Yesterday was a busy Debian day for me with the release of not one but two packages.

procps

procps version 3.3.6 was released both as an upstream and a Debian package.  While there were many bug fixes in this release, the main new feature for it was the top inspect feature.

The top inspect feature allows you to run top in the normal way then you can inspect a specific process you have selected within top for more information.  Examples of this include fuser or lsof type output to see what files or libraries are open but really the limit is how clever the operator is and how often you would need this information.  Even scripts can be run off this feature if you have some customised or cooked output you need to see.  Once the output is there, you can search for text.

There will be a small hold-up with the Debian packages as the section for the  library has been moved to libs, where it should be. At least I think that’s why there is a delay.

procps infrastructure

procps currently has only an email list and a gitorious git repository.  While this works most of the time, there are two main problems with this setup.

The first is that the only two ways you can report bugs is send an email to the list or create a git merge request. The email has the problem with tracking and gathering history while the git sets the bar pretty high for reporting something has gone wrong.

Second problem is there is no tarball file repository.  gitorious does have the feature of downloading tarballs of the tag checkpoints, but this is the raw repository.  When you make a tarball with “make dist” there are some generated files included in the tarball that don’t appear in the gitorious ones, which means its not a simple for some as you expect.

So I’ll be creating a project for these two features soon.  Not sure where they will be but I use sourceforge for both these for a few other projects so that might be where they end up.

Mudlet

Mudlet, the multi-user dungeon or MUD client, has finally made it to version 2.0!  It looks a lot more stable and polished at least from the scripting side than the previous RC versions but has all the features that we’ve come to expect with it.  The most important thing is that the developers have finally put a line in the sand and said “this is version 2.0”.  The Debian package was uploaded yesterday and should be on its way to your local mirror soon.