For people who have interest in the development of gender equity in FLOSS development, here's a short news item. Yesterday, the Samba Team announced the "pre2" version of samba 3.2.0, scheduled to be released during the SambaXP conference next month in G ttingen (to German friends around: of course, I'll be there: Apr 14-18). That release was announced by Karolin Seeger, whoc is now replacing Jerry Carter as Samba's release manager. As far as I know, Karolin is indeed the first female memer of the Samba Team (which includes about 20-30 people). Guess what: that release seems to be a pretty good one. I'm already working on the Debian package. The release is indeed the first one to include many patches we bringed from Debian, for instance those aimed at following the FHS. Steve Langasek is the one to be rewarded for this as he bringed very valuable input in the discussion I had with Jerry Carter to convince him to include these patches..:-)

Last week-end, I spent 3 days with Elizabeth and our daughters in a recreation park. Basically doing nothing, just rest and enjoy time passing without a net connection...:-) I just was infortunate enough to have an ankle tendinite and therefore could only run once on a "short" distance while a great running circuit in the forest was available (23km of paths in the woods, sigh). I however had the great pleasure to re-enjoy sauna. I didn't practice it since Debconf 5 where most of the Debian crowd discovered how great are those Finns who invented this. So, we went to sauna two days in a row. Of course, that was a kinda civilized sauna: no fully naked people, no lake to jump into when exiting (but a cold water pool, though) and only 94 degrees at the very maximum (when I could pour water on the stones without looking like a freak)....but, still. That was sauna and that was great. And we also had hammam to make interesting sauna/hammam/sauna combinations. And, guess what: the ankle tendinite is not there anymore. Is sauna also good for that? Are there saunas in Mar del Plata?

I'm just back for 45 minutes during this week-end and seeing the ITP madness that currently floods -devel, I'm just getting mad about it. Debian seems to become crazy: we get people popping up and intending to package tons of varous things while dozens of our key packages are rotting in the BTS with bugs piling up over dust because they need new blod to clean them up and keep them alive. Please wake up: what about *maintaining* what we have right now instead of packaging the 42th lightweight HTTP daemon written in <insert obscure programming language name here> while everybody setting up a webserver just installs Apache? :-) PS: I knew I shouldn't have read mail...:-)

Noting comments by bubulle and Debian-uk preparations, I've started looking at flights for Debconf8 with an eye to actually making a booking.
There appears that there will be a variety of Debian-ites hanging around Madrid airport and catching an apparently very limited number of flights to Buenos Aires as I seem to only be able to find 2 flights a day between Madrid and Buenos Aires.
Bubulle notes a connection from Paris to Madrid, I (and most of the UK team) would need a connection from London to Madrid. For some bizarre reason, leaving from Gatwick is more expensive than leaving from Heathrow. That's a PITA for me because my return flight home leaves from Gatwick.
More annoying is that the evening flight is much more expensive than the (very) early morning flight. So much so that it comes out at almost double the cost of even a relatively expensive hotel for the night.
My current ruminations revolve around:

flight  780.62   	- Expedia Special Fare

07:25 Depart London (LHR) 

Arrive Buenos Aires (EZE) 19:25 	Fri 1-Aug



13:25 Depart Buenos Aires (EZE)

Arrive London (LHR) 10:05  tip+1 day 	Sun 17-Aug

The arrival back in London is good for me because it provides plenty of time to get between Heathrow and Gatwick, even on a Sunday.
I guess London is a little further from Madrid than Paris - my trip comes out at over 1,000 compared to 900 from Paris. Can't really justify a return Eurostar for that difference.
(Yes, I'm travelling out for DebCamp too.)

Some more information about my current research for flights to Debconf. First of all, the conditions:

• Departure from Paris, either Orly or Charles de Gaulle, Aug 8th
• Arrival to Buenos Aires
• Return on Aug 17th

All this is non negotiable The best quote is still EUR902, which I obtained for an Air Europa flight (Paris-Madrid-Buenos Aires) on www.expedia.fr. The same flight is quoted higher is many other booking sites...including www.aireuropa.com. Moray Alan pointed me to www.checkfelix.at which is indeed one of the most convenient search engines around...but it misses my EUR902 quote... Don't ask why the very same flight booked from Madrid, thus direct is much more expensive: that's the joy of air transportation where nothing is logical (except in terms of getting the most out of your pocket, of course). Probably more random results to come in my blog in the next days/weeks. I hope that all this is already useful for some of you.

Here comes this time of the year where I try booking a flight to go to Debconf. That roughly means finding the cheapest way to go from CDG to EZE (Buenos Aires airport code). And, as usual, that means finding the crazyness of flight prices: the cheapest I found as of now is EUR902 with Air Europa through Madrid. The funniest is that the very same flight, *from Madrid*, costs EUR1407. Air France, which has a daily direct flight from Paris to Buenos Aires, is very expensive for me (EUR1150) and I bet that it could be as low as EUR900 for people coming.....from outside France, with a connection. That seems to be the interesting effect of airline companies trying to attract passengers to their long distance hubs. In short, I would bet that at least for all European people around, the cheapest route to Buenos Aires will be a route with a connection somewhere lese in Europe. So, even if one lives close to one of the biggest hubs in Europe, you nearly have no chance to use the direct flights it has to many places around...unless you're ready to pay for it.

I'm not going to FOSDEM, you bastards !

...where naming "server" the free software project you were developing durung your PhD was possible:

bubulle@mykerinos:~/tmp/server-0.5> ls -l
total 408
-rwxr-x--- 1 bubulle bubulle     50 jan 10  1992 bad
-rwxr-x--- 1 bubulle bubulle     58 jan 10  1992 clear
-rw-r----- 1 bubulle bubulle     57 jan 10  1992 debug
-rwxr-x--- 1 bubulle bubulle     52 jan 10  1992 good
-rw-r----- 1 bubulle bubulle    987 jan 14  1992 local.h
-rwxr-x--- 1 bubulle bubulle     43 jan 10  1992 mine
-rwxr-x--- 1 bubulle bubulle  52140 jan 14  1992 myserver
-rw-r----- 1 bubulle bubulle      0 jan 10  1992 pcsa.in
-rw-r----- 1 bubulle bubulle      0 jan 10  1992 pcsa.out
-rwxr-x--- 1 bubulle bubulle     30 jan 10  1992 pss
-rwxr-x--- 1 bubulle bubulle  40960 jan 10  1992 server
-rw-r----- 1 bubulle bubulle  47906 jan 15  1992 server.c
-rw-r----- 1 bubulle bubulle   4632 jan 15  1992 server.h
-rw-r----- 1 bubulle bubulle     62 jan 10  1992 services
-rwxr-x--- 1 bubulle bubulle 228572 jan 10  1992 sockspy
-rwxr-x--- 1 bubulle bubulle     43 jan 10  1992 theirs

Reading that 50k source file shows:

/*
Unix file server for Pathworks for DOS.
Version 0.5.
Copyright (C) Andrew Tridgell 1992.

I wonder if we could re-package this for Debian, 16 years after. Anyone feeling like ITP this?

After my blog post from Saturday and yet another call on debian-i18n, the number of complete languages bumped to 35 with Traditional Chinese, Nepali, Malayalam, Hebrew, Hindi joining the dance. Now complete: bg cs de eo es eu fi fr gl gu he hi it ja ko lt lv ml nb ne nl nn pl pt pt_BR ro ru sk sl sv ta th vi zh_CN zh_TW Incomplete:

 2 099% hu
   099% pa      2
 3 098% be
   098% ca
   098% dz
   098% sq      4
 4 097% bn      1
 5 094% ar      1
 6 093% bs
   093% da
   093% el
   093% et
   093% hr
   093% id
   093% ka
   093% km
   093% mk
   093% tl
   093% tr
   093% uk
   093% wo      13
 7 090% am      1
 8 088% ku      1

Great sunny winter time today over our area. Cold in the morning just as I like. Woke up early enough to have plenty of time in the morning. That was the perfect day to try pushing off my running limits (currently a half-marathon in 2h30). So, I ended up visiting Les Mesnuls, Mareil le Guyon, Bazoches sur Guyonne and all such nice names of my local area. This is the red line on my local Google map. Result: 26.6km, 2h28. W00t. Happy bubulle.

After working on badly encoded debian/control files, I began working on badly encoded changelog files. Again, most packages with that problem are packages that hadn't any upload for a while (the plethora of libroxen-* packages, for instance), so after a short notice, I began NMUs today. Except for a few packages where the maintainer mentioned (s)he prefers doing the upload (hurry up, Javier!), I expect dealing with that issue pretty soon and therefore fill in one of the release goals for Lenny.

We now have 30 complete languages in D-I: bg cs de eo es eu fi fr gl gu it ja ko lt lv nb nl nn pl pt pt_BR ro ru sk sl sv ta th vi zh_CN Some progress was made for others, but I doubt we reach my unofficial target of 40 languages by Thursday February 14th which is the deadline set by Otavio, D-I release manager. Incomplete languages:

 2 099% he
   099% hu
   099% pa      3
 3 098% be
   098% ca
   098% dz
   098% ml
   098% sq
   098% zh_TW   6
 4 097% bn
   097% ne      2
 5 094% ar      1
 6 093% bs
   093% da
   093% el
   093% et
   093% hi
   093% hr
   093% id
   093% ka
   093% km
   093% mk
   093% tl
   093% tr
   093% uk
   093% wo      14
 7 090% am      1
 8 088% ku      1

Translators, hurry up, please! We are in the process of *losing* translations for lenny if some of you don't wake up.

In today's annoucement of the release update, Marc Brockschmidt mentioned the release goal to make UTF-8-clean control and changelog files. I was also working on Pootle for i18n.debian.net and such non clean files for linux-doc-html-pt and linux-doc-text-pt were annoying me. So, I just decided to NMU these packages and fix the 20th century ISO-8859-1 encoding they use in debian/control. As this was easy, I decided to NMU (0-day....all these packages had longstanding bug reports while the fix is trivial) all other packages with badly encoded debian/control files and, as of tonight, there should not be such files anymore in unstable. Maintainers with badly encoded debian/changelog, watch out for your asses, I could decide for such a campaign for your stuff. So, please fix this: this is as easy as using "iconv".

(no, I won't make a daily post) After one day only, and a general call for updates, we went up to 22 complete languages for D-I level 1. +4

Otavio is currently busy preparing the first release of D-I for lenny. He is still polishng the release schedule but, as part of the process, I sent a call for translation updates today. The starting point is: 59 activated languages (including English) but 'only' 18 of them are 100%. For others:

1 100% bg
   100% cs
   100% de
   100% es
   100% eu
   100% fr
   100% gl
   100% gu
   100% it
   100% ja
   100% ko
   100% nl
   100% pt
   100% ru
   100% sk
   100% sv
   100% vi
   100% zh_CN   18
 2 099% hu      1
 3 098% be
   098% ca
   098% dz
   098% eo
   098% he
   098% ml
   098% nb
   098% nn
   098% pl
   098% pt_BR
   098% ro
   098% sq
   098% ta
   098% th
   098% zh_TW   15
 4 097% bn
   097% lt
   097% ne
   097% pa      4
 5 094% ar      1
 6 093% bs
   093% da
   093% el
   093% et
   093% fi
   093% hi
   093% hr
   093% id
   093% ka
   093% km
   093% lv
   093% mk
   093% sl
   093% tl
   093% tr
   093% uk
   093% wo      17
 7 090% am      1
 8 085% ku      1

Languages at 93% had no single updates since Etch. For these, I have some worries and I fear we could 'lose' some if their translator disappeared. Amharic and Kurdish never reached 100% yet but they have translated the most important strings, so we'll probably keep them. So, in short, the message to translators is: *move*. You have about 2 weeks.

When filing an ITP, Thou shalt read Developer's Reference 6.2.2:

• leading articles suck
• capital letters suck
• sentences suck
• jargon sucks

A lot of Debian packages description really suck, indeed. Bubulle resolution of the day: read ITP and nag proponents about synopsis writing style. Other developers/maintainers resolution of the day: get back to your packages descriptions and think about them twice after reading DevRef 6.2.2 and 6.2.3.

...install a Babelbox, de-activate the "db_info babelbox/info" line in preseed_early and put the following in big capitals on a sheet of paper attached to the monitor:

BABELBOX CONTEST
Guess what language is used to install
that Debian system.

...and wait for the crowd to slowly gather around the box and start guessing. If you can offer stickers pins CDs to winners, that's even better. Hint: do not activate easy to guess languages. Good candidates (apart from all non Latin ones which are all *very* hard to recognize for the regular French geek, except maybe Japanese) are Hungarian, Basque, Slovenian. Arabic is too easy to recognize and so is Greek. Indic languages are a great success but Dzongkha is generally the winner. Hint 2: do not sort languages alphabetically by locales. Geeks are too smart and the geeks manning the booth will learn too quickly. Watch also people trying to switch to a console during the D-I runs and typing "cat /proc/cmdline". Hint 3: train yourself to recognize the languages before the contest so that you look clever... That worked pretty well during 1st day of Solutions Linux.

That's what happened to my /usr this morning during my daily dist-upgrade. Sigh. I probably have too many things that I installed once to get a look at and forgot to remove. Time to clean that laptop out again..:-)

Joey, just don't delay your releases waiting for incoming translations. Gettext is anyway smart enough to not use translations when they're non-existing (aha) of fuzzy. So, an incomplete translation for a program will just end up in a partially translated program. That's actually the case for *many* localized software, including the big ones. I suggest that you apply such a schedule:

• Plan a release
• Send call for translations (hint: podebconf-report-po is your friend even for non debconf translations...see its man page) and give translators a deadline. The deadline has to be reasonable and leave some room for translation proofreading. Most often, when few strings are impacted (say not more than 20 but, again, that's hard to judge)
• When the deadline is reached, upload release with what you have
• A few days weeks later, eventually release a new version with late translations

But, as you suspected, releasing without synchronised translations is the better choice....as long as you care abou tsending call for updates when needed. BTW, if you need some help to coordinate incoming translations for apt-key, maybe ask on debian-i18n and someone will eventually pop up (hopefully, not /me).

The dpkg maintenance team just changed the priority of the good old dselect from Important to Optional. Simultaneously, overrides were changed by FTP masters. As a consequence, dselect will no longer be installed by default when installing a "standard" Debian system. Thanks to the dpkg maintainers for the first move (Required->Important), as well as Joey Hess who suggested to downgrade from Important to Optional. Old timers, this is time for a little tear in memory of dselect..:-)...as well as a thought to people who wrote and maintained it (it is still in the archive and part of dpkg source package but noone really maintains it, now). Time to hunt a few more "Important" packages that should be downgraded.