Search Results: "Torsten Werner"

27 April 2016

Niels Thykier: auto-decrufter in top 5 after 10 months

About 10 months ago, we enabled an auto-decrufter in dak. Then after 3 months it had become the top 11th remover . Today, there are only 3 humans left that have removed more packages than the auto-decrufter impressively enough, one of them is not even an active FTP-master (anymore). The current score board:
 5371 Luca Falavigna
 5121 Alexander Reichle-Schmehl
 4401 Ansgar Burchardt
 3928 DAK's auto-decrufter
 3257 Scott Kitterman
 2225 Joerg Jaspert
 1983 James Troup
 1793 Torsten Werner
 1025 Jeroen van Wolffelaar
  763 Ryan Murray
For comparison, here is the number removals by year for the past 6 years:
 5103 2011
 2765 2012
 3342 2013
 3394 2014
 3766 2015  (1842 removed by auto-decrufter)
 2845 2016  (2086 removed by auto-decrufter)
Which tells us that in 2015, the FTP masters and the decrufter performed on average over 10 removals a day. And by the looks of it, 2016 will surpass that. Of course, the auto-decrufter has a tendency to increase the number of removed items since it is an advocate of remove early, remove often! .:) Data is from https://ftp-master.debian.org/removals-full.txt. Scoreboard computed as:
  grep ftpmaster: removals-full.txt   \
   perl -pe 's/.*ftpmaster:\s+//; s/\]$//;'   \
   sort   uniq -c   sort --numeric --reverse   head -n10
Removals by year computed as:
 grep ftpmaster: removals-full.txt   \
   perl -pe 's/.* (\d 4 ) \d 2 :\d 2 :\d 2 .*/$1/'   uniq -c   tail -n6
(yes, both could be done with fewer commands)
Filed under: Debian

23 October 2011

Luca Falavigna: Stats, more stats and, guess what? Even more stats!

We all love stats, don t we? So, here we go! Let s start with a graph: NEW graph It shows the number of packages in the NEW queue since last year. You can see a big drop during April 2011, and a reasonably low rate during the last six months. You could think fellow Debian Developers stopped to upload NEW packages. Sorry, you re wrong! :) Since Squeeze release, 3.832 .changes files with NEW components were processed by dak, with an average of 14,85 NEW packages per day. On the FTP Team side, we had 3.732 accepts (14,47 per day), 339 rejects (1,31 per day) and 178 comments to maintainers (0,69 per day).
Who were the most prolific maintainers who got a NEW processing? Here is our special top ten:
  1. Debian Haskell Group (362 packages)
  2. Debian Perl Group (343 packages)
  3. Debian Java Maintainers (161 packages)
  4. Debian Ruby Extras Maintainers (124 packages)
  5. Debian Multimedia Maintainers (100 packages)
  6. Debian Fonts Task Force (96 packages)
  7. Debian Med Packaging Team (79 packages)
  8. Debian Install System Team (61 packages)
  9. Debian Javascript Maintainers (54 packages)
  10. Debian Python Modules Team (50 packages)
That s bad packaging teams cannot bake cookies!
Let s do the same with Changed By, this time:
  1. Ben Hutchings (159 packages)
  2. Joachim Breitner (138 packages)
  3. Clint Adams (134 packages)
  4. Jonas Smedegaard (124 packages)
  5. TANIGUCHI Takaki (97 packages)
  6. Nicholas Bamber (61 packages)
  7. Alessio Treglia (60 packages)
  8. maximilian attems (54 packages)
  9. David Paleino (51 packages)
  10. Torsten Werner (45 packages)
Much better now go and heat up your ovens, we know who you are ;)
Another nice aspect to look at is the speed of NEW processing. Some maintainers were very happy for a fast NEW processing, someone even complained for having been too quick! :) So, let s find out which upload was the quickest ever. Try to gamble a bit before reading the answer, to see whether you are near to the real value ;) Alessio Treglia, you probably already know, because your gwc_0.21.16~dfsg-1 upload has been processed in 41 seconds (yes, forty-one seconds!). Here s an excerpt from ftp-master log to certify it:
20110516120252 process-upload dak Processing changes file gwc_0.21.16~dfsg-1_amd64.changes
20110516120258 process-upload dak Moving to new gwc_0.21.16~dfsg-1_amd64.changes
20110516120339 process-new tolimar NEW ACCEPT: gwc_0.21.16~dfsg-1_amd64.changes
Alex was the super-fast FTP Team member behind the quickest accept, do you want to beat him? Join FTP Team ;)

30 July 2011

Torsten Werner: DebConf11: Jigsaw Progress in Debian

Tom Marble and Guillaume Mazoyer gave a talk about Jigsaw Progress in Debian during DebConf11 in Banja Luka. Guillaume is a Google Summer of Code student mentored by Tom and Sylvestre Ledru. The project is about modularizing OpenJDK which replaces the old fashioned classpath by a modulepath that knows about versioned dependencies. It can reduce the memory footprint and the startup time for applications running in the JVM. It would be interesting to match Debian package versions to Jigsaw module versions. Debian could influence the JDK version 8 in this area. Upstream is already building Debian packages but they do not follow the Debian policy and do not use the Debian packaging tools. Guillaume has uploaded 2 packages (jtharness, jtreg) to Debian. These packages are needed to run the upstream testsuite which ships 3484 individual tests. More than 99% of them are working in Debian. There is a GIT repository of his Jigsaw work at http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-java/jigsaw.git;a=summary. The slides of the talk are available at http://penta.debconf.org/dc11_schedule/events/718.en.html.

17 July 2011

Torsten Werner: Debian Conference 2011

Yes I am going to attend DebConf11.

13 July 2011

Torsten Werner: Certified Scrum Master

I ve passed the CSM exam of the Scrum Alliance today after having a 2 day training last week! That means that I am really agile now. :) The training was really good.

15 June 2011

Christian Perrier: So, what happened with Kikithon?

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:

13 June 2011

Christian Perrier: So, what happened with Kikithon?

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:

16 May 2011

Christoph G hre: Gosh - I'm became DD on Saturday

After nearly two years of answering questions and mostly didn't find time to do so, I'm a DD now. Thanks to all involved people, specifically to Ben Hutchings - my AM and Torsten Werner who advocate me.

31 March 2011

Torsten Werner: My Wheezy release goal: JS removal

Debian is preferring feature based releases over time based releases and that is why we currently have some discussion about release goals for our next version that has the codename Wheezy. I want to suggest the full removal of all software written by J rg Schilling who is well known for making trouble in projects that want to redistribute his software.

15 February 2011

Torsten Werner: Are we slaves?

We still have more than 300 new packages in Debian that needs manual checks and we have a lot of open bugs. I don t get paid for working on dak (the Debian Archive Kit) nor do I feel a deep passion on doing such work. I am contributing to Debian because it is a great project and because contributing is my way to say Thank you to all who made (and still make) it possible. BUT: are we slaves that are supposed to do any stuff for other people? Yesterday someone asked for an enhancement for dak via IRC. I ve kindly asked him: do you want to send a patch? (words are copied from the IRC session). Instead of answering no he sent a patch for 2 plain text files within 4 minutes after I told him the URL to dak s git repository. I could not do it faster by myself and I ve got many other open tasks. I ve applied the patch and activated it on ftp-master.debian.org. But today he ranted about my rudeness and he did not even managed to quote me correctly ( Please send a patch ).

Lucas Nussbaum: Re: please send a patch

It seems that Matthew Palmer misread my blog post as a complaint against developers asking for patches in exchange of pet feature requests. He really should pay more attention, since I gave pet feature requests as an example of case where it would be appropriate to ask for a patch:
Of course, there are cases where it s perfectly reasonable to ask for a patch: when the task is expected to take hours, or when the result is of limited interest to everybody except the demander.
But even then, it s not clear. This morning I got an email from a someone involved in PHP packages maintenance, who said that Bugs Search @ UDD was a great tool, but that he would love to have a way to list all bugs affecting packages with the implemented-in::php debtag.
To produce a working patch for this would probably take him at least an hour. You need to set up a copy of the CGI on alioth, understand the DB structure, dig into the code, etc. If you don t understand SQL and Ruby, it could be a really difficult process. Also, it s probably quite uninteresting for him to do that, since he is unlikely to stick around developing UDD.
Instead, it didn t take me more than 5 minutes to produce a one-liner.
The net result for Debian in that case? 55 minutes saved by a developer. Update:
Torsten Werner wrote an angry reply to my post. It s true that yesterday s episode triggered my blog post, because I felt quite frustrated to have to provide a patch for something that simple, and would have preferred to use the time for a Debian task where I would be more efficient. But I was not particularly angry at that episode, since that s something I ve seen on several occasions. That s also why I did not mention any team in particular.
The feature request I was making was reasonable, and cannot really be considered a pet feature request (though I might be biased with my QA hat on): mentionning in the dak templates used for bug closure that packages removed from Debian can still be found on snapshot.d.o. The fact that he thinks that addressing this himself turns him into a slave raises interesting questions.

7 February 2011

Torsten Werner: You are uploading too fast

This is my first blog post on my new tarent blog which I am using as a replacement for blogspot. We had 451 new source packages in the NEW queue tonight. It is nice to know that Debian is the largest free software distribution but it will take some time until we (the ftp team) have processed all those new packages as we need the check every single package. I wanted to work on dak (the Debian archive kit) again after we have released Squeeze but I ll give NEW processing a higher priority. My next plan for dak is generating the contents files in dak directly instead of using apt-ftparchive. Contents generation is the slowest part of apt-ftparchive and having the package contents in dak s database is quite useful.

28 October 2010

Torsten Werner: More Results from the Debian Community Poll

I have announced the Debian Community Poll and published first results in former blog posts. I'll publish my analysis of the remaining questions about changes to Debian now.
Should Debian remove its non-free component?

Should Debian spend more money?
  • 28.9% choose answer #5: I don't know or don't care.
  • 22.8% choose answer #3: Debian should pay people having important positions in Debian and doing important work.
  • 21.2% choose answer #1: Debian should spend more money on organizing developer conferences and team meetings.
  • 11.4% choose answer #4: Debian should not spend more money.
  • 8.0% choose other (see below) or didn't answer
  • 7.7% choose answer #2: Debian should spend more money on free merchandizing, free DVDs, having a sexy web site, and being present on IT events.
There were quite a number of other answers. One participant missed the information about how the money is currently spend. Several participants didn't want to choose one of the provided answers. They either wanted to choose multiple answers or various combinations of them. Most other answers fall into one of the following categories:
  • various marketing suggestions with different focus than answer #2
  • Debian hosted hardware, infrastructure, services
  • funding upstream development
  • QA and work on release-blocking issues
  • partners and commercial support
  • developing important features
  • security support for oldstable
  • education of prospective developers and contributors
  • documentation for users
  • improving usability and accessibility
  • certifications like LPIC
  • getting supported by hardware and non-free software vendors
  • beer
  • promoting debian in developing countries
  • help contributors running a business on Debian
  • Bounty system
  • updating stable to avoid becoming stale
  • developing multimedia codecs
  • getting compliant with FSF guidelines for a free system distribution
  • developing free replacements to non-free software
  • maintaining a database of debian-friendly hardware
  • lobbying and politics
  • visibility to wider society, even non-IT
  • hardware for driver developers
  • a more sexy DVD/CD set with graphics (like Fedora, Ubuntu)
  • membership to boards of W3C, TEI Consortium, OASIS, etc.

Do you prefer time based releases instead of the "it's ready when it's ready" releases?
  • 73.1% answered no
  • 19.8% answered yes
  • 5.1% anwered: I don't know or don't care
  • 2.0% didn't answer

Which release interval do you prefer?
  • 38.7% choose answer #2: about 12 months
  • 36.9% choose answer #3: 18 - 24 months
  • 10.0% choose answer #5: I don't know or don't care.
  • 5.9% choose answer #1: about 6 months
  • 5.5% choose answer #4: more than 2 years
  • 3.0% didn't answer

19 September 2010

Obey Arthur Liu: Google Summer of Code 2010 Debian Report

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)

17 September 2010

Joerg Jaspert: FTPMaster meeting, I

I announced it some while ago on debian-project, we have a FTPMaster meeting this weekend. It started out with a little workout session View image before we started discussing some things from our agenda. In the middle of the discussion we took a little sidestep, looking for a victim to promote to ftpmaster. So we selected someone not attending, he can t run away screaming. And for that: Send your condolences over to Torsten Werner. Or maybe congratulations, your call :) Right now Mark is fixing up our byhand processing and Alex is doing some other Debian work, while I m merging patches from Luca. Thats it for now, sometime soon we are going to eat, after which we put some more discussions on our agenda. Still two more days to go :)

2 August 2010

Matt Zimmerman: DebConf 10: Day 2

Today was the first day of DebConf proper, where all of the sessions were aimed at project participants. Bits from the DPL (Stefano Zacchiroli) Stefano delivered an excellent address to the Debian project. As Project Leader, he offered a perspective on how far Debian has come, raised some of the key questions facing Debian today, and challenged the project to move forward and improve in several important ways. He asked the audience: Is Debian better than other distributions? Is Debian still relevant? Why/how? Having asked this question on identi.ca and Twitter recently, he presented a summary. There was a fairly standard list of technical concerns, but also: He pointed out some areas which we would like to see improve, including: All in all, I thought this was an accurate, timely and inspirational message for the project, and the talk is worth watching for any current or prospective contributor to Debian. Debian Policy BoF (Russ Albery) Russ facilitated a discussion about the Debian policy document itself and the process for managing it. He has recently put in a lot of time working on the backlog (down from 160+ to 120), but this is not sustainable for him, and help is needed. There was a wide-ranging discussion of possible improvements including: There was also some discussion in passing of the long-standing confusion (presumably among people new to the project) with regard to how policy is established. In Debian, best practices are first implemented in packages, then documented in policy (not the reverse). Sometimes, improvements are suggested at the policy level, when they need to start elsewhere. I m not very familiar with how the policy manual is maintained at present, but listening to the discussion, it sounded like it might help to extend the process to include the implementation stage. This would allow standards improvements to be tracked all the way through from concept, to implementation, to documentation. The Java Packaging Nightmare (Torsten Werner) Torsten described the current state of Java packaging in Debian and the general problems involved, including licensing issues, build system challenges (e.g. maven) and dependency management. His slides were information-dense, so I didn t take a lot of notes. His presentation inspired a lively discussion about why upstream developers of Java applications and libraries often do not engage with Debian. Suggested reasons included: Collaboration between Ubuntu and Debian (Jorge Castro) Jorge talked about the connections between Debian and Ubuntu, how people in the projects perceive each other, and how to foster good relationships between developers. He talked about past efforts to quantify collaboration between the projects, but the focus is now on building personal relationships. There were many good questions and comments afterward, and I m looking forward to the Debian derivatives BoF session tomorrow to get into more detail. Tonight is the traditional wine and cheese party. When this tradition started, I was one of just a handful of people in a room with some cheese and paper plates, but it s now a large social gathering with contributions of cheese and wine from around the world. I m looking forward to it.

31 July 2010

Torsten Werner: The Debian freeze has already begun


Don't get me wrong. We didn't freeze the development yet but we are freezing our developers! The air condition at the Columbia University in New York City is quite cold. Bring some warm clothes if you going to attend the DebConf that will start soon.

26 July 2010

Torsten Werner: Hey, Apple!



Hey, (Big) Apple! I'll arrive in New York tomorrow to attend the Debcamp and the Debconf. I will a talk about the Java packaging nightmare during the Java track next monday. Some other things i will work on:

- getting sensible-java done
- parallelize dak (the Debian archive kit) because we have 16 cpu cores on ftp-master.debian.org now
- autobuild all packages maintained by the Java packaging team to find FTBFS bug early
- fixing RC bugs maybe?

18 July 2010

Torsten Werner: Monday: Debian bug squashing party in Berlin


This is just a reminder that we will have a small bug squashing party in Berlin. It will take place on monday 19th july starting at 16:00 with open end in the rooms of B ro 2.0 in Neuk lln. You have to organize your accomodation by yourself if you do not live in Berlin. More information is available in the Debian Wiki. Please register there if you are planning to attend.

4 July 2010

Torsten Werner: Monday, 19th July: Debian bug squashing party in Berlin

A bug squashing party with take place on monday, 19th july, in the rooms of B ro 2.0 in Berlin Neuk lln. Please check the Wiki page for more information and please register yourself there if you plan to attend. Please don't forget that you have to organize your accomodation by yourself if you do not live in Berlin.

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