Hey Yay, Backup Manger 0.7.6 came out of the SVN repo! Check it out. Expect the Debian package to be uploaded soon in sid.

Yes, I can tell you, if you have a laptop and want to power it with GNU/Linux, dont run too fast towards Ubuntu’s mirrors, give Debian etch 4.0 a try. It rocks baby. I’ve just installed it on an Asus W3 and a Sony Vaio SZ and the result is amazing. Everything works, even the damned suspend-to-ram thing works out-of-the box on the Asus laptop (not to mention it’s the first time I manage to suspend that laptop in that mode). Congratulations to the Debian-Installer team, you’ve made a great job guys: I wanted to have a 100% encrypted partition for my laptop and had nothing to do but telling d-i so. The graphical interface rocks too, maybe a little issue with synaptic touchpads though but that’s not that a problem as you can use the keyboard bindings at any time. That’s why I like Debian, you can raise your voice as much as you like when the release is not out in time, it just does not matter, because when it’s out, you know that quality is there. So be patient and enjoy the pleasure of the sexiest distro ever: Debian “etch” 4.0

I wrote a Perl module a couple of years ago, and got used to it, I just cannot code without that module now. It’s called Logger::Syslog and is a wrapper over Sys::Syslog that lets you deal with syslog in a very simple manner. Use the module and enjoy the easiness of calling info(), warning(), error() or whichever Syslog message level you like, there is a function wrapping it. It also works properly under a mod_perl environment an logs your message with additional information coming from the Perl stack (module, function name, line number, …). I use that module quite everywhere I use Perl : at work but also in my Free Software projects, like Backup Manager. It’s really time to release an “official” version that I can rely on in the future. Next step is submitting the module to the CPAN (it’s pending) and then, debianize it so backup-manager can depend on it. Todo: set up a public SVN repo to handle the sources. Updates

• Logger::Syslog is now available on CPAN.

… You have to provide a “people.debian.org” web page. So I took the time to write some stuff about my work for Debian. I’ll try to maintain that page as precisely as possible to reflect my work. It will be a good place to put some bits about apcahe-lingerd, as my inofficial packages of that patch are still used, even if the Debian Apache Team consider Apache 1.3 as an undead package. Mohammed, dear fellow NM-blood brother, I’m waiting for yours!

Well, Oh, Eh…

sukria – [adjective]:

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We created the “Debian Webapps” alioth project a couple of months ago in order to write a Webapps Policy. Today, that team takes more responsability: it now maintains a couple of packages like, for instance, bugzilla which I find complex, rich and volatile enough to warrant a collaborative maintenance (long life to Subversion). TinyMCE - which can dynamically transform any textarea element into a rich-text area - will also be maintained by the team and is currently in the NEW queue (uploaded this morning).

I like Debian, and I like Perl (even if it’s not that hype nowadays). So why not joining the Debian Perl Group in order to get involved in the maintenance of Perl libraries? I’m wondering why I haven’t think about that earlier… Anyway, here it is, I joined that dynamic team; I also suggested to create an IRC chan (#debian-perl on irc.debian.org) in order to coordinate the work of the team.

That’s pretty cool to have such a useful environment like alioth for handling collaborative maintenance. I joined the Debian Perl Group recently in order to put my Perl packages into the hand of the team, and that reminded me how alioth is a powerful tool when you’re about handling a debian package with others. As I receive quite often some po/po-debconf updates for the package backup-manager, I decided to exhume the pkg-backup-mngr project, in order to handle the source with subversion, and to let the translators commit their changes. I now use enormously svn-buildpackage and I feel pretty happy about that. I even think about opening an alioth project for every single package I maintain (and of course, which cannot be handled by an already existing team). Update I apprently forgot the last paragraph of that post in my mind, and the mail Philipp Kern sent me made me aware of that (pointing to Rapha l Hertzog announcement about collab-maint). Indeed, Philipp, I wanted to conclude my post with something about collab-maint, I guess it’s done now. Thanks!

Indeed, Jon Downland is right, the way Debian behaves these days is not very glorious, we are reflecting a pretty bad image. I don’t know if Ubuntu can be a good example for us (because we don’t have the same priorities), but I know one thing: Debian is completely hijacked by that thing we call “money”. We have to face the reality, as soon as the money came into the game, Debian has lost a point. I cannot predict if the DPL made the good choice when he decided to launch Dunk-Tank, but I can tell that now that it’s done, people have to face a very big mess. And I really hardly see how that will help us to release etch in time…

• What will happen if targets given to paid-developers are not solved in time?
• Who can guarantee that the decision to allocate money to a given developer is completely impartial?

Well, you know, when money comes in the game…

Here it is, I’m now an official Debian Developer. Thanks to my sponsors, Frankie, Neil and Est ban, thanks to Philipp Kern who was my Applicant Manager, thank you all.

Now that my Debian packages are in a better shape, I’m focusing on closing as much upstream bugs as I can in the BackupManager source tree. The more I close, the more I think it’s time to freeze the code for targetting a new stable release. I’d like very much to manage to release Backup Manager 0.8 before Debian enter its frozen-prerelase phase; providing a mature version of BM within “etch” would rock.

Welcome to this 2nd issue of the DeFuBu contest, the monthly championship of the funniest bug reported to the Debian BTS. The challengers

• Julien Danjou with #360285 (ITP: libjoey -- forks itself and does several things at the same time), #102434 (gpm: reverse marking) and #178290 (grave problems when badly mixed with irda)
• Pierre Habouzit with #379912 (kodo: Incorrectly described as useless)
• Julien Goodwin with #318229 (XOrg package is controlled by a woman disrespectful of men (which make up the vast majority of debian developers))
• Frans Pop with #258723 (vim: replace $ shlibs:Depends] in debian/control)
• Daniel Burrows with #331210 (aptitude maintainer should do bug DB clean-up and/or bug merging)
• Andres Salomon with #236874 (xscreensaver: pacman screensaver plays game incorrectly)
• Loic Minier with #382014 (can't fly to girlfriend) and #375789 (gnome-osd: information leakage when screensaver is active)
• Florent Bayle with #381978 (debian-installer: etch d-i installs an antique mouse cursor)
• Julien Louis with #382181 (nmap is a clairvoyant)
• Cyril Lacoux with #373142 (apt-get install spamc on testing removes sarge kernel image)

How the vote has been done Five Debian related people voted for these bugs: Roland Mas, Alexis Sukrieh, Cl ment Stenac, kolter and Yves-Alexis Perez. Full ranking Bugs

• #360285 (ITP: libjoey -- forks itself and does several things at the same time) (52 points)
• #102434 (gpm: reverse marking) (44 points)
• #236874 (xscreensaver: pacman screensaver plays game incorrectly) (43 points)
• #258723 (vim: replace $ shlibs:Depends] in debian/control) (37 points)
• #331210 (aptitude maintainer should do bug DB clean-up and/or bug merging) (33 points)
• #382014 (can't fly to girlfriend) (31 points)
• #373142 (apt-get install spamc on testing removes sarge kernel image) (29 points)
• #379912 (kodo: Incorrectly described as useless) and #382181 (nmap is a clairvoyant) (26 points)
• #381978 (debian-installer: etch d-i installs an antique mouse cursor) (15 points)
• #318229 (XOrg package is controlled by a woman disrespectful of men (which make up the vast majority of debian developers)) (22 points)
• #178290 (grave problems when badly mixed with irda) and #375789 (gnome-osd: information leakage when screensaver is active) (13 points)

Challengers

• Julien Danjou (109 points)
• Loic Minier (44 points)
• Andres Salomon (43 points)
• Frans Pop (37 points)
• Daniel Burrows (33 points)
• Cyril Lacoux (29 points)
• Julien Louis and Pierre Habouzit (26 points)
• Julien Goodwin (22 points)
• Florent Bayle (15 points)

The winners

• Bug: #360285 (ITP: libjoey -- forks itself and does several things at the same time)
• Challenger: Julien Danjou
• Bug reporter: Alexander Wirt
• Voter: Roland Mas with the correct reverse ordered tierc : [1] #236874, [2] #102434 and [3] #360285.

Notes To participate, simply drop me an email with a bug number. About DeFuBu

I finnaly took the time to package 0.7.4 for Debian, thanks to Philipp Kern, it has just been uploaded. This package closes about ten bugs and provide the last available “development” release of Backup Manager. I hope this package will please those who will “apt-get” into it. I now plan to fix as much upstream bugs as I can, and moreover, work on the inclusion of rdiff-backup.

I finally managed to get my new servers up-and-running (got all the worst issues you can imagine with my hardware provider), hosted in the french data-center “TeleHouse 2″. It’s a Dual Core AMD 64 that runs a “Debian 3.1 Sarge” system, rock on babe! Now, it’s time to move everything from nyx.sukria.net (my home-hosted box) to hypnos.sukria.net… (…and yeah, @backup-manager.org services are affected by these changes)

Quite some time has passed since I accepted to process Alexis Sukrieh's NM application (back in August 2005) but today I fired his AM report out to the Front Desk, where it now waits for a review if any things are missing. I hope that I did not leave out anything crucial, due to him being my very first applicant to process as an application manager. Cheers.

Yes, Bugzilla 2.22 is not yet in Debian, I know. And you know what?
That’s my top priority in my todo-list. Just be patient, I’m working on it. It’s just that I had a lot to do in real life recently and didn’t manage to find the time to focus on my pretty-complex-and-patched package, named bugzilla. By the way, as there are sometimes requests for help about the bugzilla debian package on irc.mozilla.org (chan #mozwebtools), I created a new chanel to gather those discussions: #debian on the same server. Feel free to join if you like.

A new development version of backup-manager has been published.

This release provides two new upload methods. The first one is called “ssh-gpg” and lets you upload your locally-built archives to untrusted remote places. During the upload (permormed with SSH), the archives are encrypted using GPG. The other one, called “s3″ is able to upload your archives to the Amazon S3 Storage service (if you have a valid account). This release also comes with a couple of bug fixes (filenames with spaces are now fully supported) and provides some other new options.

As requested on the users mailing-list, a Debian package will come very soon.

It took me a while to come back to the Debian bugzilla package, sadly I didn’t have the time in the past months to pay attention to it. Bug reports were coming and coming and it was really necessary to focus on them. As this weekend is a Bug Squashing Party in the Debian community, I thought it was the perfect time to wear my armor, take my sword and go squashing bugs… I’m now glad to announce that bugzilla 2.20.1-2 will be soon available for your sid box and provides some sweet improvements:

• The old hand-written postinst script that performs database creation has been replaced by a smart call to dbconfig-common’s hook. By the way, congrats go to Sean Finney, dbconfig-common was really easy to integrate and does well what it claims to.
• The checksetup.pl script - that is a critical point in the package installation phase - was fixed (some grave bugs) and was also enhanced in order to work gently with what the user inputed with debconf. I have to submit my patch upstream for that script…
• I also cleaned a bit the package, added some new translated debconf templates.

I think that this package will bring back a good-shaped package in debian and hope that users will agree on that. The BTS will tell us if I’m right. Anyway, I feel better after this upload.