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Debian packaging: Changing permissions and ownership of dirs

Regarding creating users and permissions our beloved Debian Policy [chap. 10.9] tells us:

...you must arrange for your package to create the user or group if necessary using adduser in the preinst or postinst script (again, the latter is to be preferred if it is possible).

I wanted to stick to the postinst since it's preferrable so I couldn't change the permissions in the rules file.

Now the thing is I need to give this user permissions for the dirs it will need to own/write and so on. I already have the dirs listed in debian/dirs and I don't want to hardcode anything else in the rules or in the postinst. Of course not being a so experienced debian devel I started to google but didn't find anything... asked around but nothing yet... so I hacked it in this way in the end:

debian/rules:
...
MYDIRS := $(shell cat $(CURDIR)/debian/dirs)
SUBME := $(foreach dir, $(MYDIRS), chown -R \$$the_user $(dir);)
SUBFRIENDLY := $(shell echo "$(SUBME)" | sed -e 's/\//\\\//g')
...
binary-indep: build install
...
dh_installdeb
sed -i -e 's/PLACEHOLDER/$(SUBFRIENDLY)/' $(DESTDIR)/DEBIAN/postinst
...
...

debian/postinst:
...
configure)
the_user="xyz"
#Creating the user if it does not exist
if ! getent passwd $the_user > /dev/null; then
adduser $the_user
fi

#Changing the permissions for the given dirs
PLACEHOLDER
...

(user=xyz can be easily changed to numeric ID)

I don't know if this is the 'standard' way to do it (nor if there is a standard way) but it's at least a way that worked... If anybody there can give me an hint on how to do it better, it would be really appreciated.

N900 and TV-out: I just love it

After I read the post of Urho about Wiimote+DrNokSnes+TVout I couldn't help trying it out right away (except the Wiimote thing that I don't have). That was a funny jump back in time to when I was young and passed the evenings at a friend's apartment trying to finish the (amazing at that time) Super Mario bros on the NES (I didn't have a NES myself).

Besides that I tried out for the first time in these months the TV-out. I never realized it was so amazing... after having that strange cable packed on my desk for a whole 2 months I got to really use it. And, even if at first it was just to play Mario, I realized that the N900 it's a full blown audio/video player that supports a lot of formats. So I just started to watch a TV show on the bus, arrived home and plugged it into the TV and finished watching the show there.

I mean it's amazing! 180 grams plus a cable and you have a multimedia station with 32G storage on board. I've been thinking to get some kind of media box lately... well I think I found it... it was in my pocket the whole time.

Maemo5 and Nokia N900

Oh finally we announced this thing. Still can't talk about it that much :(

The video looks great though :)

Recycling the first maemo

Time to recycle the first maemo server, phased out a long time ago and now waiting for its final death.

(it's not just a server with a yellow maemo sticker on top, even if you can argue that :D )

[Kudos to Jesus that spotted it in the corridor]

really convert your SVN to GIT with one script (tags included)

Having to convert some SVN repositories to GIT, Misha pointed me to this recipe that was quite what I needed to convert svn tags to real tags.

There was some more typing involved and I hate typing, plus I had to deal with a non standard SVN layout that by experience I think it's like a second standard. So I included all the hints found there and somewhere else in a "one click" script that tries to do everything automatically. Since it's automatic you might end up with something close but not exactly as you need, so feel free to tweak as much as you want (as I did with Frank's recipe ;) ).

You can download the script here and run it

sh convert_svn_to_git.sh -r path/to/svn/repo -a path/to/authorsfile

enjoy ;)

Where maemo is coming from...

Image by teoruiz via FlickrI will try to tell the story as my friend mooch told me quite some time ago.

It was the beginning of the internet tablets, it was so beginning that the tablets were just called "devices" and that the 770 was only a prototype. I wasn't there yet but mooch told me he was and he just received his brand new shiny desktop to start doing something.

In the search for a new name for his machine he fired up the good old 'pwgen' utility. Strange and incomprehensible names started to come up on the screen. One of those wasn't really maemo but it was really close to be (pwgen default is to give you 8 chars strings). He extrapolated somehow maemo from the 8 chars displaying on the screen and he dig up in the internet finding out that maemo didn't really mean that much besides something in a dialect on the other part of the world and he decided to choose that as the name of his desktop.

At that time he was the IT guy in the organization and he started to use his desktop to collect packages that developers were sending him over e-mail, ftp... (yeah it was really the beginning).

In few months his desktop was clogged with packages and he couldn't use it anymore as his desktop but it became quite useful as central repository for the developers.

He had to grow it with more disk space and move to another 2x CPU box. When services and needs grew way too much for the little power provided by 2GB and 2x PIII 700MHz, he ordered a new machine that became THE Server.

Someday after some other months somebody came into the room and asked him if Nokia could use that name to register a domain to publish some sdk. Without second thoughts he told "Of course".

Well that was the beginning of maemo.org .

Kudos to mooch ;)

Recovering from Maemo Summit 08

So finally I get few minutes to write about Maemo Summit 08. Hopefully (if the crawler hits my blog) this should be my first post aggregated with planet.maemo.org. So hello maemons.

At the beginning I wasn't so sure that I would have benefited by going to the summit and I was a bit sceptical about it. Well after that (and after one week passed to recover from it) I have to say: it was great!
First time I met a lot of people and had a chance to really talk to them (email, though useful, doesn't give you everything of a person). First time I had a chance to speak for more than the time allocated for the meeting with some nokians.
Overall there was this sensation of community that as an insider you don't feel everyday. Actually you never feel so much you're busy with your job.

I really have to thank (again) Quim and Peter that organized the summit. And I also have to thank the whole community. If you didn't get it we, as nokians, need you as much as you need us. Coming back to Finland after the summit I was refreshed and energized (even though I was damn tired) and I felt I was sharing this state of mind with a lot of others in the plane (at least the tiredness :D ).

Greetings to Niels, murrayc, kersten and the other of the openismus crew (great party!). To the Collabora guys and to the rest that I didn't mention here. See you at the next summit.

BIG thanks to the community to support us and to give us more energy to continue on this path.

Canola 2.0 is coming

Just read on handful's blog that Canola 2.0 is coming in 10 days.

Can't wait for it :D

Here's a teaser

Newborn in Nokia's family

The new NSeries Internet Tablet N810 saw the light today at around 8 pm (EEST). I'm really proud and happy of this product, we spent a lot of work on it to make it happen and... hey we made it! :D

It sports a lot of features but I won't list them here since you can find them in the official press release.

What I want to emphasize here is the incredible human capital that is behind the creation and the realization of this product. We've put in the device a lot of passion and I won't say that is perfect but it has something. And I like it.

More pictures here