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Joachim Breitner's Homepage

By popular request (if you consider Lunar to be a pupil) I have packaged my old hack vlshow as screen-message to Debian. The small program (called “sm” on when installed) starts and displays a given text as large as possible, in big bulky black letters on white background. You can change the text while the program is running. This might be useful to quickly send a message across the room, say something to people who think they are reading your screen unnoticed, for make-shift signs, to marvel at nice unicode characters and all kinds of other funny purposes.

I used this as a chance to try out darcs-buildpackage, which is very nice, especially as it makes the separation of upstream sources and Debian changes possible in a non-troublesome way. I attended Enrico’s tutorial on autotools and autotoolized the package during that talk, which meant that I could use cdbs for building the package − nice experience as well. Darcs’s dist feature is very nice when using autotools, although it makes darcs-buildpackage slightly inconvenient. (While dpkg-buildpackage uses darcs dist on the upstream sources to build the orig.tar.gz, it does not check the predist command in _darcs/pref/pref when building the debian package, which fails then. It works fine if I run that command, in my case predist autoreconf -i && rm -rf autom4te.cache/, before running dpkg-buildpackage.)

The package is currently in the NEW-queue, until it was accepted, you can find packages on people.debian.org. Thanks to Lunar for some patches. I’m keen to hear interesting stories about how and where you used the program.