People I Met and will Remember

• Angela, my wife, I met daily on Jabber. Thanks for letting me go to this great DebConf17 conference and keeping our family up and running
• Andreas asking people to either impersonate his wife or adoptive daughter for a photo shooting. You gave such a touching talk on Friday, together with Minh from Vietnam.
• Holger for nagging us about stone age bugs in the Debian Blends package and the outdated software list in Debian Edu (Kernel 2.6.32 package are finally not mentioned anymore)
• Vagrant, Foetini and Alkis for there efforts on LTSP and their success in Greece with bringing Debian into Greek schools
• Tiago, Jerome and all the others from the local team, providing us with such great food and support. THANKS folks!!!
• Enrico who showed my his 20 liner version of nodm aka lightdm-autologin-greeter (and also made me curious on staticsite)
• Jonas Smedegaard for teaching me the solarized theme and loads of other things
• Siri for being around and really having a stand for making Debian look more like a product
• Dimitri John Ledkov for chiming in on Ayatana Indicators as next Indicators upstream for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
• Chrys for chiming on .desktop file proxying, meet you back in #arctica on Freenode
• Sean for asking me daily, if my luggage had arrived (see below), as he shared the same fate during DebCamp
• the owner of that nice shop where I bought loads of clothes while waiting for my luggage still stuck in Hamburg
• Steven for looking into gcc compiler macros with me for nx-libs autotools conversion, also probably - luggage wise - the lightest traveller among us
• Fabian for sharing is sadness and pain about the FLOSS non-situation in schools all over Quebec
• Mario from New Zealand and Jos from the Netherlands chiming in on FLOSS and education on IRC after having watch my talk about Debian Edu / Skolelinux. Mario, we will soon ask you for opensourcing your teacher screen over WiFi solution...
• Lior who thinks about bringing Debian Edu / Skolelinux to Israel. (That would be awesome!)
• Rhonda for having time for my Debian Backports woes and probably having been quite forgiving ;-)
• Bobby who is a font engineer during the week and (used to be) a cave explorer and mapper in his spare time
• Ximin for providing deep insight in the key signing workflow and the caff approach to it
• Daniel for sharing work experiences and nudging me to go with Remote Desktop stuff (out of pure personal interest *g*, of course, but still)
• Tzfarir and Gunnar for a nice chat on the last night of DebConf

Topics I have worked on

• Finding my luggage
  • After I had arrived at Montreal Airport, I found out that my luggage stayed in Hamburg
  • So the first 4.5 days, I was continuously busy with calling Lufthansa for package item tracking...
  • Go shopping twice, to update my plastic bag of fresh clothes...
• MATE 1.18 in Debian
  • Finalize package builds of MATE 1.18 in Debian unstable (because of some GLib2.0 regression, thanks to Iain Lane for the prompt fix and upload)
• Debian Edu
  • clear up src:package debian-edu regarding the task files related to Debian Pure Blends
  • this work is still in progress...
• Debian Blends (esp. the blends-dev part of the blends src:package)
  • You can now have empty Depends: / Recommends: / Suggests: fields with the list of packages then starting in the next line.
  • It is now possible to have real Depends: fields in task files that become Depends: fields in debian/control. Packages targetting Depends: that are not in unstable get de-promoted to the Suggests: field in debian/control.
  • Tested with most available Debian Pure Blends meta-packages
  • I also pointed Daniel Pocock with his new GnuPG clean-room project towards Debian Pure Blends
• Ring: A 'new' distributed video chat tool without mediating servers. Good concept, however, we could not get it to work on the DebConf campus.
• Debian Design Team (which I am now a member of, I guess)
  • Dive into and out of the vision of a Debian Uniform set of packages, turning the collection of software in Debian into one thing.
  • Run my terminal applications now with the Base16 profile 'solarized-universal'. However, Debian Design will be much more than 16 colors in a console terminal.
  • Let's turn Debian into something like a potential product!
• Debian Policy:
  • I even helped with a Debian Policy bug...
• Skolab Groupware: Forking Kolab (v2) as a new project, named the Skolab Groupware. Instead of migrating my own mail server away from Kolab (v2), I chose continuing maintenance for it, at least for the core compoents:
  • https://github.com/Skolab-Groupware
  • Targetting small to medium sized installations with little administration effort.
  • I mainly ported Kolab's kolab-webadmin PHP project to a recent status so that it can run under Debian testing/unstable: https://github.com/Skolab-Groupware/skolab-webadmin
  • Big thanks to Siri Reiter for consulting me on artwork and for helping me putting together a simple logo for the project.
• nx-libs: Work on several PRs:
  • https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/pull/496 (review + merge)
  • https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/pull/498 (code)
  • https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/pull/499 (code)
  • https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/pull/501 (review + merge)
  • Play with KDE5 and nx-libs: IT WORKS!
• Weblate:
  • Become hosted by hosted Weblate for...
  • Ayatana Indicators
  • Arctica Project
  • Skolab Groupware
  Thanks to Michal iha for providing this fine translation service

Talks and BoFs

• Talk: Supporting Debian Edu / Skolelinux as a Product: Lessons Learned
  • Schedule: https://debconf17.debconf.org/talks/169
  • Video: http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2017/debconf17/su...
  • Outcome: https://sunweavers.net/blog/node/59
• Talk: Ayatana Indicators
  • Schedule: https://debconf17.debconf.org/talks/168
  • Video: http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2017/debconf17/ay...
  • Outcome: https://sunweavers.net/blog/node/60
• Ad-hoc BoF: Bits from the Debian+Ubuntu MATE Packaging Team
  • Schedule: https://debconf17.debconf.org/talks/223
  • Outcome: still to be published...
• Ad-hoc BoF: Debian for Remote Desktop Computing
  • Schedule: https://debconf17.debconf.org/talks/60
  • Outcome: still to be published...

Packages Uploaded to Debian unstable

• mate-settings-daemon
• mate-dock-applet
• brisk-menu
• mate-optimus
• caja-actions
• mate-common
• mate-tweak
• plank
• freerdp (2x)
• freerdp2
• gosa-plugin-mailaddress

Packages Uploaded to Debian NEW

• python-wither
• lightdm-autologin-greeter
• caja-rename

I also looked into lightdm-webkit2-greeter, but upstream is in the middle of a transition from Gtk3 to Qt5, so this has been suspended for now. Packages Uploaded to oldstable-/stable-proposed-updates or -security

• freerdp (1.1) (actually twice, one of them a security upload)
• gosa-plugin-mailaddress
• mate-themes

Other Package related Stuff

• Prepare upload of caja-admin by asking for release tags upstream
• Talk Clint Byrums into a fresh upload of the long not touch undistract-me package
• Breed on different desktop layouts for Debian MATE (like in Ubuntu MATE)
• Do quite a bit of GnuPG key signing
• Update my consent with NM to pick up my work on collab-maint request processing again

Thanks to Everyone Making This Event Possible A big thanks to everyone who made it possible for me to attend this event!!!

My laptop has somewhat less than 1/2 the grunt of my desktop at home, but I prefer to work on it as I can go sit in the sun etc, very hard to do that with a mini tower case However, running everything through ssh to another machine makes editing and iterating more clumsy; I need to do agent forwarding etc not terribly hard, but not free either, particularly when I travel, I need to remember to sync my source trees back to my laptop. So I prefer to live on my laptop and use my desktop for compute power. I had a couple of Juju charms I wanted to investigate, but I needed enough compute power to make my laptop really quite warm so I thought, its time to update my local cloud provider from Eucalyptus to Openstack. This was easy enough, until I came to run Juju. Turns out that Juju s commands really want to talk to the public DNS name of the instance (in order to SSH tunnel a connection to Zookeeper). But! Openstack returns DNS names like Server-3 , and if you think about a home network, its fairly rare to have a local DNS server *anyway*, so putting a suffix on names like that won t help at all: you either need to use a DNS naming provider (openstack ships with an LDAP provider, which adds even more complexity), and configure your clients to know how to find it, or you need to use the public IP addresses (which default to the FlatNetwork, which is routable within a home LAN by simply adding a route to 10.0.0.0/8 to your wifi interface). Adding to confusion, some wifi routers fail to forward avahi messages, which is a) terrible and b) breaks the only obvious way of doing no-config local DNS . So, I did some yak shaving this morning. Turns out other folk have already run into this and filed a Juju bug and a supporting txaws bug. The txaws bug was fixed, but just missed the release of Precise. Clint Byrum is going to SRU it this week though, so we ll have it soon. I ve put a patch up to address the Juju side, which is now pending review. Running the two together works very happily for me. \o/

another weekend, another RCBW report:

• #387756 crack-common: "crack: Do not expect the /var/run/ content to persist"
  apply patch from Georgios M. Zarkadas, upload to DELAYED/2
• #655329 src:libperl5i-perl: "libperl5i-perl: FTBFS: Failed test at t/utf8.t line 23"
  add patch from upstream git (pkg-perl)
• #655844 quassel-core: "quassel-core: fails to upgrade from squeeze"
  fix preinst script, upload to DELAYED/2
• #664939 src:egenix-mx-base: "egenix-mx-base: FTBFS with Python 2.7.3: ImportError: cannot import name customize_compiler"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Colin Watson, upload to DELAYED/2
• #665083 src:kdepim: "kdepim: FTBFS: cp: cannot stat debian/tmp/usr/lib/libakregatorinterfaces.so.4.6.0': No such file or directory"
  send patch to the BTS
• #666278 src:polybori: "polybori: FTBFS: mv: cannot stat debian/python-polybori2.7/*': No such file or directory"
  add build-arch target in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2
• #666279 src:ulogd: "ulogd: FTBFS: cp: cannot stat ./debian/tmp/usr/lib/ulogd/ulogd_SQLITE3.so': No such file or directory"
  add patches from from Ubuntu / Clint Byrum, upload to DELAYED/2, then integrated into an NMU by bubulle that adds debconf translations
• #666283 src:proftpd-mod-msg: "proftpd-mod-msg: FTBFS: mod_msg.c:314:5: error: format not a string literal and no format arguments [-Werror=format-security]"
  add patch to add missing format string, upload to DELAYED/2
• #666284 src:avbin: "avbin: FTBFS: make[1]: *** No rule to make target Makefile.'. Stop."
  sponsor NMU by Sebastian Ramacher, upload to DELAYED/2
• #666285 src:garlic: "garlic: FTBFS: cp: cannot stat ./garlic': No such file or directory"
  add build-arch target in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2
• #666295 src:scotch: "scotch: FTBFS: cp: cannot stat debian/tmp/int/bin/scotch_esmumps': No such file or directory"
  fix target dependencies in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2
• #666296 src:scmxx: "scmxx: FTBFS: cp: cannot stat debian/debian_provider_logo.bmp': No such file or directory"
  add build-arch target in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2

MySQL supports a plugin interface since 5.1, which enables creation of server components. Plugins can be loaded at server startup, or loaded and unloaded at runtime without restarting the server. Most of these plugins require the full MySQL source tree during their build, which was not available in Debian as a binary package until I uploaded 5.1.54-2 to unstable last week. I had this item on my TODO list since MySQL 5.1 was uploaded to Debian unstable, because it is not possible for a Debian source package to build-depend on another source package. Thankfully, Clint Byrum from Ubuntu sent me a small patch which added the new binary package.

The first package making use of the new mysql-source-5.1 package is HandlerSocket, a NoSQL plugin for MySQL. It is currently waiting in Debian's NEW queue for approval, and I am sure we will see more plugins/packages (XtraBackup from Percona is another well known candidate) making use of the new binary package in Debian soon.

Since MySQL 5.5 was declared stable in December last year, I regulary receive e-mails from people asking when it will get uploaded to Debian. The good thing is that the initial conversion from automake to cmake has already been done by Clint Byrum from Ubuntu, and we are going to use his work as a basis for our packages. The not so good thing is bug #59078, an issue in libmysqlclient which breaks ABI compatibility. According to Lenz Grimmer from Oracle the MySQL upstream developers are already looking at it.

I am still not sure if it is a good idea to upload MySQL 5.5 in the current state to experimental, but I am definitely not going to upload it to unstable until this issue is fixed.