These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 20 days of "blitz l10n NMU". No blog entry yesterday, sorry for those of you who like the "bubulle fights the dragon" adventures. I was travelling from Paris to Badajoz/Spain for the Free Software World Conference. Frans Pop, Wookey, Martin Michlmayr, Knut Yrvin and I will give a common talk about the results of the "Extremadura work sessions" funded by the regional government of Extremadura last year. My net connection will be jerky as we have a very good connection at the conference site, but nothing at the hotel (except a ridiculously expensive Telefonia wireless, which can't even be circumvented with IP-over-DNS). viewvc is to be uploaded by ender very soon. No news for dpkg-cross. A NMU is pretty likely now. I just uploaded a few more NMU's today as I got network again:

• ipsec-tools
• libpam-ldap
• php4-rrdtool
• freetds
• icedove will be taken care of by Alexander Sack and we will even rewrite the templates while we're at it

Welcome to this 7th issue of the DeFuBu contest, the monthly championship of the funniest bug reported to the Debian BTS. The challengers

• Loic Minier with #407127 (evolution: Dates before 1970 not supported, e.g. for birthdays) and #408989 (epiphany-browser: bugzilla.gnome.org inaccessible)
• Sune Vuorela with #407849 (script for /usr/bin/preloadkde) and #409310 (kmines: Can cheat the timer)
• Josh Triplett with #404915 (iceweasel: Icon resembles booger)
• Jeroen van Wolffelaar with #408424 (apache2: "It works!")
• Florent Bayle with #408524 (If I play piano while my computer starts up, /dev/dsp disappears !)
• Christian Perrier with #408482 (xserver-xorg: please map French Canadian (cf) to Canada (ca) layout)
• Frans Pop with #409018 (base: /etc/ld.so.nohwcap missing)

How the vote has been done Four Debian related people voted for these bugs, Emmanuel Bouthenot, Mohammed Adn ne Trojette, Julien Louis and Jade Alglave. Full ranking Bugs

• #408989 (epiphany-browser: bugzilla.gnome.org inaccessible) (28 points)
• #408524 (If I play piano while my computer starts up, /dev/dsp disappears !) (21 points)
• #407849 (script for /usr/bin/preloadkde) and #408424 (apache2: "It works!") (18 points)
• #407127 (evolution: Dates before 1970 not supported, e.g. for birthdays) (17 points)
• #404915 (iceweasel: Icon resembles booger) and #408482 (xserver-xorg: please map French Canadian (cf) to Canada (ca) layout) (11 points)
• #409310 (kmines: Can cheat the timer) (10 points)
• #409018 (base: /etc/ld.so.nohwcap missing) (10 points)

Challengers

• Loic Minier (45 points with 2 bugs)
• Florent Bayle with (21 points with 1 bug)
• Sune Vuorela (28 points with 2 bugs)
• Jeroen van Wolffelaar (18 points with 1 bug)
• Christian Perrier and Josh Triplett (11 points with 1 bug)
• Frans Pop (10 points with 1 bug)

The winners

• Bug: #408989 (epiphany-browser: bugzilla.gnome.org inaccessible)
• Challenger: Loic Minier
• Bug reporter: Tshepang Lekhonkhobe
• Voter: Emmanuel Bouthenot with two first bugs correct: #408524, #408989

Notes To participate, simply drop me an email with a bug number. About DeFuBu

Of course, I screwed it. Yesterday's samba 3.0.24 package upload was built as a native package. I didn't notice the lintian warning among the few ones produced by samba. We should do something, some day, about this. When a package has too many lintian warning (even if there are good reasons for this), the probability for missing a new one is highly increased. Steve is already building a new package but I somewhat feel ashamed that he has to often correct my mistakes on that package.

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 18 days of "blitz l10n NMU". The sing package modifications lower French stats, as expected. However, the package has already been fixed by its maintainer (kudos!). viewvc has got an RC bug today so that gives me a very good excuse to push for an urgent update...including of course our beloved l10n bugs. That leaves us with dpkg-cross again, for which I have no answer yet. Small pause today in uploads as the Samba packaging team had to take care of a security update, which has been uploaded, for unstable, 3 hours after the official annoucement by the Samba Team. We are very grateful to these wonderful people, and more particularly to Gerald "Jerry" Carter who is not only a nice guy but also a very efficient developer. Thanks also to Steve Langasek for his commitment to this issue, to No l K the for being ready to upload in case I fail, to Eloy Paris for keeping the contact and to Moritz Muehlenhoff who prepared/is preparing the update for sarge.

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 17 days of "blitz l10n NMU". As expected, we are going down because of an uncoordinated upload of viewvc. I even went a little bit more annoyed because the maintainer did some changes to the debconf templates, updated *his* Spanish translation...but didn't care to warn other translators. Next time, I'll use my rubber cluebat, damog..:-) We will be hit again becacuse the sing package was re-uploaded by its maintainer iummediately after I NMU'ed it. Unfortunately, he did then correct some typographical errors in the templates and then fuzzied 9 formerly complete translations. Sad. (update as of 09:32 UTC: this will be corrected by the maintainer) Yesterday, I continued working on Thomas Huriaux dynamic status page:

• bindgraph to be uploaded today
• openssl097 due out Feb 6th
• prc-tools due out Feb 6th
• ipsec-tools due out Feb 7th
• libpam-ldap dues out Feb 7th (with a call for updates running)
• php4-rrdtool due out Feb 7th
• glide still waiting for news
• ifhp needs the removal of debian/po

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 16 days of "blitz l10n NMU". The re-introduction of debconf templates for viewvc with incomplete translations will lower the stats as of today...:-( I already notified its maintainer who is very l10n-aware so I'm confident we will fix this soon. However, that's kind of a disappointment for me, of course, as this will delay the day we will reach 100%. Yesterday, I worked on the oldest bugs mentioned on Thomas Huriaux dynamic status page:

• courier has been uploaded, unfortunately without the Swedish translation as the maintainer wrongly assumes this shouldn't be a target for Etch
• efingerd has been NMU'ed
• squidguard has been NMU'ed
• ssl-cert has been NMU'ed
• apt-proxy has been NMU'ed (man pages translations)
• defoma has been NMU'ed (man pages translations)
• qmail is ignored because of an obnoxious maintainer who is in my kill file
• gdm is ignored because #261086 is marked wontfix for reasons I don't want to dig into now (I'm pretty sure that something better could be done for that package, oh well)
• icedove is likely to be examined at some moment
• glide maintainer has been notified
• arb is ignored on request of its maintainer
• others are my targets for today..:)

PS: the title of this blog entry comes from a bug report from Joey Hess for ssl-cert. I didn't fix that because it certainly requires too invasive changes at this moment but these debconf templates are definitely not the best worded ever and the underlyign debconf code is pretty weak.

I am running through my post-SL TODO list, and I’m down to the item which reads “Write a report”. We’ve had a very good time meeting users, prospective users and fellow DDs, as always. There were 21 people planned to man the booth, which is an all time record so far, and 18 out of those 21 showed up, which is really quite good :-) I’m not going to list everybody here, first because the list has grown quite long now, and because all in all it’s the usual French team that has been at it for the past few years already. We had a couple of firsttimers though, including Pierre Habouzit and Yves-Alexis Perez. Everybody did great, thanks for helping out, guys! Day 0: unpacking sl2007-booth… setting up sl2007-booth… We had less hardware this year than we had the previous years, for a variety of reasons, so the booth setup actually went quite fast. There were no separations between the booths in the .Org Pavilion this year, so we put a bit of thought into that and figured that, oh well, it’d do anyway. Pierre arrived at 7:30pm on the booth with some hardware from Sven and 1500 Debian flyers paid for by Linbox. We went for dinner, then Pierre and I spent the night hacking on the Babelbox scripts to get the damn thing to work with the current debian-installer. At 3:30am, we got to the point where the Babelbox would pretty much work, and couldn’t figure out what was going wrong at that point. Day 1: Fixing the Babelbox, frying a graphics card We ended up fixing the last bit of the Babelbox on the booth in the morning, and preparing the demo system (Pierre’s shuttle) at the same time. It all went fine and we ended up with a dual-head demo system and a beamer-equiped Babelbox in the afternoon after Niv brought a beamer. We used the back of Fr d ric’s Debian banner as the screen for the beamer. We had a nice chat with the Linux+ magazine team in the afternoon, discussing the upcoming Debian release and a dedicated Linux+ issue. We’ll be helping them out tracking the Etch release in the next few weeks until the release. Back at Pierre’s place, we found out that his shuttle apparently wouldn’t boot. Turns out that only the graphics card died, good news. Day 2: Business as usual, Debian France meeting The second day was really business as usual. We saw more people than the previous day, but still there were less visitors than the previous years. The exhibition was smaller than the previous years too, I just hope it’s only a temporary thing and that it’ll be bigger again next year. This also was the “dinosaurs day”, the day all the old-timers pop by and discuss around the Debian booth. This is becoming a tradition or something :-) As Christian wrote already, we met HP people and talked about Linux support from HP on HP hardware. In the evening, we had the first formal Debian France meeting. Julien Cristau and Christian Perrier got elected to the board of directors, replacing C dric Delfosse and Laurent Fousse. The board got reelected, so I’m still the President, Pierre is still the Secretary and Aur lien G r me is still the Treasurer. Thanks to Tarsus for lending us a room for the meeting! Day 3: Packing up Small day… Quite a few visitors in the afternoon, we talked about Debian France a bit more than we did on the previous day, mainly with other people from the .Org Pavilion. Conclusion Overall, a very productive edition this year, we talked about Debian France a lot, about Etch, about quite a few projects involving Debian too. Now we have a lot of work to do to release Etch and develop Debian France to the point were it will actually be really useful for Debian. Hopefully we’ll have things to show in a couple of weeks.

During the Solutions Linux 2007 event, the .Org pavillion had the (good) surprise to get the visit by M. Fran ois Bayrou, one of the candidates running for the French presidential election (mostly located in the center of our political scenery, between the ultra-liberal Nicolas Sarkozy and the socialist S gol ne Royal. He's given about 12% of votes for the first round by polls). As far as I know, he is the only candidate who visited SL2007. He even visited the .Org pavillion and had a breif talk, on the Ruby France booth, with my old friend Ollivier Robert (longtime FreeBSD activist and committer, security expert and author of calife, a light alternative to sudo). Another old friend, namely Thomas Parmelan is visible at the back of this picture. As far as I have heard, M. Bayrou unfortunately didn't stop at the Debian booth. I suppose that M. Bayrou visited the APRIL booth who launched the candidats.fr initiative, requesting the candidates running for the presidential election to publish their stance about Free Software and Digital Liberties.

There are some bloggers who I'm really happy to see back in the blogosphere.

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 15 days of "blitz l10n NMU". So, now we're waiting for dpkg-cross... I can't make Czech progress more now because nearly all pending translations are either very recent or have good reasons to not trigger NMU's (explicitely not wanted by maintainers for arb and interchange and nearly impossible for atokx, which has a NMU bug which I can't fix). So, I turned my attention to packages with old pending debconf l10n bugs just like we did during the autumn NMU campaign. Anyway, the soon to come D-I release and the FSWC2007 conference will draw my attention from the NMU campaign and, therefore, the rate will probably be lower now. Unless, of course, maintainers do the work themselves. Just look at the Czech page...:-)

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 14 days of "blitz l10n NMU". Thanks to the s390-dasd upload, we are now two packages ahead from 100%. Six strings missing. The translation for dpkg-cross will soon be reported and I will just have to nag Neil Williams kindly so that he helps us reach our Grail. Czech gains near 100 strings today while I didn't do a single NMU. That shows that maintainers are still motivated to fix remaining l10n issues which is indeed the best reward you can make to all translators. Thank you, again, ladies and gentlemen.

(update: numerous typos removed) This year, attending the whole Solutions Linux event wasn't compatible with my paid work (for those who care, I'm since September head of the Personal and departmental computing unit in the Networks and Information Department of ONERA, the French Aerospace Lab). Despite this, I booked at least yesterday afternoon to visit the expo and more particularly the Debian booth. It is always a pleasure to meet again French developers and contributors as well as all these old dinosaurs which I learned electronic communications with 1200bps modems with, some time ago. The Debian booth was as crowded as usual. It was still featuring a Babelbox, built in one night by Pierre Habouzit and Julien Blache. Congratulations, you did an awful job here. I'm glad I saw all those good people. I was tempted to cite everybody and will finally refrain because I'm too afraid of forgetting one of you guys. For our international readers, this includes several of the people I may have had a few flamy discussions and even blog "wars" with in the recent past (I'm just missing you, Joss, being told that you couldn't attend that Wednesday). As usual, we all survived very well. The other "big" event was also the first formal meeting of the Debian France non-profit organisation. Everything is pretty young but the hidden creation work done by the founding members has been huge and the base is now here. Debian now officially exists in France. I'll do my best to play my part in this action and work with other members of the board to fit the organisation goals and bring Debian more prevalence in our country. I also had a very long talk with Bruno Cornec and Louis Bouchard from HP. We discussed about HP customers needs for official support for Debian on HP machines, and not only servers (ONERA has an internal project to deploy a few hundreds of workstations aimed at being the scientific platform for ONERA scientists and PhD students. We already have more than 100 of these, based on RHEL and guess what are my mid-term plans for them? :-)). We just need some official commitment from HP to support using Debian to unlock the internal fears. It sounds like HP could go this way if customers show enough interest. Of course, ONERA's project is pretty small but we are one of the key players in out domain in the country so that could be kind of interesting marketing for HP...and Debian..:-). Bdale, I need to talk with you soon.... Back to work now, for a few days. Then, I'll take 3 days off next week to attend the 3rd Free Software World Conference in Badajoz and present the results of the Extremadura i18n session we held in September, along with other people who held some of these sessions, namely Frans Pop (about the D-I session), Wookey (about the Embedded Debian session), Knut Yrvin (about the Debian-Edu session) and Martin Michlmayr (about the QA session). All people who I will be very glad to meet again.

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 13 days of "blitz l10n NMU". conserver and libpam-rsa being uploaded leave us with 8 (EIGHT) strings to update to reach the Grail. Czech continues to improve slightly. We will probably soon reach a plateau as, now, many remaining Czech translations are fairly recent bug reports.

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 12 days of "blitz l10n NMU". Nothing happened yesterday, which explains why I didn't post. Today, a few packages uploads in unstable should have improved the stats for French. However, this is also the day where dpkg-cross introduced 3 strings without prior notification to translators. A good occasion to test my "Please interact with translators" new script..:-) Czech has improved a lot as a consequence of numerous package uploads after my strong activity during the week-end. Thanks again to all these responsive maintainers. So, now we're hunting tha last remaining parts for French:

• postfix, on its way by LaMont Jones
• s390-dasd, a D-I component, already completed in D-I SVN and which will be uploaded by Frans along with all other D-I updates
• conserver, which has indeed been uploaded today by J rgen H gg
• libpam-rsa, which I'll sponsor in a few minutes
• dpkg-cross, as explained above

Another package will soon appear, out from NEW: emdebian-tools, uploaded by Neil Williams, who took care to request for translation updates in debian-i18n. Thanks, Neil.

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 10 days of "blitz l10n NMU". Still 26 strings left to translate for French. But one more fully translated package (acidlab, thanks Javier FS) which explains the small increase. All remaining packages (postfix, ddclient, logtool, conserver, libpam-rsa) are under work by either me or their maintainers. Funnily, working on all this, I accidentally discovered that the mail queue on puccini.debian.org, which hosts packages.debian.org, was completely stucked. A prompt action by Joerg Jaspert unflushed it leading to funny results like the D-I teal receiving three notifications in a row for various versions of tasksel transiting to testing. Stats for Czech will maybe not improve as quickly as I imagined. The Czech team has been motivated deeply by my announce and they began reporting many new translations or translation updates. However, I can't really NMU packages because they have translation updates that are one day old..:-) The Portuguese team jumped into the game during this day (46.605%)

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 9 days of "blitz l10n NMU". 26 strings left to translate for French. As I, and their respective maintainers, uploaded a few packages today, this should improve as of tomorrow. Half of these are for libpam-rsa, for which Jos Parella already prepared the update which I'll upload soon. Stats for Czech should improve quickly now as I began working on a few packages and hot in touch with Miroslav Kure who will try to bump the translators work.

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 8 days of "blitz l10n NMU". No improvement today as the stats script obviously didn't run. As there is nearly no more packages for which I have to work on French (the remaining glitches are waiting for the maintainers...but I won't wait really long, guys), I focused on the second language in the rankings, namely Czech. The goal is now to improve their stats as well (and of course, this will improve many other translation teams stats while I fix all sleeping l10n bugs).

This is the current translation ratio for French in unstable, after 8 days of "blitz l10n NMU". Boooo, a new package appeared in unstable, namely libpam-rsa, bringing 13 more strings. I have used this occasion to finetune a new script of mine which I will use to mail maintainers when they introduce a new package with debconf templates and will point them to the magic podebconf-report-po utility from the po-debconf package. Ditto, maybe, for maintainers who modify debconf templates without prior notice to the translation team...(please note that this is scheduled to be a manual, nothing automated).

This is the current translation ratio for French in unstable, after 7 days of "blitz l10n NMU". 24 strings to go...efforts from yesterday have been broken by new uploads of postfix and conserver. However, the maintainers are l10n-aware, so that should be fixed soon..:-)

As I was "predicting" around myself as soon as Segolene Royal was designated as the socialist party candidate for the French presidential election (and thus becoming the very first woman in position to be elected as president here), the days of shit would come. They are coming now. Todays "small sentence" was an half-stolen sentence taken ex-abrupto in a live discussion during a visit to Canada. She expressed some "support" and "sympathy" for the ideas of Quebec autonomy. Of course, this became a big pleasure for the media around to emphasize this story, with the precious help of our right-wing parties supporters, especially those of the UMP dwarf, namely Nicolas Sarkozy. Last week, the shit was about a trip to China (with many care to not interfere in internal politics...apparently, this time she should have interfered....but not when going in Canada, strange...). The week before, this was about a trip in Middle East (a place where Sarkozy will never go during the campaign, will you bet). One woman already experienced this in the past, the only woman that has ever been Prime Minister in France, namely Edith Cresson. When Segolene's popularity was raising, some said that, in these Edith Cresson days, "minds weren't ready" and the like. Minds are still not ready. Our country, with the invaluable help of most of our political staff, does not want a woman to be our international representative. It's pretty likely that she will lose the election, and lose it by far. "They" are way too much powerful. Yes, I will regret it. Yes, I will still support her and though this becomes "ringard". I do want a woman as president and I do want *this* woman (and this party, by the way). Not only because I hate these UMP guys, with a special note for Sarkozy, but also because I really think this can change things. Yep, that may sound stupid, but I sometimes believe in politics. We suck. A lot. I just only hope to be proven wrong in April. Update: M. Mouette had a point about this original blog post, so I corrected its title. Now he can answer on the content if he likes to..;-)