I recently got myself a new host somewhere in that big thing internet. Pretty big one too and I m moving stuff from other machines over there, to get rid of the other ones. To have things nicely seperated I am using KVM, especially as I also have many different people owning a VM on that machine. In the past I was using Xen, not KVM, and there was the nice Xen-Shell available for it, so that those other people can manage their own VM, but not need direct access to the main box. Or any kind of root beside the limited ability properly put within the xen-shell. There doesn t seem to be anything like this for KVM. Nothing, nada. What? Oh well, with lots of use of search engines I finally found kvm-shell, a Shell Script from Michael Kress. It looked like it was about to do what I want - except that it didn t work. So I set out last weekend and made it work. So here, for those who are looking for a similar tool, grab your copy from here. The way to use is easy:

• You want to have local users with this script as their shell
• Then add them to a sudoers so they can run virsh
• Party

Any bugs you find (I m sure there are) are yours to keep - or you can send me a mail and a patch. Same for new features, I m interested in getting more stuff in. [Update]: Actually one could name this virsh-shell too. Or libvirt-shell It should work with all systems supported by libvirt, it is just calling virsh $whatever for most of the stuff it does.

Right, so I am at the BSP in Hildesheim. Arrived somewhere Friday, leave in a few hours, and in the meantime I managed to break all our 3 archives at least once. Yay. But heck, I also managed to get them back to work (with help from the FTPTeam too), so it was a good thing. We are back on one code revision for security, backports and main archive. Security also changed to the newer style of handling the buildd repositories and is now also using daks own method of writing packages files instead of using apt-ftparchive. And while I was at it I also created 3 new sections, got a SHA256SUMS file in addition to the MD5SUMS for the debian-installer images (thanks Joeyh for the quick reaction), enabled DM uploads for backports and implemented various other smaller fixes and cleanups.

In my previous blog about Debian's growing archive size I pointed as reference to an hard to read table on the ftp-master server, and missed that the table is not self explanatory and on the first glance hard to read. The table currently looks like the following:

                  e      s     p-u     t      u    t-p-u   l-r    s-u     o    o-p-u   s-r   
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     all         1096  12034     70  14442  15784     20      1     12   8910    230      0  
    alpha           -      -      -      -      -      -      -      -  13183    297      -  
    amd64        1164  16997    242  18581  19605     39      -     21  13964    342      -  
     arm            -      -      -      -      -      -      -      -  13251    291      -  
    armel         988  16401    239  17879  18680     39      -     21  13411    327      -  
     hppa           -      -      -      -      -      -      -      -  13227    264      -  
  hurd-i386       445      -      -      -  12622      -      -      -      -      -      -  
     i386        1178  17188    242  18727  19751     39      -     21  14377    350      -  
     ia64         951  16036    239  17303  18045     39      -     21  13554    329      -  
kfreebsd-amd64    807  14499    231  15905  16480     39      -     21      -      -      -  
kfreebsd-i386     826  14491    231  15881  16498     39      -     21      -      -      -  
     mips         974  16269    241  17730  18504     39      -     21  13638    323      -  
    mipsel        984  16291    239  17807  18558     39      -     21  13600    319      -  
   powerpc       1078  16677    239  18156  19036     39      -     21  13872    332      -  
     s390        1030  16252    239  17678  18469     39      -     21  13331    327      -  
    source        522  14974     51  16376  17405      1     19      6  12519     75    151  
    sparc         992  16423    239  17895  18673     39      -     21  13542    329      -  

The lines represent different hardware architectures Debian supports, like amd64 (for 64-Bit PCs), i386 (for 32-Bit PCs), etc. Two lines are kind of special, the one marked source and the one marked all. Let's start with the source line: That counts the number of source packages. Those are rarely seen by end users. Source packages contain the actual source needed to build a package, as well as Debian specific changes and a blue print on how to create an actual installable binary package from the source. As you can see Debian supports quite some architectures, which leads to a small problem on the mirrors: Quite a lot shipped in Debian is actually architecture independent. For example documentation, most sound and graphic files, or level data for a game. To avoid storing the very same date multiple times, Debian makes haeavy use of so called arch: all packages. You might have noticed them already while installing them:

Hole:5 ftp://ftp.rrzn.uni-hannover.de/debian/debian/ squeeze/main extremetuxracer-data all 0.4-4 [28,1 MB]
Hole:6 ftp://ftp.rrzn.uni-hannover.de/debian/debian/ squeeze/main extremetuxracer amd64 0.4-4 [273 kB]

In this example I installed a quite small game on the amd64 architecture, which depends on a quite big architecture independent package (notice the all between package name and version) containing it's data.So, to get the actual number of packages a user can install on a specific architecture, one has to add the number in the all line to the number in the specific architecture line. But what column to pick? The columns represent so called suites. The s is for stable, currently Debian 6.0 aka Squeeze and o for oldstable, aka Debian 5.0 Lenny. The t is for testing, aka Wheezy or the upcoming Debian 7.0. The u is for unstable aka sid. The e is for experimental, used for stuff probably not yet ready to be part of a stable release and therefore not uploaded to unstable. The rest is not that interesting (as you see it's mostly empty anyway), like s-u for stable updates, several p-u suites for proposed-updates (that is stuff that might end up in the next point release, and should be tested). And then we have s-r and l-r which I forgot what they are about... Sorry. But back to topic: As I explained briefly a source package is mostly used internally, but may create several binary packages, which a user can install. So the most interesting number for users is the number of binary packages on an arch. So we usually publish this number. So for example, using squeeze on i386 you can install: 17'188 (architecture dependent packages, column s row i386) + 12'034 (architecture independent packages columns s row all) = 29'222 packages. And for completeness: They are build from 14'974 source packages (row source column s). So if look that up for unstable on amd64 you should get to the result 35'389 binary packages build from 17'405 source packages. Slightly less than I reported yesterday, because we removed some old stuff e.g. obsolete libraries in the meantime. Update: J rg just explained me, that the s-r and l-r are there to ensure Debian complies with the GPL. They hold the sources of everything shipped in the original lenny and squeeze releases. Update 2: J rg explained it to me again: s-r and l-r contains sources used without being referenced by a package, and so might get lost otherwise. One example is the kernel used by the debian installation system. You have to boot a kernel somehow, so it can't be packaged. But we still need to save the sources, so it is referenced in these suites and won't get lost.

When Debian squeeze was released in February, it was shipped with slightly less than 30'000 packages. So it was just a matter of time till we also break that border. However, I was quite surprised when I checked the numbers lately and noticed that by now we not only broke the 30'000 packages border but also the 35'000 package! Right now there are 35403 packages available for installation in Debian's unstable branch for the amd64 / 64-Bit-PC architecture! Wow!

OK, this one is meant for Planet Debian...

One of many, many changes in the latest lintian is vendor profiles and, thanks to a heads-up by Niels Thykier, Emdebian will have working profile support in the next upload of emdebian-grip. (The only reason it's not already in Debian is my own fault for not uploading when I thought I had the time to upload.)

$ lintian --profile emdebian-grip drivel_3.0.2-1em1_amd64.deb 

$ lintian --profile debian drivel_3.0.2-1em1_amd64.deb 

E: drivel: debian-changelog-file-missing

E: drivel: copyright-file-compressed

W: drivel: copyright-without-copyright-notice

E: drivel: description-contains-invalid-control-statement

W: drivel: binary-without-manpage usr/bin/drivel

So the em1 version implements Emdebian Policy for Emdebian Grip. Clean for Emdebian Grip, just as the Debian package is clean prior to the changes.

I expect this to dramatically improve the processing of Emdebian packages, both for Grip and for the cross-built flavour, Crush, once that actually starts up.

Thanks to the lintian team for this support. Now if there was some way of backporting this version of lintian to Squeeze, I could also use this at work to suppress really annoying lintian warnings about non-standard suite names. (The whole point of using a non-standard suite name is to keep our stuff separate from the normal Debian/Emdebian stuff for licensing reasons etc.) Update: of course, I didn't check the PTS for lintian before writing that, so hence didn't notice that the backport already exists! Thanks again to Niels for the prompt. I've now got another package to create for work. Update2: Thanks to Joerg Jaspert for the tip that all lintian versions get backported directly from unstable as an exception on ~bpo. The work package is ready, so this is going to make things a lot easier when building stuff on stable.

In other news, the same version of emdebian-grip will include support for integrating Emdebian Grip into Debian itself. This too will use vendor-specific support, this time an internal vendor name which just needs to work on the "buildd".

(It's not quite a buildd, Emdebian Grip doesn't build anything, it's all post-processing. It's just that the processing of Debian packages for Emdebian Grip will look a bit like having a second buildd working on the packages uploaded by the existing buildd. The process itself is still developing...)

During the past Debconf, Joerg borrowed my laptop. I'd told him that he could basically wipe all files if he wanted to, since I had a full backup at home. With that, I mostly meant to say that he could reinstall the box, or add or remove packages as much as he wanted to. What I didn't mean for him to do was to give it back to me with a completely wiped hard disk that it wouldn't even boot off of anymore, but that's what he did. Oh well. So I hadn't done the restore yet, last week, since I'd been busy doing other things. Now, my backup consisted of a file called 'mbr' of 2KB; a file called 'backup.tar.bz2' of 66G, and an LVM volume called 'windows' that was written with 'dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/lvm/windows'[1]. Meaning, I could do a restore, but it was somewhat more involved than just running bacula and allowing it to do its stuff for a while. I briefly considered mounting the external USB disk on which the backup was written to my other laptop, and streaming everything over the network, but quickly discarded that idea for speed issues. Instead, I created 4GB NBD export on that other laptop, ran d-i with my partman-nbd on the to-be-restored laptop, installed Debian to the NBD device, booted off of that, and could then do a restore while having a fully functional system. With the sole gotcha that I couldn't disconnect it from the network until the restore was complete, but that's not insurmountable. The 'dd' restore has finished in the mean time, I'm still waiting for tar to complete its job. Once that's finished, I'll probably have to refresh grub to the internal hard disk, and then I'll be able to boot it. I hope. Having said that, doing a bare-metal restore while booting off of an NBD device is quite practical. I mean, sure, I could have downloaded a live system from the network somewhere, but that would've taken forever, would probably have had an impact on performance of the system while it was running, and overall isn't very ideal IMO. On the other hand, an NBD device is much faster than a local CD or DVD, can be written to without requiring a RAM disk, doesn't need squashfs to get you to reasonable sizes, and as far as the kernel is concerned it's just a local hard disk. If the above paragraph sounds like I'm proud, then that's because I am. Two years ago, doing this would have involved much more manual work. Today, I had a system running root off NBD in minutes. [1] Yeah, so my car has a builtin TomTom GPS that I can't do updates for under Linux, AFAIK. Plus some other stuff. Sue me.

When I think about Margarita, I always remember her as a friendly and welcoming person. Like most of the Debian Women members by the way. But she likes to spread some love and organized a Debian Appreciation Day for example. I think I met her in real life for the first time at Debconf 6 in Oaxtepec (Mexico). She deeply cares about Debian in general. She has proven it multiple times with her DPL candidacy and by giving talks like Making Debian rule again. One last thing, Debconf11 is just over and you will see that Debconf4 has had a big influence on Marga. My advice is simple: next time there s a Debconf on your continent, make sure to take a few days off and come to meet us! It really gives another picture of the Debian community. Now let s proceed with the interview. Raphael: Who are you? Margarita: I m Margarita Manterola, a Software Developer from Argentina. I work developing software in Python in a Debian-friendly company during the day, and teach programming at a local university during the evenings. I m married to Maximiliano Curia who is also a Debian Developer, most of our Free Software work has been done together. I only maintain a handful of packages in Debian, I m more interested in fixing bugs than in packaging new software. I ve also been a part of the organizing team of many of the previous Debian Conferences. One of the biggest commitments and the biggest success of my participation in Debian was being part of the organizing team of DebConf8, in Argentina. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Margarita: I started using Debian around 2000. Soon after we had learned the grips of general GNU/Linux usage, Maxy and I started giving an introductory course at our local university, and became quite involved with the local LUG. At some point in 2002/2003 I became a Debian Bug Reporter : most of my friends would report bugs to me, and I would then write them in the proper form to the BTS. I would also be very attentive about reporting any bugs that I might encounter myself trying to create good bug reports. The turning point in my participation in Debian was DebConf4 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Being so close to Argentina meant that we felt specially invited to be there, and Maxy and I decided to go to DebConf for our honeymoon. We didn t really know much about DebConf dynamics, but we were really eager to learn more about Debian and become more involved. What happened was that meeting with DDs from all over the world transformed our lives, we became part of the Debian family and wanted to be more and more involved. Soon after that we both started maintaining packages and not long after that, applied to become Developers. The Debian Women project also meant a lot to me. I felt encouraged all along the way, encouraged to learn, to ask questions and to lose the fear of making mistakes. I became a Debian Developer on November 2005. Since then, Debian has always been one of the most important things I do in my life. Raphael There was a Debian Women BoF during debconf. What are the plans for Debian Women in the upcoming months? Margarita: I was not there in person, but thanks to the awesome work of the video team, and of Christian Perrier s typing efforts when something failed, I was able to experience much of what was discussed. One of the many points that came up during the BOF is that many people Want to help but don t know where to start or how to go about it. It s a challenge for the Debian Women project to find a way to allow these people to become involved in Debian through Mini projects or something like that. Another of the subjects that was brought up was the Debian Women mentoring project, which has been going on for quite a while now, but lacks enough publicity. So, we need to reach more people about it, and maybe also improve it with some templates, similar to the New Maintainer templates, so that mentees that don t know where to start have some sort of general path to follow. Raphael: You created very useful diagrams documenting how package maintainer scripts are invoked by dpkg. How did you do it and was that a useful experience? Margarita: I did those diagrams to be able to answer one of the questions in the NM templates, regarding the order of the maintainer script execution. Answering the question in text was basically copying and pasting the part of the Debian Policy that explained it, which wasn t really too clear for me, so I decided to go and make a diagram of it, so that I could really understand it. I did it by the best of all debugging techniques: adding prints to each of the maintainer scripts, and testing them in all the different orders that I could think of. It was a useful experience at the time, because I learned a lot of how maintainers scripts work. I didn t expect the diagrams to become so famous, though, I only did them to answer one NM question, that I assumed most other people had already answered before Raphael: You participated in a DPL election. This is a big commitment to make. What were your motivations? Margarita: As I said, I was part of the organizing team of DebConf8, in Argentina. Which was quite a success, a lot of people enjoyed it and praised the good work that had been done by the local team. During said DebConf8, I had a dream (it was almost a nightmare, actually): I woke up and just like that, I was the DPL. I spoke to some people about this dream and to my complete surprise many said that I should actually do it. After giving that possibility a year and a half of thoughts, during the 2010 campaign I was talked into participating myself as a candidate, and it was a very interesting experience. However, I m very glad that Zack got elected and not me, I think he makes a much better DPL that I would have made. Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Margarita: I think the main problem that we have is our communication, both inside the project and outside the project. Most of us are very technical people, our skills lay in the technical part of Debian (preparing packages, fixing bugs, writing software, administering systems) not in the social part. And thus, we lack a general empathy that is quite needed when interacting with people from all over the world. Raphael: Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy? Margarita: Not particularly. I do want it to be a great release with good quality, stable software. I would also like to keep making Debian more and more universal with each release, making it more user friendly, more accessible, and more robust than any other previous release. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Margarita: I admire a lot of people in Debian. There s a lot of people that contribute a lot of time to Debian, amounts of time that I can t begin to understand how they can afford. I admire Stefano Zacchiroli, our current project leader. And Steve McIntyre, the project leader before him. Also Bdale Garbee, who s also been a DPL in the past. Making this list I realize that Debian has been blessed by quite a number of great leaders in the past. I admire Holger Levsen, for his contributions to the DebConf video team, that have made it possible year after year for the whole project to participate in DebConf remotely. I admire Steve Langasek and Andreas Barth (etch is still my favourite release). I admire Christian Perrier for his work on internationalization. I admire Joerg Jaspert for the incredible amounts of time that he puts into Debian. And actually, I could go on admiring people all night long. I admire so many people that this interview could become a very boring list of names. I guess it s better to leave it at saying that Debian is lucky to have quite a lot of excellent hackers around.

---

Thank you to Marga for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading her 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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I m here at DebConf11 and it started in the worst possible way. First my wife and me had the pleasure of being guests of the Bosnien border police for 11 hours. Overnight stay in a small room in a small building far away from whatever we know. And unknown status when it goes on. Oh fun. And then, after finally arriving here, my Laptop breaks. Stupid machine, why break at the beginning and not at the end of the conf? It heated up, all to 120 C (which I don t believe is good, nono) and then turned off. Came back on some time later, but the graphics card got a kick. The left part of the screen now shows a big white strip all over it. Which doesn t help it at all. Additionally the thing does not want to operate below 70 C anymore. At least it only takes seconds for it to heat up that far. The fans stay off. There is a way to turn them on by software. If i use that way - the temperate quickly climbs over 100 C. WTF? Well. Guess that means I am looking for a replacement. I don t have too many requirements. Basically I want a BIG screen (and I mean big, my current has 17 ) and that it works well with Debian. Reasonable battery life (1.5hours is reasonable for such a thing, anything more is fine. Its NOT a mobile thing to use on trips, for that I have other devices. It is a workstation you can easily take with you) and the usual rest of a good CPU, at least 4GB RAM and >60GB Harddiskspace. Any suggestions?

So lets try this:

So it finally looks like I will be at DebConf11 too. Including my (then) wife (ohwow, feels weird to write this). At least we just booked the flight tickets. There is a small chance that we still won t make it, but for now it looks good. Lucky beings we seem to be - we found flights going directly to Banja Luka, no need to take train from somewhere like Zagreb or so. (Well, for some values of directly, we have one stop included). We will arrive on Friday the 22nd, afternoon and leave on Sunday the 31st, again afternoon. Since DC6 this is the shortest time I had attending DebConf (DC5 I only did DebConf, not Camp, DC10 I skipped entirely). Somehow feels weird. Update: Well, due to some <censored> we now do have to go via Zagreb and an annoying bus trip. Meh. Should make us arrive on Thursday late night, but still annyoing.

The first concrete outcome from the Debian derivatives census is the creation of Planet Debian Derivatives. For those of you who are interested in the activities of distributions derived from Debian, it aggregates the blogs and planets of all the distributions represented in the derivatives census. The list of feeds will be expanded semi-automatically as more distributions participate in the census and maintainers of census pages add new blog and planet URLs. Many thanks to Joerg Jaspert for doing the necessary setup procedures for the addition of the new sub-planet to Planet Debian. I'm glad that it was accepted alongside the sole language-based sub-planet (Planet Debian Spanish). I plan further integration of information about derivatives with Debian infrastructure. My next target will be integration of information about the packages in Debian derivatives into Debian. I hope to work on getting that information into UDD (and rmadison) and the packages.d.o site during DebConf11 and DebCamp. If you are interested in helping out, please add your ideas to the integration wiki page, check out the code and add more scripts to it. If you have any comments or questions about this or any other activities related to Debian derivatives, please direct them to the debian-derivatives list and the #debian-derivatives IRC channel on OFTC. Those of you interested in the other side of the software stream might want to take a look at Planet Debian Upstream, which is run by the excellent Joey Hess. He is also on the lookout for interesting blogs by people writing software that is packaged in Debian. The site is created using ikiwiki, hosted on branchable and editable with an OpenID account.

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:

• Danke
• Thank you
• (RTL or not?) / toda
• Gracias
• / arigat
• / n ndi
• Obrigado
• Grazie
• C m n
• Kadin chey la
• / Efharisto
• Dank je wel
• Tak
• D ngge
• Merci
• Kiitos
• Tika hoki
• / dhanyavaadhamulu
• Thank you and God save the Queen
• Mul umesc
• Tack
• / didi madloba
• Gr cies
• Dakujem
• / Aabhar
• / Dhanyavadagalu
• Paldies
• / kop khun krap
• Terima kasih
• Hvala (hr)
• / Dhanyavad
• / Hvala (sr)
• Hvala (sl)
• / Akun
• / Sukriya
• Takk
• / Nandri
• Maki biyen jianbakik
• D kuji
• / Xiexie
• / Aabhari aahe
• Faleminderit
• / Kam sah ham ni da
• / Blagodaram
• / Xiexie
• Hvala (bs)

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:

• Danke
• Thank you
• (RTL or not?) / toda
• Gracias
• / arigat
• / n ndi
• Obrigado
• Grazie
• C m n
• Kadin chey la
• / Efharisto
• Dank je wel
• Tak
• D ngge
• Merci
• Kiitos
• Tika hoki
• / dhanyavaadhamulu
• Thank you and God save the Queen
• Mul umesc
• Tack
• / didi madloba
• Gr cies
• Dakujem
• / Aabhar li> / Dhanyavadagalu
• Paldies
• / kop khun krap
• Terima kasih
• Hvala (hr)
• / Dhanyavad
• / Hvala (sr)
• Hvala (sl)
• / Akun
• / Sukriya
• Takk
• / Nandri
• Maki biyen jianbakik
• D kuji
• / Xiexie
• / Aabhari aahe
• Faleminderit
• / Kam sah ham ni da
• / Blagodaram
• / Xiexie
• Hvala (bs)

Like last years initiative from Joey we have another opening for DebConf Newbies . Turns out this year it is me doing the main work for it, so here we are: If

• you never have been to a DebConf, or
• you last saw the conference in 2007 (Scotland)
• you can schedule a week off in July
• fear you might not make it with the normal sponsorship process ( they will never ever pick ME, im too small an ant in this project )

then this is for you. To apply for this funding, email newbies@debconf.org before 18th of June. The earlier you mail, the better, as funding will be given out in a first-come/first-serve way. In your email include an estimate of your travel costs, from where you travel from and the amount you are unable to fund yourself. I also need to know the dates you plan to arrive and leave. Please indicate if you will also need sponsored food and accommodation. (At the time of this writing you can still get sponsored food and accommodation by simply registering with the conference, so if you read this before May 19th please ensure to register NOW). Please also ensure you register with the conference now (see DebConf11 registration, even if your plans are not fully secure at this time. There is no punishment if you can not attend later - simply do not follow the reconfirmation process shortly before the conference.

I just had a talk on How to contribute here in Taipei. The slides are available here in case you are interested.

And here we are again. And we still have energy for one more day (and a half). Barely, but still. And it is actually looking good, we do think we will have a working archive when we are leaving here tomorrow at noon. And compared to last year we won t even need a session until 3AM to make this work (and still have half of the tools not working). Yay. Yesterday had Ansgar fixing up various issues until we set him onto Generate Packages/Sources files out of the database . Which got us some funny quotes later on, like are 3.6 seconds to write a Sources file ok or too slow? (compared to the roughly 90 seconds it takes today). Torsten had various bugfixes (as we all, somehow there is never an end of them) and is currently looking at DSUS , which is the result we got out of a GSOC project. Mark tried to continue the multi-archive stuff but got distracted a lot, we regularly asked him to look at other items and then we also made him restart all the thoughts on it by slightly redefining the parameters for the multiple archives. I myself continued with shell scripting around the buildd autosigning and today I take to check up on all our cronjobs (besides unchecked/dinstall which we know do work) to ensure we can turn them back on starting this afternoon.

Proposals for autosigning were floating around for quite some time. The most controversial parts were how we secure the machines that do the building (and in turn: how do we secure the key) and who's going to manage the keyring (because there are multiple teams involved; such discussions can indeed take quite a bit time).

What we've agreed upon now is as follows:

• All buildds with autosigned must be debian.org machines, which means that they are administrated by the Debian Sysadmins. This involves regular upgrades of the machine, firewalling and monitoring. They are all doing this already (kudos!), so there was no change needed.
• The machines must be restricted so that only a limited set of people may access it. That's done, it's just the buildd admins for the specific buildd and the global group builddadm (plus the admins and the local admin, of course).
• Every host has its own GPG key. Key generation locally on the buildds is eased by having the fine Entropy Key hooked up to provide entropy centrally and distributed to the debian.org machines. Private keys don't need to and must not leave the host. The keys are rotated every 120 days, expiry dates will be used to ensure that and to remind us when rotation is due. Sadly there is no HSM involved. Given the geographic dispersiveness of the Debian infrastructure that's not done easily. Some machines (like s390 racks) would also be unable to connect local hardware.
• The keys are restricted to specific architectures. They are not able to upload any source to the archive. However every binary on the specific architecture can be uploaded using the key, there are no further restrictions on package priorities or the like. They are maintained by the wanna-build admins on ftp-master by signing the armored public keys with their personal GPG keys (instructions available on the list). Thus a trust chain is established: who added or removed which key and when.
• We plan to suppress networking in the chroot soon. This will possibly be done with unshare(1) in util-linux, as soon as we sort out proper localhost networking. This was not deemed a blocker at this point.

Should you have thought we are gone, let me assure you - we are not. I just blog a bit later than I did the last days. Anyways, we did have a good day yesterday. Turns out that, when Ansgar said I don t know much Python so might not be able to do much he actually meant Just point me at problems, no matter how complicated, and I come up with the python code to fix them . And so we did point him at various problems and got lots of code. And we intend to continue this until Sunday. Yesterday Mark got his Packages/Sources tool so far that we are about ready to ditch the old things, even though he took time to finalize my generate-release changes too. Not to speak about that database changes I wrote about in my last entry, which he now seems to have finally wrapped his brain around in a way to get those done. Short cite: good god, this will overhaul about all our code and database handling . And thats where he is currently working on too. He did draw a plenty complicated thats how it works onto the flip chart, and now seems to dump his brain into some form of python code. I m curious about the result, lets see. Torsten fixed up the code that generated the Maintainers and Uploaders files. The old code was just plain silly and took about 15 minutes just for the Uploaders file. It is now doing both of them in less than two. Of course there had been lots of bugfixes and code enhances too, not really good to list in a blog like this. My work, besides getting a bit sick in the evening, consisted of writing shell scripts to enable us and wanna-build admins to handle the keys needed for the automated signing of packages build on DSA maintained buildds. I have those ready now, so we are able to start doing the autosign stuff today/tomorrow. Phil - well, did whatever buildd related stuff he has to. Different place, I dont see much of it, but he has a blog himself, look over there.