First of all, take this blog post as a rant from developer. I don't expect that this will change anything in how people ask me questions. Anyway before you write me email with some questions, please check following easy bits:

1. Have you tried to write your question into Google?
2. Most projects have documentation, have you looked at it?
3. There are mailing lists or discussion forums, do you really need to write directly to me?
4. Writing subject like "!important" or ALL IN CAPS will work other way than you probably expect.
5. Yes I have more email addresses, that does not mean you should write to all of them.

If you do follow these basic rules, you might get more help than usual. If you are interested in knowing more, there is famous How To Ask Questions The Smart Way which will tell you more information than I did in this rant.

Filed under: English Gammu Phpmyadmin 0 comments Flattr this!

As phpMyAdmin is approaching to 3.5 release, it has come time to share about translations status. Here comes second round of translation status update. Since last update we have two more translations at 100%:

• English (Great Britain)
• French
• Russian
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish

There are few which are really close to 100% and I hope they will get there soon:

• Danish
• Japanese

Just on next level is Czech, where I'm progressing quite slowly and would welcome help :-). There was also great improvement in Romanian in past week so I hope we will see it soon on top of the list as well. Was your language not mentioned? It's now perfect time to contribute to it.

Filed under: English Phpmyadmin 0 comments Flattr this!

Maybe this could be of interest to a few of my readers who may have missed the announcement, in particular for ones related to forges which will be deployed for private administrations in Europe. The recently stared ADMS.F/OSS project is described as :

ADMS.F/OSS is an XML and RDF vocabulary to describe software, in
particular free and open-source software (F/OSS), making it possible to
more easily search and discover software. The ADMS.F/OSS specification is still under development.

It is developped in the frame of an EC (European Community) programme for interoperability between public administrations (more on the page above). I ll try and participate to the working group, bringing in some feedback from the efforts on similar issues conducted during the (now over) COCLICO project. Hope this helps.

I ve spent a few days during work, after work and on the weekend working on python-sunlight, a unified API implementation of a few Sunlight services. This is very unstable, and not released yet (so please don t rely on it yet), but it will be shortly. Be sure to sign up for an API Key, and dump the key to ~/.sunlight.key there s a simple script to help with some of this in bin/, but nothing solid yet. I do, however, encourage you to use it and play around with it, and report your bugs. Contributions (in the form of code) are also very welcome, so please do fork the project and play around with it. Just to give everyone a taste of how cool this is this will pull up a list of twitter IDs of people who mention free market more then anyone else according to the congressional record:

from sunlight import capitolwords
from sunlight import congress
for person in capitolwords.phrases_by_entity(
    "legislator",
    phrase="free market",
    sort="count",
):
    n = congress.legislators( bioguide_id=person['legislator'],
        all_legislators="true" )
    if len(n) >= 1:
        n = n[0]
        if n['twitter_id'] != "":
            print n['twitter_id']

And the output:

RepRonPaul
stevekingia
SenSherrodBrown
JacksonLeeTX18
SenatorLeahy
ChuckGrassley
SenJohnMcCain
OrrinHatch
DanaRohrabacher
JudgeTedPoe
McConnellPress
edtowns
SenatorDurbin
SenatorSessions
SenatorHarkin
SenChrisDodd
russfeingold
RosLehtinen
sencarllevin
senjonkyl
Dennis_Kucinich
senatorsanders
SenatorReid
RepDanBurton
RepMikePence
SenSamBrownback
joebiden
FrankPallone
ToddAkin
senatorboxer
RepTrentFranks
JohnCornyn

Have fun! Show off what cha got, and please let me know if you do something cool!

When you read this, GNOME Shell 3.2 will (hopefully!) have finally transitioned to Debian s testing suite. Planet GNOME readers might think Debian now has outdated versions of software even in their development versions, or the distribution s development marches at glacial pace. Wheezy GNOME users will finally have a Shell that matches the rest of their GNOME components, something that works with the Shell extensions website and much less problems and limitations compared to 3.0.2. The reality is that GNOME 3.2 s packaging was quite ready back when it was released in late September, but a number of not-so-desirable situations held GNOME Shell from transitioning to testing until today, four months later. So, what happened? TL;DR: transitioning from GNOME 2 GNOME 3 is not so easy if you want to keep testing in a sane state, and when you need to deal with dozens of indirectly related packages, for more than 10 architectures but it shouldn t take nearly a full year, either Let s go back to the last months of 2010. Debian squeeze is in very deep freeze, and the release team and many Debian developers are focusing on squashing as many release critical bugs as they can, in order to make Debian 6.0 the great release it ended up being. The GNOME project has recently delayed the big launch of GNOME 3.0 again, until March 2011; Debian has already settled on GNOME 2.28 for its release, although it will end up cherry-picking many updates from the 2.30 release modules. With most of the stabilization work being done, many Debian GNOME team members were at that time working on packaging very early versions of what would end up being GNOME 3.0 technology: GTK+3.0, GNOME Shell, Mutter and some brave users even tried to use it via the experimental archive. On February 6th, Debian 6.0 was released, and soon after, on April 6th, GNOME made a huge step forward with the much anticipated release of GNOME 3.0. At that time, Debian developers were busy breaking unstable as much as they could, as it s tradition on the weeks following a major release, and the Debian GNOME team was able to start moving some GNOME 3.0 libraries (those which were parallel-installable with their GTK+2.0 versions) to unstable. However, moving the bulk of GNOME 3.0 to unstable wasn t so easy. When you start doing that, you need to be sure you re ready to have all affected packages in a transitionable state as soon as possible, to minimise the chances of blocking transitions of unrelated packages via the dependencies they pick up with rebuilds. All the packages involved in a transition need to be ready to go in the same testing run , for all supported architectures. When you re dealing with dozens of GNOME source packages at the same time, many of which introduce new libraries, or worse, introduce incompatible APIs that affect many more unrelated packages, things get hairy, and you need a plan. So, Joss outlined what a sane approach to this monster transition could look like. The amount of work to do was what we call fun on #debian-gnome. In a nutshell, we had to deal with quite a few transitions, starting with having a newer version of libnotify in unstable, and a pre-requisite for that was making sure all the packages using libnotify1 were ready to use the source-incompatible libnotify4, and this meant preparing patches and NMUs for many of our packages, as well as many others not under our control. Before starting a controlled transition like this one, we had to get an ACK from the release team, who was busy enough handling other huge transitions like Perl 5.12, so by the time we got our own slot, we were well into Summer. With libnotify done in August, it was time to get our hands dirty with more exciting stuff, like getting Nautilus in testing. This meant bumping a soname and requiring all packages providing Nautilus extensions to migrate to GTK+3.0, or drop the extension entirely, as you can t mix GTK+2.0 and GTK+3.0 symbols in the same process. However, in GNOME 3.0, automounting code had moved from Nautilus to gnome-settings-daemon, so in order to not break filesystem automounting in testing for an unreasonable amount of time, both Nautilus and g-s-d needed to go in at the same time. The fun thing is that g-s-d dragged glib2.0, gvfs, gnome-control-center, gdm3, gnome-media, gnome-session and gnome-panel into the equation, so this transition needed extra planning and a lot more work than initially expected: migrating all nautilus extensions, plus ensuring all Panel applets had migrated to GTK+3.0 and the new libpanel-applet-4 interface. In short, this was the monster transition we were trying to avoid. By the time all this mess was sorted out, GNOME 3.2 had been released, and for what users said, it was a lot better than 3.0. We still had no more than a few bits and pieces of 3.0 in testing, and we were working hard to get 3.0 in wheezy. With all the excitement around 3.2, at times it was difficult to explain outsiders why we were beating a dead 3.0 horse Going back to our huge transition, it was just a matter of time before all the packages would be built and be ready to enter, on the same run, in testing. A few weeks later, in early November and after several rounds of mass-bug-filings, fixing unrelated FTBFS, many NMUs, package removal requests and dealing with any possible problem that could block our transition, everything seemed to be set, and our release team magicians had everything in place for the big magic to happen. However, our first clash with the rest of Debian happened a few hours before our victory, in the form of an unannounced ruby-gnome2 upload which resetted the count for everyone. It was fun to see the release team trying all sorts of black magic in an attempt to mitigate the damage. Fortunately, after a few tries they managed to fool britney (the script that handles package transitions from unstable to testing) somehow, and the hardest part of the job was done with just one day of delay. At last, the core of GNOME 3 was in testing, and testing users found soon after. The rest of the week saw a cascade of hate posts against GNOME 3 in Planet Debian, and personally I didn t find that especially motivating to keep on working on the rest of GNOME bits. With experimental clear of GNOME 3.0 stuff, we finally were able to focus on packaging whatever GNOME 3.2 components were not already done, and preparing for what should be a plain simple transition of GNOME 3.0 to 3.2. After our share of wait for a transition slot, as Perl 5.14, ICU and OpenSSL were in the line before us, and after dealing with a minor tracker 0.12 transition, we were ready for our next episode: evolution-data-server. At first sight, we thought this would be a lot easier, but it still got a bit hairy due to evo-data-server massive soname bumps. We were given our slot just before Christmas, after a few weeks of wait for others to finish their migration rounds, and most of the pack entered wheezy a few days before the new year. No rejoicing, though, as GNOME Shell 3.2 didn t make it. First, we discovered it was FTBFS on kFreeBSD architectures, as NetworkManager had been promoted from optional to required, for apparently no good reason, leaving the BSD world in the cold, including our exotic GNU/kFreeBSD architectures. Now, let s clarify that I m a supporter of the Debian kFreeBSD architectures and was really happy to see it accepted as a technology preview in squeeze. However, as you know, GNOME Shell currently requires hardware acceleration to run, a requirement hardly met in kFreeBSD, unless you re using a DRI1 X driver. We seriously doubted anyone had ever ran a GNOME 3 session on kfreebsd-*. However, if it didn t build, it was a blocker bug for GNOME Shell. We considered creating different meta-packages for kFreeBSD architectures, to conclude it d be a mess, so our awesome Michael Biebl ended up cooking up a patch that restored the ability to build the Shell without NetworkManager support. With this out of our way, we just needed to upload Michael s fix and watch the buildds do their part of the job. Or maybe not? Enter Iceweasel 9. In parallel, and with incredible bad timing, Iceweasel 9.0 was uploaded to Debian the very same day it was released by Mozilla. Again, it greeted us with a nasty surprise: yet another mozjs API change, which made gjs FTBFS, which meant our kFreeBSD fixes would be unusable until someone who knew Gjs internals well enough bit the bullet and worked around the new API changes. Again, Michael Biebl tried to be our saviour, but unfortunately wasn t able to fix all the problems, so we tried to focus on plan B. Mozilla had released a fork of the mozjs that is included in Firefox, so that embedders would have a bit less of a hard time with these recurrent API changes. This was based on Firefox 4, and was already being packaged by Ubuntu. Gjs would build using this older version just fine, so we just needed to get it in Debian as soon as possible. We just needed to find a sucke^Wvolunteer that would be inclined to maintain the beast. Only after a few weeks we managed to get Chris Coulson, the Ubuntu packager, to maintain the package directly through the Debian archive via package syncs. However, his package had only been auto-compiled in the three Ubuntu architectures, that is amd64, armel and i386. It s late January 2012, and we ve been fighting this war for 10 months. After getting some help from Michael to get the new package in shape for Debian standards, we were excited to sponsor it for Chris. Duh, after a few days in the NEW fridge, it was rejected by the ftp-masters. The license statement was missing quite a few details, so I went ahead and sacrificed a few hours of my copious free time to get this sorted out. A few days later, mozjs was accepted, but the result was horrible. It was very red. mozjs didn t build on half of our targets. Mike Hommey was quick to file a bug and point us to the most obvious fuckups. As he had dealt with this in the past as the Iceweasel maintainer, all of these issues were fixed and patches were ready to be applied verbatim or with minimal changes to our sources. With mozjs finally built successfully (although with severe problems on ia64), we were finally able to rebuild Gjs against it, upload GNOME Shell with our kFreeBSD fixes and wait until today for this mess to be over. Whew. I can t say I ve enjoyed all the stages of this ride. Some bumps on the road were clearly there to test our patience, but it has helped me get back in touch with non-leaf GNOME packaging, which was all I was doing for a while due to being super-busy lately with studies. It also reminds me of the privilege of working side by side with some awesome people, not only Joss, Michael, Sjoerd, Laurent or Gustavo, to name just a few Debian GNOME team members, but also the receptive release team members like Julien or Cyril, and NEW-processing record-breaking ftp-master Luca. Without them, we might be trying to figure out the Nautilus transition since last Summer. We really hope GNOME 3.4 will be a piece of cake compared to this. ;)

When packaging new backport versions, I diff the old Debian package with the old backport package to extract the changes I did there, and then apply this patch to the new version. There is always a reject in debian/changelog because the topmost bpo entry won't apply cleanly to the new changelog. To fix this, I invoke "vi debian/changelog*" and manually copy the rejected hunk. Unfortunately, I regularly end up copying it from debian/changelog.rej (buffer 3) into debian/changelog.orig (buffer 2) instead of debian/changelog (buffer 1). Here's the fix in my .vimrc:

" Prevent accidental editing of patch .orig files
autocmd BufRead *.orig set readonly

Apparently HTML5 applications are the best thing after sliced bread. HTML5 is the first platform any mobile vendor supports: iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Symbian. All of them. Windows 8 is said to promote HTML5 as the preferred application development solution. I used to look kindly at that. But about a month ago I started to get worried: is HTML5 good for everything? Long-lived applications In military, industrial, warehouse management, medical, etc is not rare that bespoke applications are developed and stay in use for many years (and I really mean many: 10, 20 or even more!) with barely an update. It s not rare that those applications only receive very small updates once very 5 years. Those applications, not Angry Birds, are what keeps the world running: troops know what supplies they can count on, iPhones are manufactured, FedEx is able to deliver your package and your doctor is able to check your health. But now that everybody seems to be moving to HTML5 webapps, what happens when my warehouse management application is a webapp and the additions in the newest browsers make the webapp no longer work? Are vain upgrades the future? Say my webapp is released in 2014 and it works fine with Firefox 14.0 and Chrome 26.0, the newest browsers when I release the application in 2014. Fast-forward to 2020 and Firefox 14.0 and Chrome 26.0 do not even install on Windows 10 computer! What s the solution? Should the customer pay for a huge update and redesign to make it work with Firefox 27.1 and Chrome 41.0 in 2020? A virtual machine with Windows 8 and Firefox 14.0? A portable Mozilla Firefox 14.0 on Windows 10 in 2020 to be able to use that line-of-business application that only requires a small update once or twice every 5 years? How are the virtual machine and/or Portable Firefox 14.0 different from or better than a fat client? What s the advantage? I d say none! Native applications usually do not have that kind of problems because APIs are much more stable. You can still run Win16 applications on Windows 7! You don t believe me? We may soon be developing for 76 browsers! While HTML5 may be fine for applications which are updated very often, it makes me feel very uneasy to see it used in environments where applications will be rarely updated, such as SCADAs, warehouse management, control system, medical records, etc. A solution is needed It looks like that choice of technology is going to make those applications much more expensive in the medium and long term, paying for adaptations to new browsers (sorry, I resist to call update or upgrade to something that adds zero value other than being able to run on a newer browser). Or maybe it s about time to define actual HTML5 profiles . ACID3 seems to be too weak of a profile: two very different browsers may pass ACID3 yet a webapp would work with one browser and fail with the other due to bugs, missing features/added features, etc. Something needs to be done.

All of Gammu and Wammu related projects are slowly dying under my hands in past months (maybe I could even say years). The reason for this is lack of motivation and time to work on that properly. Last year I've managed to collect some bugfixes and to fix some bugs myself what lead to releasing Gammu 1.31.0, which seems to be quite good release. But since then, I've again hardly done any work there and my biggest motivation for working on Gammu is that without my involvement the project would be probably completely dead. This is definitely not the best motivation and the outcome can be clearly seen. The project definitely has it's problems (I could name them, but let's avoid making this blog post too long), but there are quite a lot of users using it. Currently most interesting feature seems to be SMS daemon, which is probably superior to what others provide, because this is where Gammu gets most of it's new users. Unfortunately not much of them are active in development, the biggest contribution I can expect there is to fix issues they face. On the other side bug tracker and mailing list are full of reported bugs. Not speaking of feature requests to support new phone models. Some of them should be easy to support like new S40 based Nokia's, but things like Android, iPhone or Windows Mobile would require much more work. Of course the big question is whether somebody needs anything else than SMSD. In modern phones, you anyway have most of the data on "cloud" as well, being it Google, Apple or Microsoft and possibility of doing backups to the computer are not that important as in past. I'm definitely not using Gammu to backup my phone (anyway MeeGo is not supported) and I don't think I will in near future. Simply there are better and easier ways to get my data out of phone than implementing support for Gammu. Anyway if anybody is willing to help Gammu now or in future, I'm definitely willing to help him.

Filed under: English Gammu 6 comments Flattr this!

Josselin Mouette is one the leaders of the pkg-gnome team, he takes sound technical decisions and doesn t fear writing code to work-around upstream issues. He deserves kudos for the work he has put into packaging GNOME over the years. He can also be very sarcastic (sometimes he even enjoys participating to flamewars on debian lists), and there are quite a few topics where we have long agreed to disagree. But this kind of diversity is also what makes Debian a so interesting place Read on to learn more about the pkg-gnome team, its plans for Wheezy, Josselin s opinion on the GNOME 3 switch, and much more. Raphael: Who are you? Josselin: I am a 31 years old Linux systems engineer. I started in life with physics, which I studied at the ENS Lyon. I started a thesis on experimental and numerical models for optoelectronics, but when it became clear that research was not for me, I abandoned it and accepted a job at the CEA, which holds the largest computing center in Europe. Working on these machines has been the most awesome job ever (except for it being near Paris). After that I worked a bit on system monitoring technologies. I am married, currently living in Lyon, and working for EDF (the French historical electricity company) on scientific workstations using Debian. EDF is using Debian on more than a thousand workstations and holds the fastest Debian supercomputer in the world (200 Tflops), which makes it another obvious place for Debian developers. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Josselin: I discovered Debian in 1999 while studying at the ENS, which is one of the biggest nests of Debian developers while being a small place, it is producing almost one Debian developer per year on average. After wondering for a while what it could be useful for, hacking on a slink snapshot made me think that it was for, well, everything except for gaming. Later, in 2002, when I was working on optoelectronics computing codes, I started to package them for Debian in order to make them easier to install, for us as well as other labs over the world. I started the NM process, and it was going smoothly but also going to take time. However, at that moment, the frozen-bubble game went out and made quite some buzz. Since I knew a guy who knew the game s developer, he asked me to package it. The package found 3 sponsors in a very short time and was fast-tracked into the archive at a speed that was unseen before. After which the NM process was completed very quickly. At that time, I was a heavy WindowMaker user, but I didn t like the direction the project was taking (actually, I wonder if there was one). GNOME was starting to become attractive, but its packaging in Debian was very ineffective, with many inconsistent packages maintained by people who didn t ever talk to each other some of them didn t speak English, and some of them didn t talk at all. Together with awesome people, among which Jordi Mallach, Gustavo Noronha Silva, JHM Dassen, Ross Burton and S bastien Bacher, we started the GNOME team in 2003, introducing consistent packaging practices, and initiating synchronized uploads. Releasing a completely integrated GNOME 2.8 in sarge was a considerable achievement; proving (together with the Perl team) that a team was the best way to maintain large package sets changed the way people work on Debian.

Proving [ ] that a team was the best way to maintain large package sets changed the way people work on Debian.

Raphael: You re one of the most active contributors of the team which is packaging GNOME for Debian. What would you suggest to a new contributor who would like to help the team? Josselin: There are several ways to contact the team, but the recommended one has always been IRC. We hang on #debian-gnome on the OFTC network, so just come around and ask for us. The real question is what you want to do in the team. Of course, most new volunteers want to help packaging the latest and greatest version of GNOME into unstable as soon as possible, but unless they already have Debian background, this is not the easiest task. Since there are already people working on this, the big packages are usually waiting on dependencies. I used to direct newcomers towards bug triage, but it is a tedious task and I m now convinced that our huge bug backlog will never be dealt with. The most useful thing to do for newcomers now is probably to find a GNOME or GNOME-related package that needs improvement or is lagging behind, and simply try to work on it. You can also come and fix the bugs you find annoying. Find a patch on the GNOME bugzilla, or cook it yourself, propose it, and if it s worthy enough you ll soon get commit access.

Our huge bug backlog will never be dealt with.

At this point I feel worth mentioning that if no one answers in 10 minutes, it doesn t mean that no one will answer in 2 hours, so please stay on the channel after asking. Raphael: There s been some controversy about GNOME 3 and the direction that the project is taking. What s your personal stance on GNOME 3? And what s the position of the pkg-gnome team? Josselin: The controversy is not new to GNOME 3, but the large-scale changes made with it have put it more prominently. The criticism usually boils down to a few categories:

1. General lack of configurability
2. Strange design decisions
3. Red Hat centric development
4. Hardware requirements
5. Change resistance

The lack of configuration options has been an ongoing criticism since GNOME 2.0 has decided to rip off most of them. Of course, when the control center was redesigned again for 3.0, there was a surge of horrified exclamations from people who missed their favorite buttons. On this topic, I fully concur with GNOME developers. The configuration option that is useful for you is not necessarily useful for someone else. Of course, sometimes developers go a bit too far, but the general direction is right. At work, we found that only a minority of users actually configure anything on their desktops: they just want something that works to launch their applications. Apple and Google have sold millions of devices by making them the simplest possible and without any configuration. Design decisions are, on the contrary, individual decisions, and each of them, while having reasons behind it, can be questioned. I remember seeing a lot of complaints when the OK and Cancel buttons were reversed in dialog boxes, something that nobody questions anymore. GNOME Shell is full of such changes; some are easy to get accustomed with, some others just make eyebrows raise. The most obvious example is the user menu in GNOME 3.2, which contains an entry to configure your Google account, but no entry to shutdown the computer. Both decisions were taken independently, each of them with (good or bad) reasons, but the result is simply ridiculous. The default configuration in Debian will contain an extension to make it a bit better, but on the whole we don t intend to diverge from the upstream design, on which a lot of good work has been done.

On the whole we don t intend to diverge from the upstream design, on which a lot of good work has been done.

Point 3 is more complex. Red Hat being the company spending the most on GNOME, it is obvious that their employees work on making things work for their distribution. An example is the recurring discussions about relying on system services that are currently only implemented by systemd. Since there is a lot of (mostly unjustified) resistance against systemd in Debian, and since it won t work on kFreeBSD anyway, someone needs to develop an alternative implementation of these services for upstart and sysvinit. Everything is in place for someone else to do the job but it has to be done, and this can be frustrating. Especially since it can also be hard to integrate changes needed for other distributions . Hardware requirements are mostly a consequence of the previous criticism: there s hardware that most distributions just don t want to bother supporting. We ve seen it in squeeze with the introduction of a hard dependency on PulseAudio. The Debian GNOME team (together with the Gentoo maintainers) made this dependency optional, carrying heavy patches, in order to cover the cases where it does not work. Now that it has gained more maturity, making this effort obsolete, the new tendency is to require 3D acceleration. For various reasons, it is not available to everyone . On this matter, the position of the Debian GNOME team has always been to support as much different configurations as possible with reasonable effort. Thanks to efforts from the incredible Vincent Untz, upstream supports a so-called fallback mode , which is the GNOME panel from 2.x with a lot of its bugs fixed. We intend to support this mode for as long as reasonably possible in Debian, possibly even after upstream ends up dropping it. However, other applications are going to require 3D because GStreamer is moving to clutter too, affecting video playback performance on non-accelerated systems . For epiphany this is not a problem; only embedded video will be affected. But for totem, this is a major issue; because of that we will probably keep totem 3.0 in wheezy. Finally, there is a natural human tendency to dislike change (I have it too), and it applies a lot to desktop users habits. Needless to say a change of such a scale as introducing GNOME Shell can trigger reactions. However, I don t think it is reasonable, because of this resistance, to keep gnome-panel 2.x in Debian. This would be a lot of work on obsolete technology, and would prevent the upcoming removal of a lot of deprecated libraries. This time is much better spent improving gnome-panel 3.x in Debian and keeping the fallback mode great. One of the change that was made in Debian was to make it easier to find, being available as GNOME Classic directly from the login manager, instead of having to find it in an obscure configuration panel. In all cases, I would recommend to actually try GNOME Shell for a few hours before ditching it. I had never been accustomed to a new environment as quickly ever before.

In all cases, I would recommend to actually try GNOME Shell for a few hours before ditching it.

Having seen several of my GDM patches reverted without a warning, I know we are not finished with carrying patches in Debian packages.
Scientific workstations are a non-trivial example, since there is a measurable effect of using 3D in the window manager on heavy 3D applications.
On the other hand, on accelerated systems, this feature should end up improving performance a lot. Raphael: What are your plans for Debian Wheezy? Josselin: The first goal of the GNOME team is, of course, to provide again a great desktop environment to work on. For wheezy it will probably be based on GNOME 3.4. There also needs to be some work on package management interfaces. Upstream bases everything on PackageKit, but it is not as featureful as the aptdaemon Ubuntu technology. If I have time, I would also like to improve HTTP proxy support, since currently it is based on a stack of terrible hacks. Raphael: If you could spend all your time on Debian, what would you work on? Josselin: Obviously I would like to make GNOME in Debian even better. That would imply working on underneath dependencies (what we now like to call plumbing) to make sure everything is working great. This would also imply working more as GNOME upstream to make it more suitable for our needs. I would also work on large-scale improvements on the distribution, like conditional recommends which I d love to see implemented , or automatic build-dependency generation. I would also work on the installer to make it better for desktops machines. The idea is to automatically install language packs, or glues between two packages when both packages are installed. Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Josselin: The obvious answer is the same as the one most people you interviewed before gave: not enough members in core teams. A lot of developers join Debian to work on a small number of pet packages, and don t necessarily want to be involved with existing teams. It is probably still not obvious enough that the primary way to start contributing to Debian is to join an existing team. But if there is one thing that is preventing Debian from gaining more momentum now, it is a completely different one: the too short support timeframe. 3 years is really not enough for corporate users. One year to migrate from one version to another is too short, and it is not possible to skip a release. It is definitely possible to change that with reasonable effort: the long-term support after 3 years doesn t have to cover the same perimeter as the short-term one. For example, we could upgrade the kernel to the version in the current stable release, and stop fixing all non-remote security holes. The important thing is to cover the most basic needs: companies are ready to take the risk of having less support if it allows skipping a version, but not the risk of having no support at all. And even more important is to say that you do something. Red Hat says they support a release for 10 years, but of course after 5 years the supported perimeter is extremely small.

3 years [of support] is really not enough for corporate users.

Long-term support will not magically fix all problems in Debian, but it will bring more corporate users into the picture. And with corporate users come paid Debian developers, who can work on critical pieces of the system. Debian was built on the synergy between individuals and companies, and in recent years perhaps as a reaction against what happened with Ubuntu we ve kind of forgot the latter. A lot of individuals have joined the project, and they are actively working, for example, on shortening the release cycle, which goes against the interest of professionals. We should embrace again such users and developers, and that means adapting to the current needs of larger entities. Raphael: You re the maintainer of python-support, a packaging helper that was competing with python-central. Both helpers are now deprecated in favor of dh_python2. Does this mean that the situation of Python in Debian is now sane? Or are there remaining problems? Josselin: dh_python2 (and the Python3 version, dh_python3) has a sane enough design. It fixes a lot of issues in python-central and also python-support, at the expense of somehow reduced functionality for developers. However, just like the previous tools, it merely works around design mistakes in the Python interpreter. For example it is not possible to split binary modules, pure-Python modules and byte-compiled modules in different directory trees, like Perl does although PEP 3147 introduces a way to do so. There is still no sane and standardized way to deal with module versions. There is no difference made between the module (which is a part of language semantics) and the file containing it (an information which depends on the implementation). Developers heavily rely on introspection features and make assumptions based on the implementation, that make it impossible to work around problems with module files. Such problems are not restricted to Python. Those who fought against Ruby gems could tell even worse stories. While introducing GObject introspection packages in Debian (they can be used in JavaScript and Python to provide modules based on GObject libraries), I was pleased to see a clear distinction between file and module, but I was again struck by the fact you are not forced to declare API versions in your Python/JS code. In all cases, there is no reliable way to detect runtime dependencies in a given Python or JavaScript file, which leaves the maintainer to declare them by hand, and of course, often be wrong about them. Add to that the fact that most errors cannot be detected before runtime. For all these reasons, and while still being fond of Python for scripts and prototyping, I ve become really skeptical of using purely interpreted languages to write real applications. Some GNOME developers are moving away from Python and JavaScript, mostly towards Vala; I can only approve of that move and hope the same happens to other projects. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Of course there is the never-sleeping, never-stopping, Michael Biebl who can upload a whole GNOME release in a single week-end. But there are a lot of awesome people who make Debian something that simply works. I could talk about Cyril Brulebois from the X strike force, Julien Cristau from the release team, Sjoerd Simons for his sound advice and work on plumbing, Luca Falavigna who is so fast at processing NEW, to quote only a few of those I work with frequently. And of course, Jordi and Sam for their humor.

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Thank you to Josselin for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Note that you can find older interviews on http://wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Google+, Twitter and Facebook .

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I also posted this to debian-devel, which is where the discussion will be, but I wanted to post it on my journal as well so that others who may be interested will see it on Planet Debian. For those not familiar with Debian, this concerns the implications of a new feature for how Debian tracks shared library dependencies. I'm currently working on the Policy modification to document (and recommend) use of symbols instead of shlibs, but I'd only personally used symbols with C libraries. Today I decided that I should try adding a symbols file to a C++ library, particularly if I'm going to recommend everyone do it. I tried this exercise with xml-security-c, which is, I think, a reasonably typical C++ library. Not the sort of core C++ library that would sit at the center of the distribution, but a random software package that's in Debian because other things use it. The experience was rather interesting, and I ended up uploading the new version without a symbols file and continuing to just use shlibs. That's for the following reasons:

1. The generated symbols file was HUGE. Hundreds of lines. This is a marked difference from the typical C symbols file, which is of quite manageable size. Some of that is that the library provides a lot of different classes, but some of it is that C++ just generates a lot of exported symbols. There's no way that I could do what I would do with a C library and understand those symbols, why they're there, and whether they are likely to have changed between revisions.
2. Generating a reasonable symbols file was a pain. Generating an unreasonable symbols file that just contains all of the mangled symbols is largely mechanical and uninteresting, but that symbols file doesn't seem to me to convey useful information. So I did some scripting to translate the symbols back with c++filt, and add (c++) tags, and then try to understand what I was looking at and figure out whether I should sort the symbols list because the default sort is by mangled name, which is meaningless. This is a rather unappealing process. It's not particularly difficult, but it's very awkward and feels like it's missing vital tools.
3. The resulting symbols file is incomprehensible to someone without strong knowledge of C++. It's full of opaque entries that don't make sense to the non-C++ programmer, which I suspect is a substantial number of people who package C++ libraries for Debian. I know enough C++ from school that I can evaluate security fixes, make simple patches, and review upstream changes, and I think that's all that should be needed to package things for Debian. But I'm deeply uncomfortable producing a symbols file on my own that contains entries for things that I know nothing about and cannot evaluate when they've last changed, like "non-virtual thunk to FooClass::~FooClass@Base".
4. Once I had a symbols file that resulted in a successful build and that I could have uploaded, I started thinking about how I was going to maintain it. With a C program, I would change the symbols file versions when the underlying function implementation changes in a way that may not offer eqiuvalence, similar to bumping shlibs. I realized that I was going to have no idea when that happened, and the only way that I would maintain the symbols file would be to either trust upstream to maintain ABI equivalence and therefore only change the symbols file when upstream changes the SONAME, or not trust upstream to maintain ABI equivalence and therefore change all the versions with each new upstream release. That gives me exactly the same semantics as a shlibs file, so what's the point in having a symbols file?
5. The exported symbols of the library contained many symbols that obviously weren't really from that library, but instead were artifacts of the C++ compilation process, things like instantiations of std::vector. Do those go into the symbols file? Do they change from architecture to architecture? If they disappear again, is that actually an ABI break? How do I know? It's all very mysterious, and while shlibs provides the same semantics as just ignoring this, at least I'm not then including in the package data, generated by me, things that I'm just blindly ignoring.

I came away from this experience thinking that I should revise the Policy amendment to say that symbols files are really for C libraries and for C++ libraries with either a tightly maintained symbol export list or maintained by a C++ expert, and that most C++ library maintainers should just not bother with this and use shlibs, bumping the shlibs version or not based on their impression of how good upstream is at maintaining ABI equivalence. But that feels like a result contrary to what I had previously thought was the intended direction, so I wanted to ask the Debian development community as a whole: am I missing something? Are these symbols files actually useful? Am I missing some trick to make them useful?

It looks like with start of the new year, people started to ask for phpMyAdmin's projects for GSoC 2012. Given that we have no information whether there will be Google Summer of Code this year and whether we will be chosen to participate, these questions look quite premature. On the other side you can start contributing any time and if you are already known in the community, you might have better chance being accepted. So forget speaking about hypothetical GSoC projects for now and start fixing some bugs, which is something much more needed right now (given that 3.5 is in alpha state). If you are looking for more information, we have basic facts for developers on our website, there is also a wiki page mentioning some tasks for junior developers.

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Over the last years, I have developed a variety of metapackages for managing the package selections of the systems I administrate. The meta packages are organized like this:

jak-standard

Standard packages for all systems

jak-desktop

Standard packages for all desktop systems (GNOME 3 if possible, otherwise GNOME 2)

jak-printing

Print support

jak-devel

Development packages

jak-machine-<X>

The meta package defining the computer X

Each computer has a jak-machine-X package installed. This package is marked as manually installed, all other packages are marked as automatically installed. The machine packages have the attribute XB-Important: yes set in debian/control. This creates an Important: yes field. This field is not official, but APT recognizes it and does not remove those packages (the same field is set for the APT package by APT when building the cache, as APT should not be removed either by APT). It seems to work a bit like Essential, with the exception that non-installed packages are not installed automatically on dist-upgrade. The meta packages are created using seed files similar to Ubuntu. In contrast to Ubuntu, I m not using germinate to create the packages from the seeds, but a custom dh_germinate_lite that simply takes a seed file and creates the correct substvars. It s faster than germinate and really simplistic. It also does not handle Recommends currently. The whole result can be seen on http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=users/jak/jak-meta.git. Maybe that s useful for some people. And if you happen to find some packages in the seeds that are deprecated, please let me know. Oh, and yes, some packages (such as the letterman one) are internal software not publically available yet [letterman is a simple GUI for creating letters using LaTeX]. While I m at it, I also built Ubuntu s version of wine1.2 for i386 squeeze. It can be found in
deb http://people.debian.org/~jak/debian/ squeeze main (it still needs a few changes to be correct though, I ll upload a jak2 build soon). I also built updated sun-java6 packages for my parents (mostly needed due to the plugin, some websites do not work with the IcedTea one), but can t share the binaries due to licensing requirements. I may push out a source repository, though, so others can build those packages themselves. I ll let you know once that s done.
Filed under: Debian, General

Hard to believe I've consumed all of 1981's Usenet posts now on olduse.net, and it's been running for 7 months already.

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Last night, there was a "very long" post, describing nearly every node on usenet in 1982. There had been a warning about this post the day before, since it would take many sites half an hour to download at 300 baud. It was handily formatted as a shell script, which created per-node files. So, I ran this code nobody has run since 1982. It worked. I got files. I tossed them on the olduse.net wiki, and used some ikiwiki code TOVA contracted me to write just a few months ago, to make clickable links on my usenet map. The map data was contributed in another post a while back. By 1982, usenet is getting nearly impossible to map with 1982 technology of ascii art. I enjoyed throwing graphviz, git, wikis, and the web at it. So, we have a collaboration across time, me and "Mark" and a lot of people who described their usenet nodes and piles of technology that make creating a mashup easy. Awesome!

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I blog about stuff I find on the olduse.net blog. It's an open blog; Koldfront also blogs there, and we welcome other bloggers. Some of the highlights for me have included: As the space shuttle program is winding down, reading the excitement about the first shuttle flights, and the play-by-play coverage of a launch, posted to net.columbia by a high school student borrowing his dad's account. (A usegroup name that's hard to read without remembering its fate). The announcements of the Motorola M68k, the IBM PC, and the CD-ROM. Reading the TCP-IP digest, and Postel's plans for launching IPv4 soon, while the world IPv6 launch is being planned now. (The nay-sayers are especially fun to read. Including the guy who was concerned about the address space size, in 1981!) Learning that nethack ascention tales have a history streching back 30 years, to rogue, and that the stories back then had much the same flavor as they do today. Various celebrity sightings. Dennis Ritchie teaching C and Unix. Bill Joy talking vi. RMS talking .. nuclear politics? The general development of usenet. B-news being rolled out, groups proliferating, many first inklings of what will be major problems and developments in 5 or 10 years. A shift in tone is already apparent, by now usenet is not only about announcements, there are already some flames. Still 9 years to go!

I really should write these a bit more often. Wow, I can't believe it was over 4 years ago that I started having occasional face to face meetings with the ISC DHCP folks. The entire ISC DHCP team (of 5) was in town for an all-hands meeting, and Larissa Shapiro, the Product Manager for DHCP (and BIND) suggested it would be a good opportunity for another catch up. Given the current (bad) state of DHCP 4.2 in unstable, I thought this was an excellent idea, and so we all had lunch on Tuesday. I pretty much set the agenda, and it was

• general state of 4.2.2 in Debian
• situation with GNU/Hurd and their patch to fix an FTBFS (#616290)
• the current FTBFS issues with kFreeBSD (#643569)
• the embedded BIND sources in the DHCP source
• removal of the RFCs from the embedded BIND source (#645760)

The general state of 4.2.2 in Debian In a nutshell, it's a bit of a mess. We've got release critical bugs, build failures, the whole cat and kaboodle. It makes me very sad, because 4.2.2 was the first 4.2 series that I had a chance to upload, and I was very excited to do so, because it contains the hotly desired LDAP patches merged upstream. Unfortunately, it's also got the beginnings of the BIND/DHCP merger that's going to be BIND 10, and that is all a bit of a mess. It's directly responsible for the kFreeBSD FTBFS and the introduction of the RFCs, which are both keeping 4.2.2 out of testing. I gave the ISC folks a high-level overview of how Debian development works, and the normal progression of packages from unstable to testing to stable, and the release process and whatnot, and impressed upon them the implications of the current release critical bugs. I also showed them how Ubuntu development fitted into the picture. Finally, I showed them the popcon statistics for DHCP. I think they found it useful. FTBFS issues on kFreeBSD This was a good segue to #643569. The issue is actually with the embedded BIND sources. I'd already forwarded this bug upstream when it first happened, but I don't know what had happened to it. They seemed to act as if this was the first they'd heard of it. I'm hoping that they can get this fixed in 4.2.3, which is due around the end of the quarter. Embedded BIND sources Since we were already talking about an issue caused by the embedded BIND sources, we moved on to talking about #645760 and the existence of the embedded BIND sources in general. It should be pretty straightforward for them to strip the RFCs out of the source. They've already done it in the past for the DHCP sources, so I'm also hopeful that this will get resolved in 4.2.3. The issue of the embedded BIND sources is apparently a bit more complicated, although the day before our meeting, Michael Gilbert filed #643569 and #645760, so I hope that the ISC folks can take a look at these patches and see if it's feasible to adopt them. Patches for GNU/Hurd Finally we talked about #616290, which I know is near and dear to the GNU/Hurd porters' hearts. We probably spent the most time talking about this. The DHCP developers have concerns about accepting a patch for an OS that they do absolutely no testing on, and also questioned the viability of the OS in general. They stressed that they're fairly thin in numbers relative to what they have on their plate to achieve this year, and so pushed back pretty firmly on accepting the current patch. I relayed the frustration that the Hurd folks were having about a lack of dialogue around the patch (most of the interaction has been via an ISC support person). There was actually a bit of a split between the developers, with one of them appreciating that the Hurd was unlikely to go anywhere as a platform without a working DHCP client, so in some regards, they were condemning the platform by taking the position they were taking. They're going to go away and take another look at the patch and try to come back with some actionable feedback on what needs to change to make it more acceptable to them, so we'll see what comes of this. I'm not particularly optimistic that anything acceptable to the GNU/Hurd folks is likely to happen any time soon, but maybe if the patch gets cleaned up a bit more, I'll just bite the bullet and start applying it to the Debian package. BIND 10 One of the guys is more involved in BIND 10 than DHCP, and asked if I could help out with the packaging of a build dependency for BIND 10. It seemed like #578387 was languishing so I offered to pick it up. I've not packaged a library before, mainly because the library packaging guide has scared me off it (I feel I lack the deep C fu that seems necessary), but I figured that this would be a good learning opportunity, so I'm going to dive in.

Hi folks!

We're almost done for the official Summer of Code program and I thought that I couldn't let it end without another update, so here we are (you may thank Daniel Burrows for additional poking).

The Gtk+ interface for Aptitude is making great progress. The product is not final yet but already implements many of the planned ideas, with others to come.




So, let's see the tasks presented in my previous update:

• A real user interface <- much progress here


• Being reliable <- check! we don't crash all the time anymore


• Packages dependencies, pre-dependencies, etc. <- check!


• Hyperlinks between packages <- check!


• Advanced package search <- check!


• Tags support (tag clouds ?) <- well, no clouds yet, but we have tags


• Linking with interesting data sources like popcon <- not done yet


• A lot of interesting things <- well..

In some more details: we are now much closer to the final interface. Some things are not done yet, for example, notification bars la Iceweasel (or is it Firefox ?) are in the works for unobtrusive notifications about important things and a little guidance.

We are much more reliable now. We eliminated lots of memory management problems that resulted from, mmh, imperfect coding discipline. We also lock the interface when important backend stuff reload to prevent the user from shooting himself in the foot when triggering an install when the APT cache is reloading for example.. The backend refactoring took a sizable part of this second term but it was worth it. The code is now much cleaner and uses no more (at least much fewer) ugly unscalable hacks.

One very important feature of Aptitude is the ability to easily display all kinds of dependencies and navigate through them by hyperlinking. It's now working in the Gtk+ interface as well. Feel free to click on whatever looks like a package or a package version.

We now support the powerful Aptitude package searching syntax. Daniel Burrows is talking with Enrico Zini to bring the power of apt-xapian-index to Aptitude: autocompletion! lightning fast full-text searches! tag clouds! ponies!

There is still a lot to be done. I'm not going away after the GSoC program. I'm here to stay, for Aptitude and Debian. Daniel Burrows has been very helpful and supportive. The Debian community is as awesome as I knew it before participating in the program.

Daniel Burrows is planning to merge the Gtk+ interface into the main branch in September and packages may appear into Experimental. With the very interesting evolutions of the upcoming Adept-3, Lenny+1 will show very interesting changes in the area of packages managers.

Now for you. I need you to test my interface. All necessary instructions are on the development trac : http://dev.graffit.net/aptitude/trac.

Long time no post. Anyway, I have some good news.

The Gtk code for Aptitude has been merged some time ago into the main development trunk and we now have a release in Experimental.

In case you've been living under a rock these past years, I shouldn't have to tell you what this is about :). Well, just in case.
The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is an international program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. Debian has participated since 2006, mentoring dozens of students on Debian projects.

The important part of the 2009 edition of the Google Summer of Code is going to start next week with the Organizations application period (March 9th). By that time, we should have listed a reasonable number of ideas on the dedicated wiki page.

We will try this year to improve on the performance of the previous years, starting first with more and more dedicated manpower. If you have some time to spare to help manage our Summer of Code bid this year, we can make it a much better experience for the students and for Debian.

Help is immediately needed in many areas. Some examples:

• Map out which areas in Debian could benefit from a Summer of Code project and connect the right people with the right projects ideas


• Ideas, Ideas, Ideas for Summer of Code projects

By mid-March, we will need:

• Dedicated documentation to present Debian to the prospective student


• Publicity material to promote the Summer of Code at Debian


• Ideas, Ideas, Ideas for Summer of Code projects

Further in the spring:

• Mentors, people to review proposals, do interviews


• Ideas, Ideas, Ideas for Summer of Code projects

In the summer:

• Mentoring students


• Testing and feedback for projects


• Internal communication with the community

As you can see, there is much work ahead. It's time to pitch out your favorite pet project :)
Remember! The Summer of Code has become a prominent outreach forum for open source organizations. It puts a spotlight on each of them to provide a well-rounded and deep experience of open source development.

Right now, you can help with the Wiki, join us on IRC on #debian-soc on OFTC or join the mailing-list at soc-coordination on alioth.

The short "flyers-friendly" URL for the Summer of Code at Debian is : <http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc>. Publicize it!

See you this summer!

As a Debian administrator, power user or contributor, one often goes to look for information about a package, a bug, a developer or a message from the mailing lists. If you are in this case, you may be interested in the Firefox/Iceweasel extension Debian buttons , written by Damyan Ivanov and packaged by myself. Description When installed, this extension provides five buttons, that you can place in your Firefox or Iceweasel toolbar. These buttons take the text from the X11 PRIMARY selection and act as shortcuts to the web pages corresponding to:

• a package from the archive;
• the development of a package (Package Tracking System);
• a bug report (Bug Tracking System);
• a Debian Developer's packages (Developer's Packages Overview);
• a message from the mailing-lists.

Typical use case Let us imagine you see the following sentence on IRC:

12:42 < Tanguy> I am packaging a cool Firefox/Iceweasel extension (ITP #654896)!

If you want to check out the corresponding ITP report, just double-click on the bug number to select it (do not worry about the leading hash or even the possible trailing bracket, it will be handled), and click on the BTS button on your browser toolbar: here you are! Depending on your needs and habits, this extension may considerably speed up and simplify your quests for information. At least, it does for me, so I hope you will enjoy it too!

Last year I shared my Debian related goals for 2011 . I tend to put more goals than what I can reasonably complete alone and this year was no exception. Let s have a look.

1. Translate my Debian book into English: PARTLY DONE
   It took more time than expected to prepare and to run the fundraising campaign but it has been successful and the translation is happening right now.
2. Finish multiarch support in dpkg: DONE BUT NOT ENTIRELY MERGED YET
   Yes, multiarch support was already in the pipe last year in January. I completed the development between January and April (it was sponsored by Linaro) and since then it has mostly been waiting on Guillem to review it, tweak it, and integrate it.
3. Make deb files use XZ compression by default: TRIED BUT ABANDONED
   After discussing the issue with Colin Watson and Joey Hess during debconf, I came to the conclusion that it was not really desirable at this point. The objections were that debian-installer was not ready for it and that it adds a new dependency on xz for debootstrap to work on non-Debian systems. I believe that the debian-installer side is no longer a problem since unxz is built in busybox-udeb (since version 1:1.19.3-2). For the other side, there s not much to do except ensuring that xz is portable to all the other OS we care about. DAK has been updated too (see #556407).
4. Be more reactive to review/merge dpkg patches: PARTLY DONE
   I don t think we had any patch that received zero input. We still have a backlog of patches, and the situation is far from ideal but the situation improved.
5. Implement the rolling distribution proposed as part of the CUT project and try to improve the release process: NOT DONE
   We had a BoF during debconf, we discussed it at length on debian-devel, but in the end we did nothing out of it. Except Josselin Mouette who wrote a proof of concept for his idea. For me testing is already what people are expecting from a rolling distribution. It s just a matter of documenting how to effectively use testing, and of some marketing by defining rolling as alias to testing.
6. Work more regularly on the developers-reference: PARTLY DONE
   I did contribute some new material to the document but not as much as I could have hoped. On the other hand, I have been rather reactive to ensure that sane patches got merged. We need more people writing new parts and updating the existing content.
7. Write a 10-lesson course called Smart Package Management : NOT DONE
8. Create an information product (most likely an ebook or an online training) and sell it on my blog: NOT DONE
   This was supposed to happen after the translation of the Debian Administrator s Handbook. Since the translation is not yet over, I did not start to work on this yet.
9. By the end of the year, have at least 1/3 of my time funded by donations and/or earnings of my information products: NOT REACHED
   My target was rather aggressive with 700 each month, and given that I did not manage to complete any information product, I m already very pleased to have achieved a mean amount of 204 of donations each month (min: 91 , max: 364 ). It s more than two times better than in 2010. Thank you! Note that those figures do not take into account the revenues of the fundraising of the Debian Administrator s Handbook since they will be used for its translation.

That makes quite a lot of red (for things that I did not achieve) on the other hand I completed projects that I did not foresee and did not plan. For instance improving dpkg-buildflags and then merging Kees Cook work on hardened build flags was an important step for Debian. This was waiting for so long already

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Today I released two entirely different pieces of software with the identical version number 3.20120115. Debian developers also will be soon noticing a piece of software I released with the version number 9.20120115. I expect to move more of my software to this version number scheme over time, unless I find something badly wrong with it. It reflects how I think about versions for my software; there's a kind of continual "now" that development progresses through, in which individual releases have little discrete meaning and at the same time, there can also be significant discontinuities, that require the user to do something to deal with (such as a new debhelper compat version, or a new git-annex repository format). Those two things are really all that I need a version number for my software to communicate. I can do without the rest of the things that version numbers are used for:

• The marketing of version 1.0 and 2.0.
• The comparative nuances such as whether 1.0 to 1.1 is a relatively big change, and 1.0 to 1.0.1 is a relatively small change
• The implication that 0.99 is almost 1.0 ready, and 1.1a is some kind of alpha release.

There is so much software, with so many version numbers that any signal encoded in such version numbers is swamped in the noise. Even on projects that I develop a version number like 2.88 is meaningless to me. All I care about is, how long ago was that version? Has there been a major change breaking compatibility since that version? "2.88" doesn't answer these questions well; "3.20111111" does. It is a little wordy to have the full year in there, and it can be annoying to remember to set the version to the right date on release day (TODO: automate). This is balanced with the version not being so wordy as to include the time of day, which means I might have to do a 3.20120115.1 if I goof up. These minor problems are worth it to instantly know how old a version is when a user pastes it into a bug report. And that is probably all I will ever have to say about version numbers. :)