Search Results: "lisandro"

5 January 2014

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer: Qt 5.2.0 in Debian experimental, now available for more archs

Qt 5.2.0 is already available in experimental until we get a transition slot, but don't be afraid to test it. With this release we had major improvements. With 5.1.1 currently in sid we have the following buildd chart:

Qt 5.1.1 in Debian Sid
Now with 5.2.0 in Debian experimental we have:

Qt 5.2.0 in Debian experimental

As you can see Qt has compiled in more archs, thanks to the effort of the Debian's porters and from the Qt/KDE team.

Note that Qt JS Backend has dissapeared: it's functionality (the javascript engine) is now in Qt Declarative itself. It has been ported away from Google's v8 to a Qt-based engine, allowing it to build in more archs among other features.

You can also note that we still have quite some FTBFS, mostly coming from Qt Webkit. Feel free to send patches ;-)

11 August 2013

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer: Qt in Debian: using Qt4 and/or Qt5 in your packages

Hi everyone! We now have both Qt4 and Qt5 in the archive. Those using Qt4 should not need to make any changes in their packages, although you can be extra-safe with a few steps. Don't rush, just read below.
Some backgroundSune took the time some months ago to consult upstream for a sane way to allow both SDKs to coexist without us distros having to reinvent the wheel choosing which tools have to be in use in each case.

After a long discussion, upstream decided to write qtchooser (already in the archive) to be able to select between Qt4, Qt5 and even special user's cases like cross-platform builds.

So instead of going trough Debian's alternatives as we did with Qt3/Qt4, we will make use of this new tool.
My package uses Qt, how should I proceed?There are many ways of choosing either of the versions of Qt:

- Using any qtchooser method (preferred):

* Exporting QT_SELECT with 4, qt4, 5 or qt5 as a value in debian/rules.
* Call the tool using the '-qtx' parameter, where x can be replaced with any of the options above.

- Build-depending on qt4-default or qt5-default. You can't B-D on both of them, as they can't coexist.

It is good to notice that:

- any qtchooser method will take precedence over build depending on qtX-default.
- If you export XDG_CONFIG_DIRS it will ignore the default paths to qtchooser's configs we setted up in the packages.

We have also provided qt4-[arch-triplet] and qt5-[arch-triplet] options for special cases.

Once again, if you are already using Qt4, there is no need to rush. See below.

Can is use both Qt4 and Qt5 in my package?You can't mix Qt4 and Qt5 in the same binary, but you may provide libraries compiled against one or the other. For example, your source package foo could provide both libqt4foo1 and libqt5foo1. You need to mangle your debian/rules and/or build system accordingly to achieve this. At the time of this writing I don't know of any examples yet.

So are you going to break the archive with a big transition?No, we have done our best to avoid having to make any changes to existing Qt4 packages. Qt tools should default to Qt4 except if overriden by any method described above.

My package uses Qt4, can I leave it as it is?While there is no need to apply the changes in this case, explicitly setting the Qt version will surely not hurt at all. But don't rush ;-)

14 July 2013

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer: My experiences with KMail2 in Debian

Thanks to the Qt/KDE team, specially to Maxy who has done most of the packaging and uploading, sid users are now enjoying KDE 4.10.5, including the new KDE PIM stuff that we have held out for the Wheezy release.

I started using KMail2 (inside Kontact) a few days after Wheezy's release, getting it from experimental. And I have to admit that I really like it, just like with KMail1.

But my upgrade did have some bumps on the road, so I'm sharing them here so you can now how I solved them.

Mail import worked as we were waiting: it did work. So it was really useful to hold back Kmail1 until this really worked.

Now, I had a problem with my hard disk: whenever KMail started, it would start accessing it without pause. There where two reasons (for what I could test, I haven't looked at the source to really see if there was some other oddity) for this: I had a nepomuk/virtuoso DB created quite some time ago and initial mail indexing.

The initial mail indexing takes lots of time. For 1GB of DIMAP I had to wait like 5 hours (yes, 5 hours) on a 5600 rpm disk to let it fully finish. My desktop machine, with a faster hard drive, took a little less.

As far as people told me, that should have been enough, but my disk kept crawling. So I remembered someone from the team saying something about people with early-created nepomuk/virtuoso databases will have some speed issues. Mine where more than that, buy trying was worth the shot.

I had nepomuk disabled since I tried it the first version due to this exact problem. So I closed my KDE session and removed the nepomuk/virtuoso data:

rm -r ~/.kde/share/apps/nepomuk/

Then I logged back in KDE and waited (again) the 5 hours to let nepomuk re index my mail, this time totally finishing after 5 hours. Starting from that point, I get some one or two minutes of disk trashing some times I log in (not always), but it's actually not that bad. And I heard that in KDE 4.11 this has been improved a lot, so I should see a better behavior from that point on.

Please understand that this was my trial-and-error fix, it may be possible that someone comes with a better solution :-)

29 May 2013

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer: Presenting qtchooser

A few days ago we the Qt/KDE team uploaded a new tool in the Qt ecosystem: qtchooser.

This tool is a wrapper tool used to select between different Qt versions. Of course, the first and easiest example is choosing between Qt4 and Qt5. But it doesn't end there: it can also be used to select a user's build of Qt.

To experienced Debian users, at first sight, it might resemble Debian's alternatives system. But it goes much further than that, allowing users (not sysadmins) to decide their defaults, and even adding new ones, user-wide. All this can be done using different methods like command line arguments, environment variables and configuration files.

Apart from all that, this is the recommended upstream way of managing Qt, being picked up by several (if not all) distributions, so it can easily be supported by upstream in their documentation.

My Qt4 package in Debian does not uses qtchooser, do I need to change anything?No, we have tried to make things as smooth as possible. Your Qt4 packages should be safe. There will be more info on this later.

22 May 2013

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer: Debian/Ubuntu packages caching and mobile workstations

Not so long ago I read Dmitrijs' blog post on how to configure apt-cacher-ng to advertise it's service using avahi. As I normally use my laptop in my home and at work, and both networks have apt-cacher-ng running, I decided to give it a try.

I have been administering apt-cacher-ng for three networks so far, and I really find it a useful tool. Then, thanks to the aforementioned blog post, I discovered squid-deb-proxy. I don't use squid, so it's not for my normal use case, but some people will surely find it interesting.

But I found it's client package to be really interesting. It will discover any service providing _apt_proxy._tcp through avahi and let apt use it. But then the package wasn't available in Debian. So, I contacted Michael Vogt to see if he was interested in putting at least the client in Debian's archive. He took the opportunity to upload the full squid-deb-proxy, so thanks a lot Michael :-)

I then filled a wishlist bug against apt-cacher-ng to provide the avahi configuration for publishing the service, which Eduard included in the last version of it. So thanks a lot Eduard too!

tl;dr
You know only need apt-cacher-ng >= 0.7.13-1 and avahi-daemon installed on your server and your mobile users just need squid-deb-proxy-client. Then the proxy autoconfiguration for apt will just work.

One again, thanks a lot to the respective maintainers for allowing this into Jessie :-)

Gotchas
Yes, there are still some rough edges. On one of the networks I'm behind a proxy. While configuring my machine to use apt-cacher-ng's service as a proxy trough apt.conf, apt-listbugs would just work. But now, using the service as discovered by squid-deb-proxy-client, apt-listbugs just times out. Maybe I need to fill some other bug yet...

15 May 2013

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer: Qt 4.8.4 in experimental.

Since a few days we have Qt 4.8.4 (4:4.8.4+dfsg-3) in some archs of the experimental Debian archive. This release allows Qt4 to coexist with Qt5 while avoiding FTBFSs of current Qt4 packages in the archive.

So if you maintain a Qt4 app and want to check how it works with 4.8.4, you should be ready to go.

29 April 2013

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer: On the road to Qt5: declarative, graphicaleffects and svg in experimental.

Some more Qt 5 packages have entered Debian experimental:
Enjoy :-)

21 April 2013

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer: On the road to Qt 5: Qt 5 base, tools, jsbackend and xmlpatterns in experimental

The first Qt 5 packages have been accepted in Debian experimental.

What's there
To start building Qt 5 apps you will need to export QT_SELECT=qt5, install the package qt5-defaults or read qtchooser's man page. Note that exporting QT_SELECT has precedence over installing qt5-defaults.

What's not there
ArchitecturesAMD64 is already there because it's the arch used by maintainers to build the packages. i386 should be following as soon as buildds catch up. Most surely ARM-based archs will be there at some point too.

Other archs will need some love. Not strange, the Qt project supports amd64, i386 and ARM, but we Debian have normally prepared patches to make it build in other archs. And yes, we try to push them upstream for everyone's benefit. So, if you are missing it in your arch, take a look. You may be the one who enables Qt 5 in it :-)

GLES2 and WaylandWe don't have GLES2 or Wayland support yet. Building it will most probably break the desktop for people using proprietary video drivers (or at least I was told so). I'll surely provide non-official packages with GLES2/Wayland enabled to allow people testing it, but not soon.

This also means that we are not currently able to split X11 and framebuffer support. But we have time to work on it :-)

Non DFSGs compliant files
If you get the original source code tarball from Debian you will notice that it has dfsg in it's name. That means that we had to remove some non DFSG compliant stuff from the original tarball, namely:

  • Every RFC.
  • Three files used for testing the build, which are made of RFCs.
  • Some fonts.

What's following
Other parts of Qt 5 are on the way. And remember, this packages would not have been possible if it weren't for the great Debian's pkg-kde team. My kudos to them.

1 April 2013

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer: On the road to Qt 5: Qt 4.8.4 and qtchooser uploaded to experimental

I have just uploaded Qt 4.8.4 to experimental. Apart from being the newest upstream release of the 4 series, it adds the basic support for coexisting with Qt 5. Because of this support it will need to go trough the NEW queue though, so we will need to be patient.

Developers will be interested in qtchooser, the tool that allows to switch between Qt 4 and 5 development apps. It has also been uploaded to experimental.

Of course, all this has been possible thanks to the efforts of the wonderful Qt/KDE team =)

Update: our efficacious FTP masters have already made Qt pass the NEW queue. Thanks a lot!

5 March 2013

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer: My Debian freeze experience (so far)

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

As some of you may know, I'm a part of the Qt/KDE team. Before the freeze I was mostly involved in leaf packages, with some patch here or there, nothing fancy. And then the freeze came...

Bugs in Qt

...and bugs appeared in Qt. But they didn't get solved, even if the patches were there. Due to personal reasons, the manpower in Qt/KDE land decreased below normal levels (which were already low).

I took the time to review them, apply them in a local branch, build and test the fixes. I did a Qt upload before, but it was a team-consented one. This time there was not much reaction in our IRC channel as it used to be, so I was doubting if going ahead or not. I asked Ana, my great friend and former sponsor, for an opinion on the subject, and she gave me a really important advice: the patches were looking good and there is one really big true: if something get's broken, it can be fixed with a later upload.

You might be asking yourself why I was that afraid of doing the upload. Well, when one maintains such a medular package for many users one has to be careful And I also got used that those "big ones" like Qt where normally handled by hand skilled people. Do not take me wrong here, it's not that those people where keeping them for themselves, it's knowing that one does not has the same skills nor experience as them.

But again, no one was able to upload and I had the chance and will to do another upload if needed, so off it went. That was Qt 4:4.8.2-2.

Then new experiences followed: asking a buildd maintainer for a giveback, asking the Release Team for an unblock (more on this later), etc. While sponsoring me, Ana gave me another excellent advice which I always keep in my mind:

You can't know **everything** about Debian.

And that also includes a not so technical skill: communicating with other teams. But finally we got this new version of Qt in testing. Cool :-)

Of course, new bugs appeared, and my lack of skills (and sometimes, time) where replaced by team work: Pino looking at patches and Sune contacting upstream. The eleven uploads that followed are a nice example of team work, even if I was the one who signed and did the uploads. Whoever uses Qt must know that these wonderful people (including those who are not so active nowadays like Modestas or Fathi) have done lots to bring the better to their users.Thank you guys!

Be careful, they might bite you back!

Coming back to the non-technical skills, sometimes you have to communicate with other teams in Debian. And each team is (naturally) a separate world: possibly different people, different goals, etc. Of course, we share the goal to make Debian the best experience we can, but we do not necessarily agree on the paths to achieve so.

During the freeze, there is a team that gets lots of pressure, and not by chance: the Release Team. They handle a very important task, which is to ride the freeze to get to a release. OK, that's what everyone knows. Now, one thing is knowing that and another is really understanding what does that means.

Of course I was in the first group. From the outside, communicating with the RT was a kind of "special art", and not an easy one. I have even been advised to not ask for more than one or two unblocks per weekend, as they might "bite me back". So I put on my flamesuit on and... launched reportbug release.debian.org.

Now I'm really happy to say that my experience was far from what I described above. And yes, I had the chance to even disagree on some stuff. But remember: non-technical skills, a.k.a. social skills. Once I started to know what was going on inside the RT (joining #debian-release was a big help for that) I learnt some nice tips to approach them. Please allow me to list some of them:

  • Remember: you are the maintainer of the package, they are like gatekeepers that are there to help us coordinate to do a release. But they don't maintain the code, you do that. So try to be verbose when needed, explain the changes and don't forget a nice diff. They need to understand what is going on: they can't read your mind.
  • They are human beings too: not everyday might be their best day (the same goes for you too!). And they are under the pressure of a release. Be patient, that finally pays off.
  • Does your changes seem not so clear? try to improve them.
  • The package has a lot of changes but you really feel they are needed? Try to explain that as good as you can.
  • Try to put yourself in their position: do we really want this? If in doubt, there is a nice way to know what they think: a pre-approval bug.
I want to make a stop in this last point. A pre-approval bug it's an unblock bug in which you edit the subject to add "pre-approval" in it. Easy, isn't it? It gives you the opportunity to know what the RT thinks before doing the upload. In other words: it gives you the chance to communicate and do things in the best possible way for all the parts involved.

I've have also seen pre-approval bugs that were really not needed. But to learn where the threshold of what can be directly uploaded and what deserves a pre-approval bug is you need to know the guidelines the RT gives you. Do you still have doubts? fire a pre-approval bug and try to be clear.

Of course, this are all fruits of my experience with the RT during this time. If the RT thinks different from what I'm writing here, please stand up: we are hear to listen to you and learn :-)

As a side note, I think I should file a wishlist bug to include the pre-approval bug option in reportbug. Yes, I'm lazy :-)

Summing up

Overall this was a very nice and positive experience. We are not done yet. Are we really done at some point? Let's hope not, because this is where the fun comes from :-)

2 November 2012

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer: Is your KDE slooooow? Check your loopback interface

While digging Debian Qt-KDE's bugs, it has become more common to find people reporting that their KDE is very slow. Most of the time (if not every time) it turns out that the loopback interface is down. Sometimes the user did something wrong, sometimes some network manager, but the end result is the same: KDE is terribly slow.

A user filled a bug upstream to ask for a dialogue in KDE that warns the user about this fact. Let's hope it get's implemented :-)

OK, so, how do I check that my lo interface is up?

You can simply run:

$ /sbin/ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1f:c6:ba:70:f3

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:1807 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:1807 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:494525 (482.9 KiB) TX bytes:494525 (482.9 KiB)

The last entry "lo" tells us that the interface is up.

In Debian, the file /etc/network/interfaces should have something like:

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

So, next time you find a KDE session is slow, you know what to do ;-)

16 August 2012

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer: QExtSerialPort in Debian experimental

After some rants about the status of different Qt-based serial port libs, I'm happy to announce that today QExtSerialPort was accepted in Debian experimental (this last link may give a 404 for some time, that's ok).

A great effort was done upstream to put the source in a suitable state for being included in Debian. Thank you all guys!

I packaged a beta version, so I uploaded it to experimental.

In case you are wondering why packaging a lib with (yet) no apps depending on it, the answer is quite simple: there are lots of people already using it in it's home projects (me included). Now those projects have the chance to get into Debian too :-)

As a side note, there is also another nice implementation called QtSerialPort. I have also tested it and works pretty fine too. It aims to become part of Qt as an add-on someday.


14 March 2012

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer: QtSerialPort: a new hope

Some time ago I wrote about the status of Qt-based libs for using the serial port. Some days later I was pointed to the QtSerialPort project. The good news on this is that this is a project aimed to enter into Qt 5.

I have tested the lib with some apps that originally used QExtSerialPort. So far, so good. The license terms seems pretty OK (it wouldn't have got that far in the Qt code review if it weren't).

In the meantime, I received a reply to one of my messages from an upstream dev of QSerialPort (note that is Q and not Qt). He was very kind, but considering the effort to get QtSerialPort inside Qt itself, I think it's better to try to develop with this last lib.

Maybe I should try to package it and upload it to experimental.

3 February 2012

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer: The license mess with serial port Qt-based libs

I am currently working on a Qt-based app that needs to communicate through the serial port. Apart from all the benefits that a normal lib with a serial port implementation will bring in this case, having a Qt-based serial port lib would make even more sense, as it should be as multiplatform as possible and use the signal/slot mechanism. Also it should have a DFSG-compatible license, so I can package it for Debian, of course :-)

So I have found two libs which seemed to have the above mentioned features: QExtSerialPort and QSerialPort.

QExtSerialPort seems to be the most recommended lib in the web. It features polled and signal-based functionality; it uses Qt's standard types inheriting QIODevice. But it does not states the license in any file within the source code. The original project page at SourceForge says it's in public domain. And the newer project page at Google code says it's under the new BSD license. I have asked in the mailing list for a clarification. So far nothing has changed (although in further threads the authors showed some willing to change this). And then I got to the point of finding a bug, but I don't want to spend time to track it down and make a patch without a clear license.

QSerialPort it's another lib with more or less the same features as QExtSerialPort. It's main LICENSE file says it's under the LGPL2, but licensecheck will say that the present files are LGPL3. Also, on reviewing the code, I found some minor stuff that could be improved. Well, I could contact the author and see if [s]he would receive the patches... but his site seems down. And I could not find a real-person's name in the code so far :-/

So I made a last attempt to try to get QExtSerialPort in a suitable license. If it doesn't suceed, I think I'll have to start writing one myself. The downside: I only use Linux, so there will be no multiplatform features unless someone else contributes it. Of course, if you have another option or any idea to share, I'll be happy to know it :-)

By the way, this should be my first post on Planet Debian in english, so hello planet!

15 June 2011

Christian Perrier: So, what happened with Kikithon?

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:

13 June 2011

Christian Perrier: So, what happened with Kikithon?

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:

2 December 2009

Margarita Manterola: Life after DebConf8

Finally, after more than a year of preparation, and six months of very very hard work, DebConf8 has come and gone. Even if I'm not yet completely recovered from all that stress, I'm good enough to feel really happy about how things turned out. DebConf8 was a great success. We had great talks, many opportunities for developing interesting ideas, a lot of social interaction, an awesome video team that allowed more than 200 people from all around the world to be part of the conference even if they weren't in Argentina, and in general almost everyone had a very good time. It was really nice to have so many people from Debian over here, and it was specially nice to see them working and enjoying themselves so much. This was all possible thanks to our sponsors, thanks to the many hours spent during the previous months both by the DebConf orga-team (the usual suspects) and specially by the local team, which includes Tincho, Dami n, Romanella, Maxy, Sebas, Zero, Mendieta, Dererk, Melisa, Angasule, Lisandro, Nueces, and also thanks to the all help of the volunteers that came to work with us during DebCamp and DebConf, which include Tom s, Tinchito, M nica, Lucas, Germ n, Diego, Fefu, Nicol s, Mart n, Marcos, Hern n, Alejandro, Mat as, Rodrigo, Alberto and Joaqu n, and finally, DebConf wouldn't have been the great event it was without all the people that managed to travel thousands of kilometers to get here. To all of them, thanks, for making DebConf8 such a great conference Now, at last, DebConf8 is over (although there is some stuff that we still need to do before we can really forget all about it), and life goes on. Today, I did my first NMU after a long time. I'm particularly glad to have time for fixing bugs again, but I won't lie, I'm also extremely satisfied with how DebConf8 turned out. See you in Extremadura!

5 September 2008

Raphael Geissert: Google Reader sucks at parsing Atom feeds

Since some time ago I was pointed out by somebody that my feed's urls provided by planet.d.o were giving 404's.
Today I was again notified about that issue and finally decided to investigate what was going one.

This time it was Lisandro P rez Meyer (those who attended DC8 might remember him) who notified me, so first thing I asked was the link he was using to open my blog post, and to my surprise it was:
http://my.op era.com/atomo64/blog/2537614

Which of course throws a 404 as it is not a valid link. Next question was where he was obtaining that link from, and it was then when I found the culprint: Google Reader

A quick execution of curl and grep demonstrates how dumb Google Reader is:

$ curl -s http://my.opera.com/atomo64/xml/atom/blog/ grep 'http://my.opera.com/atomo64/blog/2537614'
<id>http://my.opera.com/atomo64/blog/2537614</id>

Anyone familiar with the Atom 1.0 specs will quickly notice how wrong Google Reader is by assuming that the id is an URL. The specs (text html) state:

The "atom:id" element conveys a permanent, universally unique identifier for an entry or feed.
...
Its content MUST be an IRI, as defined by [RFC3987]. Note that the definition of "IRI" excludes relative references. Though the IRI might use a dereferencable scheme, Atom Processors MUST NOT assume it can be dereferenced.


Note that it refers to just an identifier (an IRI, actually), not to a URL.

It leaves me one question: why does it do that?!
I mean, the specs define the atom:link element as a "a reference from an entry or feed to a Web resource", what makes Google Reader believe that an identifier is better than a reference to a Web resource? :rolleyes:

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