Mausefalle, Karusellkurve, Steilhang, Br ckenschuss, Alte Schneise, Seildamsprung, L chenschuss, Oberhausberg, Hausbergkante, Zielschuss (ach mein Gott!) and the terrible Zielsprung. After last week's Lauberhorn downhill, today was Hahnenkamm's downhill race in Kitzb hel (Austria). Even though I slightly prefer the Wengen race, Die Streif is one of the scariest racest of the Ski World Cup. Great spectacle today again, however saddenned by Scott Mc Carthy's terrible accident on the Zielsprung. We don't have news yet but I cross fingers for him. Today, Didier Cuche won the race wonderfully, just before lastweek's winner, the tireless Bode Miller. Again another great ski week-end, really.

Tricky question, isn't it? Indeed, according to the ISO 639-3 standard which finally became an official ISO standard in 2007, there are 7696 different languages, including extinct, ancient, historic, and constructed languages. Of course, this may become a very debated discussion about what constitues a "language". Let's give the guidelines used by SIL International, who was designated by ISO as the official maintenance agency for ISo-639: There is no one definition of "language" that is agreed upon by all and appropriate for all purposes. As a result, there can be disagreement, even among speakers or linguistic experts, as to whether two varieties represent dialects of a single language or two distinct languages. For this part of ISO 639, judgments regarding when two varieties are considered to be the same or different languages are based on a number of factors, including linguistic similarity, intelligibility, a common literature, the views of speakers concerning the relationship between language and identity, and other factors. The following basic criteria are followed:

• Two related varieties are normally considered varieties of the same language if speakers of each variety have inherent understanding of the other variety (that is, can understand based on knowledge of their own variety without needing to learn the other variety) at a functional level.
• Where spoken intelligibility between varieties is marginal, the existence of a common literature or of a common ethnolinguistic identity with a central variety that both understand can be strong indicators that they should nevertheless be considered varieties of the same language.
• Where there is enough intelligibility between varieties to enable communication, the existence of well-established distinct ethnolinguistic identities can be a strong indicator that they should nevertheless be considered to be different languages.

So, we (iso-codes package maintainers) now have to update that part of our package and buy a big bunch of aspirin to people who will work on translating this. Moreover, contrary to all other such standards (3166 for country names, old 639-2 for languages, 15924 for language script names), there is no bloody official *French* version, so even the French translator has to work. Gues who this was until now? :-) To end this blog entry, let's ask a funny question to the readers (no, comments not allowed on my blog, I'm lazy, so answers by mail or in your blogs): what is the country in the world which as the highest number of languages listed in ISO 639-3?

The traditional gathering of the Linux and FLOSS community in France will this year again feature a Debian booth. The event will be held in Paris-La D fense (CNIT), on Jan 29-31. As the Babelbox was born in that event three years ago, we will again have one, of course (people will get bored of it...). Frans Pop improved the thing so much that it took me less than 2 hours to set one up. We will also probably have a few other demo machines and the usual bunch of developers, contributors and friends popping up at the booth. If you're around, please come up and say "hi"....(don't forget fingerprints, IDs and some aspirin to cope with the verbiage of some of us who definitely talk too much).

A new version of shadow packages (login, passwd, useradd and all other low-level user management utilities) hit unstable this week-end. That release is quite a major update as this is the first release where Nicolas Fran ois introduced numerous changes meant to make the versions of shadow used in various distros reconverge. So that version now really says "hey, Debian took shadow over". He thus incorporated lots of patches from Gentoo and Fedora as well as a few Debian ones (Debian packages were apparently closer to upstream code than others). He also added support for SHA256 and SHA512 encryption methods. Careful users will read /usr/share/doc/login/NEWS.gz to get an idea of these changes. After a small hiccup with 4.1.0-1 (The "Bleu d'Auvergne" release) which was hitting our German-speaking users (login is now providing a German version of su(1) which is also provided by manpages-de, therefore making the package uninstallable), 4.1.0-2 (the "Bleu des Causses" release) is there sitting in unstable waiting for testing. Nicolas is already working on 4.1.1, now focusing on code cleaning. That version should be out pretty soon. Also note that we'll soon be short of "Appellation d'Origine Contr l e" cheeses names for the releases and we more and more have to make our imagination work. General de Gaulle was wrong: there are not 50 million cheeses in France.

Russisprung, Hundschopf, Minsch-Kante, Canadian Corner, Kernen-S, Wasserstation, Hanneggschuss, Silberhornsprung, sterreicherloch, Ziel-S. If that rings a bell, you know what I'm talking about. Today was *the* ski downhill race of the season, namely Lauberhorn in Wengen, Switzerland. The longest (2'30") and fastest (sometimes up to 160km/h) downhill races of the season. Wengen's scenery is among my favourite ones, with the Eigerwand, M nch and Jungfraujoch dominating the entire race (the image of racers in the S curve before the Hundshopf jump, with Eiger, M nch and Jungfrau at the back is usually the image of the year when it comes at ski competitions. And, this year again, the sun was brilliantly shining over Wengen so we spent a great time watching this (on TV...going there to see it live is one of my dreams). And, for this non standard downhill race, we again had a non standard winner with Mr Bode Miller, winning it for the second time in a row. Next week is the Hahnenkamm downhill in Kitzb hel, the ski Mekkah of Austria, on the Streif. Also coming, the Schladming night slalom, Chamonix downhill, Val d'Is re downhill.....January is always busy for those who enjoy competition ski. (and, as I do not only watch sports on TV, I also ran my second longest distance today, with 19.5km in just 2 hours. Yay)

Here's what I found in the recent APT upload as changes to PO files:

 #: apt-pkg/cdrom.cc:678
 #, c-format
 msgid ""
-"Found %u package indexes, %u source indexes, %u translation indexes and %u "
-"signatures\n"
+"Found %zu package indexes, %zu source indexes, %zu translation indexes and %"
+"zu signatures\n"

The consequence of such changes is fuzzying translated strings, thus forcing translators to re-update their files and the translation coordinator to commit them. In short, valuable time wasted. One could object that translators shouldn't try to keep up 100% all time long. However, those who do not do so just end up with huge updates to do...which is sometimes demotivating. So many of us prefers keeping up with small updates. However, when one sees such updates that appear to be cosmetic, it's very hard to refrain hating developers (I even ranted about this in dpkg commit logs, which bringed some argument with Guillem Jover.... I certainly shouldn't have ranted in commit logs but that probably gives a good idea how upset I was). Please think about this next time you change a translatable string, particularly when you *know* that someone is taking care to coordinate *your* software translation work with translators. Side comment: bzr choke up on my local APT copy and I can't even cope with updates for APT. That will not really help me to love those DVCS. Update: many explained me that such changes are not useless which I'm ready to accept given my level of knowledge in programming. So, apologies to programmers who made these changes. I just hope this will however better give the translator's POV wrt such matters. We all know that translators *and* maintainers work really hard to give the best results and both always need to have a better knowledge of other's constraints....and limits! I've also been very wisely teached about possible ways to jiggle with VCS to work on defuzzification by reverting changes, unfuzzy, re-apply changes. Sure. At the expense of a lot of invested time to check how to do this properly with all these neat modern DVCS, I could. Yay, I so much love fiddling with VCS....and spending hours doing this is something that makes my days.

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 the 500000th bug contest are Miguel Gea or Kartik Mistry. I should plan a few MBF to keep chances of winning the contest myself.

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:

• #1555, Package: dselect, "dselect per-screen-half focus request". There is indeed no more information left in that bug and I wonder whether it is useful to keep it opened.
• #2297, Package: xterm, "xterm sometimes gets mouse-paste and RETURN keypress in wrong order". Seems reproducible and puzzling a lot of people.
• #2298, Package: trn, "trn bug with shell escaping". trn has been replaced upstream by trn4, apparently, so we're here talking about an old dusty software (installed by 44 ppl, still).
• #3175, Package: xonix, "xonix colors bad for colorblind".
• #3180, Package: linuxdoc-tools, "linuxdoc-sgml semantics and formatting problems". There is not info in this bug report about what the bug could be. To close?
• #3251, Package: acct, "accounting file corruption". Tagget upstream, wontfix. Should this be closed more than 11 years later or is someone still hoping that this is useful?

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 Closed

A few interesting things there:

• apparently the rate is now staging between 50,000 and 60,000 per year
• stats are less precise for the early years as many bugs are no more in the BTS (apparently that stops in 1999)
• I can't find the date where the Debian BTS was launched (-devel archives go back to July 1995 only)
• It bringed me the silly idea to check what are the oldest still opened bugs...next stupid blog entry, then !

Anyone feeling like doing the same for Launchpad? And, for those who wonder, I of course did all this by hand. No fancy automated script, just my hands and some (little) hammering of the BTS.

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 directory

This 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.