The Ceilometer team is pleased to announce that tomorrow Tuesday 5th March 2013 will be the second bug squash day for Ceilometer. We wrote an extensive page about how you can contribute to Ceilometer, from updating the documentation, to fixing bugs. There's a lot you can do. We've good support for Ceilometer built into Devstack, so installing a development platform is really easy. The main goal for this bug day will be to put Ceilometer in the best possible shape before the grizzly-rc1 release arrives (14th March 2013). This version of Ceilometer should be the last one before the final Grizzly release, so it's a pretty important one. We'll be hanging out on the #openstack-metering IRC channel on Freenode, as usual, so feel free to come by and join us!

Subunit V2 is coming along very well. Current status:

• I have a complete implementation of the StreamResult API up as a patch for testtools. Thats 2K LOC including comeprehensive tests.
• Similarly, I have an implementation of a StreamResult parser and emitter for subunit. Thats 1K new LOC including comprehensive tests, and another 500 lines of churn where I migrate all the subunit filters to v2.
• pdb debugging works through subunit v2, permitting dropping into a debugger to work. Yay.

Remaining things to do:

• Update the other language bindings the C library in particular.
• Teach testrepository to expect v2 input (and probably still store v1 for a while)
• Teach testrepository to use pipes for the stdin of test runner backends, and some control mechanism to switch input between different backends.
• Discuss the in-Python API with more folk.
• Get code merged

hey, the amount of RC bugs (affecting wheezy) is dropping significantly, mostly thanks to the work of the release team, if I'm seeing this correctly.
here are my small contributions for the last week:

• #656877 flash-kernel: "flash-kernel is not being run for kernel upgrades with unchanged ABI version"
  mark as fixed in relevant version
• #690152 src:bsaf: "bsaf: FTBFS: Test org.jdesktop.application.TaskMonitorTest failed"
  add some info to the bug log
• #697221 motion: "motion: No longer has support for mysql"
  propose alternative solution
• #699258 src:libio-async-loop-glib-perl: "libio-async-loop-glib-perl: FTBFS: test failed"
  disable unreliable tests (pkg-perl)
• #701115 owncloud: "owncloud: multiple vulnerabilities (oC-SA-2013-003, oC-SA-2013-004, oC-SA-2013-006)"
  check supplied patch and add a debdiff for testing-proposed-updates
• #701182 avelsieve: "avelsieve: Uses deprecated/removed session_unregister PHP function"
  upload the upstream patch to DELAYED/2 (the package is removed from testing but still)

when francesca started her DPL game, I also started thinking about people I'd like to encourage to stand as a DPL candidate. unfortunately my initial "short list" contained 18 names, which doesn't fit the game's rules very well. after waiting a bit, 9 of them were mentioned by others already, so I can leave them out here (which also means no public hug, sorry, please complain to the inventor of the game!). from the remaining 9, I've now chosen my Fantastic Four (in alphabtic order of first names):

• David Bremner
• Gaudenz Steinlin
• Michael Prokop
• M nica Ram rez Arceda

in my opinion, the DPL task is mostly about managing, & those four people are in my experience all very good at organising projects & dealing with people, & are therefore well suited for this task. let's see if they feel motivated to take on the challenge! (the nomination period has already started, so don't hestitate!)

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (78.31 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Debian packaging I wanted to update publican to the latest upstream release but I stopped after a few hours of work during which I filed two bugs that a modicum of testing should have caught before release. So I decided to wait for the next minor release. I uploaded python-django 1.4.4 and 1.4.5, new upstream maintenance and security releases which thus went into wheezy. I also prepared a stable update of Django (1.2.3-3+squeeze5) which required me to backport the last 2 sets of security patches. I uploaded a new revision of wordpress to fix a problem with TinyMCE (#700289) and to update/add many translation files (#697208). Bug reporting and misc fixes Live-build issue. I experienced some intermittent failures when building HDD live images with live-build on armel. Daniel Baumann directed me to the problematic piece of code (the oversizing of the image size was not enough) so I committed a small fix by increasing the oversizing factor to 6%. Live-config issue. I also reported another issue that I diagnosed in live-config (#701788), namely that the script which setups sudo was failing when the default user is root. git-buildpackage issue. I filed #700411 after noticing that git-import-orig imported the debian directory provided by upstream. Those directories are not used with 3.0 (quilt) source package and their presence in the upstream branch is thus harmful: any change to the upstream debian directory will result in conflicts when you merge a new upstream release in your packaging branch. rubygems integration. Later I had to package a bunch of ruby applications that were using Bundler and I wanted to reuse as many packaged ruby modules that I could. But for this, those modules had to provide the required rubygems meta-information. I filed #700419 to request those on rake-compiler and with the help of C dric Boutillier (and others on #debian-ruby), we identified a bunch of ruby modules which could get those with a simple recompilation. I filed bin-nmu requests in #700605. Misc bugs. simple-cdd offers to select profiles to install but I noticed that the associated debconf template was not translated (#700915). The startup scripts (provided by initscripts) in charge of activating the swap are supposed to handle a noswap kernel command line option to disable swap. In #701301, I reported that the option was not working correctly if quiet was present first in the command line due to spurious break statements. Debian France Administrative work. We were late for some legal procedures so I wrote the report of the last general assembly and sent it to the Tribunal d instance of Sarreguemines to record the changes in the administrative board. I also completed the special register of the association, it s a notebook that is legally required and that must document any important change in the governance structure of the association (new members of the board, headquarters change, new bylaws, etc.). Galette developments. Debian France is funding a few enhancements to the Galette free software that we re using to manage the association. I am in touch with the Galette developer to answer his questions and ensure that his work will meet our needs. Librement I have been looking for talented developers who have a genuine interest in my Librement project. I want to fund the initial development of the project but I don t have the means to fund it entirely. So I really wanted to find developers who would find an interest beside the money that I would pay. I got in touch with the team of developers from Scopyleft and they look like very good candidates. But they re heavy users of the Scrum development method and asked me to play the role of product owner . So I started to describe the project with user stories (i.e. create the backlog in the Scrum jargon), you can have a look at them here on trello.com. If you re interested by the topic of free software funding, feel free to review and to send me your comments. My goal is clearly to have a minimal viable product with the first iteration(s) that I fund and then use the platform itself to fund further developments of the project. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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As folks know, I ve been hacking on Firehose. I ve been debating doing some work to modify / extend / replace DACA, and I could use some help writing new wrappers around static check code, so, who wants to hack? Any UI folks? I could use a UI to view Firehose data, something spiffy and colorful. Hackers? Send in some wrappers for your favorite static checking code. Send in pull requests or email me with a pointer to the repo :) Hack on, folks!

If you use LVM with Wheezy on a solid-state drive, you really want to install the latest lvm2 update (i.e. 2.02.95-6, which contains the changes of -5). Otherwise, if you set issue_discards=1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf, you will experience severe data loss when using pvmove. Happened to me twice, once I didn't care (chroot data being lost), the second time (today) I did. Not fun, especially when the backup of the data was scheduled for the same day.

One has to wonder why it takes three months for a bug that trashes data to reach testing. (Obviously I know the answer, but they're not particularly good reasons.) Other distributions, like Ubuntu, were much quicker to notice and incorporate that fix. And in the case of the named distribution not because they auto-synced it from unstable. If somebody notices such a grave bug, please yell at people to get the fix out there to our users. Thanks.

A new Armadillo version 3.800.0 is now out. Conrad picked a new numbering scheme to coincide with the relicensing from LGPL to MPL 2.0. The new version 0.3.800.0 of the corresponding RcppArmadillo package (which still uses GPL 2 or later) is now on CRAN. It also contains the updated version of our paper as the package vignette. The summary of the main changes follows:

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.3.800.0 (2013-03-01)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 3.800.0 (Miami Beach)
  • Armadillo is now licensed using the Mozilla Public License 2.0
  • added .imbue() for filling a matrix/cube with values provided by a functor or lambda expression
  • added .swap() for swapping contents with another matrix
  • added .transform() for transforming a matrix/cube using a functor or lambda expression
  • added round() for rounding matrix elements towards nearest integer
  • faster find()
  • fixes for handling non-square matrices by qr() and qr_econ()
  • minor fixes for handling empty matrices
  • reduction of pedantic compiler warnings
• Updated vignette to paper now in press at CSDA
• Added CITATION file with reference to CSDA paper

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

So this weekend was removal time, namely Lenny. I started out by getting all the different archives which had a Lenny release placed onto archive.debian.org, namely volatile, backports, security and of course the main archive. Actually, they got put onto one of the two hosts that hold this archive and are now syncing to the other. Today started by removing Lenny from those archives. As volatile is dead as an extra archive that was easy - DSA turned off the machine. Backports and security got all their files removed in one big removal after which I had them forget they ever dealt with Lenny. The main archive is a different story. Due to its size I can t simply remove all files at once. This would break every mirror, as they don t delete too many files at once. For the official mirror scripts that magic number is 40000. Both, backports and security, had less than that for their lenny suites, but the main archive has somewhere around 195k files that need to go away. Slightly more than the limit. For that reason I set out to only delete parts of the files for each mirror push. Lucky our toolset supports this easily, I simply had to declare the lenny suites empty and let our clean-suite tool do its work. Worked flawlessly - if one considers 8 hour runtime to mark the files as delete-able no flaw. Took another two hours to actually delete the first 20000 files out of our pool. The next mirror push will thus delete every lenny related entry in our dists/ tree and some 20000 files out of pool. The following mirror pushes will continue deletion, in batches of 10000, until all of lenny is gone.

For some, LDAP, just like X.500, is black magic. I won't argue against. Sometimes it really shows surprising behavior. It always makes sense, if you think about what LDAP is built for. One surprising behavior is the handling of the "Insignificant Space"

LDAP supports syntax and comparator methods. The syntax specifies how the entry should look. Usually this is some form of text, but numbers or stuff like telephone numbers are supported as well. The comparators specifies how the values are compared. Most of the text comparators are defined to apply the handling of insignificant spaces. Insignificant space handling normalizes the use of spaces. First all leading and trailing spaces are removed. All the internal spaces are normalized to at most two spaces. At the end all strings starts and ends with one space to allow proper sub-string matches. The resulting strings are used for comparisons. This behavior makes sense most of the time. If the user want to find something in the directory, he usually don't cares about spaces, but about content. But I found one occurrence where this produces some grieve. Postfix supports LDAP since some time. And lets say, it does not care about spaces in its queries. This is no problem as e-mail addresses do not contain spaces. Or do they?

Yes, e-mail addresses can contain spaces. This is not widely known, but still allowed. This addresses are quoted and the command looks like RCPT TO:<" test"@example.com>. The local part is quoted and contains a space at the beginning. And this is where the problem starts. Postfix sanitizes the address. It uses a simplified internal representation of the address for all lookups. So the address gets test@example.com. This form is used in all table lookups. The LDAP table uses the internal form of the address. This address is copied verbatim into the query. This query may look this way (mail= test@example.com). It is sent to the server this way. The LDAP server applies the insignificant space modifications. The query is now interpreted and the comparator specified modifications are applied. The query gets effectively changed to (mail=test@example.com). And this is where the fun starts. Postfix accepts undeliverable mails. Depending on the setup, such LDAP queries may be used to check for valid addresses. Because of the space handling, the sender can add spaces to the beginning of the address and it will still be considered valid. In later steps this addresses are not longer valid. Addresses starting with spaces are considered invalid in some locations of Postfix. What surprised me a bit is that virtual alias handling did not map them. The unmodified addressed showed up on the LMTP backend server. That's why they showed up my radar. I would say Postfix is wrong in this case. The LDAP server applies the spec correctly and defines spaces in e-mail addresses as insignificant. Postfix on the other side considers them significant. The easiest fix would be to not allow any spaces in the LDAP table.

Review: Asimov's Science Fiction, June 2011

Editor:	Sheila Williams
Issue:	Volume 35, No. 6
ISSN:	1065-2698
Pages:	112

Sheila Williams's editorial is about a new ebook-only anthology of Asimov's stories, with some discussion of electronic sales. This sort of business editorial is what she's best at writing, although in this case I'm far enough in my reading that I'm reading it through a bit of a time machine. Silverberg's essay is about popular bubbles and is mildly interesting, although I've read quite a lot about this at greater length. I think he misses the plot at the end, though, where he brings in the 2008 collapse and works on focusing the blame on speculators rather than those selling the fraudulent investments. James Patrick Kelly has a surprisingly graceful introduction to fanfic that does a better job at conveying the underlying enthusiasm than most mainstream coverage. The review column this month is Peter Heck's workman-like survey of recently released books of interest. "The Cold Step Beyond" by Ian R. MacLeod: Most of MacLeod's writing I've read has focused on lush world-building, usually with a mix of magic and industrial revolution. This felt like a departure: a character study of a heavily-modified warrior and monster hunter against a clearly science-fictional background. The protagonist has no memory of her past beyond her training in a religious institution, and is as much machine as woman. She is on one of her first missions to hunt dangerous monsters. But she's given almost no direction, and rather than encountering a monster, she encounters a feral woman with an ancient ray gun. MacLeod has a very SFnal twist waiting in the wings, but what I liked best were the character dynamics and the interplay of duty and self-determination. (8) "All the News That's Fit" by Carol Emshwiller: This story follows Emshwiller's normal pattern of telling the story of an outsider and representative of outsider culture trying to understand a society, but her protagonist here is both more alone and more proactive than her average protagonist. She lives in a distant mountain village only rarely visited by a traveling reporter who brings news from outside. When he doesn't come, she goes out looking for him, at first to rescue him if he ran into trouble and later to find the news herself. Much of the story has the reader worrying nervously for her as she observes the large city while clearly having no idea how to live there. The ending provides an interesting and (at least for me) unexpected twist on the rural person coming to the big city, but it was marred by a level of anger from the protagonist that I never thought was well-motivated. (6) "Walking Stick Fires" by Alan DeNiro: There is a science fiction subgenre that, for lack of a better term, I'll call post-apocalyptic surrealism. This is an entry in that strange subgenre, featuring two alien bikers having mostly unmotivated adventures with strange objects and even stranger creatures on an Earth that's apparently been invaded and mostly devastated by multiple parties. Like a lot of post-apocalyptic surrealism, it never makes much sense. It reminded me of Rucker but with a bit more characterization and less hand-waving math. (4) "Apocalypse Daily" by Felicity Shoulders: I really liked the premise for this story. The protagonist is a concept designer for a social-oriented MMORPG, but one where only scores and resources carry over rather than the whole world. The goal of the game is survival: the world ends regularly, globally or locally, in a huge variety of ways, and one scores points and earns resources for further iterations by finding ways to survive that catastrophe. The game is structured to encourage cooperation, at least at first. But Katrina gets into a mildly paranoid workplace conflict with someone else on her team, leading to some significant changes in the underlying expectations of the game. Unfortunately, while the background and idea are quite solid, the direction the story goes is predictable pessimism, the conclusion doesn't say much that I found interesting, and I ended up detesting the protagonist. I would have preferred a more unique psychological twist. (6) "The Fighter" by Colin P. Davies: This is a rather short story, essentially an idea study in the context of a police stop of a futuristic entertainment fighter. This is another one of those depressing takes on a common SF trope. I didn't entirely follow the world-building, but it was all dark and pointless enough that I didn't really want to dig further. (4) "Kiss Me Twice" by Mary Robinette Kowal: I've read a few police procedurals featuring AIs before, but this is by far the best one I've read. Huang is a detective, and like all the detectives he makes extensive use of the police department AI. Unlike most of the detectives, though, he treats her as a full partner and close to human, and she reciprocates with a Mae West persona and a closer relationship with him than most of the department. They're in the middle of investigating a murder when there is a raid on the police department and the AI herself is stolen. The rest of the story entangles their investigation with the theft of the AI. The police AI is, of course, restored from backup, but that's the first time that's ever happened to her, and she's shaken by it, and more disturbed by the knowledge that there are two copies of her running. The mystery angle of the story is reasonably satisfying, but the AI characterization and Huang's careful feeling-out of their relationship and appropriate behavior on his part is the best part of the story. This is a great story: long, satisfying, and thoroughly excellent. I'd happily read more fiction in this universe. (8) Rating: 7 out of 10

By now I am a long time happy user of tmux instead of screen. I started using it somewhere in 2011 and by now I only have one usage of screen left over (direct ttyS0 access for one serial). As usual I have a custom config for it, and if you are interested there is a link for you: tmux.conf. But the more interesting part and why I blog is that I also wrote a little helper around tmux. Ingeniously called tm. And a colleague said I should let other people use it too and place it somewhere accessible. So, err, here it is. Or better, the usage output of it, the actual script has a link somewhere below.

---

tmux helper by Joerg Jaspert <joerg@ganneff.de>
Call as: tm CMD [host]...
CMD is one of
 ls          List running sessions
 s           Open ssh session to host
 ms          Open multi ssh sessions to hosts, synchronizing input
 $anything   Either plain tmux session with name of $anything or
             session according to TMDIR file
TMDIR file:
Each file in $TMDIR defines a tmux session.
Filename is the commandline option $anything
Content is defined as:
  First line: Session name
  Second line: extra tmux options
  Any following line: A hostname to open a shell with in the normal
  ssh syntax. (ie [user@]hostname)
Environment variables recognized by this script:
TMPDIR - Where tmux stores its session information
         DEFAULT: If unset: /tmp
TMSORT - Should ms sort the hostnames, so it always opens the same
         session, no matter in which order hostnames are presented
         DEFAULT: true
TMOPTS - Extra options to give to the tmux call
         Note that this ONLY affects the final tmux call to attach
         to the session, not to the earlier ones creating it
         DEFAULT: -2
TMDIR  - Where are session information files stored
         DEFAULT: $ HOME /.tmux.d
TMWIN  - Where does your tmux starts numbering its windows?
         This script tries to find the information in your config,
         but as it only checks $HOME/.tmux.conf it might fail.
         So if your window numbers start at anything different to 0,
         like mine do at 1, then you can set TMWIN to 1

---

It is mainly useful for using tmux as a ssh-multiplexer and replacement for clusterssh though its happy to do any other tmux session too. As the help text may already have told you, you can use it to list existing tmux sessions (oh, wow!). Honestly, that one is there because tm ls is shorter than tmux ls More interestingly, tm s HOSTNAME opens a tmux session with the first window being a ssh shell to HOSTNAME. Should you later type tm s HOSTNAME again, it will attach to the existing session. But the real kicker for me (and colleagues) actually is the ms subcommand of it. ms being short for multi-session, it is my way of no-longer using clusterssh. Basically you type tm ms HOST1 user@HOST2 and it opens a session with one tmux window consisting of two panes. Showing you host1 and host2 at the same time. And the input to both is synchronized, that is - all your input is send to both of them. You aren t limited to just two hosts, do as many as you wish. Actually, I have no idea if tmux has an upper limit, but I did already have more than 100 hosts open at once. The major limitation there is not tmux - but simply the available screenspace, as all hosts are shown in ONE window! (The one advantage of clusterssh, it uses one xterm per host) This is quite helpful in all kinds of administration work involving clusters - imaging installing a package on 5 hosts of a cluster, you usually want it on all of them - or any kind of situations where one wants to run one command on many systems. As I m already said, I m lazy. And so there is a way to easily define multisessions that one uses regulary, by creating files inside the directory behind $TMDIR, usually $ HOME /.tmux.d. They are simple text files and let you easily define sessions you can then (re)open with a simple tm whateveritsname. And if you want the whole script by now: tm

This post is just a status update for the Openstack packaging, after the next version froze last week. The Openstack bi-annual summit of next April will take place this year in Portland, Oregon, and if everything goes as plan, Grizzly will be released just before the summit. Grizzly will be out a bit before the next Ubuntu in April, as releases are following the one of Ubuntu. Openstack uses town names for it s release names: Austin, Bextar, Cactus (2011.1), Diablo (2011.2), Essex (2012.1), Folsom (2012.2), Grizzly (2013.1). I started to seriously work on the Openstack packaging in October, and never stopped working on its packaging until now. Slowly, but surely, preparing all the packages and their dependency python modules. One package at a time, working all this every day. Folsom works now pretty well and can be used in production, and I maintain it for security (along with Essex, which is in Wheezy). Then Grizzly was frozen last week, on the 22nd of February, with the G3 release. As I already worked on packaging the G2 release in January, managing the packaging of G3 was fast. On late Sunday, I had a repository with Grizzly built, and its corresponding python (build-)dependencies. But while just building your own repository is easy, having all the dependencies in Debian is a lot more work. As of today, if I include all the python modules, I have (at least) touch around 50 packages in total when working on Openstack. Many of them were simply built from scratch. The only python dependency that needs an upgrade in Experimental, so that all dependencies are satisfied, is a new version of pep8. The rest of is new python modules that were not in Debian, and which are currently waiting in the NEW queue for ftp masters approval: python-pecan, python-tablib, python-wsme and websockify. Some of these python modules have been waiting there for a long time, like python-pecan (it s been waiting in the NEW queue for more than 35 days now), some like websockify and python-wsme have been uploaded only this week. I really hope it can be possible to have all of Grizzly in Debian before the next Openstack summit (this depends mainly on the ftp-masters). Note that I do not intend to apply security patches in Grizzly until it is released as the new Openstack stable. So use my private Grizzly repository as your own risk. I intend to fix this by working on some constant integration to have nightly builds, like many people are doing with Openstack. If you want to try it out: deb http://archive.gplhost.com/debian grizzly main

For the past few days I've been making minor changes to my static-site generator, templer (source on github). The recent changes have all had one aim, which was to allow me to rebuild my main site. Now I've finished http://www.steve.org.uk is up to date, and the source code to the website is stored in a mercurial repository. No real functional changes have been made, but I've rationolized several ad-hoc bits of the site, marked areas are depreciated/unsupported where appropriate, and removed a few things that were completely broken. I almost removed the software for Microsoft Windows, but didn't. By a strange coincidence I was recognized as the author of a windows utility back in 2004 - almost ten years ago now - on Hacker News. Guess I made the right choice. I'm going to spend a while working on my slaughter documentation in the next week or two, although "the definitive guide" is a great starting point. "Yes, this is dog" - Landscape in The Mist (1984).

x-on-resize: a simple display configuration daemon I like things to be automated as much as possible, and having abandoned Gnome to their own fate and switched to xfce, I missed the automatic display reconfiguration stuff. I decided to write something as simple as possible that did just what I needed. I did this a few months ago, and when Carl Worth asked what I was using, I decided to pack it up and make it available. Automatic configuration with a shell script I ve had a shell script around that I used to bind to a key press which I d hit when I plugged or unplugged a monitor. So, all I really need to do is get this script run when something happens. The missing tool here was something to wait for a change to happen and automatically invoke the script I d already written. Resize vs Configure The first version of x-on-resize just listened for ConfigureNotify events on the root window. These get sent every time anything happens with the screen configuration, from hot-plug to notification when someone runs xrandr. That was as simple as possible; the application was a few lines of code to select for ConfigureNotify events, and invoke a program provided on the command line. However, it was a bit too simple as it would also respond to manual invocations of xrandr and call the script then as well. So, as long as I was content to accept whatever the script did, things were fine. And, with a laptop that had a DisplayPort connector for my external desktop monitor, and a separate VGA connector for projectors at conferences, the script always did something useful. Then I got this silly laptop that has only DisplayPort, and for which a dongle is required to get to VGA for projectors. I probably could write something fancy to figure out the difference between a desktop DisplayPort monitor and DisplayPort to VGA dongle, but I decided that solving the simpler problem of only invoking the script on actual hotplug events would be better. So, I left the current invoke-on-resize behavior intact and added new code that watched the list of available outputs and invoked a new config script when that set changed. The final program, x-on-resize, is available via git at

git://people.freedesktop.org/~keithp/x-on-resize

I even wrote a manual page. Enjoy!

About 5-6 weeks ago, I wrote about the Wheezy release progress, so it is about time for another update. According to UDD, we are down to 204 RC bugs (down from 249, since my last post). It is not quite the 2.4 RC bugs per day actually it is about 1.1 RC bug a day. Unfortunately, we do not appear to be fixing bugs faster than we are reporting them at the moment. If you look at Richard Hartmann s post from last week, then we had 206 RC bugs left. Even worse, we appear to have regressed between week 7 and 8 of this year (194 to 206). If you want the Wheezy release to happen soon, please consider helping us by providing bug fixes that comply with the Wheezy freeze policy. If the pace of RC bug fixes do not pick up, the alternative is that the release team deals with the bugs. Note that deals generally falls into one of 2 categories. Either we defer/ignore the problem for Wheezy[1] or we remove affected packages from Wheezy/testing. Particularly, if we have to remove packages, they may take reverse dependencies with them as collateral damage. I do not like these tools anymore than you do. But if the RC bugs fixes are not coming in, it is the only two tools we have left. [1] Meaning that at best the bug fix will occur at Wheezy point release at worst, not at all.

Daniel tells his story building a wooly mammoth, and throws some ideas on how this could be implemented easily with free software. But if I read his post correctly, Daniel still misses the precise ways to do it. Our friends Octavio and Claudia (twitted hereby) have given some Blender courses here at our classroom at home (Guys! Come again! We miss you!), and host the Spanish-speaking g-blender community. At one of their courses, they showed how to model an object/character, and in order to color/texture its parts, you can unwrap it This process yields a flattened image with the surfaces that build your object, that you can then color. Well, you can also use it as a base pattern to cut and sew your plush! It is not meant to be used for this (although it works), so it won't give you the extra tabs to be sewn in place, and the joints might not be at the most comfortable places. But it is base you can work from.