As every responsible maintainer should know, having an updated debian/copyright file is very important but can also take a significant amount of work. A lot of copy & pasting, a lot of manual corrections, and a lot of opportunity for human errors. There are several tools that help with this, but they all have their limitations. decopy is a newly uploaded tool (unfortunately too new for stretch) that aims to:

• Detect as many licenses as possible
• Parse both text and binary files
• Minimize the work needed to keep the debian/copyright file up-to-date.

How to use it In order to run it, after apt-get installing it, just go to a source package directory and run decopy in it. Depending on the size of the package, it might take a while (the thorough processing means that a lot of checking is going on). This will show you the generated debian/copyright file in stdout. If you want to store it and diff it against your current copyright file, use decopy --output /tmp/copyright. There's more documentation in the README file. Future changes More licenses are coming, the intention is to support all licenses listed in the SPDX License List. Additionally, the analysis will be improved to prioritize looking for the most common licenses first, avoiding unnecessary delays. More modes of operation are also coming. We are planning for a diff mode that shows you only the changes between the current copyright file and what the tool thinks should be there as well as an explain mode that will let the user know what the differences are in a more verbose manner. Credits and source Decopy was mainly written by Maximiliano Curia. I've added testing, documentation and packaging. It's hosted in collab-maint, licensed under the ISC license. We would love to get more contributors for it :)

Call for Proposals Deadline The deadline for submitting proposals is approaching, with only 12 days left to submit your event by June 15th. Events submitted after that date might not be part of the official DebConf schedule. We are very excited about the upcoming conference, and we would like to encourage you to send your proposals. It s an important part of the conference to hear and discuss new ideas. If you have something that you d like to present but you have not submitted your event yet, please don t wait until the last minute! Check out the proposal submission guide and submit your event. If you have already submitted your event, do take this opportunity to login to summit and review it, expanding the event description to be more descriptive and appealing to the attendees if necessary. Second Batch of Approved talks We are happy to announce the following talks that are already approved:

• What s new in the Linux kernel (Ben Hutchings)
• PPAs - what s next? (Neil McGovern)
• Let s get ready to Go (Margarita Manterola)
• Debian dependency resolution in polynomial time (Niels Thykier)
• A vision of backups in Debian (Lars Wirzenius)

Please hurry up and share your ideas with us. Propose your event before the deadline is reached. Looking forward to see you on Heidelberg, The DebConf content Team

Today at 18:00 UTC (this evening for me) there will be a Debian Publicity Team IRC meeting (open meeting, everybody invited), and I m very happy because it will be the first meeting that I know of, since I joined the team (years!). Being part of the Publicity team There are many tasks handled by Publicity, and when I joined, I supposed that I was going to be part of a team with many members and well structured. And it was true but not as I imagined. Publicity is a great team, in the sense that it accepts contributions from many people, and the few core members do an amazing work: on one side, get things done; on the other side, integrate all those occasional contributions from the wider community. But there are fewer core contributors than what one would expect by the output of the team. I would say we are maximum 10 people (out of 353 voters, 1033 Debian Developers, and 1197 contributors in the Debian Community in 2015). And as far as I know, everybody is member of some other teams too (I m a translator, others in website team, sysadmins, packaging teams and now we have a member sharing Publicity membership with DPL-ship!). Organisation around the tasks Publicity regular tasks (announcements, the newsletter Debian Project News , posting in social networks and in bits.debian.org, and other ) are all well defined and documented, in order to allow anybody jump in and help, and this is great, because it ensures a way for contributions to arrive the wide audience from the very first day: you pick something, you follow the instructions, and you re done. I love this approach, because I tend to prefer to follow instructions than to create something, and my Debian time is made of small chunks at random days/times. But sometimes I feel that we all work alone , in something like a cold, robotic do-ocracy, and I also wonder how many people don t contribute or become regular contributors just because they don t understand the procedures, or they don t like them, or other reasons IRC meeting IRC is something that I use only for contributing to free software, not in other parts of my life. I like IRC, it s productive and fun, but I m not always there, and I don t save logs when I am idle, and I usually prefer email for communication. However, I try to be more present in the Debian IRC channels of the teams where I contribute, because I ve learned that it plays a big role in feeling at home in Debian . Currently you can find me in #debconf-team #debconf15-germany #debian-i18n #debian-l10n-spanish #debian-publicity #debian-women and #debian-www . I ve attended some meetings in IRC (MediaGoblin monthly meetings, and DebConf15 meetings) and I ve learned about MeetBot and more or less how to chair an IRC meeting. Today it will be my first time chairing, it s hard to emulate so great chairs as Marga or Chris Webber, bu I hope I do it decently, and we all have a nice time knowing each other and sharing ideas for the Publicity team. Want to attend? All the details (when, where, agenda ) in the wiki page of the meeting. See you in a few hours!
Filed under: My experiences and opinion Tagged: Communities, Contributing to libre software, Debian, English, Free Software, IRC, libre software, Project Management

Debian Women is proud to announce that it will hold a MiniDebConf in Barcelona on 15-16 March 2014, where Debian enthusiasts from far and wide will gather to talk about the latest Debian changes and the Debian community, as well as to meet new and old friends. The MiniDebConf is fast approaching, be sure to make your travel arrangements! It is going to be an exciting event, in a beautiful venue, in one of the most famous European cities! Schedule A draft schedule (still subject to some last minute changes) is already available. The list of talks promises two days packed with great talks! If you have an exciting idea for a talk, but missed the deadline, please get in touch with us, we might still have a slot for you. Crowd-funding We are still raising funds to cover the costs of running the conference and to offer travel sponsorship to people who can't pay for it. Please, consider donating any amount you can, everything helps! Sponsorship If you want to attend the conference, but are unable to cover the costs. Please contact us! We don't have a big budget, but we will make our best to help. Naturally, priority will be given to participants who have an accepted talk. About this MiniDebConf We want to have a MiniDebConf with both talks and social events, to which everyone in Debian is invited but where the speakers in the talks are all people who identify themselves as female. We consider this important to

• Encourage women who haven't yet given their first DebConf talk
• Provide role models for women who are interested in contributing
• Debunk the myth that there are not enough women who can give talks in DebConf

The idea behind the conference is not to talk about women in free software, or women in Debian, but rather to make discussion about Debian subjects more inclusive for women. If you agree with this goal, spread the word. Forward this announcement and help us make this event a great success! About our sponsors This event is possible thanks to the help provided by our generous sponsors. In particular, we'd like to thank our platinum sponsor, Google. We hope to see you in Barcelona! For more information, visit http://bcn2014.mini.debconf.org

This dent by M nica Ram rez Arceda finally gave me the energy to update the statistics about female participation in Debian, first published by Margarita Manterola back in 2010. So, here the new graph updated to February 2013. The necessary caveat is that is not easy (at least for me) to tell the gender just based on first names, so the actual numbers may be higher. In addition, you should be warned that there are some contributions not easily traceable: it's the case of translators, graphic artists and documentation writers, as well as event organizers. For instance, Beatrice Torracca doesn't appear in these stats, and she is the co-coordinator of the Italian translation team and a long term Debian (and free software in general) contributor. There was a proposal to better track non packaging contributors, but no news on that front yet (at least that I'm aware of). Sources:

• "first uploads": via UDD (except for the first two cases that are from old changelogs)
• DD and DM: taken from NM website

You can find the data used as well as the updated graph here. TODO:

• graph comparing male and female participation in Debian

Continuing my series of articles on dpkg s errors, this time I ll cover a pretty common one which has several variations:

Setting up acpid (1:2.0.12-1) ...
rm: cannot remove  /etc/rc1.d/K20acpid': No such file or directory
dpkg: error processing acpid (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 acpid

Even if dpkg is failing and outputting the error message, the real problem is not in dpkg but in the installed package (acpid in the example above). As we already learned, a package contains not only files but also maintainer scripts that are executed at various points of the installation process (see some useful graphics to understand how they are called, thanks to Margarita Manterola). In the introductory example it was acpid s post-installation script that failed, and dpkg is only forwarding that failure back to the caller. The maintainer scripts are stored in /var/lib/dpkg/info/. You can thus inspect them and even modify them if you hit a bug and want to work around it (do this only if you understand what you do!). One common modification is to add set -x at the start of the script and to retry the failing operation. That way you can see what s executed exactly. Here s what the output could look like after the addition of set -x to /var/lib/dpkg/info/acpid.postinst:

$ sudo dpkg --configure acpid
Setting up acpid (1:2.0.12-1) ...
+ dpkg --compare-versions 1:2.0.11-1 lt-nl 1.0.10-3
+ dpkg --compare-versions 1:2.0.11-1 lt-nl 1.0.6-16
+ dpkg --compare-versions 1:2.0.11-1 lt 1.0.6-6
+ rm /etc/rc1.d/K20acpid
rm: cannot remove  /etc/rc1.d/K20acpid': No such file or directory
dpkg: error processing acpid (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 acpid

This output helps you locate the command that is actually failing. Here s it s relatively easy since we have an error message from rm . And the fix is trivial too, we replace rm with rm -f so that it doesn t fail when the file doesn t exist (this is a fake bug I made up for this article I just added a failing rm call but it s inspired by real bugs I experienced). Maintainer scripts are supposed to be idempotent: we should be able to execute them several times in a row without bad consequences. It happens from time to time that the maintainer gets this wrong on the first try it works, so he uploads his package and we discover the problem only later once someone ended up executing the same code twice for some reason.

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When I think about Margarita, I always remember her as a friendly and welcoming person. Like most of the Debian Women members by the way. But she likes to spread some love and organized a Debian Appreciation Day for example. I think I met her in real life for the first time at Debconf 6 in Oaxtepec (Mexico). She deeply cares about Debian in general. She has proven it multiple times with her DPL candidacy and by giving talks like Making Debian rule again. One last thing, Debconf11 is just over and you will see that Debconf4 has had a big influence on Marga. My advice is simple: next time there s a Debconf on your continent, make sure to take a few days off and come to meet us! It really gives another picture of the Debian community. Now let s proceed with the interview. Raphael: Who are you? Margarita: I m Margarita Manterola, a Software Developer from Argentina. I work developing software in Python in a Debian-friendly company during the day, and teach programming at a local university during the evenings. I m married to Maximiliano Curia who is also a Debian Developer, most of our Free Software work has been done together. I only maintain a handful of packages in Debian, I m more interested in fixing bugs than in packaging new software. I ve also been a part of the organizing team of many of the previous Debian Conferences. One of the biggest commitments and the biggest success of my participation in Debian was being part of the organizing team of DebConf8, in Argentina. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Margarita: I started using Debian around 2000. Soon after we had learned the grips of general GNU/Linux usage, Maxy and I started giving an introductory course at our local university, and became quite involved with the local LUG. At some point in 2002/2003 I became a Debian Bug Reporter : most of my friends would report bugs to me, and I would then write them in the proper form to the BTS. I would also be very attentive about reporting any bugs that I might encounter myself trying to create good bug reports. The turning point in my participation in Debian was DebConf4 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Being so close to Argentina meant that we felt specially invited to be there, and Maxy and I decided to go to DebConf for our honeymoon. We didn t really know much about DebConf dynamics, but we were really eager to learn more about Debian and become more involved. What happened was that meeting with DDs from all over the world transformed our lives, we became part of the Debian family and wanted to be more and more involved. Soon after that we both started maintaining packages and not long after that, applied to become Developers. The Debian Women project also meant a lot to me. I felt encouraged all along the way, encouraged to learn, to ask questions and to lose the fear of making mistakes. I became a Debian Developer on November 2005. Since then, Debian has always been one of the most important things I do in my life. Raphael There was a Debian Women BoF during debconf. What are the plans for Debian Women in the upcoming months? Margarita: I was not there in person, but thanks to the awesome work of the video team, and of Christian Perrier s typing efforts when something failed, I was able to experience much of what was discussed. One of the many points that came up during the BOF is that many people Want to help but don t know where to start or how to go about it. It s a challenge for the Debian Women project to find a way to allow these people to become involved in Debian through Mini projects or something like that. Another of the subjects that was brought up was the Debian Women mentoring project, which has been going on for quite a while now, but lacks enough publicity. So, we need to reach more people about it, and maybe also improve it with some templates, similar to the New Maintainer templates, so that mentees that don t know where to start have some sort of general path to follow. Raphael: You created very useful diagrams documenting how package maintainer scripts are invoked by dpkg. How did you do it and was that a useful experience? Margarita: I did those diagrams to be able to answer one of the questions in the NM templates, regarding the order of the maintainer script execution. Answering the question in text was basically copying and pasting the part of the Debian Policy that explained it, which wasn t really too clear for me, so I decided to go and make a diagram of it, so that I could really understand it. I did it by the best of all debugging techniques: adding prints to each of the maintainer scripts, and testing them in all the different orders that I could think of. It was a useful experience at the time, because I learned a lot of how maintainers scripts work. I didn t expect the diagrams to become so famous, though, I only did them to answer one NM question, that I assumed most other people had already answered before Raphael: You participated in a DPL election. This is a big commitment to make. What were your motivations? Margarita: As I said, I was part of the organizing team of DebConf8, in Argentina. Which was quite a success, a lot of people enjoyed it and praised the good work that had been done by the local team. During said DebConf8, I had a dream (it was almost a nightmare, actually): I woke up and just like that, I was the DPL. I spoke to some people about this dream and to my complete surprise many said that I should actually do it. After giving that possibility a year and a half of thoughts, during the 2010 campaign I was talked into participating myself as a candidate, and it was a very interesting experience. However, I m very glad that Zack got elected and not me, I think he makes a much better DPL that I would have made. Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Margarita: I think the main problem that we have is our communication, both inside the project and outside the project. Most of us are very technical people, our skills lay in the technical part of Debian (preparing packages, fixing bugs, writing software, administering systems) not in the social part. And thus, we lack a general empathy that is quite needed when interacting with people from all over the world. Raphael: Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy? Margarita: Not particularly. I do want it to be a great release with good quality, stable software. I would also like to keep making Debian more and more universal with each release, making it more user friendly, more accessible, and more robust than any other previous release. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Margarita: I admire a lot of people in Debian. There s a lot of people that contribute a lot of time to Debian, amounts of time that I can t begin to understand how they can afford. I admire Stefano Zacchiroli, our current project leader. And Steve McIntyre, the project leader before him. Also Bdale Garbee, who s also been a DPL in the past. Making this list I realize that Debian has been blessed by quite a number of great leaders in the past. I admire Holger Levsen, for his contributions to the DebConf video team, that have made it possible year after year for the whole project to participate in DebConf remotely. I admire Steve Langasek and Andreas Barth (etch is still my favourite release). I admire Christian Perrier for his work on internationalization. I admire Joerg Jaspert for the incredible amounts of time that he puts into Debian. And actually, I could go on admiring people all night long. I admire so many people that this interview could become a very boring list of names. I guess it s better to leave it at saying that Debian is lucky to have quite a lot of excellent hackers around.

---

Thank you to Marga for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading her answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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Out of curiosity, and because it is Sunday morning and I have a cold and can't get my brain to do anything tricky, I counted the number of candidates in each year's DPL elections.

Year	Count	Names
1999	4	Joseph Carter, Ben Collins, Wichert Akkerman, Richard Braakman
2000	4	Ben Collins, Wichert Akkerman, Joel Klecker, Matthew Vernon
2001	4	Branden Robinson, Anand Kumria, Ben Collins, Bdale Garbee
2002	3	Branden Robinson, Rapha l Hertzog, Bdale Garbee
2003	4	Moshe Zadka, Bdale Garbee, Branden Robinson, Martin Michlmayr
2004	3	Martin Michlmayr, Gergely Nagy, Branden Robinson
2005	6	Matthew Garrett, Andreas Schuldei, Angus Lees, Anthony Towns, Jonathan Walther, Branden Robinson
2006	7	Jeroen van Wolffelaar, Ari Pollak, Steve McIntyre, Anthony Towns, Andreas Schuldei, Jonathan (Ted) Walther, Bill Allombert
2007	8	Wouter Verhelst, Aigars Mahinovs, Gustavo Franco, Sam Hocevar, Steve McIntyre, Rapha l Hertzog, Anthony Towns, Simon Richter
2008	3	Marc Brockschmidt, Rapha l Hertzog, Steve McIntyre
2009	2	Stefano Zacchiroli, Steve McIntyre
2010	4	Stefano Zacchiroli, Wouter Verhelst, Charles Plessy, Margarita Manterola
2011	1	Stefano Zacchiroli (no vote yet)

Winner indicate by boldface. I expect Zack to win over "None Of The Above", so I went ahead and boldfaced him already, even if there has not been a vote for this year. Median number of candidates is 4.

Christian is a figure of Debian, not only because of the tremendous coordination work that he does within the translation project, but also because he s very involved at the social level. He s probably in the top 5 of the persons who attended most often the Debian conference. Christian is a friend (thanks for hosting me so many times when I come to Paris for Debian related events) and I m glad that he accepted to be interviewed. He likes to speak and that shows in the length of his answers but you ll be traveling the world while reading him. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Christian. Who are you? I am a French citizen (which is easy to guess unless you correct my usual mistakes in what follows). I m immensely proud of being married for nearly 26 years with Elizabeth (who deserves a statue from Debian for being so patient with my passion and my dedication to the project). I m also the proud father of 3 wonderful kids , aged 19 to 23. I work as team manager in the Networks and Computers Division of Onera the French Aerospace lab , a public research institute about Aeronautics, Space and Defense. My team provides computer management services for research divisions of Onera, with a specific focus put on individual computing. I entered the world of free software as one of the very first users of Linux in France. Back in the early 1990 s, I happened (though the BBS users communities) to be a friend of several early adopters of Linux and/or BSD386/FreeBSD/NetBSD in France. More specifically, I discovered Linux thanks with my friend Ren Cougnenc (all my free software talks are dedicated to Ren , who passed away in 1996). You re not a programmer, not even a packager. How did you come to Debian? I m definitely not a programmer and I never studied computing (I graduated in Materials Science and worked in that area for a few years after my PhD). However, my daily work always involved computing (I redesigned the creep testing laboratory and its acquisition system all by myself during my thesis research work). An my hobbies often involved playing with home computers, always trying to learn about something new. So, first learning about a new operating system then trying to figure out how to become involved in its development was quite a logical choice. Debian is my distro of choice since it exists. I used Slackware on work machines for a while, but my home server, kheops, first ran Debian 1.1 when I stopped running a BBS on an MS-DOS machine to host a news server. That was back in October 1996. I then happened to be a user, and more specifically a user of genealogy software, also participating very actively in Usenet from this home computer and server, that was running this Debian thing. So, progressively, I joined mailing lists and, being a passionate person, I tried to figure out how I could bring my own little contribution to all this. This is why I became a packager (yes, I am one!) by taking over the geneweb package, which I was using to publish my genealogy research. I applied as DD in January 2001, then got my account in July 2001. My first upload to the Debian archive occurred on August 22nd 2001: that was of course geneweb, which I still maintain. Quite quickly, I became involved in the work on French localization. I have always been a strong supporter of localized software (I even translated a few BBS software back in the early 90 s) as one of the way to bring the power and richness of free software to more users. Localization work lead me to work on the early version of Debian Installer, during those 2003-2005 years where the development of D-I was an incredibly motivating and challenging task, lead by Joey Hess and his inspiring ideas. From user to contributor to leader, I suddenly discovered, around 2004, that I became the coordinator of D-I i18n (internationalization) without even noticing You re the main translation coordinator in Debian. What plans and goals have you set for Debian Wheezy? As always: paint the world in red. Indeed, this is my goal for years. I would like our favorite distro to be able to be used by anyone in the world, whether she speaks English, Northern Sami, Wolof, Uyghur or Secwepemcts n. As a matter of symbol, I use the installer for this. My stance is that one should be able to even install Debian in one s own language. So, for about 7 years, I use D-I as a way to attract new localization contributors. This progress is represented on this page where the world is gradually painted in red as long as the installer supports more languages release after release. The map above tries to illustrate this by painting in red countries when the most spoken language in the country is supported in Debian Installer. However, that map does not give enough reward to many great efforts made to support very different kind of languages. Not only various national languages, but also very different ones: all regional languages of Spain, many of the most spoken languages in India, minority languages such as Uyghur for which an effort is starting, Northern Sami because it is taught in a few schools in Norway, etc., etc. Still, the map gives a good idea of what I would like to see better supported: languages from Africa, several languages in Central Asia. And, as a very very personal goal, I m eagerly waiting for support of Tibetan in Debian Installer, the same way we support its sister language, Dzongkha from Bhutan. For this to happen, we have to make contribution to localization as easy as possible. The very distributed nature of Debian development makes this a challenge, as material to translate (D-I components, debconf screens, native packages, packages descriptions, website, documentation) is very widely spread. A goal, for years, is to set a centralized place where translators could work easily without even knowing about SVN/GIT/BZR or having to report bugs to send their work. The point, however, would be to have this without making compromises on translation quality. So, with peer review, use of thesaurus and translation memory and all such techniques. Tools for this exist: we, for instance, worked with the developers of Pootle to help making it able to cope with the huge amount of material in Debian (think about packages descriptions translations). However, as of now, the glue between such tools and the raw material (that often lies in packages) didn t come. So, currently, translation work in Debian requires a great knowledge of how things are organized, where is the material, how it can be possible to make contribution reach packages, etc. And, as I m technically unable to fulfill the goal of building the infrastructure, I m fulfilling that role of spreading out the knowledge. This is how I can define my coordinator role. Ubuntu uses a web-based tool to make it easy to contribute translations directly in Launchpad. At some point you asked Canonical to make it free software. Launchpad has been freed in the mean time. Have you (re)considered using it? Why not? After all, it more or less fills in the needs I just described. I still don t really figure out how we could have all Debian material gathered in Rosetta/Launchpad .and also how Debian packagers could easily get localized material back from the framework without changing their development processes. I have always tried to stay neutral wrt Ubuntu. As many people now in Debian, I feel like we have reached a good way to achieve our mutual development. When it comes at localization work, the early days where the everything in Rosetta and translates who wants stanza did a lot of harm to several upstream localization projects is, I think, way over. Many people who currently contribute to D-I localization were indeed sent to me by Ubuntu contributors .and by localizing D-I, apt, debconf, package descriptions, etc., they re doing translation work for Ubuntu as well as for Debian. Let s say I m a Debian user and I want to help translate Debian in my language. I can spend 1 hour per week on this activity. What should I do to start? Several language teams use Debian mailing lists to coordinate their work. If you re lucky enough to be a speaker of one of these languages, try joining debian-l10n-<yourlanguage> and follow what s happening there. Don t try to immediately jump in some translation work. First, participate to peer reviews: comment on others translations. Learn about the team s processes, jargon and habits. Then, progressively, start working on a few translations: you may want to start with translations of debconf templates: they are short, often easy to do. That s perfect if you have few time. If no language team exists for your language, try joining debian-i18n and ask about existing effort for your language. I may be able to point you to individuals working on Debian translations (very often along with other free software translation efforts). If I am not, then you have just been named coordinator for your language I may even ask you if you want to work on translating the Debian Installer. What s the biggest problem of Debian? We have no problems, we only have solutions We are maybe facing a growth problem for a few years. Despite the increased welcoming aspects of our processes (Debian Maintainers), Debian is having hard times in growing. The overall number of active contributors is probably stagnating for quite a while. I m still amazed, however, to see how we can cope with that and still be able to release over the years. So, after all, this is maybe not a problem Many people would point communication problems here. I don t. I think that communication inside the Debian project is working fairly well now. Our famous flame wars do of course still happen from time to time, but what large free software project doesn t have flame wars? In many areas, we indeed improved communication very significantly. I want to take as an example the way the release of squeeze has been managed. I think that the release team did, even more this time, a very significant and visible effort to communicate with the entire project. And the release of squeeze has been a great success in that matter. So, there s nearly nothing that frustrates me in Debian. Even when a random developer breaks my beloved 100% completeness of French translations, I m not frustrated for more than 2 minutes. You re known in the Debian community as the organizer of the Cheese & Wine Party during DebConf. Can you tell us what this is about? This is an interesting story about how things build themselves in Debian. It all started in July 2005, before DebConf 5 in Helsinki. Denis Barbier, Nicolas Fran ois and myself agreed to bring at Debconf a few pieces of French cheese as well as 1 or 2 bottles of French wine and share them with some friends. Thus, we settled an informal meeting in the French room where we invited some fellows: from memory, Benjamin Mako Hill, Hannah Wallach, Matt Zimmermann and Moray Allan. All of us fond of smelly cheese, great wine plus some extra p t home-made by Denis in Toulouse. It finally happened that, by word of mouth, a few dozens of other people slowly joined in that French room and turned the whole thing into an improvized party that more or less lasted for the entire night. The tradition was later firmly settled in 2006, first in Debconf 6 in Mexico where I challenged the French DDs to bring as many great cheese as possible, then during the Debian i18n meeting in Extremadura (Sept 2006) where we reached the highest amount of cheese per participant ever. I think that the Creofonte building in Casar de C ceres hasn t fully recovered from it and is still smelling cheese 5 years after. This party later became a real tradition for DebConf, growing over and over each year. I see it as a wonderful way to illustrate the diversity we have in Debian, as well as the mutual enrichment we always felt during DebConfs. My only regret about it is that it became so big over the years that organizing it is always a challenge and I more and more feel pressure to make it successful. However, over the years, I always found incredible help by DebConf participants (including my own son, last year a moment of sharing which we will both remember for years, i think). And, really, in 2010, standing up on a chair, shouting (because the microphone wasn t working) to thank everybody, was the most emotional moment I had at Debconf 10. Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? So many people. So, just like it happens in many awards ceremonies, I will be very verbose to thank people, sorry in advance for this. The name that comes first is Joey Hess. Joey is someone who has a unique way to perceive what improvements are good for Debian and a very precise and meticulous way to design these improvements. Think about debconf. It is designed for so long now and still reaching its very specific goal. So well designed that it is the entire basis for Joey s other achievement: designing D-I. Moreover, I not only admire Joey for his technical work, but also for his interaction with others. He is not he loudest person around, he doesn t have to .just giving his point in discussion and, guess what? Most of the time, he s right. Someone I would like to name here, also, is Colin Watson. Colin is also someone I worked with for years (the D-I effect, again ) and, here again, the very clever way he works on technical improvements as well as his very friendly way to interact with others just make it. And, how about you, Rapha l? I m really admirative of the way you work on promoting technical work on Debian. Your natural ability to explain things (as good in English as it is in French) and your motivation to share your knowledge are a great benefit for the project. Not to mention the technical achievements you made with Guillem on dpkg of course! Another person I d like to name here is Steve Langasek. We both maintain samba packages for years and collaboration with him has always been a pleasure. Just like Colin, Steve is IMHO a model to follow when it comes at people who work for Canonical while continuing their involvment in Debian. And, indeed, Steve is so patient with my mistakes and stupid questions in samba packaging that he deserves a statue. We re now reaching the end of the year where Stefano Zacchiroli was the Debian Project Leader. And, no offense intended to people who were DPL before him (all of them being people I consider to be friends of mine), I think he did the best term ever. Zack is wonderful in sharing his enthusiasm about Debian and has a unique way to do it. Up to the very end of his term, he has always been working on various aspects of the project and my only hope is that he ll run again (however, I would very well understand that he wants to go back to his hacking activities!). Hat off, Zack!I again have several other people to name in this Bubulle hall of Fame : Don Armstrong, for his constant work on improving Debian BTS, Margarita Manterola as one of the best successes of Debian Women (and the most geeky honeymoon ever), Denis Barbier and Nicolas Fran ois because i18n need really skilled people, Cyril Brulebois and Julien Cristau who kept X.org packaging alive in lenny and squeeze, Otavio Salvador who never gave up on D-I even when we were so few to care about it. I would like to make a special mention for Frans Pop. His loss in 2010 has been a shock for many of us, and particularly me. Frans and I had a similar history in Debian, both mostly working on so-called non technical duties. Frans has been the best release manager for D-I (no offense intended, at all, to Joey or Otavio .I know that both of them share this feeling with me). His very high involvment in his work and the very meticulous way he was doing it lead to great achievements in the installer. The Installation Guide work was also a model and indeed a great example of non technical work that requires as many skills as more classical technical work. So, and even though he was sometimes so picky and, I have to admit, annoying, that explains why I m still feeling sad and, in some way, guilty about Frans loss. One of my goals for wheezy is indeed to complete some things Frans left unachieved. I just found one in bug #564441: I will make this work reach the archive, benefit our users and I know that Frans would have liked that.

---

Thank you to Christian for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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Australia s Department of Finance has mandated that the MS-Office document format should be the standard document format for all agencies [1]. Paul Wayper notes the fact that MS doesn t plan to support it s own standards and suggests ODF, also known as ISO/IEC standard 26300:2006. [2].Psychology Today has an interesting blog post by Marnia Robinson about scientific reasons for avoiding porn addiction [3]. Her post links to a number of other posts on the topic on Psychology Today.Psychology Today has an interesting post by Noam Shpancer titled What Doesn t Kill You Makes You Weaker [4]. It seems to me that the belief to the contrary is due to people rationalising bad things that happened to them, it s not all bad as it made me stronger .Psychology Today has an interesting article by Noam Shpancer about the soldier as hero myth [5]. He argues that soldiers are really just employees, the risk to American soldiers in war zones really isn t that great and that they are just pawns to the military-industrial complex.Anders Ynnerman gave an interesting TED talk about visualising medical data which includes many startling 3D pictures of humans and animals that are being scanned [6]. He describes how this is useful in forensic analysis by the police and in better understanding biological processes.Margarita Manterola gave an interesting Debconf talk titled Making Debian Rule, again , she has some interesting ideas for improving Debian [7]. She is most focussed on social problems and the questions and comments had some interesting ideas. The Center for Non-Violent Communication [8] was mentioned in the questions, apparently their success includes teaching better communication skills to violent criminals, so it seems that they can help with some big problems.Benjamin Mako Hill wrote an interesting article about the ratio of writers to readers on Wikipedia [9]. While he makes some good points I m wondering about the measure of an editor , there have been few months where I have made 5 edits, so I guess I m just a reader. I probably should take more care in logging in when I make changes though, I ve made more than a few small changes from random systems (client sites, Internet cafes, etc) without bothering to login. This would mess up the stats a bit.The Reid Report has an interesting article about Bush being limited in his international travel due to the fact that he has admitted being a war criminal [10].Understanding Prejudice is an interesting article that summarises a lot of psychological research [11]. It gives many ideas for anyone who wants to reduce prejudice.Robin Harris wrote an interesting ZD Net article about vibrations and the impact on disk performance [12]. Apparently it s very common to be able to get more performance from drive arrays if you dampen vibration, previously I believed that unless you had extreme vibration to cause catastrophic problems then nothing would go wrong. But it seems that even smaller amounts of vibration can cause a 30% performance loss or worse! There is work in progress on vibration-damping racks.In a story published in The Australian about the NSW ambulance service being shut down due to a virus, Professor Caelli cites SE Linux as an example of a technology to make computers more virus resistant [13]. Professor Caelli also states that there should be a legal requirement to have backup systems for computers that have such grave consequences if they crash.Sinclair Community College is offering a new class Fundamentals of Linux Security , it includes SE Linux [14].Slate has an interesting article about Pickpockets [15]. Apparently they are becoming extinct in the US as law enforcement has prevented the Fagins from training younger people, and it s only in Eastern Europe that the skills base remains.

• [1] http://www.itnews.com.au/News/245276,australia-mandates-microsofts-open-office-xml.aspx
• [2] http://www.mabula.net/tbfw/blosxom.cgi/2011/01/19#2011-01-19-minister-leigh-letter
• [3] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cupids-poisoned-arrow/201007/not-all-warnings-about-porn-are-moralistic-or-unscientific
• [4] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/insight-therapy/201008/what-doesnt-kill-you-makes-you-weaker
• [5] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/insight-therapy/201101/soldier-hero
• [6] http://www.ted.com/talks/anders_ynnerman_visualizing_the_medical_data_explosion.html
• [7] http://penta.debconf.org/dc10_schedule/events/627.en.html
• [8] http://www.cnvc.org/
• [9] http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20110206-00
• [10] http://blog.reidreport.com/2011/02/bush-cancels-geneva-and-other-consequences-of-torture/
• [11] http://www.understandingprejudice.org/apa/english/
• [12] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/bad-bad-bad-vibrations/896
• [13] http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/world-focus-on-ambulance-system-failure/story-e6frgakx-1226005951185
• [14] http://www.sinclairclarion.com/home/campus/2011/02/07/new-linux-class-starting-in-spring-quarter/
• [15] http://www.slate.com/id/2286010/pagenum/all/

DebConf continued until Saturday, but Friday the 6th was my last day as I left New York that evening. I m a bit late in getting this summary written up. Making Debian Rule, Again (Margarita Manterola) Marga took a bold look at the challenges facing Debian today. She says that Debian is perceived to be less innovative, out of date, difficult to use, and shrinking as a community. She called out Ubuntu as the elephant in the room , which is taking away from Debian. She insists that she is not opposed to Ubuntu, but that nonetheless Ubuntu is to some extent displacing Debian as a focal point for newcomers (both users and contributors). Marga points out that Debian s work is still meaningful, because many users still prefer Debian, and it is perceived to be of higher quality, as well as being the essential basis for derivatives like Ubuntu. She conducted a survey (about 40 respondents) to ask what Debian s problems are, and grouped them into categories like motivation and communication (tied for the #1 spot), visibility (#3, meaning public awareness and perception of Debian) and so on. She went on to make some suggestions about how to address these problems. On the topic of communication, she proposed changing Debian culture by:

• Spreading positive messages, celebrating success
• Thanking contributors for their work
• Avoiding escalation by staying away from email and IRC when angry
• Treating every contributor with respect, no matter how wrong they are

This stimulated a lot of discussion, and most of the remaining time was taken up by comments from the audience. The video has been published, and offers a lot of insight into how Debian developers perceive each other and the project. She also made suggestions for the problems of visibility and motivation. These are crucial issues for Debian devotees to be considering, and I applaud Marga for her fortitude in drawing attention to them. This session was one of the highlights of this DebConf, and catalyzed a lot of discussion of vital issues in Debian. Following her talk, there was a further discussion in the hallway which included many of the people who commented during the session, mostly about how to deal with problematic behavior in Debian. Although I agreed with much of what was said, I found it a bit painful to watch, because (ironically) this discussion displayed several of the characteristic people problems that Debian seems to have:

• Many people had opinions, and although they agreed on many things, agreement was rarely expressed openly. Sometimes it helps a lot to simply say I agree with you and leave it at that. Lending support, rather than adding a new voice, helps to build consensus.
• People waited for their turn to talk rather than listening to the person speaking, so the discussion didn t build momentum toward a conclusion.
• The conversation got louder and more dense over time, making it difficult to enter. It wasn t argumentative; it was simply loud and fast-paced. This drowned out people who weren t as vocal or willful.
• Even where agreement was apparent, there was often no clear action agreed. No one had responsibility for changing the situation.

These same patterns are easily observed on Debian mailing lists for the past 10+ years. I exhibited them myself when I was active on these lists. This kind of cultural norm, once established, is difficult to intentionally change. It requires a fairly radical approach, which will inevitably mean coping with loss. In the case of a community, this can mean losing volunteer contributors cannot let go of this norm, and that is an emotionally difficult experience. However, it is nonetheless necessary to move forward, and I think that Debian as a community is capable of moving beyond it. Juxtaposition Given my history with both Debian and Ubuntu, I couldn t help but take a comparative view of some of this. These problems are not new to Debian, and indeed they inspired many of the key decisions we made when founding the Ubuntu project in 2004. We particularly wanted to foster a culture which was supportive, encouraging and welcoming to potential contributors, something Debian has struggled with. Ubuntu has been, quite deliberately, an experiment in finding solutions to problems such as these. We ve learned a lot from this experiment, and I ve always hoped that this would help to find solutions for Debian as well. Unfortunately, I don t think Debian has benefited from these Ubuntu experiments as much as we might have hoped. A common example of this is the Ubuntu Code of Conduct. The idea of a project code of conduct predates Ubuntu, of course, but we did help to popularize it within the free software community, and this is now a common (and successful) practice used by many free software projects. The idea of behavioral standards for Debian has been raised in various forms for years now, but never seems to get traction. Hearing people talk about it at DebConf, it sometimes seemed almost as if the idea was dismissed out of hand because it was too closely associated with Ubuntu. I learned from Marga s talk that Enrico Zini drafted a set of Debian Community Guidelines over four years ago in 2006. It is perhaps a bit longand structured, but is basically excellent. Enrico has done a great job of compiling best practices for participating in an open community project. However, his document seems to be purely informational, without any official standing in the Debian project, and Debian community leaders have hesitated to make it something more. Perhaps Ubuntu leaders (myself included) could have done more to nurture these ideas in Debian. At least in my experience, though, I found that my affiliation with Ubuntu almost immediately labeled me an outsider in Debian, even when I was still active as a developer, and this made it very difficult to make such proposals. Perhaps this is because Debian is proud of its independence, and does not want to be unduly influenced by external forces. Perhaps the initial growing pains of the Debian/Ubuntu relationship got in the way. Nonetheless, I think that Debian could be stronger by learning from Ubuntu, just as Ubuntu has learned so much from Debian. Closing thoughts I enjoyed this DebConf very much. This was the first DebConf to be hosted in the US, and there were many familiar faces that I hadn t seen in some time. Columbia University offered an excellent location, and the presentation content was thought-provoking. There seemed to be a positive attitude toward Ubuntu, which was very good to see. Although there is always more work to do, it feels like we re making progress in improving cooperation between Debian and Ubuntu. I was a bit sad to leave, but was fortunate enough to meet up with Debian folk during my subsequent stay in the Boston area as well. It felt good to reconnect with this circle of friends again, and I hope to see you again soon. Looking forward to next year s DebConf in Bosnia

The Debian Women project aims to get more women to participate in Debian, as packagers, bug reporters, technical documentation writers, bug fixers, translators, artists and in any other area that helps the development of Debian. These goals are achieved through IRC tutorials, a mentoring program, a mailing list and an IRC channel.

The Mentoring Program, allows men and women that want to contribute to Debian but aren t sure where or how to start, to get some help with their first steps.

There have been at least 38 women that have contributed in packaging software for Debian, and there are currently 11 female Debian Developers and 1 Debian Maintainer. We d like to raise those numbers to 50 packagers by the end of 2011, and 20 Debian Developers by the end of 2012.

There are some other interesting statistics about the current female participation in Debian.

We are also interested in getting more women to file and fix bugs, translate debconf templates or package descriptions, contribute to the release notes, as well as participate in any other areas of the Debian project. In order to do this, we will be holding some IRC training sessions in the near future, to help people get started. We are currently making the list of subjects and trainers, we ll publish more news about this once the first sessions are scheduled.

For more information you can join the IRC channel #debian-women on irc.oftc.net, or subscribe to the debian-women mailing list. If you are a Spanish speaker, you can also join the IRC channel #debian-mujeres on irc.oftc.net.

Contributed by: Margarita Manterola

This Monday, Debian celebrated its 17th birthday. Yay! I was invited to celebrate the birthday at HacklabZAM, but could not make it due to the time (17:00-19:00, and I was just leaving work by 19:00), but still, had some beers with long-time geekish friends Iv n Chavero, Rolando Cedillo, Manuel Rabade and Od n Mojica. Nice hanging around, good beer+pizza time, and explicit congratulations to Debian. On the Debian front, Margarita Manterola, Maximiliano Curia, Valessio Brito and Raphael Geissert came up with a very fun Debian appreciation day page. It even included a (slight) hijacking of the bug tracking system's Web interface, showing happy fun balloons! Guys, thanks for a good laugh, and thanks for providing a vehicle for getting the users' thanks to the project! All in all, that was a great reminder to what we have been repeating as a mantram throughout the last years: Lets keep Debian fun!

It's been a couple of very interesting days. The thank.debian.net site was quite a success, and a lot of credit is due to Valessio's awesome balloons. Even though I didn't do much marketing about it, the site was linked on Slashdot, LWN, Ubuntu's and Debian's website, Planet, the BTS, and quite a number of blogs. We received almost 3000 thank you messages, from all over the world. Even though the site was in English, many people felt inspired to leave their thank you messages in their languages, if you browse over the site, you'll find messages in Turkish, Chinese, Russian and many other languages. On that matter, I was particularly amazed at this message in persian, which displays properly even inside mutt. Not too surprising, one of the things that people most value of Debian is the package management. The apt team got a lot of thank you messages, and many of the ones directed to the whole community also mention apt and upgrades as something very valuable I find it very interesting that many of the messages, came from Ubuntu users, stating that even though they use Ubuntu, they really value the work done by Debian. A number of posts also mention sidux, knoppix and mint among the many derivatives. Many people stated the many years that they use Debian, some of them have just started, some have been using Debian for quite a while.
I was happily surprised by a number of posts that included a thank you message to "guys/gals" or "guys and girls". And the image used in the "hackergotchi" of this message really brightened my day. Finally, I'm sorry that some people were annoyed by the thank you messages. For next year, we can try to do something a bit different and hopefully not annoy those who were annoyed this time. I do think that once in a while it's nice to be able to receive some of that much love that the users have for Debian and we rarely get to know about.

Today is Debian's Birthday, and for a while I've wanted to do something special on this date. In order to raise the general motivation of the project, have a special day when everyone is invited to thank those that make our lives easier. However long I have wanted to do this, I haven't had that much time to prepare the site itself. I've spent the past two days getting it working, with the help of Maxy, Valessio and Raphael, but there's still a lot more work to do. In any case, it's already usable at: thank.debian.net. I invite you to use it to send thanks to those that work on Debian. The code is temporarily hosted at code.google.com, but I plan to move it to alioth as soon as I'm not so rushed to finish it. Bugs & Patches much appreciated!

I spent the whole last week in bed with an acute case of pharyngitis, so I haven't been able to gather my thoughts in a blog post up to now. I'd like to congratulate zack on winning the election, and I have faith that he will be a great DPL. I'm happy with my second place, I'd like to thank everybody that supported me and I think that I'll probably try again in the future, although not necessarily next year. Since zack is probably not going to have time to keep up with his bug squashing campaign, I'm going to try and continue that myself. And, if time permits I'm also going to try to put some of the ideas in my platform into action. Finally, last friday both Maxy and me were granted the US visa that we needed to go to DC10, so we finally can say:

The DPL vote is over. I did not win, apparently. Let me start off by thanking the other candidates for running, and congratulating Stefano for winning. My own results aren't too bad; I beat 'none of the above' by a comfortable margin of almost 10 to 1, and ended up defeating Charles Plessy by a slightly smaller margin. My margin to NOTA was far better than during the previous DPL election that I participated in, though I did end up defeating more than half of the other candidates back then, which I didn't this time around. All in all, not enough to win, but enough to conclude that I might have a chance some other time. Margarita and Stefano were just better candidates this time around. My own vote was:

[ 2 ] Stefano Zacchiroli
[ 1 ] Wouter Verhelst
[ 4 ] Charles Plessy
[ 2 ] Margarita Manterola
[ 3 ] NOTA

If you run, you have to be serious about running, and support yourself. So I did. After that, I wasn't sure that Stefano would do a better job than Margarita (or vice versa), so I put them at the same spot. Finally, I became convinced during campaigning that Charles has a lot to learn still about what lives in the Debian community, and I am of the opinion that feeling the community is a vital requirement for a DPL; so that ruled him out. So why did I not win? Obviously because there were better candidates in the election, but the real question is: why is that the case? What did I do, or what did other candidates do, that meant they fared better than I? One possibility was given on IRC:

< svuorela> ol: and "I'm running because no other runs" is also
not a good way to get votes ...

Which is fair enough; but I did run with the intention of winning, and I did try to make that clear. I'm hoping that worked out okay, which would imply that there could be other reasons. I'd like to know about those. So if you voted, and did not place me on the top spot, I'd very much appreciate learning about your motivations for doing so especially so if you were one of the 39 people who would rather have redone the vote than see me win. Comments on this blog post are welcome, or by private e-mail if you'd rather not see them made public.

I ve been AWOL for most of the debian project leader election campaigns this year, but I still want to vote, so I ve been dredging the emails on the last day. Maybe someone still has to vote and reads this, or maybe it ll help someone to interpret the result. What I ve done this year is to make a quick tally of platform points and campaign answers that I liked and disliked for each candidate, then total them up to get an order. If anyone gets a negative (more dislikes than likes), then I ll rank them below NOTA. Platforms: Margarita Manterola, Stefano Zacchiroli, Wouter Verhelst, Charles Plessy. Some of the questions:

• Do you plan on taking on a 2IC or a team? No SZ, WV, CP, MM
• What do you think are valid goals to spend donated money on? How would you think is a valid way to thank (hardware) contributors? What qualifies a Debian Partner ? Spend on what we cannot receive by donation CP. Partner is defined on website CP. Spend on maintenance, development, contributions, use MM. Spend on keeping the project running and emergency reserve SZ. Partnership programs usually require an yearly subscription fee SZ. No specific spending list WV. No formal list of partners WV
• How much time do you currently/would you devote to Debian? Couple of evenings per week and a couple of days per month CP. A daily hour, more in future MM. 1-2 hours/day + 2-4 hours/week SZ. Varies WV.
• infrastructure to finance Debian related projects? Why not use other infrastructure? CP, MM. Don t SZ, WV.
• Please finish In ten years I d like Debian . to still be thriving as the Universal OS MM. to be *THE* renowned distribution in terms of freeness and democracy SZ. to be mainstream CP. to still be the distribution I consider to be the best one out there WV
• Do you think current frequency/amount of heated discussions is acceptable for the Debian project? What would you do to reduce those? too agressive, use social pressure MM. Acceptable? No. Normal? To some extent, yes. DPL must set a good example SZ. Stricter policies CP. No amount of ad-hominem attacks is acceptable, see platform WV.
• Which project and external Debian-related communications media do you follow? and contribute to? lists, IRC, planet MM, WV. lists, Planet CP. lists, IRC, planet, DN, identi.ca SZ.
• How, as DPL, you would (or even could) address the social issues around releasing? add manpower MM. status reports SZ. public disappoval of bad behaviour WV. reshape the archive CP
• should we try to coordinate our release process with Ubuntu s? Yes MM, SZ. Why not WV. More info CP
• Will you withdraw delegations of DD not behaving correctly? On recurrence MM, CP. No(?) SZ. No WV.
• Is there any part of Debian that should be restricted to a small subset of developers? Yes WV, CP, MM. No except security reasons SZ.
• Personal mentoring? Good idea MM. Recycle NM process CP. Use teams SZ. NM already is mentoring WV.
• Standardization, large scale changes, innovations valuable questions, but the responses are too complex to summarise here, sorry.
• How would you enforce Debian Community Guidelines? wouldn t SZ, MM, WV. No clear answer from CP.
• is planet.d.o a good thing? Not necessarily WV. No clear answer from SZ, MM. No reply from CP.
• How do we face the challenge to do more every year? improve our way of working and get more people to help us do our jobs MM. open Debian s door wider CP. have enough people to work on Debian WV. use our communication media SZ

Make of that what you will. It surprised me which way the scores came out, but there was one answer with such a massive problem (in my opinion) that I ranked its giver equal with the next candidate down anyway. If you re a debian developer (DD), have you voted yet?

The nomination period for the Debian Project Leader Elections 2010 is over and we have 4 candidates this year:

1. Stefano Zacchiroli [nomination mail]
2. Wouter Verhelst [nomination mail]
3. Charles Plessy [nomination mail]
4. Margarita Manterola [nomination mail]

For the next 3 weeks, you can ask your questions and follow the debate in the debian-vote mailing list.

During DebConf8, in Mar del Plata, Argentina, there was one night where I had a terrible nightmare: I woke up one day and I was DPL :). I mentioned this to some people during the conference, and to my amazement they told me that I could actually be a good DPL. I've been thinking about this possibility since then, but the post-DebConf stress was still too high for me to run for it in 2009. This year, however, I'm ready to stand for it, campaign, and either win or lose, whatever the Debian community decides. I'm currently drafting my platform, but in no way do I claim having all the good ideas. So, if you -no matter if you are a developer, a contributor or a user- have any good ideas on how to make Debian better from the DPL role, I'd be glad to hear them.