RInside 0.2.5 arrived on CRAN earlier today. RInside is a set of convenience classes which facilitate embedding of R inside of C++ applications and programs, using the classes and functions provided by the Rcpp R and C++ integration package. The big news for this release is that Windows applications once again run! James Bates gets full credit for noticing why Windows binaries died on startup, and provided a short patch which we (after some further simplicifcation) added. So for the first time since the 0.2.0 release, Windows users can just change into the examples/standard directory and issue a simple make -f Makefile.win, and the twelve example binaries will actually work. Yay, and kudos to James. The other main addition is a new examples directory examples/wt containing the web-application of the density estimation demo I had blogged about last week. By combining the Wt toolkit with RInside, we get C++ "web" applications containing R which is pretty nifty. The example otherwise follows the earlier Qt-based example of a standard desktop application with RInside. One minor snafu I just noticed is that I was overzealous with the .Rbuildignore file. By excluding the wt and qtbinaries, I also excluded their source files with the same name (up to the .cpp or .h ending). If you desire to run the examples, just grab these examples files from the SVN repo at R-Forge. All changes since the last release are summarized below:

0.2.5   2011-12-07
   o    Applied (somewhat simplified) patch by James Bates which restores
        RInside to working on Windows -- with a big Thank You! to James for
        fixing a long-standing bug we inadvertendly introduced right after
        0.2.0 almost two years ago
   o    New example embedding R inside a Wt (aka Webtoolkit, pronounced 
        'witty') application, mirroring the previous Qt application
   o    Qt example qtdensity now uses the new svg() device in base R; removed
        test for cairoDevice package as well as fallback png code
   o    Very minor fix to qmake.pro file for Qt app correcting link order

CRANberries also provides a short report with changes from the previous release. More information is on the RInside page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page.

<object data="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Aspect-ratio-4x3.svg" type="image/svg+xml"> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Aspect-ratio-4x3.svg</object> <object data="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Aspect-ratio-16x9.svg" type="image/svg+xml"> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Aspect-ratio-16x9.svg</object> It seems that nearly all computer monitors have now switched from a 4:3 aspect ratio popular several years ago to a "wide screen" 16:10 and now mostly to an even wider 16:9. But screen sizes are usually measured by their diagonal length and those sizes have not changed. For example, before I had my Thinkpad X201, I had a X60 and a X35. They are similar laptops in the same product line with 12.1" screens. But 12.1" describes the size along the diagonal and the aspect ratio switched from 4:3 to 16:10 between the X60 and the X201. As the screen stretched out but maintained the same diagonal length, the area shrunk: from 453 square centimeters to 425. But screens are not only getting smaller, they are also getting less useful. The switch to wider aspect ratios is done so that people can watch wide screen movies while using a larger proportion of their screens. Of course, the vast majority of people's time on their laptops is not spent watching wide screen movies but in programs like browsers, word processors, and editors. Because most of our writing systems lay out documents from top to bottom, the tools we most frequently use to display (and then scroll through) the things we read primarily use vertical screen space -- the dimension that is shrinking. If you have a desktop monitor, you might rotate the whole thing 90 degrees and "solve" the problem. If you're on a laptop though (as I usually am) this is clearly not an option. I am not the first person to be annoyed by this trend. In fact, many recent desktop UI changes are designed to work around this issue. In the free software world, both Unity and GNOME 3 have made efforts to hide, merge, or otherwise get ride of title bars, menu bars, and panels that take up dwindling vertical space. I use Awesome which I've mostly set up to do two side-by-side terminals with very little in the way of menu bars. Applications are the worst offenders and the solutions for those things that won't run in a terminal (or people that don't want to live there) are still lacking. I have been using Firefox's Tree Style Tab extension to move tabs to the side and hand-customized toolbars that squeeze everything I need (i.e., back, forward, stop, refresh, and URL bar) onto a single menu bar. But the situation still drives me crazy. I'd love to hear what others are doing.

This weekend, we held a combined Debian Bug Squashing Party and Ubuntu Local Jam in Portland, OR. A big thank you to PuppetLabs for hosting! Thanks to a brilliant insight from Kees Cook, we were able to give everyone access to their own pre-configured build environment as soon as they walked in the door by deploying schroot/sbuild instances in "the cloud" (in this case, Amazon EC2). Small blips with the mirrors notwithstanding, this worked out pretty well, and let people start to get their hands dirty as soon as they walked in the door instead of spending a lot of time up front doing the boring work of setting up a build environment. This was a big win for people who had never done a package build before, and I highly recommend it for future BSPs. You can read about the build environment setup in the Debian wiki, and details on setting up your own BSP cloud in Kees's blog. (And the cloud instances were running Ubuntu 11.10 guests, with Debian unstable chroots - a perfect pairing for our joint Debian/Ubuntu event!) So how did this curious foray into a combined Ubuntu/Debian event go? Not too shabby:

• Roughly 25 people participated in the event - a pretty good turnout considering the short notice we gave. Thanks to everyone who turned up!
• Multiarch patches were submitted for 14 library packages by 9 distinct contributors
• Four of these people submitted their first patch to Debian!
• Three more contributors worked on patches that were not submitted to Debian by the end of the event, but we will stalk them and see to it that their patches make it in ;)
• 8 Ubuntu Stable Release Updates were looked at for verification of fixes
• 7 of these fixes were successfully verified (one bug was not reproducible)
• 6 of those packages have already been moved to the -updates pocket, where all of Ubuntu's users can now benefit from them

When all was said and done, we didn't get a chance to tackle any wheezy release critical bugs like we'd hoped. That's ok, that leaves us something to do for our next event, which will be bigger and even better than this one. Maybe even big enough to rival one of those crazy, all-weekend BSPs that they have in Germany...

On Sunday, I brought up EC2 instances to support the combined Debian Bug Squashing Party/Ubuntu Local Jam that took place at PuppetLabs in Portland, OR, USA. The intent was to provide each participant with their own sbuild environment on a 64bit machine, since we were going to be working on Multi-Arch support, and having both 64bit and 32bit chroots would be helpful. The host was an Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric) instance so it would be possible to do SRU verifications in the cloud too. I was curious about the juju provisioning system, since it has an interesting plugin system, called charms , that can be used to build out services. I decided to write an sbuild charm, which was pretty straight forward and quite powerful (using this charm it would be possible to trigger the creation of new schroots across all instances at any time, etc). The juju service itself works really well when it works correctly. When something goes wrong, unfortunately, it becomes nearly impossible to debug or fix. Repeatedly while working on charm development, the provisioning system would lose its mind, and I d have to destroy the entire environment and re-bootstrap to get things running again. I had hoped this wouldn t be the case while I was using it during production on Sunday, but the provisioner broke spectacularly on Sunday too. Due to the fragility of the juju agents, it wasn t possible to restart the provisioner it lost its mind, the other agent s couldn t talk to it any more, etc. I would expect the master services on a cloud instance manager to be extremely robust since having it die would mean totally losing control of all your instances. On Sunday morning, I started 8 instances. 6 came up perfectly and were excellent work-horses all day at the BSP. 2 never came up. The EC2 instances started, but the service provisioner never noticed them. Adding new units didn t work (instances would start, but no services would notice them), and when I tried to remove the seemingly broken machines, the instance provisioner completely went crazy and started dumping Python traces into the logs (which seems to be related to this bug, though some kind of race condition seems to have confused it much earlier than this total failure), and that was it. We used the instances we had, and I spent 3 hours trying to fix the provisioner, eventually giving up on it. I was very pleased with EC2 and Ubuntu Server itself on the instances. The schroots worked, sbuild worked (though I identified some additional things that the charm should likely do for setup). I think juju has a lot of potential, but I m surprised at how fragile it is. It didn t help that Amazon had rebooted the entire West Coast the day before and there were dead Ubuntu Archive Mirrors in the DNS rotation. For anyone else wanting to spin up builders in the cloud using juju, I have a run-down of what this looks like from the admin s perspective, and even include a little script to produce little slips of paper to hand out to attendees with an instance s hostname, ssh keys, and builder SSH password. Seemed to work pretty well overall; I just wish I could have spun up a few more. :) So, even with the fighting with juju and a few extra instances that came up and I had to shut down again without actually using them, the total cost to run the instances for the whole BSP was about US$40, and including the charm development time, about US$45. UPDATE: some more details on how to avoid the glitches I hit.

2011, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Mika and I will be traveling this winter in the Seattle area and in Japan. The current plan is to be in Seattle December 19 through 28 and then in Japan from December 28 through January 12. After that, we will fly back to Boston for the MIT Mystery Hunt where, as punishment for winning last year, our team is running this year's hunt. We will be in Tokyo for New Years and then traveling around Japan for much of the rest of the time. We hope to visit Hokkaido and Aomori and to travel there from Tokyo along Japan's Western coast through Kanazawa and Niigata. We're still figuring out where we will visit and what we will do in both places. If you are interested in meeting up for dinner or drinks in either place (or in organizing a talk or meeting), please get in touch and let's try to figure something out.

AndroidZoom, along with just about every other third-party interface to the Android Market out there, provides 2D barcodes which aim to make it easy to install Android applications that you find online on a phone. Maybe this would be a nice feature for F-Droid? Unfortunately, I found this feature when I was trying to help a friend install the (free software) ZXing Barcode Scanner because they wanted to read a 2D barcode.

The Community Wellness team at MIT has a program on stress reduction, mindfulness, and relaxation. Among their services is a guided three-minute relaxation exercise recording (available at extension 3-2256 or 617-253-CALM). It's a very relaxing message. At the end of the recording, there's a revealing error where a standard voicemail robo-voice say "no messages are waiting" before you system hangs up on you. Turns out, the MIT wellness folks implemented this using the normal MIT voicemail system. This gave me a thought: What if my voicemail greeting included a guided relaxation message as part of its greeting so that anyone who left a message had the chance to relax a little bit first? Would messages left for me be more positive after a window of serenity? Would people ask less of me? Would my callers feel more relaxed and happier during the rest of their day? I just recorded a short version of the MIT message as my voicemail greeting. I suppose I will find out.

I've today released version 0.21 of Obnam, my backup application. This is the first version that also got uploaded to Debian. It is currently waiting for manual processing in the NEW queue. From the NEWS file: USER VISIBLE CHANGES:

• Obnam will now unlock the repository if there's an error during a backup. For the most part, the force-lock operation should now be unnecessary, but it's still there in case it's useful some day.

BUG FIXES:

• Negative timestamps for files now work. Thanks to Jamil Djadala for reporting the bug.
• The documentation for --checkpoint units fixed. Thanks, user weinzwang from IRC.
• The connections to the repository and live data filesystem are now properly closed. This makes benchmark read/write statistics be correct.

I want to blog frequently but usually don't seem to find the time for it. I'm not above tying myself to the mast if it means blogging more. Iron Blogger is a blogging and drinking club based on this premise. The rules are pretty simple:

• Blog at least once a week.
• If you fail to do so, pay $5 into a common pool.
• When the pool is big enough, the group uses it to pay for drinks and snacks at a meet-up for all the participants.

Nelson Elhage ran the original Iron Blogger for about a year before the effort ran out of steam. I've started a new instance with a couple people from the previous group and a bunch of folks from Berkman, MIT, and beyond. If you live in Boston and want to join, there are still a couple of spots available. I'm going to cap the current group, at least temporarily, at about 30 people because I think that's the maximum we'll fit into a local pub. Look over the site and send me an email if you're interested. If you don't live in Boston but want to organize your own Iron Blogger, you can use the software in Nelson's git repository (or my branch) to automate nearly the whole process of tracking posts, generating reports, and updating the ledger of debts.

A few years ago, I ran into my friend Jay in the MIT Infinite Corridor. He was looking for volunteers to have their pictures taken and then added to the library of freely licensed and remixable media that would ship with every version of Scratch -- the graphical programming language built by Mitch Resnick's Lifelong Kindergarten group that is designed to let kids create animations and interactive games. Jay suggested I make some emotive faces and I posed for three images that made the final cut: But although I've spent quite a bit of time studying the Scratch community in the last few years as it is grown to include millions of participants and projects, I forgot about about Jay's photo shoot. A couple months ago, Acetarium resident Andres Lombana Bermudez pointed out that there was a mako tag on the Scratch website and that a whole bunch of users had been publishing projects using the pictures of me which, apparently, shipped in Scratch under my name. For example, in this project in which I dance in front of a enormous "MAKO" banner: That said, given the rather emotive nature of the pictures, I seem to usually end up being blown up shot, shrunk, set on fire by dragons, or meeting other similarly unfortunate ends. There's quite many more entertaining examples under the tag and many more elsewhere on the Scratch website although they are a little trickier to track down. Jonathan Zittrain likes to say that the best technologies are generative in the sense that they encourage their users to make things with them that the designer never forsaw or anticipated. I feel generative.

This story has been floating around for a week or so. The summary is that someone bought a system that has UEFI and is having trouble installing Linux on it. In itself, not a problem. But various people have either conflated this with the secure boot issue or suggested that UEFI is a fundamentally anti-Linux technology.

Right now there are no machines shipping to the public with secure boot enabled. None at all. If you're having problems installing Linux on a machine with UEFI then it's not because of secure boot. So what is actually causing the problem?

UEFI is a complicated specification, with 2.3.1A being 2214 pages long. It's a large body of code. There's a lot of subtleties. It's very easy for people to get things wrong. For example, we've seen issues where calling SetVirtualAddressMap() resulted in the firmware referencing boot services code, a clear violation of the spec on the firmware authors' part. We've also found machines that failed to boot because grub wasn't aligning its stack properly, a clear violation of the spec on our part.

Software is difficult. People make mistakes. When something mysteriously fails to work the immediate assumption should be that you've found a bug, not a conspiracy. Over time we'll find those bugs and fix them, but until then just treat UEFI boot failures like any other bug - annoying, but not malicious.

comments

I care a lot about free network services. Recently, I have been given lots of reasons to be happy with the progress the free software community has made in developing services that live up to my standards. I have personally switched from a few proprietary network services to alternative systems that respect my autonomy and have been very happy both with the freedom I have gained and with the no-longer-rudimentary feature sets that the free tools offer. Although there is plenty left to do, here are four tools I'm using now instead of the proprietary tools that many people use, or that I used to use myself:

• StatusNet/identi.ca for microblogging (instead of Twitter): I have had my account since the almost the very beginning and am very happy with the improvements in the recent 1.0 rollout.
• Diaspora for social networking (instead of Facebook): Diaspora has made important strides forward recently and has become both quite usable and quite useful. Not having used Facebook, I've not managed to totally figure out where the system fits into my life, but I do periodically post updates that are more personal and less polished than the ones on my blog. I still have not set up my own pod but look forward to work that the Diaspora team is putting into making that process easier.
• NewsBlur for feed reading/sharing (instead of Google Reader): NewsBlur can be thought of as a replacement for Google Reader and is, in my opinion, much better even before one considers issues of autonomy. You can install the code yourself or pay the author a small amount to host it for you (he will do it for free if you are following under 64 feeds).
• Scuttle for social bookmarking (instead of Delicious): In the wake of Yahoo's sale and shutdown of Delicious, there is a renewed interest in free tools for social bookmarking. Scuttle, a rather mature project, seems to have been one of several beneficiaries. My Scuttle installation is at links.mako.cc.

In trying to switch away from proprietary services, I have found that there still a lack of good information comparing the different systems out there and giving folks advice on who might be able to help with things like setup or hosting. I really value hearing from other people about what they use and what they find useful but finding this information online still seems to be a struggle. The autonomo.us wiki seems like the natural place to host or summarize this discussion and to collect and share information useful for those of us slouching (or running) toward autonomy in our use of network services. I invite folks to get involved in improving that already useful resource. For example, this week, I spent a few hours researching free social bookmarking tools and produced a major update to the (already useful) social bookmarking page on the autonomo.us wiki. Of course, I can imagine lots of ways to improve that page and to collect similar information on other classes of network services. Please join me in that effort!

this week my activities were split between some freshly-reported pkg-perl bugs, & looking at some of the older RC bugs. for most of the ones in the latter category I found again ready-to-be-applied patches, many of them from Ubuntu again. details:

• #565087 njam: "njam: ftbfs with gcc-4.5"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Andreas Moog, upload to DELAYED/2
• #614476 src:rtpproxy: "rtpproxy: FTBFS: rtpp_syslog_async.c:88: error: format not a string literal and no format arguments"
  add format argument, upload to DELAYED/2
• #621997 src:tiemu: "tiemu: FTBFS: gui/calc/calc.c:589:4: error: 'GtkFunction' undeclared (first use in this function)"
  grab patches from Ubuntu, upload to DELAYED/2
• #622067 src:gnome-alsamixer: "gnome-alsamixer: FTBFS: gnome-app-helper.h:620:2: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list before 'GtkCallbackMarshal'"
  add patches from Ubuntu / Julien Lavergne, upload to DELAYED/2
• #624965 src:critterding: "critterding: FTBFS: BulletSoftBody/btSoftBodyInternals.h:175:17: error: uninitialized const 'zerodummy' [-fpermissive]"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Daniel T Chen, upload to DELAYED/2
• #641156 tv-fonts: "FTBFS: xset: not found"
  unset DISPLAY in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2, later integrated in maintainer upload
• #645543 src:libio-aio-perl: "libio-aio-perl: FTBFS(kfreebsd): error: 'O_CLOEXEC' undeclared (first use in this function)"
  upload package prepared by ghedo (pkg-perl)
• #645754 libmath-base85-perl: "Source package contains non-free IETF RFC/I-D"
  repack tarball to get rid of non-free rfc (pkg-perl)
• #646289 src:libdata-amf-perl: "libdata-amf-perl: FTBFS: Missing build-deps on YAML::Base?"
  override test (move away old third-party file) (pkg-perl)
• #646290 src:libdata-show-perl: "libdata-show-perl: FTBFS: test failures"
  add patch from upstream developer release (pkg-perl)
• #646296 src:libxml-atom-service-perl: "libxml-atom-service-perl: FTBFS: test failures"
  patch test (pkg-perl)

The Occupy Wall Street protests taking place around the world are incredibly moving. And, at May First/People Link, the joint us jumping with new projects. Occupy Together was the first to join, followed by the Occupy Wall Street Journal. We then launched boggs.mayfirst.org as our dedicated Occupy Wall Street shared server and the radical tech work keeps on coming (OccupyTechnoloyg, OccupyProvidence, OccupyColumbus GA just to name a few). It's also great to see free software and responsible software as a service making it's way into the conversation. I've heard many reports about the politics of technology taking it's rightful place in the realm of political decisions being made. I don't have the context for this photo from the blog non ti stavo cercando, but it sure sums up the connection :

After spotting an upload of mira, who in turn spotted an upload of abe (the package, not an upload by me aka abe@d.o), mira (mirabilos aka tg@d.o) noticed that there are Debian packages which have same name as some Debian Developers have as login name. Of course I noticed a long time ago that there is a Debian package with my login name abe . Another well-known Debian login and former package name is amaya. But since someone else came up with that thought, too, it was time for finding the definite answer to the question which are the DD login names which also exist as Debian package names. My first try was based on the list of trusted GnuPG keys:

$ apt-cache policy $(gpg --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --list-keys 2>/dev/null   \
                     grep @debian.org   \
        	     awk -F'[<@]' ' print $2 '   \
                     sort -u) 2>/dev/null   \
                   egrep -o '^[^ :]*'
alex
tor
ed
bam
ng

But this was not satisfying as my own name didn t show up and gpg also threw quite a lot of block reading errors (which is also the reason for redirecting STDERR). mira then had the idea of using the Ultimate Debian Database to answer this question more properly:

udd=> SELECT login, name FROM carnivore_login, carnivore_names
      WHERE carnivore_login.id=carnivore_names.id AND login IN
      (SELECT package AS login FROM packages, active_dds
       WHERE packages.package=active_dds.login UNION
       SELECT source AS name FROM sources, active_dds
       WHERE sources.source=active_dds.login)
      ORDER BY login;
 login                   name
-------+---------------------------------------
 abe     Axel Beckert
 alex    Alexander List
 alex    Alexander M. List  4402020774 9332554
 and     Andrea Veri
 ash     Albert Huang
 bam     Brian May
 ed      Ed Boraas
 ed      Ed G. Boraas [RSA Compatibility Key]
 ed      Ed G. Boraas [RSA]
 eric    Eric Dorland
 gq      Alexander GQ Gerasiov
 iml     Ian Maclaine-cross
 lunar   J r my Bobbio
 mako    Benjamin Hill
 mako    Benjamin Mako Hill
 mbr     Markus Braun
 mlt     Marcela Tiznado
 nas     Neil A. Schemenauer
 nas     Neil Schemenauer
 opal    Ola Lundkvist
 opal    Ola Lundqvist
 paco    Francisco Moya
 paul    Paul Slootman
 pino    Pino Toscano
 pyro    Brian Nelson
 stone   Fredrik Steen
(26 rows)

Interestingly tor (Tor Slettnes) is missing in this list, so it s not complete either At least I m quite sure that nobody maintains a package with his own login name as package name. :-) We also have no packages ending in -guest , so there s no chance that a package name matches an Alioth guest account either

The following selected bibliography showcases only a small portion of the academics who have demonstrated that while it may take two to tango, it only takes one to give a scholarly paper a silly cliche title: There are also a few hundred groups who have demonstrated that larger groups can so as well.

This year, Software Freedom Day in Boston is being organized by Asheesh and Deb and OpenHatch which means a focus on increasing involvement in free software communities. If you are all interested in getting involved in the free software community in any way and at any level -- or interested in hearing about how that might happen someday -- this is a great event to attend. For my part, I'll be giving a short talk on getting involved in Debian. The event will be held on Saturday, September 17 at Cambridge College -- between Harvard and Central squares -- with an after party at Tommy Doyle's in Harvard.

I am haunted by the nagging fear that I have mailboxes, tucked into a dark corner of an office somewhere, and perhaps even full of checks and important documents, that I don't know exist.

Even though Enrico is not smiling on this picture, he s one of the friendliest Debian person that I know. I always enjoy his presentations because he can t refrain from inserting jokes or other funny tricks. That said he s serious too, there s lots of good stuff that he has developed over the years (starting with Debtags) and he has put a lot of effort in reforming the New Maintainer process. Read on to learn more about his various projects. Raphael: Who are you? Enrico: Hi, I m Enrico Zini, a DD from Italy. I m 35 and I work as a freelance Free Software developer. One of my historical roles in Debian is taking care of Debtags, but that is not all I do: my paid work led me to write and maintain some weather forecast related software in Debian, and recently I gained a Front Desk hat, and then a DAM hat. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Enrico: It was 2001, I was at uni, I was using Debian. At some point I wanted to learn packaging so I read through the whole Policy from top to bottom. Then I thought: why package only for myself? . There were many DDs at my uni, and it only seemed natural to me to join Debian as well. Evidently this was also natural for Zack [Note from editor: Stefano Zacchiroli], who had become DD 6 months earlier and didn t hesitate to advocate me. I found the Policy and the Developer s Reference to be very interesting things to read, and I welcomed my AM s questions as an excuse to learn more. I completely understand those people who have fun trying to answer all the questions in the NM templates while they wait for an AM. With my super DAM powers I can see that my AM report was submitted on October 16, 2001 by my AM Martin Michlmayr, and that James Troup created my account 9 days later, on October 25. Raphael: You have a special interest in the New Maintainer (NM) Process since you are a Debian Account Manager (DAM) and a member of the NM Frontdesk. Thanks to your work the process is much less academic/bureaucratic than it used to be. Can you remember us the main changes? Enrico: One of the first things I noticed when I become a Front Desk member is that there was a tendency to advocate people too early, thinking by the time they ll get an AM, they ll know enough . Unfortunately, this didn t always work, and once the real NM process started it would turn into a very long and demotivating experience both for the applicant and for the AM. So we tried raising the bar on advocacies, and that seems to have helped a lot. If people join NM when they are ready, it means that NM is quick and painless both for them and their AMs, who are therefore able to process more applicants. We also did a rather radical cleanup of the NM templates , which are a repository of questions that Application Managers can ask to their applicants. We realized that AMs were just sending the whole templates to their applicants, so we moved all non-essential questions to separate files, to drastically reduce the amounts of questions that are asked by default. Other improvements in the NM process came from other parts of Debian: nowadays there are lots of ways to learn and gradually gain experience and reputation inside the project before joining NM, which means that we get many candidates who we can process quickly. For example, packages can now be uploaded via sponsors, and the Mentors project helps new contributors to find sponsors and get their first packages reviewed. Then one can now become Debian Maintainer and take full responsibility of their own packages, gaining experience and reputation. The idea of working in teams also helped: big teams like the Perl, Python, KDE, Ocaml, Haskell teams (and many more) are excellent entry points for people who have something to package. But Debian is not just for packagers, and one could join teams like the Website team, the Press and Publicity team, the Events and Merchandise team or their local translation team. Becoming DDs the non-uploading way is not just for non-technical people: one could enjoy programming but not packaging. An interesting way to get involved in that way is to help writing or maintaining some of the many Debian services. Note that I m not suggesting this as a way to learn how to program, but as a way to get involved in Debian by writing code. Finally, we started to appreciate the importance of having people activities in Debian explicitly visible, which means that the more obviously good work one has done in Debian, the less questions we need to ask. Jan Dittberner s DDPortfolio is an excellent resource for AMs and Front Desk, and I m maintaining a service called minechangelogs that for people who have done lots of work in Debian is able to fully replace the Tasks&Skills parts of the NM process. Raphael: What are your plans for Debian Wheezy? Enrico: For Wheezy I hope to be able to streamline and simplify Debtags a bit more. At Debconf11 I had a conversation with FTP-masters on how to make some tags more official, and I now have to work a bit more on that. I d also like to considerably downsize the codebase behind the debtags package, now that its job is quite clear and I don t need to experiment with fancy features the way I did in the past. I have to say that I enjoy programming more than I enjoy packaging, so most of my plans in Debian are not tied to releases. For example, I d like to finish and deploy the new NM website codebase soon: it would mean to have a codebase that s much easier to maintain, and in which it s much easier to implement new features. I d also like to design a way to allow maintainers to review the tag submission to their own packages instead of having to wait for me or David Paleino to do a regular review of all the submissions. Finally, I d like to promote the usage of apt-xapian-index in more cutting-edge packaging applications. And to design a way to maintain up to date popcon information in one s local index. And improve and promote those services that I maintain, and I tend to often have ideas for new ones. Raphael: If you could spend all your time on Debian, what would you work on? Enrico: If I could spend all my time on Debian, I would do a lot of software development: I love doing software development, but most of my development energy is spent on my paid work. I guess I would start my all your time in Debian by taking better care of the things that I m already doing, and by promoting them better so that I wouldn t end up being the only person maintaining them. After that, however, I reckon that I do have a tendency of noticing new, interesting problems in need(?) of a solution, and I guess I would end up wildly experimenting new ideas in Debian much like a victorian mad scientist. Which reminds me that I most definitely need minions! Where can I find minions? Raphael: You re the author of the Debian Community Guidelines. I have always felt that this document should be more broadly advertised. For example by integrating it in the Developer s Reference. What do you think? Enrico: The DCG was really a collection of tips to improve one s online communication, based on ideas and feedback that I collected from pestering many experienced and well-respected people for some time. Like every repository of common sense, I think it should be widely promoted but never ever turned into law. It wouldn t be a bad idea to mention it in the Developer s Reference, or to package it as a separate file in the developers-reference package. The reasons I haven t actively been pushing for that to happen are two: there isn t much in the DCG that is specific to Debian, and I don t have the resources to do a proper job maintaining it. It d be great if somebody could take over its maintenance and make it become some proper, widespread, easy-to-quote online reference document, like one of those HOWTOs that all serious people have read at some point in their lives. Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Enrico: It s sometimes hard to get feedback or help if you work on something unusual. That is partly to be expected, and partly probably due to me not having yet learnt how to get people involved in what I do. Raphael: What motivates you to continue to contribute year after year? Enrico: Debian keeps evolving, so there is always something to learn. And Debian is real, so everything I do is constantly measured against reality. What more intellectual stimulation could one possibly want? Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Enrico: I don t think I could reasonably list everyone I admire in Debian: pretty much in every corner of the project there is someone, sometimes not very well known, who is putting a lot of Quality in what they do. Someone who decided that X should work well in Debian or that Debian should work well for Y or that Z is something Debian people can rely on and makes sure that it is so. Those are the people who make sure Debian is and will be not just a hobby, but a base upon which I can rely for my personal and working life.

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Thank you to Enrico for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did.

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I often hear criticism of "negative campaigning" in the free software movement. For example, in reply to a blog post I once wrote about an FSF campaign, several people argued against, "negative campaigning of any sort, in any realm." Drawing an analogy to political smear campaigns, some members of the free software community have taken the position that negative campaigning in general is not useful and that negativity has no place in our advocacy. First, it is important to be clear on what we mean by a negative campaigns. I believe that there is a fundamental difference between speaking out against policies or actions and smear campaigns that employ untrue claims, ad hominem attacks, and that attempt to avoid a real conversation about issues. I will categorically condemn the latter form of smear campaigning in campaigns for software freedom or for anything else. That said, negativity directed at negativity has had a positive effect in many social movements. I have supported and participated in "negative" campaigns against proprietary software, software patents, DRM, centralized network services, and the firms behind these practices. I've done so because I believe that if one is taking an ethical position, it is justified, and often necessary, to not only speak about the benefits of freedom but against acts of dispossession and disenfranchisement. In some of the most effective social movements, unambiguously negative messages have been central. Should a campaign for abolishing child labor talk only about how valuable adult workers are to their employers or how happy kids are when they don't work? Should a campaign trying to abolish land mines talk only about the benefits of bomb-free fields and intact lower limbs? Should a free speech organization only speak out about the social welfare brought by a free press and never against acts of censorship? These may seem like outlandish comparisons but you can find people writing, only a couple centuries ago, about how slavery should be abolished by arguing in favor of the benefits of paid labor. Even if the economic arguments in favor of paid work are strong, these arguments seems irrelevant and offensive today. Whether slavery is more or less efficient is a moot point. Society has rejected it because it is wrong. We have made important strides toward eliminating injustices like child labor and slavery because activists waged decidedly negative campaigns against them and convinced others to join in opposition. In doing so, activists declared the status quo unconscionable and created an ethical responsibility to find alternatives and to redefine what was "realistic." While I will not suggest that the movement for software freedom is comparable in ethical weight to these other causes, I know that the free software mission is similar in kind. Of course, if one does not think that user control over technology is an ethical issue but is instead merely a matter of choice, one will probably oppose negative campaigns. It is also possible that a particular negative campaign is tactically unwise in that it is unlikely to reach a large audience, unlikely to change people's minds, or be difficult to carry out successfully. But such campaigns are a bad idea because they are ineffective, not because they are negative. Additionally, a movement that is purely negative and offers no reasonable alternative to the stated ill may also be unlikely to succeed. This is why, for example, I believe it is good that the FSF uses the large majority of its resources in the "positive" role of supporting free software. For those that do treat technological empowerment as an ethical ideal, it is both justified and essential to condemn the systematic disempowerment of others through non-free software just as we celebrate the benefits of software freedom. "Negative" campaigns against proprietary software, software patents, and DRM in music have already led our community to important -- if incomplete -- victories. The desire to right wrongs has been a critical part of our movement's success and of many others'. We would be wise not to give it up.