Midterm evaluations have already passed and I guess we have also reached a milestone since last week I finished working on the copyright tracker and started the patch tracker. Here's the list of my reports on soc-coordination for those interested

• week #1
• week #2
• week #3
• week #4
• week #5
• week #6
• week #7

Copyright tracker status Most of the functionalities of the copyright tracker are already merged. Specifically navigating in the tracker, rendering the machine readable licenses, API functionalities such as obtaining the license of a file searching by checksum or by a package / version / path or obtaining the licenses of many files at once and their respective views. Some more functionalities are still under review such as filling the database with copyright related information at update time, using the database to answer the aforementioned requests, license statistics in the spirit of the Debsources ones and exporting a license in SPDX format. Its going to be pretty exciting when those pull requests are going to be merged since the copyright tracker will be full and complete! Meanwhile I started working on the patch tracker. Patch tracker My second task is the implementation of a patch tracker. This feature existed in Debian but unfortunately died recently. I have already started revising the functionalities of the old patch tracker, started identifying target users, creating use stories and cases. Those should help me list the desired functionalities of the tracker, imagine the structure of the blueprint and start writing code to that end. It is going to be a pretty exciting run of 1 month doing this as my knowledge on the Debian packaging system is not that good just yet. I hope that until Debconf some of the functionalities of the patch tracker are going to be ready. Debconf My request for sponsorship for Debconf was accepted and I am pretty excited since this is going to be my first Debconf attendance. I am looking forward meeting my mentors (Zack and Matthieu), the fellow student working on Debsources (Clemux) as well as a lot of other people I happen to chat occasionaly during this summer. I ll arrive on Friday 14th and leave on Sunday 23.

The first 4 weeks have been really great. I had the chance to work on the new webapp, the copyright tracker. Here are my first 4 reports for the weeks:

• week #1
• week #2
• week #3
• week #4

Summary During these weeks i completed the navigation (by prefix, list of versions etc) for the copyright tracker, the license rendering and the API for searching by checksum and by package/version/filename. Still under review the batch API (request many files at once) and the the respective views for the API. In the following weeks I ll work on the database and the plugins to mine license information on update time. Experience The experience i accumulate every week is immense. During the review process of my code i receive great feedback from zack, matthieu, and jpleau. It is a great chance for everyone to improve his/hers coding skills. At the university we barely get any feedback on our code, let alone communicate directly with professors to find the best solution for a given problem. I think it gets development in another level. For example at the university we use git/mercurial for our projects, although we don't really pay attention at commit messages and we marginally make use of these tools besides 'commit pull push'. During the last weeks i had the chance to use far more commands in order to squash amend rebase commits to have a beautiful and useful log history! And this is just a minor example. All in all I think it is a great introduction to the free/open source community for somebody, like me, who has been for years only a user and couldn't find the opportunity to contribute! And don't get me wrong, gsoc is not only about coding skills. At least for myself having the chance to get just a small taste of how the Debian community works, gets organised, get things done (!) is somehow priceless! TDD I have finally understood why test driven development is so powerful. As i am advancing in the project i am sometimes obliged to retouch some areas, refactor pieces of code. Having a great test suite that keeps you on track about the changes, and possible outages in advance is pretty powerful. What is coming I feel the project is on the right path. Both clemux (fellow gsoc student working on debsources) and me are advancing in a productive pace. I hope that soon enough the copyright Blueprint will be completed (most notable pending functionalities are the plugins-hooks to mine the licenses at update time, introduction of at least another license oracle possible ninka, statistics) so that everyone can take profit of the new tools provided by DebSources. Although we haven't talked much about it the patch tracker should also come into the play sooner rather than later. Stay tuned!

The first 4 weeks have been really great. I had the chance to work on the new webapp, the copyright tracker. Here are my first 4 reports for the weeks:

• week #1
• week #2
• week #3
• week #4

Summary During these weeks i completed the navigation (by prefix, list of versions etc) for the copyright tracker, the license rendering and the API for searching by checksum and by package/version/filename. Still under review the batch API (request many files at once) and the the respective views for the API. In the following weeks I ll work on the database and the plugins to mine license information on update time. Experience The experience i accumulate every week is immense. During the review process of my code i receive great feedback from zack, matthieu, and jpleau. It is a great chance for everyone to improve his/hers coding skills. At the university we barely get any feedback on our code, let alone communicate directly with professors to find the best solution for a given problem. I think it gets development in another level. For example at the university we use git/mercurial for our projects, although we don't really pay attention at commit messages and we marginally make use of these tools besides 'commit pull push'. During the last weeks i had the chance to use far more commands in order to squash amend rebase commits to have a beautiful and useful log history! And this is just a minor example. All in all I think it is a great introduction to the free/open source community for somebody, like me, who has been for years only a user and couldn't find the opportunity to contribute! And don't get me wrong, gsoc is not only about coding skills. At least for myself having the chance to get just a small taste of how the Debian community works, gets organised, get things done (!) is somehow priceless! TDD I have finally understood why test driven development is so powerful. As i am advancing in the project i am sometimes obliged to retouch some areas, refactor pieces of code. Having a great test suite that keeps you on track about the changes, and possible outages in advance is pretty powerful. What is coming I feel the project is on the right path. Both clemux (fellow gsoc student working on debsources) and me are advancing in a productive pace. I hope that soon enough the copyright Blueprint will be completed (most notable pending functionalities are the plugins-hooks to mine the licenses at update time, introduction of at least another license oracle possible ninka, statistics) so that everyone can take profit of the new tools provided by DebSources. Although we haven't talked much about it the patch tracker should also come into the play sooner rather than later. Stay tuned!

Debian and FLOSS community don't only occupy coding developers. They occupy people who write news, who talk about FLOSS, who help on booths and conferences, who create artistic forms of the community and so many others that contribute in countless ways. A lady, that is doing many of that is Francesca Ciceri, known in Debian as MadameZou. She is non-packaging Debian Developer, a fearless warrior for diversity and a zombie fan. Although it sounds intimidating, she is deep caring and great human being. So, what has MadaZou to tell us? Who are you? My name is Francesca and I'm totally flattered by your intro. The fearless warrior part may be a bit exaggerated, though. What have you done and what are you currently working on in FLOSS world? I've been a Debian contributor since late 2009. My journey in Debian has touched several non-coding areas: from translation to publicity, from videoteam to www. I've been one of the www.debian.org webmasters for a while, a press officer for the Project as well as an editor for DPN. I've dabbled a bit in font packaging, and nowadays I'm mostly working as a Front Desk member. Setup of your main machine? Wow, that's an intimate question! Lenovo Thinkpad, Debian testing. Describe your current most memorable situation as FLOSS member? Oh, there are a few. One awesome, tiring and very satisfying moment was during the release of Squeeze: I was member of the publicity and the www teams at the time, and we had to pull a 10 hours of team work to put everything in place. It was terrible and exciting at the same time. I shudder to think at the amount of work required from ftpmaster and release team during the release. Another awesome moment was my first Debconf: I was so overwhelmed by the sense of belonging in finally meeting all these people I've been worked remotely for so long, and embarassed by my poor English skills, and overall happy for just being there... If you are a Debian contributor I really encourage you to participate to Debian events, be they small and local or as big as DebConf: it really is like finally meeting family. Some memorable moments from Debian conferences? During DC11, the late nights with the "corridor cabal" in the hotel, chatting about everything. A group expedition to watch shooting stars in the middle of nowhere, during DC13. And a very memorable videoteam session: it was my first time directing and everything that could go wrong, went wrong (including the speaker deciding to take a walk outside the room, to demonstrate something, out of the cameras range). It was a disaster, but also fun: at the end of it, all the video crew was literally in stitches. But there are many awesome moments, almost too many to recall. Each conference is precious on that regard: for me the socializing part is extremely important, it's what cements relationships and help remote work go smoothly, and gives you motivation to volunteer in tasks that sometimes are not exactly fun. You are known as Front Desk member for DebConf's - what work does it occupy and why do you enjoy doing it? I'm not really a member of the team: just one of Nattie's minions! You had been also part of DebConf Video team - care to share insights into video team work and benefits it provides to Debian Project? The video team work is extremely important: it makes possible for people not attending to follow the conference, providing both live streaming and recording of all talks. I may be biased, but I think that DebConf video coverage and the high quality of the final recordings are unrivaled among FLOSS conferences - especially since it's all volunteer work and most of us aren't professional in the field. During the conference we take shifts in filming the various talks - for each talk we need approximately 4 volunteers: two camera operators, a sound mixer and the director. After the recording, comes the boring part: reviewing, cutting and sometimes editing the videos. It's a long process and during the conference, you can sometimes spot the videoteam members doing it at night in the hacklab, exhausted after a full day of filming. And then, the videos are finally ready to be uploaded, for your viewing pleasure. During the last years this process has become faster thanks to the commitment of many volunteers, so that now you have to wait only few days, sometimes a week, after the end of the conference to be able to watch the videos. I personally love to contribute to the videoteam: you get to play with all that awesome gear and you actually make a difference for all the people who cannot attend in person. You are also non-packaging Debian Developer - how does that feel like? Feels awesome! The mere fact that the Debian Project decided - in 2009 via a GR - to recognize the many volunteers who contribute without doing packaging work is a great show of inclusiveness, in my opinion. In a big project like Debian just packaging software is not enough: the final result relies heavily on translators, sysadmins, webmasters, publicity people, event organizers and volunteers, graphic artists, etc. It's only fair that these contributions are deemed as valuable as the packaging, and to give an official status to those people. I was one of the firsts non-uploading DD, four years ago, and for a long time it was just really an handful of us. In the last year I've seen many others applying for the role and that makes me really happy: it means that finally the contributors have realized that they deserve to be an official part of Debian and to have "citizenship rights" in the project. You were the leading energy on Debian's diversity statement - what gave you the energy to drive into it? It seemed the logical conclusion of the extremely important work that Debian Women had done in the past. When I first joined Debian, in 2009, as a contributor, I was really surprised to find a friendly community and to not be discriminated on account of my gender or my lack of coding skills. I may have been just lucky, landing in particularly friendly teams, but my impression is that the project has been slowly but unequivocally changed by the work of Debian Women, who raised first the need for inclusiveness and the awareness about the gender problem in Debian. I don't remember exactly how I stumbled upon the fact that Debian didn't have a Diversity Statement, but at first I was very surprised by it. I asked zack (Stefano Zacchiroli), who was DPL at the time, and he encouraged me to start a public discussion about it, sending out a draft - and helped me all the way along the process. It took some back and forth in the debian-project mailing list, but the only thing needed was actually just someone to start the process and try to poke the discussion when it stalled - the main blocker was actually about the wording of the statement. I learned a great deal from that experience, and I think it changed completely my approach in things like online discussions and general communication within the project. At the end of the day, what I took from that is a deep respect for who participated and the realization that constructive criticism does require certainly a lot of work for all parts involved, but can happen. As for the statement in itself: these things are as good as you keep them alive with best practices, but I think that are better stated explicitly rather than being left unsaid. You are involved also with another Front Desk, the Debian's one which is involved with Debian's New Members process - what are tasks of that FD and how rewarding is the work on it? The Debian Front Desk is the team that runs the New Members process: we receive the applications, we assign the applicant a manager, and we verify the final report. In the last years the workflow has been simplified a lot by the re-design of the nm.debian.org website, but it's important to keep things running smoothly so that applicants don't have too lenghty processes or to wait too much before being assigned a manager. I've been doing it for a less more than a month, but it's really satisfying to usher people toward DDship! So this is how I feel everytime I send a report over to DAM for an applicant to be accepted as new Debian Developer: How do you see future of Debian development? Difficult to say. What I can say is that I'm pretty sure that, whatever the technical direction we'll take, Debian will remain focused on excellence and freedom. What are your future plans in Debian, what would you like to work on? Definetely bug wrangling: it's one of the thing I do best and I've not had a chance to do that extensively for Debian yet. Why should developers and users join Debian community? What makes Debian a great and happy place? We are awesome, that's why. We are strongly committed to our Social Contract and to users freedom, we are steadily improving our communication style and trying to be as inclusive as possible. Most of the people I know in Debian are perfectionists and outright brilliant in what they do. Joining Debian means working hard on something you believe, identifying with a whole project, meeting lots of wonderful people and learning new things. It ca be at times frustrating and exhausting, but it's totally worth it. You have been involved in Mozilla as part of OPW - care to share insights into Mozilla, what have you done and compare it to Debian? That has been a very good experience: it meant have the chance to peek into another community, learn about their tools and workflow and contribute in different ways. I was an intern for the Firefox QA team and their work span from setting up specific test and automated checks on the three version of Firefox (Stable, Aurora, Nightly) to general bug triaging. My main job was bug wrangling and I loved the fact that I was a sort of intermediary between developers and users, someone who spoke both languages and could help them work together. As for the comparison, Mozilla is surely more diverse than Debian: both in contributors and users. I'm not only talking demographic, here, but also what tools and systems are used, what kind of skills people have, etc. That meant reach some compromises with myself over little things: like having to install a proprietary tool used for the team meetings (and getting crazy in order to make it work with Debian) or communicating more on IRC than on mailing lists. But those are pretty much the challenges you have to face whenever you go out of your comfort zone . You are also volunteer of the Organization for Transformative Works - what is it, what work do you do and care to share some interesting stuff? OTW is a non profit organization to preserve fan history and cultures, created by fans. Its work range from legal advocacy and lobbying for fair use and copyright related issues, developing and maintaining AO3 -- a huge fanwork archive based on open-source software --, to the production of a peer-reviewed academic journal about fanworks. I'm an avid fanfiction reader and writer, and joining the OTW volunteers seemed a good way to give back to the community - in true Debian fashion . As a volunteer, I work for the Translation Committee: we are more than a hundred people - divided in several language teams - translating the OTW website, the interface of AO3 archive, newsletter, announcements and news posts. We have a orga-wide diversity statement, training for recruits, an ever growing set of procedures to smooth our workflow, monthly meetings and movie nights. It's an awesome group to work with. I'm deeply invested in this kind of work: both for the awesomeness of OTW people and for the big role that fandom and fanworks have in my life. What I find amazing is that the same concept we - as in the FLOSS ecosystem - apply to software can be applied to cultural production: taking a piece of art you love and expand, remix, explore it. Just for the fun of it. Protect and encourage the right to play in this cultural sandbox is IMO essential for our society. Most of the participants in the fandom come from marginalised group or minorities whose point of view is usually not part of the mainstream narratives. This makes the act of writing, remixing and re-interpreting a story not only a creative exercise but a revolutionary one. As Elizabeth Minkel says: "My preferred explanation is the idea that the vast majority of what we watch is from the male perspective authored, directed, and filmed by men, and mostly straight white men at that. Fan fiction gives women and other marginalised groups the chance to subvert that perspective, to fracture a story and recast it in her own way." In other words, "fandom is about putting debate and conversation back into an artistic process". On a personal side - you do a lot of DIY, handmade works. What have you done, what joy does it bring to you and share with us a picture of it? I like to think that the hacker in me morphs in a maker whenever I can actually manipulate stuff. The urge to explore ways of doing things, of create and change is probably the same. I've been blessed with curiousity and craftiness and I love to learn new DIY techniques: I cannot describe it, really, but if I don't make something for a while I actually feel antsy. I need to create stuff. Nowadays, I'm mostly designing and sewing clothes - preferably reproductions of dresses from the 40s and the 50s - and I'm trying to make a living of that. It's a nice challenge: there's a lot of research involved, as I always try to be historically accurate in design, sewing tecniques and material, and many hours of careful attention to details. I'm right in the process of make photoshoots for most of my period stuff, so I'll share with you something different: a t-shirt refashion done with the DebConf11 t-shirt! (here's the tutorial)

my setup, take #2 Look Ma, I've been interviewed by The Setup, a popular blog with "interviews asking people from all walks of life what they use to get the job done"; so I now sport a fancy http://stefano.zacchiroli.usesthis.com too. While there is overlap with my previous take on my setup, the questions are different so most of the content is novel. In particular, I quite enjoyed the question about what would be my "dream setup", and indulged in free software/hardware desiderata. Many thanks to Daniel Bogan for running the blog and kudos for his editing work: while it's just a detail, such an abundance and quality of link titles is not easy to come by on the Web.

In the middle of OPW internship I originally thought taking part in FOSSOPW is a great chance to lift my coding skills and I shouldn t miss it. As time passes by, I now have a new thought towards it. # 1 It do improves your coding skill. Zack, Matthieu and I often have discussions on coding style. For example, once Zack said, For code like this, you should explicitly use an if/else clause, not if-return. I was totally unaware of this sort of issue. Actually I even didn t know how I should call this problem. Matthieu gave me a detailed FYI link on this in no time. Besides, my completeness of thinking is also trained. Recently, I was fixing a HTTP GET Method ?suite=suite-name issue. It s a trivial task. And you know most trivial tasks require lots of scattered modification on the source code base. I did have fixed most places, such as the pages of /src/packagename and /search/ . Zack did a thorough review, and pointed out that the pages rendered by /prefix has some malformed urls in the HTML. Waiiiit, I should have noticed it. But somehow I missed it. Maybe because my mind was wandering at that time? This made me think, I shall have a thorough view of what I should do before getting my hands dirty. Or more preferably, if I could write down what I exactly want to achieve before coding, then silly problems definitely wouldn t occur. This may sound a little bit like TDD. ;). # 2 It makes you look like a (not-that-good) ninja. I use a macbook. It s not my fault! I ve tried several times, but I never successfully find a laptop that is not capable of boiling eggs when running Debian. (and especially KDE+Debian). So I have no way but switched to OSX. The development of Debsources happens on a remote Ubuntu LTS (now Debian SID, haha) virtual machine. Of course I have to install all the dependency on my own, e.g., Postgres, set up port-forwarding, e.g., ssh -D, write automate shell scripts, e.g., dash, but more importantly, I am forced to live under the dark terminal with no GUI. You know the feeling when pain hurts? Yes, exactly! But I survived. How shall I call myself now? A dedicated with-a-lot-of-useless-plugin-installed vimmer? A fond-of-fancy-window tmux-er? Yep, both. I finally found a comfort zone under the black-white-blinking screen. I wonder how people feel when they see a girl hanging out in the library, facing a full-screened black console, typing at a speed of 140wpm (Yeah, I am kidding). I don t know, but please don t call me a geek. Show me your respect, I am a ninja! # 3 It tells you communication is the most important. I bet anyone who has participated in a group-based project would understand what I mean. For one perspective, communication helps to eliminate misunderstanding. So I won t doing some useless stuff for all day and finally find out that it totally doesn t meet the requirement. On the other hand, it speeds up your learning process. I often have problems on git. So in the email I will complain if I mess up with the git repo. After a short while, my dear mentors will reply in detail on how to correctly do the git stuff. My OPW journey is cool! ;).

R.I.P. Bernard Maris and his thoughts on research and the sharing economy via Le Monde, 16 Sep 2014: Le Monde: Que devrait tre une politique de gauche? Une r gulation du capitalisme ou une politique de rupture radicale avec ce syst me conomique? B.M.: [ ] Nous allons vers une conomie de partage, de la gratuit , du logiciel libre en effet. La figure centrale de demain sera le chercheur qui, lorsqu'il donne quelque chose la communaut , ne le perd pas. Le chercheur r pond aux besoins fondamentaux de l'homme: la cr ation, la curiosit , le changement, le progr s. Il est oblig de coop rer. La coop ration canalise la violence, que le lib ralisme esp rait canaliser par le doux commerce! L'au-del du capitalisme sera une conomie solidaire et fraternelle. Aujourd'hui, la question incontournable porte sur la nature du travail.[ ] translate to English (via Google Translate)

The Tropy In this period, I have tackled several bugs and got them finally about to be merged in the codebase. Namely, they are:
#761121 allow symbolic links within same version, #761861 override detected language type. I also spent some time on making debsouces runnable on sor.debian.org.
But still there is some db related problem on it. I am not quite familiar with psql, and kinda at a loss as what to do. Zack said he would take it over and I shall focus on what really I likes. Cool. For some non-code tasks, I have a detailed read on machine-readable debian/copyright . The other task is on flask blueprint . The idea of flask blueprint , as far as I am concerned, is sort of what apps are in django. Zack has drafted a specification on debian/copyright which serves as the goal of copyright.debian.net. Combined with the above reading knowledge, and with the help of Flask expert matthieu, I will get my hands dirty in the comming weeks to create a fantastic new site, aka, copyright.d.n. Stay tuned. some thought I did spend some time learning how to use git, and read quite a lot of materials. But, I shamely forgot most of them. So when I am frequently using git these days, I feel kinda incompetent and sometimes awkward. I am thinking now, maybe I shall stop overlearn some technology that I might never use. Only real usage and practice could help me get comfort with those tools. Overlearn something which I am not currently using and either won t in the future might just be a waste of time. and finally, I spent a great Christmas. Wish everyone happy, and merry Christmas!

Down the rabbit hole Starting from this week, my OPW period officially begins.
I am thankful and very grateful to this chance. One for the reason I can get an opportunity to contribute to a beneficial, working, meaningful, real-world software. The other seemingly reason is, I can learn much experience and design philosophy from my mentors zack and matthieu. :) This week my fix is on, bug #763921. It s basically making the folder page rendering providing more information, specifically the ls -l format. This offers information such as filetype, permission, size, etc. I learned some new knowledge about man 2 stat , and also got more familiar(actually confident) with front end stuff, namely css. I also get myself familiar with the python test (coverage). Next week, I will try to increase the test coverage a bit. Tests is an essential part of software. It ensures the correctness and robustness. And more importantly, by making tests, we can easily debug the software. The so called, The trello cards of next week is interesting. (in case you dunno the site, it s here:http://trello.com Let s see it.

Shuttleworth Foundation Flash Grant I'm glad to announce that I've been awarded a 5,000 USD "Flash Grant" by the Shuttleworth Foundation. Flash grants are an interesting funding model, which I've just learned about. You don't need to apply for them. Rather, you get nominated by current fellows, and then selected and approached by the foundation for funding. The grant amount is smaller than actual fellowships, but it comes with very few strings attached: furthering open knowledge (which is the foundation's core mission) and being transparent about how you use the money. I'm lucky enough to already have a full-time job to pay my bills, and I do my Free Software activism mostly in my spare time. So I plan to use the money not to pay my bills, but rather to boost the parts of my Free Software activities that could benefit from some funding. I don't have a fully detailed budget yet but, tentatively: some money will go to fund Debsources development (by others), some into promoting my thoughts on the dark ages of Free Software, and maybe some into helping the upcoming release of Debian. I'll provide a public report at the end of the funding period (~6 months from now). I'd like to thank the Shuttleworth Foundation for the grant and foundation's fellow Jonas berg for making this possible.

Apparently, enough fellow developers have been foolish enough to nominate me as a prospective member of the Debian Technical Committee (CTTE), that I've been approached to formally accept/decline the nomination. (Accepted nominees would then go through a selection process and possibly proposed to the DPL for nomination.) I'm honored by the nominations and I thank the fellow developers that have thrown my name in the hat. But I've respectfully declined the nomination. Given my current involvement in an ongoing attempt to introduce a maximum term limit for CTTE membership, it would have been highly inappropriate for me to accept the nomination at this time. I have no doubt that the current CTTE and the DPL will fill the empty seats with worthy project members.

on perceived hysteria and silent sanity As you probably already know by now, the results of the Debian init system coupling general resolution (GR) look like this: Some random thoughts about them:

• The turnout has been the highest since 2010 DPL elections and the 2nd highest among all GRs (!= DPL elections) ever. The highest among all GRs dates back to 2004 and was about dropping non-free. In absolute terms this vote scores even better: it is the GR with the highest number of voters ever. Clearly there was a lot of interest within the project about this vote. The results appear to be as representative of the views of project members as we have been able to get in the second half of Debian history.
• There is a total ordering of options (which is not always the case with our voting system). Starting with the winning option, each option in the results beats every subsequent option. The winning option ("General resolution is not required") beats the runner-up ("Support for other init systems is recommended, i.e., "you SHOULD NOT require a specific init") by a large margin: 100 votes, ~20.7% of the voters. The winning options wins over further options by increasingly large margins: 173 votes (~35.8%) against "Packages may require specific init systems if maintainers decide" (the MAY option); 176 (~36.4%) against "Packages may not require a specific init system" (the MUST NOT option); 263 (~54.5%) against "Further discussion" (the "let's keep on flaming" option). While judging from Debian mailing lists and news sites you might have gotten the impression that the project was evenly split on init system matters, at least w.r.t. the matter on the ballot that doesn't seem to be the case.
• The winning option is not as crazy as its label might imply (voting to declare that the vote was not required? WTH?). What the winning option actually says is more articulated than that; quoting from the ballot (highlight mine): Regarding the subject of this ballot, the Project affirms that the procedures for decision making and conflict resolution are working adequately and thus a General Resolution is not required. With this GR the Debian Project affirms that the procedures we have used to decide the default init system for Jessie and to arbitrate the ensuing conflicts are just fine. People might flame and troll debian-devel as much as they want (actually, I'm pretty sure we would all like them to stop, but that matter wasn't on the ballot so you'll have to take my word for it). People might write blog posts and make headlines corroborating the impression that Debian is still being torn apart by ongoing init system battles. But this vote says instead that the large majority of project members thinks our decision making and conflict-arbitration procedures, which most prominently include the Debian Technical Committee, have served use "adequately" well over the past troubled months. That of course doesn't mean that everyone in Debian is happy about every single recent decision, otherwise we wouldn't have had this GR in the first place. But it does mean that we consider our procedures good enough to (a) avoid getting in their way with a project-wide vote, and (b) keep on trusting them for the foreseeable future.
• [ It is not the main focus of this post, but if you care specifically about the implications of this GR on systemd adoption in Debian, I recommend reading this excellent GR commentary by Russ Allbery. ]

My take home message is that we are experiencing a huge gap between the public perception of the state of Debian (both from within and from without the project) and the actual beliefs of the silent majority of people that make Debian with their work, day after day. In part this is old news. The most "senior" members of the project will remember that the topic of "vocal minorities vs silent majority" was a recurrent one in Debian 10+ years ago, when flames were periodically ravaging the project. Since then Debian has grown a lot though, and we are now part of a much larger and varied ecosystem. We are now at a scale at which there are plenty of FOSS "mass-media" covering daily what happens in Debian, inducing feedback loops with our own perception of ourselves which we do not fully grok yet. This is a new factor in the perception gap. This situation is not intrinsically bad, nor there is blame to assign here: after all influential bloggers, news sites, etc., just do their job. And their attention also testifies of the huge interest that there is around Debian and our choices. But we still need to adapt and learn to take perceived hysteria with a pinch (or two) of salt. It might just be time for our decennial check-up. Time to remind ourselves that our ways of doing things might in fact still be much more sane than sometimes we tend to believe. We went on 10+ years ago, after monumental flames. It looks like we are now ready to move on again, putting The Era of the Great systemd Histeria behind us.

Jingjie Jiang selected as OPW intern for Debsources I'm glad to announce that Jingjie Jiang, AKA sophiejjj, has been selected as intern to work on Debsources as part of the FOSS Outreach Program (formerly known as Outreach Program for Women, or OPW). I'll co-mentor her work together with Matthieu Caneill. I've just added sophiejjj's blog to Planet Debian, so you will soon hear about her work in the Debian blogosphere. I've been impressed by the interest that the Debsources proposal in this round of OPW has spawned. Together with Matthieu I have interacted with more than a dozen OPW applicants. Many of them have contributed useful patches during the application period, and those patches have been in production at http://sources.debian.net since quite a while now (see the commit log for details). A special mention goes to Akshita Jha, who has shown a lot of determination in tackling both simple and complex issues affecting Debsources. I hope there will be other chances to work with her in the future. OPW internship will begin December 9th, fasten your seat belts for a boost in Debsources development!

Debian participation in Italy's CAD68 committee (The initial policy change discussed in this document is a couple of years old now, but it took about the same time to be fully implemented, and AFAIK the role Debian played in it has not been documented yet.) In October 2012 the Italian government, led at the time by Mario Monti, did something rather innovative, at least for a country that is not usually ahead of its time in the area of information technology legislation. They decided to change the main law (the "CAD", for Codice dell'Amministrazione Digitale) that regulates the acquisition of software at all levels of the public administration (PA), giving an explicit preference to the acquisition of Free Software. The new formulation of article 68 of the CAD first lists some macro criteria (e.g., TCO, adherence to open standards, security support, etc.) that public administrations in Italy shall use as ranking criteria in software-related calls for tenders. Then, and this is the most important part, the article affirms that the acquisition of proprietary software solutions is permitted only if it is impossible to choose Free Software solutions instead; or, alternatively, to choose software solutions that have already being acquired (and paid for) by the PA in the past, reusing preexisting software. The combined effect of these two provisions is that all new software acquisitions by PAs in Italy will be Free Software, unless it is motivated in writing, challengable by a judge that it was impossible to do otherwise. Isn't it great? It is, except that such a law is not necessarily easy to adhere to in practice, especially for small public administrations (e.g., municipalities of a few hundred people, not uncommon in Italy) which might have very little clue about software in general, and even less so about Free Software. This is why the government also tasked the relevant Italian agency to provide guidelines on how to choose software in a way that conforms with the new formulation of article 68. The agency decided to form a committee to work on the guidelines (because you always need a committee, right? ). To my surprise, the call for participation to be part of the committee explicitly listed representatives of Free Software communities as privileged software stakeholders that they wanted to have on the committee kudos to the agency for that. (The Italian wording on the call was: Costituir titolo di preferenza rivestire un ruolo di [ ] referenti di community del software a codice sorgente aperto.) Therefore, after various prods by fellow European Free Software activists that were aware of the ongoing change in legislation, I applied to be a volunteer CAD68 committee member, got selected, and ended up working over a period of about 6 months (March-September 2013) to help the agency writing the new software acquisition guidelines. Logistically, it hasn't been entirely trivial, as the default meeting place was in Rome, I live in Paris, and the agency didn't really have a travel budget for committee members. That's why I've sought sponsorship from Debian, offering to represent Debian views within the committee; Lucas kindly agreed to my request. So what did I do on behalf of Debian as a committee member during those months? Most of my job has been some sort of consulting on how community-driven Free Software projects like Debian work, on how the software they produce can be relied upon and contributed to, and more generally on how the PA can productively interact with such projects. In particular, I've been happy to work on the related work section of the guidelines, ensuring they point to relevant documents such as the French government guidelines on how to adopt Free Software (AKA circulaire Ayrault). I've also drafted the guidelines section on Free Software directories, ensuring that important resources such as FSF's Free Software Directory are listed as starting points for PAs that looking for software solutions for specific needs. Another part of my job has been ensuring that the guidelines do not end up betraying the principle of Free Software preference that is embodied in article 68. A majority of committee members came from a Free Software background, so that might not seem a difficult goal to accomplish. But it is important to notice that: (a) the final editor of the guidelines is the agency itself, not the committee, so having a "pro-Free Software" majority within the committee doesn't mean much per se; and (b) lobbying from the "pro-proprietary software" camp did happen, as it is entirely natural in these cases. In this respect I'm happy with the result: I do believe that the software selection process recommended by the guidelines, finally published in January 2014, upholds the Free Software preference principle of article 68. I credit both the agency and the non-ambiguity of the law (on this specific point) for that result. All in all, this has been a positive experience for me. It has reaffirmed my belief that Debian is a respected, non-partisan political actor of the wider software/ICT ecosystem. This experience has also given me a chance to be part of country-level policy-making, which has been very instructive on how and why good ideas might take a while to come into effect and influence citizen lives. Speaking of which, I'm now looking forward to the first alleged violations of article 68 in Italy, and how they will be dealt with. Abundant popcorn will certainly be needed. Links & press If you want to know more about this topic, I've collected below links to resources that have documented, in various languages, the publication of the CAD68 guidelines.

• official material:
  • announcement (it) by the agency
  • guidelines (.pdf, it)
• press releases:
  • FSFE press release (en), also covered by LWN (en)
  • April press release (fr), also in english
• press/blog coverage:
  • on Joinup (en), European Commission blog dedicated to Free Software adoption in Europe, with comments by yours truly and Carlo Piana
  • on OpenSource.com (en), popular blog for FOSS-related topics
  • by Carlo Piana (it), fellow member of the CAD68 committee, representing KDE and FSFE
  • on Punto Informatico (it), popular Italian tech blog
  • on Apogeo online (it), blog of a popular Italian publisher of IT books
  • on Agenda Digitale EU (it), blog dedicated to digital innovation in the Italian PA
  • by Simone Aliprandi (en), lawyer who followed closely the work of CAD68 committee
• interviews:
  • on My Solution (it), by yours truly
  • radio interview (it) by yours truly for Caterpillar, RAI Radio 2

je.code(); promoting programming (in French) jecode.org is a nice initiative by, among others, my fellow Debian developer and university professor Martin Quinson. The goal of jecode.org is to raise awareness about the importance of learning the basics of programming, for everyone in modern societies. jecode.org targets specifically francophone children (hence the name, for "I code"). I've been happy to contribute to the initiative with my thoughts on why learning to program is so important today, joining the happy bunch of "codeurs" on the web site. If you read French, you can find them reposted below. If you also write French, you might want to contribute your thoughts on the matter. How? By forking the project of course!

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Pourquoi codes-tu ? Tout d'abord, je code parce que c'est une activit passionnante, dr le, et qui permet de prouver le plaisir de cr er. Deuxi mement, je code pour automatiser les taches r p titives qui peuvent rendre p nibles nos vies num riques. Un ordinateur est con u exactement pour cela: lib rer les tres humains des taches stupides, pour leur permettre de se concentrer sur les taches qui ont besoin de l'intelligence humaine pour tre r solues. Mais je code aussi pour le pur plaisir du hacking, i.e., trouver des utilisations originelles et inattendues pour des logiciels existants. Comment as-tu appris ? Compl tement au hasard, quand j' tais gamin. 7 ou 8 ans, je suis tomb dans la biblioth que municipale de mon petit village, sur un livre qui enseignait programmer en BASIC travers la m taphore du jeu de l'oie. partir de ce jour j'ai utilis le Commodore 64 de mon p re beaucoup plus pour programmer que pour les jeux vid o: coder est tellement plus dr le! Plus tard, au lyc e, j'ai pu appr cier la programmation structur e et les avantages normes qu'elle apporte par rapport aux GO TO du BASIC et je suis devenu un accro du Pascal. Le reste est venu avec l'universit et la d couverte du Logiciel Libre: la caverne d'Ali Baba du codeur curieux. Quel est ton langage pr f r ? J'ai plusieurs langages pr f r s. J'aime Python pour son minimalisme syntactique, sa communaut vaste et bien organis e, et pour l'abondance des outils et ressources dont il dispose. J'utilise Python pour le d veloppement d'infrastructures (souvent quip es d'interfaces Web) de taille moyenne/grande, surtout si j'ai envie des cr er une communaut de contributeurs autour du logiciel. J'aime OCaml pour son syst me de types et sa capacit de capturer les bonnes propri t s des applications complexes. Cela permet au compilateur d'aider norm ment les d veloppeur viter des erreurs de codage comme de conception. J'utilise aussi beaucoup Perl et le shell script (principalement Bash) pour l'automatisation des taches: la capacit de ces langages de connecter d'autres applications est encore in gal e. Pourquoi chacun devrait-il apprendre programmer ou tre initi ? On est de plus en plus d pendants des logiciels. Quand on utilise une lave-vaisselle, on conduit une voiture, on est soign dans un h pital, quand on communique sur un r seau social, ou on surfe le Web, nos activit s sont constamment ex cut es par des logiciels. Celui qui contr le ces logiciels contr le nos vies. Comme citoyens d'un monde qui est de plus en plus num rique, pour ne pas devenir des esclaves 2.0, nous devons pr tendre le contr le sur le logiciel qui nous entoure. Pour y parvenir, le Logiciel Libre---qui nous permet d'utiliser, tudier, modifier, reproduire le logiciel sans restrictions---est un ingr dient indispensable. Aussi bien qu'une vaste diffusion des comp tences en programmation: chaque bit de connaissance dans ce domaine nous rende tous plus libres.

The annual Debian developer meeting took place in Portland, Oregon, 23 to 31 August 2014. DebConf14 attendees participated in talks, discussions, workshops and programming sessions. Video teams captured a lot of the main talks and discussions for streaming for interactive attendees and for the Debian video archive. Between the video, presentations, and handouts the coverage came from the attendees in blogs, posts, and project updates. We ve gathered a few articles for your reading pleasure: Gregor Herrmann and a few members of the Debian Perl group had an informal unofficial pkg-perl micro-sprint and were very productive. Vincent Sanders shared an inspired gift in the form of a plaque given to Russ Allbery in thanks for his tireless work of keeping sanity in the Debian mailing lists. Pictures of the plaque and design scheme are linked in the post. Vincent also shared his experiences of the conference and hopes the organisers have recovered. Noah Meyerhans adventuring to Debian by train, (Inter)netted some interesting IPv6 data for future road and railwarriors. Hideki Yamane sent a gentle reminder for English speakers to speak more slowly. Daniel Pocock posted of GSoC talks at DebConf14, highlights include the Java Project Dependency Builder and the WebRTC JSCommunicator. Thomas Goirand gives us some insight into a working task list of accomplishments and projects he was able to complete at DebConf14, from the OpenStack discussion to tasksel talks, and completion of some things started last year at DebConf13. Antonio Terceiro blogged about debci and the Debian Continuous Integration project, Ruby, Redmine, and Noosfero. His post also shares the atmosphere of being able to interact directly with peers once a year. Stefano Zacchiroli blogged about a talk he did on debsources which now has its own HACKING file. Juliana Louback penned: DebConf 2014 and How I Became a Debian Contributor. Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph s in-depth summary of DebConf14 is a great read. She discussed Debian Validation & CI, debci and the Continuous Integration project, Automated Validation in Debian using LAVA, and Outsourcing webapp maintenance. Lucas Nussbaum by way of a blog post releases the very first version of Debian Trivia modelled after the TCP/IP Drinking Game. Fran ois Marier s shares additional information and further discussion on Outsourcing your webapp maintenance to Debian. Joachim Breitner gave a talk on Haskell and Debian, created a new tool for binNMUs for Haskell packages which runs via cron job. The output is available for Haskell and for OCaml, and he still had a small amount of time to go dancing. Jaldhar Harshad Vyas was not able to attend DebConf this year, but he did tune in to the videos made available by the video team and gives an insightful viewpoint to what was being seen. J r my Bobbio posted about Reproducible builds in Debian in his recap of DebConf14. One of the topics at hand involved defining a canonical path where packages must be built and a BOF discussion on reproducible builds from where the conversation moved to discussions in both Octave and Groff. New helpers dh_fixmtimes and dh_genbuildinfo were added to BTS. The .buildinfo format has been specified on the wiki and reviewed. Lots of work is being done in the project, interested parties can help with the TODO list or join the new IRC channel #debian-reproducible on irc.debian.org. Steve McIntyre posted a Summary from the d-i / debian-cd BoF at DC14, with some of the session video available online. Current jessie D-I needs some help with the testing on less common architectures and languages, and release scheduling could be improved. Future plans: Switching to a GUI by default for jessie, a default desktop and desktop choice, artwork, bug fixes and new architecture support. debian-cd: Things are working well. Improvement discussions are on selecting which images to make I.E. netinst, DVD, et al., debian-cd in progress with http download support, Regular live test builds, Other discussions and questions revolve around which ARM platforms to support, specially-designed images, multi-arch CDs, and cloud-init based images. There is also a call for help as the team needs help with testing, bug-handling, and translations. Holger Levsen reports on feedback about the feedback from his LTS talk at DebConf14. LTS has been perceived well, fits a demand, and people are expecting it to continue; however, this is not without a few issues as Holger explains in greater detail the lacking gatekeeper mechanisms, and how contributions are needed from finance to uploads. In other news the security-tracker is now fixed to know about old stable. Time is short for that fix as once jessie is released the tracker will need to support stable, oldstable which will be wheezy, and oldoldstable. Jonathan McDowell s summary of DebConf14 includes a fair perspective of the host city and the benefits of planning of a good DebConf14 location. He also talks about the need for facetime in the Debian project as it correlates with and improves everyone s ability to work together. DebConf14 also provided the chance to set up a hard time frame for removing older 1024 bit keys from Debian keyrings. Steve McIntyre posted a Summary from the State of the ARM BoF at DebConf14 with updates on the 3 current ports armel, armhf and arm64. armel which targets the ARM EABI soft-float ARMv4t processor may eventually be going away, while armhf which targets the ARM EABI hard-float ARMv7 is doing well as the cross-distro standard. Debian is has moved to a single armmp kernel flavour using Device Tree Blobs and should be able to run on a large range of ARMv7 hardware. The arm64 port recently entered the main archive and it is hoped to release with jessie with 2 official builds hosted at ARM. There is talk of laptop development with an arm64 CPU. Buildds and hardware are mentioned with acknowledgements for donated new machines, Banana Pi boards, and software by way of ARM s DS-5 Development Studio - free for all Debian Developers. Help is needed! Join #debian-arm on irc.debian.org and/or the debian-arm mailing list. There is an upcoming Mini-DebConf in November 2014 hosted by ARM in Cambridge, UK. Tianon Gravi posted about the atmosphere and contrast between an average conference and a DebConf. Joseph Bisch posted about meeting his GSOC mentors, attending and contributing to a keysigning event and did some work on debmetrics which is powering metrics.debian.net. Debmetrics provides a uniform interface for adding, updating, and viewing various metrics concerning Debian. Harlan Lieberman-Berg s DebConf Retrospective shared the feel of DebConf, and detailed some of the work on debugging a build failure, work with the pkg-perl team on a few uploads, and work on a javascript slowdown issue on codeeditor. Ana Guerrero L pez reflected on Ten years contributing to Debian.

debsources debbugs oh My ongoing quest for lowering the barrier for contributing to Debsources continues.
In this chapter:

• I've migrated bug reports from the previous ad-hoc text file in the Git repo to the Debian BTS, under the umbrella of the qa.debian.org pseudo-package.
  From now on this is the recommended (and documented) way of reporting bugs against http://sources.debian.net. Look ma, it also has one of those newfangled short URLs: http://deb.li/debsrcbugs!
• While at it, I've also properly tagged the current easy hacks on Debsources using the gift tag. There are definitely opportunities for new contributors there, and there might be more if you submit your own Debsources' pet peeves to the BTS. Again, mandatory mnemonic/short URL: http://deb.li/debsrceasy.

What's your excuse for not contributing to Debsources, again?

my setup, take #1 Among the various things I've catched up with during the summer, I've finally managed to set aside some time to answer a pending interview request for The [GNU/]Linux Setup: a blog run by Steven Ovadia that collects interviews about how people use GNU/Linux-based desktops. In the interview I discuss my day to day work-flow, from GNOME Shell to Mutt, from Emacs to Notmuch, and the various glue code tools I've written for integrating them. Enjoy! Feedback is most welcome.

Debconf14 was the first Debconf I attended. It was an awesome experience. Debconf14 started with a Meet and Greet before the Welcome Talk. I got to meet people and find out what they do for Debian. I also got to meet other GSoC students that I had only previously interacted with online. During the Meet and Greet I also met one of my mentors for GSoC, Zack. Later in the conference I met another of my mentors, Piotr. Previously I only interacted with Zack and Piotr online. On Monday we had the OpenPGP Keysigning. I got to meet people and exchange information so that we could later sign keys. Then on Tuesday I gave my talk about debmetrics as part of the larger GSoC talks. During the conference I mostly attended talks. Then on Wednesday we had the daytrip. I went hiking at Multnomah Falls, had lunch at Rooster Rock State Park, and then went to Vista House. Later in the conference, Zack and I did some work on debmetrics. We looked at the tests, which had some issues. I was able to fix most of the issues with the tests while I was there at Debconf. We also moved the debmetrics repository under the qa category of repositories. Previously it was a private repository.

Debsources now has a HACKING file Here at DebConf14 I have given a few talks. The second one has been a technical talk about recent and future developments on Debsources. Both the talk slides and video are available. After the talk, various DebConf participants have approached me and started hacking on Debsources, which is awesome! As a result of their work, new shiny features will probably be announced shortly. Stay tuned. When discussing with new contributors (hi Luciano, Raphael!), though, it quickly became clear that getting started with Debsources hacking wasn't particularly easy. In particular, doing a local deployment for testing purposes might be intimidating, due to the need of having a (partial) source mirror and whatnot. To fix that, I have now written a HACKING file for Debsources, which you can find at top-level in the Git repo. Happy Debsources hacking!