(For Those Who Care About An Introduction: Christine Spang gave a talk during DebConf10 about Simple Defects (SD), and blogged about it later on.) Folks maintaining Debian packages are already able to partially-clone bugs.debian.org s bug database thanks to the local-debbugs tool. But what about upstream s bug tracker? Taking a (shamelessly self-centered) example: X.Org packages are hosted on FreeDesktop.org s bugzilla. Thanks to SD, it s possible to fetch bugs from there as well! Here s the obligatory picture: This means that you can browse/search them locally while being offline (or well-connected, but without having to use that !$\ %$^ bugzilla web interface). Many of the replica types support both reading and writing, meaning you can also queue some changes locally, and push them later. Currently, sd help sync says that read-write support is available for RT, Hiveminder, Trac, Google Code, and GitHub. There s also read-only support for redmine. Debbugs is being worked on, see Christine s blog post about her SD talk for more info. Given there was no support for bugzilla, I had a quick look and reported my findings. The main point being: \o/ Bugzilla s XMLRPC \o/ A little while later (I m not exactly fluent in Perl ), I came up with a tentatively-mergeable branch adding preliminary read-only support for bugzilla. There s still a lot of work, but I m trying to work on it on a regular basis, adding support for more properties, and fixing bugs (tests should be written some day, too).

Frans Pop contributions to Debian has already been honoured: Frans Pop obituary by Steve McIntyre. One less known fact is that he hacked in upstream linux-2.6 too. Latest linux-2.6 git lists him with 80 commits. A bigger part of his work was testing latest linux-2.6 on different architectures. There are lots of patches with "Reported-by: Frans Pop <elendil>" and "Tested-by: Frans Pop <elendil>". Also in this field he was aiming for big coverage and a special responsive tester. I am very sad to have missed the opportunity to meet you in person. You are missed. Rest in peace, my friend.

#1: Dreams of a (almost) 4-year-old Yesterday, Terah had something going on in the evening, so it was just Jacob, Oliver, and me. Due to how the logistics worked out, she brought them to the office after work and I took them from there. We went to the post office, pharmacy, and a restaurant. Jacob and I had this conversation at the pharmacy. Jacob: Ooo! We are at the Goessel pharmacy! *claps happily* Me: Hmmm Actually Goessel doesn t have a pharmacy. This is the Hesston pharmacy. Jacob: *gets a serious look on his face* Dad, actually Goessel has a pharmacy . Look! A fire station! Me: That s right. And what can you see inside it? Jacob: FIRE TRUCKS! They are all still. Me: I guess there isn t a fire. Jacob: I think the Goessel pharmacy is on fire! Shall they go there now? Me: I hope it s not on fire. (what are you going to say to that?) Were you wanting to see a fire? Jacob: YEAH! I think it IS on fire. Shall we go see? So now he has an imaginary pharmacy with an imaginary fire and he wants to go see. Fortunately he was OK with just going inside Hesston Pharmacy instead. #2: The Songs on a Ceiling I read a book and sing a song to Jacob for bedtime every night. Over the weekends, sometimes I do that for him at nap time too. This weekend, he wanted us both to get on his bed, lie on our backs, and look at the imaginary songs on his ceiling. He gave me a whole tour, pointing to various (to me, nondescript) parts of the ceiling as he did so. Over there is a song about railroad tracks. There is one about trains. That train is upside down. That other one is stuck. There is a song about Word World. There is a song about preschool. There are the train tracks. There is a train on them. It might bump into the other train. Shall you sing a song about two trains on the tracks and they bump into the other train and go BLAM? He appeared to have a whole map in his head of his songs. The train songs were all at a specific place on the ceiling. #3: Younger Brother Oliver has really been changing lately. He occasionally will take a few steps by himself, and he has started to say a few parts of words. He communicates really well, though, especially with things he wants. He has a deep, vigorous nod to say yes, and sometimes it s accompanied by yesh for extra emphasis. His face is incredibly expressive too, and he has a distinctive Yoda-like expression at times. I almost expect to hear him say one day, Like that green bean I do not. Watermelon better is. Jacob, of course, is a lot bigger and sometimes is rough with Oliver. But they also have started to play together. Sometimes Jacob will put his head by Oliver s face. Oliver will grab fistfuls of Jacob s hair in both hands and pull. Both of them apparently find this hilarious and laugh on and on about it. #4: Viruses and Stomachs Sunday Jacob was complaining of a stomach ache. We were driving home, and shortly after we got home, he vomited on the driveway. Jacob really doesn t like throwing up. It s unpleasant and maybe a bit scary for him. He was about to start crying after vomiting, except One of our cats was hanging around. Claire came over, sniffed Jacob s vomit, and started eating it. Jacob was so fascinated by what was happening that he stopped sniffling and stood there staring at the cat, then gave an excited report of events to Terah and me. That evening, he was afraid he would throw up in bed. So we had a large bowl he held *directly* under his chin during story time. But then he didn t want to lie down, since he was afraid he d throw up in bed. Terah pointed out that he could have the bowl close while he slept. I went up and checked up on him an hour or two later, and he was sound asleep, face in the large bowl. #5: The Jukebox After the pharmacy, Jacob saw Skoops, a local 50s greasy spoon diner place across the street. He really wanted to eat there and get the birthday cake ice cream flavor. So we did. He was jabbering about getting a corn dog as we walked over, so that s what he had to eat. I don t know how he knew Skoops had them, as I don t think he s ever had a corn dog. Oh well. There s a jukebox inside Skoops, and every fifteen minutes or so, it ll spring to life and play a random song even if nobody put coins in it. This was very exciting for Oliver. He d twist all around in his highchair to watch it. And, most amusingly, he d start bopping his head. Not really in time with the music or anything, but it was cute to watch. Sometimes he d get really excited and pretty much his whole body was dancing. Well, as much dancing as you can do when you re 1 and strapped into a high chair, at any rate. One time, he heard the music, started dancing , and looked at me expectantly. So I started nodding in time with the music, and then Jacob saw us both and started sort of flailing about, somewhat in time with the music. All three of us wound up laughing after that.

Two weeks ago, Maria and I completed one of our dreams when we arrived in Cap de Creus, where the Pyrenean range sinks in the Mediterranean. To get there, we walked hundreds of kilometres during a month, crossed dozens of steep valleys and enjoyed one of the richest experiences of our lives.

We managed to complete this challenge without facing major problems or pains, and after the first five our six days, our legs seemed to have gotten used to the daily effort and it started to be easier and easier. Our morale kept growing as days passed and we advanced east. When I started walking on a cold and rainy morning in Hondarribia, after barely no rest in the night bus to Ir n, I thought for myself that it was improbable that we'd manage to get anywhere near Catalunya, that one of us would get injuried way before, or we'd just give up and go for the easy beach vacation in the Basque Country.

Biad s refuge, under Posets But we didn't, and after a somewhat painful start, with our boots soaking wet during the stages that crossed the enchanting Selva de Irati which ended up with me getting the biggest blister I've ever seen, we started to walk farther every day, extending the stages when we felt strong after reaching their official end. When we crossed from Nafarroa to Aragonese territory, the mental wall that I had built over the toughest stages in our quest started to fall apart. Days later, we found ourselves climbing down to Pineta, leaving Ordesa behind and enjoying a feeling that our adventure could not go better. The weather had been perfect for over a week and our legs and back were strong to go all over the way to the sea.

Ca n de A isclo, on our way to Pineta When we finally saw that huge blue stain on the horizon, the day before getting to the last mark, we got really excited. We had made it, but as we walked towards the cape, happiness slowly got mixed with melancholy. An unforgettable adventure was about to end, and we didn't want to face our return to the city and our routines. It had been many days surrounded only by awesome landscapes, and living without watches, with only sunlight and weariness marking the time to get in our sleeping bags.

At the very last red and white mark of our journey We've had plenty of time to meet great people. Starting with the Navarrian brothers we met in the early stage, which provided us with a good pace to follow while our leg muscles were still building up; or Kike and Ana, who drove from Pamplona to visit us during the first Aragonese stages (thanks for the supplies!). Tom s and Roger, young hikers from Matar , surprised us with their maturity and experience as mountaineers; we had the pleasure to join forces during four days, walking a really cool variant through the Infiernos and Collado del Letrero which avoided going through the ghost city of Panticosa. Roger and Tom s, we really hope to meet you soon! Andreu, Manel, Ghandi and Ga la visited us at the Vall de N ria and were unlucky to suffer a frightening hail and thunder storm when they left our shelter on their way back to their car. Thanks! All of you have been a very special part of our experience!

This adventure through GR 11 has been incredibly positive for us for several reasons. We've learned a lot about ourselves and strengthened our relation, and now I know how powerful drive can be; to get somewhere, no matter how far, it's really easy if you just believe you can do it and desire to get there. Maria and I are proud of what we've done, and no wonder we're looking for new challenges. An obvious one would be repeating this experience, going through the French side of the Pyrenees, but for now, the Corsican GR 20 seems the most appealing. We'll see, next summer!

To quote the ftp-masters REJECT-FAQ :

• Write manpages. Yes. Really. Write them. Well. It s basically: If your program/tool has a help and version commandline option you can simply run help2man and have a working start.

What may not be obvious to the recently REJECTed developer is actually how to use help2man. To try t0 explain the process a bit more verbosely, I took the liberty of writing a tutorial on the Debian wiki. Comments and corrections are welcome.

Of course, help2man-generated manpages are no substitute for real, hand-written manpages made of sweat, blood, and the Maintainer s tears, and it won t work for all packages. This is just a start, and is much better than no manpages at all.

There was a discussion on #debian-devel a couple of days ago when I brought up my creation of the above, and some wondered if it wouldn t be better to add hooks to man-db to allow package maintainers to enable manpage generation at runtime. I m not sure if that idea will ever make it into a proposal, but, if the details of the implementation were worked out, would be much better than the above, manually generated method.

Swarmnation is a neat game, but I'm not sure if it's for the reasons its authors intended. It may be interesting mostly because of its bugs. Read on for spoilers and the story that developed from an apparently abstract time waster game. When I first saw the game, I saw a grid of squares moving around. I was obviously one: A (Blue) Square. There seemed to be no pattern to the movements. So, it seemed the game represented random passers-in-the-night on the net, unable to communicate except by dashing back and forth. Then after a few minutes, a geometric shape was highlighted in yellow from out of the mass of squares. Woah! I'd been missing something here. It turned out my display was too small, and I had not noticed that the gameboard scolled over to show a tetris-style "next shape" display. Which the other squares had been busily trying to make before time ran out. Now all their movements made sense. Now with a shared goal, we could communicate. Some of us were trolls and blocked shapes from forming. A few of us became leaders, boldly taking that center position in the hollow-square-with-spot-in-the-middle shape. Most of us herded into place as soon as a shape began to form, and stayed there, frantically hoping our neighbors would also conform and keep property values high. We were playing the game. We were accumulating scores. We split into two groups, both playing the game, and then some of us defected from one group to the other, which seemed to be doing better at making a particular shape, and there was no reason to go back to that first group, I felt strongly that I was part of the second, better, group. Then, as I was getting bored and feeling the neighbors all around stifling, I noticed my square highlighted yellow for a shape that I was not currently part of. Oh, this must be a bug I thought. I hacked around, and got it to happen again. I thought maybe it was just being a bit fuzzy in accepting shapes, but no, it turned out to be more interesting. The game didn't care if we stayed in the shape. Just being part of the shape for an instant was enough. With this realization, whole new ways to play the game opened up. Dash left and right, near a forming shape, and you'll probably, for an instant, be part of it. Hang back and have your fun, spot an instant to plug a hole, and then get out and let someone else also take part. Try to form the same shape in both groups. And so on. So a grid of squares hooked up to keyboards on the net has let me watch the invention of politics, rebel from conformity and hack the system, in an hour? That's what games are about!

My good friend Frans Pop died on the 20th of August, just over a week ago. We had worked together for several years within Debian (especially within the Debian CD team), and we had become firm friends during that time. He was great to work with, always ready to help design new features or pick holes and find the bugs in the stuff I was developing myself, happy for others to dig into his own projects. On the more personal side, we met up many times at different Free Software events like DebConf and FOSDEM, and also for pure social things like BBQs and parties. We shared a lot of good times. Last week, along with some other Debian people who had worked with Frans, I headed over to the Netherlands for his funeral. His family also asked me to talk about him, and I was honoured to do so. I spoke briefly about Frans' work in Debian, highlighting the areas where he worked and the number of people he had worked with in various teams. I also told the group about the massive number of messages of sympathy and condolence which I had been asked to pass on from all over the world. His family knew that Debian was important to Frans, but were not aware of just how wide his influence and effect had been. They were especially surprised and grateful that people had travelled so far for the funeral; I told them that I would not have missed it for anything. Rest In Peace, my friend. You will be missed.

For a couple of weeks, one of the harddrives in my server has started to behave strangely. The RAID controller has started first reporting some drive timeouts (daily, when the drive runs a short or long smart test), and now it even kicks it out of the (RAID1) array. And yet, during normal operation, there's no read error or write error that I can trigger, and there are no reallocated sectors (according to smart). The only time when I can reproduce the error is:

• the drive is running a SMART short or long self-test
• a SMART query for the drive is being done (e.g. -c, -l selftest, etc.)

What happens when both these conditions are met? The the SMART query is taking ages (as in ~20-30 seconds). This might cause some such high delays that the drive itself will report a timeout error (if any I/O takes place at the same time), and log an error in its internal error log. Another harddrive (identical brand): ~3s for SMART query during selftest and I/O load, no issues whatsoever. For this harddrive, smartctl -a reads a while, and then:

Error SMART Error Self-Test Log Read failed: Input/output error
Smartctl: SMART Self Test Log Read Failed
 
real    0m39.029s

The timeout above also has generated lots of errors in the drive's error log. I don't know how to read these properly, but in any case they don't seem too scary:

Error 144 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 13552 hours (564 days + 16 hours)
  When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was doing SMART Offline or Self-test.
  After command completion occurred, registers were:
  ER ST SC SN CL CH DH
  -- -- -- -- -- -- --
  10 51 00 80 ae 39 40
  Commands leading to the command that caused the error were:
  CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC   Powered_Up_Time  Command/Feature_Name
  -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --  ----------------  --------------------
  61 80 70 80 ae 39 1c 08  41d+08:07:45.052  WRITE FPDMA QUEUED
  b0 d0 01 00 4f c2 00 08  41d+08:07:45.038  SMART READ DATA
  ec 00 01 00 00 00 00 08  41d+08:07:44.958  IDENTIFY DEVICE
  2f 00 01 10 00 00 00 08  41d+08:07:44.957  READ LOG EXT
  61 80 70 80 ae 39 1c 08  41d+08:07:37.960  WRITE FPDMA QUEUED

For some of the errors, all preceding commands are WRITE FPDMA QUEUED, but all are during a "SMART Offline or Self-test" phase. When a self-test is not being done, reading all the SMART data (smartctl -a) is very very quick, taking half a second. The only thing I can think of is that the drive's own area for storing SMART data is unhealthy, and reading it takes time, and a concurrent SMART test and I/O load makes it hard for the drive to do so. But again, I can't trigger any real I/O error, nor at the beginning of the drive neither at the end, so This also happens when the drives is connected to a plain SATA port, skipping the RAID controller, so it's not just the controller playing games on me. I'm really confused now. Given my previous experience, this drive will die, should already have died, and yet, no I/O errors, just some timeouts. Do I just need to wait a couple more weeks?

Blog Update

I've just updated the home-grown javascript I was using upon this blog to be jQuery powered. This post is a test. I'll need to check but I believe I'm almost 100% jQuery-powered now.

AJAX Proxies

It is a well-known fact that AJAX requests are only allowed to be made to the server the javascript was loaded from. The so-called same-origin security restriction. To pull content from other sites users are often encouraged to write a simple proxy:

• http://example.com/ serves Javascript & HTML.
• http://example.com/proxy/http://example.com allows arbitrary fetching.

Simples? No. Too many people write simple proxies which use PHP's curl function, or something similar, with little restriction on either the protocol or the destination of the requested resource. Consider the following requests:

• http://example.com/proxy.php?url=/etc/passwd
• http://example.com/proxy.php?url=file:///etc/passwd

If you're using some form of Javascript/AJAX proxy make sure you test for this. (ObRandom: Searching google for inurl:"proxy.php?url=http:" shows this is a real problem. l33t.)

ObQuote: "You're asking me out? That's so cute! What's your name again? " - 10 things I hate about you.

Here in the UK we've had a bank holiday weekend. Usually I would have gone to Cambridge for the Debian BBQ, but this year I joined forces with Thomas Adam for some SmoothWall Express on Debian hacking. There are several challenges involved in moving the SWE3 code from its native distribution to Debian; this weekend we worked around some of the permissions problems. On SWE3, the web server and most of the service daemons run as the user 'nobody'. This means that the web server can write out configuration files as the same user as everything else; it can also read the system log files. When the web interface needs to run a privileged action (like setting firewall rules), it sends a command to 'smoothd', which is a daemon running as root. (Admin ssh access is always directly as the root user.) However, web servers in Debian tend to run as user 'www-data', which does not have permission to read log files. Similarly, writing out configuration files as that user would mean that any cgi script (not just ones in the swe3 package) could modify them. I would prefer to run the swe3 cgi scripts as a separate user, and grant this user permission to view logs etc. This debian-webapps thread makes it sound very easy, but if you want to do that with cgi scripts rather than fastcgi, I think you have to run a separate web server for each user. On Sunday afternoon, in a dramatic display of corner-cutting, I gave up on that approach and added www-data to the 'adm' and 'proxy' groups in the postinst. Thomas heroically patched all the cgis to call the "config writers" via smoothd, although I'm wondering whether some careful use of the chgrp command in the postinst might be better than running that code as root. Another hack: in order to actually start a firewall, we needed to know which network card is the "RED" interface, in SWE3 terms; i.e. which one is meant to be the public-facing network device. It's also nice to know which one is "GREEN". So two debconf questions and some hardcoded magic numbers later, we have a basic firewall init script. Lovely. Oh, and at some point I removed the htaccess file, so any user on your network can mess with your firewall. Should probably fix that. Today I started some awful scripts which use Simple-CDD to build an iso containing all the packages we want. We are going to need to extend the networking configuration in the installer to set up multiple network cards. Then we need to figure out a nicer way of assigning IP addresses to devices; unlike on the proprietary version of the product, there seems to be no web configuration of network settings in Express. I've not figured all of this out yet. So, in summary: we are deliberately trading some technical debt in order to quickly produce an initial release that might interest people. (But please note the disclaimer of warranty in the README file in that directory.) And in other news, I've been working at Smoothwall Ltd. for just over one year. Hmm. So this is what they call 'experience'.

The last few weeks I have been using LaTex a lot, to write the final report for my master's course. During that period I found a couple of LaTeX goodies that might be interesting to share: the memoir class, gnuplot integration, and some stuff to help preparing cover pages. The memoir class is a kind of all-in-one package. It is meant to be used in place of the book and report classes, but it can also replace simpler environments, such as article. It provides many ready-to-use templates, and loads of commands to easily customize them. It seems to be specially tailored for dead-tree publication, dedicating an entire chapter in the manual to page layout. It also aims at removing the usual cruft you have to add into any medium sized project, it is macro-compatible with: abstract, appendix, array, booktabs, ccaption, chngcntr, chngpage, dcolumn, delarray, enumerate, epigraph, framed, ifmtarg, ifpdf, index, makeidx, moreverb, needspace, newfile, nextpage, parskip, patchcmd, setspace, shortvrb, showidx, tabularx, titleref , titling, tocbibind, tocloft, verbatim, and verse. Furthermore, it provides functionality equivalent to the following packages: crop, fancyhdr, geometry, sidecap, subfigure, titlesec. In the end, you have a project that only needs a couple of packages, and a few customisation commands, which is nice and also eases distribution. Other nice thing I have found is that there is not one, but many ways of merging gnuplot graphs into your text while having LaTeX typeset all the labels. There is some LaTeX packages aimed at this, but I have more success using a special gnuplot terminal. Again, there is more than one option: eepic, epslatex, latex, lua, mp, pslatex, pstex, pstricks, texdraw, and tpic. While I could not try them all, I tried a few and the easiest and prettiest was epslatex. This terminal creates two files: a EPS file, as would have been created with the usual postscript terminal, except that it does not contain any text; and a LaTeX snippet meant to be included with \input foo . Finally, I could generate graphs that match the rest of the document! To end this post, a couple of things about creating the dreaded cover page. First, a suggestion: don't fret too much about finding a ready-made template, once you understood the basics of how to insert arbitrary spaces around text, it is quite easy to roll your own cover! Having said that, the memoir manual has some sample cover pages that can be useful to use as a base, and there is another really useful resource I have found: titlepages.pdf, a collection of 40 sample title pages with source code for you to choose. Tags: Planet Debian, Planet Lugfi, latex

Debian and Ubuntu have a set of official membership roles that can be granted to regular contributors. Those roles come with rights that enable the contributors to do their work and to participate in the project governance (elections and other official decision-making processes). It s also a way for the distributions to acknowledge the work done: most contributors are proud of the status they reached. The membership structure plays an important role in the development of a distribution: it defines the kind of contributors that are welcome in the project, it sets expectations of the project towards its contributors and defines their rights. In the end, this shapes the project s ability to recruit new contributors to keep the project alive and kicking. This article introduces the existing statuses in Debian and Ubuntu, and defines the sometimes confusing jargon associated with them. The Debian Case Debian only has two types of official members: Debian Developers (DD) and Debian Maintainers (DM). The rights of the developers are codified in the Debian Constitution while those of the maintainers have been defined in a general resolution of 2007. The Debian Maintainer status is still mostly documented in a wiki page. The integration of this new status in Debian s official processes has been slow to come largely because it was introduced at that time without enough negotiation with the involved parties. Nowadays, it is preferred that people get the DM status before applying for DD. DM is a very limited role: maintainers can only upload packages that already have their name on them (either in the Maintainer or Uploaders field) and a specific flag (DM-Upload-Allowed: yes) that only Debian Developers can add. They have no other rights and limited access to Debian s resources. Besides those official roles, there are also maintainers of packages that have no official status within Debian except that they are listed in the Maintainer field of the package. They are doing the maintenance work but all uploads are done by a Debian Developer after verification of the work done (this is called sponsorship and is the only way to start with official packaging work). Once the DD trusts the maintainer, the developer will typically ask the maintainer to apply for DM status in order to be relieved from the sponsorship work. In the end, that makes three different kind of package maintainers and a lot of confusion when you discuss membership issues in particular when the New Maintainer process is the path that you follow to become a Debian Developer. Don t be fooled by the names when reading Debian s documentation! The Ubuntu Case Ubuntu had, from the start, an official Ubuntu Member status that includes all contributors: developers of course, but also documentation writers, artists, translators, etc. This status notably grants the right to vote in elections of the Community Council, the right to participate on Planet Ubuntu, and the @ubuntu.com email alias. For developers, the situation is more complicated: the wiki page lists no less than five different statuses. Initially, developers were split between Ubuntu Core Developers and the MOTU (Masters Of The Universe). The latter were responsible of the universe/multiverse sections of the archive while the former also had upload rights for the main/restricted sections. But, inspired by the Debian Maintainers concept and facing concrete problems in terms of archive management, they changed their infrastructure to offer more fine-grained control on package uploads. Ubuntu can now grant upload permissions on a package-per-package basis, but it can also delegate the right to grant upload permissions with the same granularity. This lead to the new Per-Package Uploader status which is simply an Ubuntu Member with upload rights on a limited set of packages where they have a specific expertise. The more generic Ubuntu Developers status now encompasses members of various development teams that have been delegated the right to manage upload permissions on a (usually large) package set (the current teams are Ubuntu Desktop, Mythubuntu, Kubuntu, and Edubuntu). Those teams can define their own policy to add new members provided they follow the basic rules defined by the Developer Membership Board (see this wiki page). Ubuntu Contributing Developer is an intermediate status for someone who is not yet ready for one of the other developer statuses but who has still shown enough commitment to be an Ubuntu Member. All those statuses can be obtained in a similar way: you prepare a wiki page listing your past contributions, you collect testimonials from existing members that you have worked with, you add yourself in the agenda of the next meeting of the board (or council) that grants the status that you seek, and you attend the meeting. The members of the board will decide whether you are ready for the status (or not) based on what you provided in the wiki, based on your answers during the meeting (and on a mailing-list for developers), and based on what others have to say about you. The most important boards are usually elected by the community while others are commonly appointed by the community council. Those governance bodies include Canonical employees but not as many as one would expect: two out of eight in the Developer Membership Board, two out of eight in the Community Council, but all six members of the Technical Board. The last figure, while not intended, is not surprising given the high expectations set on potential members of the technical board. Mark, as the founder, is the only person to have a permanent seat on both the Community Council and the Technical Board. Comparison of the Statuses Between Debian and Ubuntu The following table summarizes the rights given to each developer role in the two projects (Put the mouse over the abbreviations to know what they are referring to).

Rights	Debian		Ubuntu
	DM	DD	UM	PPU/UD	MOTU	UCD
Package maintenance via sponsorship	Y	N/A	Y	Y	Y	N/A
Official email alias	-	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Participate in votes for members	-	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Participate in votes for developers	-	Y	-	Y	Y	Y
Upload rights restricted to pre-approved packages	Y	-	-	Y	-	-
Upload rights restricted to a section of the archive	-	-	-	-	Y	-
Unlimited upload rights	-	Y	-	-	-	Y
Number of contributors (as of 2010-07-27)	117	904	462	27	85	63

Please note that the number of contributors are not 100% accurate for Ubuntu. A contributor can have multiple statuses (direct membership to a launchpad group) granted over time (while gaining experience). The problem has been mostly avoided by calculating differences between number of members of the various groups but it s not perfect and it can t be: some MOTU are also PPU for packages in main and it s legitimate (but I only counted them as MOTU and not as PPU). Another limitation is that members of some administrative teams are included indirectly in many teams and thus appear in the count while they should not. Anyway, this simple table makes it obvious that Ubuntu s structure offers a broader choice of statuses. They acknowledge the work of all contributors from the start while still giving the most critical rights only to those who have proven that they deserve them. Despite this difference, Debian still has a significant advantage in terms of number of developers. That number does not tell the whole story though: the Ubuntu contributors include many Canonical employees (e.g. 36 out of 63 core developers have a @canonical.com email registered on their launchpad account) that are likely to spend more time working on the distribution than the average Debian member. But even if comparing person-hours would be a challenging thought experiment, in practice it s of not much interest if both projects continue to cooperate and if more and more of the contributions flow in both directions. Debian is aware of the shortcomings of its structure. Changes to better accommodate non-packagers have been discussed several times already. The last efforts in that direction were unfortunately perceived as a solution ready to go rather than a proposal to be discussed, and the project got quickly buried by a general resolution (GR). Even if that resolution invited for further discussion and a new proposal, the truth is that when someone s initiative is corrected by way of GR, it usually kills any motivation to go forward. Possible Evolution? On the Ubuntu side, the infrastructural changes were completed recently and they don t expect any further change in the near future. They do plan, however, to expand usage of those new features so that more teams benefit from the possibility to control upload rights on packages that are relevant to them, and so that more individuals developers apply to become Per-Package Uploaders on packages that they know very well. On the Debian side, a recent discussion on the debian-project list brought back the topic of the bad terminology and it was agreed that the New Maintainer process should be renamed into something else ( New Developer process has been suggested). But Christoph Berg Debian Account Manager and hence heavily involved in the New Maintainer Team suggested that Debian would be better off implementing the long-awaited membership changes before trying to update all the documentation. It would certainly imply some more vocabulary updates. Later in the discussion, he confirmed that membership reform is on the top of the TODO list of the new maintainer team (just after the rewrite of the nm.debian.org website). What can be expected from this reform? The following answers are my own guesses based on my experience of Debian, but the project hasn t decided anything yet.

• First of all: a new status for contributors that are not packagers. The tricky part will be defining the process to follow and the rights granted.
• Changes to the technical implementation of the DM status. The current implementation does not allow to give upload rights to a single DM if two are listed in the Uploaders field of a package (and both might not have the same experience for that package). Furthermore, it suffers from annoying restrictions like the inability to upload new binary packages.
• A change of the Debian constitution to integrate those new statuses is almost unavoidable.
• Other more invasive changes have been proposed like replacing the NM process by a simple designation by other DD, but it s unlikely to happen. The NM process can already be greatly simplified by the application manager if the applicant can show good testimonials from other developers and if he has a track record of real contributions (e.g. as witnessed by changelog entries in Debian packages).

Almost two years have elapsed since the previous efforts in that direction, the new maintainer team has recruited new members and is in a general better shape. Hopefully, the next episode of this saga will have a better outcome.

This article was first published in Linux Weekly News. In a comment, Mark Shuttleworth tried to explain how the Ubuntu community is being setup.

10 comments Support my work

For me, the most enjoyable part of traveling is the inspiration that I derive from visiting different places, talking to people, and generally being outside of my normal environment. This bank holiday weekend, when so many Londoners visit faraway lands, my partner and I stayed in London instead, and my sought inspiration closer to home. The city has been delightfully quiet, and in contrast to the preceding week, the weather was mostly pleasant, apart from the sudden downpours the BBC described as squally showers .
We spent Saturday afternoon in Richmond Park, a 2500-acre nature preserve easily accessible via public transport from London. The plentiful oak trees, fallow deer, and various species of water fowl made it easy to forget the city for a while. Having visited a few times on foot, I think it would be fun to cycle next time, and see different areas of the park. Afterward, we had dinner at a tapas restaurant in Parsons Green which offered notably excellent service as well as good food. By this time, it was nearly 7:00pm, and we took a chance on getting last-minute theatre tickets to see Jeff Goldblum and Mercedes Ruehl in Neil Simon s The Prisoner of Second Avenue. We arrived at the theatre just in time for the show, which was not sold out, and in fact had quite reasonable seats available. The show had several good laughs, holding up fairly well after nearly 40 years since the original Broadway production.
On Sunday, we visited the Design Museum for the first time. Having been disappointed by the nearby Fashion and Textile Museum, our expectations were not too high, but it turned out to be very worthwhile. The Brit Insurance Designs of the Year exhibition showcased designs from architecture, fashion, furniture, transport and more. Some of my favorites were:

• Pachube, a system for sharing real-time sensor data and fostering a community around its uses
• Grassworks, a line of flat-pack, self-assembled furniture constructed entirely from bamboo, without glue or fasteners
• The Gocycle, a lightweight (16kg) electric bicycle for city dwellers
• The Eyewriter, a low-cost eye tracking system powered by open source software
• The Land Glider, a small (1 3 meters), enclosed electric vehicle which maintains stability by leaning into turns
• Analog Digital, a clock which is operated by a person covering and revealing segments using paint
• BMW GINA, a fabric-skinned shape-shifting car concept

I was delighted to see that there were a half dozen or so exhibits which related to open source software. Even including the theatre tickets, it was a very inexpensive holiday compared to traveling overseas, and generated a lot less CO2. I was more than satisfied with the inspiration available within a relatively small radius. I don t think I ll give up traveling, as I really enjoy seeing friends who live far away, but I think I ll be more inclined to stay home during peak travel times and enjoy local activities.

It seems that Google is blocking wikileaks.org in its Public DNS servers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4):

; <<>> DiG 9.7.1-P2 <<>> @8.8.8.8 wikileaks.org
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 50227
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;wikileaks.org.			IN	A
;; Query time: 2457 msec
;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
;; WHEN: Fri Aug 27 18:10:43 2010
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 31

Update: Sorry Google, for me doubting you. As it turns out, you did no evil, you were just a bit slower than the others.
Filed under: General

The DebConf registration team has the hard job of coordinating accommodation, food, and payments for hundreds of people.There are two major dates here: the sponsored registration deadline, and the reconfirmation deadline. There is also the date of opening registration, but that's usually more a matter of "how soon can we?" than "when should we?"The sponsored registration deadline (April 15 for DC10) is the deadline for requesting sponsored accommodation, food, or travel. This allows us to figure out how much we'll have to pay for attendees - attendees who register after this point should pay enough to cover their own costs.The reconfirmation deadline (June 10th for DC10) is used as a ping for attendees, particularly the sponsored ones. Attendees must reconfirm they will attend, so that we don't waste money reserving more food/rooms than we will have people using them. This deadline usually depends on the date we must give firm numbers to our accommodations.Historically, registration hasn't ever closed, anyone can come, just if you register too late you won't necessarily get any free stuff (and definitely no free food/accommodation). The deadline for food and accommodation themselves has been based on the logistics of the conference itself - DC9, when we ran out of physical rooms for accommodation, and DC10, when we had to give firm housing numbers to Columbia. Food has tended to be easier as caterers could take updates on shorter notice, usually the day before.DebConf8 began a system where attendees could pay a registration fee if they desired. This was encouraged, for example, for attendees whom could get this fee reimbursed by their company, but was not required nor encouraged of sponsored attendees. DC8-9 had two classes of fees: Professional, covering the actual costs, and Corporate, covering about double of professional and for companies or registrants whom could provide extra financial support for DebConf. DebConf10 added an extra layer of "pay per day" on top of this.It's up to the registration team to pin down attendee numbers as early as possible, as this is usually the biggest cost. DebConf provides food and accommodations to a huge number of people, but the numbers are constantly changing. It's hard to know how many people will drop out at the last minute. It's hard to know how many people will actually pay a corporate or professional fee, as opposed to mistakingly selecting it when they'd rather something else. Our registration system can't support all the little intricacies of how much an attendee will cost us, or pay us. Without knowing how many people will attend, how can we accurately get the right number of meals and right number of rooms? Sponsored people may always choose to not eat some meals with us, possibly saving us money there. How many people with travel sponsorship will actually request their full reimbursement?The registration system, Pentabarf, is used to track attendance numbers, but it isn't completely reliable. Not everyone in it will attend all days, and most people who aren't staying with us don't have accurate dates of attendance. Thus, it can only be used as estimates, not for all decisions.
The difficulties above are challenges for the registration and budgeting teams, but are not too bad - they just require thought, time, and answering many questions from attendees.Tags: debconf

Shereen El Feki gave an inspiring TED talk about Islamic youth culture [1]. She shows some interesting exerpts from the 4SHBAB TV network which is known as Islamic MTV , the music video from the US was of particularly high quality while I expect high quality videos to be made in the US I don t generally expect quality Islamic videos from the US (or anywhere else really). She also notes that the videos show a kinder gentler face of Islam . She contrasts that with a clip by Haifa Wehbe [2] a Lebanese pop star who appears to have a lot in common with Britney Spears (Shereen describes her as a pan-Arab pinup-girl ). She cites the comic The 99 which has Islamic super-heros who represent the 99 attributes of Allah. One thing that I found very interesting was that the 99 character Jemi is shown using what is obviously an OLPC. This seems to indicate some very positive trends for the interaction of Islamic culture with the European and American culture which is Christian and Atheist dominated. Kavita Ramdas gave an interesting TED talk about radical women embracing tradition [3]. She highlights a woman who teaches girls to read in Afghanistan based on the religious edict that every Muslim should read the Koran and a Croatian Lesbian choir that sings traditional folk songs. Naif al-Mutawa gave an interesting TED talk about the creation of The 99 [4]. He starts by comparing some of the characters in the Justice League of America to Christian traditions and then describes the back story behind his Islamic super-heroes. His major aim is to provide positive role models for Muslim children. Apparently a cross-over production involving characters from The 99 and the Justice League of America is being developed at the moment Wonder Woman wears clothing that is less revealing than usual though. It s worth noting that Naif is a practicing psychologist who s clients include victims of political torture, so he seems to have some insight into the problems that most people will never have.

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/shereen_el_feki_pop_culture_in_the_arab_world.html
• [2] http://www.haifafans.net/
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/kavita_ramdas_radical_women_embracing_tradition.html
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/naif_al_mutawa_superheroes_inspired_by_islam.html

I don't like repeating myself, but I'm very tempted to past my mini-review of the Roomba Vacuum Cleaner robot into this blog. Instead I will practise restraint and summerise:

• It works. It works well.
• It is a little noisy, but despite this it is great fun to watch.
• It takes a long time to clean a few rooms, due to the "random walk" it performs. Despite this it is still fun to watch and actually useful.
• Have I mentioned I grin like a child when it doesn't crash into things, and hums away past me on the floor?

250. Worth. Every. Penny. In more Debian-friendly news I've been fighting HTTP proxies today. I've noticed a lot of visitors to the various websites I host are logged as 127.0.0.1 - which is an irritation. My personal machine looks like this:

Internet -> Apache listening on *:80 -> thttpd on 127.0.0.1:xxxx

(This has been documented previously - primarily it is a security restriction. It means I can run per-UID web-servers.) I had previous added a patch to thttpd to honour the X-Forwarded-For: header - so that it would receive the correct remote address passed on from Apache. However the fact that so many visitors are logged as coming from 127.0.0.1 meant it wasn't working 100% correctly, and I wanted to understand why. Today I used ngrep to capture the incoming headers and the source of the problem became apparent:

skx:~# ngrep  -d lo  X-For ' port 1007'
..
T 127.0.0.1:41886 -> 127.0.0.1:1007 [AP]
  GET /about/ HTTP/1.1..Host: images.steve.org.uk..If-Modified-Since: Mon, 07
   Jun 2010 15:24:33 GMT..User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-U
  S; rv:1.9.1.10) Gecko/20100701 Iceweasel/3.5.10 (like Firefox/3.5.10)..Acce
  pt: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8..Accept
  -Language: en-us,en;q=0.5..Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate..Accept-Charset: I
  SO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7..Referer: http://images.steve.org.uk/2009/11/
  20/img_0471.html..X-Forwarded-For: 127.0.0.1, 11.22.33.123..Cache-Control:
  max-age=0..X-Forwarded-Host: images.steve.org.uk..X-Forwarded-Server: image
  s.steve.org.uk..Connection: Keep-Alive....

I bolded the important input; just in case that didn't jump out it was:

X-Forwarded-For: 127.0.0.1, 11.22.33.123

My patch to thttpd was making it read the first address, rather than the second - which meant that requests were being logged as coming from 127.0.0.1 and avoiding my efforts to track sources. Now I understand the problem - The X-Forwarded-Host header is being tweaked by a proxy server, such as Squid, upstream of my server. For the moment I've updated the thttpd patch to read:

        else if ( strncasecmp( buf, "X-Forwarded-For:", 16 ) == 0 )
            char *tmp = NULL;
            /* Jump to the header-value  */
            cp = &buf[16];
            cp += strspn( cp, " \t" );
            /*
             * If the first change is a 127.0.0.1, then we'll
             * jump over it.  Cope with Squid, et al.
             */
            if (  ( tmp = strstr( cp, "127.0.0.1, " ) ) != NULL )
              cp = tmp + strlen( "127.0.0.1, " );
            /* Parse the IP */
           inet_aton( cp, &(hc->client_addr.sa_in.sin_addr) );
         

That's not perfect, but the alternative would be:

• Install a patched version of libapache2-mod-rpaf to add a X-HONEST-REMOTE-IP
• Update thttpd to use that header.

Or something equally hacky and security-by-obscurity-alike. Really I just want a simple way of always getting the correct remote IP. Shouldn't be so hard, should it? *pout*. ObQuote: "You don't mess with fate, Peanut. People die when they are meant to die. There's no discussion. There's no negotiation. When life's done, it's done." - Dead Like Me.

After a long time, I decided to write again. I decided to start with software I wrote for my own usage that could be usefull for other people. I'll start with python-dvdvideo, a DVD-Video reader written in Python 3, and the reference tool dvd-video-backup-image, a generic DVD-Video dumper. Lets see, if this blog will see more postings in the future.

Being a rather patient and peaceful guy, I acknowledge that perfection is a difficult goal and I rarely rant publicly about troubles I ve stumbled upon.
Today however, I feel I have to wholeheartedly agree with Bernd about Guruplug: it has been a waste of money. I received mine in May, with the order placed and payed in February. First thing noticed is the issue with the power supply: I really think they forgot QA testing on these machines, as my PSU (and many others, just skim through the official forum) blew up just an hour after power-up. I wasn t lucky enough to admire over-heating and internal (mis-)cooling, as it went immediately through GlobalScale sales department for a RMA under warranty. And then I waited for GlobalScale, for an actually working unit. And still I am, it s almost September now. Patiently waiting (hoping, I d say) for some answers. I m not sure who to blame here, Marvell, GlobalScale or both, for this issues with regards to QA, design and sales. But I m quite sure the final result has been already perfectly described: a major fail.

As a lot of people are coming to my blog to read the installing instructions for Debian on the GuruPlug Server Plus, I shall not hide my opinion about it: It is a major design and QA fail. Don't waste your money on it.

The power supply Although I've ordered the Guruplug pretty early with the promise, that I'd have it in April, it arrived at the end of May due to QA issues with the power supply. While I appreciate that they didn't deliver broken power supplies, I would have preferred not to receive one which was "fixed" by somebody who uses the soldering iron like an axe. Here are some macro photos to show the gory details:

Software issues The version of UBoot which shipped with the device was only able to boot from NAND and network. Booting from USB failed and ext2 support was missing, too. Didn't have a look if the community came up with a fixed UBoot version yet, but in my opinion a piece of hardware for >100 EUR should not have such flaws.

Thermal issues Using the Guruplug with more than one 100 MBit/s connection is just not possible, as it would toast itself to death. For the details have a look at this discussion in the NewIT forum, it links to a lot of interesting photos and postings. This issue is a major design and QA failure. Even without knowing what the datasheets say, it is easy to imagine that a thin piece of alloy is not the proper way to cool a CPU and network chip. Especially not when it is mounted with cheapish pads instead of a proper paste. As it seems the plan was to send the heat to the shielding of the network/USB/eSata ports (the area is marked red as my first plan was to remove that part of the alloy and reuse the heat-spreader), a strong indication for that is that this is the only area with holes for air circulation. I could imagine that it was not possible to have these holes next to the PSU, which was mounted above the heat-spreader, to avoid electrical shocks. As there was no other opening for the heat to leave the case, even the microSD card became pretty hot - I've measured temperatures around 60 deg. C next to the card - while CPU and 100MB/s network were idling. The official information from GlobalScale Technologies is that only 10/100MBit/s should be used as workaround to avoid overheating until a "Professional Upgrade Kit" is released. As mentioned here the upgrade kit announcement was removed silently from GST's website. To be honest, this doesn't make me wonder. There is no way to fix the Guruplug with an external fan or any other external magic as the only way to fix it is to cool the CPU and networking chip properly. There are various workarounds for the cooling issues posted to the forums. I've decided to rip out the power supply and heat spreader out of the case and get a nice external PSU. The new connector is mounted, ready to supply the GuruPlug's board with power. Currently I'm waiting for the new heat sinks and glue to arrive. Then I'll give it a try to mount eveything in the small case again, probably with some additional air holes. As soon as I have a workign solution, I'll blog about it again.