Raphael Geissert reported bug
#460000.
As bug #450000 was reported as of November 9th 2007, this roughly gives 2
months for 10,000 bugs, so 60,000bugs a year. Bug #500000 should then be
reported around Sept 10th 2008. So, the current candidates for winning a
href="http://people.debian.org/~bubulle/500000.html">the 500000th
bug contest are Miguel Gea or Kartik Mistry.
I should plan a few MBF to keep chances of winning the contest myself.
My son Jean-Baptiste turns 20 today and I have this strange feeling of
big pride and seeing time flowing around me. I still see that little
thing I discovered on Jan 10th 1988 and compare it to the current
young man who conducts his life pretty well (no gf as of now, I'm
always surprised that none discovered the gem JB is....).
This year will anyway be a year of big pride with Sophie turning 18
(age of majority, driving license, french 'baccalaureat'....) and
Magali turning 16.
So, well, I just wanted to share this with people who're still not
bored with that blog.
dpkg and apt have been uploaded the same day to unstable. Why do I suspect
that some things could break? :-)
shadow transitioned to testing today as well. So I think that Nicolas will soon upload shadow 4.1.0-1 to unstable. This one could bite, also.
During the work in the Smith project (reviewing debconf templates and
debian/control files for English usage), the most active reviewer is
Justin B. Rye (I would also mention M.J. Ray who's pretty active in this area too).
Justin has many qualities, one of which being great skills in
linguistics, which helps him proposing great improvements to things we
review (some errors of mine sometimes slip through his attention and are pointed by translators, but still...).
Additionnally, Justin has this great and so british way to say fun things half-seriously which sometimes makes my day. Today was a great one, with me simply laughing out loud alone in my daily train when reading this one:
(talking about jargon used in a package where maintainers mention 'compiling against the linux tree')
"only dogs and programmers do things against trees"
Justin, hat off, inpublic....:-)
So, after my previous entry, here's now a small list of the oldest bugs still opened in Debian BTS:
This week-end, among other things, I played a little to get
the number of bugs reported overs years in the Debian BTS.
Here are the results:
2007: 53337 2006: 59665 2005: 57436 2004: 62327 2003: 50836 2002: 47618 2001: 46289 2000: 27181 1999: 22448 1998: 15002 1997: 9987 1996: 4205 1995: 2158 First bug for each year: 2008: 458489 Petter Reinholdtsen -> sysqrd Closed (in unstable) 2007: 405152 Martin-Eric Racine -> myspell-lv Closed 2006: 345487 Erich Schubert -> lintian Opened 2005: 288051 Nick Sillik -> gstreamer-misc Closed 2004: 225724 Peter van Rossum -> mldonkey-server Closed 2003: 174888 Chris Garguzi -> hotkeys Closed 2002: 127270 root@ttimo.net ->libapache-mod-auth-pam Closed 2001: 80981 William Steve Applegate -> php4 Closed 2000: 53800 Hamish Moffatt -> sattrack Closed 1999: 31352 Richard Stallman -> dselect Opened LOOK THIS ONE 1998: 16350 Joey Hess -> xbase-clients Closed 1997: 6363 Andreas Jellinghaus -> mgetty-fax Closed 1996: 2158 Ian Jackson -> ncurses3.0 Closed 1995: 563 Ian Jackson -> tar ClosedA few interesting things there:
I don't often blog about movies we watch, but if you have the opportunity to
see that one by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, just go ("The lives of
Others" in en and "La vie des autres" in fr).
It's been ranked as "2007 movie" in many occasions and I'd vote for it as
well even though, technically, I watched it only yesterday.
Again, just go and watch it (if not done already, of course: you've maybe
been less lazy than we were....or you're German..:-)).
I get the following for quite a while when I boot:
Cannot open input directory: No such file or directoryThis appear very early in the boot process (before loading the initrd image?) even when booting in "quiet" mode (which I usually do as I don't like the usual bunch of verbosity). I wonder what this might be.... No real harm done: everything works as expected, just annoying.
Enrico's post about
the EeePC made me look closer to this thing. Wow.
I actually didn't know that this PC is not only designed to be cheap and
small and running Linux....but *also* has a custom Debian distribution
pre-installed. Given the various explanations given by Enrico, that seems to
be a killer CDD, indeed.
It's been a while since I want to install a machine for my father in law,
who's 85 without any computing skills. I was about to install a light Debian
system on a small laptop but I was really fearing that some quirks we
(geeks) never notice would be blockers. Apparently, Asus managed to polish
everything to a level that's suitable for the average user (making
compromises, of course, such as the user management system but, hey, when
one knows about the "user management" in Windows XP Home, that's still a
huge improvment).
So, the last blocker for /me to buy such a beast is the damn keyboard. I
can't imagine giving a machine without our beloved French AZERTY keyboard
(even to a non computer-skilled person: we have tons of appliances around
here, including the (in)famous Minital that do use this keymap). So, do Asus
sell these for exotic countries? :-). Of course, any hack like putting
stickers on a crappy QWERTY keyboard is out of question.
Some may remember that French translations of po-debconf templates happened to be 100% complete back in March. This happened only after a very long process of NMU'ing packages that are loosely maintained.
Many other translations did benefit from that effort and the overall status is impressive
What puzzles me is that we're now down to 97% because some packages changed existing templates or introduced new ones. Which is fine of course as this is most often meant to improve the quality of user interaction.
However, I *really* wonder why the maintainers who are so quick to
change templates are much much less fast to introduce translation
updates. From the reports I have, French, Czech, German and Portuguese
translations should be 100% if all bugs were fixed the very same
day. So, really, *why* are there so many packages below?
The table
gives all packages for which French is not complete, along with the
translation status ("bts" meaning that the update is sitting in the
BTS for XXX days). The same table could be built for several other languages, I'm afraid.
______________________
__________________ _____po-debconf______
______name________ __%__ ____details____
ampache 0/0/2 podebconf(bts, 72 days)
aolserver4 0t0f0u
apt-listchanges 95% 23/1/0 podebconf(lcfc, 3 days)
arcboot 50% 1/0/1 podebconf(bts, 28 days)
axyl 66% 12/2/4 podebconf(bts, 109 days)
axyl-lucene 80% 4/1/0 podebconf(bts, 119 days)
davfs2 0/9/8 podebconf(bts, 182 days)
docbookwiki 0/0/15 podebconf(bts, 113 days)
dtc-xen 84% 22/4/0 podebconf(bts, 233 days)
etckeeper 0/0/5 podebconf(bts, 6 days)
firebird2.0 93% 14/1/0 podebconf(bts, 9 days)
gcl 50% 2/2/0 podebconf(rfr, 1 days)
gclcvs 50% 2/2/0 podebconf(bts, 4 days)
interchange 71% 46/4/14 podebconf(bts, 111 days)
ipplan 42% 9/11/1 podebconf(lcfc, 6 days)
jspwiki 51% 15/14/0 podebconf(bts, 9 days)
kdesudo 0/0/2 podebconf(taf, 1 days)
libpam-mount 0/0/4 podebconf(rev, 8 days)
lirc 15% 8/28/15 podebconf(bts, 78 days)
mimedefang 50% 1/1/0 podebconf(rev, 7 days)
mksh 50% 2/0/2 podebconf(hold, 200 days)
norwegian 28% 2/2/3 podebconf(bts, 154 days)
nut 66% 4/2/0 podebconf(bts, 102 days)
openssl 50% 4/0/4 podebconf(bts, 39 days)
pam 0/0/8 podebconf(bts, 77 days)
pcd2html 50% 1/0/1 podebconf(rev, 9 days)
pimppa 0/0/31 podebconf(bts, 115 days)
playmidi 83% 5/1/0 podebconf(bts, 18 days)
postfix 93% 58/3/1 podebconf(done, 2 days)
proofgeneral 0/0/4 podebconf(bts, 29 days)
radiusd-livingsto 0/0/3 podebconf(bts, 204 days)
rkhunter 66% 4/0/2 podebconf(bts, 9 days)
roxen4 97% 40/1/0 podebconf(rfr, 1 days)
shorewall-common 87% 7/1/0 podebconf(rfr, 1 days)
slim 75% 3/1/0 podebconf(bts, 211 days)
tcp-wrappers 25% 1/3/0 podebconf(bts, 143 days)
tipcutils 0/0/17 podebconf(bts, 152 days)
uw-imap 42% 8/2/9 podebconf(bts, 114 days)
whereami 66% 2/1/0 podebconf(bts, 48 days)
wvdial 0/0/13
yiff 80% 4/1/0 podebconf(bts, 2 days)
zekr-quran-transl 0/0/12 podebconf(bts, 48 days)
zephyr 66% 2/1/0 podebconf(bts, 1 days)
__________________ _____ _______________
TOTAL (fr) 97% 9796/99/181
__________________ _____ _______________
So, do you want to make a Christmas gift to Debian translators and you
have a package above? Please upload a translation update...:-)
Today, I offered myself a nice Christmas gift: I ran my first half-marathon
since I resumed running last summer.
The day was ideal for this: because of a cold I didn't run yesterday so I
was full of energy. Quite low temperature (about -3 C) and wonderful
country, entirely frozen (the temperature doesn't raise much above zero
since about 2 weeks). It was indeed the perfect moment. Even Moon and Mars
still visible at the beginning (see former blog posts).
The last 4 kms were....awful and *very* long (whatever circuit I use here, I
always end up climbing up as we're located on a plateau dominating
surrounding valleys by about 80m). Thus, I completed the distance (21.5km
according to Google Maps) in 2h20
which is not that great but, hey, that's the first one...:-)
My legs will hurt today..:)
Waking up this morning at 06:00 and walking outside enjoying the Moon-Mars
conjunction in the western sky was....great (and cold!). And watching Mars with binoculars and seeing it
turning from a single dot to a small circle is definitely the best way to
get a rough idea of the universe's depth. Try it!
Full moon is bright in the skies today and tomorrow. Moreover, it will share the skies with Mars, reaching its opposition point.
So, for everybody around, just go outside a few hours after sunset and enjoy. Tomorrow (Dec. 24th), some will even enjoy an occultation with the Moon passing in front of Mars. See this page for occultation details and locations. In short: state of Washington, USA, British Columbia (CA) and other parts of Western Canada, Greenland, Scotland, Germany, Czech Republik, Hungary, Serbia, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel. Then some parts of Armenia, Iran, Uzbekistan, Russia (Siberia) and Aleoutians.
Some more important things happened this week for Debian Installer i18n:
Andreas Schuldei writes about my blog post about making it easier to contribute to Debian:
It is much more gratifying for a contributor if his effords haveWhile I agree that Instant Gratification is very important, I don’t think that the proposed solutions solve anything. It’s easy to have things sleep in an SVN repository instead of the BTS (lots of teams do that, sometimes for good reasons, like the lack of sponsors - hint: Games team). It doesn’t make things any better. What we need is tasks whose results will be available without too much wait in Debian unstable, for everybody. Also, I must admit that I know very little about the inner workings of the Security Team. But I have the idea that it involves quite a lot of procedures (helping with bugs tagged security probably doesn’t, but going further than that probably does). Contributing to Debian already involves A LOT of procedures. A new contributor, even very good technically, can easily get lost in all the different ways to package stuff and solve common problems. So we should identify tasks that don’t have huge requirements. Ubuntu has the concept of bite-size bugs. I started working on a page explaining the different ways someone can contribute to Debian. The goal is to provide a good entry point (not something that replaces existing documentation) and keep it at a manageable size. Its focus is mainly to replace the emails we write to people asking “I’d like to contribute, but I don’t know what I can do or where I should start!”. The page is available on wiki.d.o/HelpDebian/Start. Don’t hesitate to improve it (see also wiki.d.o/HelpDebian for a TODO list). When it will be good enough, I plan to move it out of the wiki (the content shouldn’t change much anyway) to eg http://help.debian.net/, so we can improve the design (I really like the idea of adding pictures of past Debconfs like Christian Perrier did in his FOSS.in talk).
immediate effects.
[…]
So what can people who want to help Debian do to achive more imminent gratification? Pick projects that let you help directly with direct svn/git/whatnot access (Security team, Debian Edu, Debian-Installer…)
Some adventures on my way back from FOSS.in at Bangalore. I was planned to fly back through Mumbai, with a quick connection (05:30-07:00). However, the Paris flight got delayed "because of technical problems" and we finally took off at 11:00.
However, while flying the deserts of Eastern Iran (so after 2 hours flight), some very bad vibrations were happening and, apparently, one engine of the 747 was shut down by the crew.
Then we gently turn 180 degrees and were told that....we were going back to Mumbai..:-(
So here am I, currently in Mumbai airport, in the VIP lounge (I didn't want to go to a random hotel with pay-per-use wireless), coping with my mail et keeping in touch with $HOME through an awfully jerky connection.
FOSS.in was huge fun but it seems that coming back from it will not be fun at all. Well, that's how air transportation is, right?
Since some weeks I’m really busy, private and at work. It’s going into the end of the year and everybody is in hurry. There seems also coming some changes for our family down the road in the future, but more maybe later. Additionally one months ago Santiago Ruano Rinc n did surprisingly turn up as my AM. We started fast, but I got stuck at P&P part 1 with the License comparisons, cause actually I’m so busy at work and with my family, that I can’t concentrate enough late at night, when trying to work on the papers. For example the graphviz license is completely overwhelming me. My hope in the last time was some bigger timeslots at the weekends, but they got smashed by my family and/or work issues. I hope Santiago is not getting annoyed by me and I can find hopefully some free time on holidays or in the first weeks next year.
Anyways … Christian Perrier started a review and translation process of ipplans debconf templates by the debian-i18n contributors. The templates was in really bad conditions, most of it was copied over from gallery2 and I did know that they wasn’t so good. Thanks for all your work, when the process is over I’m proud to include your really nice work.
Two other packages got updates. php-suhosin got new upstream release after months which fixes the broken perdir/.htaccess support. Unfortunatly I missed the release (cause there is no announcement list and there was no watch file) unless Raphael Geissert did leave a note. I integrated the new VCS and homepage stuff also and formorer did fix some minor issues. So we can hopefully upload now (when it arrives testing) the first package to backport.org and sleep little bit better, when using PHP on stable.I think that all Debian developers (including the brand new ones) will be delighted to learn that we not only have 4 indian DD's now, but we have an Indian DPL, at least according to his own words after a few beers.
The first two days at FOSS.in have been quite busy. Sam's first talk ("Giving back to the community, how does Debian perform") was really interesting with ideas about a possible place where various distributions' patches to software could be collected and made available to upstream authors.
I then had two talks in a row, which I feared a little but went pretty well. The first one was a brand new for me ("Contributing to Debian for dummies"). I tried to enforce the idea that contributing to Debian might be fun and opened to everybody, not only deep hard-core hackers (I funnily took my friend Andrew McMillan as example for hard-core hackers....).
To make the talk less boring, I did choose to illustrate the various ideas I was explaining with photos taken from the various Debian-related events I attended last years. So, many of my Debian friends will recognize themselves on my talk slides. I hope you people won't mind being taken as examples (I should maybe have asked your authorization before....in case some of you want to sue me for using your public image).
The other talk I has was a quite standard i18n talk. As I don't like doing the same talk over and over, I changed that one slightly to make it more suitable for the local audience, putting focus on localization for languages of India (even doing some of the "famous" bubulle-style maps especially for India). In case you aren't bored with that one, here's the link to slides.
The next day features some other projects days. I will put focus on talks from the Indlinux project day. Indlinux is indeed an amazingly active project and the small room was entrely packed with people attending quite technical talks about Indic computing, Text-to-Speech, Indic languages spellchecking and such really specific topics. I also attended a very promozing talk by Dimitri Glezios, in the Fedora project day room, talking about Transifex, a very promising localisation material collecting platform with the interesting ability to be able to push translations back to thei respective upstreams, avoiding one of the major drawbacks of tools such as Rosetta. I'll have to come back on that one.
Now for the Main Confeence days....that will be busy, too, for sure ! And I didn't even mention the awful Mozilla party we had yesterday night. Some people will remember that one.
...to make the use of gettext for debconf messages i18n mandatory.
Policy 3.7.3 states:
* Packages following the Debian Configuration management
specification must allow for translation of their messages by using
a gettext-based system such as po-debconf. [3.9.1]
Not to say this took too long. Such changes are always long processes. Anyway, I think that Denis Barbier, who built the first po-debconf packages and uploaded the first version on 9/11/2002, would appreciate this.
Now, let's hunt the last remaining black sheep....:)
I finally arrived in Bangalore. Unfortunately, alone, without suitcase, which Air India apparently managed to lose. So, it will be the first time I experience the happiness of people who don't get their luggage in an airport and have to live for a few days with nothing but the clothes they had on them while travelling.
Running around in local shops to get socks or pants wasn't exactly what I planned to do here and I probably won't. So, I'll take the local stance and learn about patience, and wait. The place we're hosted at is *very* nice (B&B, probably with a few other speakers I haven't seen yet). And, it has a really good Internet connection so I feel pretty safe and can give news around.
I'm currently waiting for Sam whose flight was apparently delayed (I hope *he* gets his suitcase).... I hope he won't be too much in trouble: we don't want to lose our DPL in India (maybe they want to keep him here, though).
Next.