There are situations where you might want to redirect some audio you're playing on your local computer to another computer's speakers, potentially in a different room, or even anywhere on the Internet. One of many possibilities to do that is to use the Enlightened Sound Daemon (EsoundD, or esd). It ships with a program called esddsp (apt-get install esound-clients) which can redirect various audio sources. First, you have to start the esd daemon on a console on the remote host (the one which should output the audio on some speaker, for example 192.168.0.xxx) e.g. like this:

  $ esd -public -nobeeps -tcp

You can do this as regular user (no need to be root) if you have the proper permissions. You also need to allow connections on port 16001 in your firewall settings. Then you can redirect audio to that daemon from another computer. In this example I'm redirecting some music using various players:

  $ esddsp -s 192.168.0.xxx:16001 mpg321 -o esd foo.mp3
  $ esddsp -s 192.168.0.xxx:16001 mplayer -ao esd foo.mp3
  $ esddsp -s 192.168.0.xxx:16001 ogg123 -d esd foo.ogg

This also works fine for videos, in which case you can redirect the audio (but not video):

  $ esddsp -s 192.168.0.xxx:16001 mplayer -ao esd foo.mp4

For the video player Miro, I've recently documented this in the Debian package's README.Debian file. Basically you have to edit ~/.xine/config and enable audio.driver:esd there, then start Miro with

  $ esddsp -s 192.168.0.xxx:16001 miro

Audio will be emitted on the remote host, video remains on your local PC. Some programs may also support esd natively, in which case esddsp is not required, e.g.

  $ ogg123 -d esd -o host:192.168.0.14:16001 foo.ogg

A few weeks ago, NYU hosted an interesting event about the future of the Internet, appropriately tittled The Futures of the Internet, the video of which is now available here. One of the panelists was Jonathan Zittrain (who recently wrote an important new book bearing the same name as the event) and during the talk he provided a few ideas about how geeks and developers can help secure the Future of the Internet. While I agree with a lot in fact most of his assessments about the state and fate of the Internet as he lays out in his book and his talks, his characterization of geek/hacker/developer politics is not one of them. Basically, one of Zittrain’s claims is that developers are not doing enough to save the Future of the Internet and it is their rampant, Atlas-like libertarianism, which is, in part, to blame (first made 37:20 minutes into the video for those who want to listen to the actual comments). They have little-to-no political consciousness, are too cool to care about the fine print and they don’t care about the broader politics of the the Internet because they assume that they can just hack around any sort of barrier and impediment. While we can, without a doubt, identify a strain of libertarianism among hackers, it is by no means representative of all of geekdom and in fact, is becoming more and more a worn out 1990s stereotype/clich as time passes than an accurate representation of what is a far more variegated set of ethics and practices among hackers (and I will soon publish an article on this topic). It also completely fails to capture the ethical spirit as well as sociological, and political workings of one of the most important strains of hacking free and open source software which not only powers most of our (open) Internet but which in fact has provided a pretty hefty ethical backbone by which to conceptualize one of the ways we should think about the fight for the future of the Internet. Ok, time for a rant now Geeks not only designed the Internet, an indisputably revolutionary medium, but also implemented, and continue to maintain it, and then in their copious spare time, also engage in fighting back the political, legal and corporate encroachment which threatens to limit the very revolutionary nature of the Internet (as Chris Kelty’s new book on Free Software argues). If these acts by geeks are not enough political action, then maybe the development of not just one, but multiple entirely open and free alternatives to the only two proprietary operating systems that exist today might be a political act that would satisfy? Many would agree that even simply using a free operating system is a political act. It would be better to claim that individuals, lawyers and other political actors are not doing enough to save the Future of the Internet, rather than imploring the already overtaxed geeks to set aside everything that they are already doing to do something even more. (end rant) It also seems that when it comes to political questions related to the Internet, net neutrality being the hot topic now, or fighting restrictive and problematic laws like the DMCA, one of the only groups of people (outside of lawyers and librarians) to actually understand and dissect the fine print (and geeks actually are pretty attuned to and like to dissect the fine legal print), to protest these unsavory laws, and to support the organizations who are doing something about it (like the EFF), are geeks and hackers. While many geeks are not necessarily keen on conceptualizing their labor in traditional political terms, or aligning their technical projects with a political affiliation, and yes would rather just be writing good code, they do fight for their productive freedom and this productive freedom just happens to relate to most questions and concerns related to an open, accessible, and tweakable Internet, built by the geeks, lest we forget What was perhaps most surprising was that he also seemed to think that geeks and developers have not turned to “apprenticeship,” nor policies and procedure to coordinate their development projects, unlike Wikipedia, which he considers a shining example that geeks should look towards as a beacon of policy that geeks should consider emulating in their projects (comments made answering my question). He clearly has not been hanging out with any Debian developers in the last 10 years nor has he gone through their New Maintainer Process In other words, he seems to think they are allergic to regulation due to their accentuated libertarianism, or are against structure because of their anarchism, neither which is remotely true. I think I found this characterization most ironic and problematic for before Wikipedia was even an entry on a Wiki, projects like Debian (and most other F/OSS projects) were transforming and changing to integrate normative procedures and policies that allowed a group of people to work together, scale, grow and deal with crises’. No, they don’t have the Wikipedia badge system, but that system is emblematic of Wikipedia’s own transformation into integrating its own normative procedures and policies for working together, not an example of an idealized policy system that other projects are too primitive to have evolved into yet. About one hour into the talk when questions opened up, I objected to his characterization, but given his answer back to me, I did not make much of a dent in his thinking. Another lawyer Tim Wu (who also wrote a wonderful book on the Internet) chimed in to give me some props and also made a good point that even if geeks are the only groups of people who would storm AT&T and know intimately about the importance of net neutrality, there is a lot of room for thinking about how to strengthen and improve the tactics and politics among geeks and developers so that we can ensure the type of open and generative Internet and set of technologies we value. As part of thinking and rethinking new strategies, it is as key to acknowledge and honor the past. In this regard, free software development has been pivotal both in terms of providing software (and making it is an important political act as is choosing to use free software over propriety software) and a set of important set of ideas that a lot of lawyers like Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig have run with to make some important political claims of their own. So despite my rant above, which was a rant and thus exaggerates things to some degree, I do think there is much more that geeks and non-geeks can do, such as help translate these uber-geeky issues into less geeky terms (and actually this is already being done by some geeks as the work of Jelena Karanovic has shown, or translate the technical issues into new domains as the uber-geek Karl Fogel is doing with question copyright but first lets give credit where credit it due and recognize that labor is political

After three years, a new version of ocaml-gettext is out. I know that the delay is quite long... Been too busy to do anything regarding this. This new version is mainly a bug fix release:

• UTF-8 is better handled when merging PO/POT
• multi-lines, special and continuation comments of PO file are supported
• camomile implementation is now safer (less chance to fail if something goes wrong)
• improve overall build system

However, the major event of this release is the fact that it is now compatible with OCaml 3.10.0. This is a big news, because string extraction heavily rely on camlp4, which has changed a lot. I have also uploaded a debian package of ocaml-gettext. Plans for next release:

• website has not been updated because generating it is too much complicated, i should switch to something more simple layout and generation scheme
• my home-made build system is not good at all (fail to detect changes and do incremental rebuild...), next release should move to ocamlbuild
• PDF generation has been disabled, because it makes fop produce a lot of errorrs, it should be re-enable
• finish the patch to xgettext to allow OCaml string been extracted

Homepage Download

The recent announcements by McCain and Clinton of their support for a temporary repeal of the Federal gas tax make me sick. More on why later, but first, I want to put forth my idea. I think both Republicans and Democrats would like it -- as it's based on market principles and achieves a reduction in costs to the average household, while simultaneously helping the environment and reducing our dependency on foreign oil. But of course, it's courageous, and we don't have many politicians of that type anymore.

What we need is a large, revenue-neutral, gas tax increase. Now, before people go nuts, let's explore what this means.

Revenue-neutral means that it doesn't result in a net increase of monies going to the government. The increase in the gas tax rate is offset by a decrease in the income tax, tied to the cost of direct and indirect taxable gasoline each family or business consumes. So on day 1, if you cost of filling up at the tank goes up by $10 in a week, if you are an average family, your total paychecks also go up by $10. Your cost for receiving a package might go up by $1, and your paycheck goes up by the same amount. So you're no worse off than before -- if you're average.

Let's look at the pros and cons of this sort of plan:

• The economic incentive to be efficient consumers of gas is magnified. This will eventually lead to Americans having more money in their pockets, increasing market incentives for fuel efficiency, and a decreasing (or increasing slower) price of oil as demand slows.


• Economic incentives to use mass transit, live close to urban centers, or drive fuel-efficient vehicles are magnified. Likewise, the economic incentives to invest in mass transit and efficient automobiles are also magnified.


• As more efficient technologies come on the market, and Americans decide that they'd like to pad their bank accounts by hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, more sustainable and environmentally-friendly development patterns will emerge. Also, the price of oil will be kept low. Of course, people that choose not to change will, on average, be no worse off than before.


• Alternative choices to the automobile will have a greater incentive to develop. Think the return of a fast, speedy national passenger and freight network, greater mass transit options, etc.


• The marketplace will drive Detroit to love making fuel-efficient vehicles, because they will be the new profit centers.


• This sort of thing is known to work well in other countries around the world.

If we think more long-term, we see even more positive effects:

• The return to local agriculture and manufacturing. Due to lower transportation costs, local farmers and manufacturers will be able to undercut Walmart's prices due to the larger relative costs of Walmart's much-vaunted national distribution network. Unless, that is, Walmart starts buying local -- which is a good thing too. This is a good thing for American jobs.


• Keeping all that oil money in the domestic economy is a good thing for American jobs, too.


• Our businesses will have a jump start on being competitive in the increasingly carbon-regulated global marketplace.

As for the cons:

• Eventually this will lead to a net reduction in Federal revenues as efficiencies develop in the marketplace and people save money on gas. Corresponding budget cuts will be required. (A good thing, I figure)


• Implementing this all at once would be a shock to some people living inefficiently now -- those that are far above average. It would have to be implemented gradually to avoid being a shock to the economy.

Now, for the McCain/Clinton plan: it's a farce. Reducing the gas taxes means more efficient gas, which means more consumption of gas, which in turn leads to -- yes -- higher gas prices. Its real effect will be minimal, and is a terrible long-term policy. It charges tens of billions of dollars to the national credit card (which we, and our children, will have to repay) while achieving almost no benefit now. It's a gimmick through and through, and something that says loud and clear that neither candidate is on track for the "Straight Talk Express".

Update 4/29/2008: One potential solution for the problem of declining revenues over time is to periodically re-index the averages to mirror current usage. Assuming this does really lead to the expected drop in consumption, there is no sense in 2020 of paying people for how much gas they would have used in 2008.

(?:^ \s+)echo\s+(-[^e]*\s+)?(["\'])[^\'"]*(\\\\[abcEfnrtv\\0])+[^"\']*["\']

(or enhaced version: using a backreference so only "..." is matched but "...' is not)

it should match:
echo "foo\nbar"
echo 'foo\nbar'
echo -n "foo\nbar"

but not:
echo foo\nbar
echo -e "foo\nbar"
echo -ne "foo\nbar"
echo -en 'foo\nbar'

it works in php (preg_match), but not in perl

ideas?

---

Debian wants to release in september. This target is already becoming difficult to reach, though the Release Team would like to try to do an extra effort to reach it. History has shown that as long as testing migration is not frozen, many maintainers don't care much. Even during the freeze 'small' bug fixes are uploaded that sometimes break a lot and can delay the release quite a bit. Currently build-essential packages are frozen, though 13 of these have new uploads in unstable... We do want to finish 2 major transitions: python 2.4 -> 2.5 and perl 5.8 -> 5.10 before also freezing the non essential toolchain. The first one is reaching an end, though some build failures on arm and a flaky alpha buildd are not helpful in that regard. Note that during a freeze fixes for release critical bugs, release goal bugs, documentation issues as well as translation bugs should still be fine if they have a low impact. Please do send unblock requests for those to the Release Team. Considering all the above I do hope that maintainers start to realise that requesting freeze exceptions (exceptions to the above guidelines) should not be done lightly and start preparing for a release.

Any ALSA experts around that can help me with the following setup?I want to create a virtual device that does the following: - send the audio data to my regular onboard sound devices - when I plug in some USB audio device, send it there as well OR just thereThe difficult part is the plugging part. There is an example in the Wiki how to use two cards as one. This works, but only if the USB audio device was plugged in before starting the audio application and it is not unplugged either.Obviously, switching the configuration files on plug events is another possibility, but again this requires applications to be restarted. :-(What I want to achieve is simple: when I plug in the USB device, I want to switch my music playback there (since it will be connected to my stereo). System events, voice calls etc. however should remain on the system audio.If you have any solution, please send me an email at erich AT debian DOT org.(And yes, I know about PulseAudio, and I use it. But only on top of ALSA)

I'm just old enough to have only discovered the internet at about the time I graduated from high school, and have been using it for about 15 years. Every once in a while though, it comes back and hits me just how cool the whole thing is. Not "yeah, neat", but a serious wow at just how amazing it is to be able to communicate with people the world over. I think the first time that happened was when I had been exploring some of the early nineties internet - gopher and the web with lynx. Which was neat, but not in the "wow" sense. Then I stumbled on to IRC somehow, and since at the time I'd already started taking Italian courses, I thought I'd see if there was an Italian channel. There was, and I think the conversation went something like this:

me: so, where are you guys? someone: Italy, and you? me: Oregon, but, no, seriously, where are you? someone: Italy! me: Seriously?!

It was a very concrete demonstration of the fact, that, thanks to this new thing, I could talk to people all over the world, for free! Of course I've grown used to this, and take for granted that I can call my parents in Oregon via Skype for free, and a lot of other cool things, but once in a while something makes me take a step back and say "cool!". Most recently, a web site I follow that I follow has had an interesting back and forth between Paul Graham and David Heinemeier Hansson, with additional comments by the likes of Paul Buchheit, which, agree or disagree with their modus operandi, is an impressive cast of characters to be able to interact with, and learn from, without moving from my perch up here in the middle of the Tyrolean Alps.

Meike wonders about Open Source Census and their 45 MB tarball (and several other strange things). The good news is: There is a 270KB ruby thingy which seems to do the same, and even while marked as Expert User Only it seems to run just fine... I think; I lost patience after it scanned my /home for 6 minutes, and I didn't found a possibility to tell it not to scan my /home (which I don't wont him to scan) or /srv (which just contains a lot of files where it won't find anything usefull). BTW: While we are at complaining at them: Please make the system so, that I don't need to register to send you my data. Thanks.

There has been ongoing debate in the Debian community for a number of years about what standards of behavior should be expected. Matthew Garrett sets a new low by making a joke about Jesus being molested as a child [1]. While I believe that debate and discussion about religion is a good thing, such comments about someone who is widely regarded as a God (part of the Holy Trinity) seems to provide no value and just needlessly offends people. I used to be a Christian, and while I have great disagreements with most Christians about issues of religion I still believe that Jesus (as described in the bible) was a good person and deserves some respect. I don’t believe that blasphemy should be illegal, but some minimum standards should be observed when discussing religion. Next there is the issue of child molesting, most people agree that there’s nothing amusing in that - so I hope that nothing more needs to be said about violating babies. Finally there is the issue of rape in general often being treated as a joke in the computer industry (I am not sure how prevalent this is in the wider community). One example that is from a Wired article: “We were raped by Microsoft. Bill Gates did it personally. Introducing Gates to the president of a small company is like introducing Mike Tyson to a virgin” [2]. I admit that finding examples of this on the web is not easy, part of it is due to such slang use being more common in spoken communication than in written communication, another is the vast number of slang terms that are used. A Google search for “male rape” [3] turns up some informative articles. One FAQ suggests that 3% of men will be raped as an adult [4] - I expect that some guys will decide that it’s not so funny when they realise that it could happen to them. For people who’s knowledge of the English language is not as good as that of Matthew and I, here is the dictionary definition of the word “violated” [5].

• [1] http://www.advogato.org/person/mjg59/diary/114.html


• [2] http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.04/gates_pr.html


• [3] http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&c2coff=1&safe=off&q=male+rape&btnG=Search


• [4] http://www.aest.org.uk/survivors/male/myths_about_male_rape.htm


• [5] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/violated

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anjuta is my favourite IDE for C work - the configurable symbol browser/highlighter, the ability to right click on a function name or typedef and go straight to that part of the relevant source file somewhere else in the project (or outside), the debug support, mostly sane syntax highlighting (i.e. when it works it is perfect, when it doesn't work it doesn't try and make things worse). geany is very competent too, although possibly better suited to small tasks. (The compile and build menu options in geany don't always use the existing Makefile.)

Recently anjuta has developed an annoying habit of complaining about filetypes it claims not to understand (e.g. configure.in ac, Makefile.am - quite important files in the general C workload), geany (my favourite text editor, especially for perl) does those well but doesn't seem to support highlighting ChangeLog or debian/changelog - a task left to gedit but I can't use gedit for source code because the highlighting and general support of normal source code is truly awful, especially for perl.

(I got comments last time I rated geany higher than gedit - it's a question of focus. gedit cannot do everything - at least not well - but it tries anyway and therefore fails badly. Geany has far, far superior source code highlighting and an incredibly useful symbol browser because it has a more "source code" focus. I'm not going to go scrabbling around in gedit to create a customised highlighting scheme and only have two or three colours for perl is completely unacceptable in gedit (and changing colour scheme as no effect), as is the lack of a symbol browser.) Besides, geany loads and runs much faster than gedit.

Compare for yourself: Geany:
geany.png>

or gedit:
gedit.png

(inlined images removed - originals behind the links are quite large)

I mean, WTF? No separate colour to distinguish interpreter keywords or function names from plain text strings in gedit?? Duh? Badly broken regexp highlighting that highlights only the $ at the end? The entire file is like that - there are three colours in all. 99.9% is puce, variable names are olive and characters like line endings or tab markers are blue. Yes, I can change those colours but what's the point of changing everything that is now in puce into blue when what I need is some parts to be blue, some parts to be light blue, some parts to be red and some parts to be yellow. The gedit perl highlighting has to be the worst I've seen in any editor. It's almost easier in monochrome. Perl is by far the worst but gedit C highlighting isn't much better.

Compare with geany where keywords are always identifiable, regexps are marked up clearly, no silly marking of line ending characters inside a string, sane marking up of pod content and HERE documents and variable highlighting - and it never gets confused.

Needless to say, vi (or more precisely vim) does all the highlighting with aplomb, even though asking for a symbol browser in vim is a bit excessive, even for me.

vi.png

Why can't I have a single GUI that does highlighting as well as vim ? Geany is the closest of the three - lacking only ChangeLog and debian/changelog (and debian/control) highlighting, anjuta is almost there (once that annoying bug is fixed - already filed by someone else) but gedit? What? Has groundhog day been changed to 1st April somewhere? They're having a laugh, must be.

Test successful: the new (and very nice) Apple keyboard (the wired one, if only because I need the numeric keypad regularly) is coffee-safe. Incidentally: Anyobdy has instructions for mapping the “fn” key to function as an insert key? On the console, it produces 00 83 d0, but in X it doesn't send anything (according to xev). Comments welcome. (Martijn proposes to use F13 instead, which I guess I'll do meanwhile.) Update: Hmm. Seems I lost the s key. q, a and y also stopped working for a time but are back again. I hope s will dry out soon, I need it. (and y is again not working. Drat.

[Warning, long post ahead. If you aren’t interested in Debian or it’s internals or my work - skip it. :) ] So as you might have read here, I got the delegation of the debadmin AKA FTPMaster group lately. I’ve got some pressure to not accept this delegation, but the response to my blog post about it had been extremely positive, everyone said I should not deny it. Knowing to have such a support within Debian is something I really appreciate, making it worth to spent time on my various jobs. Now, lets take this and write a little about what happened since I gained that extra group:

• Aj resigned from anything that requires additional group privileges. (As a DD run id ajt on a debian.org machine if you want to verify this).

Work I did since then:

• One of my first action was to finally finish the release transitions support, something which was waiting for it’s final merge for a long time. The release team was waiting for this and did ping us (ftpteam) multiple times, but now it is there. You can read more about this feature in my list mail and my initial blog post. (Oh, and something I have missed about everywhere I wrote about this: This whole transitions thing is based on an idea from Marga!)
• Added a mapping in dak, requested by Luk
• Merged a patch from another ftpteam member, Thomas Viehmann, which fixes daks handling of Format 3.0 (something) uploads. Currently it rejects them, without the merged patch it just crashed.
• Changed our daily cronscript to no longer VACUUM/VACUUM analyze projectb in every run. Postgres >= 8.1 has autovacuum, and its turned on, so we should be fine without extra runs of it. (And while i write daily cronscript or cron.daily - I mean dinstall, right now run twice a day).
• Fixed a breakage in code introduced by Debian maintainers which led to process-accepted (one main part of the daily cronscript) breaking. It was triggered by some octave-$FOO package upload, where the ###censored### did add someone twice into the Uploaders: field. Not helpful, but now we ignore this case and just warn us.
• Added a script to expire old database dumps. We do dump our projectb (the main archive database) twice in every run (beginning/end), which made 4 dumps a day. While old dumps seemed to have been removed on an irregular schedule - the dumps took about 71Gb in total. Which pretty much filled up merkels /org, as they get synced there. Now, my script (reworked version of a script from Florian Reitmeir) works with an “incremental deletion” scheme:

  RULES = [ ‘days’:14, ‘interval’:0 , ‘days’:31, ‘interval’:1 , ‘days’:365, ‘interval’:31 , ‘days’:3650, ‘interval’:365 , ]

  That means we now keep all files from the last 14 days. Then keep one per week. Then one per month and finally one per year for up to ten years. All the rest gets deleted. Space usage of our dumps now: 4.8Gb. Thats 66Gb gained. Source is in dak bzr if you want it, MIT licensed. If you improvie it further I love to see patches.
• Changed the way the projectb copy on merkel gets synced. Up to now it was run from a cronjob which syncs a number of files people want to see on merkel, including the database dumps, then reloads the database using the latest dump. This was run at a “random” time, scheduled to be shortly after dinstall. Problem with such a setup is that it will miss extra dinstall runs and also might import old data, as the timing of the cronjob meant it runs while dinstall on ftp-master is still doing its work. So bad bad. It is now done using the ssh trigger feature I described a while ago. So our daily cronscript now tells merkel when it should sync its database again.
• Coordinated with the qa group we now also push them, when the sync on merkel is done, so they can kick their cronjobs to reread projectb and just run whenever they get told that something changed. Yet another bad timing eliminated. (Well, will be done today). Oh, if you have something that depends on information from projectb / ftp-master and try to schedule it to run after dinstall - talk to me, we might just push you too.
• Started talking with the release team how britney, the script which manages our testing distribution, should be handled in the future. It currently is run fully under control of us ftpmasters (and reading hint files from the release team). Ideally this gets changed so that the release team has the control of the code and whatever gets run with it and then, in some way, maybe using ssh triggers, tells us to import a new dataset for testing. That needs some thinking, as obviously it should be limited to testing and we should make sure it doesn’t break the archive, but I think that is doable.
• Prepared a patch that sanity checks the Provides: field, something we currently don’t do. Mailed our internal team address about 3 days ago, to let others look at it, no response yet.

The above should nicely sum up my work in the past few days. Most of it pretty trivial, but still things that have to be done. I plan to keep doing things, slowly going from the trivial stuff to more complicated ones, but there is lots of stuff ahead. Some ideas, and this is a very incomplete list just from my head, there are tons of things that one could do, include

• Finally allowing dpkg-sig support in .deb files. I once, years ago, made a patch for it, which never got applied. (Mostly my fault here). Need to rewrite that to fit the actual code.
• Add a few more sections to our archive. There are multiple bugs asking for them, and some others also come to mind. Like java, ruby, octave, haskell, debug to name a few, but there might be more needed. (Yes, longterm all sections should die and be replaced with debtags. I just don’t think debtags is there yet?!)
• Maybe finally drop m68k and add other architectures to the archive, like some $foo*bsd one. (Thats for after lenny of course, at the time arm also gets dropped).
• Merge a patch I got from Myon which will keep uploaders in projectb.
• Enable bzip2 support for sources, not only for the binary packages. I have a patch ready, it’s not yet merged. Needs to test if anything breaks in stable if we apply it, before we can think about it. Worst case it has to wait until we are running lenny. (The archive runs on a machine with stable, so allowed features always have to be supported in stable).
• Process the currently waiting requests for pseudo-packages and either reject or approve them. After thats done - talk to the BTS maintainers to hand the management of pseudo-packages over to them, as 99% of the usage of those is in the BTS.
• Get dak to optionally mail the sponsor of a package too, if not already in the list of those getting a dak mail. Which isn’t easy. One proposal is to just look at the gpg keyid and get the Debian uid from it, send mail there. I don’t want this, as people are, unfortunately, able to disable mail receiving for their @debian.org address. Which would give us lots of bounces. No way we like that. Similar problems with “Just take one userid that looks like a mail address from their key”.
• Improve various parts run by our daily cronjob, as that one takes ages (about an hour today). Speed improvements are always nice there.
• Think about having more dinstall runs a day. Like - every 2 or 4 or 6 hours could be nice. But that needs discussion within the ftpteam and also with the mirror people before it can be done. But 6 hours seems to be something nice to have, more might be also ok.
• Coordinate with DSA to enable the continous AKA WAL archiving for our database.
• Make merkels sync be more instant, ie. no longer rely on a push of a database dump whenever dinstall run, but something thats near realtime. Having changes done on ries immediately synced to merkel.
• More (active) ftp-team member, maybe?!

Now, do you have any time to kill? Do you want to help? Some things you could do:

• Go look at our bug page and start there. Someone, I think Don, already started using user categories. It would be nice if someone is willing to keep up with the bugs and put them in categories. And continue to do that in the future.
• Generally help with our bug page. One nice task some people do, and possibly more could also do, is retitling bugs. Especially removal bugs tend to have a wrong title. The format is pretty specific…
• Feel free to submit patches to me. I promise to look at them without too much delay and at least give you a hint what might be wrong or could be done better. And if it makes sense, doesn’t break the archive, works, and is something dak should have - I will also merge it. Of course trivial patches are way easier in that regard, non-trivial ones should go via our ftpmaster address first, to leave others a chance to comment on. Bonus points if you provide bzr trees one can merge from, and the bzr tree you should work with is http://ftp-master.debian.org/bzr/ftpmaster-dak/ - patches/bzr trees against outdated versions won’t have much luck to get looked at. :)
• Keep me happy. However you do it, just don’t hug me. :)

My previous post has led to a new name and a lot of improvements in the codebase. estron is the new name for DWI. With help from ikiwiki and Alioth, estron has a new home, a new wiki and a fresh start. I've implemented -Werror fixes across the codebase (with the sole exception of some old Gtk2 code that is now deprecated).

As is my regular practice, make distcheck is now working (although some actual tests need to be added) and I've added versioned symbol support. estron can work with libqof1 but it will be better served with libqof2 and that's probably for the best as that means I have time to finish estron to coincide with the libqof2 transition after Lenny. As mentioned in the ITP, if anyone wants to play with the code before then, I'll make an upload to experimental if you just ask (or you can just build estron from Debian SVN).

It seems everybody is ranting in Planet Debian about what our planet should be about, what content should be acceptable, whether technical-only, Debian-only, everything-goes... Even archiving the posts via a mailing-list interface has been mentioned. Besides, following the planet seems to have become mandatory to people linked to Debian, almost as mandatory as following debian-devel-announce.
I won't bother linking to other posts in this topic, as they are far too many. The whole discussion seems childlike and sterile to me. For different people, Debian means different things - This topic has come up in the planet a couple of times in the past (funny, hah, using posts in mutually-unlinked personal blogs as a way to follow a discussion). And a planet should IMHO cover a specific use case: Providing a place for those of us who think of Debian as a social frame, and value knowing -exactly- the type of information each of us publishes in his/her blog: What's up with Debian-related people's lifes.
Of course, a large fraction of this information should be somehow technical or Debian-related. But I do value having a place to learn about my peers' life accomplishments. To know if they are going through a hard time. To understand the personal interests of them. Maybe to learn I'm not the only DD who enjoys running (although I'm far under Dirk's or Christian's league) or cycling in a big city (although I lack MJ's political involvement and dedication). I actually like trying to find some logic in senseless Steve-like messages, there are some funny bits in his stuff. I like knowing I can share what I feel important about my life in a simple way with my peers, without having them drop over to my site. And yes, of course I do enjoy learning about the ongoing technical work of the bunch, even if it is often in fields I would not wander into at all (i.e. Simon's frustration with writing device drivers for Windows, Michal's advances on Gammu).
So... Please stop over-regulation. Leave the planet as it is. If you don't like it, come up with a way to filter and maybe adjust its content based on user profiles. But don't try to censor it.

There is some discussion again about what should be on topic for Planet Debian, whether it should be used for Debian-related announcements and what the archival policy should be. I believe that this discussion is rooted in two circulating views of what Planet Debian should be:

1. A forum for DD's to post Debian-related thoughts and ideas, to be used for those cases where they think a mailing list post may be less appropriate;
2. A way to collect stories about what DD's do and think in any context, the human interest angle: get to know your Debian peers more than just in technical matters.

Although I always regarded Planet Debian to be the latter and I appreciate reading posts telling me about someone's job or other interests, either one isn't an invalid approach per se. They do however prompt different choices about listing policy (Debian-only feeds vs. everything goes), how much effort it is to keep up with them and perhaps archival. The best way to match the expectations of those two groups would be to create two "planets", one for each group. Create an aggregator where any DD can add any of their feeds, and another one with a strict listing policy: only feeds that carry posts actually related to Debian development matters (probably a subset of the first). Then only the question remains which one will get to carry the Planet Debian name...

Recently a Debian Developer resigned from a position of responsibility in the project by writing a blog post. I won’t name the DD or the position he resigned as I think that there are general issues which need discussion and specific examples will get in the way (everyone who is seriously involved will know who it is anyway - for those who don’t know, it’s not really exciting). Also I think that the issue of the scope of a Planet installation is of wider importance than the Debian project, so it would be of benefit for outsiders who stumble upon this to see a discussion of general issues rather than some disagreements within the Debian project. There has been some mild criticism of the DD in question for announcing his resignation via a blog post. I don’t think that this is appropriate. In the absence of evidence to the contrary I’ll assume that the DD in question announced his resignation to the relevant people (probably the team he worked with and the Debian Project Leader) via private email which was GPG signed (if he indeed intended to formally resign). The resignation of one DD from one of the many positions of authority and responsibility in the project is not going to have a great affect on the work of most DDs. Therefore I don’t think that it was necessarily a requirement to post to the debian-private mailing list (the main list for communication between all developers regarding issues within the project) about this. It was however an issue that was bound to get discussed on debian-private (given that the circumstances of the resignation might be considered to be controversial) so it seems to me that sending an email of the form “here is a blog post I’ve written about my resignation” would have saved some pointless discussion (allowing us to skip the “why didn’t you send email” and get right on to the main discussion). A resignation letter from a public position of responsibility is a significant document. Having such documents stored on publicly accessible places is good for the community. Having a record of all such documents that you have written stored on your own server for reference (by yourself and by other people you work with) is a good thing. Therefore it seems to me that a blog is an ideal place for a resignation letter. It used to be regarded that there was a certain formality in such things, and that a letter of resignation was required to be delivered in the most direct way possible (by hand if convenient) to the person who receives it. If such conventions were followed then a blog post would occur after the receipt of the letter of resignation had been confirmed (possibly in this case a confirmation email from the DPL). But in recent times things have become less formal and the free software community is particularly informal. So it seems quite appropriate to me to have the blog post come first and the email notification merely contain the URL. Now a letter of resignation is expected to contain certain specific details. It should say specifically what duties are being resigned (particularly important when a person performs many tasks), it should have a date from which it will take effect, and it might be appropriate to mention issues related to the hand-over of tasks (whether the person resigning is willing to work with their replacements). The “resignation” (if we should call it that) in question did not contain any of the specific details that I would expect to see in a formal resignation. This indicates to me that it could be interpreted as not being a formal and official resignation, but instead being a post (possibly written in haste while angry) about a situation which may not end up being an official resignation. Until we get some more information we won’t know for sure either way. This demonstrates one problem with blogs, people usually have a mixture of serious documents and trivial things on the one blog. It can be difficult to determine how seriously to take blog posts. I’m not sure that there can be a good solution to this. At the moment some people are suggesting that every DD should read Planet Debian [1]. I disagree with that. If there is an issue which is significant and affects the entire project then it should be announced on one of the mailing lists such as debian-private, debian-announce, or debian-devel-announce (and will be announced on one of them eventually even if not by the person closest to the events). Forcing every DD to read a lot of blog posts is not in the best interests of the project. Now we could create a separate Planet installation for such things, there is already Debian Times [2] and Debian Administration [3] which serve as a proof of concept. If there was a Planet installation for important stuff related to Debian which had it’s content syndicated in various ways (including an email gateway - Feedburner.com provides a quite useful one) then requesting that everyone read it’s content in some way (either by web browsing, an RSS feed reader, syndication in another Planet, email, or something else) would not be unreasonable. The volume of posts on such a Planet would be quite small (similar to the current announcement mailing lists) so if received by email it wouldn’t fill anyone’s mailbox and if people visited the web site they would only need to do so every second month if that suited them. The issue of what types of posts are suitable for Planet Debian is probably going to get raised again soon as a result of this.

• [1] http://planet.debian.org/


• [2] http://times.debian.net/


• [3] http://www.debian-administration.org/

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I started physiotherapy this past week. The first clinic I went to on Wednesday (Mountain View Physical Therapy) turned into an interesting disaster. When we walked into the place, the first impressions were that it was noisy and dirty. There was someone sitting upright in the waiting area asleep. The place is one big room, with the massage tables in the middle of the room and exercise equipment all around the outside. None of the staff looked really happy to be there. I met my therapist who, it turns out, is the director of the clinic. She was truly excellent - good enough that I would've overlooked everything else, except for the fact that she doesn't have 3 days a week free to see me. More weeks, I would've been lucky to get her more than once per week.

So for Friday, we found a different clinic. Orthosport. It was such a difference from the previous place, there's no good comparison. The receptionist was friendly, the therapist very professional, and the place really tidy. Even the assistants were very friendly and checked in on a regular basis.

But in between those two days, I got sick again. I had some sort of stomach flu or drug reaction the previous week, and it seemed to be coming back. After two days of throwing up, I made an appointment with the after-hours clinic today to get more anti-nausea drugs. They've also taken some more blood and want to do some tests next week to make sure that everything's still doing okay.

Another bit of love and affection goes to my new bank, RBC Centura. Not only have they done lovely things for bill payments, and sending money for free between my Canadian and American accounts, they also have a "Bank by Mail" program, where I can just stick cheques in an envelope that's already postage paid, and they deposit them for me. No need to find a machine of the right persuasion to do deposits. We still have a couple tasks to do before we can close out the HSBC account, but we're almost there.

Leif is pushing out new teeth. He'll be up to 9 when he's done.