At least for my personal schedule, this is day 0 of Debconf. After being driven to Paris Orly airport by Elizabeth (my wife, dudes), I easily met with M. Adn ne Trojette and Nicolas Fran ois. A very quiet flight with about 30 people in a 200-seat plane lead us to Madrid Barajas (the flight was less quiet for Adn ne who has to suffer my constant babbling...."talks too much" as says my friend Konstantinos). This Barajas airport deserves a special mention, indeed. Its terminal 4 is incredibly H.U.G.E. More precisely it appears as huge because the two terminals are long straight buildings about 1.5 km long. As minutes were passing we easily met with Riku Voipio, Petr Rockai and Rapha l Hertzog. A few beers (for Riku, Nicolas and I) helped spending the couple hours of waiting time friendly and the French Mini-Cabal was even able to speak English (well, Frenglish...anyway). Nicolas and I then have been the local attraction but doing some hacking seated on the floor in the toilets (for caballeros, though) which is the only place with power sockets. Then we boarded in a huge A340 completely filled with people who, what a surprise, all speak Spanish. We finally met with Guido G nther whose flight had been delayed. So, finally, we will be 7 of us landng in that flight. That will make a really packed SUV cab. We're now seated, flying over Portugal and Galicia, the 4 of us French geeks hacking on our laptops (seems to me that other passengers are a bit staring at us...). Time to sleep and....see you in MEX for bubulle's blog of Debconf - day 1.

Not so spoiled, Mr bubulle. 19. I'm not that spoiled, after all..:-). and two of those ("been in Europe" and "visit the Eiffel Tower" are not really fair to me). Too lazy to show you the answers. You have to believe me, dudes. JB, you can't laugh at me anymore unless you score less than me in 20 years.

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Advice on behalf of the good old bubulle.

I would really wish that I could travel around the world and do evangelization about i18n just like Jordi, Daffyd and Michael have been able to do. Of course, this is a known difference between a development model where people are paid to work on development and a completely volunteer development model. However, I really hope that all the good things that will be done to better support Asian languages in Ubuntu will end up in Debian really soon. After all, much of the initial work has been done in Debian itself by the wonderful Japanese/Chinese/Korean developers, or by the "debian-in" project lead by Jaldhar H. Vyas for Indic languages support. Don't take me wrong: I don't have any griefs towards Ubuntu when it comes at i18n. This is an area where the collaboration is already quite good and I hope it will become better if we manage to converge towards common tools (just free up the bloody Rosetta, Mark!). This is one of the goals I personnally set for the i18n session in Extremadura. Our goals here are common: we want more and more pleaces in the world to be able to use the Best Operating System ever and we will paint it red. (another way to say this: "we want the world and we want it NOW") For this, we just have to cooperate.

Bubulle had a wonderful idea. The Debian twins have been taken pics of in several Debconfs already. Some links for your viewing pleasure:

Debconf 2 - Toronto
[1] [2] [3] [1]

Debconf 3 - Oslo
[1]

Debconf 4 - Porto Alegre
My twin was not there :(

Debconf 5 - Helsinki
[1] [2]

After bubulle asked and Gunar tried to explain (Anybody understood his explanation? Good, I thought I was the only one ;) he finally published it on the DebConf website... somehow I feel some kind of D j vu...

As many people have expressed in their blogs after Bubulle's initial rant, I am also joining the game :)
Some weeks ago I decided to finally move my personal documents repository from CVS to SVN - Why SVN? Because I don't need a distributed system, I am the only person with write (or read) access to it... Besides, I'm too lazy - The one feature that made me start using SVN and not any other system is that you can use it just as if it were CVS, but without the ridiculous constraint placed by just integrating many individual files instead of managing the whole beast as a repository.
I had a problem, though, that made me lose good part of an evening - I think it might be related to #333105, but I'm not sure: I converted my repository using cvs2svn, which saved all my five years worth of commit history (whee!), grouping commits that seemed to belong together in single SVN transactions (whee!!)... But binary files were all corrupted. To make things worse, I didn't notice this until I had to present a talk in Peru - and my laptop's working copy was severely FUBAR.
Well... I managed to give my talk - And yesterday I finally decided to restore sanity to my life, reviving my doc_gwolf SVN tree. The stupid steps?

• cvs2svn --encoding=ISO-8859-1 -s /home/cvs/doc_gwolf /home/svn/doc_gwolf
• cd /tmp; svn co file:///home/svn/doc_gwolf
• Locate all files which differ between the two checkouts
• As I had done some work without committing, check against the list what was text, what was binary
• For each of the binary files, svn remove $file;cp /tmp/cvs/doc_gwolf/$file $file; svn add $file
• Add/replace all the files which were locally modified
• Everything seems to work? Ok, svn ci, and be merry.

Phew :-/

I see that plans start getting ready. Bubulle is coming, Wouter is not, and people will soon start getting their plans ready. I am quite excited about it! Of course, I need to devote more time to it, which is hard to me - but I will do it. Oaxtepec rules, you will _love_ the place. I went there again to spend a weekend with Nadezhda - Took some more photos, added them to the album. Debconf guys: Yes, I owe you a full report... It will come. Soon. Promise.
Anyway... I'm excited. Debian friends, Mexican interested friends: What are you waiting for? Join us! Register!
[update] Well, I published this entry, but then realized I wanted to answer to Wouter's question: Why in May? ;-)
First of all, weather: The weather is plainly better in May. Somewhat warmer... The rainy season starts in May/June, but believe me, you don't want to have your laptop out during Morelos State's well known thunderstorms!
Second, I fear of political instability. Next July we will be having our federal elections. We don't anticipate instability such as what we had in 1994 (which, please you all be quiet, didn't even mean violence in the streets), but still... It's better not to have Debconf too near the elections.
Third, prices - Most places are noticeably more expensive during Summer.
And, yes, I know some people will not be able to attend... I am sorry to learn you are one of them. Still, I'm sure some other people would not be able to make it in July.

This is the new hype of last years. No development can take place with these so cool tools. Crap, I just maintain the bloody localization for apt and dpkg and, as the developers of these packages use distributed revision control systems, I'm forced to use them as well. I have never lost so much time in fixing broken stuff in my archives. OK, I'm a moron certainly but I use RCS things for several years right now (the old CVS/SVN and the like with a centralized repository) and I HAVE NEVER LOST SO MUCH TIME since I use tla, than bazaar. More fun: it seems that baz is getting obsoleted by bzr right now as obviously geeks cannot live more than one year with the same tool. So I will have to convert my archives if I want to continue helping in apt/dpkg localization. Of course, I know that people will help morons like me to do it, but, hey, this will AGAIN be lost time. Thanksfully, the D-I developers are wise people and we don't use distributed RCS but a good old solid SVN for 3 years now. Frans, Joey, don't ever think about changing this, please.... So now, I'm left with a change that I can't commit in my local archive for a French man page of dpkg, as suddenly for no reason, the bloody baz complains:

A/  arch /dpkg/dpkg--devel/dpkg--devel--1.13/philippe.batailler@free.fr--2005
A/
 arch /dpkg/dpkg--devel/dpkg--devel--1.13/philippe.batailler@free.fr--2005/patch-log
A
 arch /dpkg/dpkg--devel/dpkg--devel--1.13/philippe.batailler@free.fr--2005/patch-log/patch-1
M  man/fr/dpkg.1
M  debian/changelog
M  ChangeLog
arch_commit: unable to acquire revision lock (could not rename file.)
tree: /home/bubulle/src/debian/dpkg/dpkg-1.13
revision: bubulle@debian.org--2005/dpkg--devel--1.13--patch-88
url: /home/bubulle/arch/bubulle@debian.org--2005

So nice: I'll again waste precious time asking on IRC for help and hearing people telling me to switch to <insert your favorite RCS system here>. This will be a so wonderful Sunday....

So, the D-I team again made it: a new release of the "installer with no name yet" happened. First of all, yet another occasion to publicly reward Joey Hess work. Joey has managed to lead this work for five and a half years. I think that we all agree that without Joey's work, we wouldn't have such a nice installation system for our distribution. Joey now gives the lead to Frans Pop. Knowing Frans as we know him now, I'm confident that the good work will go on. Joey will have more time to hack in various parts of D-I or lead the testing security team. From my narrow point of view, I'm again proud that we cover more and more languages. The official announcement mentions 9 of them. We can add Vietnamese to it, even if the installer has a broken display in second stage because of a now solved localechooser bug. As a consequence, we continue to paint the world map in red. The next big push on that matter will be the release of a graphical version of the installer (an alpha version is already advertised) which will support the rendering of the various languages from india for which translation is on its way.