Search Results: "frans"

30 August 2022

Wouter Verhelst: Not currently uploading

A notorious ex-DD decided to post garbage on his site in which he links my name to the suicide of Frans Pop, and mentions that my GPG key is currently disabled in the Debian keyring, along with some manufactured screenshots of the Debian NM site that allegedly show I'm no longer a DD. I'm not going to link to the post -- he deserves to be ridiculed, not given attention. Just to set the record straight, however: Frans Pop was my friend. I never treated him with anything but respect. I do not know why he chose to take his own life, but I grieved for him for a long time. It saddens me that Mr. Notorious believes it a good idea to drag Frans' name through the mud like this, but then, one can hardly expect anything else from him by this point. Although his post is mostly garbage, there is one bit of information that is correct, and that is that my GPG key is currently no longer in the Debian keyring. Nothing sinister is going on here, however; the simple fact of the matter is that I misplaced my OpenPGP key card, which means there is a (very very slight) chance that a malicious actor (like, perhaps, Mr. Notorious) would get access to my GPG key and abuse that to upload packages to Debian. Obviously we can't have that -- certainly not from him -- so for that reason, I asked the Debian keyring maintainers to please disable my key in the Debian keyring. I've ordered new cards; as soon as they arrive I'll generate a new key and perform the necessary steps to get my new key into the Debian keyring again. Given that shipping key cards to South Africa takes a while, this has taken longer than I would have initially hoped, but I'm hoping at this point that by about halfway September this hurdle will have been taken, meaning, I will be able to exercise my rights as a Debian Developer again. As for Mr. Notorious, one can only hope he will get the psychiatric help he very obviously needs, sooner rather than later, because right now he appears to be more like a goat yelling in the desert. Ah well.

23 August 2020

Enrico Zini: Doing things /together/

Here are the slides of mine and Ulrike's talk Doing things /together/.
Our thoughts about cooperation aspects of doing things together. Sometimes in Debian we do work together with others, and sometimes we are a number of people who work alone, and happen to all upload their work in the same place. In times when we have needed to take important decisions together, this distinction has become crucial, and some of us might have found that we were not as good at cooperation as we would have thought. This talk is intended for everyone who is part of a larger community. We will show concepts and tools that we think could help understand and shape cooperation.
Video of the talk: The slides have extensive notes: you can use View Notes in LibreOffice Impress to see them. Here are the Inkscape sources for the graphs: Here are links to resources quoted in the talk: In the Q&A, pollo asked:
How can we still have a good code review process without making it a "you need to be perfect" scenario? I often find picky code reviews help me write better code.
Ulrike wrote a more detailed answer: Code reviews: from nitpicking to cooperation

11 May 2017

Norbert Preining: BachoTeX 2017

A week of typesetting, typography, bookbinding, bibliophily, not to forget long chats with good friends and loads of beer. That is BachoTeX, the best series of conferences I have ever been. This year BachoTeX was held for the 25th time, and was merged with the TUG Meeting for a firework of excellent presentations and long hours of brain storming, hacking, music making, dancing, and simply enjoying life!
Symphony of Green
And while it was a bit less relaxing for me than in the last years, mostly due to the presence of my little daughter who requested presence quite often, it is still the place to be during the Golden Week! Of course I also gave a talk at BachoTeX about our latest changes in the upcoming TeX Live 2017 release: fmtutil and updmap past & future changes (or: cleaning up the mess). Big thanks to my company Accelia Inc. for allowing me to attend the conference. We arrived after a long trip, first via train and plane to Vienna, then two days break (including research with a colleague), followed by a night train ride to Warsaw and another train ride to Torun and a taxi ride to Bachotek. All in all far too long to be done with a 14 month old girl. Finally arrived we went directly to our hut and found it freezing. Fortunately we could organize a heater so that the rest of the week we didn t have to live in 5-10 degrees
Our log house in Bachotek
The second day brought already the traditional bonfire. After a small (for Polish standard) dinner we ignored the rain and met at the fireplace for BBQ, beer, and lots of live music.
Bonfire on the second evening
The rain stopped during the bonfire, probably due to my horrible singing, and the following days we were blessed with sunshine and warmer temperatures. The forest sparked in all kinds of greens.
Sunny days in Bachotek
For our daughter the trip was a great experience lots of wild play grounds, many other kids, and a lake she really wanted to go swimming in. Normally I go swimming there, but this year I had a bad cold so I refrained from it, and with me also our daughter, to her great disappointment.
Ready to go swimming
Another day has passed, and the sunset lights up the beautiful lake Bachotek. I cannot imagine a better place for concentrated work paired with great relaxation!
Sunset along the lake
During the days the temperatures were really nice, but the mornings were cold, and our morning walk to the breakfast place was quite chilly.
Enjoying a fresh morning on the lake
Ample coffee breaks and lunch breaks left us enough time to discuss new developments. But the single most important thing that brought people to talk a lot was the horrible internet connection, a big plus in BachoTeX (but as far as rumors go it might have been the last time with that advantage!).
Beautiful and peaceful lake Bachotek
The last evening we had a banquet honoring 25 years of BachoTeX, one of the oldest TeX conference. Live music and dancing, lots of good food and drinks, and outside the perfect evening atmosphere.
Sunset around the lake
Too fast the time has passed and we had to return to Vienna, retracing the long trip. How far it may be, taking the burden to come from Japan is worth every drop of sweat, the time at BachoTeX is probably one of the most productive, and at the same time most relaxing for me. Big thanks to all our Polish friends for organizing the event.
BachoTeX conference photo

(photo by Frans Goddijn)


2 November 2014

Thomas Goirand: OpenStack packaging activity: October 2014

Wednesday 1:
Uploaded python-xstatic-jquery removing the .pth file from package.
Uploaded python-taskflow 0.4 to experimental, needed by Cinder Juno RC1
Uploaded Cinder Juno RC1 to experimental Thuesday 2:
Finally understood that the issue with murano-dashboard was that it doesn t build without django-nose >= 1.2. Opened new patch at: https://review.openstack.org/125565
Uploaded murano-dashboard to Experimental, now using django-nose from wheezy-backports in my jenkins setup, so murano-dashboard can be built for Wheezy.
Uploaded python-oslotest 1.1.0.0 (really is upstream 1.1.0)
Uploaded python-oslo.serialization 1.0.0-1 (needed by Ceilometer Juno RC1)
Uploaded Ceilometer Juno RC1
Uploaded Heat Juno RC1
Uploaded oslo.rootwrap 1.3.0.0
Uploaded oslo.db 1.0.2 (bugfix release)
Wrote a new system in openstack-pkg-tools to generate init scripts and. service files from a template, so we don t have to write N times the same thing. Friday 3:
Reworked openstack-pkg-tools to generate automatically sysv-rc init scripts, upstart jobs and systemd unit files, making the system more unified and consistent.
Applied the new system to all packages in Juno.
Uploaded Keystone 2014.1.3-1 to Sid
Uploaded Nova 2014.1.3-1 to Sid
Uploaded Glance 2014.1.3-1 to Sid
Uploaded Neutron 2014.1.3-1 to Sid
Uploaded Horizon 2014.1.3-1 to Sid
Uploaded Cinder 2014.1.3-1 to Sid
Uploaded Trove 2014.1.3-1 to Sid
Uploaded Ceilometer 2014.1.3-1 to Sid Saturday 4:
Uploaded Horizon Juno RC1 to Experimental
Uploaded oslotest 1.1.0.0 to Experimental
Uploaded Ironic Juno RC1 to Experimental
Uploaded Designate Juno RC1 to Experimental
Uploaded Nova Juno RC1 to Experimental
Uploaded Neutron Juno RC1 to Experimental
Uploaded openstack-meta-packages 0.10 to Sid
Uploaded openstack-pkg-tools 13 to Experimental
Uploaded murano-agent Juno RC1 to Experimental Sunday 5:
Uploaded Sahara Juno RC1 to Experimental (it s been approved by FTP masters)
Uploaded Murano Juno RC1 to Experimental (it s been approved by FTP masters)
Fixed all debian/watch file to understand ~b and ~rc releases (fixed applied on both Icehouse and Juno branches, though no upload yet, I ll wait until uploads are needed to have this in the archive ).
Uploaded Trove Juno RC1 to Experimental
Uploaded Sahara Juno RC1 to Experimental With this last upload, everything of Juno RC1 is in Debian Experimental! \o/ Monday 6:
Uploaded some fixes for Nova 2014.1.3-2 in Sid:
* Removed contrib/boto_v6/* in debian/copyright, replaced bin/nova-manage by nova/cmd/ baremetal_, manage.py.
* Mangling upstream rc and beta versions in watch file.
* Added 9990_update_german_programm_messages.patch, thanks to Helge Kreutzmann <debian@helgefjell.de>.
* Fixed correct de.po (Closes: #763682).
* Added nl.po initial Debconf translation, thanks to Frans Spiesschaert <Frans.Spiesschaert@yucom.be> (Closes: #764125).
* Standards-Version is now 3.9.6 (no change).
Upstreamed german translation of po file: https://review.openstack.org/126212
Uploaded Designate 2014.1-12 to Sid, added new de.po also to the Juno branch on alioth (but didn t upload the fix yet).
Uploaded sphinxcontrib-httpdomain new upstream 1.3.0 release, added Python 3.x support to the package, and transitionning to the correct namespaced python-sphinxcontrib.httpdomain package name.
Spent most of the day fixing python-xstatic issues:
o uploaded libjs-twitter-bootstrap-datepicker 1.3.1
o uploaded python-xstatic-bootstrap-datepicker requiring this libjs package
o fixed python-xstatic-jquery-ui package
Now Horizon Juno RC1 builds well, and can be installed again. \o/ Tuesday 7:
Backported python-libvirt 1.2.8 in Wheezy (for Nova Juno support )
Uploaded Ceilometer Juno RC1 with ceilometer-agent-ipmi added (the package will therefore go through the NEW queue).
Uploaded python-requestbuilder 0.2.2-1, needed by the maintainers of euca2ools.
Ported the unified generated init system scripts to Icehouse packages.
Uploaded to Sid updates for: openstack-pkg-tools, ceilometer, cinder, glance, keystone, cinder, nova. Wednesday 8:
Uploaded openstack-pkg-tools 16 to Sid
Uploaded murano-dashboard (with upstream fix to remove font-awesome, which was the reason for FTP master s rejection)
Uploaded ceilometer Juno RC1 with new IPMI agent package (needed for Ironic support).
Uploaded heat 2014.1.3 which I forgot.
Tested https://review.openstack.org/#/c/126777/ which solves the bug I sent to launchpad and approved the patch.
Uploaded python-requestbuilder 0.2.3 Thesday 9:
Worked on fixing Neutron Alembic migration with SQLite3.
Uploade Neutron 2014.2~rc1-3 with a fix for a patch that was destroying dhcp.py. This still doesn t include the Alembic migration fixes, which are still a WIP. Firday 10:
Finished fixing Neutron SQLite 3 Alembic migrations.
Uploaded neutron 2014.2~rc1-3 with the fixes.
Fixed Ceilometer wrong generation of sample config file, using upstream patch (after discussing with Julien Danjou so he wrote it).
Uploaded Ceilometer 2014.2~rc1-4 with the fix
Checked that all packages can be installed in non-interactive mode. This works well now! \o/ Saturday 11:
Uploaded new version of python-xstatic-angular-cookies (ie: 1.2.24.1-2) which allows a higher version of libjs-angularjs (otherwise the package is not installable in Sid/Jessie since last version of angularjs is uploaded). Sunday 12:
Uploaded factory-boy fix for FTBFS
Uploaded python-django-appconf FTBFS
Uploaded Horizon Juno RC2
Uploaded Heat Juno RC3
Uploaded Trove Juno RC2
Uploaded Glance Juno RC2
Uploaded Sahara Juno RC2
Uploaded Nova Juno RC2
Uploaded Neutron Juno RC2
Uploaded Cinder Juno RC2
Uploaded murano-dashboard Juno RC2 Monday 13:
Uploaded python-heatclient 0.2.12-1 to Experimental
Uploaded python-yaql with RC bugfix to Sid (missing dep on python3-ply). Thuesday 14:
Fixed arping newly added dependency in Neutron
Started testing install of all of openstack Juno at once Wednesday 15:
Fixed missing configuration files in Ceilometer (ceilometer-api couldn t start)
Upgraded to Ceilometer Juno RC3.
Backported python-setuptools, as keystone and others are broken due to the namespace of modules not working correctly with the old version of python-pkg-resources. With the new one, everything is back in order. Thesday 16:
Uploaded to Debian Experimental the final release of Juno (ie: 2014.2) for:
Sahara
Nova
Ceilometer
Cinder
Heat
Neutron
Glance
Keystone
Horizon (with fix for Django 1.7 in the wsgi file)
Uploaded to Sid:
Swift 2.2.0
Horizon 2014.1.3-3 with fix for Django 1.7 in the wsgi file that was crashing apache. OpenStack Juno packages are out!!! (ready the day of the upstream release ) Friday 17:
Investigated Trove RC bug #765348, couldn t reproduce, and therefore closed it.
Uploaded Ironic Juno final to Experimental
Uploaded Designate Juno final to Experimental
Uploaded a fix for python-jingo which failed to build with Django 1.7. Sent pull request upstream: https://github.com/jbalogh/jingo/pull/63
Uploaded CVE-2014-7230 & CVE-2014-7231 fixes for both Cinder and Nova in Debian Sid, as per OSSA 2014-036 patches. No need to upload a fix for Trove, as 2014.1.3 already has the fixes. Saturday 18:
Started building Trusty packages
Fixed oslo-config so that it never depends on python3-argparse, which doesn t exist (uploaded to Experimental)
Uploaded python-django-pyscss 1.0.3-2 with python-simplejson now as build-depends (it failed to build in my Trusty jenkins without it).
Uploaded a fix for stevedore and oslo-config to not depends on python3-argparse in Ubuntu (added debian/py3dist-overrides) Sunday 19:
Uploaded python-taskflow with ordereddict in debian/pydist-overrides.
Backported JS packages for Horizon and libvirt for Trusty (from Sid). My new Jenkin server is now producing a full set of Juno packages for Ubuntu trusty. And of course, it s updated on each git push, just like for the Wheezy backports. Monday 20:
Added FORCE_COULEUR=1 when running tests in python-couleur, so that it doesn t fail when running with git-buildpackage. Uploaded result in Sid.
Fixed python-mockito so that it never downloads distribute or nose on its clean target, which was annoying when running git-buildpackage. Uploaded to Sid.
Started to work again on automatic package deployment using openstack-deploy, from the openstack-meta-packages source package. Thuesday 21, Wednesday 22:
Worked on testing packages, did couples of minor fixes, reworked some of the default configuration files to match the install-guide, move configuration directive to the correct new section in nova.conf, etc. Thursday 23:
Patch the Neutron chapter in the install-guide to take into account the changes done on Thuesday 21, Wednesday 22, and simplify the install procedure in Debian. https://review.openstack.org/#/c/130501/ Friday 24:
Busy packing my stuff for moving to France Not much packaging work, except more auto-deploy stuff and some tests. Saturday 25:
Uploaded Nova, Neutron, Cinder and Horizon Icehouse in Sid, including some debconf translation updates, beating the Jessie freeze deadline in 10 days.
Fixed and uploaded openstack-debian-images in Sid: the login option wasn t modifying the default sudoers file, which always contained debian , instead of the custom login. Sunday 26:
Traveled to Moscow Monday 27 & Tuesday 28:
Fixed some murano & murano-dashboard stuff, thanks to the help of some murano team members in Moscow office. Uploaded fixes for murano & murano-dashboard. Tested that murano-dashboard works well, and now it does! :)
Uploaded version dependency fixes for python-xstatic-angular-cookies and python-xstatic-d3 which couldn t be installed in Sid/Jessie because of libjs-* updates. Wednesday 29:
Meeting with Saratov team
Updated sahara endpoints, but didn t upload the package yet to Debian. Thursday 30:
Uploaded ruby-raemon needed for Astute (part of Fuel web).
Packaged ruby-symboltable (not uploaded yet). Friday 31:
Wrote unit test runner for python-webpy (the current package doesn t have unit test runs).
Uploaded python-dbutils (needed by python-web.py unit tests) to Sid: now in NEW queue
Uploaded python-nose-parametrized & python-nose-timer to Sid: now in NEW queue
Uploaded sahara -2 fixing the API endpoint registration URL and service name.
Uploaded python-sphinxcontrib.plantuml to Sid: : now in NEW queue

17 August 2013

Andrew Cater: Debian - 20th birthday

Happy Birthday! Second oldest Linux distribution still going - Slackware is a little older. It's also been the bane of my life / my obsession / fixation and joy for about 15 of those years. I'm pleased and proud to be associated with the Debian Project as a Debian developer: many of my colleagues are at Debconf 13 in Vaumarcus in Switzerland right now but there will be celebrations around the world.

Great distribution: great hardware support on lots of architectures: huge numbers of derivatives - but what makes it is the people, including some of those who have contributed hugely but are sadly no longer with us. Debian is a phenomenal, supportive, family but, as ever, sometimes dysfunctional

Joel Klecker, Chris Rutter, Frans Pop, Adrian von Bidder and all the others - I so wish you'd all been here to see this.

12 May 2013

Ian Campbell: qcontrol 0.5.1

I've just released qcontrol 0.5.1. Changes since the last release: I also put together a very basic homepage. Get it from gitorious or http://www.hellion.org.uk/qcontrol/releases/0.5.1/. The Debian package will be uploaded shortly.

19 April 2012

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: People behind Debian: Samuel Thibault, working on accessibility and the Hurd

Samuel Thibault is a French guy like me, but it took years until we met. He tends to keep a low profile, even though he s doing lots of good work that deserves to be mentioned. He focuses on improving Debian s accessibility and contributes to the Hurd. Who said he s a dreamer? :-) Checkout his interview to have some news of Wheezy s status on those topics. Raphael: Who are you? Samuel: I am 30 years old, and live in Bordeaux, France. During the workday, I teach Computer Science (Architecture, Networking, Operating Systems, and Parallel Programming, roughly) at the University of Bordeaux, and conduct researches in heterogeneous parallel computing. During the evening, I play the drums and the trombone in various orchestra (harmonic/symphonic/banda/brass). During the night, I hack on whatever fun things I can find, mainly accessibility and the Hurd at the moment, but also miscellaneous bits such as the Linux console support. I am also involved in the development of Aquilenet, an associative ISP around Bordeaux, and getting involved in the development of the network infrastructure in Bordeaux. I am not practicing Judo any more, but I roller-skate to work, and I like hiking in the mountains. I also read quite a few mangas. Saturday mornings do not exist in my schedule (Sunday mornings do, it s Brass Band rehearsal :) ). Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Samuel: Bit by bit. I have been hacking around GNU/Linux since around 1998. I installed my first Debian system around 2000, as a replacement for my old Mandrake installation (which after all my tinkering was actually no longer looking like a Mandrake system any more!). That was Potato at the time, which somebody offered me through a set of CDs (downloading packages over the Internet was unthinkable at the time with the old modems). I have been happily reading and hacking around documentation, source code, etc. provided on them. Contribution things really started to take off when I went to the ENS Lyon high school in 2001: broadband Internet access in one s own student room! Since sending a mail was then really free, I started submitting bugs against various packages I was using. Right after that I started submitting patches along them, and then patches to other bugs. I did that for a long time actually. I had very little knowledge of all packaging details at the time, I was just a happy hacker submitting reports and patches against the upstream source code. At ENS Lyon, I met a blind colleague with very similar hacking tastes (of course we got friends) and he proposed me, for our student project, to work on a brlnet project (now called brlapi), a client/server protocol that lets applications render text on braille devices themselves. Along the way, I got to learn in details how a blind person can use a Unix system and the principles that should be followed when developing Accessibility. That is how I got involved in it. We presented our project at JDLL, and the Hurd booth happened to be next to our table, so I discussed with the Hurd people there about how the Hurd console could be used through braille. That is how I got into the Hurd too. From then on, I progressively contributed more and more to the upstream parts of both accessibility software and the Hurd. And then to the packaging part of them. Through patches in bug reports first, as usual, as well as through discussions on the mailing lists. But quickly enough people gave me commit access so I could just throw the code in. I was also given control over the Hurd buildds to keep them running. It was all good at that stage: I could contribute in all the parts I was caring about. People however started telling me that I should just apply for being a Debian Developer; both from accessibility and Hurd sides. I had also seen a bunch of my friends going through the process. I was however a bit scared (or probably it was just an excuse) by having to manage a gpg key, it seemed like a quite dangerous tool to me (even if I already had commit access to glibc at the time anyway ). I eventually applied for DM in 2008 so as to at least be able to upload some packages to help the little manpower of the Accessibility and Hurd teams. Henceforth I had already a gpg key, thus no excuse any more. And having it in the DM keyring was not enough for e.g. signing the hurd-i386 buildd packages. So I ended up going through NM in 2009, which went very fast, since I had already been contributing to Debian and learning all the needed stuff for almost 10 years! I now have around 50 packages in my QA page, and being a DD is actually useful for my work, to easily push our software to the masses :) So to sum it up, the Debian project is very easy to contribute to and open to new people. It was used during discussions at the GNU Hackers Meeting 2011 as an example of a very open community with public mailing lists and discussions. The mere fact that anybody can take the initiative of manipulating the BTS (if not scared by the commands) without having to ask anybody is an excellent thing to welcome contributions; it is notable tha the GNU project migrated to the Debbugs BTS. More generally, I don t really see the DD status as a must, especially now that we have the DM status (which is still a very good way to drag people into becoming DDs). For instance, I gave a talk at FOSDEM 2008 about the state of accessibility in Debian. People did not care whom I was, they cared that there was important stuff going on and somebody talking about it. More generally, decisions that are made through a vote are actually very rare. Most of the time, things just happen on the mailing lists or IRC channels where anybody can join the discussion. So I would recommend beginners to first use the software, then start reporting bugs, then start digging in the software to try fix the bugs by oneself, eventually propose patches, get them reviewed. At some point the submitted patches will be correct already most of the time. That s when the maintainers will start getting bored of just applying the patches, and simply provide with commit access, and voil , one has become a main contributor. Raphael: You re one of the main contributors to the Debian GNU/Hurd port. What motivates you in this project? Samuel: As I mentioned above, I first got real contact with the Hurd from the accessibility point of view. That initially brought me into the Hurd console, which uses a flexible design and nice interfaces to interact with it. The Hurd driver for console accessibility is actually very straightforward, way simpler than the Windows or Linux drivers. That is what caught me initially. I have continued working on it for several reasons. First, the design is really interesting for users. There are many things that are natural in the Hurd while Linux is still struggling to achieve them, such as UID isolation, recently mentioned in LWN. What I really like in the Hurd is that it excels at providing users with the same features as the administrator s. For instance, I find it annoying that I still can not mount an ISO image that I build on e.g. ries.debian.org. Linux now has FUSE which is supposed to permit that, but I have never seen it enabled on an ssh-accessible machine, only on desktop machines, and usually just because the administrator happens to be the user of the machine (who could as well just have used sudo ) For me, it is actually Freedom #0 of Free Software: let the user run programs for any purpose, that is, combining things together all the possible ways, and not being prevented from doing some things just because the design does not permit to achieve them securely. I had the chance to give a Hurd talk to explain that at GHM 2011, whose main topic was extensibility , I called it GNU/Hurd AKA Extensibility from the Ground, because the design of the Hurd is basically meant for extensibility, and does not care whether it is done by root or a mere user. All the tools that root uses to build a GNU/Hurd system can be used by the user to build its own GNU/Hurd environment. That is guaranteed by the design itself: the libc asks for things not to the kernel, but to servers (called translators), which can be provided by root, or by the user. It is interesting to see that it is actually also tried with varying success in GNU/Linux, through gvfs or Plash. An example of things I love being able to do is: $ zgrep foo ~/ftp://cdn.debian.net/debian/dists/sid/main/Contents-*.gz On my Hurd box, the ~/ftp: directory is indeed actually served by an ftpfs translator, run under my user uid, which is thus completely harmless to the system. Secondly and not the least, the Hurd provides me with interesting yet not too hard challenges. LWN confirmed several times that the Linux kernel has become very difficult to significantly contribute to, so it is no real hacking fun any more. I have notably implemented TLS support in the Hurd and the Xen and 64bit support in the GNU Mach kernel used by the Hurd. All three were very interesting to do, but were already done for Linux (at least for all the architectures which I actually know a bit and own). It happens that both TLS and Xen hacking experience became actually useful later on: I implemented TLS in the threading library of our research team, and the Xen port was a quite interesting line on my CV for getting a postdoc position at XenSource :) Lastly, I would say that I am used to lost causes :) My work on accessibility is sometimes a real struggle, so the Hurd is almost a kind of relief. It is famous for his vapourware reputation anyway, and so it is fun to just try to contribute to it nevertheless. An interesting thing is that the opinion of people on the Hurd is often quite extreme, and only rarely neutral. Some will say it is pure vapourware, while others will say that it is the hope of humanity (yes we do see those coming to #hurd, and they are not always just trolls!). When I published a 0.401 version on 2011 April 1st, the comments of people were very diverse, and some even went as far as saying that it was horrible of us to make a joke about the promised software :) Raphael: The FTPmasters want to demote the Hurd port to the debian-ports.org archive if it doesn t manage a stable release with wheezy. We re now at 2 months of the freeze. How far are you from being releasable ? Samuel: Of course, I can not speak for the Debian Release team. The current progress is however encouraging. During Debconf11, Michael Banck and I discussed with a few Debian Release team members about the kind of goals that should be achieved, and we are near completion of that part. The Debian GNU/Hurd port can almost completely be installed from the official mirrors, using the standard Debian Installer. Some patches need some polishing, but others are just waiting for being uploaded Debian GNU/Hurd can start a graphical desktop and run office tools such as gnumeric, as well as the iceweasel graphical web browser, KDE applications thanks to Pino Toscano s care, and GNOME application thanks to Emilio Pozuelo Monfort s care. Of course, general textmode hacking with gcc/make/gdb/etc. just works smoothly. Thanks to recent work on ghc and ada by Svante Signell, the archive coverage has passed 76%. There was a concern about network board driver support: until recently, the GNU Mach kernel was indeed still using a glue layer to embed the Linux 2.2 or even 2.0 drivers (!). Finding a network board supported by such drivers had of course become a real challenge. Thanks to the GSoC work of Zheng Da, the DDE layer can now be used to embed Linux 2.6.32 drivers in userland translators, which was recently ACCEPTed into the archive, and thus brings way larger support for network boards. It also pushes yet more toward the Hurd design: network drivers as userland process rather than kernel modules. That said, the freeze itself is not the final deadline. Actually, freeze periods are rests for porters, because maintainers stop bringing newer upstream versions which of course break on peculiar architectures. That will probably be helpful to continue improving the archive coverage. Raphael: The kfreebsd port brought into light all the packages which were not portable between different kernels. Did that help the Hurd port or are the problems too different to expect any mutual benefit? Samuel: The two ports have clearly helped each other in many aspects. The hurd-i386 port is the only non-Linux one that has been kept working (at least basically) for the past decade. That helped to make sure that all tools (dpkg, apt, toolchain, etc.) were able to cope with non-Linux ports, and keep that odd-but-why-not goal around, and evidently-enough achievable. In return, the kFreeBSD port managed to show that it was actually releasable, at least as a technological preview, thus making an example. In the daily work, we have sometimes worked hand in hand. The recent porting efforts of the Debian Installer happened roughly at the same time. When fixing some piece of code for one, the switch-case would be left for the other. When some code could be reused by the other, a mail would be sent to advise doing so, etc. In the packaging effort, it also made a lot of difference that a non-Linux port is exposed as released architecture: people attempted by themselves to fix code that is Linuxish for no real reason. The presence of the kFreeBSD is however also sometimes a difficulty for the Hurd: in the discussions, it sometimes tends to become a target to be reached, even if the systems are not really comparable. I do not need to detail the long history of the FreeBSD kernel and the amount of people hacking on it, some of them full-time, while the Hurd has only a small handful of free-time hackers. The FreeBSD kernel stability has already seen long-term polishing, and a fair amount of the Debian software was actually already ported to the FreeBSD kernel, thanks to the big existing pure-FreeBSD hackerbase. These do not hold for the GNU/Hurd port, so the expectations should go along. Raphael: You re also very much involved in the Debian Accessibility team. What are the responsibilities of this team and what are you doing there? Samuel: As you would expect it, the Debian Accessibility team works on packaging accessibility-related packages, and helping users with them; I thus do both. But the goal is way beyond just that. Actual accessibility requires integration. Ideally enough, a blind user should be able to just come to a Debian desktop system, plug his braille device, or press a shortcut to enable speech synthesis, and just use the damn computer, without having to ask the administrator to install some oddly-named package and whatnot. Just like any sighted user would do. He should be able to diagnose why his system does not boot, and at worse be able to reinstall his computer all by himself (typically at 2am ). And that is hard to achieve, because it means discussing about integration by default of accessibility features. For instance, the Debian CD images now beep during at the boot menu. That is a precious feature that has been discussed between debian-boot and debian-accessibility for a few weeks before agreeing on how to do it without too much disturbance. Similarly, my proposition of installing the desktop accessibility engines has been discussed for some time before being commited. What was however surprisingly great is that when somebody brought the topic back for discussion, non-debian-accessibility people answered themselves. This is reassuring, because it means things can be done durably in Debian. On the installation side, our current status is that the stable Debian installer has a high contrast color theme, and several years ago, I have pushed toward making standard CD images automatically detect braille devices, which permits standalone installation. I have added to the Wheezy installer some software speech synthesis (which again brought discussion about size increase vs versatility etc.) for blind people who do not have a braille device. I find it interesting to work on such topic in Debian rather than another distribution, because Debian is an upstream for a lot of distributions. Hopefully they just inherit our accessibility work. It at least worked for the text installer of Ubuntu. Of course, the Accessibility team is looking for help, to maintain our current packages, but also introduce new packages from the TODO list or create some backports. One does not need to be an expert in accessibility: tools can usually be tested, at least basically, by anybody, without particular hardware (I do not own any, I contributed virtual ones to qemu). For new developments and ideas, it is strongly recommended to come and discuss on debian-accessibility, because it is easy to get on a wrong track that does not bring actual accessibility. We still have several goals to achieve: the closest one is to just fix the transition to gnome3, which has been quite bad for accessibility so far :/ On the longer run, we should ideally reach the scenario I have detailed above: desktop accessibility available and ready to be enabled easily by default. Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Samuel: Debian is famous for its heated debian-devel discussions. And some people eventually say this no fun any more . That is exemplified in a less extreme way in the debian-boot/accessibility discussions that I have mentioned above. Sometimes, one needs to have a real stubborn thick head to continue the discussion until finding a compromise that will be accepted for commit. That is a problem because people do not necessarily have so much patience, and will thus prefer to contribute to a project with easier acceptance. But it is also a quality: as I explained above, once it is there, it is apparently for good. The Ubuntu support of accessibility in its installer has been very diverse, in part due to quite changing codebase. The Debian Installer codebase is more in a convergence process. Its base will have almost not changed between squeeze and wheezy. That allowed the Debian Accessibility team to continue improving its accessibility support, and not have to re-do it. A wiki page explains how to test its accessibility features, and some non-debian-accessibility people do go through it. A problem I am much more frightened by is the manpower in some core teams. The Debian Installer, grub, glibc, Xorg, gcc, mozilla derivatives, When reading the changelogs of these, we essentially keep seeing the same very few names over and over. And when one core developer leaves, it is very often still the same names which appear again to do the work. It is hard to believe that there are a thousand DDs working on Debian. I fear that Debian does not manage to get people to work on core things. I often hear people saying that they do not even dare thinking about putting their hands inside Xorg, for instance. Xorg is complex, but it seems to me that it tends to be overrated, and a lot of people could actually help there, as well as all the teams mentioned above. And if nobody does it, who will? Raphael: Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy? Samuel: That is an easy one :) Of course I wish that we manage to release the hurd-i386 port. I also wish that accessibility of gnome3 gets fixed enough to become usable again. The current state is worrying: so much has changed that the transition will be difficult for users already, the current bugs will clearly not help. I also hope to find the time to fix the qt-at-spi bridge, which should (at last!) bring complete KDE accessibility. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Samuel: Given the concerns I expressed above, I admire all the people who do spend time on core packages, even when that is really not fun everyday. Just to alphabetically name a few people I have seen so often here and there in the areas I have touched in the last few years: Aur lien Jarno, Bastian Blank, Christian Perrier, Colin Watson, Cyril Brulebois, Frans Pop, J rg Jaspert, Joey Hess, Josselin Mouette, Julien Cristau, Matthias Klose, Mike Hommey, Otavio Salvador, Petr Salinger, Robert Millan, Steve Langasek. Man, so many things that each of them works on! Of course this list is biased towards the parts that I touched, but people working in others core areas also deserve the same admiration.
Thank you to Samuel for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

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11 December 2011

Christian Perrier: New update about Debian Installer localization

Czech back to 100% in level 1 and 2, thus joining the hall of fame of full completeness. Dutch completes level 2 and also reaches the hall of fame. I take this as a specific wish for Frans Pop memory. Korean and Marathi complete level 1. Full stats are here Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files): Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.): Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader) So, full 100% completeness (hall of fame) for: Czech, Dutch, German, Persian, French, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak

3 November 2011

Joey Hess: the Engelbart demo

Just watched the whole Douglas Engelbart demo from 1968. Somehow I'd only heard of this as the first demo of the computer mouse, and only seen a brief clip on youtube. All three 30-minute reels of the film are available online, and well worth a watch in full. The mouse is the least of it, the demo includes an outlining text editor, model-view-controller, hypertext, wiki, domain specific programming languages, a precurser to email, bug tracking, version control(?), a chorded keyboard. (Ok, that last one didn't really take off.) Probably a dozen other things I've forgotten. All in a single interface, and all before I was born. Just like any tech demo, there are fumbles and mistakes, which is reassuring to anyone who has tried to give a tech demo. There's also the awesome crazy hack shown here. They could only afford these tiny, round CRTs, so they pointed a television camera at it, and the camera image was piped to their television console. (So add KVM switch to the list of firsts!) The demo was done in San Fransisco, with the computer system remote in Palo Alto, so in this image you see the text on the CRT overlaid with the video from the camera. Engelbart points out that the delay this added to the system acts as a short-term memory that filtered out flicker in the original display (and made the mouse have a mouse trail). To me it gives the whole demo a unique quality, as if it were underwater. Despite the piping around of audio and video signals, and the multiuser system, the glaring thing missing from the demo that we have these days is networking. Although there is this amusing bit at the end where they compile a regular expression and then apply it, in order to search for documents containing certain terms, and end up with a hyperlinked list of 10 results, ordered by relevance. Yes, think Google.

10 July 2011

Christian Perrier: 33094 spam posts removed from Debian mailing lists in two years

Debian mailing lists' standard policy is to allow posts from unsubscribed users. That of course fits our standards for opened development but has the drawback of allowing a lot of spam to reach our mailing lists. This spam also clutters the mailing lists archives. Since 2009, a working system allows removing spam from the mailing list archives. Today, I would like to put some light on the results of this system : Results are impressive for mailing lists where a coordinated effort is done over time: the debian-boot mailing list (first coorindated effort, initiated by regretted Frans Pop), the Italian and French mailing lists. You want to help? You can. Reporting spam is as easy as reading Debian mailing lists. When you see a mail that you consider being a spam mail, just bounce it to report-listspam at lists dot debian dotte org. Don't forward it, you need to bounce it ("b" keyboard shortcut in mutt). Alternatively, you can check for this message on Debian mailing lists archives and hit the "Report as spam" button. If you're a Debian developer, you can help in reviewing nominated spam. It takes me about 20 minutes every week. Go to the spam review home page and register for an account there. Then, you'll be able to process through nominated posts. Once a given post is confirmed as spam by at least 3 reviewers with nobody else reporting it as "ham", it is removed the next week from the archive. Feel free to join the game and be part of the Debian moppers team!

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:

14 April 2011

Timo Jyrinki: MeeGo Summit FI starts tomorrow

I'm participating in the MeeGo Summit FI that starts tomorrow, and I'm already in Tampere now, as you can see. The summit is at an interesting time, given that there is a huge amount of stuff happening around MeeGo while at the same time Nokia is balancing on what do both in the far future and what to do to ship the MeeGo device they've already promised. The summit is fully and overly booked for >300 attendees. There is also Finhack free software event happening alongside on Saturday at the same venue.

A view towards the venue(s), Finlayson area in Tampere.
The company I work for, Nomovok's CEO illustrated the MeeGo situation extraordinarily well a little less than two months ago. I think it's one of the best insights you can get from anywhere in public at the moment. Now things are starting to really heat up. Of course the Big thing is the MeeGo Conference in San Francisco in the end of May, but it takes nothing away from this being the major event both in the country formerly known as NokiaLandia, and also globally given the amount of MeeGo related talent here. Nomovok is teasing people with the SteelRat - a launchpad for MeeGo tablet creation and an UX, based on latest MeeGo Core - a beta of which will be available now in Tampere and first version in San Fransisco. Meanwhile we and others are investing in also the MeeGo IVI and MeeGo TV platforms, not forgetting about the handset industry that is more visible to many tech savvy consumers.

Pre-registration and building on-going.
At the same time there is a lot of exciting stuff going on in the Ubuntu project (Ubuntu 11.04 upcoming, I'm already using it and reporting bugs), together with Linaro and other ARM players. As a founder of Ubuntu Finland I'm always eager to see if I can work there also on work time, not only on free time. And regarding ARM, Nomovok is the key player in having ARM on MeeGo as well.

Then on the completely other end of spectrum, I'm eagerly waiting for the GTA04 project to have my Neo FreeRunner(s) bumped up to modern specs. At the end of the day I'm still using over 2,5 year old phone myself, since I want to run the software that is both free and completely selected (and if I want, done) by me. With GTA04, I could choose between MeeGo armv7hl port, Debian armhf port or Ubuntu as the base distribution to use my software.

20 March 2011

Christian Perrier: Current work in Debian

Now that I sent an update about my running activities, I have to report about what I'm doing these weeks in Debian to try keeping a fair balance for those of you who read this blog through Planet Debian. Most January was spent in preparing the release of squeeze. Of course, I didn't work directly on the release, not being involved in the release team. However, last bits of preparation for Debian Installer as well as rushing out the last remaining bits of localization work took most of my time. After the release of squeeze, time came to resume back some activities. First of all, on the l10n front, I resumed the work on "l10n NMUs", trying to get old l10n bugs fixed. I restarted proposing NMUs or, more precisely, help to perform translation updates rounds to these maintainers. Most of them had "old" l10n bugs because of the freeze. So, I indeed did not end up in doing many NMUs...but got several l10n bugs closed anyway. Work being resumed in unstable also lead to many changes in packages' debconf templates (new packages using debconf, packages introducing new templates, etc.). As these are the trigger for Smith reviews (reviews of English in debconf templates and packages' description, this activity, which was very low during the freeze, resumed again (we'll soon celebrate the 4th anniversary of this project). I also decided to invest more time in D-I again. The D-I team is currently more active than it was last years. Thanks to a few individual, work resumed in some areas and bug triaging has been very active. I recently resyned a nice improvement which had been contributed by a user to iso-scan, then polished by Frans Pop. This will allow to choose among several different ISO images when installing Debian from a USB stick while, previously, only the first found was being used. I also worked with a new translator, to prepare the activation of Uyghur translation in D-I. Some work happend in the pkg-fonts team. I had a few fonts adopted by the team, as part of the general effort to get rid of defoma. I sent patches for a few others, but many remain. If you maintain font packages, please help us in getting rid of defoma. Changes are easy to do; ask the team if you need help (pkg-fonts-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org). Samba packages also ate a significant part of my time. First of all, DSA-2175 lead to prepare fixes for samba in squeeze and lenny. Then, upstream released samba 3.5.8 which I uploaded to unstable. I briefly considered trying to get the Stable Release managers approval to push that version in squeeze, but the number of fixes made by upstream was discouraging. So, I chose to examine them slowly and cherry-pick those I consider important enough to warrant an upload for squeeze. More git wizardry learned doing so (thanks to Julien Cristau for his help). And I now have a pending proposal for three of these fixes (that represent 14 atomic patches from upstream) to be included in squeeze.

3 March 2011

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: People behind Debian: Christian Perrier, translation coordinator

Christian is a figure of Debian, not only because of the tremendous coordination work that he does within the translation project, but also because he s very involved at the social level. He s probably in the top 5 of the persons who attended most often the Debian conference. Christian is a friend (thanks for hosting me so many times when I come to Paris for Debian related events) and I m glad that he accepted to be interviewed. He likes to speak and that shows in the length of his answers :-) but you ll be traveling the world while reading him. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Christian. Who are you? I am a French citizen (which is easy to guess unless you correct my usual mistakes in what follows). I m immensely proud of being married for nearly 26 years with Elizabeth (who deserves a statue from Debian for being so patient with my passion and my dedication to the project). I m also the proud father of 3 wonderful kids , aged 19 to 23. I work as team manager in the Networks and Computers Division of Onera the French Aerospace lab , a public research institute about Aeronautics, Space and Defense. My team provides computer management services for research divisions of Onera, with a specific focus put on individual computing. I entered the world of free software as one of the very first users of Linux in France. Back in the early 1990 s, I happened (though the BBS users communities) to be a friend of several early adopters of Linux and/or BSD386/FreeBSD/NetBSD in France. More specifically, I discovered Linux thanks with my friend Ren Cougnenc (all my free software talks are dedicated to Ren , who passed away in 1996). You re not a programmer, not even a packager. How did you come to Debian? I m definitely not a programmer and I never studied computing (I graduated in Materials Science and worked in that area for a few years after my PhD). However, my daily work always involved computing (I redesigned the creep testing laboratory and its acquisition system all by myself during my thesis research work). An my hobbies often involved playing with home computers, always trying to learn about something new. So, first learning about a new operating system then trying to figure out how to become involved in its development was quite a logical choice. Debian is my distro of choice since it exists. I used Slackware on work machines for a while, but my home server, kheops, first ran Debian 1.1 when I stopped running a BBS on an MS-DOS machine to host a news server. That was back in October 1996. I then happened to be a user, and more specifically a user of genealogy software, also participating very actively in Usenet from this home computer and server, that was running this Debian thing. So, progressively, I joined mailing lists and, being a passionate person, I tried to figure out how I could bring my own little contribution to all this. This is why I became a packager (yes, I am one!) by taking over the geneweb package, which I was using to publish my genealogy research. I applied as DD in January 2001, then got my account in July 2001. My first upload to the Debian archive occurred on August 22nd 2001: that was of course geneweb, which I still maintain. Quite quickly, I became involved in the work on French localization. I have always been a strong supporter of localized software (I even translated a few BBS software back in the early 90 s) as one of the way to bring the power and richness of free software to more users. Localization work lead me to work on the early version of Debian Installer, during those 2003-2005 years where the development of D-I was an incredibly motivating and challenging task, lead by Joey Hess and his inspiring ideas. From user to contributor to leader, I suddenly discovered, around 2004, that I became the coordinator of D-I i18n (internationalization) without even noticing :-) You re the main translation coordinator in Debian. What plans and goals have you set for Debian Wheezy? As always: paint the world in red. Indeed, this is my goal for years. I would like our favorite distro to be able to be used by anyone in the world, whether she speaks English, Northern Sami, Wolof, Uyghur or Secwepemcts n. As a matter of symbol, I use the installer for this. My stance is that one should be able to even install Debian in one s own language. So, for about 7 years, I use D-I as a way to attract new localization contributors. This progress is represented on this page where the world is gradually painted in red as long as the installer supports more languages release after release. The map above tries to illustrate this by painting in red countries when the most spoken language in the country is supported in Debian Installer. However, that map does not give enough reward to many great efforts made to support very different kind of languages. Not only various national languages, but also very different ones: all regional languages of Spain, many of the most spoken languages in India, minority languages such as Uyghur for which an effort is starting, Northern Sami because it is taught in a few schools in Norway, etc., etc. Still, the map gives a good idea of what I would like to see better supported: languages from Africa, several languages in Central Asia. And, as a very very personal goal, I m eagerly waiting for support of Tibetan in Debian Installer, the same way we support its sister language, Dzongkha from Bhutan. For this to happen, we have to make contribution to localization as easy as possible. The very distributed nature of Debian development makes this a challenge, as material to translate (D-I components, debconf screens, native packages, packages descriptions, website, documentation) is very widely spread. A goal, for years, is to set a centralized place where translators could work easily without even knowing about SVN/GIT/BZR or having to report bugs to send their work. The point, however, would be to have this without making compromises on translation quality. So, with peer review, use of thesaurus and translation memory and all such techniques. Tools for this exist: we, for instance, worked with the developers of Pootle to help making it able to cope with the huge amount of material in Debian (think about packages descriptions translations). However, as of now, the glue between such tools and the raw material (that often lies in packages) didn t come. So, currently, translation work in Debian requires a great knowledge of how things are organized, where is the material, how it can be possible to make contribution reach packages, etc. And, as I m technically unable to fulfill the goal of building the infrastructure, I m fulfilling that role of spreading out the knowledge. This is how I can define my coordinator role. Ubuntu uses a web-based tool to make it easy to contribute translations directly in Launchpad. At some point you asked Canonical to make it free software. Launchpad has been freed in the mean time. Have you (re)considered using it? Why not? After all, it more or less fills in the needs I just described. I still don t really figure out how we could have all Debian material gathered in Rosetta/Launchpad .and also how Debian packagers could easily get localized material back from the framework without changing their development processes. I have always tried to stay neutral wrt Ubuntu. As many people now in Debian, I feel like we have reached a good way to achieve our mutual development. When it comes at localization work, the early days where the everything in Rosetta and translates who wants stanza did a lot of harm to several upstream localization projects is, I think, way over. Many people who currently contribute to D-I localization were indeed sent to me by Ubuntu contributors .and by localizing D-I, apt, debconf, package descriptions, etc., they re doing translation work for Ubuntu as well as for Debian. Let s say I m a Debian user and I want to help translate Debian in my language. I can spend 1 hour per week on this activity. What should I do to start? Several language teams use Debian mailing lists to coordinate their work. If you re lucky enough to be a speaker of one of these languages, try joining debian-l10n-<yourlanguage> and follow what s happening there. Don t try to immediately jump in some translation work. First, participate to peer reviews: comment on others translations. Learn about the team s processes, jargon and habits. Then, progressively, start working on a few translations: you may want to start with translations of debconf templates: they are short, often easy to do. That s perfect if you have few time. If no language team exists for your language, try joining debian-i18n and ask about existing effort for your language. I may be able to point you to individuals working on Debian translations (very often along with other free software translation efforts). If I am not, then you have just been named coordinator for your language :-) I may even ask you if you want to work on translating the Debian Installer. What s the biggest problem of Debian? We have no problems, we only have solutions :-) We are maybe facing a growth problem for a few years. Despite the increased welcoming aspects of our processes (Debian Maintainers), Debian is having hard times in growing. The overall number of active contributors is probably stagnating for quite a while. I m still amazed, however, to see how we can cope with that and still be able to release over the years. So, after all, this is maybe not a problem :-) Many people would point communication problems here. I don t. I think that communication inside the Debian project is working fairly well now. Our famous flame wars do of course still happen from time to time, but what large free software project doesn t have flame wars? In many areas, we indeed improved communication very significantly. I want to take as an example the way the release of squeeze has been managed. I think that the release team did, even more this time, a very significant and visible effort to communicate with the entire project. And the release of squeeze has been a great success in that matter. So, there s nearly nothing that frustrates me in Debian. Even when a random developer breaks my beloved 100% completeness of French translations, I m not frustrated for more than 2 minutes. You re known in the Debian community as the organizer of the Cheese & Wine Party during DebConf. Can you tell us what this is about? This is an interesting story about how things build themselves in Debian. It all started in July 2005, before DebConf 5 in Helsinki. Denis Barbier, Nicolas Fran ois and myself agreed to bring at Debconf a few pieces of French cheese as well as 1 or 2 bottles of French wine and share them with some friends. Thus, we settled an informal meeting in the French room where we invited some fellows: from memory, Benjamin Mako Hill, Hannah Wallach, Matt Zimmermann and Moray Allan. All of us fond of smelly cheese, great wine plus some extra p t home-made by Denis in Toulouse. It finally happened that, by word of mouth, a few dozens of other people slowly joined in that French room and turned the whole thing into an improvized party that more or less lasted for the entire night. The tradition was later firmly settled in 2006, first in Debconf 6 in Mexico where I challenged the French DDs to bring as many great cheese as possible, then during the Debian i18n meeting in Extremadura (Sept 2006) where we reached the highest amount of cheese per participant ever. I think that the Creofonte building in Casar de C ceres hasn t fully recovered from it and is still smelling cheese 5 years after. This party later became a real tradition for DebConf, growing over and over each year. I see it as a wonderful way to illustrate the diversity we have in Debian, as well as the mutual enrichment we always felt during DebConfs. My only regret about it is that it became so big over the years that organizing it is always a challenge and I more and more feel pressure to make it successful. However, over the years, I always found incredible help by DebConf participants (including my own son, last year a moment of sharing which we will both remember for years, i think). And, really, in 2010, standing up on a chair, shouting (because the microphone wasn t working) to thank everybody, was the most emotional moment I had at Debconf 10. Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? So many people. So, just like it happens in many awards ceremonies, I will be very verbose to thank people, sorry in advance for this. The name that comes first is Joey Hess. Joey is someone who has a unique way to perceive what improvements are good for Debian and a very precise and meticulous way to design these improvements. Think about debconf. It is designed for so long now and still reaching its very specific goal. So well designed that it is the entire basis for Joey s other achievement: designing D-I. Moreover, I not only admire Joey for his technical work, but also for his interaction with others. He is not he loudest person around, he doesn t have to .just giving his point in discussion and, guess what? Most of the time, he s right. Someone I would like to name here, also, is Colin Watson. Colin is also someone I worked with for years (the D-I effect, again ) and, here again, the very clever way he works on technical improvements as well as his very friendly way to interact with others just make it. And, how about you, Rapha l? :-) I m really admirative of the way you work on promoting technical work on Debian. Your natural ability to explain things (as good in English as it is in French) and your motivation to share your knowledge are a great benefit for the project. Not to mention the technical achievements you made with Guillem on dpkg of course! Another person I d like to name here is Steve Langasek. We both maintain samba packages for years and collaboration with him has always been a pleasure. Just like Colin, Steve is IMHO a model to follow when it comes at people who work for Canonical while continuing their involvment in Debian. And, indeed, Steve is so patient with my mistakes and stupid questions in samba packaging that he deserves a statue. We re now reaching the end of the year where Stefano Zacchiroli was the Debian Project Leader. And, no offense intended to people who were DPL before him (all of them being people I consider to be friends of mine), I think he did the best term ever. Zack is wonderful in sharing his enthusiasm about Debian and has a unique way to do it. Up to the very end of his term, he has always been working on various aspects of the project and my only hope is that he ll run again (however, I would very well understand that he wants to go back to his hacking activities!). Hat off, Zack!I again have several other people to name in this Bubulle hall of Fame : Don Armstrong, for his constant work on improving Debian BTS, Margarita Manterola as one of the best successes of Debian Women (and the most geeky honeymoon ever), Denis Barbier and Nicolas Fran ois because i18n need really skilled people, Cyril Brulebois and Julien Cristau who kept X.org packaging alive in lenny and squeeze, Otavio Salvador who never gave up on D-I even when we were so few to care about it. I would like to make a special mention for Frans Pop. His loss in 2010 has been a shock for many of us, and particularly me. Frans and I had a similar history in Debian, both mostly working on so-called non technical duties. Frans has been the best release manager for D-I (no offense intended, at all, to Joey or Otavio .I know that both of them share this feeling with me). His very high involvment in his work and the very meticulous way he was doing it lead to great achievements in the installer. The Installation Guide work was also a model and indeed a great example of non technical work that requires as many skills as more classical technical work. So, and even though he was sometimes so picky and, I have to admit, annoying, that explains why I m still feeling sad and, in some way, guilty about Frans loss. One of my goals for wheezy is indeed to complete some things Frans left unachieved. I just found one in bug #564441: I will make this work reach the archive, benefit our users and I know that Frans would have liked that.
Thank you to Christian for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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17 January 2011

Joey Hess: the conversion

It's summer in Spain, and outside there's a dry heat, but in the hack lab, it's frigid. I'm sitting across the table from Otavio, and each of our laptops is showing the same identical screen of text, editing the same file. Slowly. The file is located in Colorado, and we're fighting serious conference lag, plus transatlantic lag. Type a few lines, wait a minute, hope it shows up, and restart the converter to see if it worked. We're struggling with figuring out how to make it work, and pair programming across the table like this helps -- although we also struggle with each others accents sometimes, so we're eventually mostly communicating via text on the computers. Eventually Otavio rolls off to bed. Later, everyone else in the conference goes to bed or whatever -- I don't really notice. At some point a cleaning woman comes in, and seems suprised to see me. I muster up enough Spanish to ask if this muy fio air conditioning can be turned off. A bit later, I make this commit and then go out, look at storks in early morning light, and go to bed.
r59731   joeyh   2009-07-24 12:30:52 -0400 (Fri, 24 Jul 2009)   1 line
up to r15000; also skip the packages/po accient revs
That would have been 6 am local time. The log shows us back at it by 11 am local. There's so much detail in these logs, and it's hard to tell how any individual bit will turn out useful, but the value in aggregate is undeniable and that's why we struggle to retain it as technology marches on.
A few days later and the conversion is caught up to the commits documenting it. Everyone goes home. Later still, and work is done to verify the conversion. Problems are found, fixed. The worst of them involves the Danish language, and absolute evil. Tempers flare, and I have the last argument I'll ever have the pleasure of having with Frans. At some point in there, I do rather more coding in C++ than I ever have before, or ever wanted to. Frans's objections are addressed by that, more or less. We're using a weird tool that was developed as a kind of one-off for another project, but happens to meet our needs pretty well -- but we're stuck dealing with its bugs. And its need for copious handholding and historical research. The file we started out editing grows to two thousand lines, and now covers ten years of odd bits of history.
Suddenly it's a year and a half later. I'm in a cabin in winter, Otavio is down in summer, and I'm once again dealing with lag (dialup lag this time). We run the converter again -- one last time. And a time more.. and four or five more "last times". Finally, after a longish day, it's done.
This was not a major project, just some little bits of time here and there, maybe a week's worth in total, spread out over a few years and four or five people. It hardly seems worth writing about, just another codebase converted from Subversion to Git, a bit behind most of the other ones. Just thought I'd give you a glimpse behind the curtain.

6 November 2010

Debian News: The first beta of the Debian Installer 6.0 has been released

The Debian Installer team has announced the first beta release of the installer for Debian GNU/Linux Squeeze. This release is dedicated to Frans Pop who recently passed away.

The list of improvements and changes is listed in the announcement and the installer can be downloaded from the Debian-Installer website.

31 October 2010

Christian Perrier: Debian Installer beta1 released

Otavio Salvador announced the release of the beta1 version of Debian Installer, the installation system for Debian. This release is made in preparation of the overall release of Debian Squeeze. It should be followed soon by another release ("Release Candidate", probably) with a full localization update (that involves building/uploading all packages to get localization changes in). That release is dedicated to Frans Pop, who worked for two years as Debian Installer release manager and continued to bring very significant contributions to D-I later on.

2 September 2010

Wouter Verhelst: Frans Pop

I'm shocked to learn that Frans has died. Even more shocked to learn that, due to me sitting with my head in the sand, I almost missed it. You'll be missed, Frans. I didn't always agree with you or your methods, but I deeply respected you for who you were, what you did, and what you were willing to do. May you rest in peace.

1 September 2010

Amaya Rodrigo: Dear Frans

You will be missed so much. You were kind, you were fun to be around.
It is a privilege to have met you. Debian is privileged for the effort and time you put in it.
Your contribution will remain with us and will inspire others for a long time.
You made a difference in this world, one that will last and outlive you. I can only thank you.

Rest in peace, my brother. See you at the other side of the Firewall, and thanks for all the FLOSS ;)

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