We escorted Sarge to its last home. 3.1r8 is done, thanks to all the people who made it possible. A big thanks goes to James Troup, our ftpmaster of the day doing all the grunt work of getting a new point release out of the door. To bring in a more personal feeling of who makes this all possible, here is a list of people contributing uploads to 3.1r8 (mostly people from our fabulous Security Team):

• Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta
• dann frazier
• Darren Salt
• Devin Carraway
• Florian Weimer
• Gregory Colpart
• Julien Cristau (who is glad that he finally got rid of xfree86)
• Luk Claes
• Martin Pitt
• Michael Koch
• Moritz Muehlenhoff
• Noah Meyerhans
• Patrick Schoenfeld
• Roland Mas
• Russ Allbery
• Sean Finney
• Steffen Joeris
• Thijs Kinkhorst

I would also like to thank dann frazier, Luk Claes, Martin Zobel-Helas and Neil McGovern for helping with the preparation of the point release.

Right now, some Debian Developers (and also not yet Developers, like me:), are on
the work sessions in Extremadura, I am on the QA and release teams meeting.

We started in the morning with presentations (see also the schedule). Any comments and suggestions welcomed, please add comments below the post.

Lucas Nussbaum presenting:


Most of us:



And in details, names from left to right. Cyril Brulebois, Gon ri Le Bouder:


Luk Claes, Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt, J rg Jaspert, Lars Wirzenius:


Fabio Tranchitella, Bernd Zeimetz, Mario Iseli, Luk Claes:


Filippo Giunchedi, Stefano Zacchiroli, Tzafrir Cohen, Simon Richter, Faidon Liambotis:


And again, so that Faidon is visible:

• Froscon rocks!
• explored some more software in more detail, including op, dconf, dstat, unoconf, dwscan, ikiwiki, openQRM, Pentabarf, sl
• it was great to meet so many people (some of them for the first time in RL), including Alexander ‘formorer’ Wirt, Timo ‘Spida’ Boettcher, Marc ‘HE’ Brockschmidt, Bernd Zeimetz, Thomas ‘MrFai’ Lange, Sebastian Harl, Elmar Hoffmann, Martin Zobel-Helas, Luk Claes, Christoph ‘myon’ Berg, Klaus Knopper, Sven Guckes, Dag Wieers and many more…
• using ‘vlock -a -n’ with Debian package >=2.0-2 rocks when using libthinkfinger and authentication via ’swipe finger’ (thanks, formorer :-))
• having Debian release managers (hi Zobel and Luk :-)) by hand rocks
• the book shop at Froscon (Lehmanns) provided one of the best selection of books I’ve seen on an Open-Source event so far (fsck, 3 more books for my library)
• organization of the event was very good
• sadly the press plant made a fscking error when shipping the froscon edition of grml-CDs, so 1000 grml-CDs failed to arrive in time
• thanks to Pierre Schmitz and the Archlinux team for providing us linux-user DVDs containing grml 1.0 and grml64 0.1!

The Debian-Team at the Debian-booth of Froscon 2007: Standing (from left): Bernd Zeimetz, Thomas ‘MrFai’ Lange, Sebastian Harl, Elmar Hoffmann, Martin Zobel-Helas, Luk Claes;
Sitting in the middle: Christoph ‘myon’ Berg

MJ Ray posted a couple of short summaries as to how the election would have turned out if alternate voting systems had been used. A couple of people asked about others, so here's a nice long list:

Borda,
Borda Elimination,
Minmax,
Nanson,
Ranked Pairs,
Condorcet (SPI),
Condorcet (Debian):

• Bdale Garbee
• David Graham
• Luk Claes
• Joshua D. Drake
• Martin Zobel-Helas
• Joerg Jaspert

Bucklin:

• Bdale Garbee
• David Graham
• Joshua D. Drake
• Luk Claes
• Joerg Jaspert
• Ian Jackson

IRV,
Pluralty:

• Bdale Garbee
• David Graham
• Joshua D. Drake
• Martin 'Joey' Schulze
• Luk Claes
• MJ Ray

Most of these seem to come out in favour of the result we achieved with Condorcet. Plurality (aka: First past the post) and IRV put heavy emphisis on the voters first choice. It doesn't really make sense to compare results from a condorcet ballot with either of these methods. Bucklin is rather meaningless in a multi-winner election.

In answer to "is this type of Condorcet ever likely to elect someone who polarises views", it's possible, but unlikely. IRV and Pluralty are the ones to go for if you want the majority of people unhappy, unlike the others, which produce the majority of people happy.

I wasn't elected to SPI's board. I didn't think I would be once I saw all the other candidates (I nominated before all declared), but it looks like I would have been elected with those votes under some other common systems. I think both first-past-the-post and alternative vote (also known as instant run-off voting, reportedly recommended by Robert's Rules for election-by-mail) would have resulted in this same board:

1. Bdale Garbee
2. David Graham
3. Joshua D. Drake
4. Martin 'Joey' Schulze
5. Luk Claes
6. MJ Ray

Instead, the results were:

1. Bdale Garbee
2. David Graham
3. Luk Claes
4. Joshua D. Drake
5. Joerg Jaspert
6. Martin Zobel-Helas

Nevertheless, well done to the new members. On one hand, I'm happier, because there's still two of my top four there and now I've less required work. On the other hand, I would have liked a crack at it myself and both boards are disappointing because there's no Ian Jackson. An interesting thing is how many times I appear in each position in voting lists: (5, 1, 2, 1, 9, 6, 6, 3, 3, 4, 2, 9, 37), or as a bar chart:

1. st
2. nd
3. rd
4. th
5. th
6. th
7. th
8. th
9. th
10. th
11. th
12. th
13. th

A fairly acceptable middle-of-road candidate for most of it, but then a huge spike at the low end. Note that a majority of voters put me in positions 11-13. There wasn't much warning of that one coming during hustings. WTF? There seem to be some 30 or 40 voters who really dislike me, but didn't tell me that straight, preferring to be silent then vote me down. Are you cowards, or what? More generally, is this type of Condorcet ever likely to elect someone who polarises views, or who many inexplicably dislike? What does this say for any plan to use a Condorcet for debian's social committee? Could majorities always prevent minority reps? Update: Neil McGovern posted a few comparisons of more complex systems (I only did the easy ones) and AJ posted STV results which completes the main systems, I think. It seems Condorcet-SPI wasn't as unusual as I first thought. Finally, as I understand it, turn-out was 25% of voting members (not the 25% of SPI members that some press reported). Why was turn-out so low? (2007-08-08: 1 pingback, 3 comments)

Last weekend we organised a Bug Squashing Party where more than 70 packages got fixed. Personally I fixed more than half of these :-) I noticed two unexpected things. Some maintainers were not aware that in a BSP with uploads to DELAYED-0 they should mark bugs pending or comment in the BTS if they don't want people to work on these bugs. Next some NMUers only fixed RC bugs even if there could be translations included or updated. Anyway the BSP was very successfull though I hope even more people will be involved in the next one ;-)

This is my first real blog entry. After setting up etch's version of ikiwiki, it looked like the documentation didn't match that version, so I installed and configured the unstable version on my etch system which went pretty well. I also hope that this will show up on planet.debian.org...

should this be added to the wiki?

Apparantly not everyone knows binNMUs. Sometimes bugs are filed when binNMUs can solve the problem. Some people even wonder about breaking NMUs without any notice. A binNMU:
* no source changes * sheduled on the build daemons by someone with wanna-build access * for versions of packages which already exist in the archive * can be requested on debian-release@lists.debian.org, no bugs should be filed So a binNMU is used often for library transitions with ABI changes but without API changes (libFOO-dev has not been renamed, but libFOObar has been renamed to libFOObaz) or to fix an upload of a package that was not built in a clean environment. Note that it is a good idea to contact the maintainers of packages that reverse depend on your library before starting a library transition in any case so people know why their packages don't build/install anymore and maybe can even coordinate uploads they were going to make anyway. Informing the Release Team about library transitions of more than a couple of packages would also be appreciated....

where is this documented?

About the difference between retry, give-back and binNMU. They are all kind of rebuilds on the build daemons, though have each another goal: In my previous blog post I spoke about binNMUs. They are needed when a version of a package was built successfully and installed in the archive before. Normally this means that the version of the package is not installable on the system anymore because one of the dependencies is not installable anymore and rebuilding the package should fix it. A binNMU also means a new version (typically adding +bN where N is a positive integer) and a new changelog entry. A retry or give-back is used when a version of a package failed to build before and rebuilding the package should work. Normally this means that a build dependency was not available or some other temporary problem has been fixed. So the main difference with a binNMU is that the version of the package didn't build successfully before, so it's also not installed in the archive. A retry is used to rebuild that version of the package on the build daemon where the build failed. Normally this is used when the individualstalledpkg_timeout of a package has been increased. A give-back is used to put the version of the package in the wanna-build state 'Needs-Build' again. So it may be rebuilt on another build daemon than the one were the build failed. Note that when I talk about a version of a package in the above it should actually be a version of a package on a particular architecture as binNMUs, retries and give-backs are scheduled for a known triplet (package, version, architecture).

As there are currently four persons working on the next stable release (Dann Frazier, Luk Claes, Julien Danjou and me), we decided to track all issues for the next stable release (4.0r1) also in the Debian BTS. So if you would like to look what we currently consider for 4.0r1, have a look here. Before adding a bug (eg. with the command bts user debian-release@lists.debian.org . usertag 420759 + SRM) please contact the stable release team first, or even better, let the stable release team add your bug there on their own. Also, not all uploaded packages to proposed-updates will automatically considered for the next stable release. Update: With “contact the stable release team first” i do mean, please send requests to debian-release@lists.d.o, not contacting release team members in private over IRC or direct eMail. And NO, h01ger, cellphone is also not an option!!!1!!!elf!!!! release

Waking up at 5am (I know, not a decent hour, though I don't choose when a plane leaves), cycling to the railway station with all my luggage (no buses drive that early...), taking the train (actually 3 trains as there are 2 stops) for 1.5h, arriving at the airport, hearing about some strike, checking in and being told strike will be over when my plane takes off (9am), waiting, plane being delayed till 10am, waiting, plane being delayed till 11am, waiting, plane being delayed to 1pm, eating, waiting, plane being delayed till 3pm, queueing for information (which was going to take ages), plane being cancelled. Apparantly some firemen didn't like that they didn't get food tickets nor paid overhours I should have known that taking a plane to Spain is risky. My previous attempt: ... arriving in the airport, trying to be checked in, being told that tickets have been cancelled, making calls, being told that travel agency forgot to confirm a second time and that new tickets have been booked for 2 days later, going home, night before take off seeing that ticket to Spain has been cancelled (ticket back still valid), going to the airport anyway, being called that everything is ok, arriving at the airport, being told that I have 2 tickets for the same flight... Sorry to the people who expected me to be in Spain, I'm not going to try my luck again tomorrow, though I'll try to be happy on IRC

Something went wrong with my mailserver (configuration?) today. So if you got a bounce or are wondering why I didn't answer a mail you sent today, feel free to resend the message as I changed the forwarding to another email address for the time being.

While looking at the bugs against the release-notes package I saw still some open bugs for sarge?! I think they should be either closed or marked properly, though for now I just left them untouched. Because I don't have write access (yet?) to the CVS repository, I prepared some patches for some issues. As I know I'm quite dense in explanations, I hope some people can improve them so they can be safely included in the Release Notes I spotted quite some bugs regarding the sarge to etch upgrade path and some bugs which are already acted on, but only need a last review AFAICS. As both these categories are already worked on by other people I'm happy to skip them for now I hope my patches fasten the work on the Release Notes as the release is very near...

Since my mail to debian-devel-announce we as Release Team actually don't consider any packages that don't fix RC bugs in etch anymore. This doesn't mean packages which have bogus RC bugs will be considered, nor that packages which don't have any RC bugs filed, but still are RC buggy won't be considered. It also doesn't mean we are considering packages with RC bugs in unstable like upgrading from some intermediate version to another. Security bugs are still considered anyway, though if they don't make it in time they'll have to go via security.debian.org. Main blockers for the release are at the moment the (hopefully) last kernel upload and the release notes. Other things that still have to be taken care of are preparing the detailed release procedure, building the CDs and preparing the announcement...

Happy New Year! Happy 2007!

And a really happy one!

After the cloud of ideas and subjects on the last post, giving the clear idea that I should keep this blog more up-to-date, here is an important note that is missing (including old news that I should had post but didn't, sorry for that). I'm aware that a few people are interested in how the Debian NM process evolves from person to person, on my last update on that topic, I told you that I was recommended to the DAM by my AM. Almost three months later (2006-11-18) Myon (Christoph Berg, Front Desk Member) couldn't find my final report, he pinged my AM and one week later everything was fine again and I got approved to the next step: DAMnation. On the Christmas' evening I got a nice gift from Joerg, DAM approval. Yesterday (2007-01-02) I got the nice e-mail with the subject: New Debian maintainer Felipe Augusto van de Wiel (Thanks to James Troup, aka, elmo). The entire process took me 8 months and 10 days. I would like to say thanks to everybody that helped me pass thru this experience: Otavio Salvador (my advocate and mentor), Christian Perrier and Luk Claes (Mentors and Uploaders), Clément Stenac (my AM), Christoph Berg (Front Desk), Joerg Jaspert and James Troup (DAMs). They are directly involved in my NM process, but they were not alone, thanks for every single person that helped me with tips and hints, that took some time to teach me and all the people behind different projects in Debian (I really start naming everybody but then I realize that it got very large for Planet): Debian Brasil, Debian Volatile (aba, zobel, sgran), Release Team, Debian Women, Debian i18n Task Force and Debian l10n Brazilian Portuguese, Debian Weekly News Team, buildd.net project, Alioth admins and staff, Debian Installer Team, Debian Kernel Team, Debian Mentors, DebConf Team, OFTC Staff, Debian QA Team, Debian Doc Team, Debian WWW Team, Debian Admin Team (DSA)! People, you know who you are, thank you VERY much! You can check my Status Page to see more details about my NM process and more information about the acronyms used on this post. Now, Brazil has 17 Debian Developers (not counting the one that already retired). :-)

Mozilla Firefox Locales In 2004, we had for every individual localization a dedicated source package in the Debian archive, such as: mozilla-firefox-locale-ar, mozila-firefox-locale-ca, etc. This is a mess from every point of view. First, it creates much overhead on the archive infrastructure side as well as on the maintainers one, and second, since it often results in localization packages out of sync with the browser, it is a major pain in the ass for the users. Mozilla Firefox Locales All In January 2005, Cesar Martinez Izquierdo introduced the common source package mozilla-firefox-locale-all which included most of the available localizations. That was the inital step to clean up the mess. Later, David Moreno Garza and Luk Claes took the package over and accompanied it through the Mozilla Firefox to Firefox transition. Iceweasel l10n In September 2006, I jumped in as the new maintainer. Since then, the package did continue to evolve:

• rebranding for the Firefox to Iceweasel transition (currently, the foreign locales are fixed, only the en-US locale included in iceweasel is not, patch is at #400721).
• renaming to use the proper l10n naming scheme ($ program -l10n-$ language and not $ program -locale-$ language ).
• with the inclusion of the Catalan and Ukrainian localizations, iceweasel-l10n includes now really all Iceweasel locales which were previously packaged seperately in Debian (Thanks again to Jordi Mallach and Eugeniy Meshcheryakov for their permission for inclusion).

Additionally,

• with the readdition of temporarily removed locales within the Firefox 2.0 release (he for Hebrew and pa-in for Punjabi, taken from 2.0.0.1-rc3),
• with the inclusion of unofficial but complete localizations (fa-ir for Persian and fur-it for Furlan),
• and the half-official localizations (ka for Georgian and ku for Kurdish, taken from 2.0.0.1-rc3),

iceweasel-l10n as of 2.0+debian.1-1 supports 43 languages in total. That is more than any other distribution (yes, including Ubuntu :) contains. Icelizard Currently, the locale packages for iceape and icedove are not unified. This September, I was writing to the some of the maintainers but they seemed not interested to fix it for Etch. I will try it again in 2007, my aim is to have proper unified localization packages for all icelizard applications in Lenny. Update: iceweasel-l10n 2.0.0.1+debian-1 adds Valencian localization, so supporting 44 languages now.

Hello Planet Debian! Goodbye University Vacations!:-)

[Debian]

Thanks to Luk Claes, new translate-docformat was uploaded to fix Policy 7.6 Violation. madcoder has a list of affected packages. During the weekend I work on my packages, I'm waiting for my sponsor to get them uploaded to the archive closing the "adoption process" and fixing a few bugs and lintian warnings. There are some news from the DDTP and no news from the CVS pserver for non-DDs (and unfortunately, in this case: no news, bad news). I also sent a mail do debian-l10n-portuguese about the future of our list, we need to change a few points, create and update documentation, change our coordinators in some areas (they are MIA for quite a while now) and structure the team to be ready for future changes and also to work focused to get as much translations as possible in "etch".

[Life]

That's it... end of my University Vacation. Back to classes, busy schedule for the semester, I hope to manage everything in a very good way, so I can keep up-to-date with my Debian work.

Thanks to Cl ment Stenac (zorglub), my nice AM, this diary now appears in Planet Debian. Two old posts already appeared, but this is the first post that I made being aware that it will appear in Planet. :-) Thanks to Cl ment and Paul Wise.