01/05/2002-02/05/2002 @00:28:14 ^02:27:46

Let's write a big update about Woody!

Debian 3.0, codenamed Woody, was supposed to be released today. When I heard about this, back on Debian Weekly News's 10th April issue I thought "I'll believe that when I see it...", and, lo and behold, we have the 1st May issue which says it isn't being released just yet. But it is basically releasable. It's been basically stable for ages.

Why am I telling you this? Well, another case of my unerring sense of timing:-) I decided to do an apt-get dist-upgrade again. The download was last night, didn't take too long because I remove everything that I don't think is useful (e.g. emacs:-) ) This afternoon (unlike the last time I got this far) I actually let it install everything as well. So, I've (finally) upgraded my system to Woody.

You wouldn't notice too much of a difference. The odd difficulty.

• diald suddenly decided it wasn't disabled any more, and started creating big log files of failed connection attempts, so I had to disable it manually (exit 0 at the start of /etc/init.d/diald - yes, I still haven't tried to actually set it up properly...)
• The default configurations of mutt and slrn have changed their respective programs default colours slightly. I'll have to get used to them, or reconfigure them. Mutt in particular has made some very weird comment-outs and changes in /etc/Muttrc.

But everything else works. Some stuff slightly better.

• fetchmail "fits in" a lot better. I mean, it's got a boot-time startup script to run it as daemon, and proper ppp connection up/down scripts (well, an up script, the author doesn't think connection down scripts are necessary, but I do:-) ) What can I say? It simply feels like it is integrated into the packaging system much more neatly.
• The old problem with slrn_getdescs being run at the wrong time (i.e. just after bootup in an anacron job, and in particular when the connection wasn't up) has been fixed, again very neatly; /etc/default/slrn gets sourced from various places and it says whether or not you run getdescs via cron or via the ppp connection coming up.
• The problem with anacron and apm that I described on 4/4/2002 was fixed in much the same way I fixed it manually, although of course it fits into the packaging system much more nicely than a "local hack" (anacron puts a script into apm's directory of event handler scripts, /etc/apm/event.d/)

So, we conclude, it's all good. Have to say, HUGE MASSIVE BIGUP and stuff to everyone involved in the project. Debian rules. (he writes, for the benefit of the Sucks-Rules-O-Meter or more precisely the Linux distributions version - oh, what the hell, Linux rules as well, just for the benefit of the first one - they don't search for RISC OS, so there's no point in writing RISC OS rules as well, but it does:-) )

#warwick stuff, last week; lack of it, this week

I've been avoiding IRC recently because, like I wrote in the last update, it wastes so much time. You stare at the xchat window and type into it. Repeat until you realise what the time is, and you haven't updated your site or written your diary or are any way ready to go to sleep or anything.

However before the relevant log gets rotated away(*) I'd like to post these following quotes, from a friend who was pretending to be me at the time: (guess who!)

• "i let sarah **** me around cos i'm too crap with women to do anything else"
• "oh right so it's funny is it? why is it [everyone's] always laughing at me"
• "just because i can't go out and get a job"
• "some days everything goes really well and i fix my perl bug and i play my doom but some days i just worry and don't do anything about that worrying"
• "i'm no one everyone always talks to bex so go and talk to her or something that's probably because she's out having a life or something"
• "yeah i ****ing am [too wrapped up in my own little world to care about anyone else] now **** off stop talking about me i like to pretend to hate attention so that when i get some i don't have to convince myself i begged for it"

Good, eh? I'll probably get into loads of trouble for posting that but we were all only pretending. I think it's funny, but like I said, there's many a true word spoken in jest...

There's no reason for bleeping out certain words either, other than two and a half months without its use up to now; but thinking about it I realise the tracklist invalidates that claim... Oh well. Speaking of the tracklist why didn't anyone tell me one of the InfoTexts had a small t in the middle?!? It looked so ugly!! Aargh!! Fixed now though:-)

(*)Yes, I should probably say this out loud, I log my IRC sessions. It's so I can refer back to the conversation later, it helps me when I'm writing my real diary. I don't keep them for long, in fact I've gone so far as to write a little script to rotate them... xchat loads all perl scripts in its config directory on startup, so you have this thing that runs a program called savelog that you find on Debian systems. If you use Debian, and xchat, and/or would like to see it, tell me:-) If, on the other hand, you think it's really sinister, tell me that as well;-)