to my software-related webspace! I'm Jan Beyer (beathovn).
My everyday work is (trying to?) do research in solid state physics as a PhD student. Most of the remaining time I spent with my family (wife + 2 children), and whenever there's some minutes left, I'm fiddling around with software - with varying degree of success ;-) (see below). For non-software info on me, you can visit my private homepage here. Otherwise there's also a blog with some smaller (mostly Debian/software-related) thoughts of mine.
As I'm using Debian since long, I thought about contributing to it. So I started working on packaging software for Debian. I thought, "why not start with something, I use myself" - gwyddion. But that turned out to be a tough start. But eventually, I got it finished in an acceptable state for Debian. You can download it now as any other package via aptitude/synaptic or whatever package manager you prefer. Debian-relevant information on gwyddion can be found here.
I've also come around to updating my private repository for Debian stable (lenny). Now, I'm providing both amd64 and i386 packages of gwyddion there, so I had to change the layout in comparison to the old version. In case you used to use it, please update your /etc/apt/sources.list! For all other interested ones, please add the following line to the same file:
deb http://www.beathovn.de/debian stable main
If you use synaptic, then go to Settings - Repositories and add the information above there. Then you can either run
$ sudo aptitude update
on the commandline or click Reload in synaptic. Now you're ready to install the latest gwyddion by either
$ sudo aptitude install gwyddion
or looking for gwyddion in synaptic.
The repository is signed by the GnuPG-key 0xD29105BF. To tell APT, that it should trust signatures done by this key, add it to APT's keyring:
wget http://www.beathovn.de/debian/beathovn_de.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
Bibus is bibliographic database which works very well together with OpenOffice.org. It stores the references in either an SQLite- or a MySQL-database. This is my second Debian package. It was again quite interesting - a lot of interaction with a very helpful upstream maintainer and learning how to package Python applications (actually nothing too special...) and re-learning packaging without CDBS... ;-) The last one was the most complicated part! ;-)
Now Bibus is available both in Debian unstable (sid) and testing (squeeze)! Please test and report any problems you may find! Again, for those of you using Debian stable (lenny), you may use the backports provided in my repository. Just follow the instructions above to add the repository to your configuration. Then you will also find Bibus available.
So, I finally spend some time reactivating some long-forgotten Perl-skills and wrote a patch for licensecheck which makes it accept a new option --dep5. This will format the output similar to the guidelines of the machine-readable debian/copyright-file in DEP5. Please try and test and feel free to improve any of the many possible things, which could be improved. But I feel, it's already now usable. If you do not feel like patching licensecheck yourself, go ahead and grab the patched version from here.
The next paragraphs give some historical information. You may wish to skip them.
While packaging gwyddion, I found, that it's tough to get correct and complete information on the copyright status of all files. So I tried to hack a quick'n'dirty python-script to collect copyright and license information from the complete source tree and format it nicely. My python isn't the best, so expect anything! If you like, you can get the script from here. Then you simply rename it to checori.py and try to run it within your source tree: Go to its top directory and issue
$ python checori.py > copyright-skeleton
and have a look, what the file copyright-skeleton will contain. It may contain nothing or anything - in this case, you will have to work your way through the script and modify it for your needs! Good luck with this! ;-) It has the capability of filtering out the standard copyright+license of the whole package so that the files under this license are not printed out. This you have to adapt for your case, of course...
For every new upstream version, it's nice to know, what actually changed in upstream's tarball. But somehow I didn't find a ready-to-use command for diff-ing two tarballs. So I had to write some smallish script tardiff looking like:
#!/bin/bash
tar tf $1 | sed -e 's,[^/]*/,,' | sort > old.list
tar tf $2 | sed -e 's,[^/]*/,,' | sort > new.list
diff -u old.list new.list
rm old.list new.list
Thanks go to David Paleino for helping out with the sed-command. Somehow, I didn't get it working...
But still I think, there must have been somebody else before me, who solved this problem more generally...