the count of RC bugs is rather constant, & my impact on it during this week was rather negligible again:

• #671690 libgamin0: "libgamin0 breaks courier-imap/courier-imap-ssl (Sudden termination of connection)"
  add some info to the bugreport, do a manual versioned close after confirmation from bug submitter
• #690152 src:bsaf: "bsaf: FTBFS: Test org.jdesktop.application.TaskMonitorTest failed"
  add some info to the bugreport
• #697892 src:virtualbox: "src:virtualbox: FTBFS in sid and experimental: /usr/bin/kmk_sed: file /tmp/buildd/virtualbox-4.1.18-dfsg/src/VBox/Runtime/common/err/errmsg.sed line 31: Unmatched [ or [^"
  report new RC bug

Hang tight folks, this is a trippy one: As many have noted in my most recent post, I ve taken a shine to lisps hosted in Python. While clojure-py is badass, it s not fit for using from python. I hit some problems in the way it handles atomic variable access (well atomic , it s actually not ;) ), so I ve decided to give it a shot myself. That s right. I wrote a Lisp. A very basic, unmacroed lisp, but a lisp. So, let s take a look a trivial hy file pair The first file (really_lisp.hy), is as follows:

; vim: tabstop=2 expandtab shiftwidth=2 softtabstop=2 filetype=lisp
; Copyright (c) Paul Tagliamonte, in sofar as any of this is at all
;  copyrightable.
(def hello "World!")
(def square (fn [arg]
  (* arg arg)))
(def factorial (fn [n]
  (if (<= n 1)
   1
   (* n (factorial (- n 1))))))
(def fib (fn [n]
  (if (< n 2)
    n
    (+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2))))))

And, the example Python script example.py is as follows:

import hy.lang.importer
import really_lisp
print really_lisp.hello
# "World!"
print really_lisp.square(4)
# 16
print really_lisp.factorial(10)
# 3628800
print [really_lisp.fib(x) for x in range(1, 20)]
# [1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144,
#        233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181]

Please note two awesome things firstly, we re importing a non-python script into a Python module. Awesome. Secondly, we re able to access symbols natively, as well as functions. Let s also demonstrate the other way (just hython this time):

; vim: tabstop=2 expandtab shiftwidth=2 softtabstop=2 filetype=lisp
; Copyright (c) Paul Tagliamonte, in sofar as any of this is at all
;  copyrightable.
(puts "Hello, World!")
; "Hello, World!"
(import ["os"
         "sys"])
(puts (os.path.abspath "."))
; "/home/tag/tmp"
(puts sys.argv)
; ['/home/tag/.virtualenvs/hy/bin/hython', 'test.hy']
(sys.stdout.write "Fuggn' test\n")
; "Fuggn' test"

Naturally, not to be outdone, I decided to amp it up. Django in Lisp While insane, the big stuff looks like this: I ve replaced urls.py with urls.hy:

; vim: tabstop=2 expandtab shiftwidth=2 softtabstop=2 filetype=lisp
(import ["django.conf.urls"])
(def urlpatterns (django.conf.urls.patterns ""
  (django.conf.urls.url "^$" "djlisp.hellisp.views.home")
))

And, views.py with views.hy:

; vim: tabstop=2 expandtab shiftwidth=2 softtabstop=2 filetype=lisp
(import ["django.shortcuts"])
(def home (fn [request]
  (django.shortcuts.render_to_response "home.html"  )))

And lastly, the settings.hy file. I m not going to paste it because it s huge. But, it works!

So, after just having run 10K, I'm going to sit on a train for 20 hours and completely seize up. I've got me some stretching to do! I'm getting away to Portland for a few days. I'm taking the Coastal Starlight train up and back, and staying with Nigel and his family. I'm looking forward to having some time to myself on the train, I'm looking forward to the trip, because some mutual friends did it, and I've wanted to do it ever since. I'm also looking forward to catching up with Nigel, because I've barely spoken to him since he left Google, and he's a friend and fellow countryman who I really enjoyed working with. I'd also like to check out this barber shop, because I'm weird and like the idea of someone attacking my face with a cutthroat razor. And of course, you can't go to Portland without visiting Powell's City of Books. I'm probably spending as much time on the train as I am in Portland (I head back on Sunday), but I want to be back for Zoe's first dentist appointment on Tuesday.

Here is another interview with one of the people in the Debian Edu and Skolelinux community. I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email. After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of the people behind the German "IT-Zukunft Schule" project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview. Give a warm welcome to Angela Fu . :) Who are you, and how do you spend your days? I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son. At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids. Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-). We are also in the middle of buying a house and moving to it. In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there. Besides that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am working in our own school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" in North Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer relationship management and the communication processes in the project. Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener and a yoga teacher. How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu project? I fell in love with Mike ;-). Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into Free Software. At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for their IT environment. Often when Mike came home from working at the newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about several points where the communication with the schools head or the teachers did not work. So we were clear that he would not work for one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the parents. Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt Gramlich in G tersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building networks of people and in being in communication we dived into Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern Germany. For information about our school project you can read the interview with Mike Gabriel. What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian Edu? First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My answer comes rather from a social point of view. The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large and strong international community of Debian Developers in the background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well ;-). This is of course a user experience. What I also get as a big advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students, teachers, parents... What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian Edu? I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of Skolelinux / Debian Edu. What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good and helpful. I am also missing some kind of contact between the Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Which free software do you use daily? On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop on. As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin, LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of my N900 running with Maemo. Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools to use free software? I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the strategy has three crucial pillars:

• We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.
• Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school, they also pay us for leading all the communication processes needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.
• Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the offer to become more and more independent from us.

I recently worked on the following RC bugs:

• #691125 ejabberd: package installation creates /root/.erlang.cookie
  I tracked down the cause of this and provided a patch. Now I also know how piuparts works in detail :-).
• #691180 connman: Connman won't run due to missing libxtables.so.7
  Since this bug does not affect testing and it doesn t look like iptables 1.4.16.3-1 (a new upstream release) will go into wheezy (no freeze unblock filed), I tagged this with wheezy-ignore. I hope this was right, if not, feel free to correct me.
• #684645 liblockfile1: Order of fcntl and dotlock in maillock
  I identified the piece of code which does locking the wrong way. Since I m not familiar enough with either sendmail or NFS-safe locking, I did not send a patch. In case you have experience with this, please have a look!

# Copyright (C) YEAR Free Software Foundation, Inc. # This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package. # FIRST AUTHOR <email>, YEAR. # #, fuzzy msgid "" msgstr "" "Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n" "POT-Creation-Date: 2012-10-12 11:14+0300\n" "PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n" "Last-Translator: FULL NAME <email>\n" "Language-Team: LANGUAGE <ll>\n" "Language: \n" "MIME-Version: 1.0\n" "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n" "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n" #. type: Title # #, no-wrap msgid "Status hos doktoren" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" "**Jonas Smedegaard** [dr.jones at pobox.com " "](mailto:friends%40jones.dk?Subject=Status%20hos%20doktoren&In-Reply-To=1.5.4.32.19971011010004.0067de34%40kaospilot.dk) " "\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "_Sat Oct 11 15:22:00 CEST 1997_" msgstr "" #. type: Bullet: ' * ' #: msgid "Previous message: [Spamming? ](000001.html)" msgstr "" #. type: Bullet: ' * ' #: msgid "" "**Messages sorted by:** ? date (date.html#2) ? thread (thread.html#2) " "? subject (subject.html#2) ? author (author.html#2)" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid " Hej Patrik (og alle Jer andre )!\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " >_Vad sker med dig det var ett stycke tid diden?\n" " _>_Vad skedde der med ditt arbejde pa cafeet og pa skolen?\n" " _\n" " Lang historie!\n" " (den kommer nu )\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Jeg tror snart jeg har laert (the hard way) hvor dyr jeg egentligt er i " "drift.\n" " Jeg har nu i 3 maneder "ligget med r ven *under* vandskorpen" " " konomisk: minus 15.000,- pa kontoen. Det vender forhabentligvis indenfor " "den naeste maned - ellers pa jeg tage et regulaert lan, hvis jeg fortsat " "skal have firma som fuldtidsbeskaeftigelse.\n" " Det betyder, at jeg for tiden arbejder fra ca. 9 morgen til 0:30 nat syv " "dage om ugen (med enkelte eftermiddage eller aftener fri). Der er faktisk " "opgaver at lave, som ogsa gi'r penge i kassen - men det har der ikke vaeret " "for nogle maneder siden, og nar der var, har jeg taget mig for billigt " "betalt (men du kender mig jo!). Jeg er begyndt mere at involvere min " "storebror, nar jeg udarbejder tilbud, til at hjaelpe mig med en mere reel " "prissaetning.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid " Her er lidt(?) om, hvad jeg beskaeftiger mig med for tiden:\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " *** Homebase ***\n" " Jeg far forbindelse fra mit kontor og ned til Mejlgade om en lille uge - " "rent teoretisk ihvertfald - derefter skal jeg ha' elektronikken til at " "fungere \n" " Jeg administrerer deres servere og netvaerk, og er "Boss" for Morten " "P. fra Frontl berne, som er blevet hyret til at vedligeholde alle " "arbejdspladserne pa skolen.\n" " Jeg har *intet* at g re med content pa webserveren. Efter i foraret at " "have haft DogSystem (et par nystartede edb-folk) til at udarbejde noget " "smart (som vist aldrig blev rigtigt til noget) har Uffe nu faet samlet nogle " "studerende (vist primaert fra hold 3), som skal hitte pa noget \n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Her er et uddrag af en mail til Rasmus fra hold 3:\n" " >>_Du ma gerne f lge lidt med i arbejdet og sende mig en kommentar " "eller\n" " _>>_gode rad, hvis du f ler for det.\n" " _>_\n" " _>_Jeg har et ambivalent forhold til Jeres arbejde:\n" " _>_ - Jeg f ler for det, Ja. Meget!\n" " _>_ - I sidder og laver mit arbejde \n" " _>_ - Meningen med mit arbejde er ar g re mig selv arbejdsl s - sa det " "er\n" " _>_*godt*, at I laver det \n" " _>_ - I laver det maske bedre, maske darligere end jeg ville ha' gjort " "det -\n" " _>_men helt sikkert anderledes!\n" " _>_ - Min force (og min kaephest!) er grundstrukturer mere end visuel " "(og\n" " _>_anden) indpakning. Det er svaert at kommentere og komme med gode rad, " "nar de\n" " _>_er omkring grundstruktur. Det kraever naesten, at man sidder ved " "roret \n" " _>_ - Hvis ikke jeg kommer med mine kommentarer nu, skal jeg enten holde " "mund\n" " _>_med det (og det er svaert) eller de vil udvikles til bagklogskab og\n" " _>_bedrevidenhed \n" " _>_ - Jeg har egentligt for travlt til at beskaeftige mig med det: Jeg " "har hele\n" " _>_tiden haft "travlt". At jeg har "for travlt" er et udtryk for, at " "jeg er\n" " _>_blevet klar over, at for at leve et liv som selvstaendigt " "erhvervsdrivende\n" " _>_er det ikke nok at arbejde hardt - man skal ogsa ta' penge for " "det Jeg\n" " _>_har derfor ikke for travlt, hvis der er penge i lortet (men det er " "sjaeldent\n" " _>_tilfaeldet i Mejlgade - til gengaeld er der sa meget andet " "dernede!).\n" " _\n" " *** Brugerflade-design ***\n" " Jeg har faet et job ved Frontl berne: VPAE (Virtual Project Assistance " "Environment).\n" " De er med i et faelles-nordisk projekt om at lave en "virtuel " "projektvugge" - altsa et forum pa Internet med en raekke vaerkt jer til " "projektudvikling og administration af gamle projekter.\n" " Konkret arbejder jeg i diss uger pa design af brugergraenseflade " "(dialogbokse osv.) og n dvendige datastrukturer til et system til " "udarbejdelse af en projektbeskrivelse.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Jeg arbejder taet sammen med Morten P., og det er utroligt spaendende at " "arbejde med en konkret, mindre opgave med stor paedagogisk og funktionel " "vaerdi.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " *** Praktikant ***\n" " En af mine venner fra gymnasietiden, Henrik, studerer informatik (det " "hedder vist noget lidt andet ) her i rhus, og meget tyder pa, at han " "snart kommer i praktik her hos mig i en maned.\n" " Han skal arbejde meget selvstaendigt. Jeg har brug for hans viden " "indenfor PR, han kan bruge mig som "pr veklud", og jeg kan stille medier " "(webserver o.l.) til hans radighed.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Jeg har en ide om at vaere meget aben overfor brug af praktikanter - " "ikke bare som nem arbejdskraft (det er kraevende at saette i arbejde, og at " "give opgaver fra sig!), men mere fordi det giver mig en traening i " "formidling af min viden, og erfaringer mht. "s saetning" af mine metoder " "og ideer som tekniker - men det kraever maske lidt uddybning :\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Mit virke er grundliggende at bygge bro mellem teknikere og brugere " "indenfor IT. Det har 2 aspekter - at naerme teknikeren til brugeren, og at " "naermere brugeren til teknikken. Jeg arbejder med undervisning (arketyper, " "paedagogik og kommunikation), brugerfladedesign og almen radgivning for at " "hjaelpe brugeren pa vej. For at hjaelpe teknikeren tager jeg udgangspunkt i " "mig selv og mit arbejde med brugeren, og udvikler herigennem en raekke " "metoder og tankesaet, som jeg vil formidle - gennem praktikanter eller " "evt. decideret undervisning - til andre teknikere, som ikke i det daglige " "arbejder "i begge lejre", og derfor ikke ser de samme problematikker som " "mig.\n" " konomisk skulle "Projekt dr. Jones" gerne baeres igennem " "vha. konkrete projekter - virksomheder og enkeltpersoner, som har behov for " "min viden og mit arbejde, og som er villige til at betale merprisen for " "forskning fremfor traditionelle l sninger (NB! jeg bruger bevidst ikke ord " "som "udvikling" og "innovation" - for mit arbejde f rer til tider " "tilbage til udgangspunktet - det er ikke *altid* n dvendigt at opfinde den " "dybe tallerken igen!)\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Henrik vil ikke give mig de store erfaringer mht. formidling af min " "viden - jeg har for stor en pukkel af opgaver liggende til at kunne gabe " "over ham ogsa. Denne gang er det primaert hans felt - PR - jeg kan drage " "nytte af.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " *** Undevisning ***\n" " Jeg har nu i en maned undeervist i edb som valgfag pa IDA " "(Idraetsdagh jskolen). Indtil nu har det vaeret 2 timer om ugen, elever i " "alderen 30-60 ar - men om fa uger bliver der yderligere 4 timer om ugen med " "elever pa 20-30 ar.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Afl nningen er symbolsk (nej, god l n regnet som underviser, jeg far " "samme l n som en uddannet laerer - men ikke sammenholdt med, hvor " ""dyrebar" min tid er som selvstaendig ), men sjaeldent har jeg oplevet " "sa tydeligt et ryk i min paedagogiske forstaelse og opmaerksomhed.\n" " Jeg bliver sandsynligvis ikke haengende ved IDA i mere end et 1/2-1 ar - " "det er simpelthen for tids- og ressourcekraevende - men h ster gode " "erfaringer salaenge (og bader mig i deres positive feedback :-)\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " *** Brugerflade-programmering ***\n" " Samtidig (egentligt burde jeg forlaengst vaere faerdig, men opgaven greb " "om sig) arbejder jeg pa mit eget projekt: BOS (BrugerOpdateringsSystem).\n" " Det er et CGI-script (lille program pa en web-server), som muligg r " "redigering af indholdet pa websider uafhaengigt af sidens grafiske " "opsaetning, og - vaesentligst - UDEN AT SKRIVE EEN ENESTE KODE!\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " 1. udgave af BOS betalte jeg en programm r 15.000,- for at udvikle. Jeg " "havde brug for det til en opgave for AC (Akademikernes Centralorganisation), " "som skulle bruge det til bl.a. pressemeddelelser og publicering af et " "manedsblad pa deres 200+ siders websider (som jeg ogsa har lavet!).\n" " Da AC i sensommeren kom med rettelser og udvidelser til deres website " "blev der brug for forbedringer af BOS, og jeg erfarede, at min programm r " "havde lavet meget u-fleksibel kode, som var umulig at bygge videre pa.\n" " 2. udgave af BOS er nu naesten faerdig. Jeg valgte at skrive det om fra " "grunden selv (med hjaelp fra en god ven, som studerer datalogi), og har " "efterhanden skrevet ca. 750 linjers kode i programmeringssproget Perl \n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Jeg havde ikke troet, at jeg nogensinde skulle kunne programmere. Det " "kraever disciplin og god forstaelse for grundliggende datastrukturer, som " "jeg hidtil troede n dvendiggjorde et mangearigt universitetsstudie " "(datalogi).\n" " Jeg vil ikke sla mig ned som programm r, men kan nu bruge det som ekstra " "fjer i min vifte af erfaringsomrader, i min rejse mod "At vaere det ledende " "radgivningsorgan i Danmark indenfor anvendt edb"!\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " *** Internet-Cafe ***\n" " Jeg har jo kontor i 2 lokaler hos NETLAB, en spillecafe (computerspil i " "netvaerk). Det tog ikke mange jeblikke at slutte deres og mit netvaerk " "sammen, sa alle spillecomputerne ogsa kunne komme pa Internet - desvaerre " "fungerede det ikke med store computerspil (lang teknisk forklaring ), kun " "med alm. ting som e-mail og at "surfe" pa nettet.\n" " Jeg far snart (indenfor fa uger) "aegte" adgang til Internet, via fast " "forbindelse d gnet rundt. Sa kan der spilles computerspil via Internet, og " "spillecafeen er reelt blevet en Internet-Cafe \n" " Den kommende Internetforbindelse er dog ikke saerligt kraftig (64kbit - " "2-4 x modemhastighed) til deling mellem 20 kraftige maskiner, og har lagt en " "f ler ind hos Telia: Om ikke de har lyst til at sponsorere stedet. Give os " "en kraftig forbindelse til Internet, og til gengaeld fa reklamevaerdien af " "en stabil og hurtig forbindelse Folk der bliver rigtigt bidt af det vil " "jo f r eller siden k be en maskine selv, og sa far de jo brug for en " "Internet-udbyder \n" " Min rolle bliver at administrere "hullet" (eller "hullerne" til " "Internet, og evt. ogsa at strukturere og administrere mail-adresser til " "bes gende pa cafeen.\n" " konomisk forestiller jeg mig en fast procentdel af indtaegterne i " "cafeen - eller evt. simpelthen en billigere husleje?!?. Det gaelder om at " "finde en prispolitik, som spiller sammen med den grundliggende holdning ved " "bade dr. Jones og NETLAB om et indbydende, seri st (uden at blive kedeligt!) " "milj fremfor "flest muligt forbi kasseapperatet".\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid " -\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Det blev et laengere brev - og jeg tror faktisk, jeg vil genbruge det " "til ogsa at fortaelle familie og andre venner, hvorfor de har h rst sa lidt " "til mig pa det sidste \n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Hej allesammen!\n" " Haber I nyder tilvaerelsen. Det g r jeg - men traenger ogsa snart til et " "lille pusterum - juleferie i Sydfrankrig, regner jeg med!\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Ha' det bra!\n" " Jonas\n" " :_-)\n" " _\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "" "[More information about the Friends mailing list](http://mail.jones.dk/cgi- " "bin/mailman/listinfo/friends)" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "This text is part of my friends scriblings." msgstr ""

I just released PyGObject 3.3.91, for GNOME 3.5.91. The big new feature in this release (thanks to the release team for granting an exception) is Simon Feltman s new Signal helper class, which makes defining custom signals a whole lot simpler and more obvious. In the past, you had to do

 class C(GObject.GObject):
    __gsignals__ =  
        'my_signal': (GObject.SIGNAL_RUN_FIRST, GObject.TYPE_NONE,
                      (GObject.TYPE_INT,))
     
    def do_my_signal(self, arg):
        print("my_signal called with %i" % arg)

whereas now this looks like

class C(GObject.GObject):
    @GObject.Signal(arg_types=(int,))
    def my_signal(self, arg):
        print("my_signal called with %i" % arg)

or even more elegantly when using Python 3 and its new type annotations:

class C(GObject.GObject):
    @GObject.Signal
    def my_signal(self, arg:int):
        print("my_signal called with %i" % arg)

Check out the updated example and docstring for other ways how to use it. Overrides can now be in a directory different from the one that pygobject installs itself into. These overrides need to put this into their __init__.py at the top:

from pkgutil import extend_path
__path__ = extend_path(__path__, __name__)

and put themselves somewhere into the default PYTHONPATH. This should make it a lot easier for library packages to ship their own overrides for Python. This new version also comes with a couple of new overrides and bug fixes. See the detailled list of changes below. Thanks to all contributors!

• Fix exception test case for Python 2 (Martin Pitt)
• Bump g-i dependency to >= 1.3.9 (Martin Pitt)
• Show proper exception when trying to allocate a disguised struct (Martin Pitt) (#639972)
• Support marshalling GParamSpec signal arguments (Mark Nauwelaerts) (#683099)
• Add test for a signal that returns a GParamSpec (Martin Pitt) (#683265)
• [API add] Add Signal class for adding and connecting custom signals. (Simon Feltman) (#434924)
• Fix pygtkcompat s Gtk.TreeView.insert_column_with_attributes() (Martin Pitt)
• Add override for Gtk.TreeView.insert_column_with_attributes() (Marta Maria Casetti) (#679415)
• .gitignore: Add missing built files (Martin Pitt)
• Ship tests/gi in tarball (Martin Pitt)
• Split test_overrides.py (Martin Pitt) (#683188)
• _pygi_argument_to_object(): Clean up array unmarshalling (Martin Pitt)
• Fix memory leak in _pygi_argument_to_object() (Alban Browaeys) (#682979)
• Fix setting pointer fields/arguments to NULL using None. (Simon Feltman) (#683150)
• Fix for python 2.6, officially drop support for < 2.6 (Martin Pitt) (#682422)
• Allow overrides in other directories than gi itself (Thibault Saunier) (#680913)
• Clean up sys.path handling in tests (Simon Feltman) (#680913)
• Fix dynamic creation of enum and flag gi types for Python 3.3 (Simon Feltman) (#682323)
• [API add] Override g_menu_item_set_attribute (Paolo Borelli) (#682436)

I just released PyGObject 3.3.90, for GNOME 3.5.90. This is now working correctly on big-endian 64 bit machines such as powerpc64, and fixes marshalling for GParamSpec attributes and return values, as well as a few small bug fixes. Thanks to all contributors! Complete list of changes:

• Implement marshalling for GParamSpec (Mathieu Duponchelle) (#681565)
• Fix erronous import statements for Python 3.3 (Simon Feltman) (#682051)
• Do not fail tests if pyflakes or pep8 are not installed (Martin Pitt)
• Fix PEP-8 whitespace checking and issues in the code (Martin Pitt)
• Fix unmarshalling of gssize (David Malcolm) (#680693)
• Fix various endianess errors (David Malcolm) (#680692)
• Gtk overrides: Add TreeModelSort.__init__(self, model) (Simon Feltman) (#681477)
• Convert Gtk.CellRendererState in the pygi-convert script (Manuel Qui ones) (#681596)

Fowler published his paper on Continuous Integration (CI) way back in 2000. Personally at the time I was a much more naive developer, I was not really an adherent to the whole XP community and had worked for a series of companies where the idea of a release build was of a month long process and the concept that the whole codebase could be built and tested on every commit was a comical notion at best.

By the time the time the 2006 edition of the paper came out however I was convinced. Ever since then I have tried to make the projects I worked on have as many CI features as possible. It is one reason I ran the ARM Kernel autobuilder for years as an attempt to provide at least build coverage.

I especially like the way these concepts mean that releases are much less "scary" events and release anxiety is reduced to a minimum. When every commit produces something that is of release quality a project really is doing it right.

The reason I mention any of this is I have recently set up the NetSurf projects CI server. The heavy lifting is being done by a Jenkins instance running on a VPS fulfilling the "Every Commit Should Build the Mainline on an Integration Machine" part of the Fowler guidelines.

Setting up Jenkins was much less trouble than many of the previous systems I have used. I have been a little underwhelmed by the support for plain old make based projects which you have to resort to shell scripts for, but leaving that aside the rest was straightforward. The documentation could do with a purge pass for the old hudson name and the error reporting (especially under memory pressure) is not great.

And there lies my one real issue with the tool, memory. The VPS has 512MByte RAM and runs nothing beyond a web server, jenkins and the C compiler to build the project components. One would hope that was plenty of memory, doing the builds by hand it did seem gcc is happy in that space, alas Jenkins is a Java application and guzzles RAM (over 60% of RSS right now) and causes itself out of memory exceptions with distressing frequency.

The project is left with the choices:

• The project is relatively poor (and I already blew the budget) so "living with it" and keeping an eye on it manually is a possibility.
• Extending the VPS with another 512MBytes of RAM (Due to my VPS provider choice I had not anticipated the need so this option would cost almost as much as the original set-up)
• Buying another more suitable VPS from somewhere reputable like Mythic Beasts (why I did not go there in the first place...dumb, sometimes I am just dumb)

It is such a pity too, aside from the RAM issues it is all going well and it has already encouraged us to get the toolchains for the less commonly built targets (ppc amiga and windows for a start) working.

That's a seemingly simple question I started asking various people two weeks ago. I didn't get many useful answers, but now I have experience doing it myself, and so here's a blog post brain dump. I have been trying to convert git-annex to use GHC's threaded runtime, for a variety of reasons. Naively adding the -threaded option resulted in a git-annex command that seemed to randomly freeze, but only sometimes (and, infuriatingly, never when I straced it), and a test suite that froze at a random point almost every time I ran it. Not a good result, and lacking any knowledge about gotchas with using the threaded runtime, I was at a loss for a long time (most of DebConf) about how to fix it. I now know of at least three classes of problems that enabling the threaded runtime can turn up in programs that have been developed using the non-threaded runtime. accessing a MVar after forkprocess can hang MissingH has some code similar to this, which works ok with the non-threaded runtime:

forkProcess $ do
    debugM "about to run some command"
    executeFile ...

In the above example, debugM accesses a MVar. Doing that after forkProcess can result in a MVar deadlock, as it tries to access a MVar value, that is, apparently, not accessible to the forked process. (Bug report with test case) So, using System.Cmd.Utils from MissingH is asking for trouble. I switched all my code to the newer and, apparently, threaded runtime safe System.Process. forkProcess is a massively bad idea Even when not accessing a MVar after forkProcess, it's very unsafe to use. It's easy to miss the warning attached to forkProcess, when the code seems to work. But with the threaded runtime, I've found that most any call to forkProcess will sometimes succeed, and sometimes freeze the whole program. This might only happen around 1 time in 1000. Then you'll find this warning and do a lot of head-scratching about what it really means:

forkProcess comes with a giant warning: since any other running threads are not copied into the child process, it's easy to go wrong: e.g. by accessing some shared resource that was held by another thread in the parent.

The hangs I saw could be due to laziness issues deferring code to run after the forkProcess that you'd expect to have run before it ... or who knows what else. It's not clear to me that it's possible to use forkProcess safely in Haskell code. I think it's notable that System.Process runs the whole fork/exec in C code instead. unsafe FFI calls block According to most of the documentation you'll find in eg, the Haskell wiki, Real World Haskell, etc, the only difference between the safe and unsafe imports in the FFI is that unsafe is faster, and shouldn't be used for C code that calls back into Haskell code. But the documentation is out of date. Actually, if you're using the FFI, and the foreign function can block, you need to use safe. When using unsafe, a blocking foreign function can block all threads of the program. In my case, I was using kqueue to wait for changes to files, and this indeed blocked my whole program when linked with -threaded. Marking it safe fixed this. The details are well described in this paper: http://community.haskell.org/~simonmar/papers/conc-ffi.pdf Somewhat surprisingly, this blocking only happens when using the threaded runtime. If you're using the non-threaded runtime with unsafe blocking FFI functions, your other pseudo-threads won't be blocked. This is because the non-threaded runtime has an SIGALARM timer that interrupts (most) blocking system calls. This leads to other troubles of its own (like needing to restart interrupted FFI functions, or blocking the other pseudo-threads from running if the C code ignores SIGALARM), but that's offtopic for this post. summary Converting a large Haskell code base from the default, non-threaded runtime to the threaded runtime can be quite tricky. None of the problems are the sort of thing that Haskell helps to manage either. I will be developing new programs using the threaded runtime from the beginning from now on. By the way, don't take this post to say that threading in Haskell sucks. I've really been enjoying writing threaded Haskell code. The control Haskell gives over isolation of state to threads, and the excellent and wide-ranging suite of thread communications data types (MVar, Chan, QSemN, TMVar, SampleVar, etc) have made developing a complex threaded program something I feel comfortable doing for the first time, in any language.

This is time again for my annual report about the number of developers per country. This is now the fourth edition of this report, after the 2011, 2010 and 2009 editions. So, here we are with the June 2012 version, sorted by the ratio of *active* developers per million population for each country.

Act: number of active developers
Dev: total number of developers
A/M: number of active devels per million pop.
D/M: number of devels per million pop.
2009: rank in 2009
2010: rank in 2010
2011: rank in 2011 (June)
2012: rank now

Code	Name	Population	Act Dev	Dev	Act/Million	Dev/Million	2009	2010	June 2011	June 2012
fi	Finland	5259250	21	33	3,99	6,27	1	1	1	1
ie	Ireland	4670976	12	15	2,57	3,21	13	9	6	2	*
ch	Switzerland	7870134	20	26	2,54	3,3	2	2	2	3
mq	Martinique	396404	1	1	2,52	2,52			3	4
se	Sweden	9088728	22	37	2,42	4,07	3	6	7	5	*
no	Norway	4973029	12	15	2,41	3,02	5	4	4	6
nz	New Zealand	4331600	10	15	2,31	3,46	4	3	5	7
lu	Luxemburg	503302	1	1	1,99	1,99	8	5	8	8
de	Germany	81471834	155	223	1,9	2,74	7	7	9	9
at	Austria	8217280	14	24	1,7	2,92	6	8	10	10
fr	France	65350000	94	124	1,44	1,9	12	12	11	11
au	Australia	22607571	29	57	1,28	2,52	9	10	12	12
be	Belgium	11071483	13	16	1,17	1,45	10	11	13	13
uk	United-Kingdom	62698362	71	111	1,13	1,77	14	14	14	14
nl	Netherlands	16728091	18	38	1,08	2,27	11	13	15	15
ca	Canada	33476688	31	60	0,93	1,79	15	15	17	16	*
dk	Denmark	5529888	5	10	0,9	1,81	17	17	16	17
es	Spain	46754784	32	53	0,68	1,13	16	16	19	18	*
it	Italy	59464644	37	52	0,62	0,87	23	22	22	19	*
hu	Hungary	10076062	6	11	0,6	1,09	18	25	26	20	*
cz	Czech Rep	10190213	6	6	0,59	0,59	21	20	21	21
lt	Lithuania	3535547	2	2	0,57	0,57	28	19	20	22
bg	Bulgaria	7364570	4	4	0,54	0,54	25	23	23	23
us	USA	313232044	165	368	0,53	1,17	19	21	25	24	*
il	Israel	7740900	4	6	0,52	0,78	24	24	24	25
hr	Croatia	4290612	2	2	0,47	0,47	20	18	18	26	*
lv	Latvia	2204708	1	1	0,45	0,45	26	26	27	27
uy	Uruguay	3477778	1	2	0,29	0,58	22	27	28	28
jp	Japan	127078679	35	50	0,28	0,39	30	28	29	29
pl	Poland	38441588	9	13	0,23	0,34	29	29	30	30
cr	Costa Rica	4301712	1	1	0,23	0,23	31	30	31	31
ar	Argentina	40677348	8	10	0,2	0,25	34	33	35	32	*
sg	Singapore	5183700	1	1	0,19	0,19				33	*
pt	Portugal	10561614	2	4	0,19	0,38	27	32	32	34
gr	Greece	10787690	2	3	0,19	0,28	33	38	34	35
sk	Slovakia	5477038	1	1	0,18	0,18	32	31	33	36
tw	Taiwan	23040040	3	3	0,13	0,13	37	34	37	37
br	Brazil	192376496	21	22	0,11	0,11	36	35	38	38
by	Belarus	9577552	1	1	0,1	0,1	35	36	39	39
mg	Madagascar	21281844	2	2	0,09	0,09	44	37	40	40
cu	Cuba	11241161	1	1	0,09	0,09		38	41	41
kr	South Korea	48754657	4	6	0,08	0,12	39	39	42	42
ec	Ecuador	15007343	1	1	0,07	0,07		40	43	43
cl	Chile	16746491	1	2	0,06	0,12	42	41	44	44
ru	Russia	143030106	7	8	0,05	0,06	43	42	47	45	*
ro	Romania	21904551	1	2	0,05	0,09	45	43	45	46
co	Colombia	45566856	2	3	0,04	0,07	41	44	46	47
za	South Africa	50590000	2	9	0,04	0,18	38	48	48	48
ve	Venezuela	28047938	1	1	0,04	0,04	40	45	50	49
my	Malaysia	28250000	1	1	0,04	0,04			49	50
pe	Peru	29907003	1	1	0,03	0,03	46	46	51	51
tr	Turkey	74724269	2	2	0,03	0,03	47	47	52	52
mx	Mexico	112336538	2	2	0,02	0,02	49	49	53	53
th	Thailand	66720153	1	2	0,01	0,03	50	50	54	54
eg	Egypt	80081093	1	3	0,01	0,04	51	51	55	55
cn	China	1344413526	9	13	0,01	0,01	53	53	57	56
in	India	1210193422	8	8	0,01	0,01	52	52	56	57
sv	El Salvador	7066403	0	1	0	0,14			36	58	*
ua	Ukraine	45134707	0	0	0	0	48	53	58	59
			920	1490	61,74%

A few interesting facts:

• Ireland is the big surprise. It pops up to rank 2, thanks to 2 more developers in a relatively small country.
• Sweden climbs to rank 5. Three more active developers.
• Indeed, between Ireland (2) and New Zealand (7), the difference is really small and one more or less developer changes things significantly
• Finland is still way ahead others
• Canada takes over Denmark, thanks to four more active developers
• Spain, Italy and Hungary also increase their rank significantly.
• USA stops going down. The number of US developers is now increasing again
• No increase in number of german developers. Who said that Debian is a German cabal? Still, the devel/million ratio increases because....the population of Germany is decreasing..:-)
• One new country : Singapore, appearing immediately at rank 33
• We partly lose El Salvador where the only developer doesn't seem active anymore. Rene, wake up? :-)
• Once again, DebConf will be hosted in a country with NO Debian developer (Nicaragua). Just like last year, let's hope it will change.
• We have 24 more active Debian developers and 40 more developers overall.
• I kept Martinique separated from France. I already explained why last year..:)

PS: no, comments are still impossible on this blog. Yes, I know: not good. But I really don't want to have the hassle of dealing with spam and I'm old school. So, comments should be sent by mail to bubulle@d.o.

A couple of weeks ago was the first anniversary of orphaning Qt3 in Debian, see bug 625502. In this year, Qt3 has got a few QA uploads with the most relevant change being support to multiarch. And, more importantly, nobody seemed to care enough to step into maintaining it. In the last days, I have taken a look into how much needed to be done to remove Qt3 and there were slightly more than 50 packages depending directly or indirectly from Qt3. A removal from Wheezy seemed doable given that removing packages is never a problem during the Debian freeze ;-)
All the packages affected have a bug opened since more than one year and half ago and I have pinged all the bugs with some maintainers responding quick (thanks!). I also filed some removals for packages that were clearly unmaintained and didn t seem worth keeping, with ftp-masters responding quick too (Thanks!). And finally, a couple of QA upload for orphaned software that were still useful without Qt3. There is a wiki page tracking the status of the removal if you are curious:
http://wiki.debian.org/qt3-x11-freeRemoval If in the future, you are reading this and you need Qt3 in Wheezy, you can fetch it from Debian snapshots.

like in the last two weeks, this week's bug squashing was mostly related to the gcc 4.7 FTBFS bugs:

• #667139 coin3: "coin3: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  send debdiff to the BTS
• #667238 lfhex: "lfhex: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667263 linamc: "linamc: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  patch to enable missing include, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667272 mcmcpack: "mcmcpack: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add this-> qualifiers, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667277 milkytracker: "milkytracker: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667281 minitube: "minitube: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667284 mm3d: "mm3d: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  patch to add include and this-> qualifiers, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667289 mswatch: "mswatch: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667292 musique: "musique: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667295 netperfmeter: "netperfmeter: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667298 nmapsi4: "nmapsi4: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Francesco Cecconi (add missing includes), upload to DELAYED/2, then solved with a maintainer upload
• #667302 numptyphysics: "numptyphysics: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667303 nxcl: "nxcl: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667318 owx: "owx: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667337 qbankmanager: "qbankmanager: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to use class name, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667343 qterm: "qterm: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Paul Tagliamonte (missing include), upload to DELAYED/2
• #667347 rafkill: "rafkill: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing include, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667348 ragel: "ragel: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  patch to this-> qualifiers, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667373 simgear: "simgear: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  apply patch from Matthias Klose, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667428 zoneminder: "zoneminder: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Cyril Brulebois, upload to DELAYED/2
• #669432 src:milkytracker: "milkytracker: FTBFS: ./zzip_file.h:34:18: fatal error: zlib.h: No such file or directory"
  add missing build dependency, upload to DELAYED/5

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 use awesome as my window manager, without a gnome session around it - as gnome-power-manager now depends on having a gnome-session running, I had a choice to make - I don't need or want to run a gnome-session, so I went on the hunt for a different battery monitor for my laptop. I've ended up using fdpowermon as it does just what I need and nothing more - then I edited the default acpi scripts to do what I had gnome-power-manager doing before hand, i.e. if I've unplugged the AC and I close the lid, the laptop does a s2both. Slightly more configuration, but it now does what I expect all the time (yay!). I wanted some extra keybinding from the default config of awesome in Debian, so I also created a very small rc.lua file as follows:

dofile("/etc/xdg/awesome/rc.lua")
mylayouts =  
    layouts[2],
    layouts[10],
    layouts[2],
    layouts[2],
    layouts[2],
    layouts[2],
    layouts[1],
    layouts[1],
    layouts[1]
 
for s = 1, screen.count() do
    for t = 1, 9 do
        awful.tag.setproperty(tags[s][t], "layout", mylayouts[t])
    end
end
globalkeys = awful.util.table.join(globalkeys,
    awful.key( "Control", "Mod1"  , "l", function () awful.util.spawn("/home/brettp/bin/lock-screen.sh") end)
)
root.keys(globalkeys)

This basically overrides parts of the default config and makes it so that my "tags" are vsplit for tags 1 and 3-6, maximised for tag 2 (where my browser lives) and floating for 7-9 (where the IM client sits, and I do anything involving GIMP). It does mean that I'm at the whim of the default config mostly, but as that seems to be fairly sane most of the time, that's not a problem... it also means that I'm only maintaining a small change set rather than a full rc file, and so new "features" can come in without me having to touch anything (well, other than restarting awesome...). I do need to either unmap the minimise key combo, or create an unminimise key combo that pops up a menu with the list of minimised windows in it at some point, though - because it's all too easy to press Meta4-n when you meant Meta4-m.

As Christian already wrote, there s an Aptitude revival ongoing. We already saw this young team releasing aptitude 0.6.5 about 6 weeks ago, more commits have been made, and now we re heading towards an 0.6.6 release quickly. But this revival mostly covers the well-known and loved curses interface (TUI) of aptitude and not the seldomly installed GTK interface, which unfortunately never really took off: While aptitude itself (i.e. the curses and commandline interface) is installed on nearly 99% of all Debian installations which take part in Debian s Popularity Contest statistics, aptitude-gtk is only installed on 0.42% of all these installations. One reason is likely that aptitude-gtk still hasn t all the neat features of the curses interface. And another reason is probably that it s still quite buggy. Since nobody from the current Aptitude Team has the experience, leisure or time to resurrect (or even complete) aptitude-gtk, the plan is to stop building aptitude-gtk from the aptitude source package soon, i.e. to remove it from Debian for now. Like the even less finished Qt interface of aptitude, its code will stay in the VCS, but will be unmaintained unless someone steps up to continue aptitude-gtk (or aptitude-qt, or both), maybe even as its own source package. So if you like aptitude-gtk so much that you re still using it and want to continue using it, please think about contributing by joining the Aptitude Team and getting aptitude s GUI interface(s) back in shape. Another option would be to find a mentor so that resurrecting (one of) aptitude s GUI interfaces could become (again) a potential project at Debian s participation at Google s Summer of Code. Please direct any questions about aptitude-gtk or aptitude-qt to the Aptitude Development Mailing List. Or even better, join the discussion in this thread.

Open Source Days Open Source Days were nice, especially the meating(sic) of and talking to old friends and new people. I got to discuss Mercurial with two of its developers which was very interesting indeed. It's funny how similar git and Mercurial are in some regards and how different in others. Overall, it feels a bit as if Mercurial is not quite as distributed as git. Its local, sliding revision index feels like disaster waiting to happen, to me. On the other hand, Mercurials ability to not check out large files to your local repository sounds very git-annex-ish, which is nice. Choice is good :) My talk about how to gitify your life (slides, no video) went extremely well. Within my time-slot, there were a total of six talks, and lunch(!), in parallel. About 300 people attended OSD on Sunday and of those, many were at booths, stands, eating, etc. My personal turnout was 50-70 listeners so I was well above mathematical average and from what I heard, my talk was the most-visited one during that time. Add the fact that several people asked me to put up the resource links up again after the talk so they could take pictures and I would say this talk really was a success. Ego-stroking? Yes. Vanity? Most likely. Being able to see that people can really want to learn about what you have to say? Priceless. It's a real pity that there was no video recording, but it's obviously too late to do anything about that. Joey Hess asked me to at least make an audio recording on my laptop, but that turned out to be a lot of useless white noise with faint mumbling in between. Maybe I should at least get a small microphone or recorder so I will always have an audio copy. I already did order a presentation clickie with built-in laser pointer so I won't have to rely on possibly non-existent conference infra, any more. If there's any interest, I may re-record the talk as audio, else I will just try to get another speaker slot at another conference, with video recording, and link that. Denmark Barring the airport, central station, bus, hotel, venue, and metro, I did not see anything of Copenhagen. That's a pity, but I didn't want to leave the conference early. To continue my recent tradition of dumping random observations about places I visit onto my blog, here goes:

• Torx screw adaption: No idea, I did not see any screws as I didn't enter any wooden buildings.
• Most power outlets have their own on/off switch; I would love to have the same in Germany.
• English movies, series, etc. are not dubbed, merely subbed. This is great to learn English even though it will obviously increase potential exposure to certain "news" stations.
• When exiting Copenhagen airport's first floor, there are knee-high bumpers with broad wings right in front of escalators. In a crowd, it's impossible to see them; the first information about their existence is most likely a bruised shin. If there's ever a panic, people will get seriously hurt. I am sure that Denmark has officials from the fire department and city OK their evacuation routes. No idea how those bumpers can be allowed; they probably are not.
• It's great to have a map of your target area along with the street name in the search field handy on your phone when asking people for directions. You can pre-cache the map tiles and don't need to pay horrendous roaming charges for online navigation, that way.
• As always, the best people to ask for directions are young mothers with strollers.
• The Gulf Stream never ceases to boggle my mind. It's warm in Denmark.
• The bridge between Denmark and NorwaySweden (thanks kloeri) looks very impressive from a plane. Hopefully, I will be able to drive over it at some point in my life.
• Hotels will always be able to lend you a phone charger in case you forgot yours.
• Danish coffee is horrible. This really seems to be a common theme in Scandinavia.
• If you board last, you can sit down next to the emergency exit without bothering anyone. If the seat is still free, no one will claim it any more as you are the last to enter the plane. Just sit down and enjoy the leg room.
• The one great advantage of semi-commercial/for-pay conferences is that you will get a name badge. I need to poke FOSDEM about this again; badges and lanyards are cheap if you know where to order.

The next day was reserved for seeing Mostar. I could leave my luggage at the hotel, so I first went to the train station. The train station was rather large and impressive, in spite of only two trains per day and direction. However, the train station was closed at that time, so no ticket purchase yet. Into the historic city of Mostar: Visiting the Ottoman House was interesting, as well as climbing on the tower of one mosque. In the city, many houses still had effects of shelters and gun shots from the war. (At least) One of the trees in the pedestrian area had many shots as well.
river Neretva within the city of Mostar
City of Mostar from the mosque tower
Ottoman House and bird nests within Seeing Stari Most, the old (or rather: rebuilt) bridge was nice, as well as the masses of people looking there. However, the area with many tourists was quite small. Whereas Stari Most was shoot down during the war, there was a small sister bridge which survived the war damaged but still existed. However, that bridge collapsed during one high water afterwards but had also been rebuilt.
Stari Most with tourists, sister bridge of Stari Most without tourists and houses along the river Below Stari Most, there was an area that looked like a nice picknick-place to look at the bridge and old city, but it was obviously unmaintained since some time. Same at other places: Really great, but many of them unmaintained (as in "too less money", not as in "vandalized"). Soon in the afternoon, most tourists disappeared, so I had the chance to look at the city with only few tourists arround before I had to leave for the train. Walking around Mostar, I meet a few people who were in Germany before, for work, studying or school. The city was quite fascinating - in some way reminded me of 20 years ago. I saw a few more nice vegetables, like kiwis. Mostar wasn't as tourismn-oriented as I would have expected from the monuments available to see there. All people were very nice and friendly, and in the cafes around there was free wifi. A nice place, but also depressing when thinking how much better it could be.

From February 17 to 19th 2012, between 10 to 30 hackers met at IRILL's offices to squash as many bugs as possible for the Wheezy release. Besides about 42 pizzas, more than one hundred bugs (104 to be precise) have been fixed. Among them, 18 of them were fixed by removing old/unmaintained/deprecated packages from the Debian archive. In a great atmosphere, one of the most important achievements of this BSP was that Yada, a deprecated packaging helper, finally passed away thanks to the efforts of Cyril Brulebois. Thanks for all the contributors for making of this week end a success.