Search Results: "werner"

30 July 2011

Torsten Werner: DebConf11: Jigsaw Progress in Debian

Tom Marble and Guillaume Mazoyer gave a talk about Jigsaw Progress in Debian during DebConf11 in Banja Luka. Guillaume is a Google Summer of Code student mentored by Tom and Sylvestre Ledru. The project is about modularizing OpenJDK which replaces the old fashioned classpath by a modulepath that knows about versioned dependencies. It can reduce the memory footprint and the startup time for applications running in the JVM. It would be interesting to match Debian package versions to Jigsaw module versions. Debian could influence the JDK version 8 in this area. Upstream is already building Debian packages but they do not follow the Debian policy and do not use the Debian packaging tools. Guillaume has uploaded 2 packages (jtharness, jtreg) to Debian. These packages are needed to run the upstream testsuite which ships 3484 individual tests. More than 99% of them are working in Debian. There is a GIT repository of his Jigsaw work at http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-java/jigsaw.git;a=summary. The slides of the talk are available at http://penta.debconf.org/dc11_schedule/events/718.en.html.

17 July 2011

Torsten Werner: Debian Conference 2011

Yes I am going to attend DebConf11.

13 July 2011

Torsten Werner: Certified Scrum Master

I ve passed the CSM exam of the Scrum Alliance today after having a 2 day training last week! That means that I am really agile now. :) The training was really good.

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:

16 May 2011

Christoph G hre: Gosh - I'm became DD on Saturday

After nearly two years of answering questions and mostly didn't find time to do so, I'm a DD now. Thanks to all involved people, specifically to Ben Hutchings - my AM and Torsten Werner who advocate me.

31 March 2011

Torsten Werner: My Wheezy release goal: JS removal

Debian is preferring feature based releases over time based releases and that is why we currently have some discussion about release goals for our next version that has the codename Wheezy. I want to suggest the full removal of all software written by J rg Schilling who is well known for making trouble in projects that want to redistribute his software.

15 February 2011

Torsten Werner: Are we slaves?

We still have more than 300 new packages in Debian that needs manual checks and we have a lot of open bugs. I don t get paid for working on dak (the Debian Archive Kit) nor do I feel a deep passion on doing such work. I am contributing to Debian because it is a great project and because contributing is my way to say Thank you to all who made (and still make) it possible. BUT: are we slaves that are supposed to do any stuff for other people? Yesterday someone asked for an enhancement for dak via IRC. I ve kindly asked him: do you want to send a patch? (words are copied from the IRC session). Instead of answering no he sent a patch for 2 plain text files within 4 minutes after I told him the URL to dak s git repository. I could not do it faster by myself and I ve got many other open tasks. I ve applied the patch and activated it on ftp-master.debian.org. But today he ranted about my rudeness and he did not even managed to quote me correctly ( Please send a patch ).

Lucas Nussbaum: Re: please send a patch

It seems that Matthew Palmer misread my blog post as a complaint against developers asking for patches in exchange of pet feature requests. He really should pay more attention, since I gave pet feature requests as an example of case where it would be appropriate to ask for a patch:
Of course, there are cases where it s perfectly reasonable to ask for a patch: when the task is expected to take hours, or when the result is of limited interest to everybody except the demander.
But even then, it s not clear. This morning I got an email from a someone involved in PHP packages maintenance, who said that Bugs Search @ UDD was a great tool, but that he would love to have a way to list all bugs affecting packages with the implemented-in::php debtag.
To produce a working patch for this would probably take him at least an hour. You need to set up a copy of the CGI on alioth, understand the DB structure, dig into the code, etc. If you don t understand SQL and Ruby, it could be a really difficult process. Also, it s probably quite uninteresting for him to do that, since he is unlikely to stick around developing UDD.
Instead, it didn t take me more than 5 minutes to produce a one-liner.
The net result for Debian in that case? 55 minutes saved by a developer. Update:
Torsten Werner wrote an angry reply to my post. It s true that yesterday s episode triggered my blog post, because I felt quite frustrated to have to provide a patch for something that simple, and would have preferred to use the time for a Debian task where I would be more efficient. But I was not particularly angry at that episode, since that s something I ve seen on several occasions. That s also why I did not mention any team in particular.
The feature request I was making was reasonable, and cannot really be considered a pet feature request (though I might be biased with my QA hat on): mentionning in the dak templates used for bug closure that packages removed from Debian can still be found on snapshot.d.o. The fact that he thinks that addressing this himself turns him into a slave raises interesting questions.

7 February 2011

Torsten Werner: You are uploading too fast

This is my first blog post on my new tarent blog which I am using as a replacement for blogspot. We had 451 new source packages in the NEW queue tonight. It is nice to know that Debian is the largest free software distribution but it will take some time until we (the ftp team) have processed all those new packages as we need the check every single package. I wanted to work on dak (the Debian archive kit) again after we have released Squeeze but I ll give NEW processing a higher priority. My next plan for dak is generating the contents files in dak directly instead of using apt-ftparchive. Contents generation is the slowest part of apt-ftparchive and having the package contents in dak s database is quite useful.

28 October 2010

Torsten Werner: More Results from the Debian Community Poll

I have announced the Debian Community Poll and published first results in former blog posts. I'll publish my analysis of the remaining questions about changes to Debian now.
Should Debian remove its non-free component?

Should Debian spend more money?
  • 28.9% choose answer #5: I don't know or don't care.
  • 22.8% choose answer #3: Debian should pay people having important positions in Debian and doing important work.
  • 21.2% choose answer #1: Debian should spend more money on organizing developer conferences and team meetings.
  • 11.4% choose answer #4: Debian should not spend more money.
  • 8.0% choose other (see below) or didn't answer
  • 7.7% choose answer #2: Debian should spend more money on free merchandizing, free DVDs, having a sexy web site, and being present on IT events.
There were quite a number of other answers. One participant missed the information about how the money is currently spend. Several participants didn't want to choose one of the provided answers. They either wanted to choose multiple answers or various combinations of them. Most other answers fall into one of the following categories:
  • various marketing suggestions with different focus than answer #2
  • Debian hosted hardware, infrastructure, services
  • funding upstream development
  • QA and work on release-blocking issues
  • partners and commercial support
  • developing important features
  • security support for oldstable
  • education of prospective developers and contributors
  • documentation for users
  • improving usability and accessibility
  • certifications like LPIC
  • getting supported by hardware and non-free software vendors
  • beer
  • promoting debian in developing countries
  • help contributors running a business on Debian
  • Bounty system
  • updating stable to avoid becoming stale
  • developing multimedia codecs
  • getting compliant with FSF guidelines for a free system distribution
  • developing free replacements to non-free software
  • maintaining a database of debian-friendly hardware
  • lobbying and politics
  • visibility to wider society, even non-IT
  • hardware for driver developers
  • a more sexy DVD/CD set with graphics (like Fedora, Ubuntu)
  • membership to boards of W3C, TEI Consortium, OASIS, etc.

Do you prefer time based releases instead of the "it's ready when it's ready" releases?
  • 73.1% answered no
  • 19.8% answered yes
  • 5.1% anwered: I don't know or don't care
  • 2.0% didn't answer

Which release interval do you prefer?
  • 38.7% choose answer #2: about 12 months
  • 36.9% choose answer #3: 18 - 24 months
  • 10.0% choose answer #5: I don't know or don't care.
  • 5.9% choose answer #1: about 6 months
  • 5.5% choose answer #4: more than 2 years
  • 3.0% didn't answer

19 September 2010

Obey Arthur Liu: Google Summer of Code 2010 Debian Report

Hello fellow developers, The summer is over :( but I m happy to announce that this year s Summer of Code at Debian has been better than ever! :) This is indeed the 4th time we had the privilege of participating in the Google Summer of Code and each year has been a little different. This year, 8 of our 10 students succeeded in our (very strict!) final evaluations, but we have reasons to believe that they will translate into more long-term developers than ever, all thank to you. The highlight this year has been getting almost all of our students at DebConf10. Thanks again this year to generous Travel Grants from the Google Open Source Team, we managed to fly in 7 of our students (up from 3!). You certainly saw them, presenting during DebianDay, hacking on the grass of Columbia, hacking^Wcheering our Debian Project Leader throwing the inaugural pitch of a professional baseball game or hacking^Wsun-tanning on the tr s kitsch Coney Island beach. Before I give the keyboard to our Students, I d like to tell you that it will be the pleasure and honor of Obey Arthur Liu (yours truly, as Administrator) and Bastian Venthur (as Mentor) to represent Debian at the Summer of Code 2010 Mentors Summit on 23-24 October 2010, at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View. Like last year, we expect many other DDs to be present under other hats. We will be having 2 days of unconference on GSoC and free software related topics. We all look forward to reporting from California on Planet and soc-coordination@l.a.d.o! All of our students had a wonderful experience, even if they couldn t come to DebConf, that is best shared in their own voice, so without further ado, our successful projects: Multi-Arch support in APT by David Kalnischkies, mentored by Michael Vogt apt-get install MultiArch does mostly work now as most code is already merged in squeeze, but if not complain about us at deity@l.d.o! Still, a lot left on the todo list not only in APT so let us all add MultiArch again to the Release Goals and work hard on squeezing it into wheezy. :) Debbugs Bug Reporting and Manipulation API by David Wendt Jr., mentored by Bastian Venthur Hello, I m David Wendt, and I went to Debconf10 to learn more about the development side of Debian. Having used it since the 9th grade, I ve been intimately familiar with many of Debian s internals. However, I wanted to see the developers and other Debian users. At DebConf, I was able to see a variety of talks from Debian and Ubuntu developers. I also got to meet with my mentor as well as the maintainer of Debbugs. Content-aware Config Files Upgrading by Krzysztof Tyszecki, mentored by Dominique Dumont Config::Model is now capable of manipulating files using shorter and easier to write models. Thanks to that, packagers may start experiment with creating upgrade models. Further work is needed to support more complicated config files Dominique Dumont is working on DEP-5 parser, I ll shortly start working on a cupsd config file parser.
The best thing about DebConf10 is that every person I talked with knew what I was doing. I had a mission to get some feedback on my project. Everybody liked the idea of making upgrades less cumbersome. On the other side, it was my first visit to United States, so I decided to go on a daytrip on my own (instead of staying inside the building, despite heat warnings). I had a chance to visit many interesting places like Ground Zero, the UN headquarters, Grand Central Terminal, Times square and Rockefeller Center that was a great experience. Hurd port and de-Linux-ization of Debian-Installer by J r mie Koenig, mentored by Samuel Thibault Debconf10 was great! Among other people working on the installer, I met Aur lien Jarno from the Debian/kFreeBSD team and we worked together on a cross-platform busybox package. Besides, the talks were very interesting and I ve filled my TODO-list for the year.
For instance I learned about the Jigsaw project of OpenJDK, and how Debian would be the ideal platform to experiment with it. More generally, some people think Debian could push Java 7 forward and I d like to see this happen. Smart Upload Server for FTP Master by Petr Jasek, mentored by Joerg Jaspert I must say that it was great time for me in NY, I ve met and talked and coded with people from ftp-master team like Torsten Werner who helped me to push the project a bit further and with some other people who were looking forward to release of the tool which I hope they will use quite soon. Everybody interested, everybody excited, really cool place and time. And I can t forget the Coney Island beach and stuff, lot of fun, lot of sun;) Aptitude Qt by Piotr Galiszewski, mentored by Sune Vuorela Currently, development branches support full features searching, viewing extended package s informations, performing cache and packages operations. Code and GUI still require a lot of work which will be continued. Informations about further progress could be found on aptitude mailing list and repository rss channel. Debian-Installer on Neo FreeRunner and Handheld Devices by Thibaut Girka, mentored by Gaudenz Steinlin For me, DebConf 10 started at the airport, where Sylvestre Ledru (whom I didn t know of before) was wearing a GSoC 2007 t-shirt, that is, given the circumstances, almost equivalent to say I m a hacker, I m going to DebConf 10 .
I ve spent my time at the conference attending various talks, hacking, meeting DDs and other hackers (amongst others, my co-mentor Per Andersson, Paul Wise, Julien Cristau, Christian Perrier, Cyril Brulebois, Martin Michlmayr, Colin Watson and Otavio Salvadores who I have to thank for his patience while dealing with my questions), chatting, cross-signing keys, rushing to finish eating before 7pm, getting sunburnt, sightseeing (thanks, Arthur, for the lightning-fast tour of Manhattan!), and so on. Debian Developers and community, we count on you. See you next year! (cross-posted to debian-devel-announce@l.d.o and soc-coordination@l.a.d.o)

17 September 2010

Joerg Jaspert: FTPMaster meeting, I

I announced it some while ago on debian-project, we have a FTPMaster meeting this weekend. It started out with a little workout session View image before we started discussing some things from our agenda. In the middle of the discussion we took a little sidestep, looking for a victim to promote to ftpmaster. So we selected someone not attending, he can t run away screaming. And for that: Send your condolences over to Torsten Werner. Or maybe congratulations, your call :) Right now Mark is fixing up our byhand processing and Alex is doing some other Debian work, while I m merging patches from Luca. Thats it for now, sometime soon we are going to eat, after which we put some more discussions on our agenda. Still two more days to go :)

2 August 2010

Matt Zimmerman: DebConf 10: Day 2

Today was the first day of DebConf proper, where all of the sessions were aimed at project participants. Bits from the DPL (Stefano Zacchiroli) Stefano delivered an excellent address to the Debian project. As Project Leader, he offered a perspective on how far Debian has come, raised some of the key questions facing Debian today, and challenged the project to move forward and improve in several important ways. He asked the audience: Is Debian better than other distributions? Is Debian still relevant? Why/how? Having asked this question on identi.ca and Twitter recently, he presented a summary. There was a fairly standard list of technical concerns, but also: He pointed out some areas which we would like to see improve, including: All in all, I thought this was an accurate, timely and inspirational message for the project, and the talk is worth watching for any current or prospective contributor to Debian. Debian Policy BoF (Russ Albery) Russ facilitated a discussion about the Debian policy document itself and the process for managing it. He has recently put in a lot of time working on the backlog (down from 160+ to 120), but this is not sustainable for him, and help is needed. There was a wide-ranging discussion of possible improvements including: There was also some discussion in passing of the long-standing confusion (presumably among people new to the project) with regard to how policy is established. In Debian, best practices are first implemented in packages, then documented in policy (not the reverse). Sometimes, improvements are suggested at the policy level, when they need to start elsewhere. I m not very familiar with how the policy manual is maintained at present, but listening to the discussion, it sounded like it might help to extend the process to include the implementation stage. This would allow standards improvements to be tracked all the way through from concept, to implementation, to documentation. The Java Packaging Nightmare (Torsten Werner) Torsten described the current state of Java packaging in Debian and the general problems involved, including licensing issues, build system challenges (e.g. maven) and dependency management. His slides were information-dense, so I didn t take a lot of notes. His presentation inspired a lively discussion about why upstream developers of Java applications and libraries often do not engage with Debian. Suggested reasons included: Collaboration between Ubuntu and Debian (Jorge Castro) Jorge talked about the connections between Debian and Ubuntu, how people in the projects perceive each other, and how to foster good relationships between developers. He talked about past efforts to quantify collaboration between the projects, but the focus is now on building personal relationships. There were many good questions and comments afterward, and I m looking forward to the Debian derivatives BoF session tomorrow to get into more detail. Tonight is the traditional wine and cheese party. When this tradition started, I was one of just a handful of people in a room with some cheese and paper plates, but it s now a large social gathering with contributions of cheese and wine from around the world. I m looking forward to it.

31 July 2010

Torsten Werner: The Debian freeze has already begun


Don't get me wrong. We didn't freeze the development yet but we are freezing our developers! The air condition at the Columbia University in New York City is quite cold. Bring some warm clothes if you going to attend the DebConf that will start soon.

26 July 2010

Torsten Werner: Hey, Apple!



Hey, (Big) Apple! I'll arrive in New York tomorrow to attend the Debcamp and the Debconf. I will a talk about the Java packaging nightmare during the Java track next monday. Some other things i will work on:

- getting sensible-java done
- parallelize dak (the Debian archive kit) because we have 16 cpu cores on ftp-master.debian.org now
- autobuild all packages maintained by the Java packaging team to find FTBFS bug early
- fixing RC bugs maybe?

18 July 2010

Torsten Werner: Monday: Debian bug squashing party in Berlin


This is just a reminder that we will have a small bug squashing party in Berlin. It will take place on monday 19th july starting at 16:00 with open end in the rooms of B ro 2.0 in Neuk lln. You have to organize your accomodation by yourself if you do not live in Berlin. More information is available in the Debian Wiki. Please register there if you are planning to attend.

4 July 2010

Torsten Werner: Monday, 19th July: Debian bug squashing party in Berlin

A bug squashing party with take place on monday, 19th july, in the rooms of B ro 2.0 in Berlin Neuk lln. Please check the Wiki page for more information and please register yourself there if you plan to attend. Please don't forget that you have to organize your accomodation by yourself if you do not live in Berlin.

1 July 2010

Petter Reinholdtsen: Caching password, user and group on a roaming Debian laptop

For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is a bit troubling. Laptops are typically used also when not connected to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable. This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available in Debian. Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze. It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny. LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir This is the traditional method with a twist. The password caching is provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd. The directory lookup and password checking is done using LDAP. If one want to use Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal. If one is happy having a local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of using libpam-mklocaluser. A setup for pam-auth-update to enable pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for bug #568577 is in the archive. Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/. This is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package. These packages need to be installed and configured 
libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site. Make sure the PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not sent in clear text to the LDAP server. I've been unable to get TLS certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback on how to get this working. Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline caching until bug #485282 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one currently in /etc/nscd.conf. The changes are in the fields reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the instructions I found in the LDAP for Mobile Laptops instructions by Flyn Computing. 
	debug-level		0
	reload-count		unlimited
	paranoia		no
	enable-cache		passwd		yes
	positive-time-to-live	passwd		2592000
	negative-time-to-live	passwd		20
	suggested-size		passwd		211
	check-files		passwd		yes
	persistent		passwd		yes
	shared			passwd		yes
	max-db-size		passwd		33554432
	auto-propagate		passwd		yes
	enable-cache		group		yes
	positive-time-to-live	group		2592000
	negative-time-to-live	group		20
	suggested-size		group		211
	check-files		group		yes
	persistent		group		yes
	shared			group		yes
	max-db-size		group		33554432
	auto-propagate		group		yes
	enable-cache		hosts		no
	positive-time-to-live	hosts		2592000
	negative-time-to-live	hosts		20
	suggested-size		hosts		211
	check-files		hosts		yes
	persistent		hosts		yes
	shared			hosts		yes
	max-db-size		hosts		33554432
	enable-cache		services	yes
	positive-time-to-live	services	2592000
	negative-time-to-live	services	20
	suggested-size		services	211
	check-files		services	yes
	persistent		services	yes
	shared			services	yes
	max-db-size		services	33554432
While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf automatically like the one provided in bug #496915, the file content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the directory service on the machine. /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally look like this: 
passwd:         files ldap
group:          files ldap
shadow:         files ldap
hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
networks:       files
protocols:      files
services:       files
ethers:         files
rpc:            files
netgroup:       files ldap
The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group, shadow and netgroup. With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home directory created and have the password as well as user and group attributes cached. LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have problems doing proper caching, I've seen suggestions and recipes to use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the LDAP database is available. I have not tested such setup, because I discovered sssd. LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the sssd package from Redhat. It is part of the FreeIPA project to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux machines. The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and libpam-ccreds. It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS. Version 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010. Because the sssd package was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and version 1.2 is now in testing. These packages need to be installed and configured to get the roaming setup I want 
libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating /etc/sssd/sssd.conf. 
[sssd]
config_file_version = 2
reconnection_retries = 3
sbus_timeout = 30
services = nss, pam
domains = INTERN
[nss]
filter_groups = root
filter_users = root
reconnection_retries = 3
[pam]
reconnection_retries = 3
[domain/INTERN]
enumerate = false
cache_credentials = true
id_provider = ldap
auth_provider = ldap
chpass_provider = ldap
ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
ldap_tls_reqcert = never
ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
I got the same problem here with certificate checking. Had to set "ldap_tls_reqcert = never" to get it working. With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to modify it manually. If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.

19 June 2010

Torsten Werner: Results from the Debian Community Poll

I have announced the Debian Community Poll in my former blog post. I have closed the poll today and I will start publishing its results now.
What is the codename of the current stable release?This is the only compulsory question with the intention to block spammers. The correct codename is Lenny but I have accepted almost any answer that is somehow related to Debian. Version numbers, names from Sarge to Experimental, even well known codenames and version numbers from Ubuntu have been counted as correct. 22 partipants answered wrongly and their submissions got removed from the result set. A whopping number of 3258 submissions have been accepted and get analyzed now. Thanks to all participants!
How long have you been using Debian?

On what kind of hardware are you using Debian?
Multiple answers are allowed for this question and that is why the values do not sum up to 100%.
  • 80.5% are using Debian on the desktop
  • 62.4% on the server
  • 56.9% on the notebook
  • 21.7% on the netbook
  • 11.6% on embedded device(s)
  • 3.2% on other device(s)
The following other devices have been mentioned: smartphone, virtual machine, nettop, NAS, HTPC, workstation, pendrive, live cd, cluster, thin client, router, rocket flight computer, ibm mainframe, and automatic bar tender.

Do you contribute to Debian?
  • 50.0% choose answer #5: I don't contribute on a regular base.
  • 31.2% choose answer #4: I'm regularly helping other Debian users.
  • 8.0% choose other (see below) or simply did not answer
  • 4.9% choose answer #3: I'm regularly contributing to Debian packages without uploading them by myself.
  • 4.5% choose answer #1: I'm a Debian developer.
  • 1.4% choose answer #2: I'm a Debian maintainer.
The following other answers have been provided:
  • upstream developer or contributor
  • translator
  • bug reporter
  • advocator
  • former DD or DM
  • prospective DD or DM
  • mirror maintainer
  • package/installer tester
  • documentation writer
  • donator or debconf sponsor
  • debconf organizer or helper

How do you think about the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG)?
  • 46.0% choose answer #2: I like the DFSG but it is not the most important reason for using Debian.
  • 36.6% choose answer #1: The DFSG is very important to me. I could live with many changes in Debian but I would be very upset if Debian would allow non-free software into its main component in the future.
  • 10.1% choose answer #3: I don't know.
  • 4.9% choose answer #4: I don't care.
  • 2.4% did not answer.

Are you using Debian derived distributions, too?
Multiple answers are allowed for this question and that is why the values do not sum up to 100%. There were a lot of different answers but the most frequent are:
  • 47.1%: Ubuntu (Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu)
  • 40.8%: no answer; this was the only way to say that someone does not use a derived distribution
  • 11.0%: other (see below)
  • 7.0%: damn small linux
  • 4.8%: Sidux
  • 4.3%: grml (juxlala)
  • 2.2%: Knoppix
  • 1.6%: ELive
  • 1.4%: Maemo
The other answer includes the following distributions: 64studio, ALT Linux, arch linux, ArtistX, BackTrack, BRLix, Canaima GNU/Linux, catix, cdlinux.pl, CloneZilla, CrunchBang, Custom, ddwrt, debian arm userspace for zipit z2, DebXO (?), DreamLinux, Easy Peasy, eb4, eeebuntu, EMC2 Ubuntu (linuxcnc.org), Emdebian, Estrella Roja, Fedora, Finnix, Gentoo, gNewSense, Hackable:1, Kanotix, Kuliax, LFS and CLFS, LinEx, Linux Mint, live CDs, live-helper, Mepis antix, Musix, My own LiveCD, Mythbuntu, OpenInkpot, openwrt, paipix gnu, Parsix, Peppermint, personal debian derived, proxmox, Puppy, PureOS, qtopia, SHR, simplyMEPIS, Skolelinux, slackware, SymphonyOS, Toutou, Trisquel, tty GNU/Linux, UHU Linux, Univention Corporate Server, vinux, Voyage, Vyatta, whiite, Xandros, Xarnoppix. Not all of them are derived from Debian.

- to be continued -

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