Search Results: "Ralf Treinen"

19 October 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 77 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday October 9 and Saturday October 15 2016: Media coverage Documentation update After discussions with HW42, Steven Chamberlain, Vagrant Cascadian, Daniel Shahaf, Christopher Berg, Daniel Kahn Gillmor and others, Ximin Luo has started writing up more concrete and detailed design plans for setting SOURCE_ROOT_DIR for reproducible debugging symbols, buildinfo security semantics and buildinfo security infrastructure. Toolchain development and fixes Dmitry Shachnev noted that our patch for #831779 has been temporarily rejected by docutils upstream; we are trying to persuade them again. Tony Mancill uploaded javatools/0.59 to unstable containing original patch by Chris Lamb. This fixed an issue where documentation Recommends: substvars would not be reproducible. Ximin Luo filed bug 77985 to GCC as a pre-requisite for future patches to make debugging symbols reproducible. Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed The following updated packages have become reproducible - in our current test setup - after being fixed: The following updated packages appear to be reproducible now, for reasons we were not able to figure out. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.) Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Some uploads have addressed nearly all reproducibility issues, except for build path issues: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Reviews of unreproducible packages 101 package reviews have been added, 49 have been updated and 4 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 3 issue types have been updated: Weekly QA work During of reproducibility testing, some FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: tests.reproducible-builds.org Debian: Openwrt/LEDE/NetBSD/coreboot/Fedora/archlinux: Misc. We are running a poll to find a good time for an IRC meeting. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Holger Levsen & Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

2 October 2016

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in September 2016

FTP assistant This month I was rather busy with other stuff and only marked 191 packages for accept and rejected 21 packages. I also sent 6 emails to maintainers asking questions. Debian LTS This was my twenty-seventh month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 12.25h. During that time I did an upload of php5 fixing 17 CVEs and two additional bugs, I uploaded mactelnet and fixed one CVE. I also prepared a package for testing of zendframework, which will fix one CVE. Unfortunately my bind9 upload needed to be postponed as Florian Weimer found an incomplete patch of a previous CVE. I am trying to fix that as well. I also had some progress with the asterisk CVEs and of course the next round of php5 patches is waiting This month I also had a few days of frontdesk work at the beginning of the month and a few days at the end. Other stuff For the Alljoyn framework I uploaded alljoyn-services-1604 and as I forgot a Conflict:, I had to take care of RC-bugs: #836717, #836718 and #836719. Thanks a lot to Ralf Treinen for his automatic installation tests. As mentioned earlier, openzwave is on its way to the Debian archive. While it is still in non-free, the author of a used library gave his permission to relicense this code, so the way to main is paved now.

9 August 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 67 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday July 31 and Saturday August 6 2016: Toolchain development and fixes Packages fixed and bugs filed The following 24 packages have become reproducible - in our current test setup - due to changes in their build-dependencies: alglib aspcud boomaga fcl flute haskell-hopenpgp indigo italc kst ktexteditor libgroove libjson-rpc-cpp libqes luminance-hdr openscenegraph palabos petri-foo pgagent sisl srm-ifce vera++ visp x42-plugins zbackup The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: The following newly-uploaded packages appear to be reproducible now, for reasons we were not able to figure out. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.) Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews and QA These are reviews of reproduciblity issues of Debian packages. 276 package reviews have been added, 172 have been updated and 44 have been removed in this week. 7 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb. Reproducibility tools Test infrastructure For testing the impact of allowing variations of the buildpath (which up until now we required to be identical for reproducible rebuilds), Reiner Herrmann contribed a patch which enabled build path variations on testing/i386. This is possible now since dpkg 1.18.10 enables the --fixdebugpath build flag feature by default, which should result in reproducible builds (for C code) even with varying paths. So far we haven't had many results due to disturbances in our build network in the last days, but it seems this would mean roughly between 5-15% additional unreproducible packages - compared to what we see now. We'll keep you updated on the numbers (and problems with compilers and common frameworks) as we find them. lynxis continued work to test LEDE and OpenWrt on two different hosts, to include date variation in the tests. Mattia and Holger worked on the (mass) deployment scripts, so that the - for space reasons - only jenkins.debian.net GIT clone resides in ~jenkins-adm/ and not anymore in Holger's homedir, so that soon Mattia (and possibly others!) will be able to fully maintain this setup, while Holger is doing siesta. Miscellaneous Chris, dkg, h01ger and Ximin attended a Core Infrastricture Initiative summit meeting in New York City, to discuss and promote this Reproducible Builds project. The CII was set up in the wake of the Heartbleed SSL vulnerability to support software projects that are critical to the functioning of the internet. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

16 August 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 16 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Valentin Lorentz sent a patch for ispell to initialize memory structures before dumping their content. In our experimental repository, qt4-x11 has been rebased on the latest version (Dhole), as was doxygen (akira). Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: backup-manager, cheese, coinor-csdp, coinor-dylp, ebook-speaker, freefem, indent, libjbcrypt-java, qtquick1-opensource-src, ruby-coffee-script, ruby-distribution, schroot, twittering-mode. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: akira found another embedded code copy of texi2html in maxima. reproducible.debian.net Work on testing several architectures has continued. (Mattia/h01ger) Package reviews 29 reviews have been removed, 187 added and 34 updated this week. 172 new FTBFS reports were filled, 137 solely by Chris West (Faux). josch spent time investigating the issue with fonts in PDF files. Chris Lamb documented the issue affecting documentation generated by ocamldoc. Misc. Lunar presented a general Reproducible builds HOWTO talk at the Chaos Communication Camp 2015 in Germany on August 13th. Recordings are already available, as well as slides and script. h01ger and Lunar also used CCCamp15 as an opportunity to have discussions with members of several different projects about reproducible builds. Good news should be coming soon.

20 June 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 5 in Stretch cycle

What happened about the reproducible builds effort for this week: Toolchain fixes Uploads that should help other packages: Patch submitted for toolchain issues: Some discussions have been started in Debian and with upstream: Packages fixed The following 8 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: access-modifier-checker, apache-log4j2, jenkins-xstream, libsdl-perl, maven-shared-incremental, ruby-pygments.rb, ruby-wikicloth, uimaj. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which did not make their way to the archive yet: Discussions that have been started: reproducible.debian.net Holger Levsen added two new package sets: pkg-javascript-devel and pkg-php-pear. The list of packages with and without notes are now sorted by age of the latest build. Mattia Rizzolo added support for email notifications so that maintainers can be warned when a package becomes unreproducible. Please ask Mattia or Holger or in the #debian-reproducible IRC channel if you want to be notified for your packages! strip-nondeterminism development Andrew Ayer fixed the gzip handler so that it skip adding a predetermined timestamp when there was none. Documentation update Lunar added documentation about mtimes of file extracted using unzip being timezone dependent. He also wrote a short example on how to test reproducibility. Stephen Kitt updated the documentation about timestamps in PE binaries. Documentation and scripts to perform weekly reports were published by Lunar. Package reviews 50 obsolete reviews have been removed, 51 added and 29 updated this week. Thanks Chris West and Mathieu Bridon amongst others. New identified issues: Misc. Lunar will be talking (in French) about reproducible builds at Pas Sage en Seine on June 19th, at 15:00 in Paris. Meeting will happen this Wednesday, 19:00 UTC.

27 April 2012

Pietro Abate: Learning from the Future of Component Repositories - CBSE 2012

Learning from the Future of Component Repositories ( Pietro Abate, Roberto Di Cosmo, Ralf Treinen and Stefano Zacchiroli ) has been accepted to be presented at CBSE 2012 (26-28 June, Bertinoro, Italy)

Abstract 
  An important aspect of the quality assurance of large component repositories
  is the logical coherence of component metadata. We argue that it is possible
  to identify certain classes of such problems by checking relevant properties
  of the possible future repositories into which the current
  repository may evolve. In order to make a complete analysis of all possible
  futures effective however, one needs a way to construct a finite set of
  representatives of this infinite set of potential futures. We define a class
  of properties for which this can be done.
  We illustrate the practical usefulness of the approach with two quality
  assurance applications: (i) establishing the amount of  forced upgrades''
  induced by introducing new versions of existing components in a repository,
  and (ii) identifying outdated components that need to be upgraded in order to
  ever be installable in the future. For both applications we provide
  experience reports obtained on the Debian distribution.
The tools presented in this paper (outdated and challenges) are already in Debian as part of the 'dose-extra' package.

28 November 2011

Christian Perrier: Two important uploads: samba and pytrainer

This week-end, after a few week-ends more targeted on real life activities (country house fall works, 70km ultra run preparation and ultra run week-end), I spent most of Sunday working on two important uploads of packages I'm involved in. So, as of Sunday evening, samba 3.6.1 is now in unstable. This is the first 3.6 version to land there, after earlier versions were in experimental while Steve Langasek was working on multi-arch support and dh7-like debian/rules transition in unstable, with 3.5 versions. Merging together changes in 3.5 and 3.6 branches has been a bit painful. I guess I had it right (thankfully, I merged 3.5 packaging changes from time to time to the 3.6 branch). If there are problems with 3.6 packages, anyway, you know what to do. I also worked to package the new version of pytrainer, a sport activity logging tool. pytrainer is maintained by the "pkg-running" team, aka No l K the, Ralf Treinen and /me. This is the software I use for keeping track of all my running activities. We have a very good link with our upstream and I even recently brought several translation updates by involving Debian translators in the loop. While working to integrate version 1.9.1 (we had 1.8.0 up to now in unstable), I also cleanedout things here orthereand I'mquite happy with the result. More testing will of course be appreciated.

3 July 2011

Raphaël Hertzog: My Debian activities in June 2011

This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (195 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Dropbox for Debian This is not free software but Dropbox is very popular and they did only provide an Ubuntu package that did not work on Debian. So I created an official package. I have been in touch with Dropbox developers and they have been very helpful. They ll shortly release a signature mechanism (with GPG) so that we can further improve the package by verifying the origin of the downloaded binaries. SAT Britney At the start of the month, I continued my work on the britney reimplementation (the software that creates testing out of unstable) but I quickly stalled it because the release managers asked the feedback of Stefano Zacchiroli and Ralf Treinen (who have extensive knowledge on the topic with their research work on Mancoosi) and I did not want to invest further work in case they would identify a major flow the feedback came only very late this month and while it was somewhat negative, I still think it s worth pursuing the effort for a bit longer. Converted ftplib to multiarch While dpkg still doesn t support multiarch (no news from Guillem and no visible sign of progress :-( ), unstable got all the remaining bits allowing us to convert libraries to multiarch (see the announce). As soon as the required libc6 landed in unstable, I looked into converting the only library package that I maintain. I had no major problem but I still identified 2 issues in Lintian (filed as #630164 and quickly fixed by Niels Thykier). build-arch / build-indep support For the 42th time in the last 10 years, the idea of using build-arch/build-indep targets in the rules file has surfaced again. I had already decided some time ago that I would accept a patch implementing a new field Build-Features to enable dpkg-buildpackage to use those targets and this time Bill Allombert completed such a patch so I merged it. The technical committee also decided that it would take a final decision on this topic (see #629385). Roger Leigh provided useful input by doing an archive-wide rebuild with the various solutions suggested. Given that the majority would like to make the target mandatory at some point in the future, I provided the dpkg patch for my preferred solution. We would use auto-detection as a temporary measure until all packages have been converted to have the targets. The technical committee has not yet taken any decision even though the discussion stalled since the 12th of June. But that s usual with that body. I m sure it will be solved during Debconf. ;-) Misc dpkg work Hamster applet update Hamster-applet is a GNOME application which did not have a 3.0 release, but it had a development release (2.91.x). I checked out whether it was possible to package this version for experimental and have the applet work with the GNOME fallback mode. Apparently not, the code was not yet updated to be compatible with the newer panel. Instead I uploaded the latest stable version (2.32.1) to unstable. It has some nice improvements in the standalone version (and the name of the executable changed). For usage with GNOME 3, I have created a custom shortcut to start it quickly (with gconf-editor set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_1 to <Mod4>t and /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_1 to hamster-time-tracker because the GNOME 3 control panel does not seem to work to set custom keybindings currently). Translated my professional website into English While I m grateful for all the people who are supporting my work, I m still far from my goal to have one third of my time funded through donations and sales of products on this blog. So I decided to also bring more visibility to my company and in particular to its Debian-related service offering. It was only available in French up to now so I translated it and expanded it a bit. My support page on this blog now also links to my company s website. If your company needs help to create Debian packages, or needs Debian technical support by email, you just found the right partner. :-) BTW, I have discounted prices for individuals and non-profits who would like to benefit from my help to create Debian packages. The Debian Administrator s Handbook This is the title of the upcoming translation of my book. The project now has a dedicated website: debian-handbook.info. You can subscribe to its RSS feed to keep up with the latest news. The full table of contents is online along with a FAQ. I m actively looking for partners to help me promote the fundraising once it goes live. If you can reach a large set of readers interested by a good Debian book, get in touch with me to join the affiliate program. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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15 June 2011

Pietro Abate: MPM: A Modular Package Manager

One of our paper has been accepted to The 14th International ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE-2011) happening in June in Boulder, Colorado, USA. This is a joint work with Roberto Di Cosmo, Ralf Treinen and Stefano Zacchiroli.

Abstract 
 Software distributions in the FOSS world rely on so-called 
  package managers for the installation and removal of packages on
  target machines. State-of-the-art package managers are monolithic in
  architecture, and each of them is hard-wired to an ad-hoc 
  dependency solver implementing a customized heuristics. In this
  paper we propose a modular architecture allowing for pluggable
  dependency solvers and backends. We argue that this is the path
  that leads to the next generation of package managers that will
  deliver better results, accept more expressive input languages, and
  can be easily adaptable to new platforms.  We present a working
  prototype---called MPM---which has been implemented following the
  design advocated in this paper.
More details about the paper are available here

15 May 2011

Christian Perrier: 2011 week 19 Debian work

That was a damn busy week. It was mostly centered about attending SambaXP, the annual Samba user and developers conference, in G ttingen, Germany. The only free software conference I attend with expenses paid by my employer, Onera. This year was the 10th edition and, as last year, to the "who was there for the nth edition" game, I won by staying alone as they asked who attended all editions of the conference. :-) That was a great week, with time spent with people as interesting as Andrew Tridgell, Jeremy Allison, John Terpstra, Volker Lendecke, Kai Blin, to name a few. A good opportunity, again, to get input from our packaging work for that big piece of software, as well as getting visibility about the future of Samba. I also had a great, even if short talk, with the kind Karolin Seeger, the release manager of Samba for 3 years now. We talked about....children, as she's now a mother since last year (with a non negligible impact on her professionnal life, as often in Germany). Great meeting, too, with Brad Kuhn, from the Software Freedom Conservacy, who had a keynote about GPL licence enforcment activities. It becomes more and more sure that Samba3 and Samba4 will reconverge together after the Samba Team releases Samba 3.6. It brings plans for our packaging work: I think we'll stick with having samba 3.6 in wheezy while the brand new shiny Samba4 probably stays separate in some way. Our users (and /me first) clearly need stability in the file and print services first. Of course, I did some packaging work there: samba 3.6.0pre3 was uploaded to experimental, about 10 days after its official announcement. I also worked on the samba *binary* package bugs, triaging them as usual. We now have 51 bugs opened against the samba binary package: 18 unclassified, 11 moreinfo (several likely to be closed as unreproducible or user error), 1 wontfix, 8 with a pending patch and 13 forwarded upstream. I'm also thinking about a possible way to ask about SMB2 support in samba: it won't be activated by default in 3.6 (mostly because us, distros, requested for that and, by "us", I mean Debian, RHEL, SuSe and their derivatives, so quite a large consensus). Still, it would be good to put some light on SMB2 support and a debconf question about it could be a solution (not shown by default and defaulting to no SMB2). I also worked quite extensively on packages maintained by No l K the, Ralf Treinen and me, aka "the pkg-running team". I did setup a git repo for my new "garmin-ant-downloader" package, that allows downloading track files from Garmin Forerunner 405 GPS watches (guess what is the brand and model of mine!). My first packaging git repository! Thanks to Ralf for his advice and help in this. I triaged bugs in the other two packages we maintain: pytrainer (more bugs forwarded upstream) and garmin-forerunner-tools (which was later uploaded by Ralf). I also setup a team mailign list so, now, we're a real team...:-) Few activity on the l10n front: a few Smith reviews are in progress and I completed 1 or 2 French translations, and reviewed some others. Regular activity, then. The only specific stuff is that I'm now pushing harder for the French DDTP effort, doing many reviews and translations there. We try to reach 100% in the "popcon500" packages. Later, we'll try to head at reaching the hieghts reached by the Italian and German teams, who are, on this l10n activity, way ahead from us. Finally, during the SambaXP conference, and as usual (except last year because of too heavy work duties), I visited my German friends, living "close to" G ttingen, accomppanied by Luk Claes and his friend and colleague Ivo, who were also attending SambaXP. Great barbecue at Andreas and Kathrin Tille's place, facing the Wernigerode castle at sunset. And the best sp tzle ever at Meike and Alex Reichle's place in Hildesheim, with a french touch on the salad's dressing as well as great Chilean wine brought by Meike's coworker Wolfram. Always a great time to see these good friends even if that means driving a few hours (and being flashed....twice!...by german speed cameras on the way to and back Andreas place!) To complete the week, I ran a 34km/800m+ trail today in the Rambouillet forest, completing it in 3h31. I'll probably blog separately about running updates as it is now quite some time that I didn't. Guess what? I'll be sleeping well tonight...

30 April 2011

Christian Perrier: Pytrainer: finally

This week, I finally switched to use pytrainer to track my running data. Up to now, I was still using Garmin proprietary software on Elizabeth's Windows copmuter for this. Mostly because my GPW watch is a Forerunner 405, that uses a bloody crappy stupid USB stick with proprietary communication protocol (ANT+). So, the use of proprietary crappy software was kinda mandatory. There is however some code floating around to handle this device in Linux, named "Gant". This is far from being very polished, but I finally managed to make it work more or less reliably to get the GPS traces from my watch to my Debian laptop. So, during the week , I brought all my old running data back from "Garmin Training Center" (the Windows software provided by Garmin) back to my laptop and imported it in pytrainer. And I imported new data from my daily runs with help of that "gant" software. So, this is now time to really jump into maintenance of pytrainer and help my friend No l (that will be easy as pytrainer is kinda well maintained), then package "gant" for Debian, as part of the work in the "pkg-running" maintenance team (Ralf Treinen, No le K the and /me). New challenge for me: learn how to create a git public repo and maintain a package in it (I already participate to maintenance work with git for several things, but I never initiated any). Other plans: some bug triage on pytrainer (if some is needed, I indeed don't know yet) and eventually deal with things that have to be reported upstream. Looking at Launchpad might also be a good idea as I suspect that many are using pytrainer with Ubuntu.

24 January 2011

Pietro Abate: I'm going to fosdem !!

And don't miss the talk from Ralf at the crossdistro devroom [1] ... Sat 05/02 18:00 - 19:00: Mancoosi tools for the analysis and quality assurance of FOSS distributions (Ralf Treinen) [1]http://fosdem.org/2011/preview-saturday#crossdistro_devroom

6 March 2010

Christian Perrier: [life] Paris half-marathon

Tomorrow is the day for Paris half-marathon, the mass half-marathon that is traditionnally run 4-5 weeks before Paris marathon. This year, I'll run both, so tomorrow, I'll be running in Paris (and Bois de Vincennes) streets...along with 27,000 other people..., attempting to beat my 1h43'55" record set in my last (and as of now) only half-marathon, one month ago, in Bullion. That might be hard as running at one's own pace is easier in a run with 1,000 runners..:-) Ralf Treinen told me he might show up around km 7 (place de l'H tel de Ville). I should be around there around 11h50 as the start is at 10h and I should probably cross the start line at about 10h15, then run 5mins/km. So, if you're around eastern Paris and wake up "early" on Sundays, feel free to come and show me a nice Debian swirl so that I can run even faster (or less slow). I'll be wearing a black top with short sleeves and short running pants (not the easies to spot, I admit). Then try spotting Ralf and have a beer..:-).

5 October 2009

Christian Perrier: 42195 K lschmeter done!

Here we are back from our german week-end... The major event of this week-end was running the K ln Cologne marathon. Why Cologne? Mostly because my marathon Debian friends Ralf Treinen and No l K the ran it last year and enjoyed it. So, when we ran the Paris marathon together back in April, we decided to run either Berlin or Cologne later on. I finally settled for Cologne because this is closer from Paris and the date was more convenient. That was great also for No l, who lives close to K ln, so of course he planned that race in his (busy) schedule. Unfortunately, Ralf got tendinite problems since last Spring and could not join us. We really hope this will be temporary and we will enjoy running together in the future. So, I spent most of the week-end both visiting Cologne with Elizabeth...and running these 42,195 km. That was great, really. Even if there were much more Germans than in Debian, they were really as friendly and welcoming as Debian Germans are...:-). The race happens in Cologne center city and is well arranged for followers to be able to see runners several times, as the track comes back in the city center several times....with a memorable finish through the cathedral place, then central pedestrian streets and the bridge over the Rhein river (well, climbling it at km.42 is a small PITA, but still..). Animation nearly all along the streets with many K ln inhabitants and tourists encouraging the runners and shouting and applausing and playing percussions, and.... My own race was really as I planned to do it. I targeted 4h exactly (Paris was 4h10) and thus tried to keep a pace of 5'41"/km....which I nearly respected. I had a small alert around km13-15 when my legs where kind of heavy....and I was already imagining a terrible second part for the race. Finally, seeing Elizabeth encouraging me at km.19 in the middle of a big crowd, then passing through Friesen Platz in a great noise and with huge encouragements, just made it. I then completed the first half in 1h59'20", which was just fine. I slightly slowed down between km. 24 and 28, mostly because I was trusting my GPS watch to keep the pace...while it is indeed a bit inaccurate (its kilometers are about 950m long). So, when I realized that I was about 1-2 mins late at km. 30, I decided to accelerate a little and thus target 5'30"/km on the watch...which I could sustain up to km.38. I was fearing cramps and a very hard finish, just as it happened to me in Paris...but finally could finish in a quite good shape and keeping my pace. My final time is officially 4h00'47". So, I missed my target by very few seconds but I am really very happy with the result and the way I finished. Recovering in the hotel's sauna was amazing, after this, and I could then remember all the great moments of that race by viewing Elizabeth's pictures (soon online on my gallery, promise made). And, finally, today, we had another day off to drive back home and continue recovering....and register for Paris Marathon on April 11th 2010..:-)... Hopefully, No l (who did an amazing 3h15) will convince self that he should come with his running friends. So, dear readers, if you reached that part of my blog...I'm afraid you will again read about marathon stories from me.... As everybody was telling me: once you start, you never want to stop..:)

23 April 2009

Christian Perrier: Registered for Cologne

Now, I'm registered for Cologne Marathon. So is No l and probably Ralf Treinen. Any other DD or Debian contributors wanting to join in? I know that Dirk Eddelbuettel will probably not (btw, nice run at Boston, Dirk)....but others certainly can...and should ! October 4th, 2009 is still far enough for you guys to plan this..:-)

5 April 2009

Christian Perrier: 42,195

Done. I'm right here now sitting on my couch and trying to recover my legs after that first marathon ever. As planned, I met Ralf Treinen and No l K the at the start of the Paris Marathon. As No l was targetting 3h30m while Ralf and I were targetting 4h, we left him go with the faster runners. As No l doesn't blog that much, I think I can say it now: he managed to run in 3h28m, which is awesome. He is incredibly happy with that (we unfortunately didn't manage to meet again after the race as the crowd was too huge and the cellphones were of course miserably failing). Ralf and I ran together the first 12 kilometers. Then we split because he had to stop for a few seconds. Up to the 21st kilometer, I kept the pace for 4h and I was even running a little bit faster. However, this advance vanished slowly from km 25, up to km 35 where the virtual runner that was running 4h passed me..:-). Ralf also passed me around km 38 which is indeed the moment where I was blowing up, running slower and slower. The last 3 kilometers were a nightmare but, still, I managed to finish and my GPS watch tells me I ran for 4h10m. The official time is 4h12m56s, because of a huge "runner jam" at Bastille where we had to wait for 3 minutes before being able to enter the Faubourg Saint-Antoine street. Running through Paris is really magic, particularly with the nice sun we had ( not *too* hot, though) and I am really proud and happy to have my first marathon finished *without walking*. Yay.

4 April 2009

Christian Perrier: Forerunner

Yipee! Just the day before my first marathon, with No l K the (who's targetting 3h30, crazy No l) and Ralf Treinen (who's targetting 4h), I got a Garmin Forerunner 405 Sport GPS device as birthday gift. So, I'll apparently be able to enter the modern world and adapt my pace more easily than earlier (with my mechanical podometer and the stopwatch function of my cell phone). And that thing has even a Debian package, maintained by...Ralf and No l..:-) ...though I have no idea whether it works with a Forerunner 405 as the original author apparently owns a 305. We'll see. If you somehow happen to see blog posts of mine with the GPS track of the Paris Marathon, I made it work (or I cheated and used a Windows machine...).

17 March 2009

Christian Perrier: News of samba packages

The first version of samba packages (2:3.3.1-1) that is different from the version in lenny (2:3.2.5-4) entered testing this week-end. The first update of samba packages that's aimed for lenny has also been accepted for the next point release of Lenny, through stabe-proposed-updates. This is version 2:3.2.5-4lenny1. It fixes two important bugs discovered after the release of lenny that potentially affect many users and were fixed upstream in post-3.2.5 releases In the constant tracking of a very active upstream, I also uploaded packages for 3.3.2 in unstable. That was quite a straightforward process, of course helped by Steve Langasek, who is a constant active support in the maintenance of samba packages. I really like the team we're having now, with Steve being very picky and motivated by quality and /me doing most of the nasty repetitive work to try saving his time for more important tasks..:-) The next plan is updating packages on backports.org. Having 3.3.1 packages in testing now allows us to upload them in lenny-backports which should be good for lenny users who want to track upstream. Finally, my proposal for a talk about "Packaging Samba for Debian and derivatives" has been accepted at Samba XP, the annual conference of Samba developers and users in G ttingen, Germany. For the first time, I'll be a speaker at this conference which I attend yearly since...it exists. My "german pilgrimage" of the year in Northern/Central Germany... Ah, and I'm still preparing for the Paris Marathon, in 3 weeks now, which I will run with Ralf Treinen and No l K the. I feel in good shape for this as, this week-end, while I promised myself to "not run for too long", I just ran 19km and felt this was a quite "short" run. Still not in the performances of Dirk who mentions that 1h36 for a semi is "good for someone who didn't train that much during winter"...but I think I'll never reach that level of performance. I should have started running long distance 20 years ago for this, I'm afraid.

17 November 2008

Christian Perrier: Always more

Last week-end, I went very close to the 2/3 marathon mark by running 27 km again after I did one such run on Nov. 11th. So, indeed, I ran 27km twice with only 4 days in between (and I ran also 7km during two of these four days). That last 27km run was like a November dream: over 20km in woods, with muddy paths full of dead leaves, about 200 meters positive slope (in four climbing sections), and I didn't finish completely dead. The rate was 5'55"/km (9'37"/mile, Dirk). Tuesday, I didn't go under the 6'/km mark, so that's an improvement. Actually, this is mostly because this time, I wasn't originally imagining I would go for so long, but more an half-marathon. Ralf Treinen and No l K the (who ran together at Cologne marathon the week-end before) are trying to convince me to participate to the Paris marathon next April. It seems indeed more and more likely that I will. Other Debian runners, what about meeting next April in Paris and do it? I can host folks in my house, of course. All this, the very same week-end Bdale got his level 3 in rocketry. Great success for the 61 folks.... Cheers!

17 July 2008

Stefano Zacchiroli: paper about mancoosi at debconf8

Mancoosi paper for DebConf8 now available As previously announced, I'll be attending DebConf this year, as I did for the past 3 years. Beside the usual projects and ideas one carries with himself on his way to a DebConf, this time I will also be there to present part of my everyday work in the Mancoosi project. Very briefly (and a bit too simplistic) Mancoosi is working on pushing forward the research and technology needed to deliver better package managers to the users of open source software distributions. The project presentation event proposed by me and Ralf Treinen has been accepted in the DebConf main track. The presentation will discuss what the former EDOS project did, what Mancoosi is doing right now, trying to focus on their relationships with Debian. In case you are interested I suggest to attend the talk which will be delivered by yours truly (what else can I suggest? :) ) In the meantime, the accompanying paper is now available, you can take a sneak peek if you are interested in knowing more about Mancoosi right ahead. The paper is available in .pdf format from both my homepage and from the Pentabarf event page as an attachment (the latter, as all Pentabarf events, needs login for reasons that I still fail to understand ...). Download

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