Posted a week ago, already deferred back then, this report is even more deferred now! But as there are people interest in knowing what the "DPL job" is about even among non debian-devel-announce subscribers, here is a blog-conveyed reproduction, for the records.

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Dear project members,
here is my monthly DPL activity report, this time for last March. It is delayed by a couple of weeks because, myself being both incumbent and candidate DPL, I preferred not to use d-d-a during the voting period unless really needed. Apologies for the delay (or the unneeded paranoia, you name it). As a side effect of the delay, the results of the DPL election are now known. I'd like to thank all the people who took part in the elections: voters, people who asked questions on -vote, the secretary, and obviously Gergely and Wouter, without whom the campaign wouldn't have allowed to discuss relevant aspects of Debian "politics". Thanks for your trust. I'll do my best to match your expectations. ... and just to remind you what you've just asked for, here goes the BigMonthlyBlurb! Highlight: long-term hardware replacement planning The highlight for this month is long term planning of hardware replacement. It's something I've been discussing with DSA for quite a while and on which DSA has worked hard during the recent sprint. As a result, we now have a quite ambitious 5-year hardware replacement plan that will guarantee that all machines in production are under warranty at any given time (with the nice side effect of generally better performances, as they go hand in hand with newer hardware). The current estimated cost per year is 29'000 USD. That does not yet include buildds and porter-boxes, so it is expected to increase a bit to cover all our hardware needs. But we expect it not increase too much, as we tend to get explicit hardware donations to cover arch-specific needs. Given the current state of Debian finances and donation trends, the plan looks sustainable for at least 2-3 years. But this assessment still needs to be refined as soon as, together with the auditors, we'll manage to obtain the history of past Debian transactions, in particular from SPI. We've been waiting for this for about 5 months now, but I'm positive it could become a reality in the next weeks. In the meantime, it is surely safe to start with the plan for the next 1-1.5 years, so I'll give green light to DSA for the first acquisitions as soon as they're ready for it. When implemented, this plan will increase our ability to rely on hardware. But it also means we will need to become a bit more organized about fund-raising. The discussion started with the sprint report has some insights about how to do that. As part of this, we'll also need to share resources (e.g. contact databases, people, etc.) among the yearly DebConf fund-raising initiatives and the initiatives mentioned in the aforementioned discussion. Ongoing discussions

• A couple of important clarifications on how to deal with trademark-encumbered software in the Debian archive have been posted to -project. It seems to me there might be consensus on the overall topic, but we need to write down guidelines for maintainers (and possibly a project position statement?). I could use some help on that front, so if you've followed the discussion and/or have an interest in trademark and free software, please get in touch.
• To put an end to the long and glorious life of DEP-5, I've marked it as ACCEPTED given that it has been "implemented" in February via inclusion in the debian-policy package. You still have some time to port your debian/copyright-s to it before the Wheezy freeze.
• I've been contacted by the DuckDuckGo about a revenue sharing agreement for the inbound traffic they already get from Debian browsers. I've informed -project proposing to accept it and that has spawned a discussion that has won us an LWN article. I haven't yet summarized the thread proposing a way forward; I'll do so shortly.
• as part of a discussion on unofficial "debian" repositories, I've proposed to open up the list of *.debian.net domains. As nobody disagreed, consensus has been quickly reached and the announced change is now imminent. Thanks to Carsten Hey and Gerfried Fuchs for their help in figuring out the details of the last discussion on the matter and DSA for their feedback.

Summer of Code Debian has been accepted as an organization for the Google Summer of Code. At the time these bits go out, the student application deadline has also elapsed. In March I've contributed a few project ideas and chased potential mentors for them, when I thought the project could be important for Debian and the prospective student. I'm happy that one (a dak building block needed for the implementation of PPAs and more) has found both mentors and students. We'll see if any of the corresponding student proposal is retained and how it goes. Communication I've given an interview, about Debian and Free Software in general, to La Repubblica, one of the major newspapers in Italy. The interview is available online, but only in Italian. If some kind (and Italian-speaking) soul would like to translate it into English, I'll be happy to publish the translation as well. (update 22/04/2012: Matteo Cortese has contributed an English translation of the interview, which I'll make available shortly) Legal stuff In order to transfer ownership of the Debian trademark in Japan to SPI, I've contacted the current owners (all Japanese Debian Developers or contributors) to do the needed paperwork. I've been blessed by the help of Kenshi Muto that has taken the matter in his hands. He is now navigating through Japanese trademark procedures, a subject neither myself nor SPI lawyers were familiar with. Thanks also to Jonathan McDowell who has done the needed paperwork, SPI-side. Sprints Plenty of sprints and sprint reports in March!: Debian Med, DSA, DAM/FrontDesk. Everything should also be available from the wiki sprint page where you can find info to organize your team sprint. Assets miscellanea

• I've signed the annual memorandum of understanding with the financial entity that will help us with local expenditures for DebConf12 in Nicaragua. This year is ISIC, with whom we have an important trust path via Norman Garcia Aguilar, member of the DebConf orga team.
• After discussion with auditors, we've resolved to set a 1 year deadline for reimbursement requests. The reason is that it's a PITA to keep track of longer-running requests (yes, they do happen!) and they add uncertainty to our available finances. There can be exceptions, but please help on this front by timely requesting reimbursements after travels or other expenses.

Cheers.

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PS the boring day-to-day activity log for March is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201203

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.

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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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This is the third summary of my squeeze RC bug squashing. If you take a look at the bug graph you will notice that the blue line went up a bit over a two week's period. I would like to claim that confirming the samhain RC bug 618728 did cost me the time (I actually gave it the time to finish), but the real reason was that I was looking at other stuff. I came back with a vengeance though, so here is the list of the bugs squashed for squeeze since the last report:

• 657004: libmusicbrainz in squeeze not obsolete
• 656178: missing found version
• 654264: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 644690: no nautilus 3 in squeeze
• 644692: no nautilus 3 in squeeze
• 644693: no nautilus 3 in squeeze
• 644696: no nautilus 3 in squeeze
• 644352: explicit about testing
• 654281: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 654270: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 654267: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 654242: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 654218: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 653664: no multiarch in squeeze
• 653625: boost1.48 not in squeeze
• 653294: python-twisted 11.1.0-1 not in squeeze
• 653231: libarchive 3.0.2 not in squeeze
• 659585: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 653418: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 660044: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 650631: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 660716: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 662807: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 662811: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 662622: php 5.4 not in squeeze
• 662116: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 662200: libcvs3-5 not in squeeze
• 662198: libcvs3-5 not in squeeze
• 661879: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 661775: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 661800: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 661799: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 661798: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 663556: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 663562: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 663566: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 664188: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 663943: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 663671: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 663669: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 665218: php 5.4 not in squeeze
• 665003: clearly wrong severity
• 665218: libconfig++8 available in squeeze
• 662964: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 661909: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 661516: tm-align not available in squeeze
• 661450: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 661449: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 661413: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 660488: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 665902: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 666171: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 666172: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 666144: libmecab2 not available in squeeze
• 666112: fixing wrong found version
• 666417: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 666009: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 666006: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 665678: doesn't fail in squeeze

Current stats: 119 bugs in 93 days, still got the margin up by five more bugs. :) Enjoy!

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This is the second entry in my series about squeeze release critical bug squashing. In response to my last blog post it was asked whether this is proper release critical bug squashing. Indeed there haven't been any patches or upload involved in this, only BTS handling, but this doesn't mean that these bugs weren't considered to be affecting squeeze. You can see this effort currently as weeding out the "wrong" bugs so that the list gets more useful and actually be able to ask maintainers to address the real issues. You can at least see in this graph that the blue line is going down constantly since the year change instead of rising up like before. And I hope I will be able to keep it below the green line for a while still. Also thanks to the release-team and ftpmasters that it was possible to keep the massbugs about waf binary blob not being preferred source for modification out of affecting squeeze and ignore it for the current stable release the required changes for those would rather be a fair bit intrusive for a stable update.

• 637213: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 648989: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 584568: most stuff (BTS, PTS, ...) use maintainer information from unstable only
• 624464: most stuff (BTS, PTS, ...) use maintainer information from unstable only
• 632106: most stuff (BTS, PTS, ...) use maintainer information from unstable only
• 632108: most stuff (BTS, PTS, ...) use maintainer information from unstable only
• 632262: most stuff (BTS, PTS, ...) use maintainer information from unstable only
• 632264: most stuff (BTS, PTS, ...) use maintainer information from unstable only
• 632265: most stuff (BTS, PTS, ...) use maintainer information from unstable only
• 632266: most stuff (BTS, PTS, ...) use maintainer information from unstable only
• 595298: squeeze has linux 2.6.32
• 613732: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 616694: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 620264: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 620573: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 621440: libdb4.8 not obsolete in squeeze
• 624593: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 626868: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 628475: libdb4.8 not obsolete in squeeze
• 629838: boost1.46 not in squeeze
• 628475: boost1.46 not in squeeze
• 631623: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 639990: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 632763: no libevent 2.0 in squeeze
• 627000: not affecting squeeze
• 658216: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 654870: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 655115: this is explicitly about testing
• 657092: working in squeeze
• 655710: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 644691: no nautilus 3 in squeeze

I am glad that I managed to keep it up and even have a nice margin in case I can't put any effort into it some day but still have more bugs squashed than days there are in the year so far. Currently I am at 60 bugs in 39 days. This gives a warm feeling. :) Enjoy!

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The following announce is lazily copied from Paul Wise's announce. There is only one thing I like to add: the screenshots that are submitted and collected on screenshots.debian.net are visible on the packages websites (both Debian and Ubuntu) and are also used by the software-center package, so they help people to get a first impression of the package they might want to install. Have you ever wondered how to start getting involved in Debian/Ubuntu? Do you enjoy discovering new games and playing them? You might want to come to the games screenshot party! We hope that the party will be a fun, easy, low-commitment way to get involved. The Debian/Ubuntu Games Team is organizing a half-day screenshots party on the weekend of 25th-26th February for creating screenshots for all the games that are available in Debian/Ubuntu. If you are interested in attending, please add your availability to the poll linked from the announcement so that we can get some idea of attendance and when is a good time for the people who are interested. Look forward to lots of game playing, screenshots and merry time, hope to see you all there!

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As sort of new year's resolution I started picking up the habit to work on release critical bugreports for squeeze again. The number is way to high to be healthy, but at least it is (still) below the amount of release critical bugreports for unstable. It will be an uneven fight because it seems that there are quite some people working on weeding out release critical bugreports in unstable, but those who are interested in weeding out releasing critical bugreports in stable seems to be limited, even though it is one of our supported releases and thus should receive quite some attention, at least by the corresponding package maintainers themself. So here is the list that I managed so far:

• 651792: not relevant for squeeze
• 653520: builds on squeeze
• 654568: re-add version information lost in reassign
• 654276: not relevant for squeeze
• 654257: not failing on squeeze
• 654810: not happening on squeeze
• 654459: not relevant for squeeze
• 654406: not release critical at all, shipped as upstream
• 655007: python2.7 isn't default in squeeze
• 655372: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 527403: libjack-dev in squeeze provides libjack0.100.0-dev
• 622903: not relevant for squeeze
• 625764: squeeze has older version of libvelocity-tools-java, not affected
• 654818: does work in squeeze
• 647795: squeeze still has libahven1-dev
• 647796: squeeze still has libahven1-dev
• 636823: not obsolete in squeeze
• 628500: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 629255: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 629284: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 629293: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636132: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636268: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636271: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636517: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636520: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636521: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636522: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636823: not obsolete dependencies in squeeze

That makes 29 squeeze RCs squashed so far, I hope I can keep up with it. Enjoy!

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No, my blog isn't dead, and neither is me. It's just that way too many things happened since this year's debconf that got me a bit off tracks. I managed to do daily business like keeping my packages in shape and the backports queue low, and that was mostly it. No clue if that will change anytime soon, but I guess I would like to keep you updated with an event where you can meet me next week: There will be the Global 2000 Birthday Party going on in the WUK on Thursday 20th, so if you happen to be in Vienna at that time, drop by and enjoy some great bands. ... which brings me to one of the local bands from Vienna: Heinz aus Wien. They are around for well over 10 years now and are still rocking quite well. Here are some examples of their songs, like always:

• Wir sind immer noch: A sort of love song for this great town, Vienna.
• Lieb im Prinzip: A very pithy song about relationships.
• Ich hab mit Tocotronic Bier getrunken: Quite funny song from their early days, and interestingly, people regularly claim that it was done by a different band ...

Like always, enjoy!

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Everyone loves stats, ok well at least I do. I was doing some research with regards to package maintenance within the Debian distribution and since the results might be interesting for someone else there we are. On 19th of August 2011 there have been:

• 16935 unique source packages in Debian/sid
• 9977 packages with Vcs-* field in Debian/sid
• 6957 packages without a Vcs-* field in Debian/sid

Therefore ~59% of all packages in Debian/sid are officially managed with a version control system (VCS). Now, which VCS do those packages use?

1. Svn: 4939
2. Git: 4377
3. Darcs: 284
4. Bzr: 247
5. Hg: 61
6. Cvs: 31
7. Arch: 28
8. Mtn: 10

I ve retrieved the numbers from the Ultimate Debian Database (UDD). Sadly there s a bug in UDD regarding the Vcs-Type information, see #637524. Therefore I ve extracted a list of 80 packages where a Vcs-Browser header is available but the Vcs-Type entry is empty in UDD. 29 packages of them are managed inside CVS but don t appear as such in UDD, so I manually corrected the number for CVS in the numbers above. The remaining 51 packages have a Vcs-Browser field set but lack the according Vcs-* entry, some of them pointing to upstream VCS instead of the according Debian package repository, some of them result in 404 errors, etc. As a result I ve reported bugs where applicable (#638466, #638468, #638469, #638470, #638471, #638472, #638474, #638475, #638476, #638477, #638479, #638482, #638486, #638488, #638493, #638497, #638501, #638475, #638475, #638502, #638503, #638505, #638506, #638508, #638509, #638510, #638511, #638512, #638513, #638516, #638518, #638519, #638520, #638522, #638523, #638524, #638525, #638526, #638527, #638528, #638529, #638530, #638516, #638531). Disclaimer: I found Debian s Statistics wiki page and Zack s VCS usage stats after starting to play with my own stats. AFAICT Zack s slightly higher numbers are the result of looking at multiple versions for the same source packages, as you ll see when comparing numbers from UDD s sources_uniq view (which I used) with either 1) UDD s sources table, 2) source table count from projectb or 3) Package count from http://$DEBIAN_MIRROR/debian/dists/unstable/ main,contrib,non-free /source/Sources.bz2. Conclusion: 9316 packages are officially managed with Subversion and Git as of today, representing ~94% of the VCS managed packages. This means ~55% of all the Debian (source) packages are available through either a Git or Subversion repository and that s actually the number I was originally interested in. Thanks to Alexander Wirt, Christian Hofstaedter, Gerfried Fuchs, J rg Jaspert and Michael Renner for hints in forming up the final stats results.

Another month, another Games Team IRC Meeting happening. This time it was decided to have it again on Sunday, the time was set to 10 am UTC. To find out the time in your localtime, issue date -d '2011-06-26 10:00 UTC' in your shell. The agenda can be seen as always in the wiki. If the time or agenda doesn't fit your ideas, feel free to join our mailinglist to be informed about the discussion of agenda and time for the next meeting and raise your voice at that time. Please notice that the agenda isn't final yet, you can still drop your ideas for that. Enjoy, and join if you care about improving games packaging in Debian and influence future development!

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Martin Pitt announced packages of PostgreSQL 9.1 Beta 2 in his blog. Following this, I am hereby announcing the availability of pgadmin3 version 1.14.0 Beta 1 which amongst other things has added support for PG 9.1. You can find it in Debian experimental and backports for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, 10.10 and 11.04 in my pgadmin3 backports for stable Ubuntu releases PPA. Enjoy!

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This is a very special person. He is a very well known songwriter, at least in German language countries because he sings in German. He was that special kind of person with his lyrics when I was still a kid, and is still around continuing to write his songs in his very own special way. This person is Reinhard Mey, and if you understand German and have missed him so far, you have missed a lot. The songs that I present to you are special in the way that they are all contained in the special compilation titled Mein Apfelb umchen. The dedication he wrote for the album is also very special:

Ich glaube, Kinder zu haben ist das aufregendste Abenteuer, das wir erleben k nnen. Es ist der schwerste Beruf und die gr te Herausforderung, die ich mir denken kann, und die gl cklichste Erfahrung zugleich. Ich bin dankbar daf r! Dies sind die Lieder, die ich bis heute daf r geschrieben habe. Mein Anteil aus dem Erl s dieser Schallplatte gebe ich der Hilfe f r krebskranke Kinder.

Rough translation: I believe that having kids is the most exciting adventure that we can undergo. It is the hardest job and the biggest challenge that I can think of, and at the same time the happiest experience. I'm thankful for it! These are the songs that I wrote up to today for it. My part of the revenues of this record go to Help for children with cancer. So here are the songs:

• Mein Apfelb umchen: The song that gave this compilation its title. Extremely touching, and it manages regularly to wet my eyes... Absolutely lovely.
• Keine ruhige Minute: This is actually a live version of the song with a longer introduction that is worth listening to on its own.
• Menschenjunges: A thoughtful song about the thoughts when seeing your kid for the first time.

Enjoy! And if you feel like it, support these kind of special people.

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Whenever someone asked me about a calendar application, especially for the textmode, I always encouraged them to give pal a try. I always loved the looks of it, the interactive mode is helpful, it has HTML output format to inject the calendar into a webpage, mail output format for a daily reminder cronjob, and other useful features. I even created a file with the Austrian holidays for it which got included in the original project for the benefit of all its users.
If you haven't tried it yet and are looking for a calendar tool with support for very flexible recurring events and categories, this might be a good look. I am still happy with pal, though someone recently suggested a different tool on IRC, and that was wyrd. From a quick glance it looked promising, so I started to dig into it. My first task was to convert the former mentioned pal file for the Austrian holidays into remind format. remind is the backend for wyrd, and its definition language seems to be extremely powerful. It though took me a while to figure out how to put in Easter date related events into it, the examples weren't really hinting me in the right direction. This is part of what I am using now:
REM [trigger(easterdate(current())-47)] +6 TAG noweight MSG Faschingsdienstag %b The look and view of wyrd is different to pal in several ways. Where the granularity of pal is a pure day view, wyrd scales in hours (or half, quarter thereof). Also, wyrd offers the possibility to color the days differently by busy level. Of course it's possible to exempt tasks from adding weight to a day. pal on the other hand is able to color events differently by category. Decide yourself what you actually need, test it, and ... enjoy!

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Sometimes people will tell you what you should do. Sometimes they will even shout at you for simply asking a question on why they want something done because it isn't clear just from itself. And others likes to jump the boat and join in just for the fun of it... Gladly, this is MY life, and I choose how much abuse I'm willing to take, especially for a voluntary work that I didn't even enroll for but got put into. Sometimes through my dedication to getting quality into things and seeing that others simply neglect these areas, but they need to get addressed anyway, no matter how little respect is shown for people investing in these boring areas. The topic of It's MY Life is an old one and thus it is no surprise that a fair amount of songs surrounding it popped up over time. In my previous blog entry I wrote about different interpretations, some responses seem to hint that I wasn't clear enough about that I really meant different interpretations of the same lyrics, not just regular cover versions. The following set of songs is special in a different sense: It is about the same song title and thus does also cover different bands.

• Dr. Alban: Let's start with a rather old one.
• No Doubt: This is the band that Gwen Stefani got known through.
• Bon Jovi: No matter what you might think about Bon Jovi, they for sure wrote some pretty touching songs.

Like always, enjoy! And think about how you interact with others. I know that I'm sometimes crossing a line myself too, no one is perfect. What though makes the difference is the willingness to learn, and especially: To excuse. But in the end: It's MY life!

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Mostly everything in life boils down to the same troublesome issue: people are reading different things into what they read, and interpret them regularly in a way it wasn't meant to. It seems that in certain areas a culture of interpreting things in a bad way instead of good or asking how they were actually meant has established the rules of (not) working together but rather against each other and around each other. At times I would like to account it to language barriers, or cultural differences, but it happens with people from all areas so that reasoning would be too easy. Even artists manage to do that, and in that certain area it creates something extremely creative and thoughtful. This blog entry thus contains three songs and six videos: Two different interpretations of the same lyrics. Maybe this is able to stir some thinking process whether the interpretation that one found for a given situation might be biased or even just looking from the wrong angle.

• Imagine (John Lennon vs. A Perfect Circle): It gives me the shivers when thinking about what a different tune and might turn the same lyrics into. The various videos going with this interpretation make me even cry, and since the official video might be blocked in your country I linked one of the private made ones.
• Mad World (Tears For Fears vs. Gary Jules): You might not have known the original (Tears For Fears is well known for other songs actually) but only the cover, which was in the soundtrack of Donnie Darko.
• Drive (R.E.M. vs. R.E.M.): You read correctly: a band covering itself is rare but it happens. And yes, when I heard the live version back in the years it was a quite enlightening situation.

Enjoy! One thing I'd like to mention, and that is two cross references to former blog entries. For the first song, James Iha played as guitarist in The Smashing Pumpkins before he joined A Perfect Circle. The second cross reference is with respect to my former blog entry about the Wise Guys: They did also cover Mad World, in the Gary Jules' interpretation but of course in a capella.

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There is a whole business around books with worldly wisdoms. They get bought as gifts for friends to cheer them up, they are meant to help one through hard times. I though see a big issue with them:

• If you would really need them, you aren't able to adopt them.
• If you are able to adopt them, you don't need them.

This chicken-egg issue is a real pain here.

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As Evgeni Golov already blogged, there is going to be the next round of a IRC meeting of the Debian/Ubuntu Games Team on the upcoming Saturday. This time it will be held at April 30th at 12:00 UTC in #debian-games on irc.oftc.net, so if you are interested in bringing the Games Team up to pace again, want to join and wonder how you could help, please attend. The agenda contains a fair amount of leftovers from the first meeting, please see Meeting Page about it.

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My brother did invite me to the concert of the Wise Guys, a German acapella group. They are one of those special groups who are able to give a cheering live show and have this special cheek-in-tongue humour in a fair amount of their songs. This is the selection that helps me keeping my mood up though, you are invited to dig further.

• Jetzt ist Sommer: This was the first song I heard from them and got me interested to dig further into this band. And yes, it's true, summer is an inner feeling, not something governed by the outer world.
• Lass die Sonne scheinen: I have the feeling that this is a sequel to the former song. And it definitely helps too.
• Am Ende des Tages: No matter how your day went, what matters most are the people you think of at the end of the day.

Hope you are able to appreciate them as much as I am. At least they are able to cheer me up a fair bit.

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The Background If you weren't online last Friday you probably have missed the big news announcement on the various community distribution websites. The main pages of them got replaced by a placeholder announcing the birth of The Canterbury Project. People started to wonder whether it is an April fool's prank or for real. This blog post is meant to shine a bit more light on it and address one comment received about it. If you go to the news item on the Debian site you'll get your answer about that it indeed was an April fool's prank. The idea for doing something in coordination with other distributions came to me when I thought about last year's (or was it already two year's ago?) prank that the various web cartoon sites pulled: they replaced their main page with the page of another cartoonist. My original idea was actually along that lines. So I started to dig up website contacts from different distributions, I was aiming at the big names in the community distribution sector. Given that my time is pretty limited these days with renovating the house we plan to live in soonish I knew I had to let in others in within Debian. I though didn't want to involve too many people, for several reasons: it should be a surprise to as many as possible, but more importantly, I didn't want to shy away other distributions by an overwhelming Debian involvement. That's also part of the reason why I didn't contact many Debian based distributions. So first contacts where made, a dedicated IRC channel used for coordination, and people involved joined in. Then the thing happened which the Free Software community is so well known for: additional ideas came in, two people independently addressed me whether it wouldn't be better that instead of a circle replacement of the frontpage, why not display the same page on all of them. And one of them added that a corresponding news item might make sense. So there we were, having to think about text to put into two things: the news item and the replacement page itself. At this stage Alexander threw in a project name with a background that was adopted. Francesca started with an idea for the news item, I started to put quotes in and asked for ones from the other involved people that fit their distribution well. Klaas came up with a template for the replacement page that we tweaked. Fortunately we ended up being five distributions and the colors of the banner did match the distribution ones rather well (except for one, we had to tweak the color of one banner). The Credits We were all set, and actually everything went fine. And it definitely caught the attention. This blog post goes out in thanks to the following people:

• For Arch Linux: Pierre Schmitz and Dieter Plaetinck thanks for joining in on such a short notice!
• For Debian: Alexander Reichle-Schmehl (thanks for the name!), David Pr vot, Francesca Ciceri (thanks for gathering contact information!) and Martin Zobel-Helas (thanks for webserver setting tweaks).
• For Gentoo: Robin H. Johnson thanks for the best quote for the news item!
• For Grml: Michael Prokop thanks for the great live CD and your input!
• For openSUSE: Thomas Schmidt and Klass Freitag thanks for the perfect website theme and the best mocked up news item!
• ... and most of all, to the to be left unnamed person from the distribution that didn't join in in the end: a lot of thanks has to go in that direction because of the invaluable input. The actual idea about the additional news item is to be accounted to that person, and the Canterbury logo was tweaked there too.

I hopefully haven't forgotten anyone. There surely were some more people involved in the other distributions, and I guess the named people weren't aware of all the ones involved inside Debian. Feel free to drop missing names in the comments. Addressing Feedback Finally, let me address one concern raised: someone claimed that the real joke with this prank was that we would consider collaboration to be a joke. Actually, the total opposite is the case here. That it was possible to pull it off should be proof enough that Collaboration Across Borders actually is possible. And the background information put into the news section of the replacement site is real. Also, my personal quote in the news item was meant dead honest. I do believe that DEX has a limited point of view and only tackles part of the problem. Unfortunately, for such efforts to really come to life it takes people with a really long breath and dedication to it. Efforts like the VCS-PKG and the Freedesktop Games effort are more or less stalled. Even though a lot of people do believe in stronger collaboration to be a good thing, the basis is not working out too well. I'm in the fortunate position that for some of the packages I maintain there is exchange between packagers from different distributions to avoid common troubles. If it can't be done in the big it should at least be tried in the small. I want to specifically highlight again one part of the updates in the replacement page: the CrossDistro track at this year's FOSDEM. This one was more than fruitful, on several levels. From what I've heard a lot of discussion happened besides the talks too, and connections got established. It doesn't sound unlikely like this might be done again next year. So again, thanks for enjoying this April fool's prank, thanks to everyone who helped to deliver it, and especially a lot of thanks to the people who this might have got thinking of possibilities to improve on the collaboration front!

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Yesterday I was hinted towards lxc when I wondered what happened to openvz in unstable (which unfortunately isn't documented at all in the kernel changelogs, but that's a different story). So I started off taking a look. From a bit of experimenting around with it I consider it something that I want to play more with, and I want to share the problems I stumbled upon with you so that you don't have to figure them out on your own. First of all, LXC uses the cgroup kernel facility for resource management. The according file system isn't mounted by default, and LXC doesn't care for where it is mounted, it just needs to be. It seems like /sys/fs/cgroup seems to be the proper place (see 601757), so add the line cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup cgroup defaults 0 0 to your /etc/fstab file and sudo mount cgroup it. Next, it seems like bridging is the defacto standard for networking with lxc, but given that I want to use it on my notebook while being mobile I can't bind the bridge to any specific interface. To make this happen, one needs the bridge-utils package installed, and secondly, this is the path that I chose. I've added to /etc/network/interfaces this snippet:

auto br0
iface br0 inet static
    bridge_maxwait 0
    bridge_ports dummy0
    address 10.80.80.1
    netmask 255.255.255.0

This will bring up the bridge and act as gateway. For the running system, call sudo ifup br0. To make the host universally being able to work as gateway, of course ip_forward needs to be enabled. For this I added the line net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 to /etc/sysctl.d/local.conf (and for the running system, echo 1 into /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward). As I am using ferm for configuring the firewall on my notebook I have to add some parts into its configuration. This is the raw part that needs to get added, mix it into your existing configuration:

table filter  
    chain INPUT  
        # allow DNS queries from LXContainers
        proto (udp tcp) dport domain source 10.80.80.0/24 ACCEPT;
     
    chain FORWARD  
        # allow LXContainers into the net
        source 10.80.80.0/24 ACCEPT;
     
 
table nat  
    chain POSTROUTING  
        # NAT LXContainers
        source 10.80.80.0/24 MASQUERADE;
     
 

For DNS I installed dnsmasq so that I won't have to touch the /etc/resolv.conf inside the containers whenever I switch networks. So far for the host part, now to the actual containers. There is the /usr/lib/lxc/templates/lxc-debian helper script which uses debootstrap to create you a lenny chroot at least in the squeeze package this is hardwired, likewise with using cdn.debian.net. Copy the script and edit it to your likes if you feel like it. From what I understood it expects you to store the containers below /var/lib/lxc, I haven't yet tested for different places. So this was my commandline for that:
sudo /usr/lib/lxc/templates/lxc-debian -p /var/lib/lxc/vm0 A while later you'll end up below that directory with two entries: The config file and the rootfs subdirectory which is actually the bootstrapped distribution part. Now comes the configuration of the container. Open the config file with your favorite editor and add the following lines to the end:

lxc.utsname = vm0
lxc.network.type = veth
lxc.network.flags = up
lxc.network.link = br0
# lxc.network.name = eth0
lxc.network.hwaddr = 00:FF:80:80:80:80
lxc.network.ipv4 = 10.80.80.80/24

The network.name part is commented out, it defaults to that name internally; you though can change it to whatever you prefer. Caution, even though this is the documented approach, it does not work for Debian containers. It will always try to get its IP address through dhcp, lxc.network.ipv4 has no meaning for us. We need to change inside the rootfs the file etc/network/interfaces to read like this instead:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
   address 10.80.80.80
   netmask 255.255.255.0
   gateway 10.80.80.1

I suggest to keep the config and the interfaces file aligned with respect to the ipv4 setting so if this gets fixed upstream you won't stumble into any surprises. Also like mentioned before, we need to change the nameserver entries inside the rootfs file etc/resolv.conf to read nameserver 10.80.80.1. Now it's time to start it up and log in! sudo lxc-start -n vm0 -d will start the container in the background, and sudo lxc-console -n vm0 will give you the login to the container. The default password for the root user is root, obviously you want to change that before you install any networking services into the container like ssh-server. In case you want to quit from that console notice the message upon starting it, it's bound to <Ctrl+a q>. One more issue that I had: The default route wasn't set. I had to manually call ip r a default via 10.80.80.1 dev eth0 to be able to use the network inside the container. It seems to be related to that netbase isn't installed by default. If you install it the default route will be set upon starting the container automatically. This should get you started, there is of course more to explore and experiment with. Actually it is also suggested to create a tarball from your vm0 after you did the basic setup and installed the basic components you want to have around so you won't have to bootstrap over and over again. Do this after you have shut down the container, either through a halt from a container shell or through sudo lxc-stop -n vm0. The tarball can then get extracted to a different directory and just needs minor tweaks in the config and rootfs/etc/network/interfaces file to not create any clash with other containers (lxc.rootfs, lxc.mount.entry, lxc.utsname, lxc.network.hwaddr and ipv4 address). About limiting the containers, you can do it dynamically through the cgroup file system, and set it permanently through the config file. See man lxc.conf about these settings, amongst others. Enjoy, use, experiment. With sudo lxc-checkconfig you will see what your kernel actually supports for your LXCs. You will most probably notice the missing for the memory controller, this is tracked in the Debian bug report 534964.

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As Paul Wise already blogged, there is going to be a IRC meeting of the Debian/Ubuntu Games Team on the upcoming friday night. It will be held at 18th of March at 21:00 UTC in #debian-games on irc.oftc.net, so if you are interested in bringing the Games Team up to pace again, want to join and wonder how you could help, please attend. The agenda isn't final yet, the doodle poll about it is still open, if you want to put your preferences in.

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