Term::ANSIColor is a Perl core module that provides a few different interfaces to get at the ANSI color and text attribute escape sequences. It can be used to, for example, print out bold text or colorize output. This is a major new feature release, incorporating patches sent to me by Kurt Starsinic and Stephen Thirlwall. Kurt Starsinic contributed support for 256-color emulators. These hang special extended sequences off the otherwise-unused 38 and 48 sequences, providing an alternative naming of the base 16 colors, 216 colors arranged in an RGB namespace, and 24 shades of grey. Those colors are now available via all the normal Term::ANSIColor interfaces. He also contributed a program to print out test data for 256-color emulators that I enhanced to print out test data for the basic and 16-color sets as well, which allowed me to get rid of the static test files in the distribution. Stephen Thirlwall contributed support for creating aliases for the standard colors via an environment variable. I extended his patch to also provide a coloralias() function interface. This feature probably won't be that widely used, but it allows a user to set up custom color names for applications that take color names from user configuration (which might be handy for doing things like using the Solarized color scheme), or to define an alias like "alert" or "warning" in one place and then use it throughout the code. With the new 256-color support, it may be useful to set up more human-readable aliases for some of the RGB colors. Since I was working on this project anyway, I also redid the whole module in the new Perl coding style that I've been experimenting, based on Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices, and added a ton of new tests. There are a lot of great CPAN modules out there to do automated tests of various aspects of Perl code, and most of them don't require much effort to use. I'll probably write a separate post about that later. That sort of comprehensive review of course uncovered a bunch of microbugs and lack of clarity in the code, which is now hopefully much improved. I'm pleased to report that the test suite achieves 100% code coverage as reported by Devel::Cover (and in fact there's a maintainer-only test to ensure that it stays that way). You can get the latest version from the Term::ANSIColor distribution page.

At Debconf, we (the i18n crowd) discussed about the NMU campaign we ran before the release of Etch (roughly from September 2006 to March 2007). We concluded that running a campaign slightly earlier in the release process would be likely to save us some work. Indeed, experience shows that the initial pings sent to maintainers often trigger uploads to fix the pending l10n issues. So, let's start thinking about it now. For those who don't remember, the rough process is described here. As one sees, it is deeply respectful for maintainers and takes great care to avoid unwanted NMUs. So, to begin, please check the list of the pending po-debconf l10n issues ranked by...a pretty complicated mathematical formula which aims to put packages which would most benefit from an upload in first position... In case one of your packages is listed near the top of that list, just consider uploading it soon. PS: of course, the mathematical formula includes a secret pondering scheme aimed at giving French translations more weight, as anyone would have guessed.

So, today, I finally stopped the l10n NMU campaign. It started on Sept. 25th with the "Intent to Work" on hesiod. The last package I worked on has been isync today. The goal of that campaign was closing as many longstanding l10n bug reports as possible. The main goals were decided during the i18n work meeting in Extremadura, back in September. We focused on po-debconf translations, mostly, which are an easy target for NMUs. Thomas Huriaux extracted the data from the BTS and ranked packages with regards to the number of pending l10n bugs and their age. Lucas Wall reactivated a coordination page which we already used back in early 2006 when a first version of such a campaign was run. During that campaign, I worked on 102 packages. 89 of them got all their pending l10n bugs closed, 5 of them got most of their l10n bugs closed (remaining "l10n" bugs were either not really related to localisation and strange things which I left aside), 8 packages were ignored either because their respective maintainers wanted to handle the bugs themselves or because they were tagged for removal. Meny packages have also been handled by their respective maintainers, either because the NMU announcements woke them up...or because of their natural release process. I have to point out that the level of collaboration of package maintainers has been great (except for those who are MIA, and there are quite a few) with only one very proeminent exception (just guess which one). Thijs Kinkhorst and Tobias Toedter also contributed to the campaign. Thanks to them as well. As a side effect, we also made many of these packages as lintian-clean as we could, trying to balance between too invasive NMUs and trivial fixes. IIRC, I only introduced 3 or 4 RC bugs doing so (which I fixed immediately of course). A few RC bugs were also fixed by the NMUs and even a security bug has been hunted down (for screen). Meny thanks to all package maintainers, translators and everybody who helped during that work. It has been a great time. Just look at the result. Now heading to the improvement of the next pet project of the i18n task force: the Debian i18n server.

Today, the l10n NMU campaign had an interesting side effect: I fixed (hopefully correctly) a RC (and security) bug in screen. Indeed, while looking at this package to seek ignored debconf l10n bugs, I went on #395225...which was trivial to fix (upload the new upstream version). Moreover, it seems that I should soon have another RC bug fixed, as webfs also seems to have an RC bug and abandoned l10n bug reports. PS: my first impression about screen (definitely a useful package) is that it is not so actively maintained, though the maintainer is very responsive. He maybe needs help.

More than one month ago, when back from holidays (without a real break in my Debian activities, thanks to hotels in Mexico with Wifi), I decided to focus on technical work. No more sterile discussions, no more arguing in political Debian mailing lists, no more lessons given to the entire world (something that we(fr_FR) are so well known for). Just technical stuff and one goal: the i18n Extremadura meeting. That meeting went so well that I still have tons of work to do, combined to new organization and duties at work. This left nearly no room for tentations to react to the various events that shaked out little world recently et C'est Tres Bien, mes petits amis. I will certainly continue with that good resolution. After all, we have to release in December, don't we? :-). And we have an interesting l10n NMU campaign running as well as a running jihad against many boring and useless debconf notes.