I've put up my nearly unedited, unsorted, and uncommented photos from my recent trip to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, for the Libre Software World Conference. It was a beautiful place (and a great conference) -- I hope to write more about it soon.

For Debian s birthday, Francesca Ciceri of the Debian Publicity team suggested that developers blog about their first experiences with Debian . I found this a good idea so I m going to share my own early experience. It s quite different from what happens nowadays Before speaking of my early Debian experience, I have to set some context. In my youth, I have always been a Windows user and a fan of Bill Gates. That is until I got Internet at home at that point, I got involved in Usenet and made some friends there. One of those made me discover Perl and it has been somewhat of a revelation for me who had only been programming in Visual Basic, Delphi or ObjectPal. Later the same friend explained me that Perl was working much better on Linux and that Debian Linux installs it by default so I should try this one. I had no idea of what Linux was, but given how I loved Perl, I was eager to try his advice. So I got myself a Tri-Linux CD with Debian/RedHat/Slackware on it and started the installation process (which involved preparing boot floppies). But I did not manage to get the graphical interface working despite lots of fiddling with Xfree86 s configuration file. So I ended up installing RedHat and used it for a few months. But since many of the smart guys in my Usenet community were Debian users, I persisted and finally managed to get it to work! After a few months of usage, I was amazed at everything that was available for free and I wanted to give back. I filed my first bug report in July 1998, I created my first Debian packages in August 1998 and I got accepted as an official Debian developer in September 1998 (after a quick chat over the phone with Martin Schulze or James Troup I never understood the name of my interlocutor on the phone and I was so embarassed to have to use my rusty English over the phone that I never asked). That s right, it took me less than 3 months to become a Debian developer (I was 19 years old back then). I learned a lot during those months by reading and interacting with other Debian developers. Many of those went away from Debian in the mean time but some of them are still involved (Joey Hess, Manoj Srivastava, Ian Jackson, Martin Schulze, Steve McIntyre, Bdale Garbee, Adam Heath, John Goerzen, Marco D Itri, Phil Hands, Lars Wirzenius, Santiago Vila, Matthias Klose, Dan Jacobowitz, Michael Meskes, ). My initial Debian work was centered around Perl: I adopted dpkg-ftp (the FTP method for dselect) because it was written in Perl and had lots of outstanding bug reports. But I also got involved in more generic Quality Assurance work and tried to organize the nascent QA team. It was all really a lot of fun, I could take initiatives and it was clear to me that my work was appreciated. I don t know if you find this story interesting but I had some fun time digging through archives to find out the precise dates if you want to learn more about what I did over the following years, I maintain a webpage for this purpose.

One comment Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

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.

Last weekend I finally managed to travel to Barcelona to visit my family and some friends. As my agenda was quite packed with stuff to do, I was unable to find out if any of the Ubunteros had arrived early for UDS, and I left just after lunch on Sunday. Unfortunately, I had totally missed that before UDS, Canonical held their allhands meeting, and it would have been easy to meet them on Friday night after I got in the city. What a pitty, and sorry about this, mdz, I would have loved to meet... :( In other Barcelona news, I'm sure that UDS attendees will be astonished (or fed up!) by the football crazyness going on right now. Last night I went to a culer bar near Woody and enjoyed watching how Bar a claimed brilliantly their 3rd Champions Cup. For someone who normally doesn't care that much about football, the last few weeks have been incredible. Today I visited my 96 year old grandfather, and even if he has lost much of his expressiveness and energy since the last few months, today he was visibly happy and proud of what his Bar a has managed to accomplish this season. Three titles, plus literally going over Real Madrid in Santiago Bernabeu. Bar a is definitely m s que un club, and I'm happy that my grandfather was able to enjoy it.

37 years since I first heard Peter Gabriel's voice (Genesis' Nursey Crime, one of the first LP I ever bought) and about 34 since I first saw him on stage in what turned out to be Genesis' last show in France (St-Etienne, my home city, may 1975). Since then, I tried to keep up with PG's appearances here and there and he has always been my favourite artist. So, if any of this blog's readers happen to be in Latin America and enjoy PG's music, just try to go there:

• March 20 Lima, Peru / Esplanada Del Monumental
• March 22 Buenos Aires, Argentina / Estadio Velez Sarsfield
• March 24 Santiago, Chile / Arena Santiago
• March 27 Mexico City / Distrito Federal
• March 29 Guadalajara, Mexico / Jalisco
• March 31 Monterrey, Mexico / Nuevo Leon

The Debian Python Modules Team is discussing which DVCS to switch to from SVN. Ondrej Certik asked how to generate a list of commiters to the team s repository, so I looked at it and got this:
emilio@saturno:~/deb/python-modules$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
865 piotr
609 morph
598 kov
532 bzed
388 pox
302 arnau
253 certik
216 shlomme
212 malex
175 hertzog
140 nslater
130 kobold
123 nijel
121 kitterma
106 bernat
99 kibi
87 varun
83 stratus
81 nobse
81 netzwurm
78 azatoth
76 mca
73 dottedmag
70 jluebbe
68 zack
68 cgalisteo
61 speijnik
61 odd_bloke
60 rganesan
55 kumanna
52 werner
50 haas
48 mejo
45 ucko
43 pabs
42 stew
42 luciano
41 mithrandi
40 wardi
36 gudjon
35 jandd
34 smcv
34 brettp
32 jenner
31 davidvilla
31 aurel32
30 rousseau
30 mtaylor
28 thomasbl
26 lool
25 gaspa
25 ffm
24 adn
22 jmalonzo
21 santiago
21 appaji
18 goedson
17 toadstool
17 sto
17 awen
16 mlizaur
16 akumar
15 nacho
14 smr
14 hanska
13 tviehmann
13 norsetto
13 mbaldessari
12 stone
12 sharky
11 rainct
11 fabrizio
10 lash
9 rodrigogc
9 pcc
9 miriam
9 madduck
9 ftlerror
8 pere
8 crschmidt
7 ncommander
7 myon
7 abuss
6 jwilk
6 bdrung
6 atehwa
5 kcoyner
5 catlee
5 andyp
4 vt
4 ross
4 osrevolution
4 lamby
4 baby
3 sez
3 joss
3 geole
2 rustybear
2 edmonds
2 astraw
2 ana
1 twerner
1 tincho
1 pochu
1 danderson
As it s likely that the Python Applications Packaging Team will switch too to the same DVCS at the same time, here are the numbers for its repo:

emilio@saturno:~/deb/python-apps$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
401 nijel
288 piotr
235 gothicx
159 pochu
76 nslater
69 kumanna
68 rainct
66 gilir
63 certik
52 vdanjean
52 bzed
46 dottedmag
41 stani
39 varun
37 kitterma
36 morph
35 odd_bloke
29 pcc
29 gudjon
28 appaji
25 thomasbl
24 arnau
20 sc
20 andyp
18 jalet
15 gerardo
14 eike
14 ana
13 dfiloni
11 tklauser
10 ryanakca
10 nxvl
10 akumar
8 sez
8 baby
6 catlee
4 osrevolution
4 cody-somerville
2 mithrandi
2 cjsmo
1 nenolod
1 ffm
Here I m the 4th most committer And while I was on it, I thought I could do the same for the GNOME and GStreamer teams:
emilio@saturno:~/deb/pkg-gnome$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
5357 lool
2701 joss
1633 slomo
1164 kov
825 seb128
622 jordi
621 jdassen
574 manphiz
335 sjoerd
298 mlang
296 netsnipe
291 grm
255 ross
236 ari
203 pochu
198 ondrej
190 he
180 kilian
176 alanbach
170 ftlerror
148 nobse
112 marco
87 jak
84 samm
78 rfrancoise
75 oysteigi
73 jsogo
65 svena
65 otavio
55 duck
54 jcurbo
53 zorglub
53 rtp
49 wasabi
49 giskard
42 tagoh
42 kartikm
40 gpastore
34 brad
32 robtaylor
31 xaiki
30 stratus
30 daf
26 johannes
24 sander-m
21 kk
19 bubulle
16 arnau
15 dodji
12 mbanck
11 ruoso
11 fpeters
11 dedu
11 christine
10 cpm
7 ember
7 drew
7 debotux
6 tico
6 emil
6 bradsmith
5 robster
5 carlosliu
4 rotty
4 diegoe
3 biebl
2 thibaut
2 ejad
1 naoliv
1 huats
1 gilir

emilio@saturno:~/deb/pkg-gstreamer$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
891 lool
840 slomo
99 pnormand
69 sjoerd
27 seb128
21 manphiz
8 he
7 aquette
4 elmarco
1 fabian
Conclusions:
- Why do I have the full python-modules and pkg-gstreamer trees, if I have just one commit to DPMT, and don t even have commit access to the GStreamer team?
- If you don t want to seem like you have done less commits than you have actually done, don t change your alioth name when you become a DD (hint: pox-guest and piotr in python-modules are the same person)
- If the switch to a new VCS was based on a vote where you have one vote per commit, the top 3 commiters in pkg-gnome could win the vote if they chosed the same! For python-apps it s the 4 top commiters, and the 7 ones for python-modules. pkg-gstreamer is a bit special

To make it short: many thanks to wouter, myon, weasel and especially santiago and panthera … you made my month, definetly!

Saw in base-files changelog:

base-files (4.0.5) unstable; urgency=low
[ ]
* It's still soon to change /etc/debian_version. Please be patient.
-- Santiago Vila <sanvila@debian.org>  Tue,  5 Aug 2008 18:06:06 +0200

Applause.

Today is H ctor s birthday. We celebrated with his family and a couple of close friends. He cooked a wonderful meal for us (he is a great cook) and we had a very nice afternoon, despite having a flu (again!) and a very runny nose. I am at this very moment preparing a sponsored upload for Carlos, one of the close friends who attended. He will become an excellent Debian contributor some day.

I got H ctor a couple of cookbooks for his birthday, but much to my surprise I received a brand new server from him (late Xmas present, but I am to blame for the delay). I can now get rid of this damn noisy and slow thing that sits under my desk, aka nima. This has been a faithful server for many years and I think it deserves to be donated to the local hacklab, as I believe it can still be of use.

I hope I can put all this CPU power to good use in my Debian QA work (which I am slowly coming back to).

H ctor has been my best friend for almost 10 years. We also are co-workers at soitu.es now. He was the one who made me believe that I could contribute to Debian and that I should apply to become a Developer (although Santiago Vila was actually the first one to spot me). He was the one I run to when I felt like dying shit after my divorce . He is still the one I run to most of the time when I need support or advice, and he has this wonderful way of making me feel safe in this scary world. Even though we naturally don t agree on a lot of stuff, he does his best to respect my eccentricities, and I always carefully listen to what he has to say. I am very lucky to be his friend. May this friendship last many, many more years. H ctor, keep rocking!

It’s good to see that a large number of American native languages have their own code in ISO 639-3. I was a little disappointed when I explored ISO 639 for the fist time, most of those languages are grouped by 639-2 by a single code: sai, many of them don’t have any relation with each other. Nasa Yuwe (P ez) and Namdrik (Guambiano), for example, are spoken in the same region of Colombia and they are very different, even don’t have the same origin. If you wanted to develop software for one of them, you had to use a reserved for local use code, but now, that’s no longer needed.

Since some weeks I’m really busy, private and at work. It’s going into the end of the year and everybody is in hurry. There seems also coming some changes for our family down the road in the future, but more maybe later. Additionally one months ago Santiago Ruano Rinc n did surprisingly turn up as my AM. We started fast, but I got stuck at P&P part 1 with the License comparisons, cause actually I’m so busy at work and with my family, that I can’t concentrate enough late at night, when trying to work on the papers. For example the graphviz license is completely overwhelming me. My hope in the last time was some bigger timeslots at the weekends, but they got smashed by my family and/or work issues. I hope Santiago is not getting annoyed by me and I can find hopefully some free time on holidays or in the first weeks next year. Anyways … Christian Perrier started a review and translation process of ipplans debconf templates by the debian-i18n contributors. The templates was in really bad conditions, most of it was copied over from gallery2 and I did know that they wasn’t so good. Thanks for all your work, when the process is over I’m proud to include your really nice work. Two other packages got updates. php-suhosin got new upstream release after months which fixes the broken perdir/.htaccess support. Unfortunatly I missed the release (cause there is no announcement list and there was no watch file) unless Raphael Geissert did leave a note. I integrated the new VCS and homepage stuff also and formorer did fix some minor issues. So we can hopefully upload now (when it arrives testing) the first package to backport.org and sleep little bit better, when using PHP on stable.
nagios-plugins also got updated. Since Seanius seems really busy (like allways), nobody did really took care of the package. In October it got two CVE which was solved via NMU by the testing-security team, also two new upstream releases where available. So I droped the obsolete patches, integrated new once, did make the new shiny lintian a bit more happy, some minor fixes and queued the package to Seanius. ;)
You can expect both packages on backport.org soon. My other (comaintained) packages will get updated to latest policy and VCS/homepage guidelines in the near future. Actually I’ve to prioritize what to do with the left time slots. :/

My @debian.org account’s now been created. Thanks santiago, anibal and kapil for your sponsorships during all this time. I learned quite a lot from you all. Thanks are also due my AM, myon and my advocate, gwolf.

This week I ought to have posted about how Gunnar and I met somewhere along the Ciclotón and had amazing amounts of fun. But I can’t, because we didn’t, because I was stuck in bed, with a 39C fever, all through Sunday and Monday and half of Tuesday. And weak and tired and with a big, nasty, unsuferable headache the other half of Tuesday and Wednesday and half of yesterday. So, instead, all I can do is apologize to santiago, who nominated me for DM, and damog, who seconded the nomination, and anibal who caught my silly mistake of not mentioning that I (of course) love and accept the DFSG in my response, for being silent and unresponsive. And to the people who reported bugs in my packages and got no response. And to oliver, for whom I was supposed to fix some JavaScript issues yesterday. I hate viruses.

A comic on Human-Computer Interaction: OK/Cancel.

Santiago Vila uploaded base-files 4.0.1~bpo40+1 to backports.org, because the package from etch doesn't include the GPLv3 license. If you're going to upload the backport of a package which software is under the GPLv3, please make sure it depends on at least this version of base-files.

Fossils from the Mesozoic and Cretaceous Eras abound in Villa de Leyva, a beautiful colonial town of Colombia. There are so many fossils that even they are used in the walls of a house: Villa de Leyva is a town full of swilrs and nice shapes, and a good place for a Debian Conference

At least in unstable that's the case, thanks to santiago who uploaded rtorrent yesterday. Unfortunately(for people using testing) the new version 0.11.8/0.7.8 for libtorrent/rtorrent is out, that's why I will wait until rtorrent got into testing so there'll be no mismatch of versions between the library and the client (actually rtorrent 0.7.4 and libtorrent 0.11.7, should be rtorrent 0.7.7) and then will start looking a sponsor for the new packages of libtorrent/rtorrent (which are going to be ready later tonight).

I just upgraded my home server (kheops) to etch. I just had an issue with lifelines-report, which the former maintainer should be ashamed of. Apart from that glitch, the upgrade went well, thanks to the excellent upgrade advices in the Release Notes. Funnily, I got warned that kheops still has the "base" package installed which I didn't notice in former upgrades. This is pretty expected as kheops has never been reinstalled, is my home server since october 1996 when I installed Debian Buzz on it. I think that I'll just avoid following Santiago Vila's advice and leave "base" installed on my system, indeed. Just for fun. This is the 6th server I upgrade as of now. All other servers were pretty minor servers at work. The big issue is now upgrading the file and print servers and particularly the samba file server which hosts files for 250 users. This is probably the one and only server for which we will setup a clone and play the upgrade scenario a few times. Etch rocks, as expected.

(Translated from my same post in Spanish) A few days ago, McDonald published a cartoon on the end of the dictator Pinochet. Yesterday, fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet died in the Military Hospital in Santiago, after heart and lung diseases, being 91 years old. Now, current president Michelle Bachelet, a moderate socialist, in case Pinochet is given State memorials, could be attending the ceremony (in a predominantly conservative country as Chile), even after she was tortured and persecuted under the dictatorship and his father was murdered under the regimen, after serving Salvador Allende‘ government. Shitty life, huh? Viva Chile!, just as the ironman stated.

Last Friday I was tinkering with apcupsd and rrdtool and decided to join both: I’d monitor the mains voltage during a period of 24 hours, to see if it varied during the day. Well, apparently, it does. To my untrained eye it looks like it varies with the load in the electric network: the voltage is at its highest during nighttime, and hits its lowest point at 13:30 (solar mid-day in Galicia); then rises again while people is having lunch then dips until after 18:00. The discontinuity at about 20:15 was due to my briefly stopping apcupsd to change a configuration in my UPS. Now, I don’t know if the mains voltage really varies so much during the day or if it is because my UPS’s voltmeter is a piece of shit (which it, apparently, is) and is affected by the presence of non-resistive loads or whatnot, but the graph is interesting anyhow. Detailed explanations by people who know more about electricity than yours truly will be appreciated. On an unrelated subject, I’m teaching myself how to juggle a reverse cascade. To do it properly, it requires better timing and more homogeneous throws than I’m currently able to do. So, to master it, I first need to suck less at juggling. We’re working on it.