Once again Debian is close to release. And once again we're trying to find ways to avoid doing so. Using a technique we've employed before; firmware.

Social Contract #4 states that "Our priorities are our users and free software". The hard liners believe that it's in our users' best interests that we ensure Debian is 100% Free, whether that be regarding software, documentation or firmware. In the long run I think they're right. Access to firmware source (assuming that there's also access to suitable tools for building it and producing an image the hardware will accept, which is a fairly big assumption) enables us to continue supporting and improving hardware support long after a manufacturer has discontinued a device. It enables us to understand the behaviour of a new device better (allowing better support which makes it a more attractive purchase). It potentially lets us appropriate a device for new and exciting purposes the manufacturer never imagined (which may again increase the sales of the device). Access to firmware source is a good thing in the long term, for the consumer, the driver author and the manufacturer.

In the short term we I think we need to be pragmatic. We can say that we won't release until all non-free firmware is purged, but who knows how long that will take, and once we've done so how much hardware will we actually be able to support out of the box? What benefit is it to our users if we ship them a distribution that doesn't support their hardware and is already out of date because we spent so long removing that support? Wouldn't we be better to say "We're aware of some firmware issues. We're going to keep working on spliting such blobs out to their own easily installable packages that live outside main. We promise to continue improving the situation for each release (as we have already done since etch), but in the interests of our users we will not hold up a release at this stage of the process." Obviously plenty of people disagree with that, but I don't believe that pragmatism is against the Social Contract and I'd like to think that even our users who are fervently against firmware blobs would accept that there's a tradeoff to be had against release dates.

Anyway. I doubt I've changed anyone's mind with the above, so I'm going to go and destack the dishwasher and reply to the latest mail from my NM.

Dear Lazyweb, please put me out of my misery.

I have a string that looks something like:

a b c foo {0 1 2} fred {3 4 5} {{5 4 3} {2 1 0}} quux

I want to output:

a
b
c
foo
{0 1 2}
fred
{3 4 5}
{{5 4 3} {2 1 0}}
quux

(actually I want each line to be an array element, but that's obviously easy)

Can I do this with a Perl regex? Originally I thought I was going to have to walk the string like I would in C, but some playing around (and local help) got me to:

my $match = qr/(?:\s*[^\{\}\s]+\s*|\{(?R)\})/;

while ($cur =~ m/($match)\s+(.*)/o) {
        print $1, "\n";
        $cur = $2;
}

which sort of gets me there, except I get

{0 1 2} fred {3 4 5} {{5 4 3} {2 1 0}}

as one line instead of 4.

What obvious thing am I missing here?

This is the point where I should be writing something witty and intelligent about the election going on across the pond, but I can't think of anything worth saying. If you can, go and vote. Even if you think your side is going to win, go and bloody do it anyway.

Anyway. Today I achieved FDMI success; my code successfully registered my test cluster against the fabric switch it's connected to and reported various bits of information about itself. Hardly earth shattering but does at least indicate that I'm beginning to understand some details of Fibre Channel at the packet level and how to make our code send/receive them. Go 'bama me.

(FDMI is the Fabric Device Management Interface and a way for Fibre Channel devices to report things like their manufacturer, serial number, OS, HBA model and driver/firmware versions to a management controller on the switch fabric. It's not a complex protocol in any manner, but there's a distinct lack of clear Fibre Channel documentation around that's at a lower level than "So you want to hook up a SAN?")

If you ask the old timers about how they got started in Debian they'll tell you about sending off an email saying they wanted to get involved and having an account setup the same day. By the time I got round to joining it was during tbm's blitz when NM opened up again and it took only a few days to get through the process. When I first AMed, back in 2002, it took anywhere from a few days to a few months to process an applicant. I've recently started AMing again and so far my NM and I have exchanged 9 mails over the course of 2 weeks and still aren't through Philosophy and Procedures.

This isn't due to any failing on the part of my NM. It's just that there's a lot more "paperwork" to get through these days. There's currently a lot of discussion going on about the idea of introducing new classes of Debian involvement. I think that's something that's definitely worth looking at; it's already in existence for Debian Maintainers vs Debian Developers. However anything new that's introduced really needs to make some effort to be lighter than NM; someone who just wants to handle a few packages is going to get put off by too many hoops and the current NM process is already largely constrained by available AM time rather than anything else. I don't pretend to know what the right solution is, but I think anyone attempting to produce one should be praised for that rather than attacked.