peter.makholm.net

The major problem — one of the major problems, for there are several — one of the many major problems with governing people is that of who you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.

To summarize:- It is a well known and much lamented fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.

It’s election time, as Debian Developer I get to chose who is going to be the Debian Project Leader for the next year - but I don’t really care. If we can’t get a naturally strong leader, then I don’t think it matters at all. A naturally strong leader is one who actually leads and do so by strong consensus instead of just wanting to rule. For a naturally strong leader the election is a mere formality and he will run virtually unopposed.

So my vote is:

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e0acebd2-71f1-4df8-ae4d-50355ad7aa81
[ 1 ] Choice 1: Wouter Verhelst
[ 1 ] Choice 2: Aigars Mahinovs
[ 1 ] Choice 3: Gustavo Franco
[ 1 ] Choice 4: Sam Hocevar
[ 1 ] Choice 5: Steve McIntyre
[ 1 ] Choice 6: Raphaël Hertzog
[ 1 ] Choice 7: Anthony Towns
[ 1 ] Choice 8: Simon Richter
[ 1 ] Choice 9: None Of The Above
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What about “None of the Above” option? Isn’t that excatly what I want? No, not really. I don’t think we would be better of by not electing one of the candidates than we would by electing one of them. So “None of the Above” should be ranked equally with the others.

Why vote at all? I want to make a point, as feeble as it is, which is clearly different from just being lazy. I want to show by active participation that I don’t think the election matters. Effectively a whatever option.

Now go grab some beer…

Someone asked for a tar2rpm script which could convert tar files into rpm files so they could be installled, upgraded and removed by the standard package tools. Not being into rpm I ignored the thread until told him that it would be hard.

And then I had to write a tar2deb script to show how easy it could be:

#!/bin/sh

# $1 - tar.gz fil
# $2 - package name
# $3 - version

CONTROL=$( mktemp -dt )
DATA=$( mktemp -dt )

cat $1 | (cd $DATA ; tar xvzf - )

SIZE=$( du -s $DATA | cut -f1 )

cat > $CONTROL/control <<EOF
Package: $2
Section: unknown
Priority: optional
Architechture: all
Version: $3
Installed-Size: $SIZE
Maintainer: $USER
Description: Deb-package made from $1
 This package is made by tar2deb by $USER at
 $( date ) from $1
EOF

(cd $DATA; find -type f | xargs md5sum ) > $CONTROL/md5sums
(cd $CONTROL; tar cvzf control.tar.gz *)
cp $1 $CONTROL/data.tar.gz
echo 2.0 > $CONTROL/debian-binary

ar -cr $2_$3_all.deb $CONTROL/{debian-binary,control.tar.gz,data.tar.gz}

rm -Rf $CONTROL
rm -Rf $DATA

exit 0;

I not sure I would use it in a production system but I think it is at interesting script. Wouldn’t a tar2rpm be as easy to write? No, deb packages can be made with standard unix tools while rpm packages is a cpio archive with a header which isn’t quite as easy to manipulate directly.