I uploaded a new perl package to the archive today Net::HTTPServer a stunningly easy to use HTTP-server module. The last time I did so it was rejected by the ftpmasters who suggested that I used the wrong license. I didn’t so I’m hoping this upload will get approved! (Understandable mistake; the package contains LICENSE.LGPL but is dual-licensed like perl as the code and readme says. It was rejected because I said it was “duel perl” and the reviewer believed it was LGPL.) I’ve been using this module a lot recently at home and work and like it. I might write about using it for random purposes in my copious free time …

LWN has an article up about how RPM is forked, with no single agreed-upon upstream and lots of distros going off and patching it on their own:

Fedora currently ships version 4.4.2, and even the Fedora development repository has not gone beyond that. SUSE remains at 4.4.2, and the current RHEL offerings have rather older versions.

(And Debian's at 4.4.1+a year of patches.) rpm is not the only peice of software that is a major component of many linux distributions but has no agreed-upon upstream maintainer, and thus effectively one fork per distro. Another such peice of software is cron. Vixie cron was last released in '93. In many distributions it's still used, but in eg, Debian, the package is the result of 13 years of patches on top of that release. The debian version number is 3.0pl1-96. That's ninty-six versions based on 3.0pl1. The Red Hat sub-version is in the fourtys. There's no standard version anymore, just this pile of patches, and other piles of patches in other distributions. If we're lucky, they at least share the same security fixes. Another example is makedev, which was had its last upstream release in '98 and is at patchlevel 82 in Debian. Or netcat, last released in '96, patchlevel 32 in Debian, and a fork/rewrite at netcat.sourceforge.net. Or xgalaga, whose upstream author has fallen off the net and last released it in '98. The Debian package, which I maintain, is at patchlevel 37, and seeme to be the only place a lot of people can find to send patches to. But I don't want to be its upstream maintainer. This is the kind of thing that makes me gibber in horror when people at Ubuntu talk about Debian and other distros being part of an "ecosystem of software". I don't want to be part of an ecosystem; I'd rather be part of something that works not something that muddles through via massive trial-and-error and redundancy. Biomass is another word for "shit". But I digress.. The most productive thing I've seen done to try to address this general problem is the Unmaintained Free Software wiki, which tries to track this software and find new maintainers. That has managed to match up some software with interested people (though it failed with xgalaga), but I think it actually works less well for big and important software that ends up forked and maintained separately by the major linux distributions. I, myself, am beginning to use the degree of divergence from upstream as an indicator of how well a distribution maintains a given peice of software, with more divergence == bad. A distro that's doing a good job will a) get their patches integrated upstream and b) should work with other distros to find a new developer if upstream goes missing or insane. This is the inverse of what people might naively consider a good metric of how much work a distro is doing, but I think it leads to better software in the long run.

Argh... trying to get caught up on this journal in the wee hours of the morning here in wt:Odense. I've had pretty bad jet lag this trip -- I've never been particularly good with time changes, and the North-America-to-Europe switcheroo really throws me off. So by 2PM I'm falling down on my feet, but at 4AM I'm rarin' to go. Odense has been a particularly nice place to visit. We got into wt:Copenhagen a few days ago, and crashed at the Airport Hilton there. It's actually attached to the airport -- you can just walk right in. Maj got a good deal on a room, and we figured it would make sense to sleep with the baby right there, rather than fight the train system to find another hotel in the city centre. After a free brunch including many different kinds of pickled fish, and a looong nap, we took the train into the Central Station in Copenhagen, right by Tivoli Gardens. There were lines around the block for the amusement park, but we skirted them and headed into the pedestrian area near City Hall. Based on a recommendation in Wikitravel, we went to the line of caf s and restaurants off of Nyhavn, a sliver of water poking into the heart of the town. It was a great walk, and we had a casual sidewalk dinner at a place called Carl's Corner. The canal was lined with boats that had been converted to restaurants -- we may try one when we go back to Copenhagen this week. tags: travel copenhagen jetlag nyhaven

Wikisym The next morning I got up at dawn and got on a train to Odense for Wikisym. I missed my connection at the Central Station, and all the trains were running late, so I got real confused about where to go. The fact that I was carrying all of our luggage didn't help matters. But a few false starts later, I managed to get myself oriented and on my way. The train ride was beautiful -- wt:Denmark is a very pretty country, with rolling grassy hills and clusters of small, peak-rooved houses by the tracks. The trip from Copenhagen to Odense takes you from wt:Zealand to wt:Funen, across a long rail bridge. Very impressive. Once I'd landed in Odense and got myself organized, I slipped into the back of the room for Wikisym to catch the last few minutes of Angela Beesley's keynote address. Angela might be the hardest-working person in Wikidom -- she's a tireless community organizer not only for the Wikimedia Foundation sites like Wikipedia but also for Wikia's sites. After her talk, we did an wp:Open Space session, which continued throughout the day, interlaced with the academic presentations. I'm getting to be a big fan of Open Space; it was really effective for RecentChangesCamp, and I think it works well for organizing a conference. Ted Ernst led the sessions, with the help of Gerard Muller of the Danish Open Space Institute. Probably the most productive Open Space session for me was the one about non-text wikis -- using wiki techniques for video, audio, image and visual language editing. I'm fascinated by this stuff, and it's great to hear that some people are working with SVG and SMIL to do in-browser multimedia editing. The consensus is that the technologies Aren't There Yet but are around the corner. The other major thing I think I picked up from this session was Eugene Eric Kim's discussion of Wiki Ohana. Ohana is the Hawaiian word for family; the Wiki Ohana is a project to develop some interoperability and a transmission of our Wiki principles to new members of the family. I think it's a great idea and I'm going to try to get involved further. tags: wikisym2006 wikisym open space wiki ohana

Odense We had a great walk around Odense's core pedestrian area. It's not exceptional for Northern European towns -- it reminds me of the Netherlands, and Maj of Switzerland -- but the car-free cobble-stone walking areas are a real relief after years in North America. We have some pedestrian areas in Montreal, of course, but not in the same way. Odense is the childhood home of wp:Hans Christian Anderson, and the city is decorated with statues of HCA, and of characters from his stories (the Tin Soldier, Thumbelina, etc.) It gives a kind of fairy-tale air to the town. I'm not sure they should feel so proud of being Anderson's childhood home, though -- from everything I've read, his childhood was nightmarishly cruel, and his abysmally poor family was harshly treated by the society here. But, of course, that's in the past. Now, we had a real nice time walking around. Amita June likes tottering along on the cobblestones, and shouting really loud in the small streets to hear the echos. We ended up having dinner in a place called the Cuckoo Caf -- great food under a spreading tree in a little square. This morning -- no, yesterday morning -- Maj got up and took the first sessions, and Amita June and I slept in. We went off into town again to find a bakery, and shared a chunk of brunsviger, a sugary pastry that will probably rot out her tiny teeth. I had a cup of tea, which was less than satisfying. I've been trying to cut caffeine out of my life, so we've been having decaf at home, but they don't seem to serve it in caf s here. I'm a creature of habit, and I like the taste of coffee even if it doesn't have the caffeine oomph. tags: odense amitajune decaf hca

CAPS LOCK SUCKS In response to Lars's defense of CAPS LOCK: Lars, you ignorant slut. Caps lock has been the bane of online culture since the invention of mixed case in the late 1960s. It is a hallmark of clueless newbie-ism for people who are too analphabetic to remember the exceedingly simple English capitalization rules. The only legitimate purpose for CAPS LOCK is for doing C macros and defines, but hey, who writes in C any more? Anyways, that's just lazy programming. A real programmer would write a macro to capitalize the names of other macros where used. That's just good programming practice. Another important point is that CAPS LOCK is Eurocentric and imperialistic. What value does CAPS LOCK have for someone writing in Eritrean, Malayalam or Ojibwa? None at all. Yet dead white males like Lars Wirzenius want to force their CAPS LOCK cultural hegemony on an increasingly global culture. For shame. The worst thing about CAPS LOCK is that it squats in the middle of the most important letters on the keyboard, like a rat trap waiting to spring. Big and ugly, it always catches your left pinky when you're reaching for Ctl or Shift or Tab or A or whatever. Key-chording is here to stay, and CAPS LOCK not only ignores this important UI development but actively interferes with it. Modal interfaces are rightfully extinct, and CAPS LOCK needs to go the way of the dinosaur. It's time to eliminate this obsolete key once and for all. (This message brought to you by The Taxpayers Against Caps Lock Coalition. I, Evan Prodromou, endorse this message.) tags: caps lock ignorant slut

Tag clouds [en.wikipedia.org] are a current must-have for web 2.0 applications. Examples can be found for bookmarks, blog entries, photos, music or books. Tag clouds are hip, because they're a dynamic feature and show the "Zeitgeist" [wikipedia]. They given an overview on the users ("California" in flickr) or on current hot topics ("Israel", "Lebanon" in technorati). However, tag clouds also have severe limitations. First of all, they're arbitrarily ordered. Usually alphabetic, so there is no content relationship among the entires. Secondly, they only show an excerpt, since there are usually much more tags than fit on the screen. Thirdly, they're atomic information, whereas relations as used e.g. in RDF [wikipedia] can convey much more complex information. I'm trying to push tag clouds to a next level. They're a gimmick right now, but maybe we can make them to a powerful navigation tool? Together with Enrico Zini I've just created my first tag cloud (I've skipped making a tag cloud for my blog...). Well, it quickly evolved beyond a tag cloud. You could maybe call it a tag sky. Or tag forest. I'm not using my blog or something like this for the tag cloud. That would be quite boring, I'm not doing real tagging on it. Instead I'm using software tags. The Debtags project, led by Enrico and I, has been working on software tags for some years now during our spare time. We have about 600 tags in a dozen of facets, and 15000 software packages (I don't have the number ready how many of that are somewhat tagged already). Well, the tagging efforts are still far from complete, thats why we're currently working on an AI to assist tagging efforts, too. We generated two different renderings of the tag clouds for you: one separated cloud per facet, and all folded into one big cloud. Oh, and actually click on one of the tags, it will take you to a more complex tag-based navigation tool and a tagger. So what makes these different from the usual tag clouds you see everywhere (apart from the sheer size, sorry about that. Maybe we'll add buttons next to hide/show tags with low occurrence numbers)? Well, the tags next to each other aren't completely unrelated any more, since they are (in both renderings) grouped by their facet. This makes it easier to locate something - go through the red facets first, then look at the tags in the group. I'm thinking about a second step, which would involve dynamic expanding details in the tag cloud, or hiding them, finally transforming the tag cloud into a true navigation utility beyond a "single click filter". In my final diploma thesis, one of the topics to work on suggested by my professor is doing "tag clouds" (i.e. weighted lists) for relations. The prototype will likely be integrated with the IkeWiki semantic wiki. I don't have a clear vision of how the "relation cloud" will work or look like, but I havn't started with my tesis yet anyway. I currently imagine up to three clouds (corresponding to the empty places in the relation) that will dynamically adopt to the choices already made by the user. Some zooming will probably be needed, too. Another use of tag clouds would be a visualization of the AI - the weights could be chosen by how sure the AI is about this tag; the cloud would then describe the AIs rating of a software package description. If you have some ideas, good links, relevant papers or other feedback, just send me an email to erich@debian.org. Thank you.

When moving packages from one package to an other, take special care for proper Replaces: and Conflicts: lines. Oh... and when finally testing the upgrades, don't waste your time testing it with plain dpkg on the command line. It will fail. You'll need to test it with apt-get or aptitude directly.

Yes, the xen images from linux 2.6.16-18 in unstable does not work with the currect xen 3.0 in unstable and testing. The interface for the priviledged domain changed in an incompatible way. I'm working on that problem and 2.6.17-7 will contain a complete new infrastructure.

Get it while it’s hot! It has been uploaded to Debian and will get to the mirrors in a day or two, but if you really want it now, then grab 0.10 release from Sourceforge. The last version of SBackup was released in last November so this has been long overdue, that is why I want to extend many thanks to Jonh Wendell, who reignited my motivation for SBackup. A large part of this release is his work. We finally have two out of three most requested features: i18n and purging of old backups. Now the progress indication is the big thing people still want to see. And also lots and lots of small cornercase bugs have been fixed, some of them required rewriting chunks f the code, some others were oneliners that bothered many people. I am very proud of this release and I am looking forward to what we can do for 0.11, one small step at a time. P.S. I have already received emails of congratulation about the release and a bug report requesting the new version in Debian. Needless to say that the package has been uploaded and will go out in the next mirror push.

I was added in the tasksel group some weeks ago, and started my own branch containing stuff that hopefully will be considered for the tasksel that will be used in post-beta3 d-i.<br /><br />The changes i made are:<br /><ul><li>Add security-audit task.</li><li>Add backup-server task.</li><li>Add scanner support in desktop task using xsane.</li><li>Add video playback and cd/dvd burn support to gnome-desktop using totem-mozilla and bonfire respectively.</li><li>Replace qpopper with courier-pop in mail-server task.</li><li>Replace uw-imapd with courier-imap in mail-server task.</li><li>Add sqwebmail and courier-webadmin in mail-server task.<br /></li></ul>Suggestions are welcome, but keep in mind that the 'cd/dvd burn support' thing should be changed. I don't think bonfire is the best choice by default, but added it to avoid push some old dependencies that for example gnomebaker (if added) would bring in.<br /><br />The stratus' tasksel branch is browsable at:<br /><a href="http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/tasksel/branches/stratus/?rev=0&sc=0">http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/tasksel/branches/stratus/?rev=0&amp;sc=0</a>

Peter Nuttall is my personal hero for running with my idea to limit N consecutive posts on a planetplanet installation - if you’d like test it and apply it to planet.debian.org, or elsewhere, find it here. (Note: Patch is reversed). Bad day at work today. I spent half the morning wrestling with xen on my laptop - it seems that linux-image-2.6.16-2-xen-686 or linux-modules-2.6.16-2-xen-686 panics on boot in some weird Xen way. (ie. before initrd.) I upgraded to these packages yesterday afternoon, and the problem only showed itself by a failure to boot this morning. Since the laptop is fairly new none of my install CDs were capable of booting it with networking. In the end I downloaded knoppix, broke a window whilst waiting for it to download, and finally installed a non-Xen kernel so I could work. I’ve reported a bug against the kernel package (with a bogus email address which I’ll need to fixup afterwards) but it hasn’t shown up in the bts yet. There isn’t anything obvious in the bootup message just a panic after “disabling trace buffers” so I’m not sure the report will be terribly useful. In other “worky” news four months after making the request I got a second phone line installed in my flat today, so I can get another network connection. Neat. Now I need to track down somebody to replace / fix my window. Thats going to be pricy, but it will have to be done before the weather turns or I’ll freeze in my house. The problem is frustratingly mechanical - the window “handle” is jammed in such a way that I can’t turn the handle and close the window - so it is permananetly open about four inches. The frustration comes primarily because if the window would open more, (it won’t), I could use a screwdrive to unscrew the locking site - and that would allow me to close it. (Albeit leaving it unlocked). Its half-open/half-closed state is just the worse way for it to be stuck.

People writing about how the "new graphical installer" looks the same as the one "in text" don't understand debian installer. If you want to know the truth, 'get the facts':<br /><ul><li>There's a (not so) new frontend (GTK+ based) - read 'skin', not a entirely new installer</li><li>The questions will never be totally different than the dialog frontend (read 'blue' background) or readline frontend (read 'text mode'). It makes no sense<br /></li><li>The partitioner can look better in the GTK+ frontend and hopefully will, after Etch release<br /></li><li>If in doubt ask in debian-boot (http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot) for technical issues or debian-publicity (http://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity) for press related stuff, before post your shiny new article about beta quality software that you've no idea what really does and contains behind the scenes</li><li>debian-installer development page is http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer wiki.debian.org contains useful information to make a good or poor article too, but it's like the pile of papers in our desk, nothing more.<br /></li></ul>

This year I purchased a 3 chip video camera with the hopes of capturing some good footage at geek conferences. Part of my motivation was selfish (perhaps one day I can make a small documentary) and part of my motivation was selfless (give video footage to the geek community). Now my footage is available and I will put more up in the coming year. Warning: I have no experience with shooting so I am sure I have done most things wrong. I hope to learn some of the more technical stuff over the next few years.

"<span style="">I will say it here -- if an OpenSSH hole is found that applies to SunSSH, Sun will not be informed. Or maybe that has happened already." -- Theo de Raadt</span>. Well, the fact is that he doesn't need to inform Sun about a hole, but the whole community and i think he does, no?<br /><br />By the way, for the second time (to say the least) i think that Theo is right and raised some good points but close <a href="http://os.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/03/20/2050223&amp;from=rss">his last interview</a> with a weird phrase. Well, let me comment about what i think is Debian related in that interview:<br /><span style=""></span><span style=""><br /></span><span style="">"We often run into vendors who have signed NDA agreements with Linux developers, who will then happily write a Linux driver filled with magic numbers, which only one developer in the world understands. Having signed the NDA ensured that Linux got a working driver, sure, but the internals are indistinguishable from magic. It cannot be fixed by anyone else, because it is full of secrets. It is a source code version of a blob."</span><br /><span style=""><br /></span><span style="">It push us into the blob business again. I think we should team up with OpenBSD folks, and tell them that some Linux people care about free software as a whole. If upstream (read Linus) doesn't care about unmaintanable drivers that are written by one person under a NDA we should. Does anyone have or wants to prepare a list of these drivers ? If some of them are already in a cleaner form into the OpenBSD kernel we should prepare a new list and a linux kernel hacker with free time could redo the drivers in a cleaner way, no ?<br /><br />It's need to point out that Theo said many Asian vendors are more documentation friendly than the Americans. Are you surprised?</span><br /><br />Closing, if you feel lost in this post probably you will understand me when you buy your next laptop cointaining a cool, new wireless chipset made by a american company.

<a onblur="try parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully(); catch(e) " href="http://www.telecable.es/personales/algarcia/img/epiphany-88x31.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 89px; height: 31px;" src="http://www.telecable.es/personales/algarcia/img/epiphany-88x31.png" alt="" border="0" /></a>If you're using GNOME as your desktop environment, it's possible that you're using the wrong browser or just using one that isn't doing everything you want as i was, right ? Well, when Firefox came into the scene with one of its previous names i was using Galeon. Galeon worked for me, but it lacked some features that the new browser was offering. I would like to tell you that the same thing is happening again, and it's now time to give <a href="http://www.gnome.org/projects/epiphany/">epiphany</a> a try. If you did it before, do it again with the latest epiphany (2.14.0) in Debian sid, my reasons are below:<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Gecko<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span></span></span>Yes, it uses Gecko 1.8 as backend and not gtkhtml so don't worry about page rendering. For those 'in the loop', it's already linked against <a href="http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XULRunner">xulrunner</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span></span></span>library. Firefox (in Debian sid) isn't yet.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span></span>Bookmarks</span><br />You can attach tags (epiphany calls them 'topics') to the bookmarks and it will organize everything in a tree for you. The bookmark manager looks good for me too, i'm not too much into the bookmark thing but together with deskbar-applet and epiphany topics i can find what i want.<br /><br />The most interesting feature is that epiphany can look up to bookmarks published using avahi (mdns/dns-sd daemon) and show them as "local sites". In other words, you can setup a centralized bookmark server and all the epiphany users in your network will be able to see them. I've a mt-daapd server, and epiphany recognize that there's a admin website around, just like rhythmbox does.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Extensions<br /></span>Yes, it has extensions and is able to do ad-block and all that. Unfortunately the latest <a href="http://packages.debian.org/epiphany-extensions">epiphany-extensions</a> package still needs to be built for i386, but it's already ok for amd64 arm hppa powerpc s390.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;">RSS<br /></span>I had some rss apps around, but wasn't really using them because what i needed was subscribe from the browser, organize the feeds in the app using topics/tags or folders and see some interesting integration between that app and the browser. It's now done, try epiphany and liferea. =)<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;">Memory<br /></span>After eight hours using epiphany it won't eat all your memory to 'optimize page loading' and even with this "bug" i don't see epiphany (and the rest of my desktop) too slow to open a new page after all this time.<br /><br />I think that a lot of users and developers will just look to epiphany as a serious Firefox alternative, after a big "user oriented" distribution pick it as the default browser. Thanks to the epiphany developers anyway, keep the good work.

This post is based on the <a href="http://azure.humbug.org.au/%7Eaj/blog/2006/04/12#2006-04-11-maintainers">DPL blog entry</a> about Debian Maintainers (DMs), that should be basically people with different privileges to upload just some packages to our archive. Well, someone already pointed out that with just one package a DM can hurt too much. That's right, so discussing this subject at work, i came up with the following idea:<br /><br />We could give rights to these DMs, as aj described them, to upload their packages to experimental (and only there).<br /><br />Read a interesting experimental description:<br />"Warning: The <span class="pred">experimental</span> distribution contains software that is likely unstable or buggy and may even cause data loss. If you ignore this warning and install it nevertheless, you do it on your own risk."<br />Source: http://packages.debian.org/experimental/<br /><br />It solves the motivation problem where we've a DM that just wants to see his cool app packaged into Debian but he doesn't want to be a DD. We've a new one, the DM probably will want to see his package in our next release, so it will need to enter sid and after that testing early or late. In my scenario, he can do that in different ways:<br /><br />- Ask a DD to move (and keep pushing new versions) into sid. It's a different sponsor scheme and we should ask DDs to just move packages from experimental to sid, after X days in experimental and testing (of course). DD will move the package into sid, so no need to worry about package problems, the problem here is security. We trust a DD more than a DM, so...;<br /><br />- Some AMs, and "old world" sponsors could reunite in a project in alioth to review and do "experimental->sid" moves;<br /><br />- A DM that enters the NM process, should ask his AM to move his packages from experimental->sid, during the "t&amp;s" tests. Waiting for DAM he should use the two solutions above.<br /><br />We can consider these "experimental->sid" moves, RC bugs before Etch+1 freeze. How ? We should do a "cleanup" in experimental moving the packages to sid or remove them from experimental.<br /><br />Closing, giving rights to DMs upload to experimental is the key in my post. The rest are just drafted guidelines. Comments? :)

Guilherme Pastore and I silently started python-modules project some time ago. I drafted our policy, uploaded a package to our svn repository and Paul Wise joined us. We aim to do for Python language in Debian what pkg-perl does for Perl, but until then we were out of time to finnish the policy, prepare the announcement and keep the things moving (adding people to the group, ...).<br /><br />Raphael Hertzog heard about us and joined the team (now as a admin), and we announced today this new group in debian-devel-announce. Guilherme is still busy with real life stuff, but we're already 9 members ready to flood the Debian archives with high quality python modules packaged. We don't want to package only new modules, so if you're maintaining a python module in Debian contact us at <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-python">debian-python mailing list</a>.<br /><br />For those who see that there's a pkg-python group, yes it exists. pkg-python is specific to Python package itself, python-modules aims package and keep with a good quality the Python modules only (not apps). I think we can merge pkg-turbogears, python-krb5 that are groups for modules too and probably others into python-modules not pkg-python, but we will coordinate our work using debian-python mailing list as i said.

<a href="http://www.tribulaciones.org/blog/computers/geek/google-calendar_13-04-2006">Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo pointed out</a> that Google launched its <a href="http://calendar.google.com">Calendar</a> web site. I've decide to keep a public Debian calendar there to see if it will be useful for someone else. Actually there's dinstall run time, debcamp, debconf and debian day events.<br /><br />You can subscribe to the calendar using <a href="http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/5o3lhd71rp4ibum8btc3tmglh8@group.calendar.google.com/public/basic">ical</a> or the <a href="http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/5o3lhd71rp4ibum8btc3tmglh8@group.calendar.google.com/public/basic">xml</a> address, but you don't need to subscribe. Just search for debian events in Google Calendar and the results will appear. Give it some time, since i just subscribed the events there.<br /><br />Closing, tell me about local Debian events, Debian stuff that runs daily and more and then i'll add it there.

I'll be in Porto Alegre, Brazil <a href="http://fisl.softwarelivre.org/7.0/www/?q=en">for the event</a> (FISL, in portuguese) from 19 may until 22, the last day. There will be some interesting Debian related activities there:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Debian stand<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span></span>We will have a stand in the event, and there we plan to coordinate a Key Signing Party (KSP) and a Bug Squashing Party (BSP). Since we will have many DDs and NMs there, it sounds promising. If you want to join us in the BSP, keep an eye at debian-qa mailing list and irc.freenode.net - #debian-bugs.<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><br />Sacix<br /></span>I will talk about a CDD called <a href="http://www.sacix.org/">Sacix</a>, that aims to be the default choice for telecentres and counts with more than 15000 end-users in Brazil right now. The project wasn't a CDD until i jumped in and released with a team the 5.11 (November, last year). The next release is scheduled to May and will be Sarge based again, but with a interesting telecentre management system developed in PHP, some "in house made" backports and stuff from backports.org. Stay tuned or just go there and watch my talk.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Debian-BR-CDD<br /></span>Unlike Sacix, <a href="http://cdd.debian-br.org/">Debian-BR-CDD</a> has no clear goal in terms of audience and in its first release ships the most user-friendly GNU/Linux desktop for Portuguese speakers until now. The 1.0 announcement was made, but the release party and Otavio Salvador (DD and Debian-BR-CDD starter) talk will happen during the event.<br /><br />I'm sure that i will have some time to keep uploading <a href="http://python-modules.alioth.debian.org">python-modules</a> and meet with Otavio to talk about some new stuff for LTSP package and discuss it with <a href="http://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-ltsp">pkg-ltsp</a> members. Hopefully i'll be more involved in GNOME too, due to the evil <a href="http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=guilherme.pastore@terra.com.br">Guilherme</a> influence, that just received his account. Isn't it cool when you see a 15yr old hacker joining the project ? That's the real "fresh blood" we need.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span>

There's a <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP">Bug Squashing Party</a> going on (April 20th - 23rd) as Guilherme <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/04/msg00012.html">announced in debian-devel-announce</a>. If you're a new maintainer or debian developer, join us to squash some bugs helping Etch to be released soon. The BSP is being coordinated in irc.debian.org - #debian-bugs and there will be a real-life brazilian DDs and NMs meeting dedicating some time to the BSP, in some hours. We plan to do it daily until the end of the 7th Free Software International Forum were some of us are right now.

Well, during our current BSP i've decided to stop working on the RC bugs for a while and upload a new package that should be interesting for many users: utnubu-meta source package. I'll explain the background and the history about this package now...<br /><br />In Ubuntu there' s ubuntu-meta source package that results in <a href="http://packages.debian.org/ubuntu-minimal">ubuntu-minimal</a>, <a href="http://packages.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-standard">ubuntu-standard</a> and <a href="http://packages.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-desktop">ubuntu-desktop</a>. They're metapackages and the list of packages is built with a tool called germinate based on a seed in the web. I've a <a href="http://people.debian.org/%7Estratus/bzr/debian-seeds/">branch of cjwatson' ubuntu seed</a> and asked him to upload <a href="http://packages.debian.org/germinate">germinate</a> in Debian, he did! To avoid confusion, i've renamed "our ubuntu-meta" to utnubu-meta and it will be included in <a href="http://alioth.debian.org/projects/utnubu">utnubu alioth group </a>in svn soon.<br /><br />If you're interested in utnubu stuff, go check utnubu-meta changelog and "backmerge" some of the packages that aren't included in Debian' metapackages.