We (at Zend) want to help people get more involved in testing PHPNG (PHP next generation), so we re started to provide binaries for it, although it s still a branch on top of PHP s master branch. See more details about PHPNG on Zeev Suraski s blog post. The binaries (64bit) are compatible with Debian testing/unstable and Ubuntu Trusty (14.04) and up. The mod_php is built for Apache 2.4 which all three flavors have. The repository is at http://repos.zend.com/zend-server/early-access/phpng/ Installation instructions:

# wget http://repos.zend.com/zend.key -O- 2> /dev/null apt-key add -
# echo deb [arch=amd64] http://repos.zend.com/zend-server/early-access/phpng/ trusty zend > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/phpng.list
# apt-get update
# apt-get install php5

For the task of providing these binaries, I had a pleasure of combining my experience as a member of the Debian PHP team and a Debian Developer with stuff more internal to the PHP development process. Using the already existing Debian packaging enabled me to test more builds scenarios easily (and report problems accoredingly). Hopefully this could also be translated back into providing more experimental packages for Debian and making sure Debian packages are ready for the PHP released after PHP 5.6.
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, PHP

The Debian FTP masters have for quite a while a line in their reject FAQ about the PHP license. Despite that, quite a lot of PHP extensions were uploaded to the archive and accepted. Some are being managed/developed in PHP.net s PECL website, and are done under the umbrella of the PHP Group, which is the group the PHP license is refers to. Over time, we started to see many more extension being developed outside of the PHP group (both technically with sites like github and copyright wise). This is true to certain degree with the PHP.net s PEAR website which has software written in PHP. The issue has been raised again in October 2013 with php-gearman using the PHP license while having different copyright holders (bug #728196). After discussions (ftp masters, release team & Ond ej), it was agreed that the current interpretation is still relevant, and almost all extensions and applications should be either removed or re-licensed by its upstream. This makes the todo list 41 packages long (full list based on Ond ej Sur s bug reports). Any help with contacting upstream projects, explaining the situation and requesting a license change would be welcomed. We also need to monitor new release based on fulfilling these requests. Until such a change happen, with automatic removal of packages from testing, we re going to see packages disappear after mid July. This has a little wider affect due to package dependencies, but for the moment only on testing (Jessie).
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, PHP

The license says you can use free and open source software for any reason, but the FBI wouldn t agree with your questions Silk Road operator identified by asking a PHP related question on stackoverflow. See The Bonehead Mistake That Brought Down an Online Drug-Dealing Empire on Slate.com
Filed under: Uncategorized

I ve noticed that my post from three months ago ( Bye bye non-free PHP JSON extension ) was quoted quite often (thanks (: ). But I also noticed that most people didn t read the post fully, and didn t see the replacement package. Hopefully the title of this post will correct that impression. I d like to indicate the existence of the php5-json package. It s part of Debian unstable since June 2013 and testing (jessie) since August 2013. Users who wish to build the free extension on their own are welcome to download it from PECL at http://pecl.php.net/package/jsonc . It s a good chance to thank Remi Collet for his work on this replacement. I m happy that the main Linux distributions have already adopted it.
Filed under: Uncategorized

Two months ago I complained about how hard it was to get patches into PHP as the core member didn t give much attention for pull requests on github. After posting it on the blog, I raised the issue in the developers mailing list and was suggested to join and help. A month ago, I started sending a weekly report about new / pending / merged / closed pull requests and got cooperation from the community with reviewing the pull requests and processing them. In this period 40 requests were dealt with (obviously not all merged), and much more are work in progress while the developers are commenting on the requests. The credit is obviously for the contributors for the patches and the core developers for the work. Stas Malyshev was of special help with this change. You re welcome to follow at https://github.com/php/php-src/pulls
Filed under: PHP

One of the various ways to measure an open source project is the way it encourages and accepts patches from community members (or future members). The various open source projects I m involved with have many ways to send patches: mailing list, bug tracking systems and more recently pre-commit tools for peer review (such as gerrit). Another popular option is to use github s pull request feature for this. Personally, I find it too complex for simple patches and would prefer gerrit over it. As part of my work at Zend, I try to make sure patches are sent back upstream. Comparing to other open source projects I know, it seems to me that PHP isn t open enough for contributions. This might be just my private case, but if not, it would be discouraging people to contribute and blocking the community from expanding. 6 Months ago I submitted patch to #36103 (patch is at #63767), but no response. A month ago I submitted a simple patch to FPM s shell script (#64764), and no response there as well. To ease things up, I ve created a github fork of the php-src repository and sent pull requests with each of the patches (as suggested at http://php.net/git-php.php). Even edited the bugs reports with the pull request details (as they provide such integration). I m waiting to see if this will trigger a more rapid review process from the project. For the simple patch, I got a response very fast from a user, but still waiting for a core member to check it. Going over the pull requests (both open and closed), I m not too optimistic about having the patches merged, judging by past merged patches (most of them are at least 2 months) and by the open patches (e.g. a typos fix patch is waiting for month).
Filed under: PHP

PHP 5.5 rc2 was recently uploaded to Debian unstable by Ond ej Sur . Along side the new PHP version and its features the PHP team has dealt with the JSON extension being non-free because of the The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil license (see debian #692613).

php5 (5.5.0~rc1+dfsg-1) experimental; urgency=low
    [...]
  * Add dfsg-repack.sh script to remove non-free JSON module
    (Closes: #692613)
  * Remove php5-json from Provides, since that's no longer true
 -- Ond ej Sur  <ondrej@debian.org>  Fri, 17 May 2013 14:41:41 +0200

A package with a DFSG replacement for the JSON extension is waiting in the NEW queue and should be available soon. The new JSON extension was done by Remi Collet (PHP developer and Fedora s PHP maintainer). Review and patches are welcomed, code is available at https://github.com/remicollet/pecl-json-c . I hope the PHP project will adopt the solution, after claiming they won t fix it themselves (see php.net #63520).
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, PHP

One more step at being the universal operating system: getting Debian to space:

Specifically, the International Space Station astronauts will be using computers running Debian 6.

Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux

Continuing the previous post about commits and bugs, I d like to review some mistakes I saw recently. Mistakes do happen, but mentioning them here is meant to teach others and hopefully to reduce similar ones in the future. This post isn t about shaming the authors/commiters. Also, the points I highlight are what I consider as a mistakes or problems, other people might think differently.

1. Mentioning two bugs in one commit message, which our system doesn t support right now. So the second bug doesn t get the commit notification, and that should be done manually (example: commit 2933935 and fdo#53278).
2. Referencing gerrit changes as part of the commit message (example: commit 87f185d). Giving references as part of the commit is great and helpful, but I would prefer to see the reference to the actual commit and not to its review process. This is meaningful when you search the log. If the followup change is suggested when the first change is still in review it should be combined, otherwise it already have a commit to reference.
3. Following up a commit, and not mentioning the bug it references (example: commit 87f185d). In this specific case, the we re talking about a meta bug for translating comments from German to English (fdo#39468), so no harm done. But this important when you want to cherry pick a fix for a bug to other branches and might forget the follow up commits. It s also relevant to more technical meta bugs (example: fdo#62096).
4. Referencing a mailing list which reference a commit and a bug instead of referencing them directly (commit 21fea27, fdo#60534). This bug shows very well why correct referencing is important, a commit was made to fix the bug, a follow up commit was done without proper reference, and than the first commit was reverted. No one involved in trying to fix that specific bug knew about the follow up commit as it wasn t documented anywhere.
5. Referencing bugs though full bug URL instead of the right format (example: commit e1f6dac). Also the bug is referenced in the commit in the body of the message instead of the first line (header) which is more visible.
6. Referencing non existing bugs (example: commit 3a4534b). Which got a manual notification in the bug by the comitter (fdo#33091).
7. Using shortening services URL as part of commit messages (example: commit 86f8fba). There s no way to know to what the reference is without using the service, which in this case was leading to a post on one of the projects mailing list. There isn t any problem giving the direct URL to the list s archive. It s interesting whether we should link to our URL and is it OK to use other external services who also archive our mailing lists (example: commit e83990a).

To conclude, having references in commit message is really helpful, but please reference the right resource to help people find it easily and to let our automated services parse it.
Filed under: LibreOffice

Besides my RTL work on Libreoffice, every once in a while I just go over the regular commit log to see what have changed. I don t necessary understand each line in the commit, but do get the general idea from the commit message. Being more dependent on the commit messages makes me review them more thoroughly (hence the topic of this post). As many projects, Libreoffice has notifications of commits related to bugs reports when the bug number is properly mentioned in the commit message. This is very useful for other developers and also for QA people. After verification of a bug is fixed, I often use the commits listed on the bug report to cherry pick them to an older branch. Going to search for an unreferenced commit isn t much fun. One of the things I notice is different ways people reference bugs from not referencing them at all to referencing them in various ways like linking to the bugs system, just writing the number (without the fdo# prefix) and other creative ways This is also true for first time contributors, which might not know the standards or the rules . When I see such a case I usually put a manual notification in the bug report, and mail the author of doing so. For new or sporadic contributors this is also an opportunity to welcome and thank them for the commit and even encourage future contributions. I have been asked why aren t that info on the wiki, so I went looking and found out the info is in the right place under the Development/GetInvolved page. The relevant part is:

When you type a commit message:

• start the first line with a bug reference like fdo#12345, if you have one for your commit (see details below)
• use the rest of the first line as a concise summary of your changes
• the 2nd line remains empty
• and starting on the 3rd line you can explain how and what changes have been made for what reasons.

Thanks in advance and happy coding (:
Filed under: LibreOffice

After returning from a vacation, I went over my RTL bugs backlog. I missed helping with checking a few patches, so I got left with verifying the fixes done by the KACST guys on master. Last week was dedicated for verifications of the bug fixes, even found a regression and reverted the commit after discussion with the author. Yesterday, I took my time with pushing these fixes also to the 4-0 branch, having them available as soon as possible instead of waiting for the 4.1 release. Total of 7 bugs got pushed, see https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/RTL_Bugs#4.0.3 for the list. I notified the developers, so they ll know their changes are available to the public sooner than expected (and let the people enjoy their work earlier). All these pushes make sure that master doesn t have any RTL support superiority over the current stable branch. In one of the cases I had to do some follow up about the commit, finding another relevant commit. This was merged with a trick Eike taught me a while ago for squashing commits with git rebase. Fridrich quickly helped with verifying that the squash stills looks good, letting me push another dependent fix on top of it.
Filed under: LibreOffice

LibreOffice 4.0.0 will be released soon, and it s a good time to summarize its RTL status. Similar to 3.5.0, the RTL work started with LibreOffice conference in October, showing the current state (see LibreOffice RTL status 2012 presentation) and listing the top problems. The main goal of this talk is to raise awareness to RTL issues and recruit developer to help fix them. This was exactly what happened with fdo#44657 which is about Calc not having a scroll bar in RTL user interface. This way RTL bug #1 for almost a year. In total, version 4.0.0 has 8 bugs fixed (mainly Calc, Presenter Console and toolbars). In addition it has 5 language specific bugs fixed. Full lists are at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/RTL_Bugs#4.0.0 and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/RTL_Bugs#4.0.0_2. Beside working on fixing bugs for the 4.0.0, another focus was put on making sure the fixes are available for the 3.6.x users. This resulted with cherry picking 11 out of 13 bug fixes (part of 3.6.4 and 3.6.5 releases). More fixes are already underway in the master branch, and will also be part of 4.0.1 maintenance release (full list at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/RTL_Bugs#4.0.1). Beside thanking the core developers for their help (patches, code review), I d like to thank the guys from The National Program for Free and Open Source Software Technologies (Motah) at King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) in Saudi Arabia, which have joined the RTL team during this release, and their effect is well noticed. Despite all the work done, we still have a share of RTL bugs for the next release, these are the 7 top priority RTL bugs, any help would be appreciated.

1. fdo#33302 Brackets inverted in rtl text (mac only)
2. fdo#53030 Calc deletes current sheet, not right-clicked on sheet when trying to delete opposite directionality sheets
3. fdo#56403 RTL UI: with RTL locales presentations appear with text align to the right instead of to the left
4. fdo#37128 Writer saves text alignment of RTL paragraph not according to the ODF specification
5. fdo#44029 docx files with RTL paragraphs aren t compatible with Word
6. fdo#43093 FILEOPEN: [docx] MS Office documents opens with wrong alignment and directionality
7. fdo#56408 Brackets are not handled correctly with mixed English/Latin and Hebrew/Arabic texts

Filed under: i18n & l10n, LibreOffice

Last week, just before the branching of 3.6.4 was the peak of my recent work in LibreOffice. The motivation from attending the conference and working with others lasted long for me with the help of a few collaborations done since (thanks Caolan and Eike). My own patches were approved just in time to make it to the 3-6 branch, which, along other fixes, pretty much makes 3.6.4 a better release to the RTL users in general, and Hebrew users specifically. Things aren t perfect, but they re improving nicely (on going status is at RTL bugs wiki page). I m also very happy that most RTL related fixes since the conference have been cherry-picked from master to 3-6 branch, so the users won t have to wait till February for the 4.0 release. Last year I had to wait till the 3.5 release to see some of my work fruits, now I can see them in much shorter intervals. The motivation and involvement go hand in hand, each enhances the other for me. I ve started reviewing patches sent for RTL bugs to verify the suggested fixes with private builds and marking bugs as verified when the patches do get accepted. Compering to a month ago, I m now busy with helping the developers do their part instead of just reporting problems. Seeing things go forward (and helping them do so) is much more motivating than waiting for someone to pick the bug report and try solve it. I hope having fast response to their code changes is also motivating for the developers, in that case everyone enjoys the collaboration.
Filed under: LibreOffice

Miklos published about his LibreOffice RTF import Drawing Objects improvements which was done to fix my report (fdo#42407). As an anecdote I want to mention that he test document was my flight ticket to the LibreOffice conference in 2011. So I feel I got an extra value from attending the conference in the form of having a this RTF compatibility implemented. In addition, Miklos fixed an import problem with Hebrew with these old documents (fdo#56512) double value. Miklos I owe you a drink (: I m not sure if I should thank the traveling company for working with such old software which produced the old formatted RTF files, but in any case, it turned out to be a good thing.
Filed under: LibreOffice

I ve started the morning with the easy hacks for non developers talks, which for my opinion lacked some code related tasks that even non developers can do like fixing translation problems in the source (in the English strings), fixing some simple logic bugs which doesn t require reading complex code (e.g. traversing records and first/last special cases). The other options mentioned in the talk aren t less important, but I think people shouldn t be afraid reading/touching the code to some level even with very limited coding skills. Later I ve used Rene s 3.7/master builds for Debian to verify two RTL bugs (fdo#43210, fdo#44925) fixed by the Motah guys from Saudi Arabia. After the verification, I pushed the changes to the 3.6 branch (should appear in 3.6.4).
Katya, which I ve met in the last conference, told me see watched my talked remotely, and took interest in RTL ui forcing right alignment to non aligned text. While reproducing the bug on her computer we were able to narrow the problem a bit, to be related to the locale and not only to the RTL interface. Till the end of the day she d identified the problem in the odp file and I hope a fix will be available by tomorrow. Jan (kendy) had a good progress with fdo#44657 (RTL problem #1). Checking the fix is quite confusing, and we had to use two laptops to understand and compare the right and desired behavior. Hopefully this problem will end soon, which will make coming to the conference worthwhile (as for the RTL status and efforts). Later I started working on moving the RTL status page from a wiki in Hebrew to the TDF wiki RTL Bugs page in English . By this I hope to get more visibility to the current status, and as a base to collaboration, let others help with RTL more easily. During one of the breaks I heard Lionel encourages someone to do builds on his own, and I decided that after avoiding this tasks for two years, it s about time. By the evening I got a build running according to the native build guide in the wiki (which took half the night on my laptop). There are still a few things to learn how to do with this build, but I how to now be more active in testing things without waiting for official Debian builds (which are quite hard when Debian is frozen). Thanks to Lionel for the encouragement. http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=a662d6d8c00f5a1cff724db51b0914aab36e201b
Filed under: LibreOffice

Most of the day before the conference, and the conference morning spent working and finalizing my RTL status presentation. My apologies to the lecturers whose lectures I attend only physically (sorry, I can t split my attention too well). To my disappointment I had very few attendees in the talk, but I can understand the competition, as the other parallel talks were quite interesting. In at least one of them I wished to attend my self (if I could only be in two places in the same time ). Maybe next year we should have less parallel talks (4 tacks is a lot). To still push some of the RTL issues, I ve done a private talk over RTL issues for Caolan and Jan (kendy), which was interesting with some feedback. Jan took fdo#44657 on himself, and by the evening he showed me a great improvement in the status of things, so at least there s horizontal scrolling in Calc with RTL interface. With the help of Rene, I got master builds for Debian, and would spend the rest of the conference to check some bugs with it. During the evening dinner and social event I wanted to thank Miklos personally for really improving the RTF support for RTL and Hebrew documents, and he showed me a few of the new stuff he d done in master/3.7. While working I ve noticed a few regressions, and I m glad they were caught early. Cedric told me that after last years talk, he started to check his features also in RTL interface, which for me was the best feedback on my efforts. Having developers keeping RTL in mind (even only nce in a while) saves a lot of trouble along the road. I would prefer to check and double check features while they re being created instead of trying to get bugs fixed later on the release process. Another thing which I enjoyed noticing is the fresh blood the GSoC project brings to LibreOffice. I ve met with Miklos and Eilidh and got impressed with how a successful internship was used as a springboard into a good job. As there almost aren t any Israelis who take part in GSoC, I m not used to notice the effect closely. The event dinner and mingling was very successful for me, I ve got a chance to talk with old friends and meet some of the new attendees (and even get some technical work done by talking with people) Thanks again for the organizational team.
Filed under: LibreOffice

An old server decided to mail me about a filesystem space problem it had. Before logging in my first thought was is this server still alive? . While checking things up, I ve noticed too many processes had 2010 ? in their STIME column of ps, which made me check when was the last reboot.
The results talk for themselves.

# uptime
23:51:06 up 636 days, 8:36, 1 user, load average: 0.12, 0.43, 0.33 # who -b
system boot 2010-11-11 14:15 # cat /etc/debian_version
4.0

Sweet (: With these records, no wander I could forget about it
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux

I recently got a question by email about the lecture I presented at FOSDEM, and by that mail I discovered that the video of the lecture was uploaded to YouTube (FOSDEM 2012 Debian packaging for beginners). While I thank the person who did the upload, he/she did not keep the right license for the video which is CC-BY-SA 3.0 (as noted at FOSDEM archive). You can also grab the webm file directly. Well, the next task will be to listen to myself in order to improve for FOSDEM 2013 See you there.
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, FOSDEM

In the last 6 months I ve devoted a lot of time to the open source projects I m part of. I decided to take a vacation from most of the open source stuff I do. This is mainly to balance things better and make sure I don t feel burnt out. I m not disappearing completely, but rather shifting into a lower gear and focus on the things I enjoy most regarding open source.
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, LibreOffice

After not attending FOSDEM for a few years, this year I decided to attend and also give a talk about Debian packaging for beginners , a replay of a talk given by Gergely Nagy in Debconf11 (video). As the per distribution devrooms were replaced a few years ago with the cross-distributions rooms, I thought it might be a good chance to have this kind of introduction talk to help people started contributing to Debian (or derived distributions). The talk wasn t meant to replace reading the documentation (new maintainer s guide, developer s references and the debian policy), but it s a good start for those who want some hands-on experience. The idea is to start with a just the upstream directory and progress trough the various errors and warnings we get during the build process using dpkg-buildpackage. The outcome is of course very basic, but enough to get people ready to do things on their own, including various QA tests on the package (e.g. lintian and debdiff). The presentation covers the important points of the 3 main files in the debian directory: control, changelog and rules. It addition it holds some information about the various tools one can used to test the packages. I hope to make another version of the presentation to be more standalone than just having the main points during the talk itself.
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, FOSDEM