As part of automating the packaging process for Puppet Dashboard we ran into some baffling issues regarding the package signatures. Initially, we ended up with a package that was recognized as having a valid signature on some systems, but not others (Good with RPM 4.7.2, bad with 4.4.2.3). Additionally, when we tried signing the package with our "normal" GPG keys to try and debug this, we were unable to get a good signature from any of the systems we were testing with.

After much cursing, and Googling, we were able to find the correct incantation to get past the gauntlet of bizarre RPM behavior.

I recently received a request that I start a "Dear Jacob" advice column for git, and thought that it was a pretty nifty idea. I needed a good excuse to post more frequently, and I do end up answering a lot of questions about Git for the people that I know.

Welcome to the first installment of the "Dear Jacob" Git advice column!

The upcoming Git 1.7 has a lot of really nice improvements, and new features. One of the big new features is the --autosquash argument for git rebase --interactive.

I've decided to try out zsh for a while, and while I already get completions for most everything I want, out of the box, I am missing completions for Capistrano tasks.

I had been using brynary's Bash Capistrano completion script. I was able to find a mailing list post about setting up Capistrano task completions for zsh, but it didn't quite work for me. (show_tasks isn't a valid task.) I also didn't like throwing the .cap_tasks file in the top-level of the project. I already had a ~/.zsh_cache/ directory for caching zsh's completions, so I decided to modify the script I found to put the cache file there, instead.

While looking at how to get syntax highlighted source back up on here after switching to Mephisto, I kept running across references to the Ultraviolet gem. Some of the dependencies are a little old (Oniguruma: Gem, Library), but the output looks very nice, from the examples I'd seen.

The problem comes in, that the Oniguruma gem won't install without you already having the Oniguruma library installed (in a standard system location). This is a pretty well documented problem, with a simple fix.

I've been playing around with Git, CIA.vc, and Lighthouse on a project of mine that's recently been resurrected.

There is a pretty good update hook for CIA.vc integration called ciabot.pl that I've been using, without any complaints. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find anything to integrate Git with Lighthouse that hasn't needed modification out of the box.

We wanted to be able to close a ticket, without actually "closing" it. Thus the "pending" ticket status was born. We can set a ticket's status as "pending", and have it automatically marked as "closed" n days later, if there haven't been any replies in that time.

I have received permission from my employer to release this under the GNU GPLv2.