[Yaird-devel] Interested to help

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Hi Andrei (and others listening too),


Sorry for the late response :-(


Andrei Popescu skrev:
> On Sat, Aug 04, 2007 at 09:56:35PM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:

>> Being "not a coder" is relative. I don't consider myself a "coder"
>> either - but rather a "packager" and a "scripter".
>>
>> Are you familiar with creating diffs and applying patches? With
>> compiling a package made by others? With pulling source out of a
>> subversion repository?
> 
> I've done it before (I'm also in the Romanian translators team and work 
> on the site), but I wouldn't say I'm familiar. 

In other words, such tasks is not alien to you and won't scare you away?
That was my point! :-D


>> If interested
>> in helping with the screening of non-subscriber posts, I'll send you the
>> administration password privately.
> 
> You could encrypt it as well.

Mailinglist administration goes on unencrypted anyway, but yes, I have
now sent you the password encrypted.

Using the commandline program listadmin is much easier than web-based
admin. Install the Debian package listadmin and put the following in the
.listadmin.ini file:

default discard
adminurl http://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
password <put it here>
yaird-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org



>> Tell me what you want to work on :-)
>  
> Let's start with bug/mailing list triage and we'll take it from there.

Great!


> Just so you know. The yaird package and I have a history :) Two years 
> ago when I started using Debian (sarge was at r0) I didn't want to stick 
> with sarge so I upgraded directly to sid. All was fine until after a few 
> weeks I got hit by a yaird bug which would make an unbootable initrd and 
> I had no spare kernel (now I always keep 2 or 3 installed ;). With a 
> little help from the debian-user list I repaired my install by chrooting 
> from a Knoppix disk. I'm running sid ever since.

I've been bitten like that too. I think a lot of testing users have.

I would want to make a small Debian package that registers itself as a
ramdisk generator, depends on both yaird and initramfs-tools, and
generates *both* styles, with (maybe debconf-selectable) yaird as
default. That way you would have the reliability of yaird, but also the
flexibility of initramfs-tools as a backup (when a disk controller crash
and your spare one use a different driver). How do you think about that?


Oh, and I discourage using Knoppix. Use Debian-installer instead - that
is closer to a regular Debian system with less risks of odd surprises.



> About one year ago I changed my laptop so I took the opportunity to make 
> a clean sid install.  When I was selecting packages I stumbled on yaird 
> (initramfs-tools was installed by default) so I installed it again 
> because I like the concept of a software built to optimize as much as 
> possible. The universal initrd is for people who have no idea of kernel 
> modules, ... I'm not very fond of universal solutions, I'm using the 
> software that suits my needs, like yaird, mutt, vim, IceWM, postfix, 
> getmail, maildrop (though I recommend KDE to novices).

Sounds like you are a minimalist like me :-)

For comparison I use ion3 (not IceWM), mc (not vim) and recommend Gnome
(not KDE). And I use aptitude with its builtin tracking of automatically
vs. manually selected packages, to always keep the systems as tight as
possible.

I recently changed the long description of yaird to make it more obvious
when it makes sense to use that in favor of initramfs-tools. Your
wording above is good - could you perhaps look at the current package
description and see if it could be improved/clarified even further?


 - Jonas

-- 
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

 - Enden er nær: http://www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm

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