Today we celebrate the day of free software (each year, a saturday around mid-September) More info at softwarefreedomday.org There are no public events in Madrid, but I m going to try to hack and write a bit more this weekend, as my personal celebration. In this blog post you can find some of my very very recent activities on free software, and my plans for this weekend of celebration! Debian Children distros aka Derivatives I had the translation/update of the page www.debian.org/misc/children-distros pending since long time. It s a long page, and I was not sure what was better: if picking up the too-outdated last translation, and review it carefully in order to update it, or starting from scratch. I decided to reuse the last translation (thanks Luis Uribe!) and after some days dedicating my commuting time on it, finally, yesterday evening I finished it at home. Now it s in the review queue, and I hope in 10 days or so it will be uploaded. In the meantime, I have learned a bit about the Debian Derivatives subproject and census, I have watched the Derivatives Panel at DebConf13, and had a look at the bug #723069 about keeping the children-distros page up to date. So now that I m liberated about this translation, I m going to put some time in keeping up to date the original English page (I m part of the www and publicity team, so I think it makes sense). My goal is to review at least one Debian derivative each two days, and when I finish the list, start again. I can update the wiki myself, and for the www, I ll send patches against #723069, unless I m told to do it other way. BTW, wouldn t be nice to mark web/wiki pages as RFH the same as packages?, so other people can easily decide to put some time on them, and make http://www.debian.org even more awesome! Or make them appear in the how-can-i-help reminders :) Mmm maybe it s just a matter of filing a bug and tagging it as gift ? I think no, because nobody has the package www.debian.org installed in their system I ll talk with the maintainer about this. New Member process I promised myself to try to work a bit more in Debian during the summer and September, and if everything goes well, try to apply to the new member process in October. I wanted to read all the documentation first, and one challenge is to review/update the translations of www.debian.org/devel/join folder. This way, both myself and the Spanish speaking community benefit from the effort. Yesterday I translated one of those pending pages and I hope during the weekend I can translate/update the rest. When I finish that, I ll keep reading the other documentation. DebConf15 This summer I was invited to join the DebConf15 organization team and pick up tasks in the publicity area. I was very happy to join, I m not sure at all that I can go to DebConf15 in Heidelberg (Germany), in fact I m quite sure I will not go since mid-August is the only opportunity to visit family who lives far away, but anyway, there are things that we can do before DebConf15 and I can contribute. For now, I attended last Monday to the meeting at IRC, and I m finishing a short blogpost about the DebConf14 talk presenting DebConf15, that will be published in the DebConf15 blog. Android, F-Droid I keep on trying to spread the word about F-Droid and the free software available for Android, last week some of my friends updated Kontalk to the 3.0.b1 version (I had updated at the beginning of September) and they liked that now, the images are sent encrypted as well as the text messages :) Some friends also liked the 2048 game, since it can be played offline, without ads, and so. I decided to spend some time this weekend contributing translations to the Android apps that I use. A long pending issue is to try to put workforce in the F-Droid project itself so apps descriptions are internationalized (the program is fully translatable, but the categories of apps and the descriptions themselves, are not). This is a complicated issue, it requires to take some design decisions, and later, of course, the implementation. I cannot do it alone, and I cannot do it in the short time. But today I have filed a bug report (#35) so maybe I find other people able to help. Jabber/XMPP and the RedesLibres chatroom Since several months I ve been using more often my Jabber/XMPP account to join the chatroom redeslibres@salas.mijabber.es I meet there some people that I follow in Pump.io (for example, the people that write in the Comun cate Libremente or Lignux blogs) and we talk about pump.io, free software, free services, and other things. I feel very comfortable there, it s nice to have a Spanish speaking group inside the Free Software community, and I m also learning a bit about XMPP (I ve tried a lot of desktop and Android clients, just for fun!), free networks, and so. So today I wanted to publicly thank you everybody in that chatroom, that welcomed me so well :) Thank you, free software friends And, by extension, I want to thank you all the people that work and have fun in the Free Software communities, in the projects where I contribute or others. They (we) hack to make the world better, and to allow others join to this beautiful challenge that is making machines do what their (final) users wants. Comments? You can comment on this post in this Pump.io thread.
Filed under: My experiences and opinion Tagged: Android, Communities, Contributing to libre software, Debian, English, F-Droid, federation, Free Software, Freedom, internationalization, libre software, localization, translations

PHPUnit, according to its PTS, has been in Debian since 2009. But it was orphaned, and nobody took care of it for a while. That is until few weeks ago, Luis Uribe started to work on it. Since he isn t a DD, and that I take care of, I believe, about half of the all the PHP PEAR packages in Debian, I started working with him on re-doing the work of packaging PHPUnit for Debian. Previously, the old version was quite wrong, with missing dependencies, and not really working, what a shame PHPUnit 3.6 has been in Debian SID for 3 days now. And it s working well. I m now adding runs of unit testings from upstream packages at build time (of course, only if DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS doesn t contains nocheck , as per the policy). All together, it s been quite some fun to hack this, and I m quite happy of the results, even though there s still a lot of work remaining. PHP itself is running unit tests at build time. And not just a few: more than 11000 of them. The only small issue, is that they are totally outdated. Over the time, the vardump() function has evolved, and doesn t print things the same way. One may say that it prints things in a nicer way, but as a result, many of the tests that were suppose to work, actually fails because of these differences in vardump() over time. So I started working on fixing some of the tests. It s most of the time very easy to fix, but it takes a long time to fix all these small unit tests. So far, I ve been able to fix most of what s in the tests/, Zend/tests (more than 161 tests fixed), and the beginning of ext/*/tests: for the moment: bcmath, bz2, calendar, curl, date, dba, dom, ereg, and a part of exif, which for the moment represent 214 fixed tests, and I ll try to do more fixes when I have time. I hope to send the patches upstream soon. The final goal is of course to have the build of PHP to fail if unit tests are failing as well. For the moment, unit tests do run at build time, but the build don t care of the results, which I think is stupid (it s wasting CPU cycles for no reasons, IMO). If you maintain some PEAR packages, I would welcome you to first join the PKG-PEAR team on Alioth, and team maintain your packages, switch over to pkg-php-tools and dh 8 auto-sequencer, and to follow the PKG-PHP-PEAR packaging guide lines so that we have consistency in the archive. And of course, run unit testings, by doing a build-depends on phpunit (>= 3.6). Note that unit testings in PEAR packages are tracked on the Debian wiki. This post is also a call for help, because I feel quite alone doing this work of packaging PEAR packages, which many PHP applications depend on (think about roundcube, horde, extplorer, and many more). Other teams are doing very well, like the Perl team, and there s no reason why Debian wouldn t maintain PHP libraries as well as the ones for Perl.

shapado.debian.net Since a few hours, a Shapado instance for Debian is available at: Shapado is a Question and Answer (QA) website, meant to provide user support to the community, by the community. Another way of seeing it is as a skill exchange website: users can ask questions about stuff they don't know and other users, possiby more expert on that topic, can answer those questions; everyone can then use peer review to evaluate and sort answers. Several proprietary web applications are based on the above notions and have proven useful for user support in several contexts, including other Free Software distributions. Shapado on the other hand is Free Software released under AGPL; as such it's the best match to give a try to something similar in the context of Debian. Shapado has also a couple of other niceties, e.g. offers login via OpenID and supports questions/answers in multiple languages. Will it work for us?
Will it not?
It's up to the community. This kind of user support works when it reaches a critical mass of both "newbie" users in need of help and of "expert" users willing to help them. No matter your category, give it a try: go to the website and look around, you'll probably find a question to ask, a question to answer, or an answer to evaluate. Acknowledgements

• the Shapado developers
• Patrick Aljord for hosting support
• Fernando C. Estrada and Luis Uribe for admin / moderation work (by the way, they are looking for help)
• Jorge Castro for pinging me about this idea

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Update: add mention of multi-language support