RCBW - week #16

... and here are christmas (for those who care) RC squashes, by yours truly (for those who care too):

Debian bug #530527 - ipsec-tools - gcc 4.4 strict-aliasing, patch by peter green
Debian bug #539010 - opensrs-client - stop using deprecated Perl module MD5, patch by Ansgar Burchardt
Debian bug #539542 - libnsgif - gcc 4.4 strict-aliasing, patch by peter green
Debian bug #531715 - gcin - gcc 4.4 missing include, patch by Martin Michlmayr (+ lintian overrides for appropriate use of rpath)
Debian bug #504873 - im-sdk - gcc 4.4 missing include, patch by Martin Michlmayr (bonus: package orphaning, misc QA, kfreebsd patches applied)
Debian bug #540681 - beast - cast to volatile pointer, patch by Jakub Wilk
Debian bug #560499 - beast - gcc 4.4 missing includes

and here are the usual notes:

most of them come from Luk, which this week provided me with a looong list (and of course I was not able to empty it) ...
... that list has probably entered the radar of others: let's thank Christoph Egger, gregor hermann, and David Paleino, which contributed quite a lot of RC-fixing NMUs in the past few days (probably others did too, but these 3 got into my way the most )
I got annoyed by Debian bug #562518 (zlibg b0rkage) for a while: while my main system got saved by apt-listbugs, my cowbuilder environment was not that lucky
I've tried following a wise advice to speed up pkg building, but it does not work w/ cowbuilder, which insists in creating hard links and hence fail due to cross-device linking. I need to investigate whether this can be fixed without loosing APT cache sharing with the host system
"thanks" to im-sdk, I discovered yet another patch management system: dbs: how many others are still out there?
how dumb is a BTS instance which is not accessible by default w/o registration even for read-only purposes?

Hint/request of the week: please add +pending when you do DELAYED/ NMUs, that way filtering out already taken care of bugs gets easier and refreshing a bug log page in the browser will immediately show the new tag at the top.
(Yes, I agree that nmudiff should offer that when passed --delay, I intend to propose a patch for that, but feel free to beat me at it :-P)

In other news, christmas vacations are awesome to catch up with books you planned to finish reading months ago ...

Update: the patch for nmudiff I've mentioned has been kindly provided by gregor hermann, thanks!