/me has moved to Paris Well, this is not really an "I'm moving" post, but rather a "I've moved" post: starting from past Tuesday I'm now living in Paris. I will be working as a post-doc in the mancoosi project, which is a wonderful occasion to merge my research work with my free software enthusiasm. I've also submitted a talk proposal about mancoosi for DebConf8, ... it will be a good occasion to chat about it if you are interested. My office is in the PPS lab, which was already quite packed of Debianers, /me is just one more, happy to join the crowd! The first day of shopping in Paris forces me to post a picture on the very same lines of Enrico's "how to freak out a French person". Mine below can be titled how to freak out an inhabitant of Modena: Here you are: balsamic vinegar flavoured with figs or honey ..., tasty eh? (dedicated to gareuselesinge) PS unfortunately at home I'm still without network connectivity (unless you count poorly working, up 1 random hour per day, stolen wi-fi as connectivity), so I won't be able to work on Debian et al. a lot from home in the next few weeks.

Figures About SVN-Maintained Packages For fun and profit I and gares have just harvested a bit alioth to discover how many packages are currently maintained using subversion. The overall result is larger than I expected 3492 source packages (to be compared with 11786 total packages in unstable) are maintained using Subversion. The numbers might be a bit approximated, I report what we did to extract these number for review. The number of subversion-ed source packages have been computed running on alioth the script harvest source fields.sh (which in turn uses svnlook grep.py) its stdout can be redirected to a .txt file. Once sorted and removed of duplicates you will get something like source pkgs on svn.txt; its length approximates the number of source packages maintained via svn:

$ wc -l source_pkgs_on_svn.txt
3493

The approximation is due to the fact that debian/control are looked for everywhere in a repository, hence it can find old packages no longer in the archive or never uploaded, and some fake package (like "MODULE NAME", but it seems to be the only one). The amount of packages which are in the above list but not in the archive is about 900 packages. Still I don't think it would be fair to exclude all of them since I guess a non trivial part of that are packages that haven't yet uploaded and hence are arguably part of the active development of Debian. Excluding them, the percentage of unstable maintained using SVN on alioth is about 22%. To that you should add the packages maintained using other version control systems. The total number of source packages in unstable have been computed on my laptop as follows:

$ cd /var/lib/apt/lists/
$ ls *Sources
ftp.it.debian.org_debian_dists_unstable_contrib_source_Sources
ftp.it.debian.org_debian_dists_unstable_main_source_Sources
ftp.it.debian.org_debian_dists_unstable_non-free_source_Sources
security.debian.org_dists_testing_updates_contrib_source_Sources
security.debian.org_dists_testing_updates_main_source_Sources
$ cat *Sources   grep ^Package:   sort -u   wc -l
11786

The broader goal was to discover how many packages are maintained using any versioning system on alioth, but we were fluent only in svn internals. Dear lazyweb, feel free to harvest and forward to me your data for the other versioning systems available on alioth, I'll keep this post updated with news.