Tomorrow morning, I'll leave for Bangalore to attend FOSS.in, the major FLOSS event in India (for BLR people, my arrival time is 07:30 on Monday). That will be my first time in India, so probaly a lot to discover and learn. Also, of course, many online friends to meet in real life, which is always something one enjoys. I'll have two talks (in a row!) there. One is my first time talking about "Contrbuting to Debian". I hope I will make it interesting for attending people. The main goal is explaining that there are much much more ways to contribute to Debian than one would imagine, and roughly say that becoming a DD is far from being the only way to contribute. The other talk is my standard i18n talk, slightly more focused on localization for languages from India (yes, with the maps, of course). Sam Hocevar is also coming and giving talks. I cross fingers for people there to not be bored about our damn French accent. I'll be really delighted to share this with Sam who is someone I really appreciate (and, actually, even more since he is doing good job as DPL). Of course, I know that the most interesting will be BOFs and informal discussions as well as booths visits and the like. Everybody knows that India is the paradise for people working in i18n: so many languages to cope with! I already know it will be too short, I'm afraid, but see you in BLR !

We just had a chimney fire tonight at home... Nothing grave, indeed. I was just hacking close to the wood stove we use to heat the house during winter and I suddenly hear a kind of whoooosh noise in the chimney. Fortunately, I had of these devices you can throw in the fire and make a lot of smoke that help cooling down the fire, then I poured water inside the stove (which is exactly what's to be done, said the firemen later). Then I call firemen who came in about 10 minutes....and basically had nothing to do except survey the chimney for a while (the exit of the stove to the chimney was bright red for about 1 hour)....and dirty half of the house..:-) Noone hurt, nothing broken in the house, but that was kind of a fear. Man, the chimney was to be cleaned next Wednesday....just a little bit too late, but last cleaning was in May...:- I think it'll be quite a while since a light that wood stove again.... Update: thanks to Eric Cooper, I now know about "wood stove" or "wood-burning stove".

We just had a chimney fire tonight at home... Nothing grave, indeed. I was just hacking close to the wood oven we use to heat the house during winter and I suddenly hear a kind of whoooosh noise in the chimney. Fortunately, I had of these devices you can throw in the fire and make a lot of smoke that help cooling down the fire, then I poured water inside the oven (which is exactly what's to be done, said the firemen later). Then I call firemen who came in about 10 minutes....and basically had nothing to do except survey the chimney for a while (the exit of the oven to the chimney was bright red for about 1 hour)....and dirty half of the house..:-) Noone hurt, nothing broken in the house, but that was kind of a fear. Man, the chimney was to be cleaned next Wednesday....just a little bit too late, but last cleaning was in May...:- I think it'll be quite a while since a light that wood oven again.... (for the french around, do you have something better than "wood oven" for po le bois"?)

Information is currently not completely tripled checked but I would advice all readers of this blog entry to think twice before upgrading their Etch-based samba file servers to 3.0.24-etch6 (and maybe also 3.0.24-etch7). Same for 3.0.14a-sarge8 (and -sarge9). According to bug #453050, a quite major regression was introduced in these versions and may affect most file servers with Windows clients (which is most often the purpose of samba...). So, unless you want to screw out tons of Windows users, you really should consider upgrading to 3.0.24-etch5 or 3.0.14a-sarge7 (to fix recently unveiled security issues) which do not experience that regression. Or, if your servers are less security-challenged, stick with -etch4 and -sarge7. There might me some delay sorting this out as finding the cause of the regression requires expertise I don't have and Steve Langasek (who did most of the very hard work on last updates) may not be available immediately to work on this with upstream. It is not really clear to me whether the issue is coming from upstream or bad regression fixes in Debian packages, but you've been warned. Of course, we need to find a better way to dispatch that information than a simple blog entry. I don't have it right now so better this than nothing. Again, I'm not 150% sure of all that information but heavy users of samba servers should really be careful. Update: Steve (who never sleeps) found out that one upstream commit may have been ommitted while merging their changes. More investigation is still needed, though, as that patch does not cleanly apply on -etch7.

It's quite some time since I didn't blog about D-I i18n and the number of new languages we'll support in the next Debian version, lalala... A few works are on their way, indeed:

• Splitting the huge number of strings in D-I (1686) by priority, to avoid requesting translators a 100% complete file to get their language activated, while some of the strings are really obscure stuff for exotic architectures and not often used installation methods. That work is on its way, slowly and I expect something in the next weeks.
• Keeping the existing languages up-to-date. I'm not very annoying with the fellow translators these days. We have about 20 complete languages and many just need a quite small work to be complete again. Indeed, the quite slow pace of D-I development these days 'helps' (but that slow pace is indeed quite worrying: I'll probably get back on this in the near future)
• New languages under work:
  • Kannada (language from India): still waiting for the first commit...:-(
  • Telugu (also from india): ditto
  • Malay: though vey close from Indonesian, not much activity. The translator currently has other priorities. The file is filled with strings taken from Indonesian and basically needs review
  • Xhosa: hosed. The translations were taken from a very old Ubuntu installer, as result of a translation work funded in the past by Mark Shuttleworth (Xhosa is one of the official languages from South Africa) and nothing happened since then.
  • Marathi (language from India). Work happened and 780 strings need review, but it is hosed right now. I expect talking with the translator at foss.in
  • Irish. The translator, Kevin Scannell, is very active in Irish l10n but currently focuses more on end-user apps. The work might resume at some time
  • Welsh. Waiting for my friend Daffydd Harries to come back on it.
  • Kazakh. Has been quite active but hosed right now. Not much news from the translator
  • Northern Sami. Desperately needs a translator. Debian-Edu want it (the language is used in some schools in Norway)
  • Malagasy. The translator (who studies in France) no longer works on it
  • Persian. Moray Alan recently got contacts in Iran with people who might be interested in resuming the early work of Arash Bijanzadeh
  • Icelandic. The translator is still active from time to time. Most Icelandic people do not seem very interested in getting software localized in their language because they consider that enough ppl in Iceland are comfortable enough with English. That's obviously a big mistake (how can software be adopted by local authorities if it is not localized) but I never succeeded convincing more than 1 person.
  • Urdu (official language for Pakistan). Got some contacts and we completed the New Language Process...but the person then vanished.
  • Amharic. The translator is really active but busy with his job (he's a sailor on commercial ships!). I expect him to complete his translation and he will certainly benefit from prioritization.
  • Armenian. Very recent contacts. I expect the first commit soon
  • Lao. Basically lost contact with the translator
  • Serbian. I'm still waiting for the very active community in Ubuntu to get in touch with /me and work on a common translation. However, someone recently contacted me to work directly on Debian. Maybe expect some good news for one of the very last missing European languages
  • Occitan (regional language from France). Same than Serbian.
  • Kashmiri (language from India). Very recent contact. The translator seems really motivated. I'll probably meet him at foss.in
  • Konkani (language from India). Got a contact today..:-)
  As one sees, the activity is sometimes disappointing: I get contacts, we work on the new language process, then people disappear...but I guess that's to be expected with very little l10n communities. I still have some hope to add at least a few languages for lenny.

A one may see with the regression recently introduced by the lastest security updates of the samba package, using smbfs is currently not possible with etch Samba servers if they're up-to-date. I'm afraid that people who experience this bug just deserve what they got. Smbfs is bloody deprecated for years in favor of the cifs filesystem (samba upstream QA work never includes checks for smbfs stuff). CIFS Userland utilities are provided in the smbfs Debian package so the switch is mostly a matter of a few minutes work and manpage reading (some options might differ). We should have told this earlier, probably, sorry for this. But it is now time to say it and even shoult it: if you're using smbfs, you're shooting in your own foot. So, check you machines and if you use "smbmount", consider switching (sams for positive output of "grep smbfs /etc/fstab"): it's quite likely that it is removed in next versions of samba as Steve Langasek, myself and other samba package maintainers are really fed up with bugs related to that obsolete thing.

First step of the ultimate organization steps of the trip to India for FOSS.IN, I went today to the Embassy of India in Paris to leave my visa application. I left home at 06:20 to get one of the few trains running because of our strikes. Got two buses relatively easily from the station to the Embassy, then I arrived there 8:30 with already about 40 people before me in the queue. Discussion with fellow people in the queue...and I learned that there was no certain chance that I could actually *enter* the embassy to leave the form, my passport, my photos and the 50 bucks^W euros needed for a passport to India. I entered the embassy at....11:00 when their doors opened (we've been told that strikes in French transport are the reasons for the employees to be late.....I really wonder *how* *we* got there, indeed. Apparently, all people applying for visas live in Paris 16th. Then I got a nice ticket with a number on it (215 for the record) and began waiting in a small romm packed with dozens of people. First number called: 170. Three hours later, I finally got the pink receipt which gives me the right to worry about my passport getting lost and, hopefully, get it back on Monday with a visa for India on it. It's 14:45 while I'm writing this and I'm simply on my way back home after losing a full work day for a stupid administrative piece of paper. Have to be back on Monday 16:00 to get the visa back. Someone was saying in the queue that some days, you can wait up to 23:00 to get your passport back. It is terribly sad that this visa system still exists in some countries (not even blaming India for this: we (European Union) do exactly the same for citizens of India, forcing them to visit the French/spanish/German/whatever Schengen country in Dehli or Mumbai, to get a visa for EU. And I can really imagine what mess it can be as well. It was however interesting to see that all this crap was happening with laughs, good stories and friendly atmosphere with all the other French people waiting. Who says that French people are harsh and rude? Or is it already the influence of India on us? Anyway, Sam Hocevar told me yesterday he plans to come tomorrow for his application. Good luck, Sam and don't forget any of the requirements as well as a good coat, something to read (or your laptop to hack, with some spare batteries....and, no, no hackable WiFi around). Note that the 50 euros *have* to be cash money. So, India, here I am....nearly..:-)

Today, I found an interesting use of Google Maps:
Agrandir le plan That happens to be my running loop as of today, the longest ever. For Dirk Eddelbuettel: 16.87km, 1h41. I'm still far from your marathon performances..:-) Amazing how each and every small track in the fields is mentioned and, believe me, they have the *right* names. After all, I could use this to track down my running data. Only drawback: it takes about 15 minutes to draw such loop.

After we took over shadow maintenance as upstream, a lot of work happened on it. About 99% of that work was and still is done by Nicolas Fran ois. Nicolas is 'simply' merging (after careful review) fixes from the various distros that use shadow and integrates them in upstream source. From what I see with my challenged skills for reviewing code, this is done with a great care and Nicolas is really careful with changes. So, you've been warned: next shadow will rock and we really have to find a really good cheese name for it (hint: zgrep "The.*release" /usr/share/doc/passwd/changelog.Debian.gz').

So, our country is again in one of its recurrent strike madness. Yesterday (Wednesday), unions of the public transportation companies (mostly SNCF for trains all over the country, RATP for Paris and suburbs metros/bus system and maybe a few transport companies in other cities) called for an unlimited strike. The point is protesting against the project of harmonizing the retirement systems of these companies with the system used in private companies (AND many public ones such as Onera who I work for). The French retirement financing system is facing the challenge of all participative systems (where the current workers pay for the current retired people, contrary to cpitalization systems where one spares one's own retirement money during one's work life....I hope this is clear with my broken English). As there are less and less workers and more and more retired peoplen the load on workers is becoming harder and harder while the retirement 'salaries' (what's the word for 'pension'?) can only be lower. As a consequence, in the standard retirment system in France, ppl now have to work for 42 years to get a full pension when they retire (theoretically we can at 60....but practically, this happens at 65). In the same time, workers at SNCF, RATP and a few others still have a special retirement system with only 37 years to work and the possibility to retire when reaching 55 for some of them (good ol' days of steam trains justify the work being "hard"). All attempts to change this have failed up to now because of the power of unions at SNCF/RATP/others and the power they have to screw out the entire country. Attempts in 1999 lead to huge strike with, at that time, a strong support by the general public (who feared for their own retirement system.....the strike also being a good way to protest against the general policitcs of the government at that time...as usual). Things changed now and the majority of ppl no longer support so-called privileged people to try hanging to their special retirement system....but of course, unions still have to show their power and, anyway, very few strikers may break things a lot.....and here we are with huge strikes. Yesterday, I managed to do it well with a good train coverage on my line (1 all-stops train per 30minutes) and running at both ends (good for health!). Today was a little bit jerkier with the scheduled train being cancelled and the next one 30 minutes later...and well packed..:-) Hopefully, for tomorrow, the situation should improve as negotiations between government and unions are planned (they were already but I guess that unions had to show their strength....and check whether the average people support them like it happened in 1999....which is actually a complete failure as the general feeling over French population is "enough!"). That's good as I'm not completely sure I can sustain running 12km every day.:)

Sometimes you hit the number :)
(that means: still 50k bugs left for bug #500000)
Noticed that thanks to Christian Perrier who blogged about bug #450000.

---

Dear Lazyweb, After several years without regular physical activity, I resumed it last summer by running 3 or 4 times a week. I still have to write down how good this can be, and how good it has been for my health (from 82kg down to 75kg is already a good result, imho).. Anyway, I'm currently trying to find some software to log my running activity, to keep track of at least the distance I run (which can range from 4km during the week up to 16km, my current record, during week-ends), the time I spent running and the path I followed (I'm lucky enough to live close to forests, country and have numerous choices for my running loops....anough to nearly never reproduce the very same path). In fact, this activity is now enough a challenge for me (how long can I run? After all, I'm now not that far from the semi-marathon.....but the last kilometers may be hard) and I feel some need to track it down. So, is there something around for doing this? "apt-cache search" was silent about this but I may have used the wrong keywords.

A stupid idea that popped up in my head this morning (actually reading the backlog of #debian-devel-fr and a remark by Lucas Nussbaum): it would be interesting to list bugs tagged as "pending" more than, say, one year ago and report them somewhere (-devel or a web page). I think that in the majority of cases, there is probably something broken when a bug is marked pending for more than one year..:-)

I don't have the BTS handy right now, but bug #450000 was reported this week. At the current rate, it means that bug #500000 should come out around Oct 21st 2008. So, who will win the 500000th bug contest?

On Sept 30th 1997, alternated traffic regulation was decided in Paris for the day, because of a pollution peak. As of now, this has been the one and only time this decision was applied and it won't probably happen again because of many (stupid) limitations:

• cars with a "green" sign are not concerned and about 90% of cars now used in France have it
• it is limited to Paris and not its suburbs
• the pollution level that triggers it is stupidely high

Anyway, when this happened, I was, like dozens of millions of moron^W people in the Paris area, driving from my home to my work place (the same home and workplace than now): 30km one way, between 30 and 120 minutes (most of the time 45-60). I then decided to try using public transportation for one full month and then see if I can survive it (as many people who seldom use public transportation, I had horror stories in mind, such as full trains, no respect of schedules and of course, the horrific FRENCH STRIKES). This was 10 years ago and I never stopped. Since then, my daily trip is:

• 7 minutes walk to the bus stop
• 16 minutes ride to the train station
• 10 minutes ride in a first train
• 20 minutes ride in a second train
• 15 minutes ride in a bus
• 6 minutes walk to Onera

So, about 75 minutes from my home to my work place. 30-60 minutes "lost" per day? Not really. In the train, I can read, sleep (funnily an internal system always wakes me up at the right moment) and of course, hack on my laptop (which is my most common activity there). This, quite comfortably with enough room for my arms, feet. The same goes for the bus rides (I don't suffer from car sickness). I still haven't found a way to hack while walking (but I found some free Wifi spots at some bus stops). So, in my opinion, I *won* 90 minutes a day. And, indeed, Debian benefits it a lot as this moment is my privileged moment to work on my packages, or write stupid things in my blog, or just hack around and look for things to improve in our favourite distribution. In 10 years, I of course have a few "horror stories" about crazy schedules, missed busses and of course the awful FRENCH STRIKES. About the latter, the reality is that I just have to look at the special schedules on strike days...and spot the few trains that are schedules (either 1 every 30 minutes or, at worst, 1 every hour....when the usual schedule is 1 every 15 minutes)...and then I reach my home/work pretty safely, while many moron^W other peopl suffer from awful traffic jams on highways. So, in short, here am I, ready for 10 more years of public transportation use and being seen as an ET in my neighbourhood because I leave home by WALKING even if I am not a high school teenager. Strange person, indeed? Not to forget: from my records, I saved about EUR41,700 by doing this, assuming a cost of 0.4EUR/km, 60km/day, 200days/year for the car trips....and EUR623/year for my transportation card. I should buy a brand new SUV..:-)

Top posters in a few Debian-related Planets:

$ planet-scores.sh 
Planet Debian-FR :
     19 Rapha l Hertzog
      4 Roland Mas
      3 Jean-Christophe Dubacq
      2 Gr gory Colpart
      2 Alexis Sukrieh

Sometimes I think this should be renamed Planet Buxy.

Planet Debian-FR (utilisateurs) :
     10 Julien Candelier
      8 Emilien Macchi
      4 Guilhem Bonnefille
      3 Shams Fantar
      1 Rapha l Hertzog
      1 Olivier Berger (perso)
      1 Jean-Christophe Dubacq
      1 Jean-Baptiste H tier (djib)
      1 Eric Veiras Galisson

Newly added contributors to that planet have all their recent articles aggregated, not only the ones they wrote since they were added.

Planet Debian :
     40 Christian Perrier
      2 Russell Coker
      2 Raphael Geissert
      1 Wouter Verhelst
      1 Steve Kemp
      1 Romain Francoise
      1 NOKUBI Takatsugu
      1 Michal  iha 
      1 John Goerzen
      1 Joey Schulze
      1 Gerfried Fuchs
      1 Fathi Boudra
      1 Enrico Zini
      1 Emanuele Rocca
      1 Dirk Eddelbuettel
      1 David Welton
      1 Christine Spang
      1 Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho
      1 Adam Rosi-Kessel

Planet "Christian loves rugby".

debian-community.org :
      4 Holger Levsen
      3 Andrew Donnellan
      2 Evgeni Golov
      1 Wolfgang Lonien
      1 Rapha l Hertzog
      1 Martin Albisetti
      1 Marcos Marado
      1 Jean-Christophe Dubacq
      1 Cord Beermann
      1 Benjamin A'Lee
      1 Andreas Putzo
$

I know I have an encoding problem on some planets, but that script is a very basic curl+shell+sed+grep+recode+sort+uniq pipeline, and I only use it for the amusement value. Maybe I'll recode it with a proper RSS parser some day if I feel utterly bored.

So, finally, I really flooded Planet Debian. Murphy hasn't be nice with me and Planet indeed updated itself just while I was moving aside the old entries I accidentally marked as being posted yesterday (the window was only 2 minutes wide, dammit). As a consequence, about 40 old entries re-appeared, which I apologize for.

While playing with a method to write my blog entries on my laptop and get them synced on my home server automagically (a nice method to annoy my readers even more), I accidentally messed up old entries and made them appear as being posted today. I won't try to fix that. I just moved them aside to avoid flooding Planet Debian and that's all (hope I really won't flood it). After all, who cares? This is not such an important literature. That entry should be the first being posted from my laptop, anyway.

The Samba Team is about to release version 3.2.0 of samba. To prepare this, we built a 3.2.0~pre1-1 package which I just uploaded to experimental. As usual with Samba, users should read the WHATSNEW.txt file to check what changet in samba. One of the major changes is samba being now licensed under GLPv3. In parallel to this, we are now in the process of trying to get the main Debian patches adopted by upstream, which would reduce the size of the diff.gz file as well as save us a lot of work when upstream releases new versions. The main work happens with the "fhs.patch" patch which is aimed at a better respect of the FHS. We began discussions with upstream in a cooperative way and, even if Jerry Carter seems reluctant for some parts, I believe we can have them adopt some of our proposals (Steve Langasek helps a lot in such arguments: having him in a package maintenance team is a blessing....).

...and I like that one, as one may expect. With only 30% ball possession, France won against New Zealand. They transformed the very few occasions to score tries and finally, thanks to a magic inspiration by Fred Michalak, relayed by Yannick Jauzion, their last try made them win 20-18. The french defense was....close to heroic (179 tackles, whiles NZ tackled 36 times!), particularly at the end of the match, where the NZ bulldozer was trying to score one very last try. Not everything was perfect in this match (particularly a disaster in line-outs: I have never been fond of Rafael Ibanez, but it seems to be time for him to retire...), and only the courage made them win. I really wish I could have been in Cardiff to celebrate this. Champagne... So, rendez-vous to our English friends next week-end, in Stade de France. Given their match today, that will be though, again. Tomorrow, South-Africa-Fiji (yet another suprise?) and Argentina-Scotland. Eh, why not France-Argentina as final?