Notice: There were several requests for me to more elaborate on my path to Debian and impact on life so here it is. It's going to be a bit long so anyone who isn't interested in my personal Debian journey should skip it. :) In 2007. I enrolled into Faculty of Mechanical Engineering (at first at Department of Industrial Management and later transfered to Department of Mechatronics - this was possible because first 3 semesters are same for both departments). By the end of same year I was finishing my tasks (consisting primarily of calculations, some small graphical designs and write-ups) when famous virus, called by users "RECYCLER", sent my Windows XP machine into oblivion. Not only it took control over machine and just spawned so many processes that system would crash itself, it actually deleted all from hard-disk before it killed the system entirely. I raged - my month old work, full of precise calculations and a lot of design details, was just gone. I started cursing which was always continued with weeping: "Why isn't there an OS that can whithstand all of viruses, even if it looks like old DOS!". At that time, my roommate was my cousin who had used Kubuntu in past and currently was having SUSE dual-booted on his laptop. He called me over, started talking about this thing called Linux and how it's different but de facto has no viruses. Well, show me this Linux and my thought was, it's probably so ancient and not used that it probably looks like from pre Windows 3.1 era, but when SUSE booted up it had so much more beautiful UI look (it was KDE, and compared to XP it looked like the most professional OS ever). So I was thrilled, installed openSUSE, found some rough edges (I knew immediately that my work with professional CAD systems will not be possible on Linux machines) but overall I was bought. After that he even talked to me about distros. Wait, WTF distros?! So, he showed me distrowatch.com. I was amazed. There is not only a better OS then Windows - there where dozens, hundreds of them. After some poking around I installed Debian KDE - and it felt great, working better then openSUSE but now I was as most newbies, on fire to try more distros. So I was going around with Fedora, Mandriva, CentOS, Ubuntu, Mint, PCLinuxOS and in beginning of 2008 I stumbled upon Debian docs which where talking about GNU and GNU Manifesto. To be clear, I was always as a high-school kid very much attached to idea of freedom but started loosing faith by faculty time (Internet was still not taking too much of time here, youth still spent most of the day outside). So the GNU Manifesto was really a big thing for me and Debian is a social bastion of freedom. Debian (now with GNOME2) was being installed on my machine. As all that hackerdom in Debian was around I started trying to dig up some code. I never ever read a book on coding (until this day I still didn't start and finish one) so after a few days I decided to code tetris in C++ with thought that I will finish it in two days at most (the feeling that you are powerful and very bright person) - I ended it after one month in much pain. So instead I learned about keeping Debian system going on, and exploring some new packages. I got thrilled over radiotray, slimvolley (even held a tournament in my dorm room), started helping on #debian, was very active in conversation with others about Debian and even installed it on few laptops (I became de facto technical support for users of those laptops :D ). Then came 2010 which with negative flow that came in second half of 2009, started to crush me badly. I was promised to go to Norway, getting my studies on robotics and professor lied (that same professor is still on faculty even after he was caught in big corruption scandal over buying robots - he bought 15 years old robots from UK, although he got money from Norway to buy new ones). My relationship came to hard end and had big emotional impact on me. I fell a year on faculty. My father stopped financing me and stopped talking to me. My depression came back. Alcohol took over me. I was drunk every day just not to feel anything. Then came the end of 2010, I somehow got to the information that DebConf will be in Banja Luka. WHAT?! DebConf in city where I live. I got into #debconf and in December 2010/January 2011 I became part of the famous "local local organizers". I was still getting hammered by alcohol but at least I was getting out of depression. IIRC I met Holger and Moray in May, had a great day (a drop of rakia that was too much for all of us) and by their way of behaving there was something strange. Beatiful but strange. Both were sending unique energy of liberty although I am not sure they were aware of it. Later, during DebConf I felt that energy from almost all Debian people, which I can't explain. I don't feel it today - not because it's not there, it's because I think I integrated so much into Debian community that it's now a natural feeling which people here, that are close to me are saying that they feel it when I talk about Debian. DebConf time in Banja Luka was awesome - firstly I met Phil Hands and Andrew McMillan which were a crazy team, local local team was working hard (I even threw up during the work in Banski Dvor because of all heat and probably not much of sleep due to excitement), met also crazy Mexican Gunnar (aren't all Mexicans crazy?), played Mao (never again, thank you), was hanging around smart but crazy people (love all) from which I must notice Nattie (a bastion of positive energy), Christian Perrier (which had coordinated our Serbian translation effort), Steve Langasek (which asked me to find physiotherapist for his co-worker Mathias Klose, IIRC), Zach (not at all important guy at that time), Luca Capello (who gifted me a swirl on my birthday) and so many others that this would be a post for itself just naming them. During DebConf it was also a bit of hard time - my grandfather died on 6th July and I couldn't attend the funeral so I was still having that sadness in my heart, and Darjan Prtic, a local team member that came from Vienna, committed suicide on my birthday (23 July). But DebConf as conference was great, but more importantly the Debian community felt like a family and Meike Reichle told me that it was. The night it finished, me and Vedran Novakovic cried. A lot. Even days after, I was getting up in the morning having the feeling I need something to do for DebConf. After a long time I felt alive. By the end of year, I adopted package from Clint Adams and Moray became my sponsor. In last quarter of 2011 and beginning of 2012, I (as part of LUG) held talks about Linux, had Linux installation in Computer Center for the first time ever, and installed Debian on more machines. Now fast forwarding with some details - I was also on DebConf13 in Switzerland, met some great new friends such as Tincho and Santiago (and many many more), Santiago was also my roommate in Portland on the previous DebConf. In Switzerland I had really great and awesome time. Year 2014 - I was also at DebConf14, maintain a bit more packages and have applied for DD, met some new friends among which I must put out Apollon Oikonomopoulos and Costas Drogos which friendship is already deep for such a short time and I already know that they are life-long friends. Also thanks to Steve Langasek, because without his help I wouldn't be in Portland with my family and he also gave me Arduino. :) 2015. - I am currently at my village residence, have a 5 years of working experince as developer due to Debian and still a lot to go, learn and do but my love towards Debian community is by magnitude bigger then when I thought I love it at most. I am also going through my personal evolution and people from Debian showed me to fight for what you care, so I plan to do so. I can't write all and name all the people that I met, and believe me when I say that I remember most and all of you impacted my life for which I am eternally grateful. Debian, and it's community effect literally saved my life, spring new energy into me and changed me for better. Debian social impact is far bigger then technical, and when you know that Debian is a bastion of technical excellence - you can maybe picture the greatness of Debian. Some of greatest minds are in Debian but most important isn't the sheer amount of knowledge but the enormous empathy. I just hope I can in future show to more people what Debian is and to find all lost souls as me to give them the hope, to show them that we can make world a better place and that everyone is capable to live and do what they love. P.S. I am still hoping and waiting to see Bdale writing a book about Debian's history to this day - in which I think many of us would admire the work done by project members, laugh about many situations and have fun reading a book about project that was having nothing to do but fail and yet it stands stronger then ever with roots deep into our minds.

I met Francesca in Debconf 11 in Banja Luka. If I recall correctly, it s Enrico Zini who introduced me to her, because she was the madamezou (her IRC nickname) who started to get involved in the publicity team. Since then and despite having a bachelor thesis to complete she got way more involved and even gained official responsibilities in the project. Before starting with the interview, I wanted to mention that Francesca is drafting a diversity statement for Debian I was expecting the discussions to go nowhere but she listened to all objections and managed to improve the text and build a consensus around it. Thank you for this and keep up the good work, Francesca! Rapha l: Who are you? Francesca: My name is Francesca, I m 30 and I studied Social Sciences. Currently I live in Italy but I m planning to go abroad (not a lot of jobs here for geeky social scientists). Apart for Debian and FLOSS world in general, I have unrestrained passions for chocolate; zombie movies; sci-fi; zombie books; knitting sewing crafting and DIY in general; zombie videogames; bicycles; pulling apart objects to look inside them; splatter B movies, David Foster Wallace s books, playing trumpet, and did I already mentioned zombies? Days are too short for all this stuff, but I try to do my best. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Francesca: Some years ago I was stuck in bed for literally some months, due to a grave series of migraine attacks. I wasn t able to do anything: no social life, no books or television. So, I decided to turn on the laptop and do something constructive with it: I was already a Debian user and it seemed quite logical to me to try to give back to the community. I am not a coder and I ve not studied Computer Science, so my first step was to join an Italian Debian on-line community (Debianizzati) and help with tutorials, users support, wiki management. In a couple of months I learnt many things: helping other users with their problems forces you to do lots of research! My first contributions to the Debian project were mostly translations of the main website. Translators are the perfect typos spotters: they work so precisely on the text to be translated that they finish to do a great QA job. This is how I ve started to contribute to the Debian website: with very simple things, fixing typos or wrong links or misplaced wml tags. I still remember my first commit to the website: the idea was to undercase some tags, but it ended up that I misplaced some of them and in addition I fixed them only in the English page and not on the translations as well. When after a couple of minutes, K re Thor Olsen a long time contributor of the team and now webmaster reverted my commit, I felt so stupid and full of shame. But, to my great surprise, no one treated me like an idiot for that error: Gerfried Fuchs, one of the guru of the team, replies me in a really helpful and polite way explaining what I did wrong and how to do things correctly. I think this episode was a turning point in my Debian life: there s this idea that Debian Developers are just a bunch of arrogant assholes and maybe it was true in the past, but for my experience they are not. Well, at least the ones I met and work with .

To my great surprise, no one treated me like an idiot for that error.

Since then, I joined the WWW team and helped them apply the shiny new design provided by Kalle S derman. A lot of work was done during the week immediately before the release of the new website. Oh that was a week! We worked night and day to have the new design ready for February 6th, and it was fantastic when we finally published it, simultaneously with the release of Squeeze. At the same time, I started to contribute more actively to the Debian Publicity team, not only translating news but also writing them. It can sound scary for a non native English speaker to write something from scratch in English, but you have to keep in mind that your text will be reviewed by native speakers before being published. And we have some fantastic reviewers in the English localisation team: particularly Justin B Rye, who is tireless in his effort and more recently Moray Allan. I think I m particularly lucky to work with all these people: there s a special mood in both Publicity and WWW team, which makes you feel happy to do things and at the same time pushes you to do more just because it s fun to work with them sharing jokes, ideas, rants, patches and hugs. Rapha l: I believe that you have been trough the new member process very quickly. You re now a Non-Uploading Debian Developer. How was the experience and what does this mean to you? Francesca: Becoming a Debian Developer was not so obvious for me, because I didn t need to be a DD for the work I do in Debian. For instance, I don t maintain packages, so I had no reasons to want to become a DD in order to have uploading rights. For a while I didn t really feel the necessity of being a DD. Luckily, some people started to pester me about it, asking me to apply for the NM process. I remember Martin Zobel-Helas doing this for an entire week every single day, and Gerfried Fuchs doing it as well. Suddenly, I realized that people I worked with felt that I deserved the DD status and that I simply had thought I didn t. As a non coder and a woman, there probably was a bit of impostor syndrome involved. Having people encouraging me, gave me more confidence and the desire to finally become a DD. And so I did. The process for non uploading DD is identical to the one to become an uploading DD, with one exception: in the second part of the process (named Tasks and Skills) instead of questions about how to create and maintain packages, there are questions about the non packaging work you usually do in Debian. The general resolution which created the possibility to become a non uploading DD gave us a chance to recognize the great effort of Debian contributors who work in various area (translations, documentation, artworks, etc.) that were not always considered as important as packaging efforts. And this is great because if you are a regular contributor, if you love Debian and you are committed to the project, there are no reasons to not be an official member of it. With regards to this, I like the metaphor used by Meike Reichle in her recent talk about the Debian Women Project (video recording here):

a Debian Developer status is a lot like a citizenship in a country that you re living in. If you live in a country and you don t have citizenship, you can find a job, buy a house, have a family [...] but if this country at any point in time decides to go into a direction that you don t like, there s nothing you can do about it. You are not in the position to make any change or to make any effect on that country: you just live there, but there s no way that you can excercise influence on the people who run this country.

Rapha l: You recently joined the Debian Press Team. What does it involve and how are you managing this new responsibility? Francesca: The Press Team is basically the armed wing of the Publicity Team: it handles announcements that need to be kept private until the release, moderate the debian-announce and debian-news mailing list and maintain contacts with press people from outside the project. The real job, so, is done within the Publicity Team. The most important part of our work is to write announcements and the newsletter: while the newsletter is published bi-weekly, the announcements need to be write in a shorter timeframe. Localization is really important in spreading Debian word, so we work closely with translators: both announcements and DPN are usually translated in four or five different languages. The publicity work could be stressful, as we have strict deadlines, we need to take quick decisions and often do last-minute changes. Personally, I like it: I work better under pressure. But I know that is sometimes difficult for contributors to accept that we can t debate endlessly on details, we have just to go on and do our best in a given timeframe.

The publicity work could be stressful, as we have strict deadlines, [ ]. Personally, I like it.

Raphael: You re one of the main editor behind the Debian Project News. What s the role and scope of this newsletter? Francesca: Debian Project News is our beloved newsletter, direct successor of the Debian Weekly News founded by Joey Hess in 1999 and later kept alive by Martin Schulze. In 2007, Debian Weekly News was discontinued but in 2008 the project was revived by Alexander Reichle Schmehl. The idea behind DPN is to provide our users an overview of what is happening inside and outside the project. As the core team of editors is formed by three people, the main problem is to be able to collect enough news from various sources: in this sense we are always glad when someone points us to interesting blogposts, mails and articles. DPN is also a good chance for non coders to contribute to Debian: propose news, write paragraphs and review the draft before the publication are quite easy tasks but very useful. English native speakers can do a proofread (as no one of the main editors is a native speaker) while others can always translate DPN in their native language. People who want to help us can take a look at our wiki page.

DPN is also a good chance for non coders to contribute to Debian.

Just yesterday I realized that since January we don t miss or delay an issue: so I d like to thank the fantastic team of editors, reviewers and translators who made it possible. The team is now working on another way of spreading Debian s message: a long-time project is finally becoming real. Stay tuned, surprise arriving! Raphael: You re trying to organize IRC training sessions but that doesn t seem to take off in Debian, while it s quite common in the Ubuntu community. How do you explain that? Francesca: I m not sure about it: both Debian users and contributors seemed to appreciate this initiative in the past. I was quite surprised by the amount of Debian members present during the various sessions and by the amount of interesting questions asked by the users. So the only reason I can think about is that I need to put more enthusiasm in convincing the teams to do it: they need more encouragement (or to be pestered more!). I, for myself, think that IRC training sessions are a great way to promote our work, to share our best practice, to talk about our project to a wider audience. And I ll sure try to organize more of them. Help, suggestions, ideas are really welcome! Raphael: If you could spend all your time on Debian, what would you work on? Francesca: There is a project I d like to give more love, but I always end up without the time to do it: the debian-community.org project. Back in 2007, Holger Levsen founded it with the aim of reducing the gap between Debian contributors and Debian users, giving all an opportunity to contribute, share ideas and more. The project was discontinued and I d really like to revive it: in these years various things have changed, but I think that the core idea of having a node to connect existing local communities is still good and doable. In Debian we don t have the wide and well articulated local infrastructure present in other distributions (Ubuntu, particularly, but also Fedora): even if I don t like too centralized structures, I think that a better connection between the project and local groups of users and on-line communities would be a step forward for the project. Being part of the Events Team, I m aware of how much we need to improve our communication with local groups. An example is the events organization: sometimes, Publicity and Events teams even don t know about regional Debian related events (like booth at conferences, workshops, talks, install parties, etc) and this is a shame because we could offer a lot of help in organizing and promoting local events. What we lack is better communication. And debian-community.org project could give us exactly this. Could be a cluster of local groups, a platform for events organization and even a useful resource for newbies who want to find a local group near them. I started some effort in this sense, sending a proposal about it, working on a census of Debian local groups. Any help is appreciated! I m really curious to see how many Debian communities (from all around the world and the web) are out there, and I d love to have members from these communities better connected with the Debian Project. Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Probably the bikeshedding feticism of almost all of us. It s the other side of the coin of Debian s commitment to technical excellence and our perfectionism, but sometimes it leads just to endless discussions about details, and it is a blocker for various initiatives. In Debian, you have to be really patient and in a way stubborn to push some changes. This is frustrating sometimes. On the other hand, I really appreciate how people take some times to think to each proposals, give some feedback and discuss about it: the process could be annoying, indeed, but the result is often an improvement of the initial proposal. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Most of my teammates are simply brilliant and adorable and hard-working. But I have to admit that I particularly admire David Pr vot: beside being a webmaster he does a lot of things, from French translations to DPN editing. All his contributions have a great quality and he s able to push you always further in doing things and doing them better. He is a good example of how I d like to be as contributor: smart, tireless, friendly.

---

Thank you to Francesca for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading her answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

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, Google+, Twitter and Facebook.

3 comments Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

why I ...

• didn't show up at this year's CeBit (or why there was no Debian booth at all)
• didn't show up at this year's Chemitzer Linux-Tage
• have been badly neglecting 659832
• won't attend this year's DebConf
• have been taking forever to answer their e-mails/queries
• am always away on irc these days/weeks

The answer is this little lady, who has been turning our priorities (and daily/sleep routine) upside-down for the last weeks and made us incredibly happy ... and equally unresponsive. Please bear with us, we won't be off the face of the earth forever. :)

Alexander has already announced the final results of this weekend's BSP, but I'd like to add my personal thanks. So, kudos to all attendees, for helping to make the BSP such a success and also to my employer for the generous budget and my colleagues, especially Wolfram to whose initiative we owe this BSP, for helping out before, during and after the party. All in all it's been an event well worth repeating!

Yesterday the Bug Squashing Party in Hildesheim, Germany started. I think it's going well, according to the statistics of the #debian-bugs channel, we solved 11 bugs with direct uploads, 2 with uploads to delayed, 5 via package removals and opened/upgraded only one. So we are still fixing more than we break ;) I'm especially pleased that some of the above was done by newbies. When we started to organise this BSP (well, when I started to watch Meike and Wolfram organise it to be precise), we where kind of worried by the experienced developer to newbie ratio, and already started to prepare introductions to packaging and similar adhoc sessions, but as it seems they don't seem to be needed. Good :) So back to fixing stuff, good hunt!

The German Linux Magazine runs a sponsored an "Open Source Lounge" at CeBIT each year. Last year I put in a proposal for DAViCal and it got accepted! With some airfare support from InternetNZ I got to showcase my Free Software project at the largest IT trade fair in the world.If you have an open source project to promote I can't recommend this highly enough. Below is a review of my experience at CeBIT early this year. This is long overdue for posting, and I'm prompted now because submissions are now open for the Open Source Project Lounge at CeBIT in 2012. Apply now.The German Linux Magazine runs a sponsored an "Open Source Lounge" at CeBIT each year. Last year I put in a proposal for DAViCal and it got accepted! With some airfare support from InternetNZ I got to showcase my Free Software project at the largest IT trade fair in the world. If you have an open source project to promote I can't recommend this highly enough. Below is a review of my experience at CeBIT early this year. This is long overdue for posting, and I'm prompted now because submissions are now open for the Open Source Project Lounge at CeBIT in 2012. Apply now. DAViCal at CeBIT 2011 CeBIT in Hannover is said to be the largest trade fair in the world, attracting over 300,000 visitors during it's five days. Late last year a DAViCal user in Germany suggested that I apply for a free booth for DAViCal in the Linux New Media Open Source Project Lounge . When DAViCal was accepted, I realised I needed some funding to help me travel around the world to attend, so I applied for a grant from InternetNZ who were kind enough to agree to cover part of my travel costs, and I was on my way. Germany in March is cold, especially for me coming from Summer! My travel allowed for a couple of days in Germany before CeBIT because that was when I could get the cheapest flights, and I wanted to have a little time to recover from the journey. Everyone had warned me to pack my winter woollies, and they were definitely needed! I stayed with a friend in Hamburg for two days and on the the second day we walked through the frozen park, past the frozen lake and over the frozen streams to see the Attraktor Hackerspace in Hamburg Nord where the CCC also hold their meetings a very impressive hackerspace in a repurposed bank (including the vault :-) with several separated areas for talks, meetings and workplaces. The day before CeBIT I travelled to Hannover to take a look at my booth space, fetch exhibitor passes for myself and volunteers and generally prepare to do battle with the crowds. The following day the fair started and it was up at 6:30 to get ready and catch the 7:38 train out to the fairgrounds. Although the fair opens at 9:00 there was always something to do between eight o'clock or so when I arrived at my booth and when the attendees started wandering past.
I was fortunate to have two volunteers for my booth who were there all week, as well as a couple more who turned up on the first two days. Not only did this mean that I got to spend a few hours during the week actually wandering the fairgrounds, but that I had some knowledgeable native german speakers for the occasional visitor who could not speak English. DAViCal has been translated into a dozen languages, and there had been some extra work put in to update the German translation before CeBIT also. As well as showing DAViCal, I was also able to demonstrate a new project at the fair which was aCal - a CalDAV Calendar Client for Android which I had released into the market just a few days beforehand for a token sum (it is licensed GPL v3 or later and the source code is available on gitorious.org). Having the smartphone devices available was great for giving live demonstrations, and I used the timetable for events at the Open Source Forum across the aisle from the Open Source Lounge to populate a calendar that we shared among a variety of devices. The first day was really the calm before the storm, and we saw lots of people asking what we were about, and had some good conversations with people wanting to know more, or telling us they used the software and were very happy with it.
CeBIT closes the gates at 18:00 with the visitor supply drying up pretty quickly around then and the secret lives of the exhibitors are revealed with people starting to relax and joke, and beer or wine starting to come out and some booth parties kicking off... if you have the stamina! I didn't, so it was off back to the train, to Hildesheim, to dinner and to bed. That first day blurred into the next, and the next and by Friday I was starting to lose my voice with all the talking I had been doing. I was visited by a chap from Posnan University who are a DAViCal user and he invited me down to the Polish stand to tell me about what they do there, and he agreed that they would love to help get the Polish translation improved. Another DAViCal user turned up with some bavarian wheat beer and a special beer glass for it by way of thanks. In some spare moments I fixed a bug in aCal's handling of character sets and uploaded a new version, so that we could use umlauts in events. Many people came past to talk to us, some of whom want to help with them project or have ideas for interesting things to do with DAViCal, some were already users of DAViCal and some went away thinking that they would be in the future. The last day of CeBIT is a little different: it's a Saturday and the doors are opened to the public and the minimum age is lowered to allow children to attend the event. I had been warned that this day is a madhouse, and it did indeed seem to be so for many booths. For DAViCal it was probably quieter than the day before, I think perhaps because calendar server software is inherently less sexy than many of the other things on display. We still had plenty of great discussions with interested people nonetheless and to be honest I was fairly happy to be spared the further exhaustion that had been threatened. Sunday was spent recuperating: discovering that Hildesheim has a great little restaurant that does traditional german pancakes for breakfast and then wandering around the small city soaking in the sunshine that I'd seen through the windows outside all week. On Monday I caught the train to M nchengladbach to meet with an organisation that might provide support for DAViCal in Germany, but who hadn't been able to come to the fair to see me due to illness. I was encouraged to spend the night in Aachen a beautiful little city , which I did, arriving around sunset and I spent a couple more days before flying home being intensely antisocial to recover from the furious week beforehand. Is CeBIT worth it? CeBIT seemed to me to be quite a different business model, or perhaps on a different scale. I've seen trade fairs in New Zealand for other purposes, but not to showcase software and services in quite this way. To give an idea of it's scale, consider that I had a tiny booth in a hall that was probably four times the size of the TSB Arena, and CeBIT included around 20 such buildings , packed with exhibitors, with free buses to get around the campus, acres of multi-storey parking buildings, two train stations, and so on. The scale of the event is incredible. As a result of this scale, CeBIT boasts impressive visitor numbers, and while a visitor will usually attend with a specific area of interest in relation to their business they will also wander the fair to see other areas of more personal interest, or just to see what is around. Open Source is a specific area of interest to a significant percentage of business in Germany, and Deutsche Messe, the fair operators, recognise the value of having an open source area as a draw for visitors, with the primary open source area placed in Hall 2, directly off the main north entrance. Within the open source area, the Open Source Project Lounge , where DAViCal was located, is a series of booths sponsored by Linux New Media AG. Projects in the Open Source Lounge are selected by a jury of Linux New Media, Deutsche Messe and several community advisors, so as such there is a range of interesting projects on show and the draw of any given project has a flow-on effect to the others. As an example, at one point while briefly minding the adjacent stand for the OpenEmbedded project I was unable to help an inquiring visitor, but I was able to talk about DAViCal with him until the exhibitor returned to answer his question. His interest in DAViCal was definitely increased in this process, and I'm sure that many people came into our area of the lounge attracted by a specific exhibitor and moving on to see some of the others. Outside of this association with open source, however, CeBIT offers something which general free software events cannot: an association with mainstream software and services. This presentation of Open Source alongside IBM, SAP, HP, Oracle, Software AG, Apple, Microsoft and so forth makes inclusion at this event particularly valuable. Free software solutions can have good brand recognition within the open ecosystem itself and yet be practically unheard of outside it. Most traditional methods of communication with suppliers don't work well with Open Source projects: a request for proposal will sail silently by, unless noted by a related commercial entity. In general there is no sales department, and marketing is frequently a desultory hit or miss affair. The fair is different. The fair is about talking with people. While there is still plenty of collateral marketing with brochures, signs, presentations and giveaway knick-knacks those things are just there to bring people into range: the real action happens when you engage a person in conversation, and at that point a humble free software project can be on an equal footing with a larger booth staffed with eager young salesmen. Of course there are a number of places where free software can get a booth. Linuxtag is a German example where there are many booths for free software projects, linux.conf.au also offers booths to free software projects during it's more outreach Open Day and software freedom day events happen all around the world where booths are available, but the audience arriving at these events are all largely pre-sold on openness and free software. So in presenting this broad blend of people, in a way in which free software projects can present on a roughly equal footing with their commercial brethren, CeBIT is an opportunity not to be missed. The numbers speak for themselves, too: traffic to the DAViCal websites has increased by about 50% around CeBIT with 25% coming from Germany, but significant increases also from France, Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland and Poland. Traffic to the DAViCal wiki has doubled over the last 12 months in a steady increase to around 200,000 page views each month. This sudden increase to around 10000/day in March, with some days during CeBIT peaking at over 20000/day The Future I won't be returning to CeBIT to represent DAViCal in Hannover next year as the sponsored booth is pretty much a one-time thing and the costs involved in purchasing a booth for attendance at the fair are significant (around NZD$15000 for a small 3m x 2m stall). It's possible that I will return next year in a different capacity, as one of the larger stand organisers has confidentially indicated he will invite me to attend as part of an Open Source Apps area that he is considering running on his stand, somewhat along the lines of the Open Source Lounge . Time will tell, I guess, but if invited I think I would definitely go for that. I will definitely be suggesting to a few specific free software projects that they should apply for the Linux New Media opportunity when it comes around again. Koha is one project that immediately springs to mind, but of course there are many, many worthy free software projects and this opportunity seems to be little-understood outside of Germany. If I do convince a project to apply, and they are successful, I will also try and give them some assistance and background knowledge to understand the fair, and how best they can take advantage of the opportunity it offers. Some basic tips would be:

• Book accommodation early, a small apartment or B&B is good. CeBIT accommodation prices are exceptionally high 3 or more times normal rates. There are companies that specialise in renting apartments for the week of CeBIT which are more reasonably priced.
• The fair is in Hannover , except that really it is some distance to the southeast. Exhibitors tickets provide free transport within greater Hannover for the whole week, so you don't actually need to be that close. Options like Hildesheim, a city of some 120k people south of Hannover (where I stayed), are also good although they add a small transport cost.
• Have a pop-up banner for your project.
• Develop a slideshow which tells people about your project and which can just be left running on a larger screen.
• Have a flyer you can hand out to interested people.
• Get at least one committed person to assist on the stand for the whole week.
• Get some more volunteers to assist on the stand for one day each.
• Pace yourself: get to bed early and try not to overdo the partying it's a long week!
• If you want to take a look around the fair don't wait until Friday or Saturday do it on Thursday or earlier.

and finally... I would like to express my appreciation to InternetNZ for the grant to partially cover my travel costs to Hannover, making my attendance at this outstanding event much more achievable. My thanks also to Britta Wulfling who supported all of the projects in the Open Source Lounge. My friends Alexander & Meike in Hildesheim who supplied somewhere for me to recuperate, and accompanied me to the fair every day to run the Debian booth. Thanks also, of course, to the German Linux Magazine for selecting DAViCal for a free booth, and to Benny who pointed the opportunity out, encouraged me to apply, and came along and helped out for the whole week.

We still have some free spaces in the Hildesheim BSP, which is scheduled in two weeks. (Friday 2nd to Sunday 4th of December). If you need any additional information or want to come by please check the wiki page.

My generous employer has kindly offered to host the first Bug Squashing Party of the now commencing Wheezy Release BSP Marathon. Yay! We'll meet during the first weekend in December (Friday 2nd to Sunday 4th) in Hildesheim, Germany. There's a wiki page listing all important information. Please also use this page to sign up if you want to join us.

I attached the slides of my talks to penta but they don't seem to show up so here are a couple links:

• The Debian Women talk
• The How to contribute talk from DebianDay

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)

There are some bloggers who I'm really happy to see back in the blogosphere.

That was a damn busy week. It was mostly centered about attending SambaXP, the annual Samba user and developers conference, in G ttingen, Germany. The only free software conference I attend with expenses paid by my employer, Onera. This year was the 10th edition and, as last year, to the "who was there for the nth edition" game, I won by staying alone as they asked who attended all editions of the conference. :-) That was a great week, with time spent with people as interesting as Andrew Tridgell, Jeremy Allison, John Terpstra, Volker Lendecke, Kai Blin, to name a few. A good opportunity, again, to get input from our packaging work for that big piece of software, as well as getting visibility about the future of Samba. I also had a great, even if short talk, with the kind Karolin Seeger, the release manager of Samba for 3 years now. We talked about....children, as she's now a mother since last year (with a non negligible impact on her professionnal life, as often in Germany). Great meeting, too, with Brad Kuhn, from the Software Freedom Conservacy, who had a keynote about GPL licence enforcment activities. It becomes more and more sure that Samba3 and Samba4 will reconverge together after the Samba Team releases Samba 3.6. It brings plans for our packaging work: I think we'll stick with having samba 3.6 in wheezy while the brand new shiny Samba4 probably stays separate in some way. Our users (and /me first) clearly need stability in the file and print services first. Of course, I did some packaging work there: samba 3.6.0pre3 was uploaded to experimental, about 10 days after its official announcement. I also worked on the samba *binary* package bugs, triaging them as usual. We now have 51 bugs opened against the samba binary package: 18 unclassified, 11 moreinfo (several likely to be closed as unreproducible or user error), 1 wontfix, 8 with a pending patch and 13 forwarded upstream. I'm also thinking about a possible way to ask about SMB2 support in samba: it won't be activated by default in 3.6 (mostly because us, distros, requested for that and, by "us", I mean Debian, RHEL, SuSe and their derivatives, so quite a large consensus). Still, it would be good to put some light on SMB2 support and a debconf question about it could be a solution (not shown by default and defaulting to no SMB2). I also worked quite extensively on packages maintained by No l K the, Ralf Treinen and me, aka "the pkg-running team". I did setup a git repo for my new "garmin-ant-downloader" package, that allows downloading track files from Garmin Forerunner 405 GPS watches (guess what is the brand and model of mine!). My first packaging git repository! Thanks to Ralf for his advice and help in this. I triaged bugs in the other two packages we maintain: pytrainer (more bugs forwarded upstream) and garmin-forerunner-tools (which was later uploaded by Ralf). I also setup a team mailign list so, now, we're a real team...:-) Few activity on the l10n front: a few Smith reviews are in progress and I completed 1 or 2 French translations, and reviewed some others. Regular activity, then. The only specific stuff is that I'm now pushing harder for the French DDTP effort, doing many reviews and translations there. We try to reach 100% in the "popcon500" packages. Later, we'll try to head at reaching the hieghts reached by the Italian and German teams, who are, on this l10n activity, way ahead from us. Finally, during the SambaXP conference, and as usual (except last year because of too heavy work duties), I visited my German friends, living "close to" G ttingen, accomppanied by Luk Claes and his friend and colleague Ivo, who were also attending SambaXP. Great barbecue at Andreas and Kathrin Tille's place, facing the Wernigerode castle at sunset. And the best sp tzle ever at Meike and Alex Reichle's place in Hildesheim, with a french touch on the salad's dressing as well as great Chilean wine brought by Meike's coworker Wolfram. Always a great time to see these good friends even if that means driving a few hours (and being flashed....twice!...by german speed cameras on the way to and back Andreas place!) To complete the week, I ran a 34km/800m+ trail today in the Rambouillet forest, completing it in 3h31. I'll probably blog separately about running updates as it is now quite some time that I didn't. Guess what? I'll be sleeping well tonight...

By the way: For DebConf attendees from Germany (or passing through Germany) might be interesting, that you can currently book the night train from Munich to Zagreb with a special price (called Spar Night or something like that); quite cheap: It's cheaper for Meike and me in a double cabin of that train, than to fly for one of us. As far as I know it is a limited offer, to book fast while you can! Apparently you can't book that train via the web interface, but you can buy it in their offices and via phone. Oh, an it seems that the train on the 22nd of July there and on the 31st back might become a Debian train. Seems there are already five of us taking that one ;) Update: Fixed a typo: DebConf is taking place in July, not in June.

Let's see ...

• Got the application for leave filed and accepted at work
• Registered my talks
• Booked the trip
• Got a working plan for (my day at) DebCamp
• Wrote my abstracts

... I guess I am going to DebConf :D

This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you re among the people who support my work, then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. GNOME 3 packaging Right after the GNOME 3 release, I was eager to try it out so I helped the pkg-gnome team to update some of the packages. I did some uploads of totem, totem-pl-parser, gvfs, mutter, gnome-shell, gnome-screensaver. I also kept people informed via my blog and prepared a pinning file for adventurous users who wanted to try it out from experimental (like me). One month later, I m still using GNOME 3. There are rough edges still, but not so many. And I m starting to get used to it. Debian Rolling planning Debian Rolling is a project on my TODO list for quite some time. I decided it was time to do something about it and started a series of articles to help clarify my ideas while getting some early feedback. My goal was to prepare a somewhat polished proposal before posting it to a Debian mailing list. But as usual with Murphy s law, my plan did not work out as expected. Almost immediately after my first post the discussion started on debian-devel:
At this point it s a discussion thread of several hundreds of messages (there are several screens of messages like the one above). Many of the sub-threads have been interesting, but the general discussions mixed too many different things so that there s no clear outcome yet. Lucas Nussbaum tried to make a summary. Obviously I must adjust my plan, there s lots of feedback to process. I accepted to drive a DEP together with Sean Finney to help structure the part of the discussion that focuses on allowing development to continue during freezes. But I m also eager to fix the marketing problem of testing and have the project recognize that testing is a product in itself and that end-users should be encouraged to use it. Package Tracking System maintenance The Package Tracking System is an important tool for Debian developers, and it has been broken by some change on the Bug Tracking System. I worked around it quite quickly so that few people noticed the problem but Cron kept reminding me that I had to properly fix it. I ended up doing it last week-end. While working on the PTS, I took the opportunity to merge a patch from Jan Dittberner to enhance the news RSS feed that the PTS provides. And I also integrated information from backports.debian.org (thanks to Mehdi Dogguy for reminding me #549115). Multiarch update Not much new this month. I fixed two bugs in the multiarch dpkg branch thanks to bug reports from Ubuntu users (LP 767634, LP 756381). I m still waiting on Guillem Jover finishing his review of the multiarch branch. I m pinging him from time to time but it looks like multi-arch is no longer in his short term priority list. I ve been running this code for more than 2 months and it works fine. I want to see it merged. I m ready to update my code should anything need to be changed to please Guillem. But without any feedback we re in a deadlock. Misc dpkg work While fixing a bug in update-alternatives (found in one of the valid reports on launchpad), I noticed that there was room for improvements in the error messages output by update-alternatives. I changed them to reuse the same strings that were already used in other parts of dpkg. The result is that there are a few strings less to translate (always a nice thing for the poor translators who have to deal with the thousands of strings that dpkg contains). I also tried to fix some of the most cryptic error messages in dpkg (see #621763) but that work is stalled at the request of Guillem. Book update We (me and Roland Mas) are almost done with the update of our French book for Debian Squeeze. It will hit the shelves in July or September. I m starting to prepare the fundraising campaign to make an English translation of it. We ll use ulule.com for this. On my blog I have been pleased to interview Meike Reichle, it s the first women that I have interviewed in the series but it s certainly not the last one. I also interviewed Adam D. Barratt, one of our tireless release managers. Thanks Many thanks to the people who gave me 180.35 in March and 235.37 in April. That represents 1.5 and 2 days of work for those months. See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

8 comments Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

A few days ago I did an interview for the People Behind Debian series that, among other things, covered my Debian press work and asked what it's like to do that kind of work for Debian. Here's a little addendum: Sometimes Debian Press Work is great: All these people do all this amazing stuff and it's a pure pleasure to talk about it. Our last release was such an experience for example. I was clamped to my laptop for almost 20 hours straight and I had a great time! There was this great common feeling of community, achievement and pride in our work and I was proud and happy to be a part of it. And then there are times like the last few days, where Alex and I went South for 4.5 precious and long-awaited days of vacation and ended up spending the first two of them working on an obituary for a dear and much valued member of our community and once this was done spent the remaining days of our holidays nervously watching the net and drafting and re-drafting press announcements because some <bleep> thought it might be oh-so-hilarous to send out faked cease and desist orders to a Debian user, ostensibly as a funny prank but along the way causing a huge amount of completely unsubstantiated FUD that we'll probably spend weeks clearing up. Somewhere in between these events is what Debian press work is like.

Meike Reichle is a Debian developer since 2008 but has been involved for longer than that, in particular in Debian Women. She s a great speaker and shared her experience in a Debconf talk. She s also part of the Debian publicity team and managed the live coverage of the last release on identi.ca. Enough introduction, learn more about her by reading the interview. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Meike. Who are you? My name is Meike Reichle, I am a studied information scientist and work as a project manager at Pengutronix, an embedded Linux company probably best known for their ARM kernel work. I live in Germany, more exactly in Lower Saxony, but I was originally born and raised in Swabia. Although I moved here ten years ago I still have a rather strong Swabian cultural identity. (Among other things I pride myself on having introduced a number of fellow DDs to the true promise that are real hand-made Sp tzle ) I am married to Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, we ll have our third wedding anniversary this summer. Apart from Debian most of my spare time is used for all kinds of crafts and DIY activities. Making things with my hands always gives me a great sense of accomplishment. My Free software history is summed up pretty quickly. Like most women of my age I wasn t introduced to computers until well into my teens. I didn t have a computer of my own until I started studying at the university in 2001. From there on things developed rather quickly: Working on the University s Unix terminals got me hooked on *nixes, so I got me one of those Linuxes everyone talked about. I tried a couple of different distributions, ended up with Debian around 2004, started contributing in 2005, and finally became a full DD what a nice coincidence! exactly this day (Apr 18th) three years ago. You re part of Debian Women. How is the project going? I have the feeling that the number of women involved in Debian has not significantly increased. The amount of women active within Debian is a tricky thing to judge. Here s a quick example why: When the DPL was elected in 2004 there were 911 Debian Developers eligible to vote, 4 of them were female. Shortly after, during DebConf4, debian-women was founded. When the current DPL was reelected last month, there were again 911 Debian Developers eligible to vote, but this time 13 of them were women. You can look at these numbers and say The number of female DDs has more than tripled, what a success! Or you can pull out your calculator and it will tell you that in terms of ratio this puts us from a measly 0.4% to an only slightly less measly 1.4% ratio of female DDs. This still is pardon my language a bloody shame, but sadly also pretty close to the average ratio of women in Free Software. So, while I do think that the debian-women project did already have a significant impact on the Debian project as a whole, I don t think it has achieved its goals yet. Not for a long time. There s still a lot to be done but unfortunately the debian-women project has somewhat run out of steam at the moment. The seven years of its existence divide quite equally into the first half, which was very active and saw great results, and the second half, which was very slow and much more passive. In my impression debian-women is currently undergoing a rather bumpy generational change. On the one hand a lot of the original members, including myself, have reduced their involvement. Speaking for myself this is caused by shift of interests as much as general weariness. On the other hand there are only very few women following up. This development is also reflected quite harshly in DD numbers: If I don t misjudge any first names (and I desperately hope I do!) for the last three years not a single woman has joined Debian as a developer! After the great start debian-women has had, this is a very painful thing to see! That said, things don t look all bad. There is a number of women maintaining packages without being DDs and there s also at least one woman currently in NM, so there s hope this standstill won t last very much longer. But still, the fact remains that debian-women is suffering from a rather serious recruitment problem and I hope that this interview might actually help to spur some new or not yet active members into action. The aim of debian-women is far from achieved and now that its initial members are receding its time for new members to step up and take initiative. What should Debian do to be more attractive to women ? I think the general atmosphere has improved, we re less tolerant with rude behaviour, the usual tone on mailing lists has improved. Yet it doesn t seem to be enough. If there was a female DD for every time I answered that question First of all, I agree, Debian as a community has improved tremendously! Our general tone is much more friendly and cooperative and there is now a much better awareness of the impression we give to outsiders and newcomers. Now on to the difficult part: The question what should be done to get more women into Free Software has been around almost as long as Free Software exists, and it has been answered very well by a lot of people: Twenty years ago Ellen Spertus wrote Why are There so Few Female Computer Scientists? and most of it still holds true. Almost ten years ago Val Henson (now Aurora) wrote HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux and that also is still pretty accurate. In 2006 Floss Pols undertook extensive research to find out why there were so few women in Open Source and Free Software and how that could be changed. They also came up with a very good set of recommendations. All of these texts highlight different aspects of that question and all of them have very good points. I personally have, over the years, arrived at a rather sociological, not to say holistic point of view. In fact I answered the exact same question a few days ago, and the answer I gave then was this: After ~10 years of women in tech advocacy I d say the ultimate and final measure to get more women into Free Software is by finally achieving a truly equal society and at the same time dramatically improving child care support in almost any country. I ve come to the conclusion that what really holds women back in practice is not so much a lack of skill or interest but a simple lack of opportunity. For most of us Free Software is what we do in our spare time and that s something that women, even today, have considerably less of than men. Even in couples where both partners work full-time it is still mostly the woman who does the majority of the housework and child care duties. In most cultures men have a perceived right to their leisure time that does not to the same degree exist for women. That is one major reason, the other is instilled modesty, which has kind of become my personal arch-enemy by now. I ve talked to so many girls and women at all sorts of events about why they won t take up Computer Science studies or join a Free Software project and the answer I hear most often is that they do not consider themselves good enough in one or another aspect. Sometimes they will doubt their technical skills, sometimes their language skills, sometimes their stamina. Needless to say these girls and women were not any less qualified than the people already active in Free Software. So, yes, in the short and medium term making Debian a more welcoming and friendly place is the way to go. As many others pointed out already this will not only benefit prospective contributors but the community as a whole: those new to it as well as those who ve been in it for a long time. In the long term however what we need is empowerment! Women who are just as confident about their skills as men and are not discouraged by uncooperative environments. This is of course something that is culturally deep-rooted and can only happen in a very large time frame. So, for the moment the way to go in my view is accessibility: a cooperative atmosphere, a code of conduct, comprehensive documentation not only of technical aspects but also of structures and processes. The other thing we need to do is to have as many already active women as possible attend as many Linux/Debian/Free Software/Whatever events as possible. In my experience it happens quite often that other women see these women, feel very inspired by them, get to talk to them and then a few days later show up on some mailing list or IRC channel. From what I ve seen personal contact still beats any other kind of recruiting measures. You re a Debian developer but you re also married with a Debian developer (Alexander Reichle-Schmehl). Did you meet because of Debian? If not, who introduced Debian to the other one? We did in fact meet because of Debian. More specifically during our booth shift at the Debian booth at LinuxTag 2005, where I did a talk on the debian-women project and Alex organised the DebianDay. After that our relationship developed pretty much along our Debian activities: After our initial meeting we talked a lot on #debian.de, when Alex went to DebConf5 and I didn t we noticed that we kind of missed each other. The first gift he ever gave me was a Debconf5 shirt and a box Finnish chocolates (I still have one of them today. ) Our first secret kiss was at ApacheCon 2005, where we were both staffing the Debian booth (kudos to abe for pretending not to notice). We then became an official couple at Berlinux 2005 where we were both staffing the Debian booth and giving talks on packaging and user motivation. Our first real relationship stress test was when we both joined the DebConf6 orga team. It was a stressful time, but we passed it with flying colours! About a year later we announced our engagement via planet.debian.org. Our wedding was a veritable MiniDebConf, one of the best gifts we got was a Debian cookbook including the favourite recipes of DDs from around the world. By now we ve both finished university and work full-time jobs, so we don t do as many talks and attend as many Debian events as we used to. Instead we now mainly focus on press and publicity work, which is quite practical to work on as a pair. It s actually rather funny that way, Alex and I get confused with each other quite often, since we have almost the same name, often pick up on each other s E-Mail conversations and are most often quoted by our function rather than by name. Because of we have kind of merged into this virtual Debian Press Person in the perception of many of our contacts. You also have another hat : Debian Press Officer. What is this about? What would you suggest to people who would like get involved in that domain? Debian press work is mainly about providing an official and coordinated point of contact to anyone wanting information from or about Debian. The press team answers all sorts of inquiries (the most popular one is is of course always the next release date) and makes sure all important events and developments within Debian receive the attention and recognition they deserve. Debian is a diverse project where every sort of contributor is free to voice his or her opinion in any way. We don t have NDAs or prescribed terminology. That s one of the things I love about Debian but also something that makes us difficult to handle for conventional media. They want official statements, in generally understandable terms, at appointed times. That s what the press team takes care of. Almost all of the press work is done in the publicity team, which coordinates using IRC, Mail and SVN. The publicity team also publishes the Debian Project News, which are very popular among our users and developers. Press work is also an area of work that offers lots of possibilities for non-technical contribution. http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity lists a number of possibilities for contribution and, like most Debian Teams, we d be more than grateful to get some more helping hands and happy to introduce interested newcomers to our work. What s the biggest problem of Debian? In my view: Overwork. Debian has thousands of contributors but still a lot of the main work rests on very few shoulders. We need more contributors, especially, but not only in the key teams. In order to get more people we need to do some marketing which is very hard for us, since we are very proud of our independence and have a strong focus on purely technical aspects rather than aiming for popularity. However, with the current amount of Open Source and Free Software projects to join we find ourselves not only in a contest on technical excellence but also a sort of popularity contest that is about perception rather than hard facts. This popularity contest is difficult for Debian and currently costs us quite a bunch of very capable people. Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy? My answer to that is a non-technical one: I think Debian is currently very under-appreciated, we do a lot of great work and maybe even more importantly we do a lot of important work for Software Freedom, sometimes even at the cost of our above-mentioned popularity. I hope people will appreciate that more again in the future. Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Over the years I have made a lot of friends within the Debian community, some have even become family. That makes it somewhat hard to single out individual people. I think what I admire most is continuous commitment. I am very impressed by those among us who have kept up a high level of commitment over many years and at the same time managed to bring that in line with a fulfilled personal/family life. That s something that I hope I ll also be able to achieve in the years to come.

---

Thank you to Meike 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.

2 comments Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

As you probably already know, Debian released Squeeze aka Debian 6.0 this week-end. It was a really great week-end. I saw quite a few release already, but none with so much online social activity. Alexander and Meike Schmehl live commented the release on the Debian identi.ca account and Joey Hess held his Debian Party Line. On top of this, the team in charge of the website rolled out a new design on quite a few online services during the week-end including www.debian.org, wiki.debian.org, planet.debian.org and more. Congratulations to all the people who made this happen (and the release team in particular). It s great to see Debian achieve all of this. Do you know that it s the third time in a row that we manage to release in the 18-24 months timeframe? 3.1: June 2005 4.0: April 2007 5.0: February 2009 6.0: February 2011. Yes, despite our size and the fact that we are all volunteers, we have managed to stick to a reasonable schedule for a stable distribution that is deployed on a large scale. Wheezy kicks off The best part of the release for us the developers is that wheezy is now open for development and we can work on new features for the next release. And it started quickly: according to UDD, wheezy already features 488 new source packages that are not in squeeze, 1713 updated source packages and among those 1246 are new upstream versions. I really look forward to the upcoming projects and related discussions.

Click here to subscribe to my free newsletter and get my monthly analysis on what s going on in Debian and Ubuntu. Or just follow along via the RSS feed, Identi.ca, Twitter or Facebook.

---

For the curious, here are the UDD queries I used:

# Updated packages in wheezy
select count(source) from sources_uniq as su where (select version from sources_uniq where release='squeeze' and distribution='debian' and source = su.source) < su.version and release='wheezy' and distribution='debian';
# Updated with a new upstream version
select count(source) from sources_uniq as su where debversion(regexp_replace((select version from sources_uniq where release='squeeze' and distribution='debian' and source = su.source), '-.*', '')) < debversion(regexp_replace(su.version, '-.*', '')) and release='wheezy' and distribution='debian';
# New package in wheezy
select count(source) from sources_uniq as su where source not in (select source from sources_uniq where release='squeeze' and distribution='debian' and source = su.source) and release='wheezy' and distribution='debian';

No comment Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

That's it! Squeeze is released and the website's new design is in place. What a great day! In addition to the usual announcements on the website and mailing lists we decided to also do a live coverage of the whole process using identi.ca this time! Alex and me have been doing a live coverage of Debian's release process for almost 19 hours straight and, although we're dead beat now, I think it was well worth it! People seemed to enjoy being included in the process and many expressed their admiration for Debian's well-coordinated and purposeful proceedings. Congratulations to all involved: the FTP team, the release team, the CD team, the www team and the publicity team! Great work everyone!