altfrangg, calvados, faegnaescht, gazpacho, gin, gluggsi, lumpesammler, papillon, syydelaervli, tonic, zbasel

If you can guess this, you're invited to gatecrash anytime. If you can guess this and don't live close to me (or did at some time in the past, and didn't use Google), I'd be curious to know how...

• Digikam (the KDE 4 version as packaged in experimental) is completely b0rked, which is the most annoying thing because the machine is my main photo storage. (I don't do anything beyond archiving the photos, so just blowing away the digikam database is no issue, as is just putting the files into the filesystem. OTOH once Digikam's new removable-media support is tested and works, I plan to start annotating the pictures.)
• Kmail, absolutely wants to display emails in a proportional font. And I'm not going to configure a typewriter font as the default “proportional” system font... Also, but I suspect that might be an issue with the IMAP server, it still forgets the “ignored” state of mailing list threads. making any moderatly high traffic list impossible to read.
• OpenOffice.org runs for about 30 seconds before crashing. Ok, it's beta, but so far my experience with packaged stuff, even in experimental, was better. Still, I'm not complaining, I'll just wait for the next version.
• KDE 4 can't cope with multiple screens (at least if they don't have the same size.) KDE 3 was just nice on this system. I'll start filing bugs when KDE has stabilised enough. If I still have that graphics subsystem then — I've been considering upgrading to a bigger screen for a while now, which probably would mean that I'd throw away the second display, getting more desk space instead.

I should probably add that this is not a rant. I'm running software that's explicitly labelled as experimental. So people should probably view this as a response to whoever (can't find it anymore, wasn't it on Planet?) recently stated that he'd switch to the Hurd since Debian has become boring. Or as a Thank You posting for those making Debian from a “you know it's been the stable version for the last year when it's entered Debian” type of distribution into a “get it on the day of release” distribution.

(I haven't looked closer yet, but I had to laugh.)

Obviously, the details would be tricky, but since there is a security chain from Release.gpg to the .deb, downloading packages from untrusted peers shouldn't be a problem, even if the package name / version pair is not really unique (or even if someone actually tries a spoofing attack.)

(There's a thought: running a tftp / dhcp server with a fai network boot in addition would be a step towards world domination, too, closely followed by automated hacking tools to install Debian on all computing devices on the network. Support call: “My printer only prints one page saying debian:~# after power on and then stops.”)

Update 2008-05-07: Both Nijel and Florian Ludwig himself pointed out his apt-zeroconf project, which is unfortunately not very actively developed at the moment. Yet another thing I should/could do if I had the time.

On balance: please do it. The situation reminds me of the Debian kernel team when it changed from Herbert Xu to group maintainership, which now works quite nicely afaict. But obviously, there is no guarantee that things will work out nicely, and there might be serious friction as well. OTOH the new DPL publicly stating that he supports this decision should be a Good Thing™

find -L * -type l  | while read i; do update-alternatives --auto "$i"; done