The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Henry-Nicolas Tourneur (hntourne)
• Nick Black (dank)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Jan Moj
• Philip Wyett
• Thomas Ward
• Fabio Fantoni
• Mohammed Bilal
• Guilherme de Paula Xavier Segundo

Congratulations!

The last few days have been quite difficult for me and right now I feel like a looser and winner at the same time as I never did before. In a way I feel that I won, since our platforms were so similar my ideas weren't that bad then and the project ack'ed that. The other side is that I'm just above NOTA and not closer to sam.

Anyway, I've already offered more help to the project (that refused) and for Sam. Time to go back to the shadows and keep co-maintaining more than 150 packages that you love to use, and maybe start more two or three subprojects... Thanks for those who voted for me, I hope to see you all during the next debconf and Guilherme, for working hard to keep my act together.

Dear lazyweb,

• I've tried to avoid join or start flamewars in the Debian mailing lists. I think i managed this task very well.
• Based on my experience into pkg-perl, i had the idea to start a related Python project since there were a lot of Python modules out there and just a few packaged. I've founded python-modules with Guilherme Pastore (pkg-python name wasn't available) and we were joined by Raphael Hertzog some time later.
• I had the idea and talked with Otavio Salvador in Brasilia, Brazil during a cluster, linux and FOSS community gov't related event about the ltsp status in Debian and how it would be cool start a project in cooperation with Ubuntu. We've founded pkg-ltsp and had a online meeting at #ltsp were ogra and mdz (from Ubuntu fame) participated too. Since then, ltsp in Debian is way better than it was. I did technically way less than i could to the project itself, but i've an entire year to fix this. Thanks vagrantc and pere too for all the hard work and help.
• Merged debian-desktop development page, mailing list and alioth project in a focused thing with permission of the founders and was joined by pkg-gnome, pkg-kde, pkg-xfce, pkg-galago and tasksel members. The group did some great stuff together and it was just a restart.
• Worked very hard on Custom Debian Distributions camp, specially with Vagrant Cascardian on Simple-CDD for Etch.
• Joined pkg-gnome, tasksel and a lot (really) others projects that i did my best to help.
• I did my first security upload.

Looking back, what a insane year, but not due to the Debian related stuff that was fun to do, to say the least. Anyway, i hope to write similar stuff in the next year but with a even more exciting content. Thanks for those that helped me and those who did something for Debian in the past year. See you!

I haven't heard too many people asking if GNOME 2.16 will make etch. Maybe everyone just assumes it will, because the latest transitions have been pretty good, or maybe everyone just assumes it won't because nobody would expect Debian to ship with a current GNOME release, right? Or maybe Debian is immerse in what looks like the beginnings of a civil war, and that is more interesting. The Debian GNOME team has been preemtively working on GNOME 2.16, though, as the release clock is ticking. Lo c has spent a big amount of time revamping the packaging of GTK+ and Pango, finally resulting in sane source packages people can look at. Joss, Guilherme, Lo c and others have worked on the rest of the Developer Platform packages, which is now ready for testing in experimental. The evolution team has also been rocking and all the associated packages are ready to go in experimental as well. The GNOME 2.16 status page still shows quite some red for Desktop packages, which are now being worked on, with GTK+ 2.10 in place. But we still haven't decided if we can go ahead and attempt a 2.14 -> 2.16 transition in time for etch. Our biggest concern are the known problems of GTK 2.10's file chooser regarding cancelling of operations. Apparently, other distributions are getting bad bug reports due to these, so we need to be very careful about it. We know there are people working on an upstream fix as I write, but we don't know when there'll be a patch for GTK+ and libgnomeui available. If we learn it's due soon, we might start speaking to our release managers about the possibility of starting a transition. If we have no news, it'll probably be too late.

We're done with platform uploads (glib, gtk, pango and others). It's time to do the Desktop uploads and welcome our new and cool GNOME 2.14 desktop in Debian sid. Yes, there's a <a href="http://www.0d.be/debian/debian-gnome-2.14-status.html">status page</a>.<br /><br />I've just uploaded vte and gnome-terminal (gnome-panel is waiting the new libedata-cal1.2-dev). pkg-gnome work, basically Guilherme Pastore stuff. He did a awesome upstream work <a href="http://www.gnome.org/start/2.14/notes/en/rnusers.html">speeding up vte/gnome-terminal</a> too. Hopefully <a href="https://nm.debian.org/nmstatus.php?email=guilherme.pastore%40terra.com.br">he'll be a DD soon</a>, and it's not his fault that he's not on board yet.<br /><br />Closing, UPLOAD YOUR GNOME 2.14 DESKTOP RELATED PACKAGES NOW! Thanks. =)

Guilherme Pastore and I silently started python-modules project some time ago. I drafted our policy, uploaded a package to our svn repository and Paul Wise joined us. We aim to do for Python language in Debian what pkg-perl does for Perl, but until then we were out of time to finnish the policy, prepare the announcement and keep the things moving (adding people to the group, ...).<br /><br />Raphael Hertzog heard about us and joined the team (now as a admin), and we announced today this new group in debian-devel-announce. Guilherme is still busy with real life stuff, but we're already 9 members ready to flood the Debian archives with high quality python modules packaged. We don't want to package only new modules, so if you're maintaining a python module in Debian contact us at <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-python">debian-python mailing list</a>.<br /><br />For those who see that there's a pkg-python group, yes it exists. pkg-python is specific to Python package itself, python-modules aims package and keep with a good quality the Python modules only (not apps). I think we can merge pkg-turbogears, python-krb5 that are groups for modules too and probably others into python-modules not pkg-python, but we will coordinate our work using debian-python mailing list as i said.

I'll be in Porto Alegre, Brazil <a href="http://fisl.softwarelivre.org/7.0/www/?q=en">for the event</a> (FISL, in portuguese) from 19 may until 22, the last day. There will be some interesting Debian related activities there:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Debian stand<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span></span>We will have a stand in the event, and there we plan to coordinate a Key Signing Party (KSP) and a Bug Squashing Party (BSP). Since we will have many DDs and NMs there, it sounds promising. If you want to join us in the BSP, keep an eye at debian-qa mailing list and irc.freenode.net - #debian-bugs.<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><br />Sacix<br /></span>I will talk about a CDD called <a href="http://www.sacix.org/">Sacix</a>, that aims to be the default choice for telecentres and counts with more than 15000 end-users in Brazil right now. The project wasn't a CDD until i jumped in and released with a team the 5.11 (November, last year). The next release is scheduled to May and will be Sarge based again, but with a interesting telecentre management system developed in PHP, some "in house made" backports and stuff from backports.org. Stay tuned or just go there and watch my talk.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Debian-BR-CDD<br /></span>Unlike Sacix, <a href="http://cdd.debian-br.org/">Debian-BR-CDD</a> has no clear goal in terms of audience and in its first release ships the most user-friendly GNU/Linux desktop for Portuguese speakers until now. The 1.0 announcement was made, but the release party and Otavio Salvador (DD and Debian-BR-CDD starter) talk will happen during the event.<br /><br />I'm sure that i will have some time to keep uploading <a href="http://python-modules.alioth.debian.org">python-modules</a> and meet with Otavio to talk about some new stuff for LTSP package and discuss it with <a href="http://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-ltsp">pkg-ltsp</a> members. Hopefully i'll be more involved in GNOME too, due to the evil <a href="http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=guilherme.pastore@terra.com.br">Guilherme</a> influence, that just received his account. Isn't it cool when you see a 15yr old hacker joining the project ? That's the real "fresh blood" we need.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span>

There's a <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP">Bug Squashing Party</a> going on (April 20th - 23rd) as Guilherme <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/04/msg00012.html">announced in debian-devel-announce</a>. If you're a new maintainer or debian developer, join us to squash some bugs helping Etch to be released soon. The BSP is being coordinated in irc.debian.org - #debian-bugs and there will be a real-life brazilian DDs and NMs meeting dedicating some time to the BSP, in some hours. We plan to do it daily until the end of the 7th Free Software International Forum were some of us are right now.

Let me start with what makes me happy. I'm almost done "porting" gnome-tasksel from gtk+1 to gtk+2 (that libglade-convert thing is nice, thanks Guilherme). I need to upload the bzr repository, open bugs and contact the current upstream again. If they're not interested in the tool anymore i'm. I've some task related ideas that hopefully will be ready in time for Etch. Meanwhile, i do some python transition related uploads too.<br /><br />I am on vacation, and since i'm not miles away from my home travelling i've the motivation and enough free time to do everything Debian i ever dreamed, right? Sure, but not after somebody else inform you that this is almost game over from where you were. Bad news, no?