I think it's time to start blogging more often about this topic, and fill this section a bit more. I mean, Mermaids was a long time ago... And debconf in Mexico with my first try on skirts, getting rid of my beard and dying my hairs red is history in the meantime, too. So, what has happened in between... Well, there was of course the Regenbogenparade which I attended and which was nice. I even ordered a special t-shirt from a shop in Australia that I totally love. In summer I met up in Bratislava with a longtime friend from a MUD I played way back, and enjoyed running around in a skirt there, too. Gladly it was a sunny day. It was though... people back here in Vienna looked more awkward at me than in Bratislava. At least that was my impression... Had been to Extremadura for the i18n meeting which was quite nice. It was quite productive, even though I have to admit that I haven't done much on that front since. Even in Spain people didn't look that strange at my skirt as over here in Austria... At our company's Christmas party I got into a talk with a work colleague about the topic and she informed me that a former working colleague of us is starting with hormone treatment after the year change and if I'd fancy a meeting with him. I was quite happy about that offer so we arranged a meeting on December 23rd. It was a bit strange at first to address him as he, and we didn't know how to start talking because said working colleague was late, but after a while we talked about various things and even were finished with the more interesting topics when she finally appeared. We arranged to visit the next Trans-X meeting after the year change.
I left them for leaving home, but I wasn't able to catch my bus on time—the subway had serious problems. Well, I thought I might spend the night in the Flex so I called another working colleague who usually hangs out there about what was going on that evening, and interestingly he told me it was Gay Heaven night. I stopped believing in coincidence long ago... Anyway, was a nice evening all in all, they had a Christmas rabbit handing out "I love you" stamps with pink ink-pads. :) The Trans-X meeting wasn't too bad. It was some discussions about various topics. After a while my first shyness dropped a bit and I started to join in the discussion at some points. After the first started to leave I had some more direct talks with two of the women from there, one of them had mostly the same trip home as me so we talked on in the subway. A week later they had set a transgender weekend—no wonder, it was the weekend of the Rosenball. They were meeting in a cafe on Friday and I joined them, a bit less shy now that I at least knew some of the faces. Maria was quite ill and was sitting in her jacket within the cafe, shivering like hell... But all in all it was a nice meeting too, got to know some more nice people. I was a bit lazy from there on, didn't join another meeting... But another working colleague did invite me to the carnival party of his sister. I thought I could try a bit more than before, in the disguise of the carnival party, so I used a bra my former wife left behind, filled it with some socks, and put up some eye makeup (quite discreet, I hate overdone makeup already on natural females...) The light there wasn't the best, so they just saw my tall body at first. It took them a while to even notice the skirt, and only after I put off my long-sleeve they haven't noticed my breast. But well, I don't really blame them, my working colleague has announced me as a he, and given the low lights it's not too bad. Though, after the host noticed my breasts he asked if he could touch them and I even received a quite nice kiss from him. :D I stumbled upon the Gaia TG Guild on Gaia Online—a quite interesting web-based community. In general Gaia is filled with mostly kids, many of them immature, not able to spell and considering that even cool, but there are some quite special guilds that are lots of fun. But still, when I stumbled upon the TG Guild I was in awe of that such a thing could exist there. What I read made me feel totally happy and more confident on the path I'm having ahead of me. Last week I finally had been to an Trans-X meeting again, and Maria showed some quite interesting reportages about transsexual people—including one that was on TV just the day before about a 14 year old girl who is already on hormone treatment and has the absolute support from her family since she was 4 and confronted them with cutting "it" off when they don't allow her to wear skirts when going out, too. All the best to you, Kim! I so envy your strength... I'm sorry about the length of this entry—but I'm sick of people who tell me that I'm only playing it, or that I would hide... And I also see it as a chance to document my path for myself. I promise—the next entries will be more often and thus shorter.

We’re trying hard to include Frets on Fire in Debian. FoF is a really great game where you have to try to play a simulated guitar through your computer keyboard. The code is already GPL, and the developers are really nice and collaborative. The game consists of some code in python, some game data, graphics and so, and some songs, including a tutorial. The problem comes when we try to get the songs into Debian too. It seems that, for being able for someone to be something in the musical scene in Finland, they must sign an abusive contract with Teosto (Finish Composer’s Copyright Society, which AFAIK is a private organization), giving them exclusive rights on whatever songs you make, so you won’t be able to license any song at all without using a license that has been approved by them. More discussion here. This is wierd. Composer’s Copyright Societies should be there to help composers and artists, not to enslave them. For what I heard it’s not the only country in which that happens. Especially in Europe, the EU is extremelly protectionist to those matters, whether they do right or wrong, or whether they even go against the author’s will. Gosh, it’s the authors who should have the right to choose, not the mafias choose for them. In Spain I think it’s more or less the same, the SGAE seems to have the same attitude towards artists than Teosto. When will they realize they’re being anachronistic and unfair?

Verizon has apparently decided that BOTH of my forwarding addresses, dburrows@debian.org and Daniel_Burrows@alumni.brown.edu, are actually spammers, and is randomly rejecting some emails sent to them. I have given Verizon as large a piece of my mind as they allow: they do not provide an email address, and instead put up a form where they graciously allow you to type a 70-character (!) message. This will presumably go straight into the bitbucket, but we'll see.

If you want to email me, please send mail directly to Daniel_Burrows@verizon.net.

Does anyone know of a broadband ISP serving Redmond that doesn't suck? As far as I know, my only alternative to the telephone monopoly is the cable monopoly.

Thanks again to all the updaters. Please, start lists for banks in other countries and tell me about them. If a list already exists for your country, consider sending updates there first. Added: Banca Popolare Etica, Caisses Populaires Desjardins, Caja Madrid, Caja de Segovia, Fortis Bank Belgium, KBC, netbank.de, Osuuspankki, PC Financial Master Card, Soci t G n rale, Sparebank 1-Gruppen, Storebrand Bank Updated: NatWest Andrew Donnellan suggested:

"Perhaps it would be useful to start a list of banks that *don't* work with Free Software as well so we can a) petition them, and b) boycott them until they make it work."

I'd prefer to keep this to a positive list for various reasons (including lawyer-fear, search engine rankings, rewarding the good and saying nothing if I've nothing nice to say). If a listed bank goes bad, it will show up as Removed. If you want to rant about how a bank screwed you, please use your own site. If I see it and like it, it will appear in one of my linkposts.

Hard to believe it's already time for DemoCampMontreal2 tomorrow night (Thursday, March 29, at the SAT). I had a pretty good time at the first DemoCampMontreal back in February, despite my demo going belly-up a few times. It was a good space and a fun time to talk. I think the BarCamp page on DemoCampMontreal2 has some good info, too. Check out Fred Ngo's writeup of DemoCampMontreal2, including a fancy photo of yours truly demoing in February. It looks a little like BarCampHell, but in a good way. tags: barcamp democamp montreal DemoCampMontreal2 fred ngo me

Big day Today's our big day -- we're closing on the house at 4690 rue Pontiac tonight at 7. We just got in from Las Vegas last night, but we headed out to the bank this morning to get a cashier's check for our (very large) down payment and dot the t's and cross the i's for the mortgage. Lots more running around today, but we go to the notaire tonight, and we'll have some sort of paper certifying us as homeowners sometime tonight. Shom-pan-yah to follow. tags: house buying closing 4690ruepontiac

Open Web Design One really great Open Content (or is it Open Source...?) resource that I don't pay enough attention to is the Open Web Design repository. It's a collection of very nicely done Web designs, delivered in convenient packets of HTML and CSS. They make very nice templates for "skins" of blog engines, CMSes, or even wikis. It's a great complement to the tons of Free Web software available out there (most of which is quite skinnable, and most of which has execrable default themes). My favourite part is that all the designs are dedicated to the public domain or made available under the liberal Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license, which makes them honest-to-goodness Free Culture per the Definition of Free Cultural Works. I'm going to be using one of these Web designs to clean up my kinda bland home site. It could use a bit of editing. tags: web design design open content skins themes

Thanks Mark, Allegra, No ma and Anoushka Thanks to Mark and family for the congratulations on our new house. We signed the papers tonight, and it went surprisingly smoothly. Our seller is a fascinating guy who started the animation lab at Ubisoft, so we enjoyed getting to talk to him in between onslaughts of legalese and flurries of signatures. In other good news, I guess the gang is coming out for RoCoCo. Wow! That'll be pretty fun. Good thing we'll have two houses then. tags: mark house rococo ubisoft

[Note: I wrote this more than three weeks ago, but due to me being lazy again (yeah right) I’m just publishing this now. Well, here goes:] Due to a project working on (in Perl,) I’m asking the great Lazyweb for their great insight into the problem of sending outgoing mails. It all started when I was trying to set up my own mail system on my laptop perlis. After months of doing most of my mails under GMail and finding it impressive, but not quite adequate for my needs, I decided to go back to my old desktop workflow of downloading all my mails using ESR’s fetchmail over IMAP, and using my preferred MUA (Gnus, in this case to write my replies/posts/spam and send them using an MTA. However, since the time I’ve been checking my mails on revan, the amount of mail that I have been receiving has gone up to less than manageable proportions for my old system, so I had to revise my way of getting my email fix. Ultimately, I went on to use John Goerzen’s offlineimap to synchronize my IMAP Maildirs locally and do my mail stuff from there. No problem at the receiving front. On the sending of emails, I ran to a slight problem. I used to use an MTA to relay my mails to a smarthost for delivery, but since things have changed a bit (new ISP that blocks port 25, for one I have to find some other means. Although I could probably configure my MTA to use (and authenticate to) a smarthost, I found that approach to be too heavy for comfort (even when using a special-purpose MTA such as masqmail.) Furthermore, I’d like to have more control on how I send my mails (like which mails using one of my email addresses should go to a particular smarthost.) So, here is my attempt to solve my problem: a small, user-configurable mail submission agent. It small because it is written in Perl, and makes the most out of it (being a Perl user means you gotta love CPAN It’s user-configurable, involving a small INI-style file in the user’s home directory (I would prefer, however, to do away with tinkering with config-files altogether and do all configuration via some friendly interface.) It’s not much, but it works. And it’s working for the past three weeks or so now. I call it kartero because its the Spanish-Filipino word for postman (and yes, that’s exactly what my program does. It’s not much, but you can pick it up and try it yourself. Complaints; violent reactions: you know where to send them.

• The latch is badly designed
• MacOSX 10.4.9
• heavy (compared to an X40)
• 2 USB ports? That’s it? I accidentally jab the Firewire port with my USB devices
• That camera looks tiny
• Amazed how it detected the open wireless network. nice.
• Slow
• Track pads are terrible. Even my Dad concedes he hates it. Give us a nipple anyday.
• Plugging in my external USB fat32 hard drive didn’t work! With nfs to access my media, I was surprised how to listen an mp3, you have to copy the file into Itunes. Omg. And watching a movie. Quicktime with no fullscreen playback. OUCH.
• I’ve had to get used to looking at the top bar carefully
• ctrl+trackpad button is right click. OMG. Pain.
• samba doesn’t seem to work right
• I can’t figure out how to scroll through photos. I think there is some crap Canon image software (why do camera manufacturers seem compelled to ship terrible software with their hardware?) getting in my way here.
• Quite noisy when doing something
• Software update doesn’t seem able to resume unlike Debian. :(
• It absolutely HOGS the Internet connection! WTF! Do I have to implement QoS now? How can my Debian machines share the Internet and Wireless nicely, but not this Macbook?
• Can’t shut it down after an update
• Zoom is pretty cool for my dad
• I am slowly starting to discover the shortcuts and how to manage Windows. Alt+Tab fealt wrong though. Can’t launch dictionary. Maybe it’s not installed?
• The interface isn’t that great. Intuitive my ass. They often move the close button about.
• Updating Itunes, “Please quit iTune before conti…” Pity it can’t update a running application like Debian.
• Installing .dmg files isn’t nearly as easy as apt-get
• When I close the lid, it stops doing what it supposed to do. I HATE THAT. If you have power, do not suspend whatever.
• The shell and some sensible default applications like vim is quite nice
• I’m not a fan of the widescreen dimensions.

Btw this is my Dad’s Macbook. I’m still married to Debian SID and a Thinkpad.

Dear Lazyweb: Is it really impossible to find a full-sized USB keyboard with a built-in trackpoint mouse device but no touchpad? The logical manufacturer would be IBM/Lenovo; however, the current Lenovo keyboards either provide no built-in pointing device or have both a trackpoint and a touchpad (”UltraNav”). I’ve checked in all the regular places: eBay, Pricewatch, Amazon, Froogle, craigslist, etc., and no one has a keyboard with just a trackpoint. I’m sure I’m not the only one with this simple request. This eBay auction is the closest I could find. That keyboard is “French Canadian,” which might not matter, but it is also a “SpaceSaver” model with no numeric keypad and is generally more compressed than I need. On a related note, it is next to impossible to find a Touchstream Keyboard anymore, another brand I was interested in. I often run into this sort of problem. It undermines my faith in the web as approximating a perfect marketplace.

• My “travel” talk suggestion is accepted for Debian Day at Debconf7. See you there!
• How many DDs eat 150 emails for breakfast? Some people on this HTML WG are hilarious.
• Wordpress should be in etch. Thanks for everyone’s input on this.
• The Debian live based Webconverger “browser live system” is BETA! See about Webconverger for more information.
• My Cornwall house sitting days are over and now I need to find a (hopefully debian) contract (my CV) so I can one day afford more travel adventures.

Recently I rebooted one of my Debian Xen servers and suddenly all the Ethernet devices which used to be eth0 in the domU's became eth1.

vif = [ '', 'bridge=xenbr1' ]

I used to have the above as the interface definition and for domU's that had only a single interface that worked well (if there is only one interface then it should be eth0). However in a recent etch update this changed, so I had to use ifrename as documented in my previous blog post. It's annoying when things break because a reasonable assumption which previously worked suddenly stops working.

Even if the bug in question (if it is regarded as a bug) is fixed I'll keep using ifrename, it doesn't do any harm.

There's an advertising campaign at the moment opposing cruel treatment of pigs, the web site is at http://www.savebabe.com/ . They have rented advertising space at train stations to publish the URL.

One thing that they don't mention is the health issues related to factory farming. It makes sense to concentrate on one message at a time and they are concentrating on animal cruelty. But probably more people will be concerned with the risks of disease, parasites, and anti-biotic resistant bacteria present in meat produced from the factory farms.

Also wild boar tastes better!

Well, obviously this one needs a shorter name. The problem I'm trying to solve here is that SONAMEs, or rather the way they are used today, only handle the issue of a single, fully contained library changing ABI as one of its header files changes. However, libraries do not exist in a vacuum; as a bare minimum, they use definitions for types and alignment requirements built into the compiler, and if any of these changes, so does the library ABI. Hence, the idea of using a single number to denote the ABI is not really sufficient. The correct solution would be to embed all ABI information into the soname (libapt-pkg, for example, uses "libapt-pkg-libc6.3-6.so.3.11" on amd64, which is better but still not perfect). Obviously, this would require massive changes to the build scripts in all libraries and educating all library authors, so it is not going to happen (soon). So, what other options are there? As the kernel ABI (the syscall interface) is supposed to be really stable, we probably do not have to worry about that. So, we only have a problem if there are libraries with different assumptions about each others' ABI in the same userspace program. This can happen in two ways: The compiler changed (as in the case with the recent C++ transitions), or a library that is an indirect dependency of something that also has another dependency (direct or indirect) changes ABI. I've talked (briefly) about the former in an earlier post already. To illustrate the latter, a small example: There is a library, libuseful.so.0 that provides a number of functions, among these: struct complex_number

  float real;
  float imaginary;

 
void complex_multiply(
  struct complex_number *result,
  struct complex_number const *lhs,
  struct complex_number const *rhs); Now another library, libresourceful.so.0, comes along and implements complex_divide on top of complex_multiply. Since the definition for complex numbers from libuseful makes a lot of sense, the include file for libresourceful reads #include "libuseful.h"
 
void complex_divide(
  struct complex_number *result,
  struct complex_number const *lhs,
  struct complex_number const *rhs); Now one of the more serious people in Debian decides to write pointless 1.0, which takes two complex numbers and calculates (a*b)/a, using both complex_multiply and complex_divide, and links against libresourceful.so.0 and libuseful.so.0. Some time passes, and shortly before Debian freezes, libuseful's author decides that she needs more precision, so she changes the floats to doubles, bumps the SONAME and releases the new version. Shortly thereafter, someone notices that libresourceful is now using an outdated version of libuseful, and recompiles libresourceful. Since the header of libresourceful did not change, noone thinks of changing the SONAME, after all, changing it would render us incompatible with other distributions. Now, pointless 1.0 depends on libuseful.so.0 and libresourceful.so.0, which in turn uses libuseful.so.1. It still believes complex numbers are made from floats, however libresourceful now disagrees. The (a*b) expression is calculated correctly, using floats, however the result is then passed to the complex_divide function which expects a pair of doubles. Not good. Obviously, there is a number of things people have done wrong in this example. First of all, if you inherit type definitions or anything else from another library, your ABI becomes bound to theirs. As you cannot know statically what version your library will be linked against, you need a script that computes your ABI version at build time. If you do not want that, you need to repeat the type definitions in your header and (deep-)copy the data from one of your structures into one provided by the library you are using (I can already hear the screams of the performance fetishists). The assumption that, just because a dependency changed, there is not necessarily a need to bump the soname is not fundamentally incorrect; if no interfaces are being propagated, it is certainly correct, and most libraries do not really do this (for example, a HTTP library uses the resolver, but never passes the hostent structures upwards). Detecting this is difficult to do, although Sun has a few tools to help here. So where does that leave us? In my opinion, the most sensible thing a distribution can do is to make sure such a constellation never gets installed to an user's system. If there is any doubt, we need to err on the side of caution (aka use a bigger hammer). This is a "wacky ideas" post, so I also need to propose a totally untested thing that might work (or not), but at least has passed the stage of me sleeping a night over it. Ideally, dpkg would enforce that. In order to do that, it needs appropriate metadata that tells it that a certain constellation is probably wrong. The thing we want to avoid is an application using multiple versions of the same library at the same time, where "use" is denoted by a dependency relationship. So what we need is a way for a library package to declare that it is wrong to (indirectly) depend on this package and a package out of a certain group at the same time. I can see two ways of doing that, each with its own advantages and disadvantages: The "explicit" way is to add a new dependency relationship (that is where the subject "Conflicts-If-in-Same-Dependency-Tree" comes from), where you would conflict in this way with a virtual package that is named after your library without the SONAME version, and at the same time provide that virtual package (which is a technique that should not be unfamiliar to Debian people). The hypothetical libuseful above would then state Package: libuseful0
Provides: libuseful
Conflicts-If-in-Same-Dependency-Tree: libuseful So installing pointless_1.0 would pull in libuseful0 and libuseful1, dpkg would see the conflict and refuse. For upgrades, it would refuse the libresourceful0 upgrade, as that would create an inconsistent situation. The only way out of there is to recompile pointless. The advantage is that the modifications to dpkg would be manageable (at least compared with the other option, which I will introduce shortly), the obvious disadvantage is the massive number of virtual packages introduced. The "implicit" way of doing that is moving the SONAME into its own field in the control file, and teaching dpkg that two packages with the same name and different SONAME fields can be installed at the same time, although not depended on by the same package. This is a really nasty change to dpkg and also requires a syntax for dependencies that includes the desired SONAME version, but it gives us a lot of other advantages. The one immediately visible is that it does not bloat the Packages file too much, and does not introduce lots of virtual packages, although the net effect inside apt and dpkg is probably going to be the same. A really cool side effect though would be that the soname is no longer part of the Package: field, and thus it becomes possible to insert it using substvars. This, of course, is a cool thing when library authors come to their senses and include ABI information for dependent libraries into their SONAMEs. Since this has gotten lengthy, thanks for reading this far. Of course, questions and comments are requested, and if you are interested in pursuing this, please get in touch, either via email or if you can wait that long, at the "Wacky Ideas" BoF at DebConf. The last thing for me to do here is to welcome Joachim to the "post your ideas" "meme".

Tomorrow at 9 in the morning some officers from the Valencian regional Government will drive up to the mountains of the Bartolo, Serra Perentxissa, Montd ver and Carrasqueta to power off the set of antennas which have broadcasted the signal of TV3, the Catalan public television, during the last 20 years for the entire Valencian territory. These news have been responded with protests from most of the Valencian cultural collectives. You can sign a petition, or send an e-mail, which will be swiftly ignored by the people in charge. Behind the official reasoning for this attack to our freedom of choice -the broadcast is illegal- there is a set of good reasons for the usual suspects, the Valencian Partido Popular to do this. The biggest one is that two months before the local and regional elections, the right-wing are doing their math and it may not be working out too well for them. They need to scrape as many votes as they can, and an easy granary is attracting the extreme right-wing, which is a bit active but fragmented in the region, and mostly in the city of Val ncia. This social group is greatly virulent against anything which sounds like Catalan , especially the people known as blaveros , who claim our culture and language has no common root and has nothing to do with the culture and language from the North. Fortunately, the ISO 639 standard and the entire scientific community agree that they are nuts. But back to my rant. So, how can the PP try to get a handful of votes from the right-wing? Easy, start an anti-TV3 show on the media and start scalating it until the final act -tomorrow-, where milions of citizens are deprived of one of the best channels available in our TV sets. This will surely be sold as a major victory against the Catalan invasion or as the end of an "alegal situation", although there are like 30 other channels in the same situation in the city of Val ncia, and the PP-controlled Canal 9 channel is broadcasted in the Balear Islands (also controled by PP) in the same legal situation. In a time when watching Middle-East or American channels is trivial using a satellite set, some people think the best thing they can do is to end a service paid and provided for free by Acci Cultural del Pa s Valenci , an important cultural entity, during the last 20 years, ending the right to choose one of the only channels with all the programs in our language for milions of Valencians. Their right to do it is also challenged in court, but there is no doubt that tomorrow they'll go ahead and shut it off. We could have a reasonable government who would maybe want to accept the Catalan TV and radio channels in our territory, if the Catalan government would also accept our (crappy) channels in theirs, but they refuse this as well, because they now feel insulted . All in all, I had enough of PP long ago, and am hoping I am not the only one. In less than a month, Valencians will celebrate the 300^th anniversary of the Batalla d'Almansa on the 25th of April of 1707, although we seem to be fighting a new battle now in 2007. The Batalla d'Almansa meant the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in Spain, but also the start of tough times for our culture, language, and people, when Felipe V abolished the Valencian furs. But this story can make a blog post of its own next month. Quan el mal ve d'Almansa, a tots alcan a...

When I first started putting pictures on my web site I used to delete the originals (at the time I only had a 3.2G hard drive in my main machine and used CDs for backup so I didn't feel inclined to waste too much space). The problem is that I optimised the images for viewing on displays of the day (when 1024x768 was high resolution and I tried to get pictures down to 800x600 or less whenever possible). Also the program I was using at the time for scaling the images didn't do it nearly as well as the Gimp does now.

Now when putting pictures on my web site I keep the original JPEG's in a safe place so that if there are future changes to common display technology, net connection speed (particularly the speed of my server) or of technology for scaling and compressing images then I can re-do them to get a better result.

When saving images with Gimp I enable "Advanced Options", this allows me to set a floating-point DCT method this saves about 400 bytes on disk and apparently gives a better image quality too - it's not noticably slow on a Pentium-M 1.7GHz so they should probably make it the default. The next "Advanced" option to change is to turn off "Save EXIF data" (saves 1.9K) and "Save thumbnail" (can save almost 5K depending on the image).

The next thing to do when saving a JPEG is to enable the "Show Preview in image window" setting. This allows you to adjust the image quality while seeing the resulting image as well as the size, so you can determine which combination of file size and image quality is best for you. This is much easier than saving
a file and then running an image viewing program to inspect it!

As an aside, it would be convenient if the Gimp would reposition it's "Save as" dialogue to not occlude the image window and would enable the preview option by default on machines with reasonably fast CPUs.

I keep wondering why people keep writing HUB, WEB and SPAM, where the correct technical terms are Hub, Web and Spam. Neither of the three expressions is an acronym. Well, SPAM is, but Spiced Pork and Ham is a Trademark of Hormel Industries, and they ask people not to use their trademark to talk about Unsolicited Commercial/Bulk E-Mail on the Internet. They do, however, allow the expression Spam to be used for UCE/UBE. Any idea why people keep treating Hub and Web as an acronym? It disturbes my reading tremendously.

There's something which has been bothering me for a while. I haven't talked about it much since I don't consider it all that important after all and since I know I'm probably in a minority position, but whatever. Personally, I think the "do not Cc" policy in the Code of Conduct of Debian mailinglists is a big mistake. It serves no useful purpose (other than giving some people a reason to complain). If you want to make sure that people do not mail you unless you absolutely ask for it, then you should get their mail clients to support some sort of header to enforce that behaviour; and you should also make sure you set that header in your own mails. Most people on the Debian mailinglists use free software, after all, so doing this should be possible. Personally, I find it rather offensive that people can call Cc'ing you spamming, and get away with it. I refuse to even bother to keep track of who wants a Cc and who doesn't, and I refuse to use different keystrokes for 'reply to list' and 'reply to sender'. There's "reply" ("r", in mutt), which should go to the sender of the mail only; and there's "reply to all" ("g", in mutt), which should go to everyone who could read the original mail (either through direct, private mail or through list mail). Everything else requires special attention anyway, so it's pointless to try it. At least in my opinion. Oh well.

Thomas mentions that Etch will release with glibc 2.3 rather than glibc 2.4, and wonders why that is. There are two simple reasons for this:

1. AIUI, glibc 2.4 drops support for non-NPTL kernels (i.e., 2.4 and earlier Linux kernels). Since sarge's default kernel was still a 2.4-based kernel, upgrading to a glibc 2.4 will immediately break everything on your system, since at that point your libc suddenly refuses to cooperate with your kernel. Not providing an upgrade path for users who run a supported kernel of our previous release is not an option.
2. Etch will have official support for 11 architectures: i486 and later intel-compatibles, SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC, ARM, big- and little-endian MIPS, PARISC, ia64, S/390 and AMD64. If we want to migrate to glibc 2.4 or later and still release, then it has to work on all those architectures. Since NPTL requires some architecture-specific support and since that architecture-specific support is not available for some of our current architectures, this is not the case (also see the above). It may be possible that Debian "lenny" will drop some architectures because the most recent version of glibc still does not support them, but ultimately that decision will be up to the release managers.

So, while I'll agree that it kindof sucks that Debian will release with a somewhat outdated version of glibc, it's not as if there isn't a valid reason.