On day four the transition to Ruby 2.7 and Rails 6 went on. Minor
transitions took place too, for example the upload of ruby-faraday 1.0 or the
upload of bundler 2.1 featuring the (first) contributions by bundler s
upstream Deivid (yeah!). Further Red Hat s (and Debian s)
Marc Dequ nes (Duck) joined us.
We are proud to report, that updating and/or uploading the Kali packages is
almost done. Most are in NEW or have already been accepted.
The Release team was contacted to start the Ruby 2.7 transition and we
already have a transition page. However, the Python 3.8
one is ongoing (almost finished) and the Release team does not want overlaps.
So hopefully we can upload ruby-defaults to Debian Unstable soon.
In the evening we got together for a well earned collective drink at Brewberry
Bar and dinner, joined by local Debian colleague Nicolas Dandrimont (olasd).
Group photo of the Ruby Team in Brewberry Bar (Paris 2020)
The evening ended at Paris famous (but heavily damaged) Notre-Dame cathedral.
As my contributions to Debian continue to grow in number, I find myself
uploading to the archive more and more often.
Although I'm pretty happy with my current sbuild-based workflow, twice in the
past few weeks I inadvertently made a binary upload instead of a source-only
one.1
As it turns out, I am not the only DD who has had this problem before. As
Nicolas Dandrimont kindly pointed to me, dput-ng supports pre and post
upload hooks that can be used to lint your uploads. Even better, it also ships
with a check-debs hook that lets you block binary uploads.
Pretty neat, right? In a perfect world, enabling the hook would only be a matter
of adding it in the hook list of /etc/dput.d/metas/debian.json and using the
following defaults:
Sadly, bug #983160 currently makes this whole setup more complex than
it should be and forces me to use two different dput-ng profiles pointing to
two different files in /etc/dput.d/metas: a default source-only one
(ftp-master) and a binary upload one (ftp-master-binary).
Otherwise, one could use a single profile that disallows binary uploads and when
needed, override the hook using something like this:
I did start debugging the --override issue in dput-ng, but I'm not sure I'll
have time to submit a patch anytime soon. In the meantime, I'm happy to report I
shouldn't be uploading the wrong .changes file by mistake again!
Thanks to Holger Levsen and Adrian Bunk for catching those and
notifying me.
DebConf20 starts in about 5 weeks, and as always, the DebConf
Videoteam is working hard to make sure it'll be a success. As such, we held a
sprint from July 9th to 13th to work on our new infrastructure.
A remote sprint certainly ain't as fun as an in-person one, but we nonetheless
managed to enjoy ourselves. Many thanks to those who participated, namely:
Carl Karsten (CarlFK)
Ivo De Decker (ivodd)
Kyle Robbertze (paddatrapper)
Louis-Philippe V ronneau (pollo)
Nattie Mayer-Hutchings (nattie)
Nicolas Dandrimont (olasd)
Stefano Rivera (tumbleweed)
Wouter Verhelst (wouter)
We also wish to extend our thanks to Thomas Goirand and Infomaniak for
providing us with virtual machines to experiment on and host the video
infrastructure for DebConf20.
Advice for presenters
For DebConf20, we strongly encourage presenters to record their talks in
advance and send us the resulting video. We understand this is more work,
but we think it'll make for a more agreeable conference for everyone. Video
conferencing is still pretty wonky and there is nothing worse than a talk
ruined by a flaky internet connection or hardware failures.
As such, if you are giving a talk at DebConf this year, we are asking you to
read and follow our guide on how to record your presentation.
Fear not: we are not getting rid of the Q&A period at the end of talks.
Attendees will ask their questions either on IRC or on a collaborative pad
and the Talkmeister will relay them to the speaker once the pre-recorded
video has finished playing.
New infrastructure, who dis?
Organising a virtual DebConf implies migrating from our battle-tested
on-premise workflow to a completely new remote one.
One of the major changes this means for us is the addition of Jitsi Meet to our
infrastructure. We normally have 3 different video sources in a room: two
cameras and a slides grabber. With the new online workflow, directors will be
able to play pre-recorded videos as a source, will get a feed from a Jitsi room
and will see the audience questions as a third source.
This might seem simple at first, but is in fact a very major change to our
workflow and required a lot of work to implement.
== On-premise == == Online ==
Camera 1 Jitsi
v ---> Frontend v ---> Frontend
Slides -> Voctomix -> Backend -+--> Frontend Questions -> Voctomix -> Backend -+--> Frontend
^ ---> Frontend ^ ---> Frontend
Camera 2 Pre-recorded video
In our tests, playing back pre-recorded videos to voctomix worked well, but was
sometimes unreliable due to inconsistent encoding settings. Presenters will
thus upload their pre-recorded talks to SReview so we can make sure there
aren't any obvious errors. Videos will then be re-encoded to ensure a
consistent encoding and to normalise audio levels.
This process will also let us stitch the Q&As at the end of the pre-recorded
videos more easily prior to publication.
Reducing the stream latency
One of the pitfalls of the streaming infrastructure we have been using since
2016 is high video latency. In a worst case scenario, remote attendees could
get up to 45 seconds of latency, making participation in events like BoFs
arduous.
In preparation for DebConf20, we added a new way to stream our talks: RTMP.
Attendees will thus have the option of using either an HLS stream with higher
latency or an RTMP stream with lower latency.
Here is a comparative table that can help you decide between the two protocols:
HLS
RTMP
Pros
Can be watched from a browser
Auto-selects a stream encoding
Single URL to remember
Lower latency (~5s)
Cons
Higher latency (up to 45s)
Requires a dedicated video player (VLC, mpv)
Specific URLs for each encoding setting
Live mixing from home with VoctoWeb
Since DebConf16, we have been using voctomix, a live video mixer developed
by the CCC VOC. voctomix is conveniently divided in two: voctocore is the
backend server while voctogui is a GTK+ UI frontend directors can use to
live-mix.
Although voctogui can connect to a remote server, it was primarily designed to
run either on the same machine as voctocore or on the same LAN. Trying to use
voctogui from a machine at home to connect to a voctocore running in a
datacenter proved unreliable, especially for high-latency and low bandwidth
connections.
Inspired by the setup FOSDEM uses, we instead decided to go with a web frontend
for voctocore. We initially used FOSDEM's code as a proof of
concept, but quickly reimplemented it in Python, a language we are more
familiar with as a team.
Compared to the FOSDEM PHP implementation, voctoweb implements A / B source
selection (akin to voctogui) as well as audio control, two very useful
features. In the following screen captures, you can see the old PHP UI on the
left and the new shiny Python one on the right.
Voctoweb is still under development and is likely to change quite a bit
until DebConf20. Still, the current version seems to works well enough to be
used in production if you ever need to.
Python GeoIP redirector
We run multiple geographically-distributed streaming frontend servers to
minimize the load on our streaming backend and to reduce overall latency.
Although users can connect to the frontends directly, we typically point them
to live.debconf.org and redirect connections to the nearest server.
Sadly, 6 months ago MaxMind decided to change the licence on their
GeoLite2 database and left us scrambling. To fix this annoying issue, Stefano
Rivera wrote a Python program that uses the new database and reworked our
ansible frontend server role. Since the new database cannot be
redistributed freely, you'll have to get a (free) license key from MaxMind if
you to use this role.
Ansible & CI improvements
Infrastructure as code is a living process and needs constant care to fix bugs,
follow changes in DSL and to implement new features. All that to say a large
part of the sprint was spent making our ansible roles and continuous
integration setup more reliable, less buggy and more featureful.
All in all, we merged 26 separate ansible-related merge request during the
sprint! As always, if you are good with ansible and wish to help, we accept
merge requests on our ansible repository :)
I attended the MiniDebconf in Toulouse, which was hosted in the larger
Capitole du Libre, a free software event with talks, presentation of
associations, and a keysigning party. I didn't expect the event to be
that big, and I was very impressed by its organization. Cheers to all
the volunteers, it has been an amazing week-end!
Here's a sum-up of the talks I attended.
Du logiciel libre la monnaie libre
Speaker: lo s
The first talk I attended was, translated to English, "from free
software to free money".
lo s compared the 4 freedoms of free software with money, and what
properties money needs to exhibit in order to be considered free. He
then introduced 1, a project of free (as in free speech!) money,
started in the region around Toulouse. Contrary to some distributed
ledgers such as Bitcoin, 1 isn't based on an hash-based
proof-of-work, but rather around a web of trust of people certifying
each other, hence limiting the energy consumption required by the
network to function.
YunoHost
Speaker: Jimmy Monin
I then attended a presentation of YunoHost. Being an happy user
myself, it was very nice to discover the future expected features, and
also meet two of the developers. YunoHost is a Debian-based project,
aimed at providing all the tools necessary to self-host applications,
including email, website, calendar, development tools, and dozens of
other packages.
Premiers pas dans l'univers de Debian
Speaker: Nicolas Dandrimont
For the first talk of the MiniDebConf, Nicolas Dandrimont introduced
Debian, its philosophy, and how it works with regards to upstreams and
downstreams. He gave many details on the teams, the infrastructure,
and the internals of Debian.
Trusting your computer and system
Speaker: Jonas Smedegaard
Jonas introduced some security concepts, and how they are abused and
often meaningless (to quote his own words, "secure is bullshit"). He
described a few projects which lean towards a more secure and open
hardware, for both phones and laptops.
Automatiser la gestion de configuration de Debian avec Ansible
Speaker: J r my Lecour
J r my, from Evolix, introduced Ansible, and how they use it to manage
hundreds of Debian servers. Ansible is a very powerful tool, and a
huge ecosystem, in many ways similar to Puppet or Chef, except it is
agent-less, using only ssh connections to communicate with remote
machines. Very nice to compare their use of Ansible with mine, since
that's the software I use at work for deploying experiments.
Making Debian for everybody
Speaker: Samuel Thibault
Samuel gave a talk about accessibility, and the general availability
of the tools in today's operating systems, including Debian. The
lesson to take home is that we often don't do enough in this domain,
particularly when considering some issues people might have that we
don't always think about. Accessibility on computers (and elsewhere)
should be the default, and never require complex setups.
Retour d'exp rience : mise jour de milliers de terminaux Debian
Speaker: Cyril Brulebois
Cyril described a problem he was hired for, an update of thousands of
Debian servers from wheezy to jessie, which he discovered afterwards
was worse than initially thought, since the machines were running the
out-of-date squeeze. Since they were not always administered with the
best sysadmin practices, they were all exhibiting different
configurations and different packages lists, which raised many issues
and gave him interesting challenges. They were solved using Ansible,
which also had the effect of standardizing their system administration
practices.
Retour d'exp rience : utilisation de Debian chez Evolix
Speaker: Gr gory Colpart
Gr gory described Evolix, a company which manages servers for their
clients, and how they were inspired by Debian, for both their internal
tools and their practices. It is very interesting to see that some of
the Debian values can be easily exported for a more open and
collaborative business.
Lightning talks
To close the conference, two lightning talks were presented,
describing the switch from Windows XP to Debian in an ecologic
association near Toulouse; and how snapshot.debian.org can be used
with bisections to find the source of some regressions.
Conclusion
A big thank you to all the organizers and the associations who
contributed to make this event a success. Cheers!
TL;DR: if you applied for a DebConf 17 travel bursary, and you haven t accepted it yet, login to the DebConf website and update your status before June 20th or your bursary grant will be gone.
*blows dust off the blog*
As you might be aware, DebConf 17 is coming soon and it s gonna be the biggest DebConf in Montr al ever.
Of course, what makes DebConf great is the people who come together to work on Debian, share their achievements, and help draft our cunning plans to take over the world. Also cheese.Lots and lots of cheese.
To that end, the DebConf team had initially budgeted US$40,000 for travel grants ($30,000 for contributors, $10,000 for diversity and inclusion grants), allowing the bursaries team to bring people from all around the world who couldn t have made it to the conference.
Our team of volunteers rated the 188 applications, we ve made a ranking (technically, two rankings : one on contribution grounds and one on D&I grounds), and we finally sent out a first round of grants last week.
After the first round, the team made a new budget assessment, and thanks to the support of our outstanding sponsors, an extra $15,000 has been allocated for travel stipends during this week s team meeting, with the blessing of the DPL.
We ve therefore been able to send a second round of grants today.
Now, if you got a grant, you have two things to do : you need to accept your grant, and you need to update your requested amount. Both of those steps allow us to use our budget more wisely: having grants expire frees money up to get more people to the conference earlier. Having updated amounts gives us a better view of our overall budget. (You can only lower your requested amount, as we can t inflate our budget)
Our system has sent mails to everyone, but it s easy enough to let that email slip (or to not receive it for some reason). It takes 30 seconds to look at the status of your request on the DebConf 17 website, and even less to do the few clicks needed for you to accept the grant. Please do so now! OK, it might take a few minutes if your SSO certificate has expired and you have to look up the docs to renew it.
The deadline for the first round of travel grants (which went out last week) is June 20th. The deadline for the second round (which went out today) is June 24th. If somehow you can t login to the website before the deadline, the bursaries team has an email address you can use.
We want to send out a third round of grants on June 25th, using the money people freed up: our current acceptance ratio is around 40%, and a lot of very strong applications have been deferred. We don t want them to wait up until July to get a definitive answer, so thanks for helping us!
bient t Montr al !
Disclaimer This is an attempt at humor and hence entirely fictional in nature. While some incidents depicted are true, the context and the story woven around them are by yours truly. None of the Mascots of Debian were hurt during the blog post. I also disavow any responsibility for any hurt (real or imagined) to any past, current and future mascots. The attempt should not be looked upon as demeaning people who are accused of false crimes, tortured and confessions eked out of them as this happens quite a lot (In India for sure, but guess it s the same world over in various degrees). The idea is loosely inspired by Chocolate:Deep Dark Secrets. (2005)
On a more positive note, let s start
Being a Sunday morning woke up late to find incessant knocking on the door, incidentally mum was not at home. Opening the door, found two official looking gentleman. They asked my name, asked my credentials, tortured and arrested me for Group conspiracy of Malicious Mischief in second and third degrees .
The torture was done by means of making me forcefully watch endless reruns of Norbit . While I do love Eddie Murphy, this was one of his movies he could have done without. I guess for many people watching it once was torture enough. I *think* they were nominated for razzie awards dunno if they won it or not, but this is beside the point.
Unlike the 20 years it takes for a typical case to reach to its conclusion even in the smallest court in India, due to the torture, I was made to confess (due to endless torture) and was given summary judgement. The judgement was/is as follows
a. Do 100 hours of Community service in Debian in 2017. This could be done via blog posts, raising tickets in the Debian BTS or in whichever way I could be helpful to Debian.
b. Write a confessional with some photographic evidence sharing/detailing some of the other members who were part of the conspiracy in view of the reduced sentence.
So now, have been forced to write this confession
As you all know, I won a bursary this year for debconf16. What is not known by most people is that I also got an innocuous looking e-mail titled Pollito for DPL . While I can t name all the names as investigation is still ongoing about how far-reaching the conspiracy is . The email was purportedly written by members of cabal within cabal which are in Debian. I looked at the email header to see if this was genuine and I could trace the origin but was left none the wiser, as obviously these people are far more technically advanced than to fall in simple tricks like this
Anyways, secretly happy that I have been invited to be part of these elites, I did the visa thing, packed my bags and came to Debconf16.
At this point in juncture, I had no idea whether it was real or I had imagined the whole thing. Then to my surprise saw this
Just like the Illuminati the conspiracy was for all to see those who knew about it. Most people were thinking of it as a joke, but those like me who had got e-mails knew better. I knew that the thing is real, now I only needed to bide my time and knew that the opportunity would present itself.
And few days later, sure enough, there was a trip planned for Table Mountain, Cape Town . Few people planned to hike to the mountain, while few chose to take the cable car till up the mountain.
Quite a few people came along with us and bought tickets for the to and fro to the mountain and back.
Incidentally, I was thinking if the South African Govt. were getting the tax or not. If you look at the ticket, there is just a bar-code. In India as well as the U.S. there is TIN Tax Identification Number
Fewlinks to share what it is all about . While these should be on all invoices, need to specially check when taking high-value items. In India as shared in the article the awareness, knowledge leaves a bit to be desired. While I m drifting from the incident, it would be nice if somebody from SA could share how things work there.
Moving on, we boarded the cable car. It was quite spacious cable car with I guess around 30-40 people or some more who were able to see everything along with the controller.
It was a pleasant cacophony of almost two dozen or more nationalities on this 360 degrees moving chamber. I was a little worried though as it essentially is a bucket and there is always a possibility that a severe wind could damage it. Later somebody did share that somefrightful incidents had occurred not too long ago on the cable car.
It took about 20-25 odd minutes to get to the top of table mountain and we were presented with views such as below
The picture I am sharing is actually when we were going down as all the pictures of going up via the cable car were over-exposed. Also, it was pretty crowded on the way up then on the way down so handling the mobile camera was not so comfortable.
Once we reached up, the wind was blowing at incredible speeds. Even with my jacket and everything I was feeling cold. Most of the group around 10-12 people looked around if we could find a place to have some refreshments and get some of the energy in the body. So we all ventured to a place and placed our orders
I was introduced to Irish Coffee few years back and have had some incredibleIrish Coffees in Pune and elsewhere. I do hope to be able to make Irish Coffee at home if and when I have my own house. This is hotter than brandy and is perfect if you are suffering from cold etc if done right, really needs some skills. This is the only drink which I wanted in SA which I never got right . As South Africa was freezing for me, this would have been the perfect antidote but the one there as well as elsewhere were all bleh.
What was interesting though, was the coffee caller besides it. It looked like a simple circuit mounted on a PCB board with lights, vibrations and RFID and it worked exactly like that. I am guessing as and when the order is ready, there is an interrupt signal sent via radio waves which causes the buzzer to light and vibrate. Here s the back panel if somebody wants to take inspiration and try it as a fun project
Once we were somewhat strengthened by the snacks, chai, coffee etc. we made our move to seeing the mountain. The only way to describe it is that it s similar to Raigad Fort but the plateau seemed to be bigger. The wikipedia page of Table Mountain attempts to share but I guess it s more clearly envisioned by one of the pictures shared therein.
I have to say while Table Mountain is beautiful and haunting as it has scenes like these
There is something there which pulls you, which reminds you of a long lost past. I could have simply sat there for hours together but as was part of the group had to keep with them. Not that I minded.
The moment I was watching this, I was transported to some memories of the Himalayas about 20 odd years or so. In that previous life, I had the opportunity to be with some of the most beautiful women and also been in the most happening places, the Himalayas. I had shared years before some of my experiences I had in the Himalayas. I discontinued it as I didn t have a decent camera at that point in time. While I don t wanna digress, I would challenge anybody to experience the Himalayas and then compare. It is just something inexplicable. The beauty and the rawness that Himalayas shows makes you feel insignificant and yet part of the whole cosmos. What Paulo Cohello expressed in The Valkyries is something that could be felt in the Himalayas. Leh, Ladakh, Himachal , Garwhal, Kumaon. The list will go on forever as there are so many places, each more beautiful than the other. Most places are also extremely backpacker-friendly so if you ask around you can get some awesome deals if you want to spend more than a few days in one place.
Moving on, while making small talk @olasd or Nicolas Dandrimont , the headmaster of our trip made small talk to each of us and eked out from all of us that we wanted to have Pollito as our DPL (Debian Project Leader) for 2017. Few pictures being shared below as supporting evidence as well
While I do not know who further up than Nicolas was on the coup which would take place. The idea was this
If the current DPL steps down, we would take all and any necessary actions to make Pollito our DPL.
This has been taken from Pollito s adventure
Being a responsible journalist, I also enquired about Pollito s true history as it would not have been complete without one. This is the e-mail I got from Gunnar Wolf, a friend and DD from Mexico
Turns out, Valessio has just spent a week staying at my house And
in any case, if somebody in Debian knows about Pollito s
childhood That is me.
Pollito came to our lives when we went to Congreso Internacional de
Software Libre (CISOL) in Zacatecas city. I was strolling around the
very beautiful city with my wife Regina and our friend Alejandro
Miranda, and at a shop at either Ram n L pez Velarde or Vicente
Guerrero, we found a flock of pollitos.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/22.77111/-102.57145
Even if this was comparable to a slave market, we bought one from
them, and adopted it as our own.
Back then, we were a young couple Well, we were not that young
anymore. I mean, we didn t have children. Anyway, we took Pollito with
us on several road trips, such as the only time I have crossed an
international border driving: We went to Encuentro Centroamericano de
Software Libre at Guatemala city in 2012 (again with Alejandro), and
you can see several Pollito pics at:
http://gwolf.org/album/road-trip-ecsl-2012-guatemala-0
Pollito likes travelling. Of course, when we were to Nicaragua for
DebConf, Pollito tagged along. It was his first flight as a passenger
(we never asked about his previous life in slavery; remember, Pollito
trust no one).
Pollito felt much welcome with the DebConf crowd. Of course, as
Pollito is a free spirit, we never even thought about forcing him to
come back with us. Pollito went to Switzerland, and we agreed to meet
again every year or two. It s always nice to have a chat with him.
Hugs!
So with that backdrop I would urge fellow Debianities to take up the slogans
LONG LIVE THE DPL !
LONG LIVE POLLITO !
LONG LIVE POLLITO THE DPL !
The first step to make Pollito the DPL is to ensure he has a @debian.org (pollito@debian.org)
We also need him to be made a DD because only then can he become a DPL.
In solidarity and in peace Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #caller, #confession, #Debconf16, #debian, #Fiction, #history, #Pollito, #Pollito as DPL, #Table Mountain, Cabal, memories, south africa
For the non-Debian people among my readers: The following post presents bits of the decision-taking process in the Debian project. You might find it interesting, or terribly dull and boring :-) Proceed at your own risk.
My reason for posting this entry is to get more people to read the accompanying options for my proposed General Resolution (GR), and have as full a ballot as possible.
Almost three weeks ago, I sent a mail to the debian-vote mailing list. I'm quoting it here in full:
Some weeks ago, Nicolas Dandrimont proposed a GR for declassifying
debian-private[1]. In the course of the following discussion, he
accepted[2] Don Armstrong's amendment[3], which intended to clarify the
meaning and implementation regarding the work of our delegates and the
powers of the DPL, and recognizing the historical value that could lie
within said list.
[1] https://www.debian.org/vote/2016/vote_002
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2016/07/msg00108.html
[3] https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2016/07/msg00078.html
In the process of the discussion, several people objected to the
amended wording, particularly to the fact that "sufficient time and
opportunity" might not be sufficiently bound and defined.
I am, as some of its initial seconders, a strong believer in Nicolas'
original proposal; repealing a GR that was never implemented in the
slightest way basically means the Debian project should stop lying,
both to itself and to the whole free software community within which
it exists, about something that would be nice but is effectively not
implementable.
While Don's proposal is a good contribution, given that in the
aforementioned GR "Further Discussion" won 134 votes against 118, I
hereby propose the following General Resolution:
=== BEGIN GR TEXT ===
Title: Acknowledge that the debian-private list will remain private.
1. The 2005 General Resolution titled "Declassification of debian-private
list archives" is repealed.
2. In keeping with paragraph 3 of the Debian Social Contract, Debian
Developers are strongly encouraged to use the debian-private mailing
list only for discussions that should not be disclosed.
=== END GR TEXT ===
Thanks for your consideration,
--
Gunnar Wolf
(with thanks to Nicolas for writing the entirety of the GR text ;-) )
Yesterday, I spoke with the Debian project secretary, who confirmed my proposal has reached enough Seconds (that is, we have reached five people wanting the vote to happen), so I could now formally do a call for votes. Thing is, there are two other proposals I feel are interesting, and should be part of the same ballot, and both address part of the reasons why the GR initially proposed by Nicolas didn't succeed:
Iain Lane's reply to Ian is not yet formally proposed, but makes it spelt out that no declassification should ever occur unless all of the involved authors have explicitly consented
So, once more (and finally!), why am I posting this?
To invite Iain to formally propose his text as an option to mine
To invite more DDs to second the available options
To publicize the ongoing discussion
I plan to do the formal call for votes by Friday 23.
[update] Kurt informed me that the discussion period started yesterday, when I received the 5th second. The minimum discussion period is two weeks, so I will be doing a call for votes at or after 2016-10-03.
Last summer, Innuendo Studios made a
series of 6 short
videos
trying to understand why would anyone get involved in a coordinated harrasment
campaign.
The recent articles making straw man
arguments and gross
mischaracterization of the actions of people trying to grow the pool of free
software contributors reminded me of these videos, especially the fifth
episode which describes why some
people get so angry when others point out that maybe the general homogeneity of
backgrounds is also related to how we treat people. Guess we can transpose one
of the explanation in the video to free software communities:
Bad People do bad things; a sexist is a wife-beater or sexual assailant; I am
neither; therefore I am a Good Person and the things I do are good; I work
on free software where people report sexist biases; therefore they say I am
a wife-beater or sexual assailant; this is a false and ridiculous claim;
therefore they are bad.
This slightly helps to better understand why some people would attack efforts
that don't concern them so strongly. Sadly, it doesn't help much with what we
could do about it. Perhaps we can help them understand that they might
be just as biased as everyone else living in an institutionally sexist and
racist society. This does not make them bad people. It's just something we all
need to keep in mind to improve the situation.
(Also, be sure to read the follow-up
post
if you watch the series until the last episode.)
Thanks to Nicolas Dandrimont for his comments and suggestions.
My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me.
Debian LTS
This month I have been paid to work 15.25 hours on Debian LTS. In that time I did the following:
CVE triage: I pushed 37 commits to the security tracker and contacted 20 maintainers about security issues affecting their packages.
I started a small helper script based on the new JSON output of the security tracker (see #761859 for details). It s not ready yet but will make it easier to detect issues where the LTS team lags behind the security team, and other divergences like this and will speed up future CVE triage work (once done).
I sent DLA-174-1 (tcpdump update fixing 3 CVE) after having received a debdiff from the Romain Fran oise.
In my last Freexian LTS report, I mentioned briefly that it would be nice to have a logo for the LTS project. Shortly after I got a first logo prepared by Damien Escoffier and a few more followed: they are available on a wiki page (and the logo you see above is from him!). Following a suggestion of Paul Wise, I registered the logo request on another wiki page dedicated to artwork requests. That kind of collaboration is awesome! Thanks to all the artists involved in Debian.
Debian packaging
Django. This month has seen no less than 3 upstream point releases packaged for Debian (1.7.5, 1.7.6 and 1.7.7) and they have been accepted by the release team into Jessie. I m pleased with this tolerance as I have argued the case for it multiple times in the past given the sane upstream release policy (bugfix only in a given released branch).
Python code analysis. I discovered a few months ago a tool combining the power of multiple Python code analysis tools: it s prospector. I just filed a Request for Package for it (see #781165) and someone already volunteered to package it, yay \o/
update-rc.d and systemd. While working on a Kali version based on Jessie, I got hit by what boils down to a poor interaction between systemd and update-rc.d (see #746580) and after some exchanges with other affected users I raised the severity to serious as we really ought to do something about it before release. I also opened #781155 on openbsd-inetd as its usage of inetd.service instead of openbsd-inetd.service (which is only provided as a symlink to the former) leads to multiple small issues.
Misc
Debian France. The general assembly is over and the new board elected its new president: it s now official, I m no longer Debian France s president. Good luck to Nicolas Dandrimont who took on this responsibility.
Salt s openssh formula. I improved salt s openssh formula to make it possible to manage the /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts file referencing the public SSH keys of other managed minions.
Tendenci.com. I was looking for a free software solution to handle membership management of a large NPO and I discovered Tendenci. It looked very interesting feature wise and written with a language/framework that I enjoy (Python/Django). But while it s free software, there s no community at all. The company that wrote it released it under a free software license and it really looks like that they did intend to build a community but they failed at it. When I looked their development forums were web-based and mostly empty with only initial discussion of the current developers and no reply from anybody there s also no mention of an IRC channel or a mailing list. I sent them a mail to see what kind of collaboration we could expect if we opted for their software and got no reply. A pity, really.
What free software membership management solution would you use when you have more than 10000 members to handle and when you want to use the underlying database to offer SSO authentication to multiple external services?
Thanks
See you next month for a new summary of my activities.
We'd like to reshare a post from Nicolas Dandrimont.
Hi all,
I am delighted to announce that Debian will be participating in the next round
of Outreachy
and GSoC,
and that we are currently welcoming applications!
Outreachy
helps people from groups underrepresented in free and open source
software get involved. The current round of internships is open to women (cis
and trans), trans men, genderqueer people, and all participants of the Ascend
Project regardless of gender.
Google Summer of Code
is a global program, sponsored by Google, that offers
post-secondary student developers ages 18 and older stipends to write code
for various open source software projects.
Interns for both programs are granted a $5500 stipend (in three installments)
allowing them to dedicate their summer to working full-time on Debian.
Our amazing team of mentors has listed their project ideas on the Debian
wiki,
and we are now welcoming applicants for both programs.
If you want to apply for an internship with Debian this summer, please fill
out the template for either
Outreachy or
GSoC.
If you re eligible to both
programs, we ll encourage you to apply to both (using the same application),
as Debian only has funds for a single Outreachy intern this round.
Don t wait up! The application period for Outreachy ends March 24th, and the
GSoC application period ends March 27th. We really want applicants to start
contributing to their project before making our selection, so that mentors
can get a feel of how working with their intern will be like for three months.
The small task is a requirement for Outreachy, and we re strongly encouraging
GSoC applicants to abide by that rule too. To contribute in the best
conditions, you shouldn t wait for the last minute to apply :-)
I hope we ll work with a lot of great interns this summer. If you think
you re up for the challenge, it s time to apply! If you have any doubts,
or any question, drop us a line on the soc-coordination mailing
list or
come by on our IRC channel (#debian-soc
on irc.debian.org) and we ll do our best to guide you.
Hi everyone,
A quick announcement: Debian has applied to the Google Summer of Code, and will also participate in Outreachy (formerly known as the Outreach Program for Women) for the Summer 2015 round! Those two mentoring programs are a great way for our project to bootstrap new ideas, give an new impulse to some old ones, and of course to welcome an outstanding team of motivated, curious, lively new people among us.
We need projects and mentors to sign up really soon (before February 27th, that s next week), as our project list is what Google uses to evaluate our application to GSoC. Projects proposals should be described on our wiki page. We have three sections:
Coding projects with confirmed mentors are proposed to both GSoC and Outreachy applicants
Non-Coding projects with confirmed mentors are proposed only to Outreachy applicants
Project ideas without confirmed mentors will only happen if a mentor appears. They are kept on the wiki page until the application period starts, as we don t want to give applicants false hopes of being picked for a project that won t happen.
Once you re done, or if you have any questions, drop us a line on our mailing-list (soc-coordination@lists.alioth.debian.org), or on #debian-soc on OFTC.
We also would LOVE to be able to welcome more Outreachy interns. So far, and thanks to our DPL, Debian has committed to fund one internship (US$6500). If we want more Outreachy interns, we need your help :).
If you, or your company, have some money to put towards an internship, please drop us a line at opw@debian.org and we ll be in touch. Some of the successes of our Outreachy alumni include the localization of the Debian Installer to a new locale, improvements in the sources.debian.net service, documentation of the debbugs codebase, and a better integration of AppArmor profiles in Debian.
Thanks a lot for your help!
Unfortunately I was not able to attend debconf this year but thanks to the
awesome video team the all the talks are available for your viewing pleasure.
In order to recreate an authentic Portland experience, I took my laptop into the shower along with a vegan donut and had my children stand outside yelling excerpts from salon.com in whiny Canadianesque accents. Here are
some notes I took as I watched the talks.
Welcome Talk
Why is everyone on stage wearing shorts? Is this a thing now?
Langasek is pronounced with a 'sh' I did not know that.
Kees is pronounced 'case' I also did not know that.
Steve missed a good opportunity for a "Who moved my cheese?" joke. (Hey its
not any more obscure than the "white Chevy Nova" joke.)
A well-deserved award to Russ Allbery from some of the UK people for being
the voice of reason on the mailing lists. See Vincent Sanders blog for details.
Debian in the Dark Ages of Free software - Stefan Zacchiroli
More shorts. I am starting to feel overdressed.
Stefan reminisces about how he got involved in Free Software and
his philosophy of the same. A good introduction for anyone wondering what
makes a Debian hacker tick.
We should be concerned about software freedom in the new "cloud" environments.
Debian can play an important role in this by making it really simple for
users to set up their own cloud environments. My take: the focus should
be on free standards and protocols. The power that Google, Facebook etc.
have is drastically reduced if it is easy to jump ship.
Weapons of the Geek - Gabriella Coleman
pro: no shorts con: womens slacks
Intriguing anthropological investigation into Anonymous and how it/they relate
to Free Software.
Coc acknowledged then ignored. Why do we need it again?
"Anonymous has cabals ... [that] make the cabals within Debian look like childs play."
bugs.debian.org -- Database Ho! - Don Armstrong
I would settle for a lungi at this point but noooo shorts again. (plaid to boot.)
The return of my yearly guilt about undertaking to Don to add RSS support to
debbugs way back at debconf 10 and not following up on it. Damn it, I am going to get this done now.
Sadly, the initial part of the stream is missing and it begans right in the
middle of Don saying something interesting.
"I have to admit my primary motivation for giving a talk was to try to force
myself into actually doing the work I'm talking about."
Stats porn. The BTS is growing at a phenomenal rate. bugs opened 142/day. But only 95/day closed.
Grub Ancient and Modern - Colin and Watson
pro: no shorts con: kilt
I was interested in this talk because one of these days I want to get GRUB 2
running on Debian Minix but a lot went over my head so I'll have to do some
more research first.
One year of fedmsg in Debian - Nicolas Dandrimont
trouser status: undetermined
Problem: There are many different services providing information in Debian
but they do not interop very well.
fedmsg is a unified message bus originally developed by Fedora who were
facing a similar problem.
It has now been implemented in Debian.
Coming of Age: My Life with Debian - Christine Spang
trouser sta- oh the hell with this.
Another talk which is more biographical than technical. Again, useful to
help understand the motivations of hackers.
What interests me is that for younger generations it was open source which
was a novel idea whereas for those of who grew up in the 8-bit era, having
to hack on a computer was expected (whether you wanted to or not and it was
proprietary software you couldn't share which was considered new and strange.
Status report of the Debian Printing Team - Didier Raboud
Ou est les pantalons? Je ne sais pas. (Apologies to Mme Terzini.)
Kudos to Didier for taking up this augean task mostly on his own. Despite
the long-promised "paperless" office I need to be able to print and I was
pleasantly surprised that my new xerox all-in-one worked under Debian with
very little hassle.
Brother sucks. Don't buy their printers. Ditto for Epson and Samsung.
Recently I was doing some work on the alioth infrastructure like fixing things or cleaning up things.
One of the more visible things I done was the switch from gitweb to cgit. cgit is a lot of faster and looks better than gitweb.
The list of repositories is generated every hour. The move also has the nice effect that user repositories are available via the cgit index again.
I don t plan to disable the old gitweb, but I created a bunch of redirect rules that - hopefully - redirect most use cases of gitweb to the equivalent cgit url.
If I broke something, please tell me, if I missed a common use case, please tell me. You can usually reach me on #alioth@oftc or via mail (formorer@d.o)
People also asked me to upload my cgit package to Debian, the package is now waiting in NEW. Thanks to Nicolas Dandrimont (olasd) we also have a patch included that generates proper HTTP returncodes if repos doesn t exist.
The GSoC student application period is over, and the last two days were pretty interesting.
For a few years now, Olly Betts has provided us with a spreadsheet to graph the number of applicants to an organization over time.
Here s the graph for Debian this year:
(Historical graphs: 2013, 2012. Spreadsheet available from Olly s blog)
On Wednesday, I was thinking hmm, 30 applicants, this is a slow year . Well, the number of proposals more than doubled in the last two days, to conclude on a whooping 68 applications! The last one was submitted just three seconds before the deadline
If you want to take a look at the proposals, head over to the Debian wiki.
Time to get on reviewing! The final student acceptances will be published in just less than a month, on April 21st.
Small update as someone was complaining about the lack of pictures from DebCamp on planet.
Not to worry, everything is going fine, and some of the most important stuff is ready
You can see a few pictures from the gallery. The view from the venue is quite outstanding (it was better when there was some sun on Tuesday, but my camera battery was out ).
On my TODO-list:
A lot of mentors.d.n related stuff : prototyping things to make our codebase more bearable by actually using other people s work, e.g. debianqueued, firehose, , and building upon Lucas s idea from his new contributor survey (see the quite vague idea at the bottom)
FedMsg stuff (will probably pick up when Simon arrives)
Some 3D-printing packaging stuff (actually getting software in NEW, I got started on Printrun, and maybe Slic3r)
As you might (or might not) know, this summer, I have taken on mentoring of a GSoC project by Simon Chopin (a.k.a. laarmen) which goal is to bring fedmsg, the Fedora Infrastructure message bus, to Debian. Most of the work I ll be talking about here is Simon s work, please send all the praise towards him (I can take the blame, though).
What is this about?
As the project proposal states, the idea is to provide Debian with a unified, real-time, and open mechanism of communication between its services. This communication bus would allow anyone, anywhere, to start consuming messages and reacting to events happening in Debian s infrastructure:
trigger a test build on a git push to a source repository
trigger automated testing (piuparts, lintian) as soon as an upload hits the archive
get a desktop notification when a package you care about gets changed
When we told upstream about our plan of adapting fedmsg to work on Debian, they were thrilled. And they have been verysupportiveofthe project.
How is the project going?
Are you excited? I know I m excited.
Well, the general idea was easy enough, but the task at hand is a challenge. First of all, fedmsg has a lot of (smallish) dependencies, most of them new to Debian.
Thanks to Simon s work during the bonding period, and thanks to paultag s careful reviews, the first batch of packages (the first dependency level, comprising kitchen, bunch, m2ext, grapefruit, txws, txzmq and stomper) is currently sitting in the NEW queue. The four remaining packages (fabulous, moksha.common, moksha.hub and fedmsg proper) are mostly ready, waiting in the Debian Python Module Team SVN repository for a review and sponsorship.
While we re waiting for the packages to trickle into Debian, Simon is not twiddling his thumbs. Work has taken place on a few fronts:
Getting fedmsg integrated to mentors.debian.net (actually sending the first messages from Debian s infrastructure)
Writing a (stop-gap) wrapper to convert some of our mail broadcasts (debian-devel-changes, debian-bugs-dist) into fedmsg messages, until a more proper integration can be done
Working on reliability of the message transport, following some concerns raised by DSA.
fedmsging mentors.debian.net
Package backports
mentors.debian.net was chosen because I m an admin and could do the integration quickly. That involved backporting the eleven aforementioned packages, plus zeromq3 and python-zmq (that only have TCP_KEEPALIVE on recent versions), to wheezy, as that s what the mentors.d.n host is running. (Also, python-zmq needs a new-ish cython to build so I had to backport that too). Thankfully, those were no-changes backports, that were easily scripted, using a pbuilder hook to allow the packages to depend on previously built packages.
I have made a wheezy package repository available here. It s signed with my GnuPG key, ID 0xB8E5087766475AAF, which should be fairly well connected.
Code changes
After Simon s initial setup of debexpo (which is not an easy task), the code changes have been fairly simple (yes, this is just a proof of concept). You can see them on top of the live branch on debexpo s sources. I finally had the time to make them live earlier this week, and mentors.debian.net has been sending messages on Debian s fedmsg bus ever since.
Deployment
mentors.d.n sends its messages on five endpoints, tcp://mentors.debian.net:3000 through tcp://mentors.debian.net:3004. That is one endpoint per WSGI worker, plus one for the importer process(es). You can tap in directly, by following the instructions below.
debmessenger
Debmessenger is the stop-gap email-to-fedmsg bridge that Simon is developing. The goal is to create some activity on the bus without disrupting or modifying any infrastructure service. It s written in hy, and it leverages the existing Debian-related python modules to do its work, using inotify to react when a mail gets dropped in a Maildir.
Right now, it s supposed to understand changes mails (received from debian-devel-changes) and bugs mail (from debian-bugs-dist).
I ll work on deploying an instance of debmessenger this weekend, to create some more traffic on the bus.
Reliability of the bus
I suggested using fedmsg as this was something that already existed, and that solved a problem identical to the one we wanted to tackle (open interconnection of a distribution s infrastructure services). Reusing a piece of infrastructure that already works in another distro means that we can share tools, share ideas, and come up with solutions that we might not have considered when working alone. The drawback is that we have to either adapt to the tool s idiosyncrasies, or to adapt the tool to our way of working.
One of the main points raised by DSA when the idea of using fedmsg was brought up, was that of reliability. Debian s infrastructure is spread in datacenters (and basements ) all over the world, and thus faces different challenges than Fedora s infrastructure, which is more tightly integrated. Therefore, we have to ensure that a critical consumer (say, a buildd) doesn t miss any message it would need for its operation (say, that a package got accepted).
There has been work upstream, to ensure that fedmsg doesn t lose messages, but we need to take extra steps to make sure that a given consumer can replay the messages it has missed, should the need arise. Simon has started a discussion on the upstream mailing list, and is working on a prototype replay mechanism. Obviously, we need to test scenarios of endpoints dropping off the grid, hence the work on getting some activity on the bus.
How can I take a look?
a.k.a. Another one rides the bus
(Picture Yves-Laurent Allaert, CC-By-SA v2.5 / GFDL v1.2 license)
So, the bus is pretty quiet right now, as only two kinds of events are triggering messages: a new upload to mentors.debian.net, and a new comment on a package there. Don t expect a lot of traffic. However, generating some traffic is easy enough: just login to mentors.d.n, pick a package of mine (not much choice there), or a real package you want to review, and leave a comment. poof, a message appears.
For the lazy
Join #debian-fedmsg on OFTC, and look for messages from the debmsg bot.
Current example output:
(definitely needs some work, but it s a start)
Listening in by yourself
You need to setup fedmsg. I have a repository of wheezy packages and one of sid packages, signed with my GnuPG key, ID 0xB8E5087766475AAF. You can add them to a file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d like this:
deb http://perso.crans.org/dandrimont/fedmsg-<sid wheezy>/ ./
Then, import my GnuPG key into apt (apt-key add), update your sources (apt-get update), and install fedmsg (apt-get install python-fedmsg). The versions are << to anything real, so you should get the real thing as soon as it hits the archive.
Finally, in /etc/fedmsg.d/endpoints.py, you can comment-out the Fedora entries, and add a Debian entry like this:
"debian": [
"tcp://fedmsg.olasd.eu:9940",
],
fedmsg.olasd.eu runs a fedmsg gateway connected to the mentors.d.n endpoints, and thus forwards all the mentors messages. It ll be connected to debmessenger as soon as it s running too.
To actually see mesages, disable validate_signatures in /etc/fedmsg.d/ssl.py, setting it to False. The Debian messages aren t signed yet (it s on the roadmap), and we don t ship the Fedora certificates so we can t authenticate their messages either.
Finally, you can run fedmsg-tail --really-pretty in a terminal. As soon as there s some activity, you should get that kind of output (color omitted):
Enjoy real-time updates from your favorite piece of infrastructure!
What s next?
While Simon continues working on reliability, and gets started on message signing according to his schedule, I ll take a look at deploying the debmessenger bridge, and making the pretty-printer outputs useful for our topics. There will likely be some changes to the messages sent by debexpo, as we got some feedback from the upstream developers about making them work in the fedmsg tool ecosystem (datanommer and datagrepper come to mind).
You can tune in to Simon s weekly reports on the soc-coordination list, and look at the discussions with upstream on the fedora messaging-sig list. You can also catch us on IRC, #debian-soc on OFTC. We re also hanging out on the upstream channel, #fedora-apps on freenode.
A huge release, the combined 0.9.9 and 0.9.10 releases (I made a mistake releasing) are now tagged and pushed to pypi. It features a number of enhancements and fixes, and is just an absolute thrill to play with.
Thanks to the contributors this cycle:
Bob Tolbert
Christopher Allan Webber
Duncan McGreggor
Guillermo Vaya
Joe H. Rahme
Julien Danjou
Konrad Hinsen
Morten Linderud
Nicolas Dandrimont
Ralph Moritz
rogererens
Thomas Ballinger
Tuukka Turto
Outstanding! New features are now being considered for 0.9.11. Thanks!
Or rather, hello Planet!
Here s a somewhat traditional introductory post.
I m Nicolas Dandrimont, I m French, I m sysadmin in a grande cole, where I m mostly in charge of the GNU/Linux workstations and servers.
In Debian, I m a DM, currently in the NM queue, so I might become a DD soon-ish. I am (rather inactively) co-maintaining a few packages. In my Debian career , I have been involved in OCaml packaging and Python packaging, although lately most of my time has been spent on Google Summer of Code (mentor for two mentors.debian.net projects in 2012, org admin for Debian in 2013), and on mentors.debian.net.
In other free-software related projects, I own a RepRap 3D printer, and I grew some interest in the related software, e.g. Slic3r and printrun. There have been a lot of action in Fedora about packaging 3D-printing-related software, and it d be great to get a team together to work on that in Debian during the jessie release cycle. Consider this a call for interested parties
Unrelatedly, paultag has tricked me into working on hy, which is way too much fun. Blame him if you feel that I have been inactive lately, this has been eating way too much of my free time
Hopefully I ll be able to make regular updates on the work I do in Debian and free software, so stay tuned!
During the Paris Mini-Debconf, Nicolas Dandrimont talked about The state of mentors.debian.net: GSoC and beyond. He said that Half of Debian s packages are maintained by sponsored maintainers. That statement was actually wrong, as he confirmed later.
However, using a few UDD queries, I could come up with:
3147 packages out of 18649 packages in sid (17%) were last uploaded using a sponsored upload.
There are 963 distinct sponsorees, vs. a total of 2015 distinct emails in the Changed-By field of packages in sid. Given that it s more likely for DDs to have used several emails to upload packages, it s very likely that half of the package maintainers are sponsored maintainers.
There are 2185 packages without a DD in either the Maintainer: or the Uploaders: fields. (That includes some packages that are maintained by a team that could include some DDs)
Full UDD notes:
all packages in sid:
select source, version from sources_uniq where release = 'sid'
packages in sid known to upload_history:
select source, version from upload_history where
(source, version) in (select source, version from sources_uniq where release = 'sid')
packages that were uploaded by the changed_by person:
create temporary table sources_not_sponsored as select distinct source, version
from upload_history, carnivore_keys, carnivore_emails
where (source, version) in (select source, version from sources_uniq where release = 'sid')
and fingerprint = key
and carnivore_keys.id = carnivore_emails.id
and carnivore_emails.email = changed_by_email;
packages not uploaded by the changed_by person:
create temp table uh_sid as select source, version, fingerprint, changed_by_email
from upload_history
where (source, version) in (select source, version from sources_uniq where release = 'sid');
create temp table uh_sid_sponsored as select source, version, fingerprint, changed_by_email from uh_sid
where (source, version) not in (select source, version from sources_not_sponsored);
list with sponsor login:
select distinct source, version, fingerprint, changed_by_email, login
from uh_sid_sponsored
left join carnivore_keys on fingerprint = key
left join carnivore_login on carnivore_keys.id = carnivore_login.id;
=> 4188 sponsored packages. some of them are in a strange state (changed_by is a DD, but uploaded by another DD). excluding those:
create temp table sponsored_but_dds as select distinct source, version, fingerprint, changed_by_email, login
from uh_sid_sponsored, carnivore_emails, carnivore_login
where changed_by_email = carnivore_emails.email
and carnivore_emails.id = carnivore_login.id;
create temp table really_sponsored as select distinct source, version, fingerprint, changed_by_email, login
from uh_sid_sponsored
left join carnivore_keys on fingerprint = key
left join carnivore_login on carnivore_keys.id = carnivore_login.id
where (source, version) not in (select source, version from sponsored_but_dds);
=> 3147 sponsored packages
select distinct changed_by_email from really_sponsored ;
=> 963 different sponsorees
select distinct changed_by_email from upload_history where
(source, version) in (select source, version from sources_uniq where release = 'sid');
=> 2015 distinct emails.
no DD amongst maintainer or uploader:
create temp table dds_emails as select email from carnivore_emails, carnivore_login
where carnivore_emails.id = carnivore_login.id;
select source, version, maintainer, uploaders from sources_uniq
where release='sid'
and maintainer_email not in (select * from dds_emails)
and not exists (select * from uploaders where release = 'sid' and sources_uniq.source = uploaders.source and sources_uniq.version = uploaders.version and email in (select * from dds_emails))
and maintainer_email != 'packages@qa.debian.org'
and (source, version) in (select source, version from really_sponsored);
Group photo of the Ruby Team in Brewberry Bar (Paris 2020)
As my contributions to Debian continue to grow in number, I find myself
uploading to the archive more and more often.
Although I'm pretty happy with my current sbuild-based workflow, twice in the
past few weeks I inadvertently made a binary upload instead of a source-only
one.
TL;DR: if you applied for a DebConf 17 travel bursary, and you haven t accepted it yet, login to 
Disclaimer This is an attempt at humor and hence entirely fictional in nature. While some incidents depicted are true, the context and the story woven around them are by yours truly. None of the Mascots of Debian were hurt during the blog post
. I also disavow any responsibility for any hurt (real or imagined) to any past, current and future mascots. The attempt should not be looked upon as demeaning people who are accused of false crimes, tortured and confessions eked out of them as this happens quite a lot (In India for sure, but guess it s the same world over in various degrees). The idea is loosely inspired by 
. I guess for many people watching it once was torture enough. I *think* they were nominated for 
I have to say while Table Mountain is beautiful and haunting as it has scenes like these
For the non-Debian people among my readers: The following post presents bits of the decision-taking process in the Debian project. You might find it interesting, or terribly dull and boring :-) Proceed at your own risk.
My reason for posting this entry is to get more people to read the accompanying options for my proposed General Resolution (GR), and have as full a ballot as possible.
Almost three weeks ago, I sent 
Last summer, 
My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for 
In my last 
Unfortunately I was not able to attend debconf this year but thanks to the
awesome video team the all the talks 
Recently I was doing some work on the alioth infrastructure like fixing things or cleaning up things.
One of the more visible things I done was the switch from gitweb to 
Well, the general idea was easy enough, but the task at hand is a challenge. First of all, fedmsg has a lot of (smallish) dependencies, most of them new to Debian.
Thanks to Simon s work during the bonding period, and thanks to paultag s careful reviews, the first batch of packages (the first dependency level, comprising kitchen, bunch, m2ext, grapefruit, txws, txzmq and stomper) is currently sitting in the NEW queue. The four remaining packages (fabulous, moksha.common, moksha.hub and fedmsg proper) are mostly ready, waiting in the Debian Python Module Team SVN repository for a review and sponsorship.
While we re waiting for the packages to trickle into Debian, Simon is not twiddling his thumbs. Work has taken place on a few fronts:
) all over the world, and thus faces different challenges than Fedora s infrastructure, which is more tightly integrated. Therefore, we have to ensure that a critical consumer (say, a buildd) doesn t miss any message it would need for its operation (say, that a package got accepted).
There has been work upstream, to ensure that fedmsg 
A huge release, the combined 0.9.9 and 0.9.10 releases (I made a mistake releasing) are now tagged and pushed to pypi. It features a number of enhancements and fixes, and is just an absolute thrill to play with.
Thanks to the contributors this cycle:
Unrelatedly, 
Hopefully I ll be able to make regular updates on the work I do in Debian and free software, so stay tuned!
During the Paris Mini-Debconf, Nicolas Dandrimont talked about 