You may remember that, short before the release, Aj had a HTML page for packages in NEW, living in his ~/ajt/new/ on our ftp-master host. It was based on a patch from Thomas Viehmann and got lost with the ries crash. Today I reimplemented it, putting it directly into dak and the ftp-master codebase and webtree. My work is also based on Thomas patch, but I reworked the whole thing a bit. I’ve written a new dak command, show-new, which is based on process-new, the command I always use when I process NEW packages. Obviously not with all that functionality, it doesn’t need any reject capability, but it still has some nice parts. Like

• it only runs on packages and their versions if no html output had been generated in the past
• Automatically removes html files of packages no longer in NEW
• It runs right after generating the NEW overview page, hourly. So it should be similar up-to-date (or outdated) as that page is.

To not duplicate code too much this also meant that various code blocks had to be moved into daklib/ files. If you want to look at it - the NEW Overview, something that I wrote long ago, has links to the per-package-version files. Just click on the version number. I have plans to enhance it even more, like having the lintian output use colors too. To make that easy I filed a bug against lintian asking for it. For the other changes - well. I think the layout can be enhanced, possibly going a bit in the direction of the removals summary page, but that will take some time, as I need to talk to my CSS-masters for it. And while I was changing dak code I did some more changes to it. One patchset already got applied from James, removing the obsolete non-US support. I have a large number of other changes, but have to redo them, much more using bzr branches, so James can more easily pick single changes out of them. The changelog for those applied changes is pretty impressive with its length, I think…

2007-12-30  Joerg Jaspert  joerg@debian.org>
        * dak/dak.py (init): add show-new. This is based on a patch
        submitted by Thomas Viehmann in Bug #408318, but large parts of
        handling it are rewritten and show-new is done by me.
        * dak/queue_report.py (table_row): Add link to generated html page
        for NEW package.
        * dak/show_new.py: new file, generates html overview for NEW
        packages, similar to what we see with examine-package.
        * config/debian/cron.hourly: Add show-new call
        * config/debian/dak.conf: Add HTMLPath for Show-New
        * dak/examine_package.py (print_copyright): ignore stderr when
        finding copyright file.
        (main): add html option
        (html_escape): new function
        (escape_if_needed): ditto
        (headline): ditto
        (colour_output): ditto
        (print_escaped_text): ditto
        (print_formatted_text): ditto
        - use those functions everywhere where we generate output, as they
        easily know if we want html or not and just DTRT
        (do_lintian): new function
        (check_deb): use it
        (output_deb_info): Use print_escaped_text, not print_formatted_text.
        Also import daklib.queue, determine_new now lives there
        Also add a variable to see if we want html output. Default is
        disabled, show_new enables it for its use.
        Most of html, besides header/footer are in examine_package instead
        of show_new, as it makes it a whole lot easier to deal with it at
        the point the info is generated.
        * dak/process_new.py (determine_new): Moved out of here.
        (check_valid): Moved out of here.
        (get_type): Moved out of here.
        * daklib/queue.py (determine_new): Moved here.
        (check_valid): Moved here.
        (get_type): Moved here.
        * dak/init_db.py (do_section): Remove non-US code
        * dak/make_overrides.py (main): ditto
        * dak/process_new.py (determine_new): ditto
        * daklib/queue.py (Upload.in_override_p),
        (Upload.check_override): ditto
        * daklib/utils.py (extract_component_from_section):,
        (poolify): ditto
        * dak/import_archive.py (update_section): ditto
        * dak/symlink_dists.py (fix_component_section): ditto
        * scripts/debian/mkmaintainers: ditto
        * scripts/debian/update-mirrorlists (masterlist): ditto
        * config/debian-non-US/*: Remove subdir
        * scripts/debian/update-readmenonus: Removed.

In the recent past I did some more dak changes. Just to list them here, they are

• Fixing daks handling of keys that have expired subkeys together with non-expired subkeys (or non-expired “master” key). That created silent rejects (only sent to ftpmaster, not to the maintainer) in the past. Now it works, iff the signature is valid. (We check other reject reasons like unknown or revoked key, badsig and some other things that can go wrong before that).
• Internal for the NEW queue I adjusted the lintian call to also show what lintian warnings/errors maintainers try to override - and to have its display in color. lintian now also runs on the .dsc file, not only on the individual changes, which also helps me to spot some more errors in NEW which I previously may have missed
• The script to look at the packages in NEW also had a bug that disallowed to look at copyright files from packages using bzip2 compression in their binary tarballs. It did use some ar p tar xz pipeline, which I changed to using dpkg-deb -x and —fsys-tarfile.
• I removed a check for a dpkg pre-depends for bzip2 using binaries, as the dpkg version from sarge knows how to deal with them.

(Most patches applied by James. Can’t remember if someone else applied one. If so that would be Aj). And - at the end of all this - I will finally update my dak package again. Im not sure I get it uploaded this year, as I’m away tomorrow, but it will get an update fairly soon! Ha.

The latest warning from Dresden Codak’s Aaron Diaz:

Do we really want to live in a society populated by geriatric 27-year-olds? In living so long and spending so much time thinking’ do we not also run the risk of becoming a cold, passionless race incapable of experiencing our two emotions (fear and not fear)?

Also interesting, is a talk by Vernor Vinge from back in February to the Long Now institute titled “What if the Singularity Does Not Happen?”, to which slides are available along with an audio recording.

Okay, so any excuse to bring out the Laphroaig is fine by me, but the cute little eeePC is better than most. That it’s cute and popular is all very well, but what really makes my day is this is the first device I’ve seen that both doesn’t hide the fact it’s running Linux, and is available in maintstream stores in Australia. A random review from the Sydney Morning Herald:

You also don’t get Windows. Asus has adopted the free Linux operating system that’s been slowly yet steadily growing in popularity over the past decade. This keeps the cost down and makes better use of its relatively modest hardware, which would creak under the weight of Windows. It does mean not being able to use your favourite Windows software but, fortunately, the Eee PC comes with dozens of programs, including the familiar Firefox web browser and Skype for online phone calls.

That came out on the day the eeePC was released in Australia. Three days later, they did a followup:

Taiwan computer maker Asus might have underestimated the local demand for its diminutive Eee PC, as the $499 laptop is now virtually sold out in Australia.

From that, there’s a brief take on who’s actually buying them:

“We’ve had customers coming in buying two or three units for the family - the mix of customer has been probably novices more than the tech types,” he said.

It’s really good to see that Linux is getting credit in pretty much all those stories, no matter how mainstream. Xandros is pretty rarely mentioned, and I don’t think I’ve seen Debian mentioned yet. But even without the credit, it’s still pretty cool that with the eeePC and Dell’s trysting with Ubuntu, the real in-roads to pre-installed consumer Linux these days are building on Debian. I’d always expected that Red Hat or SuSE or someone with more commercial muscle would get through that door first (they’ve certainly had box sets more readily available!), but apparently elitist, freedom obsessed, techno-geekery actually works better, somehow. At least when there’s a company to put a smiley face in front of it all :) The other interesting thing about choosing Xandros, is that it presumably means the eeePC is covered by Microsoft’s patent protection scheme – which means no baseless threats against eeePC users from Microsoft, but also that Microsoft’s probably getting a cut of whatever Xandros receives from each eeePC sale. Whether you think that’s a problem or not, the result is probably going to be that it’s the thin edge of the wedge: it’s removed Microsoft from blocking a Linux preinstall on consumer hardware, which means we can see that regular people like Linux systems enough that they sell out in days. And that means Linux systems are a fact of life, and if Microsoft try to stop them by making it difficult for you to sell Windows systems, well, that’ll just make it difficult to sell Windows systems – which is another win for Linux. And once you get to the point where the argument for paying off Microsoft doesn’t rely on keeping your OEM deal for Windows, but is just a matter of whether their patents are actually valid… Oh, also nice from the promoting free software angle, is that the first thing you see if you decide to visit Asus’s eeePC site to check the gizmo is the news item:

2007.11.27 ASUSTek is committed to meet the requirements of the GNU General…

Add the fact that an eeePC running a Debian-derivative has access to all the software in the Debian repositories for no cost, and the new government’s planned rebates and investments in IT probably mean that parents can get close to a full refund, and you’re getting pretty close to a choice of spending nothing and getting a popular, reasonably functional and very portable laptop with all the software you could ever want, that just happens to be running Linux, or paying an extra few hundred or thousand dollars to get a Windows laptop, and then probably pirating whatever software you end up needing. In any event, to my mind, that makes 2007 the year of the Linux on the desktop: everything from here is just a simple matter of quantity. What’s next?

What I want for christmas:

For a while I’ve been trying to find some easy way to keep a few machines I admin behaving the way I want them too with minimal effort. They don’t really need much maintenance – but I would like something to help keep them all in sync. Basically, something like FAI, but much, much simpler – ideally something that takes five minutes to understand, and another five minutes to deploy; and leave the more complicated and powerful tools for when they’re actually needed. I figured what I really want was just a simple way to make a meta-package – one that doesn’t really provide any functionality, just tells apt/dpkg what I want installed (via Depends), and what I don’t want installed (via Conflicts) and adds any extra configuration stuff or local scripts that I decide I want. But doing that with a real Debian package is harder than I’m really comfortable with – I don’t want to have to worry about potential lintian errors, or rules files and debhelper commands, or writing a Makefile to get my files installed or whatever, I want something more trivial than that. Looking for meta-package creators, the only one I spotted that I thought looked likely was cdd-dev, described as “Custom Debian Distributions common files for developing meta packages”. Unfortunately it seems to just provide templates, which makes things quicker, but no less complex. Fortunately equivs (“Circumvent Debian package dependencies”) is actually used for metapackages these days, according to its maintainer on IRC and its long description:

This package provides a tool to create Debian packages that only contain dependency information. One use for this is to create a metapackage: a package whose sole purpose is to declare dependencies and conflicts on other packages so that these will be automatically installed, upgraded, or removed. Another use is to circumvent dependency checking. […]

That turned out to work much better than I remembered (from whenever I last tried it – back in ‘99 I guess?), with the only drawback being that I couldn’t add files easily. But that’s just a matter of creating a patch to equivs, which I then won’t have to worry about again. So having done that, I can now create a metapackage to do whatever I want by creating a file like:

Suite: client
Section: misc
Priority: standard
Package: ajs-client-stuff
Version: 20071114.1
Maintainer: Anthony Towns <aj@erisian.com.au>
Description: Metapackage for aj's client computers
 Depends on necessary packages, etc.
File: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/client.list
 deb http://mirror.localnet/debian etch main contrib non-free
 deb http://mirror.localnet/debian etch-proposed-updates main contrib non-free
 .
 deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib non-free
File: postinst
 #!/bin/sh -e
 .
 apt-key add - <<EOF
 [output of gpg --armour --export $KEY]
 EOF
 .
 ##DEBHELPER##

debhelper kindly takes care of getting the permissions right for me, and equivs will generate a full source package if I tell it to, which I can just upload to mini-dinstall and have a regular Debian repository just by writing a text file and running equivs-build. And my metapackage can add dependencies, conflicts, apt sources, cronjobs, scripts, configuration files, documentation, or whatever I happen to want – which means I can make it automatically update itself, and thus install any dependencies or remove any conflicts, which then means that modifying the config on all the machines is just a matter of updating the metapackage. And new installs is (hopefully) just a matter of doing a standard install and then adding the metapackage. Perfect. …even if it is really little more than a reinvention of rpm’s .spec files. :)

Something I’ve been meaning to play with for a while, inspired by a slashdot post the other day:

Hopefully I’ll be able to speed up the calculations enough to have it work on more than just .1% of the data in reasonable time (the above took three hours of CPU time to generate, sadly), at which point we might be getting somewhere. Props to cairo and gifsicle for the viewable data dump.

If, like me, you’ve been following development of Joey’s nifty new multi-repository tool and busily registering all your git and bzr and cvs and whatnot repos, you might have noticed a tantalising TODO item that’s recently appeared in the git repo:

* Ability to run commands in paralell? (-j n)
  If done right, this could make an update of a lot of repos faster. If
  done wrong, it could suck mightily. ;-)

Well, sucking mightily just means you need to prototype it first, so here’s a little add-on to mr(1) that runs multiple invocations of mr(1) simultaneously, naturally enough called mrs(1). Consideration of what that implies about superior multitasking is left as an exercise to the interested reader. The implementation is slightly interesting: it’s a fairly simple perl script that first uses “mr list” to get a list of repositories to work with, then simply uses perl’s “open” function to run mr on each of those directories with the output piped to a filehandle. At that point, things get slightly complicated, since we want to keep them all running no matter what’s going on, so we have a select() loop that collects all the output into one buffer per command, which we put together later, and print out. And just for kicks, if the output ’s longer than 20 lines, we pipe it through less after trimming out any ugly ^M nonsense we might have had thanks to progress updates or similar. I like it, anyway. And happily, while “mr update” takes about fifty seconds for me, “mrs update” takes about ten. Fun! (Joey: btw, it’s “parallel” :)

OK, changes in dpkg-dev 1.14.7 have forced my hand a little and dpkg-cross 2.0.0 has now been uploaded to Debian unstable (not experimental).
apt-cross 0.2.9 has been uploaded to Emdebian unstable - dependent on
dpkg-cross >= 1.99
apt-cross 0.3.0 has been uploaded to Debian unstable but will spend some time in the NEW queue (hence the 0.2.9 upload to Emdebian). apt-cross 0.3.0 is functionally identical to 0.2.9
emdebian-tools 0.3.9 has been uploaded to Emdebian unstable - dependent on apt-cross >= 0.2.9 and dpkg-cross >= 1.99
All three comprise extensive rewrites. apt-cross, in particular, is barely recognisable. dpkg-cross is a shadow of the former package and v2.0.0 signals the beginning of the long goodbye to both packages. dpkg developers expect to be able to merge all dpkg-cross functionality into dpkg before Lenny. Once that is done, it should be trivial to merge apt-cross behaviour into apt.
Only the new libcache-apt-perl package (containing the modified NorthernCross code from virtuoso) will persist. Once this whole transition is over, I'll upload Cache::Apt::* to CPAN so that it can become its own source package in Debian once apt-cross is removed.

IMPORTANT
dpkg cross-building support is HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL!
Significant changes are still pending, including remapping the build paths during the
dpkg-buildpackage build and utilising the updated dpkg-shlibdeps code which is a decade ahead of what we had in dpkg-cross 1.39.

1. dpkg 1.14.7 included dpkg-buildpackage as a perl script instead of shell which breaks dpkg-cross <= 1.39 but the new code to support dpkg-cross >= 1.99 is not implemented yet.


2. The breakage that Zumbi experienced when using the dpkg version from
   experimental will now occur in unstable.
   http://lists.debian.org/debian-embedded/2007/09/msg00067.html. Note that this breakage would be severity "critical" if filed as a bug because it prevents not only cross-builds but normal Debian builds.


3. dpkg-cross 2.0.0 fixes this issue. Hence the urgency in uploading dpkg-cross 2.0.0


4. dpkg-cross 2.0.0 removes the old diversions of dpkg-buildpackage and dpkg-shlibdeps.


5. dpkg is set to support the removal of the dpkg-cross diversions and code to support this is coming this weekend. This means that there will be a GAP where cross-built packages will fail to find the correct shared libraries. HOWEVER, installing dpkg-cross 2.0.0 restores the ability to build normal Debian packages whilst keeping dpkg-cross installed. This is a far more important gain than a temporary problem in packages that hardly anyone is using yet (our Emdebian crossbuilt packages).

When dpkg-dev 1.14.8 becomes available, apt-cross, dpkg-cross and emdebian-tools will be updated to depend on this version.

Everyone: please note - cross-building support in Debian will be "fragile" for the next week or so. The rewritten packages are being uploaded against experimental dpkg support I expect bugs.

The benefits of these changes are:

1. The removal of diversions that are a decade out of date.


2. The implementation of virtuoso's NorthernCross code that transforms apt-cross and fixes lots of awkward bugs.


3. The incorporation of cross-building support in the heart of dpkg.


4. The beginning of the long goodbye to dpkg-cross and apt-cross.

RESULTS
With the new packages installed, some packages will produce:

 emdebuild: ERROR /usr/bin/ contains files for the wrong architecture!

i.e. the build appears to succeed but until dpkg-dev 1.14.8 includes support for looking for the correct libraries in /usr/$arch/lib instead of /usr/lib, we get unusable packages. This at least means that packages can be test built and the patches updated.

• Python 3000 alpha 1 Released!
  And Debian still has good ol' Python 2.4...
• Thoughts after one year on the road

Today I have released the next version of DebTorrent. It's been over a month since the last release, which means there are lots of new features in this one. This is also the first release that I consider actually useable, as it now listens for HTTP requests from APT for packages to download, and feeds the downloaded packages back to APT. It also includes a backup HTTP downloader that will use a Debian mirror to download packages from, only when no peers can be found that have them. This means your download always works, even if you're an early adopter (which I hope you are) and there aren't that many peers available. Finally, the larger packages have now been split into multiple pieces, which makes downloading them much more efficient. Here's the changelog:

• Add proxying capability to listen for HTTP requests from APT
• Add caching for all files downloaded
• Add automatic starting of torrents when Packages files are downloaded
• Modify startup to initialize all torrent downloads to download nothing
• Add automatic enabling of files to download based on requests from APT
• Add a backup HTTP download from a mirror when no peers can be found for a package
• Modify torrent creation to break large packages into multiple pieces based on the information from http://merkel.debian.org/~ajt/extrapieces/ (thanks to aj for most of this)
• Add download status information available from http://localhost:9988/
• Add lots more documentation

I've already started work on the next release, which will include almost no new features, but will be much easier (I hope) to use. It will also be distributed in a .deb binary format for the first time, and (again I hope) be available in the Debian archive. Here are the plans I've come up with for the steps to complete for the next release:

1. Make a debtorrent daemon script based on btlaunchmany
2. Make a config file with lots of explanations
3. Load configuration info from /etc
4. Save downloads and state to /var/cache
5. Log all messages to /var/log
6. Clean up the debug logging, possibly add debug levels
7. Use bittornado packaging files (debian/)
8. Add init script

I've never created/packaged a daemon before, so hopefully I haven't made any blunders in those plans.

Open Source 2006 is a one-day seminar that provides Free Software actors of Finland with a forum to present their work and the current trends in Free Software development to a greater audience comprised mainly of decision-makers from the business and governmental sectors. Finnish Open Office localization team This year, a noticeable trend were governmental cases of transition to Open Office and other Free Software solutions on the municipal desktop. Thus, it was only fitting that Finnish localization took greater importance than before and, in concordance, that this year's Linux-tekij award went to the Finnish Open Office localization team. The jury invited 3 people from the localization team to receive the award on their team's behalf:

• Pastor Asmo Koskinen of the bilingual Finnish-Swedish parish of Kokkola; an active promoter of Open Office in the Finnish public sector that has given many training sessions on Open Office and helped countless end-users transition to Open Office.
• Translator Marko Gr nroos; a leading Finnish localizer that is involved in the localization of an impressive number of Free Software products.
• Language Technology Expert Harri Pitk nen; the initiator of the Hunspell adaptation for the Finnish language.

Pastor Koskinen also gave a very stimulating lecture on the collaborative effort behind the localization, mentioning in passing that Czech Pavel Jani k also plays an important role in building the Open Office binaries for a number of Baltic and Scandinavian languages. Debian community of Finland The jury also granted an honorary mention to the Debian community of Finland to acknowledge years of achievements, reaching an important milestone in 2005 when Finland hosted the yearly Debian Conference. Another motivation was a number of nominations for Ubuntu, both as a distribution and for its extremely active local user community. Given how a majority of Ubuntu developers actually are Debian Developers, the jury unanimously decided to honor them collectively from the perspective of Debian and its derivatives. The jury invited 3 people to receive the honorary mention on the community's behalf:

• Inquisitor Lars Wirzenius needs no introduction; an early adopter and promoter of Debian in Finland, his strong voice has eloquently sung the merits of Debian and Free Software to large audiences and persuaded a significant number of Finns to join the Debian project.
• Educator and Translator Tapio Lehtonen; appearing himself among this year's nominations for his extremely friendly attitude towards people making their first steps as a Free Software user, he is mainly known for localizing the Debian installation software.
• Event organizer Aschwin van der Woude (represented in absentee by co-organizer Fabian Fagerholm); personally initiated countless Free Software promoting events and developer workshops throughout Finland, culminating in 2005 with the important responsibility for Debconf5's budget and legal matters.

Lars gave the audience a very interesting perspective of his long involvement with Debian, while Tapio emphasized particular pride in seeing non-programmers that maintain documentation or localize software be acknowledged. Fabian gave a very emotional speech in which he praised the commendable efforts of dozens of volunteer DebConf5 organizers that discretely handled unpleasant tasks that were nonetheless essential to the success of the event. The Jury Yours truly was invited to join the jury on behalf of Linux Aktivaattori, alongside representatives from the academic, business and Free Software communities. During the prize ceremony, FLUG chairman Arto Ter s and myself took turns at describing the award's selection process and at introducing the winners.

About my post about the DPL vote Some people have asked me why I voted that way. Here are some pointers. And of course various irc talks, other maillist postings and many other sources

These are some random thoughts based on a not very thorough reading of candidate platforms of the DPL Election 2007, and my subjective view of the candidates based on the mailing traffic I remember reading. Wouter Verhelst: Has quite a broad Debian-background, the platform also seems to share quite a bit of my view of where Debian's problems are at the moment. Doesn't propose a course of action right now, not sure how to judge that. Not sure if I remember Wouter being heavily involved in flamewars, but I do remember reading quite a few of his emails in discussions with interest. broad Debian-background, the platform also seems to share quite a bit of my view of where Debian's problems are at the moment. Doesn't propose a course of action right now, not sure how to judge that. Not sure if I remember Wouter being heavily involved in flamewars, but I do remember reading quite a few of his emails in discussions with interest. broad Debian-background, the platform also seems to share quite a bit of my view of where Debian's problems are at the moment. Doesn't propose a course of action right now, not sure how to judge that. Not sure if I remember Wouter being heavily involved in flamewars, but I do remember reading quite a few of his emails in discussions with interest. broad Debian-background, the platform also seems to share quite a bit of my view of where Debian's problems are at the moment. Doesn't propose a course of action right now, not sure how to judge that. Not sure if I remember Wouter being heavily involved in flamewars, but I do remember reading quite a few of his emails in discussions with interest. Aigars Mahinovs: Quoting from his platform: “My goal of running for DPL is not to be DPL, but to get a few concepts closer to real life.” So don't run for DPL, but start doing these things you're thinking about. Not being DPL has the advantage that you don't have to spend time on DPL stuff that would detract you from these goals. Speaking about your goals: (i) No release: I've thought about that, too, but I feel this would quickly make Debian irrelevant. (ii) $HOME configuration files organisation: take it up with the upstream developers of all the application. I think this is a very good idea, but freedesktop.org would be a better platform. (iii) Old Maintainer Process: Idea looking for a problem. (iv) Dropping Trademarks: not sure what to think about this. Gustavo Franco: Some focus on the desktop, and a constructive attitude towards Ubuntu, both positive in my book. (The first one primarily because on servers Linux is already quite well established, while the desktop is where more work is still to be done. Not because servers are less important.) His goals: (i) Core teams: as with Wouter, he sees that people and what goes on between them are where the problems are. (ii) Release goals: I think building the release based on release goals could be a driving force, but this is more RM area than DPL. (iii) Adding features to the bts doesn't need DPL powers. (iii) New developers: certainly an area that still needs attention, but the intended course is not entirely clear to me. (iv) NEW queue: same. (v) CTTE: Not sure what the idea behind this is. (vi) Groups: yes, but again not entirely clear what and how. (vii) Backports: yes, new versions of some software should go into Debian (stable) faster. Officially supporting backports or something else, I don't know, but this is an area where a DPL could pull together the RMs, security team(s), backports.org people etc. (viii) Universal OS: is this about more media coverage or about more face to face meetings? Both are good, but we should set clear goals beforehand. (ix) Much work is needed, especially in the area of buildd management (meaning: the processes and people behind it!). Does Gustavo have previous involvement here? (x) Vendors, Website, Publicity: This is more or less all about media coverage and popularity. Much needed, but as Debian as it is will never be able to commit to a public official opinion of anything, we'll need to think hard about what to do here. (xi) NMU: I don't see a great need for action here, personally. Overall: this platform contains too much material, I fear trying to tackle all these areas will lead to a burned out DPL within three months and little actually getting anywhere. Sven Luther: It's true that it always needs at least two people for a flamewar. But having a DPL who is always ready to provide one side of an argument is not a good idea. Sam Hocevar: Everything is high-level on his platform. Both good and bad. Not sure how to rate this platform, but I see myself nodding along. Learn from other OSs is good, but I hope he also means active cooperation and not just passive let's see how they do it. Steve McIntyre: Should have won 2006. Certainly did a lot of both behind-the-scenes work and some good communication. The platform lacks mention of relations between Debian and the outside world, which is an area where I feel some work is missing (and where the DPL as the only person with a official role also known outside Debian can make a difference), and also lacks mention of legal problems (trademarks and patents) where I'm not sure how solid Debian's work is. Additional argument in favor of Steve: Having a 2IC and promoting him to DPL the year after might be a good idea overall. Maybe we should actually elect the 2IC and only have a confirmation vote to promote him to DPL? Raphaël Hertzog: I like the DPL board idea. I also like how Raphaël focuses, in his platform, on the DPL board idea and some selected problems. On the other hand, the platform is wholly focused inward, outside relations are important, too ! Anthony Towns: Not sure what to think of the current DPL. I think he had good ideas, and I still think the original “spend Debian funds for the release”-idea was not that bad, but seeing how it all worked out was very, very painful for too many people. The platform seems pretty much empty, so I guess ajt won't have my vote this time. Simon Richter: Maybe I miss something, but I only see “don't repeat the dunc-tank flamefest” in his platform, which seems a bit thin. His observation that the real power of the DPL is to get everybody's attention may be partly true, though, even if this power will be spent as soon as a DPL, trying to mediate, lets himself be drawn into the flamewar instead (I don't accuse Simon that he ultimately will do this, but I fear that it happens all too quickly). Now what? I really don't have the time to thoroughly follow the campaigning, but I'll certainly have a look at the rebuttals, and perhaps somebody will do some summary. So the ballot below will certainly change. (You might also be able to buy the vote if you're rich enough ;-)

 [ 1 ] Wouter Verhelst
 [ 5 ] Aigars Mahinovs
 [ 3 ] Gustavo Franco
 [ 6 ] Sven Luther
 [ 3 ] Sam Hocevar
 [ 1 ] Steve McIntyre
 [ 2 ] Raphaë Hertzog
 [ 5 ] Anthony Towns
 [ 4 ] Simon Richter
 [ 5 ] NOTA

Enrico, you forgot your own advanced ways of wasting time (and have some fun). ;) Here are the summaries of the candidate DPL platforms, in one sentence each: 93sam

Once we don’t Select a friendly community where the packages towards a lot of software, community are most noticeable use to show their packages towards a problem good job.

aigarius

While I were elected DPL, I have to time leave Debian Developers Corner Site, map Search about it should not have not be Even if he has, the NM; process is before.

ajt

Ideally, I’d expect that we ought to make It work together in Linux and a DPL review of the community and October firmware resolutions recall vote maybe That’s been some of stuff I’ve been a server near you United States.

hertzog

The sponsorship, principle.

sho

I believe admit volunteers to scratch our bug tracking system I do what I would like LowThresholdNmu to happen again; Admit it has rhymes with a few of it Debian; is to be really like to automatically see them.

sjr

To the web site, map Search Not Published Yet Back to the Debian Project Select a server near you United States; the web Site, map Search Not Published Yet Back to the debian For other contact information, See the Debian Project Select a server near you United States.

stratus

It is today in the web team, the users: and waited supergroups i will that any Debian support: this change our major Desktop, with Lenny development website, we’ve now almost our official status and how a statistics page.

svenl

To the ban.

wouter

I am of a native Dutch is not an area where possible.

These summaries have been generated by the following script:

for i in 93sam aigarius ajt hertzog sho sjr stratus svenl wouter; do
  echo $i
  lynx -dump -nolist http://www.debian.org/vote/2007/platforms/$i dadadodo -c 1 - 2> /dev/null
done
It is somehow subobtimal, as aigarius and sjr’s summaries show: the headers and footers of the page have some influence, but well… it was fun anyways.

Enrico: if you extract the platforms using lynx -dump -nolist (or w3m -dump ), you’ll only extract the text, with no HTML, and the keywords will vary slightly:

• 93sam: jobs, deal, dds, nms, asking
• aigarius: applications, choose, trademarks, apps, formats
• ajt: effective, neat, hoping, success, interview
• hertzog: broadly, serve, represent, pushed, chosen
• sho: deadline, icons, helps, excellence, freaks
• sjr: published, yet, inc, feb, wed
• stratus: stable, websites, feature, submitter, involving
• svenl: weekend, publish, banning, unfair, protest
• wouter: controversy, seem, background, delegates, therefore

Representative keywords of DPL platforms The DPL platforms are too long and you could use a very, very short executive summary? No problem, I have the technology for it. After the results you can find the kit to build yourself an extractor in the comfort of your home. The results

• 93sam: jobs, deal, dds, nms, asking
• aigarius: applications, aigarius, choose, trademarks, apps
• ajt: humbug, effective, neat, hoping, success
• hertzog: broadly, wouter, serve, represent, pushed
• sho: deadline, helps, excellence, freaks, tasks
• sjr: qb, published, xxxx, r, yet
• stratus: stable, websites, feature, submitter, involving
• svenl: unfair, protest, ban, publish, banning
• wouter: controversy, seem, background, delegates, therefore

Acquiring the data

for i in 93sam aigarius ajt hertzog sho sjr stratus svenl wouter
do
    wget http://www.debian.org/vote/2007/platforms/$i
done

Tokenizing

#!/bin/sh
for file in "$@"
do
    lynx -dump -stdin < $file   tr -c '[a-zA-Z]' ' '   tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'   sed -e 's/ /\n/g'   sed -e '/^$/d' > $file.tok
done

Extracting the most representative keywords

#!/usr/bin/python
import sys, math
def read_tokens(file):
    "Read all the tokens from one file"
    return [ line[:-1] for line in open(file) ]
# Read all the "documents"
docs = [ read_tokens(file) for file in sys.argv[1:] ]
# Aggregate token counts
aggregated =  
for d in docs:
    for t in d:
        if t in aggregated:
            aggregated[t] += 1
        else:
            aggregated[t] = 1
def tfidf(doc, tok):
    "Compute TFIDF score of a token in a document"
    return doc.count(tok) * math.log(float(len(docs)) / aggregated[tok])
# Output the top 5 tokens by TFIDF for every document
for name, doc in zip(sys.argv[1:], docs):
    print name, sorted(set(doc), key=lambda tok: tfidf(doc, tok), reverse=True)[:5]

Errata Jacobo suggests to use lynx -dump -nolist or w3m -dump for a more tokenizer-friendly text expansion.

The first sentence was taken from his platform. Information about this post.

[...] it looks like Tim s now more into alternative health products than computers.

This was ajt talking about former Amiga-Magazine Megadisc editor Tim Strachan. I just had to add that he's certainly not into web design or at least into testing his website with Konqueror...

Julien: ask and ye shall receive . I took the liberty of preempting Jaldhar’s GIMPing of a piece of headwear on the photo (no, contrary to popular belief, it’s not a wasps’ nest) ;-) Original found in this LWN article.

I'm glad to see that Debian vote 2006-06, to reaffirm support for the Debian project leader, has passed, and that associated counter-proposals to recall the DPL have been defeated. The central issue has been Dunc Tank, a project to raise money to support certain Debian developers with the goal of getting Debian's next release, etch, out on time. There's been more heat than light on this issue over the last few weeks in various Debian- and Linux-related venues (mailing lists to media), and I'm happy to see that we've come to a conclusive resolution and can hopefully put the issue behind us. I've been impressed with Anthony Towns's aplomb in dealing with this issue, and I'm glad that he'll be staying in the DPL seat. We have one of the best, if not the best, Linux-based Operating Systems available. But Debian's late releases have become a laughingstock, and our users have to resort to backports and workarounds to keep running a stable release version of our software. With luck, putting extra resources into getting out a release will serve our users better and restore our reputation for delivering software in a timely fashion. tags: debian dpl anthony towns dunc tank gr

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do The wp:2001: A Space Odyssey (film) jokes are probably a little too thick on the ground, but I'm glad to see the launch of the HAL Project at le Sans Fil. HAL is a distribution system for getting locally-produced digital art, music and video out on a community wireless project like le Sans Fil. Kinda puts the "community" back into "community wireless"... a great idea. The HAL Project software is of course available for download as an Open Source project, which is good news for other community wireless projects out there. tags: ilesansfil isf hal wireless local