And the winner is: Reported by: Christian Perrier ; Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2006 11:48:11 UTC.

With all the talk about binary drivers, and Ubuntu's recent decision to ship them by default, I was going to try and rant or philosophize about the various issues it raises, and how I think ripping Ubuntu a new one for this move is justified, but instead I'm going to talk about kitties and happy things.

On the XSF front, the coolest news has come from people other than me. In addition to providing compiz updates and improvements, Thierry Reding has been busy cleaning up the Debian mesa packaging in the XSF repo. Mesa's Debian maintainer hasn't been very active over the past few months, so Thierry has stepped in to help out there.

Julien Cristau, who helped in the early work moving from XFree86 to Xorg, has returned to the XSF to take over maintainance of xterm, which I've almost completely neglected. Both these packages needed more dedicated maintainance than I could provide, and it's great to see them both being beaten in to shape.

Drew Parsons has been as industrious as ever, packaging updates for drivers so we can ship Etch with driver support that is very close to what will be released upstream as 7.2. In addition, he's packaged the modesetting branch of the i810 driver. This is an experimental development branch that will become the mainline in the nearish future, and it basically allows the driver to set modelines that aren't specified by the BIOS, just like other drivers.

Christian Perrier continues to rock the translations.

I've been doing unglamorous work bringing the Xorg docs in to the late 90's, thus making sure that we ship with docs so that users can tell what's on their systems.

Finally, Thierry has put a ton of work in building infrastructure to move the XSF svn repo over to git. I've been evaluating this, and hopefully we can make the move soon so that we hit etch+1 development running. Using git will provide an easier means of pulling from and pushing to upstream. Hopefully, downstream derivatives will also use git as well to facilitate this. I'm really excited about all of this because it feels like we're active across the board.

And now for the kitties. Nicole and I have adopted a cat. We get to take her home from the shelter next Wednesday, so if some random characters start to appear from me on irc, it's probably her fault. Rest assured that when I never run for DPL, she will be a far better running mate than Zeke. As a favor I would like to ask you, all my loyal readers: if I start to talk about my cat constantly, like one would one's own child, please punch me in the kidney. Thank you.

(this could probably deserve a DWN entry) On Monday, 30 October 2006, Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya (the principal archive of books and periodicals in the nepali language, a non-governmental and non-profit organization based in Nepal) released the 1.1 version of Nepalinux, a entirely localized version of GNU/Linux, based on Debian (and the Morphix installer) for use by Nepali-speaking users. This work is supported by the PAN localization project just like the DzongkhaLinux project is. In the case of Nepalinux, though, the project is supported locally by a NGO rather than the local government During last year, good connections have been developed between the developers of this localized distribution and the Debian project, mostly through work on Debian Installer localization. This confirms Debian as the preferred choice of many CDD developers in the region. The success of NepaLinux can probably be seen by all Debian contributors as a success of the Debian project.

...then check the number of projects you're part of on Alioth. Depending on the number of projects still using CVS among them, your problems might start if you are part of more than 15 projects and you will definitely have problems if you belong to more than 32. This, thanks to a glibc group limit bug in sarge... That make a good reason to release etch, indeed.

Today, the l10n NMU campaign had an interesting side effect: I fixed (hopefully correctly) a RC (and security) bug in screen. Indeed, while looking at this package to seek ignored debconf l10n bugs, I went on #395225...which was trivial to fix (upload the new upstream version). Moreover, it seems that I should soon have another RC bug fixed, as webfs also seems to have an RC bug and abandoned l10n bug reports. PS: my first impression about screen (definitely a useful package) is that it is not so actively maintained, though the maintainer is very responsive. He maybe needs help.

(update with stupid formatting errors fixed) Yes, partly. Julien implictely asks for apologies in his recent blog posting. Because I usually don't like to let conflict rot, I tried thinking about it and draw conclusions. I still think that the attitude of people who started the incident at the JDLL has been really bad and gives a poor image of the Debian project. This is what I intended to explain to the Mozilla representative in my mail. I definitely feel the need to explain that Debian is anything but a monolithic project and when I feel that this project is hurted by the attitude of some of its members, yes I feel the need to correct people's feelings. This mail was sent before Julien sent more explanations, privately and publicly, to me when he read my blog posting. I have to admit that Julien explanations have been clear and detailed and give another light on that story. So, maybe after reading them, I would not have sent that very mail he obviously violently reacts about, or it would have been worded differently. For this, yes, I apologize, Julien. On that very action, I haven't been as wise as I thought. I indeed failed the exact same way I think you guys failed. Probably because I was deeply hurted by seeing someone I've crossed in the french free software community for nearly 15 years (Daniel Glazman) having such a poor opinion of the project that counts the most for me. Does this change what I think? Probably not. Yes, it is a bit paternalistic to think that part of our community is unecessarily childish in its way to express its opinions. *This* is what IMReallyNSHO hurts the project and this deeply lowers the credibility of Debian in the overall community and, I'm afraid, more especially in our country. So, no, I will not apologize for my opinions and, yes, I claim some experience in conflicts solving, negotiation handling and managing the public image of the work I'm involved in. The general conclusion of all this is certainly that I should really have kept my current stance: focus on technical stuff and avoid wasting time, and maybe hurt the project, in "political" discussions. So, please Julien, consider this: is that really fair for people who appreciate your work as well as those who share your ideas, to lower your involvment because you have a conflict with another person? With no doubt, your work in Debian has received deep respect by a vast majority of our fellow Debian contributors. So is the work by Joss, who is probably among the persons I disagree the most with in our French community and who dislikes myself the same way you do. So what? Is that fair to hurt the project because you've been hurted by one of its members? I don't think so and I really hope that people whose opinions you have more respect for than mine will convince you to reconsider that stance. OK, this will sound paternalistic again, so I should probably stop by now. That blog posting is likely be the last non technical until we release Etch. And, as I don't like discussing technical stuff in blogs, it will probably be the last one until we release Etch.

Yes, partly. Julien implictely asks for apologies in his recent blog posting. Because I usually don't like to let conflict rot, I tried thinking about it and draw conclusions. I still think that the attitude of people who started the incident at the JDLL has been really bad and gives a poor image of the Debian project. This is what I intended to explain to the Mozilla representative in my mail. I definitely feel the need to explain that Debian is anything but a monolithic project and when I feel that this project is hurted by the attitude of some of its members, yes I feel the need to correct people's feelings. This mail was sent before Julien sent more explanations, privately and "a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2006/10/15/29">publicly, to me when he read my blog posting. I have to admit that Julien explanations have been clear and detailed and give another light on that story. So, maybe after reading them, I would not have sent that very mail he obviously violently reacts about, or it would have been worded differently. For this, yes, I apologize, Julien. On that very action, I haven't been as wise as I thought. I indeed failed the exact same way I think you guys failed. Probably because I was deeply hurted by seeing someone I've corssed in the french free software community for nearly 15 years (Daniel Glazman) having such a poor opinion of the project that counts the most for me. Does this change what I think? Probably not. Yes, it is a bit paternalistic to think that part of our community is unecessarily childish in its way to express its opinions. *This* is what IMHO hurts the project and this deeply lowers the credibility of Debian in the overall community and, I'm afraid, more especially in our country. So, no I will not apologize for these opinions and, yes, I claim some experience in conflicts solving, negotiation handling and managing the public image of the work I'm involved in. The general conclusion of all this is certainly that I should really have kept my current stance: focus on technical stuff and avoid wasting time, and maybe hurt the project, in "political" discussions. So, please Julien, consider this: is that really fair for people who appreciate your work as well as those who share your ideas, to lower your involvment because you have a conflict with another person? With no doubt, your work in Debian has received deep respect by a vast majority of our fellow Debian contributors. So is the work by Joss, who is probably among the persons I disagree the most with in our French community and who dislikes myself the same way you do. So what? Is that fair to hurt the project because you've been hurted by one of its members? I don't think so and I really hope that people whose opinions you have more respect for than mine will convince you to reconsider that stance. OK, this will sound paternalistic again, so I should probably stop by now. That blog posting is likely be the last non technical until we release Etch. And, as I don't like discussing technical stuff in blogs, it will probably be the last one until we release Etch.

(For the non-french readers, yes, there is an obvious grammatical error in the title of this post. This is a reference to a news story that happened years ago. Bubulle is Christian Perrier’s nickname, btw.) So, here it is, I am rethinking my involvement in the Debian Project. And it’s all Bubulle’s fault. I am not leaving the Project, because Debian is far more important to me than some rude bashing from Bubulle. It is a fact that Bubulle and me have agreed to disagree on a number of topics, it’s also a fact that we are both committed to Debian. In the past few weeks, a number of things happened, and we both said things we probably regret (at least I do). I do not like this paternalistic tone he sometimes demonstrate in mailing-list postings. I totally hate that, to be frank. But I can pretty much deal with it as long as it’s not aimed at me. He tagged one of his debconf-notes-are-evil-and-useless-crap-please-remove-it filed against one of my packages as “not-fixed” even when I explained that it is not a bug and the note really is what I want. It implies that I am not fixing bugs, which is something I cannot accept. Debian bug reports tend to have the very first priority in my todo list. So far, I can deal with that. But what I cannot deal with, is this mail from Christian to Paul Rouget (the moron who first posted the photos of the Firefox/Iceweasel posters from the JDLL last saturday, vomitting on us, and the comments were even worse). Sorry, the mail is in french, I don’t know how well Google Translate performs on this one but you should give it a try. This is purely insulting. Christian did not even contact me, he did not even try to get the facts straight, and it looks like my last post, in which I explain what happened during the JDLL, was totally useless. So, congratulations Christian. I’m perhaps not the most active DD, but I’m quite active nonetheless. Well, that is, I was quite active and reactive. This is likely to change starting today. I’m not going to drop any packages. I’m not going to disappear. I’m not going to let Debian France down. I’m not going to let my packages rot in the archive. But I’m going to be noticeably less active and reactive. Next time you talk to me, it’d better be to apologize for this mail you sent to Paul Rouget. I /quit from both Freenode and OFTC on monday evening. I probably won’t come back. I feel way better already without being on these two networks, without reading Rapha l Hertzog blatantly lie about dunc-tank, without reading a whole lot of other crap. I’m taking a much-needed break. Fuck you. Pierre Habouzit, Josselin Mouette, Denis Barbier, Sam Hocevar, and others (you all know who you are): thank you, you guys rock. And GO GO GO dunc-bank !

So, finally, myself deciding to focus on technical work last months turned out to be a good idea which seems to be shared by a majority of fellow Debian developers. Of course, about some points, "le mal est fait" and for many, we are just a community of kids who are disconnected of reality. I'm afraid that Debian reputation is currently seriously damaged in the overall free software community and this, not because we are wrong on issues we raise (in short, I support the IceWeasel fork), but most of the time because we are unable to discuss issues without being uneccessarily childish and provocant. So, now for the important news, D-I has entered the final stages of the preparation for RC1. String freeze in progress, which means a window for translators to reach the heaven of being 100% everywhere.

Last weekend, I went to Zurich for the second leg of my own personal BSP marathon. Martin Krafft organised the BSP at the AI Lab in Zurich, arranging sponsorship and encouraging local DDs and users to turn up. Martin and I started early on Saturday morning, opening up the lab shortly before 9am and making a start on the RC bug list. Over the course of the next few hours, more people turned up and started work too - local DDs and a couple of Debian users from ETH. We worked our way through a fair number of bugs that day; personally I closed #389318 (a grotty FTBFS bug caused by IMHO a design mistake upstream - parsing header files using a simple awk script to create an m4 script to then generate C source) and spent quite some time digging into some other bugs. For our late dinner on Saturday, we headed to a local American-style bar/restaurant in Oerlikon called Cheyenne. Their speciality, it seems, is the "Big Mama", the largest burger I've ever seen! It comes on a huge serving plate, and is enough to feed up to 4 people...

I took the chance over dinner to chat with the small group of locals, especially Axel Beckert who had some interesting stories about Fedora, Opera and other groups. On Sunday, we started slightly later but probably had a more productive day in terms of the number of bugs closed. I fixed some silly FTBFS issues in ser: #384772 and #390008 were both caused by the build system assuming i386/amd64 compiler options. I adapted patches suggested by Julien Blache from his own work on openser (thanks!) and tested on my sparc and hppa systems at home. Job done... For the rest of the day, I used the time to work on remaining bugs in my own packages. Both CVS and debian-cd needed new uploads to be ready for the Etch freeze. CVS had a bucket-load of new translations following Christian Perrier's call, and debian-cd had a large number of bugs that had already been fixed in svn for a long time. Between those 2 uploads (and some other old bugs in debian-cd that needed reviewing) that made another 17 bugs fixed, although none of them were RC. Once those uploads were done, I continued on with my debian-cd multi-arch development work. On Sunday evening, we went into the middle of the old city centre in Zurich to a more traditional Swiss restaurant. Several of Martin's colleagues from the lab joined us, and we had some widely varying conversation, ranging from Debian (of course! *grin*) to gossip in the lab via lots of other topics. Due to my ridiculously early flight home on Monday morning we couldn't stay out too late nattering, but nonetheless all the people seemed to enjoy themselves. The Swiss group were a fair bit quieter then the Dutch the previous weekend, but seemed just as committed to getting work done and getting Etch out on time. It was lovely to meet and spend time with them, and I've promised to go back and visit again soon. Until then, I've put my small selection of photos online.

More than one month ago, when back from holidays (without a real break in my Debian activities, thanks to hotels in Mexico with Wifi), I decided to focus on technical work. No more sterile discussions, no more arguing in political Debian mailing lists, no more lessons given to the entire world (something that we(fr_FR) are so well known for). Just technical stuff and one goal: the i18n Extremadura meeting. That meeting went so well that I still have tons of work to do, combined to new organization and duties at work. This left nearly no room for tentations to react to the various events that shaked out little world recently et C'est Tres Bien, mes petits amis. I will certainly continue with that good resolution. After all, we have to release in December, don't we? :-). And we have an interesting l10n NMU campaign running as well as a running jihad against many boring and useless debconf notes.

Well, I haven't been much active blogging these days. I indeed was quite busy at work with a reorganization taking place in my department and a few more responsibilities to have for me. My biggest holidays of the year begin right now. I'll leave today and visit my mom and my sister's family in the region of St-Etienne, in France. Then back home three days later and we will leave for a 18-days trip in Mexico on Thursday. This year is my mexican year..:-) That means a 3-week break in mail and Debian activities. See you in late August with, hopefully, a new beta of the installer which will have been released by our tireless release manager Frans Pop. I will come back and the base system will already be frozen and all of us on our way to the Etch release. Great. Hugs to those of you I use to hug and kisses to others!

So, Debian France is on its way. Hurrah! Some friends I have in the Debian project have asked me why I wasn't in the founding members. The answer is easy: fouding members of a French non-profit organization have to be physically present at the founding meeting. As I couldn't make it to the LSM, this explains why I'm not listed there. Of course, I'll be in the very first members of the organization, as soon as the legal stuff will allow it. Congratulations to all the people who were involved in that process.

Last week, I finally becamed annoyed enough by the huge amount of spam I receive, mostly on my @debian.org address. So, I decided that my current anti-spam measures (SpamAssassin running on my home server, which receives all my mail, as well as my laptop, which collects it) are probably not enough. In the same time, I was seeing a few people talking about CRM114 in various occasions. It seemed easy to setup enough for me to try doing somethign with it (I usually give up on stuff that requires too much effort....). Installing it on my laptop was fairly easy, as a Debian package exists for it. Using it through procmail recipes required some documentation reading, but no more than 1 hour. The most important part has been training it. I did so for about one week by feeding undetected spam to it and teach it that it is actually spam...and of course doing the opposite with false positives on ham. One week later, I feel safe enough to actually filter all mails detected by CRM114 as spam to a dedicated mailbox, which I of course will have to investigate once a day to sort out remaining false positives. But now, my incoming mailbox is clean again and it really seems that the time I invested in learning CRM114 and teaching it about spam/ham will very quickly be worth it. In short, just try it: there are chances that you won't regret it. PS: of course, things would probably be better if Debian mail machines were using some measures similar to those finally adopted on Alioth with the help of Pierre Habouzit (RBL+greylisting, IIRC). Old debate in the project....let's hope it will happen some day if nothing I'm unaware of does prevent it.

After the DzongkhaLnux launch event which I already blogged about as well as published a report in debian-devel-announce, I got interviewed by Computerworld.au. They turned this interview into one of their head stories, which IMHO gives Debian an interesting exposure. Moreover, I am very happy of the way they wrote the story, which gives Debian the credit it deserves in that story and gives a very good transcription of my own ideas about free software. It also puts yet more exposure on the Bhutanese authorities initiative and I think they really deserve it as well. Thanks indeed to Pascal Hakim who made this possible and to Dahna McConnachie who wrote the news entry and conducted the interview.

My Debconf pictures are already on the Debconf gallery, however, they don't have comments. Today, I uploaded them to my own gallery, here with comments, legends, stupid things, etc. Enjoy...or run away....

For people who still can support my annoying and tireless enthusiasm without being distracted from the serious work of building an operating system, I have put my Bhutan pictures online. Enjoy...or run away.

Kudzu Zangpo La (very honored to meet you) So, the reason for which I travelled so long a few days ago was the Dzongkha Linux Launch. This event has been incredibly successful and rich for me, today. Just imagined that several ministries of Bhutan were attending the launch of a Debian-derived distribution, entirely localized in the Dzongkha language, the national language of Bhutan. I expected something really motivating but I can assure you, my dear Debian friends, that I wasn't expecting something with so much importance for that country. Seeing the "Chief Guest" of the event, the Honorable ministry of Education, say that "we had a collective dream and we realized it" and seeing that small CD containing a full Linux system, entirely using the Dzongkha language, that can be used by any, or nearly any, person in Bhutan, is a huge achievement. Actually, I was proud to mention that this "dream" is indeed the dream that motivates many actors of the Free Software Movement since 20 years and me since about 10 years. So, actually, I was deeply honored to represent the Debian project here and be invited to give a keynote lecture about "Free SOftware and the Global Community". I will certainly write a more formal report about this and send it to -devel-announce, but I already wanted to share my enthusiasm with all you, people in the Debian community, who are the ones who make this possible.

This trip to Bhutan is really an experience to have. First of all, that's my very first trip to Asia, so many things are actually new to me. I'm just like a 12-year old kid...:) I have been incredibly lucky to have flights booked on Emirates. This airline company is by far the best I have ever used. Aircrafts are all brand new (or I have been lucky enough to have theit only two brand new ones). Cute entertainment system which JoeyH would have loved hacking and Erinn would have loved putting games on it (maybe some were from your company, dear?). Large seats....and plane filled at about 30%, so 3 seats for myself in the Dubai-Bangkok flight and 2 in the Paris-Dubai. Geesh. My co-travellers from the trip to Mexico would appreciate the difference, I think. The aircraft crew is one of the friendliest I have ever seen (and cutest, should I say?). Iberia dragons are far away. Very international crew: on the plane from Dubai to Bangkok (which was continuing to Australia and NZ), the total number of languages spoken by the crew was 21. Not exactly as many as languages supported in D-I, but not that bad, indeed. I would have been tempted to continue to Sydney and Auckland. I bet I would have easily found hosts over there to stay for a while (hello to my friend Andrew "karora"). But I stopped in Bangkok. Huge noisy airport, with work IP-over-DNS on the WiFi...nice. As I had to spend nearly 12 hours there, that helps. I was tempted to go sleeping in a hotel, but the only easily accessible one is a luxury thing, for USD280 per night. Dude. So, let's spend the night on the hard seats in the waiting areas, trying to sleep with a bunch of other lost people. The stop in Dubai was an experience. The airport is simply...a big mall with luxury shops everywhere (and bloody expensive stuff: it seems that as long as you write "duty free" on shops, all jerks come and spend their money to buy stuff they could have bought for half the price in their country). However, seeing the city from the top is somehting one has to do once. Pictures to come on my gallery. I'll maybe blog again from Bhutan, if I manage to get time enough (I bet that I'll be very busy as there are a few people over there that I'm really impatient to meet and talk with). And, agin, nice pictures from the airplane to come, I hope (Himalaya, dude!) See you in Timphu!

Never ever fly on Iberia anymore unless they can certify that only Finnish or Norwegian people are in the flight. Or that I have my wooden base-ball bat handy to puch the two jerks who speak (loud) all night long in the two seats in front of me (and Petr)....and laugh louder and louder as long as they keep drinking the whishy-cokes offered by an incompetent and inefficient crew. First time this happens to me in transatlantic flights where, usually, people are more civilized. PS, later: these morons were indeed Mexican, not Spanish.