...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?

Let's try this way: zero neuf effe neuf onze zero deux neuf d soixante-quatorze euh trois cinq b d huit quarante-et-un cinquante-six c cinq soixante-trois cinquante-six quatre-vingt-huit c z ro That should even trigger followups by Swiss and Belgian fellows.

...is magic.

This is now established as my german annual pilgrimage. Every year since 2002, I migrate to G ttingen for 3 days to attend the SambaXP conference, the world conference of the users and developers of Samba. Halfway between a very classical conference (high-class hotel, nice conference rooms, drinks and food at will...and expensive fee) and a "geeky-style" conference (the whole Samba Team usually attends it as well as many users and developers), it is now established as the annual reference for people involved in Samba use and development. After an always interesting tutorial (this year, as often by Jerry Carter, Samba3 release manager) about making samba friendly to administrate to....Windows admins, the track continued with talks drawing the future of samba development. This year, I was however missing No l K the who could not attend, so the Debian crowd here is pretty small (but many Debian users and admins are around). I however could have interesting talks with Jelmer Vernooij (mostly involved in Samba4 development...and also in our NM queue). I also used some time to try cleaning out the Debian BTS for samba bugs, using the opportunity to show old bugs to upstream developers. I also could visit Alex and Meike who live not that far, which was a real pleasure, including the Real Swabian Sp tzle that make swabian women so strong and powerful. The conference will end up today. It will have been too short, as usual and I will feel like I'm running away on the A7 up to Hannover to catch the plane and come back home....and, as usual, I'll promise myself to come back next year and practice my German, which sucks. Tomorrow, leaving to Rome for a long week-end with Elizabeth. No laptop, no mail. Just enjoy the city. Gut!

So, second round will be S. Royal vs. N. Sarkozy. Noone will doubt where does my preference go. I've always supported S gol ne Royal and I will of course continue to do so. I however doubt she will make it. Sarkozy's advance is quite important in polls and polls fail less and less often. My personal hope is that the 87% participation ratio (the highest ever for a French presidential election) means that many people feel that our president is who we vote for...and if we want the right wing out, we have to vote. This is particularly obvious among the youngest people and I hope that it means a revival of the political conscience in this country.

So, today is the first round of the French presidential election. I already explained where is my preference going, also who I fear the most and who I absolutely don't want ever (no link here: I will never give a link to this guy and his party's web site. You don't want to read the kind of crap they write, do you? This is of course Le Pen). For those reading this and not familiar with the French presidential eletion voting system, a few more hints: We have 12 candidates this year. on first round, a president may be elected if (s)he gets more than 50% of votes (not counting white and null votes). This is of course nearly impossible. The highest probability is thus for a second round. Here, the two best ranked candidates would stay and the president is elected among one of them two. That second round will happen on May 5th. Candidates are (non neutral comments!):

• Olivier BESANCENOT: candidate of the ultra-left "Ligue Communiste R volutionnaire" party
• Marie-George BUFFET: candidate (and general secretary) of the communist party. Former Minister of Sports in Jospin's government
• G rard SCHIVARDI: candidate of the Workers' party
• Fran ois BAYROU: candidate (and president) of the "Union pour la D mocratie Fran aise" party, right/center party. Former ministry of Education in Balladur's government
• Jos BOV : alter-globalization candidate. Is that the best definition?
• Dominique VOYNET: candidate of the Green party. Former minister of Environment in Jospin's government
• Philippe DE VILLIERS: candidate (and president) of the nationalist, ultra-right wing "Mouvement pour la France" party. Has been member of Chirac's government in 1986
• S gol ne ROYAL: candidate of the socialist party candidate. Former ministry of Environment, then Scolarship Education(?), then Family in B r govoy and Jospin governments.
• Fr d ric NIHOUS: candidate of the "Hunting, Fishing, Nature and Tradition" party. Yes, we have this...
• Jean-Marie LE PEN: candidate of the fascist "Front National" party
• Arlette LAGUILLER: candidate of the ultra-left trotskist "Lutte Ouvri re" party
• Nicolas SARKOZY: candidate (and president) of the right-wing "Union pour une Majorit Pr sidentielle" party, Jacques Chirac's party. Former ministry of Interior in De Villepin and Raffarin governments, former ministry of Finances and Enconmy in Raffarin government.

Though choice, isn't it? Out of these 12, 4 have some chances to reach the second round: Bayrou, Royal, Le Pen and Sarkozy. It is pretty sure that Sarkozy will reach the second round (unfortunately, should I say). Bayrou and Royal have the best chances to be the second candidate (apparently the disaster of 2002 where Le Pen reached the second round will not happen, though still possible). So, let's vote and vote well...but, first of all, vote! See you at 20:01 +02:00.

This is the participation ratio to the French presidential election as of 12h. This is traditionnally the only official estimation one can get before the closure of the vote which happens at 20:00 (18:00 in many places). This is the highest participation ratio in all presidential elections since 1962. 10 points over the number for 2002, which featured the bad suprise of Le Pen reaching the second round. I think we have now escaped from that very bad surprise and second round should be between Sarkozy, Royal or Bayrou.

Three weeks after I officially announced the launch of the Smith Review Project, it is time to send a status update. First of all, and again, this was not an April Fool's joke. Sent on April 1st, but mostly because that day was a Sunday, the day where I have enough time to work on such annoucements. The task of reviewing debconf templates (and debian/control files) began in March 2007, much before the project is officially launched. Up to now, 17 packages have been reviewed. Several others are under work (I have 15 of these for which I'm coordinating the various review steps). The traffic on debian-l10n-english is exploding. OK, up to now, more than half of this are messages from me, which I expect to slowly change. The process is very well accepted by package maintainers and it really seems there was a need for it. The challenge now is that there are many more texts to review in Debian such as man pages (for native packages), README.Debian files and many other documentation files. We really need help and not only from people whose native language is English. Yes, that means *you* who are still reading my logorrhea.

The time has come for me to rant again about the crazy world of VCS. I noticed today that a few things changed in apt l10n and I wanted to resync with Michael Vogt's bzr archive. I was first notified about some archive format change and was suggested to run some magic spell to bring my archive to the Wonderful World of bzr 0.whatever_new_version. Fortunately, it worked, which is good because I have no bloody idea of how I can reconstruct a broken archive. Then, unfortunately, when trying to push these changes to my public archive (the one used by maintainers for l10n changes):

bubulle@mykerinos:~/src/debian/apt/bzr/apt/main> bzr rspush
kheops.homeunix.org:/home/www/www.perrier.eu.org/debian/packages/d-i/level4/apt-main
Bzrtools is not up to date with installed bzr version 0.15.0.
There should be a newer version available, e.g. 0.15.
Unable to load plugin 'bzrtools' from
'/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/bzrlib/plugins'
bzr: ERROR: unknown command "rspush"

So, again, something changed in bzr stuff. bzrtools is then broken, the rspush command I'm using for a while now is broken and I can't publish my changes anymore. Of course, while I'm fighting with this, the good old SVN for D-I still works like a charm just like it's doing since December 2003 when Joeyh migrated from CVS to SVN. Joey, Frans, promise me you'll never ever switch to this distributed hype and keep our good old, crappy, limited but rock solid SVN. This was the rant of the day.

In my server's postfix main.cf file: bounce_queue_lifetime = 8h This, instead of the "5d" default, reduced the size of the mail queue on my server from 1200 mails to 130. In these days where spammers just spam randomized addresses on servers, that sounds to be a good idea. Dear Lazyweb, other suggestions? Or is this indedd a not so good idea?

Today, Nicolas "nekral" Fran ois and I spent some time on the remaining issues of the shadow package. As the package is part of the base system, it was frozen for a while now. Thankfully for us, our upstream was nearly inactive in the meantime (no new version) and the issues reported in the BTS in the meantime were pretty minor (indeed, several of them are unreproducible, often errors in users' PAM settings). So, now we're back on duty to make the bug count for that package down to 0 (there are 17 opened bugs as of now). Our upstream seem to come back to life so we will probably do our best to lower the size of the Debian diff.gz file which raised again in the last months of the sarge->etch release cycle.

A coupld of glitches appeared lately during my sarge->etch upgrade for my home server:

• Non optimal upgrade of amavisd-new: the upgrade process is quite painful and there is no automated way to switch the old "all in one file" settings to the new layout. Pretty painful to reanalyse settings I made 2 years ago and never touched since then.
• No longer working VPN with my company. I was using Openswan and it no longer accepted to connect to my company's VPN server (a FortiNet router). After many fiddling with the infamous /etc/ipsec.conf file, I finally decided to move to StrongSwan which appears to be the next generation of such software. Using my old ipsec.conf file bringed my VPN back. As this is a big part of my work method, I'm getting reliefed..:)

There are probably a few others things to tweak, still. But I had no problem with the samba server, the squid cache, the postfix settings, IMAP server, which means that the entire family can still use their computers without hassle, which was the major challenge in this migration.

I just upgraded my home server (kheops) to etch. I just had an issue with lifelines-report, which the former maintainer should be ashamed of. Apart from that glitch, the upgrade went well, thanks to the excellent upgrade advices in the Release Notes. Funnily, I got warned that kheops still has the "base" package installed which I didn't notice in former upgrades. This is pretty expected as kheops has never been reinstalled, is my home server since october 1996 when I installed Debian Buzz on it. I think that I'll just avoid following Santiago Vila's advice and leave "base" installed on my system, indeed. Just for fun. This is the 6th server I upgrade as of now. All other servers were pretty minor servers at work. The big issue is now upgrading the file and print servers and particularly the samba file server which hosts files for 250 users. This is probably the one and only server for which we will setup a clone and play the upgrade scenario a few times. Etch rocks, as expected.

...Paris in the springtime. I'm just back from a great afternoon wandering around the city under a nice and "just warm enough" sun. Sure we went to the touristic places as we were accompanied by my sister's family...but I always enjoy these places even when they're crowded the way they were today (Easter Monday is a holiday here). Always plan your visits to Paris in springtime...and, of course, don't forget warning /me when coming, in case we can spend a few time enjoying the city. There's nothing I like more than driving and accompanying friends here around. Just ask Kenshi, Helen, Karunakar, Jamil and the few others Free Software friends who shared a few moments with me in the city. We would of course invite our brand new shiny DPL who already impressed me with his first DPL post.

Congratulations, Sam. That you were'nt my first choice is not a scoop. That I wish you a big success is probably not a scoop either. Most people in Debian love this project enough to make it a success despite the various ways we have to love it. You'll make a great DPL.

The answer to my previous question is "to be". That happened thanks to a bunch of people, in no particular order:

• Jens Sidel, for committing and suggesting early activation and advices about switching to PO format
• Christian Perrier, for being a really nice guy and for being the person that made me click and start contributing to Debian
• Kobayashi Noritada, for magic po4a related commands
  
• Frans Pop, for actually activating the thing and for advices
• Andrei Popescu, for the multiple patches sent and the late hours sacrificed on the Romanian localization altar
  
• Stan Ioan Eugen, for the work done on the translation done for 1.119, multiple comments and comments done at really late hours last night
• Dan Damian, for being the first person to translate the Release Notes in Romanian, at my suggestion
• Ru e Zeno, for comments and suggestions
• Denis Barbier and Martin Quinson for creating po4a
• Nicolas Fran ois (aka nekral) for maintaining po4a
• Javier Fern ndez-Sanguino Pe a, for making calls to translations and sacrificing the Spanish translation while working on the English text to bringing it in shape
  
• anyone that I forgot or don't know about and had a role in making this possible
• silent reviewers on the debian-l10n-romanian list - I wish you started speaking instead of unsubscribing

Updates:

• David Roundy, for creating darcs with its nice darcs send feature which allowed parallel work
  

After recent posts to debian-i18n about release notes translations and the few blog posts about them, I quickly looked at the Debian Doc Project CVS just to check the status of the French translation of this document. Indeed, the last update by Fred Bothamy was commited 1h15 after the last update of the corresponding English version. Fred has been able to keep up with the crazy number of updates during the last days. Bravo, Fr d ric, tu es un brave parmi les braves. The same congratulation set goes to Philippe Batailler who maintains the French translation of the Debian Installation Manual for about 3 years now (I suspect this to be much much more ancient but the D-I SVN log only goes back to September 2003, when the manual was converted to DocBook XML.

Yesterday night, Elisabeth planned a surprise for me (birthday time) and had tickets for the concert of Gotan Project at Le Grand Rex, Paris. It was indeed the fFirst time I ever went in that concert hall, which is indeed a huge old-style movie theater with comfortable seats, room for legs, nice art-deco decoration. Great after a normal work day..:-) The music of Gotan Project is a nice and elegant mix of electronic music and argentinian tango influence, featuring French, Swiss, Argentinian and Franco-Argentinian artists. Something I enjoy since it was started by Philippe Cohen-Solal a few years ago. The "band" made it well for a music that is mostly a studio music. Ten arsists on stage and the proeminent and warn voice of Cristina Villalonga. The artists were "home" mostly as the band born very close to the Grands Boulevards and, therefore, the atmosphere was friendly, with artists clearly being happy to be there. And, as a surprise, the closure featured Saian Supa Crew as guest artists for a great mix of French rap and the GP electrotango. Overall amazing experience and I hope this won't be the one and only concert we attend for 2007. After all, Peter Gabriel should be touring over Europe and I always try not missing his concerts since 1977. For those interested, the Lunatico tour dates for Gotan Project are available here.

Wooosh

Nothing serious should be announced on April 1st. I still receive mails asking whether the Smith Review Project is really a serious announcement. Indeed, unless I really suck even more than I thought in English, nothing is really funny in that announcement, except maybe its disclaimer. We will really review English in Debian packages. So, people with English as native language, just stop laughing et my Frenglish and join debian-l10n-english. As all good projects, we have a wiki page and a name. However, unlike other projects, we already have a few results which is certainly the most important part of the story.