Signature on .changes
(...)
Good signature on /home/mh/pbuilder/sid/result/xulrunner_1.8.0.1-1_i386.changes.
Checking Signature on .dsc
(...)
Good signature on /home/mh/pbuilder/sid/result/xulrunner_1.8.0.1-1.dsc.
Uploading via ftp xulrunner_1.8.0.1-1.dsc: done.
Uploading via ftp xulrunner_1.8.0.1.orig.tar.gz: done.
Uploading via ftp xulrunner_1.8.0.1-1.diff.gz: done.
Uploading via ftp libnspr4-dev_1.8.0.1-1_all.deb: done.
Uploading via ftp libmozjs-dev_1.8.0.1-1_all.deb: done.
Uploading via ftp libsmjs1_1.8.0.1-1_all.deb: done.
Uploading via ftp libsmjs1-dev_1.8.0.1-1_all.deb: done.
Uploading via ftp libxul-dev_1.8.0.1-1_all.deb: done.
Uploading via ftp libnss3-dev_1.8.0.1-1_all.deb: done.
Uploading via ftp xulrunner_1.8.0.1-1_i386.deb: done.
Uploading via ftp xulrunner-gnome-support_1.8.0.1-1_i386.deb: done.
Uploading via ftp libnspr4-0d_1.8.0.1-1_i386.deb: done.
Uploading via ftp libmozjs0d_1.8.0.1-1_i386.deb: done.
Uploading via ftp spidermonkey-bin_1.8.0.1-1_i386.deb: done.
Uploading via ftp libxul0d_1.8.0.1-1_i386.deb: done.
Uploading via ftp libnss3-0d_1.8.0.1-1_i386.deb: done.
Uploading via ftp xulrunner_1.8.0.1-1_i386.changes: done.
Successfully uploaded packages.

I wonder how long it will take to the ftp-masters to accept it. It seems the NEW queue is not as fast as it used to be. It's been a week I've been waiting for libxml2 and libxslt to get through, and they still haven't made it. If enough people is interested in the package before it comes out of NEW, I'll probably upload it in my repository.

I have a patch for epiphany-browser that I'll send soon to the BTS. I'll come up with a patch for yelp as well. Then, bye bye mozilla-browser.

I'm also going to build an unofficial firefox on top of xulrunner, and maybe upload it to experimental, so that we can have some feedback about that. I'll see with Eric about that.