4 September 2006

The "Debian board" has been discussed a lot recently. I'm not so convinced it will improve matters that much. I don't think Debian is lacking a central authority to keep the vision. Most people have some overall vision; these visions might disagree on some points, but a board is bound to have the same disagreements. What is taking the fun out for me is not that some technical matters don't work out the way I want them too, but usually it's lack of manpower in certain files of particular interest to me. For example SELinux has been rather frustrating for me, since I felt like fighting alone on a lost position. Often applications would change faster than the policy could be updated etc. And trying to support sarge made that even more so. Sometimes bugs were fixed upstream, but the packages in Debian weren't updated yet, etc. When I was maintaining galeon back then, the must frustrating things were that on one hand, you had lots of people complaining about galeon 2 being different from galeon 1 (and not accepting that galeon 1 was dead upstream, I preferred galeon 2 and so obviously packaged galeon 2) - and on the other hand that there were tons of open bug reports noone even had time to verify. Working on such a package can be very frustrating. I've been keeping out of flamewars and such for quite some time, so I'm not so much bothered by that. I've blogged about that before. But I don't see where a "board" or "steering commitee" would come in helpful. Especially not in comparison to DPL-named release managers etc. IMHO it would be helpful to bring more people in. Our process of becoming a DD is very demotivating, and actually we could use more people - especially - for things like bug verification. Contributing to Debian can be demotivating for several reasons:

• Packages where the maintainer doesn't respond
• Packages the maintainer doesn't really care about
• Packages where you don't understand the packaging, because it's too different from what most packages use (i.e. please use debhelper and maybe CDBS for your packages, don't build your own 20k makefile buildsystem)
• Often not easy to create proper patches
• Roundtrip times of bugtracking etc.

Stuff I've been enjoing:

• "Thank you"s at the end of bug reports
• Occassional teasing by helix for complaining too much in my blog
• Real life meetings of debian-MUC
• Team-maintained packages

What I'd love to see on the long run is some kind of central package repoistory. Many other distributions use some kind of huge version control system for managing all their packages. Maybe we could have something like this with two "default" branches. With very little effort you can get write access to the "public" branch, and only full developers can pull patches over to the "authorative" branch. Packages should be built from that branch, and use some uniform way for this (e.g. debian/patches/ directories!) But people with more experience in team maintainance, e.g. the Gnome team, can hopefully comment more on this.

If you are putting an URL containing brackets in the section title of an .ini-like formatted file, you’d better use percent notation for the brackets in the URL. Sorry for yesterday’s Planet flood. I hope it will be less painful this time.

Hi, everybody. The Battle for Wesnoth project needs to move their campaign servers to a new location, and the main problem we have is we don’t have such a location. The requeriments are the following:

• About 100Mb RAM
• Around 1Gb of disk space
• Shell account (only me and, if possible, another BfW member will use the account), the server runs as a non-privileged user, so it shouldn’t be a security risk at all
• g++ and libsdl1.2-dev and libsdl1.2-net-dev installed
• Fixed IP and some spare bandwitch, I’m not sure how much bandwidth does it use, it’s enough to clog my DSL, but that’s not a lot

If anyone can provide such a server, please contact me at isaac@warp.es or isaac at IRC (oftc or freenode) and The Battle for Wesnoth project will be eternally grateful to you. Update
Thank you for all the offers received, it’s been overwhelming to get that amount of hosting offers in such a small time frame. We have already moved the campaign servers to one of the locations offered (http://www.drazzib.com) and the multiplayer servers to another one (http://www.bawue.net).

There’s a new idea floating around: creating a steering committee for Debian. I like the principle but I think we should aim for a broader change in the constitution. I don’t think creating a new separate structure is a good idea, because in my opinion the DPL should be the steering committee. Of course a single individual can’t play that role. And in fact, this is true for almost any task that the DPL currently has to handle. So we need to get rid of the DPL and to replace it with a board. And that board would be the steering committee and would also have the responsibilities that come currently with the DPL hat. Why? First of all, the role of DPL is to provide a vision but most recent leaders have not been able to do that as they tend to get overwhelmed by simple administrative work. If you remove the hope to effectively lead Debian by giving that power to a committee, then you scare everybody that wanted to be DPL because it effectively become an administrative position with no interest. Then, in recent years, the DPL position tended to become a multi-person thingie, first with the DPL team idea and this year with the 2IC (sort of a “DPL assistant”). So it looks like we’re ready to switch to a fully multi-personal leadership: one of an elected board. And last point, since the DPL tends to be active only on internal organizational issues, for most persons he’s only working on “political” stuff and he’s not valued as contributor leading the distribution where it needs to be lead: to the next release. That’s why I suggest that the board should be elected for an entire release with a maximum of 21 months. After each release we elect a new board and it should be in place for 18 months ideally. Tying the term to a release seems like the right approach to me: at the beginning the board is effectively doing most of its work as steering committee (setting/approving release goals) and at the end, during the period where we’re freezing it has more time to concentrate on organizational issues. The questions is now: how is that going to work with the release managers? Will that position become only an administrative work of low-level coordination without any influence on the whole distribution?

On my last post, I stated that there were a number of RC bugs affecting etch, which was not completely accurate: I was counting only those affecting both etch and sid, this is to say those packages that are in etch and that still haven't been fixed on sid. It was pointed out to me that a number of packages (around 70 today) are waiting for perl to go into testing, so that they can go in too, and many of those fix RC bugs. In the end, a lot of RC bugs were not being marked as fixed in etch because of perl failing to build in hppa, mips and mipsel. After learning this, I decided that this perl bug needed to be fixed: I gathered a small team, including my guru friends, Dami n Viano and Mart n Ferrari, and between the three of us, we worked on fixing this nasty bug for three days. After a lot of time spent compiling an recompiling perl in an hppa box, we finally found out that the problem was due to a particular optimization flag (-fdelayed-branch) in gcc-4.1. Compiling the conflictive source file without that flag makes the bug go away. So, we submitted a patch and are now waiting happily for Perl's maintainer Brendan O'Dea to make the fixed upload. Hopefully, the number of RC bugs concerning etch will go down quite a lot during the next week, as the affected packages are able to migrate.

I was in a multiple-car accident yesterday. I've been having to tell this story a fair amount in person and on IRC, so I thought I'd blog about it. Short version: it was a fender-bender. I'm doing fine, nobody was hurt, Michelle wasn't in the car, and 75% of the cars involved were driven away from the scene — including mine, by me. Want the long version? Well, I'm gonna tell it anyway. I had just pulled to a stop at a traffic light, heading northbound on Keystone Avenue where it intersects 106th Street, in Hamilton County. The line of cars at the light was pretty long, and people love to try hauling ass on the stretch between 96th Street and 106th. Apparently the person behind me was one of them. The line of cars stopped in the left lane (where I was) at the light was pretty long, and much shorter in the right — the cars over there were still moving at a good clip. I looked in my rearview mirror, thinking "if someone's trying to match pace with the cars in the right-hand lane, they're gonna need to brake pretty hard to stop." It was about 1815, so it was starting to get dark. A pair of headlights approach. Fast. Oh boy. I don't stop right up on people's tails, so if I'm hit, hopefully I won't go into the car ahead. I look forward again. Yeah, there's some room here. Screech. I didn't tense up; I felt a strange sense of calm and curiosity, as I'd never been in a car accident before. I bought my car, a Volkswagen Golf, in part because of its fairly good safety ratings. It has lots of air bags, and I always use a seat belt. Plus, in this instance I figured I wouldn't get hit a high speed. "Strange Deja Vu" by Dream Theater, from the Scenes from a Memory CD, was playing. Normally I listen to All Things Considered while commuting home, but I was annoyed because when I got in the car, I heard Nina Totenberg signing off a report, which means I'd just missed some Supreme Court coverage. Damn. Anyway. BONK. I got hit. Ouch. My teeth had chomped together too hard. Maybe they should install rubber mouthpieces in the doors of cars so you can grab them right before a crash. You know, car crashes never sound like the stock sound effects that have been around for about 50 years. I guess that's because they build cars to crumple these days instead of act like steel shrapnel bombs. Damn that Ralph Nader. My wreck doesn't sound cool and stuff. And I get to walk away, well, get back in the car and drive away, instead of my wife collecting on my life insurance policy. But I digress again. A middle-aged woman in a Honda Civic skidded into me, and knocked me into the Buick Park Avenue ahead of me, which in turn tapped the minivan ahead of him. I blinked a bit and tried to reorient myself, and then turned off the CD player. We all got out of our cars. The woman in back was very distressed, and immediately and repeatedly said the thing your insurance card tells you never to say after an accident. Oh well. Being a middle-aged woman, she'd probably have to wreck a school bus full of children — twice — before her premium would go up. Mine, on the other hand — we'll see. Called 911. Reported the incident. Tried to call my wife, but she decided not to answer. I later found out she was gabbing it up with my mom. Isn't it nice when your wife gets along with your mother? I COULD BE BLEEDING OUT ON THE COLD ASPHALT, BUT YOU TWO JUST KEEP ON TALKING. Michelle and I have the same model of cell phone, and we have call waiting with caller ID, so I know she knew it was me. Anyway, I try a couple of times, then give up and leave voice mail. Turns out the guy in front, in the minivan, was a Deputy Prosecutor for Hamilton County. He said something about being experienced in car wrecks, but I don't clearly remember it. Anyway, perhaps in part because he decided he was only "tapped" and didn't need to file an insurance claim, and perhaps in part out of professional courtesy, when the cops showed up, they let him go very quickly, so I didn't get any of his information. Everybody was fine, polite, and decent about the whole thing. The couple ahead of me, whom I got knocked into, didn't have their insurance info on them (or maybe this is a euphemism for "don't have insurance"). But, except for the deputy prosecutor guy, who was outta there, we all traded names, addresses, and phone numbers. I hope the Debian Project doesn't mind that I used my Debian Project Leader business cards for this purpose. These people (and the Carmel Police Department) now have my GPG key fingerprint. Uh oh. Anyway, that's about it. Appointment tomorrow with the insurance agent, to get help filling out INDIANA OPERATOR'S VEHICLE CRASH REPORT, State Form 38656 (R6/7-91) Stock 301 Effective 1-92, which has to be filed with the Indiana State Police within ten business days, or my driver's license will be suspended. Aww, yeah. Gotta move fast, because on Friday I leave for Mérida, Spain, to attend the 2nd Annual Open Source World Conference in Extremadura. Also have an appointment with the claims adjustor tomorrow. Then I'm hoping to just leave my car at the dealership so they can work on it over the week when I'm gone. My wife and my mom, those talkative two from a couple of paragraphs ago, will be coming along with me. My mom's got a jones to visit Spain, and I've had a jones to take my wife to Europe. We'll have a couple of extra days to see what Spain is like — I'll be there from 22 October to 28 October. I hope one day to visit Barcelona and hang out with some proper anarcho-syndicalists.

The Constitution of the Debian Project specifies a decision making process known as "delegation", which the Debian Project Leader can use to spread decision-making authority throughout the Project. Historically, this power has been underused (including by myself), particularly in areas of infrastructural administration. This turns out not to be due to any lack of motivation or desire to do so on the part of past (or present) Project Leaders. I have learned that part of the problem with delegation is that the Constitution's concept of it is poorly understood by some of our developers, particularly those who are not native English speakers and for whom the dry legal language in the document is heavy going. Here, then, is my attempt to put delegation in a nutshell:

1. Any authority not otherwise assigned by the Constitution (e.g., to the individual Developer, Technical Committee or the Secretary) can be exercised by the Project Leader, either directly or through delegates.
   (5.1.1, 5.1.2, 5.1.3, 5.1.4)
2. In the case of "approving or expelling Developers or designating people as Developers who do not maintain packages", this authority must be exercised by a delegate, and not by the Project Leader directly.
   (8.1.2)
3. The Constitution suggests that there may be other powers which the DPL may not directly wield, and which he or she must delegate instead, but apart from the above, none are enumerated in the Constitution.
   (8.1.2)
4. The DPL can make two types of delegations: a particular decision, or an ongoing area of responsibility.
   (5.1.1)
5. If the DPL delegates a particular decision, he or she cannot retake responsibility for the decision personally, but can re-delegate it to someone else.^[1]
   (5.1.1, 8.2)
6. If the DPL delegates an ongoing area of responsibility, he or she can withdraw that delegation.
   (5.1.1)
7. The DPL can add or remove delegates at his or her discretion.
   (8.2)
8. The DPL cannot make someone's status as a delegate dependent on the outcome of a particular decision that they make within their authority as a delegate. That is, the DPL cannot say, e.g., "If you drop non-free from ftp-master.d.o, you no longer get to be a package archive administrator."^[2]
   (8.2)
9. The DPL cannot override the decision of a delegate once the delegate has made it.
   (8.2)
10. The Developers can override the decision of a delegate via a General Resolution with a simple majority.
    (4.1.3)

Let me know if you feel this is an inaccurate characterization of the Constitution; I've done my best, but I'm not infallible. Also, I'd like to hear your thoughts on whether you think delegation is a tool that I should use more. I appreciate your comments. ^[1] One might argue that the prohibition on rescinding delegation of a particular decision is tied the individual(s) to whom it is given, rather than the decision in question. This is important if the person or people to whom the decision is delegated prove unable to make it. This is another variant on the old "what if Linus (Torvalds) gets hit by a bus?" problem. One developer has told me that my interpretation poses a different threat, however: "It looks like you're going to decide this one issue in a way I don't like, so I'll take it away and give the decision to someone who will decide it the way I want to." Why a Leader would do this, or how he or she could expect to get away with it, is not clear to me, but this scenario is not impossible. If this ever proves to be a non-hypothetical problem, I would ask for the Project Secretary's interpretation of the Constitution. ^[2] In practice this is hard to enforce perfectly, especially if the DPL keeps his or her reasons for dismissing a delegate to him- or herself. Personally, I interpret this to mean that if the DPL attempts to sway or threaten a delegate with the loss of their position if he or she does not do the DPL's bidding on a particular issue, that the delegate should bring the DPL's misconduct to the attention of the developers. Originally published 2005-11-15. Updated 2005-11-15 to fix instances of awkward (and in one case, backwards) wording.

On 21 August, Don Armstrong, a Debian developer, accepted my offer to serve as my delegate in handling trademark issues vis-à-vis the DCCA. As an employee of a DCCA member company, I found it wise to avoid the perception of a conflict of interest. I should stress that any such perception would merely have been conjectural, however; at no point have I been asked by anyone to put my thumb on the scales, as it were, and deal with the DCCA or any of its member organizations in a preferential way. It is widely understood within the Debian Project that our existing trademark policy, originally formulated in 1998, is too vague, and has not scaled well to suit Debian's much greater degree of success and market penetration (on its own, and in the form of derivatives) seven years later. However, grappling with the issue has proven challenging for Debian's membership. I believe this is mainly because the Free Software hackers that comprise our organization have tended to self-educate to a far greater extent on copyright law, and even patent law, than they have on trademark law. Recently (within the past year or so), Debian gained access via its U.S.-affiliated charitable organization, Software in the Public Interest, Inc. to a pro bono legal counsel who understands the Free Software culture. Debian's difficulty with trademark management is not unique — we have been on the other side of this problem when dealing with the Firefox and AbiWord trademarks, since we customize the codebases of these software projects in our GNU/Linux distribution, but ship them with their names (and logos) intact. It so happens in these cases that the originators of the software (who hold the trademarks) approve of our modifications. One of the essential pillars of software freedom, however, is the user's right to make modifications that the authors or rights-holders in the software may not agree with. Free Software hackers can feel, with some justification, that it is misleading to uphold the freedom of a work on the one hand (by using a copyright license such as the GNU GPL), and take it away with the other (by asserting a trademark on some essential aspect of the work, such as its name). It is true that a work can be renamed, or descriptive text changed, to identify itself as distinct from an "official" version of the work, but this in turn, it is feared, can damage perceptions of the work through at least two mechanisms. Firstly, disclaimers about unofficial status may be unnerving to users who aren't schooled in the vagaries of trademark law, in which — at least in the United States — you are expected to aggressively defend your mark lest you lose a future infringement case you bring against a well-heeled defendant. Users may mistake strident proclamations of unofficial, unendorsed status in a piece of software as a warning that it is unsuitable for use, or has known severe flaws. Secondly, aggressive use of trademarks, or even just the tension observed above between giving with a copyright license and taking away with a trademark license, may lead some distributors to rename a work, obscuring its origins to the casual user. This can happen pre-emptively, before a distributor even knows whether the modifications they have made (or think they might make in the future) have met with any objection from the trademark holders in that work. The "freedom to fork" (i.e., make a derived version unendorsed by the original author) is an essential part of Free Software, and while Free Software hackers' sense of community generally leads them to eschew forking in favor of compromise and consensus, occasionally a fork ends up growing the userbase or improving the overall quality of the Free Software landscape. A hacker may fear that brash trademark assertions by an author constitute mere lip service towards the freedom to modify the work without changing its name, and may be tempted to fork it, leaving the trademark encumbrance behind. Even among those who do not guard their software freedoms quite so jealously, the fear can exist that a simple difference of opinion over some technical programming detail, such as choice of sorting algorithm or graphical toolkit, will escalate to the point where the trademark license on the work (implicit or otherwise) is withdrawn. This is the inverse of the previous situation — instead of a modifier choosing to fork a work, the original author of a work (or, at any rate, the holder of the trademark associated with it), can force the modifier to fork. The dilemma this imposes upon the people creating the modified versions — revert your existing change or be legally compelled to make an additional one — can rub people the wrong way. When forking occurs, for whatever reason, and even in the relatively benign case of "rebranding" to remove legally protected marks, the threat exists that the competitive strength of the corresponding software will be diluted. Imagine if each of four major GNU/Linux distributors rebranded their version of Mozilla Firefox, calling it instead things like "Lizardfox", "Hatfox", "Swirlfox", and "Hearstfox". How many users would deduce that the web browsers in question were all "really" Mozilla Firefox, each one with a fig leaf placed delicately over it so that the legally-minded types at the Mozilla Foundation and the distributors could wink at each other? Even the somewhat savvy GNU/Linux user may be more confused than one might expect, given that other names used for Mozilla's suite of applications include Sunbird and Thunderbird, yet there is an independent Free Software project called Firebird, which was established prior to the Mozilla Foundation's adoption of its product naming scheme. "What's in a name?", you may ask. They're important because they are simple labels we can use to refer to Free Software success stories. There's a lot of Free Software to talk about; the phenomenon of copyleft does much to ensure a competitive culture. It's difficult to achieve an unnatural monopoly in this environment, because anyone who steers a software project in a direction the users don't want to go has to cope with the prospect of seeing a group of those users organize their own community based around a derived version that does what they want. The hypothetical hydra-headed Firefox situation described above, however, is an example of false competition, because the distributors were compelled to distinguish their Web browsers for legal, rather than technical, reasons. In actuality, Mozilla Firefox is a good example of what's right about Free Software, not just because of its licensing but because a web browser is a familiar concept to nearly every computer user today. Free Software's early successes were more esoteric — GNU Make, the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU C Library, GNU Emacs, and even the Linux kernel are not pieces of software that the general user can easily conceptualize. It is beneficial — to say nothing of convenient — to refer to the leading freely-licensed web browser as "Mozilla Firefox" rather than "a suite of mostly-compatible, similarly-named Web browsers shipped by the various GNU/Linux distributors". Those who seek to foment confusion and FUD about Free Software would doubtless capitalize on such a situation. These issues are challenging but not insuperable. A coherent policy will enable the community to establish a set of common practices, whereas now there are few conventions in the trademark arena. Ultimately, it is my hope that Debian will be able to promulgate a trademark policy that not only satisfies our needs, but serves as a model for others. To establish a successful policy, I suspect we need to build one up from basic concepts, and formulate explicit answers to fundamental questions.

• Why even have a trademark? Let's understand what protections the law affords and determine which, if any, are applicable to our endeavors. In the U.S., trademarks are managed by the federal government (rather than the states), and regulated by Title 15, Chapter 22 of the United States Code. International treaties result in trademark law being roughly similar across most jurisdictions in the developed nations, but there could exist important differences that we should learn about.
• What level of Debian involvement should be necessary for an "outside" organization to use our mark without a fuss from us? Should there be any situations where people essentially have an automatic trademark license, or should we use trademark law as an instrument to encourage (or compel) anyone trading in our name to contact us? We need to consider small-scale garage-based redistributors who simply move physical copies of our official ISO images as well as commercial derivative distributions.
• Is it feasible to apply the copyleft concept to trademarks? That is, is there some way we can turn the restrictive aspects of trademark law into a kind of compact that upholds the freedoms of a sharing community, while penalizing the activities of those who would prey upon that community?

Originally published 2005-09-14.
Updated 2005-10-15 to add licensing in comments.

Courtesy of FindLaw Legal News: WASHINGTON-President George W. Bush said Wednesday that Harriet Miers' religious beliefs figured into her nomination to the Supreme Court as a top-ranking Democrat warned against any "wink and a nod" campaign for confirmation. "People are interested to know why I picked Harriet Miers," Bush told reporters at the White House. "They want to know Harriet Miers' background. They want to know as much as they possibly can before they form opinions. And part of Harriet Miers' life is her religion." Courtesy of the United States Constitution, Article VI: ...all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States. Oh, well, just so long as it's a criterion, not a test. I mean, it's only essential, not a qualification or something, right?

Since I got back from the Oldenburg Linux Developers' conference, I've had my attention on our security infrastructure. Despite only being there for one and a half days thanks to a badly delayed trans-Atlantic flight, I found the conversations and collaborative spirit heartening. The bad news is that what I had planned for a writeup got rendered obsolete soon after I returned to the United States. Things have been changing rapidly, but mostly for the better. We've got three machines in the DNS rotation for security.debian.org now, which is superior to the one we had before (you can use the command dig security.debian.org to inspect the DNS record). My thanks go to our security and system administration teams for recovering from the recent overload problem provoked by an xfree86 package security update. Being somewhat familiar with that package, I can understand how its large size combined with Debian's ever-growing userbase starved the security host of bandwidth. Secondly, while I was in Oldenburg, Joey Schulze gave me a lot of insight into what a challenge one particular package is — the thing sucks up at least half of his time, dwarfing all other stable security update efforts. You've probably guessed that this package is the Linux kernel. Due in part to its success, and in part due to OS kernels being inherently attractive exploitation targets, the Linux kernel is getting a significant amount of scrutiny from a security perspective. Taking Red Hat Enterprise Linux as an example, we can see two advisories in the past two weeks: one on 28 September and one on 5 October. The one on 28 September addressed eighteen (18) different vulnerabilities as catalogued by MITRE's CVE project, and the one on 5 October — that's one week later — addressed fourteen (14) vulnerabilities, of which eight (8) were distinct from the previous advisory. (There was some overlap because the earlier advisory was for Red Hat's Linux 2.4.x kernel series, and the latter was for the 2.6.x series.) Those Debian developers who have ever handled a security vulnerability in one of their own packages can likely imagine the labor burden this is. Then reflect that Debian ships and supports a lot more Linux kernel trees than Red Hat does — this only magnifies the problem. The good news is that a team of developers focused on stable kernel security updates has been established. One of its members said to me today that he has seen a "very positive increase in kernel-related security activity". It is too soon to declare this problem resolved, but I perceive no lack of talent or dedication on the part of our developers. I am there to assist them in resolving the organizational and workflow issues so that our users can see the fruits of their energy directly. Similarly, I'm interested to see how the security.debian.org round-robin arrangement holds up after a reasonable period of real-world loads, particularly since I expect kernel package updates to sock the machines about as badly as an X Window System update. These issues are not over and done with, so an announcement declaring these problems vanquished would be premature. At the same time, the developers and users at large need to know whether or not people have their attention on them. I am wary of leaders or managers who declare issues resolved too soon, or proclaim optimism that later turns out to be unfounded, and have sought to avoid this vice. I apologize if I have tacked too far in the opposite direction. I perceive progress in this area. Let me know what you think, what you need to see, and by what metrics you measure progress and accomplishment on the security front. You can reach me at leader@debian.org (the address is already blitzed with so much spam there seems little sense in obfuscating it). (After getting some feedback on this entry, it's my intention to post it with any applicable revisions to the debian-devel-announce mailing list; please take this opportunity to "patch" this "beta", if you're so inclined.)

On Friday afternoon I'll be arriving in Oldenburg, Germany, for the eleventh annual Linux developers' conference. Historically, this conference has had a strong focus on non-x86 ports of the Linux kernel, boot loader development, the GNU toolchain, and so forth. At long last, it looks like this may be my opportunity to get my Macintosh Quadra 840AV out of mothballs and back into commission, thanks to Wouter Verhelst. I should be able to fit it into my luggage if I don't bring many clothes... :-) This year, however, in addition to that, a couple of mini-conferences are being piggybacked onto the Oldenburg meeting. These include the GNU Classpath and Debian Java DevJam and the Debian Security Summit. The Java programming language is a divisive issue in the Free Software community, and has a degree of controversy that sets it apart from the usual language wars. The dominant factor in this controversy stems from what Richard Stallman refers to as the Java trap; with the specifications controlled, and the reference implementation kept unavailable on DFSG-free terms by, an industry consortium dominated by large corporations, a Free Software hacker might fear that using Java will consign them to either having to compromise their principles by using non-free class libraries (for example), or being doomed to chase the taillights of standards that could conceivably be tailored to disadvantage competitors. (Java is not alone in this respect; many people fear that Microsoft's .NET, despite being openly standardized through ISO/IEC, will in actuality be completely controlled by Microsoft.) Despite this peril, Java is attractive to GNU/Linux-using organizations. The Free Standards Group, developers of the Linux Standard Base, has received inquiries about a Free Java standard and implementation from organizations already committed to GNU/Linux. In my job, I've encountered an interest in Java from several customers and prospects. Intriguingly, these institutions are, by and large, very much aware of the Java Trap. They like the language, and are not strong advocates of Free Software, but they too are worried about vendor lock-in. They've seen the success of community-driven development as GNU/Linux moves from strength to strength, claiming territory formerly held by Microsoft and proprietary versions of Unix. Even if I can't persuade a customer to adopt a Free Java stack, I can exhort them to only code against Java standards that have seen a free implementation. That way, their development bets are hedged against any "madman theory" of the controlling vendor. Furthermore, this way they only code to standards that are seeing independent implementations, and they leave their engineers free to switch between varieties of development kit. Engineers like flexibility because it enables them to work more efficiently; sales people, marketing personnel, and strategists like efficient engineers because they make a firm more nimble. That's where the GNU Classpath and Debian Java DevJam comes in. Free Software Java enthusiasts want to see their implementations fully mature, and are working hard to make it so. The Free Software community has the opportunity to make its Java implementation not just an available alternative, but a compelling alternative to the proprietary ones on technical as well as licensing grounds. The recent release of GNU Classpath 0.18 shows just how vigorously this opportunity is being seized. Having mature software is only half the battle, however; that software has to be coherently put together and easy for the user and developer to manipulate. For many of these folks, it's not enough just to have good, Free Java virtual machines (like Kaffe and SableVM), class libraries (GNU Classpath), compilers and interpreters (gcj and gij, respectively, from the GNU Compiler Collection), and application servers (Jakarta Tomcat, JBoss, and JOnAS, among others). They also want these technologies to be mutually integrated and easy to install and use. Good software and good packaging complement each other to drive adoption of the technology, and that's what the DevJam is all about. I'm glad to see that representatives of Debian's Java packaging team will be joining not just upstream authors, but their counterparts at Fedora, Ubuntu, and Gentoo in furtherance of this goal. I've approved a budget of EUR 2000, which Petter Reinholdtsen will administrate, to support the expenses of Debian's participation in the DevJam. We've received 1500 USD in sponsorship of this event from a corporate sponsor that chooses to remain anonymous. The other mini-conference I'll be attending is the Debian Security Summit. We're bringing together the heads of our Stable Security and Testing Security teams — the two Joeys, Joey Schulze and Joey Hess, as well as a bevy of other security-minded people, with the goal of revitalizing and streamlining our security processes. Several members of the Stable Security Team have gone dormant over the past several months (or longer), leaving an increasingly small number people to handle, as of Sarge's release, not one but two stable releases. This is because we do not terminate security support for our previous stable release (in this case, Woody), until some time has passed. We've had other challenges on the security front. We had what amounted to a security support hiatus for about three weeks in June, which caused much consternation. More recently, klecker.debian.org, which provides the security.debian.org has suffered some occasional availability problems, and it hasn't always been clear what's caused them. It's my understanding that we have new hardware in place that can serve in a backup, supplemental, or failover capacity. The general feeling at DebConf 5 was that our security apparatus was in need of attention to make sure it keep pace with the demands being placed on it. I've been in fruitful contact with Joey Schulze, Steve Kemp, and others over the past several weeks, and I look forward to a productive few days.

A while back I wrote an svn post-commit hook for the kernel repository that will look for new bug closures in the changelog, and mark them pending in the bts. Originally I'd rolled my own code to do the bts interaction, but someone pointed me to the bts command in the devscripts package, so it uses that now. The script is at svn.debian.org:~dannf/bts-mark-pending, if anyone else wants to use it.

On various proliants, you can make it all the way through the install until the bootloader install. I'd noticed this before and had assumed it was a bug in grub. Turns out this is also a problem with lilo. I didn't pay much attention to it at the time because I could use the etch installer to install sarge and things worked fine. But, last week I had a reason to look deeper - turns out the problem is due to an outdated cciss driver. Replacing just the cciss.ko module with one backported from 2.6.12 makes the problem go away. That, and the fact that the 2.6.12 cciss driver added support for a number of new SmartArray cards, are a couple reasons I'd like to get this backport added to the Debian kernel in a point release. In the meantime, if someone needs an installer w/ a patched kernel, please contact me. Though, hopefully a sarge install with the etch installer will work fine.

I recently blogged about how fixing d-i on cciss was just a matter of backporting a new version of the driver. Well, I was full of shit. Turns out my test case will give a false positive sometimes - oops. Anyway, the real fix requires backporting two fixes. Hopefully we can get this fix into a sarge point release at some point. On that note, I've started usertagging bugs that I think should go into a sarge kernel point release, should we ever do one (Note: the kernel team/stable release manager haven't discussed what is/is not acceptable in a stable kernel update, so this is just a wishlist at this point.) In my opinion, any localized fix that has already gone upstream and can be easily tested should be permitted. I'd really like to put driver updates in that category, but that opinion maybe tainted by my day job. We maintain a branch of the sarge d-i stack that has a side-goal of adding support for new HP hardware. We keep it as close to sarge as possible (backporting drivers to 2.6.8, for example) with the hope of pushing as much as possible into a sarge point release. Thanks to Andrew Patterson it has pretty recent cciss & fusion drivers. If there is interest, I could probably start posting these somewhere public.

I'm always on the lookout for a better way to maintain and share my calendar. I currently have a hybrid solution - evolution/webcalendar. I use evolution to store all of my HP appointments, because it can easily import ical appointments. It also has a pop-up reminder mechanism, which is certainly a must. But what sucks is that I want to see/be reminded of the same appointments whether I'm on my laptop at home, or in the office on my workstation. evolution doesn't share its calendar with other clients. Outside of work, I use webcalendar - which is actually pretty feature rich. It can send e-mail reminders and even has a .ics interface that evolution can poll. That way I can overlay my (read-only) webcalendar appointments on top of my evolution calendar, so I only have to maintain those appointments in a single place, and can still get pop-up reminders. Unfortunately, this hasn't been working with recent evolutions - and when it did, it was flaky - random crashes, etc. A problem with webcalendar is that everyone I invite to an event needs to have an account. I want to be able to invite anyone in the world, with just their e-mail address. When I'd first read about hula, I let my mind go wild with how it might work. Wouldn't it be cool if this was just a simple to install/configure/use client that people could just install and run locally? And then what if all these clients could somehow be organized into useful groups? Like I could tell my client that I'm an HP employee, and it could talk to some hp hula server to see my coworker's schedules? And I could also see my buddy's calendar that lists all the concerts he's going to this month, by communicating with his client directly, in an rss fashion? No required central server, just a client that knows how to collect/post information in standard formats and present it in a useful way. Well, that's not what hula's all about, it seems. It looks very centralized, and isn't something many of my friends could configure themselves. I installed sid's hula today; which is admittedly about 6 months out of date. I was initially impressed with the ease of install & the pretty web page, but quickly became disappointed by the admin architecture. Adding a user is terribly, terribly non-intuitive. And the whole thing looks overly complex, like its inherited a lot of design cruft. But, once you log in as a user, things look fine. hula's calendar looks nice, and I'd seen a flash video that makes newer versions look really spiffy. So, I wanted to see if I could easily import an e-mailed invitation into it. This means I'd need to give hula access to my e-mail. You can have hula pull mail from a remote server - I was hoping to connect it to my imap server as a read-only client for this test. However, it seems that hula will only pull mail every N hours, where N is configurable globally. I really just want to have an active imap session, using hula as a front-end, but that feature doesn't look like its there. I also couldn't find anyway to import an existing calendar/.ics file. Anyway, I've seen enough to know that hula isn't going to work for me yet. It doesn't appear to offer me anything that I don't already have, or simplify anything I do already have.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/modestraier is one project of Summer Dojo 2005 (similar event as Google's Summer of Code, running by Free Software Initiative of Japan). The objective of this project is to develop apache module using Hyper Estraier as search engine, so that all html pages through the apache server will be automatically registered in Hyper Estraier's node server. Thus, you can search from html pages once you browsed ago. I intend to package this as libapache2-mod-estraier (Bug#320625) and put preliminary version on http://people.debian.org/~ukai/hyperestraier/ .

I've got mail through CAcert.org webmail (probably, CAcert Web of Trust -> Find an Assurer -> Email Me). It might be written in Japanese, but mail that I've received is encoded wrongly, so that I can't read the message. For instance, it includes the following line (od -c -t x1):

0000000   F   u   m   i   t   o   s   h   i 302 227   l  \n
        46 75 6d 69 74 6f 73 68 69 c2 97 6c 0a

MIME header of the mail says it is "text/plain; charset=UTF-8". If this byte sequence is decoded as UTF-8, "302 227" (in hex, 0xc2 0x97) would be "END OF GUARDED AREA (EPA)" (in UCS-2, it is 0x97), and "l" (in hex 0x6c). It doesn't make sense. However, the decoded byte sequence 227 154 (in hex 0x97 0x6c) could be read as in Shift-JIS. It does make sense. So, the mail was wrongly encoded, that is, encoded in UTF-8, not by each characters (in Shift-JIS), but by each bytes. Anyway, I can read the received mail by the following commands:

cat msg   iconv -f UTF-8 -t UCS-2BE   tr -d '\000'   lv -Is

Maybe, CAcert.org webmail just encodes Shift-JIS text in UTF-8 as if it were single byte character sequences. I hope it will be fixed. I'm not sure this is a bug of CAcert.org webmail or users web browser that post text in Shift-JIS (wrongly, should be UTF-8?). I've changed default language to English from Japanese for now. (Even in English, it seems that an user can send Japanese text through the webmail, though).

New upstream version of kazehakase has been released on day of Niku (29) and Hidetaka Iwai packaged it. It now be built with GNU TLS so that it depends on libgnutls-dev. But when I built his package in my environment, it failed because of gnutls_session_t was not defined. This is because I had installed libgnutls11-dev that provides libgnutls-dev, so it satisfied build-dependency. However, latest (or actual) libgnutls-dev is development package for libgnutls12 and this is what kazehakase should build-depends on. I wonder kazehakase should build-depends on libgnutls-dev (>= 1.2.6) or build-conflicts libgnutls11-dev. Probably, it wouldn't appear FTBFS bug on buildd, because buildd will try to install libgnutls-dev....