For some time (probably since upgrade to 1.0) it looks like my Piwik installation did not log URLs and page titles from visitors. Simply all URLs and page titles logged were blank. While I still postponed the investigation of this, I was pretty sure it must be some configuration issue and not a bug, so I felt reluctant to report this. Today I finally found time and copied upstream global.ini.php to my installation and it seems to do the trick. I should better care of upgrading next time :-). PS: Any volunteer for packaging piwik for Debian?

It might seem odd that someone who has come from a research organisation to one which is for education and research should ask a question such as the title! Some explanations are in order. Mathematics is one of the oldest intellectual activities of mankind, so it is not surprising that the amount of mathematics that has already been done is enormous as compared with almost any other discipline. One consequence (that has not escaped notice!) is that people who prove theorems are often much older today than in earlier years. Another important consequence is that for anyone active in mathematical research today, most mathematical learning has happened outside the classroom. Moreover, such non-classroom learning is far from linear. Monuments of mathematical beauty are built on wooden stilts; the latter are only turned into firm pillars when one finally writes down the fruits of one s research. The above paragraph is nothing new to working mathematicians, but each incoming generation must learn it anew. This is because courses and books in mathematics are often structured in a linear way. There are clearly defined prerequisites and everything new is either defined or proved in strict deductive order. This serves the important purpose that each fresh batch of students verifies the grand edifice . However, it also leaves many a student with the false impression that this is how mathematics is done. Even worse, it may leave the impression that classroom and textbook learning is what mathematics is about. One should certainly strive to improve one s classroom skills, to write more readable textbooks and to design better courses. However, one should never lose sight of the wide open spaces where many new mathematicial objects are built.

Another one, just not to forget it, since I'm just starting to play with grsecurity. When building package under pbuilder/cowbuilder and using a grsec kernel, you have some stuff to tune. I built my grsec kernel with the sysctl options enabled, so it's easier to fix. The first thing I needed, not directly related to building packages, is the permission for my user to execute stuff in untrusted folder (since I really need to be able to run stuff from my home). I've configured Trusted Path Execution with:

corsac@hidalgo: sudo sysctl -a grep kernel.grsecurity.tpe
kernel.grsecurity.tpe = 1
kernel.grsecurity.tpe_gid = 500
kernel.grsecurity.tpe_invert = 1
kernel.grsecurity.tpe_restrict_all = 1 So what I need from there is to add my user to that group:

corsac@hidalgo: sudo addgroup --gid 500 grsec-tpe
Adding group grsec-tpe' (GID 500) ...
Done.
corsac@hidalgo: sudo adduser corsac grsec-tpe
Adding user corsac' to group grsec-tpe' ...
Adding user corsac to group grsec-tpe
Done. That works fine for general usage (at the cost of less protection for my user). When trying to build stuff in pbuilder, the first problem I hit was during dependencies installation:

[81903.221359] grsec: From 127.0.0.6: denied chmod +s
of /home/corsac/debian/pbuilder/build/cow.8616/usr/local/share/sgml/stylesheet
by /home/corsac/debian/pbuilder/build/cow.8616/bin/chmod[chmod:10424] uid/euid:0/0 gid/egid:0/0,
parent /home/corsac/debian/pbuilder/build/cow.8616/var/lib/dpkg/info/sgml-base.postinst[sgml-base.posti:10421] uid/euid:0/0 gid/egid:0/0 grsec enforces some more protection when in a chroot, and especially forbids some operations in there. So I add an exception, using sysctl. For that, a convenient /etc/sysctl.conf.d/grsec.conf will help:

# we need to do stuff in chroots for package building
kernel.grsecurity.chroot_deny_chmod=0

# lock grsec sysctl
# kernel.grsecurity.grsec_lock=1 The last one is still in comment since I know I'll have to tune further the sysctl. With this, the build-deps install fine, but when starting the build itself, it fails because I can't execute stuff inside chroot, and especially not debian/rules:

Sep 20 19:43:24 hidalgo kernel: [87339.510137] grsec: From 127.0.0.6: denied untrusted exec of
/home/corsac/debian/pbuilder/build/cow.26657/tmp/buildd/evolution-data-server-2.30.3/debian/rules by
/home/corsac/debian/pbuilder/build/cow.26657/usr/bin/fakeroot-sysv[fakeroot:10916] uid/euid:1234/1234 gid/egid:1234/1234,
parent /home/corsac/debian/pbuilder/build/cow.26657/usr/bin/fakeroot-sysv[fakeroot:10895] uid/euid:1234/1234 gid/egid:1234/1234 That's again because of TPE. Because, inside the chroot, the pbuilder user (uid 1234) doesn't belong to the grsec-tpe group (which doesn't even exist). So the correct fix here is to create a 500 group inside the chroot, and add the pbuilder user:

corsac@hidalgo: sudo cowbuilder --login --save-after-login
-> Copying COW directory
[ ]
root@hidalgo:/# sudo addgroup --gid 500 grsec-tpe
Adding group grsec-tpe' (GID 500) ...
Done.
root@hidalgo:/# sudo adduser pbuilder grsec-tpe
Adding user pbuilder' to group grsec-tpe' ...
Adding user pbuilder to group grsec-tpe
Done. Et voil !

Richard Darst has been writing about DebConf organisation and wrote about DebCamp. Thought I'd give my story about where the idea for DebCamp came from, for some context. DebConf2 in Toronto was my first DebConf. I had sadly missed DebConf1 due to EPASSPORT despite having sponsored tickets; something I still kick myself about. Things were not as well organised back then. Anyway, since Ottowa Linux Symposium was the week before DebConf, some of us were in Canada early for that, and needed to find something to do in the time between conferences. My thought was, find someplace to camp. It'd be a cheap way to see more of Canada and decompress. I posted this plan to debian-private and Andreas Schuldei and I spent several days canoing around Algonquin park. Of course, we'd never met before. I'd met probably less than five European debian developers before that point. We experienced big scary lakes that challenged our limited canoe skills, portaged and camped, and even saw a moose. Later during DebConf2, I distinctly remember mentioning our camping trip and saying "we could have a DebCamp before the next DebConf". And sure enough, before DebConf3 there was a DebCamp[1]. In the days we hacked on d-i and stuff. We camped out in the gym of a primary school in Oslo, and hung out through the long evenings out front. Some people even brought tents. Since then, DebCamp has developed into the integral warmup for DebConf that Richard describes. I'd rather see it more ad-hoc and scruffy, but you can't argue with the purpose it serves. So, are there any good places to camp near Banja Luka? [1] Even then the DebConf orga team made it seem that easy.

After 20 days of final polishing and maturing since the release candidate, the PostgreSQL team released the final 9.0 version today. Hot off the press, I uploaded postgresql-9.0 final into Debian unstable; they will not go into Debian Squeeze, because Squeeze is frozen and it will take a long time to port all the packaged server side extensions to 9.0. If you are on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS or Ubuntu 10.10, you can add my PostgreSQL backports for stable Ubuntu releases PPA, which will carry 9.0 until it can be moved to the official Ubuntu backports (i. e. when 9.0 goes into Ubuntu Natty). Enjoy, and kudos to the PostgreSQL team!

This is mostly inspired on this article. The main difference is that I talk about sup instead of mutt, and use SpamAssassin together with bogofilter. Having all these utilities installed and the sources for sup configured, you only need to touch procmail and sup configuration files. My ~/.procmailrc contains a lot of comments, but what it does is basicly the following: If the message is smaller than 250 KiB, it calls SpamAssassin with it. This will create the headers X-Spam-Level and X-Spam-Status in this message. Only messages smaller than 250KiB are considered because most spam isn't bigger than that, and considering big messages would overload SpamAssassin. Then, if SpamAssassin consider this message as spam, tell bogofilter about it. Next, call bogofilter, which will add the X-Bogosity header to the message. Now we have to configure sup. We need to tell it to update bogofilter when we manually mark a message as spam. For this we can use ~/.sup/hooks/mark-as-spam.rb. We must consider two cases: the case where bogofilter thought it was not spam, and the case where bogofilter was not sure about its status. In the first case, we must tell it to forget that the message was not spam and to register it as spam now. In the second, just register it as spam. Also, we don't want spam on inbox. So we can edit ~/.sup/hooks/before-add-message.rb to look for the headers generated by SpamAssassin and Bogofilter and remove the :inbox label. It's important to mark unsure messages with a label so that we don't forget to mark it as spam if it is, and as not spam if it's not. So we need a way to mark messages as not spam. I included a new keybinding in ~/.sup/hooks/startup.rb. Unfortunatelly, I don't know how to include a new keybinding in sup without repeating all the keybindings for the mode I'm dealing with, so that's how I've made it. The command removes the :unsure label and mark it as non-spam. It also sets the undo command, unregistering the message in bogofilter. The case where the message was previously marked as spam, and not unsure, is also handled. I'm sure there's a lot of room for improvement, specially in the Ruby part, but it seems to be working.

The week before DebConf has been traditionally been DebCamp. This has been advertised as a time for core teams to come early to work on their projects together, and this post will talk more about what that means.At DebCamp, there is not much infrastructure set up yet. We have (unfurnished) hacklabs, accommodations, and usually food from the very beginning. We'll have Internet access, but the network and power distribution isn't set up yet. People find what they can and make their own space to work. The DebConf team works on setting up hacklabs starting on day 0 or 1, and the DebCampers serve as the test subjects to make sure that everything works.There intentionally aren't many scheduled activities during DebCamp. The organizers have too much else to do, and events aren't the main purpose of DebCamp. If some people wanted a place to meet, they could probably find a place, though. Some years, there have been one or two workshop type events on the DebCamp schedule.DebCamp has frequently been explained by "Development teams like debian-installer and debian-edu also have the possibility of meeting beforehand for undisturbed collaborative work. ... Interested teams should contact the organizers upfront to make special arrangements." (From the DC10 website) Also included in DebCamp are the DebConf organizers - we desperately need that time to pull organizers from over the world together to get us on the same page locally. Furthermore, anyone without a workplan can attend DebCamp by paying their actual costs.However, saying that DebCamp is limited to these groups of people doesn't reflect reality: Anyone can attend. Thus the DebCamp description doesn't necessarily reflect the actual limits for attending. This has the appearance of resulting in (and some people believe it has) a DebCamp which is biased towards those who well-connected with organizers, since they know that basically anyone can go and get a free extended holiday with Debian people. In fact, getting anyone to review the submitted workplans has met resistance in the last few years.For DebConf10, we did manage to reach agreement to filter out possible tourist-like people, but it was a similar (or only slightly more strict) criteria than DebConf itself. This was done very late, too late to be fair to force adjustments in travel plans of too many people. The difference between the DebCamp listed criteria and who has gotten sponsored for DebCamp in the past caused contention among some new organizers this year. Why didn't they know that they would have qualified for DebCamp past years? The moral of the story is that we need to be more clear on the purpose of DebCamp and make the actual qualifications for attending concrete and well-known so that it remains fair.Of course, it's also true that non-core developers and other interested people to attending DebCamp is a good thing, since it is a strong motivator to get more involved in Debian. Local people are encouraged to attend and learn/hack/volunteer. DebCamp isn't meant to be exclusive, just to reflect the realities of a limited budget.
DebCamp is a very important part of DebConf, both for Debian development purposes and for DebConf set-up purposes. However, since it is a week of limited attendance with mostly the same people attending year after year, we need to ensure that it remains transparent to the rest of Debian.Tags: debconf

There seems to be increasing demand for changing default theme in phpMyAdmin. Well the obvious question is which one to choose :-). There are currently 3 themes compatible with 3.3 branch, what is still far away from current master, however I don't see that they would mean big improvement over current ones. Maybe we should just make some contest for new theme? Anyway if we decided to change the theme, we will still get complains from users that we did the change. At least this is what I remember from last attempt to do so several years ago :-).

In one scene of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, her laptop has been broken. These are the files that she needs to recover from it. Yep, debconf templates files, debhelper md5sums, and generally /var/lib/dpkg/info/ -- in a film full of data, these are the first data that the plot turns on. (PS, Even super-anti-heroes should probably make their backups before battle.)

thanks to Lucas' recent archive rebuild & bug filing we have new stuff to work on :) my activities in the last week:

• #567241 libbuffy-perl: "fails after binnmu"
  apply patches from ntyni and upload to DELAYED/2
• #578458 src:libcoro-perl: "libcoro-perl: FTBFS: E: Caught signal 'Terminated': terminating immediately"
  send a mail to -close after it finally builds again (pkg-perl)
• #592620 time: "time: FTBFS in ubuntu due to nonexistent build dependency"
  upload NMU prepared by carnil to DELAYED/5
• #594503 liblunar-1-0-dbg: "liblunar-1-0-dbg: empty package"
  tell dh_strip about the -dbg package and upload to DELAYED/2
• #595473 gobby-0.5: "does not depend on dbus"
  close the bug as #595480 is fixed
• #595836 enscribe: "enscribe: FTBFS in squeeze: Nonexistent build-dependency: 'libgd-dev'"
  switch order of real/virtual package in Build-Depends and uploaded to DELAYED/2
• #595837 libproxy: "libproxy: FTBFS in squeeze: pacrunner_mozjs.c:33:19: error: jsapi.h: No such file or directory"
  tag unreproducible, close later
• #595845 namazu2: "namazu2: FTBFS in squeeze: Nonexistent build-dependency: 'tk8.3'"
  fix build-dep and upload to DELAYED/2
• #595850 gjs: "gjs: FTBFS in squeeze: modules/console.c:53:18: error: glib.h: No such file or directory"
  tag unreproducible, close later
• #595871 freej: "freej: FTBFS in squeeze: make[5]: *** No rule to make target ./Makefile'. Stop."
  tag unreproducible, close later
• #595876 multiboot: "multiboot: FTBFS in squeeze: rm: cannot remove debian/multiboot/usr/share/info/dir': No such file or directory"
  tag unreproducible

There are many ways that people express their thanks to Debian: mails, nice comments in a bug report, patches, so on. But to receive them in person is one of the most pleasing ones. I recently visited Bologna at the invitation of another DD (hi Guido!). The trip was nice, my first trip to this city, and a significant part of it was devoted to the local food (of course!). One evening, after a late dinner which included an absolutely fantastic Mascarpone desert, as we were paying at the cashier, one of the guys from the restaurant came forward and shook my hand while telling me something. I was tired and the few Italian I know didn't help at all, so I was at a loss on what's happening. Now, if you've ever been in a foreign country without knowing the language, you know this feeling: there is something strange going on, people are talking in a language you don't understand, and you might have just made a very big social mistake without realising it. Or it's just a silly, harmless misunderstanding. The only question is whether staying silent and just smiling is the right thing to do. In other words, you're at a complete loss. This all happens usually in just one or two seconds, before someone (if anyone, that is) manages to translate for you. In this particular case, the translation initially didn't make any sense at all: It's your t-shirt ; I usually wear t-shirts, and people never congratulate me for it. Then I realised: I was wearing one of my Debian t-shirts. My companions told him that I'm indeed involved with Debian, and he was extending his thanks. So, from a bolognese fan whose name I unfortunately didn't catch, to the Debian Project: thanks!

deb http://www.coker.com.au squeeze selinux I have an Apt repository for Squeeze SE Linux packages at the above URL. Currently it contains a modified version of ffmpeg that doesn t need execmod access on i386 and fixes the labeling of /dev/xen on systems that use devtmpfs as reported in bug #597403. I will keep updating this repository for any SE Linux related bugs that won t get fixed in Squeeze. Is there any interest in architectures other than i386 and AMD64?

And there, another day come and passed, still no real breakage, only some small things here and there. We are doing something wrong, definitely. Ok, granted, providing everyone who has experimental in their sources.list with a free upgrade path due to us suddenly forgetting that apt actually really wants this NotAutomatic: yes flag in the release instead of just looking it up in our database, later on doing the same to all of the backports user (accidently, happens when you have identical codebases), does count enough for a small icecream. But we didn t have anything serious, which is great. Alex finished patching dak rm in a way that we can now actually close all bugs attached to a (source) package we remove and was thinking of enhancing it to actually also be able to close wnpp bugs attached to it (think of O: bugs for example). Mark had design work on g-p-s, which actually is how do we generate packages and sources and how to move the config sanely into a database . Sounds easy, but trust me, it isn t, when you consider all the special cases Debian has. He also jumped in helpfully whenever there was a question around some coding and stuff, at one time turning up with the insanity/genius/younameit code that allows us to transfer even more of dak.conf into the database. This gets us a good way along the way that should end up with a dak.conf consisting of only the database details and nothing else. My job today looked similar like yesterday. Merge code I got, eat, remove lots of values from dak.conf. This weekend besides totally missing out on Baklava, had us change our dak code quite a bit: 46 files changed, 982 insertions(+), 1060 deletions(-). Besides that we do have about 18 points on our meeting notes, a mail going off to one debian lists sometime the next days summarizing it a bit more.

Asheesh posted When "free software" got a new name, which mentions about the transition period where the Free Software movement started its quest towards being understood by non-geeks, and when people started finding terms better suited for general (and specifically, business-minded) audiences. We are talking about facts that reached concretion 12 years ago, when the term Open Source was coined and divulgated. That is already far in the past to try and change it Still, during DebConf I was talking with several friends about it. In my opinion, there was never really the need to choose such an ambiguous name In English, the word Liberty unambiguously refers to free as in freedom, with no conceptual links to gratuity. Liberty is also a concept held dear by the values of the USA society (which is the birthplace of our ideological movement, so it's specially important). Jimmy Kaplowitz pointed out a reason: Liberty is an incomplete word. You could translate what Asheesh's post mentions, Freed Software Liberated Software, but libertydoes not exist as an adjective by itself, only when used as contrasting with an earlier more restricted situation. We can say some piece of software was liberated if it was born unfree, but what about things that were libre since the beginning? So, yes, as beautiful as Liberty is, and as advantageous as such a concept would have been for us... Liberty seems to be too imperfect to be able to represent our movement.

After being completed in German, Spanish, Swedish, dpkg manpages (including the horrific dpkg-source(1) manpage) are fully translated in French. 1937 paragraphs of geek jargon now using the beautiful langue de Moli re (however, I used the 21st century variant and not 17th century). You can thank my daughter for living in Bordeaux and us for visiting her this week-end, indeed. According to the statistics page, we still have some work to do, and 100% will be a no-go for squeeze but I think that the French l10n team can be proud anyway.

Rant follows. I have upgraded my PC to squeeze this weekend. While this generally worked fine, udev (version 160-1) made my day. As usual I had not read the release notes previously and was hit by

Please upgrade your kernel before or while upgrading udev.

AT YOUR OWN RISK, you can force the installation of this version of udev WHICH DOES NOT WORK WITH YOUR RUNNING KERNEL AND WILL BREAK YOUR SYSTEM

dpkg to the rescue:

dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/linux-base_2.6.32-21_all.deb 
dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/linux-image-2.6.32-5-amd64_2.6.32-21_i386.deb  /var/cache/apt/archives/linux-image-2.6-amd64_2.6.32+28_i386.deb 
reboot

Afterwards the upgrade succeded. (For reference: The correct solution would probably have been to run apt-get install linux-image-2.6-amd64 and rebooting, before starting the dist-upgrade.) udev was not finished with me, though, the syntax for udev rules has changed again. ("NAME="%k" is ignored, because it breaks kernel supplied names", "SYSFS = will be removed in a future udev version, please use ATTR =", "BUS= will be removed in a future udev version, please use SUBSYSTEM=", etc.) So I started googling and rewriting my custom rules for USB-sticks and USB cardreader. After many reboots (the only way to test these rules nowadays), thing were still not working. My cardreader is not an exotic but a common one, i.e. it does not report media changes. (The guide for writing udev rules shares this opinion.) Previously I had:

BUS=="scsi", KERNEL=="sd*", SYSFS model =="Compact Flash",SYSFS vendor =="Generic-",NAME all_partitions ="cardreader/cf"

which caused udev to generate /dev/cardreader/cf1, /dev/cardreader/cf2, etc. on bootup (without media present), enabling me to configure /etc/fstab to allow mounting of /dev/cardreader/cf1 without superuser privileges. After googling I ended up with this new rule:

SUBSYSTEMS=="scsi", KERNEL=="sd*", DRIVERS=="sd", ATTRS vendor =="Generic-", ATTRS model =="SD/MMC          ", SYMLINK+="cardreader/sd%n", OPTIONS+="all_partitions"

and while I get ...

argenau:~# ls -l /dev/cardreader/sd
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 6 Sep 19 14:42 /dev/cardreader/sd -> ../sdd

... there is still no /dev/cardreader/sd1 (unless I insert a card and run fdisk -l /dev/cardreader/sd as superuser). Looks like OPTIONS+="all_partitions" is ignored. And indeed I find this in udev's changelog:

udev 152
[...]
The option "all_partitions" was removed from udev. This should not be needed for usual hardware. Udev can not safely make assumptions about non-existing partition major/minor numbers, and therefore no longer provide this unreliable and unsafe option.

Joy. Thanks udev for telling me consumer devices have been fixed overnight, USB cardreaders have suddenly started reporting media change events.

Hello fellow developers, The summer is over but I m happy to announce that this year s Summer of Code at Debian has been better than ever! This is indeed the 4th time we had the privilege of participating in the Google Summer of Code and each year has been a little different. This year, 8 of our 10 students succeeded in our (very strict!) final evaluations, but we have reasons to believe that they will translate into more long-term developers than ever, all thank to you. The highlight this year has been getting almost all of our students at DebConf10. Thanks again this year to generous Travel Grants from the Google Open Source Team, we managed to fly in 7 of our students (up from 3!). You certainly saw them, presenting during DebianDay, hacking on the grass of Columbia, hacking^Wcheering our Debian Project Leader throwing the inaugural pitch of a professional baseball game or hacking^Wsun-tanning on the tr s kitsch Coney Island beach. Before I give the keyboard to our Students, I d like to tell you that it will be the pleasure and honor of Obey Arthur Liu (yours truly, as Administrator) and Bastian Venthur (as Mentor) to represent Debian at the Summer of Code 2010 Mentors Summit on 23-24 October 2010, at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View. Like last year, we expect many other DDs to be present under other hats. We will be having 2 days of unconference on GSoC and free software related topics. We all look forward to reporting from California on Planet and soc-coordination@l.a.d.o! All of our students had a wonderful experience, even if they couldn t come to DebConf, that is best shared in their own voice, so without further ado, our successful projects: Multi-Arch support in APT by David Kalnischkies, mentored by Michael Vogt apt-get install MultiArch does mostly work now as most code is already merged in squeeze, but if not complain about us at deity@l.d.o! Still, a lot left on the todo list not only in APT so let us all add MultiArch again to the Release Goals and work hard on squeezing it into wheezy. Debbugs Bug Reporting and Manipulation API by David Wendt Jr., mentored by Bastian Venthur Hello, I m David Wendt, and I went to Debconf10 to learn more about the development side of Debian. Having used it since the 9th grade, I ve been intimately familiar with many of Debian s internals. However, I wanted to see the developers and other Debian users. At DebConf, I was able to see a variety of talks from Debian and Ubuntu developers. I also got to meet with my mentor as well as the maintainer of Debbugs. Content-aware Config Files Upgrading by Krzysztof Tyszecki, mentored by Dominique Dumont Config::Model is now capable of manipulating files using shorter and easier to write models. Thanks to that, packagers may start experiment with creating upgrade models. Further work is needed to support more complicated config files Dominique Dumont is working on DEP-5 parser, I ll shortly start working on a cupsd config file parser.
The best thing about DebConf10 is that every person I talked with knew what I was doing. I had a mission to get some feedback on my project. Everybody liked the idea of making upgrades less cumbersome. On the other side, it was my first visit to United States, so I decided to go on a daytrip on my own (instead of staying inside the building, despite heat warnings). I had a chance to visit many interesting places like Ground Zero, the UN headquarters, Grand Central Terminal, Times square and Rockefeller Center that was a great experience. Hurd port and de-Linux-ization of Debian-Installer by J r mie Koenig, mentored by Samuel Thibault Debconf10 was great! Among other people working on the installer, I met Aur lien Jarno from the Debian/kFreeBSD team and we worked together on a cross-platform busybox package. Besides, the talks were very interesting and I ve filled my TODO-list for the year.
For instance I learned about the Jigsaw project of OpenJDK, and how Debian would be the ideal platform to experiment with it. More generally, some people think Debian could push Java 7 forward and I d like to see this happen. Smart Upload Server for FTP Master by Petr Jasek, mentored by Joerg Jaspert I must say that it was great time for me in NY, I ve met and talked and coded with people from ftp-master team like Torsten Werner who helped me to push the project a bit further and with some other people who were looking forward to release of the tool which I hope they will use quite soon. Everybody interested, everybody excited, really cool place and time. And I can t forget the Coney Island beach and stuff, lot of fun, lot of sun;) Aptitude Qt by Piotr Galiszewski, mentored by Sune Vuorela Currently, development branches support full features searching, viewing extended package s informations, performing cache and packages operations. Code and GUI still require a lot of work which will be continued. Informations about further progress could be found on aptitude mailing list and repository rss channel. Debian-Installer on Neo FreeRunner and Handheld Devices by Thibaut Girka, mentored by Gaudenz Steinlin For me, DebConf 10 started at the airport, where Sylvestre Ledru (whom I didn t know of before) was wearing a GSoC 2007 t-shirt, that is, given the circumstances, almost equivalent to say I m a hacker, I m going to DebConf 10 .
I ve spent my time at the conference attending various talks, hacking, meeting DDs and other hackers (amongst others, my co-mentor Per Andersson, Paul Wise, Julien Cristau, Christian Perrier, Cyril Brulebois, Martin Michlmayr, Colin Watson and Otavio Salvadores who I have to thank for his patience while dealing with my questions), chatting, cross-signing keys, rushing to finish eating before 7pm, getting sunburnt, sightseeing (thanks, Arthur, for the lightning-fast tour of Manhattan!), and so on. Debian Developers and community, we count on you. See you next year! (cross-posted to debian-devel-announce@l.d.o and soc-coordination@l.a.d.o)

Wanted to post this yesterday, but somehow didnt work out, so here we go now Another meeting day passed, another lot of commits into our repository, another day without entirely breaking the system. But wait, one more chance to break it today, maybe we finally manage. :) Yesterday we got volatile sorted out for Squeeze (Lenny stays like it is, seperate). Its now a suite on ftp-master, and we have all the neccessary information and workflow around it defined. At least so far that we can operate the suite, we don t define what gets into it, we just take that from the volatile team (or, I think, in future, from the SRMs) in a kind of textfile similar to how testing works. Besides having Alex unbreak our bts categorize script, Mark fixing up our BYHAND processing and implementing the volatile stuff I mentioned above, we also merged a patchset from Luca that allows us to provide the packages.debian.org service with a tree containing changelogs, copyright files, NEWS.Debian and README.Debian. Metadata basically. Which they extracted in the past, and that was taking up quite a lot of resources. Much easier if we provide it and they just use it. This is now done for both, the main archive as well as the backports archive. As soon as I upgrade the security archive it will also be done there, which should additionally enable packages.debian.org to display those files for all archives (run by FTPMaster). This update is scheduled for the upcoming week, DSA already gave me the needed bits and pieces on a host so I can do it without breaking security during the process. We currently export this metadata set only to the packages.debian.org host. We do want to provide it to more, but I am waiting for a reply from DSA as to which machine I should use for the open access to those files. When I have that reply it should be available for you all. As a sidenote from that: If you need to compute any data that has to do with the Debian archive (information out of source/binary packages or something around it) and if you do that with your own scripts - you are most likely doing it wrong. Talk to us. We might be able to help you extracting the data you need and keep it updated. Recent examples for that are the above changelogs, but also things like the package-file-mapping snapshot uses to easily determine which file belongs to which source/version, but also information like the Maintainers index, the Uploaders index and whatnot. The simple way is - ask us. We are processing a shitload of data, it might not be too complicated to let your set fall out somewhere at the side, but if you never ask you will never find out Today we start working on some internals of dak and will have some more discussion on agenda points like data.debian.org and the git source format. We already had some words on other points, but those are ones which will take a long time more to fix, like generally reworking the internals of our database to enable us having multiple archives with pretty different access levels inside one machine. (Think of security archive on ftpmaster host. You want to ensure embargoed security issues actually stay embargoed until they are released. Means a good set of neccessary changes inside the database to handle this. We have ideas, but getting them implemented will take a bit).

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And of course we had been out for food too, helps to stay alive. Turkish restaurant. All nice and well - until they told us they have NO BAKLAVA. Args. Suckers. They ruined this year! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. I wish them a windows OS for their live! If not worse! (Can it be worse than windows?) ;-)

I've now enabled IPv6 for both eyrie.org systems and have published corresponding DNS records (although DNS as always may take some time to update). Panix mentioned a while back that they now supported IPv6 (with, as usual, a great admin console interface that made it trivial to turn it on and set up proper reverse DNS), but I knew there were going to be some issues with setting it up so I put it off. Amusingly, it was Debian that finally pushed me into configuring it: I kept getting the AAAA record for security.debian.org first and waiting for the connection to time out before connecting to the IPv4 address, and I got tired of waiting. For the most part, I just had to turn it on and everything simply worked. There were only a couple bits of weirdness:

• The way that iptables handles IPv6 (or, rather, doesn't) is extremely annoying. I assumed I could just add IPv6 addresses to my regular iptables rules and be done, but no. There's a completely separate iptables table for IPv6 that's managed with a different set of tools. So I had to duplicate most of my rules and separate the address rules into two separate rule sets, plus tweak the code to load the rules. This is lame.
• tinydns of course can't handle AAAA records, since tinydns is part DNS server and part exercise in Dan Bernstein's opinions about how DNS should be constructed. Also, and probably more relevantly to this, it's not being updated these days. There's an escape where you can add raw records and a calculator on-line, so it's all set up anyway, but it's kind of a pain. At some point I'm going to care about DNSSEC, and then I'll need to find another DNS server. I still think BIND is a bloated pig, which is why I'm running tinydns. I want a miniscule DNS server that is trivial to set up and just serves out exactly the records that I tell it to, which tinydns is great at. If anyone knows anything else out there like that which they'd recommend, drop me a message.

On January 30, 1998, Wired.com gushed about the ethical underpinnings of the free software movement. The movement was growing:

Netscape's bold move last week [was] to free the source code of its browser is a prime-time endorsement for no-cost, build-it-yourself software.

The free software movement was in its second decade. In the first decade, corporations learned to tolerate it. In the late '90s, a transition was underway. Red Hat was one of the first companies ostensibly founded on free software principles. But as free software grew, some were concerned that its name was holding it back. The article explains with a link to a page within gnu.org:

But "free software" is an ambiguous term - there is a difference in meaning between the cultures of PC-based proprietary systems and the Net-centric UNIX worlds.

Michael Stutz, the author of the piece, surveyed the writing of Eric S. Raymond and interviewed luminaries like Bob Young, Russell Nelson, and Marc Andreessen. The article is about the creation of a new term for the freely-reusable code produced by the free software movement.

As proponents of free software often point out, while this software can be free-of-cost - that is, gratis - the real issue is about freedom, or human liberty. So it is really freed software.

Yes, that's right -- freed software. The emphasis is in the original. Most of us know the names Eric S. Raymond and Russ Nelson as people involved early-on in the Open Source Initiative. I guess January 1998 is before they decided on the "open source" name. Today, the community is divided into people who think it's important to say "free software" and the rest who call it "open source." We'd all agree with the following statement from the article:

"Freed software is a big win for society in general," said Russell Nelson.

And that's today's random page from the history books.