Free as in speech

pommed v1.20 is out, with two minor fixes:

• a segfault that could not trigger on any normal setup;
• use of the correct bus type to detect the Apple wireless keyboards.

Available on Alioth now, in unstable after the next mirror push.

Also I have to block pommed >= 1.19 from entering testing because Linux 2.6.25 is not yet available in Lenny. I hope this will be fixed soon, in the meanwhile, grab the packages from unstable if you’re running testing with a 2.6.25 kernel.

Joey,

I think your whole post only applies to HAL.

Fact is, DBus lets you know through a dedicated signal that you’ve been disconnected from the DBus server; at that point, you cleanup the connection and try to reconnect. Works for me.

Now, the fact that HAL (and/or libhal, it seems) provides no way of handling this situation cleanly is obviously a major bug.

I’m not a great fan of all the desktop crap that’s being promoted and hyped lately, but I am positive about DBus. DBus provides the mechanisms to handle a DBus restart properly, HAL (and pretty much everything else) doesn’t use them, blame HAL, not DBus, for this one.

As for the “DBus should never be restarted”… I have no idea why the DBus upstreams would think that, but that also wouldn’t be the first time distributions disagree with upstreams about what is good and what isn’t. The good news is, this is all free software and we can fix it without upstream’s blessing.

If somebody out there really believes that it is OK for applications to crash/exit when DBus is restarted, then I don’t have the words.

I won’t even mention the new behaviour of the DBus init script in Sid.

pommed v1.19 has landed, with improvements wrt CPU usage.

This is especially true for gpomme, which won’t cause 10 wakeups/sec anymore. PowerTop fans, rejoice! I plan to fix wmpomme too, but as I’m probably the sole user, this can wait.

pommed will also consume a bit less CPU, especially on machines without ambient light sensors.

The new code in pommed makes use of the timerfd API introduced in Linux 2.6.25, hence you’ll need to run a 2.6.25 kernel or later; pommed will not operate properly on earlier kernels.

You maintain an application that uses DBus? Better yet, you are upstream for an application that uses DBus?

Then, please:

GET OFF YOUR ASS AND HANDLE DBus SERVER DISCONNECTION/RECONNECTION INSTEAD OF CRASHING

kthxbye.

After nearly two years stuck with rEFIt 0.7 in Debian, I’ve uploaded rEFIt 0.11 to unstable today.

There’s been a bit of work done on the package, on rEFIt itself and on the tools that come with rEFIt. I’ve also added some (useful, I hope) documentation.

This version of rEFIt supports all Intel Macs to date.

rEFIt in Debian comes with gptsync, both as a Unix command-line tool and as an EFI application. It’s the only tool shipped in the package. The other tools available in the rEFIt binary distribution by upstream (the EFI Shell and utilities) come from the TianoCore project and aren’t available in Debian. See the README.Debian in rEFIt if you want the full story.

Also rEFIt in Debian lacks the machine shutdown feature for now; this feature is part of the EFI 1.10 spec which isn’t supported by gnu-efi yet, though I have also worked on updating gnu-efi for EFI 1.10 and sent this upstream. Filesystem drivers are also affected by this and, as such, are unavailable too.

If you’re interested in the gory details, see the changelog and patches.