When traveling I usually try local brands of beer. This became some sort of hobby, and usually gives me a good possibility to get in contact with the locals. For DebConf11 so far I have been suggested to try Tuzlanski (Tuzla) and Nektar (Banja Luka). Any other suggestions what should be tried?

I am going to DebCamp11 and DebConf11. I hope I can do some productive work with the website team, as well for the DSA team. Maybe I can find someone for a little skill-exchange regarding pylons.

The Background If you weren't online last Friday you probably have missed the big news announcement on the various community distribution websites. The main pages of them got replaced by a placeholder announcing the birth of The Canterbury Project. People started to wonder whether it is an April fool's prank or for real. This blog post is meant to shine a bit more light on it and address one comment received about it. If you go to the news item on the Debian site you'll get your answer about that it indeed was an April fool's prank. The idea for doing something in coordination with other distributions came to me when I thought about last year's (or was it already two year's ago?) prank that the various web cartoon sites pulled: they replaced their main page with the page of another cartoonist. My original idea was actually along that lines. So I started to dig up website contacts from different distributions, I was aiming at the big names in the community distribution sector. Given that my time is pretty limited these days with renovating the house we plan to live in soonish I knew I had to let in others in within Debian. I though didn't want to involve too many people, for several reasons: it should be a surprise to as many as possible, but more importantly, I didn't want to shy away other distributions by an overwhelming Debian involvement. That's also part of the reason why I didn't contact many Debian based distributions. So first contacts where made, a dedicated IRC channel used for coordination, and people involved joined in. Then the thing happened which the Free Software community is so well known for: additional ideas came in, two people independently addressed me whether it wouldn't be better that instead of a circle replacement of the frontpage, why not display the same page on all of them. And one of them added that a corresponding news item might make sense. So there we were, having to think about text to put into two things: the news item and the replacement page itself. At this stage Alexander threw in a project name with a background that was adopted. Francesca started with an idea for the news item, I started to put quotes in and asked for ones from the other involved people that fit their distribution well. Klaas came up with a template for the replacement page that we tweaked. Fortunately we ended up being five distributions and the colors of the banner did match the distribution ones rather well (except for one, we had to tweak the color of one banner). The Credits We were all set, and actually everything went fine. And it definitely caught the attention. This blog post goes out in thanks to the following people:

• For Arch Linux: Pierre Schmitz and Dieter Plaetinck thanks for joining in on such a short notice!
• For Debian: Alexander Reichle-Schmehl (thanks for the name!), David Pr vot, Francesca Ciceri (thanks for gathering contact information!) and Martin Zobel-Helas (thanks for webserver setting tweaks).
• For Gentoo: Robin H. Johnson thanks for the best quote for the news item!
• For Grml: Michael Prokop thanks for the great live CD and your input!
• For openSUSE: Thomas Schmidt and Klass Freitag thanks for the perfect website theme and the best mocked up news item!
• ... and most of all, to the to be left unnamed person from the distribution that didn't join in in the end: a lot of thanks has to go in that direction because of the invaluable input. The actual idea about the additional news item is to be accounted to that person, and the Canterbury logo was tweaked there too.

I hopefully haven't forgotten anyone. There surely were some more people involved in the other distributions, and I guess the named people weren't aware of all the ones involved inside Debian. Feel free to drop missing names in the comments. Addressing Feedback Finally, let me address one concern raised: someone claimed that the real joke with this prank was that we would consider collaboration to be a joke. Actually, the total opposite is the case here. That it was possible to pull it off should be proof enough that Collaboration Across Borders actually is possible. And the background information put into the news section of the replacement site is real. Also, my personal quote in the news item was meant dead honest. I do believe that DEX has a limited point of view and only tackles part of the problem. Unfortunately, for such efforts to really come to life it takes people with a really long breath and dedication to it. Efforts like the VCS-PKG and the Freedesktop Games effort are more or less stalled. Even though a lot of people do believe in stronger collaboration to be a good thing, the basis is not working out too well. I'm in the fortunate position that for some of the packages I maintain there is exchange between packagers from different distributions to avoid common troubles. If it can't be done in the big it should at least be tried in the small. I want to specifically highlight again one part of the updates in the replacement page: the CrossDistro track at this year's FOSDEM. This one was more than fruitful, on several levels. From what I've heard a lot of discussion happened besides the talks too, and connections got established. It doesn't sound unlikely like this might be done again next year. So again, thanks for enjoying this April fool's prank, thanks to everyone who helped to deliver it, and especially a lot of thanks to the people who this might have got thinking of possibilities to improve on the collaboration front!

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Since I m soliciting donations to support my Debian work, the least I can do is explain what I do. You can thus expect to see an article like this one every month. Multi-Arch work I updated the code to use another layout for the control files stored in /var/lib/dpkg/info/. Instead of using a sub-directory per architecture (arch/package.type), we decided to use package:arch.type but only for packages which are Multi-Arch: same. dpkg is taking care to rename the files the first time it is executed with write rights and then updates /var/lib/dpkg/info/format to remember that the upgrade has been done and that we can rely on the new structure. I filed a few bugs on packages that are improperly accessing those internal files instead of using the appropriate dpkg-query interface. I sent a heads-up mail on -devel to make other people aware of those problems in the hope to discover most of them as early as possible. After that, the work stalled because Guillem went away for 2 weeks and thus stopped his review of my work. I hope he will quickly resume the review and that we will get something final this month. With the arrival of dpkg 1.16.0, it s now possible to start converting libraries to multi-arch even if full multi-arch support has not yet landed in dpkg proper. See http://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/Bootstrapping for the detailed plan. If you re curious about Multi-Arch, you might want to read this article of Steve Langasek as well. Bug triage for dpkg in launchpad At the start of the month, there was close to 500 bugs reported against the dpkg package in Launchpad. Unfortunately most of it is noise many of the reported bugs are misfiled, they show an upgrade problem of a random package and that upgrade problem confuses update-manager which tries to configure an already configured package. This generates a second error that apport attributes to dpkg and the resulting bug report is thus filed on dpkg. There are literally hundreds of those that have to be reclassified. Michael Vogt and Brian Murray did some triaging, and I also spend quite some hours on this task. It s a bit frustrating as I tend to mark many reports Incomplete because there s no way they can be acted upon and many of them are so old that the reporter is unlikely to be able to provide supplementary information. But in the middle of this noise, there are some useful bug reports, like LP#739179 which enabled me to fix a regression even before it reached Debian Unstable (because Ubuntu runs a snapshot of dpkg with multiarch support). I subscribed to the Launchpad bugs for dpkg via the Debian Package Tracking System (thanks to the derivatives-bugs keyword) and will try to keep up with the incoming reports. Misc dpkg work The ftpmasters came up with a request for a new field (see 619131) in source packages. After a quick discussion and a round of review on debian-policy@l.d.o, I implemented the new Package-List field. This should allow the ftpmasters to save some time in NEW processing, but we deferred the change for the next dpkg version (1.16.1) to ponder a bit more on the design of the field. I also fixed a bunch of bugs (#619541, #605719, #598922, #616096) and merged a patch of Mark Hymers to recognize the new Built-Using field. Developers-reference work The review process for changes to the developers-reference is not working as it should. And I suffered from it while trying to integrate the patch I wrote for the Developer duties chapter (see #548867). We purposely changed the maintainer field from debian-doc to debian-policy in the hope to have more reviews of suggested changes and to seek some sort of consensus before committing anything. But we don t get more reviews and deciding to commit a patch is now even harder than it was (except for trivial stuff where personal opinions can t interfere). In my case, I only got the feedback of Charles Plessy which was very mixed to say the least. I tried to improve my patch based on what he expressed but I also clearly disagreed with some of his assertions and was convinced that my wording was in line with the dominant point of view within Debian. We tried to involve the release team in the discussion because most of what I documented was about helping making stable release happen, but nobody of the team answered. Instead of letting the situation (and my patch) rot, I solicited feedback from the DPL and from another developers-reference editor to see whether my patch was an improvement or not. After some more time, I went ahead and committed it. It was not pleasant for anyone. I don t know how we can improve this. Contrary to the policy, the developers-reference is a document that is not normative, I believe the result is better when we put some soul into it. But it s a real challenge when you seek a consensus and that the interest in reviewing changes is so low. DVD shop listed on debian.org In February, I launched a DVD shop whose benefits are used to fund my Debian work. Shortly after the launch I used the official form to be added to the official listing of Debian CD vendors and offered a few suggestions to deal with vendors who are selling unofficial images (with firmware in my case). A few weeks later, I got no answers: neither for my request nor for my suggestions, I mailed the cdvendors@debian.org team directly asking for a status update and quickly got an answer suggesting that Simon Paillard usually does the work and can t process the backlog due to some injury. At this point no concerns had been raised about adding me to the list. To save some time and some work for the team, I added myself to the list since I had commit rights and I informed them that I did it, so that they can review it. Shortly after I did that, Martin Zobel Helas objected to my addition. I cleared some misunderstandings but the discussion also lead to some changes to please everybody: the listing now indicates that some images are unofficial and I have prepared a special landing page for people coming from the Debian website through this listing. Debian column on OMG! Ubuntu I have always been a firm believer that it s important for Debian to reach out to the widest public with its message of freedom. Thus when Benjamin Humphrey contacted the debian-publicity team to find volunteers to write a Debian column on OMG! Ubuntu, I immediately jumped in. I wrote 4 articles over there. The tone is very different from my articles on my blog and I like that duality. Check out Debian is dying! Oh my word!, Debian or Ubuntu, which is the best place to contribute?, Are you contributing your share? and Ubuntu s CTO reveals DEX: an effort to close the gap with Debian. It s a great win-win situation, OMG! Ubuntu benefits from my articles, Debian s values are relayed further, and OMG! Ubuntu s large audience also helps me develop my own blog. Work on my book I had lots of paperwork to do this month (annual accounting stuff for my company) and I did not have as much time as I hoped for my book. Still I have a updated a few more chapters of my French book and I certainly hope to complete the update during April. This means that the work on the English translation could start in may. Work on my blog Just like for my book, it has been relatively difficult for me to cope with my policy of two articles every week. But I still managed to get quite some good stuff out. I interviewed Christian Perrier (Debian s translation coordinator) and also Bdale Garbee (chair of Debian s technical committee). I finished my series of Debian Cleanup Tips with 2 supplementary articles:

• Identify cruft that can be removed from your Debian system
• Remove automatically installed packages

The removal of firmware is causing troubles to quite some users so I wrote an article explaining how to deal with the problem. A regular reader also asked me to write an article about Jigdo, I executed myself because it was a good idea and that he has been very nice with me: Download ISO images of Debian CD/DVD at light speed with Jigdo. Last but not least, I shared my package maintainer pledge which inspired my developers-reference patch (see discussion above). Thanks Many thanks to all the people who showed their appreciation of my work. The 324.37 EUR that you gave me in February represented 2 days and a half of my time that I have spent working on the above projects. See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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A couple of months ago, Debian project membership voted, after extensive discussion, to implement a fundamental change in the Debian community: to welcome as members people who make a valuable contribution to the project, even if they are contributing something other than source code. This was a tremendous milestone for Debian, and one which made me feel proud to have been a part of the project. Historically, only developers had been eligible for membership, including voting and other formal privileges. Although other kinds of contributions were welcome, this disparity gave the impression that they were less valued than code contributions. It seemed to me at the time that Debian s mission was to package all of the free software in the world, and if one s efforts didn t go directly to improving packages, they just weren t as important. I don t remember when I first installed Debian, but I made my first contributions to the project in 1999, and officially joined as a developer in 2000. After several fun and rewarding years of packaging and development, I started a very demanding day job, and spent more and more of my energy into that, and less and less coding for Debian as a volunteer. However, my job with Canonical involved working with Debian, and that was a primary reason why it was interesting to me. It was an opportunity to introduce a whole new population of people to the things I loved about Debian. The reality, of course, was more complicated. Following the launch in 2004, Ubuntu grew quickly in popularity and scope, diverged from Debian in significant ways, and relations between Debian and Ubuntu became strained. Canonical grew quickly as well, and the combination of a growing community, a growing company and growing user adoption was a challenge for everyone concerned. As a Canonical manager and a Debian developer, I felt the strain as much as anyone. Meanwhile, and I felt more and more alienated from Debian. Debian developers who had been friendly in the past became suspicious of Ubuntu and me and I quickly became an outsider. My code contributions to Debian continued to decline, and I was no longer maintaining any packages. In Debian at the time, that meant that I didn t exist. I saw it as an important part of my job to work with my counterparts in Debian, in a coordinating role, but found this increasingly impractical. In 2007, I received an inquiry from the Debian Account Manager, who had noticed I wasn t actively involved in packaging, and wished to disable my account for security reasons if I wasn t using it. Although I wanted to remain active in the Debian community, I had to agree that it wasn t good security practice for me to hold onto my developer privileges. I relinquished my upload rights, with the option to come back if I resumed my development work, and officially became a nobody: I lost the right to vote, my email address and mailing list subscriptions, and all other official ties with Debian, except for the record of my GPG key in a special emeritus keyring for informational purposes. Last month, Enrico Zini announced instructions for contributors to apply for membership under the new guidelines, which recognize many kinds of contributions, not only code. Today, after a three year hiatus, I am proud to be the first Debian member to be accepted through this new process. I expect to continue to submit the occasional patch, but my primary interest is in healing the rift which still exists between Debian and Ubuntu by contributing in a more personal way. Please feel free to contact me if you d like to work together on this. You can reach me as mdz at either debian.org or ubuntu.com, or on IRC. I would like to thank Stefano Zacchiroli, for proposing the General Resolution which enabled Debian to make this transition, and for all of his other work as Debian Project Leader to help Debian grow and improve. I also appreciate Enrico Zini, Jonathan McDowell and Martin Zobel-Helas for expediently processing me and working through the technical changes needed to implement the resolution correctly. It s good to be back.

#600000

[Update: and to Rene Mayorga, for winning the 600000thBugContest!]

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

The svn repository used to draft the Debian Project News just passed the sixth hundreds commit. If my calculations are correct, that's quite more than the number of edits done, back when the DPN was drafted in the wiki. I take it as a hint, that the new work flow works better than the old one. However, playing a bit with statistics (done by horrible shell one liners ;) I noticed, that - while every Debian Developer may commit to the subversion repository - not that many commits from other DDs where made: Of the 602 commits so far, only 70 where done by other DDs:

alex@melusine:~$ svn log --xml svn://svn.debian.org/svn/publicity \
 xmlstarlet sel -t -m "/log/logentry/author" -v "concat(.,' ')"   \
sed -e "s/ /\n/g" sort uniq -c sort -n grep -v guest grep -v tolimar
      1
      1 abe
      1 hertzog
      1 holger
      1 mika
      1 paravoid
      2 pabs
      3 alfie
     15 zobel
     20 gio
     25 spaillard

To give credit where credit is due, here are the guest commits:

     16 tpeteul-guest
     21 jeremiah-guest
     25 gmascellani-guest
     36 madamezou-guest
    122 taffit-guest

Many thanks so far, but I would like to advertise the Debian Project News and invite every DD to help us and to commit directly. It's quite easy: Run svn co svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/publicity/dpn/en/current, edit the index.wml file, and then commit your changes back to the repository. (Well, ideally you would also honor Status flag and won't commit, if it's not open-for-edit.) As for the format: While we indeed use wml, you just need some basic HTML knowledge. To add a paragraph just use the following with proper content:

<a name="X"></a>
<h2>Fancy title</h2>
<p>More details about the topic.</p>

Usually the articles are kind of sorted by importance, so unless you are pretty sure it might be the easiest to just add your article at the end of the regular news, just before the other news sections. Should you not be able to fill an entire paragraph, feel free to just a one or two sentences to the other news section (just add a <p>...</p> with your content to the end of the other news). Don't worry about style, your English or syntax: It won't end up on the web page directly, it's reviewed and checked, so you can't do anything wrong. More details are available in the wiki at http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute. Feel free to ask any questions unanswered on the publicity list at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org. Feel also free to contact us there, if you would like to help by translations or reviews. The more people help, the less work it's for everyone :) If you are not a Debian Developer, but still would like to help us, it's no problem. All you need is an account on our Alioth System (very easy to get, you just need to ask) and request to join the publicity project. See http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute#Becominganeditoryourself for the respective links.

As SPI secretary I announced that nominations for the SPI board were open at the start of the month. The nomination period closes this Tuesday (13th July) with voting opening up on Thursday 15th. This year over half the board is up for election - 5 seats (currently held by Luk Claes, Joshua D. Drake, Bdale Garbee, Joerg Jaspert & Martin Zobel-Helas). So far I've received only 2 nominations, though I'm aware these things are often left to the last minute, so hopefully more will appear in the next few days. All anyone who wants to stand needs to do is drop secretary@spi-inc.org a (preferably PGP signed) email nominating yourself and providing a position statement (which will all be published once the nomination period is over).

Oh, and if you're a contributing SPI member please do remember to vote once voting is open!

First of all, THANKS Rhonda for pushing me to do that! I did plan to integrate the Debian menubar for a long time, but it never made it high enough on my todo lists up to now.

So, what am i talking about? For those of you who don't follow debian-www@l.d.o too closely, there was a recent thread about debian.org's page layout, where Rhonda pointed the initial poster to the layout proposals from Kalle S dermann. Rhonda was so kind and mainly documented in the recent blog post how to convert the gitweb theme to that layout.

I took that documentation and sat down Friday evening and converted the layout of my local instance of the DSA internal wiki to that new layout. While not everything looks perfect yet, it took me less than an hour. WOW, that was fast.

Now i became megalomaniac. After copying over the current list archive to an other machine (to not destroy the current archive while playing with mhonarc), I started playing with the same layout for lists.debian.org. The whole scripts for lists.debian.org were a bit more complex than the ikiwiki code we use for dsa.debian.org, but i managed to render usefull pages yesterday early morning.

Not everything was easyly convertable, and I still have some smaller issues to work on, but if you compare for example the following posting using the old and the new layout, i think we can use my work as basis for further improvements of the layout. Eg. i am aware that the new HTML code does not fullly validate using the w3c validator.

Many thanks also go to Kalle, who responded to my problems with the CSS immediatly.

Not all lists are converted to the new layout yet, as a full list archive rebuild seems to run about 24 hours. Also i adjusted some minor stuff in the templates while the rebuild was running, so you will see some smaller differences in the breadcrumbs. That will go away when I start the next rebuild.

So what is next? Rhonda, do we want to see if we can take over qa.d.o? ;-)

PS: if someone wants to generate new icons for the thread view arrows, i am happy to integrate them.

Now that we have released the slightly updated version of Debian's Machine Usage Policy (DMUP), I am thinking about a major rework for the next version. Maybe we should even start with a completely new text for it. I am currently doing a bit of brainstorming about how the new version could look.

Here are some of my ideas (completely unsorted):

• Debian is not an ISP. All services are offered on a best-effort basis. While we provide @debian.org email addresses, they should only be used for Debian-related work.
• Debian resources should be used for Debian-related work only. Even though I think this is self-evident, it should be explicitly mentioned.
• Data meant to be private should stay private, and not mirrored elsewhere. This especially includes log files and subscription data of any kind. I am not sure yet what to do with anonymized data, but in my personal opinion we should not even allow mirrored data of that.
• Drop large parts of the document and move it to a new document, called Debian Machine Usage Guidelines or Debian Machines Best Practices. Some parts of the current document are outdated, so let's see if we can drop those entirely.
• We forbid unlawful activities on our machines. Machines should not be used for private financial gain or for commercial purposes.
• Penalties might need some rework, in coordination with DAM.
  

Please note that this brain dump is my very personal opinion and does not reflect the opinion of the complete DSA team.

I would like to see a discussion on what the new DMUP should look like. Even though the final decision on which paragraphs make it into DMUP should stay with DSA, I think the Debian community should be involved in the evolution of this document.

Even though i am not attending DebConf10 (actually I think no one from DSA will make it), it might be a good idea if the conference could be used to do some further brainstorming. Maybe having a BoF on DMUP 2.0 might be a good idea.

A while back, I promised some people that I would answer the campaign questions on -vote despite not being on the ballot. Many things came up to pre-empt me, including a short-lived surprise stint on the Release Team. I am still a bit behind on bug reports and such, but it might be inappropriate to start answering after the official campaign period has closed, so here is a start. J rg Jaspert:

Do you plan on taking on a "2IC" or a team?

I do not. I do not believe that either option is a good idea to begin with, and even if I did, I would not be in favor of undermining the Constitution by making an end run around it in this fashion. Martin Zobel-Helas:

The Debian Project receives quite a number of monetary donations as well as contributions in kind via several umbrella organization like SPI, ffis, debian.ch, etc. a) What do you think are valid goals to spend this money on? b) How would you think is a valid way to thank (hardware) contributors? b) What qualifies a contributor to become a "Debian Partner"? What qualifies a "Debian Partner"?

a) I think that it is important not to spend money on things that only benefit a single person or small group, such as ex-post facto legal defenses, core team travel expenses, or equipment for select persons. I would consider valid expenditures to be only those that directly benefit Debian as a whole. b) Ideally, contributors, whether they be hardware donors or developers or anything else, would be motivated solely out of doing good for the project and community, and not be seeking recognition, praise, power, or favors in return. However, since it is considered acceptable to have other motives, I think it fairly appropriate to display logos and give recognition on the Partners page. b) If I had my druthers, I would reserve the term Partners for those organizations who were fully aligned with us in a common goal. In the absence of such, though, the current usage seems fine. Paul Wise:

How much time do you currently devote to Debian? How will that amount of time change for the DPL term? How will you balance your DPL time and time for other Debian activities.

My time commitment varies due to a combination of external factors and Debian-related motivation. Since I have been slowly scaling back my involvement over the past several years, and unless you assume that the DPL role is inherently demotivating, I would presume to be spending about the same time or more on Debian if elected. I will be orphaning some more packages after squeeze is released, regardless of the outcome of the election. I would definitely not run if I doubted my ability to muster up the time and energy to be a good and effective DPL for the full length of the term.

As some people had problems finding our booth, here's a small explanation. We are guest at the booth of Univention in Hall 2, stand B36. It's quite near to the north entry, where you arrive by the tram lines 8 and 18. Look for the univention booth:

If you are direct in front of the Univention booth, we are on the right hand side of the booth:

If you come from the other side, from the rest of the Open Source Area, it looks like this:

PS: And now, dear zobel, you have three guesses, what Pia is going to get for her birthday...

On Wednesday I got DAM approval and since Saturday late evening I m officially a Debian Developer. Yay! :-) My thanks go to

• Christoph Berg (Myon) whom I know for more than a decade since we studied together, and who s career in Debian was way faster than mine, but who on the other hand probably knows me better than nobody else in Debian which made him the perfect advocate;
• Bernd Zeimetz (bzed) whom I know from my times at DaLUG and who was the friendliest Application Manager I could imagine he s probably also one of the fastest (8 days from application to AM report :-);
• Luca Capello (gismo), who was the most demanding but also most inspiring sponsor I ever had and who became a very good friend after we found each other over my package conkeror.
• Arne Wichmann (Y_Plentyn) for being my first drop-in center for Debian questions (like can I directly dist-upgrade from 2.0 to 3.0? :-);
• Martin Zobel-Helas (zobel) who was always encouraging me to continue exploring new sides of Debian;
• Gerfried Fuchs (Rhonda) just for being there (and for being a package maintainer with good relations to upstream ;-);
• my coworkers at the IT Services Group of the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich, who always found new challenges in Debian for me to solve;
• and all those others who offered to also advocate me (e.g. Otavio Salvador) or sponsored my packages so far (or at least offered to do so), e.g. Alexander Wirt (formorer), Martin F. Krafft (madduck), Robert J rdens (jordens),

As Bernd cited in his AM report, my earliest activity within the Debian community I can remember was organising the Debian booth at LinuxDay.lu 2003, where I installed Debian 3.0 Woody on my Hamilton Hamstation hy (a Sun SparcStation 4 clone). I wrote my first bugreport in November 2004 (#283365), probably during the Sarge BSP in Frankfurt. And my first Debian package was wikipedia2text, starting to package it August 2005 (ITP #325417). My only earlier documented interest in the Debian community is subscribing to the lists debian-apache@l.d.o and debian-emacsen@l.d.o in June 2002. I though remember that I started playing around with Debian 2.0 Hamm, skipping 2.1 (for whatever reasons, I can t remember), using 2.2 quite regularily and started to dive into with Woody which also ran on my first ThinkPad bijou . I installed it over WLAN with just a boot floppy at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. :-) Anyway, this has led to what it had to lead to a new Debian Developer. :-) The first package I uploaded with my newly granted rights was a new conkeror snapshot. This version should work out of the box on Ubuntu again, so that conkeror in Ubuntu should not lag that much behind Debian Sid anymore. In other News Since Wednesday I own a Nokia N900 and use it as my primary mobile phone now. Although it s not as free as the OpenMoko (see two other recent posts by Lucas Nussbaum and by Tollef Fog Heen on Planet Debian) it s definitely what I hoped the OpenMoko will once become. And even if I can t run Debian natively on the N900 (yet), it at least has a Debian chroot on it. :-) A few weeks ago, I took over the organisation of this year s Debian booth at FOSDEM from Wouter Verhelst who s busy enough with FOSDEM organisation itself. Last Monday the organiser of the BSD DevRoom at FOSDEM asked on #mirbsd for talk suggestions and they somehow talked me into giving a talk about Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. The slides should show up during the next days on my Debian GNU/kFreeBSD talks page. I hope, I ll survive that talk despite giving more or less a talk saying Jehova! . ;-) What a week.

About a week ago I updated the KDE 4.1 backports for Lenny with the fourth and last revision of KDE 4.1.
As previously announced, this will be the last update available at http://kde4.debian.net What is next? The repository will continue there, so Lenny users can choose between KDE 3.5.9+ and KDE 4.1.4. But since 4.1.4 packages are not official, they do not have support: no bugs in the BTS or security updates.
If you are using Debian Lenny for stability and security purposes, you should use KDE 3.5. Testing users (future squeeze, current Lenny) can continue using them until KDE 4.2 reaches testing. Again, remember, no bugs in the BTS or security updates, but they will get a clean upgrade to KDE 4.2 in the near future. Unstable users. I have found that there are people using unstable with the backports, when they should be using experimental KDE 4.1. If this is your case, you can stick with 4.1.4 until KDE 4.2 reaches unstable or switch to experimental in a few days and get KDE 4.2 (no yet! it needs to be released first :) ). Last, but not less important, thanks to all the people helping with the backports: MoDaX for helping as backup and the rest of the Qt/KDE team who worked in the experimental packages. HE, zobel and aba for his sysadmin tasks. apol for allowing me torture his PowerPC machine. All those who translated the instructions into their languages and
helped to others users in mailing lists and forums. A quick note about KDE 3.5 to be released in Lenny As most of you have realized, the packages of KDE 3.5 in Lenny and unstable are a mixture of KDE 3.5.9 and 3.5.10. Given that KDE 3.5.10 was released after Lenny was frozen, we could not push this new version into Lenny, however the KDE 3.5 packages were patched about June last year with the latest changes in KDE 3.5 from the KDE subversion. This means some of the modules with the version 3.5.9 are exactly the same that is shipped as 3.5.10.
The only big stuff missing are the kicker improvements shipped in kdebase and some bug fixes in kdepim. But in global, it is closer to KDE 3.5.10 that to KDE 3.5.9. If you want to see what changes are you missing, check the KDE 3.5.10 changelog.

The monthly board meeting of SPI will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 21 Jan) at 20:00 UTC. Members may have seen that the meeting announcement is delayed because the secretary has been ill and it seems that none of the other board members has stepped in to take over. I think the only new associated project currently under discussion is waiting for a legal opinion, so your guess about the meeting contents is probably as good as mine. My guesses: there will probably be a treasurer s report; Martin Zobel-Helas has been filling in the gaps in the 2007-8 minutes, so there ll be two or three sets for approval; the secretary may report on website redevelopment progress; Privoxy might have taken up the offer of associated project status from the SPI December 2008 meeting; and there might be a report on Tux4Kids trademarks. Watch the comments below this article for a link to the summary when posted.

The strongly connected set of the GPG keys graph contains a bit more than 40000 keys now (yes, that’s a lot of geeks!). I wondered what was the biggest clique (complete subgraph) in that graph, and also of course the biggest clique I was in. It’s easy to grab the whole web of trust there. Finding the maximum clique in a graph is NP-complete, but there are algorithms that work quite well for small instances (and you don’t need to consider all 40000 keys: to be in a clique of n keys, a key must have at least n-1 signatures, so it’s easy to simplify the graph — if you find a clique with 20 keys, you can remove all keys that have less than 19 signatures). My first googling result pointed to Ashay Dharwadker’s solver implementation (which also proves P=NP ;). Googling further allowed me to find the solver provided with the DIMACS benchmarks. It’s clearly not the state of the art, but it was enough in my case (allowed to find the result almost immediately). The biggest clique contains 47 keys. However, it looks like someone had fun, and injected a lot of bogus keys in the keyring. See the clique. So I ignored those keys, and re-ran the solver. And guess what’s the size of the biggest “real” clique? Yes. 42. Here are the winners:

CF3401A9 Elmar Hoffmann
AF260AB1 Florian Zumbiehl
454C864C Moritz Lapp
E6AB2957 Tilman Koschnick
A0ED982D Christian Brueffer
5A35FD42 Christoph Ulrich Scholler
514B3E7C Florian Ernst
AB0CB8C0 Frank Mohr
797EBFAB Enrico Zini
A521F8B5 Manuel Zeise
57E19B02 Thomas Glanzmann
3096372C Michael Fladerer
E63CD6D6 Daniel Hess
A244C858 Torsten Marek
82FB4EAD Timo Weing rtner
1EEF26F4 Christoph Ulrich Scholler
AAE6022E Karlheinz Geyer
EA2D2C41 Mattia Dongili
FCC5040F Stephan Beyer
6B79D401 Giunchedi Filippo
74B11360 Frank Mohr
94C09C7F Peter Palfrader
2274C4DA Andreas Priesz
3B443922 Mathias Rachor
C54BD798 Helmut Grohne
9DE1EEB1 Marc Brockschmidt
41CF0322 Christoph Reeg
218D18D7 Robert Schiele
0DCB0431 Daniel Hess
B84EF12A Mathias Rachor
FD6A8D9D Andreas Madsack
67007C30 Bernd Paysan
9978AF86 Christoph Probst
BD8B050D Roland Rosenfeld
E3DB4EA7 Christian Barth
E263FCD4 Kurt Gramlich
0E6D09CE Mathias Rachor
2A623F72 Christoph Probst
E05C21AF Sebastian Inacker
5D64F870 Martin Zobel-Helas
248AEB73 Rene Engelhard
9C67CD96 Torsten Veller

It’s likely that this happened thanks to a very successful key signing party somewhere in germany (looking at the email addresses). [Update: It was the LinuxTag 2005 KSP.] It might be a nice challenge to beat that clique during next Debconf ;) And the biggest clique I’m in contains 23 keys. Not too bad.

Another point release for Etch has been done; now it's the time for the CD team to roll out new images after the next mirror pulse. The official announcements (prepared by Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, thanks!) will follow shortly afterwards. FTP master of the day was Joerg Jaspert, who did his first point release since Woody, as he told us on IRC. We appreciate your work and you spending your time that shortly before going to Argentina. This point release includes the etchnhalf update introducing a new kernel image (based on 2.6.24) and some driver updates. Additionally the infamous openssl hole will be fixed for good, even for new installs. Again I want to present you a list of people who contributed to this release. It cannot be complete as I got the information out of the Changed-by fields of the uploads.

• akira yamada
• Alexander Sack
• Alexander Schmehl
• A Mennucc1
• Andrea De Iacovo
• Andres Salomon
• Aurelien Jarno
• Charles Plessy
• Christian Perrier
• Christian Welzel
• Colin Watson
• dann frazier (indefatigable kernel worker, most sourceful uploads)
• Darren Salt
• Devin Carraway (3rd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Emmanuel Lacour
• Eric Dorland
• Fabio Tranchitella
• Faidon Liambotis
• Fathi Boudra
• Florian Weimer
• Francesco Paolo Lovergine
• Francois Marier
• Frank Lichtenheld
• Frans Pop (thanks for your d-i work!)
• Frederic Peters
• Gregory Colpart
• Holger Levsen
• Jan Wagner
• Jay Berkenbilt
• J r my Bobbio
• Joey Hess
• Joey Schulze
• Josselin Mouette
• Julien Cristau
• Kai Hendry
• Kurt Roeckx
• LaMont Jones
• Laszlo Boszormenyi
• Martin Pitt
• maximilian attems
• Michael Biebl
• Michael Koch
• Mike Hommey
• Moritz Muehlenhoff
• Noah Meyerhans
• Ola Lundqvist
• Otavio Salvador
• Patrick Matth i
• Petter Reinholdtsen
• Philipp Kern
• Pierre Habouzit
• Raphael Hertzog
• Rene Engelhard
• Robert Millan
• Roberto Lumbreras
• Roland Mas
• Romain Beauxis
• Russ Allbery
• Sean Finney
• Stefan Fritsch
• Steffen Joeris
• Stephen Gran
• Steve Kemp
• Sune Vuorela
• Thijs Kinkhorst (2nd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Thomas Viehmann
• Toni Mueller
• Tzafrir Cohen

From the Release Team we had dann frazier (who drove the important kernel part of etchnhalf), Luk Claes, Neil McGovern, Andreas Barth, Martin Zobel-Helas and me working on it. ;-)