Search Results: "Christian Perrier"

10 September 2011

Christian Perrier: Ka mate! Ka mate! Ka ora!

So, Rugby World Cup 2011 began yesterday. Tricky for us europeans to watch those games in New Zealand, particularly during the week. So, I think I'll mostly tape the games that happen in the morning (New Zealand's evening) or night (NZ afternoon)....and try to avoid my work colleagues to spoil results. One game per day will be mostly what we'll be watching, so expect me talking about scrums, offsides, tries, etc. in this blog, for about 1.5 months until October 23rd. The opening ceremony was great, with many references to New Zealand's roots and culture as well as the rugby traditions and values. Its closing with fireworks all over Auckland were apparently very nice...unfortunately they were ruined by the broadcasting of the infamous TF1 TV channel here. Yes, unfortunately RWC games are mostly broadcasted on TF1 here, a channel that usually never broadcasts rugby. This already was a big PITA for RWC2007 and I fear it will be the same this time, particularly for games of the french team. The opening game between Tonga and New Zealand was without surprise. Tonga were indeed crushed very quicly in 1st half, mostly because being too weak in defense on the outside game. All Blacks rear players were very inspired and nearly didn't miss anything during that lahftime, which lead to 29-3 after 4 minutes. Impressive. However, All Blacks game vanished during 2nd halftime and Tonga could even score a try after a really impressive 10 minutes pick and go battle. That made me happy for the Tonga players (half of them do indeed play in France...). In 45 minutes, we'll have the opening for France, against Japan. That should theoretically be easy but, well, anything can happen. We'll see!

1 September 2011

Christian Perrier: Bug #640000

Brent S. Elmer reported the Debian bug #640000 on Thursday September 1st, against evolution. Bug #630000 was reported as of June 10th. This time, it took a little bit more than 2.5 months for 10,000 bugs. This #640000 bug was indeed "fixed" very quickly as it turns out it was not a bug..:-).. Congratulations to Corsac for fixing it..:-)

28 August 2011

Christian Perrier: 10 years being Debian Developer - part 3: the news and genealogy years

I stopped my story in early 1994, after my Big Switch to the mysterious and new world of Linux. My home server, kheops, is now running Debian and is fed with news and mail by FrMug, formerly French Minix Users Group and now run by AFAU, the "Association Fran aise des Amateurs de Usenet". As I'm still console-challenged, I'm reading mail and news on another machine I have at home, named "khephren", which is running an, ahem, beta copy of Microsoft Windows 95. Yeah, I know...:-) These 1994-1999 years were mostly the Usenet years, for me. I gradually became more and more involved in several fr.* newsgroups, either related to the Linux world...or to the Windows world. The latter was professionnally a bonus for me as 1994 is also the year where I switched from the Material Science department at Onera to the Network and Computing Department. My mission there was to accompany the increasing prevalence of personal desktop workstations in the daily life of what was formerly the Big Castle of Computing at Onera, hosting various generations of Cray computers, most of which being in the Top500 world supercomputers (we even had one in the Top10, very briefly, at somepoint). So, I was "the PC and Windows guy" in this world of supercomputing, Unix and network wizards. But my hobby at home helped me keeping and growing skills in both "worlds" which, over the years, has proven to be a not so common profile..:-) Meanwhile, at home, I was spending hours and nights reading those newsgroups...or getting involved in fr.* hierarchy management..or expanding my friends network to many people in the news, Linux, BSD worlds. That lasted for about 3 years with ups and downs (with three young kids at home, you end up having slightly less time...). I was gradually improving my home server use, adding more functionalities to it, for instance setting it up as a file and print server with Samba 1.9.something (this will be the beginning of a long story with samba!). Unfortunately, my dear Ren had passed in the meantime. Ren did so much for Linux in France that he'll be the only link I give in this article. If you happen to go through P re Lachaise cemetery in Paris, go to its Memory garden instead of visiting Jim Morrison's grave and drink a whisky bottle in memory of Ren . Or just install one of the most funnily named Debian packages: le-dico-de-rene-cougnenc and, again, drink something to his memory (whisky is highly preferred). We then reached 1997 and a specific event: my father (who was very sick for years) passed during summer, some time after my grand-father passed too. As it apparently happens for many people, it triggerred me into the interest for family history. After all, those people who are going away are family memories. And, in some way, I wanted to keep track of this memory. As a consequence, I started collecting family memories, interviewing my close relatives (the oldest ones) and ending, of course, in tracking all this with my computers. That was the start of a long genealogy research that sent me on the track of the Perrier family (of course), but also all other branches, on my mother and father side, as well as reconstructing the tree of cousins we have, etc, etc. As anybody who did that knows, this is quite an endless task but I went very committed to it. I quickly ended up in joining research groups that were using the recent growth of personal access to Internet communication. Those groups were, in these 90's, building elaborated systems where people can help together in their research instead of having to travel to places where archives are stored. I participated to many such groups and even ended up animating one who was doing research in archives of the "Yvelines" "d partement", my place of living (even though I have no family branch there). At the same time, other groups were sending me research results for my own family in the French region where my roots are. Collective effort, help others for free, you can recognize things that are a constant all over these years, indeed. It actually helped me in tracking my Perrier ancestors up to about 1680, with 11 generations of men holding that name (from Jean-Baptiste, my son, up to tienne Perrier, who is born about 1640-1650, in the small village named Briant in Sa ne et Loire, in France). Or even climbing up to Laurent Polette, born circa 1510, mentioned in a document date February 1562. He his my oldest known ancestor.Those folks being 15 generations before me. My oldest ancestor is born under Fran ois the First, King of France, protector of Leonardo Da Vinci, at the time La Joconde was painted or the Chambord castle was built. Doh. Unfortunately, genealogy software, at that time, was quite poor for Unix systems. Lifelines was a quite strong development but wasn't that user-friendly and I ended up using a Windows-based "shareware" software written by an individual. Still, my Linux machine was used quite intensively: databases were stored there, and saved there, all important informations were there, my mail was received there, along with dozens of mailing lists I was reading. I even hosted a few mailing lists on my home server. Still, in the meantime also, again in 1997, in October, another event happened. We had a pollution peak in Paris area and October 1st was the first (and as of now the only ever) day where driving restrictions were applied. Up to that moment, I was driving to/from work (30 kilometers one way). I decided to use this opportunity to really test public transport, for one full month. As I knew it would take me much more time than driving, I tried to imagine a way to use that time. How about reading mail and news on a laptop instead of only at home? Done... In a few days, I found a used Compaq Aero laptop (486 16MHz), I installed Debian "bo" on it, switched my mail and news workflow to console programs (mutt and slrn) and here we go! So, finally, in October 1997, I was using Linux nearly all time long, the only exception being genealogy data handling. That laptop was named "mykerinos" (the small pyramid) and....my laptop is still named mykerinos, though it's now the 5th mykerinos I have..:-) Ah, and since then, I nearly always use public transport to go to/from work. Debian addiction is good for the planet! At some point (I don't remember exactly when...about 1999, I think), DSL connections appeared and one of the first DSL FAI emerged on France: Free. I was already using their services for dialup access, but DSL was then a revolution: persistent connection! And nearly immediately, static IP! I became one of their first DSL customers (and I'm still one). Moreover, I had then friends working there...and they had many Debian machines to host their services. So, with the help of my Freenix friends, some DNS hosting on their machines and the still tireless eu.org entirely free domain, perrier.eu.org was born. Immediately, this gave me opportunities for doing many interesting things with my home server: setting up www.perrier.eu.org and use it....for learning web things and sharing genealogical data. For instance, I ended up hosting some data sent by other genealogists such as digital copies of archives for some French regions, all served through my 512/128kbps DSL line (quickly upgraded to 2Mb, IIRC). And, very quickly, I felt the need to share my family tree, of course! And here comes Geneweb. Written (in Ocaml) by Daniel de Rauglaudre, Geneweb was (and still is) by far one of the best tools to share genealogy data over the Net. So, I ended up installing it on my home machine. Guess how I did that? "apt-get install geneweb", of course. Yes, it was packaged. Indeed by Brent Fulgham who did the initial release on July 22nd 2000. Here, my memory is a little bit vague. I think I actually packaged Geneweb for my own use and sharing it on upstream FTP site, forking Brent's package as a start, but updating to latest upstream release. Then I quickly ended up having discussions with Brent about this new upstream release, and that lead to:
geneweb (3.10-3) unstable; urgency=low
  * Merging with unofficial package from Geneweb ftp site
    (in preparation of new maintainer [Christian Perrier] takeing
    over responsibility).  Note that all of this work is from
    Christian.
  * Default database dir is now writable by members of geneweb group
  * New geneweb group added at installation
  * Package tries to properly handle former installations of the
    unofficial Geneweb package available on Geneweb ftp site
  * Debconf dialogs translated in french
  * More languages available
  * Creation of /var/geneweb/etc, /var/geneweb/cnt, /var/geneweb/images
    with proper permission so that authorised users may use these also
  * When de-installed, all databases are exported with gwu (should allow
    smooth upgrades when the databse format changes)
 -- Brent A. Fulgham <bfulgham>  Mon, 22 Jan 2001 19:30:47 -0800
See? Already "debconf translation to French"! "More languages available". Here we are. As discussed with Brent, he propsoed me to take the package over. So, on January 11th 2001, I had applied in the New Maintainer Process. I'm amazed how quickly it went indeed: there was a tool I needed, it needed to be packaged, I could handle the packaging...and then I decided to be involved. Here we are: bubulle is on his way to become one of those magicians who are building the best universal operating system. Yes, me, the clueless material scientist..:-) How did it go? You'll know this in next episode, of course...

24 August 2011

Christian Perrier: 10 years being Debian Developer - part 2: before 1992-1994 - the switch

So, we stopped our very boring story around 1992. Let's summarize where I was at that moment: We're in 1992. Magali is about to come. Three children, from 0 to 4. I'm getting bored of these BBS things. OK, I did fun things like translating (eh) the documentation of Frontdoor a Fidonet node system written by a norwegian dude. But, still. Among my BBS friends, Ren is now playing regularly with a strange thing coming from Finland. This is pretty much like these mysterious "Unix" machines I hear about, sometimes at Onera, ran by strange wizards that often look like hippies from the 70's (hey...these were my youth years). I also have these few friends from the BBS world who are also playing with these thingies. Ollivier, noticeably, who is using of these mysterious @frmug.fr.net "email" addresses, from his PC running 386BSD (what? A PC not running those wonderful MS-DOS programs? How weird). Ren is apparently playing with another tribe. He often talks about an evolution of Minix written by a Finnish student, which is available with source code, just like Ren programs. Ren is also a member of that FrMug tribe, the FRench Minix Users Group, who are comunicating with "newsgroups" that are apparently similar to what we're doing with our BBS....but apparently more funnily hackish...and most often in that mysterious "U**x" world. Ah, that thing is called Linux. You can download it by FTP on "the Internet". But I don't have "the Internet". Oh, sure, we have this thing called BitNet at work, I even have what they call "an email address" as perrier@froner81.bitnet. We can maybe do things with that. Ah yes, there are funny tools that allow "downloading" files on "FTP" (WTH is that?) servers but doing that by mail. You receive dozenes of mails "uuencoded" (WTH is that? I'm not using Unix, I'm using Dos...but, eh, it works, still). Oh, fun, I now downloaded a full set of disks (14....I need to find 14 floppies, doh!) of something called Slackware. Apparently, a crazy freak, somewhere, did assemble things so that it's easy for dummies like me to install "a Linux machine". What? This 386 DX/16 PC I borrowed from my lab could be something like one of these very very very mysterious and expensive Sun machines that a few very bearded and very smelly dudes are using at Onera to perform high performance calculations? I have to do this. Not growing a beard, but install Linux. I could even "read mail" on them. Doh, I could even read those mysterious "newsgroups", that look like our Fidonet "conferences", the only difference being. All this is so interesting. So, at first, let's help my friend Ren to spread out this marvel to the world. Ren did setup his "Renux" box for this and everybody can access it through this very modern UUCP technology, to download Slackware disk images, last versions of the Linux kernel (direct from ftp.ibp.fr, thanks to another pionneer, R my Card....ext2fs author). So, I did setup an incredibly weird system to "download" this stuff by FTPmail, de-uuencode it, process it on my work machine and then re-upload it to my home BBS and make it available in one of the first "Linux" sections of French BBS. Yay. Even of my BBS machine is not running this wonder. Still, gradually, I was becoming bored of this BBS stuff. The sirens of open systems were constantly singing in my ears and the amount of work to put in running a Fidonet node wasn't really motivating for me anymore. Finally, after our daughter Magali was born, in March 1992, I decided to shut down my BBS....and just run as a Fidonet "point" (a personal system not opened to the public) and gradually switched my interest to these open systems. I thus ended running an "experimental" Linux system at work on this refurbished 386DX machine, already and playing between both worlds for about 18 months. At some point, around mid-1993, it became obvious to me that I more wanted to participate to newsgroups-style communication, participate to the advent of this Linux thing and learn things about what was to become "The Internet" (understand "the web", aha). Meanwhile, Ren did great work translating "The Linux System" by this guy, Matt Welsh, making The Thing accessible to dummies like me. So, after summer, I decided it was time to move on and shutdown this Fidonet thing and build something like my "Freenix" friends were running, and be able to download news and mail by UUCP, with my fast HST modem, and process them with Real Men tools such as inn, sendmail, pine and trn. And then, around October 1993, here I come ready to install a Linux machine at home, and therefore zap a few years of BBS stuff on my 40MB hard disk. But, eh, I just read about this shiny new thing named Debian, that was just announced a few weeks ago. It seems to be meant for dummies like me who need a little bit more than tarballs of binary code and have no clue about libraries, ABI and such mysterious things that apparenyl constantly lead to "core dumps" on my work experimental Slackware machine. Also, I don't really understand everything to what these dude says in his "Manifesto" but that seems interesting and his (their? dunno) thing seem easy to use. Let's download the 0.93whatever version of this thing and put this on a big set of floppies. A few days after, voil . I have my first Linux system at home and it is running that Debian thing. It will need several weeks of poking around documentations, playing weird things with INN and sendmail without understanding a s**t of both....and a lot of help from Freenix friends....and I end up with a working machine that can call out FrMug for UUCP downloads of mail and news and then feed local sendmail and INN servers with them and then allow the "bubulle" user to read them remotely...from his Windows machine. Yay, admitedly, I spent a few years still using a Windows machine for mail and news! How to say that? At that time, the GUI environments were a little bit rustic and, anyway, there was no point-and-click programs for mail and news. In the meantime, the machine got upgraded to Debian 1.1 by reinstalling the system. "kheops" was born....and so was bubulle@kheops.frmug.fr.net. We're probably around early 1994 and I'm running my first Debian server at home. The beard didn't grew up, I'm not eating pizzas all day long (but I drink beer) and I'm even practicing physical activities (I was a volleyball player at that time). Despite all these flaws, I'm turning into a geek, slowly. In next episode, you'll learn how I ended up dropping the use of Windows, compiling some free software and contributing to my first package. These will be "the genealogy years".

21 August 2011

Christian Perrier: 10 years being Debian Developer - part 1: before 1992

So, on July 31st 2011, it was exactly 10 years since I am a Debian developer. What happened in the meantime? What lead me to this? What turned this unskilled dude into a sometimes quite visible contributor of one of the major free software projects? If you're interested in that, please read on. Otherwise, well, this is just yet another "bubulle talks about self" post and you can skip it. Well, first of all, how did I end up being a DD? And first of firsts, how did I end up not being a random user of Windows, playing games on his desktop computer at work? I am not a computer scientist, an "informaticien" as we sometimes say in French (most often, what people who are not in computing stuff say...thinking that all folks working more or less closely to computers know everything about them). I graduated with a PhD in Materials science, in 1989 after conducting a research on "Influence of Yttrium Oxide dispersion on the strength of titanium alloys", at Onera, a French public research institution for aerospace and defence. I was then hired, still at Onera (where I'm still working, 25 years after starting my PhD work) to lead the Mechanical Testing Laboratory in the Materials Science department. So, my lab had many big machines designed to conduct creep and fatigue tests often at interestingly high temperatures such as 2000 C, on samples of various materials that are used in aircrafts structures, engines, etc. or in various space thingies (remember Herm s, the european shuttle?) or in various "things that fly but just one way and you shouldn't be there when they land". So, we had computers handling data acquisition for these tests. So I became involved with designing data acquisition setups, or even programming data acquisition programs (one of mine, written in Forth, ran all Onera creep tests until 2004 and successfully passed Y2K because I knew that 2000 was a leap year. It could even pass 2100 as I knew this is not a leap year..:-) One day, I had to buy a modem in order to communicate with out italian counterpart (CIRA) and exchange tests results. Then I had to learn how modems work in MS-Dos(yeah...). Then, I discovered "online" resources...indeed more that strange world that was then called "BBS" (Bulletin Board Systems), those mysterious things ran by some happy few who were using modems at their home place to communicate in "forums" and everything related to technology. PC-Board, Remote Access, Fidonet, etc. became familiar to me these days, back in 1988-1990. So familiar that I ended up running my own BBS at home, killing our phone bills and using very sophisticated techniques such as US Robotics "High Speed Transfer" modems that could be used at 19200bps asymetrical for very high speed transfers of kilobytes and kilobytes of useless MS-Dos "freeware" and "shareware". Indeed, my very first BBS didn't even have one of these: it was using a cheaper V.22bis modem operating at 2400bps. I was waiting for my order of a sophisticated HST modem to arrive from USA through obscure import channels meant to circumvent the French telephone company regulations that were forbidding the use of "unapproved" systems, in order to protect the famous French Telephone System from interferences brought by Bad American Material. Bubulle System was born. During those years, I discovered very interesting things: computers can run together once you draw a wire between them. That's called Local Area Network and you can even transfer data at 1Mbps between two computers, assuming you don't forget to put terminating resistors at the end of the line on these funny 10-baseT connectors at the back of your home-assembled PC that was using 2MB of RAM (bought for very cheap through the help of an American friend who was in touch with some Chinese folks who were selling 256kb RAM sticks for half the retail price....assuming you want to drive in a mysterious storing place close to Charles de Gaulle airport or Eurodisney). Hello Gordon. Yes, I know, we're still friends on Facebook and you're probably still using that weird programming language which you were, IIRC, the only person in the world to use. 2MB, that should be enough for barely anything, including running *multitasking* software where, miracle, I could run two tasks at the same time on my one and only PC at home. Miracle, I don't have to shutdown my BBS if I want to read forums on my friends BBS. Yay for Desqview/386! Multitasking for dummies Still, I have to build one of these "networks" at home. Elizabeth won't like that as it means one more box (home-made of course) in our living room and some more wires. And why the hell is it running 24/7? So that friends can visit the BBS, darling... And I can even communicate with them: I write a message, I get an answer the day after and so on. In one full week, we can have a great conversation that would have taken *minutes* to have in the real life. Isn't this the miracle of technlogy? And, yes, this is a good reason for having phone bills raising up to 500 Francs/month: people can "exchange" programs through my BBS, that horrible white box running in the living room. Often, these programs are written for free and some of them are even given with "source code", which allows people to *modify* them. And that even makes friends, you know? Imagine that some day we have to move from one house to another: then I can just call out "who wants to help bubulle moving?", and probably a dozen of (sometimes scary but always nice and polite...and sometimes even showered) geeks will pop up and happily carry boxes full of my vinyl LP collection all day long. An entire world of friends. "bubulle", you say, dear? What's that? That's my nickname. It was invented by one of these friends, a really strange guy named Ren Cougnenc who wrote this "free software" program anmed BBTH, which allows you to use modems to connect to BBS, and even to those many "Minitel" BBS we have in France, thanks to our wonderful world-leading technology using V.23 communication. Many people know me as "bubulle" because, you know, Perrier water has bubbles and Ren likes Gaston Lagaffe fish companion who he named "bubulle". Ren , I love you. You chose to leave this world back in 1998. We'll no longer have our "p'tits midis" in Antony where you were showing me the marvels of what's coming in next episode. All this was around 1988 and about 1992, doing all these mysterious things at home (between Jean-Baptiste and Sophie's diapers) while still working with data acquisition MS-Dos machines at work. How did this end up being a Debian Developer? You'll know in the next episode..:-)

10 August 2011

Christian Perrier: dls: a direct consequence of DebConf in Banja Luka

This wouldn't certainly have happened if we held DebConf11 elsewhere. So, welcome to Yet Another l10n mailing list. Thanks to listmasters, and particularly Alexander "formerer" Wirt, for the list creation. We have plenty of very motivated people over there....and already some "technical" minor problems to solve out..:-)

7 August 2011

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: People behind Debian: Margarita Manterola, Debian Women member

Photograph taken by Julia Palandri

When I think about Margarita, I always remember her as a friendly and welcoming person. Like most of the Debian Women members by the way. But she likes to spread some love and organized a Debian Appreciation Day for example. I think I met her in real life for the first time at Debconf 6 in Oaxtepec (Mexico). She deeply cares about Debian in general. She has proven it multiple times with her DPL candidacy and by giving talks like Making Debian rule again. One last thing, Debconf11 is just over and you will see that Debconf4 has had a big influence on Marga. My advice is simple: next time there s a Debconf on your continent, make sure to take a few days off and come to meet us! It really gives another picture of the Debian community. Now let s proceed with the interview. Raphael: Who are you? Margarita: I m Margarita Manterola, a Software Developer from Argentina. I work developing software in Python in a Debian-friendly company during the day, and teach programming at a local university during the evenings. I m married to Maximiliano Curia who is also a Debian Developer, most of our Free Software work has been done together. I only maintain a handful of packages in Debian, I m more interested in fixing bugs than in packaging new software. I ve also been a part of the organizing team of many of the previous Debian Conferences. One of the biggest commitments and the biggest success of my participation in Debian was being part of the organizing team of DebConf8, in Argentina. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Margarita: I started using Debian around 2000. Soon after we had learned the grips of general GNU/Linux usage, Maxy and I started giving an introductory course at our local university, and became quite involved with the local LUG. At some point in 2002/2003 I became a Debian Bug Reporter : most of my friends would report bugs to me, and I would then write them in the proper form to the BTS. I would also be very attentive about reporting any bugs that I might encounter myself trying to create good bug reports. The turning point in my participation in Debian was DebConf4 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Being so close to Argentina meant that we felt specially invited to be there, and Maxy and I decided to go to DebConf for our honeymoon. We didn t really know much about DebConf dynamics, but we were really eager to learn more about Debian and become more involved. What happened was that meeting with DDs from all over the world transformed our lives, we became part of the Debian family and wanted to be more and more involved. Soon after that we both started maintaining packages and not long after that, applied to become Developers. The Debian Women project also meant a lot to me. I felt encouraged all along the way, encouraged to learn, to ask questions and to lose the fear of making mistakes. I became a Debian Developer on November 2005. Since then, Debian has always been one of the most important things I do in my life. Raphael There was a Debian Women BoF during debconf. What are the plans for Debian Women in the upcoming months? Margarita: I was not there in person, but thanks to the awesome work of the video team, and of Christian Perrier s typing efforts when something failed, I was able to experience much of what was discussed. :) One of the many points that came up during the BOF is that many people Want to help but don t know where to start or how to go about it. It s a challenge for the Debian Women project to find a way to allow these people to become involved in Debian through Mini projects or something like that. Another of the subjects that was brought up was the Debian Women mentoring project, which has been going on for quite a while now, but lacks enough publicity. So, we need to reach more people about it, and maybe also improve it with some templates, similar to the New Maintainer templates, so that mentees that don t know where to start have some sort of general path to follow. Raphael: You created very useful diagrams documenting how package maintainer scripts are invoked by dpkg. How did you do it and was that a useful experience? Margarita: I did those diagrams to be able to answer one of the questions in the NM templates, regarding the order of the maintainer script execution. Answering the question in text was basically copying and pasting the part of the Debian Policy that explained it, which wasn t really too clear for me, so I decided to go and make a diagram of it, so that I could really understand it. I did it by the best of all debugging techniques: adding prints to each of the maintainer scripts, and testing them in all the different orders that I could think of. It was a useful experience at the time, because I learned a lot of how maintainers scripts work. I didn t expect the diagrams to become so famous, though, I only did them to answer one NM question, that I assumed most other people had already answered before :) Raphael: You participated in a DPL election. This is a big commitment to make. What were your motivations? Margarita: As I said, I was part of the organizing team of DebConf8, in Argentina. Which was quite a success, a lot of people enjoyed it and praised the good work that had been done by the local team. During said DebConf8, I had a dream (it was almost a nightmare, actually): I woke up and just like that, I was the DPL. I spoke to some people about this dream and to my complete surprise many said that I should actually do it. After giving that possibility a year and a half of thoughts, during the 2010 campaign I was talked into participating myself as a candidate, and it was a very interesting experience. However, I m very glad that Zack got elected and not me, I think he makes a much better DPL that I would have made. Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Margarita: I think the main problem that we have is our communication, both inside the project and outside the project. Most of us are very technical people, our skills lay in the technical part of Debian (preparing packages, fixing bugs, writing software, administering systems) not in the social part. And thus, we lack a general empathy that is quite needed when interacting with people from all over the world. Raphael: Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy? Margarita: Not particularly. I do want it to be a great release with good quality, stable software. I would also like to keep making Debian more and more universal with each release, making it more user friendly, more accessible, and more robust than any other previous release. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Margarita: I admire a lot of people in Debian. There s a lot of people that contribute a lot of time to Debian, amounts of time that I can t begin to understand how they can afford. I admire Stefano Zacchiroli, our current project leader. And Steve McIntyre, the project leader before him. Also Bdale Garbee, who s also been a DPL in the past. Making this list I realize that Debian has been blessed by quite a number of great leaders in the past. I admire Holger Levsen, for his contributions to the DebConf video team, that have made it possible year after year for the whole project to participate in DebConf remotely. I admire Steve Langasek and Andreas Barth (etch is still my favourite release). I admire Christian Perrier for his work on internationalization. I admire Joerg Jaspert for the incredible amounts of time that he puts into Debian. And actually, I could go on admiring people all night long. I admire so many people that this interview could become a very boring list of names. I guess it s better to leave it at saying that Debian is lucky to have quite a lot of excellent hackers around.
Thank you to Marga for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading her answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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Christian Perrier: Jiwayeu Anivaichai' Bob

Today is our "historical" Spongebob (the one you can see here) birthday. Bob is indeed "born" on August 7th 2002, in Las Vegas, when my (at that time) kids won it in the Kids Casino in Circus Circus casino. Since then, Bob is one of the family mascots along with the world famous Titeps (these are born much earlier). The Perrier family has tons of stories about Bob and we developed a major "Sponge disease", becoming more and more crazy about this incredible character. So, happy 9th birthday, Bobob....and have a good meal tomorrow (the day after his birthday is the only day in one year where he eats something....the rest of the year, Bob only drinks whatever liquid comes close to him). I know that Jean-Baptiste won't forget to feed you.

1 August 2011

Christian Perrier: DD, 10 years

On July 30th, 2001, I received a mail from James Troup stating that I was a Debian developer, this 10 days after my Application Manager, namely Martin Michlmayr, sent his AM report. Summarizing these 10 years will be....interesting. Now that I'm on holidays, I'll try too cook something up. Sorry, folks, I completely forgot celebrating this last Saturday.

31 July 2011

Christian Perrier: [running] Debconf running: New-York record partly broken

OK, I'll also blog about other DebConf activities, but I was just working on my sports software of choice and just summarized my running activities here in Banja Luka (it's 22h45 last day of Debconf). I finally broke my record of last year (where I ran 112 kilometers) by running 115 kilometers. However, that was in 12 days while I was only 10 full days in New-York. So that record is only partially broken. These 115km were run in 12h09', which leads to a pace of 9.5km/h or 6'18"/km or 10'13"/mile (hello, Dirk). Fairly slow, indeed. However, this or that may better explain..:-). The cumulated positive slope for these 115km has been around 2000 meters! Specifically, I had great fun today when No l and I decided to make a final round in the hills close to the Banj Brdo. For that 12km run, we shared a taxi to the start of the Banj Brdo road, to avoid 2km of boring run in Banja Luka streets, then made our way to nearly each and every path we could find. Of course, that should soon lead to a very well mapped area on Openstreetmap. As usual, when a DebConf ends, the area is much better maped than it was before it. Here, the city was too well mapped by local OSMers, so we had to go to the mountains..:-). On this sunny Saturday, doing what I call a real trail run, with mud, slopes, scratching vegetation, rocks.....was an incredibly great pleasure. Sharing this with No l was also great. Hopefully, running in Managua next year will be as much fun (but maybe really tricky because of the heat). See you there!

30 July 2011

Christian Perrier: [running] Debconf running: New-York record partly broken

OK, I'll also blog about other DebConf activities, but I was just working on my sports software of choice and just summarized my running activities here in Banja Luka (it's 22h45 last day of Debconf). I finally broke my record of last year (where I ran 112 kilometers) by running 115 kilometers. However, that was in 12 days while I was only 10 full days in New-York. So that record is only partially broken. These 115km were run in 12h09', which leads to a pace of 9.5km/h or 6'18"/km or 10'13"/mile (hello, Dirk). Fairly slow, indeed. However, this or that may better explain..:-). The cumulated positive slope for these 115km has been around 2000 meters! Specifically, I had great fun today when No l and I decided to make a final round in the hills close to the . For that 12km run, we shared a taxi to the start of the Banj Brdo road, to avoid 2km of boring run in Banja Luka streets, then made our way to nearly each and every path we could find. Of course, that should soon lead to a very well mapped area on Openstreetmap. As usual, when a DebConf ends, the area is much better maped than it was before it. Here, the city was too well mapped by local OSMers, so we had to go to the mountains..:-). On this sunny Saturday, doing what I call a real trail run, with mud, slopes, scratching vegetation, rocks.....was an incredibly great pleasure. Sharing this with No l was also great. Hopefully, running in Managua next year will be as much fun (but maybe really tricky because of the heat). See you there!

10 July 2011

Christian Perrier: 33094 spam posts removed from Debian mailing lists in two years

Debian mailing lists' standard policy is to allow posts from unsubscribed users. That of course fits our standards for opened development but has the drawback of allowing a lot of spam to reach our mailing lists. This spam also clutters the mailing lists archives. Since 2009, a working system allows removing spam from the mailing list archives. Today, I would like to put some light on the results of this system : Results are impressive for mailing lists where a coordinated effort is done over time: the debian-boot mailing list (first coorindated effort, initiated by regretted Frans Pop), the Italian and French mailing lists. You want to help? You can. Reporting spam is as easy as reading Debian mailing lists. When you see a mail that you consider being a spam mail, just bounce it to report-listspam at lists dot debian dotte org. Don't forward it, you need to bounce it ("b" keyboard shortcut in mutt). Alternatively, you can check for this message on Debian mailing lists archives and hit the "Report as spam" button. If you're a Debian developer, you can help in reviewing nominated spam. It takes me about 20 minutes every week. Go to the spam review home page and register for an account there. Then, you'll be able to process through nominated posts. Once a given post is confirmed as spam by at least 3 reviewers with nobody else reporting it as "ham", it is removed the next week from the archive. Feel free to join the game and be part of the Debian moppers team!

Christian Perrier: Cheese and Wine party for DebConf 11, aka C&W7

Do I need to explain what is the Cheese and Wine (C&W) party? Still, if some of you need more information, please feel free to ask. The C&W7 wiki page now exists on DebConf wiki. Information will come there until the day of the C&W, which is scheduled for Tuesday July 26th, so the day before the planned daytrip, if I'm correct. C&W orga details are currently very vague, but the most important point is: start planning what YOU will be bringing for the event. Remember that the event is only successful when many of us manage to bring good stuff to share (preferrably cheese, wine...or other ethanol-improved beverages). If you think about something *else* than cheese, please feel free to bring it: just try to have it representative of your part of the world...or a part of the world you love. Any further questions can be asked in the debconf-discuss mailing list or in #debconf channel on irc.debian.org

27 June 2011

Christian Perrier: 2011 week 25 Debian work

I sponsored the upload of fonts-anonymous-pro prepared by Rog rio Brito. This fixed-width font is especially designed for people who write code, for instance by making clear differences between characters such as O and 0, or I, l and 1. I fixed a few glitches in various l10n scripts related to D-I (those tthigns that run daily, for which I receive a daily mail). They were the consequence of Alioth migration and I omitted to fix them until now....mumbling every morning about the scripts' noisy output..:-) I worked on only one bug for samba (doh). This was #631118 which I forwarded upstream in order to get it fixed in 3.5 series (even if 3.6 is due out soon and will be what we target for wheezy). I tried to follow the flow of translations/reviews in DDTP for French. The activity is high, here, with about 10 packages translated every day (most often packages I target for the team...by using high-popcon stats). We even had a big bump during the week-end when Georges Khaznadar (who is very active when it comes at educative software) initiated the translation of many edu-related packages (many of which he maintains himself). That's about it. Quiet week, indeed with more time invested in paid work, including during my spare time..:-). And also a week-end in our country house in Normandy, which usually means more gardening than hacking.

20 June 2011

Christian Perrier: 2011 week 24 Debian work

I uploaded a new upstream version of the ttf-oldstandard font. The new version is a real 2.2 while the former was numbered 2.02 by upstream but got accidentally numbered 2.2 by us, packagers.. The occasion was good and I renamed the source package to follow the "yes-yes-yes-soon-to-be-published" fonts packaging policy for naming. The new package is "fonts-oldstandard". A new upstream version of samba was released and I packaged it just after the last 3.5.8 package entered testing. Samba is now 3.5.9 in unstable. I should work on backporting (for backport.debian.org) what's entered in testing, by the way. I sent l10n NMU proposals for unattended-upgrades, memtest86+, cacti. I also NMUed memtest86 (still in DELAYED).

15 June 2011

Christian Perrier: So, what happened with Kikithon?

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

14 June 2011

Christian Perrier: 2011 week 23 Debian work

Quiet week, indeed. I spent part of the week-end of 4-5 June to re-setup my server at home after receiving the new box from my ISP (Free). This box can no longer be configured as an Ethernet bridge but only as a router. As a consequence, my home box no longer has my public IP on one of its Ethernet interfaces, which changes several details in the local configuration. The result is finally an hopefully safer setup, as the box now filters everything but port 22, 25, 80, 443, 993, 2317 (geneweb) while the server has similar filters in its iptables. Two firewalls instead of one. I did some bug cleaning on samba, again. The bug count should lower again in upcoming releases, but we probably reached a point where it can't go further down. Half of these are reported upstream. I should maybe check with them if they're considered fixed, pointless or just ignored as of now..:-) On Wednesday 8th, I released a samba 3.6.0rc2 package less than 12 hours after upstream published it. Yet another broken record..but it was easy as the package was completely straightforward. During the week, the French team worked on several DDTP translations now that the DDTSS is repaired (and apparently much more stable). I also sent an update for devscripts mannpages French translation. I will resume activity on l10n NMU. It's now time to think about it. Letting things pile up without nagging maintainers just leads to l10n stats slowly decreasing. We're aiming at 100% for debconf translation for 7 languages, so the wheezy freeze time will be difficult. Better start now. The most difficult part is having maintainers understand that, yes, we should care THAT early in the release process. The most complete language as of now (Russian) is already missing nearly 100 strings in about 12 packages (those that changed/introduced tempaltes recently). I have to prod these maintainers now.

Christian Perrier: Midnight in Paris

My favourite city viewed by my favourite film director. You can blindly go and see "Midnight in Paris" by Woody Allen. Great moment, superb music, great story and unique way of filming.

Philipp Kern: About versions

So Christian likes to give out awards for the best bug reporting estimates and also does statistics about developers per capita. I've got at least one area where he's on top:

The award for the introduction of the highest version into the archive goes to Nicolas Spalinger and Christian Perrier for ttf-sil-gentium. The use of a date as an epoch is amazing. The runner-up is Joey Hess with intercal (soon to be gone from Debian altogether), reusing the version number in the epoch. Somehow that fits with the crazy language the package contains.

The award for the most minimal version goes to Guido G nther with libvirt-glib. It's a number less than zero but still not negative. The runner-up is Raphael Geissert with switchsh which just happens to use 2007 as a checkout date.

13 June 2011

Christian Perrier: So, what happened with Kikithon?

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

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