This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (692.20 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Misc packaging I updated the publican package (a tool for publishing material authored in DocBook XML) with version 3.0, a major new upstream version. As with any important update, it had its share of problems and I created two patches that I sent upstream. I uploaded the package to experimental since we re in freeze. The Debian Administrator s Handbook Since the translation teams have been working for a few months, I wanted to put the result of their work online. I did it and I blogged about it on debian-handbook.info. By the way, we have a Polish translation that just started. This took quite some time because many translators were not well versed with Docbook XML and its structure. So I fixed their mistakes and asked the Weblate developer (Michal Cihar) to implement new checks to avoid those basic XML mistakes. I also added a couple of build scripts to the git repository to make it easier to rebuild translations in multiple formats. I used this opportunity to file a couple of bugs I encountered with Publican (concerning ePub output mainly, and custom brands). I also blogged about our plans to update the book for Wheezy. Roland started to work on it but I did not have the time yet. Debian France The officers (president, treasurer, secretary) have just changed and we had to organize the transition. As the new president, I got administrator access on our Gandi virtual machine (france.debian.net) as well as access to our bank account. I got also got a bunch of administrative papers retracing the history of the association. Carl Chenet (the former president) gave them to me during the mini-debconf that was organized in Paris. Indeed, Sylvestre Ledru and Mehdi Dogguy organized our second mini-debconf Paris and they did it very well. It was a great success with over 100 attendants each of the 2 days it lasted (November 24-25th). Carl managed a merchandising booth that was well stuffed (Luca Capello also brought goodies of Debian.ch) I gave small lightning talk to present the ideas behind my Librement project (it s about funding free software developers). BTW I have not been very good at it, it was only my second lightning talk and I have been a bit too verbose. The talk did not fit in my 5 minutes time slot Back from the mini-debconf, I have been trying to delegate some projects (like get a real website, improve the work-flow of members management, update our server which was still running Lenny). Julien Cristau was willing to upgrade the server did not exactly knew how to upgrade the kernel (it s a bit special since Gandi manages the kernel on the Xen hypervisor side). So I took care of this part and also did some cleanup (adding a backup with its associated remote disk, tweaking the email configuration). And Julien completed the upgrade on November 30th. Alexandre Delano volunteered to have a try at the website and Emmanuel Bouthenot has been looking a bit to see if there was something better than Galette to handle our members. It looks like we ll stay with Galette but have to take care of upgrading it to a newer version. I also processed the first membership applications and organized a vote to extend the board of administrators (since we have two vacant seats). On Monday, we should be back to 9 administrators. Librement Except for the talk during the mini-debconf, I did not do much on this project. That said I got an answer from the Autorit de Contr le Prudentiel saying that I might be eligible for the exemption case (see discussion of last month) and that I should fill out a form to get a confirmation. I also contacted Tunz.com who might be able to provide the services I need (their E-money manager product in particular). They have the required accreditation as a banking/credit institution and are willing to partner with enterprises who setup platforms where you must manage flows of money between several parties. I m now waiting for details such as the cost of their various services. I expect to have much more to show next month I m working with two developers to implement the first building blocks of all this. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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For those interested in Sympa, version 6.1.4 has been uploaded to squeeze-backports. This version fixes around two dozen bugs since the version present in squeeze (6.0.1). I strongly recommend to use this version with squeeze as it fixes some very annoying bugs. How to install it: For squeeze users Be sure to have squeeze-backports repository enabled in your sources.list as explained on Debian Backports website then:

apt-get -t squeeze-backports install sympa

For lenny users For lenny users with a running sympa installation who plan to upgrade to squeeze and use sympa from squeeze-backports, it is recommended to upgrade directly from the version 5.3.4 (lenny's version) to 6.1.4. To do so, you just need to add some apt pinning in /etc/apt/preferences (see below) and then dist-ugprade normally.

Package: sympa
Pin: version 6.1.4*
Pin-Priority: 500

Sympa 6.1.6 is already out and should be uploaded in unstable soon, it should also be backported to squeeze-backports if all goes fine. Special thanks to Gerfried (rhonda) and Alexander (formorer) for their work on Debian Backports.

The following developers got their Debian accounts in the last month:

• Ludovico Cavedon (cavedon)
• Gilles Filippini (pini)
• Christopher Taylor (ctaylor)
• Oliver Korff (okoli)
• Franck Joncourt (franck)
• Antonio Radici (antonio)
• Emmanuel Bouthenot (kolter)
• Tim Retout (diocles)
• Dario Minnucci (midget)
• Hector Oron (zumbi)
• Albin Tonnerre (lutin)
• Modestas Vainius (modax)
• Christoph Egger (christoph)
• Andrea Veri (and)

Congratulations!

emacs-goodies-el

• Test debian-mr-copyright-mode and report suggestions to Vincent Fourmond: done. Next todo: include it, probably in dpkg-dev-el.

pkg-games

• Prepare latest Bos Wars upstream, ask for a sponsor: done. Bos Wars is a futuristic real time strategy game. It used to have copyright and license troubles, but upstreams kindly addressed that.

pkg-phototools

• Finish libpuzzle packaging: done. Libpuzzle is a library to compare images, which also comes with a simple puzzle-diff binary scoring image similarity. Next todo: Wait for a review of the PHP bindings by Emmanuel Bouthenot (who already kindly rewrote upstream's manpages in a proper manner), then ask for a sponsor. Another todo: Check upstream status of CLSimilarImages, see whether it might be worth packaging it, and point the upstream authors to each others.
• Check LuxRender's upstream status: done. LuxRender is a rendering system for physically correct, unbiased image synthesis. The packaging has been ready for weeks, waiting for a released tarball (rather than working on a CVS snapshot). RC5 is on its way.

Misc.

• Suggest an option for fork()-based rendering to Blender upstreams: done. Blender is a free open source 3D content creation suite, including modelling and animating tools, as well as an internal renderer. For some reasons, one might want to use a fork()-based solution rather than one (only) based on threads (limited to 8 by default through a #define), when it comes to using a cluster. Next todo: try and hack it myself.
• Check appletouch's bug #465278 with latest kernel: done. appletouch is the mouse driver on iBook G4 machines, and tends to break badly when resuming from suspend2ram: it's unusuable until the next reboot. Not any better with 2.6.25-rc5-powerpc. Next todo: Report it upstream, following Maximilian's request.
• Check the status of a nasty xfwm4 bug: done. When the switch back to previous workspace option is enabled, and one keeps the key for switching to another workspace pressed too long, xfwm4 starts flickering between both workspaces, endlessly. Restarting X helps. That was previously reported to happen only on low machines, but it's easy to trigger this bug by lowering the delay before character repetition in the keyboard settings.

Of course, that's just an excerpt of the actual todo-list

Welcome to this 7th issue of the DeFuBu contest, the monthly championship of the funniest bug reported to the Debian BTS. The challengers

• Loic Minier with #407127 (evolution: Dates before 1970 not supported, e.g. for birthdays) and #408989 (epiphany-browser: bugzilla.gnome.org inaccessible)
• Sune Vuorela with #407849 (script for /usr/bin/preloadkde) and #409310 (kmines: Can cheat the timer)
• Josh Triplett with #404915 (iceweasel: Icon resembles booger)
• Jeroen van Wolffelaar with #408424 (apache2: "It works!")
• Florent Bayle with #408524 (If I play piano while my computer starts up, /dev/dsp disappears !)
• Christian Perrier with #408482 (xserver-xorg: please map French Canadian (cf) to Canada (ca) layout)
• Frans Pop with #409018 (base: /etc/ld.so.nohwcap missing)

How the vote has been done Four Debian related people voted for these bugs, Emmanuel Bouthenot, Mohammed Adn ne Trojette, Julien Louis and Jade Alglave. Full ranking Bugs

• #408989 (epiphany-browser: bugzilla.gnome.org inaccessible) (28 points)
• #408524 (If I play piano while my computer starts up, /dev/dsp disappears !) (21 points)
• #407849 (script for /usr/bin/preloadkde) and #408424 (apache2: "It works!") (18 points)
• #407127 (evolution: Dates before 1970 not supported, e.g. for birthdays) (17 points)
• #404915 (iceweasel: Icon resembles booger) and #408482 (xserver-xorg: please map French Canadian (cf) to Canada (ca) layout) (11 points)
• #409310 (kmines: Can cheat the timer) (10 points)
• #409018 (base: /etc/ld.so.nohwcap missing) (10 points)

Challengers

• Loic Minier (45 points with 2 bugs)
• Florent Bayle with (21 points with 1 bug)
• Sune Vuorela (28 points with 2 bugs)
• Jeroen van Wolffelaar (18 points with 1 bug)
• Christian Perrier and Josh Triplett (11 points with 1 bug)
• Frans Pop (10 points with 1 bug)

The winners

• Bug: #408989 (epiphany-browser: bugzilla.gnome.org inaccessible)
• Challenger: Loic Minier
• Bug reporter: Tshepang Lekhonkhobe
• Voter: Emmanuel Bouthenot with two first bugs correct: #408524, #408989

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