I m here at DebConf11 and it started in the worst possible way. First my wife and me had the pleasure of being guests of the Bosnien border police for 11 hours. Overnight stay in a small room in a small building far away from whatever we know. And unknown status when it goes on. Oh fun. And then, after finally arriving here, my Laptop breaks. Stupid machine, why break at the beginning and not at the end of the conf? It heated up, all to 120 C (which I don t believe is good, nono) and then turned off. Came back on some time later, but the graphics card got a kick. The left part of the screen now shows a big white strip all over it. Which doesn t help it at all. Additionally the thing does not want to operate below 70 C anymore. At least it only takes seconds for it to heat up that far. The fans stay off. There is a way to turn them on by software. If i use that way - the temperate quickly climbs over 100 C. WTF? Well. Guess that means I am looking for a replacement. I don t have too many requirements. Basically I want a BIG screen (and I mean big, my current has 17 ) and that it works well with Debian. Reasonable battery life (1.5hours is reasonable for such a thing, anything more is fine. Its NOT a mobile thing to use on trips, for that I have other devices. It is a workstation you can easily take with you) and the usual rest of a good CPU, at least 4GB RAM and >60GB Harddiskspace. Any suggestions?

So lets try this:

So it finally looks like I will be at DebConf11 too. Including my (then) wife (ohwow, feels weird to write this). At least we just booked the flight tickets. There is a small chance that we still won t make it, but for now it looks good. Lucky beings we seem to be - we found flights going directly to Banja Luka, no need to take train from somewhere like Zagreb or so. (Well, for some values of directly, we have one stop included). We will arrive on Friday the 22nd, afternoon and leave on Sunday the 31st, again afternoon. Since DC6 this is the shortest time I had attending DebConf (DC5 I only did DebConf, not Camp, DC10 I skipped entirely). Somehow feels weird. Update: Well, due to some <censored> we now do have to go via Zagreb and an annoying bus trip. Meh. Should make us arrive on Thursday late night, but still annyoing.

The first concrete outcome from the Debian derivatives census is the creation of Planet Debian Derivatives. For those of you who are interested in the activities of distributions derived from Debian, it aggregates the blogs and planets of all the distributions represented in the derivatives census. The list of feeds will be expanded semi-automatically as more distributions participate in the census and maintainers of census pages add new blog and planet URLs. Many thanks to Joerg Jaspert for doing the necessary setup procedures for the addition of the new sub-planet to Planet Debian. I'm glad that it was accepted alongside the sole language-based sub-planet (Planet Debian Spanish). I plan further integration of information about derivatives with Debian infrastructure. My next target will be integration of information about the packages in Debian derivatives into Debian. I hope to work on getting that information into UDD (and rmadison) and the packages.d.o site during DebConf11 and DebCamp. If you are interested in helping out, please add your ideas to the integration wiki page, check out the code and add more scripts to it. If you have any comments or questions about this or any other activities related to Debian derivatives, please direct them to the debian-derivatives list and the #debian-derivatives IRC channel on OFTC. Those of you interested in the other side of the software stream might want to take a look at Planet Debian Upstream, which is run by the excellent Joey Hess. He is also on the lookout for interesting blogs by people writing software that is packaged in Debian. The site is created using ikiwiki, hosted on branchable and editable with an OpenID account.

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

• Danke
• Thank you
• (RTL or not?) / toda
• Gracias
• / arigat
• / n ndi
• Obrigado
• Grazie
• C m n
• Kadin chey la
• / Efharisto
• Dank je wel
• Tak
• D ngge
• Merci
• Kiitos
• Tika hoki
• / dhanyavaadhamulu
• Thank you and God save the Queen
• Mul umesc
• Tack
• / didi madloba
• Gr cies
• Dakujem
• / Aabhar
• / Dhanyavadagalu
• Paldies
• / kop khun krap
• Terima kasih
• Hvala (hr)
• / Dhanyavad
• / Hvala (sr)
• Hvala (sl)
• / Akun
• / Sukriya
• Takk
• / Nandri
• Maki biyen jianbakik
• D kuji
• / Xiexie
• / Aabhari aahe
• Faleminderit
• / Kam sah ham ni da
• / Blagodaram
• / Xiexie
• Hvala (bs)

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

• Danke
• Thank you
• (RTL or not?) / toda
• Gracias
• / arigat
• / n ndi
• Obrigado
• Grazie
• C m n
• Kadin chey la
• / Efharisto
• Dank je wel
• Tak
• D ngge
• Merci
• Kiitos
• Tika hoki
• / dhanyavaadhamulu
• Thank you and God save the Queen
• Mul umesc
• Tack
• / didi madloba
• Gr cies
• Dakujem
• / Aabhar li> / Dhanyavadagalu
• Paldies
• / kop khun krap
• Terima kasih
• Hvala (hr)
• / Dhanyavad
• / Hvala (sr)
• Hvala (sl)
• / Akun
• / Sukriya
• Takk
• / Nandri
• Maki biyen jianbakik
• D kuji
• / Xiexie
• / Aabhari aahe
• Faleminderit
• / Kam sah ham ni da
• / Blagodaram
• / Xiexie
• Hvala (bs)

Like last years initiative from Joey we have another opening for DebConf Newbies . Turns out this year it is me doing the main work for it, so here we are: If

• you never have been to a DebConf, or
• you last saw the conference in 2007 (Scotland)
• you can schedule a week off in July
• fear you might not make it with the normal sponsorship process ( they will never ever pick ME, im too small an ant in this project )

then this is for you. To apply for this funding, email newbies@debconf.org before 18th of June. The earlier you mail, the better, as funding will be given out in a first-come/first-serve way. In your email include an estimate of your travel costs, from where you travel from and the amount you are unable to fund yourself. I also need to know the dates you plan to arrive and leave. Please indicate if you will also need sponsored food and accommodation. (At the time of this writing you can still get sponsored food and accommodation by simply registering with the conference, so if you read this before May 19th please ensure to register NOW). Please also ensure you register with the conference now (see DebConf11 registration, even if your plans are not fully secure at this time. There is no punishment if you can not attend later - simply do not follow the reconfirmation process shortly before the conference.

I just had a talk on How to contribute here in Taipei. The slides are available here in case you are interested.

And here we are again. And we still have energy for one more day (and a half). Barely, but still. And it is actually looking good, we do think we will have a working archive when we are leaving here tomorrow at noon. And compared to last year we won t even need a session until 3AM to make this work (and still have half of the tools not working). Yay. Yesterday had Ansgar fixing up various issues until we set him onto Generate Packages/Sources files out of the database . Which got us some funny quotes later on, like are 3.6 seconds to write a Sources file ok or too slow? (compared to the roughly 90 seconds it takes today). Torsten had various bugfixes (as we all, somehow there is never an end of them) and is currently looking at DSUS , which is the result we got out of a GSOC project. Mark tried to continue the multi-archive stuff but got distracted a lot, we regularly asked him to look at other items and then we also made him restart all the thoughts on it by slightly redefining the parameters for the multiple archives. I myself continued with shell scripting around the buildd autosigning and today I take to check up on all our cronjobs (besides unchecked/dinstall which we know do work) to ensure we can turn them back on starting this afternoon.

Proposals for autosigning were floating around for quite some time. The most controversial parts were how we secure the machines that do the building (and in turn: how do we secure the key) and who's going to manage the keyring (because there are multiple teams involved; such discussions can indeed take quite a bit time).

What we've agreed upon now is as follows:

• All buildds with autosigned must be debian.org machines, which means that they are administrated by the Debian Sysadmins. This involves regular upgrades of the machine, firewalling and monitoring. They are all doing this already (kudos!), so there was no change needed.
• The machines must be restricted so that only a limited set of people may access it. That's done, it's just the buildd admins for the specific buildd and the global group builddadm (plus the admins and the local admin, of course).
• Every host has its own GPG key. Key generation locally on the buildds is eased by having the fine Entropy Key hooked up to provide entropy centrally and distributed to the debian.org machines. Private keys don't need to and must not leave the host. The keys are rotated every 120 days, expiry dates will be used to ensure that and to remind us when rotation is due. Sadly there is no HSM involved. Given the geographic dispersiveness of the Debian infrastructure that's not done easily. Some machines (like s390 racks) would also be unable to connect local hardware.
• The keys are restricted to specific architectures. They are not able to upload any source to the archive. However every binary on the specific architecture can be uploaded using the key, there are no further restrictions on package priorities or the like. They are maintained by the wanna-build admins on ftp-master by signing the armored public keys with their personal GPG keys (instructions available on the list). Thus a trust chain is established: who added or removed which key and when.
• We plan to suppress networking in the chroot soon. This will possibly be done with unshare(1) in util-linux, as soon as we sort out proper localhost networking. This was not deemed a blocker at this point.

Should you have thought we are gone, let me assure you - we are not. I just blog a bit later than I did the last days. Anyways, we did have a good day yesterday. Turns out that, when Ansgar said I don t know much Python so might not be able to do much he actually meant Just point me at problems, no matter how complicated, and I come up with the python code to fix them . And so we did point him at various problems and got lots of code. And we intend to continue this until Sunday. Yesterday Mark got his Packages/Sources tool so far that we are about ready to ditch the old things, even though he took time to finalize my generate-release changes too. Not to speak about that database changes I wrote about in my last entry, which he now seems to have finally wrapped his brain around in a way to get those done. Short cite: good god, this will overhaul about all our code and database handling . And thats where he is currently working on too. He did draw a plenty complicated thats how it works onto the flip chart, and now seems to dump his brain into some form of python code. I m curious about the result, lets see. Torsten fixed up the code that generated the Maintainers and Uploaders files. The old code was just plain silly and took about 15 minutes just for the Uploaders file. It is now doing both of them in less than two. Of course there had been lots of bugfixes and code enhances too, not really good to list in a blog like this. My work, besides getting a bit sick in the evening, consisted of writing shell scripts to enable us and wanna-build admins to handle the keys needed for the automated signing of packages build on DSA maintained buildds. I have those ready now, so we are able to start doing the autosign stuff today/tomorrow. Phil - well, did whatever buildd related stuff he has to. Different place, I dont see much of it, but he has a blog himself, look over there.

And here we are, with another day of work ahead. And another huge unchecked/dinstall run about to finish. Yesterday evening Ansgar and later on Phil turned up, so we are now 5 persons sitting here and mostly coding happily away. Mark continued trying to wrap his brain around the changes we need to properly support multiple archives, with different sets of rights attached to them. It is a complex topic giving lots of headache. Besides that he is on a very good way of letting us completly remove apt-ftparchive by importing all the data we need to write Packages/Sources files on our own. And even better, the same work we can use to rewrite our rm and cruft-report commands in a sane way, not parsing Packages files anymore. Torsten did help with various database issues around the Packages/Sources issue and continued working on importing all the source filenames into the database, so we can soon provide a Contents file for sources. My own work, besides writing blog entries and preparing meeting minutes, consists of a rewrite of the script generating our Release files, the old one just wasn t up to it anymore. Especially not as we are on our way of having more and more of our tools use parallel processing, to fully use the power our ftp-master host has. And when I am done with this I will be off to tackle the keyring maintenance part we will need to enable autosigning by buildds to work. Should get interesting, with the shit of an interface one usually finds to gpg Ansgar started out by working on changes to our NEW handling, something I started with the dpkg bug #619131 and he just finished our site of the NEW handling scripts. Which means that, as soon as the dpkg maintainers added the code on their side and support this field in the .dsc files, NEW handling for packages like linux-2.6 will be much smoother. He is now implementing version control constraints into our control-suite tool. Phil is working on wanna-build stuff. And while this is just a short overview of what we did, there is always lots of discussion and bugfixing going on. It is incredibly useful to have a team sitting in one room for some days.

Good morning, and welcome to another day of archive damage, i mean hackery. Well, at least at the time of this writing it is morning and we are starting off into another day of work. As we promised to try to have at least a once-a-day-installation run I am currently processing the queue of uploaded packages, around 4gigabytes from 431 changes files. After that a dinstall will follow to push that all out. Lets see how often we can do this again today, yesterday we managed multiple times. Yesterday my work consisted of getting the ries sync into something nice and acceptable, starting to think of the change to only use the suite codenames in future (long term making lots of code issues easier, but short term a good headache) and doing the groundwork so we can upgrade the security and backports archive to squeeze/pg9 too. Mark finished of the Built-Using flag and then moved on to think about database file tracking changes related to multiple archives/locations. Which sounds simple in so few words but is definitely not simple at all. Torsten started to work on source contents and also on generating the packages/sources files out of our database. Both together is taking a good amount of time, so he continues to work on those today. In the evening we had a meeting with the Debian Hurd porters about the future of their port within the Debian archive. The perceived Hurd situation until then was that every port has to follow certain rules or gets thrown out but Hurd doesn t seem to ever get into a releasable state . Well, we did get a clean view on both sides standpoint and in the end emerged with a solution which works for both sides: The Hurd port stays on FTPMaster until Wheezy is released. Should they have managed to get the port into a state that it is released together with all the others (probably as a technology preview), it is kept in the archive. Should they not manage this, the port will be removed from the main archive and move fully to debian-ports.org. It may then reenter the main archive whenever it is ready to get released with the next release. For today we are all continuing in our parts, Mark is yelling at the insanity of the multi-location thing (something we DO need when we want to merge multiple archives, which we do want), Torsten curses the code for Packages/Sources and while I hope that DSA can find time today to upgrade our security- and backports-archive machines to Squeeze, I try to wrap my head around the code we kindly got provided by Serafeim Zanikolas - the dinstall programming fun task I asked a while ago. Im not sure yet I will succeed. :) And then we will get more arrivals this evening, so more people doing stuff tomorrow.

I am at the next edition of Debian FTPMaster meetings in the LinuxHotel Essen currently. We arrived Sunday evening and will stay until 27th March, giving us again a nice week of time to work on outstanding archive issues. And our todo does list a good number of points. Currently we are 3 persons, all 3 FTPMasters. On Wednesday evening one wanna-build member will join and on Friday evening one FTPTeam member arrives for the weekend. While thats not all of our team it still gives us a good base to work on. And so we already did, starting Sunday evening with unbreaking some fallout from Lenny->Squeeze update of the ftpmaster host as well as discussing some of our agenda points and how to tackle them. Today I started changing our backup strategy. Instead of dumping the whole dak database at dinstall start and end, a 4gb file each time, later compressing and then expiring them, we don t dump them at all anymore. Instead we save the postgres transaction id and let the Debian Sysadmin team do the backup. Which they do anyways, using the PostgreSQL WAL stuff. Which means we can just tell them to please reset the dak db to the place of transaction $BLA . Something that only works as we are switching to Postgres 9.0 and will use replication to sync our DD-accessible machine. Torsten started work by explaining us his ORMObject idea in our database layer, then violently vomitting when I pointed him at some code to fixup. Seems that code isn t all the most beautiful one, so he switched to cleanup in a different place. Lets see if I get him back to that bad code. Mark is playing with our database and trying to get that from 8.4 to 9.0, seems like some stuff we are using isn t all that en vogue anymore in 9.0, so might need adjustments.

And so there went a day of work. Minutes done, come back tomorrow

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Okok, more text: We did lots of stuff. There was breakfast, soon after we had Lunch, and guess, Dinner also. Now, would you please come back tomorrow?

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Anyways, we did some things. One of those was to have PostgreSQL 9.0 and to enable the replication to the machine any DD can access. Which is, from today on, ries.debian.org. And for the first time ever (since that time ftp-master got closed to the public), DDs can now see the live status of the archive, literally a second after a package got accepted a dak ls on ries will show you that fact. Torsten worked on fixing up old remnants of code and database entries around contents and also tackled a problem between our usage of SQLalchemy and the python multiprocessing module. He also started working on the source contents and was weird enough to get us standardized logging into a dak tool. Mark worked with DSA on the Postgres 9.0 upgrade to fix what was to fix in out database and did some tests with our environment in squeeze and coordinated changes in python-apt needed for multiarch and xz. He then started working on some larger database changes around the built-using feature. I myself started off with getting generate-packages-sources to behave when there is an error instead of silently ignoring that. I also did a bit of groundwork to enable us to do NEW processing adding overrides for all affected binary packages, not just those from the architecture currently uploaded. That will allow stuff like linux-2.6 to pass NEW just once, not once per architecture. That involves a new field in our dsc files and the status of that is tracked in Bug #619131.

So, this should be the first blog post of the DebConf6 Live Blog , run by the DebConf6 Organizers, which appears on Planet Debian. Lets start with some pictures: I have put up some pictures from my flight (the food :) ), and then from today here in Oaxtepec online. You can find them at our gallery, below the DebConf6 album. Everyone else who takes picture: Feel free to register at the gallery, and then send a little mail to gallery-admins@debconf.org, then you can put all your pictures also online there. On the network side - well, we dont have network up in the Vacational Centre yet, Im sitting in a Internet Cafe down in the town, where some locals are building up Wifi Stuff to get Net to our events place. Lets see how that works out. For the rest: Its a very nice place, really.

I ve been using dailystrips since April 2006 to get a daily overview page of all the various daily web comics I (and a few friends) like to see. It makes it much simpler than having to browse dozens of various webpages, with all their useless webbugs integrated, to see stuff. That had some drawbacks:

• dailystrips is unmaintained code. Last upstream release is from 2003.
• It is uncapable of fetching any other information than just the image. Which is bad for those like xkcd, Astronomy picture of the day or others where the title/alt text actually is an important part of it.

So about two or three weeks ago I took a look at dailystrips code to figure out where I need to stuff some lines in to get the additional information. Yuck. No. I don t like it. Not because it is perl, that alone would be fine. So, instead I went and did a little rewrite of it. In a simple and pure bash script. I duplicated the functionality of the daily mode (fetch images per day and put them into a daily subdirectory, create html files for them) and didn t bother with the fetch a random strip one as I never used that. Turned out at 276 lines of shell script that can even fetch alt/title and not break on funny characters in them, yay. Even better, as the search terms for the additional information is just a regex using bashs capability there run over the html file, one can have anything from it put as alt/title onto the final page. When I had that working I asked a colleague to provide a bit of CSS, so it also looks better now. An example output is available (note that the Previous/Archive links are not available there), and if you want you can take a look at the code too. There is no Debian package and I m not sure there should ever be one. If you want to get me patches feel free to mail me, be it for the CSS or the script, whatever.