I d like to extend a warm welcome to our new batch of students selected for the 2011 Debian Google Summer of Code! They should soon be posting on Debian Planet and you re welcome to come talk to them on #debian-soc on irc.debian.org Further details will be posted in the coming days to our wiki: http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc Automated Multi-Arch Cross-Building and Bootstrapping aka autocrossbuild , by Gustavo Prado Alkmim, mentored by Wookey
Enable easy and automated setup of cross-platform automated build systems and bootstrapping for QA in the Multi-Arch era. This involves the creation of multi-stage bootstrap build sequencing tools and a reliable automated multi-arch cross-builder. APT/Dpkg Transaction Ordering for Safety and Performance aka aptordering , by Chris Baines, mentored by Michael Vogt
The ordering code in libapt is responsible for ordering the unpacking/configuration of debs so as to ensure dependencies are satisfied etc. Currently it organizes the ordering into big batches. This project further implements an ordering satisfying more constrains such as minimal amounts of dpkg invocations , minimal amount of broken packages at any point . DebDelta APT Native Integration aka debdelta , by Ishan Jayawardena, mentored by Michael Vogt
Improve user experience of APT and its front-ends by speeding up the upgrade process. This provides a better framework for unified handling of debdelta and future APT improvements such as parallelism. Support for stable and security ugprades as well as multiple APT related libraries is expected. Dpkg Declarative Diversions aka declarativediversions , by Sam Dunne, mentored by Steve Langasek
The dpkg-divert command should be replaced with a new control file with a declarative syntax which Dpkg will parse and process directly as part of the package unpack and removal phases, eliminating the problems resulting from non-atomic handling of diversions. Backend Tools and Infrastructure for DEX aka dextools , by Nathan Handler, mentored by Matt Zimmerman
EX is a new program designed to help improve Debian and its derivatives by merging in changes made downstream and encouraging discussions between the various projects. As this is a new project, most of the infrastructure does not exist (or is rather hackish and incomplete). This project will create the necessary backend tools and infrastructure so that all Debian derivatives can easily make use of the DEX project. Jigsaw Modularized Java in Debian aka jigsaw , by Guillaume Mazoyer, mentored by Tom Marble
The Java Development Kit (JDK) is a big monolithic software tool: many of its features are only useful in limited areas (GUI toolkits are useless for a web server). This project will bring the Jigsaw modular JDK to Debian, helping performance (start-up, size, etc) but also the dependency resolution (to match Debian packaging). Some work exists upstream does not fit with Debian. This project will package the current development version of Jigsaw, update Debian Java Policy, and create the necessary packaging tools for software depending on it. Python Multi-Build for Python Extensions Packaging aka pythonmultibuild , by Mesutcan Kurt, mentored by Piotr O arowski
This project creates a tool to build Python extensions for all Python versions supported by Debian at the time. The project should detect the upstream build system and testing frameworks and use them. It will be interfaced with CDBS and the dh sequencer, replacing their Python snippets. Debian Teams Activity Metrics aka teammetrics , by Sukhbir Singh, mentored by Andreas Tille
This project will gauge the performance of teams in Debian by measuring metrics such as: postings on relevant mailing lists, package upload records from the Ultimate Debian Database and commit statistics from project repositories The information gathered will help in evaluating team performance by measuring how people in a team are working together. An interface to access this information easily will also be developed. Compute Clusters Integration for Debian Development and Building aka computeclusters , by Rudy Godoy, mentored by Steffen M ller
The project s main goal is to enable developers to easily use compute clusters (Eucalyptus, OpenStack ) as environments for arch-specific development by providing a set of tools they can use to setup and run an extended platform for their development, testing and building tasks. Good luck to everyone!

Debian Med Bioinformatics Sprint Last weekend, I was at the Debian Med Meeting in Travem nde near L beck, thanks to an invitation by Steffen M ller and Andreas Tille. It was a great opportunity to finally meet Steffen and some of the other bioinformatics people in Debian like Manuel Prinz face-to-face for the first time. Also, lots of upstream and related bioinformatics packagers from e.g. Biolinux were present as well, many of them from the UK. I discussed with and helped some people about Debian packaging. There is a big push to get Debian packages done and integrated in Debian and Ubuntu, but often enough people are not exactly sure what the requirements are and what needs to be done. Hopefully, the sprint was successful to clear things up and move forward. I also managed to finalize the initial Jmol packaging and uploaded it to Debian towards the end of the sprint. I plan to update the other bioinformatics related packages in debichem like pymol and openbabel as soon as squeeze is released. Overall, it was a great weekend, many thanks to NERC and Debian for making it possible, and to Steffen M ller for organizing it!

This brief announcement was published in the debian-devel-announce mailing list and I repeat it here for your information.
Hi! Since there has been a lot happening in the Debian Multimedia world during the Squeeze release, so we figured we should give you an update on that. Who are we? In the dark old ages, there were two teams involved in multimedia: the Debian Multimedia and Debian Multimedia Packages teams. Please note that neither of them is related to debian-multimedia.org (which is maintained by Christian Marillat, and is known to break current ffmpeg-based applications like mplayer and vlc in Debian Squeeze.). During late 2008, both teams were merged into one, the Debian Multimedia Maintainers team, to avoid effort fragmentation. Since then, there has been a lot of work done: Consumer Multimedia in Debian Consumer Multimedia is about playing and, well, consuming multimedia. Squeeze will feature:

• FFmpeg 0.5.2, finally uncrippled thanks to zack! No mp3/h264 encoder, though. (still in NEW).
• mplayer 1.0rc3, finally with mencoder enabled.
• VLC 1.1.3
• VDPAU hardware acceleration in ffmpeg/mplayer (but feedback is welcome!)
• Guayadeque 0.2.5
• gmusicbrowser 1.0.2

Squeeze will not feature:

• FFmpeg 0.6 (But already available in experimental)
• Hardware acceleration with VA-API (packages also in experimental, for support on Intel hardware).

Producer Multimedia in Debian Producer multimedia is software for producing multimedia. Squeeze will
feature: End user applications:

• Ardour 2.8.11
• Audacity 1.3.12
• Composite 0.006
• Csound 5.12. The QuteCsound frontend is also available.
• FluidSynth 1.1.1
• Hydrogen 0.9.4.1
• Internet DJ Console 0.8.3
• Jokosher 0.11.5
• LiVES 1.3.4
• mhWaveEdit 1.4.20
• morituri 0.1.1
• QTractor 0.4.6
• Rosegarden 10.04.2
• SooperLooper 1.6.14
• Traverso 0.49.1
• X Jack Video Monitor 0.4.13
• Yoshimi 0.058.1

Platforms and technologies:

• JACK versions 0.118 and 1.9.6 (aka, jackd1 and jackd2). You can choose to install any of them (but only one at a time).
• LV2 plugins are supported. Ardour has support for them, and there are a bunch of them provided in Debian.
• LADSPA plugins are still supported.
• DSSI updated to 1.0.0, many plugins are available.
• FireWire sound devices are supported with libffado, and is supported by JACK.

Squeeze will not feature:

• JACK session support.
• Ardour 3 (it s not out yet, so it did not make it in time for squeeze).
• SuperCollider. There is a package in the works, but did not make it to Squeeze.
• Toonloop: This live stop-motion animation editor has been packaged only recently.
• NASPRO: Convenient library to implement LV2 dynamic manifest plugins. It s available in Sid.
• Mixxx: 1.7 series had RC bugs, and 1.8 was too late for squeeze.

Debian Multimedia Blend There is also an effort to start a Debian Multimedia Blend to give a better overview about what multimedia applications are available in Debian. There is a short list for a quick overview as well as a long package list separated in sections to give a more detailed overview (including translations, screenshots, popularity of package etc). You are invited to help improving the tasks either directly in SVN or by sending patches to Andreas Tille <tille@debian.org> or debian-multimedia@lists.debian.org (see below). Note that not all of the packages listed in the tasks pages are maintained by the Debian Multimedia team, since they are aimed at producing useful package sets instead of showing only our own packages. For those who want to squash some bugs in multimedia packages there is also the bugs page generated by the Blends tools, or our team bug page. Other activity The team has seen a lot of growth since the merger. Of the current 52 members of the Alioth team, 20 were added during 2009 and 18 in 2010, many of whom are involved in upstream development as well as the debian packaging. The number of packages has also grown, with 112 of the current 205 git repositories in our team area having its first commit during 2010. Where to reach us The Debian Multimedia Maintainers can be reached at pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org, should you have any questions. We have also decided to repurpose the old debian-multimedia@lists.debian.org address for user and more general discussion. We would like to invite everyone interested in multimedia to join us there. Interested developers/packagers can also join us at the first address. Some of the team members are also in the #debian-multimedia channel on OFTC.

Regards,

Alessio Treglia on behalf of the Debian Multimedia Maintainers

Eclectic paper on the Ultimate Debian Database A few months ago, I've co-authored with Lucas a paper on UDD, which has just been presented at this year IEEE's Mining Software Repository conference, continuing my recent tradition of eclectic papers. The paper is titled The Ultimate Debian Database: Consolidating Bazaar Metadata for Quality Assurance and Data Mining and is available for download from my publications page. For Debian people already familiar with UDD there is probably not much to learn from it, as the main target of the paper is the community of scientists doing data mining on software repositories. For them, UDD offers a valuable entry point to Debian "facts", as data sources reflected in the database are easily joinable together and to some extent already validated by other UDD users (e.g. QA people). Nevertheless the first two sections of the paper are probably of more broad interest. There we have given our point of view on the so called Debian Data Hell: why it exists, how it's related to the nature of Debian and similar distros, etc. I've already noted in the past how that is also related to the culture of freedom that in Debian we value not only in our software, but also in our infrastructure and procedures. We should just get rid of a bit of inertia, and total world domination will then be just around the corner I'm happy to conclude quoting the acknowledgments section of the paper: Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all UDD contributors, and in particular: Christian von Essen and Marc Brockschmidt (student and co-mentor in the Google Summer of Code which witnessed the first UDD implementation), Olivier Berger for his support and FLOSSmole contacts, Andreas Tille who contributed several gatherers, the Debian community at large, the "German cabal" and Debian System Administrators for their UDD hosting and support.

Finally, it happened! I became a Debian Developer! I wish to thank everybody involved in this process: from those who helped me in my initial packaging efforts, to who actually created the account. Many thanks to the pkg-perl team for accepting newbies and helping them: props to Damyan Ivanov, Gregor Herrmann, Gunnar Wolf! Thanks to Debian-Med and Debian CLI: they always believed in me, and I had a great time in these teams. A special thanks goes to Andreas Tille, who advocated my NM candidature. Thanks to my two AMs, Bart Martens and Bernd Zeimetz. Even if my NM was long, difficult and not so flawless, it all went good, at the end . A special thanks to Enrico Zini: he was the first DD signing my GPG key, thus allowing me to have more "rights" (being a DM), and experience some more responsibility than I previously had. Thanks to his "Become a DD. NOW!" right after checking my ID in Palermo -- Enrico, it finally happened! Thanks to Christoph Berg, Ron Lee, and Stephen Gran, which handled the final steps of the overall process. And now, dapal is here to break the world. Be warned!

This is my first post on Planet. Great day! Here's a presentation of myself. I'm David Paleino, I'm 21 and studying Odontology in Palermo, Italy. Yes, I'm Italian. Some might know me because of my past "key-signing problems": that was a big issue, indeed. Anyway. I've started contributing to Debian some time ago, initially in pkg-perl team. Then I joined debian-med, and I'm still in that team. Being a dentist in future, I wanted to help the "medical" section of Debian, even though there isn't any software I could use in my future work. I'll work on that, eventually. I've developed, together with Andreas Tille, Debian Med's website and "scripts": those are intended to be used also for other Debian Blends (formerly CDDs). Now I'm also active in pkg-mono: I'm helping in the transition to Mono 2.0, and that's a big task. I also maintain some packages, even some more or less popular ones (gthumb, john, gnome-rdp, bash-completion). I'm concerned with Free Software also outside Debian-specific work: I help my LUG (SputniX) in organizing various FOSS-related events. Incidentally, tomorrow there's the LinuxMeeting, and on Sunday we have JavaDay. Everyone's welcome! I definitely hope I won't annoy you too much with my posts!

Participiants: Martin F Krafft <madduck@madduck.net> (vcs-pkg.org), Florian Maier <contact@marsmenschen.com> (LiMux), Cesar Gomez <cesar.gomez@gmail.com> (Linex), Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> (Debian Edu), Andreas Tille <tille@debian.org>, Mark Shuttleworth <marks@debian.org> (Ubuntu), Bdale Garbee (Debian)
Full event details

The first of my talks at LCA 2008 gave me a chance to talk about the current state of the Debian project, which got me my first LWN.net coverage with a photo, even (subscribers only for now, the article will become public on 7 February). Thank you, Jonathan Corbet, for a very good article which nailed all the main points! Slides are here. I agreed to this talk on short notice because I like to talk about Debian and was honoured by the chance to represent the project in this form. I would not have been able to do it without plenty of helpful input from colleagues in the last few days. Since I didn t get a chance to display the final slide with the acknowledgements during the talk, I would herewith like to thank specifically Andreas Tille, Michael Banck, Kevin Mark, Josip Rodin, MJ Ray, Cyril Brulebois, Stefano Zacchiroli, Frans Pop, Moritz M hlenhoff, Russ Allbery, Steve Langasek, Luk Class, Andreas Schuldei, and Christian Perrier. No guarantees for the completeness of the list. The talk ended in an open discussion on how Debian could improve. I took notes and shall forward them to the project mailing list, once I get a chance. Thanks to all the participants, as well. Update: during the talk, I mentioned that there was no security support around the time of the etch release. Thanks to Moritz M hlenhoff, who spotted my error: that should have been sarge . The problems with security support had long been resolved by the time etch was being prepared, and this was in (large?) part thanks to Moritz. Sorry for the screwup! I also called Linux to tend towards multimedia more than one might like. I should not have made this comment as a representative of the Debian project, and I probably did unjust to the Linux kernel in whole. This is entirely a personal issue, I have a number of problems with Linux memory management, scheduling, and some other points relevant to production use. I ve had some of these problems for years, but they seem never to get fixed, while development is fast-paced. Then I look at some of the work being done and I wonder what the priorities are. Regardless, I should not have made this comment and I apologise for it.

A little remembered fact is that the Debian Jr. project had a directory in the subversion repository of the CDD project at Alioth. Aside from Andreas Tille’s experimental conversion of Debian Jr. to use cdd-dev¹, there was nothing else there until today. While I was in the process of populating this directory with the junior-* metapackages and adding an external reference to the live CD config, it seemed to me that it would be better to move the whole thing to our own repository at Alioth, which I promptly did. So now you can check it out:

$ svn co svn://svn.debian.org/debianjr

As well, I registered Debian Jr. at http://cia.vc/ and configured svn so that the CIA bot will report on the #debian-jr channel at irc.debian.org for every commit. And finally, I applied for the creation of a debian-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org list. As soon as the list is created, I will hook it up to the repository so you can subscribe to commit emails.

¹ Although this seemed like a good idea at the time, for various reasons I ended up sticking with the single metapackage per category model Debian Jr. uses to this day. But I have retained this experiment in the repository under svn://svn.debian.org/debianjr/branches/EXP-cdd-dev in case we ever reverse that decision.

Today, Andreas Tille noticed that utnubu.org points to ubuntu.org (and not, as he expected, to the Utnubu Team’s website). This made me curious and a little whois query gave away that utnubu.org is indeed owned by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. This is not strage, they have other variations registered, like xubnutu.org (which I noticed when writing German parody news on Xubuntu).What is interesting is the fact that I announced Utnubu on debian-project at Sat, 16 Jul 2005 20:55:08 +0300 and the domain was registered at 16-Jul-2005 22:09:37 UTC by James Troup. I just assume that Canonical did that to give us the domain as soon as we need it, and they just reserved it for us since we don’t have money. Very nice. (But why didn’t the tell anyone? Well, I just assume they forgot, no need to wake sleeping dogs.