(For the non-french readers, yes, there is an obvious grammatical error in the title of this post. This is a reference to a news story that happened years ago. Bubulle is Christian Perrier’s nickname, btw.) So, here it is, I am rethinking my involvement in the Debian Project. And it’s all Bubulle’s fault. I am not leaving the Project, because Debian is far more important to me than some rude bashing from Bubulle. It is a fact that Bubulle and me have agreed to disagree on a number of topics, it’s also a fact that we are both committed to Debian. In the past few weeks, a number of things happened, and we both said things we probably regret (at least I do). I do not like this paternalistic tone he sometimes demonstrate in mailing-list postings. I totally hate that, to be frank. But I can pretty much deal with it as long as it’s not aimed at me. He tagged one of his debconf-notes-are-evil-and-useless-crap-please-remove-it filed against one of my packages as “not-fixed” even when I explained that it is not a bug and the note really is what I want. It implies that I am not fixing bugs, which is something I cannot accept. Debian bug reports tend to have the very first priority in my todo list. So far, I can deal with that. But what I cannot deal with, is this mail from Christian to Paul Rouget (the moron who first posted the photos of the Firefox/Iceweasel posters from the JDLL last saturday, vomitting on us, and the comments were even worse). Sorry, the mail is in french, I don’t know how well Google Translate performs on this one but you should give it a try. This is purely insulting. Christian did not even contact me, he did not even try to get the facts straight, and it looks like my last post, in which I explain what happened during the JDLL, was totally useless. So, congratulations Christian. I’m perhaps not the most active DD, but I’m quite active nonetheless. Well, that is, I was quite active and reactive. This is likely to change starting today. I’m not going to drop any packages. I’m not going to disappear. I’m not going to let Debian France down. I’m not going to let my packages rot in the archive. But I’m going to be noticeably less active and reactive. Next time you talk to me, it’d better be to apologize for this mail you sent to Paul Rouget. I /quit from both Freenode and OFTC on monday evening. I probably won’t come back. I feel way better already without being on these two networks, without reading Rapha l Hertzog blatantly lie about dunc-tank, without reading a whole lot of other crap. I’m taking a much-needed break. Fuck you. Pierre Habouzit, Josselin Mouette, Denis Barbier, Sam Hocevar, and others (you all know who you are): thank you, you guys rock. And GO GO GO dunc-bank !

I announced it, now he did it. Denis, we will miss you, you did a damn pretty good job on many parts where you were excellent at it. I'm disgusted to see that dunc-tank pushed you out. I'm disgusted to see that people with a lot of qualities are going to do the same, and orphan a lot of packages that really need special care, and that will fall in QA for a while. That hurts, and that hurts the Project too. Edit: and now Benjamin is following his path. I feel sick. And those where not the one that get loud about it. They just don't recognize the Debian they knew. Who can blame them ?

Directed by jd & adn Genre: Action / Adventure / Sci-Fi / Thriller / Horror / Drama / Humor
Runtime: several weeks
Country: A lot
Language: English
Color: Color (Technicolor, QT, GTK and ncurses) Tagline: They stole their project, now they want it back. Plot Outline: In September 2006, a group of developpers from the Debian planet rise against the corruption leading the government.
User Comments: Great action, great suspense, great cultural satire, and a great mind-bender. Awards: Waiting for nomination. Quotes:

• Bah, if you don't want to read me, just don't , Sven Luther
• Oh my. , Clint Adams
• Or maybe I'm withdrawing my support because I'm busy with my chainsaw. , Josselin Mouette
• "I'm withdrawing my support because the developers might agree with AJ rather than me"? Come on. , Matthew Garett
• OH NO YOU DON'T. This thread is _not_ about you, it is _not_ about Frans Pop, and it is _not_ about debian-installer. , Peter Samuelson

Cast overview

	Anthony Towns (aj), as the Debian Project Leader		Denis Barbier (bouz), as The Recaller
	Aurelien Jarno (aurel32), as one Seconder		Clint Adams (schizo), as one Seconder
	MJ Ray (mjr), as one Seconder		Pierre Habouzit (madcoder), as one Seconder
	Martin Schulze (joey), as one Seconder		Marc Dequ nes (duck), as one Seconder

Hey, somebody used a photo I took of the Papineau mural in Papineau metro station in a discussion of the prison Pied-du-Courant. They even gave me proper attribution, per the license under which the photo was published. As an American I have a shamefully bad understanding of Canadian history. Example: when I first moved to Montreal, I had to get my local land-line phone service set up. When I was asked for my address (in English -- I didn't even try doing this stuff in French back then), I answered: "Avenue Papineau. That's P-A-P-I-N--" the operator cut me off. "I know perfectly well how to spell 'Papineau', sir," he said, icily. Oops. I'm trying to get caught up. I've been reading a ton of wp:Pierre Berton books, but I still don't have the whole story as integrated into my own mental processes the way I know, say, American history almost instinctively. Like, even though I know the story, I continue to boggle that wp:Louis Riel keeps popping up in various apparently unconnected historical contexts and era. It's like, "Wha? Louis Riel again? Didn't they shoot him four or five chapters ago? Why is he still here?" I guess it just takes time. Or maybe it's something I'm never going to understand, like why there were two teams called "Roughriders" in the CFL for so long. I dunno. tags: papineau flickr louis riel bell canada me

Talk about your busy days Busy, busy day today. Alain Desilets, a researcher at the National Research Council and a really smart person when it comes to wiki, came to Montreal today for Wiki Wednesday. We had lunch with Alain and fellow researcher Julie at nearby Ty Breiz restaurant, a neighborhood landmark that makes fine crepes and cider and good garlicky salads. We talked about improving wiki interfaces to make it easier to translate between multiple language versions of a page (like you see on Wikipedia and Wikitravel), and came up with some interesting solutions. Then it was off to Wiki Wednesday proper, at which Alain presented his translation projects and also some collaborative fiction ideas for children. Very cool stuff! It was a real celebrity event: Sunir Shah of MeatballWiki, Sebastien Paquet of SocialText, Marc Laporte of Tiki CMS/Groupware, Anne and Antoine, organizing the RoCoCo 2007 event, and lots of other folks too. Anne and Antoine also presented their brilliant image-only wiki, Wikigraphe. It lets people upload images as a replacement for pages, then build "hotspots" on the images that link to other pages -- which are in themselves images. It's a destruction of the tyranny of text in the wiki world -- and fun to watch. Sylvain Carle compared it to drawball, but I think they're different. Much followup talk on RoCoCo 2007. It's going to be an exciting event -- so glad to have wiki friends around the world coming here, to my favorite city. Lots to do between now and May, but I think we can get it done and have a fantastic wiki (and wiki-like) event. Wiki Wednesdays are such excellent events -- kudos to Seb Paquet for organizing them in Montreal, and also to SocialText for such a good idea, and Robin Millette and gang for hosting. tags: wiki wednesday alain desilets ty breiz sunir shah seb paquet sylvain carle anarcat marc laporte rococo

CC Salon Montreal On top of that, we had the Creative Commons Salon Montreal tonight at Am re de boire on rue St. Denis. The Salon is developing internationally as a way for CC-related people to interact, chat, and have fun in cities around the world, and Montreal has too many CC folks to be left out. Tina Pipers, co-chair of Creative Commons Canada, is on the faculty at McGill, so we're lucky to have such a heavy hitter in the area to chat with us. (Also, I found out tonight she's Greek! Good for us.) Tonight was expecially great since Maj and I talked about Wikitravel and our new project, Crossroads, to create Open Content travel opinion, stories, blogs, photos, etc. It's just getting off the ground, but it was great to share our vision with some people who really understand the idea of content sharing and an information commons. The discussion after our talk was great. I couldn't drag myself to YULblog, though, after 6 hours of talking... I had wanted to go to get people interested in BarCampMontreal, but Sylvain (one of the event organizers) was already going, so I felt justified in sitting it out. But when am I going to get to another Yulblog? I just don't know. tags: cc cc salon cc salon montreal tina pipers wikitravel crossroads travel barcampmontreal yulblog

Searls ha ha Searls's 4th Law: No matter what car you want to rent, what you'll get is a Chevy Cavalier. Man, I love the wp:Chevrolet Cavalier. It's a fun car to drive, and it just says "rental car". Which mean, y'know, "vacation" and "distant lands" and "irresponsibility". How can you not love that car? Not to mention that someone has to straighten out Doc Searls on Elements of Style Rule #1: Form the possessive singular of nouns with 's. This includes singular names that end with s... like "Searls". There are a few exceptions for ancient names ending in -is/-us/-es, but those are few. To paraphrase: I knew Achilles; I served with Achilles; Doc Searls, you are no Achilles. tags: searls doc searls chevy cavalier elements of style

UFO Beliefs Hey! I'm back on Technorati. Rockin'! After like 3 months complaining to their customer service Web form and getting 0 (= zero) response, I finally canceled my blog claim and started a new one. The software picked up on my site right away. Problem solved! It would have been nice to hear, you know, one tiny peep out of Technorati about my 8-10 bug reports, but I guess they're pretty busy. tags: technorati listing bug reports

Two of our good friends here in Montreal are Kate and Morgan. She's a Ph.D. student in philosophy at Rutgers, working on her dissertation here, and he's a game designer. They're from Australia originally, and they just got married Down Under about 4 weeks ago. Her dad and stepmom live in North America, though, so they're thoughtfully holding a wedding party next weekend for Kate and Morgan's American friends and family at their home in wt:Hudson (New York). We've driven through the area a few times in the past, but we haven't really stopped for long. From what Kate says, Hudson's a pretty town and early October means lots of leaf-peeping opportunities. Not that Montreal's any slouch in that respect right now, but it will be nice to see other people's leaves, I guess. There's also a Firefighter Museum and a Shaker Museum. I also just finished The Island at the Center of the World, a historical book about the 17th-century Dutch colony of New Netherlands (now New York). The main settlements were in the Hudson Valley between Manhattan and Albany (New York), so I'd like to find a nice one to stop at and look around. The drive down is about 4-1/2 hours, and I think we'll be OK doing it in one hop, even with the baby strapped down in the back seat. We're heading out on Friday evening, spending Saturday checking out the sights, then parties on Sunday and Monday (a holiday, Columbus Day, in the US). Monday night Maj got us tickets to see Massive Attack here in Montreal, so we'll be zooming back up highway 87 Monday afternoon and if we can avoid problems at the border in wt:Plattsburgh we'll be rockin' out (a bit) that evening. tags: kate morgan wedding party hudson massive attack leaf peeping

Parallel distrihoozit The discussions on the cc-licenses list over the last week have gotten increasingly heated. At heart is the very emotional issue of DRM (AKA TPM) technology, and to what extent its use is compatible with Open Source and Open Content. It's been a real shame -- several pages-long posts that really try to hammer a point into the head of someone who's just not listening since they're busy writing their own 10-page-long email. It's become impossible to read and some wiser heads have asked for a cooling-off period. Thankfully so. There is very little time left to continue this discussion. I really sincerely hope that people who are interested in seeing Commons licenses that are compatible with Debian and other Free Software pop in and say something to that effect. Cool heads who can state things in simple English are particularly welcome. The list allows posting to subscribers only -- kind of a damper on one-time posts -- but subscription only takes a second, and you can disable your subscription immediately after you're done. tags: cc debian cc-licenses public review cc3.0

Busy Wednesday Ahead 2007 is going to be the year of wiki in Montreal. We're having two of the main wiki conferences -- RecentChangesCamp and Wikisym -- here in Montreal next year. And I guess it's time for the local wiki, open source, open content and "open other" community to start getting ready. At least in the wiki world we're taking the first steps. Wednesday 4 October (uhh... I mean, Duodi 12 Vend miaire) we're having Montreal Wiki Wednesday at 8655 rue St-Denis (metro Cremazie). Alain Desilets and Sunir Shah, who are both working on Wikisym, will be coming, as well as Anne Goldberg (principal organizer of RCC) and the inimitable Seb Paquet, who runs everything in this town. 15h-18h, fun times ahead. tags: wiki wiki wednesday wikisym montreal rococo

CC Salon Montreal But wait there's more! On top of WW, we're going to have a big Creative Commons Salon Montreal on Wednesday night, too. This will be the second time we've had a get-together in Montreal for CC so far, and I think it's going to be a good one. Maj and I are going to give an informal talk about Wikitravel and its CC license which has worked so well for us. I'm really gung-ho on the CC Salon idea. It's a great way to engage the interesting, fun part of CC -- and it's all about the fun, right? CC Salon Montreal is happening 4 Oct at 18:30h at L'am re boire, 2049 rue St. Denis (a mere 66-block walk from Wiki Wednesday!). Should be a good time. (On top of all this, I'll probably stop at YULblog on the way home, just to make the Web maven's trifecta for the night. tags: cc cc salon montreal salon

In all the fuss over the last few days I haven't mentioned that our friend Jani Patokallio has been in town this week. Jani is a longtime, dedicated Wikitraveller who's been instrumental in the success of the site; his dad is the Finnish ambassador to Canada so he gets the occasion once in a while to be in our neck of the woods. It was great to have him here. First, it was good because we finally managed to go out to Maamm Bolduc, the fantastic nearby diner/restaurant with the great poutine that I mentioned in Journal/20 Prairial CCXIV. Great according to montrealpoutine.com, that is. And I have to confess: it was an incredibly good poutine. Maj and I got the v g , which was rich with fried mushrooms and peppers, and Jani got the bourgignon, full of wine and beef. I think we all left satisfied. We also managed to head out to Chu Chai, the Thai restaurant on rue St Denis with all the fake meat. Jani brought his brother Miko who's at McGill right now, and they didn't seem to mind the tofu and seitan and stuff, so it must be good. I also had showed Maj the Debian:HugAFinn game, and we resolved to earn some points while we had two Finns in a relatively captive situation. I think both J & M were nonplussed by our hugging advances, but once they learned that it was in the interest of gaining points, they acquiesced stoically. Fine people, the Finns! tags: jani maam bolduc poutine chu chai hug a finn

Thanks Matt Matt Brubeck pointed out a 7-line shell script to fix the ssh UI problem I pointed out on Journal/2 Vend miaire CCXV. At least I think it was Matt -- he didn't sign his comment. This makes the second time in the last week or so that someone else has edited my WikiBlog. I guess it's a good thing, but it's making me think I need to work out some formal way to do commenting. tags: ssh blog ui help shell

Current #1: Postings like this, Proposals like this ("recall the project leader") and the way the whole situation is handled by certain people, especially joey and Denis. Not high on the list:
#n-1: That some more people might be paid for their work on Debian, but this time from a DPL-affiliated entity named "Dunc Tank", instead of companies like Credativ, IBM or HP. So what would be your opinion when AJ steps down from the dunc tank board? Is it then still this evil, volunteer-eating monster? Sure, you're entitled to your own opinion. I just don't like the way you voice (and try to enforce) your opinion.

I just wanted to pass along the invitation. Robin Millette is throwing a birthday party for Debian on Saturday, 19 August 2006. You can show up at 17:30 and apparently it will last until the wee hours of the morning. Just knock at 8655 rue Saint-Denis, Montr al. It's right by the Cr mazie station. I'm afraid I won't be able to attend as I will be far away. But do have fun celebrating!

I can't believe it's the end of wp:Thermidor already. The summer's going so fast; Fructidor is the last month of the year in the French Revolutionary Calendar, and then it's the fall equinox and things change. Speaking of the fall equinox, the Br leurs de Montr al Burners, the local Burning Man regional organization in Montreal, is planning a decompression regional burn campout event for the weekend of 22-24 September 2006. Folks interested in Burning Man and near Montreal are encouraged (by me) to participate on the Br leurs wiki or join the bruleurs mailing list. And, yes, the event starts on La F te de la R volution on the Republican calendar. Neat. tags: montreal burning man bruleurs wiki fructidor

And you smell like one too As has been mentioned in many other places, yesterday, 16 Aug, was the 13th anniversary of the launch of Debian. It's definitely something to celebrate -- the project continues to be a huge success and a bulwark of Free Software. Robin Millette and the Atelier du Libre will be hosting a Debian birthday party here in Montreal on Saturday the 19th at 8655 rue St Denis, at the Cr mazie metro stop. The event is from 1:30PM to 5:30PM and is open to all. More info at http://rym.waglo.com/wordpress/2006/08/17/party/ . tags: debian montreal robin millette birthday party atelier du libre

Long hot days in Montreal -- which means a lot of fun for me. Yesterday, I had lunch with Marc Laporte, a Montreal Open Source developer and project lead for Tiki CMS/Groupware. Marc sent me email a week or so ago -- he saw on GeoURL that we lived right across Parc La Fontaine from each other, and since we had such similar interests it made sense to meet up. Wednesdays are my Daddy Day with Amita June. I try to work 4 10-hour days a week, and take Wednesday off to spend with the baby (and let Maj get some work done). It doesn't always work out that way -- I tend to work late night and weekends anyways, and Wikitravel never sleeps -- but at least theoretically I take the baby on Wednesdays. So I had the baby, and we went and met Marc at Universel Caf on Cherrier and Parc L.F. It's a nice place -- not too pricey and the food is good. It's also got a terrasse so we could sit outside in the sun. Marc is a lot of fun -- Tiki's got such an active user and developer community, and such a unique development strategy (very liberal CVS access) that we had a lot of fun and things to talk about. Marc spent six months in wt:Buenos Aires developing software, which is just about my dream job. I've wanted to go there for a long time, and it's on our list of "next places to live". We also talked a lot about how active Wiki culture is becoming, and how great that is, and how many blechy parts there are too. As when most Wiki makers come together, we bemoaned the lack of a Wiki markup standard, but hopefully the development of a text/wiki RFC will spur its growth. At least I hope so! tags: marc laporte amitajune montreal universel geourl tiki buenos aires wiki wiki markup standard

Allez les bleus On the way back from lunch, Amita and I stopped in the great playground by the baby pools in Parc La Fontaine, when my friend Niko called and invited me over to watch the World Cup semi-finals between France and Portugal. Niko lives on Marie-Anne and DeBullion -- about half-way between the Portuguese neighborhood surrounding Iglesia Santa Cruz at rue Rachel and St Urbain, and the Barouf, a bar on St. Denis that has become the unofficial centroid of French World Cup fans in Montreal. Amita June fell asleep on the way there, so we didn't get to Niko's until the game was almost over. But that was OK -- it was kind of a boring game, as far as I can tell, and France won 1-0. What was fun was walking out to St. Denis afterwards. The police had blocked off the street for several blocks in both directions, so we were able to walk up and down the street, while people cheered allez les bleus and waved the tricolor and generally had a mad good time. We couldn't help ourselves -- we had to walk down rue Rachel and see how the other half was doing. Which was, in fact, not well -- there were an awful lot of glum Portuguese people hanging out at Rachel and St Laurent. The street wasn't blocked officially, but cars really couldn't get through the crowd of mopey, extremely well-costumed folks. It got a little ugly -- one drunk France fan came around waving a tricolor and nearly got his hat handed to him by 12 angry Portuguese, including one guy in a red, yellow and green wig with a big red clown nose. A car with a French flag driving up St. Laurent also got stopped. We figured it was time to get out, so I took the baby home and put her to sleep and hacked on my OpenID MediaWiki extension for a few hours. Things are going well -- I'm really close to a consumer and a server. The little UI niceties will have to come later -- right now I'm concentrating on the mainline functionality. tags: openid mediawiki world cup montreal amitajune france portugal allez les bleus

I woke up early Monday morning, showered and got dressed. You know there are now six people in our hotel room. Simon, Eric, Blars, M ritz, Jimmy, and I have to share one shower which makes the process a bit slow. And this shower is a push-button shower that you have to hold in order to keep the water running. And the water never really gets hot. I was typing on IRC and found Matt Zimmerman on-line. We started chatting and noticed that we were in the same room. I tried looking for someone wearing a grey hat, but couldn't find him until I looked beside me. There he was, having sat down right next to ze_dinosaur. Since Mark Shuttleworth is my boss, I paid attention to his talk, and noticed that bug 35051 popped up during the presentation. You know you've been staring at too many bugs when you know which ones they are in the bug tracking system. I talked to Matt a bit about work, because Debconf is a good time to talk about QA, right? We finished up our discussion, typed a bit on our laptops, and decided that food would be a good idea. We found some people from Intel, who introduced themselves as Mike, Mark, and Denise. I thought that Denise's name sounded familiar and then I realised that she's Denise Cooper, who worked on opening up Sun's source code. I was so happy to finally meet her, since we had talked years ago. We walked towards town to get some better food and picked up Blars. Then we saw xtat, whom I knew only from LiveJournal, and his girlfriend. I invited them to join us and we walked around town for a while. We went to this Argentinian restaurant, called Rinc n del Viejo, that had napkins on the table. I didn't want to get my hopes up, so I expected something plain, but everything was incredibly delicious. We started with some wonderful empanadas, a delicious tomato salad, and guacamole y totopos. Then I ate queso con chorizo. By the time we finished, we were all completely stuffed. We picked up some pesos and then decided to walk off this big meal. We went exploring the town and wandered about a bit. We hiked up a hill and found a street full of vibrant colours. I realized that we were in the construction district, with stores selling paint, lumber, sinks, pools, and even hand-painted tiles. A little bit further on, past some clothing stores, we found a very cute hotel that looks like it would be really fun to stay in. We found a daycare with an awesome wall, with little figures dancing about. There was a little kid who was standing inside a florists, drumming on the counter and looking very bored. Another child ducked into a used television shop. After about an hour or so, we were hot and thirsty so we decided to head back. But before we returned to the resort, we stopped at a fruit store and picked up some fruit for breakfast. Boy, oh boy, is that fruit every good. Mangos were fragrant and sweet and juicy. Bananas are just heavenly. The plantains were just wonderful. If only we could get fruit like this in Canada. And I don't even like eating fruit.

Some of the books I read in 2005:

Bruce Feiler, Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses
Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and other pieces
Bob McCulloch, My Fare City: A Taxi Driver's Guide to Edinburgh
Origen, On First Principles (translated by G. W. Butterworth)
Sin-leqi-unninni, Gilgamesh: a new English version by Stephen Mitchell
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe: from paganism to Christianity 371–1386 AD
M. A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross
Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Otto Friedrich, The Kingdom of Auschwitz
Nicholas Barton, The Lost Rivers of London: a study of their effects upon London and Londoners, and the effects of London and Londoners upon them
Anton Chekhov, The Steppe and Other Stories (translated by Ronald Hingley)
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
Otto F. A. Meinardus, Coptic Saints and Pilgrimages
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
R.W.B. Lewis, Dante: a life
Miles Glendinning and Aonghus MacKechnie, Scottish Architecture
Arturo P rez-Reverte, The Flanders Panel
John Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B (second edition)
Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: the battles for Scripture and the faiths we never knew
Plato, Timaeus and Critias (translated by Desmond Lee)
Albert Camus, The Outsider
Tim Wallace-Murphy and Marilyn Hopkins, Rosslyn: guardian of the secrets of the Holy Grail
Ginevra Lovatelli, Secret Rome
Dauvit Brown and Thomas Owen Clancy (editors), Spes Scotorum: Hope of Scots: Saint Columba, Iona and Scotland
Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII (translated by Walter Hamilton)
William Chester Jordan, Europe in the High Middle Ages (The Penguin History of Europe)
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women (translated by Virginia Brown)
Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World
Georges Perec, A Void (translated by Gilbert Adair)
Saul Bellow, The Victim
Franz Kafka, The Trial
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream (translated by Joscelyn Godwin)
Italo Calvino, Our Ancestors (The Cloven Viscount; Baron in the Trees; The Non-Existent Knight) (translated by Archibald Colquhoun)
Eusebius, The History of the Church (translated by G. A. Williamson)
Flynt Leverett, Inheriting Syria: Bashar's trial by fire
Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (City of Glass; Ghosts; The Locked Room)

Who can resist a good rhyme? Or a bad one? So this round of dak hacking turned out to make the AJ Market scheme another notch more confusing – hence the delay in blogging, and the teaser in my last post. The issue leading to the confusion is that the major item on the list to start hacking on was SCC, which unlike the projects I’ve undertaken so far, is more than a day’s hacking. In fact, due to the need to give mirrors a chance to adapt to the new system between it being implemented and actually used, it’s actually more of a multi-week task. And doing it as a one-day-a-week project would extend that into a multi-month task afaics. I guess that’s still better than never, but obviously it’s worth looking into alternatives. Naturally, then, the first phase of a longer project like this is threefold. We’ll call it “the three P’s”. Planning My theory at this point was to come up with a plan for what to do, try figuring out how much work it’d take, and then see what sort of financial arrangements might be plausible – not involving me cutting a few weeks out of my life for spare change, but without making the whole thing an unleapable chasm from what the AJ Market’s currently managing either. I figured writing it up as a semi-formal proposal makes most sense:

Summary Implementation of the outstanding mirror split proposal for the Debian archive to allow new architectures, particularly amd64, to be included in the archive. Benefit In spite (or perhaps because) of its simplicity, this project has been languishing for over two years, and is not currently being worked on; so at present it’s not even possible to estimate when it would otherwise be completed. It is most notably preventing amd64 from being integrated into the normal Debian development environment, causing derived distributions to maintain amd64 specific patches themselves. In the longer term, reducing the constraints imposed on the archive size may allow the introduction of additional suites, such as backports or volatile, as well as additional architectures; though significant further discussion on this would be needed. Background Since at least mid-2003 the Debian archive has been closed to new architectures due to the already large amount of space and bandwidth required to become a Debian mirror. At present, the archive uses some 158GiB of disk, and about 1GiB per day; additional architectures are expected to require approximately an additional 10GiB each, and there are likely around half a dozen architectures that will be considered for addition once the moratorium on new architectures is rescinded (incl amd64, armeb, sh variants, kfreebsd and possibly partial architectures for arch variants such as s390x and ppc64). The primary work needed to fix this involves:

• ensuring the mirror network operates correctly when a majority of mirrors are partial; this reduces the impact on bandwidth and storage capacity
• optimising portions of the archive maintenance software, particularly apt-ftparchive; this reduces the load on the archive server
• providing appropriate guidelines on the qualification criteria new architectures need to meet in order to be added to the archive; this provides a limit on future increases, allowing growth to be appropriately controlled

Actual work I expect there will be six phases to the project:

1. cleanup of the archive as it stands, and establishing a clear categorisation of its contents to define what a partial mirror by architecture or suite should officially contain
2. providing appropriate scripts to ensure mirror sites can easily comply with the previously defined expectations for partial mirroring
3. devise an appropriate structure for the new mirror network, that can easily incorporate existing mirrors, and coexist with the existing structure
4. provide information on the new structure to both mirror admins and users; assist with the transition, and resolve any problems found
5. ensure the archive management software is appropriately optimised, and that archive inclusion criteria have been debated and established
6. add new ports that have passed the qualification requirements to the archive

In theory, a couple of days for each of those sound plausible, so making that twelve days actual work (with a couple of week’s delay in between for mirrors to have some time to adapt to the new network). On the downside, twelve days at a day a week is over three months of real time, not counting the possibility of doing other things with the one day a week, or Christmas, or the aforementioned delay for mirrors. Yick. So much for planning. Preparation So the next “p” is preparation. In this case that’s finally getting around to fix dak CVS, which has been slightly broken since May. The extent of the actual breakage was just the loss of the ChangeLog history, aiui (or at least, that was the unrecovered breakage), but the result of that was months of uncommitted changes on both ftp-master and security (and reportedly from Ubuntu’s dak installation too). The changelog for the first set of commits (not counting buildd changes from ftp-master, security changes or Ubuntu changes that haven’t made it to ftp-master) looks like:

        * tiffani: new script to do patches to Packages, Sources and Contents
        files for quicker downloads.
        * ziyi: update to authenticate tiffani generated files
        * dak: new script to provide a single binary with less arbitrary names
        for access to dak functionality.
        * cindy: script implemented
        * saffron: cope with suites that don't have a Priority specified
        * heidi: use get_suite_id()
        * denise: don't hardcode stable and unstable, or limit udebs to unstable
        * denise: remove override munging for testing (now done by cindy)
        * helena: expanded help, added new, sort and age options, and fancy headers
        * jennifer: require description, add a reject for missing dsc file
        * jennifer: change lock file
        * kelly: propogation support
        * lisa: honour accepted lock, use mtime not ctime, add override type_id
        * madison: don't say "dep-retry"
        * melanie: bug fix in output (missing %)
        * natalie: cope with maintainer_override == None; add type_id for overrides
        * nina: use mtime, not ctime
        * katie.py: propogation bug fixes
        * logging.py: add debugging support, use   as the logfile separator
        * katie.conf: updated signing key (4F368D5D)
        * katie.conf: changed lockfile to dinstall.lock
        * katie.conf: added Lisa::AcceptedLockFile, Dir::Lock
        * katie.conf: added tiffani, cindy support
        * katie.conf: updated to match 3.0r6 release
        * katie.conf: updated to match sarge's release
        * apt.conf: update for sarge's release
        * apt.conf.stable: update for sarge's release
        * apt.conf: bump daily max Contents change to 25MB from 12MB
        * cron.daily: add accepted lock and invoke cindy  
        * cron.daily: add daily.lock
        * cron.daily: invoke tiffani
        * cron.daily: rebuild accepted buildd stuff
        * cron.daily: save rene-daily output on the web site
        * cron.daily: disable billie
        * cron.daily: add stats pr0n
        * cron.hourly: invoke helena
        * pseudo-packages.maintainers,.descriptions: miscellaneous updates
        * vars: add lockdir, add etch to copyoverrides
        * Makefile: add -Ipostgresql/server to CXXFLAGS
        * docs/: added README.quotes
        * docs/: added manpages for alicia, catherine, charisma, cindy, heidi,
        julia, katie, kelly, lisa, madison, melanie, natalie, rhona.
        * TODO: correct spelling of "conflicts"

Ugh. Still, that’s enough to start work. And the final “P”? Come on, be honest with yourself, you know what it’s going to be. Procrastination Okay, that’s not entirely fair; the irrelevant bit of work was actually on to TODO list before SCC (mostly because it was something that I could get done reasonably quickly) and in fact was this line of the above changelog:

        * dak: new script to provide a single binary with less arbitrary names
        for access to dak functionality.

All the various model/actress names have been getting more than a little confusing recently, with almost forty in the dak suite, and another two dozen or so in use elsewhere – and then there’s the fact that the whole hot babes thing is both a bit offensive, and getting a bit old. OTOH, you need something to rename them to. We ended up deciding on the “version control solution” and introducing a “dak” command that’d launch all the different little bits of functionality depending on arguments, in the same way cvs, svn, tla, bzr, darcs etc do. The implementation’s kinda neat: we have a list of commands (like “ls”) and their description (“Show which suites packages are in”), along with the python module and function they’re in (“madison”, “main()”). That let’s us not actually have to change any of the other scripts immediately, and lets “dak ls foo” work the same as “madison foo”. It also means that down the track we don’t need to have separate modules for each subcommand, and that we can rename modules and functions without affecting the user interface. Of course it also means that all the internal scripts haven’t changed to use the new names yet, leaving the new interface a bit underused, but hey, “dak ls” at least manages to be one character shorter than “madison”, so that’s a win! To be continued…

Two Sundays ago, Jim and I walked down to Ubuntu Love Day. The Ubuntu Below Zero conference is being held at the Holiday Inn in Chinatown. That's the one with the fake Chinese tiles on the roof, which is sort of tacky. We found our way downstairs to the conference room and sat down. The previous night's revelries still had quite the effect, so I'm afraid I drifted in and out while listening to people speak. I thought I had rid myself of this habit, but apparently university has trained me to consider digital projectors as sleeping aids. I'll have to do something about this one day. I got to see some fairly interesting people: Mattias Klaus, whom I met earlier at Jeff Bailey's place; Fabio Di Nitto, who is incredibly jolly; Chris Peterman, who was with his classmates from Clarkson; Colin Watson, whom I thanked for working so hard on Debian; Jeff Waugh, who dressed up as an inmate; and plenty of others. Oh, I managed to meet Andrew Mitchell in person, but we failed to have a proper CHUG meeting while we were all in town. We broke for lunch, which was held in the hotel restaurant. A buffet, with some Chinese-style dishes, was being served. There, we had to negotiate with the unilingual (Cantonese) staff to find out what Jeff could eat. We had a special order of plain white rice brought for him and we were informed that it was safe for him to eat the stir-fried vegetables. I suggested to Jeff that he ought to keep a phrasebook on him whenever he travels. On each page, one per language, there should be a written description of what he can and cannot eat. Then, he just has to show this to waiters who don't speak English or French. For reference, the characters that mean "vegetarian" in Chinese are and . Most of the time, they mean "vegan", but there are some places where eggs and oysters are considered vegetarian. After lunch, Mark Shuttleworth gave Jeff a very nice birthday speech. He also gave Jeff a nice bottle of wine, which was very nice. And Matthias came up to give Jeff a bottle of fish-oil pills, which was very odd. Then, there were two Birds Of a Feather sessions, involving how to make an Ubuntu package and how to be an Ubuntu advocate. Being upstream to both these issues, I sat in the middle of the room and listened to both presentations at once. This was quite interesting, and slightly taxing. After this was done, we broke up once more. The plan for the evening was to meet for dinner in the hotel lobby. This transformed to meeting outside the front door. Jim, wlach, and I showed up and were greeted by this mass of people. Since there were stragglers and I knew where dinner was to be held, Jeff took a group of nineteen people in the metro. I followed about ten minutes later with a group of eighteen. We met up on St-Denis, and by this time we had lost some of the more impatient, and more hungry, people. Eventually, a group of twenty-three were milling about outside Le Nil Bleu. Angie had made arrangements for us to be served a set meal, and they had agreed to seat twenty-five of us. I went inside to let the staff know that we had arrived. When 20:30 came around, we were let into the restaurant and seated. I think the kitchen was still preparing food, because we had to wait about an hour before being served. Unlike my previous experience there with Jeff, the food was quite good this time and the service was very attentive. We enjoyed ourselves very much, and Jeff seemed to be having a very excellent birthday dinner. Some of the guests were not so happy, because the food was a little spicy for their European palates. Since gratuities are not standardised around the world, we discovered that some people had not tipped. To cover the embarassment, Angie and I made sure that the wait-staff were adequately compensated for their efforts. I'll be sure to go back to this restaurant again, but with a more significant crowd to ensure good service. After eating, a group of us including Matthias and Tollef went up to B l K , which was just a little north on Mont-Royal. That's a really interesting bar with beautiful tiled floors and ostrich heads on the walls. We enjoyed the lovely music, had a very good conversation there, and laughed until we were all exhausted. Since the Canonical people had to be awake for the 09:00 keynote speech the next day, they left early. Jim and I bid goodnight to them before we staggered home.