Dear M. Mouette, in my world,
calling someone by his/her first name is a sign of familiarity and
proximity. In short, when I use someone's first name, this is because I
share something with him/her.
As far as I can tell, this is a pretty common habit inside political
parties. You know, the things very few people in our country involve
themselves in (myself first), which makes easier later to complain about the lack of
political conscience in our country.
Please also note that I do not tend to write down my blog posts with the
same care I write my professionnal reports or work. In short, I may sometime
include wording mistakes and even sometimes use some inappropriate ways to
share my ideas. This is the blogosphere, my friend... As far as I have
re-read it, that "inappropriate" use of Segolene Royal's first name happened
once in the entry title while the remaining of the blog post was
appropriately balanced.
I also tend to use respectful wording to mark my distance
with someone. I use the same when choosing between "tu" and "vous" in our
language. It even sometimes goes to the point that this is done on purpose.
I would have rather appreciated comments about the general content of that
blog post more than the way it was written. That is also
respect, so please don't give me lessons about respect or I will have to
seek for correct translations of "l'h pital qui se fout de la charit ".
This is the current
translation ratio for French in unstable, after 6 days
of "blitz l10n NMU".
23 strings to go...
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 M. 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.
This is the current
translation ratio for French in unstable, after 4 days
of "blitz l10n NMU".
Many other languages did benefit from this as well, as
shown here (for
instance, Czech went over 90% for the first time as far as I can tell).
All remaining packages with incomplete or missing French translations have
prepared NMUs and we can expect reaching the Grail in the next week.
If I have enough courage, I'll probably continue this blitz NMU campaign to
kill as many debconf l10n bugs as possible. Of course, if maintainers do it
themselves as
sugegsted
by Javier, it will be quicker.
Dear Andrew, I'm always an
enthusiast reader of your blog and more particularly the "adventures of
Aussies in USA-land"...:-)
But, I'm about to NMU one of your packages as part of my
"blitz l10n NMU"
campaign, namely the argus package. I'll of course notify you, but in
case you prefer doing this yourself, please just fix the
pending
l10n bugs
in argus. Just yell out loud..:-)
Really. After
MJ Ray
summarized very useful information about building methods, I finally
reconsidered my method for building packages.
I usually use pbuilder but I'm pretty much annoyed with its slowness when
unpackaking the base.tgz file. As a consequence, when I'm in a hurry, I
sometimes just "debuild" packages on my live system. Booooo.
Of course, this often leads to errors (two, recently, with samba. Booooo).
On the other hand, using pbuilder is a very clean way to build
packages...but is very slow, which is a pain when working on the "blitz NMU"
uploads which I blogged about a few days ago.
So, discovering cowdancer which is able to dance fast along with the safety
of pbuilder was
exactly what I was needing. Thanks, again, Junichi for that nice piece of
work...and MJ for blogging about it!
Nothing really worth noticing here, the Paris area being southward enough
and not hit by this major storm over northern Europe. Many people still remember
Dec 26th 1999 and have been very careful, indeed.
I'm just listening to the morning news and am Seeing that UK, Belgium,
Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and a part of northern France have not been
as lucky as us here (this doesn't seem to be finished and more Eastern parts
are still to be hit). The damages seem to be pretty high and so is the number of
casualties.
I hope that all you people are safe and well with no damage to your lives or
belongings.
Happy global warming...:-(... Please spread the word around: we are all
responsible for this with our daily attitude with regards to the respect of
our environment.
Environment respect is no more (and has never been) a joke. This is a matter of survival for us
and our children. Do us a favor: break one SUV a day...:-)
I started today the winter campaign of l10n NMUs, after
a long and
cool autumn campaign.
This time, this is more a kind of BlitzKrieg:
- Spot a target
- Grab pending l10n bugs
- Check maintainer's activity:
- If apparently inactive, build, upload, subscribe to PTS and request to unblock
- If apparently alive, send a short delay notice and wait for 2 days
Build
Upload
Send patch
Subscribe to PTS
Request unblock to the magic release team
No QA improvements this time, only pending debconf l10n stuff.
Targets are chosen among pending French translations. After
all, it's fair that the effort benefits the team I'm part of for years, right?
So, fellow developers, if you have pending French l10n bugs, better watch
your back...:-)
After my
rehearsal
from yesterday, I finally booked my flights to Edinburgh for Debconf 7.
I'll fly from CDG terminal F on June 15th 16:15 (AF5052) and will fly back
to CDG on June 24th 09:05 (AF5051). The return flight is somewhat more
expensive than later flights (about 30EUR more) but much more convenient for
me.
See you in EDI, ladies and gentlemen...
Well,
Damog post
about him wanting to visit Paris reminds me that I have to mention that
the "Bubulle Hotel" located not that far from the city of Paris is always
opened for Debian friends wanting to spend a few days here around and visit
the Paris area.
Definitely, my house is not the most convenient place to use as a starting
point to visit the city (it's 30km south-west of the center town and needs
40 mins by train to be in Paris), but some
already enjoyed it and I have room enough.
So, don't be shy and just ring the bell if you happen to come around
here...or plan to spend a few days in Paris before going to Debconf.
Today, I began seeking for a good and cheap flight for me to go to
Debconf in Edinburgh.
That may sound easy (Paris to Scotland, not that a big deal), but the real
jungle that are now european flights makes it more complicated than it
appears.
First of all, no choice to leave from Paris-Orly, which is much more closer
to my place (30km without going through Paris) than Charles de Gaulle (80km).
Then, the choice is mostly between:
-
Ryan Air, departing from the Paris Beauvais Tille so called "international"
airport, which is indeed 100km away from Paris, with a bus shuttle departing
from Paris, therefore forcing me to first go to the town before getting the
bus. The Ryan Air flight lands at Glasgow Prestwick, which enforces another
"long" bus transfer, which quite unpractical schedule to Edinburgh. Costs:
- 12.5 euros for a return train ticket from my place to Paris
- 26 euros for Paris-Beauvais return ticket
- 77 euros for Beauvais-Glasgow Prestwick
- 30 euros (24 pounds in local currency) for Prestwick-Edinburgh
- Total: 145.5 euros
EasyJet, departing from Charles de Gaulle and flying to Edinburgh with a
connection in London Luton. Costs:
- 26.7 euros for a return train ticket from my place to CDG
- 95 euros for a London-Edinburgh return ticket
- 76 euros for a London-Edinburgh return ticket
- 7 euros for a return bus ticket from Edinburgh airport to center town
- Total: 204.7 euros
British Airways, departing from CDG, without direct flight (connection in
Heathrow). Costs:
- 26.7 euros for a return train ticket from my place to CDG
- 217 euros for a Paris-Edinburgh return ticket
- 7 euros for a return bus ticket from Edinburgh airport to center town
- Total: 250.7 euros
Air France, a local small company, flying from CDG, with a direct flight.
Costs:
- 26.7 euros for a return train ticket from my place to CDG
- 195 euros for a Paris-Edinburgh return ticket
- 7 euros for a return bus ticket from Edinburgh airport to center town
- Total: 228.7 euros
The choice is pretty easily made. Ryan Air would make me save 73 euros but
would make a very unpractical trip (the bus shuttle to Beauvais leaves more
than 3 hours before the flight and, similarly the bus
shuttle to/from Prestwick seems quite unpractical. EasyJet is pretty not
much cheaper than traditional companies and includes an unguaranteed
connection in London Luton. British Airways is more expensive
and includes a (guaranteed) connection.
So, I'll very probably fly Air France..:-)...cocorico!
For the french fellows reading this: in case you guys want to share the
flight...or avoid sharing it....I'll probably fly Paris-Edinburgh on June
15th, leaving at 16:15 (AF 5052) and come back on June 24th, leaving at
18:15 (AF 5053). The flight back could be AF 5051 at 09:05 but that one is
more expensive by 26 euros.
Lucas, I personnally
open irssi on a screened session on my home server which I reconnect from
wherever I may be (usually with my laptop) with
screen.
Screen rocks, definitely. And I'd be happy to share my .irssi/config file, of
course.
If, by some sort of Christmas miracle, all pending debconf translation bugs
get fixed in one day, French debconf translations would reach 100%
completeness (the
real status is 96.16% today).
The Czech team reached this briefly in the past and it's a pretty long time
since we're hunting that moving target. Thanks to the release process,
package maintainers have stopped changing their debconf templates daily and,
with the incredible work of Thomas Huriaux, we've been able to reach that
Nirvana.
Geez, I got a
Nokia M770 for
X-Mas. /me does the geek dance.
So, today, I finally stopped the l10n NMU campaign.
It started on Sept. 25th with the "Intent to Work" on hesiod. The last
package I worked on has been isync today.
The goal of that campaign was closing as many longstanding l10n bug reports
as possible. The main goals were decided during the i18n work meeting in
Extremadura, back in September. We focused on po-debconf translations,
mostly, which are an easy target for NMUs. Thomas Huriaux extracted the data
from the BTS and ranked packages with regards to the number of pending l10n
bugs and their age.
Lucas Wall reactivated a
coordination page which we already used back in
early 2006 when a first version of such a campaign was run.
During that campaign, I worked on 102 packages. 89 of them got all
their pending l10n bugs closed, 5 of them got most of their l10n bugs closed
(remaining "l10n" bugs were either not really related to localisation and
strange things which I left aside), 8 packages were ignored either because their
respective maintainers wanted to handle the bugs themselves or because they
were tagged for removal.
Meny packages have also been handled by their respective maintainers, either
because the NMU announcements woke them up...or because of their natural
release process. I have to point out that the level of collaboration of
package maintainers has been great (except for those who are MIA, and there
are quite a few) with only one very proeminent exception (just guess which
one).
Thijs Kinkhorst and Tobias Toedter also contributed to the campaign. Thanks
to them as well.
As a side effect, we also made many of these packages as lintian-clean as we
could, trying to balance between too invasive NMUs and trivial fixes. IIRC,
I only introduced 3 or 4 RC bugs doing so (which I fixed immediately of
course). A few RC bugs were also fixed by the NMUs and even a security bug
has been hunted down (for screen).
Meny thanks to all package maintainers, translators and everybody who helped
during that work. It has been a great time. Just
look at the
result.
Now heading to the improvement of the next pet project of the i18n task
force: the
Debian i18n server.
Creating a new locale
I'm currently in
Cilamitay,
in the east of
Taiwan. There is
a little meeting of Taiwanese Free Software people and people from the
Amis, Taroko and
Puyuma tribes, with the idea of starting
localisation efforts for some
aboriginal languages.
These are some of the issues we are going to discuss:
Language code
A new ISO standard (639-3) will hopefully be formalised in January that will
include the language codes for the Taiwanese aboriginal tribes. We'll have to
work some temporary solution, but there's good hope that it won't have to be
temporary for long.
List of characters
Because of Christian missionary influence, both Amis and Taroko use a roman
alphabet, with accents. We need to work out the complete list of character and
accent combination, see if everything is in Unicode, see how they sort.
We then need to find a comfortable way to input them using the keyboards
normally available here (English US layout): compose key? Dead keys? How
about on Windows?
Womble2 on IRC tells me that on Windows one can works with
MSKLC.
Technical terms and country list
We need to work out how to map terms that do not exist in the language.
Technical terms are usually borrowed from Japanese.
Names for all the countries in the world probably do not exist.
Translation interface
We need to find an easy to use interface to input the translations.
There is
Rosetta.
There is
Pootle. (Thanks to Christian Perrier for pointing me at it)
There is
Webpot.
Welcome to this 5th issue of the DeFuBu contest, the monthly championship of the funniest bug reported to the
Debian BTS.
The challengers
- Pierre Habouzit with #395522 (whitelister terminates immediately)
- Josselin Mouette with #396247 (sound-juicer: weird playback if disk is ejected)
- Christian Perrier with #396223 (gnome-applets-data: Colorado Springs listed as "Colourado Springs" in British English)
- Joey Hess with #393846 (wave at a webcam to overwrite file)
- Michael Ablassmeier with #397646 (exim4-config: reportbug mail issue)
How the vote has been done
Four Debian related people voted for these bugs, Philipp Kern, Julien Louis, Cyril Brulebois and David Pashley.
Full ranking
Bugs
- #393846 (wave at a webcam to overwrite file) (with 12 points)
- #396223 (gnome-applets-data: Colorado Springs listed as "Colourado Springs" in British English) (with 10 points)
- #396247 (sound-juicer: weird playback if disk is ejected) (with 9 points)
- #397646 (exim4-config: reportbug mail issue) (with 9 points)
- #395522 (whitelister terminates immediately) (with 3 points)
Challengers
- Joey Hess (12 points with 1 bug)
- Christian Perrier (10 points with 1 bug)
- Michael Ablassmeier (9 points with 1 bug) and Josselin Mouette (9 points with 1 bug)
- Pierre Habouzit (3 points with 1 bug)
The winners
- Bug: #393846 (wave at a webcam to overwrite file) (with 12 points)
- Challenger: Joey Hess
- Bug reporter: Joey Hess
- Voter: David Pashley with the nearest ordered tierc : #393846, #396223 and #397646.
Congratulations to Joey Hess, two victories in a row :-)
Notes
To participate, simply drop me an
email with a bug number.
About DeFuBu
...a little,
Jesus. I just sent 3
bug reports in a row, in name of the French translation team and the last
one (which happens to be my translation for libroxen-imho debconf templates)
won (yeah, I cheated twice).
Considering that Michel Grentzinger already got #200000 in the past, we
couldn't make less, indeed (yes,
Noel).
Funnily, looking at these old bug reports, I found that #100000 was fixed by
a future DPL (Branden) and #200000 by the then DPL (Martin
Michlmayr). So, if you dream to run for DPL, you should consider
NMU'ing libroxen-imho with the patch offered in #400000, or you should be
Turbo Fredrikson, the package maintainer.
Interesting stats:
- I couldn't find the oldest bug report. #2531 is dated March 14th 1996 (before Buzz release)
- Bug #100000 was reported on Jun 7th 2001. More than 5 years
- Bug #200000 was reported on Jul 4th 2003. 23 months
- Bug #300000 was reported on Mar 17th 2005. 20 months
- Bug #400000 is reported on Nov 23rd 2006. 20 months
So, the bug reporting rate is indeed more or less constant during last
years.