As I did since 2007, I will be attending Debconf again this year. I have been quite busy recently, and am lagging behind in some of my Debian work, so I plan to use Debconf to get stuff done, not just socialize and attend talks.
Here is my TODO list, basically by order of willingness to do the work . It s probably too much for 9 days, so don t hesitate to talk to me if you want to help with some items.
Weaving a Semantic Web Across OSS Repositories: Unleashing a New Potential for Academia and PracticeHere s the abstract:
(DOI:10.4018/jossp.2010040103)
Authors: Olivier Berger (Institut Telecom, France); Valentin Vlasceanu (Institut Telecom, France); Christian Bac (Institut Telecom, France); Quang Vu Dang (Institut Telecom, France); St phane Lauriere (Mandriva, France)
in International Journal of Open Source Software & Processes (IJOSSP) Volume: 2, Issue: 2 (2010), Pages: 29-40 pp.
Several public repositories and archives of facts about libre software projects, maintained either by open source communities or by research communities, have been flourishing over the Web in recent years. These have enabled new analysis and support for new quality assurance tasks.Keywords : RDF, forge, archive, bug, semantic, semantic Web, ontology, database, repository of repositories,
This paper presents some complementary existing tools, projects and models proposed both by OSS actors or research initiatives that are likely to lead to useful future developments in terms of study of the FLOSS phenomenon, and also to the very practitioners in the FLOSS development projects.
A goal of the research conducted within the HELIOS project is to address bugs traceability issues. In this regard, the authors investigate the potential of using Semantic Web technologies in navigating between many different bugtracker systems scattered all over the open source ecosystem.
By using Semantic Web techniques, it is possible to interconnect the databases containing data about open-source software projects development, which enables OSS partakers to identify resources, annotate them, and further interlink those using dedicated properties and collectively designing a distributed semantic graph.
rbuilddep()
grep-dctrl -sPackage -i -r -F Build-Depends,Build-Depends-Indep "\b$1\b" \
/var/lib/apt/lists/*_Sources \
awk ' print $2 ' \
sort \
uniq
But this surely can't be the last word on this. For one thing, it
might also be useful to recursively find these reverse dependencies.
I hope I've missed some obvious way of doing this.
I reckon my attention span has got really poor over the last couple
of years. More running tomorrow morning. But first, ice cream, I
think.
Strange times... While I was quite
productive recently I had a terrible start into this week. Maybe it's
the weather change (we more or less dropped from sunny ~35 C down top rainy
~20 C), or that (nearly) everyone but me is on vacation at work, a boring
project or maybe it's that I can't attend this years DebConf. Whatever it
is, I don't feel that well and am quite grumpy (Hard to believe for those
who know me, but at least I feel grumpy ;)
So, reading I spotted this topic in Debian Project News.from a user who actually joined a discussion on Debian's development list can actually make my day :)
A new release (now at version 0.8.5) of
Rcpp
is now on CRAN and in
Debian.
This release constitutes a quick
follow-up to the last release
0.8.4
which we got out just before
CRAN closed for summer vacations.
Some fixes were made right after last release:
two harmless warnings from the help file parser of the
development version of R are now addressed, and we stopped using shell
expansions in the Makefile snippets. We also added to some internal speedups
we discovered while prepapring the talk about
RProtoBuf for
last
week's useR! meeting.
The NEWS entry follows below:
0.8.5 2010-07-25
o speed improvements. Vector::names, RObject::slot have been improved
to take advantage of R API functions instead of callbacks to R
o Some small updates to the Rd-based documentation which now points to
content in the vignettes. Also a small formatting change to suppress
a warning from the development version of R.
o Minor changes to Date() code which may reenable SunStudio builds
As always, even fuller details are in
Rcpp Changelog page and the
Rcpp page which also
leads to the downloads, the
browseable
doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats.
A local directory has
source and documentation too.
Questions, comments etc should go to the
rcpp-devel mailing list
off the R-Forge page
I spent the past three weeks away from basically any kind of usual contact. I took a three week vacation in Argentina (Buenos Aires, Entre R os, Tucum n, Salta, Jujuy, C rdoba), got my first snow experience and enjoyed a real lot... But got completely disconnected from all of my usual activities... and responsabilities :-
Anyway, yesterday afternoon I landed in New York. Arrived to Columbia around 2PM, and spent most of the day zombying around with the Debian crew. And today it starts feeling like the real job is starting.
As always, there is a lot of excitement when DebConf starts. I have many items I want to work on, and most are even Debian related ;-) So, lets get work flowing!
The web offers a compelling platform for developing modern applications. How can free software benefit more from web technology, and at the same time promote more software freedom on the web? What would the world be like if FLOSS web applications were as plentiful and successful as traditional FLOSS applications are today?
Web architecture
The web, as a collection of interlinked hypertext documents available on the Internet, has been well established for over a decade. However, the web as an application architecture is only just hitting its stride. With modern tools and frameworks, it s relatively straightforward to build rich applications with browser-oriented frontends and HTTP-accessible backends.
This architecture has its limitations, of course: browser compatibility nightmares, limited offline capabilities, network latency, performance challenges, server-side scalability, complicated multimedia story, and so on. Most of these are slowly but surely being addressed or ameliorated as web technology improves.
However, for a large class of applications, these limitations are easily outweighed by the advantages: cross-platform support, instantaneous upgrades, global availability, etc. The web enables developers to reach the largest audience of users with the most compelling functionality, and simplifies users lives by giving them immediate access to their digital lives from anywhere.
Some web advocates would go so far as to say that if an application can be built for the web, it should be built for the web because it will be more successful. It s no surprise that new web applications are being developed at a staggering rate, and I expect this trend to continue.
So what?
This trend represents a significant threat, and a corresponding opportunity, to free software. Relatively few web applications are free software, and relatively few free software applications are built for the web. Therefore, the momentum which is leading developers and users to the web is also leading them (further) away from free software.
Traditionally, pragmatists have adopted free software applications because they offered immediate gratification: it s much faster and easier to install a free software application than to buy a proprietary one. The SaaS model of web applications offers the same (and better) immediacy, so free software has lost some of its appeal among pragmatists, who instead turn to proprietary web applications. Why install and run a heavyweight client application when you can just click a link?
Many web applications perhaps even a majority are built using free software, but are not themselves free. A new generation of developers share an appreciation for free software tools and frameworks, but see little value in sharing their own software. To these developers, free software is something you use, not something you make.
Free software cannot afford to ignore the web. Instead, we should embrace the web more completely, more powerfully, and more effectively than proprietary systems do.
What would that look like?
In my view, a FLOSS client platform which fully embraced the web would:
After a quite long string freeze and last minute efforts by
translators, I finally stopped the clock on Sunday July 11th for D-I
localization update meant for the release of the beta1 version of
debian-installer for squeeze.
We finally have 65 supported languages. In a final effort, Belarusian,
Ukrainian, Hungarian, Tagalog, Kurdish, Croatian and Macedonian were
"rescued" and completed enough for being included in the release.
Unfortunately, I had to deactivate Wolof, Serbian and Welsh because of
lack of activity. For Serbian, this is very infortunate as
new translators indeed tried to contact me with updates, which I
missed and discovered only after it wasn't possible to revert the
change. Good news are that Serbian is now already reactivated for the
next release and we will even have both the Cyrillic and Latin
versions of it.
The mass upload of D-I packages happened mostly on Sunday 12th (you
probably noticed that if you follow debian-devel-changes).
It is already possible to test what will be D-I beta1: just go to the D-I
development web page, then choose to download the daily
built netboot image. Boot it with "install mirror/suite=unstable".
This is not *exactly* what beta1 will give as this will install
unstable and not testing, for non D-I packages...but I think that,
until D-I packages migrate to testing, this is the best way to test beta1.
The next step in D-I release preparation should be the mass migration
to testing of most udeb packages.
Some of you may have noticed WebKitGTK+ 1.2.2 and 1.2.3 have been uploaded recently. Here s their announcement =). A quick summary: if you re running the 1.2.x series upgrade to 1.2.3.
Here s some information regarding 1.2.2:
1.2.2 is an update to the 1.2.x stable series; along with a lot of crash, and misc fixes the biggest changes are: 1) the inclusion of a new API from the development branch (webkit_back_forward_list_clear()),http://webkitgtk.org/webkit-1.2.2.tar.gzHere s some information regarding 1.2.3: To some such a quick succession in releases may look like a brown paper bag was in order. Not strictly, but indeed 1.2.3 aims to fix some oversights with easy fixes. First of all, WebKit was not buildable with ICU 4.4.1, but thankfully a fix had already been checked in to trunk, so 1.2.3 includes that fix. Secondly, Debian s Michael Gilbert has done a great job going through all CVEs released about WebKit, and including patches in the Debian package. 1.2.3 includes all of the commits from trunk to fix those, too.
MD5: 40338001324a38b977c163291e8816d3
http://webkitgtk.org/webkit-1.2.3.tar.gzYou can read some more details, including the list of CVEs that were addressed, in the NEWS file:
MD5: 0ab5c478a6f5b74a1ae96bf13a456662
http://gitorious.org/webkitgtk/stable/blobs/master/WebKit/gtk/NEWSEnjoy!
)
I was lucky enough that Frankfurt-pm monthly meeting occurred on one free evening during my trip. So I looked for the agenda (good, they welcome presentations), subscribed to their mailing list (mostly German, but English is accepted) and proposed a presentation similar to the one I gave in Fosdem.
So here I am, Tuesday evening, after a long meeting day for business, ready to give this presentation in a Japanese restaurant in Frankfurt. Since the audience was different from FOSDEM s, I offered to tune the presentation with more Perl related details. Thanks to LyX, Beamer and some evil red TeX, I quickly re-inserted some Perlish slides, and off we go.
Well almost. Food came in just after the first slide. So we interrupted the session for excellent japanese plates :-p
Among the audience, one guy was following the presentation with acute concentration. Max was already thinking on how to use Config::Model for Padre s configuration.
After the presentations, We discussed a bit on the work needed to use Config::Model with Padre. Roughly and not necessarily in that order:
Following a brief lecture on Project Chanology, the question will be posed: how can we harness the power of lulzy virality, of pleasure, of trickery, of spectacular trolling for purposes above and beyond sharing the wisdom of Advice Dog? It ll start with a brief look at great activist media in the past, from Guernica and the picture of the whole Earth to projects by the Yes Men - how they spread ideas and helped people get informed, organize, and act. What makes the creation of lulzy memes different? Learn about how to create exploitable forms and rapid variations, and mechanisms for bringing the best stuff forward. Can we make media memes with goals beyond lulz, and teach activists who ve never heard of 4chan to make them too? Part lecture, part workshop, this will feature cameos by Rageguy, Pablo Picasso, V, alt.pave.the.earth, Kathe Kollwitz, Courage Wolf, Stewart Brand, Sarah Palin, Batman, Goya, Philosoraptor, Adolf Hitler, Trollface, Shepard Fairey, Joseph Ducreux, David Cameron, lots of Spartan warriors, and lots and lots of (trollish) cats.
Following a brief lecture on Project Chanology, the question will be posed: how can we harness the power of lulzy virality, of pleasure, of trickery, of spectacular trolling for purposes above and beyond sharing the wisdom of Advice Dog? It ll start with a brief look at great activist media in the past, from Guernica and the picture of the whole Earth to projects by the Yes Men - how they spread ideas and helped people get informed, organize, and act. What makes the creation of lulzy memes different? Learn about how to create exploitable forms and rapid variations, and mechanisms for bringing the best stuff forward. Can we make media memes with goals beyond lulz, and teach activists who ve never heard of 4chan to make them too? Part lecture, part workshop, this will feature cameos by Rageguy, Pablo Picasso, V, alt.pave.the.earth, Kathe Kollwitz, Courage Wolf, Stewart Brand, Sarah Palin, Batman, Goya, Philosoraptor, Adolf Hitler, Trollface, Shepard Fairey, Joseph Ducreux, David Cameron, lots of Spartan warriors, and lots and lots of (trollish) cats.
Next.