E17 migrates to subversion

After the E17 team has been busy converting the version control system from CVS to subversion I saw the need to update my build script to reflect this migration and finally adress a heap of bugs which have been around since the last version got released.
Along with various bugfixes, I've added functionality which further minimizes manual work needed to make packages compile. First of all, since configure.in files in subversion no longer generate Debian/changelog I've added a function which does just that: injecting the line necessary if needed. Furthermore there's now an option which generates a Debian/changelog file based on an adjustable amount of SVN log entries. The first two entries in the changelog.in of the emodules package might look like this:

emodules (@VERSION@-0cvs20080921) unstable; urgency=low

[ mekius ]
Fix history, thanks Sachiel :D

-- Falko Schmidt Thu, 11 Sep 2008 02:06:54 +0000

emodules (@VERSION@-0cvs20080921) unstable; urgency=low

[ kaethorn ]
remove the echo module.

-- Falko Schmidt Sat, 06 Sep 2008 09:46:58 +0000

Last but not least any source package which doesn't contain a Debian directory will automatically be ignored and thus not cause a build failure anymore. Packages either marked as not containing such a directory ("no debian dir") or which are mentioned in the DONTBUILDLIST variable ("skipped") will be marked accordingly in the "Check trunk" summary:



I've updated i386 and amd64 packages successfully and will from now on focus on updating and adding package descriptions in SVN. Downloads and installation instructions can be found here.

E17 sparc packages

I've compiled some sparc E17/EFL packages on a Sun Blade 1000 and uploaded them to the Debian repository. That means there are packages available for all those who need a fast desktop environment even on some of Sun Microsystem's older, but still very reliable workstations.

Usual installation procedures apply here as well.

E17 amd64 packages

Just an update to the previous post:

A new set of amd64 packages has been uploaded and should provide the same functionality as their i386 counterparts. Packages for alpha are planned for the following weeks, probably Sparc packages as well.

Big Debian E17 overhaul

As the PkgE Team is working hard to get E17 into Debian/experimental, I took some time to merge most of their packaging goodness into the debian/ folders of the enlightenment CVS tree. As a result the repository at debian.alphagemini.org now features higher consistency regarding package names and dependencies.
The major change involved renaming of -dev, -dbg and -bin packages of all libraries which now look like libfoo-dev instead of libfoo0-dev. The second change was the package name of enlightenment itself which is now available as e17. Furthermore libe-dbus is now called libedbus. libeet1 is now available from the official Debian repositories as well and should be compatible with the rest of the packages.
Due to all these changes installations will most probably break upon upgrade which can be prevented by uninstalling all previous packages from this repository beforehand. Afterwards a regular

apt-get install e17 emodules-all

should do the rest.

Apart from the above changes there are also some additions, namely three new emodules (execwatch, iiirk and notification) as well as the edje editor.

The AMD64 port will be updated accordingly as soon as the i386 port works flawlessly.

Thanks a lot to Guillaume, Sedat and Vit for reporting bugs and suggestions, and of course to the PkgE-Team for providing the package descriptions.

Further information and instructions can be found here.

dh_fixperms headaches

If you ever wondered why lines such as

install/mypackage:
chmod 4511 debian/tmp/usr/bin/my_setuid_binary

in your debian/rules file seem to be magically ignored in the resulting package, then look no further. It took me some time to figure it out, after trying all kind of combinations of post-install, pre-finalize and pre-install routines. In the end it was quite obvious.
By including the standard debhelper rules (/usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/debhelper.mk) there're a whole bunch of scripts being unleashed on your package and one of them is dh_fixperms(1) which "removes the setuid and setgid bits from all files in the package".
That's fine, but we want to override this with a statement in debian/rules

DEB_FIXPERMS_EXCLUDE := regex

where the regex excludes each file which matches. Good to know.

Software RAID on Gentoo and Debian

Up until now I backed up my hard drive with important files with unison. I did that by regularly plugging in a similar second hard drive into one of my empty drive bays, running unison, waiting for it to finish and finally pulling the new hard drive out again to store it on my shelf. This obviously spares at least one drive from running all the time but is a very tedious task, especially if it's IDE drives which aren't hot-swappable.

So I've recently gone through the very unpleasant course of loosing the data on one of my old IDE hard drives, of course the one which I don't back up with unison but located in the same file server. Rescuing data wasn't possible, even forensic tools like foremost and scalpel couldn't retrieve all the files, e.g. mp3 files were all either 7.2MB or 42MB in size and contained everything but a valid music stream. foremost didn't even finish and segfaulted after carving about 30% of the disk.

To make life easier and to possibly prevent such tragedies from happening in the future, I ordered two identical Seagate SATA hard drives, each 500GB. While Seagate doesn't precisely build silent drives but grants five years of warranty, these seemed to be perfect for the file server which is running in the cellar. But while planning on using RAID1 for the Seagate drives, I decided to do the same with my workstation - but this time not for reasons of redudancy but for the sake of access speed - and bought two Western Digital HDDs of the same size which promised to be less loud and also had 16MB of cache (instead of 8MB on the Seagate disks).

Once they arrived I added a spare PCI SATA RAID controller with a SiliconImage chipset into the file server and defined a RAID1 array in the card's BIOS setup tool. The stock Debian kernel contained all needed modules and after installing the dmraid with apt, I could view the setup

# dmraid -r
/dev/sda: sil, "sil_ahbgafcdfhah", mirror, ok, 976771120 sectors, data@ 0
/dev/sdb: sil, "sil_ahbgafcdfhah", mirror, ok, 976771120 sectors, data@ 0

# dmraid -s sil_ahbgafcdfhah
*** Active Set
name : sil_ahbgafcdfhah
size : 976771120
stride : 0
type : mirror
status : ok
subsets: 0
devs : 2
spares : 0

Mounting worked the usual way but instead of using the raw device node, you'd need to mount the respective mapped device, in my case /dev/mapper/sil_ahbgafcdfhah .

My workstation also has a (fake/software) RAID controller (onboard ICH7) but it wasn't as easy to set up because the RAID1 array acts as the boot drive and the kernel needs to be booted accordingly. Also, grub doesn't recognize RAID setups and thus I needed to create a separate small primary partition at the beginning of the RAID drive which is accessible, no matter if access it as a RAID drive or as its underlying disks. On this partition I store the kernel and its ramdisk, as well as grub's stage files. I did that by booting the Gentoo install CD, setting up dmraid as I did on the Debian box, formatting the RAID drive and copying the old drive's partitions with

# find . | cpio -pdum /mnt/target

The second problem was building a working kernel and its ramdisk. Custom built kernels didn't work because they're unable to initialize the mapping with dmraid. Luckily Gentoo's genkernel package saved my day.

# genkernel --dmraid all --menuconfig

After compiling the kernel in my chrooted target system, I copied the resulting files to my boot partition mentioned above and add the following entry to grub's config file:

title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.23 genkernel
root (hd0,3)
kernel /kernel-genkernel-x86_64-2.6.23-gentoo root=/dev/ram0 init=/linuxrc \
real_root=/dev/mapper/isw_bcaheaacjd_NewSystem2 dodmraid vga=792 ramdisk=8192
initrd (hd0,3)/initramfs-genkernel-x86_64-2.6.23-gentoo

Note that the fact that the root partition is the partition with number four has nothing to do with it being situated at the very beginning of the disk.