...Christian, but you can use 'bubulle' if you like, provided you pronounce it properly, ie the French way (b b l'). This is actually what most French(-speaking) DDs do. There is a special exception for Amaya, who uses "boubouy " in her Sprenchglish. I am proud of "bubulle", indeed. The nickname was given to me in the old days of BBS and *very* early Linux development in France, by Ren Cougnenc, *the* French Linux zealot of these years (and translator of a huge number of books/HOWTO/documentations). Ren , who I always dedicate my talks to, found it on a night in a bar back in...1990 or 1991, when we were getting heavily drunk with a few fellow friends, some of which became FreeBSD committers later (there is probably a link somewhere). "bulle" means "bubble" in French and you find bubbles in Perrier water....on the other hand "bubulle" is the name of the goldfish of Gaston Lagaffe, a pretty famous comic character from Belgian cartoonist Andr Franquin. Linking the two lead to "bubulle" which I never left, particularly since Ren decided to leave that world in July 1996. So, feel free to call me "bubulle" and when doing so, drink a pint to the memory of Ren . Late addition: I just found the very last electronic contribution Ren sent me (in newsgroups). For those who read French, this is really typical Ren -ish.

As one of the maintainers of the iso-codes package, I feel somewhat ashamed to carry that name today. I just proposed my fellow co-maintainers that we take some symbolic action as a kind of protest in the next upstream release of iso-codes. As a French citizen, I'm ashamed that my country's standard organisation, AFNOR, finally turned its planned NO vote into an abstention at the very last minute. It would have been the only european NO vote as far as I can see from unofficial records of who voted what. Kudos to Brazil, Canada, Ecuador, India, New Zealand, South Africa, Venezuela. I should add China to this but the current actions in Tibet prevent me from doing that. And I can't really support dictatures like Cuba and Iran. (of course, I'm talking about OOXML becoming a 'standard', you'd have guessed, right?)

Today is the last birthday of my twenties. Just turning 2F.

I just booked my flight tickets. Sadly, the rate went up from EUR902 to EUR1080 since Feb. 27th...:-( Anyway, I'll be there. Now I have to register the i18n sessions (yes, faw, I didn't do it already).

After almost two years, a new version of freefont has been released. Credits go to Steve White who took over the maintainance and to bubulle who took care of reviewing and uploading the new package, and who kept the project alive through the Debian BTS during all these months of inactivity.

The first democratic elections were held in Bhutan yesterday. This is an important step on the transition from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy, for the small himalayan kingdom which I already blogged quite a lot about. Sorry for that, I fell in love with that country. The 47 seats of the National Assembly were to be filled in by a two-round vote: voters first vote for parties (two of which registered: DPT and APP). The two winning parties (well, there were only two, so....) then field candidates in the consistuencies. As anyone can see, there's still some work to do to reach the democracy we all experience in the so-called western countries. As usual, this is the bhutanese way to do things: slowly, at their own pace, but consistently. Just compare this with their giant northern neighbour who's currently in the news for their democratic behaviour in Tibet... Ass BBC News says on their web site, "At a time when the future of democracy is uncertain in several countries in South Asia, Bhutan may be heading in the right direction.". And, remember, we're talking about a country who made the choice of Free Software, also..:-)

Today, while working on an l10n NMU for a package (gnarwl), I got magic lintian complain about "missing dependency on libc". And, indeed, that package provides C binaries that are linked against the libc...but does not depend on it. This is because the package has "$ shlibs:Depends " in Depends but does not run "dh_shlibdeps" in debian/rules. That bug will soon be fixed by my NMU but aren't most of the package who have the same lintian warning in the same situation?

This morning, I ranted about uncoordinated introduction of debconf templates. It happens that part of my rant went on citadel maintainers, at least one of which (Michael Meskes) being someone I have good respect for his work in Debian...and who's generally translators-aware. He bringed me an interesting argument to explain why the maintenance team did not call for translations and templates review before uploading the new package: NEW processing. They weren't apparently so sure about the package being accepted and, thus, did not want to add extra work for nothing. So, they first wanted to get the package in the archive before working on other stuff. This is indeed a valid objection to my rant and I very happily post apologies for this rant as Michael promised me he would call for review/translations just now. I still think that new packages with debconf templates should ask for a review in debian-l10n-english, though..:-)

• I guess i'm boring but... at Rob Bradford's Weblog - I'd find an alterslash-style Skip link more useful than the recently-added "Hide Author" links on planet.debian. Also, why does google put that in a bookmarklet instead of using a simple link?
• Debian, and other stuff Trying to launch emacs only when needed - can emacsclient run elisp? It would be really useful to be able to remote-control Emacs like that.
• Bubulle's weblog: F1 and anthems - at least France has an anthem... England doesn't. The slightly-religious/King-supported/used-at-cricket/Labour-linked Jerusalem and pretty-aggressive/Conservative-linked Land of Hope and Glory are often used, but aren't official.
• Write a new license, every day - Ganneff's Little Blog - this is why I was scared SPI might create a new licence for the debian logo by accident, instead of using the MIT/Expat one requested.

That time of the release process now came where I will rant about uncoordinated introduction of debconf templates. Given the release timeframe, I started the very same work I did for etch: try to get as many debconf translations as possible in place. Of course, in the same time, these efforts are balanced by maintainers of packages who introduced new debconf templates without coordinating with debian-i18n for their localization and without sending calls for translations first. The answer is easy: use podebconf-report-po! This nice utility comes along with po-debconf and should indeed be marked Essential..:-) The bad guys of the day: citadel and ttf-mathematica4.1. Both combined add 18 strings without any effort to get translatons in. The bad guys of last days: bgoffice-dict-download, movabletype-opensource. As expected, most languages statistics will go down by tomorrow despite the simultaneous efforts of maintainers and /me to complete most other packages. Please, fellow Debian developers: it is now time to stop changing the bloody debconf templates.

Nobse, why insist on watching such a boring spectacle? :-) The only good moment in a F1 Grand Prix happens when a Ferrari car wins and we can listen to "Fratelli d'Italia", the italian national anthem and, by far, my favourite national anthem. At least the music is among my favourites...the words, as often in national anthems, carry a nationalist philosophy which I don't really share. This includes our French "Marseillaise" and its "Make impure blood soak our fields' furrows". We should use a "lalala" version, just like they're doing in Spain for the "Marcha Real". The French version of Wikipedia gives interesting explanations about the controversy for La Marseillaise words. Strangely, the English version does not.

I just added a blog category in my good old Blosxom blog with gathered stats about the progress of various languages towards the 100% Grail for lenny (NMU campaign in progress...which will last until the lenny release). It is not syndicated in Planet Debian as this could sound boring to others. If you want to follow this, just go there. PS: all this is completely manual. No automation involved...:-). And, yes, it's named "l10n-fr" but all top-leading languages are followed. And, this time, the goal is to bring as many of them as possible to 100% (French, German, Portuguese can make it...I'm unsure for Czech).

Dirk, 1h36 is my current time for about 17km (so, slightly over 10miles with those funky units that are used in weird places). So, please don't imply that is is slow..:-) I lowered the run distances last weeks because of that longstanding ankle tendinite. It apparently comes from new shoes, indeed. Apparently, their back is too hard for my ankle and I'll need to change them. I'll probably go back to my EUR15 shoes which I (re)started running with and never disappointed me.

Back in February, I worked on packages providing badly encoded changelog files. With the removal of gmanedit from testing and unstable (Gnome 1.x removal process) and the ack that perl wrongly changelog encoding is mostly upstream's changelog (which will be hopefully fixed), I think its OK, now, to announce that this lenny release goal is achieved. Thanks to Bas Zoetekouw who did the mass bug filing which helped a lot tracking this down. We could now imagine tracking down badly encoded debian/copyright files... PS: above, "badly" means "using national encoding"...which is generally ISO-stoneage^W8859-1.

Bubulle asked about whether anyone has computed the number of bugs open (and by inference close) and I've just found a link from the DD statistics pages:
Debian Bug Tracking System News - These are the bugs touched during the last four hours. The data will be updated in 40 minutes.
Active Bugs 110443 (+9) 9230042 kb
Archived Bugs 366389 (+0) 24156850 kb
Debian NEW closable bugs 41
Source packages in incoming.debian.org 19
Package movement for testing +17 -2
Orphaned packages 360
Popularity contest Debian 76404 (+0) Ubuntu 448702 (+0)
Total registered dpkg/apt Users 525106

There's an RSS feed too.

Sledge blogged about "running again". For one second, I imagined he just joined the ever growing club of DD who happen to use running as a way to escape from hacking and, as a consequence, run a marathon next August in mar Del Plata. Then I realized he's "just" running for DPL..:-). Sigh. This confirms me that I'll be left with a though choice between 3 people I have great confidence in.

...is continuing to neglect our key packages. We have ridiculous numbers of maintainers on some of them. Mentioning dpkg right now is probably not appropriate but there have been not more than 4 people active on it (including Ian Jackson despite the recent events). Just look at its bugs database. APT is maintained by Michael Vogt and Otavio Salvador, both involved in (too?) many other parts of the distribution. Just look at its bugs database. aptitude is maintained by Daniel Burrows alone (my help for l10n doesn't really count). Just look at its bugs database. Despite the tremendous work of the XSF, X.Org bugs decrease quite slowly and I don't doubt that in case one of the current 3-4 people who are very hard-working on it are swaped by real life, we'd be in trouble. I could find dozens of these, probably. In the same time, we're still seeing tons of ITPs for different pieces of junk^W software which I really wonder about us needing them. We should maybe reconsider the implicit encouragements we are giving to new applicants to maintain "their" package. We'd probably better encourage them to *adopt* an existing package and rank these by order of priority or popcon score. Stop having that damn archive growing and expand the outbounds of the Debian galaxy. We'd better take care of the inside black hole.

I spent part of my Sunday on samba yesterday. After all, that ankle tendinite I have for nearly two weeks now has some benefits for Debian: I don't waste hours running on week-ends. Samba 3.0.28a was announced by upstream and I worked to package it. Not really difficult and the package is already ready. It again minimizes the numer of Debian patches: we're slowly converge back towards upstream. Meanwhile, Steve uploaded a new release of 3.0.28, introducing the use of ucf to manage smb.conf changes. He slightly messed up in the update and, therefore got 3 RC bugs in a row for the same problem (#470138, #470139, #470140...and even #470142 to complete the picture). Good score, Steve. One beer for me next Debconf...:-)...The breakage was fixed a few hours later. So, conclusion: we apparently have active users who are committed to reports errors. Good...:-) As soon as 3.0.28-4 makes its way to unstable *and* the automated Ubuntu merge-o-matic, I'll probably upload 3.0.28a, not really waiting for 3.0.28-4 to enter testing (we already have 3.0.28 in testing). Another work in the pipe is the preparation of samba 3.2.0. Upstream released RC2 last week and I did early work to package it (for experimental as of now). However, that release incorporates most parts of our "FHS" patch, for better compliance to the FHS, as well as several other patches we pushed to them. And, as these weren't applied as is, some checks have to be done. Moreover, some other changes seem to be needed to get the package to compile. And, finally, we need to merge back recent changes from the trunk branch (such as the ucf support). All this is a way too high barrier for me and I'll need Steve to take that load, which he promised to do (and so *will* do, I know him enough....). When all this will be settled down, it will be time to jump in the BTS and fight with some old bugs of the package.

Pierre Habouzit reported bug #470000 on Saturday March 8th instead of taking care of Habouzit Jr. Shame on him. Double shamre: that was an RC bug. He really should hijack that gromacs package which sounds to me as a special version of EMacs for the Groland country (fr_FR joke). As bug #460000 was reported as of January 11th 2008, we're still keeping the pace of 2 months for 10,000 bugs, so 60,000bugs a year. Bug #500000 should then be reported around Sept 10th 2008. As a consequence, the candidates for winning the 500000th bug contest are still Miguel Gea or Kartik Mistry. I still plan some MBF to keep chances of winning the contest myself. I also expect the lenny release to speed that up. See you around May 10th for bug #480000! PS: has anyone tried to plot compute the number of bugs we *close* in the same amount of time?

Riku Voipio just sent a "bits from armel porters" in debian-devel-announce (sorry, no link: I'm offline while writing this). I just want to point out that the success of armel becoming an official architecture is also due to the very clever and efficient way the porters interacted with maintainers. As a very small example, Riku recently sent a bug report about samba for armel-related issues and this bug report was full of useful and precise information. Even without Steve Langasek endorsing the fixes, I would have applied the suggested changes even though I don't understand a single bit of it: just because it was so obvious that Riku knew what he was talking about. As Riku points in his announce mail: this is a great succes and this also demonstrate that good interaction between package maintainers in Debian can still happen, despite some general perception that maintainers are "grumpy".