After reading Do It Tomorrow, I was inspired to try some of the techniques that Mark Forster proposes. I commented in the review about the closed list system, which I'm still mostly using with some success. But I also started playing with the initiative slot. In his system, the initiative slot is first thing in the morning each (eligible) morning, which is used for a special project that you want to make forward progress on. There are several criteria for choosing a task for the initiative slot. One of the strongest is dealing with a backlog. Since I'd been feeling guilty about the backlog of Debian Policy work that had built up, that seemed like a good choice. I picked up Debian Policy backlog clearing as my initiative starting at the beginning of June after the AFS and Kerberos Best Practices Workshop, with a goal of getting the open bug count below 100. This has been very instructive, both from a time management perspective and from a Debian Policy perspective. Here are a few things that I learned on the Policy side:

• The open bugs against Debian Policy by and large represent real work that we should tackle in the Policy document. They're not all fully thought-out proposals, but I didn't find much that I could simply close (apart from a set of bugs requesting additional common-licenses, once I had an analysis tool). From time to time, we've thought about timing out old bugs that have not made any forward progress, but this experience leads me to think that would serve us poorly.
• It takes me about an hour on average to resolve a Policy bug. That includes all the fast five-minute typo bugs (well, ten minutes; I need to improve my Policy workflow to be a bit more efficient in the commit process). Some bugs take easily ten hours or more, such as #504880. I think this is on par with or a bit slower than resolving typical bugs in compiled software I package, and much slower than Lintian, where bugs take about a half-hour on average to resolve, I think.
• Most Policy bugs are making no forward progress because no one has written wording and started iterating on that wording. There are some exceptions, and this process seems to go better for me than it has for some other contributors, but if I pick up a bug and start drafting wording changes, I can usually bring the bug to resolution in about a week, often less. This implies to me that our process for making Policy changes is reasonable but we need more targetted help. This was discussed at the BoF at DebConf and on the list afterwards and I now have three people who have volunteered to supply some of that targetted help and need to get more organized to make use of that offer.
• The normative (rule-affecting) versus informative (informational and documentary) distinction in Policy is tricky and unclear, and most bugs end up becoming normative. While I think our system for dealing with normative bugs is reasonable, this does slow down fixes. I can commit informative changes without review and then tweak them if people object, and it would be nice to fix more wording issues that way, but it's hard to avoid getting tangled up in normative issues.

Things I learned on the time management side:

• I didn't work from a closed list, which is frowned on for dealing with backlogs. I'm not sure if this ended up being a problem or not. The correct approach, in theory, is to work out a system for dealing with new incoming work, make sure that system is in place, and then process backlog independently of all new work. I never did that. I never separated out the backlog into a closed list that would get smaller. I suspect I should have, although I'm not sure of a good way to do that in the BTS in an area where we're already using usertags for another purpose.
• The point of the initiative slot is to unblock something or to clear a backlog, but the initiative slot is supposed to rotate. It's not a good way to deal with something that's going to take a long time to resolve. In retrospect, I was excessively ambitious with my goal. Even apart from not working from a closed list, I can average about a half-hour a day on the initiative slot, which at an hour a bug and a starting point of 160 bugs would mean 120 days to reach my goal. That's too long for one task to dominate the initiative slot.
• The initiative slot really works. We brought the bug count on Policy down from about 160 to 126 over the course of those two months, and I don't think much changed other than my level of activity and of course the normal effect of other people getting more involved when someone is visibly doing work. The bug graph is impressive. It's very obvious when I started working, and also very obvious when the ramp-up to DebConf started and I stopped having time to have a daily initiative slot.
• Doing something that's unrelated to my day job in the initiative slot creates an odd tension, and I'm not sure how to deal with that. On one hand, one of my standard time management failure modes is to spend too much time on work and not enough time on non-work tasks. On the other hand, that's partly because I'm hypersensitive to not focusing enough on work and overcompensate, and taking time each morning to do non-work things doesn't help that. I'm not yet sure what to do about this.
• One of the failure modes of initiative slots that I'm already noticing is that when I move something out of that slot, rather than continuing to work on it at a normal pace, I have a tendency to stop working on it altogether. This doesn't work, particularly if it was used for backlog clearing. I just build up another backlog and then have to use the slot to clear it again. This means I need to give more attention to my time management outside of that slot.

I stopped using the initiative slot while travelling and haven't gotten back into the hang of regular time management since I've gotten back. I haven't yet decided whether to leave Policy work in the initiative slot for right now but change the goal, or whether to swap it out for something else. I'd like to keep momentum, but I'd also like to start using that slot for other things. Still pondering.

As you probably know from reading my recent blog posts, we spent a week in New York City. Despite some behavior issues from Jacob, it was a good trip. Oliver took his first unassisted step in our hotel room there. As I wrote, the boys both loved the subway. I didn t have as much time to go out and see things as Terah and Oliver did, but I did visit the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which was near Columbia University, as well as Grand Central Terminal. Both were impressive and worth the visit. When we got home, Jacob stood on our porch teary-eyed and sad. He wanted to go back to New York and ride more subways. He had been all excited about the airplane ride, but it maybe hadn t occurred to him that we were leaving New York for good, not just taking a trip within the city like on the subway. He was mopey for the rest of the day. But he spent a couple of hours spending a little time on many of his favorite activities at home pulling out toys we hadn t taken with us, using his favorite pillow, playing with the cats, or just soaking in being back home. I think he was happy to be home, even though he would deny it. Saturday we had a busy day, and towards suppertime, Jacob requested a picnic. So we had a picnic. It was starting to cool off outside finally, so we ate at the picnic table on our back porch. It was fun to be outside even the keeping the cats off our plates part. (I eventually let them lick the plates after we were done with them.)

17 years I guess the puberty is almost a thing of the past and you re getting all grown up and stuff. You certainly changed for the better in the last years. Ok, a few rough edges here and there but overall a quite impressive development. You re already forking regularly and even your offspring is quite handsome. No wonders with those genes if you ask me. Thanks to Ian for starting probably the best Linux distribution out there. I hope you are proud of what you ve started (I certainly was when I met you two years ago) and someone is killing a few beers with you right now. Also big thanks to all the Debian Developers, Maintainers and contributors for making Debian what it is today. Keep up the good work!

Happy 17th Birthday, Debian! You kept me busy for the last 10 years and I am really looking forward to what the next 10 years might bring for our relationship. Thanks also to all the people who also are able to keep calm and to the point when discussions turn to get heated. You are the ones who make work on Debian enjoyable. Also a lot of thanks to all the people that understand the power of positive encouragement like what is currently flowing in through the thank.debian.net website. Likewise much thanks to the ever growing number of distributions that are based on Debian, because doing that is a very special kind of appreciation of our work. Thank you all!

/debian permanent link Comments: 0

I have just read The Gift of Fear and Other Survival Signals that Protect Us From Violence by Gavin de Becker. Like many self-help books it has a concept that can be described in a paragraph and explained in a few pages. The rest of the book shares anecdotes that help the reader understand the concept, but which are also interesting for people who get it from the first chapter. When I read the book I considered the majority of the content to be interesting stuff added to pad it out to book size because the concept seemed easy enough to get from the start, but from reading some of the reviews I get the impression that 375 pages of supporting material aren t enough to convince some people maybe this is something that you will either understand from the first few chapters or never understand at all. Gavin s writing is captivating, he has written a book about real violent crime in a style that is more readable than many detective novels, from the moment I finished the first chapter I spent all my spare time reading it. I was a little disappointed at the lack of detailed statistics, but when someone has done all the statistical analysis chooses to provide the results in the form of anecdotes rather than statistics I m prepared to tolerate that especially when the anecdotes are so interesting. I spent quite a bit of time reading the Wikipedia pages relating to some of the people and incidents that are mentioned in this book. The basic concepts of his book are to cease worrying about silly things like airline terrorists (passengers won t surrender now so that s not going to work again) and to instead take note of any real fear. For example if you are doing the same things you usually do but suddenly feel afraid then you should carefully consider what you might have subconsciously noticed that makes you feel afraid and what you can do about it. This isn t going to change my behavior much as I have mostly been doing what the book recommends for a long time. I think that everyone should read this book.

I'm writing a Rails application for the microblogging strategy for Debian (which I used to call, debian-twitter, but you know how us Debian folks are ). I came up with a strange issue, that at first I thought was ActionController's fault or some crap. So, I was testing one of my controllers with something like this:

cat /tmp/mm.txt   curl -d @- http://localhost:3000/message/new

/tmp/mm.txt is a PGP signed message which then I just send as POST data to my application. So far so good. However, when accessing the data from Rails, using request.body.read, I was a getting a single line, with the newlines (carriage returns) removed. So I started looking at how ActionController was getting the HTTP data and stuff. But then I tested:

cat /tmp/mm.txt   lwp-request -m POST  http://localhost:3000/message/new

And that had the carriage returns in place. So, I started looking at the curl man page and discovered this little gem:

data-binary <data> (HTTP) This posts data exactly as specified with no extra processing whatsoever. If you start the data with the letter @, the rest should be a filename. Data is posted in a similar manner as data-ascii does, except that newlines are preserved and conversions are never done. If this option is used several times, the ones following the first will append data as described in -d/ data.

cat /tmp/mm.txt   curl --data-binary @- http://localhost:3000/message/new

did indeed the tricky. Maybe someone needs this info some day.

Francois Freeing the Cloud talk at Debconf10, showed members of the Debian community keen to help see opensource Web applications. The proposed open&free implementation of Gravatar is a great example, whereby a user uploads an image of him/herself which corresponds to a hash of their email address. In order to make this Web "cloud" service rock, super quick downloads of that image are needed. Debian knows about mirroring data to distribute data amongst free software agents. And we also now know about CDN, aka content delivery networks and GEO DNS, which point to your local mirror. So lets pool our resources and offer CDN Web space (100MB?) to free software Web application projects. This will make the opensource Web services competitive in all important page load times and perhaps make it easier for user contributed data to be exported and "open". I have Debian server space in Germany I'm happy to contribute to Francois's avatar project and other similar opensource Web apps. If you think this is a good idea, please get in touch.

The Debian package of Emacs Muse was maintained by Michael W. Wolson, who is also the upstream author of that software. He announced months ago that Muse needed a new upstream maintainer. That's not something I'm willing to do, since I really think Muse has been superseded by Org mode nowadays. However, I'm still using Muse to maintain this blog with my muse-blog extension, since Org still lacks some infrastructure to maintain and publish a blog. Therefore, I adopted the Emacs Muse Debien package and updated it to the latest version!

Debconf10 has come and gone and its effects are still with me. This is not so surprising as this year I was not only a participant but on the local team. When we first started to hold in person meetings, I was a totally overwhelmed knowing that with each passing month, the demands on my time would grow and then explode. Then I got news that I landed a year long fellowship that would relieve me of all teaching for the 2010-2011 year and was able to breathe a little and enjoy what I don t get to do all that often in my academic job: work collectively. As Debcamp started, I was not sure whether I would enjoy the conference given that I had to pay attention to the nuts and bolts of the conference. I got my answer the first day as folks started to pour in hack lab. Due to the pressure cooker nature of my job, I did not attend the last two Debconfs. Seeing friends that I only see during these fairly intense weeks stirred up a lot of inside of me. It felt really good to be back . This was also my first Debcamp, and now I understand why people enjoy it so much. It gives you a chance to meet new folks instead of gravitating to those you already know and still get some work done. It also allows the orga team to hammer out some final details and test run some stuff before the swarm descends into the venue. One of the things I enjoyed the most during the week were the take out dinners. Logistically it was a bit of nightmare but it aligned very much with the culinary culture of NY and we had some nice outdoor picnics on the Columbia campus and one in Riverside Park. The pace picked up a lot during Debconf, which we kicked off with Debian Day. We managed to get a lot of NYC folks it was one of the best attended Debian Days. One of the highlights was Gale Brewer s talk. She is a public servant in the full sense of the word, dedicating thirty years of her life to this job and really understands what technology can and cannot due for New Yorkers. It was very inspirational talk. Aside from a few moments, such as the day trip and the wine and cheese party (btw, party does not capture the quantity of cheese featured and consumed ), Debconf itself has already become a bit of a blur, it all happened so quickly and under sleep deprived conditions. Nearly every vessel of time was filled, overflowing, at times bursting. I enjoyed a number of the talks Eben Moglen s, Joey Hess s CUT proposal, Marga s talk on Making Debian Rule, Zack s Bits from the DPL, the derivates BOF, and others. I also enjoyed preparing and moderating the welcome talk, which is not yet online (only the last bit is and the sound is distorted so I sound like a mouse). My sense is that the relationship between Ubuntu and Debian is improving, which is important. We need alliances and allies, not foes in the world of F/OSS (watch Eben s talk to get a sense of why this is so). I mostly ate on campus but managed two African based dinners with friends (Ethiopian and Senegalese) and only wished we had a little more time to talk. The late nights in the Carman lounge were pretty epic, if somewhat collegiate and during the end, hot and humid. Here are a few of the pictures I managed to take. I love Debconf for it so perfectly conjoins the comfort of the familiar with the thrill of the new. For those who experience it in its full intensity, it can be an artistic moment, at least in the way described by the poet John Keats: The excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty . . . And now, I am, of course, totally beat

Debconf10 has come and gone and its effects are still with me. This is not so surprising as this year I was not only a participant but on the local team. When we first started to hold in person meetings, I was a totally overwhelmed knowing that with each passing month, the demands on my time would grow and then explode. Then I got news that I landed a year long fellowship that would relieve me of all teaching for the 2010-2011 year and was able to breathe a little and enjoy what I don t get to do all that often in my academic job: work collectively. As Debcamp started, I was not sure whether I would enjoy the conference given that I had to pay attention to the nuts and bolts of the conference. I got my answer the first day as folks started to pour in hack lab. Due to the pressure cooker nature of my job, I did not attend the last two Debconfs. Seeing friends that I only see during these fairly intense weeks stirred up a lot of inside of me. It felt really good to be back . This was also my first Debcamp, and now I understand why people enjoy it so much. It gives you a chance to meet new folks instead of gravitating to those you already know and still get some work done. It also allows the orga team to hammer out some final details and test run some stuff before the swarm descends into the venue. One of the things I enjoyed the most during the week were the take out dinners. Logistically it was a bit of nightmare but it aligned very much with the culinary culture of NY and we had some nice outdoor picnics on the Columbia campus and one in Riverside Park. The pace picked up a lot during Debconf, which we kicked off with Debian Day. We managed to get a lot of NYC folks it was one of the best attended Debian Days. One of the highlights was Gale Brewer s talk. She is a public servant in the full sense of the word, dedicating thirty years of her life to this job and really understands what technology can and cannot due for New Yorkers. It was very inspirational talk. Aside from a few moments, such as the day trip and the wine and cheese party (btw, party does not capture the quantity of cheese featured and consumed ), Debconf itself has already become a bit of a blur, it all happened so quickly and under sleep deprived conditions. Nearly every vessel of time was filled, overflowing, at times bursting. I enjoyed a number of the talks Eben Moglen s, Joey Hess s CUT proposal, Marga s talk on Making Debian Rule, Zack s Bits from the DPL, the derivates BOF, and others. I also enjoyed preparing and moderating the welcome talk, which is not yet online (only the last bit is and the sound is distorted so I sound like a mouse). My sense is that the relationship between Ubuntu and Debian is improving, which is important. We need alliances and allies, not foes in the world of F/OSS (watch Eben s talk to get a sense of why this is so). I mostly ate on campus but managed two African based dinners with friends (Ethiopian and Senegalese) and only wished we had a little more time to talk. The late nights in the Carman lounge were pretty epic, if somewhat collegiate and during the end, hot and humid. Here are a few of the pictures I managed to take. I love Debconf for it so perfectly conjoins the comfort of the familiar with the thrill of the new. For those who experience it in its full intensity, it can be an artistic moment, at least in the way described by the poet John Keats: The excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty . . . And now, I am, of course, totally beat

dctrl-tools 1.14 (targeting squeeze) has the following incomplete translations (as of right now in git): ca: 89 translated messages, 4 fuzzy translations, 18 untranslated messages.
cs: 108 translated messages, 1 fuzzy translation, 2 untranslated messages.
de: 111 translated messages.
en_GB: 89 translated messages, 4 fuzzy translations, 18 untranslated messages.
es: 89 translated messages, 4 fuzzy translations, 18 untranslated messages.
fi: 111 translated messages.
fr: 108 translated messages, 1 fuzzy translation, 2 untranslated messages.
it: 65 translated messages, 8 fuzzy translations, 38 untranslated messages.
ja: 89 translated messages, 4 fuzzy translations, 18 untranslated messages.
pl: 49 translated messages, 2 fuzzy translations, 60 untranslated messages.
pt_BR: 89 translated messages, 4 fuzzy translations, 18 untranslated messages.
ru: 108 translated messages, 1 fuzzy translation, 2 untranslated messages.
sv: 84 translated messages, 4 fuzzy translations, 23 untranslated messages.
vi: 89 translated messages, 4 fuzzy translations, 18 untranslated messages. I have put the relevant pot and po files up. This is not an archival URI, but I ll keep it available long enough for this. Submissions through the BTS are accepted, as usual. Debian developers and others with collab-maint access may, if they wish, push their updates directly to the Git repository. Please use the maint-2.14 branch and please read the README. I will NOT be gathering translations from Rosetta. All contributors and committers are asked to declare whether they can affirm the Developer s Certificate of Origin. The commit tag Signed-off-by is, by convention, interpreted as an affirmation of that document by the person identified on that tag line.

Git-buildpackage 0.5.6 in experimental got rid of it's pbuilder/cowbuilder examples and added Russ's nice git-pbuilder script. I'm very happy how this turned out, now building with cowbuilder is as simple as:

# Initially create a cowbuilder environment once
git-pbuilder create
# Build the package
git-buildpackage --git-pbuilder
# At a later point update the cowbuilder environment with new versions
git-pbuilder update

Or for another distribution:

DIST=lenny git-pbuilder create 
git-buildpackage --git-pbuilder --git-dist=lenny

The new version also better interacts with dch from devscripts. So things like:

git-dch --bpo --qa --nmu

are now also supported when adding new changelog sections. Git-dch now detects new upstream version numbers automatically and bumps the version accordingly. In order to get this working I finally fixed the tag format. Since the current version in unstable should get a chance to move to testing first, I've uploaded 0.5.6 to experimental.

Long before I took the train up to New York for DebConf10, I was sure that Eben Moglen's talk, the followup to his earlier, excellent "Freedom in the Cloud", would be a highlight of the conference. Even though it was scheduled for an ugly 9 am slot the morning after that other certain highlight, the wine and cheese party. I was not disappointed. The amazing DebConf video team has already put up the video of "How We Can Be the Silver Lining of the Cloud". Embedded below for those with html5. If you watch one video from DebConf, this should be it. <video controls="controls" src="http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2010/debconf10/high/1252_How_We_Can_Be_the_Silver_Lining_of_the_Cloud.ogv"></video> (Note that the audio stops cutting in and out after he switches mics a few minutes in.) In this talk, Eben goes far past the earlier "Freedom in the Cloud" talk, changing the focus from scraping Facebook, to laying down a concrete, detailed vision of the "FreedomBox", and how it could be a game changer. After the first standing ovation I can remember at a DebConf, given to the first speaker in a suit I can remember at a DebConf, many of us ended up in this huddle in the hall. Which turned into an impromptu BoF in a nearby room, which led to this wiki page, which was followed by seemingly everyone buzzing about it for the rest of the conference, and a second BoF that probably exceeded its room's occupancy limit. Which led to ... ??

I will spend the next several months trying to find other things we can do to help make this suddenly happen. And believe me, to the rest of the world, this will happen very suddenly. We will disrupt a lot of games we would like to have disrupted.
-- Eben Moglen

---

My thoughts:

• Focusing on this is a tactical retreat from promoting free software on eg, desktops and cell phones. But Eben makes a good case for doing so in order to disrupt many things that are blocking free software elsewhere.
• Clearly there is much interest in Debian about helping with the FreedomBox. Many in the project have done a lot of work on supporting the target hardware, and supporting users who already do this kind of thing. If the software stack for the FreedomBox already existed, we'd be packaging and integrating it. Since it mostly doesn't, many of us are interested in developing parts of it.
• Eben seems to be looking for a technical project lead. Until someone steps up to provide some clarity and decision making, we're all sorta fumbling around the edges, in the dark. At least with the same goal in our heads. In other words, FreedomBox needs an "upstream", it can't just be done in Debian. This doesn't mean that someone (or a small group) from Debian couldn't become that project lead.

Following up on my Flattr FOSS post, the most interesting thing about having my projects on Flattr has been watching their relative popularities in the control panel. It looks something like this, which is done using javascript, so you might need to follow the link to my blog to see it properly.

• dpkg-repack
• debhelper
• etckeeper
• mpdtoys
• mr
• alien
• pristine-tar
• moreutils
• Joey Hess's blog
• ikiwiki

I've been watching debhelper and moreutils keep pace with each other. This is interesting, because moreutils has been highlighted by Flattr FOSS, and debhelper has not. Still, the general level of interest in moreutils continues to suprise me -- and some more utils are lined up to go into it soon! Popcon tells me that alien still has more users than anything except for debhelper; easily 5 to 10 times the users of moreutils or pristine-tar. So alien's low numbers in Flattr are also surprising. I think it might be explained by more developer types than user types following Flattr FOSS right now. Perhaps it will change now that Flattr does not need invites to sign up?

* So, here is late report! Sometime back Praveen started discussion at DebianIndia mailing list about having MiniDebConf kind of conference here in India. MiniDebConfs are generally focused on development rather than at introduction to Debian . But, since this was our first attempt, out focus was more on to introduce Debian to student community and after writing this after 5 days I realize that we ve done good job! Many thanks to Joerg Jaspert for setting up Mini website: http://in2010.mini.debconf.org/ Praveen got bunch of sponsors, many thanks to CDAC and other sponsors for making event happen with testy food and tea that kept me awake. Now what really happened at Pune? My flight was nice. I went to guest house of COEP (the host college, 2nd old engineering college in India) and took some rest and called Praveen. He was already at computer lab and setting up Virtualbox and other things. We had two places hall and lab. Unfortunately, both were at different buildings and subway between them I discussed with couple of students and we went to dinner at late night. Pro. Abhijit who was kindly give permission to use lab and college hall was another source of energy. He is handling many FOSS events in college and probably only faculty who encourage students to use and learn FOSS. The Day 1 started with long lines of registration process. As we had around 200 registration, turn out of students were 100% on first day. Hall was almost full. Dr. Shashikumar from CDAC gave nice lecture about contribution which was well received. Praveen and Onkar then took the stage and gave nice introduction about Debian. I met Onkar first time. We had really nice discussion ranging from becoming Ubuntu MOTU to his Powerbook s adapter. After that Vikram took lively session on i18n and l10n in Debian and I took boring session on Contributing to Debian . Yet another boring session from me was Developer Toolbox . Packaging workshop by me at hall made many faces to yawn heavily while Onkar and Praveen handled it nicely at Lab. Main reason for yawning was Wifi and my Macbook s capacity to deal with ndiswrapper and crappy broadcom s drivers. (Note: I should get nice machine.) I met Sham first time. I met Kushal once again and felt energetic again! Day 2 As we expected number was very low compared to Day 1. So, we closed hall and moved entire stuffs to Lab only. Vikram took again nice session on Debian Edu . It was very interactive and I should learn something from his act of presentation. Another nice thing from Day 2 was discussion with BOSS Linux team. Hold on. Lets keep some old woes aside. They are basically doing what their bosses are telling. Developers were clueless about Sending patches to upstream. Their bugzilla had Zorro bug reported. I made promise to follow-up on this and set-up patches from boss at somewhere depending upon their response. That mail is my draft let me finish it by weekend. Pavi and others took video from session. It will be nice if someone will post it somewhere We then continued on discussing bugs and packaging area. It was amazing to see Praveen become DM during conference and also to see: upstream, maintainer and sponsor in one room. I really had nice food at dinners. Mango Mastani was nice. Beer was nice. How can I forget discussion with Ramki, Ninad, Pro.Abhijit, Praveen, Pavi and others after dinner? So lets work for MiniDebConf 2011 now!

1. Create an account on Flattr.com (mine is here);
2. Submit the URL of your free software project to the Flattr directory with a good description and the proper tags (here s my entry for dpkg);
3. Add a Flattr button on your website (I put one on wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg);
4. Inform your users and reach out to free software users using Flattr by registering your project in Flattr FOSS.

And I m not alone, Joey Hess made 25 EUR in one week only. And right now only 30K people are using Flattr. I expect this number to increase significantly now that invites are no longer required to open a Flattr account (see the announce on Flattr s blog). It s time to spread the word about Flattr FOSS! 8 comments Support my work

This blog post is actually a response to a talk that was given at the debconf last week. It was marga's talk about Making Debian Rule, again. Now that the beta versions of the talks are available for download I'm able to proper quote what I want to respond to: Is there a reason why we haven't yet updated the website?, perhaps someone can answer. I feel the need to respond to this as I am the main person driving that effort. Unfortunately the question was asked in a talk with no-one involved in that work around instead of addressing those people directly, and the question wasn't brought to my attention before the talk so that I could have provided an answer to offer in the presentation already. Also, as disclaimer, this is my personal story for it and doesn't need to get shared by the other people involved. I hope it can be seen as an answer anyway. As a little of background, Kalle's proposal went a long path before even I found out about it. I was simply in awe in several ways about it because it wasn't just a great mockup of the page (which it actually is, IMHO) but was accompanied by thoughts about not only the main site but also about several sub sites. Also, it was accompanied by patches, so it was seemingly ready to get deployed right ahead. I started working on it, got accused of being discouraging while doing that, got told that it would require a proper vote for a decision and can't happen just as, but those are just the Debian way of communication. I nevertheless did set up several test sites for some over the time to play with it. Some did work out better (like the git one, though this one came last and Kalle improved the CSS over time a fair bit), some weren't ready yet (like wiki, missing e.g. the coloring for the version diff, or the packages one where the separation between the different sections isn't that visible yet). Time passed, other things demanded their attention too. Like the thing where our system administrators did send me a request along about a new www-master server that needs to get set up from scratch. Given that the documentation about the required packages for the website was lacking a fair bit (to say the least) it did require a lot of attention, especially when doing things from scratch the wish to document the dependencies properly is just natural. There are still some issues with that as can e.g. be seen on this page in the empty table at the bottom. The same issue also appears on my testsite for the new design. The last part though is currently the biggest blocking issue for both efforts. There is no way to move forward with either without having that addressed. Simon Paillard did a great job on helping the move along so far, keeping the thread about the server move requirements that I started on the debian-www mailinglist updated with information about what's still pending. Unfortunately Kalle, Simon and me are also facing some private time constraints (amongst other duties that require attention) which weren't helping to move forward at a bigger pace. Unfortunately not very many people actually has shown interest in helping out neither, after all it's easier to go and ask questions about why it's not done yet to the completely wrong audience. My plan is to switch many sites at the same time instead of one after the other simply for the effect but also for less distraction for our users, including less people repeatedly pestering about when this or that site gets done, too. At least we need a final discussion on what should go into the header links and what should be at the bottom before a switch can be made anyway. And for some there is still the opinion that such a switch is nothing that we are rightfully allowed to decide without a vote, so that's also part of the reason to not just deploy it. I hope this answers the question to some extend and like said, if only I would had been addressed about this before the talk was given an answer to it would had been ready for presentation right ahead instead of having a pretty terse statement getting relayed through IRC (thanks, Yoe!) because I was fortunate enough to be around and watching the talk at that time. Feel free to discuss it further or offer your help on debian-www, especially if you are familiar with working on CSS files.

/debian permanent link Comments: 3

This is a quick report and notes about the great presentation made at DebConf on Distributed bug tracking for Debian with SD by Christine Spang (http://penta.debconf.org/dc10_schedule/events/591.en.html) Hopefully, the slides are gonna be published soon, but in the meantime, you have them in the video recording (see link above). For those who don t know SD, they may refer to a talk given by its author, Jesse Vincent, at the recent RMLL/LSM 2010 : Peer to peer issue tracking with SD and Prophet (video recording coming soon : EDIT: a premiere recording is available here). She draws 2 main use cases in her speech, which is exactly the kind of features we ve been thinking about for fetchbugs4.me :

• as a Debian maintainer : SD may be used to clone into your local SD repository all tickets related to your activity on your packages in debbugs.
• or as both a Debian maintainer and upstream developper, you d combine bugs from Debian s debbugs and upstream s bugtracker in one same bug database.

What would be even better is to be able to link all of these bugs to each-other but I m not sure this is yet possible. Christine started implementing debbugs (Debian s bugtracker) support in SD. For reference, there s a wishlist about it in 590156 : sd: Provide sync-ing with debbugs. The implementation is still in alpha state, in read-only mode only. Christine has implemented a new method get_{machinereadablebuglog}() for debbugs SOAP interface. It seems to send some Perl Data::Dumper output, which is probably fine for SD as SD is written in Perl, like debbugs but it may be better if it was some more generally accepted format, like JSON maybe. Among the topics discussed, was the absence of any standard API to connect to bugtrackers, meaning that SD needs to include many different client code modules for each of the trackers different APIs over different kinds of protocols. I ve raised (through my IRC comments, watching the presentation through the stream), that there s a proposal for such a standard that exists : OSLC-CM. Still, it s not widely implemented, in particular in Open Source tools (see another post of mine on the subject). I think it would be great if SD could be a client of OSLC-CM compatible trackers, hence I ve filed a wishlist. Also, I suggested that maybe it would be interesting to be able to browse the mail threads of comments on Debian bugs, much like with bts mbox show 12345 command (which opens mutt on the bugs thread, for me), when in offline mode, with SD. Maybe the bts command could just use SD as a backend for all its operations. Another very interesting feature may be to allow transfering a Debian bug to an upstream bugtracker, through SD. Dunno if that will be possible. Finally the code may be found : in github. I m looking forward to testing it.

I am currently sitting somewhere around Gate A2 at Singapore Airport, waiting for my connection flight. Not my original planned one. Not the one I got first rebooked to I was in Taiwan the last 3 weeks, having had about the best time ever. The plan for the flight back was pretty simple. Today, that is Tuesday 10th August, I take the Singapore Airlines flight from Taipei to Singapore, leaving Taipei at 1810h, arrival Singapore 22:35h. I wait a little time and then board the flight from Singapore to Frankfurt, leaving at 23:50h and touchdown in Frankfurt at 06:30h. So far so easy. So far not working at all. The flight from Taipei had technical problems (they later said problems with the computer of the engines ) and was delayed by a bit more than an hour. Not enough time to get the connection flight. So the ground staff in Taipei arranged a flight for me leaving Singapore at 13:50h the next day, Hotel and Taxi and such things to be organized by Singapore ground staff. Fine fine, so over to Singapore. Got here at 23:35h, left airplane at 23:45h. Definitely not working for the original connection, so the rebooking sounded good, When I left the airplane there was ground staff waiting for me, with the information that they got another reschedule done for me. I am now supposed to fly via Zurich, getting another connection from there to Frankfurt. So over to the transfer desk to get them to handle my luggage and actually get me a usable seat. Fine fine, all worked. Leaving the transfer desk, heading over to the gate (boarding meant to start at 00:10h, so not much time left), I have the pleasure to listen to an announcement: The flight to Zurich is delayed by approximately 2 hours. Oh fun, the planned connection flight in Zurich leaves about 2 hours after the planned arrival of this flight. Back to the transfer desk, asking whats up. Simple solution, I m supposed to fly to Zurich and contact the transfer desk there, it will deal with it. Lets see what happens and if I ever get back home. :) Nice side detail - I am now supposedly getting onto an A380. Lets see if this thing is really as great as they always say. Update: Now I am home. When we started in Singapore the Flight captain announced we have good weather helping us and will end up with being only 40 minutes late in Z rich. Wellwell, I think he just used up much more gas than usual, flying faster, but whatever, it worked out, 40 minutes late it was. (I cant believe always seeing 70mph of head wind being good ). So then I had to wait at that airport. And I must say: It sucks. Taipei airport - free wifi, just some funny redirections in browser before it works. Singapore - contact a staff member of the airport, get a code, works for 6 hours, fine. Z rich - the suckers want me to pay. A lot. Useless crapshit. Way to expensive. Bad service there. The next flight then finally got me to my flights destination, Frankfurt. Had to walk through half the airport to get to the luggage, but there it actually came out first. So fine. Train home after a short visit at my work was easy, and I think I will fall asleep soonish. Ohmy. Wish I would have stayed in Taipei