Raphaël Hertzog: My Free Software Activities in January 2013
This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (84.25 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects.
Debian Packaging
In one of my customer projects, I had to use libwebsockets and since it was not packaged for Debian, I filed a Request For Package (RFP #697671). I discovered a fork of this library on github and decided to mail the original author and the author of the fork to learn a bit more about the reason of the fork. It turns out that they miscommunicated and that the original author was interested by most of the improvements. The fork still exists but the important fixes and most of the improvements have been merged (and he released a version 1.0 after that!). Furthermore the original author setup a bug tracker to better organize the project and so that the author of the fork can submit patches and be sure that they won t be forgotten (as it happened in the past). I spend quite some time discussing with both parties but at the end I m pleased to see that good progress has been made (although nobody stepped up to maintain this package in Debian).
I packaged zim 0.59 (an important bugfix release) and wordpress 3.5.1 (with several security fixes). I updated the dpkg-dev squeeze backports to version 1.16.9~bpo60+1 on request of Daniel Schepler. This backport led me to file #698133 on kgb-client because the bot literally spammed the #debian-dpkg IRC channel for multiple hours by resending old commit notices that got merged in the squeeze-backports branch. BTW, they need help to get this issue fixed.
I updated python-django-registration to fix a compatibility issue with python3-sphinx (see #697721 for details).
Misc Debian Stuff
Serious bug with salt. I filed a grave bug on salt (#697747 ) and prepared the upload to fix the issue on request of the maintainer. In the mean time, the maintainer orphaned the package. Franklin G. Mendoza already announced its willingness to take over but this package deserves multiple maintainers since this is a good piece of software that is getting more and more popular.
net-retriever and alternate keyrings. I filed a wishlist bug (#698618) on net-retriever to request a way for derivatives to use another keyring package (i.e. not debian-archive-keyring-udeb) without having to fork net-retriever.
Linux 3.7 on armel/armhf. I helped the kernel maintainers to fix the 3.7 kernel on armel/armhf by reporting on IRC the results of successive failing kernel rebuilds on those architectures (this kernel version is only in experimental).
Carl9170 firmware. I also pinged the kernels maintainers about a missing firmware for the carl9170 driver (already reported in #635840) and Ben Hutchings took care of re-activating its inclusion in upstream s linux-firmware.git and then uploaded firmware-free 3.2 to Debian. Thanks Ben!
New QA team member. And to finish with the miscellaneous stuff, I helped Holger Levsen to be added to the qa group so that he could integrate his awesome work on automated QA checks with Jenkins.
Debian France
Preparation for Solutions Linux. The people organizing the village of associations in the Solutions Linux conference have asked all organizations to apply for a booth if they wanted one. Last year Carl Chenet took care of organizing this and this time we had to find someone else. I made multiple call for volunteers (on the mailing list, on my blog) without much success but I finally managed to convince Tanguy Ortolo to take care of this. Thank you Tanguy!
Get in touch with treasurer who disappeared. During the transition with the former Debian France officers, it has been said that Aur lien G r me another former treasurer of Debian France had entirely disappeared together with some papers that he never gave to his successor. I didn t want to give up on this without at least trying to get in touch by myself so after multiple tries (over IRC, phone, and snail mail), and some weeks without answers, he got back to me, explaining that he s currently in a foreign country and that he will take care of that next time that he comes in France. \o/
New website in preparation. Replacing the single-page website webpage with a more comprehensive website is an important goal. Alexandre Delano provided a basic ikiwiki setup inspired by dsa.debian.org. I cleaned it and integrated it in a git repository on our machine. There s thus a new test website on http://france.debian.net/test/. Tanguy Ortolo and Fernando Lagrange immeditaly made some small improvements but since then nobody stepped up to further complete the website. I ll try to do this in February and put the new website in production.
Paypal and handling of members. We installed a paypal plugin in galette so that members can renew their membership online. I asked Christian Bayle to try it out and we found some issues that I reported upstream and that got fixed. But this is only the first step, we want to go much further and automate all the membership handling, from membership renewal mail reminders up to integration in the accounting system. To this end, I filed some new tickets in the Galette tracker and completed some that were already opened: #490, #368 and #394. We requested a quote for those tickets and Debian France is going to fund the work on those tickets so that we have a 100% free software solution for our needs.
Thanks
See you next month for a new summary of my activities.
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Executive summary
To avoid confusion with the proprietary versions of GForge (known as
GForge Advanced Server, GForge Express Edition and GForge Community
Edition), the free/libre/opensource codebase will from now on be
separately maintained under the name FusionForge by the main
developers of the free GForge 4.x codebase. Since this is mostly a
renaming, the migration path for existing users will be smooth.
Longer version, with details
After the initial forking from the Sourceforge codebase, the
development of GForge has long been hosted, and many enhancements
directly developed, by the GForge Group (GForge, LLC), with regular
contributions from outsiders. The results of these evolutions were
public and free, subject to the GNU GPL.
In parallel, the GForge Group wrote a proprietary re-implementation of
GForge, which it sold under the name "GForge Advanced Server", or
"GForge AS" for short. This re-implementation added some features for
"the enterprise", but was not contributed wholesale to the GForge
codebase under a free license. Although some of the features were
contributed to the public, the GForge Group concentrated its efforts
on its (proprietary software) business model, with more versions
appearing, such as "GForge Express Edition" and more recently "GForge
Community Edition". As a result, it became increasingly harder for
the public to know which version was which without doing extensive
research (indeed, some users mistakenly installed one version instead
of the other). A consequence was that the free software codebase
suffered from a loss in visibility, which lowered its momentum to the
point that there haven't been any moderately important releases since
the (currently stable) 4.5.x series was announced in late 2005.
So, in order to clarify things, avoid further confusion, and regain
some of the lost momentum, it was decided by a group of leading
contributors that the free software version of the GForge codebase
would from now on be developed under the FusionForge name, and its
development would be hosted on 
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