Christian Perrier: Celebrate Samba!
Samba 4
is out.
That's just it. 21 years (same age than the Linux kernel, 2 years
older than Debian) after a crazy australian student started it, Samba 4
is out. Doh.
Samba 4
is out.
That's just it. 21 years (same age than the Linux kernel, 2 years
older than Debian) after a crazy australian student started it, Samba 4
is out. Doh.
I happen to be a great fan of ocean races, so like many, particularly
here in France, I'm following the Vend e Globe ocean race, alone
around the world on 60-feet IMOCA race ships, without stop or
assistance.
In its early editions, Vend e Globe was easy to explain : start from
Les Sables d'Olonne and come back there after going around Antarctica
by leaving it to starboard. Period.
Now, it's a bit more complicated as, for security reasons, the sailors
have to pass a few points meant to prevent them from going too south
(during first editions, some sailors went as south as 65 S).
Sailors are currently heading "down" the Atlantic and will probably
pass in the vicinity of the Tristan da Cunha island.
This island has always been fascinating to me. It is the remotest
point inf the world with a permanent population. The closest
inhabited land is over 2800km away. 271 people live there. No
airport. No regular ship line. Only fishing boats from time to time
and that's all. It's probably hard to imagine what is the life
there....but I find this fascinating, in some way. Maybe one of these
parts of the world where I would like to go and never will. And
there's even a volcano (indeed, the island *is* a volcano) :
I wonder if there is a Linux user over there...
That was not my target in today's marathon (my second one in the
year). The target was breaking my 3h38'45" record, set on June 10th in
Caen.
And, well, I did it. By more than 5 minutes \o/. Of course, the
Seine-Eure marathon
is the perfect place for this:
It's quite some time since I didn't report about Debian Installer
localization. Indeed, thanks to the tireless activity of Cyril
Brulebois, we focused on releasing D-I and I indeed stopped harassing
translators for updates around July 2012.
Why July? Well, you probably know we have "something" to release as
soon as we can and most, if not all, Debian energies should be focused
on this!
Or, more precisely speaking, I only focused on getting the newly
introduced material translated: we had several changes recently in
D-I, mostly focused on important features, such as IPv6 support
(thanks to Phil Kern who worked on this), better wireless networking
support (thanks to Sorina Sandu) and EFI boot support (thanks to Steve
McIntyre).
And, of course, when people change code in D-I, they want to add
questions to users, display error and informative messages, etc, etc.
And these need translations..:-)
Most translators coped with all this (sometimes with /me hitting them
hard on the head to get updates) and D-I beta2 was released with 37
complete translations out of 73 supported languages.
Yesterday, I just resumed the activity of trying to get more updates
not only for those recent changes, but also for other older
changes...or for languages that never got completed in the past.
As a result, we bumped from 37 compelte languages up to 45 this
morning: look for level 1
here (level 2 has been hit by a change in iso-codes, but that
change doesn't really affect D-I).
If you language is not 100% in the leftmost column on the stats page,
you can probably help. Just get in touch with me and we'll check if
somebody is already working on this or not.
(doh, I nearly had it. I just got #690019, #690020 and #690022 for
l10n stuff)
Bartek Krawczyk reported Debian bug
#690000 on Monday October 8th, against guake. And my friend
Sylvestre Ledru, the package maintainer, now has to fix it instead of
trying to promote the use of Scilab over proprietary alternatives in
the French aerospace research organizations..:-)
Bug #680000 was reported as of July 2nd: 3 months and 8 days
for 10,000 bugs. This is a VERY significant drop in the bug reporting
rate in Debian.
Last time, I wrote: "How will the wheezy freeze affect this? We'll see
in two months!". We have the answer: the wheezy freeze triggerred an
important drop in bug reporting rate in Debian. My general feeling is
somehow different: for whatever reason, I feel like the *overall*
activity in the project has dropped significantly. I seem to have less
mails to read, less bugs reported against my packages, even less
heated discussions here and there, as well as several very quiet
channels on IRC.
Am I pessimistic when feeling that the overall momentum is sliding out
of Debian? Maybe I am, so, folks, please make me optimistic and move
you fingers out of the place where they are and help releasing that
damn penguin.
Apart from that, our next milestone (apart from the wheezy release!) will be bug
#700000. Remember
the bet?. It looks like the probability of Kartik Mistry winning
it is now away (he bet for Now 8th 2012) and the best position is hel
by David Pr vot (he bet for December 12th). On the other hand, my own
chances are increasing if the bug rate drop is confirmed and if bug
#700000 is reported in more than 3 months (I bet for February 14th
2013, guess why?). We'll see that in a few weeks!
It's been some time since I didn't write in this blog about my running
activities. So let's make an update for my international friends. If
you don't care about running, you can move to the next post in your
feed reader..:-)
After a quite busy running activity during DebConf 12 in Nicaragua, as
well as during the touristic trip we did afterwards, I went back to my
"regular" schedule.
Main objectives in September-December are roughly the following:
I recently blogged about 3 languages reaching 100% translation for
debconf templates in wheezy.
Today, two more languages joined the club: French and Portuguese.
We're still on our way to get seven or even eight complete
translations in wheezy. Czech is now only missing "linux-latest" and
Spanish waits for sysvinit (which I just NMU'ed) and nova
(unfortunately an error in former translation was unnoticed and I
discovered it quite late).
David Pr vot is still trying to get Danish complete, by doing many fast
update rounds and NMUs. I hope he succeeds in this.
After several months of effort by the i18n team (and quite a bit from
/me), some NMUs, a lot of help by the release team to accept many
unblocks, we finally reached 100% translation for debconf screens, in
wheezy, for three languages.
And, no, French is not among them (yet). The first to reach this
heaven are Russian, German and Swedish with translations for all translatable debconf screens for packages in
Debian testing (which will become the next Debian release).
Three more languages (French, Czech and Portuguese) are waiting for
one package to reach testing and another (Spanish) is waiting for three packages.
We should then soon reach 7 complete languages. David Pr vot is even
trying to get Danish as complete as possible, but it requires pushing
for about 15 packages, with many NMUs and unblocks to ask.
I started this work in early April, so it took about SIX months
to reach this and be ableto happily make a lot of noise about such
achievement. You have no idea how it is appreciated by
translators....so you maybe have a better idea why I can be so noisy
when some uncoordinated upload (for instance with modified localized
material) breaks this...
We'll have much more news about achievements in l10n for wheezy in the
upcoming weeks. We had a lot of things that deserve some trumpets,
bells or whistles..:-)
Justin B. Rye, the by far most efficient and clever reviewer of the
"Debian English Localization Team" (working in the debian-l10n-english
mailing list) just created a great page : Why The Name.
This page tries to give a clue about some cryptic packages and
software names and is a great moment to read, both because you'll
definitely learn something...and also benefit from tJustin's so
british humor.
Justin, when do you apply as non-uploading DD?
So, it's now over.
After two weeks of DebCamp+DebConf, followed by two weeks touring over
to the best places in Nicaragua with my beloved Elisabeth (our first
long holidays as a couple without children since....1987!), my
best holidays EVER are over.
I visited a wonderful country. I met wonderful people. And I have to
come back as I left un unachieved volcano climb (some could think I
did that on purpose just to have an excuse for coming back)...:-)
I'll probably try to blog about all this in a soon-to-come very long
bubullish post (IOW: full of typos and Frenglish) for those of you who
aren't tired of these.
Now, doh, I have two gardens to clean out before resuming work in less
than two weeks.
What is good in "my" job in Debian are opportunities to discover new
interesting packages.
While surveying the completion of debconf translations in unstable, I
thus noticed a new package named "hoteldruid", that has a few
questions and interaction with users.
After my usual mumble because French and a few other languages were *finally* virtually 100% in
unstable for a few days...... I went on my usual task in such cases:
propose a review of debconf templates and package description to my
fellow debian-l10n-english co-workers (/me bends to Justin B. Rye, our
tireless, picky, efficient and very clever Master Reviewer for over 5
years now).
Then I discovered what HotelDruid is about: this is a piece of
PHP-based software meant to manage....an hotel or bed and
breakfast...or any kind of such facility.
Real end-user software. Really useful software. For real people...:-)
Not the gazillionth obscure development language, or yet another
encryption library, or yet another mysterious virtualization thing
used by 10 people in the world (even if they host thousands of
machines).
These are the free software pieces I like the most. Probably Marco
Maria Francesco De Santis (the upstream author and Debian package
maintainer) somewhere in, I guess, Italy is running a small B&B (or
maybe his parents, or his wife/cousin/whatever) *and* is a free
software addict. And he wanted to run his business with
free software. Same for this French genealogist who once wanted to display
his data over the web (and make a real use of that obscure Ocaml
language.....yes, pun itended to my friends, here). Of the person who
wrote LedgerSMB to manage his business. Or those who use free software
to manage hospitals (hi Andreas) or schools (hi DebianEdu folks...and
special hi to Petter).
Real software for real people. Of course, developed with obscure geeky
things used only by those weird geeks who like to sometimes travel
half a planet to just gather together and develop the best free
operating system ever.
Guess what? I like this!
And guess what? I proposed the HotelDruid author to check whether we
could imrove....translation, of course..:-)
With all the recent talk about running on Planet Debian I am proud to announce that I did a 10K run today. It took me just about an hour a pace which for Bubulle, Noel etc. is approximately equivalent to standing still but I managed to finish without collapsing in a puddle of sweat and shame, so I consider it an achievement.
Not much progress ATM (most translations are complete and D-I has been
frozen to prepare its release anyway).
Not sure if that will work as I expect, but here as my runs in the
city of Managua, combined in one single map, thanks to OpenRunner:
<script src="http://www.openrunner.com/orservice/inorser-script.php?key=mykey&ser=S03&id=1802807&w=500&h=350&hp=128&k=5&m=0&pa=0&c=0&ts=1342329989" type="text/javascript"></script>
Originally posted by bubulle on Planet Debian, a shell prompt that displays the current git branch, in colour on some terminals, after the current working directory. The following snippet does similar things for mksh users, except it doesn t redefine your prompt but amend it just throw it at the bottom of your ~/.mkshrc before that last line beginning with a colon (copy from /etc/skel/.mkshrc if you haven t done that yet):
function parse_git_branch git branch 2>/dev/null sed -n '/^\* \(.*\)/s//(\1)/p' function amend_prompt_with_git local p q='$(parse_git_branch)' r if [[ $TERM = @(xterm-color xterm screen*) ]]; then if [[ $ PS1:1:1 = $'\r' ]]; then p=$ PS1:0:1 else p=$'\001' PS1=$p$'\r'$PS1 fi q=$p$'\e[1;33m'$p$q$p$'\e[0m'$p fi p=$ PS1%%*( )[#$]*( ) if [[ $p != "$PS1" ]]; then # prompt ends with space + #-or-$ + space, we can amend r=$ PS1: $ #p PS1=$p$q$r fi amend_prompt_with_git unset -f amend_prompt_with_git
The indirection by use of a function is not strictly necessary but allows the use of locals. I took the liberty of adding an asterisk after screen to match the GNU/Linux nonsense of having TERM=screen.xterm or somesuch.
Here's what I found out during the "Packaging with git" talk at
Debconf12. There are certainly cool enhancements. Feel free to share
on Planet.
bubulle@sesostris:~ $ cat .bashrc
# http://lukasrieder.com/2009/07/14/extend-your-bash-ps1.html
parse_git_branch()
git branch 2> /dev/null sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/(\1)/'
# set a fancy prompt (non-color, unless we know we "want" color)
case "$TERM" in
xterm-color xterm screen)
PS1='$ debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot) \[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\[\033[01;33m\]$(parse_git_branch)\[\033[00m\] \$ '
;;
*)
PS1='$ debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot) \u@\h:\w$(parse_git_branch)\$ '
;;
esac
After attending several talks and BOFs at Debconf12, I'll grant my
personal "Best Talk Award" to Hideki Yamane's Let's
shrink Debian package archive!.
Despite it being his first ever Debconf talk/BOF, Yamane-san did an
incredibly complete research work to bring arguments about
ways to reduce the size of the archive by using xz compression.
He triggerred a very live discussion (and for this we can also thank
all participants) and the quality of his slides was really high.
So, for this, as Tom Marble said after the
talk. You definitely deserve it and I'm proud to have you as teammate
in the pkg-fonts team.
As already written, even though it seems, I didn't spend my time
running at Debconf12.
Or eating cheese...
Or (tentatively) hiking volcanoes...
Or helping people to kill each other with socks...
Or drinking beers...
Not *only* all of these (some of them at the same time, though hiking
a volcano while eating cheese and drinking beers is not particularly
easy)....but also some Debian work.
So, I uploaded a backport of samba to squeeze backports and our
squeeze users should now have the same samba version than wheezy ones.
I also stopped several cronjobs on i18n.debian.net and moved some
material there as links have been (or should be) moved to the brand
new i18n.debian.org (and its alias l10n.debian.org).
I did a major cleanup in tasksel, committed
several fixes, proposed others for review (mostly to Joey Hess). All
this in preparation for a soon-to-come upload, probably after D-I
beta1 which has been prepared by Cyril Brulebois while he was.....not
attending Debconf12..
I also followed the integration of Sorina Sandu's work on netcfg for
link detection and network ESSID choice in Debian Installer. Sorina is
doing well in her GSOC work, because she's clearly someone with great
capabilities who we will, I hope, be able to keep contributing to
Debian. We can also thank the mentoring work of Gaudenz Steinlin to
guide Sorina through D-I's arcanes.
I also went through the current status of debconf translation
completeness in testing for the 7 languages that target 100% (Czech,
German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish). Here, the
point is mostly taking care that fixes are either:
This morning, I ran again with No l, my longstanding Debian running
friend.
The goal was, this time, to explore the South-East heights of
Managua. I noticed a road that seemed to be quiet enough and not
requiring a too long transit through busy, noisy and bad smelling
highways.
So, at 06:00 we headed from the Seminole hotel to the road to Masaya
(the very large highway that goes in front ofMetrocentro). We had to
run along it for a bit less than 2km. Not the best thing but the road
was not very busy at that time.
Then, we turned right into a road heading towards a quite "classy"
neighbourhood where roads are well paved, there are sidewalks, etc, etc.
It was going up ALL TIME LONG, which is interesting as a start. This
placed is named "Lomas de Santo Domingo" in Google Maps.
We even found there the embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. I can
tell you, the Iran ambassador is quite living in a neat place and
probably very happy to be there..:-)
Fromthere, a very good concrete road starts to go up and up and up and
up. many many very high standard villas, with fences, guards, etc.
Strangely, there were several "For Sale" signs instead of "Se Vende".
So, I guess this is a sign that this place is mostly inhabited by
(very rich) foreigners, diplomats, etc.
This very nice road was also....climbing a lot: 180m in 3.5km, so 5.1%
average, but sometimes closer to 10%!
At the very end of the road, we however ended....on a fence. It's
apparently guarding the final part of the road where even more fancier
villas seem to be, according to the satellite view..:-).
We tried to use a small path up, but had to stop quite quickly.
(OK, No l is definitely blurry there....blame the tired eyes after
8.7km climbing all the way)
And then, all we had to do was....going down..:-). Being both in a
fairly good shape, that went quite fast. But we both agreed that the
final part, above 12km/h along the highway, with the sun hitting hard,
was quite a challenge.
I really admire those people who happen to run long distance in places
like Managua. I can't even imagine running a marathon here....
GPS trace of what
finally turns out to be my longest run here as of now with 17.5km in
about 1h40.
A new neighbourhood to explore today: the South-West/West area.
Indeed, my original plan was going towards Lagunas de Nejapa and
Asososca. However, I now understood that such non urban areas in
Managua are almost inaccessible.
It sound like walking and hiking in the nature is not something that
urban inhabitants of Managua do often. So, in short, these places
are....just impossible to go to.
Anyway, I wanted to see this, just in case. As a consequence, I ended
heading westward from Hotel Seminole through Avenida Miguel Obando Y
Bravo (the busy highway close to the hotel, where we boarded the Day
Trip buses). Running along this one is not a bad thing as it is not
that busy, particularly at 05:45..:-)
After crossinb Pista de la Unan that goes north towards the lake, I
went 200m east then headed north up to reach the very busy Pista Juan
Pablo II (or Pista de la Resistencia). For those who went to the day trip, this is the highway we
went through at the beginning of the journey to Leon.
It sounds crazy to run along a busy highway but:
Next.