DIN bestreitet Verfahrensmängel bei der Abstimmung zu OOXML mit 7 zu 13 Stimmen

Wie vor wenigen Tagen veröffentlicht, hat das Lenkungsgremium des DIN-Normenausschusses Informationstechnik und Anwendungen (NIA) entschieden, dass bei der Abstimmung zum OOXML-Schrott “nach formalen Kriterien der Prozessablauf in der ISO nach Meinung des Lenkungsgremiums” nicht “fehlerhaft gewesen sei”.

Bei gerade einmal 7(!) von insgesamt 20 Stimmen, die dafür stimmten (6 stimmten explizit dagegen und eine Ja-Stimme holte man sich auch noch vom hauptamtlichen Mitarbeiter des DIN), bleibt mir nur zu sagen: Wohl kaum, liebes DIN! Mit diesem Ergebnis dann auch noch von einer “falschen und irreführenden” Berichterstattung bei den objektiven Berichterstattern zu sprechen, ist einfach nur unverschämt. Wenn gerade einmal 1/3 der Stimmberechtigten votieren, dass ein Verfahren keine Verfahrensmängel hatte und das als Beweis dieser These herangezogen wird, dann spreche ich von einer falschen und irreführenden Berichterstattung bei der DIN.

“Einschüchterung” hier und “Gelassenheit” da

Gestern hat das Bundesverfassungsgericht per Eilentscheidung die Vorratsdatenspeicherung zunächst einmal eingeschränkt. Dabei bescheinigten die Richter dieser Maßnahme einen:

erheblichen Einschüchterungseffekt.

Der stellvertrendende Regierungssprecher Thomas Steg sagte dazu:

Im Kabinett jedenfalls ist die Entscheidung nicht lange diskutiert worden und sie ist mit großer Gelassenheit zur Kenntnis genommen worden.

Wie bitte? Mir ist nicht ganz klar, wie sich die Einschüchterung der Bevölkerung mit der freiheitlich demokratischen Grundordnung vereinbaren lässt. Ist diese Regierung an letzterem nicht sonderlich interessiert? Hätte man sonst die Aussage der roten Roben mit großer Gelassenheit zur Kenntnis genommen?

Es bleibt nur zu hoffen, dass das Bundesverfassungsgericht die Zugriffsmöglichkeiten und die Speicherfristen in seiner endgültigen Entscheidung weiter beschränken wird. Nach bisherigem Vernehmen wird das Gesetz selber wohl nicht gekippt werden (AFAIK und IANAL).

Diploma exams are calling: Please read if you want to NMU my packages

Because my diploma exams are getting nearer, I have to reduce my contribution to the Debian project for the next two months (up to mid/end of May). There is fortunately currently not much to do for me and also no need to NMU my packages. But please read the following notes, if you (still) think there is a reason for a NMU:

GCC 4.3 transition

Done. All related packages have been fixed. My sponsor just needs to upload psicode to fix the last outstanding bug.

PS: Also the build-twice-in-a-row release goal will be reached by the upload of the apbs update by my sponsor.

gfortran transition

Almost done. mpqc already reached the buildds. ghemical has been uploaded, but waits for mopac7 and libghemical, which are in NEW because of the new library names.

apbs and psicode already have been transitioned.

Other bugs

Ok, I've closed almost all relevant bugs in my packages. There are a few outstanding bugs that should be examined for Lenny and can be fixed in NMUs - preferable via delayed NMU queue and an information to the debichem group:

#420795: chemical-mime-data: Unknown media type in type ‘chemical/x-*’

Upstream bug tracker for shared-mime-info contains some more information, how to deal with this. Patches/ideas welcome.

#438694: gabedit: Crashes when loading any XYZ format file

Looks tricky. Maybe an OpenGL issue related to some video card drivers. Not sure.

#442223: openbabel: some connect information lost when convert from pdb to txyz

Nothing examined yet to solve this bug.

#464867: extrema: conflicts with psi3 package

Hope, my team will cover this asap.

#465723: mopac7 — please do not use g2c.

There is currently a workaround using f2c to solve this bug. But MOPAC7 has been written in FORTRAN and we can use gfortran and drop f2c completely. See the report for more information. This is something I would like to see in Lenny.

For the xmlto package it was planned to add the dblatex toolchain for PDF/PS/DVI creation because passivetex will very probably never have a comeback in Debian and docbook-xsl/fop is not fully main and cannot create DVI output. In the case you want to help, feel free to add this feature by NMU to experimental (maybe with version 0.0.21~dblatexX.Y). A first patch is available in bug report #416622.

New upstream releases

It is possible that there will be a new upstream release for docbook-xsl in the near future. DO NOT consider uploading it by NMU if you did not test it! This upcoming release ships manpage stylesheets, that have been rewritten in large parts. So regressions can be expected. Fortunately Michael Smith and me agreed, that we should test it carefully, before the release is done. Unfortunately I will not have the time to do it. So if you consider uploading it, please get in contact with Michael (xmldoc) and offer your help testing it. He added (and I hope, many Debian packagers and packaging groups will like that) some kind of regressions tests. These tests build the manpages from several Debian packages: e.g. samba, apt, aptitude, git, fglrx and some more. There are further some new supported features, that should be added to the manpage example shipped with the Debian package. I also planned to split the source package (atm, docbook-xsl and docbook-xsl-doc tarballs are merged together for Debian) as soon as docbook-xsl-ns is packaged - which I wanted to do with the next upstream release. So consider all of the above notes if you plan an NMU to upload a new upstream release and in question, mail me and wait for my answer (which will need some days).

In all other cases, new upstream releases should be easier to handle.

ITPs

All my ITPs are delayed. However if you plan to still upload one of these packages, you should consider the following notes:

docbook-xsl-ns

See the above note about docbook-xsl and the source package split.

html-xml-utils

Already in a good shape, but I sent upstream some patches to improve the manpages. Version 4.6 of the html-xml-utils should contain these patches and this version should be uploaded into Debian. With this version, Bert Bos will probably also decide, which prefix will be used for the binaries (they have very generic names atm; the prefix will probably be hx- or hxu-). Waiting for this releaes therefor is IMHO a good choice.

DocBook 5

I already found a problem that need to be addressed in the package: Where to install its catalog? You will see, that there is already a catalog file in /usr/share/xml/docbook/schema/dtd/ shipped by the docbook-xml. Now I'm not sure, what to do here. Upstream ships one catalog file for all supported schemas (RNG, DTD, W3C schema and schematron), so maybe the catalog file can go into /usr/share/xml/docbook/schema/. Really not sure atm. The answer to this question might affect the Debian XML policy and should be made carefully.

QA work/fixes

Several lintian warnings have already been fixed in the SVN repositories used for my packages but have not yet been uploaded.

I really only plan to reduce my work during the preparation and the exams. So whatever you do, please try to make it easy for me to continue my packaging work after the exams :)

Packages removed from the debian.wgdd.de repository

Several packages have been removed from the archive:

CDK

The »Chemistry Development Kit« (CDK) now has been officially packaged and uploaded by Michael Koch. If you still have my packages installed, first uninstall/purge libcdk-java-doc, cdk und libcdk-java-dirbrowser (completely) and then install the current version of libcdk-java. Scripts found in cdk will probably be added to the Debian distribution soon.

Jchempaint

Jchempaint has been merged into CDK some time ago and there are plans to build/package it for Debian. My packages were just outdated. Please expect updated packages from the Debian mirror next to you :)

Jmol

Ditto. We are working on an official Debian package. I'm not planning nor working on an official Debian package. But there is an ITP (#512930) for it.

MOLDEN

This package was outdated. The current release is version 4.6. The packaging files have been moved to the debichem groups SVN. You can build the package yourself by using svn-buildpackage. Just download the MOLDEN source and the packaging files. Then set the configuration option svn-override=buildArea for svn-buildpackage to the place where the upstream tarball resists (create the symlink molden_4.6.orig.tar.gz -> molden4.6.tar.gz) and run svn-buildpackage with your preferred options.

We are currently not allowed to distribute MOLDEN binaries or its source with the Debian distribution. But we are in contact with upstream.

clamassassin

There is an official clamassassin Debian package for some time now. However, the package only ships the clamssassin script, but not clamdassassin.

pbuilder and SUN Java

pbuilder with default settings will fail to build a package depending on sun-java5 or sun-java6, because the license needs to be accepted first.

Now some time ago I saw a patch for pbuilder itself to “fix” this, but for the time beeing I used to set DEBIAN_FRONTEND to readline in my pbuilderrc. But today Michael Koch came up with much better suggestions: Preset the debconf value in the CHROOT and save it.

It's pretty easy:

$ sudo pbuilder login --save-after-login
# echo "sun-java5-jdk shared/accepted-sun-dlj-v1-1 boolean true" | debconf-set-selections
# echo "sun-java6-jdk shared/accepted-sun-dlj-v1-1 boolean true" | debconf-set-selections
# exit

and voila, problem solved. Thanks to Michael for the tip.

Update

Manual Prinz suggested a slightly different way, that realizes the same debconf setting, but with hooks.

bluefish-unstable packages ready for testing

I promised it some time ago and now it has been done: Debian packages for the development tree (1.1 series) of Bluefish are ready for Debian users and called bluefish-unstable. The packages can be installed along with the stable version, so you can safely test new features and give us feedback and bug reports.

NOTE

The packages cannot be (re)built on Etch, because debhelper version 5.0.57 or higher is necessary. I will fix this part of debian/rules soon, so it can be (re)built on Etch too.

docbook-defguide - solving performance and timing issues with native code

Some days ago I wrote down my experiences with packaging docbook-defguide. The main (remaining) issues I mentioned were the resources and the time the package needs to build. Even on an AMD X2 4600+ with 6GB of RAM it needs 7-8 hours.

Today I met with Torsten Werner. He mentioned, that there are some move JVMs I could try. So I tested alternatives to GIJ this night. I found this short summary about free JVMs, which was some kind of interesting.

I began with cacao, which seemed to be fast, but it was killed very early in the build process with an java.lang.OutOfMemory error. Even playing around with the -Xms and -Xmx switches in buildtools/saxon.sh did not help. So I dropped cacao from the list. Seems both cacao and kaffe create similar problems here and are not suitable for building the package.

Second alternative I tried was sablevm. It directly throw out some warnings or errors so I directly dropped it too.

Next JVM was jamvm. But it was as slow as GIJ. So I dropped it from the list of alternatives too.

Then I found an interesting statement in the article I linked somewhere above. The author said, that his perfomance test time with GCJ/GIJ reduced from 433 to 9 seconds, when he compiled his application into a native executable. So I took a fast look through the docbook-defguide build dependencies and found, that Debian already provides a natively compiled Xerces package libxerces2-java-gcj. But there were no packages for libsaxon-java, libxml-commons-resolver1.1-java and docbook-xsl-saxon. So short and dirty: I downloaded the source for these packages, added the necessary stuff to get natively compiled packages too, built and installed them. Fortunately packages with native code already exist for their dependencies JAXP 1.3 and Xerces.

And what should I say: Now building the TDG needs less then 512MB RAM and it builds in around an hour ... even on my system. I will ask the Debian Java maintainers to add -gcj packages for Saxon and XML-Commons and fix my own docbook-xsl-saxon package. This will hopefully help maintaining docbook-defguide.