Domenico Andreoli just announced to the world that he’s orphaning the pycurl package in Debian. pycurl is the fairly popular Python binding for libcurl written by Kjetil Jacobsen.
Fans of Debian, libcurl and python now have a fine chance to step forwards and contribute!
Update: Sandra Tosi “took it“.
A while ago I noticed that my gnome-terminals all of a sudden started to do blinking cursors. Oh the guys who thought that is a good idea to add it without any option to disable it should surely be given a proper eh well, lesson on how to do things right.
Then, just today I did apt-get update on my laptop only to find out that multi-gnome-terminal is now removed in Debian so my favorite terminal is no more!
Grrr.
Update: checking with gconf-editor under desktop > gnome > interface, there’s a checkbox for “cursor_blink” that I unchecked and wham, now the blink is gone!
I recently shot a little video with my phone (SE w580i) and when I copied it over to my Debian Linux box I of course immediately realized I had no video players that would show a 3GP film. Or rather, they all showed it but none of them played the sound! It seems the phone uses the ‘amr_nb‘ codec for audio, which is a non-free thing that my “Debian unstable” players (not very surprisingly) don’t have built-in support for…
Anyway, if you close your eyes for the problems with closed proprietary evil, I got pointed to the cool site www.debian-multimedia.org and then I could add the following line to my /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org unstable main
… and do a plain plain “apt-get update” and “apt-get dist-upgrade” and wham, my mplayer could now show the 3gp video with sound.
The only slightly quirk remaining is that I didn’t manage to transcode the movie with audio nicely with mencode, but I didn’t really spend enough time to figure out why.
I noticed curl on Fedora suddenly started using NSS for TLS/SSL, as I believe the first distro out there.
I’ve been under the impression that Debian is the only distro shipping it built with GnuTLS.
I must admit I enjoy seeing more use of curl’s wide support of various underlying technologies, and it also makes it more certain that they will remain working and even get improved as we go. When we add support for things and they never really end up getting used those features just risk serious bitrotting and slowly dying away when the code changes but nobody uses them.