Recent content in Debian on Myon's Blog
Debian is running a “ vcswatch ”
service that keeps track of the status of all packaging repositories that have a
 Vcs-Git 
(and other VCSes) header set and shows which repos might need a package upload to push pending changes out. 
 Naturally, this is a lot of data and the scratch partition on qa.debian.org
had to be expanded several times, up to 300 GB in the last…
Back in 2015, when PostgreSQL 9.5 alpha 1 was released, I had posted the
 PostgreSQL data from Debian’s popularity contest . 
 8 years and 8 PostgreSQL releases later, the graph now looks like this: 
 
 Currently, the most popular PostgreSQL on Debian systems is still PostgreSQL 13 (shipped in Bullseye), followed by PostgreSQL 11 (Buster). At the time of…
pg_dirtyread 
 Earlier this week, I updated pg_dirtyread 
to work with PostgreSQL 14 .
pg_dirtyread is a PostgreSQL extension that allows reading “dead” rows from
tables, i.e. rows that have already been deleted, or updated. Of course that
works only if the table has not been cleaned-up yet by a VACUUM command or
autovacuum, which is PostgreSQL’s garbage…
The apt.postgresql.org repository has been extended
to cover the arm64 architecture. 
 We had occasionally received user request to add “arm” in the past, but it was
never really clear which kind of “arm” made sense to target for PostgreSQL. In
terms of Debian architectures, there’s (at least) armel, armhf, and arm64.
Furthermore, Raspberry Pis are…
Users had often asked where they could find older versions of packages from
 apt.postgresql.org . I had been
collecting these since about April 2013, and in July 2016, I made the packages
available via an ad-hoc URL on the repository master host, called “the morgue”.
There was little repository structure, all files belonging to a source package
were stuffed into a…
paste is one of those tools nobody uses [1]. It puts two file side by side,
line by line. 
 One application for this came up today where some tool was called for several
files at once and would spit out one line by file, but unfortunately not
including the filename. 
 $ paste <(ls *.rpm) <(ls *.rpm | xargs -r rpm -q --queryformat '%{name} \n' -p)
 
 [1] See…
After quite some time (years actually) of inactivity as
 Debian Account Manager ,
I finally decided to give back that Debian hat.
 I’m stepping down as DAM .
I will still be around for the occasional comment from the peanut gallery, or
to provide input if anyone actually cares to ask me about the old times. 
 Thanks for the fish!
Now that Salsa is in
 beta ,
it’s time to import projects (= GitLab speak for “repository”). This is
probably best done automated. Head to
 Access Tokens 
and generate a token with “api” scope, which you can then use with curl: 
 
$ cat salsa-import
#!/bin/sh

set -eux

PROJECT='${1%.git}'
DESCRIPTION='$PROJECT…
About a week ago, I extended
 vcswatch 
to also look at tags in git repositories. 
 Previously, it was solely paying attention to the version number in the top
paragraph in debian/changelog, and would alert if that version didn’t match the
package version in Debian unstable or experimental. The idea is that “UNRELEASED” 
versions will keep nagging the…
I knew it was about this time of the year 10 years ago when my Debian account
was created, but I couldn’t remember the exact date until I looked it up
earlier this evening: today :). Rene Engelhard had been my advocate, and Marc
Brockschmidt my AM. Thanks guys! 
 A lot of time has passed since then, and I’ve worked in various parts of the
project. I became an…
Today saw the release of PostgreSQL 9.5 Alpha 1. Packages for all supported
Debian and Ubuntu releases are available on apt.postgresql.org : 
 
deb http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/ YOUR_RELEASE_HERE -pgdg main 9.5
 
 The package is also waiting in NEW to be accepted for Debian experimental. 
 Being curious which PostgreSQL releases have been in use over time, I…
At this year’s FOSDEM I gave a talk in the PostgreSQL devroom
about 
Large Scale Quality Assurance in the PostgreSQL Ecosystem .
The talk included a graph about the growth of the
 apt.postgresql.org 
repository that I want to share here as well: 
 
 The yellow line at the very bottom is the number of different source package
names, currently 71. From that, a…
Following Enrico’s
 terminal-emulators 
comparison, I wanted to implement “start a new terminal tab in my current
working directory” for rxvt-unicode aka urxvt. As Enrico notes, this
functionality is something between “rather fragile” and non-existing, so I went
to implement it myself. Martin Pohlack had the
 
right hint , so here’s…
On RedHat/CentOS/rpm systems, there’s no dpkg –compare-versions 
available - sort -V can help to compare version numbers: 
 version_lt () {
 newest=$( ( echo "$1"; echo "$2" ) | sort -V | tail -n1)
 [ "$1" != "$newest" ]
}

$ version_lt 1.5 1.1 && echo yes
$ version_lt 1.5 1.10 && echo yes
yes

Yesterday saw the first beta release of the new PostgreSQL version 9.4. Along
with the sources, we uploaded binary packages to Debian experimental and
apt.postgresql.org, so there’s now packages ready to be tested on Debian
wheezy, squeeze, testing/unstable, and Ubuntu trusty, saucy, precise, and
lucid. 
 If you are using one of the release distributions of Debian or…
Over the past few weeks, new distributions have been added on
 apt.postgresql.org :
Ubuntu 13.10 codenamed “saucy” and the upcoming Ubuntu LTS release 14.04
codenamed “trusty”. 
 Adding non-LTS releases for the benefit of developers using PostgreSQL on their
notebooks and desktop machines has been a frequently requested item since we
created the…
More and more packages are getting
 autopkgtest aka
 DEP-8 testsuites these days.
Thanks to Antonio Terceiro, there is ci.debian.net" 
running the tests. 
 Last weekend, I’ve added a “CI” column on DDPO 
that shows the current test results for your packages. Enjoy, and add tests to your packages!
My ASUS Transformer TF101 had suddenly started flickering in all sorts of funny
colors some weeks ago. As tapping it gently on the table in the right angle made
the problem go away temporarily, it was clear the problem was about a loose
cable, or some other hardware connection issue. 
 As I needed to go on a business trip the other day, I didn’t look up the
warranty…
If you are upgrading your HP/Compaq 6715b to Debian Jessie, and suddenly Wifi
stops working because the PCI device is gone, install the “rfkill” package: 
 
# lspci | tail -2
02:04.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 02)
10:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM5787M Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev…
Following an idea by Ansgar Burchardt, I’ve done some digging on version numbers in Debian: 
 
Most common version numbers:
 
projectb=> select version::text, count(*) from source group by 1 order by 2 desc;
 version | count 
------------+-------
 4:4.10.5-1 | 131
 1.0-1 | 120
 1.0.0-1 | 95
 1.1-1 | 95
 1.0.1-1 | 93
 1.2-1 | 88
 1.0-2 |…