Petter Reinholdtsen

It is a while since I posted a summary of the free software and open culture activities and projects I have worked on. Here is a quick summary of the major ones from last year.

I guess the biggest project of the year has been migrating orphaned packages in Debian without a version control system to have a git repository on salsa.debian.org. When I started in April around 450 the orphaned packages needed git. I've since migrated around 250 of the packages to a salsa git repository, and around 40 packages were left when I took a break. Not sure who did the around 160 conversions I was not involved in, but I am very glad I got some help on the project. I stopped partly because some of the remaining packages needed more disk space to build than I have available on my development machine, and partly because some had a strange build setup I could not figure out. I had a time budget of 20 minutes per package, if the package proved problematic and likely to take longer, I moved to another package. Might continue later, if I manage to free up some disk space.

Another rather big project was the translation to Norwegian Bokmål and publishing of the first book ever published by a Sámi woman, the «Møter vi liv eller død?» book by Elsa Laula, with a PD0 and CC-BY license. I released it during the summer, and to my surprise it has already sold several copies. As I suck at marketing, I did not expect to sell any.

A smaller, but more long term project (for more than 10 years now), and related to orphaned packages in Debian, is my project to ensure a simple way to install hardware related packages in Debian when the relevant hardware is present in a machine. It made a fairly big advance forward last year, partly because I have been poking and begging package maintainers and upstream developers to include AppStream metadata XML in their packages. I've also released a few new versions of the isenkram system with some robustness improvements. Today 127 packages in Debian provide such information, allowing isenkram-lookup to propose them. Will keep pushing until the around 35 package names currently hard coded in the isenkram package are down to zero, so only information provided by individual packages are used for this feature.

As part of the work on AppStream, I have sponsored several packages into Debian where the maintainer wanted to fix the issue but lacked direct upload rights. I've also sponsored a few other packages, when approached by the maintainer.

I would also like to mention two hardware related packages in particular where I have been involved, the megactl and mfi-util packages. Both work with the hardware RAID systems in several Dell PowerEdge servers, and the first one is already available in Debian (and of course, proposed by isenkram when used on the appropriate Dell server), the other is waiting for NEW processing since this autumn. I manage several such Dell servers and would like the tools needed to monitor and configure these RAID controllers to be available from within Debian out of the box.

Vaguely related to hardware support in Debian, I have also been trying to find ways to help out the Debian ROCm team, to improve the support in Debian for my artificial idiocy (AI) compute node. So far only uploaded one package, helped test the initial packaging of llama.cpp and tried to figure out how to get good speech recognition like Whisper into Debian.

I am still involved in the LinuxCNC project, and organised a developer gathering in Norway last summer. A new one is planned the summer of 2025. I've also helped evaluate patches and uploaded new versions of LinuxCNC into Debian.

After a 10 years long break, we managed to get a new and improved upstream version of lsdvd released just before Christmas. As I use it regularly to maintain my DVD archive, I was very happy to finally get out a version supporting DVDDiscID useful for uniquely identifying DVDs. I am dreaming of a Internet service mapping DVD IDs to IMDB movie IDs, to make life as a DVD collector easier.

My involvement in Norwegian archive standardisation and the free software implementation of the vendor neutral Noark 5 API continued for the entire year. I've been pushing patches into both the API and the test code for the API, participated in several editorial meetings regarding the Noark 5 Tjenestegrensesnitt specification, submitted several proposals for improvements for the same. We also organised a small seminar for Noark 5 interested people, and is organising a new seminar in a month.

Part of the year was spent working on and coordinating a Norwegian Bokmål translation of the marvellous children's book «Ada and Zangemann», which focus on the right to repair and control your own property, and the value of controlling the software on the devices you own. The translation is mostly complete, and is now waiting for a transformation of the project and manuscript to use Docbook XML instead of a home made semi-text based format. Great progress is being made and the new book build process is almost complete.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

The lsdvd project got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood. This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve Dibb.

I just wrapped up a new lsdvd release, available in git or from the download page. This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version 0.17.

• Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks
• Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is non-existant, to work around additional copy protection
• Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles
• Fix pallete display of first entry
• Fix include orders
• Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway
• Fix the chapter count
• Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising the palette size is the same.
• Fix array printing.
• Correct subsecond calculations.
• Add sector information to the output format.
• Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings with more GCC compiler warnings.

This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the project the last nine years. Please check it out. :)

I use the lsdvd tool to handle my fairly large DVD collection. It is a nice command line tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length, etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format. But lsdvd have not seen any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting its use with some DVDs. Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the project, without any reply. But I use it regularly and would like to get an updated version into Debian. So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take over. And yesterday, I became project admin.

I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly, collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place. I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too. If you got a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out the git source and join the project mailing list. :)