Debconf10 ended a week ago, and I m only now finding some time to write about it. Funny how it works that way sometimes. Anyhow, the summary of Debconf has to be: this is one amazing conference. Despite being involved with Debian for years, this was my first Debconf. I often go to one conference a year that my employer sends me to. In the past, it s often been OSCon, which was very good, but Debconf was much better than that even. For those of you considering Debconf11 next year, perhaps this post will help you make your decision. First of all, as might be expected from a technical conference, Debconf was of course informative. I particularly appreciated the enterprise track, which was very relevant to me. Unlike many other conferences, Debconf has some rooms specifically set aside for BoFs. With a day or two warning, you can get your event in one of those rooms on the official schedule. That exact thing happened with a virtualization BoF I thought the topic was interesting, given the recent shifts in various virtualization options. So I emailed the conference mailing list, and we got an event on the schedule a short while later and had a fairly large group turn out to discuss it. The hallway track conversations struck up with others in hallways or hacklabs also was better at Debconf than other conferences. Partly that may be because, although there were fewer people at Debconf, they very much tended to be technical people whose interests aligned with my own. Partly it s probably also because the keysigning party, which went throughout the conference, encouraged meeting random people. That was a great success, by the way. So Debconf succeeded at informing, which is perhaps why many people go to these things. But it also inspired, especially Eben Moglen s lecture. Who would have thought I d come away from a conference enthused about the very real potential we have to alter the dynamics of some of the largest companies in the world today by using Free Software to it s greatest potential? And, of course, I had fun at Debconf. Meeting new people or, more commonly, finally meeting in person people I d known for years was great. I got a real sense of the tremendously positive aspect of Debian s community, which I must admit I have sometimes overlooked during certain mailing list discussions. This was a community of people, not just a bunch of folks attending a random conference for a week, and that point underlined a lot of things that happened. Of course, it wasn t 100% perfect, and it won t ever be. But still, my thanks to everyone that organized, volunteered, and attended Debconf. I m now wishing I d been to more of them, and hope to attend next year s.

Dear Debian, today you turn 17 ... ... happy birthday! I've already argued how you're in very good health now that you're close to the major age and how unique and important you are for the whole ecosystem of free software. So, no, I won't insist on that here. Still, today sounds like a good day to say thank you, Debian for being here promoting software freedom and showing to the world that all this can be done do-ocratically, democratically, relying on volunteer work and donations. If you too think Debian deserves being thanked for what it is giving to the world, just say thank you, Debian . My first (meta) thank you messages go to Marga, Maxy, Valessio, Raphael, Ana, and Rhonda for ideating and spreading the 1st Debian Appreciation Day ever. Update: fix 404 Penta b0rkage in the slides link

Happy 17th Birthday, Debian! You kept me busy for the last 10 years and I am really looking forward to what the next 10 years might bring for our relationship. Thanks also to all the people who also are able to keep calm and to the point when discussions turn to get heated. You are the ones who make work on Debian enjoyable. Also a lot of thanks to all the people that understand the power of positive encouragement like what is currently flowing in through the thank.debian.net website. Likewise much thanks to the ever growing number of distributions that are based on Debian, because doing that is a very special kind of appreciation of our work. Thank you all!

/debian permanent link Comments: 0

I have just read The Gift of Fear and Other Survival Signals that Protect Us From Violence by Gavin de Becker. Like many self-help books it has a concept that can be described in a paragraph and explained in a few pages. The rest of the book shares anecdotes that help the reader understand the concept, but which are also interesting for people who get it from the first chapter. When I read the book I considered the majority of the content to be interesting stuff added to pad it out to book size because the concept seemed easy enough to get from the start, but from reading some of the reviews I get the impression that 375 pages of supporting material aren t enough to convince some people maybe this is something that you will either understand from the first few chapters or never understand at all. Gavin s writing is captivating, he has written a book about real violent crime in a style that is more readable than many detective novels, from the moment I finished the first chapter I spent all my spare time reading it. I was a little disappointed at the lack of detailed statistics, but when someone has done all the statistical analysis chooses to provide the results in the form of anecdotes rather than statistics I m prepared to tolerate that especially when the anecdotes are so interesting. I spent quite a bit of time reading the Wikipedia pages relating to some of the people and incidents that are mentioned in this book. The basic concepts of his book are to cease worrying about silly things like airline terrorists (passengers won t surrender now so that s not going to work again) and to instead take note of any real fear. For example if you are doing the same things you usually do but suddenly feel afraid then you should carefully consider what you might have subconsciously noticed that makes you feel afraid and what you can do about it. This isn t going to change my behavior much as I have mostly been doing what the book recommends for a long time. I think that everyone should read this book.

I'm writing a Rails application for the microblogging strategy for Debian (which I used to call, debian-twitter, but you know how us Debian folks are ). I came up with a strange issue, that at first I thought was ActionController's fault or some crap. So, I was testing one of my controllers with something like this:

cat /tmp/mm.txt   curl -d @- http://localhost:3000/message/new

/tmp/mm.txt is a PGP signed message which then I just send as POST data to my application. So far so good. However, when accessing the data from Rails, using request.body.read, I was a getting a single line, with the newlines (carriage returns) removed. So I started looking at how ActionController was getting the HTTP data and stuff. But then I tested:

cat /tmp/mm.txt   lwp-request -m POST  http://localhost:3000/message/new

And that had the carriage returns in place. So, I started looking at the curl man page and discovered this little gem:

data-binary <data> (HTTP) This posts data exactly as specified with no extra processing whatsoever. If you start the data with the letter @, the rest should be a filename. Data is posted in a similar manner as data-ascii does, except that newlines are preserved and conversions are never done. If this option is used several times, the ones following the first will append data as described in -d/ data.

cat /tmp/mm.txt   curl --data-binary @- http://localhost:3000/message/new

did indeed the tricky. Maybe someone needs this info some day.

Image made by Valessio Brito (sources), with some elements taken from the Open Clip Art Library.

You also can thank your favorite Debian team, maintainer or tell how much you like Debian at
http://thank.debian.net/.

SmoothWall Express is a GNU/Linux distribution geared towards firewalling, with an installer, a web interface, and some common software like squid that can be useful when running a small business router. It is theoretically the basis for the corporate products of SmoothWall Ltd., who happen to employ me; but all opinions here are my own, and I'm not speaking for them. Unfortunately, the SmoothWall Express kernel is somewhat "stable", which leads to problems installing the distro on modern hardware. There is a new version of Express in the works, but I'm afraid SmoothWall Ltd. currently has a bit of a "code dump" mentality with respect to delivering updates to their community, because they don't recall seeing any significant contributions from outsiders. At DebConf I created proof-of-concept Debian packages of two components of Express 3.0: the swe3 web interface, and the smoothd daemon which executes privileged commands. Currently these can show a basic web interface; some of the less complicated bits will even run, and I can shut down my laptop using the "shutdown" button via smoothd. (Note that I still need to add boring stuff like debian/copyright files, but I plan to release these as soon as I can.) In the near future, hopefully I can implement some of the more important features (like, er, firewalling), and add some other components like the traffic shaping and IM filtering daemon. I'm working towards a demonstration Debian Pure Blend that can show off some of the advantages of working with a third-party distribution as a base. If anyone would like to help me... send me patches. :) I expect I'll be blogging my progress occasionally.

Francois Freeing the Cloud talk at Debconf10, showed members of the Debian community keen to help see opensource Web applications. The proposed open&free implementation of Gravatar is a great example, whereby a user uploads an image of him/herself which corresponds to a hash of their email address. In order to make this Web "cloud" service rock, super quick downloads of that image are needed. Debian knows about mirroring data to distribute data amongst free software agents. And we also now know about CDN, aka content delivery networks and GEO DNS, which point to your local mirror. So lets pool our resources and offer CDN Web space (100MB?) to free software Web application projects. This will make the opensource Web services competitive in all important page load times and perhaps make it easier for user contributed data to be exported and "open". I have Debian server space in Germany I'm happy to contribute to Francois's avatar project and other similar opensource Web apps. If you think this is a good idea, please get in touch.

The Debian package of Emacs Muse was maintained by Michael W. Wolson, who is also the upstream author of that software. He announced months ago that Muse needed a new upstream maintainer. That's not something I'm willing to do, since I really think Muse has been superseded by Org mode nowadays. However, I'm still using Muse to maintain this blog with my muse-blog extension, since Org still lacks some infrastructure to maintain and publish a blog. Therefore, I adopted the Emacs Muse Debien package and updated it to the latest version!

Debconf10 has come and gone and its effects are still with me. This is not so surprising as this year I was not only a participant but on the local team. When we first started to hold in person meetings, I was a totally overwhelmed knowing that with each passing month, the demands on my time would grow and then explode. Then I got news that I landed a year long fellowship that would relieve me of all teaching for the 2010-2011 year and was able to breathe a little and enjoy what I don t get to do all that often in my academic job: work collectively. As Debcamp started, I was not sure whether I would enjoy the conference given that I had to pay attention to the nuts and bolts of the conference. I got my answer the first day as folks started to pour in hack lab. Due to the pressure cooker nature of my job, I did not attend the last two Debconfs. Seeing friends that I only see during these fairly intense weeks stirred up a lot of inside of me. It felt really good to be back . This was also my first Debcamp, and now I understand why people enjoy it so much. It gives you a chance to meet new folks instead of gravitating to those you already know and still get some work done. It also allows the orga team to hammer out some final details and test run some stuff before the swarm descends into the venue. One of the things I enjoyed the most during the week were the take out dinners. Logistically it was a bit of nightmare but it aligned very much with the culinary culture of NY and we had some nice outdoor picnics on the Columbia campus and one in Riverside Park. The pace picked up a lot during Debconf, which we kicked off with Debian Day. We managed to get a lot of NYC folks it was one of the best attended Debian Days. One of the highlights was Gale Brewer s talk. She is a public servant in the full sense of the word, dedicating thirty years of her life to this job and really understands what technology can and cannot due for New Yorkers. It was very inspirational talk. Aside from a few moments, such as the day trip and the wine and cheese party (btw, party does not capture the quantity of cheese featured and consumed ), Debconf itself has already become a bit of a blur, it all happened so quickly and under sleep deprived conditions. Nearly every vessel of time was filled, overflowing, at times bursting. I enjoyed a number of the talks Eben Moglen s, Joey Hess s CUT proposal, Marga s talk on Making Debian Rule, Zack s Bits from the DPL, the derivates BOF, and others. I also enjoyed preparing and moderating the welcome talk, which is not yet online (only the last bit is and the sound is distorted so I sound like a mouse). My sense is that the relationship between Ubuntu and Debian is improving, which is important. We need alliances and allies, not foes in the world of F/OSS (watch Eben s talk to get a sense of why this is so). I mostly ate on campus but managed two African based dinners with friends (Ethiopian and Senegalese) and only wished we had a little more time to talk. The late nights in the Carman lounge were pretty epic, if somewhat collegiate and during the end, hot and humid. Here are a few of the pictures I managed to take. I love Debconf for it so perfectly conjoins the comfort of the familiar with the thrill of the new. For those who experience it in its full intensity, it can be an artistic moment, at least in the way described by the poet John Keats: The excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty . . . And now, I am, of course, totally beat

Debconf10 has come and gone and its effects are still with me. This is not so surprising as this year I was not only a participant but on the local team. When we first started to hold in person meetings, I was a totally overwhelmed knowing that with each passing month, the demands on my time would grow and then explode. Then I got news that I landed a year long fellowship that would relieve me of all teaching for the 2010-2011 year and was able to breathe a little and enjoy what I don t get to do all that often in my academic job: work collectively. As Debcamp started, I was not sure whether I would enjoy the conference given that I had to pay attention to the nuts and bolts of the conference. I got my answer the first day as folks started to pour in hack lab. Due to the pressure cooker nature of my job, I did not attend the last two Debconfs. Seeing friends that I only see during these fairly intense weeks stirred up a lot of inside of me. It felt really good to be back . This was also my first Debcamp, and now I understand why people enjoy it so much. It gives you a chance to meet new folks instead of gravitating to those you already know and still get some work done. It also allows the orga team to hammer out some final details and test run some stuff before the swarm descends into the venue. One of the things I enjoyed the most during the week were the take out dinners. Logistically it was a bit of nightmare but it aligned very much with the culinary culture of NY and we had some nice outdoor picnics on the Columbia campus and one in Riverside Park. The pace picked up a lot during Debconf, which we kicked off with Debian Day. We managed to get a lot of NYC folks it was one of the best attended Debian Days. One of the highlights was Gale Brewer s talk. She is a public servant in the full sense of the word, dedicating thirty years of her life to this job and really understands what technology can and cannot due for New Yorkers. It was very inspirational talk. Aside from a few moments, such as the day trip and the wine and cheese party (btw, party does not capture the quantity of cheese featured and consumed ), Debconf itself has already become a bit of a blur, it all happened so quickly and under sleep deprived conditions. Nearly every vessel of time was filled, overflowing, at times bursting. I enjoyed a number of the talks Eben Moglen s, Joey Hess s CUT proposal, Marga s talk on Making Debian Rule, Zack s Bits from the DPL, the derivates BOF, and others. I also enjoyed preparing and moderating the welcome talk, which is not yet online (only the last bit is and the sound is distorted so I sound like a mouse). My sense is that the relationship between Ubuntu and Debian is improving, which is important. We need alliances and allies, not foes in the world of F/OSS (watch Eben s talk to get a sense of why this is so). I mostly ate on campus but managed two African based dinners with friends (Ethiopian and Senegalese) and only wished we had a little more time to talk. The late nights in the Carman lounge were pretty epic, if somewhat collegiate and during the end, hot and humid. Here are a few of the pictures I managed to take. I love Debconf for it so perfectly conjoins the comfort of the familiar with the thrill of the new. For those who experience it in its full intensity, it can be an artistic moment, at least in the way described by the poet John Keats: The excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty . . . And now, I am, of course, totally beat

My project. This part of this post assumes that the reader has read my last post. This post contains embarassing news: In my effort to organize the patches to make it easier to run a script that benchmarks each change to see how it affects performance, I made a very simple mistake, which mostly would disable Immix. This was done in the first patch of the stack, so all patches were compromised. I noticed this while I was attending Simon Marlow s request of measuring how many lines are being freed and allocated, and notice that it was none. My error was simply to set two different constants with the same value: BF_MEDIUM and BF_SWEPT. After the correction, I noticed two more errors that were introduced in this period, and that were not corrected because, as Immix was not activated, they were not causing any harm. Now, with everything in the stage I was before: a memory corruption that happens ocasionaly only in the nofib/real/maillist benchmark. As described in this link, I ve tried already a lot of different techniques to debug this one, but it s being hard. In the mean time, I m measuring again the stack of patches, in a lab using the complete nofib (except for nofib/real/maillist) and nofib/gc, and in my laptop only fibheaps, fulsom and constraints, from nofib/gc, which were used in my last post.

---

Debconf was great. I ve stayed in New York with my family doing tourism for some days before it, and New York city is fantastic. A very diverse architecture and people from all around the world. It s really impressive. I arrived in DebCamp on Friday and it was not easy for me to find where to check-in, and where to go after unpacking my stuff. I assume I haven t paid much attention to the e-mails explaining this, but I tried to search them when I got there, without success. It was good, on the other hand, to walk on Columbia searching: it s a very nice campus, not comparable to anything we have here in Brazil. During DebConf I tried to help the organization as much as I could, being Talk-meister in some talks, helping a little bit with food organization and participating in the video team. All of this was very fun. There were some talks that I couldn t attend to, and I watched the videos, or part of them, here on Monday: Making Debian rule again, FreeBSD, Anti-features I still want to watch some, like the Analysis of Debian mailling lists using machine learning, and there are others that I wanted to see but are not recorded, like the one about notmuch. I got my key signed by a lot of people, which certainly was not the case before, and it the GPG best practices BoF was great. And there was the proposal to host DebConf12 in Brazil, maybe in my city, Belo Horizonte. Which reminds me: Tomorrow Betim will host the Debian Day BH, in parallel to another event: FSL-BH. A BoF related to the organization of DebConf12 in Belo Horizonte is scheduled. See you there.

Finally. Let s hope other scientists follow in their footsteps and make rare a marker of the past:

No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort. It was unbelievable, said Dr. John Q. Trojanowski, an Alzheimer s researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. It s not science the way most of us have practiced it in our careers. But we all realized that we would never get biomarkers unless all of us parked our egos and intellectual-property noses outside the door and agreed that all of our data would be public immediately.

Finally. Let s hope other scientists follow in their footsteps and make rare a marker of the past:

No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort. It was unbelievable, said Dr. John Q. Trojanowski, an Alzheimer s researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. It s not science the way most of us have practiced it in our careers. But we all realized that we would never get biomarkers unless all of us parked our egos and intellectual-property noses outside the door and agreed that all of our data would be public immediately.

This supporting script for using cowbuilder with git-buildpackage came up at DebConf, which also meant more attention on the bug requesting that it be included in git-buildpackage. I've therefore done a few new releases over the last few days including additional features that the example script in git-buildpackage supported that my version of the script hadn't. Changes since 1.10 include adding support for update, create, and login options, which call cowbuilder with the corresponding flag instead of doing a build, and support for taking the distribution on which to act from the name of the script in case anyone wants to create symlinks to the script as supported by the git-buildpackage example script. I also switched the license to an MIT license instead of the same terms as Perl (which didn't make much sense, since it's not written in Perl). You can get the latest version of the script from my scripts page, and will also be included in the git-buildpackage package directly down the road. Thank you very much to Guido G nther for his discussion, willingness to include the script, and bug fixes.

APT2 is now called UPS (Universal Package System). The name is inspired by the company that delivers packages in those brown trucks and from the Image Packaging System (IPS) of OpenSolaris; and mvo writing ups after I proposed upt ( ber package tool) in IRC. It s definitely better than my first thought which was moo (and libmoo). Update: OK, let s cancel this rename insanity.
Filed under: APT2

I am betting that Luakit will be more usable than Uzbl within a week. I am also betting that I will hear chirping about Luakit not integrating with the Monkeysphere, and though I agree that this is a problem, it seems to be difficult to solve. To do it correctly, one would need hooks or callbacks in WebKitGTK+, which, in turn, would need support in LibSoup, which would probably then need support in GnuTLS. Since apparently this will take years of bickering to accomplish, perhaps some sort of hack is called for. I suppose one could, for each HTTPS URL visited, make an OOB connection, download the certificate, and then run it through Monkeysphere validation, before then letting WebKitGTK+ make another connection and download (hopefully the same) certificate a second time. This strikes me as ugly and problematic. Ideas?

dctrl-tools 1.14 (targeting squeeze) has the following incomplete translations (as of right now in git): ca: 89 translated messages, 4 fuzzy translations, 18 untranslated messages.
cs: 108 translated messages, 1 fuzzy translation, 2 untranslated messages.
de: 111 translated messages.
en_GB: 89 translated messages, 4 fuzzy translations, 18 untranslated messages.
es: 89 translated messages, 4 fuzzy translations, 18 untranslated messages.
fi: 111 translated messages.
fr: 108 translated messages, 1 fuzzy translation, 2 untranslated messages.
it: 65 translated messages, 8 fuzzy translations, 38 untranslated messages.
ja: 89 translated messages, 4 fuzzy translations, 18 untranslated messages.
pl: 49 translated messages, 2 fuzzy translations, 60 untranslated messages.
pt_BR: 89 translated messages, 4 fuzzy translations, 18 untranslated messages.
ru: 108 translated messages, 1 fuzzy translation, 2 untranslated messages.
sv: 84 translated messages, 4 fuzzy translations, 23 untranslated messages.
vi: 89 translated messages, 4 fuzzy translations, 18 untranslated messages. I have put the relevant pot and po files up. This is not an archival URI, but I ll keep it available long enough for this. Submissions through the BTS are accepted, as usual. Debian developers and others with collab-maint access may, if they wish, push their updates directly to the Git repository. Please use the maint-2.14 branch and please read the README. I will NOT be gathering translations from Rosetta. All contributors and committers are asked to declare whether they can affirm the Developer s Certificate of Origin. The commit tag Signed-off-by is, by convention, interpreted as an affirmation of that document by the person identified on that tag line.

Git-buildpackage 0.5.6 in experimental got rid of it's pbuilder/cowbuilder examples and added Russ's nice git-pbuilder script. I'm very happy how this turned out, now building with cowbuilder is as simple as:

# Initially create a cowbuilder environment once
git-pbuilder create
# Build the package
git-buildpackage --git-pbuilder
# At a later point update the cowbuilder environment with new versions
git-pbuilder update

Or for another distribution:

DIST=lenny git-pbuilder create 
git-buildpackage --git-pbuilder --git-dist=lenny

The new version also better interacts with dch from devscripts. So things like:

git-dch --bpo --qa --nmu

are now also supported when adding new changelog sections. Git-dch now detects new upstream version numbers automatically and bumps the version accordingly. In order to get this working I finally fixed the tag format. Since the current version in unstable should get a chance to move to testing first, I've uploaded 0.5.6 to experimental.

The unofficial rc bug tracker currently knows about the following bugs:

In Total:	448
Affecting Squeeze:	329
Squeeze only:	108
Remaining to be fixed in Squeeze:	221

Of these 221 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Squeeze:	24
Patched in Squeeze:	43
Duplicates in Squeeze:	19
Contrib or non-free in Squeeze:	11
Claimed in Squeeze:	2
Delayed in Squeeze:	8
Can fixed in a security Update:	12
Otherwise fixed in Squeeze:	21

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible), 121 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributers to get Debian 6.0 Squeeze released. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 271 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see my older post for an explanation of the different numbers.