On compromise, and updated packages
MJ Ray is still unclear on the concept of compromise. The important issue being discussed is not if sarge should be released now or next year, but if the new interpretations of the SC are acceptable or not. This is why the only relevant options on the last ballot were "reaffirm the changes" and "rescind the changes": the others are only different shades of the first, which in the end would still reaffirm the new, clarified social contract.
Another usually forgotten point is that pragmatism is hard to reconcile with matters of principle: people usually do not compromise on moral issues.
I'm happy to see that people like Matthew Garrett and Florian Weimer started posting something sensible to debian-legal and asking the right kind of questions. I hope others will follow.
In the last two days, I uploaded a few new packages:
- whois: I reviewed most domains and added a few new servers for countries most people have never heard of. As usual, for many domains my data is more up-to-date than the official records in the IANA ccTLD pages. I'm proud of the my research ability, but the code is ugly and after years of organic growth badly needs to be rewritten.
- tin: I packaged the new release.
- speedtouch: ditto.
- inn: I fixed a few bugs, among them a FTBFS exposed by the new gcc 3.4. Maintaining a code base which was orphaned eight years ago is fun.
- libberkeleydb-perl: recompiled against libdb4.2.
- udev: I packaged the new release and fixed a few bugs. The next upload will probably have better handling of the /dev/cdrom and /dev/dvd symlinks.
- ppp: after checking out a new CVS snapshot which fixed a few bugs, I fixed some others myself. Looks like it's again time to push some patches upstream. In hindsight, I should probably have accepted the offer of commit privileges.
I had no time yet to work on the USB coldplugging code in hotplug, but I have a few good ideas and have just bought a 9.90€ ADSL modem to test them.