I'm sure you already heard the news about the new joined Canterbury Distribution, and are eager about details. While our teams are struggling to integrate all the existing infrastructure, it's my pleasure to announce that the first pieces of the collaboration are already available for our users. As a first measurement, a common Canterbury Package Manager, called cant will be made available in all distributions. It is already available for the distribution formerly known as Archlinux, and with the next mirror push will also be available for those used to run Debian. You'll be pleased to know, that the command line syntax isn't much of a change, you can still run cant search, cant install or cant remove, but future version will also introduce all the features known from the other distributions. Stay tuned for further updates of Canterbury Linux!

For the whole week, I ve been in Bangalore for the GNOME.Asia 2011 hackfest. I ve been delegated by Stefano to represent Debian here, and my employer EDF has agreed to cover for travel costs since they are very interested in first-hand information the future of the Linux desktop and sharing our work on scientific computing. It s been a really exciting week; I ve spent quite some time packaging missing pieces of GNOME 3.0 (well, the release candidate versions of course) in experimental, together with Fred Peters. I think it s reaching a usable state now, so we ll probably soon provide metapackages to make it easily installable. The latest developments of the Shell make it a very exciting piece of software, with a strong focus on usability. Many things were written about it, but in the end my main criticism would be that it lacks some functionality - for example, the combined clock/weather/locations applet will be greatly missed. The good news is that it is extremely customizable, and with all the libraries being made accessible through GObject introspection, there are many features that are accessible from it. If you know how to write JavaScript, now is the time to write your favorite extension. On the good news front, Vincent Untz also spent a lot of time improving the so-called legacy mode , which is more and more starting to look like the Shell without special effects, and with all the features from gnome-panel 2.x that are still here. We will try in Debian to cover all uses cases that there were for GNOME 2 with GNOME 3 technology, so that panel lovers are not left behind. I ve also proposed an update to the dh_gsettings proposal, which will provide the same functionality as dh_gconf and allow to easily set distribution-specific overrides. It is still missing a way to set mandatory settings, which might come as a problem for some corporate users, but this is planned for a future version of GSettings. Today, we re having a business track where I and representatives of other companies (Oracle, Lanedo, Dexxa) are sharing experiences about making money with free software. Unfortunately the local organizers didn t manage to gather many people, despite our being in a city with an incredible number of IT industries. Tomorrow, the public conference starts, and this should be the opposite: we re expecting around 1000 people, which is a great achievement for a free software conference. For an unrelated topic, being around so many GNOME hackers has some interesting side effects; I ve been added to Planet GNOME. So, hey, hello Planet GNOME readers!

The student application period for applying to GSoC opened last Monday and we already have a couple of very good applications from students. We are still missing yours! The list of Debian projects includes a nice variety of projects:

• If you are into Python, take a look at the project for writing a tool to automate building Python extensions.
• Do you want to contribute to improving the relation of Debian with its derivatives? The DEX tools project is for you.
• If you have good web scripting skills, you might be interested in helping creating the Debian talks database.
• Are you into data mining? Check the Measuring Team Performance project.
• You would like to make Iceweasel better? The Iceweasel plugin finder needs you.
• Are you missing a system where developers can publish and auto-build their temporary non-official packages? You can make it real with the Developer Package Repositories project.
• There is more at our projects page !

There is only one week left, so do not leave it for last minute. Get in touch with the mentors of the projects you are interested in and add your proposal to the Debian wiki and in Google Melange. If you are a Debian contributor wanting to mentor a project, you still can. Please read this email with some hints.

In one of the corners of what is now know as Europa, there was a rich, prosperous and beautiful kingdom known as Trist nia. In the past, not that long ago, it had been a number of smaller kingdoms and caliphates, all with their own cultures, religions and ways of life. Wars, and series of marriages of convenience eventually configured what ended up being the united kingdom of Trist nia. Throughout the years, some of the unified cultures grew and flourished, while others struggled to survive in their ever-shrinking areas of influence. A required introduction Sometimes, the minor cultures would suffer due to oppression coming from the delegates of the King, who would ban any expression of these cultures, as they were seen as a potential threat to the kingdom's stability and unity. For example, just a few decades before the main subject of this tale, the predecessor of the incumbent King took power by force, after crushing everyone who opposed his uprise during a bloody and hard civil war. His reign was ruthless and he imposed draconian laws uppon his people: usage and teaching of the minor languages was banned, and everyone was forced to use the language of the Centr lia region, in public or private. After four decades, the majority of the Tristanian people were sick enough of the situation to consider standing against their fear of the regime and demand freedom, but repression prevailed until the old general died. His place was taken by the King's grandson even if the people had expressed, just before the Great War, that they had had enough kings and demanded a ruler they could choose directly. Of course, the new King seemed a lot nicer than who they had been suffering for ages, so when asked if they accepted the new situation, an overwhelming majority said yes . However, there was a region, Verd lia, where the majority said no . Things were actually more complicated. Verdalians formed a traditional, proud society, and while the years of oppression had undoubtedly weakened it, they had managed to preserve their very unique culture, language and traditions healthy. The Verdal language was really weird to the ears of Centr lians and even other minor cultures of the Kingdom, and erudites struggled to find its real origins, not being able to reach plausible conclusions. Verdanians, as we already know, were a traditional society, living in a land of deep and poorly connected valleys. Little they knew or cared about the complicated matters of Centr lia and other regions. What made them happy was to take care their sheep and cows, keep a good fire in their living room and, every now and then, enjoy one of their log cutting contests. The impositions of the former dictator were too much for them, and some of them started sabotaging, assaulting and killing some of the dictator's soldiers, agents and officers. This was a huge risk at the time; getting caught meant death penalty for sure, and at first, even people from other regions were in favour of these actions. However, this popular support greatly diminished when the new King took the throne, as these minority continued with the killings, while most of the people saw it was no longer justified. The Royal Ball One of the very first measures the young King introduced was to organise the Royal Ball of Trist nia , a major event through which the people of the different regions would be able to elect their delegates to the Crown. Every four years, a Great Ball contest would happen in Centr lia, and the winners would be able to decide by their own on some of the matters that affected their region. Verdanians would send a few teams of dancers, each of which came from different towns or areas. Some Verdanian teams were happy about the King and the new political situation, but other teams weren't so much. And some others, while being simple non-violent dancers, were known to be supporters of the violent minority who kept on harassing, assaulting and even killing in their struggle for freedom of Verd nia . The Verdanian groups aligned with the different culture of Verd nia (including those who were said to support the violent) tended to get a lot more points in the dancing contest, and a majority of the elected delegates were appointed by them, making it easier to pass laws and edicts that favoured protection of their ways, traditions and language. No matter how hard they tried, the dancing groups closer to Centr lia kept losing to the majority. After many years of dance contests, these groups used their closeness to the King's court to pass the Ball Law of Tristanian, that would ban any dancing group which didn't condemn the assaults and killings that kept happening in Verd nia. The unsurprising result was that, with less dancing groups participating in the following Royal Ball, the Verdanian majority was broken and new delegates, friendly of the Centralian officers, were elected. Many people who had been in favour of assaults and killings began to question this strategy, and this political movement's unity started to break. In the end, the dancers decided to part ways with the violent; they wanted to dance in the next ball, and to do so, they wrote a letter to the King, in which they explicitly expressed their rejection of violent ways, and their embracing of dancing as the only means to drive their political agenda. An objective reading of the new Ball Law clearly showed that this was enough: the text only said the requisite for a dancing group was to disavow all kinds of violence. This wasn't really expected in Centr lia, so they started to add new requirements in an attempt to keep this group from the contest: their decisive majority in Verd nia was at stake. The Royal Ball was nearing and registrations for the contest would soon close. The Centralian government first argued that the dancing group should reject the violence coming from the Verdanian extremists in particular. The dancers did it. Then they argued that the dancers were the same people who had been supporting violence in Verd nia for years, and obviously their violence rejection statement was a lie. The dancers struggled to find new dancers who had not been involved in past dances. But it was not enough. They then claimed that this dance group should be quarantined for four years, until they could prove they really were serious about their new non-violent ideas. The dance group made a plea to the Trist nian Supreme Counsel, a group of sixteen experts in law of the Kingdom, and argued that all of these draconian requirements were not part of the law that was being enforced by the King. Their appeal to the elder counselors was in vain, though. They ruled this dancing group was as criminal as the violent minority they had once supported, and should by no means take part in the Royal Ball. As a last, desperate measure, the dancing group reached an agreement with other Verdanian dancers to join forces. They would adopt a new name and new dancing costume colours. Many feared this would only end up in the ban of the other dancing group. Unfortunately, the end of this story has not been written yet, but it will be completed very soon. Only time will tell if things continue being very sad and unfair in Trist nia, or if the dance contest will once again be impartial, with legitimate results.

Este post tambi n est escrito en espa ol. If you follow me on Twitter/Facebook, you probably know that I went to Gothenburg, Sweden, during my last trip to Europe. But you probably don t know what I did in such remote city. Few months ago, I applied to a PhD student position at Chalmers. I was lucky enough to be shortlisted, so I went to some in-situ interviews. And, incredibly, I have been accepted! :-) Chalmers is a TOP 100 university. Most of the papers I read during the last months has been written by Chalmers researchers and for me is a great honor to be part of an academic institution with such prestige. I m going to move to the nice Gothenburg city in August. And I m happy :)

A while ago I said Koen from Emweb made an interesting proposal at FOSDEM about emerge, the KDE Windows build tool. Yesterday, Jaros aw Staniek and I reaffirmed our commitment to emerge . Today, I d like to go a bit further: let s bring more developers to emerge by opening it up to other projects. Keep reading! What is emerge, why is it important and what was Koen s proposal? Fact: Microsoft Windows is very different to Unix in regards to development. On Unix platforms -that includes Linux and Mac OS X-, software is usually installed to /usr: applications in /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, libraries in /usr/lib, headers in /usr/include, common resources in /usr/share, etc. Also, dependency management is usually something you can count on: when you install kdelibs5-dev in Ubuntu, it will automatically install libqt4-dev, kdelibs5-data, libfreetype (runtime), etc That makes setting up a development environment a very easy task: look for shared libraries, header files, etc in the common places and you will probably find them. On Windows there is nothing like that. When you want to compile an application, you need to provide (build and install) all its dependencies, and you need to tell Visual Studio where to find everything. Even CMake usually needs some help in the form of a hint for CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH. As you may imagine, building KDE, which has more than 200 third party dependencies and tens of modules (and with the move + split to git, many more) becomes an almost insurmountable task. Emerge to the rescue: inspired by Gentoo s emerge, Ralf Habacker, Christian Ehrlicher, Patrick Spendrin and others (yours faithfully included) developed a tool which downloads the source, configures, builds, installs and packages KDE and its dependencies. It makes a world of difference when building KDE. Actually, it makes building KDE on Windows possible. Once more: thank you very much guys, impressive tool. There are two well-differentiated parts in emerge, the engine and the recipes . The engine takes care of downloading the sources (tarballs, checkouts from Subversion and git clones, etc) , configuring and building for the usual build systems (QMake, CMake, NMake makefiles, etc), installing, bundling packages together and much more. All that for four compilers (MSVC2008, MSVC2010, MinGW32 and MinGW-W64). It s the equivalent to Gentoo s emerge, Debian s dpkg + debhelper/cdbs or Homebrew and MacPorts for Macintosh. The recipes are the package-specific instructions a particular piece of software needs to build: what s the name of the tarball? URL to download from? What versions are available? What build system to use to configure and build? Does it need any Windows-specific patch? They are written in Python using some helper modules emerge provides (the debhelper-like part I mentioned above). Currently, there are about 70 recipes in emerge, organized in our portage tree (bear in mind the names are taken from Gentoo but the internals of the tool are completely different). With those 70 recipes, we are able to build most KDE modules. Problem is to provide all the optional features, we are missing probably 200 to 250 more recipes. Given that KDE on Windows is quite short on developers, we have to decide: either we fix bugs and improve the integration of KDE on Windows, or we keep track of the dependencies. I won t lie: for KDE on Windows, I d rather focus on development than on packaging. Given that writing and maintaining recipes does not strictly require programming skills (although they help ), during my talk at FOSDEM I kept asking people to join the KDE on Windows team as packagers, even if you know little to nothing about software development. If you think about it, that s what we have in Linux distributions: there are hundreds (thousands?) of packagers in Debian, Fedora, openSuse, etc which take care of the recipes to build software developed by someone else ( upstream , in the parlance). What we have in KDE on Windows, where we are the KDE packagers, the KDE developers (upstream) and the emerge developers, is actually an anomaly. Then Koen took the microphone and said: why don t you open emerge to other projects? And I there I realized he was damn right We have developed an awesome tool to download, configure, build, package and install third party software on Windows, to manage dependencies, to update, etc. For four compilers, no less. The engine of emerge is not really tied to KDE. We already have a lot of recipes for software which is not KDE specific: openssl, Qt, bzip2, libpng, mysql, etc. I see no actual reason to disallow Gnome, GStreamer, OpenSceneGraph, LibreOffice and many others in (assuming someone wants to take care of them, of course no, do not look at me! I don t have time!). Currently, the only barrier preventing those recipes in is emerge is developed in the KDE repository and you need a KDE developer account to commit your recipes. That s about it. There is also a perception problem: if emerge is developed in KDE, it s because it s a KDE-thingy, right? . Well, no. One way to avoid that would be to graduate emerge from KDE and make it an independent project, one in which the current developers have accounts, and new developers get an emerge project account instead of a KDE account to commit recipes. Please note graduating does not mean expelling , firing or anything peyorative. It does not mean that emerge developers (engine and recipes) are worse than KDE developers, or less KDE developers than our god David Faure: in KDE, we consider Debian, Fedora, openSuse, etc KDE packagers as equals, they are also KDE developers and many of them are in the KDE eV (funny thing is I am not). My wish for today: think of one application or library you d like to see in Windows and become its maintainer in emerge for Windows. For now, let s do this in the kde-windows mailing list and if this idea succeeds, then we ll talk about graduating. You could also try to add support for a new compiler (OpenWatcom, Intel C++, etc) but that s a lot more more and it s not a priority now. PS: Yes, I know about CoApp, Microsoft s similar effort, with some magic involved. I ve been watching and trying it since day 1. I m really interested. It s just not there yet and I do not have spare time to help Garrett (hey Microsoft, hire me and I ll have all the time in the world! )

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article for The Guardian about Harper-Collins attempts to make self-destructing books [1]. They claim that a traditional book falls apart after being read 26 times (a claim that Cory disputes based on personal experience working at libraries) and want ebooks to be deleted after being borrowed so often. Really the copy-right fascists are jumping the shark here.Socialogical Images has an interesting archive of adverts for supposed treatments for autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, asperger syndrome, and attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder [2]. The New York University Child Study Center conducted the campaign of fake ransom notes to describe a psychological difference as something that kidnaps a child. The possibility that parents should to some extent learn to adapt to their child s nature rather than fixing them with medication is something that most people can t seem to understand.William Cronon has written an interesting analysis of the way Conservative , lobby groups work [3]. They are more organised than I expected.The Reid Report has a good summary of some of the corporat issues related to the Japanese nuclear melt-down [4], apparently the company that runs the reactors decided to delay using sea-water in the hope that their investment could be salvaged and thus put everyone at increased risk. I think that this proves that reactors shouldn t be privately owned.Ian Lowe wrote a good summary of the reasons why Australia should not be using nuclear power when we believed that the Fukushima disaster was over [5]. But it turns out that the Fukushima problems were worse than we thought and the melt-down is getting worse.Christopher Smart wrote a good analysis of Microsoft s latest attempt to extort money from Linux users where they assert patent claims over Android [6]. He points out that .NET/Mono is a risk to Linux.Major Keary wrote a positive review of Snip Burn Solder Shred which is a book about Seriously geeky stuff to make with your kids [7]. Sounds like a fun book.The internal network of RSA has been cracked in some way that apparently weakens the security of SecureID, Bruce Schneier s blog comments section has an interesting discussion of the possibilities [8]. I expect that it s a fairly bad attack, if the attack was minor then surely the RSA people would have told us all the details.Hans Rosling gave an interesting TED talk about The Magic Washing Machine [9]. He describes how his family benefited when his mother first got a washing machine and how this resulted in better education as his mother had more time to get library books for her children. It seems that deploying more electric washing machines should be a priority for improving education and food supplies in third-world countries.Paul Root Wolpe gave an interesting and disturbing TED talk about bio-engineering [10]. He catalogues the various engineered animals and talks about the potential for future developments.Ron Rosenbaum wrote an interesting and insightful article for Slate about Maj. Harold Hering who s military career ended after he asked how to determine whether a nuclear launch order is lawful, legitimate, and comes from a sane president [11]. The question never received a good answer, this is a good reason for moving towards nuclear disarmament and for Americans to vote for the sanest and most intelligent candidate in the presidential elections.Eythor Bender gave an inspiring TED talk about human exoskeletons [12]. He had live demonstrations on stage of a soldier using an exo-skeleton to carry a heavy backpack and a woman who suffered a severe spinal-cord injury walking after being in a wheel-chair for 19 years.

• [1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/08/ebooks-harpercollins-26-times
• [2] http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/26/mental-illness-steals-your-childs-true-self/
• [3] http://scholarcitizen.williamcronon.net/2011/03/15/alec/
• [4] http://blog.reidreport.com/2011/03/when-the-corporation-is-in-charge-japanese-nuke-co-delayed-sea-water-solution/
• [5] http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/no-nukes-now-or-ever-20110319-1c1ed.html
• [6] http://blog.christophersmart.com/2011/03/22/microsoft-licenses-its-patents-to-android-manufacturers-sues-if-they-dont-agree/
• [7] http://luv.asn.au/review/snip-burn-solder-shred
• [8] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/03/rsa_security_in.html
• [9] http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine.html
• [10] http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_root_wolpe_it_s_time_to_question_bio_engineering.html
• [11] http://www.slate.com/id/2286735/pagenum/all
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/eythor_bender_demos_human_exoskeletons.html

Today, in an IRC channel near you, the discussion came to recover files from lost+found somehow. Two years ago I wrote some scripts to automatically recover files from lost+found, so this is some sort of a repost. There are two scripts: one that generates some kind of ls-LR file to have all the information needed for the second script, which restores those files in lost+found to their original folders. Here is the information from the original blog post: make-lsLR.sh - call this regularly (cron) to create the needed files that are stored in /root/. Of course you can alter the location easily and exclude other directories from being scanned. check_lost+found.py - The second script is to be run when your fsck managed to mess up with your files and stored them into lost+found directory. It takes 3 arguments: 1) the source directory where your messed up lost+found directory is, 2) the target directory to which the data will be saved and 3) a switch to actually make it happen instead of a dry-run. You can find both files as attachment end the end of this blog post.

I've chosen to copy the files to a different place instead of moving them within the same filesystem to their original place for safety reasons. Primary goal is to retrieve the files from lost+found, not to replace a full featured backup and restore application. Because of this the script doesn't handle hard- nor symlinks correctly. It just copy files.

Of course there's still room for improvements, like handling hard-/symlinks correctly or using inode number instead of md5sums to move data back to its prior location. But it works for me[tm] well enough in this way, so I'm satisfied so far. You're welcome, though, to improve this piece of ugliness if you like.

Maybe someone else finds this usefull as well. Use it on your own risk, of course. :)

So the other day, I was able to do this in an Ubuntu natty amd64 chroot for the first time.

# cat > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/multiarch-me
APT::Architectures   "amd64"; "i386";  ;
^D
# cat >> /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg
foreign-architecture i386
^D
# apt-get update
# apt-get install flashplugin-installer:i386
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
[...]
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  flashplugin-installer:i386 flashplugin-nonfree:i386 gcc-4.5-base:i386
  libatk1.0-0:i386 libavahi-client3:i386 libavahi-common-data:i386
  libavahi-common3:i386 libc6:i386 libcairo2:i386 libcomerr2:i386
  libcups2:i386 libdatrie1:i386 libdbus-1-3:i386 libdrm2:i386
  libegl1-mesa:i386 libexpat1:i386 libfontconfig1:i386 libfreetype6:i386
  libgcc1:i386 libgcrypt11:i386 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0:i386 libgl1-mesa-glx:i386
  libglib2.0-0:i386 libgnutls26:i386 libgpg-error0:i386 libgssapi-krb5-2:i386
  libgtk2.0-0:i386 libgtk2.0-common libice6:i386 libjasper1:i386
  libjpeg62:i386 libk5crypto3:i386 libkeyutils1:i386 libkrb5-3:i386
  libkrb5support0:i386 libnspr4:i386 libnspr4-0d:i386 libnss3:i386
  libnss3-1d:i386 libpango1.0-0:i386 libpcre3:i386 libpixman-1-0:i386
  libpng12-0:i386 libselinux1:i386 libsm6:i386 libsqlite3-0:i386
  libstdc++6:i386 libtasn1-3:i386 libthai-data libthai0:i386 libtiff4:i386
  libudev0:i386 libuuid1:i386 libx11-6:i386 libx11-data libx11-xcb1:i386
  libxau6:i386 libxcb-dri2-0:i386 libxcb-render0:i386 libxcb-shape0:i386
  libxcb-shm0:i386 libxcb-xfixes0:i386 libxcb1:i386 libxcomposite1:i386
  libxcursor1:i386 libxdamage1:i386 libxdmcp6:i386 libxext6:i386
  libxfixes3:i386 libxft2:i386 libxi6:i386 libxinerama1:i386 libxrandr2:i386
  libxrender1:i386 libxt6:i386 libxxf86vm1:i386 x11-common zlib1g:i386
0 upgraded, 78 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.
Need to get 15.1 MB/15.6 MB of archives.
After this operation, 48.9 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

It is a truly heady experience, after so many years of talking about the need to properly support multiarch in Debian and Ubuntu, to see support for cross-installation of packages come to fruition. If you've talked to me any time in the past couple of weeks and noticed it's a little hard to get me to change the subject, well, that's why. Many who have grown accustomed to Debian and Ubuntu's lack of support for installing i386 packages on amd64 (or vice versa) may wonder what the fuss is about. (Whereas others who are well versed in distributions such as Red Hat and SuSE may laugh and wonder what took us so long...) So maybe a few words of explanation are in order. If you've ever installed ia32-libs on an amd64 machine anywhere; if you've ever noticed a bug where ia32-libs didn't work right because of wrong system paths, or had to file a request for another library to be added to ia32-libs because it wasn't included in the set of libraries Debian decided to package up in this grotesque, all-in-one 32-bit compatibility bundle; if you've ever decided not to install a 64-bit OS on your perfectly 64-bit-capable hardware because of concern that you wouldn't be able to run $random32-bitonly_application; multiarch is for you. If you've gotten stuck maintaining a lib32foo "biarch" package in Debian due to popular demand, multiarch is definitely for you. :) If you've ever cross-compiled software for a different Debian architecture than the one you were running, multiarch is for you. If you've ever wanted to run binaries for a different architecture under emulation, and found it awkward to set up the library dependencies, multiarch is for you, too. Because although the .deb world may be a little late to the party, we're also naturally taking things much further than anyone's done with rpm. Multiarch won't just give you the ability to install 32-bit libs on 64-bit systems; it'll give you the ability to install libs for any known architecture on any system. And a whole lot of pain just falls out of the equation in the process. A cross-compiling environment looks the same as a native-compiling environment. An emulated system looks the same as a native system. We can start to seriously consider cross-grading systems from one architecture to another. And all this is happening now. The groundwork is there in Ubuntu natty. Wheezy will be the release that brings multiarch to Debian. When dpkg 1.16.0 is uploaded to unstable real soon now, the bootstrapping will begin. I am immensely grateful to everyone who's helped make multiarch a reality - to Tollef, Matt and others for seeding the vision; Aurelien, Matthias and Arthur for their work to ready the toolchain; David and Michael for the apt implementation; Guillem and Raphael for the dpkg implementation, and Linaro's support to help make this possible; and the many other developers who've helped to refine this design over the years in numerous other BoFs, sessions and mailing list threads. I'm excited to find out what the Debian community will do with multiarch now that it's upon us. Christian, maybe you should start a pool for how long it will take before all the libraries shipped in ia32-libs have been converted to multiarch and we can drop ia32-libs from the archive?

So, the first half of my spring challenge is over. I managed to run the 50km version of Paris Eco-Trail on Saturday. 50km, this is what was advertized... The reality was 55km and, believe me, these extra 5K were worth a lot of pain..:-). I managed to complete the whole run in 6h36. As you can see, a lot slower (about 8.5km/h) than marathon races (where I managed to keep a 11.5 km/h pace) but, eh, marathons don't have 1000m positive slope! Eco-Trail is a great race. The start was in Versailles Castle park, with 5 kilometers around the Grand Canal and a few more in the castle's neighbourhood, so that the 1500-runners crowd can be a little bit dispersed before we start the forests' single track trails. Then, after 8K, we enter forests, which we won't leave until km 45, except a few street crossing here or there. Paris forests (Satory, Versailles, V lizy, Meudon, Fausses-Reposes, Saint-Cloud) are great in the springtime. The weather was a little bit "hot", which explains the quite high ratio of non finishers (11% for the 50K trail and nearly 15% for the 80K race). I managed well until KM44 where cramps began to appear. The difference between road races and trail races are rhythm differences: nobody (except the very first runners) is running when climbing hills, that would be virtual suicide. So, you have to manage this as well. My goal was keeping a 6'/km pace on the first 15K, which was quite achieved. Later on, the succession of hills makes it impossible to use one's pace as a reference. The point is mostly keeping things smooth, arrive at first food point on KM26 in very good shape and drink, drink, drink. After a 5mins stop at KM26, I started the hardest part of the trail, until KM44: this part is mostly made of ups and downs and is the real challenge: legs start burning, downhill running becomes harder and harder and you need to save some energy for the final kilometers. The second food point was in St-Cloud park, with a very nice view on the Eiffel Tower, far far away. That one is the Grail to reach...but, when here, we already have more than a marathon in our legs. So, the stop is quite longer (about 10 minutes), just to be sure about "drink, drink, drink" (eating is nearly a no-no at this point). The final 10K along river Seine, from Saint-Cloud to Eiffel Tower were really though. I was alternating walk and running, in attempts to avoid cramps (I still remember my 35K trail back in June, where I completed the last 3K with cramps in both legs, a real nightmare). I still managed to run most of the time, though very slowly. Most of us were indeed looking like zombies when crossing a small park on le Saint-Germain with kids playing football and families hanging around, enjoying the (still nice) weather. Now, even a 3-meter high climbing means walking..:-) The final kilometer was fun: at that point, you know you'll make it and you try to look proud and fine while running among the Eiffel Tower neighbourhood tourist crowd. And the applauses for the final 500meters are the real final gift with dozens of people yelling your name (it was written along with our numbers, of course!). Yay. I finally managed to finish 416th out of 1291 finishers, 50th in my age/gender category. Not that bad for the first test beyond 42K. Now the challenge is "rest, rest, rest" until April 10th and the Paris Marathon. The first marathon of my second half-century. I, of course, know that this one will be really hard. No idea, indeed, what goal I should set. Certainly not my marathon personal best (3h40'). I think I would probably already be happy to finish in less than 4 hours. If I feel really really well, I'll set 3h49' as my goal (that was my time in Paris Marathon last year). We'll see if that's crazy or not. Doh, I really have weird ideas for the gifts I offer myself for my birthday...

Wonderful jazz concert at CSO yesterday in classic double-header plus intermission format. First up was Branford Marsalis (ss,ts) with his quartet featuring Joey Calderazzo (p), Eric Revis (b) and Justin Faulkner (dr) and they simply blew the roof off the place. Best set I heard in a while: dynamic, joyful, playful, modern, whathaveyou. Really really nice. The second set was the Terence Blanchard (tp) quintet featuring Brice Winston (ts), Fabian Almazan (p), Joe Sanders (b) and Kendrick Scott (dr) who also played a nice set, but as far as I am concerned did not gel as a much as the spectacular first set. Great evening.

I m online again. (In case you didn t notice, duh ) Seems as if we (the Telco/ISP guy and me) just needed to look at it hard enough for it to go away first he could dial in, using my account data, which I probably should change now, then herc with ppp(8) and pppoe(8) was working (although at about 50 KiB/s down, he showed me 508 KiB/s a rate I had never achieved with his WiXP), then I took my notebook, which worked with pppoe(4). Now herc s working again. (Maybe altq(9) can explain the slowdown? Hm, from debian.netcologne.de I get 500 so it looks okay.)
But eurynome isn t, oh the joy. Luckily, gecko2 who administers its host system just woke up. Things we do want to see: the Telco/ISP guy accepting that I run MirBSD on a P-233MMX box with Hercules graphics card and a 9 monitor with no comment other than considering its age (and that it usually runs 24/7) as partial cause for the bug. Thanks, Netcologne! Things we don t want to see:
Mar 26 10:40:02 blau /bsd: signal 11 received by (screen:16857) UID(2999) EUID(2999), parent (screen:19111) UID(2999) EUID(2999)
Suddenly the Dungeon collapses!! - You die... (luckily, I get it about once a year only) ObCoffeeSpices: Marrakech (Cumin, Allspice, Cumin Aroma) though, due to its relative strength compared to the others, the only coffee spice I have left. And another hint: pre-warming the coffee cup with hot water, so it doesn t cool down too fast with the amounts of milk I put in, rocks. I just wore the Squeeze Release (FOSDEM, Spacefun) T-Shirt to the bakery and got asked by a neighbour: Oh, a Debian fan? Developer, even now imagine the typical informed interested guy talk for a conference booth of your OS of choice here. How proud he was to get his wife and himself Windows -free at home; how he likes to tinker a bit (if he s got any time left), which has become harder with Windows; how his time constraints have him at OpenSuSE currently but asked how squeeze is; and the usual complaints at places like $ork where they have to use Windows and MSIE (apparently you can t centrally manage Firefox, eh, good someone tells me, because that s what we do ). Wow. Anyway, it s spring, so people, wear your shirts. (Hrm, what do I make of the fact that this is my only Debian shirt although I m thinking how to get Tartan Trousers if money were no issue and nobody had ever commented on my various BSD, FOSDEM, FrOSCon, etc. wear )

A meme that keeps going around is that Asperger Syndrome (AS) is somehow universally good. The DSM doesn t list things that are beneficial, so any diagnostic criteria has to be for something that has some serious down-sides even if there are positive aspects to it. Of course on the Internet the debate won t just end there.Positive Aspects of ASThe main positive aspect of AS is intense concentration on topics of Special Interest, if a Special Interest is something that is related to a high paying job (such as computer programming) then that s a really good thing. Of course a Special Interest that isn t related to well paid employment or for which most people get paid little and only a lucky few get paid really well (such as music) isn t going to be a good thing by objective criteria.It seems that most people on the Autism Spectrum have sensory advantages over Neuro-Typical people (NTs). Better vision and hearing are quite common. It s good to be able to notice small and quiet things that most people miss, but that s not a benefit that most people seem to particularly desire. The down-side is that loud sounds and bright lights are more unpleasant and it s easy to be distracted by things that other people won t notice.The desire to give lectures has obvious benefits for any profession where giving lectures is a large part of the work, this is one reason why so many Aspies end up in academic careers. The down-side is that this is usually combined with a lack of ability to recognise when people aren t interested in receiving a lecture.Things can work out quite well for people on the Autism Spectrum who have a special interest that relates to a well paying career, who don t have any problems that prevent them from getting and keeping a job.Neutral Aspects of ASOn forums some Aspies report that they don t want to have friends, presumably their needs for friendship are met by the interaction with other forum members. As far as I can determine they are happy like that. I m sure that such people are a lot happier than people who want friends and don t have any.The incidence of asexuality among Aspies is apparently a lot higher than among the general population (something like 30% vs 1%). This isn t a bad thing for those people (I am not aware of any evidence to suggest that asexuals are less happy than people with average sexual desire), but it is evidence to suggest that Aspies are not the next stage in human evolution.Negative Aspects of ASThe DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for AS has as section C The disturbance causes clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning , in the proposed changes for DSM-V it s merged into Autistic Disorder with section D being Symptoms together limit and impair everyday functioning [1]. These seem like clear disadvantages, it doesn t seem possible to be diagnosed as being on the Autism Spectrum without having some real disadvantage.Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) seem to usually be correlated with Sensory Processing Disorder. Symptoms of SPD can include a lack of tolerance for noise, lights, certain types of clothing, dirt, and lots of other things as well as being physically clumsy. SPD is not in the diagnostic criteria for any ASD but it seems that most people on the Spectrum experience it to some degree and many regard it as the worst down-side of Autism.Spiritual Aspects of ASI ve seen a claim that AS gives them some advantage over NTs in terms of spiritual development. When someone manages to prove that their God exists or whatever other supernatural belief they have is based on fact then I ll consider this possibility.I think it s worth noting however that most religions seem to place some emphasis on humility, that seems to go against claiming that one s neuro-type is genetically predisposed to being successful at religion.ConclusionThere are many positive, neutral, and negative aspects of AS that I didn t list, I only mentioned some of the more common ones. How the positive and negative aspects compare differs on an individual basis, some people seem to be better off by objective criteria. But it seems that the best outcome is to have a different life experience that isn t objectively worse, which usually seems to involve a career in computers, science, engineering, or academia.Really if we were better then the Neuro-Typical people (NTs) would envy us, and I haven t seen much evidence of that. The NTs who do think that AS is a good thing seem to have little knowledge of AS.

• [1] http://www.dsm5.org/ProposedRevisions/Pages/proposedrevision.aspx?rid=97

Proposals for autosigning were floating around for quite some time. The most controversial parts were how we secure the machines that do the building (and in turn: how do we secure the key) and who's going to manage the keyring (because there are multiple teams involved; such discussions can indeed take quite a bit time).

What we've agreed upon now is as follows:

• All buildds with autosigned must be debian.org machines, which means that they are administrated by the Debian Sysadmins. This involves regular upgrades of the machine, firewalling and monitoring. They are all doing this already (kudos!), so there was no change needed.
• The machines must be restricted so that only a limited set of people may access it. That's done, it's just the buildd admins for the specific buildd and the global group builddadm (plus the admins and the local admin, of course).
• Every host has its own GPG key. Key generation locally on the buildds is eased by having the fine Entropy Key hooked up to provide entropy centrally and distributed to the debian.org machines. Private keys don't need to and must not leave the host. The keys are rotated every 120 days, expiry dates will be used to ensure that and to remind us when rotation is due. Sadly there is no HSM involved. Given the geographic dispersiveness of the Debian infrastructure that's not done easily. Some machines (like s390 racks) would also be unable to connect local hardware.
• The keys are restricted to specific architectures. They are not able to upload any source to the archive. However every binary on the specific architecture can be uploaded using the key, there are no further restrictions on package priorities or the like. They are maintained by the wanna-build admins on ftp-master by signing the armored public keys with their personal GPG keys (instructions available on the list). Thus a trust chain is established: who added or removed which key and when.
• We plan to suppress networking in the chroot soon. This will possibly be done with unshare(1) in util-linux, as soon as we sort out proper localhost networking. This was not deemed a blocker at this point.

If you are wondering, how we will manage to have the DebCamp preceding DebConf 11 in 2009, it's quite easy: Each attendee will find a time machine in his conference back. By the way: To make that happen, the DebConf orga team is looking for help in fund raising. Please consider helping us, or we will have to cancel the time machines and fall back to the boring DebCamp directly preceding DebConf solution.

I have been reading Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook by Sarath Lakshman, published by Packt, for a while. While most people I know learn shell scripts themselves, I was looking to refresh my concepts a little as well as have a reference lying around on the table for fast access. Since I was asked to review it for someone else, I thought I might as well post the review here.First of all, let me remark by saying that shell scripting is something learned more on a need basis than as a tool to solve the main problem. People would seldom write shell scripts as standalone programs (exceptions exist). However, what makes shell scripting invaluable to know is the fact that knowing some tricks can save several minutes, or hours, of work by automating and simplifying certain tasks, generally (but not restricted to) file management and data processing. Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook does go quite far in pursuing this goal, and is appropriate for both beginners who are looking to gain dexterity in shell scripting, as well as intermediate users who wish to polish their skills. The book also can double up as a quick reference, though I would argue that the "Advanced Bash Scripting Guide" would suit that more.At the outset, the author clarifies that the focus will be on Bash. This, people may or may not like, but the fact that bash has become ubiquitous in terms of the available shells on Unix-like systems today, starting out with bash is not a bad thing to do. Besides, learning other shell scripting languages while knowing bash isn't too hard, since the paradigm remains the same.Let's go through the books from the aspects I found most relevant.OrganizationThe book is organized into chapters based more on utility than scripting concepts themselves, although the language aspects are brought onto the reader gradually. For instance, the examples in the first chapter focus more on the basic data elements (variables, arrays, functions etc.) as well as operators (for numbers, files etc.), and all the examples demonstrate simple usage of these concepts, and he further chapters build upon these in a gradual manner.At the same time, if the reader has some familiarity with shell scripting and needs to only refresh or learn a certain concept, he/she needs to just read the relevant chapter. It is not too difficult to grasp the examples of the later chapters, provided some basic shell knowledge is assumed.Content and PresentationA positive trait in the presentation of this book is that it is all based on practical everyday examples which, with minor adaptation, can be used by many for their own daily tasks. For instance, there are several examples which describe searching for and processing files, which, I'd imagine, many users would want to do on a regular basis. Thus, providing realistic examples allows the book to double its utility. The language and approach used is simple and conversational, and the presentation is very clear, with each idea being described as a problem statement followed by a "How to do it" section with the actual code, and ending with a discussion of the nitty-gritties of the code. It is easy to go for a quick scan for those in a hurry, while those who with to read in more detail will not be disappointed either.The book also covers a wide array of applications. For instance, there are examples on automating fetching web pages and processing them, demonstrations of parsing and simplifying and even some queries around databases wrapped around in shell. It also spans to utilities and tasks connected to statistics, backups, compression, version control and many more.Breadth and DepthThe book goes into a fair amount of detail in terms of describing the shell scripting concept under consideration. The examples used go into a fair amount of detail in order to describe to the user all the aspects involved in the method or command being used. The concepts described are fairly complete, and would be sufficient for the reader to use immediately or with just a little bit of fine tuning. In terms of breadth, the book covers most of the features of shell scripting while also describing the various facilities the shell provides access to in a Unix-like environment. Thus, the book does not disappoint in this front either.In summary...In summary, probably the only thing I'd have liked to see more of is some emphasis on how to write more efficient shell scripts. Granted, most of the shell scripts described in the book are very simple and succinct, but a some words on how loops can be made better, or how to spot situations where pipes are not needed to solve a problem etc. might have been a nice addition. Some explanation of differences with dash, tcsh, zsh etc. might also have been nice, since a lot of users have different default shells. But all this isn't going to prevent me from giving this book a high rating, since it delivers quite well on the promises it makes at the beginning.This is definitely a good book to have near your desk, and kudos to the author for having taken the effort to put it together. I would highly recommend it to the beginner and occasional shell user for a thorough read, and to an intermediate to have on his/her desk for borrowing the cool scripting ideas and applications the author has written in this book.

Yesterday I was hinted towards lxc when I wondered what happened to openvz in unstable (which unfortunately isn't documented at all in the kernel changelogs, but that's a different story). So I started off taking a look. From a bit of experimenting around with it I consider it something that I want to play more with, and I want to share the problems I stumbled upon with you so that you don't have to figure them out on your own. First of all, LXC uses the cgroup kernel facility for resource management. The according file system isn't mounted by default, and LXC doesn't care for where it is mounted, it just needs to be. It seems like /sys/fs/cgroup seems to be the proper place (see 601757), so add the line cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup cgroup defaults 0 0 to your /etc/fstab file and sudo mount cgroup it. Next, it seems like bridging is the defacto standard for networking with lxc, but given that I want to use it on my notebook while being mobile I can't bind the bridge to any specific interface. To make this happen, one needs the bridge-utils package installed, and secondly, this is the path that I chose. I've added to /etc/network/interfaces this snippet:

auto br0
iface br0 inet static
    bridge_maxwait 0
    bridge_ports dummy0
    address 10.80.80.1
    netmask 255.255.255.0

This will bring up the bridge and act as gateway. For the running system, call sudo ifup br0. To make the host universally being able to work as gateway, of course ip_forward needs to be enabled. For this I added the line net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 to /etc/sysctl.d/local.conf (and for the running system, echo 1 into /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward). As I am using ferm for configuring the firewall on my notebook I have to add some parts into its configuration. This is the raw part that needs to get added, mix it into your existing configuration:

table filter  
    chain INPUT  
        # allow DNS queries from LXContainers
        proto (udp tcp) dport domain source 10.80.80.0/24 ACCEPT;
     
    chain FORWARD  
        # allow LXContainers into the net
        source 10.80.80.0/24 ACCEPT;
     
 
table nat  
    chain POSTROUTING  
        # NAT LXContainers
        source 10.80.80.0/24 MASQUERADE;
     
 

For DNS I installed dnsmasq so that I won't have to touch the /etc/resolv.conf inside the containers whenever I switch networks. So far for the host part, now to the actual containers. There is the /usr/lib/lxc/templates/lxc-debian helper script which uses debootstrap to create you a lenny chroot at least in the squeeze package this is hardwired, likewise with using cdn.debian.net. Copy the script and edit it to your likes if you feel like it. From what I understood it expects you to store the containers below /var/lib/lxc, I haven't yet tested for different places. So this was my commandline for that:
sudo /usr/lib/lxc/templates/lxc-debian -p /var/lib/lxc/vm0 A while later you'll end up below that directory with two entries: The config file and the rootfs subdirectory which is actually the bootstrapped distribution part. Now comes the configuration of the container. Open the config file with your favorite editor and add the following lines to the end:

lxc.utsname = vm0
lxc.network.type = veth
lxc.network.flags = up
lxc.network.link = br0
# lxc.network.name = eth0
lxc.network.hwaddr = 00:FF:80:80:80:80
lxc.network.ipv4 = 10.80.80.80/24

The network.name part is commented out, it defaults to that name internally; you though can change it to whatever you prefer. Caution, even though this is the documented approach, it does not work for Debian containers. It will always try to get its IP address through dhcp, lxc.network.ipv4 has no meaning for us. We need to change inside the rootfs the file etc/network/interfaces to read like this instead:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
   address 10.80.80.80
   netmask 255.255.255.0
   gateway 10.80.80.1

I suggest to keep the config and the interfaces file aligned with respect to the ipv4 setting so if this gets fixed upstream you won't stumble into any surprises. Also like mentioned before, we need to change the nameserver entries inside the rootfs file etc/resolv.conf to read nameserver 10.80.80.1. Now it's time to start it up and log in! sudo lxc-start -n vm0 -d will start the container in the background, and sudo lxc-console -n vm0 will give you the login to the container. The default password for the root user is root, obviously you want to change that before you install any networking services into the container like ssh-server. In case you want to quit from that console notice the message upon starting it, it's bound to <Ctrl+a q>. One more issue that I had: The default route wasn't set. I had to manually call ip r a default via 10.80.80.1 dev eth0 to be able to use the network inside the container. It seems to be related to that netbase isn't installed by default. If you install it the default route will be set upon starting the container automatically. This should get you started, there is of course more to explore and experiment with. Actually it is also suggested to create a tarball from your vm0 after you did the basic setup and installed the basic components you want to have around so you won't have to bootstrap over and over again. Do this after you have shut down the container, either through a halt from a container shell or through sudo lxc-stop -n vm0. The tarball can then get extracted to a different directory and just needs minor tweaks in the config and rootfs/etc/network/interfaces file to not create any clash with other containers (lxc.rootfs, lxc.mount.entry, lxc.utsname, lxc.network.hwaddr and ipv4 address). About limiting the containers, you can do it dynamically through the cgroup file system, and set it permanently through the config file. See man lxc.conf about these settings, amongst others. Enjoy, use, experiment. With sudo lxc-checkconfig you will see what your kernel actually supports for your LXCs. You will most probably notice the missing for the memory controller, this is tracked in the Debian bug report 534964.

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Good morning, and welcome to another day of archive damage, i mean hackery. Well, at least at the time of this writing it is morning and we are starting off into another day of work. As we promised to try to have at least a once-a-day-installation run I am currently processing the queue of uploaded packages, around 4gigabytes from 431 changes files. After that a dinstall will follow to push that all out. Lets see how often we can do this again today, yesterday we managed multiple times. Yesterday my work consisted of getting the ries sync into something nice and acceptable, starting to think of the change to only use the suite codenames in future (long term making lots of code issues easier, but short term a good headache) and doing the groundwork so we can upgrade the security and backports archive to squeeze/pg9 too. Mark finished of the Built-Using flag and then moved on to think about database file tracking changes related to multiple archives/locations. Which sounds simple in so few words but is definitely not simple at all. Torsten started to work on source contents and also on generating the packages/sources files out of our database. Both together is taking a good amount of time, so he continues to work on those today. In the evening we had a meeting with the Debian Hurd porters about the future of their port within the Debian archive. The perceived Hurd situation until then was that every port has to follow certain rules or gets thrown out but Hurd doesn t seem to ever get into a releasable state . Well, we did get a clean view on both sides standpoint and in the end emerged with a solution which works for both sides: The Hurd port stays on FTPMaster until Wheezy is released. Should they have managed to get the port into a state that it is released together with all the others (probably as a technology preview), it is kept in the archive. Should they not manage this, the port will be removed from the main archive and move fully to debian-ports.org. It may then reenter the main archive whenever it is ready to get released with the next release. For today we are all continuing in our parts, Mark is yelling at the insanity of the multi-location thing (something we DO need when we want to merge multiple archives, which we do want), Torsten curses the code for Packages/Sources and while I hope that DSA can find time today to upgrade our security- and backports-archive machines to Squeeze, I try to wrap my head around the code we kindly got provided by Serafeim Zanikolas - the dinstall programming fun task I asked a while ago. Im not sure yet I will succeed. :) And then we will get more arrivals this evening, so more people doing stuff tomorrow.

...and me. I turned 40 today and on such a momentous occasion I should pause
to take stock of my life. Executive summary: it's not bad at all. Last week I completed 13 years of marriage to Jyoti who loves me and always
looks out for my best interest even during the times when I do not. I have two lovely children who are kind, intelligent, Dharmic, and (mostly :-)
well behaved. Of course I can't forget all my dear friends and family who gave me their
blessings and good wishes today and indeed every day. My health is better now than it was in my twenties. Since last year I've been
exercising on the treadmill regularly and taken a lot of junk out of my diet.
I've lost about two stones and while I won't be joining the Debian marathon
runners just yet, I can at least jog briskly without collapsing in a puddle of
sweat, heart palpitations and shame. Mentally, I've been taking college level courses in Maths in an effort to
relearn the things I didn't pay proper attention to the first time I was in
college. I completed National Novel Writing Month for the first time with a
60,000 word philosophical science fiction blockbuster that other people might
actually consider readable once I finish revising it. And I am still training
for the day when I shall be granted the spot on Jeopardy which is rightfully
mine. Financially, the last few years have not been good for many people but we are
holding our heads above water and even slowly moving forwards. This is the
year Consolidated Braincells Inc. my little corporate empire will take off I
hope. As I begin preparing for Chaitra Navaratri I feel it will be extra special
this year because all these good things that are happening to me are solely
due to Her grace and krpa. Last thing I wanted to mention is that a present I gave myself today was to
make a donation to the Red Cross to help the victims of the tsunami in Japan.
If you have had good fortune in your life and have not already done so won't
you consider doing the same? (or to any of the other reputable charities
engaged in disaster relief.) Our shastras say that dana is the best insurance
against accidental sins and the guarantor of good luck.

Ok, so finally it is official! We just had the DebConf 12 decision meeting. We saw two great proposals, from the cities of Belo Horizonte, Brazil and Managua, Nicaragua. If you are curious on the decision process: We held it over two IRC channels The moderated #debconf-team channel, where only the five members of the decision committee (Marga Manterola, Andrew McMillan, Jeremiah Foster, Holger Levsen, Moray Allan) and two members from each of the bids (Marco T lio Gontijo e Silva and Rafael Cunha de Almeida from Brazil; Leonardo G mez and Eduardo Rosales from Nicaragua) had voices, and the open #dc12-discuss channel where we had an open discussion. Of course, you can get the full conversation logs in those links. I have to thank and congratulate the Brazilian team as they did a great work... The decision was very tight. It was so tight, in fact, that towards the end of the winning all of the committee members were too shy to state the results - so I kidnapped the process by announcing the winner ;-) (I hope that does not cast a shadow of illegitimacy over it) And, very much worth noting, both teams were also very professional: In previous years, we have seen such decisions degenerate into personal attacks and very ugly situations. That has always been painful and unfortunate. And although the Brazilians will not be able to go celebrate tonight, the decision was received with civility, knowing it was a decision among equals, and a decision well carried out. Well, that's it I am very much looking forward for that peculiar two weeks when the whole Debian family meets, this year to be held in Banja Luka, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and I am very eager towards meeting in 2012 in Managua, Nicaragua! Yay!