MJ Ray posted a couple of short summaries as to how the election would have turned out if alternate voting systems had been used. A couple of people asked about others, so here's a nice long list:

Borda,
Borda Elimination,
Minmax,
Nanson,
Ranked Pairs,
Condorcet (SPI),
Condorcet (Debian):

• Bdale Garbee
• David Graham
• Luk Claes
• Joshua D. Drake
• Martin Zobel-Helas
• Joerg Jaspert

Bucklin:

• Bdale Garbee
• David Graham
• Joshua D. Drake
• Luk Claes
• Joerg Jaspert
• Ian Jackson

IRV,
Pluralty:

• Bdale Garbee
• David Graham
• Joshua D. Drake
• Martin 'Joey' Schulze
• Luk Claes
• MJ Ray

Most of these seem to come out in favour of the result we achieved with Condorcet. Plurality (aka: First past the post) and IRV put heavy emphisis on the voters first choice. It doesn't really make sense to compare results from a condorcet ballot with either of these methods. Bucklin is rather meaningless in a multi-winner election.

In answer to "is this type of Condorcet ever likely to elect someone who polarises views", it's possible, but unlikely. IRV and Pluralty are the ones to go for if you want the majority of people unhappy, unlike the others, which produce the majority of people happy.

I wasn't elected to SPI's board. I didn't think I would be once I saw all the other candidates (I nominated before all declared), but it looks like I would have been elected with those votes under some other common systems. I think both first-past-the-post and alternative vote (also known as instant run-off voting, reportedly recommended by Robert's Rules for election-by-mail) would have resulted in this same board:

1. Bdale Garbee
2. David Graham
3. Joshua D. Drake
4. Martin 'Joey' Schulze
5. Luk Claes
6. MJ Ray

Instead, the results were:

1. Bdale Garbee
2. David Graham
3. Luk Claes
4. Joshua D. Drake
5. Joerg Jaspert
6. Martin Zobel-Helas

Nevertheless, well done to the new members. On one hand, I'm happier, because there's still two of my top four there and now I've less required work. On the other hand, I would have liked a crack at it myself and both boards are disappointing because there's no Ian Jackson. An interesting thing is how many times I appear in each position in voting lists: (5, 1, 2, 1, 9, 6, 6, 3, 3, 4, 2, 9, 37), or as a bar chart:

1. st
2. nd
3. rd
4. th
5. th
6. th
7. th
8. th
9. th
10. th
11. th
12. th
13. th

A fairly acceptable middle-of-road candidate for most of it, but then a huge spike at the low end. Note that a majority of voters put me in positions 11-13. There wasn't much warning of that one coming during hustings. WTF? There seem to be some 30 or 40 voters who really dislike me, but didn't tell me that straight, preferring to be silent then vote me down. Are you cowards, or what? More generally, is this type of Condorcet ever likely to elect someone who polarises views, or who many inexplicably dislike? What does this say for any plan to use a Condorcet for debian's social committee? Could majorities always prevent minority reps? Update: Neil McGovern posted a few comparisons of more complex systems (I only did the easy ones) and AJ posted STV results which completes the main systems, I think. It seems Condorcet-SPI wasn't as unusual as I first thought. Finally, as I understand it, turn-out was 25% of voting members (not the 25% of SPI members that some press reported). Why was turn-out so low? (2007-08-08: 1 pingback, 3 comments)

The chinese-big5 is moderated since quite some time, because of to much unfilterable spam. Now the last remaining listmoderator asks for help as won’t be able to do listmoderation in near future. If you are able to read/write chinese-big5 and want to do listmoderation, please contact listmaster@lists.debian.org and/or write to 434837@bugs.debian.org. listmaster

In answer to zobel's post, here is how to fight efficiently against those nasty spams. Well, there is a wonderful tool, called clamav that you know already for sure. What is less known is that there are people that have had the idea to use clamav to fight spams as well. They provide constantly renewed spam signatures that fight against the jpgs/gifs/... that are too many those days. I use this script twice a day to update my signatures, and it works well. I use this setup on a medium sized mail server with excellent results, here are the numbers for the last 30 days. The mail server had:

 2.357.038 connections attempts
 1.841.425 mails have been greylisted[]
 ---
   510.193 mails have been rejected
   238.869 of those thanks to clamav (~50%) 
 ---
   502.580 mails have been accepted for delivery
 1.564.130 mails have been delivered to users

As you can see, on 4 mails that are considered for delivery (after the greylisting), 1 is rejected thanks to clamav. That's 25% of the incoming mails that get simply dropped, and that has almost 0 false positives^[2]. Another note about greylisting: a quick reader could think that 1.8M - (2.3M - 0.5M - 0.5M) ~= 0.5M of mails are greylisted for nothing. That's not the case at all, the 2.3M are connection attempts. And we have some SMTPs that we talk to a lot (as it's the mail server of the Alumni of my school, we talk to the school MX a lot e.g.) and some of the connections carry up to dozens of mail on a regular basis. Our estimation is that in a regular day, greylisted mails that are submitted again are around the thousands, meaning some dozens of thousands a month, which is ridiculously small. And among them, sadly, most are still spams. These good ratios exists because we use conditional greylisting: we greylist IPs that look suspcicious only. But I already talked about that, and it's not really the matter of this post.

due to the constant high volume of incoming spam containing attachments
which are not easy parseable for our filters, the listmasters decided
now to block the following types of attachments: Content-Type: image/(gif jpeg)
Content-Type: application/pdf This is only a temporary solution, until we have better methods to
filter out spam mails containing these types of attachments. If you know better solutions, let us know! listmaster

I will most probably not accept any further source packages for Debian Etch r1 after todays tonights dinstall run, unless someone really convinces me there is something very important missing. Update: Exception are granted for packages related to D-I or kernel, if not already uploaded. release

hi, planet && iso8859-15 to utf8 with netatalk magic Hi, Planet!
Welcome to my blog, and thanks to Martin for subscribing me. I m not going to bother you with any details about me, if you have any questions feel free to ask me on freenode or oftc (in case you re wondering: my nick is bzed).

After a longer time of planning we ve upgraded our main file server at work: New machine, new storage (7TB - woohoo!), Etch instead of Sarge and UTF-8 for file names instead of ISO8859-15. Everything not a too complicated thing, except for renaming the about 10,000,000 files from ISO8859-15 to UTF-8 in a proper way.
In theory this is easy, as convmv happily takes care of the problem. But this did not work for us unfortunately, as we re not only providing NFS and Samba services, but also AFP (Apple_Filing_Protocol) via netatalk. Years ago you had to choose ISO8859-15 if you wanted to allow your Apple and Windows users to see the same, non-broken file names - not only because AFP didn t support UTF8 before version 3, which came out with OSX1). Normally you d think that a server would not allow a client to write a file with a file name which includes not supported characters - again, OSX and netatalk go their own way here:
Characters which are not supported by the underlying file system are character(!)-wise encoded using the CAP encoding. So we had to find a way to

• convert file names from ISO8859-15 to UTF-8
• replace CAP encoded characters by the appropriate UTF-8 character

Luckily netatalk ships the uniconv(1) util2) which is able to take care of this problem. It also updates the CNID3) Database at the same time. There s two things you need to take care of in case you re using the dbd CNID backend:

• uniconv assumes that cnid_metad is listening on port 4700, you need to start it first. Don t run afpd at the same time!
• If you ve specified external CNID dbpaths in your AppleVolumes.default (normally they re located in the root of each volume, prone to be deleted by users accidentally), you need to move the .AppleDB directory into your volume s root directory, otherwise uniconv will create a new CNID database. Just move it back as soon as uniconv is finished.

Be careful: uniconv assumes that all colons in a file name are part of a CAP encoded character. That s not a problem as long as you have only Mac and Windows clients accessing your server, as both systems do not allow colons in file names. In our case we found a number of cache files from Nautilus (which is running on our sunray/Solaris web-surf terminals as default browser) with colons in the file name. I hope no user will miss them Including a final synchronisation of all files to the new storage, about two hours it took uniconv to convert the file names and a aunch break, we were finished after about 14 hours of work. Until now it seems that our users didn t notice the change at all, except for those who realized that they have much more free space now. Looks like a successful weekend so far! 1) and uses a NFD variant of Unicode normalization (UTF-8#Mac_OS_X), but netatalk takes care of this and translates it into the NFC form, which is used on most other platforms 2) it s called netatalk-uniconv in Debian and shipped with netatalk 3) Catalog Node ID, another crust from old Mac OS versions

It is not high crowded here, but we have about 2-3 visitors at any time at the booth. No Tags

<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'> <h1><a name="hi_planet_iso8859-15_to_utf8_with_netatalk_magic" id="hi_planet_iso8859-15_to_utf8_with_netatalk_magic">hi, planet // iso8859-15 to utf8 with netatalk magic</a></h1> <p> <em><strong>Hi, Planet!</strong> <br/> Welcome to my blog, and thanks to <a href="http://blog.zobel.ftbfs.de/" title="http://blog.zobel.ftbfs.de/" rel="nofollow">Martin</a> for subscribing me. I m not going to bother you with any details about me, if you have any questions feel free to ask me on <a href="http://freenode.net/" title="http://freenode.net/" rel="nofollow">freenode</a> or <a href="http://www.oftc.net/" title="http://www.oftc.net/" rel="nofollow">oftc</a> (in case you re wondering: my nick is bzed).</em> <br/> <br/> After a longer time of planning we ve upgraded our main file server at <a href="http://www.architektur.tu-darmstadt.de" title="http://www.architektur.tu-darmstadt.de" rel="nofollow">work</a>: New machine, new storage (7TB - woohoo!), Etch instead of Sarge and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8" title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8">UTF-8</a> for file names instead of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO8859-15" title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO8859-15">ISO8859-15</a>. Everything not a too complicated thing, except for renaming the about 10,000,000 files from ISO8859-15 to UTF-8 in a proper way. <br/> In theory this is easy, as <a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/convmv" title="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/convmv" rel="nofollow">convmv</a> happily takes care of the problem. But this did not work for us unfortunately, as we re not only providing NFS and Samba services, but also AFP (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Filing_Protocol" title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Filing_Protocol">Apple_Filing_Protocol</a>) via netatalk. Years ago you had to choose ISO8859-15 if you wanted to allow your Apple and Windows users to see the same, non-broken file names - not only because AFP didn t support UTF8 before version 3, which came out with OSX<a href="#fn__1" name="fnt__1" id="fnt__1">1)</a>. Normally you d think that a server would not allow a client to write a file with a file name which includes not supported characters - again, OSX and netatalk go their own way here:<br/> Characters which are not supported by the underlying file system are character(!)-wise encoded using the <a href="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/configuration.html#id2898845" title="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/configuration.html#id2898845" rel="nofollow">CAP encoding</a>. So we had to find a way to </p> <ul> <li> convert file names from ISO8859-15 to UTF-8 </li> <li> replace CAP encoded characters by the appropriate UTF-8 character </li> </ul> <p> Luckily netatalk ships the <a href="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/uniconv.1.html" title="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/uniconv.1.html" rel="nofollow">uniconv(1)</a> util<a href="#fn__2" name="fnt__2" id="fnt__2">2)</a> which is able to take care of this problem. It also updates the CNID<a href="#fn__3" name="fnt__3" id="fnt__3">3)</a> Database at the same time. There s two things you need to take care of in case you re using the dbd <a href="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/configuration.html#CNID-backends" title="http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/configuration.html#CNID-backends" rel="nofollow">CNID backend</a>: </p> <ul> <li> uniconv assumes that <em>cnid_metad</em> is listening on port 4700, you need to start it first. Don t run afpd at the same time! </li> <li> If you ve specified external CNID dbpaths in your <em>AppleVolumes.default</em> (normally they re located in the root of each volume, prone to be deleted by users accidentally), you need to move the .AppleDB directory into your volume s root directory, otherwise uniconv will create a new CNID database. Just move it back as soon as uniconv is finished. </li> </ul> <p> Be careful: uniconv assumes that all colons in a file name are part of a CAP encoded character. That s not a problem as long as you have only Mac and Windows clients accessing your server, as both systems do not allow colons in file names. In our case we found a number of cache files from Nautilus (which is running on our sunray/Solaris web-surf terminals as default browser) with colons in the file name. I hope no user will miss them <img src="http://bzed.de/lib/images/smileys/icon_wink.gif" alt=";-)" /> </p> <p> Including a final synchronisation of all files to the new storage, about two hours it took uniconv to convert the file names and a aunch break, we were finished after about 14 hours of work. Until now it seems that our users didn t notice the change at all, except for those who realized that they have much more free space now. Looks like a successful weekend so far! <img src="http://bzed.de/lib/images/smileys/icon_biggrin.gif" alt=":-D" /> </p> <p> <strong>update:</strong> full html in the feed. </p> <div class="tags"><span> <a href="http://bzed.de/tags/debian" class="wikilink1" title="tags:debian" rel="tag">debian</a>, <a href="http://bzed.de/tags/linux" class="wikilink1" title="tags:linux" rel="tag">linux</a> </span></div> <a href="#fnt__1" id="fn__1" name="fn__1">1)</a> and uses a NFD variant of Unicode normalization (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8%23Mac_OS_X" title="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8%23Mac_OS_X">UTF-8#Mac_OS_X</a>), but netatalk takes care of this and translates it into the NFC form, which is used on most other platforms <a href="#fnt__2" id="fn__2" name="fn__2">2)</a> it s called netatalk-uniconv in Debian and shipped with <a href="http://packages.debian.org/stable/net/netatalk" title="http://packages.debian.org/stable/net/netatalk" rel="nofollow">netatalk</a> <a href="#fnt__3" id="fn__3" name="fn__3">3)</a> Catalog Node ID, another crust from old Mac <acronym title="Operating System">OS</acronym> versions </div>

The last two days Zobel and I filled 400 bugs against several packages which doesn’t build a second time from the same source. For details why we has done this, please have a look on this Mail. Prominent packages which has this FTBFS error:

• debian-policy
• kdegames
• aptitude
• …

This was an task I volunteered for during my NM Process. Maybe I can do later on some work on QA :)

Apparently, it is fine by him if others flood planet debian with repeats because they screwed an upgrade, post questionable career advice or misleading documentation links, make fun of unrelated computer companies, or discuss the weather or traffic, but I posted about Eurovision and Martin Zobel-Helas unlinked my entries and sent me a rude email. Isn't planet debian a planet of debian developers, not just a planet of debian development? Even if you only write about debian, please don't force that on everyone else. I like reading about the other stuff developers do - even the loony political views that I don't agree with... Didn't someone put up a Planet Debian Tech a while ago? Maybe that's what Martin Zobel-Helas should read. Whatever happened to it?

While reading the newest print version of the German LinuxMagazin i found an interview with Mark Shuttleworth, which made me partly wonder. There he says: “Bei vielen Sachen, die einen gro en Einfluss auf Systeme wie den Kernel, X.org oder Open Office haben, bernehmen wir die F hrungsrolle, wir stellen die Pakete und viele gelangen so zu Debian. Also sind wir in vielen F llen der Upstream von Debian.” (english: On many things, which do have a great influence on systems like kernel, X.org or Open Office, we take the leadership role, we supply the packages and many of those getting into Debian this way. Therefore we are the upstream of Debian in many cases.) I know of certain packages, like python, gcc, apt and maybe X.org, which are mainly maintained by Ubuntu developers. But is this really true: Is Ubuntu really upstream of many Debian packages? Can someone please enlighten me, and give me some statistics where Ubuntu is upstream of Debian, and where Debian is upstream of Ubuntu? I would really like to know the facts. No Tags

As there are currently four persons working on the next stable release (Dann Frazier, Luk Claes, Julien Danjou and me), we decided to track all issues for the next stable release (4.0r1) also in the Debian BTS. So if you would like to look what we currently consider for 4.0r1, have a look here. Before adding a bug (eg. with the command bts user debian-release@lists.debian.org . usertag 420759 + SRM) please contact the stable release team first, or even better, let the stable release team add your bug there on their own. Also, not all uploaded packages to proposed-updates will automatically considered for the next stable release. Update: With “contact the stable release team first” i do mean, please send requests to debian-release@lists.d.o, not contacting release team members in private over IRC or direct eMail. And NO, h01ger, cellphone is also not an option!!!1!!!elf!!!! release

blog posts I am going to identify all my DPL-related posts with a dpl tag. All such posts will be accessible through http://sam.zoy.org/blog/?cat=dpl. talks On May 5th I attended an Etch Install Party at the Carrefour du Num rique in the Cit des Sciences et de l'Industrie in Paris, organised by the Parinux LUG. Fellow developers Christian Perrier and Julien Cristau as well as not-yet-but-now-almost-really-soon-to-be developer Yves-Alexis Perez were also present. I did a (rather dull, sorry; I didn't prepare it well enough) talk about the Debian project, its organisation and how people, even beginners, can help Debian and its community. My slides (French) are available, and the Carrefour du Num rique people kindly recorded it and made it available for download. interviews Since the DPL elections I have given several interviews, of which a few have already been published. They may be of interest because I share my thoughts about topics that were not covered in my platform, or not very deeply. You can also check whether I am consistent. And it s important that people know what I may say about Debian to the rest of the world. The interviews are:

• by Sam Varghese on iTWire (also an OSNews story with comments)
• by Bruce Byfield on linux.com
• by French LUG RotomaLUG (audio file and very nice text version available); this one is supposed to be less formal and professional but the questions were very well organised

FTP-master and other teams Zobel is frustrated by things not happening in the FTP team which were apparently going better when AJ was DPL. I don t really know how to understand that blog post. A DPL+FTP-master hat is something that cannot happen this year, so if this is what allowed AJ to be efficient we ll have to find something else. For the record, after my first bits from the DPL on debian-devel-announce and its request for candidacy I have received one offer to help the DSA team and one offer (this morning) to help with the NEW-handling part of FTP-master work.

Advantage of the time AJ was DPL: Requests of the stable release team to the FTP-Admin team got processed quite fast. The stable release team is now waiting since a couple of weeks to get
#418639 fixed. Also AJ promised to semi-automate p-u-new processing, which didn’t happen since the release of etch. current mood: frustrated. release

… it is quiet in my INBOX…. No Tags

With man-db entering p-u-new now, the package list for the last update of Sarge as “stable” distribution is frozen now. All further updates to Sarge will happen, as soon as Sarge is declared “oldstable”. This seems to become a busy weekend. release

Happy New Year! Happy 2007!

And a really happy one!

After the cloud of ideas and subjects on the last post, giving the clear idea that I should keep this blog more up-to-date, here is an important note that is missing (including old news that I should had post but didn't, sorry for that). I'm aware that a few people are interested in how the Debian NM process evolves from person to person, on my last update on that topic, I told you that I was recommended to the DAM by my AM. Almost three months later (2006-11-18) Myon (Christoph Berg, Front Desk Member) couldn't find my final report, he pinged my AM and one week later everything was fine again and I got approved to the next step: DAMnation. On the Christmas' evening I got a nice gift from Joerg, DAM approval. Yesterday (2007-01-02) I got the nice e-mail with the subject: New Debian maintainer Felipe Augusto van de Wiel (Thanks to James Troup, aka, elmo). The entire process took me 8 months and 10 days. I would like to say thanks to everybody that helped me pass thru this experience: Otavio Salvador (my advocate and mentor), Christian Perrier and Luk Claes (Mentors and Uploaders), Clément Stenac (my AM), Christoph Berg (Front Desk), Joerg Jaspert and James Troup (DAMs). They are directly involved in my NM process, but they were not alone, thanks for every single person that helped me with tips and hints, that took some time to teach me and all the people behind different projects in Debian (I really start naming everybody but then I realize that it got very large for Planet): Debian Brasil, Debian Volatile (aba, zobel, sgran), Release Team, Debian Women, Debian i18n Task Force and Debian l10n Brazilian Portuguese, Debian Weekly News Team, buildd.net project, Alioth admins and staff, Debian Installer Team, Debian Kernel Team, Debian Mentors, DebConf Team, OFTC Staff, Debian QA Team, Debian Doc Team, Debian WWW Team, Debian Admin Team (DSA)! People, you know who you are, thank you VERY much! You can check my Status Page to see more details about my NM process and more information about the acronyms used on this post. Now, Brazil has 17 Debian Developers (not counting the one that already retired). :-)

I just sent the first preparation mail for r5, which will either happen end of December or 48h before the release of Etch, whatever comes first. It currently does not cover all packages, as there are still quite a couple (more then 20) packages that need to be accepted from p-u-new by ftpmaster. Stay tuned for more information during the next days. release

There are a couple of bugs around where it would be a shame to remove the package (or where it is next to impossible), which are hard to fix for outsiders but should be way easier for people inside:

• #397623: During build of gimp-help, xsltproc tries to download the DTD from the web address. Anyone knowing how to prevent that could probably fix the bug within minutes.
• #397636: open-iscsi: This seems to need just a new upstream version, but nothing for somebody who doesn't use open-iscsi himself. Update: Martin (zobel) will take care if the maintainer doesn't fix this bug.
• #397655: debiandoc-sgml has issues generating cjk-packages correctly.

There are a couple of more such bugs available, please feel free to visit our RC bugs list yourself.