I m planning on taking the Tallink Silja boat from Stockholm to Tallin to get to (and from) Akademy. It is a all-night boat with restaurants, bars and almost whatever you would like. The boat leaves shortly before dinner and arrives shortly after breakfast and it is full of great fun. Last time (Akademy 2010 in Tampere), Inge, Ryan, Chani, Martin and me were on such a boat and it was a nice experience. Anyone up for such a experience this year ? You hopefully know how to reach me

The atmosphere in Munich s Backstage Werk just before the opening act to the Mouse on Mars was very chilled. People sat on the stairs or scattered themselves over the dance floor while low-fi ambient tunes came from the speakers. It wasn t loud, you had to try hard to hear the people mumble. I have no idea who the opening act was, and their first tune was very nice and groovy. Then ensued a noise explosion, one could only pity the electronic equipment that was being asked to perform in ways that may be described as everything else than you expect , and of course, the base beat shook the building; I am quite sure they didn t use treble at all, but I may also simply have been unable to hear it. Plus, it seemed to us that the musicians catered for what may be a widespread decrease of attention span: it was noticable how they jumped from one thing to the next, not leaving them (or their listeners) any time to get in the groove. My brother and I went outside for a bit and talked about today s music and its simplicity. We postulated the repetitiveness as the basis of a mass movement, considered scene clubs that played heavy techno to an audience that is so entirely different to who historically frequented such musical performances, and in general tried to avoid assuming a position between simplifying society and accepting that individual freedom is as eclectic as can be. When MoM opened, they continued pretty much in line with their openers and half way through the first tune, I started to wonder how long I would last, or when it would be reasonable to step outside again. I had been a little afraid this would happen, having bought and listened to their latest album Parastrophics in preparation of the concert and not being able to get into it. However, what then followed blew us away. Still heavy, still all over the place, but now they were developing sound scenes, ripping them apart, having fun playing with and teasing the audience, while putting on a groove that inevitably made your muscles twitch with the beat. David Bowie called MoM the next big thing and I have to give it to them: MoM have always had a certain aura of that s what your music is like? we can improve on that! to them, and yesterday, they continued along those lines with astounding consistency, and it felt fresh. It also felt real. They weren t just pushing buttons and computers making music, they were making music and the computers were their instruments. Between the two founding members of MoM sat Dodo Nkishi, drummer and microphone artist, and if you don t believe, fast, big breakbeat can be performed live, well, you re wrong. Most everyone in the room was dancing. And while I was more swaying in awe, watching and wondering how the heck they are doing what they are doing, I couldn t contain the bouncing any longer. They came back for an encore and there was no more stopping the crowd, Thomas or me. Three tracks later, they waved goodbye and left, but a bunch of us simply continued to dance. Thomas questioned who would last longer and I started yelling loudly for another encore. The lights turned on, I considered it a slap in the face, but I did not stop yelling. Others tuned in. And then the lights went off and the band came back. Following their 2.5 hour show, gosh was I exhausted. It was a magnificent show. If you aren t afraid of big beat electronica and you take pleasure in nonstandard art, I heartily recommend you ensure that MoM aren t soon playing near you without you there. PS: MoM will play at the (D sseldorf Open-Source Festival)[http://www.open-source-festival.de/en/] on 30 June 2012! PPS: Now I listen to Parastrophics and I am really enjoying it. NP: Mouse on Mars: Parastrophics

I met Francesca in Debconf 11 in Banja Luka. If I recall correctly, it s Enrico Zini who introduced me to her, because she was the madamezou (her IRC nickname) who started to get involved in the publicity team. Since then and despite having a bachelor thesis to complete she got way more involved and even gained official responsibilities in the project. Before starting with the interview, I wanted to mention that Francesca is drafting a diversity statement for Debian I was expecting the discussions to go nowhere but she listened to all objections and managed to improve the text and build a consensus around it. Thank you for this and keep up the good work, Francesca! Rapha l: Who are you? Francesca: My name is Francesca, I m 30 and I studied Social Sciences. Currently I live in Italy but I m planning to go abroad (not a lot of jobs here for geeky social scientists). Apart for Debian and FLOSS world in general, I have unrestrained passions for chocolate; zombie movies; sci-fi; zombie books; knitting sewing crafting and DIY in general; zombie videogames; bicycles; pulling apart objects to look inside them; splatter B movies, David Foster Wallace s books, playing trumpet, and did I already mentioned zombies? Days are too short for all this stuff, but I try to do my best. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Francesca: Some years ago I was stuck in bed for literally some months, due to a grave series of migraine attacks. I wasn t able to do anything: no social life, no books or television. So, I decided to turn on the laptop and do something constructive with it: I was already a Debian user and it seemed quite logical to me to try to give back to the community. I am not a coder and I ve not studied Computer Science, so my first step was to join an Italian Debian on-line community (Debianizzati) and help with tutorials, users support, wiki management. In a couple of months I learnt many things: helping other users with their problems forces you to do lots of research! My first contributions to the Debian project were mostly translations of the main website. Translators are the perfect typos spotters: they work so precisely on the text to be translated that they finish to do a great QA job. This is how I ve started to contribute to the Debian website: with very simple things, fixing typos or wrong links or misplaced wml tags. I still remember my first commit to the website: the idea was to undercase some tags, but it ended up that I misplaced some of them and in addition I fixed them only in the English page and not on the translations as well. When after a couple of minutes, K re Thor Olsen a long time contributor of the team and now webmaster reverted my commit, I felt so stupid and full of shame. But, to my great surprise, no one treated me like an idiot for that error: Gerfried Fuchs, one of the guru of the team, replies me in a really helpful and polite way explaining what I did wrong and how to do things correctly. I think this episode was a turning point in my Debian life: there s this idea that Debian Developers are just a bunch of arrogant assholes and maybe it was true in the past, but for my experience they are not. Well, at least the ones I met and work with .

To my great surprise, no one treated me like an idiot for that error.

Since then, I joined the WWW team and helped them apply the shiny new design provided by Kalle S derman. A lot of work was done during the week immediately before the release of the new website. Oh that was a week! We worked night and day to have the new design ready for February 6th, and it was fantastic when we finally published it, simultaneously with the release of Squeeze. At the same time, I started to contribute more actively to the Debian Publicity team, not only translating news but also writing them. It can sound scary for a non native English speaker to write something from scratch in English, but you have to keep in mind that your text will be reviewed by native speakers before being published. And we have some fantastic reviewers in the English localisation team: particularly Justin B Rye, who is tireless in his effort and more recently Moray Allan. I think I m particularly lucky to work with all these people: there s a special mood in both Publicity and WWW team, which makes you feel happy to do things and at the same time pushes you to do more just because it s fun to work with them sharing jokes, ideas, rants, patches and hugs. Rapha l: I believe that you have been trough the new member process very quickly. You re now a Non-Uploading Debian Developer. How was the experience and what does this mean to you? Francesca: Becoming a Debian Developer was not so obvious for me, because I didn t need to be a DD for the work I do in Debian. For instance, I don t maintain packages, so I had no reasons to want to become a DD in order to have uploading rights. For a while I didn t really feel the necessity of being a DD. Luckily, some people started to pester me about it, asking me to apply for the NM process. I remember Martin Zobel-Helas doing this for an entire week every single day, and Gerfried Fuchs doing it as well. Suddenly, I realized that people I worked with felt that I deserved the DD status and that I simply had thought I didn t. As a non coder and a woman, there probably was a bit of impostor syndrome involved. Having people encouraging me, gave me more confidence and the desire to finally become a DD. And so I did. The process for non uploading DD is identical to the one to become an uploading DD, with one exception: in the second part of the process (named Tasks and Skills) instead of questions about how to create and maintain packages, there are questions about the non packaging work you usually do in Debian. The general resolution which created the possibility to become a non uploading DD gave us a chance to recognize the great effort of Debian contributors who work in various area (translations, documentation, artworks, etc.) that were not always considered as important as packaging efforts. And this is great because if you are a regular contributor, if you love Debian and you are committed to the project, there are no reasons to not be an official member of it. With regards to this, I like the metaphor used by Meike Reichle in her recent talk about the Debian Women Project (video recording here):

a Debian Developer status is a lot like a citizenship in a country that you re living in. If you live in a country and you don t have citizenship, you can find a job, buy a house, have a family [...] but if this country at any point in time decides to go into a direction that you don t like, there s nothing you can do about it. You are not in the position to make any change or to make any effect on that country: you just live there, but there s no way that you can excercise influence on the people who run this country.

Rapha l: You recently joined the Debian Press Team. What does it involve and how are you managing this new responsibility? Francesca: The Press Team is basically the armed wing of the Publicity Team: it handles announcements that need to be kept private until the release, moderate the debian-announce and debian-news mailing list and maintain contacts with press people from outside the project. The real job, so, is done within the Publicity Team. The most important part of our work is to write announcements and the newsletter: while the newsletter is published bi-weekly, the announcements need to be write in a shorter timeframe. Localization is really important in spreading Debian word, so we work closely with translators: both announcements and DPN are usually translated in four or five different languages. The publicity work could be stressful, as we have strict deadlines, we need to take quick decisions and often do last-minute changes. Personally, I like it: I work better under pressure. But I know that is sometimes difficult for contributors to accept that we can t debate endlessly on details, we have just to go on and do our best in a given timeframe.

The publicity work could be stressful, as we have strict deadlines, [ ]. Personally, I like it.

Raphael: You re one of the main editor behind the Debian Project News. What s the role and scope of this newsletter? Francesca: Debian Project News is our beloved newsletter, direct successor of the Debian Weekly News founded by Joey Hess in 1999 and later kept alive by Martin Schulze. In 2007, Debian Weekly News was discontinued but in 2008 the project was revived by Alexander Reichle Schmehl. The idea behind DPN is to provide our users an overview of what is happening inside and outside the project. As the core team of editors is formed by three people, the main problem is to be able to collect enough news from various sources: in this sense we are always glad when someone points us to interesting blogposts, mails and articles. DPN is also a good chance for non coders to contribute to Debian: propose news, write paragraphs and review the draft before the publication are quite easy tasks but very useful. English native speakers can do a proofread (as no one of the main editors is a native speaker) while others can always translate DPN in their native language. People who want to help us can take a look at our wiki page.

DPN is also a good chance for non coders to contribute to Debian.

Just yesterday I realized that since January we don t miss or delay an issue: so I d like to thank the fantastic team of editors, reviewers and translators who made it possible. The team is now working on another way of spreading Debian s message: a long-time project is finally becoming real. Stay tuned, surprise arriving! Raphael: You re trying to organize IRC training sessions but that doesn t seem to take off in Debian, while it s quite common in the Ubuntu community. How do you explain that? Francesca: I m not sure about it: both Debian users and contributors seemed to appreciate this initiative in the past. I was quite surprised by the amount of Debian members present during the various sessions and by the amount of interesting questions asked by the users. So the only reason I can think about is that I need to put more enthusiasm in convincing the teams to do it: they need more encouragement (or to be pestered more!). I, for myself, think that IRC training sessions are a great way to promote our work, to share our best practice, to talk about our project to a wider audience. And I ll sure try to organize more of them. Help, suggestions, ideas are really welcome! Raphael: If you could spend all your time on Debian, what would you work on? Francesca: There is a project I d like to give more love, but I always end up without the time to do it: the debian-community.org project. Back in 2007, Holger Levsen founded it with the aim of reducing the gap between Debian contributors and Debian users, giving all an opportunity to contribute, share ideas and more. The project was discontinued and I d really like to revive it: in these years various things have changed, but I think that the core idea of having a node to connect existing local communities is still good and doable. In Debian we don t have the wide and well articulated local infrastructure present in other distributions (Ubuntu, particularly, but also Fedora): even if I don t like too centralized structures, I think that a better connection between the project and local groups of users and on-line communities would be a step forward for the project. Being part of the Events Team, I m aware of how much we need to improve our communication with local groups. An example is the events organization: sometimes, Publicity and Events teams even don t know about regional Debian related events (like booth at conferences, workshops, talks, install parties, etc) and this is a shame because we could offer a lot of help in organizing and promoting local events. What we lack is better communication. And debian-community.org project could give us exactly this. Could be a cluster of local groups, a platform for events organization and even a useful resource for newbies who want to find a local group near them. I started some effort in this sense, sending a proposal about it, working on a census of Debian local groups. Any help is appreciated! I m really curious to see how many Debian communities (from all around the world and the web) are out there, and I d love to have members from these communities better connected with the Debian Project. Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Probably the bikeshedding feticism of almost all of us. It s the other side of the coin of Debian s commitment to technical excellence and our perfectionism, but sometimes it leads just to endless discussions about details, and it is a blocker for various initiatives. In Debian, you have to be really patient and in a way stubborn to push some changes. This is frustrating sometimes. On the other hand, I really appreciate how people take some times to think to each proposals, give some feedback and discuss about it: the process could be annoying, indeed, but the result is often an improvement of the initial proposal. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Most of my teammates are simply brilliant and adorable and hard-working. But I have to admit that I particularly admire David Pr vot: beside being a webmaster he does a lot of things, from French translations to DPN editing. All his contributions have a great quality and he s able to push you always further in doing things and doing them better. He is a good example of how I d like to be as contributor: smart, tireless, friendly.

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Thank you to Francesca for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading her answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on 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 received the email yesterday and was like wow, I m in . I would like to thank:

• Raphael Hertzog and Roland Mas who motivated me to contribute to the Debian project in the first place.
• Sandro Tosi, who taught me a lot while I have been working on Reportbug.
• A huge, huge thanks to Piotr O arowski, who patiently sponsored all the packages I asked him to review.
• Xavier Oswald who allowed me to start the NM process.
• And finally a huge thanks to Martin Zobel-Helas and Holger Levsen who were my application managers.

Sorry for the other readers who will find this post boring, but it means a lot to me

Today we released Epiphany 3.4. It includes all the fixes, enhancements and new cool features that we build since September 2011. That is 6 months of cool stuff! Xan already explained the bigger picture but I want to highlight some details in the spirit of Every Detail Matters. Improved location bar, and the new history backend The location bar suggestions now load extra-extra-fast, thanks to our new SQLite backend. Besides being extra fast, SQLite allows us to make complex queries to offer better results in the completion. Goal for 3.6: to successfully handle searches like that page, with the dog, you know, that one with the funny one . This also makes possible to have a cool Overview start page for 3.6. Much like Chrome or Opera do. An awesome UI: cleaner toolbar, loading progress That is all the chrome you are getting, kid! Less distractions, more web! All the usual tools are still available in the gear menu: Oh, and this other one is a pretty one. Check out the new load progress indicator: You might have already noticed the combined stop/reload button. Some other niceties like the new link tooltips are all over the place. I will not ruin the surprise . Reliable download icons This is my friend Juanjo:
He is always happy. One day he said: Diego, my PDF documents are shown as boxes while downloading. It makes me mad! I want Juanjo to keep that happy hacker smile. So I decided to fix this. Downloads now have a better idea of the icon they should show: Page icons, now a WebKitGTK+ feature Do you notice something? Yeah, icons for every of the loaded pages. The support for this is now in WebKitGTK+, available to other applications. This means it is better supported and maintained! Redesigned about: pages For a time now we have had some geeky about: pages. One for memory (about:memory), one for plugins (about:plugins), and perhaps the most useful one, one to manage applications (about:applications): And, last but not least Less lines:

$ git diff --shortstat 3.2.0..3.4.0
328 files changed, 73211 insertions(+), 104528 deletions(-)

Unlike other browsers, Epiphany does not have dozens of engineers behind the project. This means that the more code we have to maintain, the less time we have to develop new features and to even maintain that code! Also, this makes Xan happy. But luckily Igalia has hackers like Martin Robinson who are willing to show us how hacking should be done: Epiphany 3.4.0, alias, Web. Is an awesome release. It will soon be in your distro of choice. Thanks Allan for the screenshot help!

Over the past few weeks, I upgraded my Ubuntu hosts to the Precise release due to be published next month. While the upgrade on my desktops from Oneiric to Precise went mostly well, the upgrade of my terminal server from Lucid to Precise was more daunting. In short: too many packages leave an undue amount of cruft behind, namely tons of obsolete configuration files that are not correctly handled by maintainer scripts, to either delete obsolete files or to rename them to the currently valid filename. At Debian, these oversights are periodically monitored using piuparts and reported to the package maintainer, but Ubuntu doesn't seem to offer this sort of automated Quality Assurance process yet. Perhaps this would be something worth developing? PS: For those who wonder how I spotted those obsolete configuration files, I simply enabled the FLAUSCH environment variable before running upgrade-system.

I'm happy to announce that cluster-glue 1.0.9+hg2665-1~bpo60+1 is available in the backports repository for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 ("Squeeze"). I uploaded the backport-version right after the package got migrated from unstable to testing last night. This version of cluster-glue fixes a nasty bug in the IPMI STONITH resource agent, so everybody is highly advised to update to this version to make sure that STONITH via IPMI works as expected.

I'm happy to announce that cluster-glue 1.0.9+hg2665-1~bpo60+1 is available in the backports repository for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 ("Squeeze"). I uploaded the backport-version right after the package got migrated from unstable to testing last night. This version of cluster-glue fixes a nasty bug in the IPMI STONITH resource agent, so everybody is highly advised to update to this version to make sure that STONITH via IPMI works as expected.

Released a few hours ago, here is the monthly report of DPL activities for February 2012.

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Howdy, dear Project Members,
here's another round of updates about what has happened in DPL land, this time during February 2012. Highlights Quit a bit of highlights for this month:

• The first item is not pleasant but important. Early February I've submitted to the attention of the Technical Committee the upload of multi-arch enabled dpkg to the archive. The Technical Committee quickly reached a decision. Shortly afterwards an upload to experimental has happened and discussions on -devel ensued. Please help out with testing.
• Thanks to IBM and OSUOSL we have some new fairly capable (virtual) machines for powerpc* ports. See the announcement for more info. In particular, please note the call for powerpc64 porters. If you're interested in contributing to such a port, please get in touch with DSA.
• Google Summer of Code project is up again. As usual, it is a good chance to get some work done and, more importantly, to let students who are passionate about Free Software discover Debian. I've delegated the task of GSoC admins --- thanks Ana, Gergely, and Sukhbir! A call for project proposals has already been sent out; there isn't much time left, so please hurry up and drop your ideas to the wiki page and contact the soc-coordination mailing list.
• A couple of important discussions have been going on on -project. The first is the old "trademark vs DFSG" discussion. I've posted there results from legal advice that I've sought on the matter, based on your suggestions. Then, I've posted a proposal on how to deal with trademarks issues in the archive.
• The second discussion is about Debian affiliation with OSI. We've been approached by OSI about that, as I've summarized on -project. Helped by the feedback received, I've decided to go ahead with affiliation and I'm now discussing with OSI representative the next steps.
• The long running work on software patent issues in the archive has been concluded publishing a policy on the matter. We now have a contact point and legal advice with whom we can discuss specific issues if/when they arise; hopefully that would help us to discriminate actual issues in the archive (if any) from the vast amount of FUD in the area.

Talks, interviews, and the like

• Following up Debian related talks at FOSDEM, I've been interviewed, together with Lars Wirzenius and Wookey, for The Register.
• I've took part at a FOSDEM panel session on comparing the organization of local user groups, ambassadors, and the like. We've mostly to learn from others in this area, but I've took the change to summarize what we currently have in a slide deck.

Sprints Plenty of sprints related news!

• DSA and the Groupware team will be holding sprints later on in March, while DAM / FrontDesk are having one right now co-located with the BSP in Moenchengladbach
• the video team sent out a report for their sprint back in November
• debbugs (AKA bugs.debian.org) hackers are organizing a sprint to get people interested in contributing to the code base up to speed. If you're, drop a line in the thread

It would be amazing to have an average of one sprint per month for 2012, and we're on good track for it. If you want to help, organize one for your team as documented on the wiki. Legal stuff

• Thanks to SPI, we've established contacts with the owners of debian.eu, domain we believe we legitimately own. As a first step they've set up HTTP redirection from debian.eu to debian.org (instead of a computer hardware shop, as it was before) and we're now discussing actual transfer of domain ownership to a Debian Trusted Organization.
• We've contacted the Japanese trademark office to transfer the "debian" trademark there to SPI. Thanks to the previous owners (all Debian developers or contributors) for agreeing to the move. Now "only" a nasty pile of paperwork remains to be done.

Appointments In addition to the GSoC admins delegation (see above), I've agreed with former secretary Kurt Roeckx to reappoint him as a secretary for another year. Many thanks, Kurt! Miscellaneous

• We have been invited to attend the OpenStack summit in April and have a presence there, free of charge. Loic Dachary, active member of the OpenStack packaging team in Debian, has agreed to go and represent Debian there. Thanks a lot to Stefano Maffulli for the invitation and to Loic for his availability!
• We are in the process of joining as a project, instead of relying on individual maintainers as in the past the ISC forum to get access to embargoed vulnerability information for important pieces of software such as BIND and DHCP. They've kindly offered us membership free of charge. I've submitted a draft of the membership agreement to SPI and I'm waiting for their decision.
• Steady progress on the front of periodic budget reports, thanks to the work of Martin Michlmayr. We've discussed at length during FOSDEM and agreed on procedures to query the state of Debian finances that work for both auditors and the DPL. Martin has also set up a shared ledger repository and already checked in into it a lot of money transactions for the past few years not from all trusted organizations yet, though. Have faith, we'll get there

Happy Debian hacking.

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PS as usual, the boring day-to-day activity log is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.*

I'm seeking advice on budgeting. Historically, I've been crap at managing money. Things have improved in recent years. My main tool is Martin Lewis' Money Saving Expert budget planner. It's simply a spreadsheet, into which you feed your income and outgoings. You can supply each line item as either a daily, monthly or annual income or expense. The sheet works out both a monthly and an annual total for each and the difference (be it positive or negative). The monthly summary is a useful benchmark against which you can compare your monthly bank statements, but it's not sufficient. Consider a one-off annual expense, such as a holiday payment. On the budget planner, the expense will be divided up into monthly chunks and deducted from your monthly income. However, the expense won't be on your bank statements, unless you've made a special arrangement to pay out a monthly sum to another account, such as savings account, for every annual expense. Therefore you can't just compare the planner's monthly summary against your bank statement summary and hope the two match. I really need to see what my monthly outgoings should total to, rather than what all my outgoings are, presented monthly, in order to meaningfully compare the two. How should I handle this? Should I do as I suggested there and total up my annual one-offs, divide by twelve and make a monthly payment for that sum to a savings account? I'd still want to be able to quickly look at my main statement and judge the overall figure as either 'good' or 'bad'. Perhaps I should feed my various statements into one place, perhaps a finance tool, in which case, which one? How do you manage your finances?

Now that Rcpp 0.9.10 is released and on CRAN, other packages can take advantage of a small change needed to make use of the quasi-output stream Rcpp::Rcout. So the new release 0.2.35 of RcppArmadillo does just that---and input/output from Armadillo, the wonderful linear algebra / math library for C++ written chiefly by Conrad Sanderson now comes through in a coordinated buffered fashion. As as std::cout is no longer used by default, the R CMD check no longer flags this. There are two more bugfixes in the releases for issues noticed by attentive RcppArmadillo users. Teo Guo Ci spotted a missing semicolon when C++0x code was activated, and Gershon Bialer suggested a fix for an issue plagueing users of the jurassic g++ 4.2.1 compiler which Apple forces on users of OS X. We thank Martin Renner for testing these fixes. The NEWS entry below summarises the changes.

0.2.35  2012-02-17
    o   Upgraded to Armadillo release 2.4.3
          * Support for ARMA_DEFAULT_OSTREAM using Rcpp::Rcout added
    o   Minor bug fix release improving corner cases affecting builds:
          * Missing semicolon added in Mat_meat (when in C++0x mode), with
            thanks to Teo Guo Ci 
          * Armadillo version vars now instantiated in RcppArmadillo.cpp
            which helps older g++ versions, with thanks to Gershon Bialer
          * Thanks also to Martin Renner for testing these changes
          * Unit tests output fallback directory changed per Brian Ripley's
            request to not ever use /tmp
          * Minor update to version numbers in RcppArmadillo-package.Rd

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat reports for 0.2.35 relative to 0.2.34 As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

I've started using my kinesis keyboard with my laptop a lot during the workday, but not the rest of the time, which means my USB keyboard is being plugged and unplugged often. I prefer to have a lot of keys remapped on the kinesys, So I was having an annoying time having to run xmodmap (possibly without the benefit of having Mod4 to get the window manager to give me a shell) to set these keys. I survived about two weeks before this bugged me enough to figure out what could be done to solve this. I had solved it once before by dropping a magically crafted file into /etc/hal/fdi/policy, but that system is long gone. Luckily it looks like thanks (at least in part) to Martin Pitt, udev has a keymap facility for handling this type of scenario. /usr/share/doc/udev/README.keymap.txt.gz has a bunch of good hints that got me started.

$ /lib/udev/findkeyboards
USB keyboard: input/event2
AT keyboard: input/event0

Finds my keyboard devices. I'm interested in the USB connected keyboard. So I run:

/lib/udev/keymap -i input/event2

To discover scan codes my keyboard generates for the keys I want to remap. here #654928 got me, the trick is to issue the above command from the laptop keyboard, so that the terminal you launched keymap in doesn't get wonky because it never got the key-release event from the enter key. When I hit keys on my external keyboard now, I get stuff like:

scan code: 0x7004A   key code: home
scan code: 0x700E7   key code: rightctrl

They key codes coming out match what is printed on the keycaps. From here I generate a file matching files in /lib/udev/keymaps, but change the keycodes to the keycodes I want to remap to, ending up with:

0x7004A leftmeta 
0x700E7 rightalt

This file goes into /lib/udev/keymaps/kinesis-stew. It appears the things like leftmeta/rightalt which are valid come from /usr/include/linux/input.h. It also seems to be valid to put hex there, but I didn't find a good way to figure out what hex codes go with which key codes. Then I look for the VendorID/DeviceID by looking in the output of "udevadm info --export-db" for input/event2 and find:

ID_VENDOR_ID=05f3
ID_MODEL_ID=0007

So now I'm ready to create my udev rule (which I put into /etc/udev/rules.d/99-stew-keymap.rules

ATTRS idVendor =="05f3", ATTRS idProduct =="0007", RUN+="keymap $name kinesis-stew"

And now everything seems to be good. I can plug and unplug my external keyboard without having to run xmodmap to get the keybindings I want, and the keybindings for the built-in laptop keyboard are not disturbed.

Over recent months, I have been pondering the relevance of my Free Software involvement a lot: More than anything, it constantly feels more and more like several important distributions and projects are moving in directions that break with the old ways far too radically, by breaking software usability rules such as "least surprise", "works out of the box", and "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" either to try new approaches to addressing existing needs or simply for change's sake. Another aspect lies in my usual motivation for packaging or adopting software: because I need it and nobody else bothered doing it. Further reflection made me ponder what, correspondingly, are my usual reasons for dropping software: because what exists already works and because everybody and their grand-mother already invented a million of ways to handle the same issue. Which brings us to today's news. What prompted me to hand the dictionary packages I maintained over to someone else was a combination of "no longer need it" and "it already works fine as it is." For instance, the Estonian dictionaries haven't seen any upstream release since the initial one in 2003. While I still use Estonian daily in my online communications, the last 9 years have mostly been spent making minor changes to the dependencies and maintainer scripts, just to keep the package compliant with current Debian packaging policies and with ongoing improvements to the dictionary-common maintainer tools. This is not the sort of work that requires any knowledge of the Estonian language, so I felt that having dictionary-common developers handle those technical transitions in a clean and across-the-board way for as many dictionary packages as possible would be more productive than me trying to keep track of those changes by myself. A similar case applies to the Latvian dictionaries. While there have been occasional upstream releases, some of which required patching the source code, maintaining the package has mostly been about tracking Debian policy changes and dictionary-common functional changes. Additionally, my interest for learning Latvian has dramatically dropped over the years, so I no longer saw any point in remaining involved in maintaining the package. Ditto for the Russian dictionaries: occasional upstream releases, occasional patches, regular packaging upgrades to keep up with the Debian policy and with dictionary-common functionality, but no longer much of anything than a passive interest in practicing my Russian. One of the developers behind dictionary-common, Agustin Martin Domingo, frequently helped me make sense of the changes I needed to track in the past, so he gladly accepted taking over the technical maintenance of all 3 packages. The Estonian dictionaries, while extremely skim in the breadth of vocabulary they cover, remain useful, but are essentially deprecated, as the upstream author is working on a spell checking engine similar to what Voikko does for Finnish, which is why maintaining them will be a rather easy task for Agustin. Meanwhile, Aigars Mahinovs passively remains on board for the Latvian dictionaries, while the Russian dictionaries have been adopted by Mikhail Gusarov, in both cases with Agustin assisting on technical matters. Basically, I feel that passing the maintenance over to people whose motivation remains high is a better way to guarantee those packages' future than leaving them in my unmotivated hands and I'm glad that I found someone to keep on packaging them. PS: happy Valentine's day to everyone!

As many would know, Debian GNU/Linux is one of the oldest, and the largest Linux distributions that is available for free. Since it was first released in 1993, several people have analysed the size and produced cost estimates for the project. In 2001, Jes s M. Gonz lez-Barahona et al produced an article entitled Counting Potatoes , an analysis of Debian 2.2 (code named Potato). When Potato was released in June 2003, it contained 2,800 source packages of software, totalling around 55 million lines of source code. When using David A. Wheeler s sloccount tool to apply the COCOMO model of development, and an average developer salary of US$56,000, the projected development cost that Gonz lez-Barahona calculated to start-from-scratch and build Debian 2.2 in 2003 was US$1.9 billion. In 2007 an analysis entitled Macro-level software evolution: a case study of a large software compilation by Jes s M. Gonz lez-Barahona, Gregorio Robles, Martin Michlmayr, Juan Jos Amor and Daniel M. German was released. It found that Debian 4.0 (codename Etch released April 2007) had just over 10,000 source packages of software and 288 million lines of source code. This analysis also delved into the dependencies of software packages, and the update flow between Debian release (not all packages are updated with each release). Today (February 2012) the current development version of Debian, codenamed Wheezy, contains some 17,141 source packages of software, but as it s still in development this number may change over the coming months. I analysied the source code in Wheezy, looking at the content from the original software that Debian distributes from its upstream authors without including the additional patches that Debian Developers apply to this software, or the package management scripts (used to install, configure and de-install packages). One might argue that these patches and configuration scripts are the added value of Debian, however the in my analysis I only examined the pristine upstream source code. By using David A Wheeler s sloccount tool and average wage of a developer of US$72,533 (using median estimates from Salary.com and PayScale.com for 2011) I summed the individual results to find a total of 419,776,604 source lines of code for the pristine upstream sources, in 31 programming languages including 429 lines of Cobol and 1933 lines of Modula3! In my analysis the projected cost of producing Debian Wheezy in February 2012 is US$19,070,177,727 (AU$17.7B, EUR 14.4B, GBP 12.11B), making each package s upstream source code wrth an average of US$1,112,547.56 (AU$837K) to produce. Impressively, this is all free (of cost). Zooming in on the Linux Kernel In 2004 David A. Wheeler did a cost analysis of the Linux Kernel project by itself. He found 4,000,000 source lines of code (SLOC), and a projected cost between US$175M and US$611M depending on the complexity rating of the software. Within my analysis above, I used the standard (default) complexity with the adjusted salary for 2011 (US$72K), and deducted that Kernel version 3.1.8 with almost 10,000,000 lines of source code would be worth US$540M at standard complexity, or US$1,877M when rated as complex . Another Kernel Costing in 2011 put this figure at US$3 billion, so perhaps there s some more variance in here to play with. Individual Projects Other highlights by project included:

Project	Version	Thousands of SLOC	Projected cost at US$72,533/developer/year
Samba	3.6.1	2,000	US$101 (AU$93M)
Apache	2.2.9	693	US$33.5M (AU$31M)
MySQL	5.5.17	1,200	US$64.2M (AU$59.7M)
Perl	5.14.2	669	US$32.3M (AU$30M)
PHP	5.3.9	693	US$33.5M (AU$31.1M)
Bind	9.7.3	319	US$14.8M (AU$13.8M)
Moodle	1.9.9	396	US$18.6M (AU$17.3M)
Dasher	4.11	109	US$4.8M (AU$4.4M)
DVSwitch	0.8.3.6	6	US$250K (AU$232K)

Debian Wheezy by Programming Language The upstream code that Debian distributes is written in many different languages. ANSI C with 168,536,758 is the dominant language (40% of all lines), followed by C++ at 83,187,329 (20%) and Java with 34,698,990 (8%). If you are intersted in finding the line count and cost projections for any of the 17,000+ projects, you will find them in the raw data CSV. Other Tools and Comparisons Ohcount is another source code cost analysis tool. In March 2011 Ohcount was run across Debian Sid: its results are here. In comparison, its results appear much lower than the sloccount tool. There s also the Ohloh.net Debian Estimate which only finds 55 Million source lines of code and a projected cost of US$1B. However Ohloh uses Ohcount for its estimates, and seems to be to be around 370 million SLOC missing compared to my recent analysis. Summary Over the last 10 years the cost to develop Debian has increased ten-fold. It s intersting to know that US$19 billion of software is available to use, review, extend, and share, for the bargain price of $0. If we were to add in Debian patches and install scripts then this projected figure would increase. If only more organisations would realise the potential they have before them. Need help with Linux (including Debian), Perl, or AWS? See www.jamesbromberger.com.

If you met Ana, you ll easily remember her. She has a great and pronounced Spanish accent I m glad that the existence of the Debian Women project helped her to join Debian because she has been doing a great job. From KDE packaging to publicity/marketing work, her interests shifted over the years but this allowed her to stay very involved. As she explains it very well, Debian is big enough so that you can stop doing something which is no longer fun for you, and still find something new to do in another part of Debian! Read on to learn more about Ana, the KDE team, Debian s participation to the Google Summer of Code, and more. Raphael: Who are you? Ana: I m Ana Guerrero L pez and I m in my early 30s. I was born and raised in the wonderful city of Sevilla, Spain and I live in Lyon, France. I share my life with another Debian Developer and my paid work is doing Debian support and integration, so you won t be surprised to read that Debian is a big part of my life. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Ana: Although I knew about the existence of Linux since 1997 or so, I didn t really start using Linux until the summer 2001 when I finally got a computer on my own and an Internet link at home. In the beginning, I was using Mandrake in a dual boot with Windows and later around 2003, I happily moved to only using Debian and ditching the Windows partition. Once settled as a Debian user, I knew anybody could help improve the distribution but I hesitated to join mostly due to two reasons, my perception of Debian was the one of a very elitist and aggressive club and who wants to join this kind of cult^wproject? And even if I wanted to join, I did not know how to get started. By the summer of 2004, the Debian Women project started, it made me seeing Debian as a more welcoming project, and I started maintaining my first packages. The following summer 2005, I attended akademy 2005 (the annual KDE conference) where I had the pleasure to meet there some of the people from the KDE team and this really made a difference for me. Christopher Martin and Adeodato Sim , with the help of other people, have started the maintenance of KDE as a team a few months before and by that time most of the KDE modules where under the maintenance umbrella of the team. This was a very good move since it allowed easily to share the KDE maintenance in a more coordinated way and also eased having non-DDs, like me at that time, to join in and help.

The Debian Women project started, it made me seeing Debian as a more welcoming project.

Raphael: You re part of the Debian KDE team. What s your role in the team and what are your plans for Wheezy? Ana: Nowadays, I am not as active in the KDE team as I used to be in the past. The KDE 3 to KDE 4 transition was quite tiring and changes on the KDE side like the successive marketing renames, the shorter 6 months schedule (it used to be at least 9) or the uncoordinated KDE releases mostly burnt me out. Currently, I am mostly working in helping others to get started within the team, some small fixes here and there, and helping with the uploads: an upload of the full KDE suite to the archive requires some building power and upload bandwidth not everybody have. For Wheezy, with the tentative freeze date in June, the plan is to try to ship the latest possible point release of the KDE 4.8 series. The first release of the series, 4.8.0 was released a couple of weeks ago and while writing these lines, the packaging work for 4.8 hasn t started yet. The next move for the team is getting 4.7.4 in unstable, currently sitting in experimental.

For Wheezy, [ ] the plan is to try to ship the latest possible point release of the KDE 4.8 series.

Besides the KDE packages, there is some software which users perceive as KDE, such as amarok, digikam, etc., which are not part of KDE but fall under its umbrella. These other programs have their own maintainers and their updates depend greatly in the availability of them. For the KDE office suite, we have right now KOffice in the archive. KOffice got a fork some time ago named Calligra and we should replace KOffice by Calligra in the archive before the release of Wheezy. Sadly there isn t yet a final release of Calligra to use. My personal goal for Wheezy was to finish the removal of all the remaining packages depending on KDE 3 and Qt 3 that Squeeze still contained. The removal of the KDE 3 libraries and all the packages using them was quickly achieved after the release of Squeeze. The removal of Qt 3 soon showed that it was task harder than expected since some popular packages (sometimes not in the Debian archive, e.g. third-party scientific software) depend on it, and also Qt 3 is a requirement for LSB compatibility. Right now, Qt 3 has been orphaned for 9 months and nobody has shown any interest in adopting it. Raphael: KDE, much like GNOME, has been forked by people who were unhappy by the direction that the project has taken since version 4 (cf Trinity). What s your personal opinion on KDE 4.x and what s the position of the Debian KDE team concerning this fork? Ana: I use KDE 4 on my laptop and I think it is a solid desktop environment and platform. However I am finding it less and less attractive for me. On one side, my usage of the computer has been slightly changing and on the other side, I do not like how the new developments in KDE are evolving, things like plasmoids or activities are not attractive for me. I have switched my other 2 systems to awesome although I continue to use mainly a bunch of KDE applications: dolphin, konsole, kate, juk, kmix, etc. So you might say my desktop environment is an awesome KDE. Regarding the Trinity project, a lot of users complained very loudly when KDE 3 got replaced by KDE 4 in testing/unstable, so I find quite laudable the decision of some users to act instead and try to continue with a forked development of KDE 3. However the Trinity team seems to be about 3 persons (funny for a project named Trinity ) while KDE 3 is big. In perspective, it does not look that big because KDE 4 is even larger, but it is still too much for such small team. In addition those developers need to maintain Qt3 that has been end-of-lifed years ago by Nokia/Trolltech . So my guess is that sooner or later the project will fade away. Nobody from the KDE team is interested in Trinity and in case someone wants to package it for Debian, they would have to make a new team. For the reasons mentioned above: Qt3 maintenance and reduced upstream group, this would be a bad idea. My advice if you do not like KDE 4 and you miss KDE 3, would be taking a look at razor-qt based on Qt4 and quite similar to KDE 3. I read they have plans to port it to Qt4, but frankly that could take some years same it took to the KDE project for KDE 4.0.0 Raphael: You used to maintain news.debian.net, a WordPress blog dedicated to Debian, but you stopped a while ago. A few months later you started to maintain a Debian page on Google+. Why did you stop the blog and what s your goal with the Google+ page? Ana: I blogged about the reasons I started news.debian.net. In short, I thought Debian needed a better system to publish news, something like a blog. I first tried to suggest the idea to the press/publicity team but they weren t interested, so I started the project alone. IMHO the blog worked quite well and I was feeling like it should be made official. I talked about this with some people but at the time I wasn t pushing it because I had other priorities and I knew pushing it to become official would need some extra time and energy. Stefano decided to start the discussion about making news.debian.net official (that s moving it to a debian.org domain) in its own initiative. After the public discussion and some private exchange of emails with DSA, the situation became frustrating and I decided to close news.debian.net after the release of Squeeze. Later, during DebConf, an officer from the press team announced they were launching a blog and I asked Stefano if he could try to have a discussion about this to see if it could still somehow fit my ideas, and maybe contributing myself, but nobody from the press team answered Stefano s email and the blog hasn t started yet either. Irony that communication didn t work when wanting to improve communication. About the Google+ page, everyday I follow what is going in Debian and quite often I find things I want to share. I do not want to clutter my own profiles with Debian stuff or have people following me because of that, so I decided to create the Debian page when Google+ made them available. I like the fact that people can follow that without having an account in Google+ although they can not comment anonymously. I am not happy about the fact that Google+ is a closed platform but hopefully the data will become easier to export in the near future. Right now, there are some services that provides RSS feeds of Google+ pages if you want to follow the page and you are not in Google+ (or I could setup one if several people ask me). Raphael: Last year you helped to manage Debian s participation to the Google Summer of Code. How did it went? Is there something that you can improve for this year? Ana: I think last year we managed to have people in Debian more aware about what the students were doing. That also helped students to get more feedback and therefore get to know more people in the project and get more integrated. Students were sending periodic public reports available to everybody interested in the status of the projects and some of them also held their own sessions in DebConf. We still failed to start looking for mentors early enough and to give them information about how the GSoC worked and how they could have a successful project. Having good projects in Debian is harder than in other projects because the GSoC mostly promotes having students started in Open Source *coding* for a project, while Debian is more a project about integrating software and we overall do not have so many parts that has to be coded. My personal goal for this year is to try getting the projects earlier to attract good students from the very beginning, even if that means we have less projects than in other years. Raphael: What motivates you to continue to contribute year after year? Ana: Three things. I like improving the OS I use, I like the friends I have made while working in Debian through the years and because I have fun. Also Debian is quite a big project, so if you become tired or burn out working in some area, you always can easily find interesting things to do somewhere else. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Ana: Adeodato Sim , he is now in a long leave from the project, but it is one of those persons who made a difference in the project in his job in the release team some years ago. Aur lien Jarno because of his tireless work in (e)glibc and porting of several architectures. I also have special admiration for all those people who have been very active in the project for more than 7-8 years because I know it is not always easy to combine it with real life.

---

Thank you to Ana for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading her answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

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Part of our efforts to reduce power consumption is to identify processes which keep waking up the disk even when the computer is idle. This already resulted in a few bug reports (and some fixes, too), but we only really just began with this. Unfortunately there is no really good tool to trace file access events system-wide. powertop claims to, but its output is both very incomplete, and also wrong (e. g. it claims that read accesses are writes). strace gives you everything you do and don t want to know about what s going on, but is per-process, and attaching strace to all running and new processes is cumbersome. blktrace is system-wide, but operates at a way too low level for this task: its output has nothing to do any more with files or even inodes, just raw block numbers which are impossible to convert back to an inode and file path. So I created a little tool called fatrace ( file access trace , not fat race ) which uses fanotify, a couple of /proc lookups and some glue to provide this. By default it monitors the whole system, i. e. all mounts (except the virtual ones like /proc, tmpfs, etc.), but you can also tell it to just consider the mount of the current directory. You can write the log into a file (stdout by default), and run it for a specified number of seconds. Optional time stamps and PID filters are also provided.

$ sudo fatrace
rsyslogd(967): W /var/log/auth.log
notify-osd(2264): O /usr/share/pixmaps/weechat.xpm
compiz(2001): R device 8:2 inode 658203
[...]

It shows the process name and pid, the event type (Rread, Write, Open, or Close), and the path. Sometimes its not possible to determine a path (usually because it s a temporary file which already got deleted, and I suspect mmaps as well), in that case it shows the device and inode number; such programs then need closer inspection with strace. If you run this in gnome-terminal, there is an annoying feedback loop, as gnome-terminal causes a disk access with each output line, which then causes another output line, ad infinitum. To fix this, you can either redirect output to a file (-o /tmp/trace) or ignore the PID of gnome-terminal (-p pidof gnome-terminal ). So to investigate which programs are keeping your disk spinning, run something like

  $ sudo fatrace -o /tmp/trace -s 60

and then do nothing until it finishes. My next task will be to write an integration program which calls fatrace and powertop, and creates a nice little report out of that raw data, sorted by number of accesses and process name, and all that. But it might already help some folks as it is right now. The code lives in bzr branch lp:fatrace (web view), you can just run make and sudo ./fatrace. I also uploaded a package to Ubuntu Precise, but it still needs to go through the NEW queue. I also made a 0.1 release, so you can just grab the release tarball if you prefer. Have a look at the manpage and --help, it should be pretty self-explanatory.

I hope by now you have heard of ACTA. In any case, here is a nice 6:30 minute video giving a good overview. Please help stop ACTA. Our freedom is at risk. Whether you tell people about it, write about it, use services like Twitter to tell the world about #StopACTA, or whether you take the time to march against what corporate entities are lobbying politicians to do against their people please help protect the Internet as we know it. NP: God is an Astronaut: Moment of Stillness