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Shortly after the scandal over Cornelia Rau (a mentally ill Australian who was in detention for 10 months), another case gets some media attention: Vivian Young/Alvarez/Solon. She is an Australian citizen born in the Phillipines, who also suffers from a mental illness. From the news reports, the sequence of events seems to be: In 1984, Vivian moved to Australia to live with her new husband. In 2001, she was involved in a car accident in NSW. While being treated at Lismore Hospital for her injuries, she lodged a citizenship application and the staff contacted the immigration officials. She gave her name as "Vivian Alvarez". On July 17, 2001, the Queensland Department of Families finally notified police that "Vivian Young" was missing. Days later, she was deported to the Phillipines -- neither the NSW or Qld police noticing that she was on the missing persons list. Apparently she was pushed onto the plane in a wheelchair, still suffering from head injuries. In 2003, an immigration official discovered the mistake while looking through the missing persons list. It doesn't seem that any action was taken at this time. This month, the mistaken deportation becomes public. This is the first time that the family is notified -- four years after the deportation, and two years after the mistake had been discovered. The government says they don't know her location, but are doing everything in their power to find her. Among the Australian family, she left behind a son who is still in foster care. Rather than being an isolated case, it is quite likely that there have been other questionable deportations -- this one getting more attention because the person in question is an Australian. This case has racial overtones too, since it is unlikely that a white Australian would have been deported under the same circumstances. Despite all this, the Minister for Immigration does not feel that a Royal Commission would be appropriate.

Ubuntu Down Under I have been in Sydney for the past week for UDU, which wraps up tomorrow. It has been great meeting up with everyone again, but has also been exhausting. Some of the stuff on the horizon will be quite ground breaking. For instance, I don't think anyone has attempted something like Grumpy Groundhog (which will hopefully be very useful to both the distro team, and upstream projects like Gnome). Python Experimented with using the new ELF visibility attribute support in GCC 4 in Python, and came up with this patch. It restricts the list of exported symbols to just the ones marked with the PyAPI_FUNC and PyAPI_DATA markers, which omits all the private symbols that /usr/bin/python or libpythonX.Y.so export. In addition, it uses "protected" visibility for all the exported symbols, which means that internal calls to the public Python API don't have to go through the PLT (which they do if Python is compiled as a shared library). In the shared libpython case, this speeds things up by about 5% (according to pystone and parrotbench), which isn't too bad for a small patch. In the static libpython case, it seems to slow things down slightly -- by < 1% in my tests so far. Of course, the shared libpython case is still slower than the static version (which is why /usr/bin/python doesn't use a shared libpython on Ubuntu), but it does make it less slow than it was before :) Solaris Glynn: If Solaris feels like a second class citizen, it is probably because hardly any hackers have access to Solaris machines (the same seems to be true of architectures other than i386). A fair number of developers would probably be interested in fixing Solaris build failures if they knew that they existed. I realise that Sun doesn't want to provide external access to a build machine (at least, that's what I was told last time I asked some Sun/Gnome hackers), but maybe running a tinderbox style system and publishing the build logs would help. As well as telling me if my package is broken, it'd give me a way to tell whether the fixes I check in actually solve the problem.

One of the changes in the recent pkg-config releases is that the --libs output no longer prints out the entire list of libraries expanded from the requested set of packages. As an example, here is the output of pkg-config --libs gtk+-2.0 with version 0.15: -lgtk-x11-2.0 -lgdk-x11-2.0 -latk-1.0 -lgdk_pixbuf-2.0 -lm -lpangoxft-1.0 -lpangox-1.0 -lpango-1.0 -lgobject-2.0 -lgmodule-2.0 -ldl -lglib-2.0 And with 0.17.1: -lgtk-x11-2.0 If an application is compiled with the first set of -l flags, it will include DT_NEEDED tag for each of those libraries. With the second set, it will only have a DT_NEEDED tag for libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0. When run, the application will still pull in all the other libraries via shared library dependencies. The rationale for this change seems to boil down to: Some programs link to more libraries than they need to. Sometimes programs link to libraries that they don't use directly -- they're encapsulated by some other library they use. The application will need to be recompiled if one of the libraries it is linked against breaks ABI, even if the library is not used directly. At first this seems sensible. However, in a lot of cases applications actually use libraries that are only pulled in through dependencies. For instance, almost every GTK application is going to be using some glib APIs as well. With the new pkg-config output, the fact that the application depends on the ABI of "libglib-2.0.so.0" is no longer recorded. The application is making use of those APIs, so it declare that. Without the glib DT_NEEDED tag, the application is relying on the fact that GTK isn't likely to stop depending on glib ... Furthermore, this causes breakage if you link your application with the libtool -no-undefined flag. On platforms that support it, this generates an error if you don't list all the libraries the application depends on. This allows for some optimisations on some platforms (e.g. Solaris), and is required on others (e.g. Win32). (interestingly, this problem doesn't exhibit itself on Linux. The -no-undefined flag expands to nothing, even though the linker supports the feature through the -zdefs flag) For these reasons, I've disabled the feature in jhbuild's bootstrap, using the --enable-indirect-deps configure flag. If the aim is just to get rid of unnecessary library dependencies, the GNU linker's --as-needed flag seems to be a better choice. It will omit a DT_NEEDED tag if none of the symbols from the library are used by the application.

If you look at the bottom of Cadbury's website in the footer of the page, you find the following text: ..., and the colour purple are Cadbury Group trade marks in Australia. Apparently Cadbury believes they can trade mark a colour, and according to a story on the radio they've been sending out cease and desist letters to other small chocolate makers in Australia. It turns out that even though they are claiming it as a trade mark, they only have a pending application. The details can be found by going to here, choose "enter as guest", and enter "902086" into the search box at the bottom (it doesn't seem like you can bookmark a particular application). It seems that the application has been pending since February 2002, and was deferred at the applicant's request 5 months later. So it seems weird that they've started trying to assert it now. The 17 categories the application mentions include soaps and perfumes, jewellery, kitchen utensils, clothing and leathergoods (it also includes classes that you'd expect a chocolate company to claim). It seems like a clear abuse of the trade mark system, and I'm surprised it isn't getting more news coverage.