This wasn't very widely announced but last week featured a partial sun eclipse over central, south and east Asia. The eclipse was really partial but happening at sunrise in some countries, it gave some opportunities to shoot very nice pictures such as these ones:

• Goa silhouettes
• Turan sunsire

The new moon, combined with a Venus conjonction, also offered this nice view from Lisbon which is one the nicest cities in Europe, IMHO. Good opportunity for those of you who didn't alreay know about the Astronomy Picture of the Day to learn about it, add Jamie Zawinski's RSS feed (http://www.jwz.org/cheesegrater/RSS/apod.rss) to your feed reader and just enjoy one nice picture daily.

The dumb samba package maintainers (hint, hint: "dpkg -s") had yesterday the crazy idea to add one debconf template to the package. Given the more and more concetrated schedule for the release now that D-I is nearly out, the challenge was interesting for translators and translation teams. We have to get as many updates as possible out of the 42 languages the templates are translated into. 24 hours later, we already have 26 of them which is something I wouldn't have even expected (when Steve Langasek asked me for an advice, I predicted something like 10-15 updates in one day, to the best). Should I say "wow"?

Welcome to this 8th issue of the DeFuBu contest, the almost monthly championship of the funniest bug reported to the Debian BTS. The challengers

• Pierre Tramo with #409352 (mplayer_1.0~rc1-12.diff.gz is CHAOTIC)
• Christian Perrier with #230485 (apache2/ssl-cert's debconf abuse makes baby jesus cry)
• Jeroen van Wolffelaar with #409637 (tasksel: [INTL:eo] kelkaj korektoj pri la esperanta traduko.)
• Steve Langasek with #410605 (dpkg: bzip2 code in compression.c incorrectly uses zlib define (Z_ERRNO))
• Josh Triplett with #412460 (magicor-data: Penguins don't have teeth) and #398276 (xdm: don't bundle turning on sit0 irradiating me all day)
• Mike Hommey with #413660 (RFP: mozilla-firefox -- Mozilla's firefox package is required in non-free) and #413714 (iceweasel: overflow:hidden ugly chopping characters in half)

How the vote has been done Four Debian related people voted, Raphael Hertzog, Jeroen van Wolffelaar, Ana Guerrero and Margarita Manterola. Full ranking Bugs

• #409637 (tasksel: [INTL:eo] kelkaj korektoj pri la esperanta traduko.) (34 points)
• #412460 (magicor-data: Penguins don't have teeth) (29 points)
• #230485 (apache2/ssl-cert's debconf abuse makes baby jesus cry) (26 points)
• #398276 (xdm: don't bundle turning on sit0 irradiating me all day) (23 points)
• #410605 (dpkg: bzip2 code in compression.c incorrectly uses zlib define (Z_ERRNO)) (16 points)
• #409352 (mplayer_1.0~rc1-12.diff.gz is CHAOTIC) (15 points)
• #413660 (RFP: mozilla-firefox -- Mozilla's firefox package is required in non-free) (14 points)
• #413714 (iceweasel: overflow:hidden ugly chopping characters in half) (3 points)

Challengers

• Josh Triplett with (52 points with 2 bugs)
• Jeroen van Wolffelaar (34 points with 1 bug)
• Christian Perrier (26 points with 1 bug)
• Mike Hommey with (17 points with 2 bugs)
• Steve Langasek (16 points with 1 bug)
• Pierre Tramo (15 points with 1 bug)

The winners

• Bug: #409637 (tasksel: [INTL:eo] kelkaj korektoj pri la esperanta traduko.)
• Challenger: Josh Triplett
• Bug reporter: Serge Leblanc
• Voter: Raphael Hertzog with unordered tierc : #412460, #409637 and #230485

Notes To participate, simply drop me an email with a bug number or a request to vote, or anything that may help. About DeFuBu

107 packages get out of NEW today. I wonder how many of these will have introduced debconf templates that we will have to review, then translate..:-)

On Wednesday March 7th, I announced the end of the "blitz" l10n NMU campaign. This campaign started on January 21st after a first campaign during Autumn 2006. The main point was dealing with all pending l10n issues reported against packages, with etch as the main target and French reaching 100% as the secondary target..:-) This has been a great success, thanks to the collaboration of maintainers, translators and release managers. I have no statistics on the number of closed bugs and uploaded packages (shame on me), but at some moments I did up to 8 uploads in the same day. The pending l10n bugs page clearly shows that, except for a few packages for which maintainers have various, good and bad reasons to refuse a NMU and a maintainer upload, the situation is now quite clean. Release constraints now enforce more and more care with uploads, so it's time to suspend the action and move to another jihad (not officially announced yet, I'm preparing the material and announcement).

No, not talking about Julien Blache, the wonderful president of Debian France here..:-) My JB, namely Jean-Baptiste, my 19 year old son, is planning to attend a one year Bachelor of engineering term next year, in United Kingdom. From what he told us, he's seriously considering to attend it at the University of South Wales, in Glamorgan. This is great news for me as I think this abroad experience will be a great bonus for him, later, in his professionnal career. You know how parents are, right? I already enjoy in advance stories about life in Wales, the funky accent people have over there and, definitely, how great is that part of the country (I'm a rugby and beer fan, so Wales can only be great). Even funnier, JB will also attend a 2.5 months term between April and July in....Edinburgh, Scotland. So, apparently, I'll be able to see my son during Debconf and probably he'll be able to meet some of you, ladies and gentlemen (if he's not too shy). Even if he's not in computer science studies, that would be good for him to know more about these strange freaks his dad is hanging around yearly. Definitely, I will need to hook up with debian-UK people at some moment, to get hints about all this. Again, we all know how parents are, right? :-)

Note to self: when running "aptitude upgrade" in a window, avoid entering suspend-to-disk without checking what dpkg is doing at the moment the system enters suspend. Today, I had indeed the very bad luck of my system entering suspend to disk exactly when the postinst of initramfs-tools was updating the initrd for the kernel I'm using. It did shutdown exactly at the moment where the initramfs image was backed up but the new one was not in place yet. Guess what happens when booting up again? :-) Of course, this also happens the very same day I just cleaned up old kernel versions because I'm happy with the current kernel I'm using. To complete the nightmare, no CD drive handy while I was in the train, so no possible immediate rescue and one ends up with a bubulle looking through the window in the train instead of doing his Debian duties. Back at work, the magic rescue mode of D-I of course saved my life, as usual. PS: I wonder whether this race condition could be considered a bug in initramfs-tools.

Joss, you made my day.

There are days like this where you get inspiration. Since about January (strange that one cannot never remember the beginning of such annoyances), neither suspend-to-ram nor suspend-to-disk were working anymore on my Dell latitude X1. Suspend to RAM indeed stopped working back in August 2006 for an unknown reason. The laptop indeed goes into sleep mode but, when waking up, the video card is not restored properly. A quite common problem, unfortunately. Why it suddenly stopped working is hard to explainn but as my laptop runs unstable and, usually, the latest Debian kernel, there may be an explanation somewhere betwwen kernel stuff and Xorg stuff. Since then, I had suspend to disk working pretty well until it suddenly stopped working back in January. The system was printing "Snapshotting system" on the screen and that's all. So, since then, I keep my laptop ON all the time, which is pretty bad when travelling (and I travel a lot all day long as I use public transportation with 3 connections morning and evening). Moreover, I cannot even completely close it because some moron at Dell has decided to hardcode in the BIOS that the laptop should enter suspend to RAM when the LID is closed. So, closing the laptop means....no more screen when opening it up. As a consequence, during last weeks, I had my laptop hald-closed in my bag with some random device inserted between the screen and the keyboard to prevent it to be entirely closed. Absolutely stupid. However, this morning, the Holy Grace touched me. I finally remembered that, for last New Year's Eve week-end, I did setup the Conexant HSF modem drivers on the laptop because I was staying at my mom's place with nothing but a phone line to get my mail. And, definitely, this was the explanation. As soon as I unload the Conexant driver before going to suspend to disk mode, the suspend to disk magically works again. Dammit. Once again a proof that Thou Shalt Never Use Non-Free Drivers. I'm now again a happy suspend to disk user. If someone, some day, can bring me back a working suspend to RAM, I'll hug kiss her him to death.

This is the sound of Galician po-debconf translations being given a big push with the last upload of dbconfig-common and its 101 strings for po-debconf. I'm amazed by the current effort of Magic Jacobo who is doing alone all this effort. Simultaneously, the Portuguese team has definitely beaten up the Brazilian team and the Catalan team is still running after world domination. Czech and German are progressing rapidly and all this should be soon available as nice graphs thanks to the work of Nicolas Fran ois.

The l10n NMU blitz campaign continues to give results and not only for French. I'm now reaching quite recent bug reports (about 30-40 days ago)....which were sent by some teams when I started this campaign, back in January. So the stats for these teams will improve strongly, namely the Czech team stats and a few others (Galician, Portuguese, Catalan...). On the ranking contest, Spanish is coming closer to Dutch for the 7th rank, mostly because many Spanish translations were pending in the BTS while much less Dutch ones were. Both these teams have strong QA processes so that slows them down when compared to 1-person "teams". Of course, the result is certainly definitely better. For the 9th rank, Portuguese should come before Brazilian as of today. Ditto for Galician/Catalan for the 14th rank. Another activity began yesterday: try to complete a few packages in testing. These packages have a complete translation for several languages in unstable but they don't qualify to enter testing. So, I will offer to upload l10n fixes through testing-proposed-updates as the release team seems to be OK with that. There's a chance that my own language reaches 100% for testing also, then. And, finally, I'm polishing a new project: proofreading ALL debconf templates, and bring more wording consistency, with the help of debian-l10n-english members. That will of course be a lenny project.

For those who care, tonight:

Penumbral Eclipse Begins:       20:18:11 UT 
Partial Eclipse Begins:       21:30:22 UT 
Total Eclipse Begins:       22:44:13 UT 
Greatest Eclipse:       23:20:56 UT 
Total Eclipse Ends:       23:57:37 UT 
Partial Eclipse Ends:       01:11:28 UT 
Penumbral Eclipse Ends:       02:23:44 UT

We just did it.

Some may have noticed that I have silenced myself up a little. Actually, this is mostly because the various percentages are progressing slower and slower now. While hunting ignored l10n bugs, I'm now reaching bugs around #403000 which means most of these bugs have been reported since the whole system was frozen. I still NMU a lot of packages (about 2-4 a day) and trigger more and more maintainer uploads (because, now, maintainers of packages I'm reaching are really active maintainers). The 100% heaven is still very close, but shhhhh.

No percentages today..:-) Only statistics, ahem. I noticed today, that the ranking page just shows that Japanese took the 6th rank to Dutch. The Portuguese team is also hunting down the Brazilian l10n team and is now only missing 72 strings to take the 9th rank. Another interesting "fight" happens between Galician translators (indeed Jacobo alone) and the Catalan team for the 14th rank. And, believe me, for them, this is a real contest, just read #debian-i18n...:-) Finally, I'll mention Turkish, Norwegian Bokm l, Basque, Polish and Romanian who are all very close together. Come one and fights, people...this is Good for Debian localisation.

Aur lien, I definitely can do better. All my recent blog entries (except one or two political ones) are focused on this activity, which lasts for 1.5 month now. As usual, when I began it, I ommitted to record the status of l10n to just have a proof that it gave great results, so you will just have to believe me. It is giving great results..:-) Making a lot of noise is sometimes a good way to make one's point. That is specifically my goal here. I think that at least one goal is achieved: I now expect many package maintainers to think twice before changing the debconf templates in their packages and, more generally, any internationalised material. Not that I don't want them to be fixed (indeed, that will be my next jihad: take packages one by one, ranked by popcon score, proofread the English templates, change them if needed and accompany maintainers in the interaction with translators), but I want them to be fixed cleanly.

One step beyond. This is the madness that happens when uncoordinated uploads are done. This time, this has been an old dbmail upload that was rotting in NEW for two months and had been resurrected from there. So, my target is moving again, the very exact day where I intended to announce that French has reached 100%. We're now again in a call for translations for this package, just the same day I had gotten rid with debsecan, the former target mover. Today's uploads: tvtime, amavisd-new, openslp, smsclient (by its maintainer), gpsd, fdutils, apmd.

Today, I was about to announce French reaching 100%. The announcement was written and ready to be sent as of today when the status page would have been generated. But, of course, as of every week-end, this is the moment that yet another maintainer choose to break his debconf templates. That sucks. A lot.

Nearly no change today. Le Grand Soir est pour demain (fingers crossed) Today's uploads: mserv, shaper, tftp-hpa. Some work on geneweb as the 5.0 release will happen soon (too late for etch). I'm also doing some work on i18n.debian.net, re-writing some scripts I stupidely lost on the server....

Big bump for stats of german debconf translations This is somewhat expected: most of the NMUs I'm doing today include german translations. It seems that the german l10n team had a great activity between October 2006 and January 2007, which is the period of time I'm fixing remaining bugs for right now. Today's uploads: localization-config, xmcd (switch to po-debconf and a lot of translations). And I finally couldn't resist and I posted a call for new translations for my geneweb pet package. 23 translations and already one more came (Tamil). On The Road to 100%, we're now missing Florian Weimer's debsecan.