Debian buttons for Firefox/Iceweasel
As a Debian administrator, power user or contributor, one often goes to look for information about a package, a bug, a developer or a message from the mailing lists. If you are in this case, you may be interested in the Firefox/Iceweasel extension “Debian buttons”, written by Damyan Ivanov and packaged by myself.
Concerning the good use of ITP
When someone wants to package a piece of software for Debian, he has to file an Intent to Package, by filing a special bug report against the pseudo-package “wnpp” (work-needing and prospective packages) with a title of “ITP: software name”. This way, we can synchronize our efforts, for instance if someone else wants to package the same piece of software. I have seen two recent examples of a misunderstanding of the correct use of such reports, so perhaps this reminder may be of some help for newcomers.
Wrapper to use su as sudo (or sudo as su)
Classified in : Homepage, Debian, Command line
The problem
Some programs require root privileges for part of their work: most notably Debian building tools such as dpkg-buildpackage or pdebuild. So, several command can be used to obtain real or fake root privileges: su, sudo, fakeroot, etc. Among them, su is quite distinct, because it only takes a quoted command to pass it to a shell. That is why its interface is completely incompatible with the others':
$ su -c "pbuilder --build package.dsc" $ sudo pbuild --build package.dsc
This is annoying when real root privileges are needed, for instance by pbuilder, a tool to build Debian packages inside a minimal chroot. Indeed, in such a case I only know one command to obtain the root privileges, sudo, and some people (read: me) prefer using su.
Uninstalling a single component of a meta-package
Classified in : Homepage, Debian, Command line, To remember
Or how to get rid of Evolution without removing your whole system
There is a complain I have heard several times from people after they installed Debian: “I use Icedove/Thunderbird so I do not need Evolution: I tried to remove it but this would remove my whole system, that sucks!”