Tomorrow, I'll leave /home for more than 3 weeks:

• 10 days with my family in a rented house in Cahors (FR). We might have Internet access there (the owner is indeed installing it and I'll probably help him doing this The Right Way...being interested in the result).
• back at /home on Wednesday Aug. 6th by train
• buy cheese on Aug. 7th (VERY important). Pack it in the bag (round goat cheese inside socks, etc). Also pack some other less important stuff (t-shirts, sweaters, running stuff).
• fly off to DebConf from Paris Orly (Aug 7th, 21:10), via Madrid with Air Europa
• meet Jacobo Tarrio at EZE airport and get our bus to Mar Del Plata
• kiss and hug dozens of friends
• stop sleeping
• enjoy DebConf
• back home on Aug. 18th
• back to work on Aug. 19th (yeah, that's crazy)

For people who are not tired of this, I've had the great honor of being sollicited to hold a keynote lecture at Debconf. As you'd guess, that will be about i18n in Debian. I plan it to be a kinda general thing, giving the current rough picture of how things are going (or not going). No deep technical stuff (aha, how could *I* do that anyway?), just talking with hands. From informations I have, it should be on Aug. 14th, at the beginning of the talks schedule (9:30 or so, local time...check this when the official schedule is out). Apart from that, my personal schedule for DebConf is mostly working with the i18n folks who will be there (Felipe A. van de Wiel aka "faw", Nicolas Fran ois aka "nekral") on the i18n server. Work/talk with Neil Williams about tdebs stuff and all things related to i18n and embedded stuff is also planned as well as preparing the Extremadura meeting we need to have at the end of the year.

Roberto Lumbreras reported bug #480000 on Wednesday May 7th. As bug #470000 was reported as of March 8th 2008, we're still keeping nearly exactly the pace of 2 months for 10,000 bugs, so 60,000bugs a year. Bug #500000 should then be reported around Sept 7th 2008. As a consequence, the candidates for winning the 500000th bug contest are still Miguel Gea or Kartik Mistry. Jacobo Tarrio has his chances, though. I haven't done any MBF to keep chances of winning the contest myself. See you around July 7th for bug #490000!

A few news from the campaign of NMU's targeted at bringing po-debconf translation ratio as high as possible for as many languages as possible (and also improve packaging quality quite significantly on many loosely maintained packages).

• Galician translation are going up quickly. Each NMU features updates by Jacobo Tarrio and Galician is now ranked 10th in the translation ratio list. They could even hit the Spanish (Castillian) translation ratio and become the most translated language from Spain..:-)
• Finnish follows the same way. Starting from quite low, Esko Araj rvi bringed it to 13th rank and now above 50%
• Russian is also going up quite fast and could at least reach 70 or even 80%
• Portuguese (non Brazilian) hit the 90% mark and heads up to 100%
• German is very likely to be bringed to 100%. Crossed 97% today.
• French will be bringed to 100%, as it was for Etch. Close to 99% now.

Maintainers are incredibly cooperative (at least those who are active..:-)). l10n NMUs are always welcomed. Some prefer uploading themselves which is of course perfectly OK. I will now also focus my efforts to minimize uncoordinated changes to debconf templates. Those are generally motivated by the will to follow writing style guidelines, which is perfectly OK. I however still suggest maintainers to send call for translation updates *before* uploading packages with modified templates. Will probably soon post that suggestion to -release.

Fonts are usually a problem when packaging games. Many games seem to pick up fonts from somewhere in the web, which licenses allow only free redistribution, but not modification. Some others don’t even allow commercial use. Some game developers don’t mind at all about this, some others just don’t pay much attention to licenses. In any case, if we want those games in Debian main, we must replace the fonts in them. The problem is then trying to find appropiate fonts for the replacement. As there’s no easy way to have a visual look at all the fonts in the archive, I’vd developed a tiny script to generate some web pages with images of all the TrueType fonts in Debian SID. Lots of thanksgo to Jacobo Tarrio, you’ve helped me a lot!