Some more important things happened this week for Debian Installer i18n:

• First of all, Amharic was activated. The longstanding translation effort is reaching its end with Tegegne Tefera completing 87% of the core D-I translations and, more importantly, all strings for the most used packages. Amharic is the national language of Ethiopia and is indeed our second 'native' African language, after Wolof. This is indeed the first language we activate for lenny and that could be a sign of some revival in D-I i18n work.
• I also completed the tests phase of a new version of the 'synchronization script' that allows having all translatable strings for D-I package in a single (giant) PO file. Up to now, we were requiring translators to complete that file before we activate languages. However, many strings in the file are related to very rarely used features or high-end architectures. As the probably of someone installing Debian with LVM support on a s390 machine in something else than English is pretty low, we had to do something. So, very soon, the core D-I file should be splitted in five subfiles:
  • sublevel 1: default installs on common architectures
  • sublevel 2: general strings not used during default installs
  • sublevel 3: expert strings (some low prio, some for e.g. RAID)
  • sublevel 4: specific to less-popular arches (powerpc, mips, sparc) or used in experimental features
  • sublevel 5: same for high-end (hppa, ia64, s390) and hobby (m68k) arches and old stuff (partconf, partitioner, that are replaced by partman for a while)
  This will of course allow translators to better prioritize their work. We'll probably activate languages when translators complete the first two sublevels or so (that remains to be discussed). Thanks anyway to Frans Pop for the numerous good ideas he bringed when we discussed this.
• Armenian got its first commit in the D-I SVN. While the translated ratio is still very low, that's a positive sign
• Effort to translate D-I in Kashmiri should start soon as Rakesh Pandit seems very motivated to work on it
• Several languages from India should also soon raise their translation ratio: Kannada, Telugu, Marathi are expected...

All this work is meant to give some more push to D-I localization effort that paced for some time last months while I focused my attention on some other areas. It seems to show that things never work without someone to care about them, apparently..:-)...so, existing translators, watch out, I'm back on D-I i18n and will kick your asses if you don't keep your translations up to date..:-)

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?

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.

* I was too tired to write this yesterday. Yes, it was very hectic day (but great fun!). Things started very well. Sam and Bubulle did great presentations (specially, this slide from bubulle’s presentation!). Problem with G0SUB’s laptop lead our workshop in very bad situation but Karunakar’s laptop made life easy by some percent! Thanks to him!! Personally, I will not say anything about last two talks, but we have to be very careful next time * Congrats to Varun for being 4th Indian Debian Developer! Yeppie!

...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).

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"?)

Phew, Rob, I thought that was Debian's 50000th bug!

Fortunately, I haven't lost the bet!

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..:-)

Yay, the club seems to be getting bigger and bigger. While I've been mostly away from this blog, Bubulle has joined the group. Also, the long-disappeared Evan promises to be back, and running as well. I didn't get to see him, but Gaby told me she saw Mauricio (making a IMHO very nice 0:51:33 time for 10Km) on last week's Nike race. Of course, I was also at the race, with a 1:07:36 total time. Not bad for such a strange period!

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.:)

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..:-)