getting libleveldb1v5 fixed

Please treat this as a child’s fantasy till the information is not approved or corrected by a DD/DM who obviously have much more info and experience in dealing with below.

It had been quite a few years since I last played Minetest, a voxel-based game similar and yet different to its more famous brethren minecraft .

I wanted to install and play it but found that one of the libraries it needs is libleveldb1v5, a fast key-value storage library which according to #877773 has been marked as grave bug report because of no info. on the soname bump.

I saw that somebody had also reported it upstream and the bug has been fixed and has some more optimizations done to the library as well. From the description of the library it reminded me so much of sqlite which has almost the same feature-set (used by mozilla for bookmarks and pwd management if I’m not mistaken).

I was thinking as to if this has been fixed quite some back then why the maintainer didn’t put the fixed version on sid and then testing. I realized it might be because the new version has a soname bump which means it would need to be transitioned probably with proper breaks and everything.

A quick check via

$ apt-rdepends -r libleveldb1v5 | wc -l
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
195

revealed that almost 190 packages directly or indirectly will be affected by the transition change. I then tried to find where the VCS is located by doing –

$ apt-cache showsrc libleveldb1v5 | grep Vcs-Git
Vcs-Git: git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/leveldb.git
Vcs-Git: git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/leveldb.git

Then I cloned the repo to my system to see if the maintainer had done any recent changes and saw :-


b$ git log --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr)' --abbrev-commit | head -15
* 7465515 - (HEAD -> master, tag: debian/1.20-2, origin/master, origin/HEAD) Packaging cleanup (4 months ago)
* f85b876 - Remove libleveldb-dbg package and use the auto-generated one (4 months ago)
* acac71f - Update Standards-Version to 4.1.2 (4 months ago)
* e281654 - Update debhelper level to 11 (4 months ago)
* df015eb - Don't run self-test parallel (4 months ago)
* ba81cc9 - (tag: debian/1.20-1) Update debhelper level to 10 (7 months ago)
* cb84f26 - Update Standards-Version to 4.1.0 (7 months ago)
* be0ef22 - Convert markdown documentation to HTML (7 months ago)
* ab8faa7 - Start 1.20-1 changelog (7 months ago)
* 03641f7 - Updated version 1.20 from 'upstream/1.20' (7 months ago)
|\
| * 59c75ca - (tag: upstream/1.20, origin/upstream) New upstream version 1.20 (7 months ago)
* | a21bcbc - (tag: debian/1.19-2) Add the missing ReadMemoryBarrier and WriteMemoryBarrier functions for mips* (1 year, 5 months ago)
* | 70c6e38 - Add myself to debian/copyright (1 year, 5 months ago)
* | 1ba7231 - Update source URL (1 year, 5 months ago)


There is probably a much simpler way to get the same output but for now that would have to suffice.

Anyways, there are many variations of the code I used using git log --pretty and git log --decorate etc. Maybe one of those could give the same output, would need the time diff as shared above.

Trivia – I am usually more interested in commit messages and time when the commits are done and know a bit of git to find out the author of a particular commit even if abbreviated commit is there and want to thank her(im) for the work done on that package or a particular commit which address some annoying bug that I had. /Trivia

Although the best I have hankered for is to have some sort of visualization tool about projects that I like

something like Andrews plot or the C-Chart for visualization purposes but till date haven’t found anything which would render it into those visuals straightway. Maybe a feature for a future git version, who knows 🙂

I know that in itself is a Pandora’s box as some people might just like to have visualization of only when releases were made of an upstream project while there will be others like who would enjoy and be fascinated to see amount of time between each commit on a project. I have seen quite a few projects rise, wane and have a rise again but having such visualizations may possibly help out in getting people more involved with a project/library whatever.

All the commits for the said library are done by the maintainer Laszlo Boszormenyi so it seems that the maintainer is interested in maintaining it. At least all the last 10-12 messages going almost 1.5 years shows that he is/was active till at least 4 months back, which brings me to another one of my pet issues.

There aren’t any ways to figure out how recently a DD or DM committed on Debian somewhere. People usually try the MIA team (Missing in Action) and many a times you feel you are taking the team’s time especially when it turns out to be a false positive. If users had more tools than probably MIA’s workload would be much lesser than before.

The only the other way is to look at all the packages a particular DD/DM is maintaining and if you are lucky then s(he) has made a release of a package or something that you can look into and know for certain that the person is active.

The other longer way is to download all the VCS repositories of a DD/DM, cycle through all of them using something like above to see when was the last commit done on all her(is) repos. and then come to conclusion one way or the other. If s(he) is really MIA then tell them to MIA team so they can try to connect with the person concerned, and if s(he) doesn’t respond in a reasonable time-frame then orphan the packages.

If a DD/DM has not committed for more than a year or two for any of her(is) projects I guess it’s reasonable to expect that the person concerned is MIA.

Anyways, it would be nice if the present maintainer is able to get the new release out so the other 190 packages which are probably installable could also work. When I was churning this on my head, I thought why couldn’t the DD’s have some sort of CI infrastructure which may automate things a bit and make life somewhat easier.

I have seen the Debian travis ci instance but know that’s limited to upstream projects hosted on github.

For those who might not know Travis CI is one of many such solutions. They are continuous integration software and they are quite a few of them.

What they do is they try to build the project/application/library etc. after each and every commit taking into account any parameters told/programmed into it. There may be times when upstream make an incompatible change or make some mistake while committing, because it’s autobuilds the application or whatever automatically, if it fails to build it forces the developer to see where they messed up. At the end you have a slightly better application at the end as at least obvious bugs are ironed out.

I do remember reading about gitlab-ci somewhere, maybe in the thread where DD’s were discussing about various alternatives to alioth or somewhere else. I dunno if would be just a matter of turning it on or that part is still not open-sourced yet, no idea.

If that happens, it would probably save the DD’s/DM some computational time apart from being able to know if things are going well or not.

I know gitlab had shared (paraphrasing here) they may make some of the things more open-source if Debian were to adopt the product, now that Debian has, I and guess most of the community would be hoping as lot of hard work, tears have gone into getting things ported from alioth to salsa especially in the last one month or so.

I do know that we have the autobuilder network but from what I understand, it’s for a slightly different use-case. This is more to see if the package builds on all the 10-11 official architectures and maybe some of the unofficial architectures.

While I was reading it, I was unable to find if just like people all around the world are doing mirrors (full or partial depending on the resources they have and the kind of pickup they are seeing) can people be part of autobuilder network to give additional computational power to the network. The name does say ‘autobuilder network’ so maybe that possibility exists, maybe it does not.

I did consult the documentation on the topic and it seems it’s a bit of work, see the workflow shared in wiki for transitions.

After reading that, you really wonder the patience of the people who slog through all this.

I did try to connect with him on the bug mentioned but he hasn’t got back, perhaps he’s busy IRL.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?package=release.debian.org#_0_17_4

Till later.

Note – I have not talked about */debian/control or */debian/changelog.Debian, */debian/changelog or any of the files because once those are made, they are probably just need to be fiddled around a bit. The control file will probably list newer version of dependencies and may or may not have newer build dependencies. Changelog.Debian would document the changes the DD/DM had to do in order for the binary to be built successfully and in the archive and changelog will just document the time till where upstream’s work was taken.

Different strokes

Statutory warning – It’s a long read.

I start by sharing I regret, I did not hold onto the Budget and Economics 101 blog post for one more day. I had been holding/thinking on to it for almost couple of weeks before posting, if I had just waited a day more, I would have been able to share an Indian Express story . While I thought that the work for the budget starts around 3 months before the budget, I came to learn from that article that it takes 6 months. As can be seen in the article, it is somewhat of a wasted opportunity, part of it probably due to the Government (irrespective of any political party, dynasty etc.) mismanagement.

What has not been stated in the article is what I had shared earlier, reading between the lines, it seems that the Government isn’t able to trust what it hears from its advisers and man on the street. Unlike Chanakya and many wise people before him who are credited with advising about good governance, that a good king is one who goes out in disguise, learns how his/er subjects are surviving, seeing what ills them and taking or even not taking corrective steps after seeing the problem from various angles. Of course it’s easier said then done, though lot of Indian kings did try and ran successful provinces. There were also some who were more interested in gambling, women and threw/frittered away their kingdoms.

The 6-month things while not being said in the Express article is probably more about checking and re-checking figures and sources to make sure they are able to read whatever pattern the various Big Businesses, Industry, Social Welfare schemes and people are saying I guess. And unless mass digitalization as well as overhaul of procedures, Right to Information (RTI) happens, don’t see any improvement in the way the information is collected, interpreted and shared with the public at large.

It would also require people who are able to figure out how things work sharing the inferences (right or wrong) through various media so there is discussion about figures and policy-making. Such researchers and their findings are sadly missing in Indian public discourses and only found in glossy coffee table books :(.

One of the most basic question for instance is, How much of any policy should be based on facts and figures and how much giving fillip to products and services needed in short to medium term ?

Also how much morality should play a part in Public Policy ?

Surprisingly, or probably not, most Indian budgets are populist by nature with some scientific basis but most of the times there is no dialog about how the FM came to some conclusion or Policy-making. I am guessing a huge part of that has also to do with basic illiteracy as well as Economic and Financial Illiteracy.

Just to share a well-known world-over example, one of the policies where the Government of India has been somewhat lethargic is wired broadband penetration. As have shared umpteen times, while superficially broadband penetration is happening, most of the penetration is the unreliable and more expensive mobile broadband penetration.

While this may come as a shock to many of the users of technology, BSNL, a Government company who provides broadband for almost 70-80% of the ADSL wired broadband subscribers gives 50:1 contention ratio to its customers.

One can now understand the pathetic speeds along with very old copper wiring (20 odd years) on which the network is running. The idea/idiom of running network using duct-tape seems pretty apt in here 😦

Now, the Government couple of years ago introduced FFTH Fiber-to-the-home but because the charges are so high, it’s not going anywhere. The Government could say 10% discount in your Income Tax rates if you get FFTH. This would force people to get FFTH and would also force BSNL to clean up its act. It has been documented that a percentage increase in broadband equals a similar percentage rise in GDP.

Having higher speeds of broadband would mean better quality of streaming video as well as all sorts of remote teaching and sharing of ideas which will give a lot of fillip to all sorts of IT peripherals in short, medium and long-term as well. Not to mention, all the software that will be invented/coded to take benefit of all that speed.

Although, realistically speaking I am cynical that the Government would bring something like this 😦

Moving on –

Another interesting story which I had shared was a bit about World History

Now the Economist sort of confirmed how things are in Pakistan. What is and was interesting that the article is made by a politically left-leaning magazine which is for globalization, business among other things .

So, there seem to be only three options, either I and the magazine are correct or we both are reading it wrong.

The third and last option is that the United States realize that Pakistan can no longer be trusted as Pakistan is siding more and more with Chinese and Russians, hence the article. Atlhough it seems a somewhat far-fetched idea as I don’t see the magazine getting any brownie points with President Trump. Unless, ‘The Economist’ becomes more hawkish, more right-wingish due to the new establishment.

I can’t claim to have any major political understanding or expertise but it does seem that Pakistan is losing friends. Even UAE have been cautiously building bridges with us. Now how this will play out in the medium to long-term depends much on the personal equations of the two heads of state, happenings in geopolitics around the world and the two countries, decisions they take, it is a welcome opportunity as far they (the Saudis) have funds they want to invest and India can use those investments to make new infrastructure.

Now, I need a bit of help of Java and VCS (Version control system) experts . There is a small game project called Mars-Sim. I asked probably a few more questions than I should have and the result was that I was made a member of the game team even though I had shared with them that I’m a non-coder.

I think such a game is important as it’s foss. Both the game itself is foss as well as its build-tools with a basic wiki. Such a game would be useful not only to Debian but all free software distributions.

Journeying into the game

Unfortunately, the game as it is currently, doesn’t work with openjdk8 but private conversations with the devs. have shared they will work on getting it to work on OpenJDK 9 which though is sometime away.

Now as it is a game, I knew it would have multiple multimedia assets. It took me quite sometime to figure out where most of the multimedia assets are.

I was shocked to find that there aren’t any tool/s in Debian as well a GNU/Linux to know about types of content is there inside a directory and its sub-directories.

I framed it in a query and found a script as an answer . I renamed the script to file-extension-information.sh (for lack of imagination of better name).

After that, I downloaded a snapshot of the head of the project from https://sourceforge.net/p/mars-sim/code/HEAD/tree/ where it shows a link to download the snapshot.

https://sourceforge.net/code-snapshots/svn/m/ma/mars-sim/code/mars-sim-code-3847-trunk.zip

unzipped it and then ran the script on it –

[$] bash file-extension-information.sh mars-sim-code-3846-trunk
theme: 1770
dtd: 31915
py: 10815
project: 5627
JPG: 762476
fxml: 59490
vm: 876
dat: 15841044
java: 13052271
store: 1343
gitignore: 8
jpg: 3473416
md: 5156
lua: 57
gz: 1447
desktop: 281
wav: 83278
1: 2340
css: 323739
frag: 471
svg: 8948591
launch: 9404
index: 11520
iml: 27186
png: 3268773
json: 1217
ttf: 2861016
vert: 712
ogg: 12394801
prefs: 11541
properties: 186731
gradle: 611
classpath: 8538
pro: 687
groovy: 2711
form: 5780
txt: 50274
xml: 794365
js: 1465072
dll: 2268672
html: 1676452
gif: 38399
sum: 23040
(none): 1124
jsx: 32070

It gave me some idea of what sort of file were under the repository. I do wish the script defaulted to showing file-sizes in KB if not MB to better assess how the directory is made up but not a big loss .

The above listing told me that at the very least theme, JPG, dat, wav, png, ogg and lastly gif files.

For lack of better tools and to get an overview of where those multimedia assets used ncdu –

┌─[shirish@debian] - [~/games/mars-sim-code-3846-trunk] - [10210]
└─[$] ncdu mars-sim/

--- /home/shirish/games/mars-sim-code-3846-trunk/mars-sim --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
46.2 MiB [##########] /mars-sim-ui
15.2 MiB [### ] /mars-sim-mapdata
8.3 MiB [# ] /mars-sim-core
2.1 MiB [ ] /mars-sim-service
500.0 KiB [ ] /mars-sim-main
188.0 KiB [ ] /mars-sim-android
72.0 KiB [ ] /mars-sim-network
16.0 KiB [ ] pom.xml
12.0 KiB [ ] /.settings
4.0 KiB [ ] mars-sim.store
4.0 KiB [ ] mars-sim.iml
4.0 KiB [ ] .project


I found that all the media is distributed randomly and posted a ticket about it. As I’m not even a java newbie, could somebody look at mokun’s comment and help out please ?

On the same project, there has been talk of migrating to github.com

Now whatever little I know of git, it makes a copy of the whole repository under .git/ folder/directory so having multimedia assets under git is a bad, bad idea, as each multimedia binary format file would be unique and no possibility of diff. between two binary files even though they may be the same file with some addition or subtraction from earlier version.

I did file a question but am unhappy with the answers given. Can anybody give some definitive answers if they have been able to do how I am proposing , if yes, how did they go about it ?

And lastly –

America was founded by immigrants. Everybody knows the story about American Indians, the originals of the land were over-powered by the European settlers. So any claim, then and now that immigration did not help United States is just a lie.

This came due to a conversation on #debconf by andrewsh –

[18:37:06] I’d be more than happy myself to apply for an US tourist not transit visa when I really need it, as a transit visa isn’t really useful, is just as costly as a tourist visa, and nearly as difficult to get as a tourist visa
[18:37:40] I’m not entirely sure I wish to transit through the US in its Trumplandia incarnation either
[18:38:07] likely to be more difficult and unfun

FWIW I am in complete agreement with Andrew’s assessment of how it might be with foreigners. It has been on my mind and thoughts for quite some time although andrewsh put it eloquently.

But as always I’m getting ahead of myself.

The conversation is because debconf this year would be in Canada. For many a cheap flight, one of the likely layovers/stopover can be the United States.

I actually would have gone one step further, even if it was cheap transit visa, it would equally be unfun as it would discriminate.

About couple of years back, a friend of mine while explaining what “visa” is, put it rather succinctly –

the visa officer looks at only 3 things –

a. Your financial position – something which tells that you can take care of your financial needs if things go south –

b. You are not looking to settle there unlawfully

c. You are not a criminal.

While costs do matter, what is disturbing more is the form of extremism being displayed therein. While Indians from the South Asian continent in US have been largely successful, love to be in peace (one-off incidents do and will happen anywhere) if I had to take a transit or tourist visa in this atmosphere, it would leave a bad taste in the mouth.

When one of my best friends is a Muslim, 20% of the population in India is made of Muslims and 99% of the time both of us co-exist in peace I simply can’t take any alternative ideology. Even in Freakonomics 2.0 the authors when they shared that it’s less than 0.1 percent of Muslims who are engaged in terrorist activities, if they were even 1 percent than all the world’s armed forces couldn’t fight them and couldn’t keep anyone safe. Which simply means that 99.99% of even all Muslims are good.

This resonates strongly with me for number of reasons. One of my uncles in early to late 80’s had an opportunity for work to visit Russia for official work. He went there and there were Secret Police after him all the time. While he didn’t know it, I later read it, that it was SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) when all and any foreigners came visiting the country, and not just foreigners, they had spies for their own citizens. Russka a book I read several years ago explained the paranoia beautifully.

While U.S. in those days was a more welcoming place for him.

I am thankful as well as find it strange that Canada and States have such different visa procedures. While Canada would simply look at the above things, probably discreetly inquire about you if you have been a bad boy/girl in any way and then make a decision which is fine. For United States, even for a transit visa I probably would have to go to Interview where my world view would probably be in conflict with the current American world view.

Interestingly, while I was looking at conversations on the web and one thing that is missing there is that nobody has talked about intelligence community. What Mr. Trump is saying in not so many words is that our intelligence even with all the e-mails we monitor and everything we do, we still can’t catch you. It almost seems like giving a back-handed compliment to the extremists saying you do a better job than our intelligence community.

This doesn’t mean that States doesn’t have interesting things to give to the world, Star Trek conventions, Grand Canyon (which probably would require me more than a month or more to explore even a little part), NASA, Intel, AMD, SpaceX, CES (when it’s held) and LPC (Linux Plumber’s conference where whose who come to think of roadmap for GNU/Linux). What I wouldn’t give to be a fly in the wall when LPC, CES happens in the States.

What I actually found very interesting is that in the current Canadian Government, if what I read and heard is true, then Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada made 50 of his cabinet female. Just like in the article, studies even in Indian parliament have shown that when women are in power, questions about social justice, equality, common good get asked and policies made. If I do get the opportunity to be part of debconf, I would like to see, hear, watch, learn how the women cabinet is doing things. I am assuming that reporting and analysis standards of whatever decisions are more transparent and more people are engaged in the political process to know what their elected representatives are doing.

One another interesting point I came to know is that Canada is home to bicycling paths. While I stopped bicycling years ago 😦 as it has been becoming more and more dangerous to bicycle here in Pune as there is no demarcation for cyclists, I am sure lot of Canadians must be using this opportunity fully.

Lastly, on the debconf preparation stage, things have started becoming a bit more urgent and hectic. From a monthly IRC meet, it has now become a weekly meet. Both the wiki and the website are slowly taking up shape. http://deb.li/dc17kbp is a nice way to know/see progress of the activities happening .

One important decision that would be taken today is where people would stay during debconf. There are options between on-site and two places around the venue, one 1.9 km around, the other 5 km. mark. Each has its own good and bad points. It would be interesting to see which place gets selected and why.

Debutsav 2014 Experiences – Day 2

This will be the last post in series on Debutsav 2014 held at Amrita University and consequently will be biggish.

Git way -V

This will be a short update as the git repository for debutsav has moved from gitorious.org to Gitlab.com

The Git way -III

This is part three of the Git basics or Git way for people.

The Git way – II

This is part 2 of the git basics or the git way which should help us in the very least to make a repo. and start contributing.

The Git way

This will be 2-3 part series on using git to fork a repo, make changes and initiating merge requests to the main repository

Ideas for Debian Utsav

This post attempts to share some ideas of what could be done/achieved in Debian Utsav 2012.

Compilation and DVCS-3

This would be my last and perhaps the most where I would go wrong as dealing with git and I have the least technical experience/understanding of it while the philosophy is much simpler to understand or know intuitively.

Expectations and Reality

Hi all,
This post would try to capture few of the things I had thought I missed and some things which are surprising