10 May 2026
Planet Debian
Steinar H. Gunderson: MySQL hypergraph optimizer
MySQL released (well, flipped the default compilation flag for) the hypergraph join optimizer in the community builds; this was the main project I started and worked on while I was there, so it's nice to see even though it's been default in e.g. their cloud column store for a long time. You can read their blog post (though beware, likely-LLM text ahead).
(The cost model improvements and TPC-DS benchmarking are from after my time.)
10 May 2026 8:30am GMT
09 May 2026
Planet Debian
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSpdlog 0.0.29 on CRAN: Small Enhancement
Version 0.0.29 of RcppSpdlog arrived on CRAN today, has been uploaded to Debian and built for r2u. The (nice) documentation site has been refreshed too. RcppSpdlog bundles spdlog, a wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovich. You can learn more at the nice package documention site.
This release features a rewritten internal routine unpacking the R variadic arguments into C++ variadic template arguments. This in turn allows to turn back to std::format in C++ mode when C++20 is used. We also adjust for the not-quite-ready-for-this state of the x86-64 based macOS machine at CRAN. It is running a compiler and SDK choice that cannot fully deal with C++20, so we dial compilation on it down to C++17. Similarly, and as we found out after the release, Ubuntu jammy is also too old to default to std::format so we need to add a better detection here too so that we can also fall back to the included fmt there.
The NEWS entry for this release follows.
Changes in RcppSpdlog version 0.0.29 (2026-05-08)
Some small continuous integration updates
The internal formatter was rewritten as a recursive generator of variadic templates.
Switch back to
std::formatwith C++20, but force inferior macos-release-x86_64 to use C++17 rather than default C++20 which fails
Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report detailing changes. More detailed information is on the RcppSpdlog page, or the package documention site.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.
09 May 2026 10:49pm GMT
Jelmer Vernooij: Remove-after Annotations for Debian Files
deb-scrub-obsolete is a tool in the debian-codemods suite that tries to identify and remove cruft automatically. It knows about dummy transitional packages, superseded alternatives, and similar patterns it can detect by querying the archive. But some workarounds are too project-specific for a generic tool to recognise on its own.
Developers can leave structured comments in their packaging files that tell deb-scrub-obsolete when a particular line or block can be removed.
The Debian Janitor regularly runs various codemods like deb-scrub-obsolete on all vcs-accessible Debian packages. This means that if you leave a "remove-after: trixie" annotation in your package, you will automatically get a pull request to remove the annotated code once trixie has been released, without needing to remember to do it yourself.
The Comment Format
The annotations take the form of specially-formatted comments. For shell files (and by extension most maintainer scripts), a line-level annotation looks like this:
install -m 755 compat-wrapper /usr/lib/foo/ # remove-after: trixie
When trixie has been released, deb-scrub-obsolete will remove that line entirely. The comment can appear anywhere on the line - before or after other comments - and additional explanatory text can follow:
blah # Trixie comes with blah built in # remove-after: trixie
For larger sections, block-level annotations bracket the code to remove:
# begin-remove-after: trixie alternatives --add foo bar alternatives --add foo bar1 # end-remove-after
These blocks can be nested, which is useful when one outer condition wraps several inner ones with finer-grained timing.
Expressions
The initial set of supported expressions is deliberately small. The main one is a Debian release name: remove-after: trixie means "once trixie has been released". The condition is checked against distro-info <https://manpages.debian.org/trixie/distro-info/distro-info.1.en.html>_, the same data source that other Debian tooling uses to track release status.
The expression language is designed to be monotonic - conditions should only ever go from false to true, not back. A workaround that needs to be re-introduced after removal belongs in a new commit, not in an annotation. If deb-scrub-obsolete cannot parse an annotation it finds in a file, it leaves all annotations in that file untouched, to avoid a situation where related blocks are only partially removed.
Annotations can also carry a marker name - an arbitrary label with no spaces, commas, or the word "after" - which can then be passed to deb-scrub-obsolete on the command line. This makes it possible to trigger removal of a named set of annotations together, useful for coordinated transitions where several packages need to be cleaned up at the same time.
Future Extensions
The initial expression set is minimal; the design leaves room for richer conditions. Some candidates under consideration:
- Whether a particular suite has a new enough version of a package (removing a Build-Depends version constraint once it is satisfied everywhere)
- Whether a package has been removed from the archive
- Whether all currently-supported releases contain a new enough version
- Whether a Debian transition has completed
Compound expressions using "and" / "or" are also on the list, for cases where removal depends on multiple conditions being true simultaneously.
Status
The annotation format is specified but not yet implemented in deb-scrub-obsolete - it is planned for a future release. If you maintain Debian packages and have opinions on the annotation format or the expression language, feedback is welcome. The specification lives in scrub-obsolete/doc/scrub-annotations.md in the lintian-brush repository. Many thanks to Helmut Grohne for the initial suggestion and feedback on the design.
09 May 2026 6:45pm GMT