I recently ranted about Ubuntu not giving much credit to Debian. I have to complete this by thanking the Merge-o-Matic feature which (for a few months now) sends to package maintainers a diff file with the Debian package when a new Ubuntu package is uploaded. This sometimes make it quite easy to spot modifications done by Ubuntu and eventually adopt them. This already bringed me, as maintainer, a few interesting patches for iso-codes, console-data and geneweb. In the case of iso-codes, samba and geneweb, the Ubuntu patch was even reported manually as a Debian bug by a Ubuntu contributor/developer (no later than today, Martin Pitt took care to suggest us to adopt bzip2 compression for iso-codes and Mathias Gug proposed a patch to enable usershares in samba). So, well, even if things can still be improved, many Good collaboration also often happens.

After one day off, we watched Argentina-Georgia yesterday evening. Interesting game because it directly affect France's chances to qualify after Argentina's win on Friday. Argentina had a big disadvantage by playing only 4 days after their historic battle against France. As a logical consequence, they appeared quite tired and very imprecise. On the other hand, Georgia fought very courageously with a strong pack of forwards, encouraged by most of the crowd in Lyon. Finally, Argentina won *and* scored the bonus point by scoring a try in the very last minute (which might become very important to qualify in this pool. Good game even if Argentina was not that impressive, but I still think this is mostly because of the 4-days delay. Today, 3 games were scheduled. We didn't watch USA-Tonga (15-25). USA was slightly favourite for that one but they also were quite tired by playing 4 days only after their battle against England on Saturday. This was the first match for Tonga and obviously the island players were less tired and played a good rugby to win that one. Japan-Fidji (31-35) seems to have been the most uncertain match as of now. I somewhat regret not watching it as these two are among the teams I like watching and 7 tries in the match probably made it very interesting. Tonight, we watched Italy-Romania (24-18). The italians compete with Scotland for the remaining qualifying spot in that pool, if one assumes that New Zealand will obviously win all its matches. So, Italy *had* to win that match. The quality of romanian rugby has decreased in the last 10 years, but they still have a good set of great players, most of them playing...in France (just like one third of the italian team, indeed). The match was quite indecise with italy keeping the ball all first half long, but only leading 8-0 on half time....and being surprised by two romanian tries at the beginning of second half (8-12). After a strong domination of Italy, Romania was logically sanctioned by one expulsion and a penalty try (for successive voluntary faults), but, until the end, Italy was still in danger. They finally made it, which was the most important for them, 4 days after they were sweeped out by the All Blacks. We're now eagerly waiting for *THE* game of this week, England-South Africa in the Stade de France on Friday. Elizabeth found out that a few tickets are still available, but for 253 euros each, we decided to watch it on TV. So, between 21:00 and 23:00UTC that day, don't even think about pinging me on IRC. I still haven't decided who I'll support the most as I'm not a huge fan of either team....but they're still among the best in the world, of course.

W00t, my pet package is so clean! Ah, looking closer, there's a Ubuntu thing in a corner. I'll integrate that patch when Debian will be mentioned in their release announcements.

Erinn, I got it, thanks to Mohammed. So, dear, now you have to switch to KDE and learn German.

RSA leads by 13-3 against Fiji. They played very slowly...and lost tons of balls during 1st half. IMHO, the Springboks should be scared. Another team was leading 13-3 yesterday evening...:-)

After my rehearsal from yesterday, I finally booked my flights to Edinburgh for Debconf 7. I'll fly from CDG terminal F on June 15th 16:15 (AF5052) and will fly back to CDG on June 24th 09:05 (AF5051). The return flight is somewhat more expensive than later flights (about 30EUR more) but much more convenient for me. See you in EDI, ladies and gentlemen...

... I just learned how to use Mercurial after Daniel converted his darcs repository for aptitude to Mercurial. Being such a VCS wizard when you're told to be the DD with no programming skills is kinda scary...:-)

Hmmm, dear LWN, Anthony Towns is not alone when claiming that the reaction of the Debian community towards Nexenta after they announced their work was probably overflated and certainly too much aggressive. I remember having done so already and I did it again later. I usually avoid debian-devel flamewars but here, this is not really a flamewar. This was a rude action against people who may have done mistakes, errors and certainly need to talk deeper with the Debian community. Even if the contributors in this thread do not think they have been rude, I'm pretty much sure they have been "perceived" as being rude by outsiders. I'm afraid that such behaviour is very likely to enforce a very commonly feeling among the free software community of Debian being a kindergarten of free software bigots completely disconnected from real life. We know we are not this so we should try to avoid people thinking we are. This is not why I work in this project. When it comes at Free Software, I'm a kind of "bigot" too, but I usually try to not enforce my bigotry to other people by being uselessly aggressive. This also is a key point for Free Software and we should more often think about it. (don't take the word "bigot" as first degree, please...) We (as a community) have been aggressive with Nexenta about this issue, just like we have been in the past with, say, Ubuntu. So, I wish that we'll sing along with Erast Benson at next Debconf just like some did at Debconf 5 with the Shuttleworth gang. I wish I would see more Debian contributors bringing this feeling in -devel, especially our "historical" contributors, just like Ian Murdock did. Don't be shy, people..:-)

Julien's blog entry and some spare time lead me to try this powertop utility which I never heard about before. As a consequence, I ended up tine tuning a few parameters on my laptop, mostly sound card and wireless card energy saving parameters. I also finally turned "noatime" ON on my mounted partitions when the laptop runs on battery (I use laptop-mode for such automation). I was prevented to do so util now because mutt relies on access times to define whether mailboxes got new mail or not. However, recent mutt version now have "set check_mbox_size" which make mutt rely on the mailboxes sizes I still have fine tuning to do, mostly trying to get my hard disk really spin down in some occasions (mail reading, mostly) as well as automate the screen brightness, but this powertop utility is really worth it in the hunt for wasted energy. And, of course, installing it is just a matter of "aptitude install powertop", thanks to Patrick Winnertz who packages it. And thanks to Julien who blogged about Powertop, even for ranting about it...:-)

New pictures again (I leave tomorrow for holidays, so I hurry up). Again among my favourite ones, pictures of people just socializing. Amaya once wrote that Debconf is more about socializing than hacking and I couldn't agree more.

There are some bloggers who I'm really happy to see back in the blogosphere.

Geez, I got a Nokia M770 for X-Mas. /me does the geek dance.

107 packages get out of NEW today. I wonder how many of these will have introduced debconf templates that we will have to review, then translate..:-)

...before I have to survive with a right-wing president for 5 more years. So, after 8 years of De Gaulle, 5 years of Pompidou, 7 years of Giscard (20 years right), 14 years of Mitterrand, 12 years of Chirac, I will very probably have to wait for 5 more years to get a president who's closer to my own political views. May I say CRAP?

Today is the day where the very controversial DADVSI bill will be examined by the French Parliament. DADVSI stands for "Droit d'Auteur et les Droits Voisins dans la Soci t de l'Information" which can be roughly translated to "Author Rights and Related Rights in the Information Society". This very controversial bill includes some very ambiguous parts about software "that could be used to illegally exchange data over the Internet". The text is so vague that it can even interpreted as possibly allowing to forbig software authors to publish their sources....which explains why the French Free Software community reacted so strongly. This text is promoted by the major entertainment companies (Vivendi Universal and the like...). Some even said to representatives of the Free Software communities: "we will foirbid you to publish your sources". I'm feeling they're failing, though. The very active lobbying promoted by the EUCD.INFO initiative has already reached one goal: the bill will not be examined confidentially. For instance, I'm currently watching the LCI TV channel, one of the major news channels among satellite/cable/Internet channels in France and this problem is now in their major headlines. You're screwed, pals. Bottom line note: in France, laws are proposed by the government and must be examined, then voted, by the Parliament. The Parliament may "amend" a law (ie propose changes) which sometimes means completely changing it. We now have a great hope that this will happen as many of our representatives ("d put s"), including some from the current majority (right wing) and most of the left wing representatives, have expressed very strong reserves. Additionnal side note: at this moment, there are no less than 200 amendments proposed to this bill...:-)

Bartosz, it's interesting to see that "right wing" seems to have different definitions for both of us, and probably in both our countries...:-) So far, the definition of M. Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz party "Law and Justice" (I think this is the right translation of PiS...in French, we use "Droit et Justice") would classify it as "conservative" for me...and thus eligible for being called "right wing". Anyway, we both agree that political orientations in Poland really suck. I really would have hated seeing someone like Roman Giertych, head of the "Polish Families League", ultra-catholic party, be in some change in my country (we have a very similar political man named "Philippe de Villiers", here). Worse is the nomination of Andrzej Lepper who probably represents the most hideous aspects of populism. I think that such step is more or less impossible to avoid, unfortunately. And I stay confident that your country, as well as all recent EU members from Central Europe, will soon overcome this. Don't emigrate: you have to change your country from the inside...:)

We just did it.

It's quite some time since I daily live with a partly broken KDE. I know that some transitions are on their way, so this might be related in some way. As of now:

• Cookie Manager not working in Konqueror (going to "Cookies" in the Konqueror configuration dialogs just says "Unable to start cookie manager" which is what I call informative)
• kwallet seems to have lost track of the few (low importance) passwords I registered in it. Launching kwalletmanager just shows an empty window and trying File/New wallet just....does nothing.
• klaptop no longer showing the status of my battery in the tray (of course, this is supposed to be set in the KDE configuration center). Manually launching 'klaptop_check' gives nothing (dunno if that one is the systray application)
• kmix status of the sound settings disappears from time to time from the tray
• ....and probably a few others I don't even notice anymore

This is quite frustrating as I see no obvious place to look at and I dealt with daily aptitude upgrades quite painlessly. It is not frustrating enough to make me look deeper into this but, anyway, I have no damn clue about where to look, indeed. I guess that a KDE wizard could probably have more clue about this but, really, putting myself in Joe User's skin, I really feel as clueless as the average Windows user when something is broken on his computer. THat's maybe the 'just like Windows' stance of KDE, after all...:-) (GNOME zealots, go away: I ran out of GNOME a while ago when I had about the very same feeling during some transitions and my only option was to either try understanding every funky file in ~/.gconf to fix my problems)

Over one year ago, still at DebConf 6, the Latin American Debian people (and by people I mean just interested people, regardless of whether they were/are official DDs or not) held a BoF session. One of the ideas we discussed there was that, in order to increase Debian presence in our region (which is by no means small - Let alone the geographical aspects, I'm guessing we are about 350 million people, roughly split in half between [officially] Spanish- and Portuguese- speaking countries). Yet, this is an area with very little involvement in Debian in particular, and with Free Software in general.One of our first issues seems to be language - Just by its scale and economic importance, we cannot even put in the same scale Brazil and the Spanish-speaking countries... So I'll focus on Spanish-speaking Latin America, as (I recall) we did in that session.So, we agree: We need more local involvement in each of our communities. And, so far, we have seen quite relevant results. The number of people directly involved in Debian in Argentina, Chile, Per , Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador and Mexico (excuse me if I forget you in another country!) has notably risen since I brought this topic up, together with Christian Perrier, back in DebConf5, Helsinki. An undeniable fact is that distances in our continent, however, are huge. In the 2006 BoF, we agreed we should promote regional meetings, that would serve both for working focused on Debian topics (i.e. hack sessions, as we do in DebConf) and for spreading our work to the local population, to help them see that it is not needed to be super-skilled or anything like that to contribute to a real, important and large Free Software project such as ours. Of course, taking into account the distances in the continent, we thought it would be sensible to split it in two - and to try and hold regional mini-debconfs - One for the Northern half (i.e. Per , Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, Cuba and Mexico), and one for the Southern half (Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay). And, for logistical reasons mainly, I strongly advocated having our first Northern meeting in Panam . Why Panam ? Because it is a place cheap and easy to get to. They have a very important international airport, connecting to most if not all countries in the region, and -as they have risen as a business center- have good connectivity. Visa is required for many of the interested countries, but trivial to get (as opposed to what happened here in Mexico :-( ). Of course, other countries also looked interesting (there was some argument pushing Venezuela, but in the end, we all conceded it would be in Panam .I have to strongly thank Guillermo Garc a - He is not (yet? :) I hope he still wants to get involved with this bunch of people) in Debian in any way, but after I contacted him, he agreed to start looking for a way to get us the right facilities in Panam . He coordinated with a team which did most of the organization - A very nice web site is still available so you can look at their work - Quite a good job, I must add.They contacted Universidad Tecnol gica de Panam , started talking with several potential sponsors, got information regarding hotels for us... But in the end, it flopped. Why? Because, although many of us were originally interested, in the end very few people (only three, none of them officially a Debian Developer, according to their last press release) confirmed their intention to attend.Which brings me again to the question: Why?First and foremost, I think it was lack of involvement. For one reason or another, all of the people that in the beginning pushed for this miniDebConf ended up busy doing other stuff, and didn't get at all involved in organization. It would have been a great present from our Panaman friends, yes, but quite unfair. And, of course, with no Debian people involved in organizing it, we got an chicken-and-eggesque situation... Where it didn't grab the attention of other Debian people.Second, what they offered us was quite different to what we intended in the first place - At least, to what I imagined. On my first messages both to debian-devel-spanish and to Guillermo, I tried to get something close to what we had in mind: Something as informal and as intimate as it could be. My original request to Guillermo was just to get us a room where we could hack and talk, and probably sleep with sleeping bags.Of course, I can perfectly imagine that when he requested the space to the university, on one hand, they didn't feel at ease having International Guests (with capital I and G - Very important for most Latin American universities!) sleeping on the floor. And, on the other hand, they would love to be able to show us around! Having an international project focus on a university in a non-technologically-well-known little country is quite something to show off!Anyway... What happened? I was among the instigators, but Real Life called me away (I've been mostly inactive in Debian since September! :-( ). The miniconf was scheduled for November 14-17. I also insisted originally on having the miniconf on a long weekend (say, Friday through Sunday), as -being a miniconf and not the Real Deal- it'd be much easier for most of us to rob one day off work than a full week. In the end, this was the most important point for my decision not to join: I cannot afford more time off my work, not at this time of year. About the other involved people? I do not want to speak for any other people.In the end, sadly, Guillermo had to inform us they cancelled - No, not postponed, but definitively cancelled. Why? Because -and I have to agree- next year we will have DebConf in Argentina... And many people in the region will focus our time and money on getting there. Ok, making this whole story short: I'm very, very ashamed and sorry, with you personally, Guillermo, and with your whole team. And I hope we can resurrect this idea - be it in Venezuela (as it was suggested once) or elsewhere.

A few weeks ago, I announced that Debian maintainers of shadow were about to take upstream development over. This has now happened and, after final cleaning work (90% by Nicolas Fran ois and 10% by /me), we released shadow 4.0.18.2 which is just a simple take-over of the package, with inclusion of the trivial patches we had in the Debian package. Immediately after, the Debian package was uploaded (release name "Vacherin", to continue our tradition of naming releases of the Debian package from French cheese names) and we're now officially in charge of this software which is used by several Linux distros. The main contact point for shadow maintenance is the pkg-shadow-devel mailing list on Alioth.