Tarballs of Ion! — zakame’s blog

Another new release brought to you by Zakame Interactive™.

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I’m quite unlucky today because I ran out of prepaid internet credits for my home machine but, ’tis just my luck that I’m in a net cafe to blog about this

Following madduck’s recent blog entry about Debian package management using GNU Arch/Bazaar, the irclog on the pkg-zope wiki, and Manoj’s packages, I began my own work on maintaining my own packages on Arch with GtkLP. It was rather easy to import my existing Debian package into my archive, but it also gave me an opportunity to change gtklp’s ./debian system from using debhelper to Manoj’s debian-dir and skeleton-make-rules mechanism, which according to him draw inspiration from CDBS. This caused me to review some stuff from the GNU Make Info so I can make my local.mk, remove some unnecessary files needed by debhelper, and fix a couple of bugs that should have been fixed earlier, had I not been so sloppy a developer :(.

What caused me to move my maintenance of gtklp over to Arch was the prism-merge technique. At first, I found it confusing, until I found the original article by Tom Lord in the Arch Wiki which clearly explained the technique. I adapted it to Manoj’s model of ’sloppy’, ‘upstream’, ‘feature’, and ‘devo’ branches as follows:

• Working on $(FEATURE)s:
  1. Using sloppy as my working branch, changes I make can easily be packed into a diff via tla what-changed -o ,changes;
  2. Then, upon inspecting ,changes I move it into the right $FEATURE directory, where it will be applied back again with tla redo ,changes, then do tla commit; and,
  3. Coming back to the sloppy directory, I do tla sync-tree $(cd $FEATURE && tla tree-version) to keep a record of the feature change in the sloppy branch.
  4. Repeat for every $FEATURE change I work on.
• Merging $(FEATURE)s to ‘devo’:
  1. First, I make sure ‘devo’ is as recent as upstream by invoking tla star-merge --three-way gtklp--upstream--1.0 in the ‘devo’ directory (checked out as gtklp-1.0rel+1.0f on my $GTKLP=~/tla/packages-debian/gtklp/);
  2. Then, for every $FEATURE, I merge it in ‘devo’ using tla replay --skip-present gtklp--$FEATURE--1.0, resolving any rejects via gnuclient (BTW, I have unrecognized \.rej$ in my {arch}/=tagging-method so I don’t accidentally commit borken code
  3. Once everything’s integrated, ’tis time to do a commit via tla commit!

Using this method, I can introduce a new upstream version to the archive simply by importing it to ‘upstream’ via tla\_load\_dirs (BTW the latest version of that already works with tla-1.3 given you update load-dirs-common also) and committing that, reversing previous changesets in $(FEATURE)s via tla replay --reverse, star-merge the new upstream to the $FEATURE directory, and (optionally) re-apply the previous changes using tla replay --skip-present $REVISION, depending on whether the original upstream has merged $FEATURE changes or not.

While things seem to be more complicated in prism-merge, I have the advantage of being able to build my package using arch-buildpackage, as well as being able to produce a $FEATURE changeset (that is version semi-independent) if I need to (not to mention being able to host my Arch archive on my own webserver as well).

Needless to say, I haven’t perfected this technique (in fact, during the last upstream tree-sync I got so confused I had to rm -rf $GTKLP); but, at least, I have a few package sources lying around here to try this out, so…

Unfortunately, I ran out of credits while doing tla archive-mirror zakame@spunge.org--debian. Waah!!!

Anyways, mad props to Manoj and to Madduck for all their work!

Edit: I’ve refined my method, forgoing with patch commits to ‘upstream’ and using tla what-changed instead of tla undo to copy changes instead of moving them.

‘Tis in the news!

Kaya lang, My NatSci I midterms is on September 10 in the morning!!! I’m gonna miss half of SFD!

But, on the bright side, I got my Ubuntu Hoary CDs today, and I think I’ll be bringing a few to PUP just in case Jerome doesn’t bring enough Hoary hedgehogs.

Yesterday, I was this | | close to working on a laptop. My tito was considering of getting a Toshiba Dynabook Satellite 2550S that one of his cousins was selling. He had me test the system, which I found to be terribly fast, considering it had only a Celeron-366, 64 MB of memory, and a 4 GB hard disk, with only Windows ME and Office (presumably all officially licenced) installed.

Unfortunately, for 25,000 pesos, the price was too steep. Pop wouldn’t hear of it, preferring 15k instead, since the seller told us that we needed to ‘convert’ the battery so it would become rechargeable (huh? more expense), as well as that we might have to upgrade the RAM and HD.

Thus, I had no recourse but to tell my uncle that even if the notebook was nice, he still needed to shell out extra for the upgrades, which, of course, would not sit well with him. Also, since this was a ‘chance’ bargain offered by his cousin, there really wasn’t any incentive for my uncle to buy the thing since no one else in his family would use it (three of his children are in Manila, finding no lack of computing, and all of them would probably use computers for games, which, would not be `ideal working’ for the laptop).

Oh well, that’s life here in Daet, it seems. If only I had the money to shell out, I would have bought the box myself; I think it is still an excellent machine to do work with, and given the increasing power rates, I might save some money as well. But, then again, if I had cash to burn, I’d get either an X40 or a customized Aviator AX7.

Now that would make an excellent birthday gift.

12 years seems like only yesterday, indeed.

Incidentally, the day before Debian’s big day was also the day Clair started using GNU/Linux. I myself will also be having my second year using Debian on the 21st.

Anyway, Happy Birthday again, and may Debian truly be the universal operating system!!!

Things I’m doing/did (in no particular order):

• Started my own emacs-wiki branch in GNU Arch, which can be found in my archive. I picked up tla a few days ago, and later I found myself getting Xtla for Emacs and integrating my recent note-anchor patches into my own branch. My next goal: get nested lists to work.
• Signified ITA to Debian ecb which was recently orphaned by Joerg Jaspert. Will be working on an update by next week, as I’m currently busy completing schoolwork.
• Finished my Natural Science I assignment today, and now yak shaving prior to completing my Philosophy 1 assignment. I should be submitting these before the 13th, as that will be the day I will be back in Manila for my second study session at UP Diliman. Even as the requirements become increasingly difficult for me to follow, distance education simply rocks! (Thanks to PlannerMode and the Hipster PDA
• Submitted my 2 talk abstracts for the upcoming LinuxWorld Philippines conference: an introduction to Emacs and a bit of document typesetting with LaTeX.

I think I still need to master this blogging thing…