This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (692.20 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Misc packaging I updated the publican package (a tool for publishing material authored in DocBook XML) with version 3.0, a major new upstream version. As with any important update, it had its share of problems and I created two patches that I sent upstream. I uploaded the package to experimental since we re in freeze. The Debian Administrator s Handbook Since the translation teams have been working for a few months, I wanted to put the result of their work online. I did it and I blogged about it on debian-handbook.info. By the way, we have a Polish translation that just started. This took quite some time because many translators were not well versed with Docbook XML and its structure. So I fixed their mistakes and asked the Weblate developer (Michal Cihar) to implement new checks to avoid those basic XML mistakes. I also added a couple of build scripts to the git repository to make it easier to rebuild translations in multiple formats. I used this opportunity to file a couple of bugs I encountered with Publican (concerning ePub output mainly, and custom brands). I also blogged about our plans to update the book for Wheezy. Roland started to work on it but I did not have the time yet. Debian France The officers (president, treasurer, secretary) have just changed and we had to organize the transition. As the new president, I got administrator access on our Gandi virtual machine (france.debian.net) as well as access to our bank account. I got also got a bunch of administrative papers retracing the history of the association. Carl Chenet (the former president) gave them to me during the mini-debconf that was organized in Paris. Indeed, Sylvestre Ledru and Mehdi Dogguy organized our second mini-debconf Paris and they did it very well. It was a great success with over 100 attendants each of the 2 days it lasted (November 24-25th). Carl managed a merchandising booth that was well stuffed (Luca Capello also brought goodies of Debian.ch) I gave small lightning talk to present the ideas behind my Librement project (it s about funding free software developers). BTW I have not been very good at it, it was only my second lightning talk and I have been a bit too verbose. The talk did not fit in my 5 minutes time slot Back from the mini-debconf, I have been trying to delegate some projects (like get a real website, improve the work-flow of members management, update our server which was still running Lenny). Julien Cristau was willing to upgrade the server did not exactly knew how to upgrade the kernel (it s a bit special since Gandi manages the kernel on the Xen hypervisor side). So I took care of this part and also did some cleanup (adding a backup with its associated remote disk, tweaking the email configuration). And Julien completed the upgrade on November 30th. Alexandre Delano volunteered to have a try at the website and Emmanuel Bouthenot has been looking a bit to see if there was something better than Galette to handle our members. It looks like we ll stay with Galette but have to take care of upgrading it to a newer version. I also processed the first membership applications and organized a vote to extend the board of administrators (since we have two vacant seats). On Monday, we should be back to 9 administrators. Librement Except for the talk during the mini-debconf, I did not do much on this project. That said I got an answer from the Autorit de Contr le Prudentiel saying that I might be eligible for the exemption case (see discussion of last month) and that I should fill out a form to get a confirmation. I also contacted Tunz.com who might be able to provide the services I need (their E-money manager product in particular). They have the required accreditation as a banking/credit institution and are willing to partner with enterprises who setup platforms where you must manage flows of money between several parties. I m now waiting for details such as the cost of their various services. I expect to have much more to show next month I m working with two developers to implement the first building blocks of all this. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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Next week end, November 24th and 25th, the mini Debconf will take place at EPITA in Paris. Mehdi Dogguy and I worked hard on the organization and on building a great program for this 2012 conference. This mini debconf will cover many subjects like Gnome (both as upstream and downstream), the Release team, how the Linux is packaged in Debian, etc.
The keynote will be "Free software and Debian, 20 years after" by Roberto Di Cosmo. Also, some merchandising will be proposed during the event by the association Debian France. Here is a quick list: Polos

Long-sleeved polo
40 euros - 10 pieces
Sleeveless polo
25 euros - 100 pieces Thanks to Tanguy Ortolo for taking take of the order. Buff

Buff Debian
18 euros - 75 pieces. It is described as Original Multifunctional Headwear. Real life example in video.
I love them! Finally, we will sell two kinds of Debian branded Sticker Portable:

Sticker Debian
1 euro - 100 pieces. They can be also ordered on the it2l website. Thanks to J r me Lemaire for providing these great products. If these products are successful, we will probably produce more for FOSDEM! For more information about the conference:
The official website
Wiki page for subscription

(doh, I nearly had it. I just got #690019, #690020 and #690022 for l10n stuff) Bartek Krawczyk reported Debian bug #690000 on Monday October 8th, against guake. And my friend Sylvestre Ledru, the package maintainer, now has to fix it instead of trying to promote the use of Scilab over proprietary alternatives in the French aerospace research organizations..:-) Bug #680000 was reported as of July 2nd: 3 months and 8 days for 10,000 bugs. This is a VERY significant drop in the bug reporting rate in Debian. Last time, I wrote: "How will the wheezy freeze affect this? We'll see in two months!". We have the answer: the wheezy freeze triggerred an important drop in bug reporting rate in Debian. My general feeling is somehow different: for whatever reason, I feel like the *overall* activity in the project has dropped significantly. I seem to have less mails to read, less bugs reported against my packages, even less heated discussions here and there, as well as several very quiet channels on IRC. Am I pessimistic when feeling that the overall momentum is sliding out of Debian? Maybe I am, so, folks, please make me optimistic and move you fingers out of the place where they are and help releasing that damn penguin. Apart from that, our next milestone (apart from the wheezy release!) will be bug #700000. Remember the bet?. It looks like the probability of Kartik Mistry winning it is now away (he bet for Now 8th 2012) and the best position is hel by David Pr vot (he bet for December 12th). On the other hand, my own chances are increasing if the bug rate drop is confirmed and if bug #700000 is reported in more than 3 months (I bet for February 14th 2013, guess why?). We'll see that in a few weeks!

This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (1086.48 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Dpkg I am subscribed to Launchpad s dpkg bug tracker and I was getting annoyed with the amount of noise I got under the form of bug reports that look like package foo failed to install/upgrade: package foo is already installed and configured . Those reports are a combination of a bug in APT and of random other failures (often hardware related like corrupted .deb files, or I/O errors, but sometimes also real problems in other packages) but they always end up assigned on dpkg (because dpkg is outputting an error message complaining about APT s decision to configure something that doesn t have to be configured). I simply don t have the time required to manually process and inspect all those reports, so I decided to filter them at the apport level with a new Ubuntu bug pattern that indicates that those reports are a duplicate of LP#541595. Thanks to this, the dpkg bug count quickly went down from 130 to about 80. Packaging I sponsored a new upstream version of ledgersmb. I quickly updated WordPress to version 3.4.2 since it contains security relevant fixes. I also pushed a small update of nautilus-dropbox fixing #686863 because upstream renamed the binary package that they hand out on their website from nautilus-dropbox to dropbox. Their dropbox package only conflicts with old versions of nautilus-dropbox and not with the version that Debian is shipping and thus I had to add a Conflicts on our side to forbid co-installation of both packages. Testing wheezy s installation I bought a new laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad X230) and used this as an excuse to test Wheezy s installation process. It worked mostly fine except for two things:

1. First I noticed that it would not accept my passphrase for my encrypted partition during early boot this turned out to be already reported as #619711 but was no longer getting any attention from the package maintainer. After some IRC discussion with Julien Cristau, we prodded Michael Prokop who had apparently already offered to take care of this issue. I tested his updated package and the result got quickly uploaded.
2. I had weird networking problems that turned out to be related to the lack of the loopback network (i.e. on localhost). This was the result of a broken /etc/network/interfaces: it had been incorrectly modified by NetworkManager. I reported this in #688355. This issue affects people with IPv6 enabled networks.

Debian France There s a resurgence of activity in Debian France. Sylvestre Ledru is leading the organization of a mini-debconf in Paris on November 24-25th. And Tanguy Ortolo is now taking care of some merchandising (Polo shirts, to change from the usual T-Shirt). I might give a talk during this mini-debconf, possibly about multi-arch. Misc It s been a few months that I noticed a 2 second lag of gnome-shell everytime that smuxi (my IRC client) sent a notification. It s very annoying, you have the impression that the entire machine freezes. So I contacted Mirco Bauer on #smuxi and we investigated a bit. It turns out that smuxi is using an old version of the notification protocol where the picture is sent as a bytestream leading to huge dbus messages. This is clearly sub-optimal so smuxi will be fixed to be able to send the path of the picture instead of the picture itself. On the other hand, it s really a bug of gnome-shell that it freezes during the time it takes to handle the bigger-than-usual dbus message. So I also filed a bug on GNOME Shell (Bugzilla #683829) to get this fixed. Librement: funding free software work I started a new project with the goal of helping free software developers to fund their free software work. It s still mostly vaporware for now but I have a public code repository, a nice logo and lots of ideas. If the topic is of interest to you, and you d like to be involved, feel free to get in touch. Otherwise stay tuned. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (88.41 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. This month has again been a short one since I have mostly been in vacation during the last 2 weeks. Dpkg Things are relatively quiet during the freeze. I only took care of fixing 3 bugs: a regression of 3.0 (quilt) (#683547), a segfault of dpkg-query -W -f (commit) and a bad auto-completion for French users (#685863). Testing the upgrade to wheezy We got several reports of wheezy upgrade that failed because dpkg ran the trigger while the dependencies of the package with pending triggers are not satisfied. Unfortunately fixing this in dpkg is not without problems (see #671711 for details) so Guillem decided to defer this fix for Jessie. My suggestion of an intermediary solution has fallen in limbo. Instead we now have to find solutions for each case where this can fail (example of failure: 680626). Another way to avoid those errors is to ensure that triggers are run as late as possible. We can improve this in multiple ways. The first way is to modify most triggers so that they use the interest-noawait directive. In that case, the packages activating the trigger will be immediately marked as configured (instead of triggers-awaited ) and the trigger will thus not need to be run as part of further dependency solving logic. But as of today, there s no package using this new feature yet despite a nudge on debian-devel-announce. The second way is to modify APT to use dpkg no-triggers, and to let the trigger processing for the end (with a last dpkg configure -a call). I requested this early in the wheezy timeframe but for various reasons, the APT maintainers did not act on it. I pinged them again in #626599 but it s now too late for wheezy. I find this a bit sad because I have been using those options for the entire wheezy cycle and it worked fine for me (and I used them for a dist-upgrade on my wife s laptop too). It would have been good to have all this in place for wheezy so that we don t have to suffer from the same problems during the jessie upgrade, but unless someone steps up to steer those changes, it seems unlikely to happen. Instead, we re back to finding klumsy work-arounds in individual packages. Packaging I prepared security updates for python-django (1.4.1 for unstable,
1.2.3-3+squeeze3 for stable). I packaged a new upstream version for cpputest (3.2-1). I reviewed ledgersmb 1.3.21-1 prepared by Robert James Clay and asked him to prepare another version with further fixes. I released nautilus-dropbox 1.4.0-2 with supplementary changes of my own to support https_proxy and to display better diagnostic information when the download fails. With the help of Paul van der Vlis and Michael Ziegler, we did what was required to be able to migrate python-django-registration 0.8 to Wheezy even though it s a new upstream version with backwards incompatible changes. Thanks to Adam D. Barratt who unblocked the package, we now have the right version in Wheezy despite the fact that I missed the freeze deadline. Debian France Julien Cristau reminded the board of Debian France that we have to elect officers (President, Secretary, Treasurer) as the current officers have withdrawn. I was somewhat afraid that nobody would take over so I pinged each member to try to get new volunteers. We now have volunteers (me, Julien Danjou and Sylvestre Ledru) and we re waiting until Julien finds some time to run the election. Misc With the help of DSA, I setup antispam rules for the owner@packages.qa.debian.org alias because I was getting tired by the amount of spam. In the process, they asked me to write a wiki page for dsa.debian.org to document everything so that they can refer to it for future queries. I did it but it looks like that they did not apply my patch yet. I also tested an upstream patch for gnome-keyring (see bugzilla #681081) that reintroduces the support of forgetting GPG passphrases after a specified amount of time. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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In the process of installing and configuring wanna-build, I had lots of problems. Because there was almost no documentation on the subject (and some of the existing was outdated), I had to figure out how everything works by reading the source code and asking people on IRC and mailing lists. I use the most recent version (from git) and since it s not stable, there were some problems and bugs. I fixed several bugs in order to set the system up. I also documented every step so now there s documentation on everything I have done. I uploaded the documentation on installing and configuring wanna-build [0]. I installed and configured reprepro on a local machine in order to use it with wanna-build. In the process I made step-by step setup instructions [1]. I installed and configured sbuild. The lastest version of sbuild contains filters but they don t work. Their purpose is to keep only the necessary variables in the environment, but apparenly the configuration file which should set them is never read. That leaves the filter list empty which causes the environment to be empty. I had to disable them to keep my work going. I installed buildd. I had some problems setting it up there was a bug in the scripts related to parsing the configuration file. I was pointed to a helpful bug report on the topic and with some additional changes I eventually got it working. In the process I had to read some of the source code of buildd. I made a patch that fixes a bug in the manual page of reprepro and got it approved. I contacted the Alioth admin team via the web site, requesting to use their server for my project Clang for build services . I got approved and I created a git repository where I m now uploading my work. The repository that I use to upload changes to sbuild and buildd is [2]. I add the name of the used compiler to the control file and to the name of the deb package. I wrote a function for parsing the debian/rules file looking for hard-coded compiler there. If there is such compiler, which is different from the one chosen as a default, the building proccess exits with a clear error. I made changes to wanna-build, dpkg, sbuild and buildd to fix bugs in them and make it possible to use a compiler different from gcc for the build process.
After my work a build compiler can be set easily. If a package can not be built with that compiler, the build process fails with a clear error. I also modified the pgstatus web interface to display build logs and create reports on user request. I wrote complete documentation about setting up wanna-build, reprepro and buildd ([0] and [1]). This makes a fully functional buildd infrastructure. Now we have a full step by step tutorial. Me and Sylvestre Ledru who was my great mentor, modified the buildd daemon so it will be possible to be run several instances of it for different architectures on a single physical server. I made a lot of changes to pgstatus this is a web interface to the wanna-build database. I had to add some features and fix several problems. In the process I read some of the code of pgstatus and buildd-tools. Now I have a better understanding of how they work. I added a new feature in pgstatus that allows the user to create a full report of the state of all builds. When a designated reports page is opened, a table with the current state of the builds is shown, together with a list of all the reports saved to files for the current distribution and architecture. The reports can be downloaded directly from the
interface. They are stored in JSON format. The log files were not accessible from pgstatus because of lack of implementation and bugs. I created a script that reads emails sent by wanna-build and extracts log files from them. I made changes to wanna-build so that it feeds the database with the necessary information about package history. I updated the wanna-build patch to include these changes. As a result the buildd logs can now be opened from the web interface of pgstatus. I applied a patch that fixes bug [3] so that config_schroot.sh (this script installs and sets the default compiler) starts with the necessary privileges. I added a new feature to sbuild that allows scripts to be run right after the dependencies are installed in the chroot and before the actual package starts building. Now anybody can configure sbuild to run such a script by modifying the appropriate configuration file. By adding the following lines: $external_commands =
chroot-pre-build-commands => [
['/root/purge-gcc.sh'],
],
; The script /root/purge-gcc.sh is run by sbuild in the chroot. This script can be necessary to set everything in the environment so that packages are built exactly as needed. Me and my mentor used this to replace gcc with a script that removes all gcc-specific packages so that we can be sure whether a package uses clang or not. I have a fully functional buildd infrastructure installed on my development system. In order to get it running, I made several patches: dpkg.patch The main patch with a lot of changes related to compiler support for building.
wanna_build.patch Fixes bugs and makes wanna-build feed the database with package history information.
sbuild.patch Fixes bugs and work-arounds the problem that some sbuild scripts are called without reading the configuration file of sbuild. Adds configuration option that allows scripts to be run right after the dependencies are installed in the chroot and before the actual package starts building.
pgstatus.patch Fixes bugs and adds reports page to pgstatus. Me and my mentor contacted the Debian wanna-build team to connect our new service with Debian. We explained what the current state of the project is and what we need from them. I thank my mentor Sylvestre Ledru for his presentation on DebConf 12 ([4], [5]). He showed our project and it was seen that people are interested in it. A nice resume of his talk has been made by Michael Larabel on Phoronix [6]. I tested everything thoroughly to make sure my changes don t break anything. I am happy to say that the project is now finished. ==== [0] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWannaBuildInfrastructureOnOneServer
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/SetupBuildServiceForWanna-build
[2] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-llvm/clang-build.git;a=summary
[3] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=608840
[4] http://sylvestre.ledru.info/blog/media/5/rebuild-debian-presentation-clang-July-10.pdf
[5] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2012/debconf12/high/884_Build_Debian_with_another_compiler.ogv
[6] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEzODQ

Thanks to the work of Andrej Belym, Debian has now a new C++ standard library. This work has been done in the context of the Google Summer of Code 2012.
Available in Debian Experimental, this new packages provides both the runtime libraries (libc++abi1) and the C++ headers (libc++-dev). With this library, it is possible to build a C++-based program without any dependency on libstdc++. For example, as detailed in README.Debian, with the (amazing) C++ code:

// foo.cpp
#include <iostream> int main()
std::cout < < "plop" << std::endl;
return 0;

build with clang++ (or g++) will give:

$ clang++ -o plop foo.cpp
$ ldd plop grep c++
libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 (0x00007f15791cb000)

Using libc++, it will drop the dependency on libstdc++ to use lib++

$ clang++ -stdlib=libc++ -o plop foo.cpp
$ ldd plop grep c++
libc++.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc++.so.1 (0x00007f87464df000)

For the record, it is not that trivial to do with g++. The command being:

g++ -nostdlib -lc++ -lc++abi -std=c++11 -o plop /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/crt1.o /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/crti.o foo.cpp /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/crtn.o -isystem/usr/include/c++/v1 -lc -lgcc_s

Besides this change, libc++ provides a support of C++ 11, considered as "correct" against the C++11 standard by upstream.

// bar.cpp
#include <chrono>
int main()
return 0;

clang++ -stdlib=libc++ -o bar bar.cpp

More information:

• libc++ website
• libc++abi website
• libc++abi Specification

The lunch and dinner catering was outdoors which was novel. The food was generally good if a little limited for those of us with less straightforward dietary requirements.

A couple week ago, during the last debconf (Debian Conference) in Managua/Nicaragua, I presented the latest developments about the inclusion of clang in the Debian architecture. To sum up (details are available in the slides and the video), the rebuild of the Debian archive with Clang 3.1 increased the number of failures from 8.8 to 12.1%. The main reason is that further checks have been added to clang. With Paul Tagliamonte as co-mentor and Alexander Pashaliyski as a GSoC student, we made great progress in bringing Clang as A new compiler in the Debian infrastructure. The various feedbacks that I had during Debconf were pretty good. It interests many people for reasons like Quality Assurance (more checks), performances, hackability or to decorrelate Debian and GCC. Build Debian with another compiler - Slides
Build Debian with another compiler - Video A nice resume of my talk has been made by Michael Larabel on Phoronix:
Decoupling GCC From Debian By Using LLVM/Clang

A couple week ago, during the last debconf (Debian Conference) in Managua/Nicaragua, I presented the latest developments about the inclusion of clang in the Debian architecture. To sum up (details are available in the slides and the video), the rebuild of the Debian archive with Clang 3.1 increased the number of failures from 8.8 to 12.1%. The main reason is that further checks have been added to clang. With Paul Tagliamonte as co-mentor and Alexander Pashaliyski as a GSoC student, we made great progress in bringing Clang as A new compiler in the Debian infrastructure. The various feedback that I had during Debconf were pretty good. It interests many people for reasons like Quality Assurance (more checks), performances, hackability or to decorrelate Debian and GCC. Build Debian with another compiler - Slides
Build Debian with another compiler - Video A nice resume of my talk has been made by Michael Larabel on Phoronix:
Decoupling GCC From Debian By Using LLVM/Clang

During my various chats and presentations on LLVM/Clang, one of the common criticism on LLVM/Clang is about the Apple's (supposed?) control on the platform. Even if I am not concerned by this concern, here are some statistics about the development. Basically, I used the git history to build a list of all the author. If domain names were clear (ex: @google.com, @apple.com, etc), I used them for the paternity of the commit. If there were not clear (ex: @gmail.com, @me.com), I dig on the web to find the employer (Linkedin was my friend). Of course, identifying individuals are pretty tough. Their percentages can be considered as a minimal figure.

To sum up, we can easily see that the percentage of contributions of Apple is decreasing over the time.
However, we all know that the number of commits is not the best metric to measure the control of one on a project. Source: Processed data (please contact me in case of mistake)

A couple weeks ago, I have been interviewed by the news site "Free Libre open source software for science and engineering" about Scilab and my work in Scilab Enterprises.
I am happy to share it:
http://www.floss4science.com/scilab-an-interview-with-sylvestre-ledru/.

Released a few days ago, I am happy to announce that LLVM and clang 3.1 are already available in the Debian archive in Unstable. RC versions were already available for the last few weeks in Debian experimental. They are very likely to be part of wheezy.
We will soon try a new rebuild of the Debian archive with the version 3.1. Talking about clang, a couple of months ago, I proposed a GSoC project to extend the Debian infrastructure in order to use clang instead gcc to build Debian packages. The goal is not to replace gcc but it is more about building packages with a new compiler. With Paul Tagliamonte as co-mentor, Alexander Pashaliyski is going to work during the summer on this subject. The final deliverables should be:

• Build services modified to be able to use clang instead of gcc/g++
• Integration into the Debian infrastructure (buildd.d.o, and similar services)
• An easy way to switch of compiler between gcc/g++ and clang
• A way to build a package with a different compiler (gcc, clang, intel compiler, etc)
• Time permitting, a fully clang-built Debian installation

For now, Alexander is working on an installation of the wanna-build and buildd services in order to have a dedicated testing environment.

From February 17 to 19th 2012, between 10 to 30 hackers met at IRILL's offices to squash as many bugs as possible for the Wheezy release. Besides about 42 pizzas, more than one hundred bugs (104 to be precise) have been fixed. Among them, 18 of them were fixed by removing old/unmaintained/deprecated packages from the Debian archive. In a great atmosphere, one of the most important achievements of this BSP was that Yada, a deprecated packaging helper, finally passed away thanks to the efforts of Cyril Brulebois. Thanks for all the contributors for making of this week end a success.

Back in October 2011, I blogged about the removal of the sun-java6 package from the Debian archive. Even if Openjdk 7 is just great, some corporations still need to use the non-free sun-java6 packages.
For perform this task, C dric Pineau and I brought back an old package from the archive called java-package. From the upstream release, for example jdk-6u*-linux-x64.bin (which the user will have download since Debian is no longer allowed to redistribute it), the command

make-jpkg ~/Downloads/jdk-6u31-linux-x64.bin

will generate a .deb which can be installed in the packaging system. Obviously, new upstream releases will NOT be automatically updated. This is far from perfect but it is temporary solution until everybody switch to the OpenJDK.

Recently, I have been working on a side project for Debian. The goal was to rebuild of the Debian archive (the distribution) with clang, a new C/C++ compiler. clang is now ready to build software for production (either for C, C++ or Objective-C). This compiler is providing many more warnings and interesting errors than the gcc suite while not carrying the same legacy as gcc.
This rebuild has several goals. The first one is to prove (or not) that clang is a viable alternative. Second, building a software with different compilers improves the overall quality of code by providing different checks and alerts. The result are detailed and explained here:
http://clang.debian.net/ Conclusions
When I had the idea to rebuild Debian with a new compiler, I was expecting many issues and bugs caused by clang but I have been surprised to notice that most of the issues are either difference in C standard supported, difference of interpretation or corner cases.
My personal opinion is that clang is now stable and good enough to rebuild most of the packages in the Debian archive, even if many of them will need minor tweaks to compile properly.
In the next few years, coupled with better static analysis tools, clang might replace gcc/g++ as the C/C++ compiler used by default in Linux and BSD distributions.
The clang developers are progressing very fast: 14.5% of the packages were failing with version 2.9 against 8.8% with version 3.0.
Several major steps in the clang adoptions have been made like chromium/chrome being built by default with clang, Xcode providing clang by default, FreeBSD working on the gcc -> clang switch, etc.
However, on the Debian point of view, one of the important step would be to make sure that clang manages all the Debian architecture/kernel (11 official, 6 unofficial)

Yesterday, I uploaded hdf5 1.8.8 in unstable. This new version, which has been available in experimental for a while, is a major step in the HDF5 packaging. For those who are using this package, besides the switch from version 1.8.6 to 1.8.8, the changes are the following:

• Since upstream is now trying to keep a consistent ABI/API, packages have been renamed from libhdf5-xxx-X.Y.Z (X, Y and Z being the version number) to libhdf5-xxx-7 (7 being the version of the soname)
• The package libhdf5-serial-* have been renamed to libhdf5-7 or libhdf5-dev
• Symbol files have been added for all the libraries.
• arm archs have also libhdf5-openmpi-dev
• Support of HURD, armhf & s390x
• Help is now up to date and the debian/html.tgz.uu removed (thanks to the source format v3.0, two source tarballs are now used)
• A new package hdf5-helpers which contains h5cc, h5c++ and h5fc has been introduced
• Fix many lintian warnings
• Java HDF has been updated to version 2.8

More information about the transition:
http://release.debian.org/transitions/html/hdf5.html TODO: Fix the FTBFS (Fail To Build From Sources) under sparc & ia64.

Next February, 17 to 19th, a Bug Squashing Party (BSP) is organized at IRILL offices (disclosure: I work for IRILL part time), close to Place d'Italie in Paris. The principle of a BSP is to gather Debian contributors to tackle a maximum of bugs in Debian. This event is also the opportunity for new potential contributors to meet Debian Developers or Maintainers. Numerous regular contributors will attend to this BSP and will help newcomers to fix their first bugs. For organization reasons, an inscription on the Debian wiki is mandatory. Non-Parisian can find a list of hostel close to the IRILL's offices.

As said in one of my previous blog post, we, Debian, were going to remove sun-java6 packages from the archive once critical security issues would come. It was supposed to happen sooner and later and here we are. The version 29 (see the #645881 Debian bug) of the Oracle proprietary JVM has been released. It fixes some critical issues but, because of the DLJ removal, Debian is no longer able to distribute it. Unfortunately, we have no other choice than asking for a removal from the archive and promote the use of the openjdk 6 & 7.
The conclusion is:
apt-get --purge remove sun-java6-jre && apt-get install openjdk-7-jre

After a request from Olivier Berger, I developed the Removed packages feed for Debian. This feed lists packages removed from the Debian Archive. Debian removed packages on Identi.ca
Debian removed packages on Twitter
For more information about removed packages