We in Debian-IN team where maintaining ttf-indic-fonts a set of fonts for all Indian language fonts from various origin. This package used to build around 7 to 10 binary package of different Indian language. The source package ttf-indic-fonts was itself a mess. It was a native package it was mixing all fonts with active upstream and inactive upstream together which was hard to maintain. Last April I transitioned this package from old packaging style (which version I don't remember) to dh7 standard. At the same time bubulle asked me it would be great if I can rename the package to Fonts team new packaging policy Even though I was just beginning with Debian packaging I dared to propose a draft :) Well it was in May and now its March 2012 almost one year over and We have successfully finished the transition and Kartik uploaded all packages to Debian. Now Debian-IN team maintains 62 packages and me? Yeah my package count jumped from 12 to 38! Almost close to close to number of packages Kartik is maintaining :) Please do the testing report any bugs! Cya

Around two years ago, the OECD presented a study on residential bandwitdth available per country that triggered quite a bit of debate all over the world I have seen at least criticism to it in Mexico, in the USA and in Australia. It's very easy to take a simplified view of a statistic and bitch on how sorry the state of our country is. In our case, the outcry was that Mexico was the lowest of all of the OECD countries, and I have seen this repeated on so many topics that it what surprises me is that people keep getting surprised at it! OECD does not represent the 200 countries in this world (only the top 30, and the meaning of "top" is not unambiguous). I found this graph that helps me illustrate this point: While that graphic is part of a report illustrating how sorry the USA should be for their low position, it shows the OECD member countries. And yes, the only country Mexico could be compared in general terms from those in the list is Turkey. Coherently, they are located at positions 28 and 30. But what prompted me into writing this post? That some weeks ago I was reading a viewpoint article at the Communications of the ACM magazine: What gets measured gets done: Stop focusing on irrelevant broadband metrics, by Scott Wallsten (might be behind a paywall for you If you are interested, I can share a copy with you, just ask me by email). Wallsten's article contains the following graph: I found it pretty telling that, although Mexico sits at the extreme of the graph (and the height of our bar makes it very hard to get a real value out of this particular rendering), our ISPs join a very select group of countries (Sweden, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and Ireland, in my very subjective measure) by delivering what they promise. In 2010, the dominant broadband offering was 1Mbps, although higher options have long existed. I always got basically the 100% of what my ISP (Telmex) has promised, even though I have always had the cheapest package available. Some months ago, I got a call announcing we were being pushed 5x into the future, and starting right then, I had a 5Mbps connection. And although I didn't really expect it to be true, I have had a clean 6Mbps (yes, 6 instead of 5) connection. So, that's it. This post contains no hidden truths, but just what grabbed my attention from a series of data points :-)

Attachment	Size
Residential Internet speed comparison per country (2010)	397.15 KB
Measured and advertised download speeds (in kbps)	252.86 KB

Summary The JSON License may seem interesting, but it a bad license, both non-free and ambiguous: do not use it. If you are the author of a piece of software that uses JSMin or its PHP port, consider dropping that non-free part or at least rendering it optional.The JSON license Do you know the JSON License? It is a software license inspired by the MIT/Expat license with one additional morality clause:

The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.

Non-free For novices that clause can be perceived as a good idea serving a noble goal. But the problem here is that is would make your software non-free. Indeed, there are two common definitions of free software: the FSF definition, and the Debian Free Software Guidelines, also known as the Open Source Definition. Basically, both definitions indicate that to be free, a piece of software must be usable with no restrictions, and forbidding evil uses is such a restriction. Specifically, it violates:

• the FSF's zeroth liberty: A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms: The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0). [ ]
• the DFSG/OSD sixth point: No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor: The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor.

Ambiguous In addition to these incompatibilities to being free, this morality clause implies additional problems, the most important one being that it is ambiguous, which is very bad for a license clause: who exactly defines what is Good and what is Evil? If it is the author, then this clause could be used for arbitrarily forbidding any use; it it is the licensee, then this clause it as good as void. Do not use it For all these reasons, the JSON License with that infamous morality clause is not suitable for free software, so if you plan to use that license for your work, please consider these suggestions: 1. do not; 2. do not, really; 3. if still in doubt, refer to point 1. There are several standard free software licenses, the closest one being the MIT/Expat one, that you should consider instead. Now, if you really want to be considered as non-free, and rejected by Debian, Red Hat/Fedora, Google Code and more generally any free software distributor, this is the way to go. On thing worth noting is that this morality clause only annoys free software distributors, that are certainly not doing Evil, but will not prevent any evil person to do Evil things with your software. To encourage people to do Good rather than Evil, it would be better to formulate that clause as a suggestion rather than an order:

The Software should rather be used for Good, not Evil.

The JSMin case This infamous JSON License is known to be used by JSMin and its PHP port. If you are a Web application author, be careful when embedded external content, since it can render you whole piece of software non-free! If you are using JSMin, I would suggest that you drop it, or at least make it optional by using a conditional (if JSMin is here, use it, otherwise do nothing) so that distributors such as Debian can expurgate that non-free part.

I have just bought our plane tickets to Managua, so I can finally say this: Yes, many of you will ask what happened, I was bragging everywhere I wanted to go by land, driving from Mexico City to Managua. I'd love to, and I'm sure it's completely doable... But we have family issues to attend on July 21, in Argentina. So we will have a beautiful flight schedule (and carbon footprint) for this July:

June 30

Mexico San Salvador Managua, 17:35-20:30. Yes, this means I will not be in Mexico to cast my vote on July 1st. Well, I had already accepted this would happen... And the price difference was quite sensible.

July 15

Managua San Jos Mexico, 16:25-22:20

July 16

Mexico Santiago Buenos Aires (AEP), 20:30-09:55

July 23

Buenos Aires (EZE) Lima Mexico, 08:35-19:00

Several people have asked me on the best airline options for this trip. In our case, to Managua, it was with TACA, US$518 total. You can get tickets for ~US$30 less, but the flight goes through Panama instead of San Salvador, for an extra 1000Km And instead of ~3hr it makes slightly over 6. Yes, on our way back we will be routed a bit South to San Jos , but it's not as bad, and it's for a very short layover. For Argentina? Well, we have always found LAN to be the cheapest and most convenient. This time, TACA/Avianca was a very close second, which lost due to almost doubling the flight+layover time Why aren't we taking a Mexico Managua Buenos Aires flight instead? Because it's ~US$150 more expensive per person. Not *that* much, but still some money. And by returning to Mexico and having a night at home, we will save us the hassle of carrying Winter clothes to Nicaragua and Summer clothes to Argentina. Oh, and if you are planning on dropping by home while we are away and robbing all of our stuff: There's not that much to take from there, and we have already arranged for somebody to be there while we are away. But thanks for thinking about us, anyway! [update] And what about DebConf12 registration? When is the system opening for us all to register? Soon, dear friends, we are talking about some related issues, and you will have your registrationi open soon.

The next day was reserved for seeing Mostar. I could leave my luggage at the hotel, so I first went to the train station. The train station was rather large and impressive, in spite of only two trains per day and direction. However, the train station was closed at that time, so no ticket purchase yet. Into the historic city of Mostar: Visiting the Ottoman House was interesting, as well as climbing on the tower of one mosque. In the city, many houses still had effects of shelters and gun shots from the war. (At least) One of the trees in the pedestrian area had many shots as well.
river Neretva within the city of Mostar
City of Mostar from the mosque tower
Ottoman House and bird nests within Seeing Stari Most, the old (or rather: rebuilt) bridge was nice, as well as the masses of people looking there. However, the area with many tourists was quite small. Whereas Stari Most was shoot down during the war, there was a small sister bridge which survived the war damaged but still existed. However, that bridge collapsed during one high water afterwards but had also been rebuilt.
Stari Most with tourists, sister bridge of Stari Most without tourists and houses along the river Below Stari Most, there was an area that looked like a nice picknick-place to look at the bridge and old city, but it was obviously unmaintained since some time. Same at other places: Really great, but many of them unmaintained (as in "too less money", not as in "vandalized"). Soon in the afternoon, most tourists disappeared, so I had the chance to look at the city with only few tourists arround before I had to leave for the train. Walking around Mostar, I meet a few people who were in Germany before, for work, studying or school. The city was quite fascinating - in some way reminded me of 20 years ago. I saw a few more nice vegetables, like kiwis. Mostar wasn't as tourismn-oriented as I would have expected from the monuments available to see there. All people were very nice and friendly, and in the cafes around there was free wifi. A nice place, but also depressing when thinking how much better it could be.

Tired of using curl to debug webapps? Looks quite complicated and for sure it is error prone. This looks much better, and I ve just created package with this useful tool. It s called httpie and is already in NEW queue. Besides simplifying syntax it has also color output which makes results more readable. For the impatient I put this package also on my people.d.o page.

Having monitoring for dualstack connectivity in place helps a lot. Unfortunately in most cases we are running also services we want to offer dualstacked. In the past we just monitored in those cases IPv4 only or created a separate check for the same service on IPv6. This is a bit messy and I was looking for something to check services via IPv4 and IPv6. Digging my most boring search engine doesn t help much here. So I was talking with some people more involved into the core Icinga/Nagios stuff. Seems there is actually the best solution to use check_multi. As we have the command definition for check_multi_icinga already in place, I created a check_smtp_dualstack.cmd for monitoring a dualstacked SMTP service

command[ IPv4 ] = check_smtp -4 -H $HOSTADDRESS$
command[ IPv6 ] = check_smtp -6 -H $HOSTADDRESS6$
state [ CRITICAL ] = COUNT(CRITICAL) > 1
state [ WARNING ] = COUNT(WARNING) > 0 COUNT(CRITICAL) > 0
state [ UNKNOWN ] = COUNT(UNKNOWN) > 1 A simple SMTP service definition does the trick (don t forget address6 in host definition)

define service
use generic-service ; Name of service template to use
host_name localhost
service_description SMTP
check_command check_multi_icinga! check_smtp_dualstack.cmd !'-r 1+2+4+8
Okay .. that looks nice, but only at the first view. Imagining what we are actually running as service checks, it seems we just need for every unique service check a new cmd-file for check_multi as I didn t found a way to generalize the whole stuff yet. Does anybody know a way to pass commands for check_multi via service definitions? Something like:

define service
[...]
check_command check_multi_icinga! check_general_dualstack.cmd !'check_smtp -p 666 ! -r 1+2+4+8
[...]

Since some ages we are deploying IPv6 in our network and also for some selected services. Some days ago we discovered, that anybody has enabled accidentally a router advertisement daemon in a network where this shouldn t happen. As result of this, IPv6 enabled systems got (additional) IPv6 adresses and some services where using this new learned addresses as source address when sending out replies. Maybe this doesn t sound so harmful on the first view. But some services rely on a correct source address when getting a reply for a request (for example dns resolver library). To be aware of the issue, that a service maybe available via IPv4 but not via IPv6 or vica versa, a dualstacked monitoring needs to be in place for dualstacked services. Looking into the issue, I stumbled upon Michael Friedrichs HowTo about Dualstacked monitoring with Icinga. Luckily we have the full software stack in place on Squeeze (with squeeze-backport). As icinga and nagios-plugins was in installed already, I just needed to fetch check_multi.

aptitude install -t squeeze-backports nagios-plugin-check-multi Now a new check command is needed, I created the following:

define command
command_name check_multi_icinga
command_line /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_multi \
-f /etc/check_multi/$ARG1$ $ARG2$ $ARG3$ $ARG4$ \
-s objects_cache=/var/cache/icinga/objects.cache \
-s status_dat=/var/cache/icinga/status.dat \
-s HOSTADDRESS=$HOSTADDRESS$ -s HOSTADDRESS6=$HOSTADDRESS6$
For monitoring connectivity I created check_host_alive_dualstack.cmd

command[ IPv4 ] = check_ping -4 -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -w 5000.0,100% -c 5000.0,100% -p 5
command[ IPv6 ] = check_ping -6 -H $HOSTADDRESS6$ -w 5000.0,100% -c 5000.0,100% -p 5
state [ CRITICAL ] = COUNT(CRITICAL) > 1
state [ WARNING ] = COUNT(WARNING) > 0 COUNT(CRITICAL) > 0
state [ UNKNOWN ] = COUNT(UNKNOWN) > 1 Now we just need to replace the check-host-alive command and add a value for address6 on the host as the following

define host
use generic-host ; Name of host template to use
host_name localhost
alias localhost
address 127.0.0.1
address6 ::1
check_command check_multi_icinga! check_host_alive_dualstack.cmd !'-r 1+2+4+8
Reloading icinga should you show something like this:
Now we have general connectivity of our dualstacked systems monitored.

Inspired by the interview series conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux community. This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a more international audience. While Debian Edu and Skolelinux originated in France and Norway, and have most users in Europe, there are users all around the globe. One of those far away from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator and contributor. It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to work out of the box in Japan. I got him to answer a few questions, and am happy to share the response with you. :) Who are you, and how do you spend your days? My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko, and we have three lovely children, aged 15, 14 and 4(!) I am the IT Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics, Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person, so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster, also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux. How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu project? In around 2004 or 5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn't really improve my setup. I did various desperate searches for things like "school Linux server" and ended up in a document called "Drift" something or other. Reading there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge. What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu? For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who doesn't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with Japan. What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu? The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people who don't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be important to the school. School administrators or directors, for instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is. A second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required multiplies. For example, backup wasn't working properly in Lenny. It took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups. I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will help. Which free software do you use daily? Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux (customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my house, that's very useful for the family photos and music. At school the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS. We also have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle. Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools to use free software? Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry, and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about file formats and Word than they did 5 years ago. The Edu aspect is also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu? But of course the main attraction is budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People are not impressed when their USB drive doesn't work, or their browser doesn't play flash, for example.

Yesterday, I've finalized Weblate 0.4. It improved handling of plural strings, added documentation and implemented support for secondary languages. If you ask for 0.3, well I managed to release two versions in the day, but I expect to slow down this pace. Full list of changes for 0.3:

• Better display of source for plural translations.
• New documentation in Sphinx format.
• Displays secondary languages while translating.
• Improved error page to give list of existing projects.
• New per language stats.

Full list of changes for 0.4:

• Added usage guide to documentation.
• Fixed API hooks not to require CSRF protection.

You can find more information about Weblate on it's website, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Weblate is now also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu and others.

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FedEx has had some issues in my area. There for awhile, they kept returning packages as undeliverable, saying the address was bad. It wasn t. Just because their GPS can t find it or their driver doesn t know it doesn t mean it doesn t exist. A map, a real map, would have done it. I had this kind of conversation with them once. Me: So you re returning my package to the sender. FedEx: Yes sir, the address was wrong. Me: No, it wasn t. [ we confirm we're talking about the same address. ] FedEx: Our driver says it doesn t exist. Me: I ve lived here for [x] years. I do know my address. FedEx: Maybe it s just new. Me: Someone has lived at this spot since the 1890s. FedEx: Hmm. I don t know then. Me: How about I give you directions? FedEx: Well, OK, I guess I could send directions. But they probably won t see them for three days. Me: Where will my package be by then? FedEx: Hard to say. Me: Do you people have cell phones maybe? FedEx: No. Me: Well, OK then Lately we have been noticing that the driver throws the package from the truck without stopping. We find them all over the yard. Unless it s big, in which case he puts it on the porch, puts a completely useless sticker on the door saying We delivered your package to right here! , and doesn t ring the doorbell. And panics due to the muddy road. The FedEx driver once told Terah, I almost got stuck on that muddy road! What s the good one? Terah: Well, which one did you take? [ he describes ] Terah: [ serious ] That IS the good road. FedEx: [ turning pale ] Oh my. I don t know if I can make it back to the highway. Terah: Well, I suppose I could get the boys in the car and drive you into town FedEx: [ embarrassed and more pale ] Uhm that s OK uhm I think A *month* later, we got another FedEx package. The driver called me at work, saying, I just don t know how I m going to get down those roads. Can I deliver the package to you here? (10 miles away). I said yes, and managed to suppress a significant snicker at his obvious relief. FedEx drivers seem to come and go. The UPS driver, on the other hand, knows the names of our boys, our cat, and puts anything small behind the storm door so it won t blow away if we re not home. And he gets a great big laugh when I tell him that the FedEx drivers are afraid of our roads. Haha, he thinks THAT S mud? Obviously he never drives in Butler County.

Hey I'm alive. I was jet lagged, and then caught a flu and wasn't active for the few weeks, but now back.

I've just switched https://l10n.cihar.com/ to Weblate as I think it's stable enough to replace Pootle installation there. This change immediately affects translation of all projects which were done there - phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Wammu, GePeS or Ukolovnik. In addition Weblate itself is also being translated there. Your old usernames and passwords should be valid (in case you've activated the account and used it in last year), but you might want to adjust your profile as the settings were intentionally not imported (many users had corrupted name in Pootle and hope this will let them fix it). Let's see how many bugs will this switch reveal, but I expect it will work quite smoothly.

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I followed Gregor s evolution within Debian because I used to be somewhat active in the Perl team. His case is exemplar because it shows that you don t need to be an IT professional to join Debian and to make a difference. His QA page is impressive with hundreds of packages maintained and hundreds of non-maintainer uploads too. While he started out slowly, I remember meeting him at Debconf 7 in Edinburgh and after that he really got more implicated. Again a case of someone joining for technical reasons but getting more involved and staying there for social reasons! Let s jump into the interview and learn more about him. Raphael: Who are you? Gregor: I m 41 years old, and I live in Innsbruck, Austria, in a shared apartment with a friend of mine. In my day job, I m working at the regional addiction prevention agency, so I m one of the few Debian guys who s not an IT student or professional. I started maintaining packages in 2006, and I am a DD since April 2008. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Gregor: After having used Debian on servers for some years, I finally switched to it on the desktop after some procrastinating. Soon afterwards I wanted to know more about the making-of , started to join mailing lists, filed bugs, and tried to learn packaging. Luckily I quickly found a permanent sponsor Tony Mancill, and we re still co-maintaining each others packages. And when I packaged my first Perl modules, Gunnar Wolf invited me to join the Debian Perl Group, an offer I accepted a few days later. And I m still there Later, the NM process, although it involved some waiting times, was also a good learning experience due to my AM Wouter Verhelst. (And in the meantime the organization of the NM process has vastly improved, from what I hear.) So my starting point for joining Debian was my curiosity but what really helped me to find my way into the project was the support of the people who invited and helped me. Raphael: What s your biggest achievement within Debian or Ubuntu? Gregor: I m not sure I can name a single big achievement but I guess I can say that my contributions to the Debian Perl Group have helped to make and keep the team a success story. Raphael: The pkg-perl team seems to work very well. As an active member, can you explain us how it is organized? How do you explain its success? In particular it seems to be a great entry point for new contributors. Gregor: The team is huge, both in numbers of members and packages (over 2200). Since last DebConf we manage our source packages in git, we have 2 mailing lists and an IRC channel, and we manage to keep an overview by using PET, the Package Entropy Tracker. It s true that we get new members on a regular basis; we try to invite people (like it happened to me 6 years ago ) but there are also quite a few new contributors who find our docs and introduce themselves on the mailing list. Maybe someone should conduct a study and ask them what motivated them to join. We hand out group membership/commit access quickly, and we try to mentor new contributors actively during their early times in the group. Some of them leave for other projects after some time, but many also stay and become DDs later. I m not sure what the reasons for the group s success are, maybe a combination of:

• a culture in the group (and also in the upstream Perl community) that s based on fun, cooperation, and respect;
• the fact that packaging Perl modules is most of the time quite easy;
• a great set of tools, and also (hopefully) useful documentation;
• a bunch of relaxed people who are open to newcomers and try to help each other.

For everyone interested in joining the Debian Perl Group, our Welcome page on the wiki is a good starting point. Raphael: What are your plans for Debian Wheezy? Gregor: Nothing overly exciting. What I should do is getting a newer JabRef into Debian (which involves packaging some new Java libraries any takers?). A solution for libdatetime-timezone-perl (which ships timezone data converted to Perl modules and tends to get outdated when the timezone data change) would be nice; let s see if #660404 leads to some results And some Perl packages will also need a bit of work for the hardening build flags release goal (cf. #657853). Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Gregor: Inertia. While I really like the fact that Debian is a volunteer project, and that every contributor works when and on what they decide to work on, I get the feeling that Debian could do better in moving forward, innovating, taking decisions. I also think that more uniformity in managing source packages would make things easier; it s quite amazing to see how many source formats, packaging helpers, patch systems, RCSs etc. are used all over the archive. I m not advocating for mono-cultures, and I consider this diversity a strength in general, but having to find out first how this particular package works when preparing a bug fix can be annoying. On the bright side, I think that the myth Debian and its mailing lists are mostly about flames can be seen as dispelled in the meantime. Sure, sometimes the tone could be a bit more civil, but in general most of the interactions I ve seen in the last years were friendly and helpful. IMO, the Debian Project consists of mostly nice and cooperative people, and that s what makes it fun for me. Raphael: You re one of the most dedicated participants to RCBW (Release Critical Bugs of the Week), an initiative to fix RC bugs every week. How much time do you spend on it? What would you advise to people who are considering to join the movement? Gregor: I got into the habit of fixing RC bugs after having been invited to my first Bug Squashing Party in Munich some years ago. During this weekend I saw that fixing RC bugs can be fun, is often not that difficult, and gives a warm fuzzy feeling I can definitely recommend attending a BSP if one happens to be organized near you. After tasting blood at this first BSP I tried to continue looking at RC bugs, and I guess I spend something around half an hour per day on it. I usually blog about it once a week, in order to motivate others to join in. And joining is easy: just take a look at the tips people like Zack, Vorlon, or me have written. You don t have to be a DD to help, many of my NMUs are based on patches that others kindly prepare and send to the BTS kudos! Another nice aspect is that the RC bug list contains problems from different fields: general packaging problems, language-specific issues, policy violations, etc. So there s something for everybody, and you don t have to be an expert in all fields to fix a specific bug. What s rewarding about fixing RC bugs is not only the feeling of accomplishment and the knowledge about having helped the next release I also received quite a few Thank you mails from maintainers who were busy at that time and appreciated the help. Raphael: Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy? Gregor: Well, there s not so much left of the Wheezy release cycle if we manage to freeze in June Some quick thoughts for Wheezy and Wheezy+1:

• Obviously, getting multi-arch and the hardening build flags as far as possible would be good.
• What I like is the idea of the time-based freeze, and I hope it will work out in June. And then I hope that the freeze will be shorter this time than during the last 2 releases.
• Unless I m missing something, the CUT discussions have more or less died down; IMO that s a pity because there are users who run testing and would like to avoid the several month long freeze. Maybe someone can come up with new ideas for Wheezy+1
• Too late for broad adoption in Wheezy but still: What constantly annoys me is the handling of conffiles during upgrades (when I want to keep changed values but at the same time want to add new variables). Config::Model seems to be the best idea so far for configuration upgrades but it s not yet widely adopted.

Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Gregor: There are many people in Debian I admire, too many to name them all. The first one that comes to my mind is Russ Allbery who not only does great work from lintian to Debian policy but who also sets a great example of communicating in a perfectly polite and respectful way even in heated discussions.

---

Thank you to Gregor for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

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I'd been curious about Jonathan Lethem ever since Cory Doctorow blogged a riveting review of 'Chronic City' on boingboing, but it was this short fictionalisation of Phil K Dick's early writing life that really made me curious to sample more of his work. It was then that I discovered that virtually no (physical) bookshop anywhere in my vicinity, first or second hand, had a single book by him in stock. Of course I could have ordered some books on Amazon immediately, but I've been trying to ween myself off the urge to purchase and own every book I want to read. I was beginning to wonder whether anyone in the UK had heard of Lethem when I found two books in the Durham branch of Waterstones. The city library near where I work has a small number on their records, but most of them are on loan (and mega-overdue), with the exception of one book, a short story collection called 'Men and Cartoons', which I duly borrowed. The six-ish stories within are very varied, to say the least: from realist social observations, to satirical looks at near-historical periods of time, to melencholic observations about odd relationships, to straight up science fiction. There is a feint thread of comic books in common across a few of them. They were quick and fun to read. Without being able to point at why or where, I felt that they were very well written, and I've got a taste for something more substantial ("Gun, with Occasional Music" just dropped through my letter box).

Thanks to klibc being fixed, rootskel finally built in the archive and hence we've now finally enabled the daily builds of debian-installer for s390x. They're still untested, though, and I hope to come around to that in the near future.

In other news I've spent some more time chasing weird 64bit big endian issues in glib. Newer versions have regressed in their support and again assume that certain fields are either 32bit/64bit little endian or 32bit big endian, which is unhelpful. Sadly the testsuite is guilty as well, which doesn't make debugging any easier. I still suspect a bug in either gio or GClosure's interface to libffi, let's hope that when that one's found that the remainder of the archive is building just fine (Currently a lot is blocking on glib-networking which fails in its testsuite. And of course there are still usertagged bugs that need to be fixed.)

It would be cool if we could run more testsuites during package building and find the bugs in them. glib does have one, but its failures are non-fatal for the build (also because there are so many failures). That would make porting to future architectures a tad easier.

Thanks to great feedback I've received on Weblate, I've decided to release 0.2 version quite soon to fix things where people complained most. It improves validation of some forms and there are lot of improvements in editing translations, especially plurals. Full list of changes includes:

• Improved validation of several forms.
• Warn users on profile upgrade.
• Remember URL for login.
• Naming of text areas while entering plural forms.
• Automatic expanding of translation area.

You can find more information about Weblate on it's website, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. PS: As a special bonus, Weblate now comes also with documentation (also available in docs directory in sources).

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Just a quick note that the merry Finnish localization folks are organizing an (extended) localization weekend, starting today. As a nice step towards ease of use, they're utilizing the long developed, maybe even underused Translatewiki.net platform, or to be precise a separate instance of it. Translatewiki.net is used by MediaWiki (Wikimedia Foundation), StatusNet and other high profile projects. Co-incidentally the main developer of Translatewiki.net is Finnish as well.

Anyway enough of the platform, join the translation frenzy at http://l10n.laxstrom.name/wiki/Gnome_3.4, but do make sure to read the notes at http://muistio.tieke.fi/IYZxesy9uc.

I've promised to help in upstreaming those to git.gnome.org on Sunday. There is additionally a new report about Ubuntu 12.04 LTS translations schedule (to which these GNOME contributions will find their way as well) at the ubuntu-l10n-fin mailing list by Jiri.

Ja sama suomeksi.

This evening I sat down and migrated my personal virtual machine from a 32-bit installation of Debian GNU/Linux to a 64-bit installation. I've been meaning to make this change for a good few months, but it took me until this evening until I decided it was as good a time as any. Mostly the process is painless:

• Ensure you have a 64-bit kernel, with support for 32-bit binaries too.
• Install the 32-bit compatibility libraries, such that your old binaries work.
• Overwrite your binaries and libraries in-place so you have a 64-bit base system.
• Patch it up afterwards.

I overwrote a lot of the libraries and binaries on the system such that I had a working 64-bit apt-get, dpkg, sash, etc, and associated libraries. Then once I had that I could use those tools to pull the resto of the system up to date. One thing I hadn't counted on is that I needed to have a 64-bit version of bzip such that "apt-get update" didn't complain about errors. I suspect I could have fixed that by re-configuring my system to disable compression. Still it was easily solved. Along the way I also shot myself in the foot by having a local caching DNS resolver, listening on 127.0.0.1, which broke. With no DNS I couldn't use apt-get - but once the problem was identified it was trivial to fix. Anyway all seems OK now. My websites are up, email is flowing and I guess anything else can wait until the morning. ObQuote: "Somebody's coming up. Somebody serious." - Leon

Resolving IP addresses in vim A friend on IRC said: "I wish vim had a command to resolve all the IP addresses in a block of text". But it does:

:<block>!perl -MSocket -pe 's/(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)/gethostbyaddr(inet_aton($1), AF_INET)/ge'

If you use it often, put the perl command in a one-liner script and call it an editor macro. It works on other editors, too, and even without an editor at all. And it can be scripted! We live with the power of Unix every day, so much that we risk forgetting how awesome it is.