What's new?
I have not been blogging for a while. The reason is that in the last two months I have not worked much on my packages (which were already in good shape for the release) and instead I have spent most of my time on IP networking and some personal projects.
The most important is my reimplementation of the useful parts of IRRToolSet. IRRToolSet is a very large and very old program which is used to generate routers configurations by processing abstract information stored in the Internet Routing Registries (better known to the public as whois servers). The main issue with it is that being a very large and very old C++ program it has suffered from bit-rot and when built on modern Linux systems it tends to segfault or just silently drop some output, which is very bad news if you use it to decide which traffic you want to send to other networks.
Considering that I hate C++ and that trying to fix this code would be insane anyway, I took the approach of reimplementing in perl the pieces which people actually use, using the Template Toolkit to generate the output and YAML to store the local configuration data. So far it appears to be working well, so I will probably release it next month after some polishing.
My other current activity is playing with the FOX board, a tiny computer based on a CRIS single chip solution from AXIS. It's a very interesting platform which I hope will lead to some electronic hacking (I have not soldered in years now...), but the official toolchain is very bad so my first goal is to make busybox, the uClibc and buildroot fully work on the CRIS architecture.
On the Debian front I do not plan to make new uploads soon, except for udev and hotplug-ng when the next upstream versions will be released. (So let me know if you urgently need fixes for some of the small bugs currently opened on my packages.)