Entries posted in April 2007

I'm back from Vienna (Ask Alfie for picture(s) of me wearing my partner's hat ..!) with a new need to update my killfile.

I use procmail to filter my mail, and my current setup looks like this:

# If the sender is in the killfile then drop the mail into killfile
:0:
# grep for it in the killfile
* ? grep -i `formail -rtzxTo:` $HOME/.procmail_killfile
/dev/null

This invokes formmail to get the sender of each incoming message and then drops the mail into /dev/null if the message is from somebody whos email address is contained in ~/.procmail_killfile - there are two problems with this approach:

• It doesn't handle killing threads, only senders. I guess using a similar approach to grep for message-id's in reference would work, but I'm having a hard time thinking it through properly.
• It doesn't cope with people who use multiple addresses. Perhaps message-id would be useful here, although again if people use multiple sending hosts then they would have different components.

Any improved recipes are greatfully received. And that's all I'm going to say about Debian communications for today.

Tags: killfile, megan, procmail, vienna | No comments

My apt-get repository has moved- no longer:

deb     http://steve.org.uk/apt sarge ...
deb-src http://steve.org.uk/apt sarge ...

Instead you should now use:

#
#  Steve Kemp's repository:  Sarge
#
deb     http://apt.steve.org.uk/sarge sarge main non-free contrib
deb-src http://apt.steve.org.uk/sarge sarge main non-free contrib

Or :

#
#  Steve Kemp's repository:  Etch
#
deb     http://apt.steve.org.uk/etch etch main non-free contrib
deb-src http://apt.steve.org.uk/etch etch main non-free contrib

This scheme should be more extensible and will be easier for me to maintain.

I've setup symlinks so that clients who don't update will still have something working - but I'd really rather you switched if you're using these repositories.

I've imported the Sarge repository fully, for AMD64/i386. I'll go through the Etch one shortly - I think most packages people care about are in the new release, the biggest package is xen-tools which has had several important/interesting/useful changes since the Etch freeze…

There are some custom packages that seem suprisingly popular, such as the steve-completion which will need to be imported for etch too - but I'll do those by the end of the week all being well.

BUG: if apt-get honoured HTTP redirects I'd not have to post this here and hope for the best …

Tags: apt-get, cvsrepository | No comments

Megan's back after spending most of the early part of today in Casualty following a minor head injury.

(Did you see what I did there? Good job I'm not an apostrophe Nazi or I'd never have let myself abuse language in such a way!)

Not a great day, but not as bad as it could have been.

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My girlfriend who was returned from hospital on Friday learnt a couple of days later that she'd managed to suffer a fractured skull.

Apart from that shocking news I.ve been doing little. Lots of travelling, lots of tidying up _/bin, little else. One new toy is release which will allow me to easily release projects. The idea is you run "/bin/release" inside a project directory and it will:

• Run a command such as "make release".
• Check the release is signed correctly.
• Upload the file, via scp, to a remote host.
• Run a command to trigger a mini-dinstall.

Very simple, almost trivially so, but it has a lot nicer than having to do all the bits manually. (sample .release file.)

I had a piece of code for triggering new freshmeat announcements working a while back - but it was a little too fragile when it came to reading the ChangeLog files I use so I've killed it for the moment. (Probably "$EDITOR fresmeat.tmp &" would be a better idea anyway!)

Connectivity is bad right now, since I'm in the middle of changing home ISP, but hopefully that will be resolved in the next week or two. (Switching from Telewest/Virgin -> Sky for people in the UK who might care.)

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