Using ipcfg, now

Yesterday, I had some time to debug ipcfg some more. The main blocker for me to upload it to unstable was the fact that I could not get WPA security to work; therefore, I could not use it myself. In the interest of "eat your own dogfood", I did not feel that uploading some experimental code to Debian that I'm not using myself is a good idea.

That problem is now fixed, albeit through something of a hack, one that I hope will not be necessary forever: I decided to write a plugin to run ifupdown extension scripts (found in /etc/network/if-*.d). It does require some set-up, and there are still some severe issues; but as of now, I am using ipcfg rather than ifupdown on my laptop.

Those interested in trying it out can either wait for ftp-master to ack the upload and then install from unstable, or just fetch it from the git repository.

ACCEPTED

My mutt said this last night:

 894   + Jan 15 Archive Adminis (0,4K) ipcfg_0.1_amd64.changes ACCEPTED

This obviously means that if you wish to use it, you no longer need to go through git; you can just add experimental to sources.list and run 'apt-get install ipcfg'. A few notes, though:

• I missed a few build-dependencies, so it's only available on amd64 for now. Yes, I should use pbuilder more (I did for the 0.3 upload, which went in today).
• The documentation is somewhat lacking. I just found out that the documentation isn't actually installed in the binary package, so you have to download the source package (or check out the git repository). This will be fixed for the next release. The documentation also currently consists of a few .txt files rather than (a) proper man page(s). This will likely take some more time.
• ipcfg Conflicts:, Replaces: and Provides: ifupdown. This is because there is no proper virtual package name for it to conflict/replace/provide. I have filed a bug, #554194, against debian policy, to request it be made, but so far this is not yet finished (and indeed was somewhat dead during the period that I had no time to work on ipcfg). This may confuse some packages that really do depend on ifupdown.
• ifdown works, but not reliably so. This will be my next main point of focus.
• If you use the insserv automatic ordering system for initscripts, then you must either purge ifupdown or remove its initscript before installing ipcfg; otherwise, the availability of two initscripts that provide network configuration will confuse the hell out of insserv.

And in case you wonder why the hell I went from 0.1 to 0.3:

ipcfg (0.2) experimental; urgency=low

  * Rebuild without .git directory. D'oh.

 -- Wouter Verhelst   Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:43:09 +0100

srsly

Whoa.

Kim Clijsters, Belgium's number 1 female tennis player of the moment, just got booted out of the Australian Open by Nadia Petrova. Not what I'd expected—especially not with this kind of score; 6-0 6-1. To call this "unexpected" would be a severe understatement.

Seriously.

That leaves Belgium's hope with Justine Henin or Yanina Wickmayer. I say "or", because they'll next meet eachother in Melbourne. Sounds like an interesting match, indeed.

Going, obviously

If you thought otherwise, you're crazy, but just for reference:

This year I volunteered to organize the "distributions" devroom/track, because it seemed to be going nowhere, and the people who where supposed to do so were too busy with other stuff. I'm still not very fond of the idea of mixing all distributions in one room, but at least we managed to avoid complete and utter disaster wherein nearly no talks would have been submitted.

Let's see how it goes, now.

On MySQL and Oracle

I think Monty has well and truly lost it.

The European Commision, after careful consideration, has cleared Oracle's purchase of Sun:

The Commission's investigation showed that another open source database, PostgreSQL, is considered by many database users to be a credible alternative to MySQL and could be expected to replace to some extent the competitive force currently exerted by MySQL on the database market.

I'd go one step further, and would say that MySQL is not a credible alternative to PostgreSQL. But whatever. Hopefully, if MySQL fails, then PostgreSQL will (finally) get the attention that it deserves. I'll have a real database every time over this piece of... anyway.[1]

This is a fair argument, and to be sure it is certainly not a problem for anyone to migrate from MySQL to a MySQL fork, or (with some work) from MySQL to PostgreSQL. But Monty seems to disagree, and now tries to get Russia and China to block the merger.

What's next, Andorra?

[1] comments on this blog item in defense of MySQL will be vigorously moderated away. MySQL is a POS that falls over if data is corrupt, that corrupts its own data (most distributions call 'mysql_recover' in their initscript for a reason), and whose C API does not properly support cursors unless you want to block concurrent access until the cursor is closed (paragraph 3). Every time a customer asks me about MySQL, I vigorously recommend against it, because it's a bad idea.