Next week end, November 24th and 25th, the mini Debconf will take place at EPITA in Paris. Mehdi Dogguy and I worked hard on the organization and on building a great program for this 2012 conference. This mini debconf will cover many subjects like Gnome (both as upstream and downstream), the Release team, how the Linux is packaged in Debian, etc.
The keynote will be "Free software and Debian, 20 years after" by Roberto Di Cosmo. Also, some merchandising will be proposed during the event by the association Debian France. Here is a quick list: Polos

Long-sleeved polo
40 euros - 10 pieces
Sleeveless polo
25 euros - 100 pieces Thanks to Tanguy Ortolo for taking take of the order. Buff

Buff Debian
18 euros - 75 pieces. It is described as Original Multifunctional Headwear. Real life example in video.
I love them! Finally, we will sell two kinds of Debian branded Sticker Portable:

Sticker Debian
1 euro - 100 pieces. They can be also ordered on the it2l website. Thanks to J r me Lemaire for providing these great products. If these products are successful, we will probably produce more for FOSDEM! For more information about the conference:
The official website
Wiki page for subscription

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5484

Such a basic/important app and such a stupid bug... 3 years and not fixed yet? Seriously? and people claim Android is ready for lambda users?

</rant>

I'm a heavy user of Debian's Bug Tracking System (especially during this period of the year ;)) and I quite like it. And as a Debian developer, I have to check multiple sources when looking at some source package. Namely, I mainly check the following sources:

• Packages Tracking System gives almost all information concerning a source package (maintainer, available versions, number of bugs, etc )
• Buildd Status Pages build status for the package on each architecture
• and sometimes Popularity Contest numbers

All this is great since you can move from the first one to the second one (and vice-versa) just by clicking with your mouse. It becomes less handy when you are looking at any bug report. In fact, the BTS doesn't link back to the previously mentioned services [1]. So, you have to copy/paste the name of the package or start a new tab and write down the address of the desired service. All this is not very nice for a lazy person like me :)

A few days ago, I remembered that I was already using GreaseMonkey and thought : "Hey, it would be nice to hack quickly something using GM to add the missing links". After a few tests, I've come up with a (very simple, yet extremely useful to me) user script that I called Debian BTS extra links [2]. It adds what I've been missing for years. If you are lazy and don't want to install right now, you can check the following pages to see what it adds:

• A regular bug report page
• A modified bug report page

The userscript will add links to PTS, Buildd status pages and Popcon near every pkgreport.cgi?src= link. Simple and useful. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I do.

Of course, I've submitted a bug (#679282) against the pseudo package bugs.debian.org kindly asking its maintainer to add a link to (for now) the PTS. But I know that they are busy so I'm not expecting a result soon. Fow now, my simple and dumb userscript WFM.

[1] This is partly true since it links back to the PTS on main pages (pages that list all bug reports of a given set of packages).

[2] Only tested with a recent Iceweasel (from experimental) and Chromium (from unstable).

P.S.: If you do wonder, #4300 is the least bug number known to the BTS. Well, or at least, the result of running ls -1 /srv/bugs.debian.org/spool/archive/00/ sort -h head -n1 on bugs.debian.org.

And Now For Something Completely Different There are those weird coincidences that flock together and have the power of subverting initial expectations. Something like that has happened to me this week, when I've ended up spending a considerable amount of my IRILL work time (you know, something like 1000% of it) as a Debian Video Team volunteer. Mean as I am, I'm not going to explain the concatenation of coincidences. Suffices to say that most of the video hardware meant to be used at DebConf11 ended up being in my IRILL office. Of course all of it for about 200 kg and 2000 liters was in need of some inventory, packing, and shipment love. Together with Holger, Mehdi, and Etci we have tamed all of it. The following box miscellanea will therefore soon be on its way to Banja Luka:

DebConf11 video hardware

As an undesirable side effect, I had to join Bdale's knows more about ATA than he'd like to -club.
Holger opted not to join the club and I really can't blame him.

I m really happy to be able to attend DebConf11. It will be my third DebConf. I hope it will be as productive and enjoyable as past editions I ll arrive on July 20th and stay until the end of DebConf. See you all there soon!

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)

It seems that Tunisia hosts a new shiny complete Debian mirror since a few days. It s available at http://debian.mirror.tn. It even has all release architectures, which was a good surprise. Possibly, this new mirror will get its ftp.tn.debian.org some day if it implements all the requirements (which are listed here). As far as I know, this is the second complete Debian mirror in Africa. The first one is hosted in South Africa. Algeria hosts a Debian mirror too, but has i386 only. http://debian.mirror.tn had even a complete debian-cd/ directory when I had a look at it last Friday, but it disappeared over the week-end. I do wonder if it will come back at some point. It would make a lot of people happier, in my opinion. This new mirror is hosted by ATI (Tunisian Internet Agency), a government agency which organizes anything that has something to do with Internet (IP addressing, interconnection of ISPs, mail gateways, main registrar of .tn domain extension, ). During Ben Ali s era, they were known for Internet censorship. But, it seems that censorship was controlled directly by the palace. Since the revolution in Tunisia, ATI tried to clean his name and start a new life . At the same location, they also host other mirrors among which we can find: Ubuntu, Mozilla, Eclipse, CPAN, Apache and Fedora. So, I think I m not mistaken to say that there is a real intention to support Free Software. I hope they ll be able to go further and provide hosting for Free Software Clubs/Groups in Tunisia, or even help to organise FOSS events. Anyway It s nice to know that I ll have a decent Debian mirror to use this summer from Tunisia The revolution continues stay tuned!

This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you re among the people who support my work, then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. GNOME 3 packaging Right after the GNOME 3 release, I was eager to try it out so I helped the pkg-gnome team to update some of the packages. I did some uploads of totem, totem-pl-parser, gvfs, mutter, gnome-shell, gnome-screensaver. I also kept people informed via my blog and prepared a pinning file for adventurous users who wanted to try it out from experimental (like me). One month later, I m still using GNOME 3. There are rough edges still, but not so many. And I m starting to get used to it. Debian Rolling planning Debian Rolling is a project on my TODO list for quite some time. I decided it was time to do something about it and started a series of articles to help clarify my ideas while getting some early feedback. My goal was to prepare a somewhat polished proposal before posting it to a Debian mailing list. But as usual with Murphy s law, my plan did not work out as expected. Almost immediately after my first post the discussion started on debian-devel:
At this point it s a discussion thread of several hundreds of messages (there are several screens of messages like the one above). Many of the sub-threads have been interesting, but the general discussions mixed too many different things so that there s no clear outcome yet. Lucas Nussbaum tried to make a summary. Obviously I must adjust my plan, there s lots of feedback to process. I accepted to drive a DEP together with Sean Finney to help structure the part of the discussion that focuses on allowing development to continue during freezes. But I m also eager to fix the marketing problem of testing and have the project recognize that testing is a product in itself and that end-users should be encouraged to use it. Package Tracking System maintenance The Package Tracking System is an important tool for Debian developers, and it has been broken by some change on the Bug Tracking System. I worked around it quite quickly so that few people noticed the problem but Cron kept reminding me that I had to properly fix it. I ended up doing it last week-end. While working on the PTS, I took the opportunity to merge a patch from Jan Dittberner to enhance the news RSS feed that the PTS provides. And I also integrated information from backports.debian.org (thanks to Mehdi Dogguy for reminding me #549115). Multiarch update Not much new this month. I fixed two bugs in the multiarch dpkg branch thanks to bug reports from Ubuntu users (LP 767634, LP 756381). I m still waiting on Guillem Jover finishing his review of the multiarch branch. I m pinging him from time to time but it looks like multi-arch is no longer in his short term priority list. I ve been running this code for more than 2 months and it works fine. I want to see it merged. I m ready to update my code should anything need to be changed to please Guillem. But without any feedback we re in a deadlock. Misc dpkg work While fixing a bug in update-alternatives (found in one of the valid reports on launchpad), I noticed that there was room for improvements in the error messages output by update-alternatives. I changed them to reuse the same strings that were already used in other parts of dpkg. The result is that there are a few strings less to translate (always a nice thing for the poor translators who have to deal with the thousands of strings that dpkg contains). I also tried to fix some of the most cryptic error messages in dpkg (see #621763) but that work is stalled at the request of Guillem. Book update We (me and Roland Mas) are almost done with the update of our French book for Debian Squeeze. It will hit the shelves in July or September. I m starting to prepare the fundraising campaign to make an English translation of it. We ll use ulule.com for this. On my blog I have been pleased to interview Meike Reichle, it s the first women that I have interviewed in the series but it s certainly not the last one. I also interviewed Adam D. Barratt, one of our tireless release managers. Thanks Many thanks to the people who gave me 180.35 in March and 235.37 in April. That represents 1.5 and 2 days of work for those months. See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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Well, I still don t feel ready enough to go back to (real) work. So, once more, I had to get my fingers on something to hack and I picked the Buildd Status Pages once more. It s not my favorite project, but I decided to implement the few remaining ideas and get (temporarily) done with it. So, here we are with new features (and a few bug fixes):

• Add option to show (co-)maintained packages (Closes: #559515, #507782). It takes as input two files (Maintainers and Uploaders) to find the list of packages. Unfortunately, they contain binary packages (and particularly architecture all packages) that wanna-build doesn t know anything about. On buildd.debian.org, I don t have enough data (yet) to filter out that list manually. Ideally, my input should be a list of sources packages with at least one binary non architecture all packages only. Anyway now, if you enter an email address, the script should parse those files looking for your list. Then, it adds a link to DDPO using that email address and replaces it by the list of found packages in the form, so that you can manually filter it.
  Update: I ended up filtering manually the list of packages. I keep only packages that wanna-build knows something about, on at least one architecture.
• Escape special HTML characters when we fetch a log (Closes: #621739). No comment on this one please At least, it was very easy to fix.
• Add a raw option to fetch.php so that it outputs only what s in the log file, without any processing or escaping.
• Add a link to buildd.debian-ports.org, with the same list of selected packages and suite. Additionally, I ve made some changes so that the deployment there becomes a bit easier.
• Try to produce valid XHTML code. I just went through errors I ve seen and fixed them. The produced XHTML code is rather simple. So, I don t need a real library for that yet.
• Add support for tail of logs. If your package fails to build on some architecture, the script will show you the last 15 relevant lines below the status table.

In my opinion, this new set of features deprecates totally the old version, since all (and more) is now covered and working with this new version. So, I think we can remove pkg.cgi and friends and put some redirection to the new scripts. If you disagree, please tell us ! I ll submit a bugreport to QA folks asking them to change/remove links still present on the PTS and DDPO. I think that this is the last set of changes before a while (except fixes). I hope that you ll enjoy these new features as much as I do. If I still have some energy, I ll try to spend it on -release stuff where there are several ongoing transitions (and many others waiting for acks, hints, analysis, etc ).

Last week, I had to put my daily (real) work off for a bit, to get some rest. I took this occasion to implement a few ideas I had for the Buildd Status Pages. Mainly, I wanted to get rid of my external dependencies which are:

• https://buildd.debian.org/build.php which shows all build logs available for a package. It s nice and simple, but old and not easy to read. In my opinion, it s almost useless because it takes some time to realize (visually) what happened to the package (there are no colors to distinguish successful builds from failures, text is not aligned, etc ).
• https://buildd.debian.org/fetch.cgi which shows the content of a build log given a package, a version, an architecture and a time-stamp identifying the log file (you can see this as an example). The page works, there is no real need to rewrite it, modify it or whatever. It just does its job perfectly, but it was my last external dependency

Besides of getting rid of external dependencies, there were also a few feature requests (#618676, #612174, #518526) waiting for a while and it was good time to fix them. Hopefully, there are related to what I was fixing. The final version is now deployed and can be used. The implemented changes are :

• From the regular package view, you have now a link to all logs available for that packages (click on Logs in the table), or all logs for a specific architecture (click on old in the table, for you preferred architecture).
• The listing of available build logs has now its own new page. The default listing shows everything, i.e. every version available and everywhere known architecture (just like the old page did before). But now, you get with that the build time and disk space consumed during the build, when available. Furthermore, it groups the logs by version so that it becomes easier to see that all that group are logs for the same version . And you can also show build logs for a specific architecture by choosing one (links in rows) ; or restrict on versions, in a similar way. And, of course, there are some additional colors in each row to distinguish successful builds from those who failed.
• The page that fetches the log is now available from other pages. And this removes the last external dependency.
• All pages have an appropriate HTML title set (yeah, it s a shame that I didn t fix that since the first deployment).

I think that I tested well enough this new version and it works okay. Nevertheless, if you encounter a bug or a strange behavior, please don t hesitate to contact me (either by mail or on irc) or submit a bug report against buildd.debian.org. The next steps (probably) are :

• add the last feature that pkg.cgi has which the ability to select a list of packages according to their maintainer (or co-maintainer).
• a better integration with P-A-S files.
• show tail of logs for build failures.
• ask wb-adm if build.cgi, bymaint.php, fetch.php, info.cgi are still needed/useful. If you do use use/need them, please speak up before they get removed.
• if you have any other idea, do submit a bugreport.

now that we have released squeeze, I'd like to say thanks to the release team. I've really enjoyed the cooperation in the past months.

the people I had the most contact with were mehdi & also adam, & they were always very quick, very friendly, & very cooperative when I had some requests.

merci beaucoup, & I hope you continue your good work!

Mehdi is a Debian developer for a bit more than a year, and he s already part of the Debian Release Team. His story is quite typical in that he started there by trying to help while observing the team do its work. That s a recurrent pattern for people who get co-opted in free software teams. Read on for more info about the release team, and Mehdi s opinion on many topics. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Mehdi (except for the additional information that I inserted in italics). Who are you? I m 27 years old. I grew up in Ariana in northern Tunisia, but have been living in Paris, France, since 2002. I m a PhD Student at the PPS laboratory where I study synchronous concurrent process calculi. I became interested in Debian when I saw one of my colleagues, Samuel Mimram (first sponsor and advocate) trying to resolve #440469, which is a bug reported against a program I wrote. We have never been able to resolve it but my intent to contribute was born there. Since then, I started to maintain some packages and help where I can. What s your biggest achievement within Debian? I don t think I had time to accomplish a lot yet I ve been mostly active in the OCaml team where we designed a tool to compute automatically the dependencies between OCaml packages, called dh-ocaml. This was a joint work with St phane Glondu, Sylvain Le Gall and Stefano Zacchiroli. I really appreciated the time spent with them while developing dh-ocaml. Some of the bits included in dh-ocaml have been included upstream in their latest release. I ve also tried to give a second life to the Buildd Status Pages because they were (kind of) abandoned. I intend to keep them alive and add new features to them. If you had a wand and could change one thing in Debian, what would that be? Make OCaml part of a default Debian installation But, since I m not a magician yet, I d stick to more realistic plans:

1. A lot of desktop users fear Debian. I think that the Desktop installation offered by Debian today is very user-friendly and we should be able to attract more and more desktop users. Still, there is some work to be done in various places to make it even more attractive. The idea is trying to enhance the usability and integration of various tools together. Each fix could be easy or trivial but the final result would be an improved Desktop experience for our users. Our packaged software run well. So, each person can participate since the most difficult part is to find the broken scenarios. Fixes could be found together with maintainers, upstream or other interested people.
   
   I ll try to come up with a plan, a list of things that need polishing or fixes and gather a group of people to work on it. I d definitely be interested in participating in such a project and I hope that I ll find other people to help. If the plan is clear enough and has well described objectives and criteria, it could be proposed to the Release Team to consider it as a Release Goal for Wheezy.
   
   
2. NMUs are a great way to make things move forward. But, sometimes, an NMU could break things or have some undesirable effects. For now, NMUers have to manually track the package s status for some time to be sure that everything is alright. It could be a good idea to be auto-subscribed to the bugs notifications of NMUed packages for some period of time (let s say for a month) to be aware of any new issues and try to fix them. NMUing a package is not just applying a patch and hitting enter after dput. It s also about making sure that the changes are correct and that no regressions have been introduced, etc
   
   
3. Orphaned packages: It could be considered as too strict and not desired, but what about not keeping orphaned and buggy packages in Testing? What about removing them from the archive if they are buggy and still unmaintained for some period? Our ftp archive is growing. It could make sense to do some (more strict) housekeeping. I believe that this question can be raised during the next QA meeting. We should think about what we want to do with those packages before they rot in the archive.

[Raphael Hertzog: I would like to point out that pts-subscribe provided by devscripts makes it easy to temporarily subscribe to bug notifications after an Non-Maintainer Upload (NMU).] You re a Debian developer since August 2009 and you re already an assistant within the Release Management team. How did that happen and what is this about? In the OCaml team, we have to start a transition each time we upload a new version of the OCaml compiler (actually, for each package). So, some coordination with the Release Team is needed to make the transition happen. When we are ready to upload a new version of the compiler, we ask the Release Team for permission and wait for their ack. Sometimes, their reply is fast (e.g. if their is no conflicting transition running), but it s not always the case. While waiting for an ack, I used to check what was happening on debian-release@l.d.o. It made me more and more interested in the activities of the Release Team. Then (before getting my Debian account), I had the chance to participate in DebConf9 where I met Luk and Phil. It was a good occasion to see more about the tools used by the Release Team. During April 2010, I had some spare time and was able to implement a little tool called Jamie to inspect the relations between transitions. It helps us to quickly see which transitions can run in parallel, or what should wait. And one day (in May 2010, IIRC), I got offered by Adam to join the team. As members of the Release Team, we have multiple areas to work on:

1. Taking care of transitions during the development cycle, which means making sure that some set of packages are correctly (re-)built or fixed against a specific (to each transition) set of packages, and finding a way to tell Britney that those packages can migrate and it would be great if she also shared the same opinion. [Raphael Hertzog: britney is the name of the software that controls the content of the Testing distribution.]
2. Paying attention to what is happening in the archive (uploads, reported RC bugs, etc ). The idea is to try to detect unexpected transitions, blocked packages, make sure that RC bug fixes reach Testing in a reasonable period of time, etc
3. During a freeze, making sure that unblock requests and freeze exceptions are not forgotten and try to make the RC bug count decrease.

There are other tasks that I ll let you discover by joining the game. Deciding what goes (or not) in the next stable release is a big responsibility and can be incredibly difficult at times. You have to make judgement calls all the time. What are your own criteria? That s a very hard to answer question (at least, for me). It really depends on the case . I try to follow the criteria that we publish in each release update. Sometimes, an unblock request doesn t match those criteria and we have to decide what to accept from the set of proposed changes. Generally, new features and non-fixes (read new upstream versions) changes are not the kind of changes that we would accept during the freeze. Some of them could be accepted if they are not intrusive, easy and well defended. When, I m not sure I try to ask other members of the Release Team to see if they share my opinion or if I missed something important during the review. The key point is to have a clear idea on what s the benefit of the proposed update, and compare it to the current situation. For example, accepting a new upstream release (even if it fixes some critical bugs) is taking a risk to break other features and that s why we (usually) ask for a backported fix. It s also worth noticing that (most of the time) we don t decide what goes in, but (more specifically) what version of a given package goes in and try to give to the contributors an idea on what kind of changes are acceptable during the freeze. There are some exceptions though. Most of them are to fix a critical package or feature. Do you have plans to improve the release process for Debian Wheezy? We do have plans to improve every bit in Debian. Wheezy will be the best release ever. We just don t know the details yet During our last meeting in Paris last October, the Release Team agreed to organize a meeting after Squeeze s release to discuss (among other questions) Wheezy s cycle. But the details of the meeting are not fixed yet (we still have plenty of time to organize it and other more important tasks to care about). We would like to be able to announce a clear roadmap for Wheezy and enhance our communication with the rest of the project. We certainly want to avoid what happened for Squeeze. Making things a bit more predictable for developers is one of our goals. Do you think the Constantly Usable Testing project will help? The original idea by Joey Hess is great because it allows d-i developers to work with a stable version of the archive. It allows them to focus on the new features they want to implement or the parts they want to fix (AIUI). It also allows to have constantly available and working installation images. Then, there is the idea of having a constantly usable Testing for users. The idea seems nice. People tend to like the idea behind CUT because they miss some software disappearing from Testing and because of the long delays for security fixes to reach Testing. If the Release Team has decided to remove a package from Testing, I think that there must be a reason for that. It either means that the software is broken, has unfixed security holes or was asked for the removal by its maintainer. I think that we should better try to spend some time to fix those packages, instead of throwing a broken version in a new suite. It could be argued that one could add experimental s version in CUT (or sid s) but every user is free to cherry-pick packages from the relevant suite when needed while still following Testing as a default branch. Besides, it s quite easy to see what was removed recently by checking the archive of debian-testing-changes or by querying UDD. IMO, It would be more useful to provide a better interface of that archive for our users. We could even imagine a program that alerts the user about installed software that got recently removed from Testing, to keep the user constantly aware any issue that could affect his machine. About the security or important updates, one has to recall the existence of Testing-security and testing-proposed-updates that are used specifically to let fixes reach Testing as soon as possible when it s not possible to go through Unstable. I m sure that the security team would appreciate some help to deal with security updates for Testing. We also have ways to speed migrate packages from Unstable to Testing. I have to admit that I m not convinced yet by the benefits brought by CUT for our users.

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Thank you to Mehdi for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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So, I m (almost) back from the first edition of MiniDebConf Paris, which was a success thanks to the great organizing skills in panic mode of Carl Chenet and Mehdi Dogguy. I think that everybody is already looking forward to the next edition. I met lots of people, and it was great to be able to finally put faces on names from the french free software community. I gave two talk there, the first one on Debian and Ubuntu (slides), the second one on Debian Quality Assurance (slides), which both went well (I think). I also hacked a bit:

• I added tags and claimed by to UDD Bugs Search.
• I worked on my piuparts replacement (which really needs a sexy name ; I m open to suggestions), processing the results, making some improvements to the script, and filing 16 RC bugs.

If you want to help me, here are some easy tasks that need takers (it s unlikely that I ll be able to tackle them anytime soon):

• One missing thing in UDD Bugs Search is information about the deferred/delayed queue. Unfortunately, the ftp-masters status information is not available in a machine-parseable format.
  • Improve dak code to also export the data in a machine-parseable format (JSON, YAML). I was told the changes are to be done in dak/show_deferred.py.
  • Write the corresponding UDD importer (actually, that s a 30 mins job for me, so I could easily find time to do it if the data was available).
  Update: done!
• Another missing thing is comments (as on bts.turzimmer.net). I don t really have good ideas about how to implement them, so if you want to tackle that with your own idea, go ahead. (It s probably easy to setup a copy of bugs.cgi on alioth if you are not a DD). The CGI is in Ruby.
• Help me process the logs of my piuparts replacement, and file the bugs. I don t have any good scripts to automate bug filings yet. You need a good understanding of packages dependencies and maintainers scripts, but it s a good way to learn, too. (I would need to regenerate the full results first, so talk to me if you are interested)

One of the other things I d like to do is discuss ways to improve the synchronization of UDD (currently, it s synchronized at arbitrary times, while we could sync Sources+Packages just after dinstall, for example).

I'm just back home after Paris mini-DebConf. I'm happy, excited, and exhausted almost as if it had been a full fledged DebConf. That's enough in my book to consider the event a complete success. As far as I know, it has been the first mini-DebConf held in Paris and about 150 people have come to attend the event from all over Europe. Off the top of my head I've met friends from at least: Spain, UK, France (obviously!), Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Greece. I'm still very much impressed by such a diverse attendance. Initially, I had planned the first "DPL strike" ever (i.e. not doing anything DPL-related) for the duration of the conference, in order to take part into the BSP. That agenda has been pretty much subverted by a last minute emergency, by chatting with loads of people, and by actually finalizing the Debian Sprint Program, which had been at the top of my Debian TODO list for quite a while now. Nonetheless, I've managed to advance a bit on a couple of RC bugs, which belong to the "annoying/pointless/but-still-valid" category. They are not solved yet, but I hope to have good news to share soon. Bottom line: I loved the event. and I've even managed to avoid getting killed by my (local) family for taking part in a Debian-weekend after an almost full week of Debian traveling, which is another success on its own right Closing advice: beside some last minute legwork, I did essentially nothing to organize this mini-DebConf, your kudos should be better directed to Carl Chenet and Mehdi Dogguy for the organization. Other gifts such as bug fixes can be directed to the speakers, sponsors, and loads of other helpers from Debian France and not in particular Xavier Oswald, Valessio Brito, Tanguy Ortolo, Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Luca Capello, Stephane Glondu, and others which surely I'm forgetting to mention here (sorry about that). Kudos folks ... let's do it again next year! (SCNR)

Recently [1], Zack, from an original idea of Jorge, asked the project whether it makes sense to have a debian instance of Shapado (a free software web application for question and answer support for our users). The idea was well accepted and http://ask.debian.net showed up quite quickly[2]. More recently, I stumbled upon an article[3] which announces the birth of the pretty same service but for Ubuntu users (in partnership with Canonical, Ltd.). It was known for some time as http://ubuntu.stackexchange.com. Then, it was redesigned (I guess) and offered a new domain name. The service runs Stack Exchange which is like Shapado but closed-source. It even runs on Windows Server and .Net. Admittedly, there is also http://ubuntu.shapado.com but it doesn t seem very active (nor seems to be supported by Canonical). In 2 days timeframe, both distributions gained the same service but they did it quite differently. I found this chain of events quite funny. And, really, I m quite happy to be on Debian s side (as always) [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2010/09/msg00123.html
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2010/10/msg00028.html
[3] http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/10/ubuntu-stack-exchange-is-askubuntu-com/

BSP Paris 2010, during mini-DebConf The first mini-DebConf in Paris, France is just a few weeks away and about 150 persons have signed up as attendees (wow!). The days of the conference (October 30th-31st, 2010) will most likely see the Debian Squeeze release in its deepest possible freeze, fighting with the very very very few remaining RC bugs (right? right!). What's the most useful thing that a crowd of Debian hackers can do that close to a release?
A Bug Squashing Party, of course! Therefore please welcome: We now need to arrange a room for the BSP, in parallel with the talk rooms of the conference. Hence please sign-up on the wiki page if you plan to attend the BSP. Please do so even if you're already signed up as a conference attendee, as the rooms will be different.

Last night, I released xen-tools 4.2 and also uploaded it to Debian Unstable. It also should become part of the upcoming Debian stable release called Squeeze. (Thanks, Mehdi!) For those who are missing xen-tools in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx or Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, there s now a xen-tools PPA containing the current stable package for both Ubuntu releases. Major changes since the 4.2 release candidate 1:

• Tons of documentation improvements
• Preliminary support for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal and Debian 7.0 Wheezy (Closes #597521)
• More robustness on exotic combinations of command-line options

Major changes since 4.2 beta 1:

• Uses GeoIP for Debian mirrors: Default Debian mirror is now cdn.debian.net
• Uses apt-config to parse Dom0 s apt.conf. (Closes #560011)
• With --verbose, the output of commands called by xen-tools (e.g. debootstrap) is not only logged, but also printed to STDOUT. (Closes #513126)
• Adds btrfs support.

New Team Member I d also like to welcome St phane Jourdois as member of the xen-tools development team who contributed quite a lot of the new code in 4.2. See GitHub s Impact Graph or Ohloh s List of Contributors. Roadmap If there s no need for a bug fix release, the next release will be 5.0 and will be the result of some heavy refactoring. Our aim is:

• less code duplication
• more modularity
• more consistency over all included scripts and hooks

We will probably also use Perl::Critic to improve the code consistency and quality further. (Thanks Ren e for the idea!)

(update: yesterday's version was using http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/ReleaseTeam as reference, while http://www.debian.org/intro/organization is the one that's up-to-date. Those watching the current traffic in debian-release can probably realize the huge *thank you* deserved by the entire release team for the work they're doing. So, how about spamming the release team members with (private!) "thank you" messages when they unblock a package of yours? And (even more difficult) also one when they don't unblock your package...but spent time reviewing it and more time to explain you why they prefer not unblocking it... In any case, thank you, Neil Maulkin, Adam adsb, Dann dannf, Felipe faw, Jurij trave11er, Luk luk, Mehdi mehdi, Pierre MadCoder, Julien jcristau (doh, French Cabal!)...and Martin zobel (who's apparently forgotten on the page). Not to forget Adam adsb and Phil phil for managing stable releases....and the Wise Release Wizards (vorlon, aba, luk, HE). Hat off, guys (only guys there, yet another place for d-w to show up).

Those watching the current traffic in debian-release can probably realize the huge *thank you* deserved by the entire release team for the work they're doing. So, how about spamming the release team members with (private!) "thank you" messages when they unblock a package of yours? And (even more difficult) also one when they don't unblock your package...but spent time reviewing it and more time to explain you why they prefer not unblocking it... In any case, thank you, Neil Maulkin, Adam adsb, Dann dannf, Felipe faw, Jurij trave11er, Luk luk, Mehdi mehdi, Pierre MadCoder, Julien jcristau (doh, French Cabal!). Not to forget Adam adsb and Phil phil for managing stable releases....and the Wise Release Wizards (vorlon, aba, HE). Hat off....