In a comment on a previous blog entry I was described as an active Fedora advocate, I don't think that is an accurate description. I advocate it to appropriate people, which is mostly non-programmers - but as I mentioned that means a larger proportion of the population than to whom I can advocate Debian. It's not that I'm trying to advocate Fedora, just that it fills a need for many people. I believe that the term Fedora advocate means someone has an objective of increasing the use and to use Fedora, I don't have such an objective. I am a Linux advocate, a Free Software advocate, and sometimes a Unix advocate (Unix meaning the entire family of Unix-like operating systems). Merely promoting something does not make you an advocate for it. I don't think of myself as a Debian advocate at this time, but as I am a Debian developer this may change.

It seems that the people who run the Fedora Planet think that my blog has suitable Fedora content, it's been added to that planet. Also the Fedora Planet appears to be running an older version of the Planet software as it has the same problem with my blog that Debian Planet had before the upgrade.

Now on the issue of gratis vs libre: As I am not a Red Hat employee I can't maintain a kernel-xen-nopae package and give it the same status as the kernel-xen package. Even when I was a Red Hat employee I couldn't have done that - it would require some amount of management approval. I believe that this fundamentally makes Fedora less of a libre distribution. There is no room in Fedora for someone who is an upstream developer and who just wants to maintain their own package. There is Fedora-Extras, but that has a second-class status. Only Red Hat employees can maintain packages in Fedora Core. This makes Fedora fundamentally less libre than Debian. I am not trying to suggest that Red Hat change things in this regard, I believe that Fedora is meeting all it's goals and that making Fedora as libre as Debian is not possible given the goals of making a profit on selling support of RHEL.

Chris made a good point. I also believe that MP3 codecs should not be in Debian/main. But I believe that people making mistakes about some issues is not a factor in judging the entire project. I believe that Debian is more libre although some bad decisions were made - largely due to lack of overall management. Fedora has hierarchical management, so when the legal team declares that some software can not be distributed then it gets removed without debate. I guess I could propose a GR to exclude MP3 codecs from main.

Also it should be noted that RHEL Extras has some of this software that is not in Fedora (RealPlayer for example). The Red Hat legal advice was that MP3 codecs need a license, so they ship a licensed version in their commercial distribution. This is the right thing to do for their customers (it's handy to have and I'm sure that they get a good deal by paying license fees for all their customers) and removing such things from Fedora is the right way to offer a gratis product without unreasonable legal liability.

Naturally Fedora is much more libre than any secret-source OS. Every user has the option of downloading the Fedora source and recompiling it as they wish. I could compile Fedora with a Xen kernel that runs on my hardware and with SE Linux policy that is more restrictive than that which Fedora currently has. I could build custom Fedora install CDs to install things the way I want (which I considered doing when I worked for Red Hat). But the liberty to fork a project does not compare to the liberty to join it, and the liberty to create your own packages in extras does not compare to the liberty to add your own packages that do things differently to the default package.

There are of course positive and negative aspects to this. I started work on SE Linux in Debian in 2001. In 2003 I joined Red Hat to work on SE Linux, in Red Hat I was not the only person dedicated to SE Linux work and other people spent part of their time working on it. The SE Linux work in Red Hat soon eclipsed that of Debian because there was management support. There was no possibility for a package maintainer to refuse to fix a bug that affected SE Linux simply because they didn't care for it. The positive side of this is that the SE Linux work proceeded quickly and efficiently. The negative side of this is that things which don't have management support don't appear in Fedora Core. Exim is a fine MTA but is not in Fedora Core. Some people think that AppArmor is a better option than SE Linux, they are wrong - but in Debian any developer has the option to add AppArmor support and neither I nor any other DD can prevent them. The libre nature of Debian means that as long as basic technical criteria are met DDs can add any package that they wish to the distribution.

These issues however are all related to people who are actively involved in Free Software development. For a typical Free Software user it often doesn't make much difference, until of course your favourite program doesn't get management approval to appear in Fedora Core. But the counter argument is that the quality of some of the >10,000 packages in Debian is not so high. You can install a Fedora Core package and have a reasonable expectation about how well it works, but Debian packages are sometimes rather experimental.

I also don't believe that Debian is a very functional Democracy. Some of the problems of Direct Democracy are demonstrated in Debian. In many ways it is more anarchistic, anarchy gives you liberty for good and bad. Maybe we should consider a Representative Democracy model for Debian.

Back to work on Debian now. Released an updated security advisory, which seemed to work out OK despite the archive changes. Some of my packages have new maintainers. The rest I will go through and upload with the maintainer set to QA tomorrow. Some coding issues to resolve in the next day or two:

mod_ifier

This apache module is utterly broken with regard to POST data. How I managed to use it in production for so long and not notice is beyond me. Short version: The module intercepts incoming HTTP requests and filters them according to a set of user-defined rules. It allows you to block incoming requests with particular CGI parameters (get vs. post). However once the module has read the POST data it is destroyed - and unavailable for use by the CGI itself. Apparently I must use the Apache API to use buckets/brigades to read only a copy of the submitted data, so that when the module is finished processing the data is still available. I can find no understandable code for doing this. But I’m trying.

xen-tools

I need to rework some of the error detection so that roll-back will work when installation fails.

I need to find time to write more articles for the debian-administration site, but I think that will be difficult for the next week or two. I feel like I need a holiday…. despite just having had one. I guess that is because of the aftermath, but still .. ugh.

At the Journ es du logiciel libre near Lyon, the Debian stand happened to face the Mozilla one. The Debian developers present there had prepared some Iceweasel propaganda:



However it seems Daniel Glazman didn't understand all the fun of this situation, and just found these developers to be total morons or bloody fanatic assholes. "Moron" is also reserved for anyone trying to post comments disagreeing with him on his blog, which can also be simply deleted.

It seems some people need to take things less seriously.

Of course, as the epiphany maintainer, I can only be happy of this situation which will lead to more people using this great browser.

I’ve finally finished packaging keytouch, and gotten approval for it by my sponsor. It’s currently in NEW, and probably won’t make it to etch, because of the freeze. Kind of a shame, since I could have finished a little earlier and it would have gotten in. Well, can’t have everything. I did manage to upload a new version of sawfish, which finally documents how to prepare the source tarball. sawfish has so many old bugs I’m at a loss as how to handle them. I’ll be RFHing it soon, to see if someone can help me triage. But still, with upstream almost dead, it’s hard to think of a good approach.

1) I'm not attractive (OK - so less learned, more reaffirmed) 2) Not all hills lead back to the flat 3) See 2. (OK - so I left $club which I can't remember thinking "tired, home time", wished people good byes, and looked for a hill, usually any going up are back to the flat... wandered up the hill, carried on wandering, discovered pizza shop that I normally order from, said "Oh bollocks" and started heading in the right direction, down the hill, across the road, back up the other hill. Sucks to be on the wrong side of London Road.) 4) Sleep is good. That's what I'm just about to do.So, what have I learned today? EDIT: OK - writing an entry in vim at nearly 3am when you've been to a club results in the unfortunate side effect of somehow managing to put several copies of the post in the entry - BAH!

Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier: “If the Sun folks are really interested in luring Linux users over to Solaris or OpenSolaris, they should take a cue from Nexenta and adopt APT and dpkg for their package management.”

A couple of comments on the ongoing votes. The DFSG/firmware issue is a complicated one. For the votes that we’ve currently got open, I’m voting for futher discussion in favour of the DFSG#2 clarification – not because I disagree with requiring source code for all works in principle, but because I think we should be making sure we can make Debian work with full source for everything first, before issuing position statements about it; and I’m voting for “release etch even with kernel firmware issues” above further discussion and “special exception to DFSG#2 for firmware” below further discussion, because I don’t think we can handle the broader issue before etch, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to try to tie the exception to the non-existance of technical measures directly. I’m not really sure that’s a good enough reason to vote that option below further discussion, so I might change my vote on that yet. There have been quite a few other proposals on the topic, including one from me that didn’t get sufficient seconds to be voted on, another from Frans Pop that was withdrawn due to procedural issues, a couple more from Sven Luther, and a new proposal from Sven and supported by the kernel team that’s a further refinement on the “release etch even with firmware issues” resolution currently being voted on. I personally think we should spend some time after etch thinking a bit more deeply about this stuff. Personally, I think we should insist on source for everything, but that also means we need to have a clear explanation on why it’s good – even for firmware and font files and music and artwork – and it means we’re going to need to make sure we have a reasonable way of distributing it, and it means we’re going to have to make sure that we have a good way of distributing stuff that doesn’t meet our standards but that users still need or want; whether that’s drivers they need to do installation or get good graphics performance, documentation for their software, or whatever else. There’s a lot of real improvements we could make there – both in making the core of Debian more free and more useful, and making it easier for users who want to make compromises to choose what they want to compromise on and what they don’t want to compromise on. I really hope that once etch is done and dusted quite a few of those sorts of improvements will get done, both in technical improvements in Debian, and in good advocacy from Debian and other groups towards people who aren’t already making things as free as they potentially could be. One the recall issue, I would have preferred to vote “re-affirm”, then “recall”, then “further discussion”, to say “I don’t think this creates a conflict of interest that can’t be handled, but I’ve no objection if other people think it does”. But since that isn’t what the ballot(s) turned out to be, I’ve voted “re-affirm” above further discussion on that ballot, and “recall” below further discussion on the other ballot. I’ve voted the “wish success” option above “don’t endorse/support” option for two reasons – first, because the “wish success” resolution actually refers to “projects funding Debian or helping towards the release of Etch” in general, while the “don’t endorse/support” proposal specifically talks about projects I’m involved in (including non-Dunc-Tank projects) which seems kind of personal. There’s also the fact that I’d rather see more success and mutual support in the Debian community, even for projects I don’t personally like, than less. I originally voted the “don’t endorse/support” option below further discussion for those reasons, but then decided that that was silly – just as I would have been happy to vote for the recall above further discussion, it’s not really that big a deal either way, and fundamentally I think both options are essentially the same anyway: that any potential conflict of interest can be dealt with, and Debian and Dunc-Tank are fundamentally different projects. I was probably influenced in that a fair bit by the “not endorse/support” option being proposed and seconded mostly by people who actively oppose the idea, including Josselin Mouette, Samuel Hocevar, Pierre Habouzit and Aurélien Jarno. But in the end, the outcome’s fine any which way – some people will continue disagreeing with the concept, others will agree with it, and everyone can keep contributing to Debian in whatever way they think’s best whatever the outcome. And like I said when running for DPL this year, while you are a lot more visible as DPL, it’s not actually that necessary to be DPL to get things done in Debian.

We have started using qemu for automated testing at work. Right now we only have one kernel and disk image that I threw together by hand (for ARM), so I spent a big chunk of this afternoon trying to figure out how to do it and document the process. When I did it last time, I needed major kernel hacks and qemu patches and debian-installer tweaks, because the ARM emulation didn't have anything capable of working as a hard drive; so I took some code that Paul had written to use the Angel RDI semihosting operations as a "virtual block device" that talked to the host system. I added support for this hack to qemu and forced d-i to install even though there was only a single non-partitionable device. Since then, Paul added real PCI support to the ARM qemu. So I expected everything to be much easier. I took Aur lien Jarno's excellent writeup and prepared to try again. But since we already had a functional ARM disk image, that was lower priority... I decided to try MIPS. I helped get the MIPS softmmu port working about a year ago, but it hasn't been receiving a whole lot in the way of care (though there's a bunch of unreviewed patches for it). First I discovered that I'd never gotten initrds implemented last time I worked on qemu-system-mips. So I hacked that together. Then I needed a drive; I used root NFS in my last setup, but the whole point of this experiment was to avoid that. So I added the emulated ISA IDE controller. Good news: both of those worked easily! And the d-i session starts up OK, and even writes to the disk OK; partition tables were discovered at next boot. I've posted some patches for these. Bad news: it hangs during formatting the swap partition, consuming endless CPU. It's definitely doing _something_ in userspace, but I'm not sure what, and it's hard to find out. I've heard other reports of faulty MIPS emulation recently, too. I know how to debug this sort of thing, but it's really more time-consuming than I can manage now :-( While waiting for builds in that, I resolved to try reproducing a nasty kernel bug in qemu for x86-64: since I booted into 2.6.19-rc1 all my coredumps have been truncated very short. My normal hardware kernel boots OK, but if I rebuild the kernel with the default config and debug info, it doesn't:

checking if image is initramfs...it isn't (bad gzip magic numbers); looks like an initrd
Freeing initrd memory: 5498k freed
*hang*

And the other thing that's apparently not been getting a lot of love lately is the debugging stub; if I attach GDB, it dies much earlier, so I can't set a breakpoint at initramfs detection to see what's going on. Overall result for the day: Argh!

Just did an awesome install of Debian etch onto Maggie's laptop, which had stopped having working wifi in windows for unknown reasons. Everything worked great in the installer and the resulting desktop felt very nice for a regular user, the only things I had to add were madwifi (non-free..) and network-manager. It was probably my most painless and happy Debian installation ever. (Details on the page for ?phoenix, and in the installation report linked to from there.)

Yay! I have a VPN now set up at the office and tested with Linux and windows clients using OpenVPN. Interestingly I may have found my problem with Openswan while getting the OpenVPN server to work. But I now have a working solution and it impressed the management-types.

There were a few Debian Developers from the U. S., canada and Italy,and I did a meeting with them at a vegetarian curry restaurant in Ginza.11 people in total attended, with 6 people from Japan (Knok,Horms, Nori1, Iwamatsu, Daigo, dancerj).Mattia Dongli isthe Debian maintainer for user-mode-linux, and I did receivepatches for pbuilder user-mode-linux support; only that Ididn't remember until he mentioned.Matthew Wilcox and Iand few others discussed git/mercurial, and how it improvedour lives.Icommented that mercurial is not well-accepted because HG hasa subtly different connotation in Japan.I discussed a bit about ruby with Daigo, and it soon became midnight.Thanks to all who attended for attending.

Hey, the actual version 0.06 of my Perl written WAP browser wApua now is in Debian Sid! It’s the first software written by me which has entered the Debian repository as its own package (since pum is included in the package pisg which is in testing now for a while) as well as the first software debianized by me which reached Debian Unstable. Things are always exiting for the first time. ;-) Thanks to Myon for sponsoring the package.

I'm in Ghana now for more than two month, and my mission to spread Free Software at the SOS Hermann Gmeiner International School has been progressing slowly. So far I have setup a FAI based automatic installation of Debian Sarge, extended that to automatically resize the existing windows and put it on a few computers in the staff work room, the library and the student's computer room, but interest was generally quite low.I also noticed that most probably don't know me (unfortunately, I was not introduced properly), and if, they don't know why or what for I'm here. So I asked for permission to hold a talk a the friday morning assembly, where all the studentds and staff come together, and I was given five minutes. I want to use the time to give a very brief introduction what Free Software is and why we need it.Read the full post for the text of the speech, I'm keen to hear comments, suggestions and corrections, preferably before friday morning on the meridian.
"Five Minutes about Free Software" vollst ndig lesen

There's been an amazing amount of press and blogging about the whole Firefox trademark issue. Some of it very positive and with a good grasp of the crux of the problem. Some of it not so positive. I hope you can forgive me using my blog to ask a question but: Ian, where did I go wrong? What could I have done to salvage the situation? I'm certainly not pleased with having to do this but I didn't really see a whole lot of other options.

It was also nice to see Linux.com do a more in depth analysis of the issue. I'm glad to see Larry Rosen seemingly agreeing with me that they could have a free copyright license and a more restrictive trademark license, as I had proposed many times. They did manage to misquote me a little though. "annoyingly bureaucratic and is completely unprecedented in the Free Software community" was said in reference to Mozilla's requirement for patches to be vetted, not the discussion about the trademark.

I've been a fan of the Open Directory Project for a long time. I finally volunteered to become an editor about a month ago, and I just started editing my first category, wiki farms , today. I hope to get the category up to good shape in the next few days. I've now got an ODP profile, too. tags: odp dmoz directory editor wikifarms

Hudson Maj, Amita June and I went down to wt:Hudson (New York) over the weekend for the wedding reception of our friends Morgan and Kate. The trip down was fantastic -- the colors in the wt:Adirondacks were really amazing, just hitting their peak. Amita June had a good drive, too: she got to look around a lot, listened to some music, and had a nap of about an hour and a half. Hudson was a cute town, but not cutesy like other parts of the wt:Hudson Valley can be. The town is small -- 4-5 streets wide -- with big brick buildings lining the main street down to a promenade overlooking the Hudson River. There are a few gourmet restaurants and a disproportionate number of art galleries and antique stores, but it doesn't feel like the locals have been pushed out of their town... yet. We stayed at the St. Charles Hotel, as arranged by Kate's stepmom for most of the guests. It was functional and clean but otherwise unexceptional. There was a bar and a restaurant downstairs, and the hotel itself is just opposite a nice little park. Sunday morning we had breakfast at the Earth Kitchen organic market; I had a bowl of granola and fruit, Maj had a huge plate of huevos rancheros, and AJ ate whatever she could get off our plates. We walked around town and down to the waterfront, where we got a panoramic view for miles up and down the Hudson Valley. With the leaves nearing their height of color, it was an awe-inspiring view. We took a late lunch at Mexican Radio, a branch of a restaurant by the same name in Manhattan. It had good quality California-style Mexican food, with a few fusion dishes (like "Mexican spring rolls") that were probably overdoing it a bit. The margaritas were top-notch, and they have a tequila sampler option with three excellent tequilas for... $125! You won't normally lose that much money on three shots of tequila unless you pass out in the gutter in wt:Nuevo Laredo. The reception itself was at the Ca' Mea restaurant, right next to the historic Hudson Opera House. Kate and Morgan were in good form, playing goth-y music from their early days, and family and friends had a good time too. We all probably ate too much, and Maj and I both had hangovers the next morning. Amita June, however, had an excellent time running around the party and dancing with the bride. She was made for weddings. The drive home the next day was less than optimal. We did brunch in the St. Charles's restaurant, Bridges, and then stopped by the house of Kate's dad and stepmom for an afternoon get-together. They have a really nice Victorian house on a hill above town that overlooks the valley. We had to leave after only a few minutes, though, since we'd been lucky enough to get guest-listed for the Massive Attack show in Montreal that night. Trouble hit us as we were coming up the 87, though. First, the baby refused to sleep, getting more and more hysterical the longer she went awake. By 4:30PM, we'd had to stop so many times to soothe her that we were starting to get worried about the time. Then, we hit a detour on the interstate -- a huge accident had happened going through the mountains. We got into a sluggish line of cars wending its way along highway 9, and by the time we were back on the interstate we knew we were going to be late. We decided that luck was against our going to see MA, so we called and canceled our baby-sitter and sent email to our friend DJ Ghostbeard who'd asked us to come to the show (although we didn't get a call through... his voicemail box was full). We stopped at Geoffrey's Pub in wt:Plattsburgh for a late dinner of blackened salmon, broiled seafood and mashed potatoes, and then got back on the road. ...and straight into a 2-1/2-hour line at the Canadian border. This weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving, and apparently a lot of people took the opportunity to dip down into the states for a last bit of outdoorsmanship before the winter frosts settled in. Amita June, already a little frantic from not sleeping, went completely ballistic, and although we managed to keep her mellow most of the time, 2 hours in a line of cars with a crying baby is a little bit much for anyone. We didn't get back to Montreal until nearly midnight. It was great to get home, finally, and as usual travel's made me appreciate staying in one place. The Gazette this morning says the Massive Attack show was excellent, but I'm glad we didn't try to make it -- coming in 4 hours late is just too much. We're off to wt:Halifax next weekend for our wedding anniversary, and hopefully we'll be back into travel mode by then. tags: hudson kate morgan amitajune hudson valley adirondacks plattsburgh massive attack

Destinyland Dave Cassel has an excellent list of the 100 Greatest Internet Moments. A great compendium of Stuff What Happened over the last 10 years in cyberland. I think Dave's one of the best Internet culture observers out there. I'm glad to see he's got a new podcast, Destinyland, in which he tears apart the weird media culture we live in. Example: the crazy spiral of Dana Plato. Example: Schoolhouse Rock: Behind the music. Example: Dark side of the Hampster Dance. Good stuff. tags: destiny destinyland podcast dave cassel

Recently there's been some awe in the Free Software and general Linux world from several people over the fact that Debian is dropping Firefox from its distribution, and planning to replace it with GNU IceWeasel. Personally, I don't see what else the Firefox maintainers should do. While I can understand the Mozilla people's concern over modified (read: possibly trojaned) versions of Firefox and that they need to protect their trademark against abuse, I can't believe that there can't be a better way to handle this than to require review of every patch in the Debian package. After all, packaging a browser requires more than just writing a script that gets it compiled and that gets the compiled stuff in the .deb archive. There is also branding to be done—the Debian firefox package contains a search engine for Debian packages. I doubt this is part of the original firefox source, and there are more things. Additionally, sometimes you may have to change stuff so that it works with the specific quirks of the Debian distribution, or other things. Finally, in accordance with its published policy on the matter, the Debian distribution also wants to be able to distribute security-patched versions of Firefox after Debian Stable releases; and we want to do that not just by throwing in the new version of Firefox, but by using the older version, patching it so that the security bug (and only the security bug) gets fixed, and releasing that. We can't use the official mozilla.org/mozilla.com source for that, since they cease security support after half a year or so (which is, by far, not enough for Debian); and the discussion in the bug report on the matter does not inspire confidence that we would be allowed to release a security-fixed version of firefox and still call it firefox. The alternative would be to forget about our own security releases and ceding to the braindead mozilla.org/mozilla.com security policy, but I have a pretty public opinion on that one. So that leaves us with not adhering to their braindead trademark policy, which requires us to choose another name. And as it happens, there already appears to be a piece of software that not only is a forked Firefox, it also drops non-free software from the release, something which Debian has to do anyway. So why not use that instead? BTW, yes, I did call their trademark policy braindead. No, IANAL. But you don't have to be a lawyer to see that doing something like the way Debian manages its trademark—you're not allowed to call it "official" unless your product is bit-by-bit the same thing as what Debian produces—is sane enough without being a nuisance like the firefox trademark policy.