Luca's meaningless thoughts

I've done my regular aptitude full-upgrade and noticed the f*cking Adobe Flash player stopped working for amd64.

If you are experiencing the same, take a look at the workaround here.

Flash must die, DIE!

I've updated my Mutt Debian package with the NNTP patch to the latest Debian Mutt package.

If you have Debian testing/unstable and amd64 or i386 arch, just download and install the provided packages.

For other setups, here are the quick (copy&paste) instructions:

ver=1.5.20
deb_ver=$ver-8luca1
url=http://www.llucax.com.ar.nyud.net/proj/mutt-nntp-debian/files/latest
wget $url/mutt_$deb_ver.dsc $url/mutt_$deb_ver.diff.gz \
   http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/m/mutt/mutt_$ver.orig.tar.gz
sudo apt-get build-dep mutt
dpkg-source -x mutt_$deb_ver.dsc
cd mutt-$ver
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
# install any missing packages reported by dpkg-buildpackage and try again
cd ..
sudo dpkg -i mutt_${deb_ver}_*.deb mutt-patched_${deb_ver}_*.deb

See the project page for more details.

I've updated my Mutt Debian package with the NNTP patch to the latest Debian Mutt package. I've put up a small home page for the project too, so it's easier to find.

I'll post new releases here anyway, so stay tuned =)

Finally, Debian's bug #508070 is closed! That means that LDC is officially in Debian now. The package is only in the experimental repositories for now, I hope it hits testing soon.

Thanks to Arthur Loiret for the packaging efforts!

Did you ever wanted Mutt with NNTP support packed up for your Debian (or Debian-ish) box, but you are too lazy to do it yourself? Did you even tried to report a bug so the patch can be applied to the official Debian package but the maintainers told you they wont do it?

If so, this is a great day for you, because I did it and I'm giving it away with no charge in this one time only opportunity!!! =P

Seriously, I can understand why the maintainers don't want to support it officially, it a big patch and can be some work to fold it in. So I did it myself, and it turned out it's wasn't that bad.

I adjusted the patch maintained by Vsevolod Volkov to work on top of all the other patches included in the mutt-patched Debian package (the only conflicting patch is the sidebar patch and some files that doesn't exist because the patch should be applied after autotools files are generated and Debian apply the patches before that) and built the package using the latest Debian source (1.5.20-4).

You can find the source package and the binary packages for Debian unstable i386 here. You can find there the modified NNTP patch too.

If you have Ubuntu or other Debian based distribution, you can compile the binary package by downloading the files mutt_1.5.20-4luca1.diff.gz, mutt_1.5.20-4luca1.dsc and mutt_1.5.20.orig.tar.gz, then run:

$ sudo apt-get build-dep mutt
$ dpkg-source -x mutt_1.5.20-4luca1.dsc
$ cd mutt-1.5.20
$ dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
$ cd ..
$ sudo dpkg -i mutt_1.5.20-4luca1_i386.deb \
        mutt-patched_1.5.20-4luca1_i386.deb

Now you can enjoy reading the D newsgroups and your favourite mailing lists via Gmane with Mutt without leaving the beauty of your packaging system. No need to thank me, I'm glad to be helpful ;)