Debian is quite probably the project that most uses a OpenPGP implementation (that is, GnuPG, or gpg) for many of its internal operations, and that places most trust in it. PGP is also very widely used, of course, in many other projects and between individuals. It is regarded as a secure way to do all sorts of crypto (mainly, encrypting/decrypting private stuff, signing public stuff, certifying other people's identities). PGP's lineage traces back to Phil Zimmerman's program, first published in 1991 By far, not a newcomer PGP is secure, as it was 25 years ago. However, some uses of it might not be so. We went through several migrations related to algorithmic weaknesses (i.e. v3 keys using MD5; SHA1 is strongly discouraged, although not yet completely broken, and it should be avoided as well) or to computational complexity (as the migration away from keys smaller than 2048 bits, strongly prefering 4096 bits). But some vulnerabilities are human usage (that is, configuration-) related. Today, Enrico Zini gave us a heads-up in the #debian-keyring IRC channel, and started a thread in the debian-private mailing list; I understand the mail to a private list was partly meant to get our collective attention, and to allow for potentially security-relevant information to be shared. I won't go into details about what is, is not, should be or should not be private, but I'll post here only what's public information already. What are short and long key IDs? I'll start by quoting Enrico's mail:

there are currently at least 3 ways to refer to a gpg key: short key ID (last 8 hex digits of fingerprint), long key ID (last 16 hex digits) and full fingerprint. The short key ID used to be popular, and since 5 years it is known that it is computationally easy to generate a gnupg key with an arbitrary short key id. A mitigation to this is using "keyid-format long" in gpg.conf, and a better thing to do, especially in scripts, is to use the full fingerprint to refer to a key, or just ship the public key for verification and skip the key servers. Note that in case of keyid collision, gpg will download and import all the matching keys, and will use all the matching keys for verifying signatures.

So... What is this about? We humans are quite bad at recognizing and remembering randomly-generated strings with no inherent patterns in them. Every GPG key can be uniquely identified by its fingerprint, a 128-bit string, usually encoded as ten blocks of four hexadecimal characters (this allows for 160 bits; I guess there's space for a checksum in it). That is, my (full) key's signature is:

AB41 C1C6 8AFD 668C A045  EBF8 673A 03E4 C1DB 921F

However, it's quite hard to recognize such a long string, let alone memorize it! So, we often do what humans do: Given that strong cryptography implies a homogenous probability distribution, people compromised on using just a portion of the key the last portion. The short key ID. Mine is then the last two blocks (shown in boldface): C1DB921F. We can also use what's known as the long key ID, that's twice as long: 64 bits. However, while I can speak my short key ID on a single breath (and maybe even expect you to remember and note it down), try doing so with the long one (shown in italics above): 673A03E4C1DB921F. Nah. Too much for our little, analog brains. This short and almost-rememberable number has then 32 bits of entropy I have less than one in 4,000,000,000 chance of generating a new key with this same short key ID. Besides, key generation is a CPU-intensive operation, so it's quite unlikely we will have a collision, right? Well, wrong. Previous successful attacks on short key IDs Already five years ago, Asheesh Laroia migrated his 1024D key to a 4096R. And, as he describes in his always-entertaining fashion, he made his computer sweat until he was able to create a new key for which the short key ID collided with the old one. It might not seem like a big deal, as he did this non-maliciously, but this easily should have spelt game over for the usage of short key IDs. After all, being able to generate a collision is usually the end for cryptographic systems. Asheesh specifically mentioned in his posting how this could be abused. But we didn't listen. Short key IDs are just too convenient! Besides, they allow us to have fun, can be a means of expression! I know of at least two keys that would qualify as vanity: Obey Arthur Liu's 0x29C0FFEE (created in 2009) and Keith Packard's 0x00000011 (created in 2012). Then we got the Evil 32 project. They developed Scallion, started (AFAICT) in 2012. Scallion automates the search for a 32-bit collision using GPUs; they claim that it takes only four seconds to find a collision. So, they went through the strong set of the public PGP Web of Trust, and created a (32-bit-)colliding key for each of the existing keys. And what happened now? What happened today? We still don't really know, but it seems we found a first potentially malicious collision that is, the first "nonacademic" case. Enrico found two keys sharing the 9F6C6333 short ID, apparently belonging to the same person (as would be the case of Asheesh, mentioned above). After contacting Gustavo, though, he does not know about the second That is, it can be clearly regarded as an impersonation attempt. Besides, what gave away this attempt are the signatures it has: Both keys are signed by what appears to be the same three keys: B29B232A, F2C850CA and 789038F2. Those three keys are not (yet?) uploaded to the keyservers, though... But we can expect them to appear at any point in the future. We don't know who is behind this, or what his purpose is. We just know this looks very evil. Now, don't panic: Gustavo's key is safe. Same for his certifiers, Marga, Agust n and Maxy. It's just a 32-bit collision. So, in principle, the only parties that could be cheated to trust the attacker are humans, right? Nope. Enrico tested on the PGP pathfinder & key statistics service, a keyserver that finds trust paths between any two arbitrary keys in the strong set. Surprise: The pathfinder works on the short key IDs, even when supplied full fingerprints. So, it turns out I have three faked trust paths into our impostor. What next? There are several things this should urge us to do.

• First of all, configure your local GPG to never show you short IDs. This is done by adding the line keyid-format 0xlong to ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf.
  • I just checked both in /usr/share/gnupg/options.skel and /usr/share/gnupg2/gpg-conf.skel, and that setting is not yet part of the packages' defaults. I'll check a bit deeper and file bugs right away if needed!
• Have you written or maintained any program that deals with GPG keys in any way? Make sure it specifies --keyid-format long or 0xlong in any relevant call. It might even be better to use the machine-oriented representation instead: --with-colons.
  • ...Of course, your computer will not feel tired or confused at comparing 160-bit full fingerprints instead of 64-bit long IDs, so it's better if our scripts use the full version for everything.
• Only sign somebody else's key if you see and verify its full fingerprint (this is not a new issue, but given we are talking about it, and that DebConf is around the corner, and that we will have a KSP as usual...)

And there are surely many other important recommendations. But this is a good set of points to start with. [update] I was pointed at Daniel Kahn Gillmor's 2013 blog post, OpenPGP Key IDs are not useful. Daniel argues, in short, that cutting a fingerprint in order to get a (32- or 64-bit) short key ID is the worst of all worlds, and we should rather target either always showing full fingerprints, or not showing it at all (and leaving all the crypto-checking bits to be done by the software, as comparing 160-bit strings is not natural for us humans). [update] This post was picked up by LWN.net. A very interesting discussion continues in their comments.

For those of you back at my university, you may have noticed I'm not there this semester.

Google's 2012 FEP team

I spent this past summer at Google, Inc, developing internal tools for the AdSense team, specifically Google Programmable Ads. Being at Google was great; I loved my team and my intern cohort, the rest of the interns in the Freshman Engineering Practicum.

I'm not currently at Google; my internship ended at the beginning of August. Although it was a blast, all good things must come to an end.

I'm not at Mason, either. I was super excited to return to university, and was just about to buy my books and get ready to move in when I got an email from a former coworker at Ksplice, a startup Oracle acquired while I interned there last year. He was starting a new company which would focus on business communications. I'd be working with a bunch of my former coworkers, and based on what I had heard of the company's plans I was confident in their ability to make an awesome product.

Needless to say, when they decided to offer me a position working there full time, I jumped on it.

From an academic point of view, Mason didn't really have much of a mechanism to support this. Co-ops are uncommon there, and not really supported for more than one semester; a full year away had never been done, according to our career services. My department was fully supportive, however, so we managed to find a way to make it work. This involved filling out some oddly-named forms, such as Special Registration for Graduation Request, which the registrar asserted was the right form, trust us on this one.

Myself and Obey Arthur Liu at a SIPB hackathon

But that's all neither here nor there. I'm now up in Cambridge, MA, working with awesome people (including but not limited to tabbott, wdaher, jesstess, and keegan), and exploring the city. I'm hanging out with MIT SIPB, helping with the maintenance of Sugar Labs' servers in E15 and spending more time working on various open source projects.

To my friends at Mason: I miss you all. I know regardless of how the next year+ turns out, it'll be one one hell of a ride.

I'll be in Great Britain next week. I'll come to the Debian Party 2008 in Cambridge on Saturday 23rd August and will be back to London to visit 'till Wednesday 27th August. I'm staying by myself in a nice little hotel in Bloomsbury.

It will be very interesting to meet Debian people and probably do some pitching for my Aptitude GTK project which is making nice progress.

I've never been to London before. In fact, I've been once when very young and all that I can remember is that the hot dogs seemed nice :). I'm currently reading the Lonely Planet book about London and filling my program. Hi, London!

Hi folks!

We're almost done for the official Summer of Code program and I thought that I couldn't let it end without another update, so here we are (you may thank Daniel Burrows for additional poking).

The Gtk+ interface for Aptitude is making great progress. The product is not final yet but already implements many of the planned ideas, with others to come.




So, let's see the tasks presented in my previous update:

• A real user interface <- much progress here


• Being reliable <- check! we don't crash all the time anymore


• Packages dependencies, pre-dependencies, etc. <- check!


• Hyperlinks between packages <- check!


• Advanced package search <- check!


• Tags support (tag clouds ?) <- well, no clouds yet, but we have tags


• Linking with interesting data sources like popcon <- not done yet


• A lot of interesting things <- well..

In some more details: we are now much closer to the final interface. Some things are not done yet, for example, notification bars la Iceweasel (or is it Firefox ?) are in the works for unobtrusive notifications about important things and a little guidance.

We are much more reliable now. We eliminated lots of memory management problems that resulted from, mmh, imperfect coding discipline. We also lock the interface when important backend stuff reload to prevent the user from shooting himself in the foot when triggering an install when the APT cache is reloading for example.. The backend refactoring took a sizable part of this second term but it was worth it. The code is now much cleaner and uses no more (at least much fewer) ugly unscalable hacks.

One very important feature of Aptitude is the ability to easily display all kinds of dependencies and navigate through them by hyperlinking. It's now working in the Gtk+ interface as well. Feel free to click on whatever looks like a package or a package version.

We now support the powerful Aptitude package searching syntax. Daniel Burrows is talking with Enrico Zini to bring the power of apt-xapian-index to Aptitude: autocompletion! lightning fast full-text searches! tag clouds! ponies!

There is still a lot to be done. I'm not going away after the GSoC program. I'm here to stay, for Aptitude and Debian. Daniel Burrows has been very helpful and supportive. The Debian community is as awesome as I knew it before participating in the program.

Daniel Burrows is planning to merge the Gtk+ interface into the main branch in September and packages may appear into Experimental. With the very interesting evolutions of the upcoming Adept-3, Lenny+1 will show very interesting changes in the area of packages managers.

Now for you. I need you to test my interface. All necessary instructions are on the development trac : http://dev.graffit.net/aptitude/trac.

Long time no post. Anyway, I have some good news.

The Gtk code for Aptitude has been merged some time ago into the main development trunk and we now have a release in Experimental.

Are you going?

I was also entertaining the idea of giving a lightning talk in the Debian room (not as part of the general lightning talks) about aptitude-gtk. I certainly don't feel like talking for a whole hour talk or what. I don't have that much interesting stuff to say. Maybe we could do it with other 2008 european GSoCers. That could be useful as we didn't do much publicity-wise (see) in a timely maneer.

Certainly I should write a mail about that to the soc-coordination list about this or ramble about it on the planet. :) Oh, I'll get around it.

So any Debian GSoCers going to FOSDEM ?

In case you've been living under a rock these past years, I shouldn't have to tell you what this is about :). Well, just in case.
The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is an international program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. Debian has participated since 2006, mentoring dozens of students on Debian projects.

The important part of the 2009 edition of the Google Summer of Code is going to start next week with the Organizations application period (March 9th). By that time, we should have listed a reasonable number of ideas on the dedicated wiki page.

We will try this year to improve on the performance of the previous years, starting first with more and more dedicated manpower. If you have some time to spare to help manage our Summer of Code bid this year, we can make it a much better experience for the students and for Debian.

Help is immediately needed in many areas. Some examples:

• Map out which areas in Debian could benefit from a Summer of Code project and connect the right people with the right projects ideas


• Ideas, Ideas, Ideas for Summer of Code projects

By mid-March, we will need:

• Dedicated documentation to present Debian to the prospective student


• Publicity material to promote the Summer of Code at Debian


• Ideas, Ideas, Ideas for Summer of Code projects

Further in the spring:

• Mentors, people to review proposals, do interviews


• Ideas, Ideas, Ideas for Summer of Code projects

In the summer:

• Mentoring students


• Testing and feedback for projects


• Internal communication with the community

As you can see, there is much work ahead. It's time to pitch out your favorite pet project :)
Remember! The Summer of Code has become a prominent outreach forum for open source organizations. It puts a spotlight on each of them to provide a well-rounded and deep experience of open source development.

Right now, you can help with the Wiki, join us on IRC on #debian-soc on OFTC or join the mailing-list at soc-coordination on alioth.

The short "flyers-friendly" URL for the Summer of Code at Debian is : <http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc>. Publicize it!

See you this summer!

(Photo credit: Obey Arthur Liu; originally on Picasa, license.) Three weekends ago, I participated in a Debian bug squashing party. It was more fun than I had guessed! The event worked: we squashed bugs. Geoffrey Thomas (geofft) organized it as an event for MIT's student computing group, SIPB. In this post, I'll review the good parts and the bad. I'll conclude with beaming photos of my two mentees and talk about the bugs they fixed. So, the good:

• Attendance. As Luke put it, when he arrived, there was hardly anyone there. Then people showed up! And then mentorship and pedagogy happened! In all, 14 people attended, seven of whom are active in Debian or its derivatives (Ubuntu, Debathena).
• We took photos. Arthur took a wide panoramic photo, and I snapped a few good ones, too. (Thanks to Jessica McKellar for letting me borrow her camera.) Here's my full photo set.
• Good, free pizza. Props to geofft for ordering from Beauty's, and props to SIPB for picking up the tab.
• We fixed bugs! I mentored two new Debian contributors through their first release-critical bug fix. Both of them said they would attend similar events in the future. One of my mentees is now idling and asking questions in the #debian-mentors IRC channel.
• The Debian Events team republished the event. MadameZou posted the event to debian.org, giving it a nice stable URL.
• geofft made a good list of bugs to work on. He worked from the release-critical bug list, categorized the bugs by expected difficulty, and made somee short notes about how to fix the bug. This turned out quite useful.
• People printed music to the speakers. If this sounds weird, you should read the SIPB documentation for how to use Gutenbach (written by Liz Denys).
• We had a good ratio of developers to newcomers. This was hugely helpful; from what I saw, new people rarely waited very long for their questions to be answered. Thanks to Luke Faraone, Sam Hartman, Obey Arthur Liu, Karl Ramm, and Christine Spang from Debian, and Geoffrey Thomas from Debathena, for sharing knowledge.

The event was a success, but as always, there are some things that could have gone more smoothly. Here's that list:

• We hadn't prepared for people to do Debian development on Ubuntu. In particular, it took Luke and me about half an hour to come up with a pbuilder command line that worked.
• We didn't contribute to Ubuntu, just Debian. I actually think this is fine, but geofft did originally want people to work on both. He was disappointed, and we could have managed to do that if we had done more prep.
• We could have reached more prospective attendees. I know earlier in the year, daf organized a highly popular Debian packaging tutorial elsewhere on campus. I didn't see any of those people at the event, and I think some would have attended if they had known about it.
• Some people wanted a bit more context. In particular, attendees asked me about what makes a bug release-critical and what it means to do a non-maintainer upload. We could have taken some time to explain these to the whole group; instead, we dove right into hacking. Because we had so many mentors, I think people did get their questions answered, but we can't sustain that if the event grows in size.
• Mentees didn't always get high-quality help. geofft suggested Jessica work on one bug, and when she had a question, she asked Luke Faraone. Luke wasn't familiar with the bug, and he skimmed it, not realizing that the bug changed issues midway through the bug log. As a result, his initial help was unhelpful. After Luke, Jessica, and the bug were on the same page (so to speak), Jessica received clear, sound answers to questions.

Still, it turned out well! I did three NMUs, corresponding to three patches submitted for release-critical bugs by my two mentees. Those mentees were: Jessica McKellar is a software engineer at Ksplice Oracle and a recent graduate of MIT's EECS program. She solved three release-critical bugs. This was her first direct contribution to Debian. In particular:

• #636201: While updating the package for multiarch support, the maintainer of wildmidi presumably made a typo. A single character was missing from a "Replaces:" declaration in debian/control. This bug caused upgrades to fail. Sam Hartman uploaded an NMU based on a patch Jessica prepared.
• #626420: The scribus-doc package failed to build from source due to a missing build-depends entry. This one was super easy, and served as a good test package for setting up and using pbuilder.
• #565000: The switch to gcc-4.5 left hubbub unable to build from source due to new GCC warnings that made -Wall fail on the source, although it would succeed with earlier versions of the package. This led to long philosophical discussions about the particularly most reasonable fix: removing -Wall, or adding a more specific exception.

Jessica has since gotten involved in the Twisted project's personal package archive. Toward the end of the sprint, she explained, "I like fixing bugs. I will totally come to the next bug squashing party." Noah Swartz is a recent graduate of Case Western Reserve University where he studied Mathematics and played Magic. He is an intern at the MIT Media Lab where he contributes to DoppelLab in Joe Paradiso's Responsive Environments group. This was definitely his first direct contribution to Debian. It was also one of the most intense command-line experiences he has had so far. Noah wasn't originally planning to come, but we were having lunch together before the hackathon, and I convinced him to join us. Noah fixed #625177, a fails-to-build-from-source (FTBFS) bug in nslint. The problem was that "-Wl" was instead written in all lowercase in the debian/rules file, as "-wl". Noah fixed that, making sure the package properly built in pbuilder, and then spent some quality time with lintian figuring out the right way to write a debian/changelog. That's a wrap! We'll hopefully have one again in a few months, and before that, I hope to write up a guide so that we run things even more smoothly next time.

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

• Danke
• Thank you
• (RTL or not?) / toda
• Gracias
• / arigat
• / n ndi
• Obrigado
• Grazie
• C m n
• Kadin chey la
• / Efharisto
• Dank je wel
• Tak
• D ngge
• Merci
• Kiitos
• Tika hoki
• / dhanyavaadhamulu
• Thank you and God save the Queen
• Mul umesc
• Tack
• / didi madloba
• Gr cies
• Dakujem
• / Aabhar
• / Dhanyavadagalu
• Paldies
• / kop khun krap
• Terima kasih
• Hvala (hr)
• / Dhanyavad
• / Hvala (sr)
• Hvala (sl)
• / Akun
• / Sukriya
• Takk
• / Nandri
• Maki biyen jianbakik
• D kuji
• / Xiexie
• / Aabhari aahe
• Faleminderit
• / Kam sah ham ni da
• / Blagodaram
• / Xiexie
• Hvala (bs)

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

• Danke
• Thank you
• (RTL or not?) / toda
• Gracias
• / arigat
• / n ndi
• Obrigado
• Grazie
• C m n
• Kadin chey la
• / Efharisto
• Dank je wel
• Tak
• D ngge
• Merci
• Kiitos
• Tika hoki
• / dhanyavaadhamulu
• Thank you and God save the Queen
• Mul umesc
• Tack
• / didi madloba
• Gr cies
• Dakujem
• / Aabhar li> / Dhanyavadagalu
• Paldies
• / kop khun krap
• Terima kasih
• Hvala (hr)
• / Dhanyavad
• / Hvala (sr)
• Hvala (sl)
• / Akun
• / Sukriya
• Takk
• / Nandri
• Maki biyen jianbakik
• D kuji
• / Xiexie
• / Aabhari aahe
• Faleminderit
• / Kam sah ham ni da
• / Blagodaram
• / Xiexie
• Hvala (bs)

I d like to extend a warm welcome to our new batch of students selected for the 2011 Debian Google Summer of Code! They should soon be posting on Debian Planet and you re welcome to come talk to them on #debian-soc on irc.debian.org Further details will be posted in the coming days to our wiki: http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc Automated Multi-Arch Cross-Building and Bootstrapping aka autocrossbuild , by Gustavo Prado Alkmim, mentored by Wookey
Enable easy and automated setup of cross-platform automated build systems and bootstrapping for QA in the Multi-Arch era. This involves the creation of multi-stage bootstrap build sequencing tools and a reliable automated multi-arch cross-builder. APT/Dpkg Transaction Ordering for Safety and Performance aka aptordering , by Chris Baines, mentored by Michael Vogt
The ordering code in libapt is responsible for ordering the unpacking/configuration of debs so as to ensure dependencies are satisfied etc. Currently it organizes the ordering into big batches. This project further implements an ordering satisfying more constrains such as minimal amounts of dpkg invocations , minimal amount of broken packages at any point . DebDelta APT Native Integration aka debdelta , by Ishan Jayawardena, mentored by Michael Vogt
Improve user experience of APT and its front-ends by speeding up the upgrade process. This provides a better framework for unified handling of debdelta and future APT improvements such as parallelism. Support for stable and security ugprades as well as multiple APT related libraries is expected. Dpkg Declarative Diversions aka declarativediversions , by Sam Dunne, mentored by Steve Langasek
The dpkg-divert command should be replaced with a new control file with a declarative syntax which Dpkg will parse and process directly as part of the package unpack and removal phases, eliminating the problems resulting from non-atomic handling of diversions. Backend Tools and Infrastructure for DEX aka dextools , by Nathan Handler, mentored by Matt Zimmerman
EX is a new program designed to help improve Debian and its derivatives by merging in changes made downstream and encouraging discussions between the various projects. As this is a new project, most of the infrastructure does not exist (or is rather hackish and incomplete). This project will create the necessary backend tools and infrastructure so that all Debian derivatives can easily make use of the DEX project. Jigsaw Modularized Java in Debian aka jigsaw , by Guillaume Mazoyer, mentored by Tom Marble
The Java Development Kit (JDK) is a big monolithic software tool: many of its features are only useful in limited areas (GUI toolkits are useless for a web server). This project will bring the Jigsaw modular JDK to Debian, helping performance (start-up, size, etc) but also the dependency resolution (to match Debian packaging). Some work exists upstream does not fit with Debian. This project will package the current development version of Jigsaw, update Debian Java Policy, and create the necessary packaging tools for software depending on it. Python Multi-Build for Python Extensions Packaging aka pythonmultibuild , by Mesutcan Kurt, mentored by Piotr O arowski
This project creates a tool to build Python extensions for all Python versions supported by Debian at the time. The project should detect the upstream build system and testing frameworks and use them. It will be interfaced with CDBS and the dh sequencer, replacing their Python snippets. Debian Teams Activity Metrics aka teammetrics , by Sukhbir Singh, mentored by Andreas Tille
This project will gauge the performance of teams in Debian by measuring metrics such as: postings on relevant mailing lists, package upload records from the Ultimate Debian Database and commit statistics from project repositories The information gathered will help in evaluating team performance by measuring how people in a team are working together. An interface to access this information easily will also be developed. Compute Clusters Integration for Debian Development and Building aka computeclusters , by Rudy Godoy, mentored by Steffen M ller
The project s main goal is to enable developers to easily use compute clusters (Eucalyptus, OpenStack ) as environments for arch-specific development by providing a set of tools they can use to setup and run an extended platform for their development, testing and building tasks. Good luck to everyone!

The two first interviews were dedicated to long-time Debian developers. This time I took the opposite approach, I interviewed David Kalnischkies who is not (yet) a Debian developer. But he s contributing to one of the most important software within Debian the APT package manager since 2009. You can already see him in many places in Debian sharing his APT knowledge when needed. English is not his native language and he s a bit shy, but he accepted the interview nevertheless. I would like to thank him for the efforts involved and I hope his story can inspire some people to take the leap and just start helping My questions are in bold, the rest is by David. Who are you? I am David Kalnischkies, 22 years old, living in the small town Erbach near Wiesbaden in Germany and I m studying computer science at the TU Darmstadt. Furthermore I am for more than half a decade now young group leader of my hometown. I never intended to get into this position, but it has similarities with my career in this internet-thingy here. I don t remember why, but in April 2009 I was at a stage that some simple bugs in APT annoyed me so much that I grabbed the source, and most importantly I don t know why I did it but I published my changes in Mai with #433007, a few more bugs and even a branch on launchpad. And this public branch got me into all this trouble in June: I got a mail from Mr. package managment Michael Vogt regarding this branch A few days later I joined an IRC session with him and closely after that my name appeared for the first time in a changelog entry. It s a strange but also addicting feeling to read your own name in an unfamiliar place. And even now after many IRC discussions, bugfixes and features, three Ubuntu Developer Summits and a Google Summer of Code in Debian, my name still appear in places I have never even thought about e.g. in an interview. What s your biggest achievement within Debian? I would like to answer MultiArch in APT as it was my Google Summer of Code project, but as it has (not much) use for the normal user at this point will hopefully change for wheezy I chose three smaller things in squeeze s APT that many people don t even know yet:

• MMap run out of room , the most famous error related to the APT::Cache-Limit option is gone. The DynamicMMap in APT now deserves its name
• Download and usage of multiple Translations of Descriptions
• crazy stuff like apt-cache show ^apt-.*$/experimental works

If your impression is now that I only do APT stuff: that s completely right, but that s already more than enough for me for now as the toolchain behind the short name APT contains so many tools and use cases that you always have something different. You re an active member of the APT development team. Are there plans for APT in Debian Wheezy? What features can we expect? That s very hard to answer, as the team is too small to be able to really plan something. I mean, you can have fancy plans and everything and half a second later someone arrives on the mailing list with a small question which eats days of development time just for debugging But right now the TODO list contains (in no particular order):

• MultiArch managing packages built for different architectures like i386 on amd64 to ease the usage of packages which only work on specific architectures or cross-compiling.
• rewriting the subsystem responsible for downloading files to e.g. enable tools like apt-file or debtags to reuse the infrastructure by plugging into it.
• splitting long descriptions out of the Packages file to possibly decrease the size to download on an apt-get update . Includes mostly pulling the button only to enable it by the archive masters
• backporting popular features of some frontends to enable all frontends to use them, e.g. apt-get changelog or apt-get download
• support research on resolver improvements by implementing support for a distribution independent upgrade problem format (CUDF).
• an additional single binary for users wrapping apt-get, apt-cache and co.
• getting in contact (again) with various forks like apt-rpm and derivatives like maemo or telesphoreo to join forces instead of splitting them by working on different (and possibily very old) heads of the dragon

We will see what will get real for wheezy and what is postponed, but one thing is sure: more will be done for wheezy if you help! If you could spend all your time on Debian, what would you work on? I would spend it on APT s debbugs count zero would be cool to look at! We make progress in this regard, but with the current velocity we will reach it in ten years or so. Reading more mailing lists would be interesting, as I am kind of an information junky. Maintaining a package could be interesting to share the annoyance of a maintainer with handcrafted dependencies just to notice that APT doesn t get it in the way I intended it to be. Through, to make it feel real I need to train a few new APT contributors before so they can point my mistake out, but this unfortunately doesn t depend so much on time but on victims Maybe I could even be working on getting an official status. Beside that, I would love to be able to apt-get dist-upgrade the increasing mass of systems I and many others carry around in their pockets. In regards to my phone, this is already fixed, but there is much room for improvements. What s the biggest problem of Debian? You need to be lucky. You need to talk at the right time to the right person. That s not really a debian-only problem as such, but in a global project full of volunteers you can see it clearly as there are plenty of opportunities to be unlucky. For example, it s unlikely that an interview would be made with me now if Michael had not contacted me in June 2009. In a big project like Debian, you are basically completely lost without a mentor guiding you, so things like the debian-mentors list are good projects, but I am pretty certain they could benefit from some more helping hands. The other thing which I consider a problem is that and I read from time to time some people don t care for translations. That s bad. Yes, a developer is able to read English, otherwise s/he couldn t write code or participate on the mailinglists. Still, I personally prefer to use a translated application if I have the chance as it s simply easier for me to read in my mother tongue, not only because I am dyslexic, but because my mind still thinks in German and not in English. Yes, I could personally fix that by thinking in English only from now on, but its a quite big problem to convince my family which is not really familiar with tech-stuff to use something if they can t understand what is written on screen. It was hard enough to tell my mother how to write an SMS in a German interface. My phone with English words all over the place would be completely unusable for her despite the fact that my phone is powered by Debian and better for the task from a technical point of view. You are not yet an official Debian developer/maintainer, but you re already perceived in the community as one the most knowledgeable person about APT. It s a great start! What s your advice to other people who want to start contributing to Debian in general, and to APT in particular? It was never a goal in my life to start contributing . My goal was and still is to make my life easier by letting the computer work for me. At some point APT hindered the success of this goal, so it needed to be fixed. I didn t expect to open pandora s box. So, my advice is simple: Just start. Ignore the warning signs telling you that this is not easy. They are just telling you that you do something useful. Only artificial problems are easy. Further more, contribution to APT, dpkg or any other existing package is in no way harder than opening an ITP and working on your own, and it s cooler as you have a similar minded team around you to talk to. APT didn t accept release codenames as target release was one of the first things I fixed. If I had asked someone if that would be a good starting point the answer would have been a clear no , but I didn t search for a good starting point As a kid I can start playing football by just walking on the field and play or I can sit near the field, watching the others play, while analyzing which position would be the best for me to start ruling out one by one as the technical requirements seem too high Oh bicycle kick that sounds complicated I can t do that Julian Andreas Klode is working on a APT replacement, there s also Cupt by Eugene V. Lyubimkin. Both projects started because their authors are not satisfied with APT, they find APT s code difficult to hack partly due to the usage of C++. Do you share their concerns and what s your opinion on those projects? I don t think C++ is a concern in this regard, after all cupt is currently rewritten to C++0x and APT2 started in vala and is now C + glib last time I checked at least. I personally think that something is wrong if we need to advertise an application by saying in which language it is written The major problem for APT is probably that the code is old : APT does its job for more than 12 years now, under different maintainers with an always changing environment around it: so there are lines in APT which date from a time when nobody knew what a Breaks dependency is, that packages can have long descriptions which can be translated or even that package archives can be signed with a gpg key! And yet we take all those for granted today. APT has proven to adapt to these changes in the environment and became in this process very popular. So I don t think the point is near (if it will come at all) that APT can go into retirement as it is completely replaced by something else. The competitors one the other hand have their first 12 years still to go. And it will be interesting to see how they will evolve and what will be the state of the art in 2022 But you asked what I think about the competitors: I prefer the revolution from inside simply because I can see effects faster as more users will profit from it now. Cupt and co. obviously prefer the normal revolution. The goal is the same, creating the best package manager tool, but the chosen way to the goal is different. aptitude and cupt have an interactive resolver for example: that s something I dislike personally, for others that is the ultimate killer feature. cupt reading the same preference file as APT will have a different pinning result, which we should consider each time someone mentions the word drop-in replacement . APT2 isn t much more than the name which I completely dislike currently from a user point of view, so I can t really comment on that. All of them make me sad as each line invested in boilerplate code like configuration file parsing would be in my eyes better be spent in a bugfix or new feature instead, but I am not here to tell anyone what they should do in their free time But frankly, I don t see them really as competitors: I use the tools I use, if other do that too that s good, if not that s their problem. The thing that annoys me really are claims like plan is to remove APT by 2014 as this generates a vi vs. emacs like atmosphere we don t need. If some people really think emacs is a good editor who cares? I really hope we all can drink a beer in 2022 in Milliways, the restaurant at the end of the package universe, remembering the good old 2010 Is there someone in Debian that you admire for his contributions? No, not one, many! Michael Vogt who has nearly the monopole of package manager maintainer by being upstream of APT, synaptics and software center to name only the biggest and still has the time to answer even the dumbest of my questions. Jason Gunthorpe for being one of the initial developers behind deity who I will probably never meet in person beside in old comments and commit logs. Christian Perrier for caring so much about translations. Obey Arthur Liu as a great admin for Debian s participation in Google s Summer of Code. Paul Wise for doing countless reviews on debian-mentors which are a good source of information not only for the maintainer of the package under review. I guess I need to stop here because you asked for just one. So let s end with some big words instead: I am just a little cog in the big debian wheel

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Thank you to David Kalnischkies 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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Debian so far had a nice experience with the Google Summer of Code and this year, Google is going to run the Google Code-in. We have applied and would now need some help from you all.
In the words of the official announcement: Google Code-in, Google s contest to introduce pre-university students to the many kinds of contributions that make open source software
development possible, is starting on November 22, 2010. Google is inviting students worldwide to produce a variety of open source code,
documentation, training materials and user experience research for the organizations participating this year. These tasks include:

• Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code
• Documentation: Tasks related to creating/editing documents
• Outreach: Tasks related to community management and outreach/marketing
• Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality
• Research: Tasks related to studying a problem and recommending solutions
• Training: Tasks related to helping others learn more
• Translation: Tasks related to localization
• User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction

I have applied on behalf of Debian and we now need a series of short tasks (1-2 weeks work) to propose in all these areas.
The selected mentoring organizations will be announced on November 5th 2010.
As you can see, this is an interesting project as the individual tasks are closer in size to an RC bug and encompass a wider range of areas than the Summer of Code. I set up a welcome page and a tasks page.
Please fill in your tasks ideas ASAP. You can also volunteer to help as admin and/or mentor.
We will be using the usual communication channels used for the Summer of Code:

• IRC: #debian-soc on irc.debian.org
• ML: soc-coordination@lists.alioth.debian.org

Hello Planet Debian, Since everyone seems to like sharing and hearing about travel plans, I took the initiative of creating a Debian group on Tripit*. To join, you need a @debian.org email and click on: http://www.tripit.com/group/join/debian. Cheers *I realize Tripit is not free (as in freedom), but it s not like there are comparable free alternatives.

Hello fellow developers, The summer is over but I m happy to announce that this year s Summer of Code at Debian has been better than ever! This is indeed the 4th time we had the privilege of participating in the Google Summer of Code and each year has been a little different. This year, 8 of our 10 students succeeded in our (very strict!) final evaluations, but we have reasons to believe that they will translate into more long-term developers than ever, all thank to you. The highlight this year has been getting almost all of our students at DebConf10. Thanks again this year to generous Travel Grants from the Google Open Source Team, we managed to fly in 7 of our students (up from 3!). You certainly saw them, presenting during DebianDay, hacking on the grass of Columbia, hacking^Wcheering our Debian Project Leader throwing the inaugural pitch of a professional baseball game or hacking^Wsun-tanning on the tr s kitsch Coney Island beach. Before I give the keyboard to our Students, I d like to tell you that it will be the pleasure and honor of Obey Arthur Liu (yours truly, as Administrator) and Bastian Venthur (as Mentor) to represent Debian at the Summer of Code 2010 Mentors Summit on 23-24 October 2010, at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View. Like last year, we expect many other DDs to be present under other hats. We will be having 2 days of unconference on GSoC and free software related topics. We all look forward to reporting from California on Planet and soc-coordination@l.a.d.o! All of our students had a wonderful experience, even if they couldn t come to DebConf, that is best shared in their own voice, so without further ado, our successful projects: Multi-Arch support in APT by David Kalnischkies, mentored by Michael Vogt apt-get install MultiArch does mostly work now as most code is already merged in squeeze, but if not complain about us at deity@l.d.o! Still, a lot left on the todo list not only in APT so let us all add MultiArch again to the Release Goals and work hard on squeezing it into wheezy. Debbugs Bug Reporting and Manipulation API by David Wendt Jr., mentored by Bastian Venthur Hello, I m David Wendt, and I went to Debconf10 to learn more about the development side of Debian. Having used it since the 9th grade, I ve been intimately familiar with many of Debian s internals. However, I wanted to see the developers and other Debian users. At DebConf, I was able to see a variety of talks from Debian and Ubuntu developers. I also got to meet with my mentor as well as the maintainer of Debbugs. Content-aware Config Files Upgrading by Krzysztof Tyszecki, mentored by Dominique Dumont Config::Model is now capable of manipulating files using shorter and easier to write models. Thanks to that, packagers may start experiment with creating upgrade models. Further work is needed to support more complicated config files Dominique Dumont is working on DEP-5 parser, I ll shortly start working on a cupsd config file parser.
The best thing about DebConf10 is that every person I talked with knew what I was doing. I had a mission to get some feedback on my project. Everybody liked the idea of making upgrades less cumbersome. On the other side, it was my first visit to United States, so I decided to go on a daytrip on my own (instead of staying inside the building, despite heat warnings). I had a chance to visit many interesting places like Ground Zero, the UN headquarters, Grand Central Terminal, Times square and Rockefeller Center that was a great experience. Hurd port and de-Linux-ization of Debian-Installer by J r mie Koenig, mentored by Samuel Thibault Debconf10 was great! Among other people working on the installer, I met Aur lien Jarno from the Debian/kFreeBSD team and we worked together on a cross-platform busybox package. Besides, the talks were very interesting and I ve filled my TODO-list for the year.
For instance I learned about the Jigsaw project of OpenJDK, and how Debian would be the ideal platform to experiment with it. More generally, some people think Debian could push Java 7 forward and I d like to see this happen. Smart Upload Server for FTP Master by Petr Jasek, mentored by Joerg Jaspert I must say that it was great time for me in NY, I ve met and talked and coded with people from ftp-master team like Torsten Werner who helped me to push the project a bit further and with some other people who were looking forward to release of the tool which I hope they will use quite soon. Everybody interested, everybody excited, really cool place and time. And I can t forget the Coney Island beach and stuff, lot of fun, lot of sun;) Aptitude Qt by Piotr Galiszewski, mentored by Sune Vuorela Currently, development branches support full features searching, viewing extended package s informations, performing cache and packages operations. Code and GUI still require a lot of work which will be continued. Informations about further progress could be found on aptitude mailing list and repository rss channel. Debian-Installer on Neo FreeRunner and Handheld Devices by Thibaut Girka, mentored by Gaudenz Steinlin For me, DebConf 10 started at the airport, where Sylvestre Ledru (whom I didn t know of before) was wearing a GSoC 2007 t-shirt, that is, given the circumstances, almost equivalent to say I m a hacker, I m going to DebConf 10 .
I ve spent my time at the conference attending various talks, hacking, meeting DDs and other hackers (amongst others, my co-mentor Per Andersson, Paul Wise, Julien Cristau, Christian Perrier, Cyril Brulebois, Martin Michlmayr, Colin Watson and Otavio Salvadores who I have to thank for his patience while dealing with my questions), chatting, cross-signing keys, rushing to finish eating before 7pm, getting sunburnt, sightseeing (thanks, Arthur, for the lightning-fast tour of Manhattan!), and so on. Debian Developers and community, we count on you. See you next year! (cross-posted to debian-devel-announce@l.d.o and soc-coordination@l.a.d.o)

This week, I am attending DebConf 10 at Columbia University in New York. The first day of DebConf is known as Debian Day. While most of DebConf is for the benefit of people involved in Debian itself, Debian Day is aimed at a wider audience, and invites the public to learn about, and interact with, the Debian project. These are the talks I attended. Debian Day Opening Plenary (Gabriella Coleman, Hans-Christoph Steiner) Hans-Christoph discussed Debian and free software from a big picture perspective: why software freedom matters, challenging the producer/consumer dichotomy, how the Debian ecosystem hangs together, and so on. Steps to adopting F/OSS in government (Andy Oram) Andy discussed FLOSS adoption in governments, drawing on examples from Peru, the city of Munich, the state of Massachusetts. He covered the reasons why this is valuable, the relationship between government transparency and software freedom, and practical advice for successful adoption and deployment. Pedagogical Freedom (panel, Jonah Bossewitch et al) The panelists discussed the use of technology in education, especially free software, some of the parallels between free software and education, and what these communities could learn from each other. This is a promising topic, though the perspectives seemed to be mostly from the education realm. There is much to be learned on both sides. Google Summer of Code 2010 at Debian (Obey Arthur Liu) This talk covered the student projects for this year s Summer of Code. Most of the students were in attendance, and presented their own work. They ranged from more specialized projects like the Hurd installer, to core infrastructure improvements like multi-arch in APT. Beyond Sharing: Open Source Design (Mushon Zer-Aviv) Mushon gave an excellent talk on open design. This is a subject I ve thought quite a bit about, and Asheesh validated many of my conclusions from a different angle. I ve added a new post to my todo list to go into more detail on this subject. Some points from his talk which resonated with me:

• When collaborating on code, everyone must reason with one collaborator: the computer. This forces a level playing field and a common encoding.
• Collaborating on other types of creative work is more difficult in part because of the differences encoding/decoding information between different individuals
• Making this easier for design work requires improving motivational factors and language as well as tools and processes
• Many design decisions are actually rational, and are compatible with a group consensus project. Too often, I hear that design can t be done collaboratively, citing too many cooks in the kitchen analogies, but I have never believed it.
• Mushon s own project, shiftspace.org, seems to be a browser-plugin-based system for collaboratively remixing web applications. I haven t looked at it yet.
• Leadership and openness are not mutually exclusive. This is another pet peeve of mine, and there are so many examples of open leadership in the free software community that I don t see how anyone can think otherwise.
• Mushon s presentation is available in revision control so that it can be freely used and improved

How Government can Foster Freedom in Technology (Hon. Gale Brewer) Councillor Brewer paid a visit to DebConf to tell us about the work she is doing on the city council to promote better government through technology. Brewer seems to be a strong advocate of open data, saying essentially that all government data should be public. She summarized a bill to mandate that New York City government data be public, shared in raw form using open standards, and kept up to date. It sounded like a very strong move which would encourage third party innovation around the data. She also discussed the need for greater access to computers and Internet connectivity, particularly in educational settings, and a desire to to have all public hearings and meetings shared online. Why is GNU/Linux Like a Player Piano? (Jon Anderson Hall, Esq.) Jon is a very engaging speaker. He drew parallels between the development of player pianos, reproducing pianos, reed organs, pipe organs and free software. He even tied in Hedi Lamarr s work which led to spread spectrum wireless technology. To be quite honest, I did not find that these analogies taught me much about either free software or player pianos, but nonetheless, I couldn t help but take an interest in what he was saying and how he presented it. DebConf Opening Plenary (Gabriella Coleman) Biella and company explained all the ins and outs of the event: where to go, what to do (and not do), and most importantly, whom to thank for all of it. Now in its 11th year, DebConf is an impressively well-run conference. I m looking forward to the rest of the week!

The following developers got their Debian accounts in the last month:

• Scott Kitterman (kitterman)
• Dominique Belhachemi (domibel)
• Sylvain Beucler (beuc)
• Alessio Treglia (alessio)
• Giovanni Mascellani (gio)
• Ulises Vitulli (dererk)
• Tommi Vainikainen (tvainika)
• Serafeim Zanikolas (sez)
• Hideki Yamane (henrich)
• Obey Arthur Liu (arthurliu)
• Thierry Soloniaina Randrianiriana (thierry)
• Thomas Weber (tweber)
• Mikhail Gusarov (dottedmag)
• Ritesh Sarraf (rrs)
• Kanru Chen (koster)

Congratulations!

Hello Planet Debian readers!

I've never thought that such a thing can ever happen, but I've started blogging ;) So now it is time to introduce myself.

My name is Piotr Galiszewski and I am second year student of computer science at AGH - University of Science and Technology in Krakow (Poland). I have been GNU/Linux user for about 5 years (mostly Debian based distributions).

Thanks for Debian and Google, this summer I will be working on creating Qt-based user interface for aptitude as my Google Summer of Code project. I hope that my mentors Sune Vuorela and Daniel Barrows will be patient with me ;) I am sure I will learn a lot from them. Please look at abstract of my project made by Debian GSoC administrator Obey Arthur Liu:

Qt GUI for aptitude. Currently, KDE users need to use Aptitude via the console interface, or install the newly developed GTK frontend, which does not fit well into KDE desktop. Making Qt frontend to Aptitude would solve this problem and bring an advanced and fully Debian-compliant graphical package manager to KDE.

As I wrote in my proposal I will split my work into three main parts:

1. writing low level classes which will abstract aptitude signals and slots (which uses sigc++) into Qt slots and signals.
2. creating and evaluating GUI mockups
3. implementing GUI on top of classes from the first point

Point 1 and 2 will be made simultaneously and will take all May and half of June. Low level classes should implement all necessary functions for further use in GUI. This classes allow me to avoid direct usage of none Qt code in GUI classes and also give much more time to prepare completed and usability-wise mockups. Every mockups version will be presented and discussed on this blog. First version should be ready in next few days and updates will appear each week (or to weeks).
After finishing this two steps I will start coding GUI. With mockups and finished low level classes this should not be complicated (Yeah, I know that this is only my dream).

Full text of my proposal (including more precise time-line) can be found at Debian wiki.

Currently, project is slightly behind the schedule . It is caused by changes in my studies plan. The Juwanalia students' festival took place earlier, and yesterday it finished. But my first exam will take place one week later on 18 May, so I will have more time to catch up with time-line.

This project is my first direct contribution to Debian, but not first involvement in free software movement. I've been Kadu Instant Messenger developer for more then two year. In last two years I have been second most active developer with more than 700 commits in master branch. During GSoC period my Kadu activities will be limited. If time allows me to do this, I will be still contributing to Kadu. I still can be found at Kadu forum or #kadu channel on irc.freenode.net. I will also continue reviewing patches and fixing low time-consuming bugs.

My plans for the next few days:

• continue researching aptitude codebase
• discover all functionalities that should be implemented by Qt frontend
• review of other graphical package manager GUIs (and probably write about my thoughts on this blog)
• create first draft of my mockups

If you have any thoughts about this project, please add comment to this post or contact me directly. I will be glad to read all yours opinions

Cheers

PS. As you can see English is not my mother tongue, so please forgive me my mistakes

I d like to extend a warm welcome to our selected students for the 2010 Debian Google Summer of Code! They should pop up on Debian Planet soon and you re welcome to come talk to them on #debian-soc on irc.debian.org Aptitude Qt by Piotr Galiszewski, mentored by Sune Vuorela Qt GUI for aptitude. Currently, KDE users need to use Aptitude via the console interface, or install the newly developed GTK frontend, which does not fit well into KDE desktop. Making Qt frontend to Aptitude would solve this problem and bring an advanced and fully Debian-compliant graphical package manager to KDE. Content-aware Config Files Upgrading by Krzysztof Tyszecki, mentored by Dominique Dumont When a package deliver configuration files, the problem of merging user data with new configuration instructions will arise during package upgrades on users systems. Sometimes merging can be done with 3 way merge, but this process does not insure that the resulting file is correct or even legal. This project intends to create standards, tools an heuristics to make the scary config file conflict resolution debconf prompt a thing of the past. Debbugs Bug Reporting and Manipulation API by David Wendt Jr., mentored by Bastian Venthur Currently debbugs supports a SOAP interface for querying Debian s Bug Tracking System. Unfortunately this operation is read-only. This project would create an API for debbugs which supports sending and manipulating bug reports, without having to resort to email. This project does not intend to replace email as mean to manipulate the BTS but rather to enhance the BTS to allow other means of bug creation and manipulation. Debian High Performance Computing on Clouds by Dominique Belhachemi, mentored by Steffen Moeller The project paves a way to combine the demands in high performance computing with the dynamics of compute clouds with Debian. Combining the Eucalyptus cloud computing infrastructure with the TORQUE resource manager and preparing the components for dynamically added and removed instances provides the user with a attractive high performance computing environment. Such a system allows users to share resources with large compute centers with minimal changes in their workflow and scripts. Debian-Installer on Neo FreeRunner and Handheld Devices by Thibaut Girka, mentored by Gaudenz Steinlin This project aims to improve the installation experience of Debian on handheld devices by replacing ad-hoc install scripts by a full-blown and adapted Debian-Installer. The Neo FreeRunner is used as it is the most convenient and open device from a development standpoint, but other devices will also be explored. Hurd port and de-Linux-ization of Debian-Installer by J r mie Koenig, mentored by Samuel Thibault The primary means of distributing the Hurd is through Debian GNU/Hurd. However, the installation CDs presently use an ancient, non-native installer. The goal of this project is to port the missing parts of Debian-Installer to Hurd. To achieve this, all problematic Linux-specific code in Debian-Installer will be replaced by less or non-kernel dependent code, paving the way for better support of other non-Linux ports of Debian. Multi-Arch support in APT by David Kalnischkies, mentored by Michael Vogt Hardware like 64bit processors are perfectly able to execute 32bit opcode but until now this potentiality is disregard as the infrastructure tools like dpkg and APT are not able to install and/or solve dependencies across multiple architectures. The project therefore focuses on enabling APT to work out good solutions in a MultiArch aware environments without the need of hacky and partly working biarch packages currently in use. Package Repository Analysis and Migration Automation by Ricardo O Donell, mentored by Neil Williams Emdebian uses a filter to select packages from the main Debian repositories that are considered useful to embedded devices, excluding the majority of packages. The results of processing the filter are automated but maintaining the filter list is manual. This project seeks to automate certain elements of the filtering process to cope with specific conditions. This project will also generalize to more elaborate and intelligent algorithms to improve the transitions of the main Debian archives. Smart Upload Server for FTP Master by Petr Jasek, mentored by Joerg Jaspert Making packages upload smarter, more interactive and painless for uploaders by switching from anonymous FTP and Cron jobs to a robust protocol and modern package checking and processing daemon. This daemon would test early and report early, saving developers time. More details coming soon on http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc Congratulations everyone and have a fruitful summer!

The student application period for the Google Summer of Code has started since March 29th, but there is still time: the deadline is Friday, April 9th at 19:00 UTC. If you re a student, go check out the Debian Ideas page. Pick an idea you like or suggest your own. Come talk to the Summer of Code team on #debian-soc on irc.debian.org and on the soc-coordination mailing list. Work with us to perfect your proposal before the deadline and hopefully, you ll get your awesome project and your ticket to DebConf10 in New York this summer.
Do you like to tinker ? Do you like having a positive impact on all kinds of users ? The Google Summer of Code at Debian has been a exceptional experience for all our students over these past years and we look forward to welcoming you in this great family to work on the foundations of the Linux experience of millions of users spanning several distributions, from the smallest embedded devices to the largest supercomputers. So, please take a look at our Ideas page, apply and tell your friends to do so by rebloging, retweeting, reeverything!