Bleeding edge

It appears that, unless someone could manage to find a non-invasive fix to #503907 and other bugs, we won’t have a working webkit for lenny. Thus I agreed to having the webkit plugin for liferea removed from sid, in preparation for its likely removal from testing.

Now, liferea 1.4.18 has a couple important bugs, including the elusive #487927. Some of them might be solved by the newer releases, but I cannot simply upload 1.4.23, as the changes from 1.4.18 are much too big. However, if some of those changes are relevant to those important bugs, I could try to cherry pick them back into 1.4.18.

Thus, to try to get some feedback about those changes, and to satisfy those of you that want to keep using webkit, I have uploaded 1.4.23 to experimental. It is currently waiting in the new queue, meanwhile I prepared binary packages for amd64 and i386. (Thanks for the tip, Julien!). If these packages help with some bug you have been hit with, please send your feedback to the BTS.

I’ve prepared a set of experimental packages of 1.5.5. They seem to be working fine, and are ready for some testing from brave users.

I’m not going to upload them soon to Debian experimental, since I want to be able to use that if for some reason I need testing of an urgent 1.4 update before the Lenny release.

Meanwhile, take a look at http://www.nul-unu.com/quien/rodrigo/debian/liferea/

There are source and amd64 binary packages. I’ll try to get access to some i386 machine to compile them there. One of these days

Debian makes inroads in Mexican bakeries:

Liferea’s upstream has decided to stop puting Debian Planet as a default example feed for new installs. I agree with that change for the upstream distribution, but I’m still going to revert it for the Debian package. And, of course, that gives us the chance to do even better. I’ve added Planeta Debian to the Spanish default feed list and Planet Debian-FR to the French one. I wanted to add Debian Brasil to pt_BR, but their feed returns a 404.

So, do you know about Debian planets in other languages? Please open a wishlist bug against liferea with the name, URL, the URL of the feed, the language it’s in, as well as some way I can verify the site is “official”, where that means it’s mostly published to by developers and heavy users.

The languages which currently have a customized list are bg, es, nl, pt_BR, sk, ca, eu, pt, sv, de, fr, pl, ru and tr. If your language is not one of those, you’d do better to start by contributing a non-Debian specific feed list for your language, directly to upstream (and maybe translating the whole program, while you’re at it ).

Has Debian Planet been acting up? I’ve been getting old entries shown again and again, but I don’t know if it’s the planet or a bug in Liferea I ought to find out about.

My @debian.org account’s now been created. Thanks santiago, anibal and kapil for your sponsorships during all this time. I learned quite a lot from you all. Thanks are also due my AM, myon and my advocate, gwolf.

This week I ought to have posted about how Gunnar and I met somewhere along the Ciclotón and had amazing amounts of fun. But I can’t, because we didn’t, because I was stuck in bed, with a 39C fever, all through Sunday and Monday and half of Tuesday. And weak and tired and with a big, nasty, unsuferable headache the other half of Tuesday and Wednesday and half of yesterday. So, instead, all I can do is apologize to santiago, who nominated me for DM, and damog, who seconded the nomination, and anibal who caught my silly mistake of not mentioning that I (of course) love and accept the DFSG in my response, for being silent and unresponsive. And to the people who reported bugs in my packages and got no response. And to oliver, for whom I was supposed to fix some JavaScript issues yesterday.

I hate viruses.

Hey, Gunnar, what do you say next month we try to meet during the ciclotón?

I’ve been 3 times to it and it really is a lot of fun! Even in weather like yesterday’s! I very nearly decided to stay in bed sipping chocolate, but in the end the shame at seing my brother getting all ready to go was too much.

The webkit rendering plugin for liferea is now available in unstable. It has missing features and crashes not-so-rarely. But it renders properly (and I rather like how it loks, actually) everything I’ve tested with it so far. Please help us get it into a releasable shape by testing and reporting bugs, but do be kind to us and try to see if the bugs are in liferea or in webkit itself, by using /usr/lib/WebKit/GdkLauncher on the relevant URL.

Many thanks are due to Lars, our very excelent upstream.

I must admit I had no idea that something called webkit exists. Until a few days ago, that Lars blogged about adding support for it to liferea. And now it seems we’re about to have webkit available in unstable.

I guess that means I’ll just have to work on getting the combination packaged. Look for it soonish, in your nearest experimental mirror.