22 December 2012

My current employer as a benefit offers two days of paid volunteer time every calendar year. In September I decided to devote this time for Debian project. It wasn t easy to convince HR and my manager (hi Gloria ) that such activity can be considered as volunteering but I eventually did it! So last Thursday and Friday were days I could spent working on my packages and other stuff related to Debian Let s talk about effects. 5 packages updated, 16 bugs closed, more than 50 lintian warnings/errors solved. Here goes changelogs from updated packages:
calcurse (3.1.2-1) unstable; urgency=low * The Akamai Technologies paid volunteer days release.
* Package made from scratch (this was funny experience):
- uses new quilt source format
- uses new copyright format
- uses debhelper compatibility level 9 w/hardening options
- uses the newest Standards-Version
* New upstream version:
- supports UTF8 (Closes: #558671)
- hopefully fixes problem with accented characters (Closes: #466010) -- Bartosz Fenski <fenio> Thu, 20 Dec 2012 13:51:08 +0100 httpie (0.3.1-1) unstable; urgency=low * The Akamai Technologies paid volunteer days release.
* Includes manual page (Closes: #673067)
Courtesy of Khalid El Fathi <khalid>. Thanks!
* New upstream version. (Closes: #693810)
- handles binary transfers properly (Closes: #689974) -- Bartosz Fenski <fenio> Thu, 20 Dec 2012 14:27:59 +0100 skipfish (2.10b-1) unstable; urgency=low * The Akamai Technologies paid volunteer days release.
* New upstream version.
* Bumped Standards-Version (no changes needed).
* Various path fixes because of upstream changes.
* Added new libpcre3-dev build dependency.
* Totally rewritten copyright file to comply with new copyright standard. -- Bartosz Fenski <fenio> Thu, 20 Dec 2012 14:59:36 +010 ipcalc (0.41-3) unstable; urgency=low * The Akamai Technologies paid volunteer days release.
* ACK previous NMU, thanks Christopher!
* Documents some missing features in the manpage (Closes: #588143)
Thanks Tanguy Ortolo <tanguy>!
* Fixes other minor problems in manpage (Closes: #688148)
* Description now says it's tool IPv4 only (Closes: #628955)
* Fixes lack of </table> tag when printing supernets (Closes: #600251)
* The following changes are courtesy of Jari Aalto <jari.aalto>:
- Remove deprecated dpatch and upgrade to packaging format "3.0 quilt".
- Update to Standards-Version to 3.9.3 and debhelper to 9.
- Add build-arch and build-indep targets; use dh_prep in rules file.
- Patch 03: update with "quilt refresh" to make it apply cleanly.
Thanks to these changes (Closes: #670737) -- Bartosz Fenski <fenio> Fri, 21 Dec 2012 12:30:11 +0100 netw-ib-ox-ag (5.39.0-1) unstable; urgency=low * The Akamai Technologies paid volunteer days release.
* New upstream version.
* Uses Homepage header. (Closes: #615219, #615294, #615321, #615436, #645522)
* Bumped Standards-Version (no changes needed).
* Switch to dpkg-source 3.0 (quilt) format)
* Fixes FTBFS on s390x and sparc64 (Closes: #639493)
* Fixes 29 (sic!) lintian warnings/errors thus many small changes
in packaging scripts. -- Bartosz Fenski <fenio> Fri, 21 Dec 2012 15:38:29 +0200
Despite this I did something else. I sent end of the world joke-mail to debian-mentors mailing list stating (ignore the fact that my own server marked me as spammer; fixed already ;P) that I m going to review and try to upload every package that will be send to me during end-of-the-world day.
That action was quite successful although no package has been uploaded yet. I reviewed 4 of them and two more are yet to come. So it looks that these two days sponsored by Akamai motivated me enough to spent few more days or even months and help other people to contribute to Debian. Thank you Akamai!