Unfortunately I was not able to attend debconf this year but thanks to the awesome video team the all the talks are available for your viewing pleasure. In order to recreate an authentic Portland experience, I took my laptop into the shower along with a vegan donut and had my children stand outside yelling excerpts from salon.com in whiny Canadianesque accents. Here are some notes I took as I watched the talks. Welcome Talk

• Why is everyone on stage wearing shorts? Is this a thing now?
• Langasek is pronounced with a 'sh' I did not know that.
• Kees is pronounced 'case' I also did not know that.
• Steve missed a good opportunity for a "Who moved my cheese?" joke. (Hey its not any more obscure than the "white Chevy Nova" joke.)
• A well-deserved award to Russ Allbery from some of the UK people for being the voice of reason on the mailing lists. See Vincent Sanders blog for details.
  

Debian in the Dark Ages of Free software - Stefan Zacchiroli

• More shorts. I am starting to feel overdressed.
• Stefan reminisces about how he got involved in Free Software and his philosophy of the same. A good introduction for anyone wondering what
  makes a Debian hacker tick.
• We should be concerned about software freedom in the new "cloud" environments. Debian can play an important role in this by making it really simple for
  users to set up their own cloud environments. My take: the focus should
  be on free standards and protocols. The power that Google, Facebook etc.
  have is drastically reduced if it is easy to jump ship.

Weapons of the Geek - Gabriella Coleman

• pro: no shorts con: womens slacks
• Intriguing anthropological investigation into Anonymous and how it/they relate to Free Software.
• Coc acknowledged then ignored. Why do we need it again?
• "Anonymous has cabals ... [that] make the cabals within Debian look like childs play."

bugs.debian.org -- Database Ho! - Don Armstrong

• I would settle for a lungi at this point but noooo shorts again. (plaid to boot.)
• The return of my yearly guilt about undertaking to Don to add RSS support to debbugs way back at debconf 10 and not following up on it. Damn it, I am going to get this done now.
• Sadly, the initial part of the stream is missing and it begans right in the middle of Don saying something interesting.


• "I have to admit my primary motivation for giving a talk was to try to force myself into actually doing the work I'm talking about."
• Stats porn. The BTS is growing at a phenomenal rate. bugs opened 142/day. But only 95/day closed.

Grub Ancient and Modern - Colin and Watson

• pro: no shorts con: kilt
• I was interested in this talk because one of these days I want to get GRUB 2 running on Debian Minix but a lot went over my head so I'll have to do some
  more research first.

One year of fedmsg in Debian - Nicolas Dandrimont

• trouser status: undetermined
• Problem: There are many different services providing information in Debian but they do not interop very well.
• fedmsg is a unified message bus originally developed by Fedora who were facing a similar problem.


• It has now been implemented in Debian.

Coming of Age: My Life with Debian - Christine Spang

• trouser sta- oh the hell with this.
• Another talk which is more biographical than technical. Again, useful to help understand the motivations of hackers.
• What interests me is that for younger generations it was open source which was a novel idea whereas for those of who grew up in the 8-bit era, having
  to hack on a computer was expected (whether you wanted to or not and it was
  proprietary software you couldn't share which was considered new and strange.

Status report of the Debian Printing Team - Didier Raboud

• Ou est les pantalons? Je ne sais pas. (Apologies to Mme Terzini.)
• Kudos to Didier for taking up this augean task mostly on his own. Despite the long-promised "paperless" office I need to be able to print and I was
  pleasantly surprised that my new xerox all-in-one worked under Debian with
  very little hassle.
• Brother sucks. Don't buy their printers. Ditto for Epson and Samsung.
• Buy HP instead.

The DebConf team is pleased to announce the release of the DebConf13 Final Report. It s a 32-page document which gives the reader an idea about the conference as a whole. It includes words from the Debian Project Leader, descriptions of talks, a section about the Debian Birthday Party, attendee impressions, budgeting and DebConf13 in numbers. If you attended Debconf13, the report may refresh some of your memories and bring you closer to the organization team work. If not, it will certainly encourage you to be part of future Debian events. We thank the Matanel foundation, Google, the Republic and Canton of Neuch tel, and all other DebConf13 sponsors for their support that made the event possible. The DebConf team

Follow me on Identi.ca or Twitter One of my resolutions for 2014 is to keep trying harder to talk about my Debian contributions. So here it is, on a monthly basis this time I hope, quite short this month because I m leaving for holidays at the end of the week and I think I won t have time to contribute more this month. Debian packages Below are some packages I updated recently: 1. Brebis, the fully automated backup checker I successively packaged Brebis, the fully automated backup checker, versions 0.6 to 0.9 (the latter is today in Debian Sid and Jessie) since my last Debian activities blog posts (in french). 2. Pycallgraph, a Python library that creates call graphs for Python programs Pycallgraph is one of the first Debian packages I have been maintaining. So when I noticed it was upgraded after so much time I was really eager to package the new version 1.0.1. Now available in Debian Sid! Just belown an example of the generated graph for the application Belier, a sysadmin tool. 3. Belier, the SSH connection generation tool Nothing really new for Belier, the SSH connection generation tool but I updated the package in order to update the configuration of the Debian package and get rid of some warning messages. Kind of maintenance job I kept avoiding and avoiding, until now. Bug report I d like to take a few seconds to talk about an interesting bug report about the need for a nagios3-dev package I created asking for a new nagios3-dev or nagios3-headers package to offer a simple access to the headers of Nagios for the developers of Nagios external modules. In Nagios, some headers are generated after the ./configure, meaning it may be platform dependent. I (and not only me, the same request was active already by someone other Nagios module developers) thought it was simple to ask the Nagios3 Debian package maintainer to offer these files in a dedicated package. It seems until now people just add the missing files in tarball of their app or in their Debian packages, even if these Nagios headers are not really part of this application. In my opinion, that s why Build-Depends packages are for, don t you think? It seems it is not so simple. I could not understand why it was more important to prevent Debian users who need these files to access these files in a convenient way than letting them to put theses files in there own source tarball/repository. The maintainer told me it could break things. Sure. But we all know an external module of any app often relies on a really specific version of this app. That s nothing new, thats how external modules work. That s not every apps in the world which could provide a stable API to ease the development of external modules. But at least they give access to their dev files or headers when they are FOSS. But feel free to explain to me. After all, the bug reports are still not tagged as "won t fix" Your turn now I d be delighted to have your opinions in the comments of this blog post.

Follow me also on Twitter Just in time for this 2013 Christmas, the Brebis Project released Brebis "Bouddhinette" 0.9. Hope you ll enjoy our X-mas present Reminder: Brebis is the fully automated backup checker, a CLI software developed in Python, allowing users to verify the integrity of archives (tar,gz,bz2,lzma,zip) and the state of the files inside the archives. You will find more information about Brebis features on the Brebis Project homepage. What s new? The major features for this release are:

• support of the apk archive
• the cli offers new options to store the configuration file (-C), the list of files (-L) or both (-O) in custom locations

The extensive list of the supported features is available on the Brebis Project homepage. Get Brebis The official archive of Brebis 0.9 is available here. Feedback about Brebis What do you think about the Brebis project ? We at the Brebis Project welcome any feedback about Brebis. Feel free to comment on this blog, to subscribe to the Brebis-users mailing list, by Twitter or email me directly at carl.chenet@brebisproject.org

Official website: http://www.brebisproject.org
Mailing-list: http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/brebis-users

DebConf13 DebCamp confirmed! The DebConf Team is very pleased to announce that DebCamp will be open for almost a full week in August. DebCamp will start on Tuesday 6 August 2013 at the main conference venue, Le Camp, and will be immediately followed by DebConf13, starting Sunday 11th August. Opening of the reconfirmation period As the DebConf Registration Team have announced on debconf-announce (to which you should really be subscribed), now is the time to reconfirm your attendance to DebConf13 (and actually register to DebCamp). This is really important for final calculations of food, room and costs, please read the announcement for all the important details. The reconfirmation period is open until the 30 June 2013. We look forward to seeing everyone in August in Vaumarcus. The DebConf team

Dear all, DebConf13 sponsorship application date extended As communicated through the debconf-announce@lists.debconf.org mailing list, the deadline to apply for DebConf13 sponsorship has been extended to the end of this week, May 19th. If you intend to attend DebConf13 in August and would like to apply for sponsored registration, now is the time to register in Penta! After this deadline you will no longer be able to apply for sponsored food, accomodation or travel. Please refer to the announcement and to the registration documentation for details. Please contact us on the debconf-discuss mailing list if you have any questions. DebConf12 final report The DebConf team is also happy to announce the release of the DebConf12 Final Report. It s a 39-page document which gives the reader an idea about the conference as a whole. It includes descriptions of talks, DebCamp and Debian Day activities, personal impressions, attendee and budgeting numbers, the work of various teams, social events and so on. If you attended Debconf12, the report may refresh some of your memories and bring you closer to the organization team work. If not, it will certainly encourage you to be part of future Debian events. We thank the Universidad Centroamericana, the Government of Nicaragua, Google and all other DebConf12 sponsors for their support that made the event possible. The DebConf team

Dear all, Registration is now open for DebConf13, which will take place in Le Camp near Vaumarcus, Switzerland, from Sunday 11 August to Saturday 17 August 2013. The registration deadline for those who wish to make sponsorship applications is Wednesday 15 May 2013. After this date, you can still register, but you will need to pay for accommodation and food. Registration If you want to attend DebConf13, go to the Registration page and follow the procedure outlined there. Please even read the website page if you attended previous conferences, because it explains some important changes with respect to previous years. DebCamp We are planning to prepend the current DebConf week with additional DebCamp days, but we need some more time to sort out the details. We also need more money to be able to fully sponsor DebCamp for everyone or to extend it to more than a few days. If you would like this to happen, please contact us and help find additional sponsorship. We will send another announcement about DebCamp as soon as registration for DebCamp opens. Thank you DebConf13 thanks its two platinum sponsors, Google and the Matanel Foundation, as well as all other sponsors. We look forward to welcoming you to Le Camp in August! The DebConf team

The DebConf13 matching fund announced previously is now complete. The matching sponsor, Brandorr Group will match the collected amount of 2513 USD, resulting in 5026 USD of sponsoring money for DebConf13, for the benefit of all attendees. Despite raising only slightly more than half of the expected money, this first experience of raising funds through this matching fund mechanism can be considered successful.

DebConf is very important to the health of Debian, and Debian is very important to our team, so we re doing what we can to help. In this case we really wanted to see if we could provide an incentive for individual users of Debian to donate to the project. It seems like it worked well, and we d love to do something like this again in the future.

Brian Gupta, Brandorr Group

DebConf13 continues to welcome donations from individuals and is also seeking further sponsors. Registration opening Registration for DebConf13 will be opening shortly: stay tuned! We look forward to welcoming you to Vaumarcus!

As part of the DebConf13 fundraising effort, a generous sponsor, Brandorr Group, has proposed to start a matching fund in USD for DebConf13; in place through the end of April 30th. The rules are quite simple:

• for each dollar donated by an individual to DebConf13 through the mechanism, Brandorr Group will donate another dollar;
• individual donations will be matched only up to 100 USD each;
• only donations in USD will be matched;
• Brandorr Group will match the donated funds up to a maximum total of 5 000 USD;
• this generous offer will only stay in place through the end of April 30th, please act quickly, and help spread the word!

For details, please see our Monetary support from individuals page, which also has a short url, for convenience: http://deb.li/dc13donate. Help welcome As always, the DebConf team is looking for volunteers. Some jobs need technical skills, but many DebConf tasks are about working to deadlines on non-technical issues (e.g. fundraising, budgeting, talk scheduling). You can see more information about some of the jobs to be done on the DebConf wiki. Please do think about getting involved and sharing your ideas with us, to help us make DebConf an even more useful event for Debian in the future. We look forward to welcoming you to Vaumarcus!

This is the first freeze in which I'm involved with upload rights. And it turned out to be a quite interesting ride so far, so I thought it would be nice to write about it.

Some of our customers are using central CUPS systems for managing their printer infrastructure. In the last years the demand for support printing (called Airprint) from mobile apple products increased. This worked well for us on Debian squeeze as documented here (updated scrips). I tried this on a fresh installed Debian wheezy amd64, but no printer was found on any IOS device. Hmm .... let's see if the printer is announces via avahi:

$ avahi-browse -a   grep -i print
+   eth0 IPv6 Kyocera FS-1020D @ service                    Internet Printer     local
+   eth0 IPv6 AirPrint Kyocera @ service                    Internet Printer     local
+   eth0 IPv4 Kyocera FS-1020D @ service                    Internet Printer     local
+   eth0 IPv4 AirPrint Kyocera @ service                    Internet Printer     local

WTF?!? Fortunately we have an Ubuntu 12.04 running in our office and printing from IOS devices works without problems (without copying any files to /etc/avahi/services/):

$ avahi-browse -a   grep -i print
+   eth2 IPv6 Ricoh Aficio MP C2800 @ printing              Internet Printer     local
+   eth2 IPv6 Ricoh Aficio MP 171 @ printing                Internet Printer     local
+   eth2 IPv4 Ricoh Aficio MP 171 @ printing                Internet Printer     local
+   eth2 IPv4 Ricoh Aficio MP C2800 @ printing              Internet Printer     local

I just copied the whole configuration over to my wheezy system, but it didn't worked out. I tried this all on a kfreebsd-i386 system again without success. Sorry, but I don't understand the source of this issue. Cups on wheezy has the same upstream version as on precise. Avahi-daemon on wheezy is just one minor version ahead off precise. Is this a bug/incompatibility in cups and/or avahi? A missing patch compared to the packages of precise? Is this a configuration problem? Update: Looking into LP #1054495 and the debdiff of cups 1.5.3-0ubuntu6 indicates, that there seems modifications beside simple changes of mime configurations files. Update: The fix for LP #1054495 does really fix the problem on wheezy too. With the help of Didier Raboud I was able test a binary package with this fixapplied on our test setup. The good news is, there are no extra modifications needed beside just configuring cups to export it's printers for enabling support for iOS devices. I opened #700961 and hopefully release managment will accept this fix for wheezy. Hints, rants and comments could be send to 'blog - at - waja - dot - info' or via @blogwajainfo.

This post is a quick status update on DebConf13, for those who aren t following the debconf-team mailing list. As you may know, this year s DebConf will be held at Le Camp, in Vaumarcus, Switzerland. Our concept for this DebConf is to hold it in a natural environment, away from distractions. We hope you will enjoy spending time together with other Debian collaborators in this beautiful part of Switzerland, on the shore of Lake Neuch tel. Dates DebConf13 will take place from Sunday 11. August 2013 to Sunday 18. August 2013. (We will use Saturday 10. August 2013 to prepare the venue for the conference.) You may notice that the dates don t cover two weeks like in the last few years (there is no separate DebCamp week). For budget reasons, current plans are to merge the two weeks activities into an 8 day period. If you think that s a pity, it s not too late to change it just join the fundraising team and start working quickly! Travel If you want to start arranging your travel to attend DebConf, some initial travel suggestions may be useful:

• We recommend that people from nearby countries take advantage of the excellent train connections to Switzerland, rather than looking for flights: the Swiss Federal Railways website, provides a very helpful international travel planner which knows about trains, but also about the local bus connections you will need to reach the DebConf venue.
• The best railway station to aim for is Yverdon-les-Bains. To get to the venue from there, take a local bus to the bus stop called Concise, Camp de Vaumarcus , which is very close to the venue. You can also directly use that name as your final destination in the above travel planner.
• Nearby airports include Geneva - GVA (1h30 from the venue by train), Zurich - ZRH (3h from the venue by train) and Basel-Mulhouse - BSL (3h from the venue by train).

The DebConf13 map shows the venue and the bus line (with some stops). Registration We expect to open registration around the start of March. Currently we are still evaluating some possible new conference management systems, which we hope might avoid the frustrations some attendees have had in the past with Pentabarf. Help welcome As always, the DebConf team is looking for volunteers. Some jobs need technical skills (e.g. testing conference management system setups, working on the website), but many DebConf tasks are about working to deadlines on non-technical issues (e.g. fundraising, budgeting, talk scheduling). You can see more information about some of the jobs to be done on the DebConf wiki. Please do think about getting involved and sharing your ideas with us, to help us make DebConf an even more useful event for Debian in the future. We look forward to welcoming you to Vaumarcus!

The following developers got their Debian accounts in the last month:

• Jonathan Wiltshire (jmw)
• Michael Hanke (mih)
• Sebastian Reichel (sre)
• Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals (sgevatter)
• K re Thor Olsen (kaare)
• Didier Raboud (odyx)
• Benjamin Drung (bdrung)

Congratulations!

The following developers have returned as Debian Developers after having retired at some time in the past:

• Matt Zimmerman (mdz)
• Jerome Marant (jerome)
• Scott James Remnant (keybuk)

Welcome back!

Lightspark, the modern and efficient open source Flash player, just landed in experimental! Few days have passed since 0.4.2 release, and thanks to the great packaging efforts made by Didier Raboud, package is ready to be widely tested. Don t expect a fully functional Flash player, though. Some features aren t implemented yet, and it s still buggy, but it looks very promising. Stay tuned for updates!

Qt 4.7.0 beta 2 and Qt Creator 2.0.0 have been released upstream. There s some
noticeable changes in our Qt packages compared to Qt 4.6.x series:
- legacy Qt Assistant (ADP) is removed
- new Qt declarative module is introduced
- Qt Multimedia and Qt Webkit aren t being built anymore In case your package depends on the deprecated Qt Assistant, it is still being
shipped in a separated Qt Assistant compatibility package called
qt-assistant-compat. Qt Multimedia is now shipped from Qt Mobility API instead of Qt. The module has
been renamed to Qt Mobility MultimediaKit. Qt Mobility delivers a set of APIs
for mobile device functionality. Qt WebKit is shipped standalone, separated from Qt. Hopefully, it will make
Qt WebKit security support easier. There are also a new component in the family: Qt Messaging Framework (QMF).
The Qt Messaging Framework, QMF, consists of a C++ library and daemon server
process that can be used to build email clients, and more generally software
that interacts with email and mail servers. Finally, I have started to ship a snapshot of a new Phonon backend: Phonon VLC,
one backend to rule them all ! All the packages can be found in Debian Experimental repository, except
Qt Simulator, a simulator for Qt applications running on Nokia devices.
This package should land soon in Debian archives. I encourage you to try building your Qt applications against these packages and
please, report any bugs you encounter. Enjoy. http://packages.qa.debian.org/q/qt4-x11.html
http://packages.qa.debian.org/q/qtcreator.html
http://packages.qa.debian.org/q/qt-assistant-compat.html
http://packages.qa.debian.org/q/qtmobility.html
http://packages.qa.debian.org/q/qtwebkit.html
http://packages.qa.debian.org/q/qmf.html
http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/phonon-backend-vlc.html
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=587759

He might too shy to tell everybody, but the world must know. Luca Capello successfully defended his PhD thesis today at Universit de Gen ve, getting a Tr s Bien mention. I must admit that my last biology lesson was 13 years ago, so I m not sure I can really comment on his work on Vomeronasal Receptors: from Monogenic Expression to Axon Guidance. But I was very impressed by the quality of the experimental process, especially compared to what we do in computer science. Debian was well represented at the defense, since Axel Beckert, Didier Raboud and the Debian kilt were also there. Welcome to the list of Debian Developers holding PhD degrees, Luca!

Luca waiting at the door (again).

Luca ready to start.

Everything is in the title I have uploaded Qt 4.6.0 beta 1 packages to Debian experimental. Amd64 and i386 packages are built (unfortunately, alpha and s390 architectures failed to build).If you wonder if KDE 4.3.2 is working with these packages, the short answer is yes.

Since 2 months (7 weeks exactly), QtCreator is stuck in NEW queue Until NEW queue is fixed, you can find the packages on Alioth: http://alioth.debian.org/~fabo/ Bonus: kdevplatform is also waiting in NEW since ages, so on Alioth. Sorry dear users to provides packages this way. Note on architectures : only amd64 and i386.

Ultimate Debian Database (UDD) is a GSoC project (now finished) which aimed at importing all different data sources that we have in Debian in a single SQL database, to make it easy to combine that data. Currently, we import information about source and binary packages, all bugs (both archived and unarchived), lintian, carnivore, popcon, history of uploads, history of migrations to testing, and orphaned packages. The goal is really to have that data, without really thinking of a specific use cases: there will be lots of use cases. Buildstat is a project by Gon ri Le Bouder, that provides a framework for running QA tests (rebuilds and lintian currently, but buildstat is built in a very extensible way) on packages, using both packages in the archive, and packages in the VCS repositories of teams. This is pretty cool: it allows teams to get an overview of the status of their packages, not using the archive as reference, but using their VCS. Buildstat schedules and runs the tests, store the data in an SQL database, and allows to browse the data using a web interface. Buildstat also import some data from other sources (only the BTS currently, using the LDAP dump) to display it on the web interface. Since both projects are using an SQL DB, people have been asking why we don’t simply merge them. The big advantage would be that the data is synchronized: buildstat would display more up-to-date info about the data sources it doesn’t generate locally (like bugs), and UDD would get fresh buildstat data. We have been talking a lot with Gon ri, considering the different possibilities. But I don’t think it’s a good idea. I think that both projects should try to do one thing, but do it very well, instead of trying to fix the world. UDD focuses on importing data that exists elsewhere. Sometimes it means doing some complex processing. But data should be be generated by UDD. Merging the projects would mean having a very big piece of software that does everything (or tries to do everything). Both databases were designed differently, with different goals. UDD tries to stay close to the data it imports. There might be some incoherences in the data sources, but that’s fine: one of the goal of UDD is to make it easy to find them (and fix them), so we need them in the DB. In buildstat, since the goal of importing data is to display it on the web interface, with a strict use case, you can freely “simplify” data if it helps. Another big difference is that UDD is designed to be easy to use (ie write and run queries) by a human user: UDD uses multi-column primary keys, while buildstat uses surrogate keys (integer “id” keys), that ORM tools usually require. There are also more technical concerns: currently UDD makes a compromise, for each data source, on what it imports: it tries to import the data that is useful, not all the data available. Merging buildstat and UDD would mean increasing the DB size significantly, by adding all the “private” data that buildstat needs. Another problem is the stable API problem: if buildstat and UDD are merged, it means that buildstat cannot change its DB schema without making sure that it wouldn’t break what UDD users are doing. So, what should we do, from my POV, instead of merging? - Continue to talk, and get Gon ri into the UDD “team”. He gathered a lot of experience working on buildstat, and he probably would be able to help a lot. - Data that is not generated by buildstat (bugs data) should be imported from UDD. Doing SQL->SQL will probably make things easier there. - A summary of buildstat’s infos should be imported into UDD. There’s also the issue of providing the data through a web interface, to the DDs, which buildstat tries to address partially. The Debian Developer Packages Overview (DDPO)’s main limitations are: - lack of knowledge about VCS (what buildstat solves) - lack of knowledge about complex organizations (you can’t get any list of packages, or list of packages maintained by teams not using a consistant Maintainer/Uploaders scheme, or list of packages from tasks, etc) - poor handling of large amount of packages. In teams with lots of packages, it’s useful to have restricted views, such as “packages outdated compared to upstream”, “packages which have bugs/RC bugs”, “packages which are newer in the VCS than in the archive”. The perl team’s work on PET clearly shows the kind of things that are needed. At this point, I think that DDPO would benefit from a full rewrite (using the existing code as a source of inspiration, and making sure that there are no regressions, of course). Using UDD as the data source, it should be easy to get something done (even if UDD still lacks some of the data DDPO has currently). But it still requires web developer skills, which I don’t have. If you are interested, contact me!