20 May 2004
Mail Viruses
The barrage of mail viruses and their side effects is getting quite annoying. In the past week, I've had a gnome.org mailing list subscriptions disabled twice. After looking at the mailing list archive, it was pretty obvious why.
The mail server that serves my account is set up to reject windows executables a few other viruses at SMTP delivery time (so it isn't responsible for generating bounces). Unfortunately, a number of viruses got through to the mailing lists and were subsequently rejected before reaching my account. After a certain number of bounces of this type, mailman helpfully disables delivery.
It'd be nice if mail.gnome.org was set up to reject these sort of
messages too (in the case of gnome.org it'd probably be safe to block
zip files as well, which would cut out virtually all the viruses).
It also seems that the email viruses don't pick the sender and recipient completely at random. Apparently a number of infected machines keep on mailing the XML mailing list with my address as the sender. It got so bad that the list admin put me in the "always moderate" list. Of course, this meant that I ended up receiving many messages telling me my message awaits moderation (which are pretty easy to filter). Luckily the new version of Mailman limits itself to 10 of these messages a day.
jhbuild
I've merged in some of Thomas Fitzsimmons' jhbuild
patches. It
isn't yet at a stage where you can build GCJ using an unmodified
jhbuild, but we've got some of the basics in there. A big part of the
changes involve adding support for srcdir != builddir builds, which is
apparently the preferred way of compiling GCJ. This is accomplished by
setting the buildroot config key to the directory where you want
builds to be performed. Things aren't fully working yet, but at least
some modules build in this mode. We'll probably need to add support for
marking some modules as not supporting srcdir != builddir builds,
since some modules will most likely never support it.
gnome-common
I've been doing some work to simplify the gnome-common autogen script. A lot of the infrastructure dates back to the early 2.0 days where it was important to make sure developers could hack on 1.x apps and 2.0 stuff at the same time, which involved complicated infrastructure to make sure 2.0 packages didn't see the Gnome 1.x autoconf macros and vice versa.
Since then things have changed. Developing Gnome 1.x apps isn't really
a priority any more (and no one was using the stuff installed by
gnome-common for 1.x work anyway). We also have far fewer autoconf
macros in gnome-common, and they aren't particularly Gnome 2 specific.
This is partly because I killed a lot of them last year, and deprecated
most of the rest. While looking through the macros this time, it turned
out I could remove another one, and get rid of the deprecated macros
altogether. This just leaves some macros for setting compiler warning
flags, one for adding a --enable-debug configure option.
The patch moves the remaining autoconf macros to the normal
$(datadir)/aclocal directory so that aclocal can find it easily, and
install the common autogen script as $(bindir)/bin/gnome-autogen.sh
(which was previously a small script that would choose which set of
macros and autogen script to call based on an environment variable).
Hopefully these simplifications will make it easier to debug autotool failures in the various Gnome packages. Many people seem to find autoconf hard enough to understand as is without us making things more complicated and adding extra ways that things could fail.