Five years after the release of patch 2.5.9, patch 2.6 was released two weeks ago. The most interesting feature is that it will now produce reject files in unified format when the input is in that format. Lucky for those of us whose brain hurts when trying to read context diffs.

Of course there are more changes, and one of them is affecting Gentoo in particular: Gentoo service announcement: keep clear of GNU patch-2.6. The linked Gentoo bug #293570 has attachments to reproduce the bug:

benz:~/tmp/tripwire-2.3.1-2 $ patch -p0 -F3 < ../tripwire-friend-classes.patch
patching file tripwire-2.3.1-2-p1/src/fco/fconame.h
Hunk #1 succeeded at 48 with fuzz 3 (offset -1 lines).
patching file tripwire-2.3.1-2-p1/src/fco/fcosetimpl.h
Hunk #1 succeeded at 45 with fuzz 3 (offset -1 lines).
patching file tripwire-2.3.1-2-p1/src/tw/fcoreport.h
Hunk #1 succeeded at 84 with fuzz 3 (offset -1 lines).

benz:~/tmp/tripwire-2.3.1-2 $ ls -l
drwxr-xr-x 4 cbe credativ 4096 18. Nov 05:03 src/
drwxr-xr-x 3 cbe credativ 4096  2. Dez 12:23 tripwire-2.3.1-2-p1/

Note that it created a new tripwire-2.3.1-2-p1 directory inside the existing one, which is consistent with -p0. The newly created file contain just the "+" lines from the patch. (There are no "-" lines.) patch 2.5.9 would have refused the patch because it couldn't find the file to patch.

This is arguably a surprising behavior, but what really happens here is that -F3 (fuzz 3) will explicitly tell patch to ignore 3 context lines if it cannot apply the patch otherwise. diff's default behavior is to create patches with 3 lines of context. patch's default fuzz factor is one less than that, 2. Now, 3 - 3 is zero, which doesn't leave any context left.

Apparently lots of Gentoo ebuilds use -F3, and try to guess the correct number of directories to strip, starting with -p0, -p1, ... No wonder that things break badly for them now, as patches will suddenly succeed with -p0.

I'm not sure I like the new patch behavior, but in Gentoo's case I'd say they are using way too much magic in their build system, and now get bitten by options they shouldn't have put there in the first place.

Setting up a 6to4 tunnel on freewrt:

#!/bin/sh
# http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux+IPv6-HOWTO/configuring-ipv6to4-tunnels.html

ip -6 route flush dev tun6to4
ip link set dev tun6to4 down
ip tunnel del tun6to4

sleep 2

ttldefault=15
ipv4=$(ip a show ppp0 | sed -ne 's/.*inet \([^ ]*\).*/\1/p')
local6to4prefix=$(printf "2002:%02x%02x:%02x%02x" `echo $ipv4 | tr "." " "`)
local6to4address="$local6to4prefix::1"

ip tunnel add tun6to4 mode sit ttl $ttldefault remote any local $ipv4
ip link set dev tun6to4 up
ip -6 addr add $local6to4address/16 dev tun6to4
ip -6 route add 2000::/3 via ::192.88.99.1 dev tun6to4

ip -6 addr add $local6to4address/64 dev eth0.0
ip -6 route add $local6to4address/64 dev eth0.0

sed -i -e "s/prefix.*/prefix $local6to4prefix::\\/64/" /etc/radvd.conf
/etc/init.d/S51radvd restart

I just finished packing up the signature collection for dedication-5.0.txt. Hopefully I didn't miss any signatures, saving about 400 attachments is tedious. Fortunately most people got the filenames right. On the down side, there were about 80 signatures that I couldn't verify because the corresponding key could not be found on the key servers. I've mailed the owners, and about 20 have uploaded their key until now.

There are 355 valid signatures. Thanks to all for such a huge participation, that's about twice the number (185) we got for dedicating Potato to Espy in 2000. (These were DD-only, though.)

Comparing to the various Debian keyrings, 207 active DDs participated, 3 former DDs, 12 Debian maintainers, and 133 other contributors.

Let's hope Lenny will be as great as Thiemo would have liked it.

From: Christoph Berg <myon@debian.org>
To: Debian Bugs Submit <submit@bugs.debian.org>
Subject: Bug#512072: RFH: mutt -- text-based mailreader supporting MIME, GPG, PGP and threading

Package: wnpp

Hi,

the Debian Mutt package needs more maintainers.

There are almost 200 open bugs. Some of these are already forwarded upstream and might just need some triaging/poking. Some need forwarding. Some might be fixed with a trivial patch. Others are Debian specific, mostly for the extra patches we include. There's duplicates and sub-wishlist items. We are using bts-link to link to dev.mutt.org's trac, but that also needs more tweaking.

There's a new upstream version 1.5.19 pending, we need people to check which bugs still apply.

The (in?)famous mutt-patched package needs love to get the sidebar patch updated to the new version, and to get some of mutt-ng's extra gimmicks and add-ons integrated.

I've moved packaging to git since that seems to be the least scary choice nowadays:

http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-mutt/mutt.git

The repository has been updated to 1.5.19. The mutt-patched build is disabled for now, as the patch doesn't apply. Testers welcome :)

If you are interested in helping out, please get in contact with me. To get started, subscribe to mutt's PTS feed. There's no extra maintainer mailinglist, mailing mutt@packages.debian.org will work for PTS subscribers. If you prefer IRC, join #mutt on irc.freenode.net.

Thanks,
Christoph

projectb =>
SELECT
        array_accum(SUBSTRING(source FROM 1 FOR 1)) AS first,
        SUBSTRING(source FROM 2) AS rest
FROM
        (SELECT DISTINCT source FROM source) AS source
GROUP BY rest
HAVING
        COUNT(SUBSTRING(source FROM 1 FOR 1)) >= 4
ORDER BY rest;

        first        |  rest
---------------------+---------
 {c,f,j,l,p,s}       | am
 {a,g,n,y}           | ap
 {c,d,p,r,t,x}       | ar
 {b,d,l,s}           | ash
 {h,i,l,n,r,v}       | at
 {b,m,r,s}           | c
 {g,j,p,x}           | cal
 {e,g,p,x}           | cb
 {d,j,k,n,t}         | cc
 {a,f,i,v}           | check
 {a,d,e,g,m,u}       | cl
 {e,j,n,q,u,x}       | d
 {e,g,l,t,x}         | db
 {c,d,r,s}           | dd
 {j,l,o,u}           | de
 {f,g,l,s,w,x}       | dm
 {a,l,p,u}           | dns
 {e,l,n,q,r}         | e
 {j,s,t,x}           | ed
 {g,l,m,n}           | edit
 {c,e,f,x}           | fingerd
 {b,d,l,p,x}         | fm
 {g,k,p,y}           | forth
 {c,g,j,l}           | ftp
 {b,g,m,o,p}         | identd
 {f,k,t,v,z}         | ile
 {s,u,v,z}           | im
 {b,d,m,s,w}         | ing
 {b,g,w,z}           | ip
 {j,l,s,t}           | irc
 {a,c,f,j,u}         | lex
 {e,p,s,z}           | lib
 {f,k,r,x}           | log
 {i,m,o,q,s,v}       | m
 {c,q,s,w,x}         | mail
 {c,d,h,m,o,p,s,t,x} | make
 {e,i,l,x}           | mms
 {b,g,x,z}           | oo
 {b,c,r,s}           | play
 {e,f,g,r}           | pm
 {g,p,t,w,x}         | pp
 {i,q,w,x}           | print
 {a,b,m,o}           | sc
 {b,c,d,k,p,z}       | sh
 {a,f,p,x}           | sp
 {a,h,s,x}           | t
 {g,u,x,y}           | talk
 {a,e,i,k,q,w,x}     | term
 {a,h,i,m,n,p}       | top
 {c,k,q,r}           | torrent
 {a,h,l,n,o}         | tp
 {g,i,j,o}           | ts
 {c,j,n,o,r}         | unit
 {f,g,l,p,w}         | v
 {c,k,p,r}           | vm
 {i,l,n,s,x}         | watch
 {9,b,d,j,l,p,t}     | wm
 {g,j,r,w,x}         | zip
(58 Zeilen)

... and the winner is make!