Status update, October 2021
Leaves are falling, and so have been articles! Let’s see what other things have been achieved this month.
On writing
I am quite proud of myself. While between July and September 2021, no articles have been published. During this month, 3 of them went out! One can deduce that I have found some motivation for writing about my small experiments.
I still do not check how many readers I have. Maybe I should spend some time in setting back a GoAccess cron task to analyze the web server's logs.
I have a lot of other ideas, of course. But writing takes time. However it helps me to keep track of what I have learned over the months — as well as empty my mind to let room for other things to learn.
I am currently writing this status update in a sofa inside of a nice coffee shop. It helps to get out in order to change atmosphere and find motivation do finish something before going home. Maybe this is an habit to put in place: go to the coffee shop at least once every month in order to write other status updates!
Debian work
bcnc
I have spent a substantial amount of time in improving the Debian packaging of bCNC. Indeed, this work has been started March 2021 but has not been validated since. Thanks to the many reviews of Stefano, I have been able to push the following commits in the Salsa repository:
* b1d93bb introduce autopkgtests * acc95ce d/control: manually add missing depends * cd8c101 d/rules: keep .egg-info until dh_python3 for Depends * d596c51 d/copyright: explain license inference * e655334 d/upstream/metadata: add Registry for pypi * 2abdd7b d/bCNC: use exec and consider spaces in args * acf138a d/rules: do not install tests * fa1c7e8 d/README.debian: explain missing testing dep * 4b4cd93 new repack for embedding tests/ dir * e47fcd6 Update upstream source from tag 'upstream/0.9.14.317+ds2' |\ | * c5b0368 New upstream version 0.9.14.317+ds2 * | dc8dabd d/copyright: do not exclude unexisting svgelements * | 04354b3 d/README.debian: explain strange upstream release policy * | d7a90f5 d/copyright: do not exclude tests anymore * | 05fe01d d/copyright: mark code owned by Vasilis Vlachoudis * | 35f1a7a d/control: add missing pil.imagetk dep * | 7ce30ee move startup script outside of d/rules * | aa0a0ec introduce README.debian * | 2ac9741 install upstream README in docs
A lot of cleanup indeed. I think that the package is now in good shape for being sponsored into the NEW queue, where copyrights will be validated.
Bug reporting
While working on my Debian packages, I also found issues in other Debian packages. While I do not have the complete list in mind for this month's worth of bugs, it shows that reporting bugs is also an important way of contributing to the Debian ecosystem.
By using the bts block XXXXXX by YYYYYY, I was able to register the dependencies between my ITP (Intent To Package) bugs and the bugs I reported and that are currently blocking me from making progress. Some of them have been closed pretty fast, some others are still open.
Since the dependencies are stored in the bugs database, I can put these packages on hold and move on to do other things. I will get notified by email when the bugs are closed, and can check back on where I stopped.
See ya!