nutmeg's blog

I somehow thought I usually was nice and helpful, however upon reading Marc's e-mail about trying to make exim4 a little bit more foolproof, I realized I was not.

My gut reaction to the problem (people failing to check the docs at all) was a simple "So what? Either they'll learn the minimal basics (Docs on Debian are in /usr/share/doc and reading them can be helpful.) or Debian is not for them. I sure won't be jumping through hoops for them."

Lesson learned: I am just an elitist <insert favorite 4-letter word>.

Yesterday I got an e-mail from Werner Koch (gnupg upstream) about the status of gnupg2 in etch since he somehow thought me to be involved in its packaging.

I am not involved at all but have nevertheless wasted a little time on giving gnupg2 1.9.91 a shot. Initial packages can be found here:
deb http://www.bebt.de/debian/ sid gnupg2
deb-src http://www.bebt.de/debian/ sid gnupg2
I have not tested them at all, except for checking installability and for comparing filelists, however they should spare the maintainer a nontrivial amount of time, as the packaging is a lot less crufty than before. Check the changes file.

With some handholding from Steve Langasek it is now finally done:
Apparently successful
final: -gnutls12,-libtasn1-2,
[...]
The old gnutls stuff (gnutls11, gnutls12, libtasn1-2) has been removed from etch. It took a little bit longer than I originally thought but it happened before etch, which is the main point. ;-)

There are not many lessons learned, I should have know before that it can take an unexpected amount of time to get stuff (re)built. A nice piece of information was the best way to ask for binary NMUs. The other thing is that it might be have been worthwile to upload a libgnutls11 without libgnutls11-dev at some point to stop people from (accidentally) building against the old crufty library. I ended up searching for these with grep-dctrl regularily.