Executive summary To avoid confusion with the proprietary versions of GForge (known as GForge Advanced Server, GForge Express Edition and GForge Community Edition), the free/libre/opensource codebase will from now on be separately maintained under the name FusionForge by the main developers of the free GForge 4.x codebase. Since this is mostly a renaming, the migration path for existing users will be smooth. Longer version, with details After the initial forking from the Sourceforge codebase, the development of GForge has long been hosted, and many enhancements directly developed, by the GForge Group (GForge, LLC), with regular contributions from outsiders. The results of these evolutions were public and free, subject to the GNU GPL. In parallel, the GForge Group wrote a proprietary re-implementation of GForge, which it sold under the name "GForge Advanced Server", or "GForge AS" for short. This re-implementation added some features for "the enterprise", but was not contributed wholesale to the GForge codebase under a free license. Although some of the features were contributed to the public, the GForge Group concentrated its efforts on its (proprietary software) business model, with more versions appearing, such as "GForge Express Edition" and more recently "GForge Community Edition". As a result, it became increasingly harder for the public to know which version was which without doing extensive research (indeed, some users mistakenly installed one version instead of the other). A consequence was that the free software codebase suffered from a loss in visibility, which lowered its momentum to the point that there haven't been any moderately important releases since the (currently stable) 4.5.x series was announced in late 2005. So, in order to clarify things, avoid further confusion, and regain some of the lost momentum, it was decided by a group of leading contributors that the free software version of the GForge codebase would from now on be developed under the FusionForge name, and its development would be hosted on FusionForge.org. So is this a fork? Well, we don't know yet. It could arguably be called one, since we're taking the code and running away with it under a new name. However, we believe it's not a fork unless both roads continue their own way (more of a oddly-shaped bend). What happens to the GForge codebase developed by the GForge Group at gforge.org remains to be seen, although for the sake of our users we will backport security fixes to the gforge.org Subversion repository (at least for the 4.5.x series and the unreleased 4.6 and 4.7 pre-series) for some time. The bulk of the development will move on to FusionForge and the repositories at FusionForge.org, though, and users are encouraged to migrate at their own pace. Since we're basically continuing the evolution rather than starting from scratch, the migration path should be rather smooth. So why the FusionForge name? Because there were actually lots of locally-patched versions of GForge (and Sourceforge), and we felt it was a waste of resources that should be fixed. It seems many people and organisations took these codebases at some point in time and evolved them for their own needs. Sadly, many of the changes were not contributed back or even published, so lots of efforts were duplicated. Fortunately, many of the people managing these locally-patched forges are now realising that "out-of-tree" patches and features require quite some manpower to maintain. Some formal inter-project discussion is already taking place, and we hope to achieve actual merging of most of the interesting features that have been developed here and there into a common base that can be reused locally with minimal changes. We'd like to "un-fork" as much as possible. We also expect that, by using standard components and tools, we'll facilitate the work of potential contributors, thereby reducing the risk of a new era of fragmentation. And who are we anyway? We're Christian Bayle, Roland Mas and Alain Peyrat, long-time contributors to GForge and responsible for over 95% of the commits over the past two years, as well as a few relative newcomers. Christian and Roland have been maintaining the Debian packaging since the "Debian-SF" era, and Alain has been focusing on code quality. The three of us have, for various reasons, a vested interest in maintaining a lively codebase in a healthy ecosystem. What are our plans? Our short-term goals, as currently planned, include:

• pushing a stable FusionForge release out of the door;
• cleaning up and auditing the database schema to ensure consistency and increased performance;
• merging in new plugins, in particular for new version control systems;
• continuing streamlining the installation process to make it more portable across distributions.

Longer term goals are less well defined, but we're thinking about the following:

• increasing code quality by the use of modern automated tools;
• encouraging a lively stream of external contributions, to reduce the gap between the official version and the locally-patched ones;
• defining an explicit governance model and release process for the FusionForge project;
• as a consequence, a more frequent and predictable release schedule;
• increasing data portability and interoperability with other forges, to reduce lock-in for users and projects.

Some of these items should be facilitated by our switch to a distributed version control system and a new coordinated workflow. Also, the Debian i18n team has been kind enough to offer to host our translation effort on their Pootle server, which means translators will have a much easier time doing their job. We hope to hear from users and contributors alike in the near future. For more information, we can be reached via our fusionforge-general mailing-list (see our lists), which is also suitable for general discussions. We can also be found on IRC (#fusionforge on the Freenode network).

Giving up on a position within a free software project when you know you re no longer managing to do an effective job is a wonderfully liberating experience. Now that I have started to talk with Miriam Ruiz about handing over the Debian Jr. project, I can stop worrying about the leadership task and just have fun with it. I can always count on Miriam for recommendations for games in Debian my kids may enjoy, as she has a passion for finding good games to package for Debian, and in particular, games for children. Over the past few weeks we ve had some fun with her picks. At the same time, I always have Debian Jr. in mind. How can we ensure kids can have the most fun with this? How do we equip their guides to help them? What we ve done with each new piece of software is to find a quiet time when one or more of the children can start playing with it on their own while we watch, offering such guidance as they need, but for the most part just letting them loose with it. Each wrinkle of the brow, each impetuous thump of the mouse, every illuminated grin and exclamation of delight is noted. We try to see what frustrates or pleases our kids and discuss it both with them and the Debian maintainers and upstream developers. This is an excercise we ve managed to pull off without being overly intrusive and the results have been well worth the effort. Using a few of Miriam s picks we tried this week, we were able to draw their play into the free software development process. Here s a brief summary of those sessions: Platinum Arts Sandbox puts into children s hands the ability to role play in a 3D world and edit that world using simplified controls. The expressions on the faces of our kids as they played were priceless: both the ups and the downs. I wanted to capture this on video and share it. After having established a rapport with upstream, we took a 20 minute clip of one of our play sessions and gave a copy to them to use to help further their work. Here is the edited result. They were very pleased to have that kind of feedback and found the video valuable for determining where the software still needed improvement and to notice which aspects particularly pleased the children. I happen to know that Hex-a-hop is one of Miriam s personal favourites. We have a household full of puzzle-lovers so this puzzle game was an instant hit. While on irc on #debian-jr with Miriam we relayed in real-time some of the reactions as they played this and a handful of her other picks. This gave her some confirmation of areas she knew needed work as well as inspiration for upcoming releases of these packages. During this play session, which also included StegaVorto, kartofel, Anagramarama, Funny Boat and Vodovod, my youngest girl, age 7, plunked down on the couch next to me as her 10-year-old sister played. Then she started to notice I was typing what people in the livingroom were saying and doing on irc. She took a mild affront to me copying her own words and actions, so I decided it would be better to let her participate so she would feel included. At this point, I started playing secretary for her, typing what she dictated to me while she read the responses from the display. Later, I just handed her the keyboard so she could type and read the responses on her own. She was still at it long past bedtime and it was with some reluctance that she finally gave up the keyboard. We all had a lot of fun and look forward to doing this again. We are particularly careful with privacy, taking care to share pictures, videos, and other personal details only so far as we believe it does not put our children at risk. Also, we need to ensure we observe in a way that is welcome and doesn t interfere with their enjoyment. But with a little bit of prudence and a practiced eye and ear for what increases or diminishes enjoyment of the software, we can involve our children directly in the free software development process. I commend to anyone who has the privilege to share free software with children to use this method to communicate with maintainers and developers, increasing your own enjoyment of the software in the process and that of children and their guides everywhere.

Going to a party where the host is an obstetrician makes for some interesting conversations.

I learned last night that the reason flour is all enriched in Canada is because the government required that folate be added to the flour. Apparently the reason we don't have more births with neural tube defects is because everyone eats Cheerios for breakfast, and the 40% of pregnancies that are unintended have a base of folic acid in their system already.

I know that the US has these types of things as well, but coming from a place where it seems like everyone loudly wants the government to get out of the way to a place where good government is something we explicitly value is one of the many reasons I'm happy to be home.

The funniest thing I've heard about The Economist is that it is full of neo-liberal absurdity and supported criminals like Reagan and Thatcher.

We're still managing to keep to the weekly release cycle and put substantial changes into each version. This makes me happy. I'm hoping that we'll be able to keep slowly working the bug count down. This release merges quite a bit of work done by Raphael Geissert, most notably the addition of pedantic tags. Lintian has quite a few open bugs for checks that are useful in only some contexts or that check coding style issues that not everyone agrees with or wants to be bothered with, and we've been holding off on implementing those since I'd like to encourage everyone to enable info-level tags and I didn't want to just put them all in there. Now we have a new level, --pedantic, which includes all the picky stuff and the stuff that may be completely wrong. It's up to each maintainer whether to use --pedantic at all. The tags won't be in the default lintian.debian.org view (right now, they're not there at all). If you do use --pedantic, please don't worry too much about making your package pedantic-clean unless the tags really seem like a good idea. Also, as noted in the man page, adding overrides for pedantic tags is probably not worth the effort. You should look over the report and apply human judgement. I expect this mode to be useful for sponsors, who want to be alerted to possible issues but can decide for themselves which ones to mention. This release will also add a new page on lintian.debian.org that shows tags sorted by severity and certainty. Not only will this be useful for people looking for problems in the archive, it will also help the Lintian maintainers with updating severities and certainties. (For example, looking at the test page, I think a lot of the important tags should probably be serious instead.) I'm currently doing a full archive run from scratch with the new version to make sure that I plugged the memory leak problems that Lintian had before and to finish fixing #507849. Once that run finishes, I'll send a "bits from the Lintian maintainers" post to debian-devel-announce with information about the pedantic mode and the new tag page.

I have been wondering for a while how to get X.org "input-hotplug" to work, but I never actually tried before today. It is actually fairly easy, once you know what to do. Requirements First, make sure you have the evdev X driver installed (xserver-xorg-input-evdev). You might want to use X packages from experimental since things are much more recent than in Lenny or Sid these days, and upstream improved input management in the meantime. Then, if you are not running a pre-packaged kernel, check the the evdev driver is enabled and loaded in your kernel (CONFIG_INPUT_EVDEV). Telling hal what to do with input devices Now, you need to tell hal how to configure your input devices. Actually, you do not have much to do since latest xserver-xorg-input-evdev packages bring what you need. hal reads all fdi files under /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy to find out how devices should be configured. If you run lshal and look for input, you should see that the evdev is planned to drive your input devices. However, if you look at keyboard devices in lshal (look for input.keys), you will see that the US layout is used. To switch to another layout, you can add some overriding rules as a new *.fdi file in /etc/hal/fdi/policy/. For instance, to get French layout:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.keys">
      <-- Enforce XkbLayout=fr and XkbVariant empty -->
      <merge key="input.xkb.layout" type="string">fr</merge>
      <merge key="input.xkb.variant" type="string" />
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

Thanks to this, you can enforce XkbLayout, XkbVariant and friends as usual in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Don't forget to restart hal after modifying some fdi files. Then run lshal, and look for Xkb, you should find your setup there. Note that you can add some matching rules to configure some devices with different setups if needed. Just need to read the output of lshal and find something like a hardware identifier to match on. You can find some documentation about these rules by looking at the existing fdi files in /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/, and in the upstream x11-input.fdi (note that input.xkb.foo is the actual recommended syntax instead of input.x11_options.XkbFoo). Touchpads If you have a touchpad and want to use the synaptics driver, installing the xserver-xorg-input-synaptics will bring another fdi file. /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/11-x11-synaptics.fdi matches input.touchpad in the device capabilities in hal. Now the synaptics driver will be automagically loaded for your touchpad (instead of evdev for regular mice). Again, you can override this rule in /etc/hal/fdi/policy/ and you can add many configuration options for synaptics as well. See /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/11-x11-synaptics.fdi to get an example. Fortunately, you will not have to manually take care of the above /etc/hal/fdi/policy/ file for ever. The plan is to have hal look at the Debian console configuration and get at least the keyboard layout from there automatically. Telling the Xserver to talk to hal Now, you need to tell the Xserver to use what hal wants. Basically, you want to remove everything about keyboard, mouse and other input devices from your xorg.conf. Just drop all InputDevice sections and all references to them within other sections. With recent Xserver versions, options AllowEmptyInput and AutoAddDevices are enabled by default (otherwise, you might have to add them in the ServerFlags section). For more documentation, you want to read Peter Hutterer's blog, especially this post and this one. By the way, if you don't want this input-hotplug thing and you want to run a recent Xserver anyway, you should set AllowEmptyInput and AutoAddDevices to off in the ServerFlags section. Update: Fixed the way to manage fdi files, fixed the syntax of input.xkb.foo rules, added a paragraph about synaptics, and organized things in sections. Thanks to everybody's comment.

It has been a while since my last post here. Not because nothing happened, but mostly because I did not have time to do much for X. Fortunately, Julien is taking good care of X in Debian so we are still close to latest upstream bits. Obviously, due to Lenny's freeze, everything is happening in experimental these days. Xserver 1.6 The release Xserver 1.6 is expected in the near future. 1.6-rc1 (1.5.99.901) entered experimental recently. Both video and input driver ABIs changed and very few drivers have been rebuilt so far. So if you're not running Intel or Radeon, you might not be able to upgrade yet. Please be patient :) You might have heard that many things are happening in X.org these days: DRI2, kernel-modesetting (KMS), RandR 1.3, ... Everything is not ready yet, but it's getting close for real. Radeon 6.10.0 and Intel 2.6.1 Radeon driver 6.10.0 was released in early 2009. As usual, it brings many fixes, and improvements for modern boards (see Alex Deucher's blog for details). However, Radeon is not ready for above DRI2 and KMS yet. Most of the development for these new features is first done in the Intel driver, which got recently bumped to 2.6.1 as well. DRI2 DRI2 is the new Direct Rendering Infrastructure. The most noticeable change from the user point of view is support for Redirect Direct Rendering, which basically means that your 3D application can be wobbly/transparent in Compiz. See Kristian H gsberg's blog for details. If you want to try DRI2 on Intel, you have to enable UXA as the acceleration architecture in xorg.conf (Option "AccelMethod" "UXA" in the Device section). DRI2 will then be enabled automatically. Then, it may or may not work, depending for instance on the hardware. I get a black screen at startup on i865 while i945 works fine until I start Compiz (the server suddenly exits for some reason then). Note that you probably want to upgrade your Mesa packages to experimental as well here (7.3 has been released recently). Of course, running git snapshot of various components (Mesa, libdrm, kernel drm, Intel driver, ...) may help since the released versions seem to not be entirely ready yet. But, things should may be ready to use for everybody in the near future. Kernel Modesetting The other nice feature that makes a lot of noise in X.org these days is Kernel modesetting (KMS). It moves the management of mode (aka resolution+rate) into the kernel. It helps support for switching between different users' sessions, enables reporting of kernel messages (oops, panics, ...) while X is running, and reduces the need to blank the screen during boot (since the kernel can setup the display early and X doesn't have to change it later independently). KMS testing requires a bleeding-edge kernel (2.6.29). Using a git snapshot of the drm stack is probably a good idea as well since I couldn't get KMS to work on 2.6.29-rc2 here. Again only Intel will support KMS soon, but other drivers will follow. Panning is back (aka RandR 1.3) Xserver 1.6 brings support for the 1.3 version of the RandR X extension. Among other improvements, it reintroduces one feature that many users miss since it was removed back in Xserver 1.3 or so. "Panning" (often referred to as "Virtual Desktop") gives the ability to move the display within a larger screen when the mouse approaches from the border. Instead of being configured with the Virtual option in xorg.conf (this option means something else nowadays), it may now be enabled/tuned with xrandr --panning. You'll need the latest libxrandr2 and xrandr utilities to do so (the latter is not uploaded yet).

I've released version 0.5.1 of the aptitude package manager (release notes). Once it has been installed into the archive, you can download it from Debian's experimental distribution, or manually from the aptitude package page. WARNING: This is an unfinished piece of software. Do not install it if you want a package manager that does everything you need perfectly all the time. It is buggy and incomplete. There are no huge user-visible changes in this release, but there are a number of smaller new features and enhancements. Click through to the release notes to see a list of what changed in this release, with screen-shots.

"You never call, you never write. I hardly know you anymore." Yes, I've been meaning to write up on several things. For some time now, I've been a happy VIM user and a while back I ran in to a blog post where someone mentioned a new feature they found in VIM which got me to explore the vim-scripts package. There are a lot of scripts out there that extend VIM far beyond what it can do by default. And it's quite powerful even without the scripts. One of the neat little scripts I decided to install by default was surround, it allows one to easily replace surrounding parenthesis, tags or quotation marks. There are a lot of scripts in the vim-scripts package, but it's not always clear how to enable the scripts. Thats where vim-addon-manager comes to play, it provides a vim-addon command that allows you to easily enable or disable the scripts. I'm still trying to grasp the full potential of all the new commands available, but it certainly appears that I'll be having even more fun writing stuff. It's kind of odd, at first when you start to use vi-like editors, you struggle. But in the end it's just such a convenient way of editing files that it really does grow on you.

As I wrote quite a while ago, I set up a RAID5 with three
IDE disks at home, which I'm using as backup (yes, I know that
RAID != backup) and storage space. A few days ago, the RAID was put to a real-life test for the first time, as one of the disks died. Here's what that looks like in dmesg:

raid5: raid level 5 set md1 active with 3 out of 3 devices, algorithm 2
RAID5 conf printout:
 --- rd:3 wd:3
 disk 0, o:1, dev:hda2
 disk 1, o:1, dev:hdg2
 disk 2, o:1, dev:hde2
[...]
hdg: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x21
hdg: DMA timeout error
hdg: 4 bytes in FIFO
hdg: dma timeout error: status=0x50   DriveReady SeekComplete  
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
hdg: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x21
hdg: DMA timeout error
hdg: 252 bytes in FIFO
hdg: dma timeout error: status=0x50   DriveReady SeekComplete  
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
hdg: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x21
hdg: DMA timeout error
hdg: 252 bytes in FIFO
hdg: dma timeout error: status=0x58   DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest  
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
hdg: DMA disabled
ide3: reset: success
hdg: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x21
hdg: DMA timeout error
hdg: 252 bytes in FIFO
hdg: dma timeout error: status=0x58   DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest  
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
hdg: DMA disabled
ide3: reset: success
hdg: status timeout: status=0x80   Busy  
ide: failed opcode was: 0xea
hdg: drive not ready for command
hdg: lost interrupt
hdg: task_out_intr: status=0x50   DriveReady SeekComplete  
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
hdg: lost interrupt
hdg: task_out_intr: status=0x50   DriveReady SeekComplete  
ide: failed opcode was: unknown

That's when I realized that something was horribly wrong. Not long after that, these messages appeared in dmesg. As you can see the software-RAID automatically realized that a drive died and removed the faulty disk from the array. I did not lose any data, and the system did not freeze up; I could continue working as if nothing happened (as it should be).

 md: super_written gets error=-5, uptodate=0
 raid5: Disk failure on hdg2, disabling device.
 raid5: Operation continuing on 2 devices.
 RAID5 conf printout:
  --- rd:3 wd:2
  disk 0, o:1, dev:hda2
  disk 1, o:0, dev:hdg2
  disk 2, o:1, dev:hde2
 RAID5 conf printout:
  --- rd:3 wd:2
  disk 0, o:1, dev:hda2
  disk 2, o:1, dev:hde2

This is how you can check the current RAID status:

 $ cat /proc/mdstat
 Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] 
 md1 : active raid5 hda2[0] hde2[2] hdg2[3](F)
       584107136 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/2] [U_U]

The "U_U" means two of the disks are OK, and one is faulty/removed. The desired state is "UUU", which means all three disks are OK. The next steps are to replace the dead drive with a new one, but first you should know exactly which disk you need to remove (in my case: hda, hde, or hdg). If you remove the wrong one, you're screwed. The RAID will be dead and all your data will be lost (RAID5 can survive only one dead disk at a time). The safest way (IMHO) to know which disk to remove is to write down the serial number of the disk, e.g. using smartctl, and then check the back side of each disk for the matching serial number.

 $ smartctl -i /dev/hda   grep Serial
 $ smartctl -i /dev/hde   grep Serial
 $ smartctl -i /dev/hdg   grep Serial

(ideally you should get the serial numbers before one of the disks dies) Now power down the PC and remove the correct drive. Get a new drive which is at least as big as the one you removed. As this is software-RAID you have quite a lot of flexibility; the new drive doesn't have to be from the same vendor / series, it doesn't even have to be of the same type (e.g. I got a SATA disk instead of another IDE one). Insert the drive into some other PC in order to partition it correctly (e.g. using fdisk or cfdisk). In my case I needed a 1 GB /boot partition for GRUB, and the rest of the drive is another partition of the type "Linux RAID auto", which the software-RAID will then recognize. Then, put the drive into the RAID PC and power it up. After a successful boot (remember, 2 out of 3 disks in RAID5 are sufficient for a working system) you'll have to hook-up the new drive into the RAID:

 $ mdadm --manage /dev/md1 --add /dev/sda2
 mdadm: added /dev/sda2

My new SATA drive ended up being /dev/sda2, which I added using mdadm. The RAID immediately starts restoring/resyncing all data on that drive, which may take a while (2-3 hours, depends on the RAID size and some other factors). You can check the current progress with:

 $ cat /proc/mdstat 
 Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] 
 md1 : active raid5 sda2[3] hda2[0] hde2[2]
       584107136 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/2] [U_U]
       [>....................]  recovery =  0.1% (473692/292053568) finish=92.3min speed=52632K/sec

As soon as this process is finished you'll see this in dmesg:

 md: md1: recovery done.
 RAID5 conf printout:
  --- rd:3 wd:3
  disk 0, o:1, dev:hda2
  disk 1, o:1, dev:sda2
  disk 2, o:1, dev:hde2

In /proc/mdstat you'll see "UUU" again, which means your RAID is fully functional and redundant (with three disks) again. Yay.

 $ cat /proc/mdstat
 Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] 
 md1 : active raid5 sda2[1] hda2[0] hde2[2]
       584107136 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/3] [UUU]

Btw, another nice utility you might find useful is hddtemp, which can check the temperature of the drives. You should take care that they don't get too hot, especially so if the RAID runs 24/7.

 $ hddtemp /dev/hda
 dev/hda: SAMSUNG HD300LD: 38  C
 $ hddtemp /dev/hde
 dev/hde: SAMSUNG HD300LD: 44  C
 $ hddtemp /dev/sda
 dev/sda: SAMSUNG HD322HJ: 32  C

The gnome-power-manager developers like clean code. Actually, more than clean code: code that will not generate a single nitpicking warning. The package builds with the following C compiler flags:

-Werror -Wcast-align -Wno-uninitialized -Wall -Wformat-security

Sometimes the compiler is more clever than the coder On the SPARC architecture, -Wcast-align really starts to mean something. Unlike most other architectures, any alignment error on here will leave you gather your teeth spread on the floor after you ve been hit by a SIGBUS. It tries to catch at build time alignment errors resulting from a cast between pointers to different types. Together with -Werror, it triggered a first FTBFS bug. The error occured on the following code:

        if (XRRGetOutputProperty (brightness->priv->dpy, output, brightness->priv->backlight,
                                  0, 4, False, False, None,
                                  &actual_type, &actual_format,
                                  &nitems, &bytes_after,  ) != Success)  
                egg_debug ("failed to get property");
                return FALSE;
         
        if (actual_type == XA_INTEGER && nitems == 1 && actual_format == 32)  
                *cur = *((int *) prop);
                ret = TRUE;
         
        XFree (prop);
        return ret;

More precisely, the error occurs when casting prop (which is an array of pointers) into an int *. The compiler is clearly right. The alignment requirements are different for a pointer and an integer; therefore, casting a pointer to a pointer into a pointer to an integer will always work, but dereferencing the pointer later will possibly cause a crash. Turning this expression into a memcpy leads to code that should always work. Lesson learned: do not design APIs where an array of pointers can actually store integers. Have you ever heard of opaque structures? and sometimes it is not This was not enough and a second FTBFS bug showed up. Here, the error happens in the following code:

static inline GstBuffer *
gst_buffer_ref (GstBuffer * buf)
 
  /* not using a macro here because gcc-4.1 will complain
   * if the return value isn't used (because of the cast) */
  return (GstBuffer *) gst_mini_object_ref (GST_MINI_OBJECT_CAST (buf));
 

GstBuffer is a structure which contains a GstMiniObject at the beginning. Therefore, you conduct operations on the GstMiniObject through a mere cast. The first cast (GstBuffer GstMiniObject) is fine, but in the second cast (GstMiniObject GstBuffer), the compiler suspects a problem, since the alignment requirements on GstBuffer are stronger than those on GstMiniObject. The compiler is wrong because it didn t read the API documentation; otherwise, it would have known that gst_mini_object_ref can only return NULL or its argument, which means there can t be any loss of alignment. Since there are no function attributes to express such complex things, we are still forced to rely on the developer having correctly read the documentation. Way to go, compiler. Lesson learned: there are good reasons why some warnings are not part of -Wall. Especially, it is dubious to use them with -Werror. Does anyone know whether it is possible to apply -Werror only to some of the warnings and not to all of them? It would sound like a useful improvement.

FOSDEM is a place where free and open source software really means open source software and the F in FOSDEM is a token gesture to the free software movement if you believe FOSDEM organiser Philip Paeps. If that s so, I m amazed they can claim to promote the awareness of free software with a straight face. I m not going to FOSDEM again because there are better value-for-money events around now, but I do understand the motives of the various anti-Novell campaigners. The Boycott Novell site linked to my explanation of Boycotts a few years back. I really don t agree that A conference just is not complete without corporate schwag and presence. Presence? I don t really enjoy being jumped by salesmen. Schwag? There was one long-term useful item in my last conference pack, that was from an association and I would probably have bought a slightly better one if I hadn t been given it. So, I really don t understsand why FOSDEM are annoying people in part because they like branded cheap junk. I suspect most of it ends up in the bins before long. I mean, who needs a non-obvious bottle-opener? I have one on the waiters friend, another with a nice handle, one on my penknife, one on my wife s penknife and even one on the can opener s handle. There are probably a few more in my home and bottles aren t even so hard to open without a special tool anyway! Anyway, if you re going, I hope you have a safe journey. Maybe you could mention Glyn Moody s summary of the FOSDEM controversy to some people there. Call me when you re organising a trip to something like a drupalcon, wordcamp or LUGRadio Live.

For the benefit of Debian users, here's a quick summary of Paul Fenwick's talk about cool stuff in recent Perl versions.

apt-get install libmoose-perl
apt-get install libpar-packer-perl
apt-get install libdevel-nytprof-perl
apt-get install libautodie-perl
apt-get install libperl-critic-perl
Now I have to integrate all that into my writing of Perl programs, which doesn't really happen frequently enough for such changes to become easily ingrained... Great fun, and it's tempting to install Windows just so I could run some of that stuff, but perhaps Paul hasn't realised that you can run Minesweeper under Wine?

... and I completely missed it. I've been ranting on and off about the Linux desktop world needing a shakeup, about non-techies shaking their head and not understanding why a Linux Desktop needs further clarification so that anybody knows what it means. Seems I'm absolutely not the only one: KDE's aKademy conference and GNOME's GUADEC are to be held side by side as the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit 2009 in early July this year. I finally saw this in connection with LWN's coverage (subscriber only at this time, sorry) of the recent Qt relicensing by Nokia. The true Year of the Linux Desktop finally? I doubt it, seeing that many people with little computer skills are still completely unaware of what's happening. And currently, I share the pessimism about OpenOffice.org's future as shown in Michael Meeks' interpretation of the commit stats. A real killer in the collaboration platform space is still missing, as well: there are numerous commercial players, quite a few commercial pseudo-opensource packages, tons of real opensource frameworks, but none that can be recommended, in my opinion, without its share of doubts, either about the features, the licensing, or the future. Still, it's been the year of the Linux desktop for me since about 1997 (and that means Debian since not long after that), and I do see the situation improving year for year, so here's a big thank you to all working on it.

Our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. . . Our security emanates from the justness of our cause; the force of our example; the tempering qualities of humility and restraint. - Barack Obama, inaugural speech, Jan. 20, 2009

This, right here, is why, for the first time in my life, I actually feel good about an American president. Why I have hope about our government for the first time in years. Why I m glad I used a vacation day to sit on the couch and watch TV yesterday. On the occasion, once every 4 or 8 years, that is a celebration of American strength, power, and pride, we see our new president speaking of humility, of peace, of moral leadership, this is something remarkable. Past presidents have used occasions such as these to speak of crushing our enemies, of wanting people dead or alive, of grand government promises that turned out to triple the national debt. Obama spoke of extending the hand of friendship to anyone that would unclench their fist. He spoke that we had kicked the can down the road too far, and now we ve reached the end of the road. We have to stop thinking that we can have everything: low taxes, expensive programs, and a large military, simply by mortgaging our future. And he leveled with us: we all are in this together, and all have to work to make it better. Conventional politicians assumed it would be political suicide to say even half of what Obama has said. Yet he went out there and did it. He was blasted during the campaign by people on both sides of the political spectrum for being just words . He s the first presidential candidate that meant what he said about bringing Americans, and their representatives, together. The shock in Washington has he invited gasp! both an openly gay bishop and an anti-gay evangelical minister to give prayers was telling. It s as if people were saying, Wait, he really MEANT that? Yes, he did. Let s hope he can pull it off. And as Rev. Lowry concluded with his benediction:

With your hands of power and your heart of love, help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nations shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid, when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream. . . Let all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen. (amen) Say Amen! (Amen!) Say Amen! (AMEN!)

I was in Boston last week for FUDcon F11. As usual, despite bringing several tonnes of camera gear, I couldn t be bothered to pull it out aside from a few (terrible) casual shots. But hey, I m not big on being spontaneous. Anyway, the two hackfest days were really productive (as were the days I managed to make it out to the Red Hat office.) Although sadly we didn t make it into MIT for the Sunday hackfest day, due to the weather and the Sunday bus schedule in Arlington. Instead of DaveJ doing his usual what s going on in the kernel for F$next I pitched that session and Dave held a session on dracut, he and Jeremy s new framework for building initramfs. My session was well attended and got a lot of questions about various things like the new drivers/staging policy (though, that s a post for another time.) The rest of the time was productively spent poking at updates for the kernel for F9 and F10, rebasing them to 2.6.28, and poking at 2.6.29-rc1 for rawhide. This meant btrfs, while not ready for your critical data, was in mainline! After pushing out the new build, I spent most of the weekend doing some btrfs testing, and pushing out a new btrfsprogs build. Once they were composed into rawhide, I believe Fedora became the first to ship the mainline working btrfs in a distro. All said, it was a fairly productive weekend, and FUDPub on Saturday night was a great chance to catch up with a bunch of my coworkers who I rarely get to see. I kind of wish I had bothered to set up an umbrella and get some decent shots of my friends, colleagues and coworkers having a raucous good time, but oh well, there s always next release. off-topic
I absolutely hate being politic, and desperately hate posting about life or whatever, since I don t care about yours and don t see why you should care about mine, but the callous arrogance of these striking transit workers here in Ottawa is beginning to irritate me. These are people who ve threatened to picket students attempting to get to school if the universities accepted funding from the municipal government to continue to run replacement shuttles, and (though they ve reached a side agreement now) had threatened to picket for attempting to hire more drivers to increase their ParaTranspo service which provides shuttle services for the elderly and less-able-bodied residents of Ottawa. My point is, one of the shops I walked past on the high street yesterday said it best: Caution, possibly NSFW depending on your point of view. Given that I live in a (fairly) suburban part of Ottawa, this means I get to enjoy a forty minute walk to the nearest (competent) grocery store or coffee shop, and haven t bothered much. But hey, wonderful North American urban planning strikes again. Huzzah.

Patio Maravillas is a self-managed government-independent social center in Madrid, placed in a squatted building that long ago belonged to school. The place currently belongs to a Real Estate company, Grupo 2 Reunidos. According to the law, the place has to be used for providing services to the community, which hasn t happened for 10 years. Nobody knows what plans they do have for the building, but there are suspicions that it might be related to property speculation. Nothing new on the horizon. The police are throwing them out of the building tomorrow morning, incidentally coinciding with the opening of the Foro Social Mundial (World Social Forum), for which Patio Maravillas was going to be one of the hosting buildings. Madrid isn t really known for supporting social movements in general, and has a conservative government, so feel free to think that the coincidence is not random. Patio Maravillas has been giving courses and workshops to the community since July 2007, and is very well considered and supported by different organizations. Supposedly whatever happens tomorrow will be without violence, but knowing how the Spanish Police behaves in this situations that is not very likely. The event will be streamed and probably recorded, and information will be twittered, so hopefully nothing serious will happen. I really hope the best for them. I d love to be able to be there with them, but as it is really not possible for me, I m giving them all my support from here. Good luck! Keep up the good work!

My own perception of the debacle about the end-user who decided to cancel her college enrollment because she could not get Microsoft products to install on Ubuntu is three folds:

• Canonical and Dell evidently need to improve their marketing efforts, because the user didn't realize what she was purchasing. Knowledge of what Ubuntu is and how it can interact with the rest of the world clearly wasn't passed on in the form of a small printed User's Guide that should have come with the newly purchased laptop computer. Additionally Dell most definitely needs to make emphasize the same information in its online shop to help customers make an informed decision (and, no, eschewing the problem by obfuscating or removing non-Microsoft alternatives to the purchasing options isn't the right answer).
• The newspaper that reported on the story really needs to do its homework to more accurately report what is Ubuntu and, perhaps, participate in the efforts to educate the masses about non-Microsoft alternatives in the Operating System market. Educating the Press to enable this might require hiring a dedicated person at Canonical to work with the non-industry Press.
• The girl in question really needs to get a hold of herself, the sooner the better. Her hasty withdrawal from her enrollment was clearly unwarranted and her attitude of crying wolf and blaming everyone else for her own failure at making an informed purchase speaks volumes.

Personally, I think that Canonical needs to hire an individual that understands the above three aspects and, most of all, how to remedy them, as its next OEM channel Manager, if they truly want to increase Ubuntu's market penetration.

Attractive _ with the face tattoo

It s been a while now since the 2008 Summer of Code ended. This year, twelve (?) projects were selected. That s twelve students working full time on a Debian-related project during the summer. The Google Summer of Code has sometimes been criticized in the past for having a poor student-developer retention rate inside the host projects. One of the goals of the program has always been to bring new people to budding or established free software organizations and it s a pity that some would leave the project as soon as the program ends. On the other end, poor integration of created code within the project leads to work that is hard to merge in, or worse, doesn t get merged in at all. That s a waste of time and resources and a probably cause of global warming as well. Hopefully, it s not always the case. Some people choose to stay committed within the organization in the long-term. Useful code gets merged in and pushed to the public. I am going to give a talk about this at FOSDEM (go to FOSDEM!) so I m giving you a little preview. I need your help to collect information for my talk. As you know, information is always hard to come by with these kinds of projects so anything can be useful. Without further ado, let s have a look at the cast of the Debian Google Summer of Code 2008: Netconf, a network configuration management system Presentation Netconf is a network configuration management system designed with modern network infrastructures and the needs of roaming users in mind. It is a personal project of Martin Krafft that he started in 2007. He did some presentations about it that you can find on the dev website. The project proposal was introduced by the mentor. The work was mainly about completing the roadmap items for version 1.0. Most of the design was done and code fleshed out. The stated goal was to have netconf ready for lenny. Martin noted that due to lack of regular free time, he couldn t reach that goal by himself. Student Jonathan Roes was a computer science graduate student from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He had programming experience as a hobby for a long time and wrote some free games and libraries for the Nintendo DS and some proprietary webapps. He submitted a few little patches in mid-march right after the publication of accepted mentoring organizations and went on to work from mid-may to mid-august. He wrote a lot of code right into the trunk since the whole project was a prototype. Result The last commit by Jonathan was also the last to date in the main netconf git repository. No further progress has been made and obviously netconf didn t get into lenny. I couldn t find any further public involvement of Jonathan within Debian. The ultimate Debian database, all things Debian in a SQL database Presentation The Ultimate Debian database wants to reunite all Debian data sources in a SQL database The project was mentored by Lucas Nussbaum and co-mentored by Stefano Zacchiroli and Marc HE Brockschmidt. The project proposal was introduced by Lucas. Student Christian Neronus Von Essen is.. well, there wasn t much information readily available on him. Result The whole project is coded up and working well with a whole bunch of data sources. There will be a talk at FOSDEM about this so I ll leave it to Lucas to talk about it in detail. I couldn t find any further public involvement of Christian within Debian. Security-beta, a beta testing for Debian security updates Presentation The task is to improve the quality assurance process for security updates by providing a public security update beta test program in addition to the existing QA done for security updates. During the preparation of security updates, there s an inherent delay between the initial upload of the fixed packages and the time until the packages have been built on porter machines. This time gap will be used for a new security update beta program. The project was supposed to be mentored by Moritz M hlenhoff. Student The project was supposed to be done by Nico Nion Golde. He is studying computer sciences at the Technical University of Berlin. He s also a DD. Result There s no nothing. Nico, what happened ? And obviously, he s still developing for Debian. Debgraph, a generic infrastructure for the development of packages management tools Presentation In a large software ecosystem such as Debian Linux, there is the potential for dependencies among software packages to create complex management and technical problems. For example, dependency loops (cycles) in which a package directly or indirectly depends on itself can confuse package management tools as they determine the proper order of package installation. debgraph helps developers to solve this problem by enabling generic queries (e.g., Give me all the nodes that depend on package X ) against the graph of packages and thus automating much of the manual labor that is typically involved in resolving dependency problems. The project was mentored by Robert Lemmen, who introduced the project proposal. The project was already started and the C++ code foundation was done by the time it was proposed. Student The project was executed by Adam Jensen, research assistant in the Software Engineering and Network Systems Laboratory at Michigan State University. Result Adam maintained a blog about his progress and finished ahead of schedule. However, the resulting work seems to be unused, which is a pity since the code could be used within other programs (package managers?). I couldn t find any further public involvement of Adam within Debian.
That s all for now. The information is quite fragmented I admit. Most of it was pulled from Google, mailing lists, commit logs, blogs, whatever. If some projects are lacking in information here, it s because I couldn t find it readily (which is an issue in itself!). In my next post, I ll try to analyze the success and failures to extract some insight. Teaser: pet projects!
If you re a student or a mentor mentioned above, feel free to fill any of the blanks in my report. It s much appreciated. You re not a student or mentor mentioned above and have an opinion on how to improve the next Debian Summer of Code ? Feel free to comment.
Sledge, ping! Here s a list of projects to be described in my next posts:

• Debian NAS, improve support of Debian on NAS devices
• Cran2deb, generate Debian packages from R packages
• Mergemaster, interactively merge changes in configuration files
• PAS NSS Debian Installer, improve support of PAM and NSS at install-time
• Jigdo-ivory, a JavaScript Jigdo client
• Aptitude-gtk, usability and GTK+ GUI for the Aptitude package manager
• Lintian for fuller automated setups
• Debexpo, a generic web-based package repository