Search Results: "ag"

8 August 2010

DebConf team: DebConf10: beta versions of the recordings are up (Posted by DebConf10 Videoteam)

For your enjoyment and enlightment, 85 videos in low and high encoding quality are available at the usual location already, which I think is totally superimpressive, even though the videos are relased as betas (or maybe alphas?) - so you might find issues. We will continue to work on them the next days and^w^w weeks, if you re on the team you can use the reviewing interface in penta like you did in NYC. More information about the work still to be done should be available on our mailing list in a few days
As previously said, please leave a thanks-message in our wiki. We truely love to hear your stories, where, what, how and why you watched our videos and how you benefit from our work. Your feedback is truely very important to us!
It is important to leave your thanks mesaage on the wiki, as our team consisted of about 40 wonderful people this year, so if you just say thanks to a few members, your message will not be as powerful and motivating as it could be :-)
So much for now, big thanks to everyone who help make DebConf10 a wonderful experience and great conference! You rock!

Kumar Appaiah: Debconf10 and New York Visit

So, I have finally visited my first Debconf, and it was a phenomenal experience. To meet persons who have guided you, persons work with, and persons you respect face-to-face and have conversations with them about several topics ranging from their vision for Debian to their views on topics totally unrelated to software is something truly great. I am now convinced that events like this, which provide the right environment to socialize and discuss various issues concerning Debian, will go a long way into getting several aspects of the project moving along in the right directions, as well as create awareness to the outside world about what the project is about and how it benefits users.In terms of discussions, the Debian Science track was a nice way to see how contributors are putting Debian to good use for scientific research, and it was a nice opportunity to list out the things to be done to fill in the gaps and take Debian as a science platform forward. The Debian Python BoF was also a good place to meet many contributors face-to-face, and learn more about the technical concerns which people have in regard to the future of Python in Debian.While I didn't hack much during the conference, Christian's presence made me finish the Hindi translation of the Debian Installer. We can now shift focus to other aspects, such as getting packages in order for a short freeze-to-release cycle.Columbia University provides for a very nice venue, with easy access while maintaining a quaint environment within itself. Since this is my second visit to New York City, I had an idea of the common tourist locations, so I did not go around much during the conference. However, since I have a buffer day, I might try my hand at some photography around the place.Have a safe trip home, and a wonderful time ahead! I leave you with a photo I took when I went with a friend across the Brooklyn Bridge after Debconf.Downtown Manhattan Panorama - from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, Brooklyn, NY

Petter Reinholdtsen: Testing if a file system can be used for home directories...

A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian Edu/Skolelinux machines. This was thought to be no problem, as the access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to mount home directories without any problems. But, after months of struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible. The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the underlying file system is a unix file system. When using a Windows file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics, and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics. As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as it should. If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might help you find your way out again. This is the fs-test.c source: 
/*
 * Some tests to check the file system sematics.  Used to verify that
 * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
 * directory.
 * License: GPL v2 or later
 * 
 * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
 * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
*/
#define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
#define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE 1
#define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE 1
#define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
#include <errno.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <sys/file.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#ifdef TEST_SQLITE
/*
 * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
 * package and linking with -lsqlite3.  A more low level test is
 * below.
 * See also <URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 >.
 */
#include <sqlite3.h>
#define CREATE_TABLE_USERS                                              \
  "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); "
int test_sqlite_open(void)  
  char *zErrMsg;
  char *name = "testsqlite.db";
  sqlite3 *db=NULL;
  unlink(name);
  int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &db);
  if( rc ) 
    printf("error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
    sqlite3_close(db);
    return -1;
   
  /* create tables */
  rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,  0, &zErrMsg);
  if( rc != SQLITE_OK ) 
    printf("error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n", zErrMsg);
    sqlite3_close(db);
    return -1;
   
  printf("info: sqlite worked\n");
  sqlite3_close(db);
  return 0;
 
#endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
/*
 * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3.  This
 * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows 2003.  This is
 * done in the sqlite3 library.
 * See also
 * <URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html> and the
 * POSIX specification
 * <URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html>.
 */
int test_gcompris_locking(void)  
  struct flock fl;
  char *name = "testsqlite.db";
  unlink(name);
  int fd = open(name, O_RDWR O_CREAT O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
  printf("info: testing fcntl locking\n");
  fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
  fl.l_pid    = getpid();
  printf("  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
  fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
  fl.l_len    = 1;
  fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
  if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
  printf("  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
  fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
  fl.l_len    = 510;
  fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
  if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
  printf("  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824");
  fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
  fl.l_len    = 1;
  fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
  if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
  printf("  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
  fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
  fl.l_len    = 1;
  fl.l_type   = F_WRLCK;
  if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
  printf("  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
  fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
  fl.l_len    = 510;
  if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
  printf("  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824");
  fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
  fl.l_len    = 2;
  fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
  if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
  close(fd);
  return 0;
 
/*
 * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
 * below them.  This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
 * Mounting with option 'sync' seem to solve this problem while
 * slowing down file operations.
 */
int test_subdirectory_creation(void)  
#define LEVELS 5
  char *path = strdup("test");
  char *dirs[LEVELS];
  int level;
  printf("info: testing subdirectory creation\n");
  for (level = 0; level < LEVELS; level++)  
    char *newpath = NULL;
    if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777))  
      printf("  error: Unable to create directory '%s': %s\n",
	     path, strerror(errno));
      break;
     
    asprintf(&newpath, "%s/%s", path, "test");
    free(path);
    path = newpath;
   
  return 0;
 
/*
 * Test if symlinks can be created.  This was a problem detected with
 * KDE.
 */
int test_symlinks(void)  
  printf("info: testing symlink creation\n");
  unlink("symlink");
  if (-1 == symlink("file", "symlink"))
    printf("  error: Unable to create symlink\n");
  return 0;
 
int main(int argc, char **argv)  
  printf("Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n");
  test_symlinks();
  test_subdirectory_creation();
#ifdef TEST_SQLITE
  test_sqlite_open();
#endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
  test_gcompris_locking();
  return 0;
When everything is working, it should print something like this: 
Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
info: testing symlink creation
info: testing subdirectory creation
info: sqlite worked
info: testing fcntl locking
  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking the read-only lock (while Windows do not). Another was a bug in the CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory. Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need it. :)

Michael Banck: 8 Aug 2010

So, DebConf is over and it was a blast. I wanted to blog about my talks for a couple of days, but the conference was so great that I did not get around to it until now. The unique thing about this year's conference were the outstanding contributions by non-Debian FLOSS people from the east coast. I am really glad the organizers decided to reach out to the communi ty and take this opportunity when a lot of great minds were just a couple of hours away. Also, discussing and hanging out with the local team people was so much fun and interesting that it was wor th the visit alone. The venue was just perfect, the dorms were on campus, the cafeteria had an all-you-can-eat buffet, everything was in short walking distance and the Columbia campus is beautiful. I would have liked to go to a couple more places in the evenings, but hanging out in the Carman basement lounge with awesome people was just as good. A big thanks to Richard Darst, Biella, Micah and the rest of the crew. The Debian GNU/Hurd talk went quite well, I was pleasantly surprised so many people made it to the Davis auditorium. I wanted to do the presentation on Debian GNU/Hurd (and I had it working before the talk), but as my notebook has a different resolution than the projector, I decided to play it safe and just show a d-i run in qemu. Nevertheless, Jeremie's wo rk on debian-installer is impressive, I got it installed on my ThinkPad without a problem (using qemu) and it automatically installed and setup grub2. Unfortunately, grub2 seems to be having issues when booting my notebook natively, but I got it to work with grub-legacy, including X and evince. There were quite a few comments and I had interesting conversations afterwards with a couple of people. It is a shame Emilio Pozuelo Monfort (pochu) could not make it to DebConf to give the talk himself, he did lots of great work on porting packages and fixing the Hurd and glibc for various testsuites over the last couple of months. My other talk about GOsa and FAI was a bit rougher, I scrambled to get FAI integration in GOsa to work based on Mark Pavlichuk'sinstallation scripts which I fixed up over the last couple of weeks to the point where one can install a client using the FAI simple demo classes (which I ported to GOsa's FAI LDAP). There were some problems with the demonstration during the talk and I guess it was a tough audience for a web-based admin tool but I hopefully got my point across that we should salvage this work done for the city of Munich. Indeed, I had great discussions with Andreas Mundt from debian-edu afterwards who posted a summary and call for discussion to the debian-edu mailing list.

Joey Hess: bye bye, ny ny

view of Manhatten, Statue of Liberty, and Ellis Island from helicopter
In a few hours I will be catching the train for home. It's been a great DebConf, and a thrilling visit to New York. I'm especially happy with how well my CUT BoF went, and that we launched Branchable. As usual, DebConf is inspiring. I'm leaving with a scary new todo list:
my foot at 1000 feet

7 August 2010

Petter Reinholdtsen: Autodetecting Client setup for roaming workstations in Debian Edu

A few days ago, I tried to install a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the university infrastructure. It was fairly easy, but it occured to me that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure around it. Now I am a huge step further along that road. With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory servers for Kerberos authentication. All this without any configuration at all during installation. My users home directory got a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL. In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured. In addition to this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf. Iceweasel and KDE is configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use a proxy when at the university network. If the machine is moved to a network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP gave it a IP address. The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS entry ldap.$domain. If this do not exist, it look for the _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP server. Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and pick the first one as the LDAP base. For Kerberos, a similar algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the uppercase version of $domain. So, what is not working, you might ask. SMB mounting my home directory do not work. No idea why, but suspected the incorrect Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be the cause. These are not properly configured during installation, and had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server, but SMB mounting still do not work. :( With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM authentication. It should also work out of the box in a Active Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects with UID and GID values. If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RInside release 0.2.3

A new 0.2.3 release of RInside is now on CRAN. RInside is a set of convenience classes which facilitate embedding of R inside of C++ applications and programs. RInside works particularly well with Rcpp and now depends on it. This is the first release since March when we released 0.2.2. A few things got added to Rcpp in the meantime, and RInside is taking advantage of some of these as illustrated in several of the included examples. More details and the changelog are on the RInside page which also leads

Christian Perrier: Developers per country

Back in 2009, I did some analysis of the number of developers per country. Apparently, some people at DebConf remember this and asked if I could update this data. So, here we are with the 2010 version, sorted by the ratio of *active* developers per million population for each country. 
Act: number of active developers
Dev: total number of developers
A/M: number of active devels per million pop.
D/M: number of devels per million pop.
2009: rank in 2009
2010: rank in 2010
Code	Name		Population	Act	Dev	A/M	D/M	2009	2010
fi	Finland		5359538		21	32	3,92	5,97	1	1
ch	Switzerland	7782900		22	26	2,83	3,34	2	2
nz	New Zealand	4386207		11	15	2,51	3,42	4	3
no	Norway		4895500		11	14	2,25	2,86	5	4
lu	Luxemburg	502202		1	1	1,99	1,99	8	5
se	Sweden		9354462		18	34	1,92	3,63	3	6
de	Germany		81757600	148	212	1,81	2,59	7	7
at	Austria		8356707		14	23	1,68	2,75	6	8
ie	Ireland		6197100		9	12	1,45	1,94	13	9
au	Australia	22413132	32	56	1,43	2,5	9	10
be	Belgium		10827519	14	16	1,29	1,48	10	11
fr	France		65447374	84	112	1,28	1,71	12	12
nl	Netherlands	16607943	20	38	1,2	2,29	11	13
uk	United-Kingdom	62041708	64	102	1,03	1,64	14	14
ca	Canada		34199000	27	56	0,79	1,64	15	15
es	Spain		46030109	34	52	0,74	1,13	16	16
dk	Denmark		5540241		4	8	0,72	1,44	17	17
hr	Croatia		4489409		3	3	0,67	0,67	20	18
lt	Lithuania	3341966		2	2	0,6	0,6	28	19
cz	Czech Rep	10506813	6	6	0,57	0,57	21	20
us	USA		309913000	165	360	0,53	1,16	19	21
it	Italy		60231214	32	46	0,53	0,76	23	22
bg	Bulgaria	7563710		4	4	0,53	0,53	25	23
il	Israel		7602400		4	6	0,53	0,79	24	24
hu	Hungary		10005000	5	11	0,5	1,1	18	25
lv	Latvia		2217969		1	2	0,45	0,9	26	26
uy	Uruguay		3494382		1	2	0,29	0,57	22	27
jp	Japan		127420000	32	45	0,25	0,35	30	28
pl	Poland		38192000	9	13	0,24	0,34	29	29
cr	Costa Rica	4253897		1	1	0,24	0,24	31	30
sk	Slovakia	5379455		1	1	0,19	0,19	32	31
pt	Portugal	11317192	2	4	0,18	0,35	27	32
ar	Argentina	40134425	6	8	0,15	0,2	34	33
tw	Taiwan		23119772	3	3	0,13	0,13	37	34
br	Brazil		192272890	20	21	0,1	0,11	36	35
by	Belarus		9648533		1	1	0,1	0,1	35	36
mg	Madagascar	20653556	2	2	0,1	0,1	44	37
gr	Greece		11306183	1	3	0,09	0,27	33	38
kr	South Korea	48758000	4	6	0,08	0,12	39	39
ec	Ecuador		14790608	1	1	0,07	0,07		40
cl	Chile		17063000	1	2	0,06	0,12	42	41
ru	Russia		141927297	7	8	0,05	0,06	43	42
ro	Romania		22215421	1	2	0,05	0,09	45	43
co	Colombia	45393050	2	3	0,04	0,07	41	44
ve	Venezuela	26814843	1	1	0,04	0,04	40	45
pe	Peru		29461933	1	1	0,03	0,03	46	46
tr	Turkey		72561312	2	2	0,03	0,03	47	47
za	South Africa	49991300	1	8	0,02	0,16	38	48
mx	Mexico		111211789	2	2	0,02	0,02	49	49
th	Thailand	66404688	1	2	0,02	0,03	50	50
eg	Egypt		78737000	1	2	0,01	0,03	51	51
in	India		1184344000	7	7	0,01	0,01	52	52
cn	China		1338612968	6	10	0	0,01	53	53
ua	Ukraine		45888000	0	0	0	0	48	54
								
								
					873	1410	61,91%
A few interesting facts:

6 August 2010

Ben Hutchings: 'This Week in Debian' podcast

A few weeks ago Zack wrote about preparations for a new podcast to be called 'This Week in Debian'. I volunteered to be interviewed, and have now talked with Jonathan Nadeau for about 30 minutes about the work of the kernel team and the release process. Hopefully he'll be editing down my rambling so the first episode won't be too boring! If you do work on Debian that you'd like to talk about to an interested audience, follow the link above and yourself to the list of potential interviewees.

Matthew Garrett: AE_AML_BUFFER_LIMIT in \_SB_._OSC

If you get messages like this:

ACPI Error (psparse-0537): Method parse/execution failed [\_SB_._OSC] (Node ffff8801e8c62b30), AE_AML_BUFFER_LIMIT

then you've fallen foul of one of the less appealing aspects of ACPI. _OSC methods are defined as methods to allow the operating system and the firmware to handshake over their support of optional features. Different _OSC methods apply to different types of hardware. CPU _OSC methods allow the operating system to inform the firmware that it supports ACPI 3.0 throttling states, while PCIe _OSC methods allow the operating system to indicate that it can manage native PCIe hotplug. The firmware can choose whether or not to give up control of these features, and the OS then has to cope.

The problem arises when we get to the _OSC method on the system bus. This wasn't specified until ACPI 4.0, leaving an attractive mechanism for vendors to add OS/firmware integration. To that end, we now have at least three different _SB_._OSC methods in the wild:
  1. The ACPI specified _OSC. This exists purely for the OS to tell the firmware what it supports, without the firmware having the opportunity to disagree. As such it passes 8 bytes of data to the method.
  2. The Microsoft WHEA _OSC. This exists to allow the firmware and Windows to handshake over whether or not the firmware supports Microsoft's hardware error reporting.
  3. HP's PCC _OSC method, designed to allow handshaking between the OS and the firmware in order to determine whether they support OS interaction with the firmware-level CPU scaling


This wouldn't be enough to be a problem in itself. The ACPI spec requires _OSC methods to have GUIDs in order to protect users from exactly this kind of situation - Windows can attempt to enable WHEA on a machine with a spec-compliant _OSC, and the _OSC method will return an immediate failure because the GUID doesn't match. Except that the WHEA and PCC versions of _SB_._OSC pass 12 bytes of data in the third argument, against the ACPI spec version's 8. And many _OSC implementations attempt to access the region between bytes 9 and 12 before checking the GUID, resulting in the AE_AML_BUFFER_LIMIT error.

This is made even more annoying due to the fact that argument 2 contains the number of parameters being passed in argument 3, making it straightforward to avoid this kind of failure. Firmware authors, tbh.

DebConf team: DebConf10: please say thank you to the whole team (Posted by DebConf10 Videoteam)

If you appreciate the videoteams work, please leave a message in our wiki. We truely love to her your stories, where, what, how and why you watched our videos and how you benefit from our work. Your feedback is truely very important to us! :-)

Martin-&#201;ric Racine: Hell just froze over a.k.a. Squeeze is frozen

Just noticed about an hour ago on debian-announce: Squeeze entered into freeze tonight. Hurray! What this means in practice is that, unless a new version of something fixes a serious bug, it will not be allowed to trickle down from Sid into Squeeze on time for the actual release. Still, I cannot help but feel sad that it happened just a few days short of upstream releasing the Geode 2.11.9 driver for X.org, because AMD recently committed a lot of resources towards fixing all outstanding issues on this driver and yet one major Linux distribution is about to release without those fixes, unless the Release Manager agrees to let us squeeze 2.11.9 into, well, Squeeze. Doable? Possibly, if enough people calmly ask the Release Manager for it.

Thorsten Glaser: FrOSCon 2010 and other sundries

The FrOSCon 5 - 21./22. August 2010 booth plans have finalised, I am rather content: 

	               I   STANDPLAN FROSCON 2010
	  F reeWRT
	 
	  M irBSD
	    
	 
	  D ebian
	                     C = Collectd
	 
	 C     G rml

This is especially good, as XTaran will be shared among (at least) Debian, Grml, FreeWRT; same for me plus of course MirBSD; kimnotyze is FreeWRT but may help with MirBSD; benz and gecko2 probably are MirBSD but gecko2 could help with FreeWRT, tokkee was interested in FreeWRT too anyway.

Some days, you just love software.

	Aug  6 13:55:01 blau firesomething-bin: stack overflow
	    in function VFY_EndWithSignature
	Aug  6 13:55:01 blau /bsd: signal 6 received by
	    (firesomething-bi:1146) UID(2999) EUID(2999),
	    parent (sh:9059) UID(2999) EUID(2999)

Thus, let me re terate it for all of you:
(removed from Planet Debian) Well, now that the Debian Release Managers have sent their freezing bits around *shudder* Squeeze is frozen. Well, at least everything I have my hands in has migrated. I m still not persuaded. I also can t decide which looks worse (KDE 4 or Win 7), tending towards KDE 4 (Read on for more controverse/questionable statements.)

Alexander Reichle-Schmehl: Release Critical Bug report for Week 31

The unofficial rc bug tracker currently knows about the following bugs:
In Total:433
Affecting Squeeze:314
Squeeze only:69
Remaining to be fixed in Squeeze:245
Of these 245 bugs, the following tags are set:
Pending in Squeeze:18
Patched in Squeeze:45
Duplicates in Squeeze:28
Contrib or non-free in Squeeze:10
Claimed in Squeeze:2
Delayed in Squeeze:7
Can fixed in a security Update:9
Otherwise fixed in Squeeze:32
Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible), 145 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributers to get Debian 6.0 Squeeze released. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 220 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see my older post for an explanation of the different numbers.

Andreas Barth: RFH: buildd and multiple builds in parallel

On some machines, we have enough cpus to run more than one build in parallel. However, as of now, this isn't supported by buildd. What needs to be done is to change the following code to have up to n builds happening in parallel (including of getting the next package if there is a free slot). 
    while( 1 )  
        $self->check_restart();
        $self->read_config();
        my ( $dist_config, $pkg_ver) = get_next_REDO($self);
        $self->do_build( $dist_config, $pkg_ver) if $pkg_ver;
        next if $pkg_ver;
        ( $dist_config, $pkg_ver) = get_next_WANNABUILD($self);
        $self->do_build( $dist_config, $pkg_ver) if $pkg_ver;
        next if $pkg_ver;
        # sleep a little bit if there was nothing to do this time
            $self->log("Nothing to do -- sleeping " .
                       $self->get_conf('IDLE_SLEEP_TIME') . " seconds\n");
            my $idle_start_time = time;
            sleep( $self->get_conf('IDLE_SLEEP_TIME') );
            my $idle_end_time = time;
            $self->write_stats("idle-time", $idle_end_time - $idle_start_time);
Any takers? The full code is available from git://git.debian.org/buildd-tools/sbuild.git in the file lib/Buildd/Daemon.pm (and I'm happy to try out appropriate patches). Update The code above lives in the git branch buildd, and not master. Also, I already have one proposal in my mail.

5 August 2010

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.2.5

Hot on the heels of RcppArmadillo release 0.2.4 a few days ago comes a new release 0.2.5 which is now on CRAN. RcppArmadillo makes it easy to write highly efficient and highly readable C++ code for linear algebra (based on Armadillo) in R extensions (using Rcpp for the interface). This release upgrades the included Armadillo version to Conrad's just-released version 0.9.60. This overcomes some of minor issues we had with 'older' compilers such as g++ 4.2.x with x being 1 or 2. No other changes were made from our end. The short NEWS file extract follows: 
0.2.5   2010-08-05
    o   Upgraded to Armadillo 0.9.60 "Killer Bush Turkey"
More information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

Christian Perrier: +1 to languages of India in Debian Installer

After Arjuna Rao Chavala successfully completed enough of D-I translation, I just activated support for the Telugu language in Debian Installer. Given the currently planned released, that will be available in the next release, so hopefully for Squeeze. Telugu is spoken in Andhra Pradesh, one of the largest states in India, on the south-eastern coast of the country. The main city of Andrha Pradesh is Hyderabad, the 6th largest city of India. Telugu is the third most-spoken language in India, with about 74 million native speakers. As of now, out of the 29 languages in India with over 1 million speakers, we do support 9 of them that represent over 70% of the population of India. We indeed now support the five most spoken languages in India (of course, all this by excluding English).

Andreas Barth: RFH: buildd and multiple builds in parallel

On some machines, we have enough cpus to run more than one build in parallel. However, as of now, this isn't supported by buildd. What needs to be done is to change the following code to have up to n builds happening in parallel (including of getting the next package if there is a free slot). 
    while( 1 )  
        $self->check_restart();
        $self->read_config();
        my ( $dist_config, $pkg_ver) = get_next_REDO($self);
        $self->do_build( $dist_config, $pkg_ver) if $pkg_ver;
        next if $pkg_ver;
        ( $dist_config, $pkg_ver) = get_next_WANNABUILD($self);
        $self->do_build( $dist_config, $pkg_ver) if $pkg_ver;
        next if $pkg_ver;
        # sleep a little bit if there was nothing to do this time
            $self->log("Nothing to do -- sleeping " .
                       $self->get_conf('IDLE_SLEEP_TIME') . " seconds\n");
            my $idle_start_time = time;
            sleep( $self->get_conf('IDLE_SLEEP_TIME') );
            my $idle_end_time = time;
            $self->write_stats("idle-time", $idle_end_time - $idle_start_time);
Any takers? The full code is available from git://git.debian.org/buildd-tools/sbuild.git in the file lib/Buildd/Daemon.pm (and I'm happy to try out appropriate patches).

Alexander Reichle-Schmehl: DDs, please feel free to commit to the DPN directly

The svn repository used to draft the Debian Project News just passed the sixth hundreds commit. If my calculations are correct, that's quite more than the number of edits done, back when the DPN was drafted in the wiki. I take it as a hint, that the new work flow works better than the old one. However, playing a bit with statistics (done by horrible shell one liners ;) I noticed, that - while every Debian Developer may commit to the subversion repository - not that many commits from other DDs where made: Of the 602 commits so far, only 70 where done by other DDs: 
alex@melusine:~$ svn log --xml svn://svn.debian.org/svn/publicity \
 xmlstarlet sel -t -m "/log/logentry/author" -v "concat(.,' ')"   \
sed -e "s/ /\n/g" sort uniq -c sort -n grep -v guest grep -v tolimar
      1
      1 abe
      1 hertzog
      1 holger
      1 mika
      1 paravoid
      2 pabs
      3 alfie
     15 zobel
     20 gio
     25 spaillard
To give credit where credit is due, here are the guest commits: 
     16 tpeteul-guest
     21 jeremiah-guest
     25 gmascellani-guest
     36 madamezou-guest
    122 taffit-guest
Many thanks so far, but I would like to advertise the Debian Project News and invite every DD to help us and to commit directly. It's quite easy: Run svn co svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/publicity/dpn/en/current, edit the index.wml file, and then commit your changes back to the repository. (Well, ideally you would also honor Status flag and won't commit, if it's not open-for-edit.) As for the format: While we indeed use wml, you just need some basic HTML knowledge. To add a paragraph just use the following with proper content: 
<a name="X"></a>
<h2>Fancy title</h2>
<p>More details about the topic.</p>
Usually the articles are kind of sorted by importance, so unless you are pretty sure it might be the easiest to just add your article at the end of the regular news, just before the other news sections. Should you not be able to fill an entire paragraph, feel free to just a one or two sentences to the other news section (just add a <p>...</p> with your content to the end of the other news). Don't worry about style, your English or syntax: It won't end up on the web page directly, it's reviewed and checked, so you can't do anything wrong. More details are available in the wiki at http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute. Feel free to ask any questions unanswered on the publicity list at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org. Feel also free to contact us there, if you would like to help by translations or reviews. The more people help, the less work it's for everyone :) If you are not a Debian Developer, but still would like to help us, it's no problem. All you need is an account on our Alioth System (very easy to get, you just need to ask) and request to join the publicity project. See http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute#Becominganeditoryourself for the respective links.

Matt Zimmerman: DebConf 10: Day 3

How We Can Be the Silver Lining of the Cloud (Eben Moglen) Eben s talk was on the same topic as his Internet Society talk in February, which I had downloaded and watched some time ago. He challenges the free software community to develop the software to power the freedom box , a small, efficient and inexpensive personal server. Such a system would put users more in control of their online lives, give them better protection for it under the law, and provide a platform for many new federated services. It sounds like a very interesting project, which I d like to write more about. Statistical Machine Learning Analysis of Debian Mailing Lists (Hanna Wallach) Hanna is bringing together her interests in machine learning and free software by using machine learning techniques to analyze of publicly available data from free software communities. In doing so, she hopes to develop tools for studying the patterns of collaboration, innovation and other behavior in these communities. Her methodology uses statistical topic models, which infer the topic of a document based on the occurrence of topical words, to group Debian mailing list posts by topic. Her example analyzed posts from the debian-project and debian-women mailing lists, inferring a set of topics and categorizing all of the posts according to which topic(s) were represented in them. Using this data, she could plot over time the frequency of discussion of each topic, which revealed interesting patterns. The audience quickly zoned in on practical applications for things like flamewar and troll detection. Debian Derivatives BoF (Matt Zimmerman) I organized this discussion session to share perspectives on Debian derivatives, in particular how we can improve cooperation between derivatives and Debian itself. The room was a bit hard to find, so attendance was relatively small, but this turned out to be a plus. With a smaller group, we were able to get acquainted with each other, and everyone participated. Unsurprisingly, there were many more representatives from Ubuntu than other derivatives, and I was concerned that Ubuntu would dominate the discussion. It did, but I tried to draw out perspectives from other derivatives where possible. On the whole, the tone was positive and constructive. This may be due in part to people self-selecting for the BoF, but I think there is a lot of genuine goodwill between Debian and Ubuntu. Stefano Zacchiroli took notes in Gobby during the session, which I expect he will post somewhere public when he has a chance.

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