For once, Clint blogged on something that I can understand. I don’t buy everything he says, but in the case of DSA, the part where he says “you cannot have a functional and respectable subgroup if it maintains autonomy like that” is a real problem. The leadership problem I mentioned is real. And it can theoretically be solved by undelegating one of the problematic side of this DSA-internal dispute. But which one? Given the unwillingness of Joey to discuss the problems, he makes an easy target… which would leave DSA up to Ryan, James and Phil. But is that a desirable thing? If DSA is perceived as being an “autonomous” group which is not involved in Debian’s main discussions and which is somewhat disconnected from Debian’s day-to-day life, it’s largely due to the behavior of James and Ryan. E-mail communication with them is very difficult as they’ll respond only if they really care about something. And despite the setup of the request tracker, they have barely been able to make proper usage of it… the idea was to use RT tickets to track everything that DSA does but they don’t use it as such. For example, James setup a “wikiadm” group and he never reported anything to the related ticket (#194) (I did it myself once I found out). Also there’s an internal ticket about the replacement of ftp.debian.org (that I created because ftp.d.o ran out of space regularly) and AFAIK Jeroen has been in touch with James to setup that replacement, but nothing got reported to the tracker. Ryan promised me once to put his DSA TODO list in the tracker so that other people can jump in and help out. He never did. So while Joey is definitely a pain for DSA, at least he’s a visible participant of the team and he interacts with the community. James and Ryan are not, they interact only through private channels and do not share their opinions or their vision of Debian.
I believe this is a real problem. On the other hand, most of the interesting changes in the last months are the results of James’s work. But he’s also implicitly blocking addition of new members as long as the leadership problem is not solved. I tried to fill the communication void of the DSA team by various means. I follow everything as closely as I can so that I can report changes on other channels, mailing lists when needed. I made efforts to document stuff on the wiki page, etc. But this is not a long term solution, the communication issue must be fixed within the team. The path ouf of this mess is still not very clear, but something is going to change soon. Not quite sure what though. What would you suggest? And if you were DPL, what would you do? Since private discussions and negotiations lead nowhere, it’s tempting to bring the issue in the public area. In theory, they have no way to escape discussions and they’ll have to communicate their grudges against the other side if they want to have some fair judgment between both parties. Unfortunately, given the habits of James and Ryan, they probably won’t participate in any public discussion and either resign or stay where they are waiting for any decision… Comments welcome. Partagez cet article / Share This

Today I worked on packaging Saxon 8 for Debian. While looking at some of its code I saw the following:

if (System.getProperty("java.vendor").equals("Jeroen Frijters"))
platform = DotNetPlatform.getInstance();

Note: Jeroen Frijters is the author of IKVM.

Copy of a mail I sent to debian-www earlier today. I don't think it warrants posting to -devel-announce, but I post it here to make it visible to people not usually following debian-www. Since I seem to sense an increased stream of offers to help out with packages.d.o coming my way (but maybe that is just wishful thinking ;) I wanted to give a short update on the development of the current code and the status of the infrastructure so that nobody can claim he wanted to help but failed due to lack of information.

• The code in the CVS is seriously lacking in many regards, especially update and CGI speed. It runs pretty stable though and since we excluded robots from using the CGI scripts it seems to run with at least enough speed to keep any big complaints from rising. (If anyone is interested, packages.d.o currently has about 200,000 page hits a day, with a notable decrease – up to 50,000 – during the etch freeze and a similar increase after release)
• packages.d.o is currently run on puccini.d.o, this host is exclusivly used for this purpose. Adminstration is be done by group pkg_maint, current members are Martin 'Joey' Schulze and me.
• The same code is also used to create the page packages.ubuntu.com, see branch ubuntu in CVS. packages.ubuntu.com is run a private server of mine and only administrated by me.
• Everybody with write access to the website has also write access to this part of the CVS. The code run on packages.d.o is updated once a day during the update cron job. Since there is no staging ground for changes, any commits should be made with extreme care...
• Last year Jeroen van Wolffelaar and I started to develop a new version with the goal to make dynamic page generation possible which allows for faster update of information and more flexible presentation. We coordinated our work by using a SVN repository located at svn.wolffelaar.nl.
• This development was stalled several times when he and/or I had no time to actively pursue it.
• In April 2007 I decided to revive the development to get the code in a state ready for deployment. Since I was by then inititated in the wonders of distributed scm, I decided to move the code to yet another repository, namely git (for cloning use git://source.djpig.de/git/packages.git) There is also a ubuntu branch there but it is in a rather sorry state atm regarding site layout.
• I think the new code is currently in a state where it could be safely deployed to packages.d.o but I'm currently waiting for an etch upgrade of the host since the code has grown some dependencies on stuff only available in etch. The next possibility for this to happen is probably during Debconf.
• I don't know yet how to handle the SCM stuff when the code is to be deployed.
• You can try out this new code base at packages.debian.net (Might be slightly out-of-date sometimes since I don't run the cronjob as often as possible to give packages.ubuntu.com more ressources)
• Bug reports and patches against this version are very much welcome, please send them directly to me (but feel free to CC debian-www if you want to have an open discussion on the matter in question).
• Bug reports and patches against the version currently in use should be directed to the BTS as usual.
• If there is interest we can make a little improvised BoF about packages.d.o at Debconf.

It happened again. The linux-2.6 2.6.20-1 release failed for arches which we don't build snapshots for. This means that none of them was ever built in the time after I commited the whole stuff. As this happens over and over again I consider this a real problem now. So the following arches needs new debian-kernel maintainers: alpha, hppa, and mips.

/me giggles at jvw. Oh, hang on. He's already pointed out my own little mistake from last year. Doh! :-)

In a previous entry, I explained how you can be assimilated to an Ubuntu developer without even being an official Debian developer, and of course without prior notice. I am now quite ashamed: I have just discovered that this was already discussed some time ago (read: months before my post), and led to the following results:

• If the package is in universe or multiverse, the Maintainer field will be set to Ubuntu MOTU Developers

• If the Maintainer field is modified, the old value will be saved in a field named XSBC-Original-Maintainer

However, packages where my name appears either in the Maintainer or in the XSBC-Original-Maintainer field still “belong” to me in Launchpad (see https://launchpad.net/~julienv/+packages for example).
However, I am not responsible for the bugs of these packages (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/~julienv/+assignedbugs) Now that my blog is syndicated on Planet Debian, I ask it again:

Am I supposed to look on Launchpad for bugs reported against the packages I maintain in Debian?

Obviously, if a bug wasn’t reported by a Debian user, it might mean nobody suffers from it, but fixing it could avoid future bug report anyway (except if this particular bug is very specific to Ubuntu). In order to improve the Debian maintainers’ work, I think it would be great that the PTS integrates the bugs in Launchpad in a simple way. This would allow us to easily subscribe to the bugs, and eventually get a notice if the bug is fixed, or at least allow us to be aware of the issue.

Welcome to this 8th issue of the DeFuBu contest, the almost monthly championship of the funniest bug reported to the Debian BTS. The challengers

• Pierre Tramo with #409352 (mplayer_1.0~rc1-12.diff.gz is CHAOTIC)
• Christian Perrier with #230485 (apache2/ssl-cert's debconf abuse makes baby jesus cry)
• Jeroen van Wolffelaar with #409637 (tasksel: [INTL:eo] kelkaj korektoj pri la esperanta traduko.)
• Steve Langasek with #410605 (dpkg: bzip2 code in compression.c incorrectly uses zlib define (Z_ERRNO))
• Josh Triplett with #412460 (magicor-data: Penguins don't have teeth) and #398276 (xdm: don't bundle turning on sit0 irradiating me all day)
• Mike Hommey with #413660 (RFP: mozilla-firefox -- Mozilla's firefox package is required in non-free) and #413714 (iceweasel: overflow:hidden ugly chopping characters in half)

How the vote has been done Four Debian related people voted, Raphael Hertzog, Jeroen van Wolffelaar, Ana Guerrero and Margarita Manterola. Full ranking Bugs

• #409637 (tasksel: [INTL:eo] kelkaj korektoj pri la esperanta traduko.) (34 points)
• #412460 (magicor-data: Penguins don't have teeth) (29 points)
• #230485 (apache2/ssl-cert's debconf abuse makes baby jesus cry) (26 points)
• #398276 (xdm: don't bundle turning on sit0 irradiating me all day) (23 points)
• #410605 (dpkg: bzip2 code in compression.c incorrectly uses zlib define (Z_ERRNO)) (16 points)
• #409352 (mplayer_1.0~rc1-12.diff.gz is CHAOTIC) (15 points)
• #413660 (RFP: mozilla-firefox -- Mozilla's firefox package is required in non-free) (14 points)
• #413714 (iceweasel: overflow:hidden ugly chopping characters in half) (3 points)

Challengers

• Josh Triplett with (52 points with 2 bugs)
• Jeroen van Wolffelaar (34 points with 1 bug)
• Christian Perrier (26 points with 1 bug)
• Mike Hommey with (17 points with 2 bugs)
• Steve Langasek (16 points with 1 bug)
• Pierre Tramo (15 points with 1 bug)

The winners

• Bug: #409637 (tasksel: [INTL:eo] kelkaj korektoj pri la esperanta traduko.)
• Challenger: Josh Triplett
• Bug reporter: Serge Leblanc
• Voter: Raphael Hertzog with unordered tierc : #412460, #409637 and #230485

Notes To participate, simply drop me an email with a bug number or a request to vote, or anything that may help. About DeFuBu

So its post-FOSDEM already… Time flies when you’re having fun.
I arrived Brussels at around 10AM friday, met Tulitar, who was just as clueless as me regarding where the hell we were going. We ended up meeting a nice group of people on the train who incidently neither knew where they were going, but were following someone who did. We eventually got off at the right place and met Dave, who also had no clue where the hostel was.
After being slightly lost and meeting some other Debian people, we finally got in at the hostel where we had to lock baggage in the basement as we could not check in before three. Tired as hell, we left out and met Jeroen and a few other people and headed for the chocolate museum. Belgian chocolate is /awesome/. They had solid dark chocolate sculptures and even chocolate CLOTHING.
After the chocolate museum, everyone left back for the hostel and passed out, except me, who was still eager for more city exploring and/or beer. I met up with Martin and left to get some asian foods before the famous beer gathering. I’m convinced we tried every beer on every page of every beer charter of every pub we visited. Belgian beer is by far the best I’ve ever had. ‘Duvel’ is one of my top favourites.
During the beer gathering we thought it’d be a really good idea to discretely throw coasters at the people sitting below, us hiding at the top of the pub. Ended not as discretely as it started, hundreds of coasters flying throughout the room. Pure entertainment gold, but seemed to piss off the organizers and bar-people, and Martin was noble enough to take the blame even if I blatantly started it all with my childish ways.
The next day was started with getting lost AGAIN, because I could in no way remember where the hostel was. Interesting start of the day. I think I’ve lost count on the amount of times I’ve gotten lost in Brussels at this point. On our way to the FOSDEM venues we also found an entire area of brussels where they just don’t sell sandwiches. The day ended with much delicious Belgian beer consumage.
All in all it was fun and interesting. I also discovered that they are way more lenient with airport security in Belgium. I had tons of liquids and creams in my bag, and they didn’t comment it at all OR put it in little plastic bags. Despite me happily not feeling like a terrorist, the flight back sucked. It was an hour delayed, and when I landed there was even more snow in Norway than there originally was when I left. Missing the green grass of Belgium.
Now please, people, upload pictures from FOSDEM and give me the URL!

I've returned from FOSDEM in Brussels. Joost drove Jeroen, Christiaan and myself to Eindhoven where we took the train to Utrecht. FOSDEM has been a success again. The event has grown even bigger, still the FOSDEM team managed to create a good event nonetheless, thanks! Meeting up with the Debian crew again, both the usual suspects and new faces, was one of the highlights. The Debian booth has been popular, with the T-shirts in good demand; on Sunday morning I could only offer people the choice between S and XXL sizes. The Debian room had a diverse selection of interesting talks. Holger introduced Debian-Community.org, which I see as a useful initiative to provide recognition aswell as visibility for what already happens. To the Anonymous who returned me my lost backpack: thanks! I'm now off to sign all those keys.

Welcome to this 7th issue of the DeFuBu contest, the monthly championship of the funniest bug reported to the Debian BTS. The challengers

• Loic Minier with #407127 (evolution: Dates before 1970 not supported, e.g. for birthdays) and #408989 (epiphany-browser: bugzilla.gnome.org inaccessible)
• Sune Vuorela with #407849 (script for /usr/bin/preloadkde) and #409310 (kmines: Can cheat the timer)
• Josh Triplett with #404915 (iceweasel: Icon resembles booger)
• Jeroen van Wolffelaar with #408424 (apache2: "It works!")
• Florent Bayle with #408524 (If I play piano while my computer starts up, /dev/dsp disappears !)
• Christian Perrier with #408482 (xserver-xorg: please map French Canadian (cf) to Canada (ca) layout)
• Frans Pop with #409018 (base: /etc/ld.so.nohwcap missing)

How the vote has been done Four Debian related people voted for these bugs, Emmanuel Bouthenot, Mohammed Adn ne Trojette, Julien Louis and Jade Alglave. Full ranking Bugs

• #408989 (epiphany-browser: bugzilla.gnome.org inaccessible) (28 points)
• #408524 (If I play piano while my computer starts up, /dev/dsp disappears !) (21 points)
• #407849 (script for /usr/bin/preloadkde) and #408424 (apache2: "It works!") (18 points)
• #407127 (evolution: Dates before 1970 not supported, e.g. for birthdays) (17 points)
• #404915 (iceweasel: Icon resembles booger) and #408482 (xserver-xorg: please map French Canadian (cf) to Canada (ca) layout) (11 points)
• #409310 (kmines: Can cheat the timer) (10 points)
• #409018 (base: /etc/ld.so.nohwcap missing) (10 points)

Challengers

• Loic Minier (45 points with 2 bugs)
• Florent Bayle with (21 points with 1 bug)
• Sune Vuorela (28 points with 2 bugs)
• Jeroen van Wolffelaar (18 points with 1 bug)
• Christian Perrier and Josh Triplett (11 points with 1 bug)
• Frans Pop (10 points with 1 bug)

The winners

• Bug: #408989 (epiphany-browser: bugzilla.gnome.org inaccessible)
• Challenger: Loic Minier
• Bug reporter: Tshepang Lekhonkhobe
• Voter: Emmanuel Bouthenot with two first bugs correct: #408524, #408989

Notes To participate, simply drop me an email with a bug number. About DeFuBu

Improving package managers I noticed two posts on improving package managers none of which mentions Debtags. Daniel Burrows mentions various issues:

• the current sections in Synaptic are useless
• there are better keyword search technologies than strstr()
• we could use popularity contest data to sort results
• it would be cool to do amazon-like things using popcon data

David Nusinov mentions that the ideal package manager should look like Google, where you search for things using just a simple one line text entry and pick from the results what you want to install. I should probably do a bit of recap of things that have been going on. I'll go through that list again:

• The current sections in Synaptic are useless

Agreed. This used to be a bug about this, which has been closed by Debtags more than one year ago. We now have much more useful category data for about 73% of the archive (including experimental), but what we lack is software using it. Here's a quick trick to try:

1. install debtags, and this gives you an easy to read text file in /var/lib/debtags/package-tags.
2. from that file, pick packages that have the tags role::program, scope::application and interface::x11.
3. display the results, and use the tags works-with::* and use::* to navigate the results.

There is a python-debian package in experimental that has a debtags module you could play with. Why is that that so far noone has written a simple package manager just for gamers, which uses only the game::* tags? Do you think Debtags gives you too many tags? Then check out:

• The Debtags smart search, and especially how it does not show you all the tags, but it is able to infer the tags you want from your google-like query (hi David!).
• The Debtags tag editor, and especially the search-as-you type feature on all the tags and the tag search (analogous to the Debtags smart search, but it only searches tags.
• The Debtags tag cloud, and if you don't like that one try to make your own: there are countless ways of generating tag clouds from Debtags data.

To summarise so far, we not only do have better categories, but also a number of cool algorithms to use them, and some interface prototypes as well. Just don't expect me to write a package manager as well: that's a job that so far I decided to leave to someone else. adept gave it a try, with positive results.

• there are better keyword search technologies than strstr()

Indeed, Xapian for example. I use it as part of the backend of the Debtags smart search, and here's our Xapian-powered normal keyword based package search interface which does stemming, indexing and all you want to ask from a serious full text index. In that page you don't see all the nice features of Xapian, but only the ones that I needed for my Debtags evil plans. Have a look at the documentation and give it a try. Here is a way to see Xapian's similarity matching in action:

1. go to the Go tagging! page
2. click on a random untagged package
3. the system gives you a rather relevant selection of tags
4. look at it again: the package was untagged: how could the web engine possibly figure those tags out?

What is happening under the scenes is that:

1. I ask Xapian: "what packages are similar to this one?".
2. I aggregate the tags of the resulting packages.
3. I rank the tags by how many resulting packages have them.

While we are on this topic, why don't we decide that we maintain a Xapian index of our package descriptions in, for example, /var/lib/apt/fulltext/, so that various applications can share it?

• we could use popularity contest data to sort results

Indeed. Anyone would like to implement this little "popcon" tool? Having the data easily accessible locally can encourage people to use them. The Debtags Go tagging! page already uses popcon data to show the most common untagged packages at the top, with double reason: it shows packages that more people are likely to know (and therefore likely to categorise) and it pushes for the most common packages to be tagged more urgently.

• it would be cool to do amazon-like things using popcon data

Indeed. Anyone volunteers to implement a prototype? The full unaggregated (but anonymised) popcon data are accessible to every Debian Developer on the host gluck.debian.org in the directory /org/popcon.debian.org/popcon-mail/all-popcon-results. Ideally one can do many interesting things with this concept: besides tag suggestions, one could identify the packages that are most representative of an installed system, and also offer negative suggestions like: "people who have packages like yours usually don't have this package: would you like to remove it?". There is more than all this that could be done. Recently, almost by accident, I had the idea of querying packages by example, like pointing to a file and find packages that can work with it. I've asked Jeroen to have Mole collect info on all files that could possibly get installed in /usr/lib/mime/packages/ (as suggested by Bernhard R. Link), to see if that prototype can be made more accurate. Query by similarity would be nice: I don't like this program, but what else do we have that does the same job? This is best implemented using Debtags data, since it directly maps to semantic properties. Note that you don't have to show a single tag to the user to implement this kind of interface. Do we have a way to point at the X window of an application and get the name of the package that installed it? Wouldn't it be about time to have it? Why don't we have a system updater utility that shows the Debian weather? Why aren't more people playing with semantic web? But more generally, the problem with package managers is that we seem to be irrationally compulsive in wanting to make the one and only big easy and complete interface for everyone. Other more reasonable people would tell you that if you have two very different kinds of users you may want to consider having two different user interfaces. Ubuntu for example installs by default 3 package manager interfaces: Synaptic; the thing that you access from the application menu to add applications to it; and the update manager. Does it sound like a waste? To me it makes lots of sense. We have lots of interesting, usable metadata; we have algorithms; we have prototypes; we have ideas for lots of cool, implementable features. The question is, are we able to write applications that just combines what is needed from all this treasure to provide the right interface(s) for our base(s) of users? Even if my English in 2004 wasn't easy to understand, a read here might still be useful. There is so much really cool stuff to be written, just within reach.

Just spent a long weekend (Thursday night to Monday afternoon) in Finland. Hanna invited me over a while ago with a promise of sauna and ice swimming, and I'm a sucker for travelling to parties these days... *grin*. Unfortunately, the weather in Finland (just like in the UK) at the moment is ridiculously warm for the time of year. When I visited in November for the BSP, there was some snow on the ground and temperatures were as cold as I expected. This time, there was no sign of any snow and I was worried that we might not get any ice...! Lars was kind enough to offer me some crash space at short notice for my visit (there's nothing like last-minute organisation for this kind of jaunt!). On Friday we met up with Jesus, Jeroen, Hanna, Pixie and Dave for lunch and some wandering around in the middle of Helsinki. Then on to some bars later for some drinks and food. I could get used to this... :-) On Saturday, we got up early, bought large amounts of food and drink to take with us, and caught the bus north-west out of Helsinki towards central Finland. 90 minutes on the bus and in a taxi, and we were dropped off at Hanna's family's cottage by the lake below: As we got there, the temperature was dropping just enough that we could actually see the ice forming on the lake. Beautiful! In the middle of nowhere in the forest, things were incredibly quiet and peaceful. We lit the fire for the the sauna, and wandered off for a walk through the forest. Later on, beer, sauna and (almost) ice swimming. Naked geeks! I must admit that I chickened out a little - coming out of the sauna into freezing temperatures slowed me down a little. By the time I reached the bottom of the steps to the lake surface, I couldn't force myself into the lake fully. I got three toes wet, then ran back inside into the warm... :-) Dave was more resilient (in and out FIVE times!), but it looks like he maybe overdid things. He crashed out later and was acting quite oddly for a while - we worked out that he was probably dehydrated. We carried on drinking and snacking at the cottage, then headed back into Helsinki for the bars and clubs later that night. More of the same on Sunday along with a cinema visit, and I was thoroughly exhausted and ready to head back to the UK on Monday. Thanks very much to Hanna, Lars, Jesus and the others for making my trip so much fun. Helsinki is a lovely place to visit, although probably too expensive for me to manage it too often. I'm saving already for the next time! I've put my photos online as usual.

I am really upset by the way the ARM build daemons are managed. The packages are not uploaded regularly, with sometimes three days between two uploads. Well it should not be a problem, if packages that have failed to build due to some packages not uploaded fast enough (see for example python-gnome, or rkward) were requeued, but that’s actually not the case. Also last week, the build daemon named “cats” stopped to upload packages, despite it continued to build them. 11 days later, nothing has changed even after a mail to arm@buildd.debian.org. And I do not speak about build daemons building nothing. All of that resulted in ARM being the slowest architecture to build packages. It looks like the ARM build daemon maintainer does not know the excellent page made by Jeroen. As arm@buildd.debian.org is everything but responsive (well if you can assign a level of responsiveness to /dev/null), I have decided to act. I have installed QEMU on an 8-way Opteron machine, and created 8 emulated ARM machines, which 256MB of RAM and 10GB of disk for each, all running buildd + sbuild. Altogether those 8 emulated ARM machines should be faster than all the Debian ARM build daemons. I have setup a wanna-build database on my server. During the day it has built around 100 packages. Yes I agree that real machines would be better, but I don’t have a stack of fast ARM machines at home. Anyway when you see random segfaults on the build daemons, or strange failures (that happen for weeks) on the build daemon named “netwinder“, you may think to that again. Unfortunately the machine I use for that is only available for a few months, and I will have to stop the emulated machine then. I just hope that the situation with respect to the build daemons will improve, so that I can stop them even before.

Today I had problems trying to fix the versioning information of bug #343593. Neither the correct command notfound 343593 4.2.26-2 nor an unversioned reopen made the bts forget the wrong "found in 4.2.26-2". Jeroen told me of a heavier boot to kick the bts with: reassigning somewhere else and back again. This worked nicely. Documented here, so I will be able to look it up later.

The general freeze for Debian Etch has been postponed because of too many open RC bugs. This is handy because ones packages can be even more polished, but only once the archive is frozen it will really stabilize. There's also some people who think now is a good time to do an automated search for RC bugs (instead of a year ago...?), bringing the number even further up. More effort is required here to squash those bugs, and squash them sooner rather than later. That's why Jeroen, Bas and I have decided to work on this together the upcoming Wednesday evening. A small-scale BSP, but everyone is welcome to come along and join in! In other news, my iBook is broken again, it might have been stocked with refurbished parts after its previous breakdown according to the Apple Store. Although it's October, I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon with Stefan on a sunny terrace . I booked tickets to Stockholm, and a very good looking hostel.

The recent Debian Bug Squashing Party was quite a success if you ask me. The most problematic was that it coincided with the Utrecht Programming Championship (a qualifier for the ICPC NWERC), which took much of my time as an organiser and of Jeroen and Jelmer as contestants. It was worthwhile though, because their Team J won the contest. On the BSP a significant number of bugs have been squashed, but also a lot of work has gone into debian-cd, the release notes, security updates and removing packages. Steve has very few photo's available. Let's repeat it for etch+1, especially when it doesn't share a weekend with other local events.

Last weekend, Jeroen van Wolffelaar and Thijs Kinkhorst organised a BSP at Utrecht University. I went along for a couple of reasons:

• to help reduce the number of RC bugs in the run-up to the Etch release
• to meet some of the Dutch developers and users, and to encourage them to work their best for Etch

I met up with Hanna Ollila at Schiphol Airport late on Friday evening, and we took the train down to Utrecht together. We found Jeroen and some others at the station and went straight on to a party in the middle of town for a few hours. Then after just a few hours' sleep we headed into the University to get breakfast and start squashing bugs. A group of about a dozen people turned up that day - mainly a mixture of Dutch DDs and other locals.

I took a look at a couple of bugs initially on Saturday: #387419 and #387498. Unfortunately, the first (kdepim FTBFS on alpha) was difficult to reproduce - the alpha machine I had available for testing was too short on memory and took a very long time to build kdepim, long enough that after 2 days I gave up. I couldn't reproduce the latter (system() hanging when running on mips) on any machine I had access to - it looks like more work is needed there... In parallel with those two RC bugs (found on Andreas' great summary page at http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php), I also had a very productive session working in parallel with Christian Perrier, fixing translation/i18n bugs in one of my own packages, CVS. Thanks Christian, you're a pleasure to work with! On Saturday evening, the gang of us headed into the centre of Utrecht for a nice meal, some beer and some spirited conversation at a Greek restaurant. I took the opportunity to talk with Frans Pop about some of the remaining work needed for d-i and debian-cd. On Sunday, the work continued. I was still waiting on feedback on #387498 and my build of #387419, so I decided to make the most of the uninterrupted time to get some debian-cd development work done. I'm still hoping to get multi-arch CDs working before we release etch, so this was a great help. In fact, I got so engrossed in this that I managed to work straight through dinner...! In terms of bugs, I must admit that I didn't do much in terms of reducing absolute numbers. This weekend, there were a lot of bugs in categories that don't really work well for Bug Squashing: licensing/legal bugs (which really need discussion with the maintainer), newly-opened bugs (IMHO it's a little rude to NMU a package when a bug has only just been opened - give the maintainer at least a couple of days to respond!) and deep bugs where intimate knowledge of the package is needed. I expect there will be more to work on next weekend in Zurich, if nothing else some of those "new" bugs will have aged. Early on Monday morning I caught the bus from near Jeroen's apartment to start the journey home. Thanks to the nice reliable public transport, I got all the way to Schiphol well in time. Then my flight back to Stansted was delayed... :-( It was great to meet up with a bunch of enthusiastic people. Some I'd met before (Frans, Jeroen, Hanna). Some I met for the first time (Thijs, Bas, Moritz and others). But all of them were working hard, wanting to help get Etch out on time. Let's keep up the good work! I have a small number of photos online.

#386363... Amazing. Just amazing. I especially appreciate the new arguments and insights contributed by both parties every time.

Tomorrow we'll have the first real-life meeting, together with Thijs Kinkhorst and dr. Bas Zoetekouw, to organize details about the upcoming Debian Bug Squashing party in Utrecht, The Netherlands, on the weekend of September 30th. As a study association, A-Eskwadraat has had Debian Developers for quite some time, from Bas since 2000 until our most recent addition, Thijs, but we've never organized a Debian event – yet. In 2002 though, there was a Mozilla 1.0 release party where also the release of woody was celebrated. The university has been supportive of the initiative, and is offering the location for free, as long as there are not too many people around that they feel the need for (expensive) security to be on-site 24h/day. For that reason, and also for food planning, please do subscribe yourself in wiki. If more than 25 people end up subscribing, we'll let you know how we'll arrange that. We're still not having a definitive deal with a sponsor, so don't know how flexible we are in this regard. At this moment, we've also got a handful of international attendees too, including Debian's "Second in Command", Steve McIntyre. I'm looking forward to it, and to meeting various Debian contributors (mostly again). See you in Utrecht!

As I'm starting this blog post, I'm sitting on the 22:19 train Breda->Roosendaal, on my way home. I'm coming from the Debian Birthday Party that happened in caf Zeezicht on the Grote Markt in Breda, where a number of Dutch Debian people gathered. I'm not Dutch, but I do speak Dutch, and it's always nice to meet fellow Debianistas without having to revert to English. I had a fairly entertaining chat with some people, and eventually Jeroen van Wolffelaar showed up, with whom I had some interesting talk about the state of m68k and related dak-matters. I stayed there for two hours, but they were worth it. So why did give this post a title of Darn? When I got on the train, I broke my wristwatch. When I was taking my backpack off my back, my watch got stuck behind the strap that is supposed to keep the backpack on my back—whatever its name is—and as a result, it fell off my arm. Which isn't supposed to happen under normal conditions. It doesn't seem to be FUBAR, but it's still going to be have to be repaired before I can wear it again. I feel naked now.