Archive for July, 2009

I landed roughly an hour ago and am in a taxi on my way back home.

DebConf 9 has been an awesome experience for me. It was actually my very first attendance to a DebConf ever, and I have been please to meet all these people from all around the world (litterally). Putting more than a hackergotchi on so many names I have known for years was great, too. I hope to be able to meet you again in the future.

DebConf 9 has also been a quite productive week for me, being able to allocate some time to things I wanted to do for a long while. And to tackle some bugs, too. You can expect to see more coming in the next weeks, since some of this work is under progress and will need some more to be done to be released in the wild.

DebConf is not only the hacklabs, so I also attended quite a lot of various talks and BoFs, plus some extra activities, too.

We also got some interesting ideas from people attending our (Rene and I) BoF to hopefully get some more people involved in the Mozilla packaging, one of which is to keep the packages orphaned until the team gets enough people. So expect the packages to keep being orphaned, though still technically maintained, and some other things to come in Iceweasel.

Another great happening from DebConf 9 is that Anibal introduced me a venezuelian guy (hi Antonio) who is interested in helping out on Mozilla packages, so we now have a bigger team ! Welcome Antonio !

To conclude, I'd like to give many thanks to all the people I have met and whom I spent some great time with. See you soon, I hope.

Typing this text on a (non-openmoko-but-android) phone took so much time that I am now at home and finished to type on my laptop...

Oh, I forgot. This time, my luggage was in the same plane as me ;)

My luggage has arrived today (well, technically, yesterday), during the day trip. We are at Debconf day 4, I arrived on day 0, I'm leaving on day 8, that's what we can call effectiveness...

I won't have to wash my underwear everyday anymore, and you won't be seeing me in jeans and same teeshirts (the debconf one everybody got and the apt-get install anarchy I bought on arrival) !

I got to Cáceres for my first Debconf... without my luggage. Somehow, it wasn't in the plane I took to Madrid, so it is somewhere... not with me. According to Air Europe, it is now in Madrid and should be sent here tomorrow.

I already got a Debian T-shirt to alleviate part of the issue.

PS: damn it's hot in those rooms.

Update: that'll be arriving tomorrow morning, that is, the day after tomorrow from the original post

Beware ! xulrunner 1.9.1 might break some applications like epiphany, galeon, yelp, chmsee, etc.

You have three main options to work around this problem:

• Set the MOZ_GRE_CONF environment variable to /etc/gre.d/1.9.system.conf
• Remove the /etc/gre.d/1.9.1.system.conf file
• Copy the /etc/gre.d/1.9.system.conf file in the ${HOME}/.gre.d directory (which you can create if it doesn't exist, which is very likely)

For the moment, I identified a definite breakage of epiphany.

Depending on what API the applications use, they might break more or less. What happens is that some of the applications depending on xulrunner-1.9, using the XPCOM standalone glue, give a too broad range of versions of xulrunner they claim to be compatible with. The net result is that the glue can end up loading libxul 1.9.1, which may not be totally binary compatible with what the application actually needs.

The problem may or may not happen on your computer, because the XPCOM glue is half broken in its way to find a proper libxul : it stops at the first one if sees that fits in the given range. This means that depending on the order of the files in the /etc/gre.d directory, you can get a different version of libxul.

The workarounds above ensure libxul 1.9 is always loaded.

In my previous posts about the release of Iceweasel 3.5, some people succeeded in installing Iceweasel on Lenny by rebuilding xulrunner-1.9.1 (not without some trouble).

Actually, thanks to the improved dpkg-shlibdeps, it's almost painless to install the packages from testing/experimental. The old days where pulling a package from testing or unstable would pull a new libc6 and a bunch of other packages are long gone (though, as we will see, things could be even better).

So, if you are a Lenny user, are not afraid with a few packages from testing on your system, and want to use Iceweasel 3.5, here are the steps you can go through to install it:

• Add the testing and experimental sources to your apt sources:
  $ echo deb http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian testing main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/testing.list
$ echo deb http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian experimental main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list

• Set the default distribution to "stable":
  $ echo 'APT::Default-Release "stable";' > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/default
• apt-get update
• Install a few dependencies from "testing":
  $ apt-get install -t testing libstartup-notification0 libsqlite3-0 libnss3-1d libhunspell-1.2-0 libasound2
• Install iceweasel:
  $ apt-get install iceweasel/experimental

The latter won't work until xulrunner-1.9.1 reaches experimental (Update: it got there), but the following alternative procedure will do in the meanwhile:

• Tentatively install xulrunner-1.9.1 (provided you downloaded it following the previous instructions):
  $ dpkg -i xulrunner-1.9.1_1.9.1-1_*.deb libmozjs2d_1.9.1-1_*.deb
  You will get dependency problems, ignore them.
• Fix the dependency problems:
  $ apt-get -f install
  This will install all the required packages from Lenny.
• Install iceweasel:
  $ apt-get install iceweasel/experimental

Now, the sad thing about this, is that technically, you shouldn't need to install libstartup-notification0 and libasound2 from testing at all. The same might even apply for libhunspell-1.2-0. The reason is that technically, xulrunner-1.9.1, which has a versioned dependency on these libraries, doesn't actually require the versions it demands, and earlier versions could work as well. The ones from Lenny should be enough.

The reason why this happens is that these libraries don't provide symbols files, which are the basis for the improved dpkg-shlibdeps to make better dependencies, ones that would allow xulrunner-1.9.1 from experimental to work with Lenny's libstartup-notification0, libasound2, and libhunspell-1.2-0.

I just uploaded iceweasel 3.5-1 in experimental. It should reach your mirrors soon, but its main dependency, xulrunner-1.9.1, is still in NEW, so you'll have to take it from my people.debian.org space until is comes out from there.

Some quick links:

• For amd64:
  • libmozjs2d_1.9.1-1_amd64.deb
  • xulrunner-1.9.1_1.9.1-1_amd64.deb
• For i386:
  • libmozjs2d_1.9.1-1_i386.deb
  • xulrunner-1.9.1_1.9.1-1_i386.deb

And until it reaches your nearby mirror, you can take iceweasel from there too:

• For amd64
• For i386

For the people using Lenny, note that you should only need to rebuild xulrunner. The iceweasel package should be installable as is once you have xulrunner 1.9.1 installed.

You will need the following change to configure.in to be able to build xulrunner on Lenny:
- PKG_CHECK_MODULES(SQLITE, sqlite3 >= $SQLITE_VERSION)
+ PKG_CHECK_MODULES(SQLITE, sqlite3)

Then run autoconf.

I might provide backported packages in the near future.

When I said I had to update the copyright file...

$ git diff --stat debian/1.9 debian/1.9.1 debian/copyright
 debian/copyright | 543 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++----
 1 files changed, 502 insertions(+), 41 deletions(-)
$ wc -l debian/copyright
1259 debian/copyright


Note that many of those lines should probably be added to the copyright file for the current version in unstable...

The release is currently building on my PC and will be uploaded after some testing. Stay tuned.

Iceweasel will probably follow tomorrow.

Note for the ftp-masters reading this: Yes, a bunch of libraries were added to the source, and they are currently used by the packages. This has been done on purpose, for two reasons: lack of time to implement the necessary hacks to use system libraries, and lack of time to investigate the state of the patches against these libraries to avoid iceweasel crashing.

Update: Uploaded. The packages may sit in NEW for a while, so they are already available on my people.debian.org space.

It took less time I expected, but after making xulrunner 1.9.1 pre-release packages available, I'm making iceweasel 3.5 pre-release packages available:

• For amd64
• For i386

As for xulrunner, some more work on these is required before they are ready to be uploaded to the Debian archive.

I'm more than halfway to an upload of xulrunner to experimental, but until I get iceweasel itself built, and xulrunner in an uploadable shape, you can download amd64 and i386 packages of xulrunner-1.9.1 from my p.d.o space. To get something that works, you only need libmozjs2d and xulrunner-1.9.1. Following are direct links to the relevant files:

• For amd64:
  • libmozjs2d_1.9.1-0_amd64.deb
  • xulrunner-1.9.1_1.9.1-0_amd64.deb
• For i386:
  • libmozjs2d_1.9.1-0_i386.deb
  • xulrunner-1.9.1_1.9.1-0_i386.deb

I only tested the amd64 binary, which doesn't have JIT javascript, so if you have particular problems with the i386 binaries, please report them in the comments. You can obviously leave comments for problems with the amd64 binaries, by the way.

Since iceweasel 3.5 is not ready yet, you may still want something to try this xulrunner out. You can try your own monster, for that purpose. The steps involved to create the monster are actually simple:

• Edit the /usr/lib/iceweasel/application.ini file and change the MaxVersion value in the [Gecko] section to 1.9.1
• Replace the /usr/lib/iceweasel/xulrunner symbolic link with a symbolic link to /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.1 (ln -sfn ../xulrunner-1.9.1 /usr/lib/iceweasel/xulrunner)

With these changes, running iceweasel will start the monster.

If you still want to have iceweasel running the "normal" version, skip the second step above and start xulrunner-1.9.1 /usr/lib/iceweasel/application.ini instead.