Petter Reinholdtsen

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the Norwegian Unix User Group about the OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net, and was very happy to learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to use when looking for peoples public key. So far I have used subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former were misbehaving, but those days are ended. The servers I have used up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable. I hope those problems are gone now.

Behind the round robin DNS entry of the sks-keyservers.net service there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every day to ensure they are well connected and up to date. It must be better than what I have used so far. :)

Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do not seem to be used in Debian. Perhaps it should?

Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this line:

keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net

With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV entries in DNS. Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG keyserver automatically should their need it:

% host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
_pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
%

Now if only the HKP lookup protocol supported finding signature paths, I would be very happy. It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to another key. Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys. This is as far as I can tell not possible today. Perhaps something for a future version of the protocol?

Two years later, I am still not sure if it is legal here in Norway to use or publish a video in H.264 or MPEG4 format edited by the commercially licensed video editors, without limiting the use to create "personal" or "non-commercial" videos or get a license agreement with MPEG LA. If one want to publish and broadcast video in a non-personal or commercial setting, it might be that those tools can not be used, or that video format can not be used, without breaking their copyright license. I am not sure. Back then, I found that the copyright license terms for Adobe Premiere and Apple Final Cut Pro both specified that one could not use the program to produce anything else without a patent license from MPEG LA. The issue is not limited to those two products, though. Other much used products like those from Avid and Sorenson Media have terms of use are similar to those from Adobe and Apple. The complicating factor making me unsure if those terms have effect in Norway or not is that the patents in question are not valid in Norway, but copyright licenses are.

These are the terms for Avid Artist Suite, according to their published end user license text (converted to lower case text for easier reading):

18.2. MPEG-4. MPEG-4 technology may be included with the software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:

This product is licensed under the MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer for (i) encoding video in compliance with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4 video”) and/or (ii) decoding MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or was obtained from a video provider licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4 video. No license is granted or shall be implied for any other use. Additional information including that relating to promotional, internal and commercial uses and licensing may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com. This product is licensed under the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license for encoding in compliance with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except that an additional license and payment of royalties are necessary for encoding in connection with (i) data stored or replicated in physical media which is paid for on a title by title basis and/or (ii) data which is paid for on a title by title basis and is transmitted to an end user for permanent storage and/or use, such additional license may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for additional details.

18.3. H.264/AVC. H.264/AVC technology may be included with the software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:

This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for the personal use of a consumer or other uses in which it does not receive remuneration to (i) encode video in compliance with the AVC standard (“AVC video”) and/or (ii) decode AVC video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal activity and/or was obtained from a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No license is granted or shall be implied for any other use. Additional information may be obtained from MPEG LA, L.L.C. See http://www.mpegla.com.

Note the requirement that the videos created can only be used for personal or non-commercial purposes.

The Sorenson Media software have similar terms:

With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4 Video Decoders and/or Encoders: Any such product is licensed under the MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer for (i) encoding video in compliance with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4 video”) and/or (ii) decoding MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or was obtained from a video provider licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4 video. No license is granted or shall be implied for any other use. Additional information including that relating to promotional, internal and commercial uses and licensing may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com.

With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4 Consumer Recorded Data Encoder, MPEG-4 Systems Internet Data Encoder, MPEG-4 Mobile Data Encoder, and/or MPEG-4 Unique Use Encoder: Any such product is licensed under the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license for encoding in compliance with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except that an additional license and payment of royalties are necessary for encoding in connection with (i) data stored or replicated in physical media which is paid for on a title by title basis and/or (ii) data which is paid for on a title by title basis and is transmitted to an end user for permanent storage and/or use. Such additional license may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for additional details.

Some free software like Handbrake and FFMPEG uses GPL/LGPL licenses and do not have any such terms included, so for those, there is no requirement to limit the use to personal and non-commercial.

Lenge siden jeg har hatt tid til å publisere lenker til skriverier jeg har hatt glede og nytte av av å lese. Her er en liten norsk lenkesamling.

• Sjøslag om fiskemilliardene (NRK Ytring 2014-03-03) - litt om hvordan de norske felles matressurser røves fra felleskapet.
• Matkrisen kan komme til Norge (Aftenposten 2014-4-01) - hvordan miljøendringene vil gjøre matproduksjonen i Norge mer sårbar.
• Norge trenger kornlager (NRK Ytring 2014-06-07) Chr. Anton Smedshaug forteller litt om Norges sårbare matsituasjon etter at Staten solgte Norges kornlager.
• PST vil overvåke datatastaturer (NRK 2014-03-04) - PST ønsker retten til å bryte seg inn på private PC-er og legge inn spionprogrammer. Hvilket nok vil gjøre Linux mer populært, men gjør at en i enda mindre grad enn i dag kan stole på datamaskiner - neppe en god ide for samfunnet totalt sett.
• «Ruter fremstår som et pøbelvelde» (OsloBy 2014-03-05) - et eksempel på hvordan kollektivtransportselskapet i Oslo håndterer sine kunder.
• Clear Channel nektet å vise Greenpeace-reklame i Oslo (Dagbladet 2014-03-05) - forteller litt om hvordan hvilke budskap som når ut i det offentlige rom kontrolleres i Norge.
• Svarte ikke på kritikken (Dagbladet 2014-03-06) - innlegg fra Norsk presseforbund der de nok en gang tar opp det forkastelige i at politiet nå har full tilgang til å bedrive telefonkontroll av advokater.
• «Putin spiller poker, ikke sjakk. I sjakk har man regler.» (Aftenposten 2014-03-08) - sjakklegenden Kasparov forklarer litt om hvordan han ser at Russlands politikk fungerer, blant annet i lys av started av Ukraina-krisen.
• I seng med fienden (Aftenposten 2014-03-10) - kronikk fra Eirik H. Vinje om hvordan menn og kvinner settes opp mot hverandre i det offentlige ordskiftet, kanskje på sviktende grunnlag.
• Fritt frem for skulk (Aftenposten 2014-03-14) - skildring av hvordan norske elever i dag ikke lenger har rimelig krav om oppmøte på skolen.
• «Datalagringsdirektiv» avslørte abort, sykdom og våpenkjøp (Aftenposten 2014-03-14) - om hvordan forskere har dokumentert hvordan innsamling av metadata om telefoni og Internett-bruk kan være svært avslørende.
• Konsentrasjonssvikt på pensum (Dagbladet 2014-03-14) - Kommentar om hvordan (feil) bruk IKT i skolen kan ødelegge mer enn det bidrar til læring.
• Reservasjonsrettsstaten (blogg fra Doremus 2014-02-09) - morsom beskrivelse om hvordan regjeringens forslag til reservasjonsrett for leger kan utvides til å gjelde alles samvittighet.
• Autoritær gjøkunge (Aftenposten 2014-03-25) - Kronikk av Bjørn Stærk om snurpenots-overvåkningen som varsleren Snowden dokumenterte.
• Leveransekrise i Offentlig sektor – mener Mike Bracken, Executive Director of Digital in the Cabinet Office (blogg fra Friprog-senteret 2014-03-26).
• Norge må stanse avlyttingen (Dagbladet 2014-03-26) - leserinnlegg fra Felix Horne der han ber om at Norge gjør en innsats for å få slutt på overvåkning av innbyggerne som gjøres i Norge av Etiopiske myndigheter.
• Demokrati er ingen naturlig styreform (Aftenposten 2014-04-01) - kronikk av Stein Ringen om hvordan demokrati som styreform går tapt når innbyggerne tar det for gitt.
• Ytringsansvar ere Enhver tilladte! (NRK Ytring 2014-04-01) - innspill fra Trygve Svensson og Helge Svare om at hver enkelt av oss har et ansvar for å ytre oss i den offentlige debatten.
• Jeg er ingen god samfunnsborger (Aftenposten 2014-04-16), kronikk av Simen Tveitereid om alternative måter å motiveres i samfunnet, uten å hige etter mer penger og flere ting.
• DLD-dommen: Avgjørelsen får umiddelbar virkning (Aftenposten 2014-04-10) - kronikk av Høyres Michael Tetzschner, en partiutbryter i DLD-saken som stemte nei til DLD i Stortinget i 2011.
• Datalagringsdirektivets endelikt (blogg fra John Wessel-Aas 2014-04-11) - oppsummering av hvordan direktivet ble funnet ugyldig i EU-domstolen.
• Kronikk: Kapitulasjonspresidenten (VG 2014-04-22) - kronikk av Einar Kr. Steffenak om hvordan Stortingspresidenten og regjeringen viser sin prinsippløshet i møte med Kina.
• Innerst inne er alle nordmenn (Aftenposten 2014-04-27) - kronikk fra Bjørn Stærk om hvordan vi i Vesten i stor grad baserer oss på en fantasi om at alle i verden bærer på en drøm om å bli som oss.
• Det italienske senatet gav seg selv 134 milliarder euro i sluttpakke (Aftenposten 2014-06-19) - forsker Simen Gaure forteller hvordan løgner og fantasi fra nettkilder i stor grad blir akseptert som sannhet - antagelig også av deg og meg.
• Et forsvar for bråkmakerne (Dagbladet 2014-05-30) - kronikk av Dag Øystein Nome som beskriver hvordan dagens skole ikke fungerer så godt for mange elever.
• Betalte med slitt seddel - havnet i arresten (Osloby 2014-06-25)) - dokumentasjon av Oslopolitiets angrep på vår alles rett til å ferdes uten elektronisk sporing. Jeg bruker kontanter i så stor grad som mulig da banken ikke har noe med hvor jeg er og hva jeg kjøper. Vi som gjør dette risikerer som beskrevet overgrep som frihetsberøvelse og registrering og lagring av fingeravtrykk og bilde i politiets database over mistenkte.
• Fredsprisen til Snowden (Aftenposten 2014-06-28) - leder som forklarer hvorfor varsleren Snowden bør få fredsprisen.
• Strategi for politistaten (Dagbladet 2014-08-01) - leder som advarer om sterke krefter som bruker terrortrusselen til å lirke Norge nærmere å bli en politistat.
• Vi må tenke nytt om narkotika (NRK Ytring 2014-08-03) - Mark Lewis forklarer hvorfor legalisering og offentlig kontroll av narkotikamarkedet er mye bedre enn å overlate det til kriminelle.

The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for schools, Debian Edu / Skolelinux, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust the setup. I managed to interview him this summer.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I'm married with Hedda, a self employed physiotherapist. My former profession is tool maker, but I haven't worked for 30 years in this job. 30 years ago I started to support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only works with Windows . :-(

In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use Windows 98, 2000, XP, …, 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX. Today we are running a Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist, psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to work with the documentations of our patients.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu project?

Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in his school (Gymnasium Harsewinkel). They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their computer skills in optional lessons. I'm spending 4-6 hours a week with this job.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian Edu?

The independence.

First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.

Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices. The servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are working reliable.

We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45 workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile solution for all classrooms. These machines are all booting from the terminal server. In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile workstations. Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these machines in their classrooms. Internet access is realized by a WLAN router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian Edu?

Teachers and pupils are Windows users. <Irony on> And Linux isn't cool. It's software for freaks using the command line. <Irony off> They don't realize the stability of the system.

Which free software do you use daily?

Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Samba, Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, … and Skolelinux / Debian Edu)

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools to use free software?

In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS Office. They don't know about the possibility to use Free Software instead. Another problem are the publisher of school books. They develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.

This summer I finally had time to continue working on the Norwegian docbook version of the 2004 book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with todays copyright law. Yesterday, I finally completed translated the book text. There are still some foot/end notes left to translate, the colophon page need to be rewritten, and a few words and phrases still need to be translated, but the Norwegian text is ready for the first proof reading. :) More spell checking is needed, and several illustrations need to be cleaned up. The work stopped up because I had to give priority to other projects the last year, and the progress graph of the translation show this very well:

If you want to read the result, check out the github project pages and the PDF, EPUB and HTML version available in the archive directory.

Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if you find any.

The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project provide an instruction manual for teachers, system administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up and maintaining a Debian Edu installation. This text is about how the text processing of this manual is handled in the project.

One goal of the project is to provide information in the native language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations. But we also want to make sure each language contain the same information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations in sync. And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to edit the documentation using a web browser. We also want it to be easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these goals.

We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the Debian wiki, as several wiki pages written in English. It consist of one front page with references to the different chapters, several pages for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the chapters together into one large web page (aka the AllInOne page). The AllInOne page is the one used for further processing and translations. Thanks to the fact that the MoinMoin installation on wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in the Docbook format, we can fetch the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the manual. This process also download images and transform image references to use the locally downloaded images. The generated Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done using the documentation/scripts/get_manual program, and the result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and a handfull of images. The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML and epub versions of the English manual. This is the basic step of our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.

But English documentation is not enough for us. We want translated documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to track the English original. For this we use the poxml package, which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based translation tools used by those translating free software. The pot file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po files), which the translations update with the native language translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the original. The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml). This translated (or partly translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version of the documentation.

The translators use different tools to edit the .po files. We recommend using lokalize, while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like Poodle or Transifex. All we care about is where the .po file end up, in our git repository. Updated translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as bug reports against the debian-edu-doc package.

One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if they show translated user applications), and are needed in different formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in this regard). For this we transform the original PNG images to the needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide translated images by storing translated versions in images/$LANGUAGECODE/. I am a bit unsure about the details here. The package maintainers know more.

If you wonder what the result look like, we provide the content of the documentation packages on the web. See for example the Italian PDF version or the German HTML version. We do not yet build the epub version by default, but perhaps it will be done in the future.

To learn more, check out the debian-edu-doc package, the manual on the wiki and the translation instructions in the manual.

Jeg har fortsatt behov for å kunne laste ned innslag fra NRKs nettsted av og til for å se senere når jeg ikke er på nett, men min oppskrift fra 2011 sluttet å fungere da NRK byttet avspillermetode. I dag fikk jeg endelig lett etter oppdatert løsning, og jeg er veldig glad for å fortelle at den enkleste måten å laste ned innslag er å bruke siste versjon 2014.06.07 av youtube-dl. Støtten i youtube-dl kom inn for 23 dager siden og versjonen i Debian fungerer fint også som backport til Debian Wheezy. Det er et lite problem, det håndterer kun URLer med små bokstaver, men hvis en har en URL med store bokstaver kan en bare gjøre alle store om til små bokstaver for å få youtube-dl til å laste ned. Rapporterte nettopp problemet til utviklerne, og antar de får fikset det snart.

Dermed er alt klart til å laste ned dokumentarene om USAs hemmelige avlytting og Selskapene bak USAs avlytting, i tillegg til intervjuet med Edward Snowden gjort av den tyske tv-kanalen ARD. Anbefaler alle å se disse, sammen med foredraget til Jacob Appelbaum på siste CCC-konferanse, for å forstå mer om hvordan overvåkningen av borgerne brer om seg.

Takk til gode venner på foreningen NUUGs IRC-kanal #nuug på irc.freenode.net for tipsene som fikk meg i mål.

Oppdatering 2014-06-17: Etter at jeg publiserte denne, ble jeg tipset om bloggposten "Downloading HD content from tv.nrk.no" av Ingvar Hagelund, som har alternativ implementasjon og tips for å lage mkv-fil med undertekstene inkludert. Kanskje den passer bedre for deg? I tillegg ble feilen i youtube-dl ble fikset litt senere ut på dagen i går, samt at youtube-dl fikk støtte for å laste ned undertitler. Takk til Anders Einar Hilden for god innsats og youtube-dl-utviklerne for rask respons.

Dear lazyweb. I'm planning to set up a small Raspberry Pi computer in my car, connected to a small screen next to the rear mirror. I plan to hook it up with a GPS and a USB wifi card too. The idea is to get my own "Carputer". But I wonder if someone already created a good free software solution for such car computer.

This is my current wish list for such system:

• Work on Raspberry Pi.
• Show current speed limit based on location, and warn if going too fast (for example using color codes yellow and red on the screen, or make a sound). This could be done either using either data from Openstreetmap or OCR info gathered from a dashboard camera.
• Track automatic toll road passes and their cost, show total spent and make it possible to calculate toll costs for planned route.
• Collect GPX tracks for use with OpenStreetMap.
• Automatically detect and use any wireless connection to connect to home server. Try IP over DNS (iodine) or ICMP (Hans) if direct connection do not work.
• Set up mesh network to talk to other cars with the same system, or some standard car mesh protocol.
• Warn when approaching speed cameras and speed camera ranges (speed calculated between two cameras).
• Suport dashboard/front facing camera to discover speed limits and run OCR to track registration number of passing cars.

If you know of any free software car computer system supporting some or all of these features, please let me know.

I've been following the Gnash project for quite a while now. It is a free software implementation of Adobe Flash, both a standalone player and a browser plugin. Gnash implement support for the AVM1 format (and not the newer AVM2 format - see Lightspark for that one), allowing several flash based sites to work. Thanks to the friendly developers at Youtube, it also work with Youtube videos, because the Javascript code at Youtube detect Gnash and serve a AVM1 player to those users. :) Would be great if someone found time to implement AVM2 support, but it has not happened yet. If you install both Lightspark and Gnash, Lightspark will invoke Gnash if it find a AVM1 flash file, so you can get both handled as free software. Unfortunately, Lightspark so far only implement a small subset of AVM2, and many sites do not work yet.

A few months ago, I started looking at Coverity, the static source checker used to find heaps and heaps of bugs in free software (thanks to the donation of a scanning service to free software projects by the company developing this non-free code checker), and Gnash was one of the projects I decided to check out. Coverity is able to find lock errors, memory errors, dead code and more. A few days ago they even extended it to also be able to find the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL. There are heaps of checks being done on the instrumented code, and the amount of bogus warnings is quite low compared to the other static code checkers I have tested over the years.

Since a few weeks ago, I've been working with the other Gnash developers squashing bugs discovered by Coverity. I was quite happy today when I checked the current status and saw that of the 777 issues detected so far, 374 are marked as fixed. This make me confident that the next Gnash release will be more stable and more dependable than the previous one. Most of the reported issues were and are in the test suite, but it also found a few in the rest of the code.

If you want to help out, you find us on the gnash-dev mailing list and on the #gnash channel on irc.freenode.net IRC server.

It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically. So I implemented one, using my Isenkram package. To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and run tasksel as user root. You should be presented with a new option, "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)". When you select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.

The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of packages to install. The first part is in /usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc and look like this:

Task: isenkram
Section: hardware
Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
 Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
 proposed.
Test-new-install: mark show
Relevance: 8
Packages: for-current-hardware

The second part is in /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware and look like this:

#!/bin/sh
#
(
    isenkram-lookup
    isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
) | sort -u

All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to have installed on our machines. I've not been able to find a way to get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install before doing the installation. So if you are curious or careful, check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.

The information about which packages are handling which hardware is fetched either from the isenkram package itself in /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package database (using the Modaliases header). The APT package database parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs #719837 and #730704). The cause is in the python-apt code (bug #745487), but using a workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to around 2 MiB per hardware detection. It should make the desktop daemon a lot more useful. The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to unstable today.

I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to use the AppStream data source for this. A proposal for getting proper AppStream support into Debian is floating around as DEP-11, and GSoC project will take place this summer to improve the situation. I look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to start using the information when it is ready.

If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in the pymissile package or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram package. See also all my blog posts tagged isenkram for details on the notation. I expect the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the moment I got no better place to store it.