Another point release for Etch has been done; now it's the time for the CD team to roll out new images after the next mirror pulse. The official announcements (prepared by Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, thanks!) will follow shortly afterwards. FTP master of the day was Joerg Jaspert, who did his first point release since Woody, as he told us on IRC. We appreciate your work and you spending your time that shortly before going to Argentina. This point release includes the etchnhalf update introducing a new kernel image (based on 2.6.24) and some driver updates. Additionally the infamous openssl hole will be fixed for good, even for new installs. Again I want to present you a list of people who contributed to this release. It cannot be complete as I got the information out of the Changed-by fields of the uploads.

• akira yamada
• Alexander Sack
• Alexander Schmehl
• A Mennucc1
• Andrea De Iacovo
• Andres Salomon
• Aurelien Jarno
• Charles Plessy
• Christian Perrier
• Christian Welzel
• Colin Watson
• dann frazier (indefatigable kernel worker, most sourceful uploads)
• Darren Salt
• Devin Carraway (3rd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Emmanuel Lacour
• Eric Dorland
• Fabio Tranchitella
• Faidon Liambotis
• Fathi Boudra
• Florian Weimer
• Francesco Paolo Lovergine
• Francois Marier
• Frank Lichtenheld
• Frans Pop (thanks for your d-i work!)
• Frederic Peters
• Gregory Colpart
• Holger Levsen
• Jan Wagner
• Jay Berkenbilt
• J r my Bobbio
• Joey Hess
• Joey Schulze
• Josselin Mouette
• Julien Cristau
• Kai Hendry
• Kurt Roeckx
• LaMont Jones
• Laszlo Boszormenyi
• Martin Pitt
• maximilian attems
• Michael Biebl
• Michael Koch
• Mike Hommey
• Moritz Muehlenhoff
• Noah Meyerhans
• Ola Lundqvist
• Otavio Salvador
• Patrick Matth i
• Petter Reinholdtsen
• Philipp Kern
• Pierre Habouzit
• Raphael Hertzog
• Rene Engelhard
• Robert Millan
• Roberto Lumbreras
• Roland Mas
• Romain Beauxis
• Russ Allbery
• Sean Finney
• Stefan Fritsch
• Steffen Joeris
• Stephen Gran
• Steve Kemp
• Sune Vuorela
• Thijs Kinkhorst (2nd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Thomas Viehmann
• Toni Mueller
• Tzafrir Cohen

From the Release Team we had dann frazier (who drove the important kernel part of etchnhalf), Luk Claes, Neil McGovern, Andreas Barth, Martin Zobel-Helas and me working on it. ;-)

Tomorrow, I'll leave /home for more than 3 weeks:

• 10 days with my family in a rented house in Cahors (FR). We might have Internet access there (the owner is indeed installing it and I'll probably help him doing this The Right Way...being interested in the result).
• back at /home on Wednesday Aug. 6th by train
• buy cheese on Aug. 7th (VERY important). Pack it in the bag (round goat cheese inside socks, etc). Also pack some other less important stuff (t-shirts, sweaters, running stuff).
• fly off to DebConf from Paris Orly (Aug 7th, 21:10), via Madrid with Air Europa
• meet Jacobo Tarrio at EZE airport and get our bus to Mar Del Plata
• kiss and hug dozens of friends
• stop sleeping
• enjoy DebConf
• back home on Aug. 18th
• back to work on Aug. 19th (yeah, that's crazy)

For people who are not tired of this, I've had the great honor of being sollicited to hold a keynote lecture at Debconf. As you'd guess, that will be about i18n in Debian. I plan it to be a kinda general thing, giving the current rough picture of how things are going (or not going). No deep technical stuff (aha, how could *I* do that anyway?), just talking with hands. From informations I have, it should be on Aug. 14th, at the beginning of the talks schedule (9:30 or so, local time...check this when the official schedule is out). Apart from that, my personal schedule for DebConf is mostly working with the i18n folks who will be there (Felipe A. van de Wiel aka "faw", Nicolas Fran ois aka "nekral") on the i18n server. Work/talk with Neil Williams about tdebs stuff and all things related to i18n and embedded stuff is also planned as well as preparing the Extremadura meeting we need to have at the end of the year.

30 C, 19 km, 2 hours, 200m positive slope Exactly one year after (re)starting to run regularly, that was my pace for today. Running on afternoon on a sunny and hot summer day lowers the pace quite severey, indeed, but I wanted to try it and see how I can resist. Considering that I still remember July 24th 2007 where my first run lead to the great performance of 3.5km in 30 minutes (and two stops because being too tired), this is not so bad. Ah, and the last number is 75....kilograms. On July 24th 2007, it was 82..:-)

Steve Langasek just uploaded samba 3.2.0 in unstable. Right before the freeze...:) This is being prepared for months, now, which explains why we're doing this so close to the release. Kudos to Steve who made the final work as I'm quite unavailable for a few days and the clock was ticking down.

Last news I gave for D-I and related stuff l10n completion was on June 15th. We're now one month later, so let's see what happened since then. D-I "level 1" (ie the core D-I) had several templates changes which bringed the translation ratio from 100% to 99% and below several times, for all languages. Several teams have still been able to cope with that. Other levels had no changes and I therefore spent some time nagging them to complete the missing bits here and there. The current status is:

• Level 1 (core D-I): 20 complete languages (be cs de eu fi fr gl gu ja ko nl pt pt_BR ro ru sk sv th tr vi) just like we had on June 15th
• Level 1 + Level 2 (packages with strings used in default installs): 20 complete languages as well (the same ones of course). Big improvement here as we had only 11 of them in June.
• Level 1-3 (pkgs prompting during default desktop installs or important for desktop installs): 16 complete languages. We "lose" Belarusian, Gujarati, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian.
• Level 1-4 (adding pkgs prompting during other tasks): 16 (the same ones)
• Level 1-5 (adding important stuff such as apt, dpkg, aptitude): 9 complete languages. Those languages reaching the Grand Slam are: German, French, Galician, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Vietnamese

Changes are still planned for level 1: D-I developers are really active these days, particularly with the great "come back" of J r my Bobbio and the constant QA work by Frans Pop. I also tried to merge in some work done in Ubuntu's Rosetta and then interest those people who translate there to collaborate to D-I "upstream". This lead me to merge updates for Icelandic, Kazakh, Afrikaans, Malay, Welsh and Serbian. Contacts were made with the relevant translators:

• For Icelandic, the translation updates in Rosetta come from a woman whose login is "eeinarsdottir" but I couldn't succeed in getting an e-mail address to get in touch with her. She apparently lives in Finland if I believe Google and is also using "zorglubb" as nickname. Any hint to get in touch with her would be appreciated.
• For Kazakh, I tried to get in touch with the person who translated in Rosetta but got no answer as of now. In the same time, I tried to re-wake up Talgat, who's registered as the D-I translator but wasn't very successful.
• For Afrikaans, Friedel Wolff, the main maintainer of Pootle, is very interested in working on the translation, through Pootle of course. He was however very reluctant wrt our current policy to activate languages only when people complete "sublevels" 1 and 2....which would require about 6000 words to be updated. Scary for him, as it seems. I tried to get in touch with the translator in Rosetta....but got no answer.
• For Malay, the current translator (NB Liang) was very happy to get more strings translated because of the merge with Rosetta translations. He proposed the Rosetta translator to collaborate: no answer.
• For Welsh, I got a positive contact with Jonathan Price who did some work in Rosetta, completing the old work by Daffyd Harries (Welsh used to be complete in D-I in the past). We'll see if that goes further than "I'll have a look at it".
• By far the most positive contact was for Serbian. In about one week, I managed to get in touch with Veselin Mijuskovic and Marko Uskokovic, who work for the cp6linux project, funded by the Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Society of the Republic of Serbia. This project is aimed at creating a fully localized Linux-based distribution for use in Serbia, with support for Serbian (both cyrillic and latin), as well as regional languages of Serbia. Their distribution is currently based on Ubuntu. They did a lot of l10n work which, unfortunately, did not end up upstream as of now. They gave me access to their Pootle server and I'll try to get some of their work back in Debian.

My conclusion about all this is mitigated: I'm somewhat sorry to see some work happening in Rosetta, still without any connection with "upstream" work, with people apparently working without even some internal coordination and quite anonymously. I wonder if these people know that their work has few chances to end up anywhere, except in Ubuntu (for D-I translation, I even doubt it ends up somewhere: this is just unused work....until I grab it for D-I "suptream").

Now that D-I beta2 has been released, the next release of D-I *will* very certainly be called a "Release Candidate" and be the final release used in Lenny. So, it's time for our translators to put their work in shape and we have 61 supported languages so far. In short, expect being nagged by /me quite often in the upcoming two months. The current status is:

• Level 1 (core D-I): 20 complete languages (bg, cs, dz, eo, es, fr, gl, gu, ja, ko, lt, mr, nl, pt, pt_BR, ro, ru, th, tr, vi)
• Level 1 + Level 2 (packages with strings used in default installs): 11 complete languages (bg, cs, es, fr, gu, ja, pt, ro, ru, th, vi)
• Level 1-3 (pkgs prompting during default desktop installs or important for desktop installs): 7 complete languages (bg, fr, ja, pt, ru, th, vi)
• Level 1-4 (adding pkgs prompting during other tasks): 7 (the same)
• Level 1-5 (adding important stuff such as apt, dpkg, aptitude): 2 complete languages (fr, vi)

Of course, I expect these to raise up significantly. I posted new calls for updates this week-ed, in the hope people are not tired of /bubulle nagging them constantly. Please note that Level 1 partial completion (the first two "sublevels") is a requirement for a language to be activated in D-I. As of now, we "only" have about 40 languages in that case.

...I have proofs. So, libwiki-toolkit-perl is now the leader of the contest for "those annoying packages which introduce new debconf templates without calling for translations"...and therefore prevent the poor german and french teams to at least have one day in the 100% heaven. fr was just missing fourteen strings, de was missing 39. And now, there are 6 more of these....and to make things slightly more complicated and give the maintainer a chance to mess up, he introduced a typo in his debconf templates. yay. It is indeed now about two full months since we're so close and each time we succeed in lowering down the numbers (for instance by nagging Marco enough and have him upload udev), someone pops up with yet another debconf template that was so urgent that (s)he could not even wait for a call for translations. Bummer. Now I know. There *is* a secret conspiracy of people who watch our stats daily and introduce or change something just to make us mad. Guys, it work *perfectly*.

'churro' is the name of the Debian i18n server (i18n.debian.net), hosted by the Extremadura region in Merida (IIRC). That server was setup back in september 2006, during the first Extremadura i18n meeting. Since then, a lot of hidden work happened on it, mostly moving all scripts that build statistics pages from Debian localization data, for instance the Central Debian translation statistics. Thomas Huriaux, then Nicolas Fran ois, have been the people building all this, with the help of Felipe Augusto van de Wiel for the system administration. Churro for instance has neat statistics pages, built by Nicolas Fran ois. These would just need to be packaged with nice web pages to give a great website for stats junkies(See that example showing how Swedish decreased over time, then revived recently....or that other one showing German reaching the 100% Grail). The DDTP also uses churro as server which is an important brick for having translated package descriptions (which is now an achieved lenny release goal). And now, since this week-end, I think we can say that Pootle is partly in production. The Pootle server is now hooked directly to the VCS of some parts of Debian-Installer related packages (including the core D-I itself) and, since last night, I am not the only one using it...:-) That small bit:

Author: pootle-guest
Date: Sun Jul 13 20:48:15 2008
New Revision: 54294
Log:
Commit from Debian/Pootle l10n server by user pi. 413 of 413 messages translated (0 fuzzy).
Modified:
   trunk/packages/po/sublevel3/eu.po

... indeed shows that Piarres Beobide Ega a, the Basque team coordinator, just committed an update to D-I SVN, through Pootle. We're still working on organizing all that scattered stuff, to finally turn churro into the central point for Debian localization and internationalization work but I think that the i18n team can really be proud of the achieved work, already. PS: as churro turned out to be hard to pronounce for German mouths, please note that it is also called 'spaetzle' :-)

Good movie. Two great irish actors (Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson), a wonderful fuckin' city which is just like a fairy tale and a quite crazy story. A few hilarious moments, the best of which for me being that sentence (transcript from my understanding): "Bruges is not too crowded. Would it be elsewhere than in Belgium, it would be overcrowded". And the film even features the two actors facing 'The Last Judgement' by Hyeronymus Bosch, a triptych where I remember spending more than one full hour just watching, in Groeningue Museum (if you happen to go in Bruges, go there!).

Max Stotsky reported bug #490000 on Wednesday July 9th. Yet another i18n-related bug for a round number mark: "apt-cache search and ddtp". As bug #480000 was reported as of May 7th 2008, we're still keeping nearly exactly the pace of 2 months for 10,000 bugs, so 60,000bugs a year. Bug #500000 should then be reported around Sept 9th 2008. As a consequence, the candidates for winning the 500000th bug contest are still Miguel Gea or Kartik Mistry. The probability that they win iw now indeed very high as our bug reporting pace is obviously very constant. I will therefore not win the contest (which many people already lost as they predicted dates that are now in the past) See you around September 9th for celebrating Debian having half a million bugs in 15 years.

It's never too late. Today, I finally figured out that "TIA", which I see here and there in mails, is meaning "Thanks in advance". After about 20 years of electronic communication, it was about time. This is a great time for this as I recently figured out "IANAL" and "TTBOMK". Always learning, finally. Time for me to use these now. I think I'll use their French version (which nobody uses) to make this as cryptic as those acronyms were for me:

• MDA == TIA
• PAQJLS == TTBOMK (actually PAQJLS is more AFAIK, but heh)
• JNSPUA == IANAL

...are the last remaining packages before I am happy (or before someone adds a package with templates or adds templates to a package) udev, nut, flash-kernel, dtc, root-system are the additional missing ones before my German friends are happy. Your package is listed there? Make us happy, upload with translation fixes and win a beer at Debconf8 (or 9, or 10...). Your package is not listed there? Make us happy by NOT uploading with new or changed debconf templates without sending a call for translation update (hint: "man podebconf-report-po"). Anyway, this rush to 100% is much much more peaceful and easy than the same rush for Etch (where I think that French sustained 100% for about one week).

Today, two friends of mine (and friends of many readers of Planet Debian) are getting married. Too far away from here, indeed, but I send them all the best for this day and wish them the best for the upcoming dozens of years. The Debian community is anything but a virtual community and they're proving it today. Gl ckw nsche, Meike und Alex

My random thoughts of the day go to the "triggers" feature in dpkg. The addition of that feature triggered a lot of noise, discussions and flames a few months ago. Actually more about the way it was added and the schedule that was followed, more than the feature itself. No need to come back on this. That's Debian's life...:-) These days are over: the feature is here. And frankly I love it even though I probably don't understand more than 10% of it... Today, I ran quite huge "dist-upgrade" of my laptop (where I try to stick with unstable) after 3...days not upgrading it. And I noticed that:

.../...
D paquetage de la mise   jour de foo
Pr paration du remplacement de foo
.../...
Param trage de foo
.../...
Traitement des   d clenchements (triggers)   pour   menu  ...
.../...

(isn't the French localization of dpkg rocking?). So, as I understand, update-menus is now only called once per run instead of being launched on every package configuration. If I'm correct, this is what triggers are for. And, frankly, that rocks. This is one of these improvements that will never be noticed by Joe Random User, but exactly one that makes our favourite distro and its derivatives the best all around. So, that random blog post is dedicated to all people who made this possible. Such things are the reason I'm still stuck to Debian after so many years.

Yesterday, I again got a stupid thing like:

: host YYYYYYYYYYY.de[AA.BB.CC.DDa] said: 550
    5.7.0 ... We don't accept mail from SPAM-friendly
    providers (in reply to RCPT TO command)

That's insane. Do people really want to communicate? This was about a bug in a Debian package and the above is the address used by the maintainer in his package. Dude, when you put your name in a package, please accept that people will want to send you mail and will want to be able to do so *easily*. The original mail was sent from my home server, hosted on a fixed IP address of the French ISP provider Free. The address has reverse DNS resolution and my system never sent spam or never was used to send spam. Free has a policy to block outboind port 25 for its customers unless they explicitely request to open it...which is IMHO the best compromise to avoid thousands of zombie Windows computers to send out spam. Blocking random blocks of IP addresses because they are "used by ISP customers" or because "one should us one's ISP mail server" is nonsense. This is not the Internet I knew and this is not the Internet I want. I don't see any reason why my home server would be worse than Free mail servers. I know what spam is. I receive tons of it and I had to take measures to limit and filter it. These measures never involved such stupid blocking by IP address and silly blacklisting. I use the Internet to communicate and I want people to be able to reach me, not going through weird ways to find their route to my precious mail address. That was the random rant of the day. I know many people will maybe comment on why Filtering Is Good or why I Shouldn't Be Sending Mail Directly But Use My ISP. Feel free to do so but also think about it: aren't we using mail to freely communicate? Blocking IP addresses randomly is just the poor man's solution to spam.

And the packages that drove me nuts today are....root-system and mxallowd. Congratulations, people, you succeeded in turning me mad the same day by introducing debconf templates without any prior call for translations. So, another move back for translation teams. As a reward for that, please expect an *immediate* l10n NMU proposal by /me. Maybe, some day, people will *learn*. I can dream... Besides that, these packages are packages indeed coming out of NEW. I should maybe talk with the ftpmasters and see if we can enforce maintainers who introduce new packages with debconf stuff to actually:

• ask for a templates review on d-l-english
• send a call for translations

Yesterday, I looked at the status of debconf translations for the three top languages in the current ranking. French and German will make it definitely. I can fairly easily NMU packages which are slow, if needed (but for most that won't be needed, except maybe udev where Marco is.....somewhere). Of course, being the nasty person I am, I'll arrange so that French makes it before German..:-) However, Portuguese will not, IMHO. There are way too many missing translations so even though they're 96% or so, I don't think I can successfully push enough packages at the same time. Apparently, the Portuguese team has been neglecting the *needed updates* for translations they already sent in the past. Sorry, guys, you'll stay hosed around 96-99% probably. Unless some miracle happens.

In bug #480478, Robert Millan proposes adding the backports.org keyring package to Debian main so that our users benefit from it and may use packages from backports.org, if they want to. As one would expect, it turns out that some zealots (did I say 'bigots'?) followed up to mention that bpo is not an official Debian service and why should we promote the use of non official services and blah and blah and blah. There was even a mention of freeness! For $ DEITY 's sake, could some people land back on earth? Even thoug bpo is not an official service, it is one of the best services that's offered to our users. And it is maintained By DDs and not the worse of us. It is even pretty useful for us, the very pure Debian developers...just run "dpkg -s git-code" on Alioth and make your mind... I sincerely hope that the debian-backports-keyring will make its way in main. Really. We still have a few users who didn't switch to Ubuntu and we really should make some efforts to keep them unless we want indeed what some people seem to want: having the DD's as the only users of Debian.

Marc, from my experience, there is no 'secret' in the console-tools/kbd migration work. Just low involvment of all parties. I have watched the work on console handling stuff in Debian for a few years now, and my conclusion is just that nearly nobody cares about it now. I do maintain console-data that provides console fonts and keymaps. I took it over slowly from Alastair McKinstry (the console-tools maintainer mentioned in Marc's blog entry) because that involved maintaining localization of keymap names....that are used and visible in the installer. Ideas to switch the installer to console-setup and related tools are floating around. Just not achieved...because of lack of motivated manpower. Progress was made because of Anton Zinoviev and Colin Watson's work, but the project is currently hosed on a quite critical choice:

• either ask about keymap layout during install, but that requires internationalization of the model/layout names...that are in an XML file. Nobody worked on this and this is therefore a blocker.
• or use the Ubuntu way to set the keymap (by asking users to type keys and guess the right keymap from that). Colin already said to the D-I team that this is basically a big hack...but, well, it works.

About console-tools being installed by default: this is the consequence of it being Important while kbd is Extra. I think it should be up to kbd maintainers to push the change up. But this brings us back to the initial remark: indeed, now nobody cares about console handling, particularly when it comes at handling non-English environments. Those who still use the console in Linux environments apparently all do it with US keyboards and an English locale. For sure, kbd is more maintained than console-tools so, at least, we should switch to it. Funnily, our installer (even the graphical version) *still* relies on console keymaps during the installation process and, therefore, we rely on mostly unmaintained stuff here (people who think that I maintain console-data are plain wrong: I just keep it surviving...:-))

After last 2.6.25 kernel again dropped support for /proc/acpi, I decided to move forward and try removing things which depend on it on my laptop. That actually involved switching from klaptopdaemon to kpowersave. This is really a must do. I don't know if this happened in KDE tasks but if it is not, we should think about it. Not only is kpowersave properly using /sys/class/power_supply instead of /proc/acpi/battery, but it seems much more powerful and providing reliable information. PS: that /sys interface seems nice but finding where the hell information is stored is really a nightmare: "/sys/class/power_supply" is damn anti-natural to me... And, well, this is probably the 4th or 5th change for system information in Linux. Sometimes, I regret the stability of Windows when it comes at this (/me runs away).