Posted a week ago, already deferred back then, this report is even more deferred now! But as there are people interest in knowing what the "DPL job" is about even among non debian-devel-announce subscribers, here is a blog-conveyed reproduction, for the records.

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Dear project members,
here is my monthly DPL activity report, this time for last March. It is delayed by a couple of weeks because, myself being both incumbent and candidate DPL, I preferred not to use d-d-a during the voting period unless really needed. Apologies for the delay (or the unneeded paranoia, you name it). As a side effect of the delay, the results of the DPL election are now known. I'd like to thank all the people who took part in the elections: voters, people who asked questions on -vote, the secretary, and obviously Gergely and Wouter, without whom the campaign wouldn't have allowed to discuss relevant aspects of Debian "politics". Thanks for your trust. I'll do my best to match your expectations. ... and just to remind you what you've just asked for, here goes the BigMonthlyBlurb! Highlight: long-term hardware replacement planning The highlight for this month is long term planning of hardware replacement. It's something I've been discussing with DSA for quite a while and on which DSA has worked hard during the recent sprint. As a result, we now have a quite ambitious 5-year hardware replacement plan that will guarantee that all machines in production are under warranty at any given time (with the nice side effect of generally better performances, as they go hand in hand with newer hardware). The current estimated cost per year is 29'000 USD. That does not yet include buildds and porter-boxes, so it is expected to increase a bit to cover all our hardware needs. But we expect it not increase too much, as we tend to get explicit hardware donations to cover arch-specific needs. Given the current state of Debian finances and donation trends, the plan looks sustainable for at least 2-3 years. But this assessment still needs to be refined as soon as, together with the auditors, we'll manage to obtain the history of past Debian transactions, in particular from SPI. We've been waiting for this for about 5 months now, but I'm positive it could become a reality in the next weeks. In the meantime, it is surely safe to start with the plan for the next 1-1.5 years, so I'll give green light to DSA for the first acquisitions as soon as they're ready for it. When implemented, this plan will increase our ability to rely on hardware. But it also means we will need to become a bit more organized about fund-raising. The discussion started with the sprint report has some insights about how to do that. As part of this, we'll also need to share resources (e.g. contact databases, people, etc.) among the yearly DebConf fund-raising initiatives and the initiatives mentioned in the aforementioned discussion. Ongoing discussions

• A couple of important clarifications on how to deal with trademark-encumbered software in the Debian archive have been posted to -project. It seems to me there might be consensus on the overall topic, but we need to write down guidelines for maintainers (and possibly a project position statement?). I could use some help on that front, so if you've followed the discussion and/or have an interest in trademark and free software, please get in touch.
• To put an end to the long and glorious life of DEP-5, I've marked it as ACCEPTED given that it has been "implemented" in February via inclusion in the debian-policy package. You still have some time to port your debian/copyright-s to it before the Wheezy freeze.
• I've been contacted by the DuckDuckGo about a revenue sharing agreement for the inbound traffic they already get from Debian browsers. I've informed -project proposing to accept it and that has spawned a discussion that has won us an LWN article. I haven't yet summarized the thread proposing a way forward; I'll do so shortly.
• as part of a discussion on unofficial "debian" repositories, I've proposed to open up the list of *.debian.net domains. As nobody disagreed, consensus has been quickly reached and the announced change is now imminent. Thanks to Carsten Hey and Gerfried Fuchs for their help in figuring out the details of the last discussion on the matter and DSA for their feedback.

Summer of Code Debian has been accepted as an organization for the Google Summer of Code. At the time these bits go out, the student application deadline has also elapsed. In March I've contributed a few project ideas and chased potential mentors for them, when I thought the project could be important for Debian and the prospective student. I'm happy that one (a dak building block needed for the implementation of PPAs and more) has found both mentors and students. We'll see if any of the corresponding student proposal is retained and how it goes. Communication I've given an interview, about Debian and Free Software in general, to La Repubblica, one of the major newspapers in Italy. The interview is available online, but only in Italian. If some kind (and Italian-speaking) soul would like to translate it into English, I'll be happy to publish the translation as well. (update 22/04/2012: Matteo Cortese has contributed an English translation of the interview, which I'll make available shortly) Legal stuff In order to transfer ownership of the Debian trademark in Japan to SPI, I've contacted the current owners (all Japanese Debian Developers or contributors) to do the needed paperwork. I've been blessed by the help of Kenshi Muto that has taken the matter in his hands. He is now navigating through Japanese trademark procedures, a subject neither myself nor SPI lawyers were familiar with. Thanks also to Jonathan McDowell who has done the needed paperwork, SPI-side. Sprints Plenty of sprints and sprint reports in March!: Debian Med, DSA, DAM/FrontDesk. Everything should also be available from the wiki sprint page where you can find info to organize your team sprint. Assets miscellanea

• I've signed the annual memorandum of understanding with the financial entity that will help us with local expenditures for DebConf12 in Nicaragua. This year is ISIC, with whom we have an important trust path via Norman Garcia Aguilar, member of the DebConf orga team.
• After discussion with auditors, we've resolved to set a 1 year deadline for reimbursement requests. The reason is that it's a PITA to keep track of longer-running requests (yes, they do happen!) and they add uncertainty to our available finances. There can be exceptions, but please help on this front by timely requesting reimbursements after travels or other expenses.

Cheers.

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PS the boring day-to-day activity log for March is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201203

SSH is definitely one of my most often used tools, not only for system administration at work but also on the road with my netbook, an EeePC 701 running Debian Sid. On the road, it often happens that I have a flaky WLAN or UMTS connection, so I often have to kill (via <Enter>~.) and reconnect my SSH session due to a changed IP address or so. First step against problems arising from using SSH over unreliable network connections is of course GNU Screen. Second step is use SSH keys and ssh-agent to not needing to type the password on every reconnect. But it s still very annoying to kill the SSH connection and call ssh again manually. For luck there is autossh, a wrapper around SSH which regularily checks via two tunnels connect to each other on the remote side if the connection is still alive, and if not, it kills the ssh and starts a new one with the same parameters (i.e. tunnels, port forwardings, commands to call, etc.). It s quite obvious that this is perfect to be combined with screen s -R and -d options (Reattach if a detached screen is around, else start a new screen; detach a currently attached screen), so I found myself very often typing (or fetching it from the commandline history :-):

autossh -t sym.noone.org 'screen -Rd'

-t is necessary to allocate a terminal device on the remote machine which is not done by default if you directly call a command via ssh. In comparision to OpenSSH, autossh needs the single quotes, because otherwise it would parse -Rd as options to parse to ssh and bail out. That s not a real problem, but when you re used to just type ssh -t sym.noone.org screen -Rd without any quotes, you ll run into this then and when. Update, 25-May-2010, 14:55: As Carsten Hey points out, autossh also supports the -- option to declare that all following options and parameters must be passed to ssh itself. (End of Update) Typing that often and mistyping it then and when cries for an shell alias or an shell function. So I came up with the following shell function:

asc()  
    autossh -x -a -t "$@" 'screen -RdU'
 

I used a function instead of an alias in case of autossh will in future regard all parameters given after the command as part of the command as ssh does. The additional options -x and -a disable X and SSH Agent forwarding which both don t work if you reattach to an already running screen. And if you re using Zsh as I do, you can even add some more format string magic to set the window title more or less to the expanded alias, eh, function:

function asc()  
    # Set the title to something more obvious, e.g. the expanded
    # alias, eh, function
    print -Pn "\e]0;%n@%m: autossh -t $* 'screen -RdU'\a";
    autossh -x -a -t "$@" 'screen -RdU'
 
compdef asc=ssh

Update, 25-May-2010, 14:59: As Hauke points out in a comment, Zsh users should also declare that asc should have the same tab completion as ssh itself. The example above has been updated accordingly. (End of Update) In the meanwhile on the EeePC I use asc on the commandline more often than ssh itself. And I nearly no more type autossh. (The most common exception here is autossh hostname tail -F /path/to/some/logfile.) Using that function you can also add common ssh options for tunneling, etc. I use it most often like this:

asc -D 1080 sym.noone.org

This opens a SOCKS proxy on localhost, port 1080 and that way I can surf via the host I m connecting to by SSH. There s one small drawback though: You didn t expect that I can just invent some new three letter command without a namespace clash, did you? There is a free game called Advanced Strategic Command whose binary (and Debian package) is named asc, too. If you have that game installed, you can always call it using its full path, e.g. /usr/games/asc on Debian. P.S.: My whole grml based .zshrc is also available via git at git.noone.org as well as on github.

A few days ago, I asked how to fork a debian package privately. I got some repsonses by comments, e-Mail and other blog posts, and I want to summarize the tools that were suggested. I have not really tried them, just looked at the webpages, the documentation or the sourcecode. I m only including Debian-specific solutions, as using Gentoo might be nice, but is out of scope here :-)I also deleted half the text before saving it, and I hate rewriting stuff, so it might be a bit terse.debtooEddy Petri or tells me about his three year old project debtoo, which wants to bring a Gentoo-like experience to Debian. While it probably provides what I need, it feels too big in that it has a more general aim than what I m looking for. It is not in Debian and not actively developed in the last two years.srcinstEddy also tells me about srcinst, which is a small haskell program written by jgoerzen in 2005. This is more a proof-of-concept that builds a package and all necessariy build-dependencies without using a binary package, but does not allow for patches to be applied. It is in Debian, actively maintained, but not developed, and barely documented (just an IRC log).apt-buildA similar tool and also in Debian is apt-build. This package is created to compile packages for optimization (as it asks half a dozend compiler-flag-questions with DebConf during the installation). It allows the user to apply a patch to the source, but it has to be passed as a command line option, and patches seem not to be tracked. Not much development in the last year, and not much documentation.debpatchNot to be confused with the program in the debdelta package is the debpatch tool by Victor Hsieh which Carsten Hey told me about. Also written in 2005, this comes closest to what I want. For every package you want to modify, you can configure it to apply patches to the source, to add patches to the debian/patches directory or to statically replace files in the generated binary and puts it in a local apt repository. No code yet to track new versions of the packages and no support for pbuilder though. This perl script is not yet in Debian, but is available as a Debian package and seems to have seen some development in the last years. Quick Googleing does not return any user reports; has any already tried this?customdebSomewhat in this direction goes the script that I wrote two weeks ago for a totally different project, customdeb, but it is aimed at binary debian files exclusively, and debpatch already supports replacing files in the binary package.Summary I found a few projects that go in a similar direction, and one that seems to fit my needs quite well. All of them are not widely used and in a very early state of development. I m actually surprised that this is not a itch more people had to scratch! I will have a closer look at debpatch when I find the time and maybe, if found useful, see if it can be included in Debian probably after a name change, since we already have a debpatch binary.

A few days ago, I asked how to fork a debian package privately. I got some repsonses by comments, e-Mail and other blog posts, and I want to summarize the tools that were suggested. I have not really tried them, just looked at the webpages, the documentation or the sourcecode. I m only including Debian-specific solutions, as using Gentoo might be nice, but is out of scope here :-)I also deleted half the text before saving it, and I hate rewriting stuff, so it might be a bit terse.debtooEddy Petri or tells me about his three year old project debtoo, which wants to bring a Gentoo-like experience to Debian. While it probably provides what I need, it feels too big in that it has a more general aim than what I m looking for. It is not in Debian and not actively developed in the last two years.srcinstEddy also tells me about srcinst, which is a small haskell program written by jgoerzen in 2005. This is more a proof-of-concept that builds a package and all necessariy build-dependencies without using a binary package, but does not allow for patches to be applied. It is in Debian, actively maintained, but not developed, and barely documented (just an IRC log).apt-buildA similar tool and also in Debian is apt-build. This package is created to compile packages for optimization (as it asks half a dozend compiler-flag-questions with DebConf during the installation). It allows the user to apply a patch to the source, but it has to be passed as a command line option, and patches seem not to be tracked. Not much development in the last year, and not much documentation.debpatchNot to be confused with the program in the debdelta package is the debpatch tool by Victor Hsieh which Carsten Hey told me about. Also written in 2005, this comes closest to what I want. For every package you want to modify, you can configure it to apply patches to the source, to add patches to the debian/patches directory or to statically replace files in the generated binary and puts it in a local apt repository. No code yet to track new versions of the packages and no support for pbuilder though. This perl script is not yet in Debian, but is available as a Debian package and seems to have seen some development in the last years. Quick Googleing does not return any user reports; has any already tried this?customdebSomewhat in this direction goes the script that I wrote two weeks ago for a totally different project, customdeb, but it is aimed at binary debian files exclusively, and debpatch already supports replacing files in the binary package.apt-srcAlso a related tool Carsten Hey told me about is apt-src. This tool wants to provide apt-like features for source packages. It allows you to install sources somewhere, upgrade the source and build binary packages from them. It does not really hide the sources from the user and seems to be created for people who want to work with the source somehow. If you have local changes to the sources, it can try to merge them with the new version, but these changes are not kept as a separate patch but only as implicit changes. If that were different, it would seem be a very nice tool. It s written by Joey Hess he abondonned it in 2004. Since then, not much development has happened.debnestYet another approach is taken by debnest, which Peter Makholm took over. Here, you create a full debian source package with a debian/ directory containing a control and rule file etc., but besides the debian/ directory, it contains just the packed sources (.dsc et al) from another package. In your debian/rules, you can specify your changes. I can see no support for tracking new versions of the inner package, but at least this project is maintained and in Debian.Summary I found a few projects that go in a similar direction, and one that seems to fit my needs quite well. All of them are not widely used and in a very early state of development, and it seems to be something people start to work on and quickly lose interest. I m actually surprised that this is not a itch more people had to scratch! I will have a closer look at debpatch when I find the time and maybe, if found useful, see if it can be included in Debian probably after a name change, since we already have a debpatch binary. Or maybe I should try to add support for what I need to apt-src, which seems to be the most advanced of all these programs, although it s unmaintained longer than the others exist.Update: Added apt-src.Update 2: Added debnest;