Migrating a mediawiki instance from the old server to a new box. Of course it does not work (returns an empty 500 Error page). Of course there is no entry in error.log. Of course there is no obvious match of verbose/debug in a grep over the config files. Lovin' it

While other people are squashing RC bugs I was using this week to fix (or investigationg) some more kFreeBSD issues -- mostly looking at failed build logs and trying to fix the problems and after some nice fish for dinner writing things up.

• First issue this week was #639178 a build failure in tar I had reported earlier and didn't manage to process the response. After sending some findings to the bug I noticed Petr was faster and did actually find out a lot more detail. Short story: success in that test suite requires linux behavior and the failure on kfreebsd is covered by what POSIX allows
• #640156 multiarch related changes resulting in a nonfunctional ldd breaking clutter-gst build
• #640012 postfix is hard-coding kFreeBSD versions … up to 7 and therefore won't build on a 8.2 kernel. It also doesn't handle absence of NIS on Hurd and kFreeBSD #545970
• #640159 iozone3 just needed a bit of massaging to combine the FreeBSD backend with the linker flags needed for kFreeBSD
• Installing the build depends for openjdk-* resulted in a installation failure for some time. Looking closer it turned out a minimal testcase was installing menu and python2.6 together. Turned out dash's test builtin wasn't working #640334 because it was relying on the intuitive but not POSIX mandated behavior of the faccessat syscall #640325
• #640341 ed decided not to build on kfreebsd-i386 in the 40 minutes between -2 and -3 upload. Without any actual source changes. Just trying agan tricked it to build again but probably someone should look what went wrong actually
• #640378 leveldb needed enabling the FREEBSD_OS kind of build with the linux style of linker flags (additional -lrt)
• #640385 owfs was failing to some symbol difference (but otherwise building although being a *fs ;))
• the gcc family of packages still has some heisenbug repeatedly failing when doing regular builds on the buildds. Independent which one. Multiple times in a row. Building on my test VM or my notebook doesn't show that problem (but takes ~10h). Building on the same buildd in the same chroot with the same sbuild flags and it's still building fine.

I'm coming as well! Really looking forward to meet the people from Debconf9 again. Also people from the Games Team and the buildd and kfreebsd folks. And ideally there will be some more people interested in (Common) Lisp as well, we'll see

What is Unknown Horizons?

Unknown Horizons is a Free Strategy game I have written about from time to time about and do from time to time contribute. I also build Packages for Debianoids. Unknown Horizons is not a new thing, it has been there for some years now. It currently gets boosted by 3 very active GSoC Students and evolving steadily.

Preparing for 2011.2

Unknown Horizons is Preparing for another Release, 2011.2. As part of the effort I have updated the official Unknown Horizons Debian and Ubuntu weekly archives with new rc builds to get some more testing before the release happens. Please test!

Why isn't it in Debian main yet?

Unknown Horizons hasn't been uploaded to Debian yet. This is mostly due to 2 factors: The game engine Unknown Horizons build upon, FIFE isn't in Debian, evolving fast and not providing much of a stable interface and therefor Unknown Horizons has traditionally had a strict dependency to some VCS state of approximately the same age. Not good for a Debian package obviously. And second, Unknown Horizons got rid of some content that was not free (as in "main") just recently.

Personally I'm hoping we can have some packages soon as the freeness stuff is sorted out now and I haven't seen any troubling breakages with regard to the engine recently.

Looking around old files I have put online ages ago I stumbled upon a Unknown Horizons Code Swarm Video I have created back in September 2009. Feeling more than a bit sad this piece of software died soon after being released. Searching the web for "Code Swarm" still finds lots of old Videos created back then.