Olly Betts: Debian RC Bugs Fixed for November 2011
I was travelling for most of November, but managed to fix four RC bugs in the
final week:
dpkg-report
dpkg-report --last-two-days
dpkg-report --log-file /path/to/logs
dpkg-report --log-file /path/to/logs --merge
dpkg-Report for all:
------------------------
Newly Installed:
abc
Removed:
foo
Upgraded:
bar (0.99-12 - 1.00-1)
dpkg-Report for test*:
------------------------
Newly Installed:
blub
dpkg-Report for test1:
------------------------
Upgraded:
baz (1.0.0-1 -> 1.0.0-2)
dpkg-Report for test2:
------------------------
Upgraded:
zab (0.9.7 -> 0.9.8)
The bug webinterface of the
Ultimate Debian Database
currently knows about the following release critical bugs:
| In Total: | 1749 |
|---|---|
| Affecting Wheezy: | 1094 |
| Wheezy only: | 138 |
| Remaining to be fixed in Wheezy: | 956 |
| Pending in Wheezy: | 43 |
|---|---|
| Patched in Wheezy: | 178 |
| Duplicates in Wheezy: | 50 |
| Can be fixed in a security Update: | 33 |
| Contrib or non-free in Wheezy: | 12 |
| Claimed in Wheezy: | 0 |
| Delayed in Wheezy: | 2 |
| Otherwise fixed in Wheezy: | 93 |
Wheezyreleased. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 991 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see
Interpreting the release critical bug statisticsfor an explanation of the different numbers.
December, release time. I m currently involved in the release management of three major projects and it s not always about fun. So lets make it more fun: https://github.com/mika/commit-sounds
(including English!)
The string freeze of Debian Installer officially ended at 23:59
yesterday (Sept. 20th). Indeed, this was extended a bit to today, with
agreement by Otavio Salvador who I thank for this.
That allowed Zak to "save" Tagalog and also the Welsh and Latvian
translators to polish their work.
We now have to decide about some of these languages: those that failed
to meet the release criteria but were formerly activated in D-I. There
are four such languages: Amharic, Welsh, Estonian and Northern Sami.
Please find below the mail I just sent to debian-i18n and
debian-boot. I promised that this discussion would happen in
public. It will (but it will be short as we can't delay the release of
the installer for ages....and I think that my proposals are
reasonable!)
First of all, the numbers as of Sunday Sept. 21st 09:32 UTC (date of
the last commit with an l10n update):
Languages meeting the release criteria: 59
------------------------------------------
Already activated and complete for level 1: 51
Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Catalan, Czech, Danish,
German, Dzongkha, Greek, Esperanto, Spanish, Basque, Finnish, French,
Galician, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian,
Italian, Japanese, Georgian, Khmer, Korean, Lithuanian, Latvian,
Macedonian, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian Bokm l, Nepali, Dutch,
Norwegian Nynorsk, Punjabi, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese,
Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Albabian, Swedish, Tamil, Thai, Turkish,
Vietnamese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese
Already activated and complete for sublevels 1 and 2: 6
Bengali, Kurdish, Slovenian, Tagalog, Ukrainian, Wolof
Not yet activated languages complete for sublevels 1 and 2: 2
(the mail in -i18n and -boot says 3 but this is an error by me)
Irish, Serbian
Languages failing to meet the release criteria: 15
--------------------------------------------------
Activated languages: 4
Amharic, Welsh, Estonian, Northern Sami
Not yet activated languages: 11
Afrikaans, Persian, Armenian, Icelandic, Kazakh, Kannada,
Malagasy, Malay, Telugu, Urdu, Xhosa
Discussion
----------
(careful people will notice that I moved Welsh down to "failed to meet
the release criteria" as this is what is technically correct)
Nothing to discuss for the 57 already activated languages that meet
the defined criteria. They'll be kept or first activated in the RC1
release of Debian Installer.
Similarly, nothing to discuss for the 11 languages that were not
activated and haven't made it. They will remain unactivated.
Two languages should be activated as they have met the release
criteria for the first time during the string freeze: Irish and Serbian.
This adds more load (and size changes) to D-I but I really don't see
any reason to not follow our own rules there.
The discussion comes for the 4 languages that fail to meet the release
criteria. Here are my proposals with some rationale:
Amharic:
I would really dislike deactivating Amharic because it's highly
symbolic to have the language of Ethiopia activated. We have so few
African languages. Also, the translation is nearly complete and the
translator was well coping with updates until July. The missing
stuff for Amharic in sublevels 1 and 2 are messages about loading
drivers or firmware from removable media, the rescue mode stuff for
the graphical installer and some messages that briefly appear during
finish-install. A little bit more important is the message warning
that the boot partition is not ext2 or ext3, added in August by
tbm. I think this is not enough to drop out one year of efforts for
the translator
As a consequence, I propose to KEEP Amharic.
Welsh:
Only five strings are missing in sublevels 1 and 2 because of the
small experience of PO files by the person who completed the
translation during last week. One will make the regular user login
name screen to be in English and others will make the GRUB password
screen to be in English as well, that's all.
Additionnally, we can safely assume that all potential users of
Welsh have good skills in English...and will therefore very easily
cope with these screens.
As a consequence, I propose to KEEP Welsh.
Estonian:
The translation had NO update since Etch. The last update is dated
back to Feb. 17th 2007. I haven't got any sign of life from the
translator and no Estonian users have volunteered to maintain the
translation.
Missing strings are in many places, including several screens that
appear in default installs. Even though one can assume that the
skills of the average Linux user in Estonia is fairly good, I think
this is not enough to throw users in a big mix of English and
Estonian.
As a consequence, I propose to DROP Estonian.
Northern Sami:
The translation is very incomplete. With about any other language,
that would be a reason to drop the translation.
However, a few reasons make me suggest keeping it:
- Northern Sami is mostly used in Norway and D-I will fall back
to Norwegian Bokm l which is understood by all potentials users
as it is teached in all Norwegian schools.
- Users will be warned, *in Sami*, about this situation
- The choice of Sami will be kept in localechooser even if the
translations are dropped. This is on request of Debian Edu
developers to avoid them to develop a special boot floppy
to offer the choice of Sami (a requirement for Norwegian
schools). I personnally think this is a reward to Debian Edu and
its ancestor Skolelinux for their initial involvement in the
development of D-I
As a consequence, I propose to KEEP Northern Sami.
I understand that these choices may be debatable and some may sound
slightly subjective. I however think this is the best way to be fair
with translators' efforts without compromising the quality of D-I.
Please note that the final word on this will be by D-I release
managers...but advices are very much welcomed.
$ dconf read /org/gnome/shell/enabled-extensions > /tmp/extensions $ vi /tmp/extensions $ dconf write /org/gnome/shell/enabled-extensions "$(cat /tmp/extensions)"I guess now it's time to log out from fallback mode to find out if I can log back in to Gnome Shell again. [ nope. didn't work ]
$ gnome-shell-extension-tool help Usage: gnome-shell-extension-tool [options] $ man gnome-shell-extension-tool No manual entry for gnome-shell-extension-tool See 'man 7 undocumented' for help when manual pages are not available.What more needs to be said? At least /usr/bin/dconf has built-in help. Which is great, since it doesn't have a man page either.
Recently I said that my perl-based sysadmin tool, Slaughter, was at the cross-roads. I wasn't sure if I should leave it alone, or update it somehow.
As I'm generally lazy and busy (yes it is possible to be both simultaneously!) I didn't do anything.
But happily earlier in the week I received a bunch of updates from Jean Baptiste which implemented support for managing Windows clients, via Strawberry Perl.
So I guess the conclusion is: Do nothing. Change nothing. Just fix any issues which are reported to me, and leave it as-is. (I did a little more than that, refactoring to avoid duplication and improve "neatness".)
As I said at the time I've had some interesting feedback, suggestions and bugfixes from people over the past year or so - so I shouldn't be surprised to learn I'm not the only person using it.
ObQuote: "Oh, yes, a big cat! My salvation depends upon it! " - Dracula (1992)
Happy.
This is how I feel after I ran the "Le Puy-Firminy" night race last
Sunday. 70 kilometers (mixed roads and trails), 1500 meters positive
slope, close to my birth town, St-Etienne (the track on Garmin Connect
unfortunately has bugs for the profile, sorry for this....this is
apparently a bug in Garmin Connect as pyTrainer shows the
track very well.
And running this by night, starting at midnight and arriving
at....09:16 the next day. A full night running.
Such "ultra" experience is completely different from marathon running.
In marathons, you mostly try keeping a constant pace all along the
race, running very close to your limits all along the race.
Very long distances involve managing much more than keeping a constant
pace. Being able to run (and walk) for many hours requires being very
careful at the start of the race, controlling the pace and save energy
for the last part of the race. Climbing is most of the time done by
walking (except for the very first runners) and going down for
kilometers is very hard for legs, even at slow paces.
Night running is also making things a lot different. Particularly in a
quite small race like this one, it means running alone most of the
time. And, by alone, I really mean alone. You and your head lamp,
that's all.
I am very happy about the way I managed this race. I reached the 32km
mark, where an important food/drink point was organised, in a little
bit more than 3 hours 15 minutes, where I stopped about 7-8 minutes.
That was followed by about 5 kilometers downhill, at 6%, on a paved
road, which is really killing legs.
The marathon distance was reached in about 5h05, more or less what I
planned, but that race is known to be harder in its second half. And
completing a marathon, *then* knowing that you still have 2/3 of a
marathon to run is kinda challenging..:-)
Another important moment of the race was the 55 kilometer mark. This,
because this was the longest distance I ever ran in a single race (in
March, for the Paris Ecotrail race). Of course, the longer you run,
the harder are legs and what was expected happened to me: I had cramps
in both legs, at the worst moment, around km 64, when the track
brutally goes down for 150 meters in a small canyon, then goes up for
about 200 meters. Indeed, I completed kilometer 66 in....22 minutes (I
see my marathon runners friends laughing here).
This is indeed where you know if you're strong and motivated enough :
not abandoning, continue despite cramps, waiting for them to
disappear...and finally complete the race.
It was really worth it anyway : running by night is really magic. I
still remember the though moments at 5am, in the moonlight, alone on a
road...and so happy to be there..:-)
That race was the last one for me this year. I followed my plans (the
only regret being not beating my record at Berlin marathon).
Next year plans include two marathons: probably Caen ("Les Routes de
la Libert " along the D-Day beaches in Normandy) in June and another
one during Fall. I'll also push my limits a bit further with the 80km
race of Ecotrail, arriving at Eiffel Tower first floor after running
through forests in the SW area of Paris....and probably again that
70km race in November. Once you've tried ultra races, you don't want
to stop..:-)
Until the end of the year....recovery...and training. After all,
Ecotrail is only in 4 months..:-)
The bug webinterface of the
Ultimate Debian Database
currently knows about the following release critical bugs:
| In Total: | 1758 |
|---|---|
| Affecting Wheezy: | 1102 |
| Wheezy only: | 138 |
| Remaining to be fixed in Wheezy: | 964 |
| Pending in Wheezy: | 45 |
|---|---|
| Patched in Wheezy: | 176 |
| Duplicates in Wheezy: | 47 |
| Can be fixed in a security Update: | 31 |
| Contrib or non-free in Wheezy: | 13 |
| Claimed in Wheezy: | 0 |
| Delayed in Wheezy: | 2 |
| Otherwise fixed in Wheezy: | 91 |
Wheezyreleased. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 1002 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see
Interpreting the release critical bug statisticsfor an explanation of the different numbers.
Could you not trust this man?Max and Fraser are very interested in this year's election. I guess political awareness starts at the first election after you turn 10, or so. They're both very curious about how mum and dad are voting, and while their mother will not tell (though we all have our suspicions :-) I don't see any reason not to discuss my political leanings with them.I've been what is commonly termed a 'floating' voter for most of my voting life. I imagine the politicians themselves might term people like me 'floaters', with an eye to the scatalogical implications. After all, their livelihoods are on the line!So, after reading this blog post I thought I might as well also share my personal voting plans with the world.
Could you not trust this man?
alt="imagine an xkcd-style infographic here"
0 seconds
apt-get update (thanks aj, for the pdiffs)#! redirections)
Andrew Cowie blogs about 'A good GNOME 3
Experience'.
He writes
I think it s a bit odd not to expect that something that was widely advertised as being such a different user experience is different.and
if they had gone and bought an Apple laptop with Mac OS X on it they would be perfectly reasonably working through learning how to use a new Desktop and not complaining about it at all. But here we are admonishing the GNOME hackers had the temerity to do something new and different.I think Andrew's phrasing here is a bit disingeneous. Or perhaps he genuinely mistakes the frustration that has been felt by GNOME 3. I don't want to whine on too much, so I'll try to get this out of the way in one paragraph. F/OSS users are members of a community. There is inevitably a wall between the majority of community members and the blessed: the decision makers, the developers. The art of maintaining a good community is partly to do with making this wall as invisible as possible: encouraging participation, lowering the barrier for contributions; welcoming feedback; etc.1. The GNOME community have invested a lot into the GNOME 2 way of doing things, and GNOME 3, by breaking away from that so fundamentally, has devalued the community's investment. It screams: we don't want your panel widgets! We don't want your themes! Your working practices are wrong: this is the right way! GNOME 3 is opinionated software, and it's opinion differs from a large body of the GNOME community. The result? resentment. Remember: GNOME 3 is not just something new: it's the abrupt termination of something old, tried and tested. and hopefully that's the last time I need to vent about my GNOME 3 frustration. It's hear to stay, the question for the frustrated is: are you? Moving on Andrew goes on to recommend:
One thing I do recommend is mapping (say) CapsLock as an additional Hyper You do the mapping in: System Settings Keyboard Layout Layout tab Options..I used to do this with GNOME 2, but I couldn't find how to do it on GNOME 3. Andrew's post gave me the important hint that it was still possible, but the precise location doesn't match: On my Fedora 16 / GNOME 3.2 system, it's System Settings Region and Language Layouts Options ". This is especially useful on my beloved UltraNav keyboard which lacks the Windows 95 keys. Sadly it does not work very well through various remote desktop tools: I get an inconsistent capslock state within VMs connected to via
VNC. rdesktop seems ok.
Yesterday evening I updated my server to remove MySQL:
steve:~# dpkg --purge mysql-client-5.1 \
mysql-common \
mysql-server-5.1 \
mysql-server-core-5.1 \
python-mysqldb \
libdbd-mysql-perl \
libdatetime-format-mysql-perl
Until last month I had two database in use, one each for a pair of
web-applications. As of now one is using redis - which I'm already
using for my image hosting - and the other application is using SQLite.
Until recently I had a high opinion of SQLite, although that has now been downgraded a little, it is still a thoroughly excellent piece of software. I was just surprised at little things it was missing, to the extent I had to rewrite my applications SQL.
Still one less service is a good thing, and the migration wasn't so painful..
In more productive news I recently acquired a nice external flash - the Yongnuo YN-460 II is (very) cheap and cheerful, it can be fired remotely with my triggers so I've had a lot of fun with opportunistically taking pictures and experimenting with lighting.
Most of the results are NSFW, but there are some other examples lurking around including the first time I managed to successfully capture a falling water-drop. (Not the best picture, not the most explicit effect, but fun regardless. I both can and will do better next time!)
Somebody recently asked me to write about "camera stuff under linux" and happily I declined. Why decline? Because there are so many good tools, applications, and utilities. (I use local tools for organisation and duplicate detection, rawtherapee for RAW conversion and GIMP for touchups). Having many available options is fantastic though, and something hard to appreciate for "newcomers" to Linux. (Yeah I waited 90 seconds - if I remembered to add -nojava - for Netscape Navigator to start, under X10, with 8Mb of RAM. Happier days are here. Sure DRM is bad, secure boot .. an open question, but damn we have it good compared to almost any previous point in time!)ObQuote: "Yeah, obviously it is only a tactical party. I'm only having a party to eventually get sex." - Peep Show
Someone should package Beets.
The bug webinterface of the
Ultimate Debian Database
currently knows about the following release critical bugs:
| In Total: | 1812 |
|---|---|
| Affecting Wheezy: | 1161 |
| Wheezy only: | 163 |
| Remaining to be fixed in Wheezy: | 998 |
| Pending in Wheezy: | 47 |
|---|---|
| Patched in Wheezy: | 191 |
| Duplicates in Wheezy: | 47 |
| Can be fixed in a security Update: | 31 |
| Contrib or non-free in Wheezy: | 16 |
| Claimed in Wheezy: | 0 |
| Delayed in Wheezy: | 4 |
| Otherwise fixed in Wheezy: | 89 |
Wheezyreleased. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 1053 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see
Interpreting the release critical bug statisticsfor an explanation of the different numbers.
FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (Belgium). One of the developer rooms will be the CrossDesktop DevRoom, which will host Desktop-related talks.
We are now inviting proposals for talks about Free/Libre/Open-source Software on the topics of Desktop development, Desktop applications and interoperativity amongst Desktop Environments. This is a unique opportunity to show novel ideas and developments to a wide technical audience.
Topics accepted include, but are not limited to: Enlightenment, Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Windows, Mac OS X, general desktop matters, applications that enhance desktops and web (when related to desktop).
Talks can be very specific, such as developing mobile applications with Qt Quick; or as general as predictions for the fusion of Desktop and web in 5 years time. Topics that are of interest to the users and developers of all desktop environments are especially welcome. The FOSDEM 2011 schedule might give you some inspiration.
Please include the following information when submitting a proposal: your name, the title of your talk (please be descriptive, as titles will be listed with around 250 from other projects) and a short abstract of one or two paragraphs.
The deadline for submissions is December 20th 2011. FOSDEM will be held on the weekend of 4-5 February 2012. Please submit your proposals to crossdesktop-devroom@lists.fosdem.org
Also, if you are attending FOSDEM 2012, please add yourself to the KDE community wiki page so that we organize better. We need volunteers for the booth!
Next.