Search Results: "bap"

19 January 2009

Neil Williams: langupdate - Emdebian language support using TDebs

A bit of news on langupdate - things are moving along and it is mostly working, including a new no-op mode when installed on Debian so that it doesn't try to replace files from packages that do not use TDebs yet.

I've added support for /etc/locale.gen so that any configured locale is automatically picked up and selected for TDeb support. In addition, extra languages can be specified via the LANGUAGE environment variable. When languages are de-configured (or the LANGUAGE variable is unset or not given), unwanted TDebs can be automatically purged using the -r command to langupdate. As with previous releases, all cache data is downloaded to a dedicated directory under /var which is cleaned out after each run, including the downloaded TDebs themselves.

The one bug that is holding back a release is that although langupdate can identify TDebs for binary packages that have the same name as the source package, I'm having problems retrieving the name of the source package from the libapt-pkg (C, not perl) library without resorting to mass fork/exec for apt-cache showsrc. I'm not sure if it is a repository problem or an apt problem.

langupdate is now sufficiently advanced that I've asked for translations of the 41 gettext messages included with the binary. So far, I've got three translations in place and 10 days more before the translation deadline expires.

If anyone fancies helping out with the C/C++ code for langupdate, the
SVN is available via Emdebian.


# langupdate -?
Usage:
langupdate [OPTION...] - updates language support for emdebian

Apt frontend to match the Emdebian TDeb support with the installed
packages and supported locales.

Help Options:
-?, --help Show help options

Application Options:
-n, --dry-run Only show the cache data, do not install
-m, --mirror=mirror_name Use the specified TDeb mirror instead of the Emdebian default.
-r, --autoremove Remove TDebs for unsupported locales.
-v, --verbose=integer Specify verbose level [0-4]
--suite=codename Specify the apt suite name [default unstable]
--version Show version information and exit.

Emdebian TDebs provide a method for splitting all translation files out of
packages and into separate TDeb packages, organised by the locale root and
source package. This allows individual users to only install translations
files for the locales supported on their own machine and only for the
packages installed at the time.

Note that this functionality is not available for Debian TDebs.

8 December 2008

Gunnar Wolf: Apt-get and gems: Different planets, right. But it must not be the war of the worlds!

Thanks to some unexplained comments on some oldish entries on my blog, I found -with a couple of days of delay- Rubigem is from Mars, Apt-get is from Venus, in Pelle's weblog. And no, I have not yet read the huge amount of comments generated from it... Still, I replied with the following text - And I am leaving this blog post in place to remind me to further extend my opinions later on.
Wow... Quite a bit of comments. And yes, given that the author wrote a (very well phrased and balanced) post, I feel obliged to reply. But given that he refered to me first, I'll just skip the chatter for later - I'm tired this time of day ;-)
Pelle, I agree with you - This problem is because we are from two very different mindsets. I have already said so - http://www.gwolf.org/soft/debian+rails is a witness to that point.
But I do not think the divide is between sysadmins and developers. I am a developer that grew from the sysadmin stance, but that's not AFAICT that much the fact in Debian.
Thing is, in a distribution, we try to cater for common users. I have a couple of Rails apps under development that I expect to be able to package for Debian, and I think can be very useful for the general public.
Now, how is the user experience when you install a desktop application, in whatever language/framework it is written? You don't care what the platform is - you care that it integrates nicely with your environment. Yes, the webapp arena is a bit more difficult - but we have achieved quite a bit of advance in that way. Feel like using a PHP webapp? Just install it, and it's there. A Python webapp? Same thing. A Perl webapp? As long as you don't do some black magic (and that's one of the main factors that motivated me away from mod_perl), the same: Just ask apt-get to install it and you are set.
But... What about installing a Rails application? From a package manager? For a user who does not really care about what design philosophy you followed, who might not even know what a MVC pattern is?
Thing is, distributions aim at _users_. And yes, I have gradually adopted a user's point of view. I very seldom install anything not available as a .deb - and if I do, I try to keep it clean enough so I can package it for my personal use later on.
Anyway... I will post a copy of this message in my blog (http://gwolf.org/), partly as a reminder to come back here and read the rest of the buzz. And to go to the other post referenced here. And, of course, I invite other people involved in Ruby and Debian to continue sharing this - I am sure I am not the only person (or, in more fairness, that Debian's pkg-ruby-extras team is not the only team) interested in bridging this huge divide and get to a point we can interact better - And I am sure that among the Rubyists many people will also value having their code usable by non-developers as well.

25 November 2008

John Goerzen: Why Do Web Applications Stink So Badly?

So today, I happen to be looking at wikis for two small to mid-sized public proojects (MoinMoin and DokuWiki look like frontrunners right now — any suggestions?) Recently, I’ve also looked at blog and CMS software, and a host of other web apps. It’s as if these people have learned nothing about good software practices over the last 20 years. Warning: Rant Ahead So how many of you have been here before? You download WebApp X. It tells you to cd to your DocumentRoot and unzip/untar it there. At this point, most of them will tell you to chmod -R 777 the install directory. Some of the better ones, such as WordPress, will tell you to chmod it 777, or if that makes you nervous, to instead chown it to the user that your webserver runs as. It is at this point that you realize that the Java-based programs ship with their own webserver that takes 2 minutes to load and uses 2GB of RAM, while the PHP-based programs want you to give them 32MB RAM per process, and probably modify your global PHP settings in a way that breaks some other PHP web app you’re already using. As if that isn’t enough to scare you off, generally speaking, config files — including passwords to databases — are stored in the same directory, along with .htaccess files. Many of these programs are also downloading and updating plugins over the Internet, usually without any kind of cryptographic authentication, and overwriting their own program files in the process. Oh, and this is a class of app that is notorious for security problems to start with, and makes your server known to billions of people via search engines. Absolutely no opportunity for trouble here, of course! That sentence was dripping with sarcasm, in case you didn’t get it. It also makes it almost impossible for people such as Debian maintainers to package up some webapps (such as just about every single one that uses Ruby on Rails) because there is just no sane way to make it behave with respect to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. I’d love to see web app developers do a few simple things:
  1. Separate code from data
  2. Separate code from configuration
  3. Separate all of the above from the DocumentRoot to the greatest extent possible
I realize that some of this is purportedly to make things easier to install when you have FTP access only. But to me it seems just really poor design. I’ve written webapps, and it’s not that hard to do this part right. Plus, doing the above right means that I no longer have to do something like use git on my WordPress installations because it’s too much of a hassle to apply security and plugin updates on all three separate ones otherwise.

24 November 2008

Gunnar Wolf: It's just a different mindset. Not necessarily a _sane_ one, though...

Wouter insists that Ruby Gems are enough of an argument to keep Rails at a distance. Even though I agree with the basic claim and think that Gems are basically insane and sick, this should be taken a bit more under perspective.
We are blessed. We are blessed to have Debian, such a rich OS with such a great package management system, and with superb integration between so many packages. Blessed are also the users of most Free Software based distributions, as they share the advantages of systems growing with full consciousness of their interaction's benefits. However, integration with the rest of the world is not seamless.
Most scripting languages have their own infrastructure for managing the modules/libraries/pacakges/whatevers dependencies. Perl has CPAN, PHP has PEAR, Ruby has Gems... I do see Gems as the most obnoxious of them all, but the basics are the same.
The Rails crowd started being Unix-centric, but the Windows (and MacOS - they are no better, believe me, at least in this regard) world has exerted its pressure. Gems caters very well to their needs, but we do suffer the integration at the distro side.
The only sane way the propietary-minded people have managed to stay clear of the well known "DLL hell" is to ship everything a given program requires bundled together - that's the main reason for the bloat of lots of applications, and for the sloppiness of security support. Every application packager is responsible for shipping updated versions to any library it bundles in, except for the very basic core that the OS itself provides. That seems so annoyingly backwards to us that... it is unbelievable.
So, yes, Rails application trees often include Rails itself. For $DEITY sake, even I have grown used to working that way, as things tend to break under your nose otherwise. My proposal (which we talked over at DebConf, but have not pushed so far) is to support simultaneous versions of Rails installed in a Debian system (of course, via different packages), more or less in the way that simultaneous versions of Ruby, PHP or Python (and, in some limited fashion, Perl - Although Perl does not suffer from this incompatible bumps. Yay for Perl!) can be installed.
...And, yes, together with the pkg-ruby-extras team, I have been trying to -slowly, yes- package whatever modules we often use so they don't have to be included in Rails applications.
So far, the best way (although by far not optimal) I have found to limit this explosion of trees is to include most libraries in my Rails application trees as git submodule trees - If they are not explicitly downloaded, the systemwide libraries will be used.
Yes, the "ship the whole thing as a bundle" approach is quite annoying. However, at least I must acknowledge that it works better than the approach I took with previous (mod_perl-based) webapps I wrote... As relatively few people grok mod_perl, I ended up with quite some apps which were not installed by anybody but me. Rails is obnoxious... but seems to be parsable by the humanity at large.

3 November 2008

Enrico Zini: rc-buggy packages sorted by popularity

rc-buggy packages sorted by popularity After doing a round of tag reviews so that we release lenny with the latest tag contributions, I still had a bit of spare time. Since people are urging to fix the last bugs I thought I could contribute a list of RC-buggy packages sorted by popularity: 
#!/usr/bin/python
import urllib2
import sys, re #, gzip
PKGRE = re.compile(r'<strong>Package: </strong><a href="[^"]+" name="([^"]+)">')
POPCONRE = re.compile(r'^(\d+)\s+(\S+)')
PKGMAPRE = re.compile(r'^([^(]+)\(([^)]+)')
COMMASPLIT = re.compile(r'\s*,\s*')
# Allow to download other package views
if len(sys.argv) > 1:
    url = sys.argv[1]
else:
    url = "http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php"
def read_packages(url):
    "Download the list of rc-buggy packages"
    fd = urllib2.urlopen(url)
    for line in fd:
        mo = PKGRE.search(line)
        if mo:
            yield mo.group(1)
# FIXME: this is a deprecated data source, but at the moment it is just what
#        is needed
def read_bintosrc(url = "http://qa.debian.org/data/ddpo/results/ddpo_packages"):
    "Download the binary to source package map"
    fd = urllib2.urlopen(url)
    for line in fd:
        mo = PKGMAPRE.search(line)
        if mo:
            src = mo.group(1)
            bin = COMMASPLIT.split(mo.group(2))
            for p in bin:   
                yield p, src
def read_popcon(url = "http://popcon.debian.org/by_inst"):
    "Download popcon information"
    fd = urllib2.urlopen(url)
    # It doesn't work on urllib2 objects because it wants tell()
    #fd = gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=fd, filename=url, mode="rb")
    for line in fd:
        mo = POPCONRE.match(line)
        if mo:
            yield mo.group(2), int(mo.group(1))
print "Reading mapping of binary packages to source packages..."
bin2src = dict(read_bintosrc())
print "Reading popcon scores..."
# We actually want the score of source packages, and for it we use the score of
# its binary package with the highest score
scores = dict()
for pkg, score in read_popcon():
    pkg = bin2src.get(pkg, pkg)
    if pkg not in scores:
        scores[pkg] = score
#scores = dict(read_popcon("http://popcon.debian.org/by_inst.gz"))
print "Reading list of rc-buggy packages..."
# The bug page has a mix of source and binary packages: convert all to source
# packages
packages = sorted(read_packages(url), key=lambda x:scores.get(bin2src.get(x,x), 0))
for p in packages:
    print scores.get(bin2src.get(p,p), 0), p
This can be run on people.debian.org as ~enrico/popzimmer (0 is the rank of packages that for some reason cannot be mapped to any rank): 
$ ~enrico/popzimmer 
Reading mapping of binary packages to source packages...
Reading popcon scores...
Reading list of rc-buggy packages...
0 roxen-fonts-iso8859-2
2 dpkg
11 pam
61 glibc
61 libc6
123 initramfs-tools
149 bind9
150 grub
180 portmap
213 nfs-common
279 libgl1-mesa-dri
298 libsnmp-base
298 snmpd
309 avahi
397 mysql-dfsg-5.0
408 xserver-xorg-input-wacom
409 xserver-xorg-video-vesa
428 docbook-xml
499 openoffice.org-core
567 xine-lib
600 evolution-data-server
669 eog
671 xserver-xorg-video-intel
691 epiphany-browser
691 epiphany-gecko
695 kdelibs4c2a
698 uswsusp
754 guile-1.6
959 gpm
964 cups
990 kdebase
1002 ghostscript
1069 giflib
1076 xulrunner-1.9
1177 libapache2-mod-perl2
1217 vlc-nox
1229 kernel-package
1311 kdeutils-dev
1520 libparted1.8-10
1767 wireshark
1785 selinux-policy-default
1908 dia
1943 htop
1983 boost
2140 cantlr
2145 transmission
2159 emacs22
2312 swfdec-mozilla
2449 eclipse
2449 libswt3.2-gtk-java
2728 lilo
2898 libnss-ldap
3013 java-access-bridge
3051 blender
3099 libtemplate-perl
3499 fglrx-atieventsd
3602 virtualbox-ose
3619 jfsutils
3806 anjuta
3962 kbuild
4076 libgnustep-gui0.14
4222 libwebkit-1.0-1
4332 rosegarden
4412 matplotlib
4412 python-matplotlib
4950 mail-notification-evolution
5195 nut-cgi
5273 sbcl
5538 ruby1.9
5679 kmymoney2
6076 websvn
6147 miro
6264 gnat-4.1
6431 gallery2
6478 gnome-chess
6512 joystick
6862 istanbul
6937 wordpress
7476 luatex
7635 csound
7635 python-csoundac
8257 libpam-mount
8471 wmcpuload
8631 nbsmtp
8642 oxine
8774 axiom
8949 libengine-pkcs11-openssl
9052 clamav-getfiles
9221 open-iscsi
9262 ptex-bin
9701 egroupware-core
10012 debian-cd
10127 libjogl-java
10453 libjson-xs-perl
10698 gcjwebplugin
10736 request-tracker3.6
11294 python-extclass
11518 rkward
11600 alevt
12929 otrs2
13205 bindgraph
13956 icecc-monitor
14223 netmaze
14505 cdebconf
14526 mumble
14687 fnonlinear
14724 recite
14789 jbidwatcher
15766 libnss-ldapd
15812 glpi
15905 lustre-source
15982 win32-loader
16232 ampache
17168 libghc6-missingh-dev
17311 acl2
17830 apertium
18462 emacspeak
18469 glassfish
19257 isight-firmware-tools
19719 libnagios-object-perl
20144 libwx-perl
20465 dns2tcp
21614 python-kinterbasdb-dbg
21690 hf
21902 libcobra-java
22365 tomcat6
22573 libphp-snoopy
23501 coco-java
23926 boxbackup-server
24009 libghc6-wash-dev
26323 libdesktop-notify-perl
26439 opendb
28426 adolc
28795 xorp
29986 libgdata-java
31262 libjboss-serialization-java
31472 pixelpost
31658 cournol
32939 mediamate
34365 gforge-plugin-scmcvs
34659 libgearman-client-async-perl
42233 libhamcrest-java
48076 mahara
55303 mxallowd
85881 roxen-fonts-iso8859-1
So, if you don't know from what package to start fixing bugs, "Begin at the beginning,", the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop."

7 October 2008

Miriam Ruiz: Apostasy in Spain

Data ordered by entry data is not a data file, and thus not protected by the law regarding personal data files, because it’s hard to do searches in them. I know it sounds ridiculous, but that’s the argument that the highest court in Spain (Tribunal Supremo) has used to prevent the Catholic Church from losing believers. Many children are automatically baptisted by their parents when they’re just babies, without having any decision in that, and thus they names are written down in the Church files^Wlists of baptisted people. That’s the numbers they will use later when asking for privileges for the Catholic Church, and that’s why it’s so important for them that all of us are counted as catholics, whether we are or not believers. Fewer than half of Spanish youth consider themselves Catholic, so it’s important for them to keep appearances to keep their power intact. In Spain thousands of non believers are demanding that the Church cancel their baptism records, in order to annul any official connection with Catholicism. And church leaders in turn have gone to the courts to try to stop parishioners deserting. The Tribunal Supremo seems to be taking a political side with their decision trying to vulnerate non-believers rights to artificially promote the Catholic Church. Apostasy is the formal religious disaffiliation or abandonment or renunciation of one’s religion. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights, considers the recanting of a person’s religion a human right legally protected by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: “The Committee observes that the freedom to ‘have or to adopt’ a religion or belief necessarily entails the freedom to choose a religion or belief, including the right to replace ones current religion or belief with another or to adopt atheistic views […] Article 18.2 bars coercion that would impair the right to have or adopt a religion or belief, including the use of threat of physical force or penal sanctions to compel believers or non-believers to adhere to their religious beliefs and congregations, to recant their religion or belief or to convert.”. Anyway, many religious groups and even some states punish apostates. For Catholics, the word “apostasy” signifies the desertion of faith, which had been one of the three unpardonable sins in the early years of the Church. AEPD, the national agency for data protection, is pondering now whether to appeal against the sentence. I hope they do. There are other legitimate subjects that could appeal against it, too. No one should be forced to belong to a Church they don’t believe in.

3 October 2008

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: Gammu stable version 1.21.0

Good news everyone, after long time of inactivity and huge development over past month, new stable Gammu release is out. Since 1.20.94, there are only minor fixes in handling some corner cases in AT parser, but full list of changes since last stable 1.20.0 is quite long: You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/, Binary packages will be available soon.

15 September 2008

Martin F. Krafft: 35 years ago

Today, 35 years ago was a dark day for the human age. I mourn the deaths of 4 innocent children as a result of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

MJ Ray: BT raise phone call connection charge

The biggest competitor to our telephone service, BT, increase their connection charge to 7p per call tomorrow (16 September 2008) for many customers (thanks to MSE for the news). However, our telephone service’s basic prices remain 4.7p per call for up to 1 hour (then 1.175p/minute) for Evening & Weekend Local and National calls and 2.94p/minute Daytime Local and National Calls, with no set-up charge. BT’s prices for 1471, 1571, ringback, alarm calls and 3-way calling are also increasing. What are they playing at? It says these price rises are “in order to stay competitive”. Huh? Increased competition but still raising prices - it’s almost like they want to stay competitive by not having any customers who read their bills! I guess then they’ll be able to charge what they like, pretty much. 5 per call, anyone? And Phorm would get through pretty easy if they only have negligent customers…

12 September 2008

Joerg Jaspert: It's name is [meme]

Yay. A Meme. And I have a bad enough headache to write something… My own machine set uses something from the Babylon5 series, so I have delenn (laptop), vorlon (desktop) (Yes, contrary to common believe it is not named after that prior Release Manager of Debian :)), sheridan/vir/kosh/lyta/morden (various servers). More interesting is the naming scheme i took for DebConf hosts: Characters from the Simpsons, but the names have to make some kind of sense with the function of the machine. And names from members of the Simpsons family are forbidden and to be used for machines directly at a DebConf venue only. Some of the names we use are cmburns, smithers, apu, skinner, quimby, wiggum, herb, krabappel, horatio, cletus, kent, krusty. Look for the TXT records to know who it is, all of them have one. Finding out why the hosts carry those names is left as an excercise to the reader, except for two to demonstrate the twisted brain you need to get it :) At work it is extremely boring, descriptive names for the function. Like mail1, mail2, etc.
Oh, and also, lets shoot madduck. Comments: 1

10 September 2008

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: Gammu test version 1.20.91

New testing version of Gammu was just born. It brings quite a lot of fixes -- I simply release it because changelog got too big :-). Full list of changes: You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/, Debian users will find packages in experimental soon. PS: I still have about 50 unread mails about Gammu, so please be patient.

2 September 2008

MJ Ray: Plesk open_basedir and PEAR: the missing step

I hate the Plesk server control panel webapp but our webmaster cooperative still maintains one (but only one) server that uses it. That non-free software means that it’s under our “limited support agreement” which essentially says “you understand that the lack of copyright permissions means this system may break in ways we’re legally forbidden to fix and you have to go beg the copyright holder for help”. Recently, a site broke because it wanted to use a PEAR module and Plesk’s PHP configuration includes an open_basedir which forbids access to /usr/share/pear - that’s stupid. If someone has enough permission to install dangerous stuff into that folder, they definitely have enough permission to edit the PHP configuration. The httpd.include file which contains that PHP configuration has a comment at the top that helpfully tells you to create a vhost.conf file alongside it, instead of editing the httpd.include which gets regenerated by Plesk (wiping out any changes at some near-random time in the future). It doesn’t mention that you need to run /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng -u --vhost-name=your.domain after creating it, else no amount of reloading the Apache httpd configuration will make it use the new file. I found the idea from this Re:morse.nl blog post and then read the –help output to pick the best options for me. It’s not obvious on SWSoft’s Plesk help, which is also stupid. Finally, you can’t edit the httpd.include template (to mention the websrvmng command to future sysadmins, or to change the open_basedir across all sites) because it is a string inside websrvmng and not a template file - very very stupid. I didn’t find the source code for websrvmng and I doubt we have permission to modify it, so I guess this is another thing we can’t fix in a reasonable way, like the limited support agreement says. I could recompile PHP to ignore those open_basedir settings or add /usr/share/pear to it, but that’s one hell of a work-around. It seems like having non-free software (like Plesk) rewrite the configuration files of free software (like PHP) is a good way to cripple the free software. One day I want us to be like Bristol Wireless and have a policy of refusing to deal with such non-free-software systems, but that’s a decision I’ve never won in any organisation I’ve joined yet.

1 September 2008

MJ Ray: The Phone Co-op: interview, phorm, challenges

Among other things, my webmaster cooperative is an agent for the Phone Co-op. Particularly with Free Software, cost-efficient ways of downloading data is a good companion service to have and the Phone Co-op has given a good ADSL and calls service to my own home and office for a few years now. When there are problems, they’ve worked pretty well to fix them. Just last week, I had a phone call to tell me when routing problems in LINX were fixed… which was a great help. I don’t remember an ISP doing that for me for years. I think the last one was my university’s dial-up service, 10 or more years ago. Another unusual thing for a UK ISP is the excellent public position on the Phorm ad-snooper that I mentioned previously: We strongly oppose these practices, especially the loss of privacy [...] Phorm is not operating on our users’ lines and we have required and received assurances from our suppliers that this will remain the case. Our Chief Executive Vivian Woodell gave an interview to the FT (accept the first two cookies, then block the rest, else you only get two paragraphs) which has a pretty good explanation of how the business side of the cooperative works. We’re recruiting for Line Rental (PSTN and ISDN) until the end of the year, including special offers like residential Unlimited Anytime Calls for 7.95 a month (normally 9.99) at the moment, as well as the great climate-neutral and ethical policies - if your landline contract renewal comes up, give it a look. The Phone Co-op was ten years old in June, but there are still big challenges: I’d love to see a cooperative pay-as-you-go mobile phone service and the mobile contract offers still look a bit expensive to me (no bundled data on phones, 25 per month for a 3G data card). I’d also love to see support for some daring innovative solutions like customers owning their own tails (tails are the last link to their house, where most of the UK has a choice of one provider: BT), using that as a way to upgrade small towns and villages to fibre-optic, or offer resident-owned wifi. Update: As if by magic, Ofcom has started a social web consultation about mobile phone services. Go comment.

25 August 2008

Wouter Verhelst: Why apt sucks

From a buildd log: 
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  apache2-threaded-dev: Depends: apache2.2-common (= 2.2.9-7) but it is not going to be installed
                        Depends: libaprutil1-dev but it is not going to be installed
E: Broken packages
Investigating with my set of perl scripts yields: 
wouter@country:~/code/perl$ ./check-dep-waits
apache2-threaded-dev
dep-wait libmysqlclient15off (>> 5.0.51a)
Note the complete lack of any reference to mysql in the apt output. Also, in case you thought any of the above is bogus: apache2-threaded-dev depends on apache2.2-common which depends on libaprutil1 which depends on libmysqlclient15off. So there. I've long been hoping for someone to finally fix #325786, but that never happened. Now that I wrote that perl script that I linked to above, I don't think I still need it -- particularly because my script works on my laptop, too, rather than only on m68k machines. Which is good.

24 August 2008

Jonathan McDowell: DebConf8 writeup

I took a note of the various talks I attended at DebConf, with the aim of writing a few notes about each so that I could try to explain to my work mates exactly what I get out of going. However I think a lot of the benefit is about general face to face contact with fellow DDs and random conversations that happen. Having worked from home for over 3 years I'm finding it quite nice to be back in an office with people working on the same things as me; there are conversations that you will have over a quick cup of coffee or in the corridor that you wouldn't bother typing on IRC or email or picking up the phone for. Debian is a lot like a large organisation full of telecommuters and DebConf provides a vital opportunity for us to have those "minor" conversations that prove quite useful and to remind each other what we're actually like in person. I didn't end up writing a lot of notes during the talks so these are just snippets after the fact. If I'd been more organised I'd have done a write up on a daily basis rather than leaving it all until the week after. A lot of the below is fragmented thoughts, but the longer I leave it the less relevant it gets and the more chance I forget something. It'd have been up faster if I hadn't been fighting Movable Type to try and get some sort of headings. Sunday
Introduction, Marga The "Welcome to DebConf" bit. Marga got up and talked about how at DebConf4 (Brazil) she hadn't been a DD and now she was and how it had been a life changing event. She'd thought she was to blame for DebConf8 in Argentina, but trawling mail archives had shown it was originally Mart n's idea. She hadn't realised at the start quite how much work it would be. Steve's DPL talk, Steve McIntyre The DPL welcomes us to DebConf and talks about Debian's achievements, some of the results of his team survey (the teams largely say they need more manpower. Not really a huge surprise.). NM/User Survey BOF, Paul Wise Paul emailed debian-user, debian-newmaint and various other places (I think) asking about people's experiences as a Debian user or applicant to New Maint. His final results aren't yet published and I got the impression a disappointing number of our users had replied. The NM problems these days seem to be largely down to a lack of AMs, at least according to the stats on nm.debian.org. Meet SPI board - bdale, maulkin, jimmy, michael, others A chance to meet those of the SPI board who were present. The usual "If you're involved with Debian you should seriously consider joining SPI". Some discussion about the fact that although SPI was originally mostly Debian these days other projects are making more and more use of it - OFTC, PostgreSQL and Madwifi for example. Not a huge amount of new information for me. I've been an SPI member for some time and I think they perform a vital role for Debian. They've had issues in the past but it's really good to see them overcome and more projects on board. Monday
http://hp.com/go/debian, bdale Bdale talks about the history of Debian and HP. And makes the point that HP aren't doing any of this to be "nice"; their primary responsibility is to their shareholders. Not surprising, but it's good that even with that criteria at the fore front Debian ends up a good idea for a large multinational. Managing 666 packages, Mart n Ferrari Mostly centered around the pkg-perl experience and the tools/workflow they have to help manage things. Impressive web tool (DEHS) to help track packages with new upstreams, issues or pending uploads. Quality Assurance in Lenny + 1 I can't remember a lot of this, which is a bit bad. I remember a discussion about whether we should release with orphaned packages, or if they should be removed. The argument for not removing them seemed to revolve around a theory that if they weren't buggy then what was the harm, the argument for was that if they were unmaintained and not really used than how did we actually know they weren't buggy, and was it reasonable that they potentially held up library transitions etc? Bugs in large packages Don Armstrong and ways in which the BTS can help people with lots of bugs. This (thankfully) doesn't affect me, but it was interesting to hear Don talk about his work on the BTS and his various ideas. I was sorry I'd missed his talk on SOAP access to it; I shall have to find time to watch the video. Tuesday
Debian and Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth The usual interaction with Debian stuff, including how we interact with our upstreams. If a bug is raised with an Ubuntu package then it might well be appropriate to raise it with Debian and upstream as well, but each set of people should be able to use their own bug reporting systems rather than having to go to a foreign system. I don't think it was actually said, but I guess the idea is that launchpad is the thing that will do this gluing together. He also talked about Ubuntu as an "experiment" rather than a fork of Debian; something that has potentially different ideas about how to do things but that these ideas may lead to things that should be fed back into Debian. The point was made that even if you consider Ubuntu a fork they've forked 9 times now; it hasn't been a case of forking once and diverging wildly since thast point. I have a few thoughts on all the whole Debian/Ubuntu stuff which I should really try to form into something coherant and post. I think it's important to take Mark's talk in the context of bdale's "Shareholders come first" point. Derivatives round table Didn't stay for most of this. Ubuntu, Debian-EDU (which I hadn't realised was a derivative rather than a team within Debian, but apparently there are various things it was much easier for them just to patch now and try to work towards a generic solution later), someone from Extramadura and someone from the Munich government Linux stuff. I'm sure I've missed someone off. tdebs/i18n This was a useful BOF. It helped that we said no to the usual video team requirement that if you want to speak you had to wait for the microphone. This works fine for a normal talk, but really impedes the flow of conversation in something like a BOF. tdebs are something that have partly come from a need of Emdebian to reduce installed package size and partly from the desire of the i18n team to be able to update package translations without having to do a full binary NMU of a package. We had some of the FTP team, the release team, the i18n team and Emdebian there and I think some progress has been made. There'd been various conversations had before this meeting which I think helped people think about the issues and objections so that we had answers by the time we all sat down together - an excellent example of the use of DebConf. DebConf9 C ceres Various bits of discussion about next year's DebConf in Extramadura. Temperature is likely to be an issue for me as they reckon it could easily get up to 40C! I'll melt! Venue sounds good; some queries regarding late night hacklabs and net connections to same, but I'm sure the networking team will sort it all out as usual. ;) DebConf10 bids Venezela and New York were both pitching. Lots of people don't want to travel to the US or think they'll have problems doing so (I hadn't realised there was such an issue for people from South America). I suspect various people will have issues with Venezela as well; I heard expressions of doubt over their political stability expressed. However I'd be happy to go to either (and preferably both! DebConf10 + 12 perhaps?) Speaking of which, what ever happened to the Sarajevo bid? If they're reading, have you considered DebConf11? Wednesday
A day trip to an Argentinian ranch and lunch was an asido. Fantastic food and a pleasant afternoon spent sitting in the sun chatting to people. That evening was the formal, but thanks to having stayed up until after 4 on Tuesday I had to wimp out and go to bed fairly early. Not until I'd seen the DPL dance though. :) Thursday
Internationalization in Debian I forget most of this other than pretty graphs from Christian regarding what's translated and what other languages we might have; e.g. you can consider South America to be covered largely by Spanish and Portuguese, or you can consider it to not be covered very much at all by the local indigenous languages. dh-make-webapp: yeah right! Mainly what I took away from this was "It'll never happen thanks to the fact that every web app author uses a different system" and that more work needs to be done on the web apps best practices document. I don't really do web apps, but having them easily installable on my systems is a good thing so I hope some standardisation within Debian comes from this. Best practises in team-maintaining packages Various team members got up to talk about work flow in their teams. Not unsurprisingly different things seem to work for different people. Predictable PRNG in the Vulnerable Debian OpenSSL Package Lucian giving his Black Hat talk about the OpenSSL issues we faced earlier this year. Some queries about automated testing and that it should have found this, which originally I agreed with until I thought about it - you'd have to have run > 65536 tests and compared all the data to find this; something like the FIPS tests against a single run wouldn't have shown any issues. Lucian wanted feedback on ensuring he was presenting the Debian side of things acceptably as well. Keysigning Run by Don Armstrong. Nothing to really remark except I think key signing attendance is dropping off after things like the Helsinki experience. Also I've now managed to get my new RSA key signed by keys other than my own (and I'll try to get sorted out to sign keys myself soon). Friday
LessWatts Intel's drive towards reducing power usage. Odd to hear such things from someone who wasn't Matthew Garrett and I think I'd heard most of it before. Debian technical policy update Sorry Manoj, I should have been paying more attention. Debian Policy is something I think is important, but I'm not enough of a nitpicker to really feel I can contribute a whole lot. Virtualisation in Debian - Present and future This was depressing. What I took away was "We had 2 forms of virtualisation in etch (Xen + vserver) and we're supporting neither for Lenny". As someone running a Xen machine this is problematic. The host does have the hardware support that would allow kvm, but I'm worried about smooth migration (it's a colo box). There was some mention of Xenner, which isn't packaged for Debian. I took a look at doing so but there are some worrying items in the TODO list (like, oh, locking to enable reliable SMP) and I've spectacularly failed to get it compiling so far. I should have another go. Emdebian update Neil Williams about where Emdebian is and waved his Balloon3 about. Some interest from the Openmoko guys and discussion about why it might be better than OpenEmbedded. And equally what it couldn't do that OpenEmbedded can manage (mainly very small installs; a minimal Emdebian install is 24MB+ and with X that goes up to 75MB+ I believe). netconf I'd never actually seen Martin talk about netconf before. Am impressive flow of control diagram. It all sounds quite complex for little benefit at present, but if he pulls it off then I can see it being a much more flexible replacement for the likes of Network Manager. Saturday
Lenny - The Road To Release Neil played with putting the heads of the release team on random images. And tried to tell us all how to behave during the release process in terms of what should and shouldn't be uploaded etc. Most of it is just common sense, but apparently everything he talked about he'd experienced. Also pointed out we were supposed to release in 3 weeks and didn't even have the appropriate kernel in testing yet so it's probably not going to happen. Colour me surprised. Sustainable Computing Low power consumption/affordable computing. Interesting points about the OLPC being used in the middle of nowhere with no chance of an Internet connection being close by compared to neighbours in large cities where people can't necessarily afford top of the line computers or individual connections - in this sort of scenario mesh networking is really viable in terms of getting people connected up. Multi winner voting Manoj needs pretty diagrams, probably drawn by Martin Krafft. ;) Semi-interesting discussion about multi-winner voting (e.g. SPI board elections) and how the current Debian voting system is completely tied to Debian's infrastructure eg the LDAP setup. Manoj would like to make it more generic so it could be used by other groups as well as for different sorts of votes in Debian.

15 August 2008

DebConf 8 video: dh_make_webapp: yeah right!

Full event details

DebConf 8 video: dh_make_webapp: yeah right!

Full event details

6 August 2008

Christian Perrier: Holidays report

Sure, that sounds fairly formal to send a report for holidays, doesn't it? Anyway, as I have a few (often Debian/FLOSS related) friends around the world who are reading my blog entries, this might interest them so that's indeed a report..:-)...and I have time for it, so... I'm currently going back from Cahors to Maurepas (home), on my way to Debconf. We spent 10 days in Cahors with Elizabeth and the girls, finally joined by Jean-Baptiste on Sunday. We had great time over there, enjoying the richness of Quercy: So, I'm now heading back home, assemble stuff and will take off for Debconf on Thursday 7th (Paris Orly to Madrid, then Buenos Aires via Air Europa: IIRC nobody from Debconf is in the same flight). "Assemble stuff" here also means collecting cheese for the now famous Debconf Cheese&Wine party. That one will be tricky to achieve as most of us are coming from quite far away and...there are only 6 French citizens who attend DC8..:-)). Anyway, I already know that my fellow Nicolas Fran ois (namely nominated as Assistance CheeseMaster recently) will bring some good stuff. I haven't decided yet what to bring. I might be influenced by my holidays, so cheeses from South-West France are highly probable. Cahors wine will be the choice (prepare yourself: that is strong stuff). At Debconf itself, we'll have a quite busy schedule. I intend to mostly work along with Felipe, Nicolas, Grisu and others on i18n.debian.net. I'll have to animate the i18n sessions for which I want to prepare some schedule instead of just "lat's gather and talk" which didn't work so well last year, IMHO. And I have that bloody keynote lecture which, BTW, could be rescheduled if I properly read debconf-discuss as, finally 9am for keynotes seems to be considered too early for the late birds at DC8...:-)... We'll see: I will certainly have something that's not very well cooked and prepared. Expect some improvisation: this year I didn't want to stress myself with a talk, slides and blahblah. Elizabeth will come back from Cahors on Saturday with the kids. She'll have a holiday week at her father's place whil ethe kids will....do their stuff at Maurepas (this is what happens when kids are grown up). We'll gather together again on Aug 18th and I go back to work on 19th. Crazy, I know but I have a very busy and full work schedule for the upcoming next 2 months. September will be a hard time to go through: Jean-Baptiste will start his "Licence Profesionnelle" in Automated and Embarked Systems. He'll do it in shared time: half-time at university for classes and half-time working in a company (which turns out to be Essilor, the world leader for progressive glasses....and the company which Elizabeth is working for). He'll stay at my sister-in-law place during the week (30km away from our place but closer from university and work). Sophie, our 18-year old daughter, will spend the year in Toulouse, to prepare the admission in a Social Workers school. She'll have her own apartment, in the very center of the city, 20 meters away from Place du Capitole. Annoying, isn't it ? :-) So, we'll mostly stay with our "little" Magali, our 16 y.o. who will be attending High School, on her way to Baccalaur at. Tell us about shrinking families.... Now time to work on some slides for the Debconf keynote. Damn.

13 July 2008

Romain Beauxis: Spip package

I've just uploaded a new package for the SPIP content management webapp. SPIP is a very powerfull CMS made by a team of french coders. It is widely used in the french-speaking part of internet, used in thousands of sites, ranging from personal home page to professional publication websites. SPIP is somehow not well known in the eglish-speaking world, probably because most of the things happen in French... However, it's fully translated and documented in English, as well as many other (...)

21 June 2008

Obey Arthur Liu: State of the Aptitude

I promised to post some updates about how the Aptitude project would be going so here it is. Here’s what aptitude-gtk currently looks like : Aptitude-gtk (20080621) Well, nothing very special right now. It’s really only a testing interface. The final GUI will probably be different. Now you may be interesting by what’s going on behind it ? Where to start ? Aptitude is written in C++ with varying dosages of OO coding depending on the age of the code :). For the most part, the code is neat, clean and easy to understand. Sometimes, it’s overengineered: the code that implements the progress status of packages downloads and actions is exhaustive enough to cover the setup phases of a hydraulic dam, although sometimes you can still see progress bars mysteriously going backwards. Sometimes, Daniel Burrows will be happy to provide you with complimentary barf bags while explaining some ungodly oddities that have existed for years because it’s easier to remember the ritual dances to do than to make stuff behave logically. Currently Aptitude-gtk is able to execute the libapt-pkg initialization phase, load up repository lists and update lists (think “aptitude update”). The next big task will be to load up the installed packages list and display it. It involves quite a lot of code because of all the things that connect to it : incremental package searches, sorts, filters and so on. It’s been very interesting so far. By the way, the minesweeper feature is already implemented, courtesy of gnomine :)

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