We have an additional listmaster@teams.debian.net: Michael Banck. Thanks for joining the team. No Tags

Living really downtown and having a demonstration of NPD and of Antifa at the same time, while you try to move out of a flat. Anyway, relocation finished by 10pm yesterday evening, now waiting for DSL connection. Stuff

After tonights dinstall run, we will freeze 3.1r7 for sourcefull uploads, unless someone has a very good reason for another package inclusion for oldstable. Adventureous admins (who have also a backup of their systems) might want to try to add olstable-proposed-updates to their /etc/apt/sources.list and try to upgrade. Please report any problems to the debian-release@lists.debian.org mailing list. release

• 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

Thanks James. No Tags

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)

The chinese-big5 is moderated since quite some time, because of to much unfilterable spam. Now the last remaining listmoderator asks for help as won’t be able to do listmoderation in near future. If you are able to read/write chinese-big5 and want to do listmoderation, please contact listmaster@lists.debian.org and/or write to 434837@bugs.debian.org. listmaster

due to the constant high volume of incoming spam containing attachments
which are not easy parseable for our filters, the listmasters decided
now to block the following types of attachments: Content-Type: image/(gif jpeg)
Content-Type: application/pdf This is only a temporary solution, until we have better methods to
filter out spam mails containing these types of attachments. If you know better solutions, let us know! listmaster

I will most probably not accept any further source packages for Debian Etch r1 after todays tonights dinstall run, unless someone really convinces me there is something very important missing. Update: Exception are granted for packages related to D-I or kernel, if not already uploaded. release

It is not high crowded here, but we have about 2-3 visitors at any time at the booth. No Tags

Apparently, it is fine by him if others flood planet debian with repeats because they screwed an upgrade, post questionable career advice or misleading documentation links, make fun of unrelated computer companies, or discuss the weather or traffic, but I posted about Eurovision and Martin Zobel-Helas unlinked my entries and sent me a rude email. Isn't planet debian a planet of debian developers, not just a planet of debian development? Even if you only write about debian, please don't force that on everyone else. I like reading about the other stuff developers do - even the loony political views that I don't agree with... Didn't someone put up a Planet Debian Tech a while ago? Maybe that's what Martin Zobel-Helas should read. Whatever happened to it?

While reading the newest print version of the German LinuxMagazin i found an interview with Mark Shuttleworth, which made me partly wonder. There he says: “Bei vielen Sachen, die einen gro en Einfluss auf Systeme wie den Kernel, X.org oder Open Office haben, bernehmen wir die F hrungsrolle, wir stellen die Pakete und viele gelangen so zu Debian. Also sind wir in vielen F llen der Upstream von Debian.” (english: On many things, which do have a great influence on systems like kernel, X.org or Open Office, we take the leadership role, we supply the packages and many of those getting into Debian this way. Therefore we are the upstream of Debian in many cases.) I know of certain packages, like python, gcc, apt and maybe X.org, which are mainly maintained by Ubuntu developers. But is this really true: Is Ubuntu really upstream of many Debian packages? Can someone please enlighten me, and give me some statistics where Ubuntu is upstream of Debian, and where Debian is upstream of Ubuntu? I would really like to know the facts. No Tags

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

Advantage of the time AJ was DPL: Requests of the stable release team to the FTP-Admin team got processed quite fast. The stable release team is now waiting since a couple of weeks to get
#418639 fixed. Also AJ promised to semi-automate p-u-new processing, which didn’t happen since the release of etch. current mood: frustrated. release

… it is quiet in my INBOX…. No Tags

With man-db entering p-u-new now, the package list for the last update of Sarge as “stable” distribution is frozen now. All further updates to Sarge will happen, as soon as Sarge is declared “oldstable”. This seems to become a busy weekend. release

I just sent the first preparation mail for r5, which will either happen end of December or 48h before the release of Etch, whatever comes first. It currently does not cover all packages, as there are still quite a couple (more then 20) packages that need to be accepted from p-u-new by ftpmaster. Stay tuned for more information during the next days. release

Yesterdays statistic from debian-devel-changes: 17x “New upstream release” with only 2 packages actualy fixing bugs! 5x “Initial Release“! Guys, that close before the release, use experimental, that is what it is for. And it gets autobuilded for almost all architectures (1 buildds (s390) currently down). Thanks for helping to get the release out in time. No Tags