On August 16th 2008 the Debian
Project, joy and burden of my geek life, has turned 15 years of age.
Congratulations! There have been celebrations all around the world, and
we've also had a little party at our home, complete with nice unhealthy
food, red wine and chocolate and strawberries for dessert.
For a GNU/Linux distribution 15 years is quite a lot. We're almost the only
distribution of such old age (Hi Slackware!) and there've been many,
many others that didn't make it half as long. That said I am quite proud of
this little project of ours and hope for many happy returns!
Artwork by Andre L.R.Ferreira, source: debianart.org
(whose lack of thumbnails is still immensely annoying)
It's more or less four months since I proposed to
resurrect our
newsletter. We already released eight issues of the Debian Project
News and work for the ninth issue has already started. So I guess it's
time for a small "state of the DPN" speech, but since I'm not attending
DebConf, you will have to read this mail instead ;)
After having a rough start (and in fact missing some self-set deadlines
and completely underestimating how much work is involved in such a kind
of newsletter) we finally developed a - more or less - working flow of
work (Which is by the way documented here).
Speaking of the current state sadly means to confess, that our hopes to
draw a lot of help from the community by using a system for drafting the
news with a low entry barrier were not fulfilled. We actually had a
good start, with good participation, but due to (I assume) the
aforementioned initial difficulties participation in the creation of the
DPN dropped considerably. Currently the workload of creating our
bi-weekly newsletter is shared by only two people (that being Meike
Reichle and myself), which is barely enough :(
While we at least get a hint from time to time, what we should mention
in the next issue, it rarely happens, that someone contributes by
drafting a text -- which is the real work. (At this point a
BIG "Thank
You" to those who did! (See list bellow.) It's much
appreciated!)
We suffer especially, since although we are a two people team, we have
in fact no redundancy, since real live issues affecting one of us will
most likely affect the other one, too.
Therefore we mostly concentrated our work on creating the next issues
and getting them out in time, and didn't have time to answer all mails
considering suggestions for changes and improvements (yet?). We are
sorry, but at least we tried to read them briefly and keep them in mind
when drafting the next issue. As a result of this we re-added the list
of DSAs, WNPP and new and noteworthy packages due to popular demand.
There are still a lot of unanswered mails not dealing with content, but
with workflow issues / proposals (including changing from
wiki.debian.org to a special ikiwiki instance). We are sorry, that we
couldn't yet act on them and take appropriate measures, but be assured,
they are not forgotten.
Other issues the DPN currently have are "unwritten guidelines" regarding
editorial choices of DSAs to be published and which packages to list in
the "new and noteworthy package" section. Both is more or less done by
our gut feeling.
Speaking of problems the DPN are facing, we also need to mention
translations of the DPN. The current workflow makes it difficult for
translators of the DPN, since we often fail to get the final draft of
the DPN ready in time to give translators a "head start" so the
translated DPNs can be released together with (or at least with a as
small as possible delay to) the English DPN.
So here is a big call for help! We really need your help writing the
DPN. (Monitoring lists and newstickers we don't monitor ourselves would
be nice, too, but only add more work to us if you only give us
pointers.)
We will both be very busy with our real live the upcoming month, and are
not sure how much time we can dedicate to the DPN. So please help us!
The current draft for the next issue of the DPN is always available
here .
There should already be a todo list with pointers to interesting
topics, which need to be written out. Some guidelines about style and
content are available here.
Last but not least, we would like to thank the following people who have
contributed to the DPN so far:
Today, two friends of mine (and friends of many readers of Planet
Debian) are getting married.
Too far away from here, indeed, but I send them all the best for this day and wish them the best for the upcoming dozens of years.
The Debian community is anything but a virtual community and they're proving it today.
Gl ckw nsche, Meike und Alex
Finally, here's the looong overdue second post on the
Open Source Census. Very shortly after my initial
post on my experiences with the Open Source Census I got an e-mail from
one of their engineers adressing the points I had made in my post. So here
are a few additions to my first post:
As I said a month ago, my main server Delmak was dying. Well it still runs (proof: you could read this blog some days ago).
Thanks to friends I host for free, they've kindly given enough money to buy a brand new server (C2D E8400, 4 GB RAM, 2x500 GB RAID 1) in order to replace the good old Delmak.
This new box has been named Prometheus after the only BC-303 class battleship ever built.
Delmak was used to mainly run as a Web, mail and databases server. I decided to do use this server switch to change the server software I use.
The first mail server I setup was based on Exim 3, courier- imap,pop -ssl, with userdb files. That was... rough. Later I switched to Exim 4, using vexim, and MySQL as a back-end. That was something like 3 years ago I guess. Since then I never really touched that back. I added spamassassin and clamav filtering some months after, because some users asked for it. That's all.
So this week, I decided to switch away from this configuration. I do not understand Exim anymore anyway, so I decided to use Postfix which I often use and administrate at work. Obviously, I also now use PostgreSQL as database back-end, since it rocks, and since Postfixadmin supports it. By the way, be aware that the Debian package of postfixadmin is crappy (the configuration file is readable by anyone by default, with the database password in it).
I also set up postgrey which is quite nice and efficient.
Well, then was time for amavisd-new installation, but I did not do it. Seriously, amavisd-new configuration is a bloody mess, as the language it is written in (yes, Perl).
So I switched to dspam which I heard is nice. Well, it seems to be for now, since it even supports clamav daemon usage directly, which is very very nice because that means I do not have to set up another thing for that.
I also switched from courier to dovecot, mainly because the latter seems to be faster and lighter. I then changed the default virtual_transport to Dovecot LDA. The main advantage of this is that the LDA updates the Dovecot index while delivering. It also supports quota, which I do not use and plug-ins, like the Sieve language for mail filtering.
So I decided to change my procmailrc to a new Sieve filter. My procmailrc is quite small since I only use regex to match lists and some mail address, so it has only something like 12 rules.
And well, I did not do it since I discovered after some googling that Dovecot implementation of Sieve is grabbed from Cyrus which does not support variables for now. That means that the following procmailrc code:
:0: * ^X-Mailing-List: <debian-.+@lists.debian.org> * ^X-Mailing-List: <debian-\/[^@]+ list-debian-$MATCH/which will translate to:
require [ "regex", "variables", "fileinto" ]
if header :regex "X-Mailing-List" "<debian-(.+)@"
fileinto "lists.debian.$ 1 ";
stop;
But that won't work since Dovecot Sieve implementation does not support "variables". Well, since I'm not ready to list all the lists I'm subscribed to, Sieve is a no-go for now. I'll stick with procmail.
Meike
wonders about Open Source Census and
their 45 MB tarball (and several other strange things).
The good news is: There is a 270KB ruby
thingy which seems to do the same, and even while marked as Expert User Onlyit seems to run just fine... I think; I lost patience after it scanned my /home for 6 minutes, and I didn't found a possibility to tell it not to scan my /home (which I don't wont him to scan) or /srv (which just contains a lot of files where it won't find anything usefull). BTW: While we are at complaining at them: Please make the system so, that I don't need to register to send you my data. Thanks.
I recently read about the Open
Source Census and thought it would be a nice thing to also put my vote
in and make sure my operating system of
choice was properly represented (currently it doesn't seem to
be). After creating an account there, downloading a 45M tgz
including among other things a complete java runtime environment, starting
the scan tool that takes neither a -h nor a --help parameter and watching
it hog 70% CPU for over 20 minutes I lost patience and killed the script.
Somehow this whole thing is not exactly inspiring confidence and I start
getting an idea why there are currently (Thu Apr 24 12:47:57 CEST 2008)
only 53 Debian users who submitted their data. Although it's a pity Debian
is (and will probably continue to be) so underrepresented there, I can't say
I blame anyone for not taking part.
I spent the entire week at the SambaXP conference in G ttingen, Germany. The conference is the annual conference of the community of developers, contributors and users of Samba. I general call it "my annual german pilgrimage" as I attended all seven editions of the conference, the only FLOSS conference I attend on my work time, as my daily work involves quite a lot of uses of samba.
This year featured a workshop or training session held by John Terpstra, longstanding FLOSS evangelist and member of the Samba Team for over 10 years, and Karolin Seeger, the brand new release manager of Samba.
This has indeed been an incredible opportunity to have discussions with them about the packaging work for Samba. Actually, the work we did in the last 3 years to bring Samba Debian packages in a very good shape (when I don't screw up) is much appreciated. I think these days have been another opportunity to keep that link very closed.
I have been impressed by the promising work of Karolin with respect to the preparation of the release and the very serious way she has to do that work....as well as her very friendly, while still discreet approach to technical discussion.
Some work was done on Samba package bugs, though less than usually (the remaining ones are harder and harder to tackle!). I mostly work on Debian packages as well as .deb packages prepared by Sernet (the services company that organises the conference and employer of some Samba Team members), as these could some day become the packages provided by the Samba Team.
Talks at the conference were pretty interesting, to keep connected with Samba 3.2 and 4.0 development. News from Andrew Tridgell about exchanges with Microsoft (yes, The Evil) and access to MS documentation, are very promising. The collaboration between Samba developers and Microsoft enginneers is now working well again, at the engineers level (as Tridge says: "lawyers are away, now, we can talk at the engineers level and restore the link that existed in the early 90's").
I also could measure the progress of the Openchange project whose ultimate aim is to provide a complete Microsoft Exchange replacement solution. They currently have working MAPI libraries and an Evolution plugin for Exchange is under development, while the bricks to build a server are patiently being put together. Good discussions with Julien Kerihuel, the lead (and French) developer and manager of the project.
Jelmer Vernooij and I also settled the final plans to get Samba4 packages in Debian. I proposed to make a first upload to experimental, but quite soon to upload to unstable, the point being a largest as possible exposure of that code, so that upstream developers (Jelmer himself, Andrew Bartlett and a few others...) get as much feedback as possible. That upload will not be targeted for lenny (we'll block it from entering testing). For that reason and also because Samba 3 and 4 will certainly coexist for years, the source package will be named "samba4". Expect more news quite soon.
And final conclusion of that week: I've also been delighted to be able to visit Alex and Meike in Hildesheim, as well as Andreas in Wernigerode. It's always a great pleasure to see longstanding Debian friends. At the beginning of the week, I planned to see *two DD and finally, at the end of the week, I can tell I've seen *three* Debian developers, finally!
Yay! A big fat thank you to:
No news in this post, just a little advertising. I just came across geekspeakr.com and think it's a
really great idea. From the site:
Many organisers of technical conferences, meetups, and dinners want to have more gender-balance in their lineups, but they don't know where to find technical women speakers.I guess this could also be interesting for a some of my fellow Debian Women.
Enter geekspeakr.com, a simple directory and connections system to help technical women speakers and event organisers to find each other.
Since yesterday I am through with my
NM procedure. Looking back I get to the same conclusion as probably
most NMs have: not overly hard, but time-consuming and glad to have it over
with. Anyway, so far so good, just waiting for DAM approval and my account
now. There are still a couple of people in front of me but I hope
for another processing before the elections close. (I
guess it would at least be good for the turnout.)
For now, many thanks to my Application Manager Andreas Barth who has
been very responsive and always answered my mails quickly and thoroughly,
and also to Martin Zobel-Helas for advocating me.
beamers. Given how much more succinct and easy on the vocal apparatus
beameris than
video projector, not to mention that it's plain cool, I think we should adopt the name here in the States. All in favor: refer to the next video projector you see as a
beamer. If enough of us do it they'll call it a movement! UPDATE: the original post confused overhead and video projectors. I always have used the terms interchangably, and apparently incorrectly. I'm not sure why: maybe it's partly because when I was a kid the only projectors I encountered were overheads. Anyway, several readers wrote me to say that
beameris quite specifically a term for a video-projector and not at all a term for the overhead type. My bad. Comment by Meike Reichle on 2007-12-13: Hey Daniel! actually we do call an overhead projector[0] simply an "Overhead" (in the former GDR is used to be called a "Polylux"). A "Beamer" is a video projector[1]. Best wishes from Germany, Meike [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:OHP-sch.JPG [1] http://www.audio-ideas.com/reviews/video/graphics/LG-JT41.jpg Comment by Magnus Therning on 2007-12-13: No, /video projectors/ are called beamers in some places. Search for "beamer" on wikipedia and you'll find "Video projector, a pseudo-anglicism in a number of languages including German and Dutch." An overhead projector is quite a different thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overhead_projector /Magnus (wearing his besserwisser hat)
Like Meike already told, it was a nice event, like always. IMHO it’s based on the good balance of community and a small amount of business booth and of course the visitors.Seems as if the Chemnitz
Linux Days somehow turned out to be the only Linux event I still attend
regularly. These days I miss out on most of them, simply because of a total
lack of spare time, however, I somehow always make the CLT ... no matter
how big the hassle may be! They're just worth it :)
My talk went well, even though I actually got a bit pressed on time this
year and had to cut the Q&A part. The (German) slides for my talk are
as usually on my talks
page.
I recently had my first podcast experience, when I was approached by
Mario Heide of the German podcast pofacs.de ("Podcast für
alternative Computer Systeme") who asked me for an interview. To be
true, I first had to read up a bit on podcasts, but after a little research
I was very happy to accept his invitation. We did the interview via Sykpe,
which wasn't exactly optimal sound-wise but still very nice. We talked
mostly about Debian, primarily from a first time user point of view.
The (German) interview is online now and
will, as I just heard, also be included on the next LinuxUser magazine CD.
If you do understand German also have a look at the other podcasts there and thanks again
to Mario for giving me the opportunity to brag a bit about Debian.
Next.
