If you find yourself trying to pre-empt accusations of unfairness by coming up with plausible explanations, this should be a clear and obvious indication that you are about to do something unfair and wrong. If you are being accused of unfairness and are trying to think of ways to defend against this criticism, it means you probably already have done something unfair and wrong. It also means that you probably have too much power.

Memorial Day weekend is also time for the annual Bike The Drive in Chicago. This time only half the household got up bright and early and enjoyed Lakeshore Drive free of cars. A highly recommended event.

It's Memorial Day weekend so it was time for the Chicago's JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge on Thursday. The weather was glorious, the usual 20-some thousand runners participated and a good time was had. Work had arranged for a nice tent, food, music --- and a bunch of people showed up and enjoyed it. Nice one. This time we all got chip-timing via a small (rfid ?) strip tagged to back of the bib number. Which is handy as I managed to not stop my time by hand correctly. Given that I am still nursing a sore Achilles tendon and don't train well or much, the time of 23:51 (or 6:48 min/mile) was ok compared to the other seven previous times I have run this.

Last week was very busy for me. Unfortunately, I spent most of my time no my study duties. An exam session is fast approaching, so in next 3 weeks the situation will not be better. But as I promised, during second part of week, I am working full time on my project.

So, here are missing mockups of future Aptitude Qt GUI:

Changes Preview tab:

Only one "Preview Tab" can be opened at the same time. Changes will be live updated here.

Resolver:

Perform Changes tab:


This time I am not too innovative. I think that current Aptitude GTK design for this tabs is quite intuitive and good-looking, so I have added only minor tweaks.

To sum up mockups topic, below are links to all presented mockups (with some comments which raises during my recent private discussions). Now, I am open for any suggestions and comments about current design. At the end of next week, second iteration will be presented. Depending of the level of required changes there could be third iteration, before sending mockups to Piotr "Patpi" Pe zowski, who is the person behind Kadu Usability Project. I am glad that he agreed to spend his spare time and help me with this task :)

Packages tab:

This tab in second iteration will have only small changes. I was told that will be nice to select multiple categories at the same time. I agree, so categories list will support multi selection. There will be also an option in configuration window (There is no mockup now. Currently, I do not know what option will be configurable and it is not the most important thing at this stage. The window will be patterned upon KDE configuration windows) to move this list on the right side of this tab.

It will be possible to have multiple "Packages tabs" opened at the same time. It will not be allowed to close first "Package Tab". Ctrl + T shortcut, action in main menu and toolbar (I have forgotten about toolbar in this iteration - maybe it is not necessary?) will open new tab. There will be also an option that each text search will do this. I will try to add shortcuts wherever is it possible to allow using the GUI without mouse.

"Show changes" button will be change to "Resolve dependencies" when necessary.

Updates widget:

Most of the comments from "Packages tab" apply here too. In the table showing updates will be also "Current Version" column.


Package Informations tab:

Only one clarification: multiple "Packages Informations" tabs for the same package will not be allowed.

I am looking forward to read any comments regarding presented design. Please leave comment below this post or contact me directly (see About Me page).

On Monday/Tuesday I will write first weekly report.

Cheers.

Today, I have finished only one mockup. Designing "Package Details" tab was much harder than I had thought it would be. But here is it:

Package details:

It is not finished and requires more work (as all mockups). There are two main mockups left (Preview and Resolver tabs). They will have been finished till the end of Wednesday. Fortunately, there is still some time to finish and evaluate mockups. As I wrote before, firstly I will be coding low level classes.

Today (it is past midnight in my timezone ;) ) is also official start of coding period (It has not been announcement yet). For the next month, I will have been sharing my time between GSoC and my normal study duties. Due to that fact, most of my work will be done in second part of each week. I will write weakly updates on this blog.

So, please stay tuned and wish me good luck :)

Here are two mockups presenting my basic ideas about future aptitude-Qt GUI:

Packages tab:


Updates tab:


Mockups for Show Package and Preview tabs will be finished tomorrow.

Any comments and constructive criticism are much appreciated.

Hello all.

Last week I was very busy, due to my university duties. On Tuesday I had my first exam in this semester (in Numerical Analysis), which took me more time than I had thought it would be.
From this reason my project is slightly behind schedule, but now I will do my best to catch the plan.

On the other hand, there are also some good news for me. Some time ago, Daniel Burrows migrated aptitude repository from mercurial to GIT. I am git user for nearly year, so I strongly support this move ;) .

Here are some basic thoughts which functionalities good package manager must have (and which approach (from aptitude-gtk, synaptic and adept) I like the most):

• upgrade packeges with good conflict resolution - aptitude conflict resolver is the most advanced. Without a doubt, it has to be in Qt version
• fast searching and installing new packages - I prefer synaptic/yast approach with categories on the left and packages on the right, with single click behavior from KPackegeKit/adept (single click shows package description under selected package and with detailed informations available in new tab - as in aptitude-gtk)
• viewing detailed package informations
• downgrading, holding etc
• fetching packages list, cleaning cache etc

All of this will be elaborated in mockups. Am I forgetting something important?

The most important questions is: "What is the most common use case for package manager? Installing packages or upgrading packages?". I am not sure if this two actions require different views, or there should be only new category in install package view.

This is all now. More updates (and mockups) will be available today's midnight (or tomorrow morning). So please stay tuned :)

Hello Planet Debian readers!

I've never thought that such a thing can ever happen, but I've started blogging ;) So now it is time to introduce myself.

My name is Piotr Galiszewski and I am second year student of computer science at AGH - University of Science and Technology in Krakow (Poland). I have been GNU/Linux user for about 5 years (mostly Debian based distributions).

Thanks for Debian and Google, this summer I will be working on creating Qt-based user interface for aptitude as my Google Summer of Code project. I hope that my mentors Sune Vuorela and Daniel Barrows will be patient with me ;) I am sure I will learn a lot from them. Please look at abstract of my project made by Debian GSoC administrator Obey Arthur Liu:

Qt GUI for aptitude. Currently, KDE users need to use Aptitude via the console interface, or install the newly developed GTK frontend, which does not fit well into KDE desktop. Making Qt frontend to Aptitude would solve this problem and bring an advanced and fully Debian-compliant graphical package manager to KDE.

As I wrote in my proposal I will split my work into three main parts:

1. writing low level classes which will abstract aptitude signals and slots (which uses sigc++) into Qt slots and signals.
2. creating and evaluating GUI mockups
3. implementing GUI on top of classes from the first point

Point 1 and 2 will be made simultaneously and will take all May and half of June. Low level classes should implement all necessary functions for further use in GUI. This classes allow me to avoid direct usage of none Qt code in GUI classes and also give much more time to prepare completed and usability-wise mockups. Every mockups version will be presented and discussed on this blog. First version should be ready in next few days and updates will appear each week (or to weeks).
After finishing this two steps I will start coding GUI. With mockups and finished low level classes this should not be complicated (Yeah, I know that this is only my dream).

Full text of my proposal (including more precise time-line) can be found at Debian wiki.

Currently, project is slightly behind the schedule . It is caused by changes in my studies plan. The Juwanalia students' festival took place earlier, and yesterday it finished. But my first exam will take place one week later on 18 May, so I will have more time to catch up with time-line.

This project is my first direct contribution to Debian, but not first involvement in free software movement. I've been Kadu Instant Messenger developer for more then two year. In last two years I have been second most active developer with more than 700 commits in master branch. During GSoC period my Kadu activities will be limited. If time allows me to do this, I will be still contributing to Kadu. I still can be found at Kadu forum or #kadu channel on irc.freenode.net. I will also continue reviewing patches and fixing low time-consuming bugs.

My plans for the next few days:

• continue researching aptitude codebase
• discover all functionalities that should be implemented by Qt frontend
• review of other graphical package manager GUIs (and probably write about my thoughts on this blog)
• create first draft of my mockups

If you have any thoughts about this project, please add comment to this post or contact me directly. I will be glad to read all yours opinions

Cheers

PS. As you can see English is not my mother tongue, so please forgive me my mistakes

With the 10.10 developer summit behind us, several teams have published engineering plans for the 10.10 release cycle, including:

• The Desktop team plan, via Rick Spencer, includes both Desktop Edition and Netbook Edition, and covers Software Center, GNOME, application and browser selection (including Chromium), X11 and social networking
• The Server team plan, via Jos Boumans, covers migrating services to Upstart, improvements to the mail stack, cloud and cluster storage systems, cloud deployment and load balancing, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, and Java
• The Foundations team plan, via Duncan McGreggor, covers system initialization, btrfs, cleaning house, improvements to the installers, Software Center (also) and Upstart (itself), along with a batch of miscellaneous projects, including compiling Ubuntu for the i686 instruction set
• The Kernel team plan, via Leann Ogasawara, covers the choice of kernel 2.6.35, the current Ubuntu patch set, the configuration of our various kernel flavours, bug management, and the availability of backports of newer kernels to Ubuntu LTS releases

During the week-end, samba 3.5.3 hit the archive. It is still in experimental (and will remain there as Squeeze will be released with 3.4.* as finally decided during SambaXP). For lenny users, I also build backported packages. They are not on backports.org as the policy for these "as official as possible" backports is to have the same version than testing. So, they are provided "as is", for i386 and amd64, on the pkg-samba team's unofficial repository. The Release file on that repository is signed by my GPG key. Please note that these backports also need talloc from backports.org so you need to add entries for backports.org in your sources.list files to be able to use them. Since I last blogged about samba packages, the 3.4.8 version was also released. It entered testing without any problem and I also uploaded a backported version to backports.org. Finally, on May 5th, new versions of the 3.2.5 packages of lenny were updated to 2:3.2.5-4lenny11, currently in stable-proposed-updates. So, they will be part of the next point release of lenny. They fix two important bugs (#575951 for interdomain trust with w2k8 servers, and #538819 for memory leaks in some situations).

wiki.d.o/Teams to the rescue About 3 years ago (too bad I've actually missed the 3-year anniversary by a few days!), Raphael set up http://wiki.debian.org/Teams. In my recent encounters and contacts with people interested in contributing to Debian, I've found that page to be of invaluable help. In particular, people find it very useful in understanding the macro-structures of Debian and in understanding where they can start to contribute. Approaching a team is most likely "less scary" than contacting a larger forum, and that page offers a good service of team indexing. Of course, the usefulness of wiki.d.o/Teams is directly proportional to how much complete it is and to how much individual team pages are current. So, in case you didn't know about the page or that you just remembered that years ago you set up a page there and then forgot about it, this is probably a good moment to add or update your team information there. To eat my own dog food, I've recently set up Teams/DPL, which is probably not terribly useful, but it contains interesting stuff such as where the daily activity bits are stored. (Yes: I'm just a one-person-team, but given the index is useful to document Debian "parts" in general, I believe we should allow for a slightly semantic abuse of the name.) Incidentally, that shows another way in which wiki team pages can come to the rescue: improve the documentation of our processes. For instance, we are grown accustomed to the fact that d-d-a is an authoritative information source. Well, of course it is, but when you need to find out a 4-year old d-d-a post of some core team, since it is the only documentation of some still current (is it?) procedure, let's be fair and acknowledge that a mailing list archive it's not that handy. So, summarizing relevant d-d-a posts in team pages (with references to the originals) is another way, accessible to everybody, to help in keeping docs current. I've been doing that recently for a handful of teams, and people seem to appreciate (of course it's your responsibility to check that they do appreciate).

The python-pykickstart package just landed in sid. If you wish to create or modify your kickstart configuration file from python, pykickstart is developed by Redhat fellows in order to make your job with kickstart easier. Kickstart aims to make automated systems installations for redhat/fedora.

And just to round off my last post (and of course, following a completely non-technical thematic), what is the logical consequence of feeling introspective and blogging just before preparing dinner? Of course Dinner gets prepared with sharing it in mind. The dish ends up even looking as if meant to be served! So this was it: One of my simplest and still favorite dishes: Tostadas. But, yes, these are heterodox tostadas, as they share the basic tostadiness (a hard, roasted and cracky toasted corn tortilla with a soft leguminous layer to give it some consistency, and with... stuff on top. Yes, stuff is sometimes too generic, but that's the beauty of it). What did I come up with? In the strict order with which they were approached at feeding time, and described bottom to top:

1. Closest to traditional, top left: Mashed beans, bits of panela cheese with little bits of chipotle and soybean-based vegetarian chorizo
2. Something I have only seen in Guatemala, and which I intend to take a better look at next time I'm there (top right): Mashed frijoles, , cochinita pibil (canned, shame on me, and frankly lacking in taste), grated beet (betabel/remolacha/betarraga/whatnot), grated cabbage
3. The heterodoxiest of them all, and the idea that led me to the others (center): Mashed lima/fava beans (according to Google habas), cochinita pibil, nopales, and a hint of habanero sauce.

Yum! [update] On a completely unrelated notice, but not worth opening a third post in a row... Some minutes after I published the earlier post, I got a visit to http://gwolf.org/blog/pleasant-perception-changes?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter. Now, it beats me: I don't use twitter. I don't even care about twitter. And were my message so deep somebody just twitted (twat it?) right away, I still find the time lapse too short. Who's auto-twitting me? Maybe a planet or other such aggregator?

as a short reminder that there are still a few RC bugs waiting to be fixed here's a short list of the ones I've worked on in the last time:

• #571116 debsums: "debsums: overwrites /etc/apt.conf.d/90debsums without asking"
  upload NMU prepared by Giovanni Mascellani to DELAYED/2
• #578458 src:libcoro-perl: "libcoro-perl: FTBFS: E: Caught signal 'Terminated': terminating immediately"
  modify package to get more info (pkg-perl)
• #578638 libpam-ldap: "libpam-ldap: needs versioned dependency on libpam-runtime"
  make dependecy versioned (again), upload to DELAYED/2
• #581194 libpoe-component-irc-perl: "libpoe-component-irc-perl: Insufficient stripping of CR/LF allows arbitrary IRC command execution"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #581327 src:libpoe-component-sslify-perl: "libpoe-component-sslify-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  new upstream release + additional dependency (pkg-perl)
• #583351 libtime-y2038-perl: "libtime-y2038-perl: FTBFS"
  adjust build dependency to please sbuild (pkg-perl)
• #583418 src:libnet-z3950-zoom-perl: "libnet-z3950-zoom-perl: FTBFS: Nonexistent build-dependency: libyaz3-dev"
  correct build dependency (pkg-perl)
• #583462 src:libnet-https-any-perl: "libnet-https-any-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  fix test suite in debian/rules (pkg-perl)
• #583467 src:libdist-zilla-perl: "libdist-zilla-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  upload new upstream version (pkg-perl)
• #583751 src:ufraw: "ufraw-batch: fails to install"
  new RC bug reported

I've updated my BPM tap toy, which started behaving strangely since some GTK update. I've identified two issues, and it is working again now.The BPM tap toy is a tiny Python script to obtain a BPM estimation by tapping on your mouse or keyboard. In contrast to many other such applications it does give you an error estimation and will visualize your precision in tapping. This way, you can judge how precise the value is.I have some ideas to further increase precision while adding another useful visualization to judge the result quality.

Today I received a mail from the DebConf Travel Sponsorship Team and they informed me that I may get partially (or fully) sponsored. Ok that s a bit vague for now, but that also means that I may come to Debconf 10 yeah! I also applied for this Debconf Newbies thingy, as this will be the first DebConf for me, but unfortunately there where too many applicants and not enough money and they had to decline my request.

The last weeks, I've occasionally been contributing to Wikipedia. I must say, Wikipedia is a really odd world of its own. Another thing I found quite surprising is the difference between the English and the German Wikipedia.Some things I noticed:

• Some information in Wikipedia is grossly inaccurate. Interestingly, this even applies to computer science topics as simple as database indexes.
• A lot of the time, you meet users that 'defend' 'their' pages to any changes, as if they were the sole expert on this subject
• There appear to be plenty of zealots^W users with their life focused on deleting things from Wikipedia they do not consider "notable". This goes as far as the German Wikipedia having an initative called "Improve, don't delete" or the "Article Rescue Squad" in English Wikipedia
• English Wikipedia suffers a lot from link spam, despite "nofollow". In 'hot' (commercially, not on Wikipedia) topics such as "knowledge management" (yes, the "knowledge management" article on Wikipedia is crap, despite Wikis often being called "knowledge management"), half of the edits are link spam and reversals. There also is a lot of bookspam and citation spam, resulting in badly written articles where half of the article is unsorted and only partially relevant literature. In German Wikipedia, this seems to be a lot less of an issue.
• In general, German Wikipedia seems to be a lot more patrolled against changes (in particular links), but often is both less complete and less accurate.

So on overall: keep away from Wikipedia contributors, they're all maniacs. And often, don't bother to read a Wikipedia article if you can get an appropriate textbook. The Wikipedia article will just try to sell you a dozen textbooks anyway; you'll also have to read them to check the validity.It is a pity, that despite its size and "eyeballs", Wikipedia so far seems to have not attracted much attention by actual "domain experts", but it seems that it is largely filled by bureocrats, zealots and promoters. (That don't have any real work to do?)There are many things wrong here, that have been pointed out by many others, too. I'm not going to rescue the Wikipedia world, either. And yes, I am aware that you can discuss in Wikipedia, too.

• Good articles get more contributions. Nobody cares for the black sheep. It probably gives just much more gratitude to turn a good article into an excellent one, than turning a bad one into an okay one.
• Wikipedia at the same time tries to be exhaustive and maintain a certain "notability". This ends in people creating articles (because they're missing) and others then deleting them (because they consider them "not notable"). This is very discouraging to users that might even be experts on that subject they have been adding. (See also "the rich get richer" in this blog rant)
• New articles get extra attention, and often are attacked quickly for either quality or notability (despite WP:IMPERFECT), while articles that have been bad for years are barely re-checked. The categories listing Articles that need expansion and Articles that need cleanup are getting out of control, at 58000+ articles for the latter. Articles "lacking sources" is at 340.000+ articles. That is 1 out of 10.
• In fact, Wikipedia even has 138 "cleanup categories". Did I mention it is run by bureocrats, not by domain experts?

I fear that Wikipedia will go the DMOZ road. There was a time that DMOZ was doing quite well. Nowadays, large parts of DMOZ are dead. For two main reasons: it's hard to get in, and the backlog is way too large. If you get into DMOZ for a larger category, you'll be faced with thousands of pending link submissions, where for a large part you don't feel qualified to judge on appropriateness or rewrite their description in a neural manner. I have the impression that the same is happening for Wikipedia: on one hand, users that join are often kicked badly for many of their first contributions and will just leave again. At the same time, many of the old articles are in desparate need for attention, but nobody of the established users is willing to spend the days of cleanup/rewriting needed to get the article into a useful shape again. And a new user will never dare to discard most of the existing article; they usually just add or modify single paragraphs to see what happens. So Wikipedia might be hitting some kind of barrier.Still, I have to admit that I frequently use Wikipedia to look up things. Usually because it just comes up first in Google. I then often follow links to better resources, such as MathWorld. And I wish, Google would have taken me there right away ...And don't assume I'd know how to run things better. I'd sure propose to spend more time at fixing existing articles instead of attacking new contributions that much (you'll lose contributors this way). But I also see the need for fighting spam (although you should also remove old spam ...). But I don't know if there is a solution that will actually attract domain experts to re-write all the badly written and inaccurate articles that don't have their personal zealot to patrol them.P.S. Sorry, no comments on my blog. This isn't Facebook. Instead of commenting on my blog, how about working on Wikipedias backlog instead?P.S. Another example is the German Wikipedia story surrounding Fefe's blog. Many here at the open source communities will know fefe for his work on Dietlibc, libowfat and similar highly respected open source projects. His blog has been famous for being high-quality in security, privacy topics, politics and media critics. Some of his fans (likely) started a Wikipedia page on his blog. There have been at least two huge discussions about deleting the Wikipedia page. "sock puppets" and all such things have been brought up, while Fefe himself was amused. The discussions around deleting the blogs page on Wikipedia made it all the way to the print newspapers. As I said, I'm not actually bringing up new critique on Wikipedia. It's an ongoing problem for years now.[Insert random Deletionism rant against Wikipedia]

I have uploaded a new cvs/git snapshot of exim4 to experimental. This is 4.72 RC plus some DKIM related fixes that were commited afterwards. For a complete list of changes take a look at the upstream changelog. Lenny packages are here.

So, yesterday was my 0 14 (20th) birthday and Germany won the Eurovision Song Contest 2010. Next up is Formula One in Turkey and Sebastian Vettel starting from position 3, hopefully he manages to overtake Hamilton and Webber and win this race. Let s see
Filed under: General

I recently saw a couple of bugreports all complaining about debian/watch files failing with GoogleCode. Since I'm myself maintaining some packages whose upstream authors use Google as their hoster, I felt it was a good idea to offer a service for uscan(1) and DEHS. You can reach the service at http://googlecode.debian.net. To use it in your debian/watch, just use:

http://googlecode.debian.net/p/<project>/<regex>

For example:

http://googlecode.debian.net/p/pyproj/pyproj-(\d+.*).tar.gz

The source code is available at debian-it.it (you should give this url to git clone). This service is currently in beta testing; suggestions and patches are more than welcome! Also, feel free to report any issue you might encounter!