I've been pretty busy. What's more, I expect to take six plane trips
(three round-trips) in the month of October, and at least four more
(two round-trips) before the end of the year.
I'll be in Washington, D.C., from October 8 (Dave Barry's son's
birthday, as readers of Dave Barry Slept Here will all
recall) until the evening of October 11. If you want to wait in
line at the Supreme Court with a group of us starting on the evening
of October 8, let me know. (Of course, we will be making a valiant
attempt to get in to the
Eldred argument.)
Later in the week, EFF has several meetings with staff at the
FCC to talk about the
broadcast
flag NPRM. I also hope to visit the
CCIA,
Public Knowledge,
the Library of Congress,
and the National
Cryptologic Museum.
I finished A Void, by Georges Perec (translated by Gilbert Adair), the eighth
book on my reading list.
What leads to the error
Package foo has no available version, but exists in the database.
This typically means that the package was mentioned in a dependency and
never uploaded, has been obsoleted or is not available with the contents
of sources.list
E: Package foo has no installation candidate
Is this necessarily indicative of a bug?
(I get this when I try to satisfy a dependency of a package which was
itself not actually available in the release of Debian I'm using. Maybe
that explains it; maybe changing sources.list would make the error
go away.)
I visited relatives in San Ramon and got some driving lessons. (Many
readers will be aware that I've never learned to drive a car and don't
have a driver license.) I also got to ride a mountain bike and a motor
scooter. Motor scooters are remarkably fun, and are supposedly legally
equivalent to bicycles in many jurisdictions (although they pollute the
air a lot more).
I had a BBC meeting in Berkeley with Nick, and I fixed the way
packages whose best upstream source is Debian are handled. This
turns out to be pretty straightforward, because gar is powerful
enough to handle a gzipped patch downloaded from the
Debian pool.
So
pax
is a pretty canonical example of how this is done.
bsd-finger
and
procps
are other examples. I am glossing over the still-unexplained fact that
pax and procps require WORKSRC to be changed by means of the addition
of ".orig", where bsd-finger works fine with the default value of WORKSRC.
Conceivably, we could have a script called use-gnu-upstream
which would produce a basic Makefile for a GNU package called foo, and a similar
script called use-debian-upstream which would do the same thing for a Debian
package called foo. So if you wanted to add GNU hello to the BBC, you could
then start with
mkdir utils/hello
cvs add utils/hello
cd utils/hello
use-gnu-upstream hello
and then customize the resulting Makefile. use-gnu-upstream and
use-debian-upstream would have to check (using standardized rules)
for the most current upstream package versions available at
ftp.gnu.org and
ftp.debian.org, respectively.
In a cafe:
First person: I'm trying to learn to copy an entire DVD onto my hard
drive [points at laptop] -- that would be really convenient.
Second person: You can do that?
First person: You can, but I haven't quite figured it out yet.
Second person: Is that legal?
First person: I think it's legal -- I know you're copying it, but
I think you're allowed to make one copy of something for your own
use.
I resisted the temptation to give them a five-hour lecture on
DeCSS, DVD Video, Universal v. Reimerdes and its
appellate history, the WIPO Internet treaties, DVD CCA
v. McLaughlin and its much more interesting
(and encouraging) appellate history, the
CPTWG, the Gallery of CSS
Descramblers, Bernstein,
1201,
and two upcoming bills to reform the DMCA's anticircumvention
rules which are due to be introduced in the very near future.
"a DVD litigation fan, the way many
people are science fiction fans..."
