The Debian Python Modules Team is discussing which DVCS to switch to from SVN. Ondrej Certik asked how to generate a list of commiters to the team s repository, so I looked at it and got this:
emilio@saturno:~/deb/python-modules$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
865 piotr
609 morph
598 kov
532 bzed
388 pox
302 arnau
253 certik
216 shlomme
212 malex
175 hertzog
140 nslater
130 kobold
123 nijel
121 kitterma
106 bernat
99 kibi
87 varun
83 stratus
81 nobse
81 netzwurm
78 azatoth
76 mca
73 dottedmag
70 jluebbe
68 zack
68 cgalisteo
61 speijnik
61 odd_bloke
60 rganesan
55 kumanna
52 werner
50 haas
48 mejo
45 ucko
43 pabs
42 stew
42 luciano
41 mithrandi
40 wardi
36 gudjon
35 jandd
34 smcv
34 brettp
32 jenner
31 davidvilla
31 aurel32
30 rousseau
30 mtaylor
28 thomasbl
26 lool
25 gaspa
25 ffm
24 adn
22 jmalonzo
21 santiago
21 appaji
18 goedson
17 toadstool
17 sto
17 awen
16 mlizaur
16 akumar
15 nacho
14 smr
14 hanska
13 tviehmann
13 norsetto
13 mbaldessari
12 stone
12 sharky
11 rainct
11 fabrizio
10 lash
9 rodrigogc
9 pcc
9 miriam
9 madduck
9 ftlerror
8 pere
8 crschmidt
7 ncommander
7 myon
7 abuss
6 jwilk
6 bdrung
6 atehwa
5 kcoyner
5 catlee
5 andyp
4 vt
4 ross
4 osrevolution
4 lamby
4 baby
3 sez
3 joss
3 geole
2 rustybear
2 edmonds
2 astraw
2 ana
1 twerner
1 tincho
1 pochu
1 danderson
As it s likely that the Python Applications Packaging Team will switch too to the same DVCS at the same time, here are the numbers for its repo:

emilio@saturno:~/deb/python-apps$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
401 nijel
288 piotr
235 gothicx
159 pochu
76 nslater
69 kumanna
68 rainct
66 gilir
63 certik
52 vdanjean
52 bzed
46 dottedmag
41 stani
39 varun
37 kitterma
36 morph
35 odd_bloke
29 pcc
29 gudjon
28 appaji
25 thomasbl
24 arnau
20 sc
20 andyp
18 jalet
15 gerardo
14 eike
14 ana
13 dfiloni
11 tklauser
10 ryanakca
10 nxvl
10 akumar
8 sez
8 baby
6 catlee
4 osrevolution
4 cody-somerville
2 mithrandi
2 cjsmo
1 nenolod
1 ffm
Here I m the 4th most committer And while I was on it, I thought I could do the same for the GNOME and GStreamer teams:
emilio@saturno:~/deb/pkg-gnome$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
5357 lool
2701 joss
1633 slomo
1164 kov
825 seb128
622 jordi
621 jdassen
574 manphiz
335 sjoerd
298 mlang
296 netsnipe
291 grm
255 ross
236 ari
203 pochu
198 ondrej
190 he
180 kilian
176 alanbach
170 ftlerror
148 nobse
112 marco
87 jak
84 samm
78 rfrancoise
75 oysteigi
73 jsogo
65 svena
65 otavio
55 duck
54 jcurbo
53 zorglub
53 rtp
49 wasabi
49 giskard
42 tagoh
42 kartikm
40 gpastore
34 brad
32 robtaylor
31 xaiki
30 stratus
30 daf
26 johannes
24 sander-m
21 kk
19 bubulle
16 arnau
15 dodji
12 mbanck
11 ruoso
11 fpeters
11 dedu
11 christine
10 cpm
7 ember
7 drew
7 debotux
6 tico
6 emil
6 bradsmith
5 robster
5 carlosliu
4 rotty
4 diegoe
3 biebl
2 thibaut
2 ejad
1 naoliv
1 huats
1 gilir

emilio@saturno:~/deb/pkg-gstreamer$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
891 lool
840 slomo
99 pnormand
69 sjoerd
27 seb128
21 manphiz
8 he
7 aquette
4 elmarco
1 fabian
Conclusions:
- Why do I have the full python-modules and pkg-gstreamer trees, if I have just one commit to DPMT, and don t even have commit access to the GStreamer team?
- If you don t want to seem like you have done less commits than you have actually done, don t change your alioth name when you become a DD (hint: pox-guest and piotr in python-modules are the same person)
- If the switch to a new VCS was based on a vote where you have one vote per commit, the top 3 commiters in pkg-gnome could win the vote if they chosed the same! For python-apps it s the 4 top commiters, and the 7 ones for python-modules. pkg-gstreamer is a bit special

Today I got a mail from weasel, that my Debian account has been created. So in the end of my NM process everything went pretty fast. Now that I finally became a Debian Developer it feels like the end of a long journey, so I'd like to reflect on my process.

I started my "career" in Debian around 2006, when I got a co-maintainer of the smstools package. From then I got more involved with adopting some more packages etc. till I finally applied to become a DD on 31th August 2007. Until then most of my uploads where sponsored by Daniel Baumann (panthera), who therefore helped me learn a lot, and so he got my advocate. From that point on the most time of my NM process I've been waiting. Waiting for an AM, waiting for my AM (well, he also needed to wait for me because we both had busy times during my active processing), waiting for front desk. After all I had luck, because the DAM problem has been solved recently. I know that a part of the time I didn't feel like pushing my application forward fast, because I did not see where this would lead, except to a situation where I'd again wait for the DAM.

Now I'm quiet happy. And that is a good moment to thank some people, who helped me to get to this point: panthera for beeing my sponsor and advocate for some time, Thijs for beeing a sponsor and quiet helpful when it was about fixing security issues in mantis, naoliv for beeing a very reliable sponsor, pabs for beeing my AM, Myon for several actings on my NM application and off course the people involved in account creation. Thanks.

mmap()/vmsplice() root exploit and fun with Xen: Today has been a very busy day. First of all, a new exploit was discovered today that uses vmsplice to gain root access. Of course, there’s an unpleasant side effect to that exploit (so don’t try it on your machines!), it messes up the memory map and applications start crashing until you reboot your machine. When combined with Xen, things get worse: the hypervisor crashes and obviously takes out all of your domUs which is unpleasant. As a result, I upgraded my Xen-using stuff to 3.2, but the bug is still there. There’s a nice “feature” though: When the hypervisor crashes, it reboots so you can’t even get a crash log. Fantastic, except not. Xen 3.2 seems nice so far, I backported it to etch for use on my dom0’s. I haven’t noticed any major problems yet so that’s good. It’d be nice to have linux-image-2.6.23-xen backported to etch, that’ll probably be my next project (at the same time, I plan to patch out the vmsplice syscall so it can’t be exploited by users on my machines). Hopefully the backports.org maintainer will do a backport soon. dsyslog in NEW: dsyslog has been released (I did this yesterday actually), and is now in NEW as of today. For those of you who don’t know what dsyslog is, it’s a syslogging daemon I am writing from scratch for my needs. It has a 100% modular design; the core only provides a generic message processing and routing framework. Thanks to naoliv and dmb for collaborating on the packaging. upse 0.6.0 released: Today I also released upse 0.6.0, which adds the ability to use a PSone ROM instead of emulation so that you can listen to mods that require a replayer which depends random aspects of the ROM itself. Right now, this feature only works with upse123, but I will add support to the audacious plugin in 0.7.0. Please note that upse does not include a PSone ROM image as it’s pretty much guaranteed to be non-free. You can use a gameshark, or some sort of JTAG method to dump the ROM’s contents. (The ‘crash2′ replayer is especially a problem with this one.) Additionally, the new release features reworked modeling of the PSone’s SPU analog filters. srctool: A lot of people commented on my ideas for replacing srcinst with something more modern and powerful (presently called srctool). I’ll be sure to take a look at them over the next few days and comment back. freenode adopts DroneBL as part of their anti-trolling defense: LoRez notified me on freenode today that they are using DroneBL to help keep trolls and proxy abusers off the network. I wish them luck with their use of this, and recommend an additional blacklist as a supplement, dnsbl.anoxs.net. While I disagree with the way they have implemented their DNSBL, they do indeed get results.

Sven M ller commented:

"Well, if pbuilder slows you down too much, perhaps cowbuilder is the right one for you. I haven't tried it myself yet, but it is supposed to eliminate the worst delay pbuilder introduces: The unpacking of the base.tgz minimal chroot archive."

Nelson A. de Oliveira asked:

"Have you tried cowdancer + pbuilder? It makes creating packages really fast (there is no more need to uncompress the tarball, for example)."

I looked for cowbuilder, but there's no package called that, so I was quite glad for the second comment. I'll backport cowdancer and give it a go. Thanks!