Funnily, I just discovered while digging in a user issue of my pet package geneweb, that "start-stop-daemon" has a "--umask" switch, designed exactly for doing what I currently do with a wrapper script in the package..:-) After all, it's only 3.5 years that it's sitting here waiting for me..:-) Looks like I'll have to do an upload for geneweb which I'll do happily as it will drop what I consider a quite bad hack.

It tooks me one week, this time after Karolin released upstream samba 3.4.4, to get Debian packages in unstable. That release will unfortunately be the first to use a "~dfsg" suffix to upstream version. In short, upstream used to distribute RFC files in their tarball. They first removed them when we pointed them at this (because we had an RC bug by our zealous "non-free documentation" hunters). However, they were reinstated after a discussion in upstream lists where it was pointed that these RFC files were needed for Samba 4 sources (that are distributed along with Samba 3 though not used to build Samba 3 packages). So, well, even though I don't feel really concerned by cutting hair in 4 about documentation files freeness, I fixed this by repackaging the upstream tarball without these files. I did choose to use "~dfsg" as suffix so that someone wanting to upgrade from our packages to some unofficial packages using the standard versioning (such as SerNet packages) can do it.

Today, I took my good old Sony camera with me for my morning run. Along the 15.4km running path, I took "some" pictures, so you can run virtually with me without even freezing. Admittedly, most pics are slightly (or highly) fuzzy which proves that I did shoot the pictures *while running* (except a few!).

In a comment to my previous blog post, I linked to the DebConf photo gallery page with the DebConf8 mugshots. Felix Brandt, a friend of mine, noticed the per-picture view statistics there and plotted them, differentiating between male and female. He finds that the number of views on an image gives a fairly good indication of the sex (or gender?) of the person in question: The most notable exception is the image of bubulle. He does not even look feminine. Maybe it s because he s like a mother to us Debianers, always kind and always helpful? :-) This observation fits my experience when I created a top-100-statistic of individual picture page views of my personal gallery: I got a collection of pretty much all pictures of girls in bikinis, lying at some beach, across the various pages and years, and hardly any other picture. I won t post these top-100 here, as I don t want to additionally increase the effect...

It's quite some time since I gave news about my running junkiness. So here they are. Apparently, my last blog entry was about my worries about which marathon(s) to run next year. At least one is scheduled, of course Paris. The highest probability as of now if Berlin in September (probable enough for me to register as soon as it becomes possible)...which would also leave a possibility to run Donostia in late November if I manage to convince Elisabeth that running 3 marathons in a year is not entirely crazy. I'll also try again to run a solo marathon in late May in for t de Rambouillet (: I still have to see some wallabies that are said to be living here). Other planned runs include the Semi de Paris (Paris half-marathon), which is twinned with the Paris marathon, 5 weeks before, as well as a much smaller one, the semi-marathon des Lions in Bullion, in the Rambouillet forest, where I had a memorable run on Dec 17th on a snowy day. That will make 3 mass runs in a row, one per month, culminating to Paris marathon. Sounds like a good plan. So, since I ran the Cologne marathon, my plans were mostly to stay trained enough. For this, I went back to me regular schedule of one short 10km run on Saturday morning, then a longer one on Sunday morning, plus hopefully small runs with colleagues, or alone, at lunch break. The most interesting things to notice during this October-December timeframe were then:

• 10km+14km on the week-end after the marathon. Much better recovery than what I had after my first marathon.
• a small local cross-country run in my living town, where I completed the 11km in 52 minutes, finishing 40th or so, out of 160 runners...and something like 10th in my age category.
• a first "how are the legs" half-marathon on Oct 18th...that I completed in 1h51'31", my best time on half-marathon so far (5'16"/km, 8'35"/mi)
• an interesting series of four half-marathons, one each week, ran every Sunday between Nov 29th and Dec 20th, in very bad weather conditions (the last one turned out to happen during a mini snow storm). They were run on purpose at quite slow paces, between 5'30" and 5'45", but are very promising on my ability to chain long runs over time
• this memorable run I mentioned already: the 14km run I did alone in snow in the middle of nowhere in Rambouillet forest during the day (Dec 17th) where the entire Paris area was a giant traffic mess because of big snow falls during morning peak hour

All this, plus many others cumulated about 375km in 3 months which is fairly what I planned to do. The goal right now is to both enjoy winter runs in snowy landscapes as we are very lucky to have a real winter this year in Paris area (I'll try to shoot some pictures tomorrow and post them on my gallery)....and properly prepare the Paris marathon, where my goal is to break the 4h barrier and go down to about 3h50 (some might say I'm not ambitious enough). A long term goal (probably 2011) is the well-known Saint Lyon long distance night run, starting from my birth city, Saint- tienne: 69km, departure at midnight, 1300m positive slope (1700m negative), up to 850m altitude from 500m, 55 editions. This on the first week-end of December, which in that season may mean "snow" (the 1990 edition was stopped at the 2/3 of the run because of a 70cm snow fall, but 80 heroes completed the whole run anyway). That run will be the next Grail, as it seems.:)

After modernizing all font packages maintained by the pkg-fonts team (dropping defoma, source v3, etc.), I'm now investigating (with the help of other pkg-fonts team members) the list of ttf-* packages that are *not* maintained by our team. It seems that several of these suffer from low interest from their respective maintainers, so that task will often involve checking whether the said font is still wished in Debian, then talk with the maintainer if there is still one to convince him her to maintain the package collaboratively....or adopt the package when it is clearly abandoned. As of now, I already imported 4 ttf-arphic-* packages in our SVN and I'm working to modernize them. Dear readers, please feel free to point me to good candidates for this. Otherwise, I'll process the output of "apt-cache search -n ttf-" alphabetically...

My first RC Bug-squashing Day (or rather night):

• bug #552791 acorn-fdisk Copyright file does not contain verbatim copy of the license or a pointer to one
• bug #562647 gidentd Does not work with ipv4 after recent change in netbase
• bug #558812 dietlibc incorrect license in debian/copyright
• bug #531937 autossh FTBFS on mipsel due to missing -fPIC

I picked all of them mostly randomly from the list Zack gave me, and except dietlibc they are packages I had not even heard of before. The first one begun easily (track down licencing information, pimp debian/copyright, but I ended up fixing compiler and lintian warnings and even wrote a manpage for it while there (but for this one, I didn t bump the Standards-Version). The second one was only the second one to complete because the others took longer; it s basically a change of a d mon to use two instead of one listening socket, to work with a doble stack OS instead of just a dual stack OS by not using v4-mapped IPv6 addresses (I considered if to use select(2) or poll(2), or to just fork and have two d mons running, but that seemed too ressource-consuming to me so I chose the less-complicated poll(2) method, looking at popa3d(8) s source code (inherited from OpenBSD) in the MirBSD tree since I could not find my network programming book. The third one was basically communicating with upstream; the bug can be blosed with no change to the package. The fourth one took me a while; luckily I have qemu 0.11.0 on MirBSD, and aurel32 s mipsel qemu images helped a great deal; however, cowbuilder --create failed for me, so I ended up waiting almost the entire night for a-g d-u to finish; in the end, it was simply a bug in upstream s configure.ac which is only exposed due to a toolchain bug on mips(el). To do: my AM Zack needs to upload the NMUs (after checking, of course); I need to communicate some of the fixes upstream (the gidentd upstream is NXDOMAIN ), produce a very small testcase for the mipsel toolchain bug, maybe fix some more mipsel FTBFSen as I have a working qemu instance now, but maybe I ll do that at the BSP when I can t find IPv6 bugs or so that I feel I can fix (I also want to do an mksh release which has to be prepared first RSN, and there s still the need to formally publish the MirBSD-current bi-arch snapshot and make another ISO out of it for BT and prepare the multi-BSD USB stick for allbsd.de ). Annoyances: a-g d-u could ask me things at the start before working for some four+ hours instead of in the middle, and the same questions several times (PAM restart). The sid kernel doesn t boot today but did yesterday, the lenny kernel produces this:
Starting the hotplug events dispatcher: udevdudevd[320]: udev: missing sysfs features; please update the kernel or disable the kernel's CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED option; udev may fail to work correctly
(I hate udev.) And, worst of all, these annoying fireworks (some sounded like originating from inside our staircase, I pity the neighbour s cats) when one wants to hack Finally, I *loathe* CDBS. Debhelper v5 rules! Oh, and I also was under the impression that Firstname LASTNAME was a French thing, and to a much lesser extent Asian. (@bubulle)

Sandro, I was about to write that I wouldn't join you in the club of Those Who Reviewed The Entire Debian Mailing Lists, at least for 2009. And, finally, in a very last rish, I ade it and completed my remaining 541 mails to review in the bloody debian-user mailing list. By the way, you could be interested in learning that I flagged all messages from the "Sponge Burning A Republican!" giant thread (probably the biggest thread in Debian mailing lists ever) as spam. That's debatable but such huge crap is definitely not something I personnally think belonging to the Debian mailing list archives..:-) To others: we still need a few other crazy minds to continue cleaning up spam from our lists archives (at least, debian-boot is in the way to become the first entirely spam-free mailing list on lists.debian.org).

Wouter (and Faidon on IRC too) suggest I'm influenced by my (supposedly bad) French habits for writing names and suggest that capitalizing names is a French habit (which is of course bad, just like all French ways to do things...:-)). Well, sorry to disagree, but there's nearly nothing true in this, IMNSHO. I have never noticed that family name capitalization is more widespread in my own country (which I pretend to know in details, when it comes at its culture) than it is elsewhere. This is more personal habits than anything else. The only thing I can see where one is instructed to use capitals are manually-filled forms, where capitals are often the best way to avoid misreadings. I though my main point was clear: I don't like name capitalization. I just see it as a practical way to silently tell people "*this* is my family name and *that* is my first name". Actually, this is exactly what several Asian contributors are doing on a daily basis and, from what I've been told, for that exact purpose. So, my "proposal" is just returning them the favor and give them a chance to call me "Dear Christian" and call you "Dear Wouter". Let's say this is a way to show them some consideration. This is somewhat ugly but unless someone has a better proposal, I'll stick with it. And, on that matter, well, I think that Wolf's proposal to do the opposite would probably lead to weird results. Though let's admit that Gunnar has a point: there's often more than just "first" and "family" names in many places (including mine as my full name is "Christian Jean Antoine Perrier") and that make things pretty more complicated. Maybe we should all call ourselves "dude" or "pal", after all..:-)...but that again is "western" style habits. In some places, that would obviously be considered very rude...even in our friendly free software community. I just had the case 10 minutes ago, by the way. Had to answer by mail to the Khmer translator of D-I whose name is "Khoem Sokhem". And it just took me quite a while to dig into my archives and find out that I should use "Dear Sokhem" (plus another 10 minutes to confirm that he is a "he".... as I previously worked for months with the former translator before learning that "he" was indeed a "she"...quite a shame for someone who pretends to have some awareness about gender considerations in free software, sin't it?). Anyway, thanks for this "conversation" and Happy New Year to all my friends around. At least for those who celebrate a new year in the upcoming hours..:-)

It seems strange to me. I don't think I know people as aware of internationalization issues as Bubulle, a.k.a. Christian PERRIER, and I have the feeling his last post regarding how he shall address himself is somewhat short-sighted. That might just mean I am in an even worse position. First, I recognize Christian's concern, but not only when dealing with people from around the globe It happens in my everyday life. When you show an ID stating Gunnar Eyal Wolf Iszaevich, the first reaction is a blank stare of disbelief, only to be followed by a question: So, what is your name? So I understand Christian wants to make it easier for people to guess what his name is in the least obtrusive way possible. I have seen the convention he suggests (uppercasing the family name) AFAICT used by French and Japanese people. But for me, it is intuitively backwards. If I were to emphasize a part of my name, it would be the part by which I expect people to address me with I would write GUNNAR Wolf. And yes, I usually leave out my second given name and my mother's family name, as it is customary here. Well, anyway... Reading my name, few people would guess I live in Mexico. Even fewer will believe I was born here. And if somebody calls me by the wrong part of my name, I won't feel at all offended. I strongly prefer my name to be used, as I like to be addressed casually, but quite often I am introduced as Dr. Wolf, in what at most would be an ex-profeso honoris causas doctorate, or at least an ignoratis causas one.

I recently tried to improve my way to interact with people by mail, in my free software work. Particularly, my intent is to be "better" in using other people names and specific politeness rules. As many of my readers may guess, being involved in internationalization means interacting with people of different cultures. And, when it comes at names, this is just a nightmare..:-) Most so-called "westerners" (western of what, by the way?) are used to the common tradition we share to use people's "first" name....at first...followed by what is most often the "family" name (the one we usually get from our parents). As a consequence, it is fairly easy for me to guess that, interacting with someone named "Barack Obama", I can use "Dear Barack" if I'm in position to use his first name and "Mr Obama" if I need to show some respect distance whatever. Also, as most "western" names are quite familiar in my ears (international culture, blah blah), I can easily guess what is a first name and what is a family name (though, here, "Barack" is probably not the best example). Gender may become a little bit trickier in several cases, but, thankfully, in English, "Dear" does not change with gender (but the third person does whic sometimes leads to problems). The problem arises when interacting with many other culturally different people such as my friends in Japan, China, India, Africa, etc. Here, dammit, the habits might vary a lot and things get harder. Should I call my friend "Kenshi Muto" as "Dear Kenshi", "Kenshi-san", "Muto-san" or whatever? From my readings, I see that most Japanese people do put their family name at first. So, I should then call him "Dear Muto" if I'm very close to him (oh, maybe it's 'her', by the way, who knows?)...or maybe "Kenshi-sensei" because he (oh...or she) is a respected figure in the Japanese FLOSS community...or whatever. Damn! Thankfully, I know Kenshi for years, we're good friends and I know that he's using the "western" way to write his name. I also know he's a man : after 5 or 6 Debconfs, you know everything about people! But, of course, it becomes harder when it comes at people I never had contacts before.....and I don't want to appear as impolite, or silly so, then we jump into my daily "nightmare". Using Wikipedia for hints about Chinese, Indian (the many ones) or even Icelandic or Indigenous peoples of the Americas helps a lot, still. I can only encourage my various friends in free software to do the same. We probably all deeply appreciate when someone shows some knowledge of our culture or at least tries to do his her best to understand our culture. That is probably also part of the mutual enrichment we get in our free software activities. As a tribute for this, I now write my own name as "Christian PERRIER" in my email headers, so that people have a slightly better clue that "Perrier" is my family name and that someone who wants to be familiar with me should call me "Dear Christian". I can probably ncourage my friends all around the world to do the same. For once, using capitals is not about 'shouting' but more about helping other people to figure things out. Next blog writing about the interesting challenge we all face in free software meetings and conferences: shake hands, kiss, hug or just wave? :-)

Being stuck at home because of my stepfather's health condition becoming worse and therefore family meeting plans being changed, I just made the Debian project a small Christmas gift by fixing an RC bug on December 25th for the first time in my Debian life. Apparently, after TeXLive packages changes, this one will not be the only one discovered by Lucas automated archive rebuilds. Anyway, Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it.

Today, Hideki Yamane completed his work on the last four packages maintained by the Font packaging Team to make them switch to source v3. Along with these changes, we also moved all our packages to debhelper v7 and minimal rules files. We also dropped the dependency on the obsoleted defoma. The team maintains 77 source packages for fonts and has now built a quite solid experience in this. In the upcoming weeks, I'll try to get in touch with other people who maintain fonts, inviting them to join the team and maintain their packages in our SVN (we don't do very fancy things so SVN is very well suited for such work). The maingoals will be to continue dropping support for defoma (dropping defoma hints files: you can see good examples on how to do this properly in packages maintained by the team, such as ttf-dejavu). We also intend to drop useless Recommends or Suggests that appear in some font packages (often on "x-ttcidfontconf fontconfig" which is now completely useless) as well as harmonizing package naming schemes (with a "(ttf otf)-<foundry>-<fontname>" scheme). Feel free to join and share your advice and thoughts about The Right Way To Maintain Font Packages on our mailing list.

Mika Tiainen reported the Debian bug #560000 on Tuesday December 8th, against the ferm package. Bug #550000 was reported as of October 7th 2009. So, again, no matter what, we're still keeping up with the very regular "10,000 bugs in 2 months" pace This time, I would like to highlight a specific bug that missed to be #560000 by very few hours: namely "#559980: aptitude: Totally broken on GNU/kFreeBSD". Please read that bug report and take time to send Cyril "KiBi" Brulebois a nice "Chapeau" ("hat off") for the time he invested in analyzing this bug and providing a good workaround. Update: KiBi told me that his workaround is broken. Still, the "hat off" still stands as what impressed me is more the nice investigation work than the workaround itself. Of course, admittedly, Cyril is not alone doing such work but it never hurts telling good people they are doing good work. To all Planet readers: <Teletubbies mode ON>from time to time, please remember putting more light on those people doing great and sometimes obscure work in our project</Teletubbies>. After all, blogs are not only about ranting, right? :)

Only two days after Karolin released upstream samba 3.4.3, I uploaded a Debian package in unstable. Happy.

To readers who followed my concerns about virtualization for my brand new laptop (see former blog entries): I finally settled for the easy way and I'm now using VirtualBox OSE to host the Windows machine I use at work. Booting our master CD (that uses a Dos-based system and Symantec Ghost to write a sysprepped image on the new machine) in a virtual machine, and write the master on the virtual disk was really straightforward. Then, the magic processes we have for our automated masters, ran nearly flawlessly and, apart from figuring out which network setup to choose for the Windows machine to properly join the company's domain, I had na real headache. So, now, I have a working double machine with no big trouble. The only pain is switching in on/off from the docking station: I found no way to have the double screen setup I use when the laptop is docked (main KDE screen on laptop and emulated machine on the desktop screen) to automatically shrink down to the laptop's screen when I undock the machine. So, I had to hack down two little xrandr-based scripts to do this manually before undocking and after docking. And the final reault is there: the Dell Latitude E 4200 farly well survives to all this and both machines are fast enough for my needs (except when I compile packages on the laptop, which is very rare now).

A few of us are working on spam removal from Debian lists archives. The wiki page linked above explains how to report spam on Debian mailing lists. This is in short as easy as bouncing a mail to a specific address, from your favourite MUA. These "reported spams" then need to be reviewed. Once a given message has been identified as "spam" by enough DD's (there are many false positives in the candidates, particularly in non English-speaking mailing lists), it is removed from the archives. Many mails have already been removed and any help is welcomed. Since Frans Pop launched this for debian-boot, back in May, I use 1 or 2 hours every Sunday to this work. After working on debian-boot only, I gradually worked on reported spams in other lists. As of now, I only have 4 lists where I still have work to do:

• debian-user (115 of 2420 reviewed)
• debian-user-spanish (177 of 1157 reviewed)
• debian-devel (136 of 1075 reviewed)
• debian-chinese-gb (159 of 556 reviewed)

The Chinese and the Spanish ones are tricky because identifying spam there is much less easy (for Chinese, I'm quite conservative and only tag very obvious spam....for Spanish, I read enough of the language to be able to target spam). What about you? Will you be able to help the few of us who work on getting clean archives (noticeably, Sandro Tosi, Giacomo Catenazzi, Cord Beermann, Luk Claes, Frans Pop, Bastian Blank, Luca Falavigna, Michael Koch, Bernd Steinmetz, Thoomas Viehmann, Florian Ernst, Adam D. Barratt, to name thos ewho reviewed more than 1000 mails)? Working on lists in your own language might be a good idea (I'm particularly thinking about lists in German, Spanish, Chinese and French).

Thanks to people who reacted to this post of mine. As expected, when one posts such angry post, reactions come. Guess what: that was intended..:-) So, I got more background on this KDE pulls MySQL in issue. The issue is more subtle than just KDE upstream being dumb and using a MySQL daemon or database for desktop operations. In short, akonadi uses mysqld to manage its cache, from what I understood. So, what's needed is indeed the mysqld binary and not necessarily having it running as a *daemon*. Bug #513382 explains it all. I really hope that MySQL and KDE maintainers will settle to find a solution for this. Apparently, other distros managed to get such issue solved and I would hate Debian being laughed at because we are the only ones where "thy laptop shalt be a database server". Really, I won't be getting deeper into that issue, because I don't have the expertise but, really also, we can't seriously ship Squeeze with the current setup. What's unclear from the pointed bug report is whether someone is doing something about this. Yes, the issue is not new. I actually went on it because I was installing a new laptop and noticed questions about MySQL. My former laptop already had MySQL for other reasons, so I never noticed that my KDE packages were suddenly pulling more stuff in. Thanks to Sune Vuorela, from the Debian KDE team, and Eckhart W rner, from upstream KDE, for bringing more light on this. Ah, and thanks also to people who reworked the design of kdm login screen. It's really nice..:-) (and this is not sarcasm, here, I really mean it).

So, nowadays, installing a brand new sid machine with the KDE task leads to...installing a MySQL server on one's laptop (thanks to the whole akonadi crap). There's probably a Debian bug report about this but I am too lazy (and too angry) to look for it. I think we should really congratulate KDE upstream developers for this very wise decision that's definitely a big progress in terms of user friendlyness. Being prompted for the MySQL root password while installing a new shiny laptop is a huge progress and will certainly never make Windows users laugh loudly. As a very longstanding KDE user, I am incredibly happy that Debian has chosen to install GNOME by deault. Really.

Thanks to everybody who went through the pain of my blog (which doesn't allow comments because I don't want to bother with blog spam) and still cooked up a private reply to me. It's very much appreciated. So, Patrick, Dan, Dirk and No l, you just won a free beer for your wise advice.....except the two marathoners among you guys who shouldn't drink beer (though it would help you slowing down enough to be able to run along with me). In short, all this can be summarized to "Christian, you're going the wrong way with Xen, use KVM". One of the advices was using VirtualBox OSE, which is certainly a wise advice as well...but not what I want to experiment (I already use VB for the few D-I work I'm still doing and that would not be a new experiment for me). I'll go your proposed way and will let you know. Still, I'd love being able to figure out Xen stuff as this is what we're more and more using at ONERA.