mawk(1) , gawk(1) and package control files (questions)
I have debianized mawk(1), a pattern scanning and text processing
language (it's awk, really). I will upload it as soon as I get ELF
installed. For now, I have a few questions on this my first
debianization effort.
o Why is gawk a required package? And is there any reason why gawk
forcibly installs awk to be a symbolic link to awk? Maybe because my
mawk package hasn't been released yet :) Could gawk | mawk be set up
for the Required priority?
o I'm not clear on the provides virtual package as it would apply to
'awk'. Should gawk provide 'awk'? Should mawk provide 'awk'?
Since clearly awk should be a symbolic link to gawk or mawk but not
both, is there a conflict here? Or should the conflict be resolved
by the {post,pre}{inst,rm} scripts (this seems best to me as most
people would have both installed side by side)? Maybe my mawk package
should Recommends or Suggests gawk?
o It occurs to me that many packages should Recommends or Suggests
man and/or info. Yet they don't. Why? What am I missing? And most
packages depend on ldso. So are essential packages too basic to be
listed in the control files? Is it possible that this lack of
consistency in setting dependencies could affect us much like the
current libc, libc4 and libc5 (which as required packages under Debian
0.93R6 weren't mentioned in the depends fields of any packages).
Thanks for Debian. I'm thoroughly enjoying it! I just wish I could
easily order a CD :(
--
Christopher J. Fearnley|UNIX SIG Leader at PACS
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (finger me!)|(Philadelphia Area Computer Society)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] |Design Science Revolutionary
http://www.netaxs.com/~cjf |Explorer in Universe
Dare to be Naive -- Bucky Fuller |Linux Advocate
Re: Bug#1870: /usr/bin/perl: cannot execute binary file
J.H.M.Dassen spoke unto the world and said: Darren, can you please release an a.out perl that uses dynamic loading? I'm having a couple of not-quites on perl including a broken SDBM. Did you get that to work for you? Should I release one that mostly works or fix everything up first? (BTW, this is slow due to me catching up on stuff from my hospital stay.) Darren [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.daft.com/~torin/[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Darren Stalder/2608 Second Ave, @282/Seattle, WA 98121-1212/USA/+1-800-921-4996 @ Do you have your clothes on? I probably don't. Take yours off. Feel better. @ @ Sysadmin, webweaver, postmaster for hire. C and Perl programmer and tutor. @
Bug#1877: at/batch do not mail output with sendmail installed
Package: at Version: 2.9a-1 The commands at and batch do not mail their output if sendmail is installed as MTA instead of smail. This is because atrun uses /usr/sbin/rmail (from smail) for sending mail. I think this should be changed to /usr/bin/mail, or whatever cron uses (cron works with sendmail). Harald Schueler Universitaet EssenTel +49-201-1832456 Fachbereich 7 Fax +49-201-1832120 45117 Essen Email [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: mawk(1) , gawk(1) and package control files (questions)
The following are my best guesses at answers. If I guess wrong,
someone with better information will correct me.
Chris Fearnley [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
[...] I have a few questions on this my first
debianization effort.
o Why is gawk a required package? And is there any reason why gawk
forcibly installs awk to be a symbolic link to awk? [...]
I'm not sure. The FSSTND doesn't require awk, none of the base
system packages seem to need it in order to install, dpkg and dselect
don't seem to need it.
It may be that Required indicates facilities expected to be present
in a traditional unix environment. I'm just guessing about that,
though. I don't offhand recall the exact definition of the PRIORITY
field in package control files, and haven't been able to find that
documented anyplace in a brief search for that info this morning.
o I'm not clear on the provides virtual package as it would apply to
'awk'. Should gawk provide 'awk'? Should mawk provide 'awk'?
Since clearly awk should be a symbolic link to gawk or mawk but not
both, is there a conflict here? Or should the conflict be resolved
by the {post,pre}{inst,rm} scripts (this seems best to me as most
people would have both installed side by side)? Maybe my mawk package
should Recommends or Suggests gawk?
Yes, both gawk and mawk could provide awk (presuming that mawk is
100.00% backwards compatable with standard awk). Other packages
could then have a dependency on awk satisfied by either of the
packages which provided it being installed.
This sounds like a situation which might be resolved with Ian Jackson's
update-alternatives script, which is part of the dpkg package. I don't
think there's any documentation on it, though. It'd allow gawk and
mawk to both be installed, would and link one or the other to awk depending
on relative priorities agreed to between the gawk and mawk
maintainers. Some (perhaps all, by now. perhaps not) of the vi clones
use it. Elvis uses it, for one. Look in the pre* and post* scripts
in the elvis package for an example of usage, or read the script itself
for info. In the meantime, or as an alternative to update-alternatives,
the mawk package might just provide mawk, without making the symlink to awk.
If my guess above about PRIORITY: Required is correct, I don't
think mawk vs. awk can presently be resolved by updates-alternatives
to the point where they are true alternatives. At least one of
them would need to be PRIORITY: Required in order to provide the
awk facility. I don't think dselect knows about alternative Required
packages to the point that it can install any of the alternatives to
satisfy a requirement. The awk facility would be what is actually
required here, but the PRIORITY field is associated with particular
packages, not with the facilities which they provide.
o It occurs to me that many packages should Recommends or Suggests
man and/or info. Yet they don't. Why? What am I missing? And most
packages depend on ldso. So are essential packages too basic to be
listed in the control files? Is it possible that this lack of
consistency in setting dependencies could affect us much like the
current libc, libc4 and libc5 (which as required packages under Debian
0.93R6 weren't mentioned in the depends fields of any packages).
True. Packages install their man pages regardless of whether
/usr/bin/man is installed. Ditto with info pages and /usr/bin/info.
Also, some facilities provided by base system packages are necessary
for installation of (some or all) packages, but no dependency is
declared on the packages which provide those facilities.
Generally, packages presume that the base system packages will be
present without declaring explicit dependencies (though I don't
think it's documented precisely what the base system is guaranteed
to provide), only declare dependencies on other packages which are
needed for their proper installation and operation, and omit declaring
dependencies on packages needed to display their docs.
Thanks for Debian. I'm thoroughly enjoying it! I just wish I could
easily order a CD :(
Eventually..
Bug#1878: bind doesn't purge named.boot
Package: bind Version: 4.9.3-BETA24-1 The postrm script doesn't remove the named.boot file when you run dpkg --purge on the package. -- Richard Kettlewell [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.elmail.co.uk/staff/richard/
Bug#1879: Emacs shell mode weirdness - looks like C code bug
Package: emacs
Version: 19.29-3
I tried M-x shell and got a buffer containing:
Can't exec program:
Process shell exited abnormally with code 1
The nulls and \220 characters are likely to get mangled by
transmission by mail, so I've attached a uuencoded version too.
Ian.
begin 664 shell-buffer-bug
M0V%N)[EMAIL PROTECTED]F]GF%M.B``@0D)`O=7-R+V)I;B]B87-H@I0F]C
H97-S('-H96QL(5X:71E9!A8FYOFUA;QY('=I=@@8V]D92`Q@I0
`
end
Can't unmount /usr
I don't know what to report this a bug as but it happened about the time I upgraded to the ELF packages. I can't unmount /usr anymore and because of this everytime I reboot my /usr parition is fscked. Any ideas why this is happening, could there be a shared library that is in use on my /usr partition or something? /usr is a seperate partition on my system. Any ideas would be extremely welcome. Andrew -- Dehydration - 34%, Recollection of previous evening - 2%, embarrassment factor - 91%. Advise repair schedule:- off line for 36 hours, re-boot startup disk, and replace head - wow, what a night! -- Kryten in Red Dwarf `The Last Day' Andrew Howell [EMAIL PROTECTED] Perth, Western Australia [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Bug#1880: Compile error dpkg-1.0.5.tar.gz
Package: dpkg I try to compile dpkg-1.0.5, both with GCC 2.5.8 (a.out target) and GCC 2.7.0 (ELF target) and in both cases I got: filesdb.c: In function `sysinfo': filesdb.c:30: `__NR_sysinfo' undeclared (first use this function) filesdb.c:30: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once filesdb.c:30: for each function it appears in.) make[1]: *** [filesdb.o] Error 1 make[1]: Leaving directory `/var/tmp/dpkg-1.0.5/main' make: *** [all] Error 2 Note: I don't have Debian installed, but I need dpkg to unpack some of the Debian packages. I just did a ./configure (worked fine) and make, which gave the above result. Thanks for any help. -- --Jos Vos [EMAIL PROTECTED] --X/OS Experts in Open Systems BV | Phone: +31 20 6938364 --Amsterdam, The Netherlands| Fax: +31 20 6948204
Re: mawk(1) , gawk(1) and package control files (questions)
'Bill Mitchell wrote:'
The following are my best guesses at answers. If I guess wrong,
someone with better information will correct me.
Thanks for the feedback.
Chris Fearnley [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
[Deleted first part]
o I'm not clear on the provides virtual package as it would apply to
'awk'. Should gawk provide 'awk'? Should mawk provide 'awk'?
Since clearly awk should be a symbolic link to gawk or mawk but not
both, is there a conflict here? Or should the conflict be resolved
by the {post,pre}{inst,rm} scripts (this seems best to me as most
people would have both installed side by side)? Maybe my mawk package
should Recommends or Suggests gawk?
Yes, both gawk and mawk could provide awk (presuming that mawk is
100.00% backwards compatable with standard awk). Other packages
could then have a dependency on awk satisfied by either of the
packages which provided it being installed.
Yes, mawk(1) is 100% POSIX awk compient. It is GPL'd and still under
development. It is also, perhaps, 3 times faster than gawk. Though
someone could write an awk script that depended on a gawk extension.
[more deleted]
o It occurs to me that many packages should Recommends or Suggests
man and/or info. Yet they don't. Why? What am I missing? And most
packages depend on ldso. So are essential packages too basic to be
listed in the control files? Is it possible that this lack of
consistency in setting dependencies could affect us much like the
current libc, libc4 and libc5 (which as required packages under Debian
0.93R6 weren't mentioned in the depends fields of any packages).
True. Packages install their man pages regardless of whether
/usr/bin/man is installed. Ditto with info pages and /usr/bin/info.
Also, some facilities provided by base system packages are necessary
for installation of (some or all) packages, but no dependency is
declared on the packages which provide those facilities.
Generally, packages presume that the base system packages will be
present without declaring explicit dependencies (though I don't
think it's documented precisely what the base system is guaranteed
to provide), only declare dependencies on other packages which are
needed for their proper installation and operation, and omit declaring
dependencies on packages needed to display their docs.
This strikes me as a bug: it's those little assumptions that could
come back to bite. Perhaps the Maintainers FAQ should suggest that
man, info, ldso, sh, perl, et. al. be added as per appropriate to the
recommends, suggests, and depends fields (just as libc{,4,5} are now
suggested to be explicitely listed).
--
Christopher J. Fearnley|UNIX SIG Leader at PACS
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (finger me!)|(Philadelphia Area Computer Society)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] |Design Science Revolutionary
http://www.netaxs.com/~cjf |Explorer in Universe
Dare to be Naive -- Bucky Fuller |Linux Advocate
Bug#1656: etc/ntp.drift should be somewhere in /var (FSSTND)
Marek Michalkiewicz writes: Package: xntp Version: 3.4x-1 The /etc/ntp.drift file is often updated by xntpd while it is running - so it should probably be somewhere in /var (/var/run/ntp.drift maybe?). Different file name may be specified in /etc/ntp.conf (driftfile name) - or the default should be changed in the source. Does anyone have any suggestions for this? Should I leave ntp.drift in /etc or move it to /var/run or /var/lib/xntp? Andrew -- Dehydration - 34%, Recollection of previous evening - 2%, embarrassment factor - 91%. Advise repair schedule:- off line for 36 hours, re-boot startup disk, and replace head - wow, what a night! -- Kryten in Red Dwarf `The Last Day' Andrew Howell [EMAIL PROTECTED] Perth, Western Australia [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Well folks...
It looks like I am buring up more hard drives than I can buy around here :) We are not losing the debian.org drive but we are losing drives that are not even being used yet. I am currentyl making tape backups of the system and therefore are stopping uploads from happening. (and downloads for that matter.) Anyway yesterday we had problems with our Fiber Optic Ring here on campus which caused us to lose 75% of the packets going across the line. Today that has been fixed by CISCO and we are back running except I am making backups. Folks I have two choices for you.. 1 I bring the machine down now to fix the problem and unpgrade the OS to current released version. OR 2 I wait for Christmas break take the machine down for 3 Weeks and do it up right. This also means the machine will have its ups and downs over the next three weeks while we wait. -- Matthew S. Bailey 107 Emmons Hall Central Michigan University Mt. Pleasant, MI 48858 [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... Any resemblance between the above views and those of my employer, my terminal, or the view out my window are purely coincidental. Any resemblance between the above and my own views is non-deterministic. The question of the existence of views in the absence of anyone to hold them is left as an exercise for the reader. The question of the existence of the reader is left as an exercise for the second god coefficient. (A discussion of non-orthogonal, non-integral polytheism is beyond the scope of this article.)
Bug#1881: Majordomo UID wrong?
Package: majordomo Version: 1.93-1 Hi... It seems that after I installed the majordomo package it placed the folowwing entry in /etc/passwd: majordom:*:102:102::/usr/lib/majordomo:/bin/false Ok, that's fine but doing an ls -l majordomo in /var/lib produces this: drwxrwsr-x 4 101 majordom 1024 Nov 22 02:24 majordomo/ What is user 101 if I may ask? Definately no user in /etc/passwd (or on my NIS server) with UID 101. This may not be a bug, but I think there should be at least a UID 101 in /etc/passwd entry - note that 'majordom' is UID 102 Regards, ...Karl -- | PO Box 828 Office: (09)316-3036 Fax: (09)381-3909 |OWER INTERNET SERVICES Canning Bridge After Hours: 015-779-828 WA, 6153 Sales Support: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Internet Service Providers and Networking Solutions
Re: Well folks...
Folks I have two choices for you.. 1 I bring the machine down now to fix the problem and unpgrade the OS to current released version. OR 2 I wait for Christmas break take the machine down for 3 Weeks and do it up right. This also means the machine will have its ups and downs over the next three weeks while we wait. Is there a possibility of finding a machine to take over as ``ftp.debian.org'' while the upgrade happens? Too often it seems that a minor fix snowballs into a major problem. If we can set up such a replacement system, even temporarily, it would allow the upgrade to be installed and tested in less of a rush and any problems would be invisible to the external users. (Obviously, it would be ideal if we could keep the secondary system as a hot backup... but here I'm dreaming.) -- Matthew S. Bailey 107 Emmons Hall Central Michigan University Mt. Pleasant, MI 48858 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- David H. Silber [EMAIL PROTECTED] Project: Debian GNU/Linux (dbackup) http://www.access.digex.net/~dhs/ Wanted: Spare time. Programmer for hire.
Bug#1656: etc/ntp.drift should be somewhere in /var (FSSTND)
Andrew Howell: Does anyone have any suggestions for this? Should I leave ntp.drift in /etc or move it to /var/run or /var/lib/xntp? ... or /var/log/xntp - xntpd can generate some statistics logs if this feature is enabled in the config file, so a separate directory might be a good idea. Marek
Re: Well folks...
On Tue, 21 Nov 1995, David H. Silber wrote: Is there a possibility of finding a machine to take over as ``ftp.debian.org'' while the upgrade happens? Too often it seems that a minor fix snowballs into a major problem. If we can set up such a replacement system, even temporarily, it would allow the upgrade to be installed and tested in less of a rush and any problems would be invisible to the external users. (Obviously, it would be ideal if we could keep the secondary system as a hot backup... but here I'm dreaming.) Well there is a machine that is a hot backup problem is that I am going to be taking it with me when I go home over break I am not going to take it offline unless one people want me to do it now. OR Christmas comes along. during chrismas when NO ONE is here I don't trust things anyway. I plan on building it over christmas unless people want me to do it now... I will change a few hard drives around on the next round and be adding some others. I just want opinions before I do anything. -- Matthew S. Bailey 107 Emmons Hall Central Michigan University Mt. Pleasant, MI 48858 [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... Any resemblance between the above views and those of my employer, my terminal, or the view out my window are purely coincidental. Any resemblance between the above and my own views is non-deterministic. The question of the existence of views in the absence of anyone to hold them is left as an exercise for the reader. The question of the existence of the reader is left as an exercise for the second god coefficient. (A discussion of non-orthogonal, non-integral polytheism is beyond the scope of this article.)
Bug#1883: compress missing?
Package: base? gzip? I can't find the compress program on the system. I know, gzip is better, and can decompress *.Z files, but can't create *.Z files if I want to give something compressed to someone who doesn't have gzip (many non-Linux systems come with compress but not gzip). Source can be found for example in the FreeBSD distribution, and is under the standard BSD copyright which shouldn't be a problem for us... Marek
Bug#1882: elv-fmt is broken
Chris Fearnley [EMAIL PROTECTED] When I try to reformat a paragraph, with the command '!}fmt', in elvis, core is dumped. When I do it in vim or nvi, I get garbage instead of a reformatted paragraph. I tried reinstalling (and rebuilding the .deb package for) elv-fmt and the same effects were noted. I'll look at this -- probably tonight. I had to re-install textutils in order to get a working /usr/bin/fmt. NB, the fmt in textutils seems to work with elvis, nvi, and vim. Is there any reason to have elv-fmt instead of the GNU fmt? If there is some reason, then some note in elv-fmt's description (at least) should alert that textutils has another (possibly better) version of /usr/bin/fmt. There was once a bug report against textutils fmt that it did a buggy fmt -- sometimes producing very poor results. elvis fmt did a much better job in those cases. I'm not sure of the current status of that bug (and can't reach the web site to check at the moment). [Now that I purged elv-fmt, I notice that usr/doc/copyright/elvis has been deleted as well. I had to re-install elv-vi in order to get the copyright notice back. Well this might be a dpkg problem, I don't know.] That's almost certainly my fault. I'll look at that as well. This is with debian 0.93R6 + plus a few packages from 1.0 (but I haven't upgraded to ELF yet, so that's not it). I'll upload an a.out package revision if I fix anything. An elf package will have to wait until elf ncurses is available and stable.
FTP site taking an xmas vacation
I'd like to hear from sites that can provide 400MB of FTP area to serve as an alternate site. Thanks Bruce -- Visit the Toy Story Web Page! http://www.toystory.com
Bug#1883: compress missing?
Unfortunately, compress infringes the Unisys - Terry Welch patent. Thanks Bruce -- Visit the Toy Story Web Page! http://www.toystory.com
Re: Well folks...
On Tue, 21 Nov 1995, David H. Silber wrote:
Is there a possibility of finding a machine to take over as
``ftp.debian.org''
while the upgrade happens? Too often it seems that a minor fix snowballs
into
a major problem. If we can set up such a replacement system, even
temporarily,
it would allow the upgrade to be installed and tested in less of a rush and
any problems would be invisible to the external users. (Obviously, it would
be ideal if we could keep the secondary system as a hot backup... but
here I'm dreaming.)
Well there is a machine that is a hot backup problem is that I am going
to be taking it with me when I go home over break
I am not going to take it offline unless one people want me to do it now.
OR
Christmas comes along. during chrismas when NO ONE is here I don't
trust things anyway. I plan on building it over christmas unless people
want me to do it now... I will change a few hard drives around on the
next round and be adding some others.
I just want opinions before I do anything.
Perhaps the thing to do would be to take advantage of the availability of
the hot backup system while it is available and do the upgrade now.
When is your break, anyway?
When should I try to get in to ftp.debian.org to upload
dbackup-0.1-alpha.2.{deb,tar.gz}?
--
Matthew S. Bailey
107 Emmons Hall
Central Michigan University
Mt. Pleasant, MI 48858
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
David H. Silber [EMAIL PROTECTED] Project: Debian GNU/Linux (dbackup)
http://www.access.digex.net/~dhs/ Wanted: Spare time.
Programmer for hire.
Re: Well folks...
When should I try to get in to ftp.debian.org to upload
dbackup-0.1-alpha.2.{deb,tar.gz}?
Sorry, Forgot to reopen the ftpserver. The backup finished two hours ago...
Upload away again...
Well the machine would be gone for around the 16th to the 3rd of january.
It is too late for me to do much now with mine since I am already packing
it up to take home with me for the next week. So I will need someone to
cover me on that.
Ian Murdock what did they ever do with the new IP I gave you?
You know this would be easier if I could control DNS that way I could
just point the thing where it needs to be :)
Anyway
--
Matthew S. Bailey
107 Emmons Hall
Central Michigan University
Mt. Pleasant, MI 48858
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
... Any resemblance between the above views and those of my employer,
my terminal, or the view out my window are purely coincidental. Any
resemblance between the above and my own views is non-deterministic.
The question of the existence of views in the absence of anyone to hold
them is left as an exercise for the reader. The question of the
existence of the reader is left as an exercise for the second god
coefficient. (A discussion of non-orthogonal, non-integral polytheism
is beyond the scope of this article.)
Bug#1656: etc/ntp.dFrom @mongo.pixar.com:debian-devel-request@Pixar.com Tue Nov 21 23:34:18 1995
Karl Ferguson writes: It seems that after I installed the majordomo package it placed the folowwing entry in /etc/passwd: majordom:*:102:102::/usr/lib/majordomo:/bin/false Ok, that's fine but doing an ls -l majordomo in /var/lib produces this: drwxrwsr-x 4 101 majordom 1024 Nov 22 02:24 majordomo/ What is user 101 if I may ask? Definately no user in /etc/passwd (or on my NIS server) with UID 101. This may not be a bug, but I think there should be at least a UID 101 in /etc/passwd entry - note that 'majordom' is UID 102 Yes, it is a bug. What is supposed to happen is that the preinst creates a group and user for majordomo; files are supposed to be in the .deb file owned by user majordom and group majordom, and represented in the tar file inside the .deb file by text strings - so that they get set to whatever numeric values were set up by the preinst. Physically examining the tar file from the .deb I uploaded reveals that it does, indeed, have the text values of the user name and group name. You will probably find majordomo doesn't work very well unless you chown anything owned by user 101 to be owned by majordomo. Is there a group with gid 101 on your system? What is the gid of the majordom group on your system? This needs some experimentation. -- Richard Kettlewell [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.elmail.co.uk/staff/richard/
