SprezzOS Weeklyish Oblations, Objections, and News (SWOON)

Volume I, Issue 3. 2013-02-15. Editor: Nick Black.

I. INTRODUCTORY RITES

“Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming: feedback is the treament.”

—Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained

A very frustrating week, in which little seemed to be accomplished. Things started off on a bad note when I nuked my primary machine; much of Sunday was spent reinstalling it, taking copious frustrated notes on the bugs I ran across in the installer and early system, cursing, stomping around the condo whilst smoking a great many cigarettes, and other endeavors unrelated to the closing of bugs and verification of their resolutions. This all started in an attempt to build working USB-based installation media, which I foolishly promised a user in G+'s Linux community I would have cooked up “in about two hours.” Alas, two hours later I was still pulling down new firmware for my LSI SAS9211 and cursing ASRock's atrocious UEFI half-implementation.

That said, I still hope to have USB installation media Real Soon Now.

We took aboard our second sprezzadev, the wise and thorough Leon P. Smith, after he made fun of my claims to be putting together a modern Haskell stack. Mr. Smith is a functional programming expert out of Cleveland's Case Western, which any programmer worth his salt can identify as the alma mater of one Donald Ervin Knuth. He is the author of the Control.Monad.Queue package, has published with the ACM and in the Monad.Reader, and maintains the Melding Monads blog. I've known him for close to a decade now, since the old LiveJournal days, and have the highest respect for his knowledge and engineering. Yay!

I am growing incredibly tired of the debian-installer and everything about it. I'd really like to overhaul the entire thing, but just can't justify wasting all that time on the craptastic, run-once-per-machine installer. Ugh, it eats tremendous amounts of my time, though, breaking in mysterious and varied ways that are often traced back to upstream details (fluctuations, almost) of which I'm ignorant. Once all of the possible base packages have been imported, adopted, and rebuilt, we can eliminate the Debian repositories from the installer's sources and this ought cease. I look forward eagerly to that day.

Κύριε, ἐλέησον.

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II. LITURGY OF THE WORD

No big changes or achievements this week, just a lot of grindwork. Sorry! Some weeks are better than others.

καὶ εἰς ἕνα Κύριον Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ τὸν Μονογενῆ.

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III. LITURGY OF THE EUCHARIST

No awesome realizations this week, only the dreadful fact that we're setting up installed machines with an incorrect /etc/apt/sources.list, one using wheezy repositories. This was taken down as bug 648, and this is the kind of soul-crushing crap that makes this effort unpleasant at times. One, there's about four different preseeding values which ought have affected this. Two, some of them seem to do what their documentation claims, some seem not to have any effect, and some have unexpected effects. Three, there's a Debian bug on this, and someone sent in a patch, and then an updated patch, and it's now just sitting there, and has been for about two years. wtf, Debian? Goddamnit! I've said it before, and I'll say it again: democracy simply does not work.

That's all I've got. Check the repository logs if you want to see the largely mindless version bumping and rebuilding that got done this week.

Mysterium fidei.

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IV. COMMUNION RITE

SprezzOS patches were accepted to the following upstream projects this week:

• debhelper — “Incomplete Depends lists due to deprecated find(1) usage”
  
  Joey Hess didn't bother to credit us in the changelog, but hey, that's not why we hunt down deprecated usages of find(1) in other people's accursed perl on our sunday mornings. We still love him.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.

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V. CONCLUDING RITE

• The most recent release of SprezzOS is 1.0.4 ("von Neumann").
• There are now 1558 source packages in SprezzOS.
• There are now 6956 binary packages in SprezzOS.
• There were 309 commits to SprezzOS repositories this week.
• There are now 2 registered Sprezzadevs.

Ite, missa est.

Rock over London, Rock over Atlanta
Wheaties: Breakfast of Champions.

Per ardua ad astra.