Lior Kaplan: FOSScamp Syros 2017 day 2
The morning stated by taking the bus to Kini beach. After some to enjoy the water (which were still cold in the morning), we sat for talking about the local Debian community and how can we help it grow. The main topic was localization (l10n), but we soon started to check other options. I reminded them that l10n isn t only translation and we also talked about dictionaries for spell checking, fonts and local software which might be relevant (e.g. hdate for the Jewish/Hebrew calendar or Jcal for the Jalali calendar). For example it seems that regular Latin fonts are missing two Albanian characters.
We also talked about how to use Open Labs to better work together with two hats member of the local FOSS community and also as members of various open source projects (not forgetting open content / data ones projects as well). So people can cooperate both on the local level, the international level or to mix (using the other s project international resources). In short: connections, connections, connections.
Another aspect I tried to push the guys toward is cooperating with local companies about open source, whether it s the local market, the municipal and general government. Such cooperation can take many forms, sponsoring events / giving resources (computers, physical space or employee s time) and of course creating more jobs for open source people, which in turn will support more people doing open source for longer period.
One of the guys thought benefit the local community will benefit from a mirror server, but that also requires to see the network topology of Albania to make sure it makes sense to invest in one (resources and effort).
We continued to how it would be best to contribute to open source, mostly that Debian, although great isn t always the best target, and they should always try to work with the relevant upstream. It s better to translate gnome upstream then sending the Debian maintainer the translation to be included in the package. That shortcut can work if there s something urgent like a really problematic typo or something what unless done before the release would require a long long wait (e.g. the next Debian release). I gave an example that for important RTL bugs in LibreOffice I ve asked Rene Engelhard to include the patch instead of waiting for the next release and its inclusion in Debian.
When I started the conversation I mentioned that we have 33% females out of the 12 participants. And that s considered good comparing to other computer/technical events, especially open source. To my surprise the guys told me that in the Open Labs hackerspace the situation is the opposite, they have more female members than male (14 female to 12 male). Also in their last OSCAL event they had 220 women and 100 men. I think there s grounds to learn what happens there, as the gals do something damn right over there. Maybe Outreachy rules for Albania should be different (:
Later that day I did another session with Redon Skikuli to be more practical, so I started to search on an Albanian dictionary for spell checking, found an old one and asked Redon to check the current status with the guy. And also check info about such technical stuff with Social Sciences and Albanological Section of the Academy of Sciences of Albania, who is officially the regulator for Albanian.
In parallel I started to check how to include the dictionary in LibreOffice, and asked Rene Engelhard to enable Albanian language pack in Debian (as upstream already provide one). Checking the dictionaries I ve took the opportunity to update the Hebrew. It took me a little longer as I needed to get rust off my LibreOffice repositories (dictionaries is a different repository) and also the gerrit setup. But in the end: https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/41864/
With the talks toady and the starting to combine both Debian and LibreOffice work today (although much of it was talking) I felt like I m the right person on the right place. I m happy to be here and contribute to two projects in parallel (:
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, i18n & l10n, LibreOffice
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, i18n & l10n, LibreOffice
What happened in the 
I knew it was about this time of the year 10 years ago when my Debian account
was created, but I couldn't remember the exact date until I looked it up
earlier this evening: today :). Rene Engelhard had been my advocate, and Marc
Brockschmidt my AM. Thanks guys!
A lot of time has passed since then, and I've worked in various parts of the
project. I became an application manager almost immediately, and quickly got
into the NM front desk as well, revamping parts of the NM process which had
become pretty bureaucratic (I think we are now, 10 years later, back where we
should be, thanks to almost all of the paperwork being automated, thanks
Enrico!). I've processed 37 NMs, most of them between 2005 and 2008, later I
was only active as front desk and eventually Debian account manager. I've
recently picked up AMing again, which I still find quite refreshing as the AM
will always also learn new things.
Quality Assurance was and is the other big field. Starting by doing QA uploads
of orphaned packages, I attended some QA meetings around Germany, and picked up
maintenance of the DDPO pages, which I still maintain. The link between QA and
NM is the MIA team where I was active for some years until they kindly kicked
me out because I was MIA there myself. I'm glad they are still using some of
the scripts I was writing to automate some things.
My favorite MUA is mutt, of which I became co-maintainer in 2007, and later
maintainer. I'm still listed in the uploaders field, but admittedly I haven't
really done anything there lately.
Also in 2007 I started working at credativ, after having been a research
assistant at the university, which meant making my Debian work professional. Of
course it also meant more real work and less time for the hobby part, but I was
still very active around that time. Later in 2010 I was marrying, and we got
two kids, at which point family was of course much more important, so my Debian
involvement dropped to a minimum. (Mostly lurking on IRC ;)
Being a PostgreSQL consultant at work, it was natural to start looking into the
packaging, so I started submitting patches to postgresql-common in 2011, and
became a co-maintainer in 2012. Since then, I've mostly been working on
PostgreSQL-related packages, of which far too many have my (co-)maintainer
stamp on them. To link the Debian and PostgreSQL worlds together, we started an
external repository (apt.postgresql.org) that contains packages for the
PostgreSQL major releases that Debian doesn't ship. Most of my open source time
at the moment is spent on getting all PostgreSQL packages in shape for Debian
and this repository.
According to minechangelogs, currently 844 changelog entries in Debian mention
my name, or were authored by me. Scrolling back yields memories of packages
that are long gone again from unstable, or I passed on to other maintainers.
There are way too many people in Debian that I enjoy(ed) working with to list
them here, and many of them are my friends. Debian is really the extended
family on the internet. My last DebConf before this year had been in Mar del
Plata - I had met some people at other conferences like FOSDEM, but meeting
(almost) everyone again in Heidelberg was very nice. I even remembered all
basic Mao rules :D.
So, thanks to everyone out there for making Debian such a wonderful place to
be!
Alexander Reichle-Schmehl created Debian 
The strongly connected set of the GPG keys graph contains a bit more than 40000 keys now (yes, that’s a lot of geeks!). I wondered what was the biggest clique (complete subgraph) in that graph, and also of course the biggest clique I was in.
It’s easy to grab the whole web of trust 
Another point release for Etch has been done; now it's the time for the CD
team to roll out new images after the next mirror pulse. The official
announcements (prepared by Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, thanks!) will follow
shortly afterwards. FTP master of the day was Joerg Jaspert, who
did his first point release since Woody, as he told us on IRC. We
appreciate your work and you spending your time that shortly before
going to Argentina.
This point release includes the etchnhalf update introducing a new kernel
image (based on 2.6.24) and some driver updates. Additionally the
infamous openssl hole will be fixed for good, even for new installs.
Again I want to present you a list of people who contributed to this
release. It cannot be complete as I got the information out of the
