... to the degree that you may get unsolicited e-mails from Canonical flunkies, asking about your project timeline and status on an Ubuntu bug that is so crucial that it needs its very own project manager, but which isn't important enough to forward to the Debian bug tracker. At the time I got the e-mail, I had already decided to give up on d-i development, so I had a brief gape at the sheer chutzpah of the thing and deleted it. In retrospect, I shouldn't have done that. I've needed a good laugh a few times since then, and re-reading that e-mail would have done nicely. Anyone got one of these e-mails that they kept, so I can keep the lulz going 4eva? E-mail me.

For the whole week, I ve been in Bangalore for the GNOME.Asia 2011 hackfest. I ve been delegated by Stefano to represent Debian here, and my employer EDF has agreed to cover for travel costs since they are very interested in first-hand information the future of the Linux desktop and sharing our work on scientific computing. It s been a really exciting week; I ve spent quite some time packaging missing pieces of GNOME 3.0 (well, the release candidate versions of course) in experimental, together with Fred Peters. I think it s reaching a usable state now, so we ll probably soon provide metapackages to make it easily installable. The latest developments of the Shell make it a very exciting piece of software, with a strong focus on usability. Many things were written about it, but in the end my main criticism would be that it lacks some functionality - for example, the combined clock/weather/locations applet will be greatly missed. The good news is that it is extremely customizable, and with all the libraries being made accessible through GObject introspection, there are many features that are accessible from it. If you know how to write JavaScript, now is the time to write your favorite extension. On the good news front, Vincent Untz also spent a lot of time improving the so-called legacy mode , which is more and more starting to look like the Shell without special effects, and with all the features from gnome-panel 2.x that are still here. We will try in Debian to cover all uses cases that there were for GNOME 2 with GNOME 3 technology, so that panel lovers are not left behind. I ve also proposed an update to the dh_gsettings proposal, which will provide the same functionality as dh_gconf and allow to easily set distribution-specific overrides. It is still missing a way to set mandatory settings, which might come as a problem for some corporate users, but this is planned for a future version of GSettings. Today, we re having a business track where I and representatives of other companies (Oracle, Lanedo, Dexxa) are sharing experiences about making money with free software. Unfortunately the local organizers didn t manage to gather many people, despite our being in a city with an incredible number of IT industries. Tomorrow, the public conference starts, and this should be the opposite: we re expecting around 1000 people, which is a great achievement for a free software conference. For an unrelated topic, being around so many GNOME hackers has some interesting side effects; I ve been added to Planet GNOME. So, hey, hello Planet GNOME readers!

A while ago I said Koen from Emweb made an interesting proposal at FOSDEM about emerge, the KDE Windows build tool. Yesterday, Jaros aw Staniek and I reaffirmed our commitment to emerge . Today, I d like to go a bit further: let s bring more developers to emerge by opening it up to other projects. Keep reading! What is emerge, why is it important and what was Koen s proposal? Fact: Microsoft Windows is very different to Unix in regards to development. On Unix platforms -that includes Linux and Mac OS X-, software is usually installed to /usr: applications in /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, libraries in /usr/lib, headers in /usr/include, common resources in /usr/share, etc. Also, dependency management is usually something you can count on: when you install kdelibs5-dev in Ubuntu, it will automatically install libqt4-dev, kdelibs5-data, libfreetype (runtime), etc That makes setting up a development environment a very easy task: look for shared libraries, header files, etc in the common places and you will probably find them. On Windows there is nothing like that. When you want to compile an application, you need to provide (build and install) all its dependencies, and you need to tell Visual Studio where to find everything. Even CMake usually needs some help in the form of a hint for CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH. As you may imagine, building KDE, which has more than 200 third party dependencies and tens of modules (and with the move + split to git, many more) becomes an almost insurmountable task. Emerge to the rescue: inspired by Gentoo s emerge, Ralf Habacker, Christian Ehrlicher, Patrick Spendrin and others (yours faithfully included) developed a tool which downloads the source, configures, builds, installs and packages KDE and its dependencies. It makes a world of difference when building KDE. Actually, it makes building KDE on Windows possible. Once more: thank you very much guys, impressive tool. There are two well-differentiated parts in emerge, the engine and the recipes . The engine takes care of downloading the sources (tarballs, checkouts from Subversion and git clones, etc) , configuring and building for the usual build systems (QMake, CMake, NMake makefiles, etc), installing, bundling packages together and much more. All that for four compilers (MSVC2008, MSVC2010, MinGW32 and MinGW-W64). It s the equivalent to Gentoo s emerge, Debian s dpkg + debhelper/cdbs or Homebrew and MacPorts for Macintosh. The recipes are the package-specific instructions a particular piece of software needs to build: what s the name of the tarball? URL to download from? What versions are available? What build system to use to configure and build? Does it need any Windows-specific patch? They are written in Python using some helper modules emerge provides (the debhelper-like part I mentioned above). Currently, there are about 70 recipes in emerge, organized in our portage tree (bear in mind the names are taken from Gentoo but the internals of the tool are completely different). With those 70 recipes, we are able to build most KDE modules. Problem is to provide all the optional features, we are missing probably 200 to 250 more recipes. Given that KDE on Windows is quite short on developers, we have to decide: either we fix bugs and improve the integration of KDE on Windows, or we keep track of the dependencies. I won t lie: for KDE on Windows, I d rather focus on development than on packaging. Given that writing and maintaining recipes does not strictly require programming skills (although they help ), during my talk at FOSDEM I kept asking people to join the KDE on Windows team as packagers, even if you know little to nothing about software development. If you think about it, that s what we have in Linux distributions: there are hundreds (thousands?) of packagers in Debian, Fedora, openSuse, etc which take care of the recipes to build software developed by someone else ( upstream , in the parlance). What we have in KDE on Windows, where we are the KDE packagers, the KDE developers (upstream) and the emerge developers, is actually an anomaly. Then Koen took the microphone and said: why don t you open emerge to other projects? And I there I realized he was damn right We have developed an awesome tool to download, configure, build, package and install third party software on Windows, to manage dependencies, to update, etc. For four compilers, no less. The engine of emerge is not really tied to KDE. We already have a lot of recipes for software which is not KDE specific: openssl, Qt, bzip2, libpng, mysql, etc. I see no actual reason to disallow Gnome, GStreamer, OpenSceneGraph, LibreOffice and many others in (assuming someone wants to take care of them, of course no, do not look at me! I don t have time!). Currently, the only barrier preventing those recipes in is emerge is developed in the KDE repository and you need a KDE developer account to commit your recipes. That s about it. There is also a perception problem: if emerge is developed in KDE, it s because it s a KDE-thingy, right? . Well, no. One way to avoid that would be to graduate emerge from KDE and make it an independent project, one in which the current developers have accounts, and new developers get an emerge project account instead of a KDE account to commit recipes. Please note graduating does not mean expelling , firing or anything peyorative. It does not mean that emerge developers (engine and recipes) are worse than KDE developers, or less KDE developers than our god David Faure: in KDE, we consider Debian, Fedora, openSuse, etc KDE packagers as equals, they are also KDE developers and many of them are in the KDE eV (funny thing is I am not). My wish for today: think of one application or library you d like to see in Windows and become its maintainer in emerge for Windows. For now, let s do this in the kde-windows mailing list and if this idea succeeds, then we ll talk about graduating. You could also try to add support for a new compiler (OpenWatcom, Intel C++, etc) but that s a lot more more and it s not a priority now. PS: Yes, I know about CoApp, Microsoft s similar effort, with some magic involved. I ve been watching and trying it since day 1. I m really interested. It s just not there yet and I do not have spare time to help Garrett (hey Microsoft, hire me and I ll have all the time in the world! )

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article for The Guardian about Harper-Collins attempts to make self-destructing books [1]. They claim that a traditional book falls apart after being read 26 times (a claim that Cory disputes based on personal experience working at libraries) and want ebooks to be deleted after being borrowed so often. Really the copy-right fascists are jumping the shark here.Socialogical Images has an interesting archive of adverts for supposed treatments for autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, asperger syndrome, and attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder [2]. The New York University Child Study Center conducted the campaign of fake ransom notes to describe a psychological difference as something that kidnaps a child. The possibility that parents should to some extent learn to adapt to their child s nature rather than fixing them with medication is something that most people can t seem to understand.William Cronon has written an interesting analysis of the way Conservative , lobby groups work [3]. They are more organised than I expected.The Reid Report has a good summary of some of the corporat issues related to the Japanese nuclear melt-down [4], apparently the company that runs the reactors decided to delay using sea-water in the hope that their investment could be salvaged and thus put everyone at increased risk. I think that this proves that reactors shouldn t be privately owned.Ian Lowe wrote a good summary of the reasons why Australia should not be using nuclear power when we believed that the Fukushima disaster was over [5]. But it turns out that the Fukushima problems were worse than we thought and the melt-down is getting worse.Christopher Smart wrote a good analysis of Microsoft s latest attempt to extort money from Linux users where they assert patent claims over Android [6]. He points out that .NET/Mono is a risk to Linux.Major Keary wrote a positive review of Snip Burn Solder Shred which is a book about Seriously geeky stuff to make with your kids [7]. Sounds like a fun book.The internal network of RSA has been cracked in some way that apparently weakens the security of SecureID, Bruce Schneier s blog comments section has an interesting discussion of the possibilities [8]. I expect that it s a fairly bad attack, if the attack was minor then surely the RSA people would have told us all the details.Hans Rosling gave an interesting TED talk about The Magic Washing Machine [9]. He describes how his family benefited when his mother first got a washing machine and how this resulted in better education as his mother had more time to get library books for her children. It seems that deploying more electric washing machines should be a priority for improving education and food supplies in third-world countries.Paul Root Wolpe gave an interesting and disturbing TED talk about bio-engineering [10]. He catalogues the various engineered animals and talks about the potential for future developments.Ron Rosenbaum wrote an interesting and insightful article for Slate about Maj. Harold Hering who s military career ended after he asked how to determine whether a nuclear launch order is lawful, legitimate, and comes from a sane president [11]. The question never received a good answer, this is a good reason for moving towards nuclear disarmament and for Americans to vote for the sanest and most intelligent candidate in the presidential elections.Eythor Bender gave an inspiring TED talk about human exoskeletons [12]. He had live demonstrations on stage of a soldier using an exo-skeleton to carry a heavy backpack and a woman who suffered a severe spinal-cord injury walking after being in a wheel-chair for 19 years.

• [1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/08/ebooks-harpercollins-26-times
• [2] http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/26/mental-illness-steals-your-childs-true-self/
• [3] http://scholarcitizen.williamcronon.net/2011/03/15/alec/
• [4] http://blog.reidreport.com/2011/03/when-the-corporation-is-in-charge-japanese-nuke-co-delayed-sea-water-solution/
• [5] http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/no-nukes-now-or-ever-20110319-1c1ed.html
• [6] http://blog.christophersmart.com/2011/03/22/microsoft-licenses-its-patents-to-android-manufacturers-sues-if-they-dont-agree/
• [7] http://luv.asn.au/review/snip-burn-solder-shred
• [8] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/03/rsa_security_in.html
• [9] http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine.html
• [10] http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_root_wolpe_it_s_time_to_question_bio_engineering.html
• [11] http://www.slate.com/id/2286735/pagenum/all
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/eythor_bender_demos_human_exoskeletons.html

Mike Gerber reported the Debian bug #620000 on Tuesday March 29th, against the imvirt package. Bug #610000 was reported as of January 14th. That makes 2.5 months for 10,000 bugs, a higher ratio than we had for 600000-610000. This is probably a consequence of the resumed development after the release of squeeze. And don't forget aboutthe bug prediction contest.

I've finally come up with a decent way for pmount to support mounting image files using loop devices. This has required a little more work than I thought, since I had to add support for configuration files for pmount, as loopback mounting is by essence insecure, so the support for it had to be user-configurable. I have tried hard to make the loopback mounting as secure as possible, for instance by ensuring that a user cannot bypass file permissions with it, but of course lookback mount still means that a user has read-write access to a mounted FS which can be used to exploit potential weaknesses in the kernel... I have uploaded a new version of pmount to experimental. Comments, bug reports, exploits are welcome !

So the other day, I was able to do this in an Ubuntu natty amd64 chroot for the first time.

# cat > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/multiarch-me
APT::Architectures   "amd64"; "i386";  ;
^D
# cat >> /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg
foreign-architecture i386
^D
# apt-get update
# apt-get install flashplugin-installer:i386
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
[...]
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  flashplugin-installer:i386 flashplugin-nonfree:i386 gcc-4.5-base:i386
  libatk1.0-0:i386 libavahi-client3:i386 libavahi-common-data:i386
  libavahi-common3:i386 libc6:i386 libcairo2:i386 libcomerr2:i386
  libcups2:i386 libdatrie1:i386 libdbus-1-3:i386 libdrm2:i386
  libegl1-mesa:i386 libexpat1:i386 libfontconfig1:i386 libfreetype6:i386
  libgcc1:i386 libgcrypt11:i386 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0:i386 libgl1-mesa-glx:i386
  libglib2.0-0:i386 libgnutls26:i386 libgpg-error0:i386 libgssapi-krb5-2:i386
  libgtk2.0-0:i386 libgtk2.0-common libice6:i386 libjasper1:i386
  libjpeg62:i386 libk5crypto3:i386 libkeyutils1:i386 libkrb5-3:i386
  libkrb5support0:i386 libnspr4:i386 libnspr4-0d:i386 libnss3:i386
  libnss3-1d:i386 libpango1.0-0:i386 libpcre3:i386 libpixman-1-0:i386
  libpng12-0:i386 libselinux1:i386 libsm6:i386 libsqlite3-0:i386
  libstdc++6:i386 libtasn1-3:i386 libthai-data libthai0:i386 libtiff4:i386
  libudev0:i386 libuuid1:i386 libx11-6:i386 libx11-data libx11-xcb1:i386
  libxau6:i386 libxcb-dri2-0:i386 libxcb-render0:i386 libxcb-shape0:i386
  libxcb-shm0:i386 libxcb-xfixes0:i386 libxcb1:i386 libxcomposite1:i386
  libxcursor1:i386 libxdamage1:i386 libxdmcp6:i386 libxext6:i386
  libxfixes3:i386 libxft2:i386 libxi6:i386 libxinerama1:i386 libxrandr2:i386
  libxrender1:i386 libxt6:i386 libxxf86vm1:i386 x11-common zlib1g:i386
0 upgraded, 78 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.
Need to get 15.1 MB/15.6 MB of archives.
After this operation, 48.9 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

It is a truly heady experience, after so many years of talking about the need to properly support multiarch in Debian and Ubuntu, to see support for cross-installation of packages come to fruition. If you've talked to me any time in the past couple of weeks and noticed it's a little hard to get me to change the subject, well, that's why. Many who have grown accustomed to Debian and Ubuntu's lack of support for installing i386 packages on amd64 (or vice versa) may wonder what the fuss is about. (Whereas others who are well versed in distributions such as Red Hat and SuSE may laugh and wonder what took us so long...) So maybe a few words of explanation are in order. If you've ever installed ia32-libs on an amd64 machine anywhere; if you've ever noticed a bug where ia32-libs didn't work right because of wrong system paths, or had to file a request for another library to be added to ia32-libs because it wasn't included in the set of libraries Debian decided to package up in this grotesque, all-in-one 32-bit compatibility bundle; if you've ever decided not to install a 64-bit OS on your perfectly 64-bit-capable hardware because of concern that you wouldn't be able to run $random32-bitonly_application; multiarch is for you. If you've gotten stuck maintaining a lib32foo "biarch" package in Debian due to popular demand, multiarch is definitely for you. :) If you've ever cross-compiled software for a different Debian architecture than the one you were running, multiarch is for you. If you've ever wanted to run binaries for a different architecture under emulation, and found it awkward to set up the library dependencies, multiarch is for you, too. Because although the .deb world may be a little late to the party, we're also naturally taking things much further than anyone's done with rpm. Multiarch won't just give you the ability to install 32-bit libs on 64-bit systems; it'll give you the ability to install libs for any known architecture on any system. And a whole lot of pain just falls out of the equation in the process. A cross-compiling environment looks the same as a native-compiling environment. An emulated system looks the same as a native system. We can start to seriously consider cross-grading systems from one architecture to another. And all this is happening now. The groundwork is there in Ubuntu natty. Wheezy will be the release that brings multiarch to Debian. When dpkg 1.16.0 is uploaded to unstable real soon now, the bootstrapping will begin. I am immensely grateful to everyone who's helped make multiarch a reality - to Tollef, Matt and others for seeding the vision; Aurelien, Matthias and Arthur for their work to ready the toolchain; David and Michael for the apt implementation; Guillem and Raphael for the dpkg implementation, and Linaro's support to help make this possible; and the many other developers who've helped to refine this design over the years in numerous other BoFs, sessions and mailing list threads. I'm excited to find out what the Debian community will do with multiarch now that it's upon us. Christian, maybe you should start a pool for how long it will take before all the libraries shipped in ia32-libs have been converted to multiarch and we can drop ia32-libs from the archive?

For some time, I was looking for a way to change grub default entry for only one boot. I want to tell it that next time it should boot the entry 0, and the time after that, use the usual default (the entry 1). Founding documention for this is not as easy at it should, and the information on the debian wiki wasn't clear enough for me to understand. So I edit the wiki page to make clear that grub-reboot also available for those using grub2, and that it will only configure the boot, but not reboot the computer itself. As each time I wrote some text in English, I'm not sure my version correctly transmit my meaning. By the way, I'm changing my blog. The old one contain a post on my search of a solution for this. Thanks to stbuehler and Jochen for the indication leading to the correct solution for this. Thanks also to Vadim Solomin for a patch to make pm-hibernate notice the configured method for shutting-down the computer.

As students will be able to submit applications to GSoC later today (see timeline), it's time to promote that phpMyAdmin again participates. The ideas list is based on the one from last year with few additions, but as always, you are welcome to bring your own ideas. All information you want to know before applying can be found in our applicant guide. The most important thing is that we require you to submit patches to fix some bug or implement feature request before deadline for application submission. This proved last year to be useful to get people in touch with code base before accepting them, so that they have all things set up even before community bonding period. So all students are welcome, you will be able to apply later today on our GSoC page.

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Bdale is a long-time Free Software believer, he has been contributing even before Debian existed in the prehistoric era of free software. Anyone who went to a big Free Software conference has seen one of his colorful t-shirts. Or maybe you have heard the story where he got his beard shaved by Linus Torvalds to raise funds to protect the Tasmanian Devil. More seriously Bdale has played and continue to play a number of important roles in the Debian community. He also represents one of the biggest corporate sponsors (both for DebConf and for the servers that Debian owns): Hewlett Packard. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Bdale. Who are you? I made my first personal contribution of source code to what we now call Free Software in 1979. I started with HP in 1986 and for nearly a decade have served the company as Chief Technologist for Open Source & Linux. I am president of Software in the Public Interest, which is the umbrella organization providing legal and financial existence for Debian in the USA. I also represent users, developers, and Debian interests on a number of boards including at the Linux Foundation and the Freedombox Foundation. I m happily married with two children. Many people in Debian have met some or all of my family. They all joined me for Debconf in Edinburgh, and my daughter Elizabeth also attended in Caceres and New York. I joined Debian in 1994. I ve been responsible for a number of packages essential to our base system continuously since that time. But I ve also contributed to the project in many other ways over the years. I ran the first server that was fully dedicated to Debian. Ideas of mine influenced the development of project infrastructure, from the early design of our mirror network to structuring the archive around a package pool . I started or made significant early contributions to 5 ports of Debian to non-i386 architectures. I served as Debian Project Leader (DPL) in 2002-2003, was acting Secretary for a while, and have served on the Technical Committee for a number of years. Over the years, I ve also had some interesting hobbies. I helped design, build, and program pieces of various amateur radio satellites. I enjoy making physical things, and have many tools for working in wood and metals. My son and I are very active in the world of high power model rockets. And with my partner (and fellow Debian developer!) Keith Packard I m now running a small business making and selling open hardware and open source avionics for hobby rockets. You can read more about that at http://altusmetrum.org. You re the chair of the Debian technical committee. Can you quickly explain the role of this committee? I think many people assume the Technical Committee has a larger role in Debian than it really does. Section 6 of Debian s constitution defines the official role of the Technical Committee. Most importantly, the committee exists as a last resort place to resolve technical conflicts between Debian developers that they are unable to resolve by themselves. Most of the power in Debian is left in the hands of individual developers, who are usually able to collaborate with each other to make good technical decisions. So the Technical Committee s resolution process has only rarely been needed, which I think is a very good thing. From my point of view, the technical committee is not working. In many cases, the committee does not take any (timely) decision and just waits until the underlying situation has evolved to a point where the intervention of the committee is no longer needed. Do you agree with this and how can you explain it? I think it s very important for all of us to remember that everyone working on Debian does so voluntarily, and people who volunteer their time generally deserve a measure of respect and appreciation for their efforts. No issue is brought to the Technical Committee unless resolving it is expected to be really difficult, or at least contentious. And often, the issues brought to the committee have been as much or more about personality than technology. That makes some of them really hard to solve. So I do not agree that the technical committee is not working. It seems to me that the decisions that bog down and take a long time are the ones where arguments start out or become emotional instead of technical. In this context, if committee members can help lead public and private discussions in a way that causes a situation to evolve to the point where a decision is no longer needed, that may be healthier for the project in the long term than a quick vote that satisfies some contributors at the expense of others. The last important change that was made to try to revive the committee was the addition of two new members (Don Armstrong and Russ Allbery). Is there anything else that could be tried? The biggest improvement I could personally wish for is something people sending issues to the committee can help with. As the ultimate technical decision making body for a project whose output is mostly software, the more a request can be put in terms of a decision about source code, the easier it will be for us to make a decision. That won t always be possible, but when we re forced to try and dream up alternatives and then figure out whether anyone would actually be willing to write the code to implement those alternatives, the process takes a lot longer than choosing between competing patch sets or deciding whether a patch should be included. Besides your role in the technical committee, you have held the role of mediator/facilitator/advisor on numerous occasions. Because you re an old wise bearded guy who travels a lot and knows many Debian contributors I would like to thank you for all this work that few people notice. Are there been times where this has been a real burden for you? Thank you for mentioning this. I ve put a lot of my heart into Debian over the years, largely because it s a project and a community that continues to amaze and inspire me. I feel fortunate to have been able to meet and work on Debian with so many outstanding people from around the world. Many are now my friends, with all the silly and serious things being a friend implies. I ve been asked for and have given advice many times. I ve helped celebrate birthdays, marriages, new jobs, and the arrival of children. Sadly, I have also found myself having to try and find the right words to mark the loss of some of these friends The only time any of this feels like a burden is when there s some important problem that many people care about, that I m working behind the scenes to help fix, but can t really talk about publicly without causing more harm than good. It s distressing to have people think you don t care or aren t helping, when really you re doing everything you possibly can just not in a publicly visible way. Of course I understand that this is an impossible situation. If you can t see what s happening, there s no way to know if something is happening or not. That s why I advocate doing as much as possible in Debian, and SPI, and everywhere else I contribute in as open a way as possible. You have been Debian Project Leader and you promoted the vision of Debian as the Universal Operating System. What does universal mean for you? The biggest thing to me at the time was the idea that Debian could be anything. Those who chose to work on Debian would ultimately determine what Debian became. I also wanted to make sure we thought about as broad a set of potential users and collaborators as possible. But this vision provided a framework for pursuing a whole range of worthwhile increases in Debian s scope of utility, some of which I articulated in my DPL platforms, some others put forward. Internationalization, porting to more supported architectures, our inclusive and evolving approaches to accepting new developers and new packages, and so forth. I think this vision has served us well, and it pleases me that it has stayed a part of our collective thinking for so long. We re again in Debian s electoral period, what do you think of the work done by the current DPL? I m very happy with what I ve observed of Stefano s activities during his first year as DPL. He has an obvious enthusiasm for Debian, communicates well both in one to one interactions and in front of a crowd, and I think represents Debian very well. It is interesting that he s running unopposed for re-election this year. I choose to interpret that as evidence he s doing a good job, the project is running well, and nobody feels the need to try and take the job away From him. I m glad he s willing to continue in this role for another year. What s the most important thing that Debian should achieve in the wheezy timeframe? I don t yet have a very crisp personal wish-list for wheezy. But I would certainly like to see multiarch support finally completed! I m also very interested to see what comes from the CUT work. You have been an early supporter of multiarch , a project to allow easy installation of foreign architecture packages. It s on good track for Wheezy. Do you think it s an important milestone? My original motivation for requesting multiarch support was to enable support for 32-bit x86 binaries on ia64 Itanium systems, in the time leading up to the sarge release. I ended up creating the ia32-libs package, which I m not proud of. The emergence of 64-bit extensions to x86 (the amd64 architecture) made this a much broader issue. Today, I run a 64 bit kernel and a 32 bit user space on my notebook. There are problems with just moving entirely to 64 bit but I would like to be able to run some applications that work with large data sets in full 64 bit mode!

---

Thank you to Bdale Garbee for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. 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, Twitter and Facebook.

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• Ben Hutchings reported that older Lenny CDs do not actually install anymore. As we are still telling people that they don't need to throw away old CDs this was a tad disappointing to me. Got myself a 5.0.0 disc through jigdo and cdimage's fine snapshot service for packages that aren't actually in (old)stable anymore. Using a network mirror during installation is apparently the default (although you can decline it). Doing so will try to go to the security mirror and try to upgrade the base installation it just expanded from the debs on the CD. As the archive signing key changed recently, this leads to apt moaning about untrusted packages, which isn't actually exported to the debian-installer UI. The installation just hangs in "Select and install software" with a prompt being displayed on tty4. Mark Hymers agreed that it makes sense to switch the Release signature for lenny-security back to the old key for the time being and called for objections on debian-devel. Doing so should fix installation for oldstable users with old CDs again. In the future d-i should upgrade debian-archive-keyring first before the security archive's contacted and I've filed a bug report about that (#619751).
• Closed some old crufty bug reports on the pseudo package buildd.debian.org that were either already solved or easy to solve. (#607619, #602841, #586882, #520479, #507153, #605285)
• Scripted the generation of keys to get the initial batch of them done. 27 machine keys have been generated so far, with the exception of some machines that are currently down or lack entropy (like the kfreebsd-* ones which aren't fed by the keys). The keys are already activated on the archive side. s390, half of powerpc and some amd64 already run with autosigning turned on. armel will follow tomorrow thanks to Riku Voipio. We'll get more coverage soon, I bet.
• Fixed up retry as an answer to the build log. There are two possible actions that a buildd admin can do when he received a log: retry and give-back. The former will cause a build retry on the same buildd it was tried before. The latter will give it back to wanna-build to reschedule it. Due to the way retry is implemented you cannot retry binNMUs, though. There's #524547 filed against buildd about that. (There's still no support to schedule a build on a specific set of buildds neither.)
• Fixed up a typo in the wanna-build trigger for the main archive that caused double builds when we manual re-run it instead of being pushed by the archive.
• Thought about how to use Packages-arch-specific properly from WB::QD (our Perl-ish quinn-diff replacement). Currently the handling of annotations like "!linux-any" is broken because the logic does not account for architecture wildcards (besides of "any" which is special ). Luckily there's some sort of test suite, which I already adapted locally, but the code isn't really the best to read at the moment. So that's still on my to-do list to solve #603762.
• There's a post on arch:all autobuilding not happening just yet pending in the queue. I hope to get it out tomorrow or the day after.

And here we are again. And we still have energy for one more day (and a half). Barely, but still. And it is actually looking good, we do think we will have a working archive when we are leaving here tomorrow at noon. And compared to last year we won t even need a session until 3AM to make this work (and still have half of the tools not working). Yay. Yesterday had Ansgar fixing up various issues until we set him onto Generate Packages/Sources files out of the database . Which got us some funny quotes later on, like are 3.6 seconds to write a Sources file ok or too slow? (compared to the roughly 90 seconds it takes today). Torsten had various bugfixes (as we all, somehow there is never an end of them) and is currently looking at DSUS , which is the result we got out of a GSOC project. Mark tried to continue the multi-archive stuff but got distracted a lot, we regularly asked him to look at other items and then we also made him restart all the thoughts on it by slightly redefining the parameters for the multiple archives. I myself continued with shell scripting around the buildd autosigning and today I take to check up on all our cronjobs (besides unchecked/dinstall which we know do work) to ensure we can turn them back on starting this afternoon.

There will be an ASoC conference in Edinburgh 4th-5th May this year, held in the Scotch Malt Whisky Society in Edinburgh. Full details are in the announcement if you ve got an interest in embedded audio on Linux I recommend you attend, there s a lot of development going on in this area right now and it promises to be a great opportunity to coordinate development plans and make sure things work well for everyone. Having met quite a few of the attendees who ve signed up already I can also say that it should be an opportunity to meet some really excellent people.

A meme that keeps going around is that Asperger Syndrome (AS) is somehow universally good. The DSM doesn t list things that are beneficial, so any diagnostic criteria has to be for something that has some serious down-sides even if there are positive aspects to it. Of course on the Internet the debate won t just end there.Positive Aspects of ASThe main positive aspect of AS is intense concentration on topics of Special Interest, if a Special Interest is something that is related to a high paying job (such as computer programming) then that s a really good thing. Of course a Special Interest that isn t related to well paid employment or for which most people get paid little and only a lucky few get paid really well (such as music) isn t going to be a good thing by objective criteria.It seems that most people on the Autism Spectrum have sensory advantages over Neuro-Typical people (NTs). Better vision and hearing are quite common. It s good to be able to notice small and quiet things that most people miss, but that s not a benefit that most people seem to particularly desire. The down-side is that loud sounds and bright lights are more unpleasant and it s easy to be distracted by things that other people won t notice.The desire to give lectures has obvious benefits for any profession where giving lectures is a large part of the work, this is one reason why so many Aspies end up in academic careers. The down-side is that this is usually combined with a lack of ability to recognise when people aren t interested in receiving a lecture.Things can work out quite well for people on the Autism Spectrum who have a special interest that relates to a well paying career, who don t have any problems that prevent them from getting and keeping a job.Neutral Aspects of ASOn forums some Aspies report that they don t want to have friends, presumably their needs for friendship are met by the interaction with other forum members. As far as I can determine they are happy like that. I m sure that such people are a lot happier than people who want friends and don t have any.The incidence of asexuality among Aspies is apparently a lot higher than among the general population (something like 30% vs 1%). This isn t a bad thing for those people (I am not aware of any evidence to suggest that asexuals are less happy than people with average sexual desire), but it is evidence to suggest that Aspies are not the next stage in human evolution.Negative Aspects of ASThe DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for AS has as section C The disturbance causes clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning , in the proposed changes for DSM-V it s merged into Autistic Disorder with section D being Symptoms together limit and impair everyday functioning [1]. These seem like clear disadvantages, it doesn t seem possible to be diagnosed as being on the Autism Spectrum without having some real disadvantage.Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) seem to usually be correlated with Sensory Processing Disorder. Symptoms of SPD can include a lack of tolerance for noise, lights, certain types of clothing, dirt, and lots of other things as well as being physically clumsy. SPD is not in the diagnostic criteria for any ASD but it seems that most people on the Spectrum experience it to some degree and many regard it as the worst down-side of Autism.Spiritual Aspects of ASI ve seen a claim that AS gives them some advantage over NTs in terms of spiritual development. When someone manages to prove that their God exists or whatever other supernatural belief they have is based on fact then I ll consider this possibility.I think it s worth noting however that most religions seem to place some emphasis on humility, that seems to go against claiming that one s neuro-type is genetically predisposed to being successful at religion.ConclusionThere are many positive, neutral, and negative aspects of AS that I didn t list, I only mentioned some of the more common ones. How the positive and negative aspects compare differs on an individual basis, some people seem to be better off by objective criteria. But it seems that the best outcome is to have a different life experience that isn t objectively worse, which usually seems to involve a career in computers, science, engineering, or academia.Really if we were better then the Neuro-Typical people (NTs) would envy us, and I haven t seen much evidence of that. The NTs who do think that AS is a good thing seem to have little knowledge of AS.

• [1] http://www.dsm5.org/ProposedRevisions/Pages/proposedrevision.aspx?rid=97

Proposals for autosigning were floating around for quite some time. The most controversial parts were how we secure the machines that do the building (and in turn: how do we secure the key) and who's going to manage the keyring (because there are multiple teams involved; such discussions can indeed take quite a bit time).

What we've agreed upon now is as follows:

• All buildds with autosigned must be debian.org machines, which means that they are administrated by the Debian Sysadmins. This involves regular upgrades of the machine, firewalling and monitoring. They are all doing this already (kudos!), so there was no change needed.
• The machines must be restricted so that only a limited set of people may access it. That's done, it's just the buildd admins for the specific buildd and the global group builddadm (plus the admins and the local admin, of course).
• Every host has its own GPG key. Key generation locally on the buildds is eased by having the fine Entropy Key hooked up to provide entropy centrally and distributed to the debian.org machines. Private keys don't need to and must not leave the host. The keys are rotated every 120 days, expiry dates will be used to ensure that and to remind us when rotation is due. Sadly there is no HSM involved. Given the geographic dispersiveness of the Debian infrastructure that's not done easily. Some machines (like s390 racks) would also be unable to connect local hardware.
• The keys are restricted to specific architectures. They are not able to upload any source to the archive. However every binary on the specific architecture can be uploaded using the key, there are no further restrictions on package priorities or the like. They are maintained by the wanna-build admins on ftp-master by signing the armored public keys with their personal GPG keys (instructions available on the list). Thus a trust chain is established: who added or removed which key and when.
• We plan to suppress networking in the chroot soon. This will possibly be done with unshare(1) in util-linux, as soon as we sort out proper localhost networking. This was not deemed a blocker at this point.

Should you have thought we are gone, let me assure you - we are not. I just blog a bit later than I did the last days. Anyways, we did have a good day yesterday. Turns out that, when Ansgar said I don t know much Python so might not be able to do much he actually meant Just point me at problems, no matter how complicated, and I come up with the python code to fix them . And so we did point him at various problems and got lots of code. And we intend to continue this until Sunday. Yesterday Mark got his Packages/Sources tool so far that we are about ready to ditch the old things, even though he took time to finalize my generate-release changes too. Not to speak about that database changes I wrote about in my last entry, which he now seems to have finally wrapped his brain around in a way to get those done. Short cite: good god, this will overhaul about all our code and database handling . And thats where he is currently working on too. He did draw a plenty complicated thats how it works onto the flip chart, and now seems to dump his brain into some form of python code. I m curious about the result, lets see. Torsten fixed up the code that generated the Maintainers and Uploaders files. The old code was just plain silly and took about 15 minutes just for the Uploaders file. It is now doing both of them in less than two. Of course there had been lots of bugfixes and code enhances too, not really good to list in a blog like this. My work, besides getting a bit sick in the evening, consisted of writing shell scripts to enable us and wanna-build admins to handle the keys needed for the automated signing of packages build on DSA maintained buildds. I have those ready now, so we are able to start doing the autosign stuff today/tomorrow. Phil - well, did whatever buildd related stuff he has to. Different place, I dont see much of it, but he has a blog himself, look over there.

I know this is almost a cliche, but here goes. Just to show you that it still exists. Today my car needed some work. This morning I dropped it off at the mechanic, who lives right off a well-traveled state highway. They don t have a dropbox for keys because, well, they don t need one. I left the keys in the car. They called to say that they d have to close early this afternoon, but not to worry the keys were in the car along with the bill, which I could drop by and pay or put in the family s box at church. And sure enough, the car sat there the rest of the afternoon, and until about 9:45PM, with the keys in the ignition, bill tucked in under my ham radio speaker, ready to pick up. And it wasn t at risk for being stolen. Things just sort of happen that way out here sometimes. I remember one time we were taking a train out of Newton, KS, which departs at about 3:30AM. The only other train through there departs at 3:00AM. And back then, there was sometimes no station agent on some days. We got there our usual 15 minutes before the train departed, and struck up a conversation with a couple from California. They were almost beside themselves with shock. First off, they had arrived an hour and a half early, being used to doing that for getting on planes and, apparently, trains. But what really stunned them was the fact that the station was simply left unlocked all night. There weren t any cops there, and in fact there was nobody there at all for most of the night. And yet it had no signs of graffiti, no vandalism, and no apparent concern from anybody that it was unlocked. I think they also felt unsafe, having no guards or officials present. And they were literally the only people in the station for an hour, I m sure. And sure enough, along came the train. We all heard the whistle and had our things ready to go by the time the conductor got off the train, walked into the station, announced it, and led us all out to it. 3 minutes later, we were all on our way to California and the land of, apparently, locked doors. Back in 2002, when we bought a house in Kansas, the inspector commented that none of the outside locks worked. At closing, the sellers gave us a key, commenting We never use it and it took forever to find it. I guess that s why they didn t know the locks were broken. There s something good about a setting like this. I know that my car is safe at the mechanic with the keys in it. He knows that I ll pay his bill. We all take pride in our community institutions. And besides, if anybody did try to spray some graffiti in the train station, they ll be living with people that will remember it for the next 40 years. Accountability is implicit here.

And here we are, with another day of work ahead. And another huge unchecked/dinstall run about to finish. Yesterday evening Ansgar and later on Phil turned up, so we are now 5 persons sitting here and mostly coding happily away. Mark continued trying to wrap his brain around the changes we need to properly support multiple archives, with different sets of rights attached to them. It is a complex topic giving lots of headache. Besides that he is on a very good way of letting us completly remove apt-ftparchive by importing all the data we need to write Packages/Sources files on our own. And even better, the same work we can use to rewrite our rm and cruft-report commands in a sane way, not parsing Packages files anymore. Torsten did help with various database issues around the Packages/Sources issue and continued working on importing all the source filenames into the database, so we can soon provide a Contents file for sources. My own work, besides writing blog entries and preparing meeting minutes, consists of a rewrite of the script generating our Release files, the old one just wasn t up to it anymore. Especially not as we are on our way of having more and more of our tools use parallel processing, to fully use the power our ftp-master host has. And when I am done with this I will be off to tackle the keyring maintenance part we will need to enable autosigning by buildds to work. Should get interesting, with the shit of an interface one usually finds to gpg Ansgar started out by working on changes to our NEW handling, something I started with the dpkg bug #619131 and he just finished our site of the NEW handling scripts. Which means that, as soon as the dpkg maintainers added the code on their side and support this field in the .dsc files, NEW handling for packages like linux-2.6 will be much smoother. He is now implementing version control constraints into our control-suite tool. Phil is working on wanna-build stuff. And while this is just a short overview of what we did, there is always lots of discussion and bugfixing going on. It is incredibly useful to have a team sitting in one room for some days.

Update: Despite another email yesterday reasserting the 90-120 days lie, the source code has now landed on HTC's site.

As has been discussed before, HTC have a somewhat "interesting" interpretation of the GPL that allows them to claim they don't need to provide source code until between 90 and 120 days after the release of binaries. It's probably noteworthy that the FSF (who, you know, wrote the license and all) disagree with this interpretation, as do the kernel copyright holders (who, you know, wrote the code that the license covers) I've talked to about it. Anyway, after a pile of screaming and shouting from all sides HTC have tended to release their source code in a timely manner. So things seemed better.

HTC released the Thunderbolt last week and we're back to the 90-120 day song and dance. It's probably worth remembering that by behaving in this way HTC gain a competitive advantage over any vendors who obey the terms of their license - HTC can incorporate improvements made by others without releasing their own until through a significant portion of the lifecycle of their phone.

As far as I'm concerned, every single Thunderbolt sold so far embodies a copyright infringement. Wilfully engaging in copyright infringement for commercial benefit is typically frowned upon by courts, especially if by doing so a foreign company is gaining commercial advantage over a domestic one. If you think Microsoft's patent assault on Android is a problem, just imagine what they could do if they hired one significant Linux kernel developer and used their copyrights to attack the overwhelming majority of Android vendors who fail to comply with the GPL. It probably wouldn't be industry ending (companies would merely have improve their compliance procedures) but it'd do a huge deal of damage in the short term. It's insane for companies to behave this way. Don't reward them by giving them your money.

I'll be talking about this at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit next month, along with an update on my study of the compliance of Android tablets. I'm hoping that there'll be further developments after that.