debian – Made by Mikal

I was unaware of Debian’s extrepo command…

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 18, 2025
Post category:Debian

…and its actually a pretty neat idea!

Now admittedly, I encountered extrepo when one of the repos being added to a Docker container build I care about was being unreliable, but that caused me to dig into what it is and how it works and I quite like the idea.

The basic idea is that there are people out there who publish packages for Debian, either as hilarious curl scripts which you’re meant to pipe into a root shell, or as just .deb files which you download and manually install. Instead of being terrible though, what if there was a tool which knew how to provide apt repository configurations for those things? Then, apt would do the right things when the packages changed and so forth. Those configurations could come from a central source which you could also trust to provide the GPG keys that signed those packages. Neat yeah?

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ImageMagick bug?

Post author:mikal
Post published:September 27, 2005
Post category:Imagemagick

Subject: imagemagick: If the trailing character of a montage label option is a percent sign, the output image is erroneous Package: imagemagick Version: 6:6.2.3.6-3 Severity: normal *** Please type your report below this line *** Executing this command line: montage -geometry +10+10 -tile 2 -label "-sepia-tone 15%%" \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20a.jpg -label "-sepia-tone 35%%" \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20b.jpg -label "-sepia-tone 55%%" \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20c.jpg -label "-sepia-tone 75%%" \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20d.jpg ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20.jpg Whereas this command line: montage -geometry +10+10 -tile 2 -label "-sepia-tone 15%% " \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20a.jpg -label "-sepia-tone 35%%" \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20b.jpg -label "-sepia-tone 55%%" \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20c.jpg -label "-sepia-tone 75%%" \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20d.jpg ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20.jpg Produces the expected output: -- System Information: Debian Release: testing/unstable APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: i386 (i686) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Kernel: Linux 2.6.11 Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968) Versions of packages imagemagick depends on: ii libmagick6 6:6.2.3.6-3 Image manipulation library imagemagick recommends no packages. -- no debconf information

Why Debian?

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 12, 2005
Post category:Imagemagick

Why do I use Debian? Well, one of the reasons is the bug reporting. I think I just found two bugs in ImageMagick, one a simple documentation bug, and the other a functionality bug. With Debian, I can just run the reportbug command from the command line with the name of the package, and walk through the simple bug reporting process, instead of having to fight my way through mailing lists for the dozens of different packages I have installed. It's nice.