I have just uploaded Lintian 2.5.18 to unstable. While fixing 22 bugs, it only features 5 new tags.

• debian-changelog-has-wrong-weekday
• debian-rules-missing-good-practice-target-dfsg
• empty-udeb-package
• file-name-in-PATH-is-not-ASCII
• misplaced-extra-member-in-deb

The release also include fixes to some false-positives, such as python:any dependencies triggering python-script-but-no-python-dep, a rewritten README file. We also included a patch to make Lintian accept the Original-Maintainer field by default for non-Debian vendors (even if they do not have a profile and Lintian ends up loading the debian/main profile). We also added support for running Lintian directly from a git checkout or source tree without setting LINTIAN_ROOT (or passing root). Since that was the primary use-case for root that option has now been deprecated. I also had lintian and lintian-info require the include-dir and [no-]user-dir options as the first if given at all. I would like to thank Bastien Roucari s, Gaudenz Steinlin, Gunnar Wolf, J r my Bobbio and Lucas Nussbaum for contributing to Lintian and the many who submitted reports or suggestions for improvements. I would also like to thank Brian hugmeir Fraser, who assisted me in identifying and working around a bug in Perl s glob function when run under threads (filed upstream as RT#119897).

when francesca started her DPL game, I also started thinking about people I'd like to encourage to stand as a DPL candidate. unfortunately my initial "short list" contained 18 names, which doesn't fit the game's rules very well. after waiting a bit, 9 of them were mentioned by others already, so I can leave them out here (which also means no public hug, sorry, please complain to the inventor of the game!). from the remaining 9, I've now chosen my Fantastic Four (in alphabtic order of first names):

• David Bremner
• Gaudenz Steinlin
• Michael Prokop
• M nica Ram rez Arceda

in my opinion, the DPL task is mostly about managing, & those four people are in my experience all very good at organising projects & dealing with people, & are therefore well suited for this task. let's see if they feel motivated to take on the challenge! (the nomination period has already started, so don't hestitate!)

As already written, even though it seems, I didn't spend my time running at Debconf12. Or eating cheese... Or (tentatively) hiking volcanoes... Or helping people to kill each other with socks... Or drinking beers... Not *only* all of these (some of them at the same time, though hiking a volcano while eating cheese and drinking beers is not particularly easy)....but also some Debian work. So, I uploaded a backport of samba to squeeze backports and our squeeze users should now have the same samba version than wheezy ones. I also stopped several cronjobs on i18n.debian.net and moved some material there as links have been (or should be) moved to the brand new i18n.debian.org (and its alias l10n.debian.org). I did a major cleanup in tasksel, committed several fixes, proposed others for review (mostly to Joey Hess). All this in preparation for a soon-to-come upload, probably after D-I beta1 which has been prepared by Cyril Brulebois while he was.....not attending Debconf12.. I also followed the integration of Sorina Sandu's work on netcfg for link detection and network ESSID choice in Debian Installer. Sorina is doing well in her GSOC work, because she's clearly someone with great capabilities who we will, I hope, be able to keep contributing to Debian. We can also thank the mentoring work of Gaudenz Steinlin to guide Sorina through D-I's arcanes. I also went through the current status of debconf translation completeness in testing for the 7 languages that target 100% (Czech, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish). Here, the point is mostly taking care that fixes are either:

• already fixed in unstable (therefore checking that unblock requests have been sent by maintainers)
• sent as a bug report (so that I can harrass package maintainers to fix it)
• under work by a localization team (so that I can pester them to move on)

I can we have good chances to achieve this goal for at least 6 of these 7 languages (Czech might be more tricky as several translations are not yet made). Finally, I also did most of my regular Debian work (which usually takes 1-2 hours every day)...and bits of my paid work (sorry for those people who I shared the table at breakfast, but that was my only common time window with my team at work). So, well, quite productive weeks, once again.

Second day in managua, second day running. Today, after breakfast, so at about 7h45, I went out running with Gaudenz Steinlin. The goal was to go to laguna de Tiscapa, a lagoon of volcanic origin, in the middle of the city of Managua. The laguna is not really far away from the place we're staying at (about 2.5km). However, as usual here, the only way to get there is along the streets. Noisy streets. Often smelly streets. But that's the only way. For instance, it took Gaudenz several minutes before he could manage to cross the "Pista Beljamin Zelodon", a quite busy highway. The lagoon per se is really nice, particularly the view from the Sandino monument where you can see the Peninsula de Chiltepe. However, apart from that, it was sometimes a quite boring run because of the traffic, noise, etc. But I enjoyed again having a good run with Gaudenz. We'll do this again, but in another place..:-) GPS trace for that run is here.

OK, I still have to load my photos of Debconf10 somewhere. Shame on me. My gallery is broken (no longer allows uploads, even local ones!). Still, do you remember that we somehow mentioned that a small bunch of geeks did run together a local race at Debconf10? Indeed, a dozen of Debconf10 attendees did participate to the Van Cortland Track Club Summer Series run of Thursday August 5th. And all of us completed this 5km cross-country run in Van Cortland Park, in Bronx, turning it into the most international attendance of this local race. We now have the official results.. So please congratulate No l K the for finishing 17th scratch, 2nd in his category...or Gaudenz Steinlin being 32th only 41 seconds after No l. Or Iustin 107th, Gregory, 113th, Luca (and kilt) 140th, Maxy 163th, Marga 167th. Even /me though I finished 5 minutes after that Kevin british guy who I ran with the week-end before, dammit. Or whoever I'm forgetting (we were more than this, IIRC). Geeks can run. Fast, for some of them (I still need to have No l telling me about his last marathon).

Hello fellow developers, The summer is over but I m happy to announce that this year s Summer of Code at Debian has been better than ever! This is indeed the 4th time we had the privilege of participating in the Google Summer of Code and each year has been a little different. This year, 8 of our 10 students succeeded in our (very strict!) final evaluations, but we have reasons to believe that they will translate into more long-term developers than ever, all thank to you. The highlight this year has been getting almost all of our students at DebConf10. Thanks again this year to generous Travel Grants from the Google Open Source Team, we managed to fly in 7 of our students (up from 3!). You certainly saw them, presenting during DebianDay, hacking on the grass of Columbia, hacking^Wcheering our Debian Project Leader throwing the inaugural pitch of a professional baseball game or hacking^Wsun-tanning on the tr s kitsch Coney Island beach. Before I give the keyboard to our Students, I d like to tell you that it will be the pleasure and honor of Obey Arthur Liu (yours truly, as Administrator) and Bastian Venthur (as Mentor) to represent Debian at the Summer of Code 2010 Mentors Summit on 23-24 October 2010, at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View. Like last year, we expect many other DDs to be present under other hats. We will be having 2 days of unconference on GSoC and free software related topics. We all look forward to reporting from California on Planet and soc-coordination@l.a.d.o! All of our students had a wonderful experience, even if they couldn t come to DebConf, that is best shared in their own voice, so without further ado, our successful projects: Multi-Arch support in APT by David Kalnischkies, mentored by Michael Vogt apt-get install MultiArch does mostly work now as most code is already merged in squeeze, but if not complain about us at deity@l.d.o! Still, a lot left on the todo list not only in APT so let us all add MultiArch again to the Release Goals and work hard on squeezing it into wheezy. Debbugs Bug Reporting and Manipulation API by David Wendt Jr., mentored by Bastian Venthur Hello, I m David Wendt, and I went to Debconf10 to learn more about the development side of Debian. Having used it since the 9th grade, I ve been intimately familiar with many of Debian s internals. However, I wanted to see the developers and other Debian users. At DebConf, I was able to see a variety of talks from Debian and Ubuntu developers. I also got to meet with my mentor as well as the maintainer of Debbugs. Content-aware Config Files Upgrading by Krzysztof Tyszecki, mentored by Dominique Dumont Config::Model is now capable of manipulating files using shorter and easier to write models. Thanks to that, packagers may start experiment with creating upgrade models. Further work is needed to support more complicated config files Dominique Dumont is working on DEP-5 parser, I ll shortly start working on a cupsd config file parser.
The best thing about DebConf10 is that every person I talked with knew what I was doing. I had a mission to get some feedback on my project. Everybody liked the idea of making upgrades less cumbersome. On the other side, it was my first visit to United States, so I decided to go on a daytrip on my own (instead of staying inside the building, despite heat warnings). I had a chance to visit many interesting places like Ground Zero, the UN headquarters, Grand Central Terminal, Times square and Rockefeller Center that was a great experience. Hurd port and de-Linux-ization of Debian-Installer by J r mie Koenig, mentored by Samuel Thibault Debconf10 was great! Among other people working on the installer, I met Aur lien Jarno from the Debian/kFreeBSD team and we worked together on a cross-platform busybox package. Besides, the talks were very interesting and I ve filled my TODO-list for the year.
For instance I learned about the Jigsaw project of OpenJDK, and how Debian would be the ideal platform to experiment with it. More generally, some people think Debian could push Java 7 forward and I d like to see this happen. Smart Upload Server for FTP Master by Petr Jasek, mentored by Joerg Jaspert I must say that it was great time for me in NY, I ve met and talked and coded with people from ftp-master team like Torsten Werner who helped me to push the project a bit further and with some other people who were looking forward to release of the tool which I hope they will use quite soon. Everybody interested, everybody excited, really cool place and time. And I can t forget the Coney Island beach and stuff, lot of fun, lot of sun;) Aptitude Qt by Piotr Galiszewski, mentored by Sune Vuorela Currently, development branches support full features searching, viewing extended package s informations, performing cache and packages operations. Code and GUI still require a lot of work which will be continued. Informations about further progress could be found on aptitude mailing list and repository rss channel. Debian-Installer on Neo FreeRunner and Handheld Devices by Thibaut Girka, mentored by Gaudenz Steinlin For me, DebConf 10 started at the airport, where Sylvestre Ledru (whom I didn t know of before) was wearing a GSoC 2007 t-shirt, that is, given the circumstances, almost equivalent to say I m a hacker, I m going to DebConf 10 .
I ve spent my time at the conference attending various talks, hacking, meeting DDs and other hackers (amongst others, my co-mentor Per Andersson, Paul Wise, Julien Cristau, Christian Perrier, Cyril Brulebois, Martin Michlmayr, Colin Watson and Otavio Salvadores who I have to thank for his patience while dealing with my questions), chatting, cross-signing keys, rushing to finish eating before 7pm, getting sunburnt, sightseeing (thanks, Arthur, for the lightning-fast tour of Manhattan!), and so on. Debian Developers and community, we count on you. See you next year! (cross-posted to debian-devel-announce@l.d.o and soc-coordination@l.a.d.o)

It's almost been a week since the GSoC started! Before describing what I've been doing this week I would like to write a word on the project and thank the ones I'm thankful to. The project Currently, Debian can be installed on the Neo Freerunner (FR) by running a shell script called install.sh on an already running Linux installation on the device (more information here). This works. However, it doesn't make use of the Debian Installer, and it is specific to the FR. The plan is to port Debian Installer to the FR and other similar devices. In order to succeed in this project, I'm mentored by Gaudenz Steinlin and Per Andersson, who I want to thank for their guidance (and the patience they'll probably need to have :p). I have to thank Obey Arhur Liu for all his organizing work, especially for the DebConf 10 sponsoring. While I'm at thanking, I want to thank Google, whithout which this program wouldn't exist at all, and especially Carol Smith, who makes an amazing job at organizing every aspect of the GSoC! What I've been doing Now, what have I been doing this week?

• I've set up a Virtual Machine to build the d-i image (as it have to be done on an ARM machine)
• I've set up a cross-compilation toolchain, following lindi's instructions
• I've created a new flavour for the linux-2.6 package
• I've built a d-i image using that kernel flavour
• As Gaudenz suggested, I've started identifying and including the missing drivers needed for a normal use of the Debian Installer on the FreeRunner

As we did not set up git repositories yet, I'll not share the full patches, but only a few files for now:

• The linux 2.6.32-4-s3c24xx kernel package
• The config.s3c24xx config file used to build this kernel
• The first d-i image using that kernel

If you want to try the uImage, here is how to boot it. What's coming next First, I hope everything will be in place to share the full sources by then. The first thing I'll do next week is finishing identifying and including the needed drivers. Then, depending on how good goes the installation process, I may:

• wonder how we can build and run d-i for an Android Phone
• start hacking a user-friendly interface to upload the d-i image to the FreeRunner and boot it
• think about how we should handle the different bootloaders
• see wether/how Debian can be installed on the FR's MTD

I d like to extend a warm welcome to our selected students for the 2010 Debian Google Summer of Code! They should pop up on Debian Planet soon and you re welcome to come talk to them on #debian-soc on irc.debian.org Aptitude Qt by Piotr Galiszewski, mentored by Sune Vuorela Qt GUI for aptitude. Currently, KDE users need to use Aptitude via the console interface, or install the newly developed GTK frontend, which does not fit well into KDE desktop. Making Qt frontend to Aptitude would solve this problem and bring an advanced and fully Debian-compliant graphical package manager to KDE. Content-aware Config Files Upgrading by Krzysztof Tyszecki, mentored by Dominique Dumont When a package deliver configuration files, the problem of merging user data with new configuration instructions will arise during package upgrades on users systems. Sometimes merging can be done with 3 way merge, but this process does not insure that the resulting file is correct or even legal. This project intends to create standards, tools an heuristics to make the scary config file conflict resolution debconf prompt a thing of the past. Debbugs Bug Reporting and Manipulation API by David Wendt Jr., mentored by Bastian Venthur Currently debbugs supports a SOAP interface for querying Debian s Bug Tracking System. Unfortunately this operation is read-only. This project would create an API for debbugs which supports sending and manipulating bug reports, without having to resort to email. This project does not intend to replace email as mean to manipulate the BTS but rather to enhance the BTS to allow other means of bug creation and manipulation. Debian High Performance Computing on Clouds by Dominique Belhachemi, mentored by Steffen Moeller The project paves a way to combine the demands in high performance computing with the dynamics of compute clouds with Debian. Combining the Eucalyptus cloud computing infrastructure with the TORQUE resource manager and preparing the components for dynamically added and removed instances provides the user with a attractive high performance computing environment. Such a system allows users to share resources with large compute centers with minimal changes in their workflow and scripts. Debian-Installer on Neo FreeRunner and Handheld Devices by Thibaut Girka, mentored by Gaudenz Steinlin This project aims to improve the installation experience of Debian on handheld devices by replacing ad-hoc install scripts by a full-blown and adapted Debian-Installer. The Neo FreeRunner is used as it is the most convenient and open device from a development standpoint, but other devices will also be explored. Hurd port and de-Linux-ization of Debian-Installer by J r mie Koenig, mentored by Samuel Thibault The primary means of distributing the Hurd is through Debian GNU/Hurd. However, the installation CDs presently use an ancient, non-native installer. The goal of this project is to port the missing parts of Debian-Installer to Hurd. To achieve this, all problematic Linux-specific code in Debian-Installer will be replaced by less or non-kernel dependent code, paving the way for better support of other non-Linux ports of Debian. Multi-Arch support in APT by David Kalnischkies, mentored by Michael Vogt Hardware like 64bit processors are perfectly able to execute 32bit opcode but until now this potentiality is disregard as the infrastructure tools like dpkg and APT are not able to install and/or solve dependencies across multiple architectures. The project therefore focuses on enabling APT to work out good solutions in a MultiArch aware environments without the need of hacky and partly working biarch packages currently in use. Package Repository Analysis and Migration Automation by Ricardo O Donell, mentored by Neil Williams Emdebian uses a filter to select packages from the main Debian repositories that are considered useful to embedded devices, excluding the majority of packages. The results of processing the filter are automated but maintaining the filter list is manual. This project seeks to automate certain elements of the filtering process to cope with specific conditions. This project will also generalize to more elaborate and intelligent algorithms to improve the transitions of the main Debian archives. Smart Upload Server for FTP Master by Petr Jasek, mentored by Joerg Jaspert Making packages upload smarter, more interactive and painless for uploaders by switching from anonymous FTP and Cron jobs to a robust protocol and modern package checking and processing daemon. This daemon would test early and report early, saving developers time. More details coming soon on http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc Congratulations everyone and have a fruitful summer!

Sooner or later, I will conduct a series of interviews as well as a community survey among Debian package maintainers as part of my research. The motivation for my research is to improve the workflows in the Debian project. How could I make you take part in such a survey? A key challenge and necessity of a survey is to ensure a high degree of participation, or else the responses cannot be read as descriptive of the entire group. Well-formulated questions and a smart way to present them are prerequisites. For instance, I'd consider it quite counter-productive (somewhat ironic even) to ask Debian package maintainers to hit radio buttons on a web form. Instead, participation should require the use of tools with which we are familiar. Another way to get people to respond is by showing how their time will help the project. This assumes that the research hypothesis is tangible and the whole endeavour plausible. And that people care. A third means of motivation is to reward participants. Commonly, this is done by way of a draw among all participants at the end of the survey, and a price given out to the (random) winner. Obviously, the individual's chances get slimmer with every additional participant, but if the price is right, it's still worth a try. I've been pondering for a few days on what a right price would be. Previously, Nokia Internet tablets have been hip, but would you dedicate your time to a survey where you could win one of those? Or a Neo1973 (thanks Lo-lan-do)? Or would a game console, such as the PS3 or the Wii be more exciting? Or is there something (in the same price range) out there you want and would, uh, fill for fill out the survey I mean Please take a moment and let me know which price you could not resist. Don't hesitate to provide me with a list I could just as well let the winner of the draw chose her/his favourite NP: The Pineapple Thief: 8 Days Later Update: Gaudenz Steinlin suggested a Thecus N2100.