sil2100//vx developer log

First of all, some loose things about Debian packages. Lately I had really much contact with package creation and management. Debian packages are a powerful tool - actually, even basing a build system for cross-compiled embedded systems on .deb wouldn't be such a bad idea.
Recently I learned about the existence of deb-triggers - a very useful mechanism for registering common actions that should be performed by all installed packages as result of a specified action. For example, a package can register a trigger to be run when any Debian package installs/copies a file to a given directory. This can be useful when, for instance, we want to update some cache file whenever new entries are installed by a different package. Examples: texinfo documentation, gtk2/3 IM cache entries.

When a trigger is 'triggered', the postinst script of the trigger-registering package is called with some additional arguments. Besides triggering on directory modification, triggers can also be fired directly by packaged using dpkg-trigger. Very useful thing. You can read more about it on man deb-triggers, man dpkg-trigger and on this nicely written howto.

Now a small thing about Plymouth. Here's a useful batch of Plymouth commands that can be used in your system init shell script (in the initramfs). It's nothing new, but useful to have a list of:

• plymouth pause-progress - to make the progress bar (dots in the Ubuntu theme) stop moving.
• plymouth unpause-progress - to make the progress bar move again.
• plymouth watch-keystroke --keys=KEY --command=COMMAND - makes Plymouth (and the init script) wait for the user pressing the KEY key (e.g. a character key), after which it executes COMMAND and resumes. Useful when ran in the background.
• plymouth --ignore-keystroke=KEY - disables a previous binding through watch-keystroke.
• plymouth message --text="TEXT" - if the given Plymouth theme allows it, this displays the given message on the bootsplash.

That's all for today. In the nearest future I'm planning on writing a bit about Maliit plugin development and Compiz plugin development. I just need to find a bit more free time, since I actually picked up too much things lately. Stay tuned!
And by the way - new Unity (5.6.0) has been released! Testing is welcome!