@Braiam dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=$((4096*1024)) oflags=seek_bytes seek=$((63*512)) ... there, a DD (obviously untested).

@derobert Huh? What is a DD here?

Hope that helps...

:-P

I'm officially lost. But never mind.

We could probably send you a GPS app.

I assumed @Braiam meant Debian Developer. But I don't know what the context was.

Oh. he probably did.

@derobert Thanks, but I can find one. If I need it.

@derobert Well, his context was not clear. Did he want one as a pet, did he want to talk to one, or did he want to gaze upon a DD from a distance?

@FaheemMitha I'd advise against keeping a DD as a pet. At least, if the flamewars on -devel are any indication.

@derobert Good point.

Though I don't follow -devel. Do you?

If you do obtain a DD, evidence shows you should also obtain a secluded mountain cabin for the DD. That works really well, for quite a while.

@FaheemMitha Somewhat. As in I'm subscribed and occasionally go through the folder.

@derobert Oh.

@derobert Not all DDs are Joey Hess. Some of them are quite social. Some have families, even.

Though my impression of JH is that he is quite a normal and amiable chap. I don't know why he chooses to live like a hermit. But doubtless he has his reasons.

@FaheemMitha Yes. But how many have done as much awesome stuff as joeyh?

@derobert Anything interesting?

@derobert Not many. But you don't need to live like a hermit to be productive.

@FaheemMitha Haven't gone through it in a few weeks. Last time it was mostly normal stuff.

And I doubt JH thought to himself - let me live like a hermit, I'll get more stuff done. He must like living that way.

@derobert No systemd flamewars?

Nope. Hasn't been one of those in a bit, actually.

I think everyone on the list but a person or two is sick of them. So someone will troll, and not be fed.

That's probably good. Though it does make for entertaining press. Like that time when the TC started resigning en-masse.

Entertaining in a burning house kind of way.

Yeah...

I don't find -devel terribly interesting most of the time. Mostly minutiae.

@FaheemMitha At least it didn't reach Dresden-level interestingness.

@derobert As in the WW2 firestorm?

@FaheemMitha Yeah, for the most part that's what it is. It's supposed to be that. Discussions about actually developing Debian.

@FaheemMitha yeah

@derobert True. But not really entertaining for spectators.

Though it's educational to see how much effort goes into Debian.

You wouldn't guess it from the outside. If you were just a user.

@FaheemMitha Well, it still can be. Depends on how hard the problem they're working on is.

@FaheemMitha apparently...

"Living in the woods without modern conveniences is great, because it's quiet and you can think as much as you like; the internet is just as close as it is anywhere else (maybe a bit slower); and when you've spent too much time quietly thinking you'll need to go chop wood, or haul water, or jump in the river to cool off, depending on the season." zgrimshell.github.io/posts/…

@derobert You must admit that sounds a little hermit-like.

Any minute now he'll publish a philosophical book called "Walden Redux" or something.

Well, without Debian, maybe he'll have time to take up book-writing.

@derobert I hope he hasn't given up on Debian entirely. Lots of people hope he'll change his mind and come back.

"Or it can go other the way -- I had an affinity to mathematics when I was young, but it got knocked out of me in the way that happens to many people, and languages like perl and C don't do much to make you want to learn more about higher-order math."

I wonder what he meant by "t got knocked out of me in the way that happens to many people". I'm tempted to write and ask him.

Hmm, he implies he does it partly to keep costs down, and that way he has more freedom to do what he wants. Which makes sense, I suppose.

@derobert Ever tried Haskell?

@derobert HA!

yeah, I wanted someone to pass a patch to my country locale

upstream is slow as heck

@Braiam @StephenKitt is a DD, and has been a regular on the site for some months now.

Hi. I have a following problem. I need to display QR codes on a graphical console on Linux. I use qemu. Have you an idea how to write the code to put pixels on framebuffer? I used mmap to write to the buffer, but this failed.

@FaheemMitha Yes, he is very friendly!

@Braiam Feel free to email me (skitt@debian.org) and I'll see what I can do.

@StephenKitt None of us have ever met him, but I'll take your word for it.

@JKS Post a question on the site. That's what it is there for. Don't worry, we don't bite.

@JKS hmm, actually, if it is a programming question, should probably go on SO.

@StephenKitt thanks, will try to put the stuff together, just one question git patch or quilt?

@Braiam LOL.

@FaheemMitha Very, very briefly. It's on my every-growing todo list...

@derobert ok

So are a few other languages, like Python and Lua. When they actually happens depends a lot on which program I need to modify first...

@derobert I thought you knew Python.

@FaheemMitha Nope. I've done C, C++, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, HyperTalk, ... a few more, but not Python.

@derobert ok.

Oh! Java, I did that too. That's another major one.

(Many of those I've probably forgotten...)

@derobert There are better languages than Java.

BASIC, hypercard, C, C++, Perl, PHP (ewww), Java, Fortran, Python, Objective C and probably a few im forgetting but no haskell (though I know of it)

@FaheemMitha I'm not sure whether you were counting me in "none of us", but I have indeed met him ;-).

@Braiam It depends on the package, if it uses manual quilt patches then quilt, if the quilt patches are auto-generated from a git branch then git.

@StephenKitt No, I guess I meant the other (non-DD) folks here. :-)

@FaheemMitha OK I see!

I've seen his talks. He seems very down-to-earth.

I watched a rather rambling talk he gave about debhelper a while back.

Rather stream-of-consciousness.

I didn't think he was a great speaker, I must say.

It depends on whether you enjoy stream-of-consciousness talks I guess.

Lots of his talks are designed more to start discussions than present a tightly-focused message.

@StephenKitt Yes, I see. Does it work? :-)

@FaheemMitha Generally speaking yes, he usually ends up with a few BoF sessions afterwards (and more than are scheduled originally).

@StephenKitt ok. Have you chatted to him one-on-one?

@FaheemMitha Yes, but about travelling, not coding!

@StephenKitt oh. And did you ask him about his remote mountain fastness?

:-)

@FaheemMitha No, he writes enough about that that there isn't much that would make sense to ask in casual conversation...

@StephenKitt ok :-)

If I met him, I would be tempted to ask. Though it might not be polite.

I don't think he'd consider it as impolite, or even boring!

Given how much he writes about it he probably enjoys talking about it too...

My comment earlier relates more to the fact that I like talking with people about things I don't know about them (yet).

@StephenKitt I see.

So, you talked to him about travelling?

Yup.

And on that note good night!

@StephenKitt Good night.

@casey Oh right! I've done PHP too. And BASIC and LOGO.

And I'll say PHP isn't that terrible of a language. PHP's problem has always been its users...

Like Perl's used to be.

> Compiling the GNU C library yourself requires a lot of resources. For a complete build using dpkg-buildpackage you need at least 750MB free disk space and at least 16MB of RAM and 32MB of swap space (if you have only that much you're better off not running X at the same time). Note that the C library on the Hurd is also somewhat larger: you'll need over 800MB of free disk space to build Hurdish packages.

O_O 2015?

that 16MB has to be a typo

back when you could compile something in 16MB, it didn't take that much disk space

can't be a typo for 16GB, no compilation requires that much unless it involves Java

16MB + 32MB of swap might do, granted compilers of that time weren't very resource intensive (considering current behavior)

for some reason I decided to clone the entire glibc svn repository instead of just the trunk :/