I will start linking to places we stayed at etc, from now on. On the one hand, we already left those places so my paranoid self can rest assured that no one will come hunt us down, on the other hand, I decided to only to name and link to those places which really deserve a mention. If they are linked here, I can whole-heartedly recommend them. Mongolia After leaving through the Russian border fortifications, Mongolia was an instant and welcome change. Trees growing right next to the tracks, branches forming a bit of a natural tunnel; the trains passing by keeping branches at bay, but the trees free to grow wherever else they pleased. A few hundred meters later below a rocky ledge, a cow had apparently fallen down and died. Partially decomposed flesh still clinging halfway to its rib-cage, it proved to be a sign of the (mostly) more laid-back attitude Mongolians tend to take. After finally getting our passports back and being allowed to leave the train, we first headed to the station to get some money. At ~1800:1, the exchange rate for Tugruk against Euro speaks volumes about inflation; imagine my surprise that the MNT 20,000 note is the largest one. It's also the one and only amount any and all ATMs will default to. We were quite surprised by how cheap everything was, even in the one single store within the station directly behind the border. In Russia, travellers expect to pay hefty markups when shopkeepers know they can charge them, not so in Mongolia. The woman in the trash Upon returning from the station, our waggon was just merrily being driving away on its own by a lone engine, something we had not anticipated or appreciated a whole lot. A woman (we hadn't noticed her before) who was busy scavenging a trash container for food for herself and her scrawny-looking son happily stopped what she was doing and, with a big smile, moved her hands around and smacked them back together, signalling us that our waggon would be attached to a different train for the subsequent journey. To put it mildly, I was stunned; we had met people eating from the trash in Russia as well (yes, I always make a point of giving them enough for a few decent meals; anyone eating out of the trash actually needs and definitely deserves something good happening to them), but they were glum and disheartened. Here, there was someone who not only had to look out for herself, but for a three or four year old boy as well, and still was just so... positive... I don't know if I would have it in me to act the same way... As an aside, even though we were just a few kilometers across the border from Russia, she did not actually take the money from me, she cupped her hands to receive it by having me place it into her hands; this is a very Asian thing in my experience and something we would see both in Mongolia and China consistently. Later, when we were back in our waggon, she passed by and happened to see the Spot Messgenger 2 dangling in front of our window, its lights blinking every five seconds. For a solid twenty minutes, until the train started moving again, she squatted down with her son, oggling the Spot. I have no idea what she was thinking it was and I had no chance to explain it to her, but she was really fascinated and just kept staring and staring. When we finally left the station, we waved to and smiled at each other, she ran after us, and then she was gone. All in all, this was one the more memorable things which happened to us. Mongolian Infrastructure When I say that Mongolians as a whole tend to be a lot more laid back than Russians, this extends to infrastructure as well, but not in the good way.

• Where Russia uses concrete sleepers, Mongolia uses roughly-hewn wooden ones.
• Where Russia has two rail tracks, Mongolia has a single one which is extended by parking spots to let other trains pass then and now.
• Where Russia maintains a perimeter along their rail tracks, Mongolia has a mainly gapless barbed-wire fence against animals on both sides; said fence may be near or far, covered with bushes or standing on its own. Its there so serve a purpose, but that's it. There's nothing else in ways of track protection.
• Where Russia has well-built, if dirty, crossings with one design spanning across all of Russia, Mongolia has random crossings that happen to look like they look.
• While Russia's streets are covered with potholes, Mongolia's are covered with potcaves.
• Some smaller stations didn't warrant a stop, but they couldn't be passed at full speed, either. Basically, if someone was waiting at the station, the train would come to a complete stop. At night, attendants would lean out of the train with flashlights, scanning the station and its surroundings for potential customers. If anyone was found, they signalled the driver and we would stop. Strange, but it works.

Ulan Bator Little Dhingis Khan We arrived in Ulan Bator at six in the morning and started haggling with taxi drivers. Our hostel had (stale, it turned out) information about acceptable fare from station to their place on their website, 5,000 MNT was supposedly OK. Our driver tried to get 20,000, then 15,000, then 12,000, then 10,000, went down to 7,000 and finally settled for 5,000, all this interspersed with frequent "no" by us and walking away. Once on the road, he wanted to convince me that we had agreed upon 5,000 per person, something that did not quite work out for him. When we arrived, he started to tell me that he was good friends with the hostel manager and that said manager would surely want us to pay more; again, that did not work too well. He made the mistake of getting our luggage out of his trunk immediately (we always kept all our stuff in the passenger area afterwards...) before I paid and even though I only had a 10,000 or 20,000 note, I insisted on correct change. The same old dance began anew, with him edging closer to the correct change in steps of 1,000 MNT. He tried to get away several times, but I stood in his door and held it open; if he had just driven off, I couldn't have stopped him, but that thankfully didn't occur to him. After he shoved all small change (MNT is bill only, no coins) he had with him at me and wanted to make off yet again, I was close to throwing all the small crap at him, but after he, a man of maybe 1.65 meter and sitting down, tried to signal his willingness for a fist fight and me, a man of 1.94 meter and standing started laughing, he gave me 2,000 more and drove off cursing. In case you forgot, at that exchange rate, we argued about two to three Euro, but as he tried to cheat, it became a matter of principle. The Hostel, part one All parking lots and other property in Ulan Bator have a small watchtower with private 24/7 guards; said guard ambled down, let us in and woke the poor woman who was forced to let us check in. As she was Mongolian as well, we were a bit surprised when she switched from broken English to perfect German, but the owners of the OASIS are a German-Austrian couple so I guess that makes sense. Fighting through the war Traffic in Ulan Bator is war. Lonely Planet talks about the city being too newly motorized and that it did not have to develop a culture of driving, yet. This is a euphemism for "no one has any qualms maiming or killing you". Everyone is driving like mad, nudging and racing their way in front of each other. If a driver has an oppurtunity to get ahead by a few centimeters with his small car, thereby blocking the way for several buses, making a whole parking lot grind to a halt and thereby deadlocking themselves, they will take said opportunity, and gladly. Red lights are gentle suggestions, there to be mainly ignored; police will not drive over red lights, but they will not stop anybody else from doing so, either. A hearse will have a dozen or more cars following it, all driving in a tight pack, aggressively attacking anyone who dares to wedge in between them and expecting all other traffic to make way even if they are driving over a red light. Crossing a main street in Ulan Bator as a pedestrian is hell. There are a few traffic lights and they help to some extent, but you still need to be extremely careful when crossing a street. Thailand, India, Russia, China, no matter where it's supposedly hard to cross a street by foot, I never had any issues weaseling through. In UB, it takes planning, determination, and a lot of attention, especially as there are stretches where there's not a traffic light in sight. While maintaining eye contact with a driver usually ensures that they will try not to hit you, this does not work in the least in UB. In the evening, I took to shining a high-powered flashlight at the ground to the oncoming traffic's side to mark ourselves and decrease the likelihood of being hit. This worked well in combination with sprinting through gaps in the traffic, except for one guy who actively aimed for us and did not slow down. He even changed lanes, just to keep us in front of his car... Shining the flashlight directly at him in highest mode made him break quite violently though; a good thing, as he may have hit us had he not slowed down. UB itself Ulan Bator is weird. It has clear signs of westernization, but it's still very much an old city. There is one large store which would fit into any random shopping center in Germany (which are tiny when compared to most other countries) and which carries most goods, if with a limited selection. Its supermarket is extremely well stocked with food and drink from all other the world and laughably cheap (for us) prices. While its infrastructure is definitely crumbling, the city is clean, especially when compared to Russia. Two girls from Stuttgart who we met during our Trans-Siberian travels commented on how clean Russian cities were when compared to home, but that may be more of a statement about Stuttgart than about Russia... Anyway, in Mongolia in general and in UB in particular, there's a concise effort to make what they have look nice and clean. There is no trash in the streets, loose gravel and earth is removed from the curb by dedicated workers, all areas of packed earth are sieved and all large stones removed. All in all, it's a lot cleaner (if more dusty and sandy) than Russian cities if somewhat older and more shabby-looking. That being said, Mongolia's countryside is littered There were several street stalls consisting of nothing more than a cardboard box on a stool selling single chewing gums and cigarettes from the original packaging; it's normal for people to buy one cigarette or one piece of chewing gum and walk on. The sights of UB were nice, but nothing too special. Outlook In the next part, I'll cover "The Hostel, part disaster" and generally talk more about excrement than I thought one could write before moving on to China (were I am located at the time of this writing).

I have a Seagate GoFlex Net with two 2TB harddrives attached to it via SATA. The device itself is connected to my PC via its Gigabit Ethernet connection. It houses a Marvell Kirkwood at 1.2GHz and 128MB. I am booting Debian from a USB stick connected to its USB 2.0 port. The specs are pretty neat so I planned it as my NAS with 4TB of storage being attached to it. The most common use case is the transfer of big files (1-10 GB) between my laptop and the device. Now what are the common ways to achieve this? scp:

scp /local/path user@goflex:/remote/path

rsync:

rsync -Ph /local/path user@goflex:/remote/path

sshfs:

sshfs -o user@goflex:/remote/path /mnt
cp /local/path /mnt

ssh:

ssh user@goflex "cat > /remote/path" < /local/path

I then did some benchmarks to see how they perform: scp: 5.90 MB/s rsync: 5.16 MB/s sshfs: 5.05 MB/s ssh: 5.42 MB/s Since they all use ssh for transmission, the similarity of the result does not come as a surprise and 5.90 MB/s are also not too shabby for a plain scp. It means that I can transfer 1 GB in a bit under three minutes. I could live with that. Even for 10 GB files I would only have to wait for half an hour which is mostly okay since it is mostly known well in advance that a file is needed. But lets see if we can somehow get faster than this. Lets analyze where the bottleneck is. Lets have a look at the effective TCP transfer rate with netcat:

ssh user@goflex "netcat -l -p 8000 > /dev/null"
dd if=/dev/zero bs=10M count=1000   netcat goflex 8000

79.3 MB/s wow! Can we get more? Lets try increasing the buffer size on both ends. This can be done using nc6 with the -x argument on both sides.

ssh user@goflex "netcat -x -l -p 8000 > /dev/null"
dd if=/dev/zero bs=10M count=1000   netcat -x gloflex 8000

103 MB/s okay this is definitely NOT the bottleneck here. Lets see how fast I can read from my harddrive:

hdparm -tT /dev/sda

114.86 MB/s.. hmm... and writing to it?

ssh user@goflex "time sh -c 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/remote/path bs=10M count=100; sync'"

42.93 MB/s Those values are far faster than my puny 5.90 MB/s I get with scp. A look at the CPU usage during transfer shows, that the ssh process is at 100% CPU usage the whole time. It seems the bottleneck was found to be ssh and the encryption/decryption involved. I'm transferring directly from my laptop to the device. Not even a switch is in the middle so encryption seems to be quite pointless here. Even authentication doesnt seem to be necessary in this setup. So how to make the transfer unencrypted? The ssh protocol specifies a null cipher for not-encrypted connections. OpenSSH doesnt support this. Supposedly, adding

  "none", SSH_CIPHER_NONE, 8, 0, 0, EVP_enc_null  

to cipher.c adds a null cipher but I didnt want to patch around in my installation. So lets see how a plain netcat performs.

ssh user@goflex "netcat -l -p 8000 > /remote/path"
netcat goflex 8000 < /local/path

32.9 MB/s This is far better! Lets try a bigger buffer:

ssh user@goflex "netcat -x -l -p 8000 > /remote/path"
netcat -x goflex 8000 < /local/path

37.8 MB/s now this is far better! My Gigabyte will now take under half a minute and my 10 GB file under five minutes. But it is tedious to copy multiple files or even a whole directory structure with netcat. There are far better tools for this. An obvious candidate that doesnt encrypt is rsync when being used with the rsync protocol.

rsync -Ph /local/path user@goflex::module/remote/path

30.96 MB/s which is already much better! I used the following line to have the rsync daemon being started by inetd:

rsync stream tcp nowait root /usr/bin/rsync rsyncd --daemon

But it is slower than pure netcat. If we want directory trees, then how about netcatting a tarball?

ssh user@goflex "netcat -x -l -p 8000   tar -C /remote/path -x"
tar -c /local/path   netcat goflex 8000

26.2 MB/s so tar seems to add quite the overhead. How about ftp then? For this test I installed vsftpd and achieved a speed of 30.13 MB/s. This compares well with rsync. I also tried out nfs. Not surprisingly, its transfer rate is up in par with rsync and ftp at 31.5 MB/s. So what did I learn? Lets make a table: </dr></dr></dr></dr></dr></dr></dr></dr></dr></dr>

method	speed in MB/s
scp	5.90
rsync+ssh	5.16
sshfs	5.05
ssh	5.42
netcat	32.9
netcat -x	37.8
netcat -x tar	26.2
rsync	30.96
ftp	30.13
nfs	31.5

For transfer of a directory structure or many small files, unencrypted rsync seems the way to go. It outperforms a copy over ssh more than five-fold. When the convenience of having the remote data mounted locally is needed, nfs outperforms sshfs at speeds similar to rsync and ftp. As rsync and nfs already provide good performance, I didnt look into a more convenient solution using ftp. My policy will now be to use rsync for partial file transfers and mount my remote files with nfs. For transfer of one huge file, netcat is faster. Especially with increased buffer sizes it is a quarter faster than without. But copying a file with netcat is tedious and hence I wrote a script that simplifies the whole remote-login, listen, send process to one command. First argument is the local file, second argument is the remote name and path just as in scp.

#!/bin/sh -e
HOST=$ 2%%:* 
USER=$ HOST%%@* 
if [ "$HOST" = "$2" -o "$USER" = "$HOST" ]; then
        echo "second argument is not of form user@host:path" >&2
        exit 1
fi
HOST=$ HOST#*@ 
LPATH=$1
LNAME= basename "$1" 
RPATH= printf %q $ 2#*: /$LNAME 
ssh "$USER@$HOST" "nc6 -x -l -p 8000 > $RPATH" &
sleep 1.5
pv "$LPATH"   nc6 -x "$HOST" 8000
wait $!
ssh "$USER@$HOST" "md5sum $RPATH" &
md5sum "$LPATH"
wait $!

I use pv to get a status of the transfer on my local machine and ssh to login to the remote machine and start netcat in listening mode. After the transfer I check the md5sum to be sure that everything went fine. This step can of course be left out but during testing it was useful. Escaping of the arguments is done with printf %q. Problems with the above are the sleep, which can not be avoided but must be there to give the remote some time to start netcat and listen. This is unclean. A next problem with the above is, that one has to specify a username. Another is, that in scp, one has to double-escape the argument while above this is not necessary. The host that it netcats to is the same as the host it ssh's to. This is not necessarily the case as one can specify an alias in ~/.ssh/config. Last but not least this only transfers from the local machine to the remote host. Doing it the other way round is of course possible in the same manner but then one must be able to tell how the local machine is reachable for the remote host. Due to all those inconveniences I decided not to expand on the above script. Plus, rsync and nfs seem to perform well enough for day to day use.

It's not too obvious how to test email receive handlers in Appengine. The important observation is that the handlers take HTTP POSTs with multipart/form-data encoded data. In python you can build an email to be handled with the following code:

from email.message import Message 

def test_email(self):
  body = Message()
  body.add_header('to', 'test-unknown@other-app.com')
  body.add_header('from', 'test@app.com')
  body.add_header('Content-Type', 'multipart/alternative', boundary=self.boundary)
  text = Message()
  text['content-type'] = 'text/plain'
  text.set_payload('I am I! Don Quixote!  The man of La Mancha!')
  body.attach(text)

  post(payload=body.as_string())

Today my system froze and failed to reboot. I plugged in an Ubuntu live USB stick and booted from it. Then I discovered the problem that my Intel SSD 320 broke. The output of hdparm is attached to the end of the blog post. You can see that the device size is reduced to 8 MB from 120 GB and the serial number is called BAD_CTX 00000159. The firmware of the SSD was up-to-date and the last firmware update should have fixed the 8 MB bug. The Intel SSD 320 is my second SSD. My first SSD was a Super Talent Ultradrive GX 64GB, which died after around fifteen month of heavy use. It left a big bunch of my data corruption behind. SSDs seems to be very unreliable. Both SSDs died, but I cant remember that one of my HDDs died. $ sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda /dev/sda: ATA device, with non-removable media
Model Number: INTEL SSDSA2CW120G3
Serial Number: BAD_CTX 00000159
Firmware Revision: 4PC10362
Transport: Serial, ATA8-AST, SATA 1.0a, SATA II Extensions, SATA Rev 2.5, SATA Rev 2.6
Standards:
Used: unknown (minor revision code 0x0029)
Supported: 8 7 6 5
Likely used: 8
Configuration:
Logical max current
cylinders 16383 16
heads 16 16
sectors/track 63 63
--
CHS current addressable sectors: 16128
LBA user addressable sectors: 16384
LBA48 user addressable sectors: 16384
Logical Sector size: 512 bytes
Physical Sector size: 512 bytes
device size with M = 1024*1024: 8 MBytes
device size with M = 1000*1000: 8 MBytes
cache/buffer size = unknown
Nominal Media Rotation Rate: Solid State Device
Capabilities:
LBA, IORDY(can be disabled)
Standby timer values: spec'd by Standard, no device specific minimum
R/W multiple sector transfer: Max = 16 Current = 16
DMA: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5 *udma6
Cycle time: min=120ns recommended=120ns
PIO: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
Cycle time: no flow control=120ns IORDY flow control=120ns
Commands/features:
Enabled Supported:
Security Mode feature set
* Power Management feature set
* Write cache
* Look-ahead
* Host Protected Area feature set
* WRITE_BUFFER command
* READ_BUFFER command
* NOP cmd
* DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE
SET_MAX security extension
* 48-bit Address feature set
* Device Configuration Overlay feature set
* Mandatory FLUSH_CACHE
* FLUSH_CACHE_EXT
* General Purpose Logging feature set
* WRITE_ DMA MULTIPLE _FUA_EXT
* 64-bit World wide name
* IDLE_IMMEDIATE with UNLOAD
* WRITE_UNCORRECTABLE_EXT command
* READ,WRITE _DMA_EXT_GPL commands
* Segmented DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE
* Gen1 signaling speed (1.5Gb/s)
* Gen2 signaling speed (3.0Gb/s)
* Phy event counters
* Software settings preservation
* SMART Command Transport (SCT) feature set
* SCT LBA Segment Access (AC2)
* SCT Error Recovery Control (AC3)
* SCT Features Control (AC4)
* SCT Data Tables (AC5)
* Data Set Management TRIM supported (limit 8 blocks)
* Deterministic read ZEROs after TRIM
Security:
Master password revision code = 65534
supported
not enabled
not locked
frozen
not expired: security count
supported: enhanced erase
2min for SECURITY ERASE UNIT. 2min for ENHANCED SECURITY ERASE UNIT.
Logical Unit WWN Device Identifier: 500151795951d4b9
NAA : 5
IEEE OUI : 001517
Unique ID : 95951d4b9
Checksum: correct


A while back, I was thinking. Playing the flute or whistling on a bottle is the exact same technique; but, in my opinion, the sound that comes from a bottle has some interesting overtones, making for a nice sound. Since the material of which an instrument is made is in large part responsible for the overtones that it produces (apart from the technique used by the musician), I wondered if nobody had ever come up with the idea of making a flute in glass. Turns out that, of course, this has already happened. In fact, the modern concert flute wouldn't have been possible without one Claude Laurent, a Parisian instrument maker who received a patent for "a new [method of] making flutes from crystal"; part of his patent described a method of attaching the valves to the instrument. It was this method which was used by Theobald Boehm when he invented the fingering system that defines the modern concert flute. The price of an intact Laurent flute today is, of course, beyond my budget; and it doesn't look like there are any glass flutes being made that use the Boehm system. But that doesn't mean there aren't any glass flutes being made anymore; indeed, a short look around the Internet quickly turned up Hall Crystal Flutes, a family-owned business from Rochester in the US state of Washington. As the price was not too insane (49 USD for the instrument, plus almost the same amount for shipping it to Belgium), I ordered one of their piccolos in C. Last wednesday, a woman from the post office rang my doorbell, with a pakage containing the new instrument. Unfortunately, however, it had a customs tax of slightly more than what was in my wallet at the time, which meant I could only fetch it from the post office the next day. At least I could pay in plastic there. After having had it for a few days, I can make a few observations:

• For someone who's been used to the Boehm system for as long as I have been, I thought the fingering system would be very confusing, but it's not too bad.
• As I bought a piccolo and not a flute, the sound is fairly sharp, and not entirely what I expected of it. Having said that, it's certainly not too bad, and I expect I'll be able to improve with time.
• Playing the highest notes on the fingering chart is challenging, and I've thus far not been able to produce the very highest note on that chart. Since playing a piccolo (any piccolo) is always slightly more difficult than playing a regular flute, however, especially in the higher octaves, that's not too unexpected.
• Playing sharp or flat notes requires me to open one of the holes slightly. Getting a correct sharp or flat requires, obviously, to open the hole to the exact correct amount, which will require quite some practice to do well. But I'm sure I'll get there, eventually.

I've been playing a few diddlies on it for the past few days, and it's been fun so far. We'll see where this leads us.

I met Francesca in Debconf 11 in Banja Luka. If I recall correctly, it s Enrico Zini who introduced me to her, because she was the madamezou (her IRC nickname) who started to get involved in the publicity team. Since then and despite having a bachelor thesis to complete she got way more involved and even gained official responsibilities in the project. Before starting with the interview, I wanted to mention that Francesca is drafting a diversity statement for Debian I was expecting the discussions to go nowhere but she listened to all objections and managed to improve the text and build a consensus around it. Thank you for this and keep up the good work, Francesca! Rapha l: Who are you? Francesca: My name is Francesca, I m 30 and I studied Social Sciences. Currently I live in Italy but I m planning to go abroad (not a lot of jobs here for geeky social scientists). Apart for Debian and FLOSS world in general, I have unrestrained passions for chocolate; zombie movies; sci-fi; zombie books; knitting sewing crafting and DIY in general; zombie videogames; bicycles; pulling apart objects to look inside them; splatter B movies, David Foster Wallace s books, playing trumpet, and did I already mentioned zombies? Days are too short for all this stuff, but I try to do my best. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Francesca: Some years ago I was stuck in bed for literally some months, due to a grave series of migraine attacks. I wasn t able to do anything: no social life, no books or television. So, I decided to turn on the laptop and do something constructive with it: I was already a Debian user and it seemed quite logical to me to try to give back to the community. I am not a coder and I ve not studied Computer Science, so my first step was to join an Italian Debian on-line community (Debianizzati) and help with tutorials, users support, wiki management. In a couple of months I learnt many things: helping other users with their problems forces you to do lots of research! My first contributions to the Debian project were mostly translations of the main website. Translators are the perfect typos spotters: they work so precisely on the text to be translated that they finish to do a great QA job. This is how I ve started to contribute to the Debian website: with very simple things, fixing typos or wrong links or misplaced wml tags. I still remember my first commit to the website: the idea was to undercase some tags, but it ended up that I misplaced some of them and in addition I fixed them only in the English page and not on the translations as well. When after a couple of minutes, K re Thor Olsen a long time contributor of the team and now webmaster reverted my commit, I felt so stupid and full of shame. But, to my great surprise, no one treated me like an idiot for that error: Gerfried Fuchs, one of the guru of the team, replies me in a really helpful and polite way explaining what I did wrong and how to do things correctly. I think this episode was a turning point in my Debian life: there s this idea that Debian Developers are just a bunch of arrogant assholes and maybe it was true in the past, but for my experience they are not. Well, at least the ones I met and work with .

To my great surprise, no one treated me like an idiot for that error.

Since then, I joined the WWW team and helped them apply the shiny new design provided by Kalle S derman. A lot of work was done during the week immediately before the release of the new website. Oh that was a week! We worked night and day to have the new design ready for February 6th, and it was fantastic when we finally published it, simultaneously with the release of Squeeze. At the same time, I started to contribute more actively to the Debian Publicity team, not only translating news but also writing them. It can sound scary for a non native English speaker to write something from scratch in English, but you have to keep in mind that your text will be reviewed by native speakers before being published. And we have some fantastic reviewers in the English localisation team: particularly Justin B Rye, who is tireless in his effort and more recently Moray Allan. I think I m particularly lucky to work with all these people: there s a special mood in both Publicity and WWW team, which makes you feel happy to do things and at the same time pushes you to do more just because it s fun to work with them sharing jokes, ideas, rants, patches and hugs. Rapha l: I believe that you have been trough the new member process very quickly. You re now a Non-Uploading Debian Developer. How was the experience and what does this mean to you? Francesca: Becoming a Debian Developer was not so obvious for me, because I didn t need to be a DD for the work I do in Debian. For instance, I don t maintain packages, so I had no reasons to want to become a DD in order to have uploading rights. For a while I didn t really feel the necessity of being a DD. Luckily, some people started to pester me about it, asking me to apply for the NM process. I remember Martin Zobel-Helas doing this for an entire week every single day, and Gerfried Fuchs doing it as well. Suddenly, I realized that people I worked with felt that I deserved the DD status and that I simply had thought I didn t. As a non coder and a woman, there probably was a bit of impostor syndrome involved. Having people encouraging me, gave me more confidence and the desire to finally become a DD. And so I did. The process for non uploading DD is identical to the one to become an uploading DD, with one exception: in the second part of the process (named Tasks and Skills) instead of questions about how to create and maintain packages, there are questions about the non packaging work you usually do in Debian. The general resolution which created the possibility to become a non uploading DD gave us a chance to recognize the great effort of Debian contributors who work in various area (translations, documentation, artworks, etc.) that were not always considered as important as packaging efforts. And this is great because if you are a regular contributor, if you love Debian and you are committed to the project, there are no reasons to not be an official member of it. With regards to this, I like the metaphor used by Meike Reichle in her recent talk about the Debian Women Project (video recording here):

a Debian Developer status is a lot like a citizenship in a country that you re living in. If you live in a country and you don t have citizenship, you can find a job, buy a house, have a family [...] but if this country at any point in time decides to go into a direction that you don t like, there s nothing you can do about it. You are not in the position to make any change or to make any effect on that country: you just live there, but there s no way that you can excercise influence on the people who run this country.

Rapha l: You recently joined the Debian Press Team. What does it involve and how are you managing this new responsibility? Francesca: The Press Team is basically the armed wing of the Publicity Team: it handles announcements that need to be kept private until the release, moderate the debian-announce and debian-news mailing list and maintain contacts with press people from outside the project. The real job, so, is done within the Publicity Team. The most important part of our work is to write announcements and the newsletter: while the newsletter is published bi-weekly, the announcements need to be write in a shorter timeframe. Localization is really important in spreading Debian word, so we work closely with translators: both announcements and DPN are usually translated in four or five different languages. The publicity work could be stressful, as we have strict deadlines, we need to take quick decisions and often do last-minute changes. Personally, I like it: I work better under pressure. But I know that is sometimes difficult for contributors to accept that we can t debate endlessly on details, we have just to go on and do our best in a given timeframe.

The publicity work could be stressful, as we have strict deadlines, [ ]. Personally, I like it.

Raphael: You re one of the main editor behind the Debian Project News. What s the role and scope of this newsletter? Francesca: Debian Project News is our beloved newsletter, direct successor of the Debian Weekly News founded by Joey Hess in 1999 and later kept alive by Martin Schulze. In 2007, Debian Weekly News was discontinued but in 2008 the project was revived by Alexander Reichle Schmehl. The idea behind DPN is to provide our users an overview of what is happening inside and outside the project. As the core team of editors is formed by three people, the main problem is to be able to collect enough news from various sources: in this sense we are always glad when someone points us to interesting blogposts, mails and articles. DPN is also a good chance for non coders to contribute to Debian: propose news, write paragraphs and review the draft before the publication are quite easy tasks but very useful. English native speakers can do a proofread (as no one of the main editors is a native speaker) while others can always translate DPN in their native language. People who want to help us can take a look at our wiki page.

DPN is also a good chance for non coders to contribute to Debian.

Just yesterday I realized that since January we don t miss or delay an issue: so I d like to thank the fantastic team of editors, reviewers and translators who made it possible. The team is now working on another way of spreading Debian s message: a long-time project is finally becoming real. Stay tuned, surprise arriving! Raphael: You re trying to organize IRC training sessions but that doesn t seem to take off in Debian, while it s quite common in the Ubuntu community. How do you explain that? Francesca: I m not sure about it: both Debian users and contributors seemed to appreciate this initiative in the past. I was quite surprised by the amount of Debian members present during the various sessions and by the amount of interesting questions asked by the users. So the only reason I can think about is that I need to put more enthusiasm in convincing the teams to do it: they need more encouragement (or to be pestered more!). I, for myself, think that IRC training sessions are a great way to promote our work, to share our best practice, to talk about our project to a wider audience. And I ll sure try to organize more of them. Help, suggestions, ideas are really welcome! Raphael: If you could spend all your time on Debian, what would you work on? Francesca: There is a project I d like to give more love, but I always end up without the time to do it: the debian-community.org project. Back in 2007, Holger Levsen founded it with the aim of reducing the gap between Debian contributors and Debian users, giving all an opportunity to contribute, share ideas and more. The project was discontinued and I d really like to revive it: in these years various things have changed, but I think that the core idea of having a node to connect existing local communities is still good and doable. In Debian we don t have the wide and well articulated local infrastructure present in other distributions (Ubuntu, particularly, but also Fedora): even if I don t like too centralized structures, I think that a better connection between the project and local groups of users and on-line communities would be a step forward for the project. Being part of the Events Team, I m aware of how much we need to improve our communication with local groups. An example is the events organization: sometimes, Publicity and Events teams even don t know about regional Debian related events (like booth at conferences, workshops, talks, install parties, etc) and this is a shame because we could offer a lot of help in organizing and promoting local events. What we lack is better communication. And debian-community.org project could give us exactly this. Could be a cluster of local groups, a platform for events organization and even a useful resource for newbies who want to find a local group near them. I started some effort in this sense, sending a proposal about it, working on a census of Debian local groups. Any help is appreciated! I m really curious to see how many Debian communities (from all around the world and the web) are out there, and I d love to have members from these communities better connected with the Debian Project. Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Probably the bikeshedding feticism of almost all of us. It s the other side of the coin of Debian s commitment to technical excellence and our perfectionism, but sometimes it leads just to endless discussions about details, and it is a blocker for various initiatives. In Debian, you have to be really patient and in a way stubborn to push some changes. This is frustrating sometimes. On the other hand, I really appreciate how people take some times to think to each proposals, give some feedback and discuss about it: the process could be annoying, indeed, but the result is often an improvement of the initial proposal. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Most of my teammates are simply brilliant and adorable and hard-working. But I have to admit that I particularly admire David Pr vot: beside being a webmaster he does a lot of things, from French translations to DPN editing. All his contributions have a great quality and he s able to push you always further in doing things and doing them better. He is a good example of how I d like to be as contributor: smart, tireless, friendly.

---

Thank you to Francesca for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading her answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Google+, Twitter and Facebook.

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It s taken some time, but now none of my personal Linux hosts (4 in total) are running the 2.6 kernel any more. From the start (January) my company web host on Amazon EC2 has been running a 3.x kernel. My little Acer Aspire Revo low power home server, with attached disk pack that sits in my shed in a network cabinet has run 3.x for the last 6 months or so. My Linux laptop (Dell Studio 1558) which only recently got installed (and, since removing Windows, hasn t overheated once!) went to 3.x immediately. And the last piece of the puzzel is a virtual machine I ve had for many years with Bytemark.co.uk they re now offering a 3.2 kernel in their menu of selectable kernels. Not that 3.x is that much different than 2.6.3x; but its a line in the sand of feature and security thats easy to identify. But with nearly 15 years of looking at a 2.x kernel, its about time we moved to 3.x!

Just for you:

module main  
    import std (range);
    import std.io (printf, IO);
    /* print the Fahrenheit-Celcius table
        for fahr = 0, 20, ..., 300 */
    function main(mutable IO io)  
        Int lower = 0;   // lower bound
        Int upper = 300; // upper bound
        Int step = 20;   // step
        for (Int fahr in range(lower, upper, step))  
            Double celcius = 5 * (fahr - 32) / 9;
            std.io.printf(io, "%3d\t%6.1f\n", fahr, celcius);
         
     
 

It does not really look like it, but this language is purely functional. It represents side effects using unique types. If you declare a mutable parameter, you basically declare a unique input parameter and a unique output parameter. I m also giving you a list implementation

module std.container.list  
    /** The standard singly-linked list type */
    type List[E]  
        Nil;                    /** empty list */
        Node  
            E value;            /** current value */
            List[E] next;       /** remaining list */
         
     
 

Thus are only excerpts from a document with tens of pages and the reference implementation of the standard library. The incomplete working draft for the language is attached: JAK Programming Language Early Working Draft (28 pages). Update: Fixed the link.
Filed under: General

There are some really good Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices on the market. NetApp is one company that is known for making good products [1]. The advantage of a NAS is that you have a device with NVRAM for write-back caching, a filesystem that supports all the necessary features for best performance (NetApp developed their own filesystem WAFL to provide the features they needed), and a set of quality hardware that has been tested and certified to work together. If you want a cheap NAS then you end up with something running Linux with GPL filesystems. This isn t a bad thing as such, but some of the best performance and data integrity features are available in ZFS (which isn t GPL) and BTRFS (which isn t ready for production use). Not to mention WAFL which has been providing ZFS/BTRFS type features for more than a decade. A cheap NAS will generally be sold without disks as this is the best way to keep costs down. Selling with disks either means selling lots of different variations (which means it can t be sold off the shelf) or selling packages that don t quite suit some customers (thus causing people to buy the device and replace the disks which means extra costs). This means that the vendors can t provide the guarantees about disk quality and suitability that NetApp can provide. One major problem with a NAS is that you typically can t get shell access. Commands such as rm -rf and cp -rl which are typically rather quick when performed locally can take ages when run over NFS. Also commands such as grep -R which can perform reasonably well over NFS will always perform better when run locally. Also tasks such as compiling big programs which require good disk speed as well as some CPU time can be run locally if you have a file server system that also has local accounts (IE a typical multi-user Unix server configuration), but a dedicated NAS will prevent that. I have never used a NetApp device due to my clients deciding (sometimes correctly and sometimes incorrectly IMHO) that they are too expensive. But when considering what my clients do the down-sides of lacking local code execution on a NetApp would be more than compensated in many cases by the significant performance and reliability advantages that they offer (see my post about the reliability issues in standard RAID implementations [2]). A server class system (with ECC RAM as a minimum criteria) running RAID-6 can be a fairly decent file server. That requires hardware RAID with NVRAM for the write-back cache for decent write performance, but when write performance isn t required software RAID does the job quite well. A Dell tower system will typically hold at least 4 disks which means 6TB of RAID-6 storage and is quite cheap it can be under $2000. also such a system can be easily expanded with extra Ethernet ports etc. NetApp doesn t sell products directly and doesn t list prices, but they do have some adverts for products being under $7500 . That s not really cheap but not THAT expensive when you consider the features. A hidden cost in running a NAS is having someone perform sysadmin work on it. For a relatively expensive device that offers significant features such as a NetApp Filer this expense probably isn t too great. But for a device that does what any PC running Linux can do it s noteworthy that more training or experimenting time is required. There are some special cases where small and cheap NAS appliances really make sense, such as the Apple Time Capsule for home network backups. But apart from that I don t think that cheap NAS appliances make sense. It seems that cheap NAS devices provide the biggest down-sides of expensive NAS devices (in terms of lacking local access and having a different administration interface to servers) while also having the biggest down-sides of PC servers (lacking the advanced features of WAFL and performance of a NetApp). Earlier today I started a process of reorganising some backups which included backups to a cheap NAS. I have been very unimpressed by the time taken to copy and rm files over NFS. I m sure that the job would have been completed hours ago if I had local root access to the NAS.

• [1] http://www.netapp.com/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/02/06/reliability-raid/

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J rg is a very active contributor within Debian, and has been for a long time. This explains why he holds so many roles (FTPmaster and Debian Account Manager being the 2 most important ones) Better known as Ganneff (his IRC nick), he s not exactly the typical hacker. He has no beard and used to drink milk instead of beers. Check out his interview to learn more about some of the numerous ways one can get involved in Debian, managing its infrastructure and without having to be a packager. Raphael: Who are you? J rg: My name is J rg Jaspert and I m 35 years old working for a small company doing system administration and consulting work for our customers. I m married for a little while now and sometime soon a little Ganneff will be crawling out of my wife. (Whoever didn t think of the movie Alien now is just boring). Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? J rg: I started using Debian somewhere around 2000, 2001. Before that I had the misfortune to try SuSE and RedHat, both with a user experience that let me fully understand why people think Linux is unusable. (Due to my work I m in the unfortunate situation to have to use RedHat on two machines. Funny how they are still utter crap and worse than bad toys). And all of this lets get a Linux running here came up because I was trying to find a replacement for my beloved OS/2 installation, which I had for some years. So after I got Debian installed, good old Potato, I got myself active on our mailing lists, starting with the German user one. A bit later I replied to a question if someone can help as staff for a Debian booth somewhere. It was the most boring event I ever visited (very nice orga, unfortunately no visitors), but I got a few important things there:

• a signature from a DD on my key (Hi grisu),
• a discussion with an upstream author with some useful piece of software to package and
• an impression that this can be fun, if there are just some visitors for an event. So I tried again and did help as staff on a LinuxTag booth a while later.

The software I packaged, found me a sponsor and voila, maintainer I was. Some more packages got added and at some point my sponsor turned out to be my advocate. The NM process run around 2 months, and mid April 2002 I got THE MAIL. Raphael: Some Debian developers believe that you have too many responsibilities within Debian (DAM, FTPMaster, Debconf, Partners, Planet Debian, Mirrors, ). Do you agree that it can be problematic, and if yes, are you trying to scale down? J rg: It s DebConf, tssk. And yes, I do have some extra groups and roles. And you even only list some, leaving out all I do outside Debian. But simply counting number of roles is a plain stupid way to go. Way more interesting is how much work is behind a role and how many other people are involved. And looking at those you listed I don t see any I am a SPOF. Let s look at those you listed: DAM: Here I did start out assisting James to get the huge backload down which had accumulated over time. Nowadays I am merely the one with the longest term as DAM. Christoph Berg joined in April 2008 and Enrico Zini followed during October 2010, both very active. Especially Enrico, lately with the redesign of the NM webpages. FTPMaster: The basic outline of the FTPMaster history is similar to the DAM one. I joined as an assistant, after the oh-so-famous Vancouver meeting in 2004. Together with Jeroen, we both then got the backload down which had accumulated there. He did most of the removals while I had a fun time cleaning up NEW. And we both prepared patches for the codebase. And in 2007, as the last action as DPL, Sam made me FTPMaster. Since then I haven t been alone either. In fact we have much more rotation in the team than ever before, which is a good thing. Today we are 3 FTPMasters, 4 FTP Assistants and 1 Trainee. Though we always like new blood and would welcome more volunteers. DebConf: I am very far outside the central DebConf team. I am not even a delegate here. Currently I am merely an admin, though there are 4 others with the same rights on the DebConf machines. I ve not taken any extra jobs this year, nor will I. Probably for next year again, but not 2012. Planet: I am one of three again, but then Planet is mostly running itself. Debian developers can just edit the config, cron is doing the work, not much needed here. Occasional cleanups, every now and then a mail to answer, done. In short: No real workload attached. Mirrors: My main part here is the ftpsync scriptset. Which is a small part of the actual work. The majority of it, like checking mirrors, getting them to fix errors, etc. is done by Simon Paillard (and since some time, Raphael Geissert is active there too, you might have heard about his http.debian.net). Having said that, there is stuff I could have handled better or probably faster. There always is. Right now I have 2 outstanding things I want to do a (last) cleanup on and then give away. Raphael: You got married last year. I know by experience that entertaining a relationship and/or a family takes time. How do you manage to combine this with your Debian involvement? J rg: Oh well, I first met my wife at the International Conference on OpenSource 2009 in Taiwan. So OpenSource, Debian and me being some tiny wheel in the system wasn t entirely news to her. And in the time since then she learned that there is much more behind when you are in a community like Debian, instead of just doing it for work. Even better that she met Debian people multiple times already, and knows with who I am quarreling Also, she is currently attending a language school having lots of homework in the evening. Gives me time for Debian stuff. How that turns out with the baby I have no idea yet. I do want to train it to like pressing the M key, so little-Ganneff can deal with NEW all on its own (M being Manual reject), but it might take a day or twenty before it gets so far. Raphael: Thanks to the continuous work of many new volunteers, the NEW queue is no longer a bottleneck. What are the next challenges for the FTPmaster team? J rg: Bad link, try this one. Also, no longer sounds like its recent. It s not, it s just that people usually recognize the negative only and not the positive parts. Well, there are a few challenges actually. The first one, even if it sounds simple, is an ongoing one: We need Debian Developers willing to do the work that is hidden behind those simple graphs. Yes, we are currently having a great FTP Team doing a splendid work in keeping that queue reasonably small this is a/THE sisyphean task per excellence. There will always be something waiting for NEW, even if you just cleaned the queue, you turn around and there is something else back in already. Spreading this workload to more people helps not burning one out. So if one or more of the readers is interested, we always like new volunteers. You simply need to be an uploading DD and have a bit of free time. For the rest we do have training procedures in place. Another one is getting the multi-archive stuff done. The goal is to end up with ONE host for all our archives. One dak installation. But separate overrides, trees, mirrors, policies and people (think RMs, backports team, security team). While this is halfway easy to think of in terms of merging backports into main it gets an interesting side note when you think of merging security into main . The security archive does have information that is limited to few people before public release of a security announce, and so we must make sure our database isn t leaking information. Or our filesystem layer handling. Or logs. Etc. Especially as the database is synced in (near) realtime to a DD accessible machine. And the filesystem data too, just a little less often. There is also a discussion about a good way to setup a PPA for Debian service. We do have a very far developed proposal here how it should work, and I really should do the finishing touches and get it to the public. Might even get a GSoC project on it. So far for some short to middle term goals. If you want to go really long term, I do think that we should get to the point where we get rid of the classical view of a source package being one (or more) tarballs plus the Debian changes. Where a new version requires the full upload of one or more of those parts of the source package. I don t know exactly where it should end up. Sure, stuff like one central DVCS, maintainers push there, the archive generates the source tarballs and prepares the mirrors do sound good for a quick glance. But there are lots of trouble and pitfalls and probably some dragons hidden here. Raphael: The Debian repositories are managed by DAK (Debian Archive Kit) which is not packaged. Thus Debian users pick tools like reprepro to manage their package repositories. Is that how things should be? J rg: Oh, Mark Hymers wants to do a package again. More power to him if he does, though yes, DAK is not exactly a quick-and-easy thing to install. But nowadays it is a trillion times easier than the past thanks to Mark s work people can now follow the instructions, scripts and whatever they find inside the setup directory. Still, it really depends on the archive size you are managing. A complex tool like dak does not make sense for someone who wants to publish one or a dozen of his own packages somewhere. Thats just like doing a finger amputation with a chainsaw it certainly works and is fun for the one with the chainsaw but you probably end up a little overdoing it. I myself am using dpkg-scan[packages sources] from a shell script but also mini-dinstall in places (never got friend with reprepro when I looked at it). Works, and for the few dozen packages those places manage it is more than enough. Also, using dak forces you into some ways of behaviour that are just what Debian wants but might not be what a user wants. Like inability to overwrite an existing file. One of the reasons why mentors.debian.net won t work with dak. Or the use of a postgres database. Or that of gpg. Sure, if you end up having more than just a dozen packages, if you have many suites and also movement between them, then dak is sure a thing to look at. And how should things be : however the user and admins of that certain install of reprepro, mini-dinstall, dak, whatever want it. This is not one-tool-for-all land Raphael: What is the role of Debian Account Managers (DAM)? Do you believe that DAMs have a responsibility to shape Debian by defining limits in terms of who can join and what can be done within Debian? J rg: Quote from https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2010/10/msg00010.html:

The Debian Account Managers (DAM) are responsible for maintaining the list of members of the Debian Project, also known as Debian Developers. DAMs are authoritative in deciding who is a member of the Debian Project and can take subsequent actions such as approving and expelling Project members.

Now, aside from this quote, my OWN PERSONAL OPINION, without wearing anything even vaguely resembling a DAM hat: DAM is the one post that is entitled to decide who is a member or not. Usually that is in the way of joining (or not), which is simple enough. But every now and then this also means acting on a request to do something about whatever behaviour of a Debian Project member. I hate that (and i think one can easily replace I with WE there). But it s our job. We usually aren t quick about it. And we don t act on our own initiative when we do, we always have (numerous) other DDs complain/appeal/talk/whatever to us first. The expulsion procedure , luckily not invoked that often, does guarantee a slow process and lots of input from others. Are we the best for it? Probably not, we are just some people out of a thousand who happen to have a very similar hobby Debian. We aren t trained in dealing with the situations that can come up. But we are THE role inside Debian that is empowered to make such decisions, so naturally it ends up with us. Raphael: You did a lot of things for Debian over the years. What did bring you the most joy? Are there things that you re still bitter about? J rg: The most joy? Hrm, without being involved in Debian and SPI I would never have met my wife.
Or my current job. Or a GR against me. Not many running around with that badge, though I m still missing my own personal Serious problems with Mr. Jaspert thread. Bad you all.
Or visited so many places. Think of all the DebConfs, QA meetings, BSPs and whatever events.
Or met so many people.
Or learned so many things I would never even have come near without being DD. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? J rg: Yes.

---

Thank you to J rg for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Google+, Twitter and Facebook.

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According to this Usenet posting, GNU Screen became 25 years old today. (Found via Fefe.) And no, it s not dead. In contrary, the reaction on the mailing list to bug fixes with patches is usually impressingly prompt. :-) I took this occassion and uploaded a current git snapshot of GNU Screen to Debian Experimental. Bug #644788 (screen 4.1.0 can t attach to a running or detached screen 4.0.3 session) is still an issue with that snapshot, but gladly upstream seems to work on a solution for it. There s even talk about a 4.1.0 beta release soon although that hasn t happened yet. Have fun!

I've been experimenting with a new packaging tool/workflow based on marking certain commits on my integration branch for export as quilt patches. In this post I'll walk though converting the package nauty to this workflow.

1. Add a control file for the gitpkg export hook, and enable the hook: (the package is already 3.0 (quilt))

   % echo ':debpatch: upstream..master' > debian/source/git-patches
   % git add debian/source/git-patches && git commit -m'add control file for gitpkg quilt export'
   % git config gitpkg.deb-export-hook /usr/share/gitpkg/hooks/quilt-patches-deb-export-hook
   

   This says that all commits reachable from master but not from upstream should be checked for possible export as quilt patches.
2. This package was previously maintained in the "recommend topgit style" with the patches checked in on a seperate branch, so grab a copy.

    % git archive --prefix=nauty/ build   (cd /tmp ; tar xvf -)
   

   More conventional git-buildpackage style packaging would not need this step.
3. Import the patches. If everything is perfect, you can use qit quiltimport, but I have several patches not listed in "series", and quiltimport ignores series, so I have to do things by hand.

   % git am  /tmp/nauty/debian/patches/feature/shlib.diff
   

4. Mark my imported patch for export.

   % git debpatch +export HEAD
   

5. git debpatch list outputs the following

   afb2c20 feature/shlib
   Export: true
   makefile.in    241 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--------------------------
   1 files changed, 136 insertions(+), 105 deletions(-)
   

   The first line is the subject line of the patch, followed by any notes from debpatch (in this case, just 'Export: true'), followed by a diffstat. If more patches were marked, this would be repeated for each one. In this case I notice subject line is kindof cryptic and decide to amend.

    git commit --amend
   

6. git debpatch list still shows the same thing, which highlights a fundemental aspect of git notes: they attach to commits. And I just made a new commit, so

   git debpatch -export afb2c20
   git debpatch +export HEAD
   

7. Now git debpatch list looks ok, so we try git debpatch export as a dry run. In debian/patches we have 0001-makefile.in-Support-building-a-shared-library-and-st.patch series That looks good. Now we are not going to commit this, since one of our overall goal is to avoid commiting patches. To clean up the export, rm -rf debian/patches
8. gitpkg master exports a source package, and because I enabled the appropriate hook, I have the following

    % tar tvf ../deb-packages/nauty/nauty_2.4r2-1.debian.tar.gz   grep debian/patches
    drwxr-xr-x 0/0               0 2012-03-13 23:08 debian/patches/
    -rw-r--r-- 0/0             143 2012-03-13 23:08 debian/patches/series
    -rw-r--r-- 0/0           14399 2012-03-13 23:08 debian/patches/0001-makefile.in-Support-building-a-shared-library-and-st.patch
   

   Note that these patches are exported straight from git.
9. I'm done for now so

   git push 
   git debpatch push
   

the second command is needed to push the debpatch notes metadata to the origin. There is a corresponding fetch, merge, and pull commands. More info

• Gitpkg bug
• Git Repo with git-debpatch (WIP)
• Example package: nauty
• Example package: bibutils In this package, I was already maintaining the upstream patches merged into my master branch; I retroactively added the quilt export.

Around two years ago, the OECD presented a study on residential bandwitdth available per country that triggered quite a bit of debate all over the world I have seen at least criticism to it in Mexico, in the USA and in Australia. It's very easy to take a simplified view of a statistic and bitch on how sorry the state of our country is. In our case, the outcry was that Mexico was the lowest of all of the OECD countries, and I have seen this repeated on so many topics that it what surprises me is that people keep getting surprised at it! OECD does not represent the 200 countries in this world (only the top 30, and the meaning of "top" is not unambiguous). I found this graph that helps me illustrate this point: While that graphic is part of a report illustrating how sorry the USA should be for their low position, it shows the OECD member countries. And yes, the only country Mexico could be compared in general terms from those in the list is Turkey. Coherently, they are located at positions 28 and 30. But what prompted me into writing this post? That some weeks ago I was reading a viewpoint article at the Communications of the ACM magazine: What gets measured gets done: Stop focusing on irrelevant broadband metrics, by Scott Wallsten (might be behind a paywall for you If you are interested, I can share a copy with you, just ask me by email). Wallsten's article contains the following graph: I found it pretty telling that, although Mexico sits at the extreme of the graph (and the height of our bar makes it very hard to get a real value out of this particular rendering), our ISPs join a very select group of countries (Sweden, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and Ireland, in my very subjective measure) by delivering what they promise. In 2010, the dominant broadband offering was 1Mbps, although higher options have long existed. I always got basically the 100% of what my ISP (Telmex) has promised, even though I have always had the cheapest package available. Some months ago, I got a call announcing we were being pushed 5x into the future, and starting right then, I had a 5Mbps connection. And although I didn't really expect it to be true, I have had a clean 6Mbps (yes, 6 instead of 5) connection. So, that's it. This post contains no hidden truths, but just what grabbed my attention from a series of data points :-)

Attachment	Size
Residential Internet speed comparison per country (2010)	397.15 KB
Measured and advertised download speeds (in kbps)	252.86 KB

I followed Gregor s evolution within Debian because I used to be somewhat active in the Perl team. His case is exemplar because it shows that you don t need to be an IT professional to join Debian and to make a difference. His QA page is impressive with hundreds of packages maintained and hundreds of non-maintainer uploads too. While he started out slowly, I remember meeting him at Debconf 7 in Edinburgh and after that he really got more implicated. Again a case of someone joining for technical reasons but getting more involved and staying there for social reasons! Let s jump into the interview and learn more about him. Raphael: Who are you? Gregor: I m 41 years old, and I live in Innsbruck, Austria, in a shared apartment with a friend of mine. In my day job, I m working at the regional addiction prevention agency, so I m one of the few Debian guys who s not an IT student or professional. I started maintaining packages in 2006, and I am a DD since April 2008. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Gregor: After having used Debian on servers for some years, I finally switched to it on the desktop after some procrastinating. Soon afterwards I wanted to know more about the making-of , started to join mailing lists, filed bugs, and tried to learn packaging. Luckily I quickly found a permanent sponsor Tony Mancill, and we re still co-maintaining each others packages. And when I packaged my first Perl modules, Gunnar Wolf invited me to join the Debian Perl Group, an offer I accepted a few days later. And I m still there Later, the NM process, although it involved some waiting times, was also a good learning experience due to my AM Wouter Verhelst. (And in the meantime the organization of the NM process has vastly improved, from what I hear.) So my starting point for joining Debian was my curiosity but what really helped me to find my way into the project was the support of the people who invited and helped me. Raphael: What s your biggest achievement within Debian or Ubuntu? Gregor: I m not sure I can name a single big achievement but I guess I can say that my contributions to the Debian Perl Group have helped to make and keep the team a success story. Raphael: The pkg-perl team seems to work very well. As an active member, can you explain us how it is organized? How do you explain its success? In particular it seems to be a great entry point for new contributors. Gregor: The team is huge, both in numbers of members and packages (over 2200). Since last DebConf we manage our source packages in git, we have 2 mailing lists and an IRC channel, and we manage to keep an overview by using PET, the Package Entropy Tracker. It s true that we get new members on a regular basis; we try to invite people (like it happened to me 6 years ago ) but there are also quite a few new contributors who find our docs and introduce themselves on the mailing list. Maybe someone should conduct a study and ask them what motivated them to join. We hand out group membership/commit access quickly, and we try to mentor new contributors actively during their early times in the group. Some of them leave for other projects after some time, but many also stay and become DDs later. I m not sure what the reasons for the group s success are, maybe a combination of:

• a culture in the group (and also in the upstream Perl community) that s based on fun, cooperation, and respect;
• the fact that packaging Perl modules is most of the time quite easy;
• a great set of tools, and also (hopefully) useful documentation;
• a bunch of relaxed people who are open to newcomers and try to help each other.

For everyone interested in joining the Debian Perl Group, our Welcome page on the wiki is a good starting point. Raphael: What are your plans for Debian Wheezy? Gregor: Nothing overly exciting. What I should do is getting a newer JabRef into Debian (which involves packaging some new Java libraries any takers?). A solution for libdatetime-timezone-perl (which ships timezone data converted to Perl modules and tends to get outdated when the timezone data change) would be nice; let s see if #660404 leads to some results And some Perl packages will also need a bit of work for the hardening build flags release goal (cf. #657853). Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Gregor: Inertia. While I really like the fact that Debian is a volunteer project, and that every contributor works when and on what they decide to work on, I get the feeling that Debian could do better in moving forward, innovating, taking decisions. I also think that more uniformity in managing source packages would make things easier; it s quite amazing to see how many source formats, packaging helpers, patch systems, RCSs etc. are used all over the archive. I m not advocating for mono-cultures, and I consider this diversity a strength in general, but having to find out first how this particular package works when preparing a bug fix can be annoying. On the bright side, I think that the myth Debian and its mailing lists are mostly about flames can be seen as dispelled in the meantime. Sure, sometimes the tone could be a bit more civil, but in general most of the interactions I ve seen in the last years were friendly and helpful. IMO, the Debian Project consists of mostly nice and cooperative people, and that s what makes it fun for me. Raphael: You re one of the most dedicated participants to RCBW (Release Critical Bugs of the Week), an initiative to fix RC bugs every week. How much time do you spend on it? What would you advise to people who are considering to join the movement? Gregor: I got into the habit of fixing RC bugs after having been invited to my first Bug Squashing Party in Munich some years ago. During this weekend I saw that fixing RC bugs can be fun, is often not that difficult, and gives a warm fuzzy feeling I can definitely recommend attending a BSP if one happens to be organized near you. After tasting blood at this first BSP I tried to continue looking at RC bugs, and I guess I spend something around half an hour per day on it. I usually blog about it once a week, in order to motivate others to join in. And joining is easy: just take a look at the tips people like Zack, Vorlon, or me have written. You don t have to be a DD to help, many of my NMUs are based on patches that others kindly prepare and send to the BTS kudos! Another nice aspect is that the RC bug list contains problems from different fields: general packaging problems, language-specific issues, policy violations, etc. So there s something for everybody, and you don t have to be an expert in all fields to fix a specific bug. What s rewarding about fixing RC bugs is not only the feeling of accomplishment and the knowledge about having helped the next release I also received quite a few Thank you mails from maintainers who were busy at that time and appreciated the help. Raphael: Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy? Gregor: Well, there s not so much left of the Wheezy release cycle if we manage to freeze in June Some quick thoughts for Wheezy and Wheezy+1:

• Obviously, getting multi-arch and the hardening build flags as far as possible would be good.
• What I like is the idea of the time-based freeze, and I hope it will work out in June. And then I hope that the freeze will be shorter this time than during the last 2 releases.
• Unless I m missing something, the CUT discussions have more or less died down; IMO that s a pity because there are users who run testing and would like to avoid the several month long freeze. Maybe someone can come up with new ideas for Wheezy+1
• Too late for broad adoption in Wheezy but still: What constantly annoys me is the handling of conffiles during upgrades (when I want to keep changed values but at the same time want to add new variables). Config::Model seems to be the best idea so far for configuration upgrades but it s not yet widely adopted.

Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Gregor: There are many people in Debian I admire, too many to name them all. The first one that comes to my mind is Russ Allbery who not only does great work from lintian to Debian policy but who also sets a great example of communicating in a perfectly polite and respectful way even in heated discussions.

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Thank you to Gregor for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

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JFFNMS version 0.9.2 was released today both as an upstream tar.gz file and a new debian package. This version fixes some bugs including making sure it works with PHP5.4. The biggest change in PHP 5.4 is that you can no longer call by reference. Previously you could call a function like myfunc(&blah); which would send a pointer to blah and not the item itself. Now the function definition needs to define what it wants rather than change it each time.

Related articles

• PHP 5.4 Released (developers.slashdot.org)
• PHP: Object by reference in php5 (stackoverflow.com)
• After eight RCs, PHP 5.4.0 is finally released (webdev360.com)

For various reasons, having vmware running on my desktop would be kind of useful. VMware provide a Free (as in beer) version of their software called VMware Player. I downloaded the file VMware-Player-4.0.2-591240.x86_64.bundle off their website and tried to build it. It failed to build. Given my previous lack of success with VMware server, I wasn t too surprised. What was surprising was it wasn t too hard to fix it. The problem was that the vmnet module would not compile and that was due to three things:

• net device ops no longer has set_multicast_list (in netif.c)
• the linux module header needs to be included to define THIS_MODULE
• skb_frag_t has been redefined and needs an adjustment

The patch is only a few lines and means I can compile vmware on my Debian sid computer running kernel 3.2.0-1 vmnet.patch To use it, you will need to find where the modules are built, for me it is /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source

1. mv vmnet.tar vmnet2.tar
2. tar xf vmnet2.tar
3. patch -p1 < vmnet.patch
4. tar cf vmnet.tar vmnet-only

With that you can run the player which will try to build the modules and you re done!

Related articles

• imabonehead: Cross-compiling VMWare View for ARM Linux (in Debian/Ubuntu) CNXSoft Embedded Software Development (cnx-software.com)
• Virtually Run Another OS in your System (tech2copycat.wordpress.com)
• Upgrade to Oneiric breaks VMWare Player (aslakjohansen.wordpress.com)

I didn t realize that I had two of my machines attached to openvpn from the same l2 segment. It caused a network outage for about 24 hours. Sorry for the downtime folks. I believe that if I turn on stp for all nodes which have two legs in to the same l2, I can avoid this type of problem in the future. But I don t think the broadcast network overhead for managing the spanning tree is worth it. Especially for vlans which span counties.

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Wait, I think LD1 is in the same county as the vlan hub. How about vlans which span legislative districts. http://wa-demchairs.org/kcdems/districts.php Hello from LD40, Orcas3! Reporting from F5 HQ/LD36 in Seattle.

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I use the following tools to manage my vlans and bridges: vlan, bridge-utils and openvpn I verify my tls certs with perl.

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
use strict;
use Log::Log4perl;
Log::Log4perl->init('/etc/openvpn/log4perl.conf') or die "couldn't init logger: $!";
my $logger = Log::Log4perl->get_logger('tls-verify');
$logger->debug("verifying tls cert for config [$ENV config ]");
my($network) = ($ENV config  =~ m:^/etc/openvpn/(.*?).conf$:);
my($certificate_depth) = ($ARGV[0] =~ /^(\d+)$/);
my($locality,$organization,$org_unit,$common_name) =
  ($ARGV[1] =~ m /C=US/ST=Washington/L=(.*?)/O=(.*?)/(?:OU=(.*?)/)?CN=(.*)$ );
$logger->debug("X509_NAME_oneline: [$ARGV[1]");
my %network_cn =
  (
   vl3  =>  [ 'vl3.colliertech.org',
              'Collier_Technologies_Server_CA',
              'Collier_Technologies_Root_CA',
   ],
   vl12 =>  [ 'vl12.colliertech.org',
              'Collier_Technologies_Server_CA',
              'Collier_Technologies_Root_CA',
   ],
   vl245 => [ 'vl245.colliertech.org',
              'Collier_Technologies_Server_CA',
              'Collier_Technologies_Root_CA',
   ],
  );
if( exists $network_cn $network  ) 
  exit 0 if $network_cn $network ->[$certificate_depth] eq $common_name;
  $logger->error("common name: [$common_name], network: [$network], depth: [$certificate_depth]");
 else 
  $logger->error("network: [$network]");
 
exit 1;

As many would know, Debian GNU/Linux is one of the oldest, and the largest Linux distributions that is available for free. Since it was first released in 1993, several people have analysed the size and produced cost estimates for the project. In 2001, Jes s M. Gonz lez-Barahona et al produced an article entitled Counting Potatoes , an analysis of Debian 2.2 (code named Potato). When Potato was released in June 2003, it contained 2,800 source packages of software, totalling around 55 million lines of source code. When using David A. Wheeler s sloccount tool to apply the COCOMO model of development, and an average developer salary of US$56,000, the projected development cost that Gonz lez-Barahona calculated to start-from-scratch and build Debian 2.2 in 2003 was US$1.9 billion. In 2007 an analysis entitled Macro-level software evolution: a case study of a large software compilation by Jes s M. Gonz lez-Barahona, Gregorio Robles, Martin Michlmayr, Juan Jos Amor and Daniel M. German was released. It found that Debian 4.0 (codename Etch released April 2007) had just over 10,000 source packages of software and 288 million lines of source code. This analysis also delved into the dependencies of software packages, and the update flow between Debian release (not all packages are updated with each release). Today (February 2012) the current development version of Debian, codenamed Wheezy, contains some 17,141 source packages of software, but as it s still in development this number may change over the coming months. I analysied the source code in Wheezy, looking at the content from the original software that Debian distributes from its upstream authors without including the additional patches that Debian Developers apply to this software, or the package management scripts (used to install, configure and de-install packages). One might argue that these patches and configuration scripts are the added value of Debian, however the in my analysis I only examined the pristine upstream source code. By using David A Wheeler s sloccount tool and average wage of a developer of US$72,533 (using median estimates from Salary.com and PayScale.com for 2011) I summed the individual results to find a total of 419,776,604 source lines of code for the pristine upstream sources, in 31 programming languages including 429 lines of Cobol and 1933 lines of Modula3! In my analysis the projected cost of producing Debian Wheezy in February 2012 is US$19,070,177,727 (AU$17.7B, EUR 14.4B, GBP 12.11B), making each package s upstream source code wrth an average of US$1,112,547.56 (AU$837K) to produce. Impressively, this is all free (of cost). Zooming in on the Linux Kernel In 2004 David A. Wheeler did a cost analysis of the Linux Kernel project by itself. He found 4,000,000 source lines of code (SLOC), and a projected cost between US$175M and US$611M depending on the complexity rating of the software. Within my analysis above, I used the standard (default) complexity with the adjusted salary for 2011 (US$72K), and deducted that Kernel version 3.1.8 with almost 10,000,000 lines of source code would be worth US$540M at standard complexity, or US$1,877M when rated as complex . Another Kernel Costing in 2011 put this figure at US$3 billion, so perhaps there s some more variance in here to play with. Individual Projects Other highlights by project included:

Project	Version	Thousands of SLOC	Projected cost at US$72,533/developer/year
Samba	3.6.1	2,000	US$101 (AU$93M)
Apache	2.2.9	693	US$33.5M (AU$31M)
MySQL	5.5.17	1,200	US$64.2M (AU$59.7M)
Perl	5.14.2	669	US$32.3M (AU$30M)
PHP	5.3.9	693	US$33.5M (AU$31.1M)
Bind	9.7.3	319	US$14.8M (AU$13.8M)
Moodle	1.9.9	396	US$18.6M (AU$17.3M)
Dasher	4.11	109	US$4.8M (AU$4.4M)
DVSwitch	0.8.3.6	6	US$250K (AU$232K)

Debian Wheezy by Programming Language The upstream code that Debian distributes is written in many different languages. ANSI C with 168,536,758 is the dominant language (40% of all lines), followed by C++ at 83,187,329 (20%) and Java with 34,698,990 (8%). If you are intersted in finding the line count and cost projections for any of the 17,000+ projects, you will find them in the raw data CSV. Other Tools and Comparisons Ohcount is another source code cost analysis tool. In March 2011 Ohcount was run across Debian Sid: its results are here. In comparison, its results appear much lower than the sloccount tool. There s also the Ohloh.net Debian Estimate which only finds 55 Million source lines of code and a projected cost of US$1B. However Ohloh uses Ohcount for its estimates, and seems to be to be around 370 million SLOC missing compared to my recent analysis. Summary Over the last 10 years the cost to develop Debian has increased ten-fold. It s intersting to know that US$19 billion of software is available to use, review, extend, and share, for the bargain price of $0. If we were to add in Debian patches and install scripts then this projected figure would increase. If only more organisations would realise the potential they have before them. Need help with Linux (including Debian), Perl, or AWS? See www.jamesbromberger.com.

Matthew Aslett wrote about how the proportion of projects released under GPL-like licenses appears to be declining, at least as far as various sets of figures go. But what does that actually mean? In absolute terms, GPL use has increased - any change isn't down to GPL projects transitioning over to liberal licenses. But an increasing number of new projects are being released under liberal licenses. Why is that?

The figures from Black Duck aren't a great help here, because they tell us very little about the software they're looking at. FLOSSmole is rather more interesting. I pulled the license figures from a few sites and found the following proportion of GPLed projects:

RubyForge: ~30%
Google Code: ~50%
Launchpad: ~70%

I've left the numbers rough because there's various uncertainties - should proprietary licenses be included in the numbers, is CC Sharealike enough like the GPL to count it there, that kind of thing. But what's clear is that these three sites have massively different levels of GPL use, and it's not hard to imagine why. They all attract different types of developer. The RubyForge figures are obviously going to be heavily influenced by Ruby developers, and that (handwavily) implies more of a bias towards web developers than the general developer population. Launchpad, on the other hand, is going to have a closer association with people with an Ubuntu background - it's probably more representative of Linux developers. Google Code? The 50% figure is the closest to the 56.8% figure that Black Duck give, so it's probably representative of the more general development community.

The impression gained from this is that the probability of you using one of the GPL licenses is influenced by the community that you're part of. And it's not a huge leap to believe that an increasing number of developers are targeting the web, and the web development community has never been especially attached to the GPL. It's not hard to see why - the benefits of the GPL vanish pretty much entirely when you're never actually obliged to distribute the code, and while Affero attempts to compensate from that it also constrains your UI and deployment model. No matter how strong a believer in Copyleft you are, the web makes it difficult for users to take any advantage of the freedoms you'd want to offer. It's as easy not to bother.
So it's pretty unsurprising that an increase in web development would be associated with a decrease in the proportion of projects licensed under the GPL.

This obviously isn't a rigorous analysis. I have very little hard evidence to back up my assumptions. But nor does anyone who claims that the change is because the FSF alienated the community during GPLv3 development. I'd be fascinated to see someone spend some time comparing project type with license use and trying to come up with a more convincing argument.

(Raw data from FLOSSmole: Howison, J., Conklin, M., & Crowston, K. (2006). FLOSSmole: A collaborative repository for FLOSS research data and analyses. International Journal of Information Technology and Web Engineering, 1(3), 17 26.)

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