At the beginning of DebCamp, Zack started the RCBC the Release Critical Bug squashing Contest. Two weeks later not only DebConf10 is over but we also have results for the RCBC:

In summary: It was a huge success, we managed to fix

• 139 RC bugs in testing/unstable
• 79 RC bugs in stable

And the winners are:

• Stable: Gerfried Fuchs (77 bugs)
• Testing/unstable: 1. Moritz M hlenhoff (32 bugs), 2. Nico Golde (17 bugs), 3. Alexander Reichle-Schmehl (16 bugs)

All details can be found at http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf10/RCBC.

The winners who haven't collected their prizes at the closing ceremony will get them be snail mail.

Finally let me thank

• our donors of the prizes
• Micah and Zack for initiating the contest
• Mehdi for being my co-judge
• all participants who hugely improved Debian in the last two weeks

Recipe for RCBC - Release Critical Bug squashing Contest: It has been a while since my last post in the RCBW tradition. Luckily, the tradition is in very good health of its own, thanks to many others that have picked up the habit of SPAM-ing planet with good news for Debian, encouraging others to do the same. With all that RC-obsessed people around and with the Squeeze release forthcoming, can DebConf10 be devoid of geeky RC-squashing activities? Of course not! Thanks to the orga team we expect the conference to contain a 2-week long RC bug squashing pride with tutorials, BoFs, a permanent bug squashing party, ... and a contest! I won't indulge much on the contest as the wiki page contains all rules and gory details. Obviously, all usual rules and best practices of bug squashing parties will apply; coordination will happen on #debian-bugs. Get involved, it starts today, and it's open to everyone (DebConf10 attendees as well as Debian enthusiasts abroad, regular RC squashers as well as casual bystanders, etc). All this wouldn't have been possible without the help of many people that love Debian, so many thanks to:

• the sponsors of RCBC:
  • Marvell, for offering a GuruPlug
    (of course, the winner of this device is expected to help with Debian support for it *g*)
  • HP, for offering t-shirts
  • Pearson, for offering books
• micah - who dragged me into this (it hasn't been hard)
• gregoa and mehdi - the almighty judges - who have been transitively dragged into this (it hasn't been hard either)

PS a corresponding announcement is in the debconf-announce pipeline already

Recently, I started to write some web tool to track the status of ongoing transitions in unstable. I thought I could use some code from the Buildd status project (to see how it fetches the status for each package). Unfortunately, this caused some nightmares for some WB admin (because they used to rely on the generated BDB files and not the PGSql database, where the former is a snapshot of the latter stored in a funny format). Those BDB files were considered deprecated and status pages were looking for some love. Besides, the BDB files were kept in sync by regenerating them regularly (every 15 minutes, AFAIK). So, the information stored there was up-to-date only for a couple of seconds and then outdated, waiting for the next run to be updated. Last weekend, I rewrote the status pages from scratch to make them use the PGSql database. I kept the same user interface (and pages arguments) to make it a drop-in replacement for the old one. Today, thanks to the WB admins, the new status pages replaced the old ones! There are no new visible features for now (except the backend and some links) but I have a list of new features that I intend to implement. These new features will be implemented in my local copy first and then integrated if WB admins want them. And, as some of you already noticed, the new status pages are aware of non-free packages (because it happens that the data is present in the PGSql database thank WB admins for that!).

Since the recent announce of http://ubuntudiff.debian.net, some people started using it and asked for a few features. Lately, I ve been working on it and tried to implement the following:

• Use a single page (instead of a small HTML page with a lot of JS) well, that was easy
• Show the debdiff between the Ubuntu package and the Debian one: that was simpler than I first thought. Right now, it s implemented and deployed [1]. When I first generated all patches, I realized how people can be crazy I had diffs larger than 60MB. So, I had to reduce that by keeping only diffs less than 200 lines per file. At the end, I had a little more than 2GB of patches (and html files) generated for ~2000 source packages (which is somehow reasonable). So now, below the changelog, there is a list of modified files and you can:
  • download a patch for each file, extracted from the debdiff,
  • or click on the file s name to see the diff (if not too large, i.e. less than 200 lines)
  Note that red colored filenames denote files with too large diffs.

I ll still have some details to fix like putting the download patch link on the left, fix the show/hide thing which is also activated when you click on download patch . Then, I ll consider it feature-complete (almost) and won t touch it again. My next game will be to write some tools to analyse or detect new transitions if you want to play, let me know As always, please test this new beta version of UbuntuDiff (and enjoy it :p) and maybe, you may also report errors/bugs, if any [1] http://ubuntudiff.debian.net/beta/

I got my air ticket. So, I m able to say that I will go to DebConf10!

... or as some fellow DD said, one year ago: "j'ai 1000 ans". So what happened during last year, the DVCS way:

$> cd "Sylvain Le Gall"
$> darcs whatsnew
hunk life.txt 0
+ Yvain, my son, talks and walks, this is quite amazing to see your
+ child growing up.  My wife is pregnant, release expected in July
+ ;-)
+ 
+ I traveled quite a lot this year: Spain, Tunisia, Belgium,
+ Roscoff and Huelgoat (Brittany) 
hunk debian.txt 0
+ I went to Debconf 9 and attended Debcamp before. I met a lot of
+ very interesting people there. I spent the Debcamp time to
+ implement Zack proposal to compute OCaml package dependencies
+ using dh-ocaml. It WORKS ;-) It was a pleasure to work with Mehdi
+ Dogguy and Stephane Glondu on this subject.
+ 
+ The dh-ocaml work allowed me to be the co-author, with Stephane
+ and Mehdi, of Zack's article on the subject. 
+ My first publication!
+ 
+ I went to FOSDEM 2010 and helped attend the Debian booth. Quite a
+ nice experience I was there with my good old Open Brick NG (need
+ to blog about it one day).
+ 
+ Found some time to enable the LLVM OCaml bindings in LLVM Debian
+ package.
+ 
+ Voted for the first  OCaml-aware DPL! (NB: this was not the
+ reason for my vote)
hunk work.txt 0
+ I worked on extending a tool that I delivered before. OCaml is
+ quite a good language when it comes to do maintenance. You can
+ extend something and have dozens of compiler errors where your
+ changes propagate. Once every error has been corrected, your
+ changes are OK. Of course, this requires to use OCaml types,
+ pattern matching and a bit of unit testing.
+ 
+ I was delighted when Jun Furuse ask me if he can organize 
+ OCaml Meeting 2010 in Japan. The first OCaml Meeting spin-off. 
+ 
+ OASIS has been growing quite a lot since the year before and got
+ enough importance. Thus I decided to give a talk about it at CAML
+ Consortium in December and then at OCaml Meeting 2010. 
+ 
+ I decided to have some English training. I was missing some oral
+ fluency.
+ 
+ I organized the OCaml Meeting 2010 in April. It was quite a lot
+ of work, especially to prepare my own presentation, but the
+ meeting was a success and probably my best birthday gift with the
+ OCaml Hacking Day organized just after.
$> darcs record -a
What is the patch name? "32 year old"

Unfortunately, this release is late. My birthday was on April 16th, but it was OCaml Meeting this day, which was my top level priority at this time. See you next year!

RCBW - #20 With a couple of days of delay, here are this last week squashes, by yours truly:

• bug #567767 - nxml-mode - request removal, integrated into emacs23
• bug #546764 - d-feet - add missing dep on hicolor-icon-theme
• bug #566290 - php-wikidiff2 - add missing dep/substvar on phpapi-*
• bug #567860 - php-net-ping - sponsored fix (+ upstream release) for DM maintainer
• bug #248275 - anteater - proposed removal
• bug #536285 - mirage - avoid tricking users to delete the wrong file (patch by Evgeni Golov)

The delay is due to FOSDEM, it's hard to squash bugs when you are: (1) having fun (best FOSDEM ever, if you ask me), (2) connected with very poor network connectivity (let's say: FOSDEM-quality network). Also, there are just 6 squashes, but last week there were 8, so ... (I know, I suck). Among the main highlights of the week, I just want to cite Mehdi Dogguy: he was with me at JFLA 2010 last week and I've managed to grab him into the "RCBW tunnel". With a handful of well-targeted NMUs, he has fixed about 10 RC bugs in the few days of the conference. He is too shy to blog about that, but since I'm evil, I'm disclosing it here Welcome on board, Mehdi! (now you're doomed: you must continue doing that!)

Just an update about sgeps, because it seems to have made a small stir (which is more than I expected).

• Yes, I know about emacs foo.gpg. Admittedly I found out while I was developing sgeps, but I kept on my track anyway. The real reason was that I was having fun, but I could also mention that sgeps doesn't store data unencrypted on disk, not even temporarily. I'm not sure about vim foo.gpg. (Update: Joey Hess telle me it does the right thing.) Anyway, I don't want to fire up an editor (or switch to an already opened one) just to get a password.
• I had also found out about pwman too. My script started as pwman.pl but it was renamed later. I like the simplicity of sgeps better, especially the lack of any UI besides the CLI, but pwman is probably good in its own way, but it doesn't fit my usage pattern.
• It seems the Gentoo people don't share my qualms about making very small packages, and apparently sgeps is now packaged for Gentoo Linux.
• Mehdi Dogguy already contributed suggestions (including better error handling) and even a patch implementing sgeps --delete. Thanks to him!
• An anonymous commenter suggests that sgeps should be able to store notes as well as passwords. That wasn't a requirement I initially had, but I won't reject the patch if it comes He also argues that it should be able to push the password into the X11 paste buffer. Again, why not, if it doesn't break anything.

The culture of freedom lies in the details Here is an interesting blog post by Bradley Kuhn about Ubuntu, Debian, and (warning: my interpretation ahead) the culture of freedom. While reading it, I had kinda moment of truth, because just yesterday I was musing with Mehdi and Lucas on the fact that Debian is basically the only remaining distribution among the mainstream ones (if that means something) that is free from the ground up, including its infrastructure. We "just" seek hardware via donations and then we run, thanks to the amazing work of DSA, our own free infrastructure on top of it. Let's cherish this value! Thanks to Roberto Di Cosmo for the pointer to Bradley's post. Update: there's a thread on the ubuntu-devel mailing list about Bradley's post.

OCaml 3.11 has migrated to testing Quoting from Dato:

* St phane Glondu [Sat, 04 Apr 2009 14:01:35 +0200]:
> Adeodato Sim  a  crit :
> >> Please schedule the attached requests for the OCaml 3.11.0 transition.
> > Scheduled, with the glitches noted below. Please get back to us with the
> > needed wanna-build actions.
> All packages that needed recompilation or sourceful uploads for the
> OCaml 3.11.0 transition are now compiled and available in unstable.
> I guess migrating ocaml to testing can now be considered...
This is now done:
ocaml    3.11.0-5   testing
ocaml    3.11.0-5   unstable
Congratulations for making of this transition one of the less painful
I ve ever had to deal with, though I guess being a quite self-contained
set of packages and not having ties to other ongoing
transitions really
helped. ;-)
Thanks!,

IOW OCaml 3.11 has just migrated to Debian testing YAY \o/ Congrats and thanks to all the people who contributed. Special kudos go to the (not so) newbies of the Debian OCaml Task Force, and in particular to Stephane Glondu and Mehdi Dogguy: they have contributed work to a lot of packages and have also developed new tools which helped monitoring the transition effectively. Keep up the good work.

Update: The Listen website has been temporarily taken down, and Abaakouk Mehdi is in the process of fixing the copyright notices. I am very grateful for this. In my mind, this issue is finished; we’ll soon see a new release of Listen, with intact copyright notices, and everyone wins. Also, so people don’t take my opinion as anything other than solely mine - Eduardo Gonzalez and Michael Urman, the other Quod Libet developers who had their copyrights infringed, have also commented on the issue with slightly different views. (But first second, a brief open letter to people who leave anonymous comments calling me an ass: The only tool free software developers have to defend themselves is their copyright. Copyright infringement is not a “minor problem” but the single largest mistake you can make when writing free software. When you take my work, and strip my name from it, and plasters yours all over it, I have every legal and ethical right to be as pissed about it as I want. I love it when people use my code. I see no reason to love it when people misrepresent my code. Without the ability to pursue copyright infringement, I might as well be writing public domain code, and in that case, I might as well be getting paid for helping software hoarders, and screw you all. Abaakouk screwed up, really badly, but you guys who don’t want me to enforce my license are a real threat to free software.) Dear Abaakouk Mehdi, author of “Listen, just listen,” Your program is ugly. But beyond that, it’s infringing upon my copyright and that of my friends. Your mmkey support, on-screen display, config.py, stock.py, much of your utils.py, and probably more but because I’m already angry enough I’m going to stop looking, is taken directly from my audio player, Quod Libet. Normally, that’s fine. It’s free software. Enjoy the source. You didn’t credit any of our work on the website. That’s fine; it just makes you an asshole, albeit a law-abiding one. But you had to go one step further and rip off most of the copyright notices. You also licensed all the code under “GNU GPL v2 or later”. You can’t do that. Quod Libet’s source is released under the GNU GPL, version 2. My one consolation is your complete incompetence. I mean, it’s really obvious from your screenshots that you ripped off our OSD, and you even left in the horrendous Python style guideline violations that we’ve since fixed. You copied and didn’t use a lot of our utility functions (and you didn’t copy and reimplemented improperly a few others). You left in half my comments, but then translated some docstrings. And to cap it off, you authenticate yourself to leoslyrics.com as auth=QuodLibet. Remove my code from your release, until you can learn how to properly, and legally, credit people.