The Debian Python Modules Team is discussing which DVCS to switch to from SVN. Ondrej Certik asked how to generate a list of commiters to the team s repository, so I looked at it and got this:
emilio@saturno:~/deb/python-modules$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
865 piotr
609 morph
598 kov
532 bzed
388 pox
302 arnau
253 certik
216 shlomme
212 malex
175 hertzog
140 nslater
130 kobold
123 nijel
121 kitterma
106 bernat
99 kibi
87 varun
83 stratus
81 nobse
81 netzwurm
78 azatoth
76 mca
73 dottedmag
70 jluebbe
68 zack
68 cgalisteo
61 speijnik
61 odd_bloke
60 rganesan
55 kumanna
52 werner
50 haas
48 mejo
45 ucko
43 pabs
42 stew
42 luciano
41 mithrandi
40 wardi
36 gudjon
35 jandd
34 smcv
34 brettp
32 jenner
31 davidvilla
31 aurel32
30 rousseau
30 mtaylor
28 thomasbl
26 lool
25 gaspa
25 ffm
24 adn
22 jmalonzo
21 santiago
21 appaji
18 goedson
17 toadstool
17 sto
17 awen
16 mlizaur
16 akumar
15 nacho
14 smr
14 hanska
13 tviehmann
13 norsetto
13 mbaldessari
12 stone
12 sharky
11 rainct
11 fabrizio
10 lash
9 rodrigogc
9 pcc
9 miriam
9 madduck
9 ftlerror
8 pere
8 crschmidt
7 ncommander
7 myon
7 abuss
6 jwilk
6 bdrung
6 atehwa
5 kcoyner
5 catlee
5 andyp
4 vt
4 ross
4 osrevolution
4 lamby
4 baby
3 sez
3 joss
3 geole
2 rustybear
2 edmonds
2 astraw
2 ana
1 twerner
1 tincho
1 pochu
1 danderson
As it s likely that the Python Applications Packaging Team will switch too to the same DVCS at the same time, here are the numbers for its repo:

emilio@saturno:~/deb/python-apps$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
401 nijel
288 piotr
235 gothicx
159 pochu
76 nslater
69 kumanna
68 rainct
66 gilir
63 certik
52 vdanjean
52 bzed
46 dottedmag
41 stani
39 varun
37 kitterma
36 morph
35 odd_bloke
29 pcc
29 gudjon
28 appaji
25 thomasbl
24 arnau
20 sc
20 andyp
18 jalet
15 gerardo
14 eike
14 ana
13 dfiloni
11 tklauser
10 ryanakca
10 nxvl
10 akumar
8 sez
8 baby
6 catlee
4 osrevolution
4 cody-somerville
2 mithrandi
2 cjsmo
1 nenolod
1 ffm
Here I m the 4th most committer And while I was on it, I thought I could do the same for the GNOME and GStreamer teams:
emilio@saturno:~/deb/pkg-gnome$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
5357 lool
2701 joss
1633 slomo
1164 kov
825 seb128
622 jordi
621 jdassen
574 manphiz
335 sjoerd
298 mlang
296 netsnipe
291 grm
255 ross
236 ari
203 pochu
198 ondrej
190 he
180 kilian
176 alanbach
170 ftlerror
148 nobse
112 marco
87 jak
84 samm
78 rfrancoise
75 oysteigi
73 jsogo
65 svena
65 otavio
55 duck
54 jcurbo
53 zorglub
53 rtp
49 wasabi
49 giskard
42 tagoh
42 kartikm
40 gpastore
34 brad
32 robtaylor
31 xaiki
30 stratus
30 daf
26 johannes
24 sander-m
21 kk
19 bubulle
16 arnau
15 dodji
12 mbanck
11 ruoso
11 fpeters
11 dedu
11 christine
10 cpm
7 ember
7 drew
7 debotux
6 tico
6 emil
6 bradsmith
5 robster
5 carlosliu
4 rotty
4 diegoe
3 biebl
2 thibaut
2 ejad
1 naoliv
1 huats
1 gilir

emilio@saturno:~/deb/pkg-gstreamer$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
891 lool
840 slomo
99 pnormand
69 sjoerd
27 seb128
21 manphiz
8 he
7 aquette
4 elmarco
1 fabian
Conclusions:
- Why do I have the full python-modules and pkg-gstreamer trees, if I have just one commit to DPMT, and don t even have commit access to the GStreamer team?
- If you don t want to seem like you have done less commits than you have actually done, don t change your alioth name when you become a DD (hint: pox-guest and piotr in python-modules are the same person)
- If the switch to a new VCS was based on a vote where you have one vote per commit, the top 3 commiters in pkg-gnome could win the vote if they chosed the same! For python-apps it s the 4 top commiters, and the 7 ones for python-modules. pkg-gstreamer is a bit special

I just receive The Mail (tm) from weasel, and I can't be happier that this (mh, is my life too boring?): I just become a DD!!!!!!! Please join my happiness in this achievement!!

I'd like to thank all the people helped me in my way to Debian, both for a long and fruitful collaboration or for just a mail exchange, both for kind people and rude ones (ah, we all have our own character, so never mind :) ) and in doing this I'm sure I'll forget someone (so please excuse me for this, you're in my mind tough): so thank you Tony, Bernd, Piotr, Thomas, Vincent, Adeodato, Lucas, Luk, Sune, Joerg (yeah, I'm brave :) ), Paul, and many others!

Of course, congrats go also to my other colleagues that "laureate" with me in Mid September DD Class :D

Today I finally made something for phpMyAdmin :-). First I've updated Czech translation of 3.0, so it is not that behind as it used to be (only some PBXT strings are missing right now) and then I fixed some potential issues which Thijs has found (thanks to him for his great security work not only for Debian). Later I focused a bit on demo server. As we already have new setup script from GSoC (made by Piotr Przybylski), links to setup script have been updated and I also reorganised links to all demo versions including direct login links for cookie based authentication. I hope it is now a bit easier to navigate and choose which demo version you want to test :-).

Well I did not expect that much when MySQL offered us to piggyback on their participation in GSoC 2008, but at the end we have two projects. One is about blobstreaming which I absolutely don't know and is probably some amazing new technology :-). Marc will act as a sponsor on this together with some guys from http://www.blobstreaming.org. The second project is setup rewrite where I will act as a mentor and Piotr Przybylski will implement it. Hopefully we will bring this to successful end and soon phpMyAdmin will bring you easier way to set up and configure it's options.

YAY! I'm now a Debian Developer. I started celebrating by uploading an NMU for the oldest patch of a RC bug I had sitting in the BTS. Thanks to Ari for advocating my membership, to Ari, Clint, Free, Piotr for sponsoring my uploads, and TomV. for managing my application. Also a special thanks to sam for making the last minute DAM appointments, which probably sped up my account creation, thus, finally 'making debian sexier' :).

Some time ago I wrote a note about VSTi on Linux. Today I tried to run FL Studio with WINE and... it works almost ;) perfectly! I'm really impressed. Now almost all VSTi plugins works seamlessly and even external plugins can be used, i.e. my favourite Superwave P8 :) I think it might be an issue with registration of full version copy but at least there are some cracks working. It's good to see the real audio software run on Linux. WINE developers, you've done an amazing job. Thank you!

I made a new release of YADA, the packaging helper different than others. New version of YADA supports Homepage field in debian/control file which appeared in dpkg last time. Wow. The YADA supported Home-Page field many years ago. YADA is very different that other Debian packaging helpers. Most important is that no Makefile have to be edited at all. This is the strongest and the weakest point of the YADA. People loves it or hate it. Some people even have a vendetta against YADA. Other people find the tool is very simple. Well, I think the YADA is some kind of prosthesis for native Debian packaging system, but even this prototype is much better than any Makefile-based aids just because I don't need to edit any Makefile. YADA had a black PR and much of bad FUD. There was opinion that it violates Debian policy, it is problematic for NMUs and security updates and maintaining of Debian patches is very difficult. This tool is very powerful and has some pitfalls but it doesn't mean it is evil by design. I really don't know how to make i.e. the iceape-l10n package without using YADA and its macro engine. It have to be more complicated and with much redundancy for metainformations. I think I could switch from YADA to another packaging tool, but please... Just create it! :)

The geek like me should have a special birthday cake. And my girl knows it :)

The first serious i18n effort for the Games Team is now bearing fruit. The newer version of the game hex-a-hop is now entering Debian. All the merit goes to Jens Seidel, who has developed the patches for making it work with SDLPango and to support all the spectrum of Unicode characters, instead of the limited ASCII set included in the game, as well as to all the people of Debian i18n who have done the translations (Helge Kreutzmann, Damyan Ivanov, Enrique Mat as S nchez, Bas Wijnen, Piotr Engelking, Yuri Kozlov and Clytie Siddall). The game has already been translated to Bulgarian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, Russian and Vietnamese. Thanks Jens, both for taking care of the changes in the code needed to achieve this, and also for coordinating all the t10n and i18n process, as I don’t really have much experience in those areas.

Some time ago, I needed a small but helpful tool which could start some shell command with bounded time and kill spawned process if it was timed out. There is timeout package in Debian but it has very serious bug #187092. In fact, this tool can't intercept the proper status of called command and can't kill processes spawned by called command. I've tried to fix the Debian's timeout package but the bug is still opened over 4 years. So I decided to code the own Perl implementation. The result was attached to bug report. I've noticed that my script is currently used by Exim packagers. It's nice to see that my work is still useful. I think more people can find this script helpful so I set the Google Code project: timeout-pl. You can download the newest version of this script from Google or CPAN. Have a fun.

I maintain the HenPlus interface for databases. The tool is written in Java but it didn't work with non-Sun implementation of Java. The reason was sun.misc.Signal class. It is used for trapping Ctrl+C in application. I wonder why the GNU Classpath does not support this class. Does it mean the Sun Java is not really standarized? I've found the workaround. I unpacked some of sun/misc/*.java files from official Sun Java sources. Fortunatelly they was published under GPL license. The trick made possible to compile the HenPlus with GCJ+ECJ, so I could change the build-time dependency to java-gcj-compat-dev. It really worked! Even if the signal couldn't be handled with GCJ or SableVM, the application started with non-Sun Java runtime:

Hen*Plus> system-info
----------------------------------------+---------------------------------------------+
            System Property                                  Value                     
----------------------------------------+---------------------------------------------+
 Diff. of used memory (now-before) [KB]                                      1.932,00  
 Java VM                                     GNU libgcj 4.1.2 (Ubuntu 4.1.2-0ubuntu5)  
 Java Vendor                                           Free Software Foundation, Inc.  
 Java Home                                /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.4.2-gcj-4.1-1.4.2.0/jre  
[...]

I've found that the GCJ and Kaffe doesn't work with Oracle JDBC driver. I'm suprised that SableVM works without problems. It's good to see that there is a reasonable alternative for Sun's imlementation.

Piotr, ShipIt for Debian? What for? To improve our sales? To increase our number of users? What are official CDs? Is there any official CD vendor? I have no clue how much Canonical can invest on shipping Ubuntu CDs worldwide, but I widely prefer to see that money used on bringing Debian developers from all over the world to the Debian conference held somewhere every year. Do you think that’s very little money? I don’t think so, and the project still tries to remain stood up to produce a free universal operating system, with an excellent quality assurance. Shipping Debian CDs for free from the Debian project? What for? How does the project make benefit from that?

A few weeks ago I filled a ShipIt form. Today I've got 6 CD-s with Ubuntu and Kubuntu: I wonder why I didn't get the Kubuntu AMD64 edition. Well, it might be better because I didn't use 64-bit on my NEC and I can give somebody one more CD. I'm trying to imagine the ShipIt for Debian. Well, I supose that Debian has not enough funds for such an action...

Some time ago I've filled ITP for libtool-cvs. I needed the new libtool for fakechroot project. The stable release of libtool is badly broken and causes that autoconf generates ./configure script which fails if C++ compiler is not installed in system. The cure is the newest libtoolize taken directly from CVS. I rather want to see the libtool package in Debian because it is hard to install it manually. So I decided to make the new package. Fortunatelly, the current stable libtool maintainer (Kurt Roeckx) is very helpful person and he don't see any problem if I prepare the experimental release of his package :) So here it is: fresh and brand new libtool Debian packages. There was some controversy with versioning schema. The current CVS snapshot is labeled as 2.1a. The upstream's authors promised that the next release should the version number greater than previous. I hope they really don't release new libtool i.e. as a version 2.0. Whatever. This is the experimental package at least. I don't know, why the package is not indexed by packages.debian.org yet. It is strange as fara as it came into ftp.debian.org.

I like very much a Test::Unit framework. I've found it as a very handy tool for organising the tests. I really don't like the standard Test::Simple and its deriveratives. I don't understand why I have to see the output for each failed test. I rather like the do-or-die tests grouped logically as test units. Somebody write me a note for Exception::Base module that it depends on non-core Perl modules. It is not for runtime but build dependency. Even that, it is true, because Test::Unit is a somewhat heavy module and it depends on i.e. Errors. I decided to reimplement Test::Unit. So it is available Test::Unit::Lite already! It is much lighter replacement for original Test::Unit. It should be compatible for existing test suites. The intention was possibility of bundling the Test::Unit::Lite with other module distributions:

$ perl -MTest::Unit::Lite -e bundle

It copies the Test::Unit::Lite module to the inc directory in the distribution source. The Test::Unit module isn't perfect. The most annoying behaviour is the random order for calling test cases. The Test::Unit::Lite sorts the function names and calls it always in the same order. There is not so many Perl modules distributions that use Test::Unit. I hope a little that my package could change this situation and the test units will be more popular and easier to use.

I just configured my Kubuntu so it can be a printer server for my girl's notebook. She works on Windows XP and she's connected via wi-fi. It was looking very simply. "Export the driver for Windows users" in KDE's Control Panel. Huh... I've download the necessary files from CUPS site. It was not enough. I had to upload some files from Windows into /usr/share/cups/drivers. Soon it was clear that cupsaddsmb command needed root privileges. Then the smbpasswd command was needed. After all, I had to edit smb.conf. I think I might reconfigure my Samba server just because I have 10 years experience in Linux technology and I was desperate. There was a success after one hour of browsing the documentation, downloading the many files from Internet and local systems, manually editing some system files and calling some mysterious commands. Success? I think it was a failure. The printing technology is still for hackers.

I'm working on some interesting project in Perl. I decided to make it fully OO, XP and other buzzwords-friendly. I just implementing some Registry Pattern which is just a Singleton Pattern. The Perl Design Patterns site is very useful, but I wanted more. The beauty of Perl is its flexibility. I'd like to call the class directly and by object. So it is my version:

  package System::Path;
  use File::Spec ();
  # Class attributes
  my %attrs = (
      home => undef,
      root  => undef,
      tmpdir  => undef
  );
  # Private constructor used by singleton
  sub _new  
      my $class = shift;
      my $self =   %attrs  ;
      bless($self, $class);
      $self;
   
  # Instance of singleton class
  my $Self;
  # Singleton constructor
  sub instance  
      $Self  = (shift)->_new;
   
  # Returns a string representation of the temporary directory
  sub tmpdir  
      my $self = shift;
      $self = __PACKAGE__->instance
          unless ref $self eq __PACKAGE__;
      return $self-> tmpdir 
          if $self-> tmpdir ;
      $self-> tmpdir  = File::Spec->tmpdir;
   
  # (...)
  1;

Then I can call: $dir = System::Path::tmpdir; or $dir = System::Path->tmpdir; or $obj = System::Path->instance; $dir = $obj->tmpdir; ...and each way is correct. BTW, they are great tunes on chillout@DI.FM radio at the moment :) "Sacred Cycles", "Greece 2000" and beautiful set of Marco Torrance vs. Xerxes... Oh my! :)

Yesterday I uploaded new ossp-uuid packages. Today I was worried why they weren't in incoming.debian.org nor archived in sid... I forgot that new upstream brought new binary package (libossp-uuid15), so it came to NEW and BYHAND packages queue. The Iceweasel stucked there for 90 minutes. My package is still in queue for 15 hours. All packages are equal, but some packages are more equal than others :)

There was very funny thread about CDBS and kitten. I think any other solution is better than plain Makefile. Long time ago I adopted the YADA. It's wonderful tool for anybody who hates Makefiles. Yes, the project is still alive. Unfortunately I don't have too much time for promoting this project. Just one month ago some developer did NMU for my package (see Bug#391753). He wrote that YADA is quite unfriendly for NMUers. I really wonder, how it could be unfriendly as far as plain Makefile don't support even separate patch files... I think it would be much better if Debian had only one tool for packaging. The RPM's SPEC file as single source for package is more friendly for maintainer than thousands of separate debhelper's files. So the YADA came. But... I understand it is just an option. It is my choose how to package my packages. My own right to decide. I can live with Debian and CDBS, YADA or other packaging helpers.

I've just installed dssi-vst. I tried to use Linux as music instrument one year ago, but it failed. It was not so hard just now. I googled and found very usable site about VST on Linux. I did not receive the USB-MIDI connector yet, that I bought on Allegro , so I used the vkeybd. It was pretty cool. The first instrument that I tested was SUPERWAVE. I started the jack-dssi-host dssi-vst.so:SUPERWAVEP8.dll and the instrument appeared as another MIDI and audio client in JACK Audio Connection dialog. Now I'm missing FL Studio on Linux badly...