I am very happy that 19 contributors who were waiting for their accounts, sometimes for a very long time, became Debian Developers today. This is great news for them, and for the project as a whole. Many thanks to all people involved for making this possible, including Joerg Jaspert, Steve McIntyre and James Troup. And congratulations to (using their account names) kibi, plessy, gregoa, goneri, tincho, akumar, filipe, miriam and the others I haven’t had the chance to work with yet. It also seems that the various pending issues (updating keys that expired, etc.) have been resolved, which is great news for several of our current DDs. But this doesn’t solve the DAM problem on a permanent basis. Something interesting about today’s events is that the account manager asked the system administrators to create the accounts, which is a nice way to offload part of the process. But the keyring maintainance is still a SPOF. A tool has been developed to allow multiple people to collaboratively edit the same keyring (and it’s used to maintain the Debian Maintainers keyring), but I’ve heard that some people weren’t satisfied with it, unfortunately. Let’s hope that this is solved soon, so the next ones to go through NM won’t have to wait that long!

Even if i don't like talking about this in public, Lucas Nussbaum blog entry decides me to write this, because I, too, agree that the Debian accounts and keyring situation is severely hurting Debian, and that a solution needs to be found RSN. I wish to be more clear on some of my positions concerning this. First of all, I am actually being hit by a "GPG key expired" status that prevents me to vote and upload packages. It is a little bit my fault because 1) i set an expiration date on my GPG and 2) i only update this expiration date in keyring.debian.org less than 1 month before it expires -- but it was more than 3 months ago... I have pinged different people since then to get the keyring updated without success. I have reuploaded my key without expiration date, and now i know that things can take a long time inside Debian (2nd rank after waiting for my own Debian account creation). Another point is concerning DM (Debian Maintainer). I was against the proposal when it was voted, because i was thinking it will create a "sub" status of Debian Developper (i.e people which are in between debian users and debian developers). I have changed my mind concerning this point the DM process is lightweight and everything seems to be faster with it. This is a really good points for DM (and jetring). I am also considering to sponsor myself to apply to DM, in order to have a non-expired GPG key somewhere. Last but not least, i met several French NM at DebConf 7 (Kibi, Goneri...). At that time, i didn't know them. Since DC7, I have seen them working on different parts of Debian. I think it is a shame to make them wait so long. It is really the best way to make their motivations disappear. Looking back at my own situation, i realize that i was more active before my account creation. This is probably because it takes a long time to process, and i loose hope in a possible account creation. I am now more active in Debian, but still not doing as much as i want to. I don't know the best solution to solve this problem. I tend to think that some key people should delegate their work to other DD (within a team ?). Last year at DC7, Sam Hocevar was already discussing this problem with the people involved in Account Creation. I don't know what was the result of this discussion... Hope, this post will help to show that this problem is important.

Buggy Vcs-Svn fields around My statistics flu continues (oh, BTW, don't worry, I'll be quiet again on planet RSN). This time I wanted to check how many packages are maintained using some Version Control System in Debian, but at the same time are not declaring a proper Vcs-XXX field in their debian/controls. With the help of Goneri and the svnbuildstat I've managed to cross the data used to actually build nightly packages from subversion repositories with the Vcs-XXX fields declared in Debian source packages. The outcome is yet another daily updated page which lists packages which are missing Vcs-Svn field and/or declare a wrong one (i.e. one which is not in sync with what svnbuildstat is using to build the package). You might want to have a look to the corresponding dd-list to see if some of your packages need to be fixed. Several of mine do for example ... Oh, of course the check is limited to what svnbuildstat knows. If you want to be checked it's a good idea to ask for the addition of your repository to svnbuildstat.

CakePHP is a nice MVC framework for PHP. Yes, like Catalyst or Ruby on Rails. It has its own DB abstraction layer and two weeks ago, I had to create a models mapping. Our DB has about 20 tables and for each a them, a file was needed to describe its relationship with the rest of the DB. I far as I know CakePHP doesn’t provide a tool for that and so I did mine : cakephp_create_model.pl You’ll need to respect the CakePHP convention for your DB and to edit the top of the file to change the DB authentification informations.

$./cakephp_create_model.pl
Writing destinataire.php
(…)
Writing etat.php

The script can’t detect one to one relationship, you’ll have to add them yourself.

After Ubuntu and Fedora, it’s time to regularise your Debian installation. Please help us by providing evidence to fight piracy.. Breaking News
Hundreds of Debian customers provide evidence to help FBI and China s Public Security Bureau crack $2 billion global software counterfeiting syndicate. The svg file.

I think SvnBuildStat is reasonably stable now. Feel free to contact me ( goneri on IRC ) if you want to add your Alioth project.

Collab-maint never ceases to amaze me. And Subversion, too (all dvcs fans, stop now! I know, I use darcs, is cool). I always find more and more interesting this about Subversion.

And, no, this is not about Subversion or some VCS, is about integration of services. We need more of that. generally speaking. I am also thinking about look and feel of different services (BTW, I have found a nice pretext to motivate my halt on the work for the Debian wiki theme :-D - see current state of work, if you care).


Why did I wrote this? I had this conversation (trimmed for the sake of brevity):

goneri wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 03:42:56AM +0200, Eddy Petri or wrote:

>> goneri-guest@users.alioth.debian.org wrote:

>>> -use lib "/usr/share/svn-buildpackage";
>>> +#use lib "/usr/share/svn-buildpackage";

> Yes, you're right.
>
> How do you have the commit messages?

I subscribed in PTS - see "Subscription - Package Tracking System" and choose "Adanced Mode"
instead of "Subscribe", check the corresponding check boxes  ;-)  .

/me will blog about this.

Debian Games won a status page : http://nana.rulezlan.org/~goneri/pkg-games/. I expect it to help us improve the global quality. Currently we need DD interested in sponsoring. Feel free to contact us if you’re interested.

Today Ludo pointed me on this picture from Flickr:

I’m famous .