A Quick Recap from last year: Kotlin is being packaged under the Google Summer of Code within the Debian organization itself. The major reason behind bringing Kotlin in Debian is to update all the Android packages which are now heavily dependent upon the Kotlin libraries. The major work to bring Kotlin into Debian is done for the version 1.3.30, by Saif Abdul Cassim (goes by m36 on IRC) as a part of his GSoC'2019. All his contributions to the team can be found in his blog posts. So, for now, we have a bootstrap package and a Kotlin package for the version with 1.3.30. There were still changes needed as we lacked some of the dependencies for Kotlin, and the source package lacked copyright information and didn t comply with Debian standards. What's the present year brought for Kotlin? To be specific the following were mainly left dependencies for Kotlin:

• JLine3
• intellij-community-idea
• kotlin-bootstrap

And, we lack documentation for the newbies in order to get them started :( Most importantly the crucial part was and still is, to figure out how to upload the package? For GSoC'20, three students are selected as a part of project Android SDK tools in Debian. What's the work done/left? Work Done

• A couple of dependencies were completed and reside in NEW Queue, those include Jline3 (done by @samyak-jn, myself), and intellij-community-idea (finished by @The_LoudSpeaker, Raman Sarda).
• The kotlin package residing in m36 s repository had a couple of issues that were needed to be fixed to meet Debian standards, but Kotlin was building fine locally with the mentioned dependencies. :D
• I (Samyak Jain) took the work for converting all the commits to the patches as all the changes were made directly to the source, and henceforth fixed rules and control files to meet Debian Standards. Debian is very particular about its license policies. The copyright was a pending task that was completed for Good. The newer package exists at Samyak's repo.
• I set up an initial wiki page for Kotlin as well, so everyone can follow. Thanks, Hans (@_hc) for the help with that. The wiki page for Kotlin exists here.

What's Blocking?

• The most uncertain thing is to decide, how Kotlin will be uploaded to the Debian Archive?

What is the problem being faced? The Kotlin-Bootstrap package consists of JAR files for various dependencies of kotlin such as Gradle, kotlin compiler, and kotlinx. The package is added to the build-depends of the main package so that the JAR files can be provided. Since the kotlin-bootstrap consists of binaries (JAR files), it is not feasible to upload the package as free software. The other workaround was the Gradle 6.4 version, which consists of Kotlin files and generates a suitable JAR. But since the package needed Kotlin language itself, it was never updated, as it created a cyclic dependency. Final workaround came, which proposed Kotlin to build from itself, that was a pretty impressive suggestion. But, we still have to look if the solution is feasible? Because, as far as I last checked and conversed with ebourg on the mailing list here, Emmanuel Bbourg mentioned very clearly that the rebuilt package is our interest. So, this is under WIP. But, I fail to acknowledge the fact if we can drop the kotlin-bootstrap package totally, Kotlin will not be able to be built because each and every JAR file present in the bootstrap is needed. That pretty much is the ongoing work and the update on the kotlin package. We intend to bring Kotlin to the Debian Archive as soon as possible :) Have any queries or suggestions for Kotlin? Please feel to drop a message at #debian-mobile channel on OFTC.

This DebConf has been the first one where I ran every day. That proved to be kinda hard on some mornings, but I found a way to circumvent that by proposing group runs at the end of the relevant days. In total, I managed to run 12 days in a row, for a grand total of 186.88km, in 21h22', for a total height difference of 6972m. In short, I nearly climbed Mount Aconcagua, Americas highest peak..:-) Most of these runs were quite slow ones and rather "short" ones (around 15km), because of the nature of the paths around (nearly impossible to find something flat except by running around the football field). The longest run was for the DayTrip, with about 25km in about 4 hours (including some pauses) and 1600m height difference. I'm definitely working on my moutain running skills more than marathon and other kind of "speed" races. That followed a great results for my last race, the "EDF Cenis Tour" 50km trail race in Lanslebourg, French Alps, where I completed the race in 6h38, nearly the sametime than Mont-Blanc marathon, 1 month earlier....which was 8 kilometers shorter. I'm apparently ready for very long distance mountain races, now, as it seems. Thanks you DebConf 13 organizers for choosing such a great locations for us, crazy runners. And, despite that, my next running goal is a "classical" marathon, the Toulouse marathon in late October, where I expect breaking the 3h30 barrier, that would indeed be a qualifier for the Boston Marathon, one of my dreams for the future (and, yes, it is still a dream, despite this year's events).

My last running update was sent after I had a great April month with two successful trail races (35km then 44km). The next target was Mont-Blanc marathon in Chamonix valley in early July, so it's time for me to send a new update before summer. May and June was mostly training. Huge training. Very long distances with 375km in May and over 430 in June (breaking my former monthly record by over 50 kilometers). Yes, that means over 14 kilometers every day..:-) I indeed achieved that with my "go to work partly by running" habits, which are now deeply included in my daily schedule. Much more convenient than bus ride (with the typical random schedules of RATP, which French people translate by "Rentre Avec Tes Pieds" or "Come back home by walking"....which is exactly what I'm doing). With such training (sometimes including extra rides in the forests, with short but steep ups and downs)....I was well prepared for THE early summer goal : Marathon du Mont-Blanc in Chamonix (not Ultra Trail du Mont-blanc : this one, I'm not ready for....yet).. My first mountain trail race, and what race! Imagine 42km in the moutain lovers heaven, namely the Chamonix Valley, with the Mont-Blanc, Aiguille Verte, Aiguille du Midi, Aiguilles Rouges, etc. above your head. Of course, not only in the valley but goind up and down "slightly"....in short 2200 meters positive climb..:-) I ran it with a female friend of mine, who I met in local races and through runners web forums. Sabine has about the same running skills than me and we developed a good and nice friendship, sharing our love for running in the nature. So, during May and June, we decided to run this race together as we were both registered for it. A first trial in a local 35km trail race two weeks before the MMB was very successful. We ended up in 3h40 and Sabine was ranked 5th female runner. And, moreover, we had a tremendous pleasure by crossing the finishing line together. So, we did it again in Chamonix. And, hell, we did it well: I had set the goal to 6 hours and 30 minutes and we completed the race in..... 6 hours and 34 minutes. Much much better than I and she would have expected. And, believe me, crossing the finishing line was again a special moment, particularly because the crowd at the end of this race make it look like l'Alpe d'Huez on the Tour de France. And, this on a wonderful sunny day, arriving at Planpraz, facing the Mont-Blanc. If you've ever been to Chamonix, you know what I mean. So, first moutain trail and, hell, not the last one! For those of you who can read French...or just want to see some pictures of a running bubulle, here is the link to the story. And these 42 kilometers were indeed so well done that the day after, while coming down from the famous Aiguille du Midi with Elisabeth (who came with me to Chamonix, of course)...I decided to run down from the cable car intermediate stop (2300m altitude) to Chamonix (1050m). Over 1200 meters down in 48 minutes... :-). Just a bit slower than the cable car....:) The remaining of July saw me again running back and forth to work and I'm indeed about to break my monthly record, eventually reaching 450 kilometers in one month and only two days NOT running in the whole month. Yeah, crazy. The upcoming Sunday, August 4th, just before going to Debconf 13, I'll spend a few days in Lanslebourg and will be running the EDF Cenis Tour trail, for 50 kilometers and 2600 meters positive climb. This time, a very "small" race, with no more than 150 runners. So, that will be another experience by running nearly entirely alone between 1400 and 2700 meters altitude. I'll post the outcome (or you'll probably hear about it at DC13....). See you, hopefully not in 3 months, for another update about running Bubulle.

As you might (or might not) know, this summer, I have taken on mentoring of a GSoC project by Simon Chopin (a.k.a. laarmen) which goal is to bring fedmsg, the Fedora Infrastructure message bus, to Debian. Most of the work I ll be talking about here is Simon s work, please send all the praise towards him (I can take the blame, though). What is this about? As the project proposal states, the idea is to provide Debian with a unified, real-time, and open mechanism of communication between its services. This communication bus would allow anyone, anywhere, to start consuming messages and reacting to events happening in Debian s infrastructure:

• trigger a test build on a git push to a source repository
• trigger automated testing (piuparts, lintian) as soon as an upload hits the archive
• get a desktop notification when a package you care about gets changed

When we told upstream about our plan of adapting fedmsg to work on Debian, they were thrilled. And they have been very supportive of the project. How is the project going? Are you excited? I know I m excited. Well, the general idea was easy enough, but the task at hand is a challenge. First of all, fedmsg has a lot of (smallish) dependencies, most of them new to Debian. Thanks to Simon s work during the bonding period, and thanks to paultag s careful reviews, the first batch of packages (the first dependency level, comprising kitchen, bunch, m2ext, grapefruit, txws, txzmq and stomper) is currently sitting in the NEW queue. The four remaining packages (fabulous, moksha.common, moksha.hub and fedmsg proper) are mostly ready, waiting in the Debian Python Module Team SVN repository for a review and sponsorship. While we re waiting for the packages to trickle into Debian, Simon is not twiddling his thumbs. Work has taken place on a few fronts:

• Getting fedmsg integrated to mentors.debian.net (actually sending the first messages from Debian s infrastructure)
• Writing a (stop-gap) wrapper to convert some of our mail broadcasts (debian-devel-changes, debian-bugs-dist) into fedmsg messages, until a more proper integration can be done
• Working on reliability of the message transport, following some concerns raised by DSA.

fedmsging mentors.debian.net Package backports mentors.debian.net was chosen because I m an admin and could do the integration quickly. That involved backporting the eleven aforementioned packages, plus zeromq3 and python-zmq (that only have TCP_KEEPALIVE on recent versions), to wheezy, as that s what the mentors.d.n host is running. (Also, python-zmq needs a new-ish cython to build so I had to backport that too). Thankfully, those were no-changes backports, that were easily scripted, using a pbuilder hook to allow the packages to depend on previously built packages. I have made a wheezy package repository available here. It s signed with my GnuPG key, ID 0xB8E5087766475AAF, which should be fairly well connected. Code changes After Simon s initial setup of debexpo (which is not an easy task), the code changes have been fairly simple (yes, this is just a proof of concept). You can see them on top of the live branch on debexpo s sources. I finally had the time to make them live earlier this week, and mentors.debian.net has been sending messages on Debian s fedmsg bus ever since. Deployment mentors.d.n sends its messages on five endpoints, tcp://mentors.debian.net:3000 through tcp://mentors.debian.net:3004. That is one endpoint per WSGI worker, plus one for the importer process(es). You can tap in directly, by following the instructions below. debmessenger Debmessenger is the stop-gap email-to-fedmsg bridge that Simon is developing. The goal is to create some activity on the bus without disrupting or modifying any infrastructure service. It s written in hy, and it leverages the existing Debian-related python modules to do its work, using inotify to react when a mail gets dropped in a Maildir. Right now, it s supposed to understand changes mails (received from debian-devel-changes) and bugs mail (from debian-bugs-dist). I ll work on deploying an instance of debmessenger this weekend, to create some more traffic on the bus. Reliability of the bus I suggested using fedmsg as this was something that already existed, and that solved a problem identical to the one we wanted to tackle (open interconnection of a distribution s infrastructure services). Reusing a piece of infrastructure that already works in another distro means that we can share tools, share ideas, and come up with solutions that we might not have considered when working alone. The drawback is that we have to either adapt to the tool s idiosyncrasies, or to adapt the tool to our way of working. One of the main points raised by DSA when the idea of using fedmsg was brought up, was that of reliability. Debian s infrastructure is spread in datacenters (and basements ) all over the world, and thus faces different challenges than Fedora s infrastructure, which is more tightly integrated. Therefore, we have to ensure that a critical consumer (say, a buildd) doesn t miss any message it would need for its operation (say, that a package got accepted). There has been work upstream, to ensure that fedmsg doesn t lose messages, but we need to take extra steps to make sure that a given consumer can replay the messages it has missed, should the need arise. Simon has started a discussion on the upstream mailing list, and is working on a prototype replay mechanism. Obviously, we need to test scenarios of endpoints dropping off the grid, hence the work on getting some activity on the bus. How can I take a look? a.k.a. Another one rides the bus (Picture Yves-Laurent Allaert, CC-By-SA v2.5 / GFDL v1.2 license) So, the bus is pretty quiet right now, as only two kinds of events are triggering messages: a new upload to mentors.debian.net, and a new comment on a package there. Don t expect a lot of traffic. However, generating some traffic is easy enough: just login to mentors.d.n, pick a package of mine (not much choice there), or a real package you want to review, and leave a comment. poof, a message appears. For the lazy Join #debian-fedmsg on OFTC, and look for messages from the debmsg bot. Current example output:

01:30:25 <debmsg> debexpo.voms-api-java.upload (unsigned) --
02:03:16 <debmsg> debexpo.ocamlbricks.comment (unsigned) --

(definitely needs some work, but it s a start) Listening in by yourself You need to setup fedmsg. I have a repository of wheezy packages and one of sid packages, signed with my GnuPG key, ID 0xB8E5087766475AAF. You can add them to a file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d like this:

deb http://perso.crans.org/dandrimont/fedmsg-<sid wheezy>/ ./

Then, import my GnuPG key into apt (apt-key add), update your sources (apt-get update), and install fedmsg (apt-get install python-fedmsg). The versions are << to anything real, so you should get the real thing as soon as it hits the archive. Finally, in /etc/fedmsg.d/endpoints.py, you can comment-out the Fedora entries, and add a Debian entry like this:

    "debian": [
        "tcp://fedmsg.olasd.eu:9940",
    ],

fedmsg.olasd.eu runs a fedmsg gateway connected to the mentors.d.n endpoints, and thus forwards all the mentors messages. It ll be connected to debmessenger as soon as it s running too. To actually see mesages, disable validate_signatures in /etc/fedmsg.d/ssl.py, setting it to False. The Debian messages aren t signed yet (it s on the roadmap), and we don t ship the Fedora certificates so we can t authenticate their messages either. Finally, you can run fedmsg-tail --really-pretty in a terminal. As soon as there s some activity, you should get that kind of output (color omitted):

 
  "i": 1, 
  "msg":  
    "version": "2.0.9-1.1", 
    "uploader": "Emmanuel Bourg <ebourg@apache.org>"
   , 
  "topic": "org.debian.dev.debexpo.voms-api-java.upload", 
  "username": "expo", 
  "timestamp": 1373758221.491809
 

Enjoy real-time updates from your favorite piece of infrastructure! What s next? While Simon continues working on reliability, and gets started on message signing according to his schedule, I ll take a look at deploying the debmessenger bridge, and making the pretty-printer outputs useful for our topics. There will likely be some changes to the messages sent by debexpo, as we got some feedback from the upstream developers about making them work in the fedmsg tool ecosystem (datanommer and datagrepper come to mind). You can tune in to Simon s weekly reports on the soc-coordination list, and look at the discussions with upstream on the fedora messaging-sig list. You can also catch us on IRC, #debian-soc on OFTC. We re also hanging out on the upstream channel, #fedora-apps on freenode.

You're pretending people are mocking Mrs Segol ne Royal because she's a woman, well, I don't think it has any chances to be true. It's IMHO a reason for many people to be addicted to her without even thinking to listen to what she says. I've listened to many of her interviews, those are pathetically void and empty. She's not able to use correct and decent French, and when I listen to her, I'm often under the impression to talk to my butcher. If I imagine her in the middle of an internationnal summit, I'm just plain afraid. When I try to sum up her ideas, I come up with a big nothing. That's just air and wind. I can't say the UMP is very kind with her but hey, she's a candidate to the presidency, she should grow a skin, chose a real communication manager (Montebourg, BWAHAHAHAHAHA), etc Recently, presidency candidacy has begun to look like a show. She's making pirouettes over pirouettes. How can you blame other candidates to just push her a bit so that she fall on the nose ? That is indeed unfair, but:

• it has nothing to do with the fact that she is a woman, that's a very very very bad argument, to me it's even in her disfavour, because it looks like that: look it's only a woman, please be kind with here WTF? if she's going to be the French President she has to be a bit stronger than that, and beeing a woman or not is totally irrelevant ;
• I'm not sure she really needs to be pushed hard to fall, her campaign (atm) is a long succession of "rattrapage aux branches".

So I'm under the impression that you defend her because she's a woman, which is certainly a way for chosing your favourite candidate, but it's not in my criterion list (neither as a pro or a cons) for such an election. And I'm not that sure she won't attend to the second turn. The "She's a woman" criterion will weigh on the election in a way that we didn't met before, and that is very hard to estimate.