About two weeks ago, I was claiming that my pet package is awfully clean!. It turned out to be slightly untrue as there was a pending Ubuntu patch. Despite what I claimed then, I finally integrated it without checking whether they now mention Debian in their release annoucements. Yesterday, the package migrated to testing. So, now, my pet package really has the cleanest packages.qa.debian.org page possible.

The talks I proposed for FOSS.in, the major FLOSS conference in India, have been accepted for the Project Days, in the Debian-Ubuntu sessions. Thanks to the event organizers who will sponsor my travel to Bangalore, I'll probably leave as of Sunday Dec. 2nd and attend the entire conference from Dec. 4th to Dec. 8th. During earlier weeks, Sam Hocevar, the Debian Project Leader, also agreed to come to the conference and give two talks there. And, this morning, I had the nice surprise to discover that Lucas Nussbaum, one of our most tireless QA animators in Debian, will also come and give a talk about QA in Debian. So, that should make three French DD attending and, therefore, bring a strong Debian representation in this conference, which is something I definitely find interesting as I invested quite a lot of time and energy last years to increase the Debian presence in South Asia. This will certainly be a great occasion for us to give credit to the few people who contribute to Debian (and related projects) in India, and of course meet them in person. Please check the list of talks to get an idea of talks. Now for the challenge: the organizers expect our slides....by 7 days as of now. I don't know for Sam and Lucas but I have just begun working on one of my two talks (the i18n one, of course...you know: the one with the cute maps....). Would someone have a ready "How to contribute to Debian" talk somewhere? :-)

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.

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

Great final. South Africa *and* England showed that a match without tries can still be one of the best of the tournament. The first half was one of the most intense (I'd say *the* most intense) I've seen, with England playing well with their strengths (forward lanes, mauls) but felt against a tremendously defending South African team...and a perfect Percy Montgomery transforming all penalty kicks, therefore converting RSA domination. I also noticed the incredible energy of Bryan Habana who "destroyed" Sackey three times even if he weights many pounds less. I think that all rugby fans enjoyed that final even without tries (again, South Africa wins a world cup without scoring a try in final). So, that's the end of 1.5 month of rugby crazyness. Dear readers who survived until now, thank you for sharing my passion for that sport...et rendez-vous pour le tournoi des 6 nations..:-)

OK, I'm taking the risk of being ridiculous and have all my English friends laugh loudly in 3 hours. So, my bet is South Africa winning over England, 25-16 (3 tries, 2 transformed and 2 penalty kicks while England scores one trandformed try and 3 penalty kicks). The weather is *perfect* over Paris tonight. That will be a great final.

France sank against Argentina tonight. Last time France played in Parc des Princes, they were crushed by South-Africa, 10 years ago. The same happened tonight with an impressive victory by Argentina against France. France dominated the first 20 minutes but Argentina's defense was heroic and strong. Certainly the best defense play of this entire world cup, in this match, with a great organization around mauls, an impressive scrum and explosive tackles. After being dominated 26 minutes long and anyway scoring a try an, Argentina had to resist 10 minutes before half time when France unsuccessfully attempted to score a try (which would probably have changed the match). I think I will have to review these 10 minutes again as this was a demonstration of defensive play. It is indeed not a surprise that Ibanez lost his nerves and got expelled at the very end of 1st half time. Sad end of career...very similar to Zidane's one, indeed. In second half time, seeing France being crushed so hard was sometimes saddening but Argentina played so wonderfully that we could just be admirative of that play. Again, their solidarity and defensive play made the difference and, 5 tries later, they finally logically beat France. The Argentinian team is really a great satisfaction of the world cup. Playing only with 18 players, they only half-missed one match: their semi-final against South-Africa. I think they now really deserve to play in the Tri-Nations tournament along with New Zealand, Australia and South-Africa: if that doesn't happen, I will really think that other southern hemisphere nations are just cowards..:-) What about France? Well, this is a really sad ending for that world cup. Finishing with two very bad matches is really worrying for the future of that team. There are many promising players in that team (such as Dusautoir, Szarzewski...) and they can probably rebuild something and we still be enthusiast about that sport in this country.

Answering to Christian Perrier about if Ubuntu is not based anymore on debian and that's why debian didn't get named in all their site avoiding any kind of relation with debian as their base even in the announcement of 7.10: I can see my packages there and I'm not a volunteer of Ubuntu (at least not directly) so they're definetely still based on Debian and just copying a lot of packages from debian to their repos.

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.

Christian Perrier is wondering why the official announcement about the Gutsy release does not even contain the word “Debian”. It’s not new: Debian is virtually nonexistent in Ubuntu’s communication. It seems that the last Ubuntu release to acknowledge its Debian origins was Dapper (June 2006), maybe because that was the “Long Term Support” release. The fact that there’s no “Ubuntu is based on Debian” paragraph on www.ubuntu.com was raised during Debconf, and it was supposed to get fixed, but it seems that it didn’t happen for some reason (there was such a paragraph before the website redesign). In other news, I’ve been trying to install Ubuntu Gutsy inside qemu, but it fails miserably while booting the installer. I removed the “quiet” and “splash” options from the kernel cmdline, and discovered that after trying to “mount the root filesystem”, I get dropped into busybox with no error message to google for. Feisty fails as well, but Dapper boots fine. So much for the Ubuntu is an ancient African word, meaning “I can’t install Debian” joke!

So, Ubuntu Gutsy is out. That's great for Ubuntu users, I guess. I indeed just wonder why the official announcement does not even contain the word "Debian". I never played the common "Ubuntu bashing" game that's pretty popular among DD and Debian users, but I probably would have appreciated something reminding the link between Debian and Ubuntu. This is probably not new and I guess that reading the former announcements would lead to the same feeling....this is just the first time I notice this. Isn't Ubuntu still based on Debian? From the activity about the few packages I maintain, I was still thinking this.

...and, really, we nearly never thought that Argentina could win tonight. South Africa was really too strong for them. The only domain where Argentinians dominated were scrums but this was much compensated by their great weakness on line-outs, losing something like 5 or 6 of them. South Africa thus logical won very easily...and Bryan Habana is now the best try scorer all along RWCs, along with Jonah Lomu. He is a really great player, indeed. Much much impressive South Africa: they'll be by far the favourites of the final against England, which they beated already during that World Cup. I said several times that I'm not a deep fan of RSA's play, but I could become one. Their game improved all along the World Cup and today, they probably played their best match. Two remakes next week-end: France-Argentina for the 3rd place and South Africa-England as final. That will be good matches, no doubt...and I hope that Bernard Laporte will change the French team to play against Argentina.

...and, really, we nearly never though that Argentina could win tonight. South Africa was really too strong for them. The only domain were Argentinians dominated were scrums but this was much compensated by their great weakness on line-outs, losing something like 5 or 6 of them. South Africa thus logical won very easily...and Bryan Habana is now the best try scorer all along RWCs, along with Jonah Lomu. He is a really great player, indeed. Much much impressive South Africa: they'll be by far the favourites of the final against England, which they beated already during that World Cup. I said several times that I'm not a deep fan of RSA's play, but I could become one. Their game improved all along the World Cup and today, they probably played their best match. Two remakes next week-end: France-Argentina for the 3rd place and South Africa-England as final. That will be good matches, no doubt...and I hope that Bernard Laporte will change the French team to play against Argentina.

...at least, in my opinion (which is obviously biased, let's admit that). There are several reasons for this loss:

• Strategic choices: Bernard Laporte deliberately chose to use the same tactic against England and New Zealand. However, the tactic that worked against New Zealand failed against England, mostly because that tactic...is just the play of the English team. So, as we say in French, "les Bleus" entered the game of England and therefore made the task easier for them.
• The choice of players. This is the result of the previous item. Reconducting the entire team that won against NZ was IMHO a bad idea. It is not a scoop that I dislike Rapha l Ibanez or Fabien Pelous and I would rather have seen the punch of Dimitri Szarzewski or, for once, S bastien Chabal beginning the game (actually, he entered pretty quickly because of Pelous' injury).
• Several failures to occupy the English side with kick play. In many occasions, kick shots by either Beauxis, Traille or Jauzion missed their target. This is IMHO the main reason for the defeat.
• Too many drop tentatives. When they were in the English side, why the hell did they choose to kick drops several times instead of just play. That sounds like a fear of not scoring and the French lost several key balls with that miserable tactic.
• Too many lost balls in mauls. That is not only a failure by the French but also good defense play by the English team.
• Discipline. It happened only once (high tackle by Dimitri Szarzewski) but that was *the* moment where no error was possible and it offered an ideal penalty kick to Wilkinson.
• Bad luck. We can't rule out that one. The difference is 5 points: this stupid 1st minute try....and the missing 50 centimeters on Chabal's action in the last minutes.

Some *bad* reasons for the English victory:

• Johnny Wilkinson influence: this is untrue. Apart from his drop goal, he missed penalty kick tentatives and his kick play was not brilliant during the same. I much preferred Andy Gomarsall during that game.
• Scrums. They didn't crush the French scrum which is one of the satisfactions of that game. The English team even had to cheat slightly during 1st half time to win their scrums.
• Good play. No. Watching the game again, there was as many bad choices in the English side than in French side. I can only enhance their defense, not their attack. So, as I wrote immediately after the game, that one was one of the worst matches in the entire WC.
• The referee. Before the game, some French newspapers were doubting of Mr. Kaplan because he's South-African (funnily, some English newspapers were also doubting because he was supposed to advantage England's opponents in the past). He was indeed perfect. Anyway, everybody knows I never blame referees in sports.

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

So, A completely non-existing French team lost against a....nearly completely non-existing English team. Too many bad decisions, too much bad kick play, too many lost balls....and even no luck (the English try...damn). The French team couldn't win with such poor play (even when they were leading by 9-8, we both were completely sure they would lose on a penalty kick). What's pretty sad is that England nearly showed nothing too and, therefore, both teams made this the worst match I've seen in that world cup. Hopefully, Argentina and South Africa will show some better play tomorrow. However, when I see this, I nearly regret that France eliminated New Zealand. The All Blacks could never have played as bad as France did and they would certainly have kicked out that boring English team. Definitely, I'll be South African or Argentinian next Sunday (I have a small preference for being Argentinian, indeed).

To make Erinn happy, I'd like to find a nice pink theme for KDE. Dear pink-lover Lazyweb, any hint?

Logically, Argentina won against Scotland tonight after a.....quite boring match. Scotland, as expected for them unfortunately, wasn't able to put speed in their game, the only way to beat Argentina this year. Even with that poor game (Lamont, their rear player, was a disaster), Scotland finished quite close to ARG, who didn't play brilliantly with many approximations (Hernandez being a bit arrogant, trying to kick too many drop goals) and a bit of luck. So, nothing really impressive in that match. Does that mean that South Africa has better chances to qualify for the final: who knows? Argentina can be unpredictable...but it seems they are a little bit burned out (they don't really have 30 top players and some of their key players appear tired). The semi-finals will feature France-England (about 50-50 chances from what we saw up to now) and South Africa-Argentina (60-40, in my opinion). Next week-end, Stade de France.

...but, really, Fiji would have deserved the victory. They did put the Stade Velodrome on fire this afternoon, pushing South-Africa to play....a quite bad rugby with few imagination and many errors. In the RSA team, only Steyn emerged and saved his team from sinking (37-20). RSA scored 5 tries mostly only because they have good four-wheel-driven "trucks". In the Fiji side, Sisa Koyamaibole and Mosese Rauluni lead their team to even the score 20-20 on 65th minute...unfortunately, losing in the last 10 minutes despite the support of the entire French crowd. The Springboks need to improve their play dramatically if they want to have a chance against Argentina (very probably unless Scotland realises a miracle). My conclusion today: the Three Nations from southern hemisphere (RSA, NZL, AUS) should really consider opening their annual tournament to other nations such as Samoa, Tonga, Fiji or Argentina. That would certainly force them to play another game than their usual game. Of course, that would mean being less attractive to players (just count the number of players from Samoa, Tonga and Fiji who play with New Zealand and Australia) but considerably widening rugby in the Pacific area.

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...:-)