Search Results: "olasd"

23 July 2023

Wouter Verhelst: Debconf Videoteam sprint in Paris, France, 2023-07-20 - 2023-07-23

The DebConf video team has been sprinting in preparation for DebConf 23 which will happen in Kochi, India, in September of this year. Video team sprint Present were Nicolas "olasd" Dandrimont, Stefano "tumbleweed" Rivera, and yours truly. Additionally, Louis-Philippe "pollo" V ronneau and Carl "CarlFK" Karsten joined the sprint remotely from across the pond. Thank you to the DPL for agreeing to fund flights, food, and accomodation for the team members. We would also like to extend a special thanks to the Association April for hosting our sprint at their offices. We made a lot of progress: It is now Sunday the 23rd at 14:15, and while the sprint is coming to an end, we haven't quite finished yet, so some more progress can still be made. Let's see what happens by tonight. All in all, though, we believe that the progress we made will make the DebConf Videoteam's work a bit easier in some areas, and will make things work better in the future. See you in Kochi!

13 November 2021

Ruby Team: Ruby Team Sprint 2020 in Paris - Day Four

On day four the transition to Ruby 2.7 and Rails 6 went on. Minor transitions took place too, for example the upload of ruby-faraday 1.0 or the upload of bundler 2.1 featuring the (first) contributions by bundler s upstream Deivid (yeah!). Further Red Hat s (and Debian s) Marc Dequ nes (Duck) joined us. We are proud to report, that updating and/or uploading the Kali packages is almost done. Most are in NEW or have already been accepted. The Release team was contacted to start the Ruby 2.7 transition and we already have a transition page. However, the Python 3.8 one is ongoing (almost finished) and the Release team does not want overlaps. So hopefully we can upload ruby-defaults to Debian Unstable soon. In the evening we got together for a well earned collective drink at Brewberry Bar and dinner, joined by local Debian colleague Nicolas Dandrimont (olasd).
Group photo of the Ruby Team in Brewbarry Bar, Paris Group photo of the Ruby Team in Brewberry Bar (Paris 2020)
The evening ended at Paris famous (but heavily damaged) Notre-Dame cathedral.

16 July 2020

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: DebConf Videoteam Sprint Report -- DebConf20@Home

DebConf20 starts in about 5 weeks, and as always, the DebConf Videoteam is working hard to make sure it'll be a success. As such, we held a sprint from July 9th to 13th to work on our new infrastructure. A remote sprint certainly ain't as fun as an in-person one, but we nonetheless managed to enjoy ourselves. Many thanks to those who participated, namely: We also wish to extend our thanks to Thomas Goirand and Infomaniak for providing us with virtual machines to experiment on and host the video infrastructure for DebConf20. Advice for presenters For DebConf20, we strongly encourage presenters to record their talks in advance and send us the resulting video. We understand this is more work, but we think it'll make for a more agreeable conference for everyone. Video conferencing is still pretty wonky and there is nothing worse than a talk ruined by a flaky internet connection or hardware failures. As such, if you are giving a talk at DebConf this year, we are asking you to read and follow our guide on how to record your presentation. Fear not: we are not getting rid of the Q&A period at the end of talks. Attendees will ask their questions either on IRC or on a collaborative pad and the Talkmeister will relay them to the speaker once the pre-recorded video has finished playing. New infrastructure, who dis? Organising a virtual DebConf implies migrating from our battle-tested on-premise workflow to a completely new remote one. One of the major changes this means for us is the addition of Jitsi Meet to our infrastructure. We normally have 3 different video sources in a room: two cameras and a slides grabber. With the new online workflow, directors will be able to play pre-recorded videos as a source, will get a feed from a Jitsi room and will see the audience questions as a third source. This might seem simple at first, but is in fact a very major change to our workflow and required a lot of work to implement. 
               == On-premise ==                                          == Online ==
                                                      
              Camera 1                                                 Jitsi
                                                                          
                 v                 ---> Frontend                         v                 ---> Frontend
                                                                                            
    Slides -> Voctomix -> Backend -+--> Frontend         Questions -> Voctomix -> Backend -+--> Frontend
                                                                                            
                 ^                 ---> Frontend                         ^                 ---> Frontend
                                                                          
              Camera 2                                           Pre-recorded video
In our tests, playing back pre-recorded videos to voctomix worked well, but was sometimes unreliable due to inconsistent encoding settings. Presenters will thus upload their pre-recorded talks to SReview so we can make sure there aren't any obvious errors. Videos will then be re-encoded to ensure a consistent encoding and to normalise audio levels. This process will also let us stitch the Q&As at the end of the pre-recorded videos more easily prior to publication. Reducing the stream latency One of the pitfalls of the streaming infrastructure we have been using since 2016 is high video latency. In a worst case scenario, remote attendees could get up to 45 seconds of latency, making participation in events like BoFs arduous. In preparation for DebConf20, we added a new way to stream our talks: RTMP. Attendees will thus have the option of using either an HLS stream with higher latency or an RTMP stream with lower latency. Here is a comparative table that can help you decide between the two protocols:
HLS RTMP
Pros
  • Can be watched from a browser
  • Auto-selects a stream encoding
  • Single URL to remember
  • Lower latency (~5s)
Cons
  • Higher latency (up to 45s)
  • Requires a dedicated video player (VLC, mpv)
  • Specific URLs for each encoding setting
Live mixing from home with VoctoWeb Since DebConf16, we have been using voctomix, a live video mixer developed by the CCC VOC. voctomix is conveniently divided in two: voctocore is the backend server while voctogui is a GTK+ UI frontend directors can use to live-mix. Although voctogui can connect to a remote server, it was primarily designed to run either on the same machine as voctocore or on the same LAN. Trying to use voctogui from a machine at home to connect to a voctocore running in a datacenter proved unreliable, especially for high-latency and low bandwidth connections. Inspired by the setup FOSDEM uses, we instead decided to go with a web frontend for voctocore. We initially used FOSDEM's code as a proof of concept, but quickly reimplemented it in Python, a language we are more familiar with as a team. Compared to the FOSDEM PHP implementation, voctoweb implements A / B source selection (akin to voctogui) as well as audio control, two very useful features. In the following screen captures, you can see the old PHP UI on the left and the new shiny Python one on the right. The old PHP voctowebThe new Python3 voctoweb Voctoweb is still under development and is likely to change quite a bit until DebConf20. Still, the current version seems to works well enough to be used in production if you ever need to. Python GeoIP redirector We run multiple geographically-distributed streaming frontend servers to minimize the load on our streaming backend and to reduce overall latency. Although users can connect to the frontends directly, we typically point them to live.debconf.org and redirect connections to the nearest server. Sadly, 6 months ago MaxMind decided to change the licence on their GeoLite2 database and left us scrambling. To fix this annoying issue, Stefano Rivera wrote a Python program that uses the new database and reworked our ansible frontend server role. Since the new database cannot be redistributed freely, you'll have to get a (free) license key from MaxMind if you to use this role. Ansible & CI improvements Infrastructure as code is a living process and needs constant care to fix bugs, follow changes in DSL and to implement new features. All that to say a large part of the sprint was spent making our ansible roles and continuous integration setup more reliable, less buggy and more featureful. All in all, we merged 26 separate ansible-related merge request during the sprint! As always, if you are good with ansible and wish to help, we accept merge requests on our ansible repository :)

22 November 2017

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: DebConf Videoteam sprint report - day 3

Erf, I'm tired and it is late so this report will be short and won't include dank memes or funny cat pictures. Come back tomorrow for that. tumbleweed Stefano worked all day long on the metadata project and on YouTube uploads. I think the DebConf7 videos have just finished being uploaded, check them out! RattusRattus Apart from the wonderful lasagna he baked for us, Andy continued working on the scraping scheme, helping tumbleweed. nattie Nattie has been with us for a few days now, but today she did some great QA work on our metadata scraping of the video archive. ivodd More tests, more bugs! Ivo worked quite a bit on the Opsis board today and it seems everything is ready for the mini-conf. \0/ olasd Nicolas built the streaming network today and wrote some Ansible roles to manage TLS cert creation through Let's Encrypt. He also talked with DSA some more about our long term requirements. wouter I forgot to mention it yesterday because he could not come to Cambridge, but Wouter has been sprinting remotely, working on the reviewing system. Everything with regards to reviewing should be in place for the mini-conf. He also generated the intro and outro slides for the videos for us. KiBi and Julien KiBi and Julien arrived late in the evening, but were nonetheless of great assistance. Neither are technically part of the videoteam, but their respective experience with Debian-Installer and general DSA systems helped us a great deal. pollo I'm about 3/4 done documenting our ansible roles. Once I'm done, I'll try to polish some obvious hacks I've seen while documenting.

21 November 2017

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: DebConf Videoteam sprint report - day 2

Another day, another videoteam report! It feels like we did a lot of work today, so let's jump right in: tumbleweed Stefano worked most of the day on the DebConf video archive metadata project. A bunch of videos already have been uploaded to YouTube. Here's some gold you might want to watch. By the end of our sprint, we should have generated metadata for most of our archive and uploaded a bunch of videos to YouTube. Don't worry though, YouTube is only a mirror and we'll keep our current archive as a video master. RattusRattus Andy joined us today! He hacked away with Stefano for most of the day, working on the metadata format for our videos and making schemes for our scraping tools. ivodd Ivo built and tested a good part of our video setup today, fixing bugs left and right in Ansible. We are prepared for the Cambridge Mini-DebConf! olasd Nicolas finished his scripts to automatically spool up and down our streaming mirrors via the DigitalOcean API today and ran our Ansible config against those machines to test our setup. pollo For my part, I completed a huge chunk of my sprint goals: we now have a website documenting our setup! It is currently hosted on Alioth pages, but olasd plans to make a request to DSA to have it hosted on the static.debian.org machine. The final URL will most likely be something like: https://video.debconf.org The documentation is still missing the streaming section (our streaming setup is not final yet, so not point in documenting that) and a section hosting guides for the volunteers. With some luck I might write those later this week. I've now moved on documentation our various Ansible roles. Oh, and we also ate some cheese fondue: Our fondue dinner

20 November 2017

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: DebConf Videoteam sprint report - day 1

Another videoteam report! We've now been hacking for a full day and we are slowly starting to be productive. It's always hard to get back in a project when you haven't touched it in a while... Anyway, let's start this report with some important announcement: we finally have been able to snap a good picture of the airbnb's cat! The airbnb's cat No more nagging me about the placeholder image from Wikipedia I used in yesterday's report! Set up Our hacking space Here's what the team did today: tumbleweed Stefano started the day by hacking away on our video archive. We eventually want to upload all our videos to YouTube to give them exposure, but sadly our archive metadata is in a pretty poor shape. With the script tumbleweed wrote, we can scrape the archive for matches against the old DebConf's pentabarf XML we have. tumbleweed also helped Ivo with the ansible PXE setup he's working on. Some recent contributions from a collaborator implemented new features (like a nice menu to choose from) but also came with a few annoying bugs. ivodd Ivo continued working on the PXE setup today. He also tried to break our ansible setup by using fresh installs with different user cases (locales, interfaces, etc.), with some success. The reason he and Stefano are working so hard on the PXE boot is that we had a discussion about the future of our USB install method. The general consensus on this was although we would not remove it, we would not actively maintain it anymore. PXE is less trouble for multiple machines. For single machines or if you don't control the DHCP server, using ansible manually on a fresh Debian install will be the recommended way. olasd After a very long drive, olasd arrived late in the evening with all our gear. Hurray! We were thus able to set up some test boxes and start wiring the airbnb properly. Tomorrow will certainly be more productive with all this stuff at our disposition. pollo Today I mainly worked on setting up our documentation website. After some debate, we decided that sphinx was the right tool for the job. I am a few pages in and if I work well I think we'll have something to show for at the end of the sprint! I also was thrown back into ansible after witnessing a bug in the locale management. I'm still rusty, but it's slowly coming back to me. Let's end this blog post with a picture of the neon pineapple that sits on the wall of the solarium. Upside down this picture is even more troubling

19 November 2017

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: DebConf Videoteam sprint report - day 0

First day of the videoteam autumn sprint! Well, I say first day, but in reality it's more day 0. Even though most of us have arrived in Cambridge already, we are still missing a few people. Last year we decided to sprint in Paris because most of our video gear is stocked there. This year, we instead chose to sprint a few days before the Cambridge Mini-Debconf to help record the conference afterwards. Since some of us arrived very late and the ones who did arrive early are still mostly jet lagged (that includes me), I'll use this post to introduce the space we'll be working from this week and our general plan for the sprint. House Party After some deliberations, we decided to rent a house for a week in Cambridge: finding a work space to accommodate us and all our gear proved difficult and we decided mixing accommodation and work would be a good idea. I've only been here for a few hours, but I have to say I'm pretty impressed by the airbnb we got. Last time I checked (it seems every time I do, some new room magically appears), I counted 5 bedrooms, 6 beds, 5 toilets and 3 shower rooms. Heck, there's even a solarium and a training room with weights and a punching bag on the first floor. Having a whole house to ourselves also means we have access to a functional kitchen. I'd really like to cook at least a few meals during the week. There's also a cat! Picture of a black cat I took from Wikipedia. It was too dark outside to use mine It's not the house's cat per say, but it's been hanging out around the house for most of the day and makes cute faces trying to convince us to let it come inside. Nice try cat. Nice try. Here are some glamour professional photos of what the place looks like on a perfect summer day, just for the kick of it: The view from the garden The Kitchen One of the multiple bedrooms Of course, reality has trouble matching all the post-processing filters. Plan for the week Now on a more serious note; apart from enjoying the beautiful city of Cambridge, here's what the team plans to do this week: tumbleweed Stefano wants to continue refactoring our ansible setup. A lot of things have been added in the last year, but some of it are hacks we should remove and implement correctly. highvoltage Jonathan won't be able to come to Cambridge, but plans to work remotely, mainly on our desktop/xfce session implementation. Another pile of hacks waiting to be cleaned! ivodd Ivo has been working a lot of the pre-ansible part of our installation and plans to continue working on that. At the moment, creating an installation USB key is pretty complicated and he wants to make that simpler. olasd Nicolas completely reimplemented our streaming setup for DC17 and wants to continue working on that. More specifically, he wants to write scripts to automatically setup and teardown - via API calls - the distributed streaming network we now use. Finding a way to push TLS certificates to those mirrors, adding a live stream viewer on video.debconf.org and adding a viewer to our archive are also things he wants to look at. pollo For my part, I plan to catch up with all the commits in our ansible repository I missed since last year's sprint and work on documentation. It would be very nice if we could have a static website describing our work so that others (at mini-debconfs for examples) could replicate it easily. If I have time, I'll also try to document all the ansible roles we have written. Stay tuned for more daily reports!

14 June 2017

Nicolas Dandrimont: DebConf 17 bursaries: update your status now!

TL;DR: if you applied for a DebConf 17 travel bursary, and you haven t accepted it yet, login to the DebConf website and update your status before June 20th or your bursary grant will be gone. *blows dust off the blog* As you might be aware, DebConf 17 is coming soon and it s gonna be the biggest DebConf in Montr al ever. Of course, what makes DebConf great is the people who come together to work on Debian, share their achievements, and help draft our cunning plans to take over the world. Also cheese. Lots and lots of cheese. To that end, the DebConf team had initially budgeted US$40,000 for travel grants ($30,000 for contributors, $10,000 for diversity and inclusion grants), allowing the bursaries team to bring people from all around the world who couldn t have made it to the conference. Our team of volunteers rated the 188 applications, we ve made a ranking (technically, two rankings : one on contribution grounds and one on D&I grounds), and we finally sent out a first round of grants last week. After the first round, the team made a new budget assessment, and thanks to the support of our outstanding sponsors, an extra $15,000 has been allocated for travel stipends during this week s team meeting, with the blessing of the DPL. We ve therefore been able to send a second round of grants today. Now, if you got a grant, you have two things to do : you need to accept your grant, and you need to update your requested amount. Both of those steps allow us to use our budget more wisely: having grants expire frees money up to get more people to the conference earlier. Having updated amounts gives us a better view of our overall budget. (You can only lower your requested amount, as we can t inflate our budget) Our system has sent mails to everyone, but it s easy enough to let that email slip (or to not receive it for some reason). It takes 30 seconds to look at the status of your request on the DebConf 17 website, and even less to do the few clicks needed for you to accept the grant. Please do so now! OK, it might take a few minutes if your SSO certificate has expired and you have to look up the docs to renew it. The deadline for the first round of travel grants (which went out last week) is June 20th. The deadline for the second round (which went out today) is June 24th. If somehow you can t login to the website before the deadline, the bursaries team has an email address you can use. We want to send out a third round of grants on June 25th, using the money people freed up: our current acceptance ratio is around 40%, and a lot of very strong applications have been deferred. We don t want them to wait up until July to get a definitive answer, so thanks for helping us! bient t Montr al !

5 December 2016

Shirish Agarwal: The Anti-Pollito squad arrest and confession

Disclaimer This is an attempt at humor and hence entirely fictional in nature. While some incidents depicted are true, the context and the story woven around them are by yours truly. None of the Mascots of Debian were hurt during the blog post . I also disavow any responsibility for any hurt (real or imagined) to any past, current and future mascots. The attempt should not be looked upon as demeaning people who are accused of false crimes, tortured and confessions eked out of them as this happens quite a lot (In India for sure, but guess it s the same world over in various degrees). The idea is loosely inspired by Chocolate:Deep Dark Secrets. (2005) On a more positive note, let s start Being a Sunday morning woke up late to find incessant knocking on the door, incidentally mum was not at home. Opening the door, found two official looking gentleman. They asked my name, asked my credentials, tortured and arrested me for Group conspiracy of Malicious Mischief in second and third degrees . The torture was done by means of making me forcefully watch endless reruns of Norbit . While I do love Eddie Murphy, this was one of his movies he could have done without . I guess for many people watching it once was torture enough. I *think* they were nominated for razzie awards dunno if they won it or not, but this is beside the point. Unlike the 20 years it takes for a typical case to reach to its conclusion even in the smallest court in India, due to the torture, I was made to confess (due to endless torture) and was given summary judgement. The judgement was/is as follows a. Do 100 hours of Community service in Debian in 2017. This could be done via blog posts, raising tickets in the Debian BTS or in whichever way I could be helpful to Debian. b. Write a confessional with some photographic evidence sharing/detailing some of the other members who were part of the conspiracy in view of the reduced sentence. So now, have been forced to write this confession As you all know, I won a bursary this year for debconf16. What is not known by most people is that I also got an innocuous looking e-mail titled Pollito for DPL . While I can t name all the names as investigation is still ongoing about how far-reaching the conspiracy is . The email was purportedly written by members of cabal within cabal which are in Debian. I looked at the email header to see if this was genuine and I could trace the origin but was left none the wiser, as obviously these people are far more technically advanced than to fall in simple tricks like this Anyways, secretly happy that I have been invited to be part of these elites, I did the visa thing, packed my bags and came to Debconf16. At this point in juncture, I had no idea whether it was real or I had imagined the whole thing. Then to my surprise saw this evidence of conspiracy to have Pollito as DPL, Wifi Password Just like the Illuminati the conspiracy was for all to see those who knew about it. Most people were thinking of it as a joke, but those like me who had got e-mails knew better. I knew that the thing is real, now I only needed to bide my time and knew that the opportunity would present itself. And few days later, sure enough, there was a trip planned for Table Mountain, Cape Town . Few people planned to hike to the mountain, while few chose to take the cable car till up the mountain. First glance of the cable car with table mountain as background Quite a few people came along with us and bought tickets for the to and fro to the mountain and back. Ticket for CPT Table mountain car cable Incidentally, I was thinking if the South African Govt. were getting the tax or not. If you look at the ticket, there is just a bar-code. In India as well as the U.S. there is TIN Tax Identification Number TIN displayed on an invoice from channeltimes.com Few links to share what it is all about . While these should be on all invoices, need to specially check when taking high-value items. In India as shared in the article the awareness, knowledge leaves a bit to be desired. While I m drifting from the incident, it would be nice if somebody from SA could share how things work there. Moving on, we boarded the cable car. It was quite spacious cable car with I guess around 30-40 people or some more who were able to see everything along with the controller. from inside the table mountain cable car 360 degrees It was a pleasant cacophony of almost two dozen or more nationalities on this 360 degrees moving chamber. I was a little worried though as it essentially is a bucket and there is always a possibility that a severe wind could damage it. Later somebody did share that some frightful incidents had occurred not too long ago on the cable car. It took about 20-25 odd minutes to get to the top of table mountain and we were presented with views such as below View from Table Mountain cable car looking down The picture I am sharing is actually when we were going down as all the pictures of going up via the cable car were over-exposed. Also, it was pretty crowded on the way up then on the way down so handling the mobile camera was not so comfortable. Once we reached up, the wind was blowing at incredible speeds. Even with my jacket and everything I was feeling cold. Most of the group around 10-12 people looked around if we could find a place to have some refreshments and get some of the energy in the body. So we all ventured to a place and placed our orders the bleh... Irish coffee at top of Table Mountain I was introduced to Irish Coffee few years back and have had some incredible Irish Coffees in Pune and elsewhere. I do hope to be able to make Irish Coffee at home if and when I have my own house. This is hotter than brandy and is perfect if you are suffering from cold etc if done right, really needs some skills. This is the only drink which I wanted in SA which I never got right . As South Africa was freezing for me, this would have been the perfect antidote but the one there as well as elsewhere were all bleh. What was interesting though, was the coffee caller besides it. It looked like a simple circuit mounted on a PCB board with lights, vibrations and RFID and it worked exactly like that. I am guessing as and when the order is ready, there is an interrupt signal sent via radio waves which causes the buzzer to light and vibrate. Here s the back panel if somebody wants to take inspiration and try it as a fun project backpanel of the buzz caller Once we were somewhat strengthened by the snacks, chai, coffee etc. we made our move to seeing the mountain. The only way to describe it is that it s similar to Raigad Fort but the plateau seemed to be bigger. The wikipedia page of Table Mountain attempts to share but I guess it s more clearly envisioned by one of the pictures shared therein. table mountain panaromic image I have to say while Table Mountain is beautiful and haunting as it has scenes like these Some of the oldest rocks known to wo/man. There is something there which pulls you, which reminds you of a long lost past. I could have simply sat there for hours together but as was part of the group had to keep with them. Not that I minded. The moment I was watching this, I was transported to some memories of the Himalayas about 20 odd years or so. In that previous life, I had the opportunity to be with some of the most beautiful women and also been in the most happening places, the Himalayas. I had shared years before some of my experiences I had in the Himalayas. I discontinued it as I didn t have a decent camera at that point in time. While I don t wanna digress, I would challenge anybody to experience the Himalayas and then compare. It is just something inexplicable. The beauty and the rawness that Himalayas shows makes you feel insignificant and yet part of the whole cosmos. What Paulo Cohello expressed in The Valkyries is something that could be felt in the Himalayas. Leh, Ladakh, Himachal , Garwhal, Kumaon. The list will go on forever as there are so many places, each more beautiful than the other. Most places are also extremely backpacker-friendly so if you ask around you can get some awesome deals if you want to spend more than a few days in one place. Moving on, while making small talk @olasd or Nicolas Dandrimont , the headmaster of our trip made small talk to each of us and eked out from all of us that we wanted to have Pollito as our DPL (Debian Project Leader) for 2017. Few pictures being shared below as supporting evidence as well The Pollito as DPL cabal in action members of the Pollito as DPL where am I or more precisely how far am I from India. While I do not know who further up than Nicolas was on the coup which would take place. The idea was this If the current DPL steps down, we would take all and any necessary actions to make Pollito our DPL. Pollito going to SA - photo taken by Jonathan Carter This has been taken from Pollito s adventure Being a responsible journalist, I also enquired about Pollito s true history as it would not have been complete without one. This is the e-mail I got from Gunnar Wolf, a friend and DD from Mexico
Turns out, Valessio has just spent a week staying at my house And
in any case, if somebody in Debian knows about Pollito s
childhood That is me. Pollito came to our lives when we went to Congreso Internacional de
Software Libre (CISOL) in Zacatecas city. I was strolling around the
very beautiful city with my wife Regina and our friend Alejandro
Miranda, and at a shop at either Ram n L pez Velarde or Vicente
Guerrero, we found a flock of pollitos. http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/22.77111/-102.57145 Even if this was comparable to a slave market, we bought one from
them, and adopted it as our own. Back then, we were a young couple Well, we were not that young
anymore. I mean, we didn t have children. Anyway, we took Pollito with
us on several road trips, such as the only time I have crossed an
international border driving: We went to Encuentro Centroamericano de
Software Libre at Guatemala city in 2012 (again with Alejandro), and
you can see several Pollito pics at: http://gwolf.org/album/road-trip-ecsl-2012-guatemala-0 Pollito likes travelling. Of course, when we were to Nicaragua for
DebConf, Pollito tagged along. It was his first flight as a passenger
(we never asked about his previous life in slavery; remember, Pollito
trust no one). Pollito felt much welcome with the DebConf crowd. Of course, as
Pollito is a free spirit, we never even thought about forcing him to
come back with us. Pollito went to Switzerland, and we agreed to meet
again every year or two. It s always nice to have a chat with him. Hugs!
So with that backdrop I would urge fellow Debianities to take up the slogans LONG LIVE THE DPL ! LONG LIVE POLLITO ! LONG LIVE POLLITO THE DPL ! The first step to make Pollito the DPL is to ensure he has a @debian.org (pollito@debian.org) We also need him to be made a DD because only then can he become a DPL. In solidarity and in peace
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #caller, #confession, #Debconf16, #debian, #Fiction, #history, #Pollito, #Pollito as DPL, #Table Mountain, Cabal, memories, south africa

16 March 2015

Bits from Debian: Debian is now welcoming applicants for Outreachy and GSoC Summer 2015

We'd like to reshare a post from Nicolas Dandrimont. Hi all, I am delighted to announce that Debian will be participating in the next round of Outreachy and GSoC, and that we are currently welcoming applications! Outreachy logo Outreachy helps people from groups underrepresented in free and open source software get involved. The current round of internships is open to women (cis and trans), trans men, genderqueer people, and all participants of the Ascend Project regardless of gender. GSoC 2015 logo Google Summer of Code is a global program, sponsored by Google, that offers post-secondary student developers ages 18 and older stipends to write code for various open source software projects. Interns for both programs are granted a $5500 stipend (in three installments) allowing them to dedicate their summer to working full-time on Debian. Our amazing team of mentors has listed their project ideas on the Debian wiki, and we are now welcoming applicants for both programs. If you want to apply for an internship with Debian this summer, please fill out the template for either Outreachy or GSoC. If you re eligible to both programs, we ll encourage you to apply to both (using the same application), as Debian only has funds for a single Outreachy intern this round. Don t wait up! The application period for Outreachy ends March 24th, and the GSoC application period ends March 27th. We really want applicants to start contributing to their project before making our selection, so that mentors can get a feel of how working with their intern will be like for three months. The small task is a requirement for Outreachy, and we re strongly encouraging GSoC applicants to abide by that rule too. To contribute in the best conditions, you shouldn t wait for the last minute to apply :-) I hope we ll work with a lot of great interns this summer. If you think you re up for the challenge, it s time to apply! If you have any doubts, or any question, drop us a line on the soc-coordination mailing list or come by on our IRC channel (#debian-soc on irc.debian.org) and we ll do our best to guide you.

19 February 2015

Nicolas Dandrimont: We need your help to make GSoC and Outreachy in Debian a success this summer!

Hi everyone, A quick announcement: Debian has applied to the Google Summer of Code, and will also participate in Outreachy (formerly known as the Outreach Program for Women) for the Summer 2015 round! Those two mentoring programs are a great way for our project to bootstrap new ideas, give an new impulse to some old ones, and of course to welcome an outstanding team of motivated, curious, lively new people among us. We need projects and mentors to sign up really soon (before February 27th, that s next week), as our project list is what Google uses to evaluate our application to GSoC. Projects proposals should be described on our wiki page. We have three sections:
  1. Coding projects with confirmed mentors are proposed to both GSoC and Outreachy applicants
  2. Non-Coding projects with confirmed mentors are proposed only to Outreachy applicants
  3. Project ideas without confirmed mentors will only happen if a mentor appears. They are kept on the wiki page until the application period starts, as we don t want to give applicants false hopes of being picked for a project that won t happen.
Once you re done, or if you have any questions, drop us a line on our mailing-list (soc-coordination@lists.alioth.debian.org), or on #debian-soc on OFTC. We also would LOVE to be able to welcome more Outreachy interns. So far, and thanks to our DPL, Debian has committed to fund one internship (US$6500). If we want more Outreachy interns, we need your help :). If you, or your company, have some money to put towards an internship, please drop us a line at opw@debian.org and we ll be in touch. Some of the successes of our Outreachy alumni include the localization of the Debian Installer to a new locale, improvements in the sources.debian.net service, documentation of the debbugs codebase, and a better integration of AppArmor profiles in Debian. Thanks a lot for your help!

31 August 2014

Alexander Wirt: cgit on alioth.debian.org

Recently I was doing some work on the alioth infrastructure like fixing things or cleaning up things. One of the more visible things I done was the switch from gitweb to cgit. cgit is a lot of faster and looks better than gitweb. The list of repositories is generated every hour. The move also has the nice effect that user repositories are available via the cgit index again. I don t plan to disable the old gitweb, but I created a bunch of redirect rules that - hopefully - redirect most use cases of gitweb to the equivalent cgit url. If I broke something, please tell me, if I missed a common use case, please tell me. You can usually reach me on #alioth@oftc or via mail (formorer@d.o) People also asked me to upload my cgit package to Debian, the package is now waiting in NEW. Thanks to Nicolas Dandrimont (olasd) we also have a patch included that generates proper HTTP returncodes if repos doesn t exist.

22 March 2014

Nicolas Dandrimont: Debian proposals in GSoC 2014

The GSoC student application period is over, and the last two days were pretty interesting. For a few years now, Olly Betts has provided us with a spreadsheet to graph the number of applicants to an organization over time. Here s the graph for Debian this year: Debian GSoC proposals, 2014 edition (Historical graphs: 2013, 2012. Spreadsheet available from Olly s blog) On Wednesday, I was thinking hmm, 30 applicants, this is a slow year . Well, the number of proposals more than doubled in the last two days, to conclude on a whooping 68 applications! The last one was submitted just three seconds before the deadline If you want to take a look at the proposals, head over to the Debian wiki. Time to get on reviewing! The final student acceptances will be published in just less than a month, on April 21st.

10 January 2014

Paul Tagliamonte: Docker in Debian

Hello, World! Docker s in Debian! Isn t that great! Let s all get happy! It s called docker.io, so go ahead and sudo apt-get install docker.io whenever you want :) The first two uploads have a few errors, which are 100% my fault. The first were a set of FTBFS bugs, which were a stupid error on my part. Thanks to olasd for catching the remaining bug, related to stripping the binaries. I m so sorry this happened, it slipped through as a result of me having a local docker binary in /usr/local, which I tested completely before uploading a totally different binary. I won t let it happen again. It should be fixed now. However, this comes with a warning. It appears as though systemd (which, for the record I adore) is allowing lxc-start unmount /dev/pts and friends, which causes a bunch of damage to the host. I ve filed the bug as bug #734813. Currently the outdated mount(1) is holding back a workaround. Hopefully we get util-linux updated so we can hack around this in the short-term. Hopefully the bigger issues get solved. So, if you re a systemd user, please hold off on using docker.io until we resolve this issue in Debian.

31 December 2013

Paul Tagliamonte: Hy 0.9.12 released

Good morning all my hungover friends. New Hy release - sounds like the perfect thing to do while you re waiting for your headaches to go away. Here s a short-list of the changes (from NEWS) - enjoy! 
Changes from Hy 0.9.11
   tl;dr:
    0.9.12 comes with some massive changes,
    We finally took the time to implement gensym, as well as a few
    other bits that help macro writing. Check the changelog for
    what exactly was added. 
    
    The biggest feature, Reader Macros, landed later
    in the cycle, but were big enough to warrent a release on it's
    own. A huge thanks goes to Foxboron for implementing them
    and a massive hug goes out to olasd for providing ongoing
    reviews during the development.
    
    Welcome to the new Hy contributors, Henrique Carvalho Alves,
    Kevin Zita and Kenan B l kba . Thanks for your work so far,
    folks!
    
    Hope y'all enjoy the finest that 2013 has to offer,
      - Hy Society
    * Special thanks goes to Willyfrog, Foxboron and theanalyst for writing
      0.9.12's NEWS. Thanks, y'all! (PT)
    [ Language Changes ]
    * Translate foo? -> is_foo, for better Python interop. (PT)
    * Reader Macros!
    * Operators + and * now can work without arguments
    * Define kwapply as a macro
    * Added apply as a function
    * Instant symbol generation with gensym
    * Allow macros to return None
    * Add a method for casting into byte string or unicode depending on python version
    * flatten function added to language
    * Add a method for casting into byte string or unicode depending on python version
    * Added type coercing to the right integer for the platform
    [ Misc. Fixes ]
    * Added information about core team members
    * Documentation fixed and extended
    * Add astor to install_requires to fix hy --spy failing on hy 0.9.11.
    * Convert stdout and stderr to UTF-8 properly in the run_cmd helper.
    * Update requirements.txt and setup.py to use rply upstream.
    * tryhy link added in documentation and README
    * Command line options documented
    * Adding support for coverage tests at coveralls.io
    * Added info about tox, so people can use it prior to a PR
    * Added the start of hacking rules
    * Halting Problem removed from example as it was nonfree
    * Fixed PyPI is now behind a CDN. The --use-mirrors option is deprecated.
    * Badges for pypi version and downloads.
    [ Syntax Fixes ]
    * get allows multiple arguments
    [ Bug Fixes ]
    *  OSX: Fixes for readline Repl problem which caused HyREPL not allowing 'b'
    * Fix REPL completions on OSX
    *  Make HyObject.replace more resilient to prevent compiler breakage.
    [ Contrib changes ]
    * Anaphoric macros added to contrib
    * Modified eg/twisted to follow the newer hy syntax
    * Added (experimental) profile module

8 August 2013

Nicolas Dandrimont: Hello from DebCamp

DebConf flag (minus the wind) Small update as someone was complaining about the lack of pictures from DebCamp on planet. Not to worry, everything is going fine, and some of the most important stuff is ready s3kr3t You can see a few pictures from the gallery. The view from the venue is quite outstanding (it was better when there was some sun on Tuesday, but my camera battery was out ). On my TODO-list: See you there!

14 July 2013

Nicolas Dandrimont: Bootstrapping fedmsg for Debian

As you might (or might not) know, this summer, I have taken on mentoring of a GSoC project by Simon Chopin (a.k.a. laarmen) which goal is to bring fedmsg, the Fedora Infrastructure message bus, to Debian. Most of the work I ll be talking about here is Simon s work, please send all the praise towards him (I can take the blame, though). What is this about? As the project proposal states, the idea is to provide Debian with a unified, real-time, and open mechanism of communication between its services. This communication bus would allow anyone, anywhere, to start consuming messages and reacting to events happening in Debian s infrastructure: When we told upstream about our plan of adapting fedmsg to work on Debian, they were thrilled. And they have been very supportive of the project. How is the project going? Are you excited? I know I m excited. yep, he's excited too Well, the general idea was easy enough, but the task at hand is a challenge. First of all, fedmsg has a lot of (smallish) dependencies, most of them new to Debian. Thanks to Simon s work during the bonding period, and thanks to paultag s careful reviews, the first batch of packages (the first dependency level, comprising kitchen, bunch, m2ext, grapefruit, txws, txzmq and stomper) is currently sitting in the NEW queue. The four remaining packages (fabulous, moksha.common, moksha.hub and fedmsg proper) are mostly ready, waiting in the Debian Python Module Team SVN repository for a review and sponsorship. While we re waiting for the packages to trickle into Debian, Simon is not twiddling his thumbs. Work has taken place on a few fronts: fedmsging mentors.debian.net Package backports mentors.debian.net was chosen because I m an admin and could do the integration quickly. That involved backporting the eleven aforementioned packages, plus zeromq3 and python-zmq (that only have TCP_KEEPALIVE on recent versions), to wheezy, as that s what the mentors.d.n host is running. (Also, python-zmq needs a new-ish cython to build so I had to backport that too). Thankfully, those were no-changes backports, that were easily scripted, using a pbuilder hook to allow the packages to depend on previously built packages. I have made a wheezy package repository available here. It s signed with my GnuPG key, ID 0xB8E5087766475AAF, which should be fairly well connected. Code changes After Simon s initial setup of debexpo (which is not an easy task), the code changes have been fairly simple (yes, this is just a proof of concept). You can see them on top of the live branch on debexpo s sources. I finally had the time to make them live earlier this week, and mentors.debian.net has been sending messages on Debian s fedmsg bus ever since. Deployment mentors.d.n sends its messages on five endpoints, tcp://mentors.debian.net:3000 through tcp://mentors.debian.net:3004. That is one endpoint per WSGI worker, plus one for the importer process(es). You can tap in directly, by following the instructions below. debmessenger Debmessenger is the stop-gap email-to-fedmsg bridge that Simon is developing. The goal is to create some activity on the bus without disrupting or modifying any infrastructure service. It s written in hy, and it leverages the existing Debian-related python modules to do its work, using inotify to react when a mail gets dropped in a Maildir. Right now, it s supposed to understand changes mails (received from debian-devel-changes) and bugs mail (from debian-bugs-dist). I ll work on deploying an instance of debmessenger this weekend, to create some more traffic on the bus. Reliability of the bus I suggested using fedmsg as this was something that already existed, and that solved a problem identical to the one we wanted to tackle (open interconnection of a distribution s infrastructure services). Reusing a piece of infrastructure that already works in another distro means that we can share tools, share ideas, and come up with solutions that we might not have considered when working alone. The drawback is that we have to either adapt to the tool s idiosyncrasies, or to adapt the tool to our way of working. One of the main points raised by DSA when the idea of using fedmsg was brought up, was that of reliability. Debian s infrastructure is spread in datacenters (and basements :D ) all over the world, and thus faces different challenges than Fedora s infrastructure, which is more tightly integrated. Therefore, we have to ensure that a critical consumer (say, a buildd) doesn t miss any message it would need for its operation (say, that a package got accepted). There has been work upstream, to ensure that fedmsg doesn t lose messages, but we need to take extra steps to make sure that a given consumer can replay the messages it has missed, should the need arise. Simon has started a discussion on the upstream mailing list, and is working on a prototype replay mechanism. Obviously, we need to test scenarios of endpoints dropping off the grid, hence the work on getting some activity on the bus. How can I take a look? a.k.a. Another one rides the bus A parisian bus built in 1932 (Picture Yves-Laurent Allaert, CC-By-SA v2.5 / GFDL v1.2 license) So, the bus is pretty quiet right now, as only two kinds of events are triggering messages: a new upload to mentors.debian.net, and a new comment on a package there. Don t expect a lot of traffic. However, generating some traffic is easy enough: just login to mentors.d.n, pick a package of mine (not much choice there), or a real package you want to review, and leave a comment. poof, a message appears. For the lazy Join #debian-fedmsg on OFTC, and look for messages from the debmsg bot. Current example output: 
01:30:25 <debmsg> debexpo.voms-api-java.upload (unsigned) --
02:03:16 <debmsg> debexpo.ocamlbricks.comment (unsigned) --
(definitely needs some work, but it s a start) Listening in by yourself You need to setup fedmsg. I have a repository of wheezy packages and one of sid packages, signed with my GnuPG key, ID 0xB8E5087766475AAF. You can add them to a file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d like this: 
deb http://perso.crans.org/dandrimont/fedmsg-<sid wheezy>/ ./
Then, import my GnuPG key into apt (apt-key add), update your sources (apt-get update), and install fedmsg (apt-get install python-fedmsg). The versions are << to anything real, so you should get the real thing as soon as it hits the archive. Finally, in /etc/fedmsg.d/endpoints.py, you can comment-out the Fedora entries, and add a Debian entry like this: 
    "debian": [
        "tcp://fedmsg.olasd.eu:9940",
    ],
fedmsg.olasd.eu runs a fedmsg gateway connected to the mentors.d.n endpoints, and thus forwards all the mentors messages. It ll be connected to debmessenger as soon as it s running too. To actually see mesages, disable validate_signatures in /etc/fedmsg.d/ssl.py, setting it to False. The Debian messages aren t signed yet (it s on the roadmap), and we don t ship the Fedora certificates so we can t authenticate their messages either. Finally, you can run fedmsg-tail --really-pretty in a terminal. As soon as there s some activity, you should get that kind of output (color omitted): 
 
  "i": 1, 
  "msg":  
    "version": "2.0.9-1.1", 
    "uploader": "Emmanuel Bourg <ebourg@apache.org>"
   , 
  "topic": "org.debian.dev.debexpo.voms-api-java.upload", 
  "username": "expo", 
  "timestamp": 1373758221.491809
Enjoy real-time updates from your favorite piece of infrastructure! What s next? While Simon continues working on reliability, and gets started on message signing according to his schedule, I ll take a look at deploying the debmessenger bridge, and making the pretty-printer outputs useful for our topics. There will likely be some changes to the messages sent by debexpo, as we got some feedback from the upstream developers about making them work in the fedmsg tool ecosystem (datanommer and datagrepper come to mind). You can tune in to Simon s weekly reports on the soc-coordination list, and look at the discussions with upstream on the fedora messaging-sig list. You can also catch us on IRC, #debian-soc on OFTC. We re also hanging out on the upstream channel, #fedora-apps on freenode.

19 May 2013

Nicolas Dandrimont: Hello world

Or rather, hello Planet! Here s a somewhat traditional introductory post. I m Nicolas Dandrimont, I m French, I m sysadmin in a grande cole, where I m mostly in charge of the GNU/Linux workstations and servers. In Debian, I m a DM, currently in the NM queue, so I might become a DD soon-ish. I am (rather inactively) co-maintaining a few packages. In my Debian career , I have been involved in OCaml packaging and Python packaging, although lately most of my time has been spent on Google Summer of Code (mentor for two mentors.debian.net projects in 2012, org admin for Debian in 2013), and on mentors.debian.net. In other free-software related projects, I own a RepRap 3D printer, and I grew some interest in the related software, e.g. Slic3r and printrun. There have been a lot of action in Fedora about packaging 3D-printing-related software, and it d be great to get a team together to work on that in Debian during the jessie release cycle. Consider this a call for interested parties :) Unrelatedly, paultag has tricked me into working on hy, which is way too much fun. Blame him if you feel that I have been inactive lately, this has been eating way too much of my free time ;) Hopefully I ll be able to make regular updates on the work I do in Debian and free software, so stay tuned!

Neil Williams: pybit 1.0.0 - distributed, scalable builds direct from VCS or archives

PyBit is a distributed build system able to build packages in response to VCS commits or other triggers, across multiple architectures, multiple clients and multiple build environments with automated uploads to a nominated repository.

Support is included in 1.0.0 for building Debian packages using sbuild in response to subversion commits or changes in debian-devel-changes@lists.debian.org (by using apt as a version control handler) for any architecture and build environment which sbuild can support. There is also an example git commit template. Pybit has been designed to be fully extensible, so support for RPM or other package formats can be added as well as other version control handlers, other build environments and other architectures. Pybit is also scalable, when one type of client is struggling with the workload, another machine of the same architecture can be added to the pool to share the load. Pybit can also build a package for any number of architectures and build environments at the same time. The Pybit web interface provides an at-a-glance summary of all current builds as well as options to blacklist certain combinations, cancel and retry specific jobs and add monitor each pybit client. Current use cases include:

2 November 2012

Neil Williams: Introducing pyBit - Buildd Integration Toolkit

pyBit - cross-platform package building using AMQP


Message queues provide a simple way to create a distributed, cross-platform buildd toolkit to build packages using a collection of buildds, direct from various VCS clients. pyBit is intended to support rapidly evolving software collections and can support multiple VCS frontends and multiple build backends. Cross building is expected to be supported for some backends. The initial backend uses dpkg for Debian with subversion providing the source and sbuild doing the actual build.

pyBit includes support for cancelling selected builds and using multiple buildd clients per architecture, per platform and per suite.

Hooks are available or in development for subversion and git, other VCS hooks can be added. A RESTful web API provides live build reports and can generate build jobs for specific packages using particular VCS branches on selected architectures to support re-building packages at any point in the development process. Build history is stored using postgresql.

Other buildd systems can rebuild long lists of packages or build lots of binary packages from relatively slow moving source packages. PyBit exists to handle much more rapid software development across a wide range of platforms, VCS inputs and architectures. Buildd clients which are under-used can be tasked with building multiple suites or adding cross-build support. Buildd clients which are over-utilised are easily identified and adding new machines to an existing architecture / platform / suite pool should be easy. Hook activation automatically cancels any ongoing build for the same architecture, platform and suite to avoid wasting time on an interim version.

The emphasis in pyBit is to have fast builds with redundant clients, reliable reporting using a flexible and intuitive frontend. To this end, there is no need for a source package to be uploaded. Depending on the VCS hook in use, builds can happen every time a particular file is changed (e.g. debian/changelog for a native Debian package) or at every push (for a distributed VCS) or whatever is appropriate for a particular software collection. Builds are checked for available build-dependencies and packages re-queued if the build-dependencies are not yet met.

In the longer term, it may well be possible to use more than one server / database combination to support more builds and more platforms.

So far, we've got to a working model and tagged 0.1.0 as the first downloadable release. There is a lot more to do, especially adding more documentation, more VCS hooks, support for more VCS methods on the buildd clients and more buildd client scripts for platforms other than Debian. (The git hook and git source client are expected to let pyBit be self-buildable but a certain amount of configuration will be required for the server and each client which makes it not-quite self-hosting.)

pyBit concentrates on preparing collections of binary packages which can be used to build others, rather than trying to rebuild everything every time - this allows more rapid upstream software development and encourages modular, re-usable software. pyBit will also support rebuilding specific versions, architectures, suites or platforms via the RESTful web API. Access to this frontend can be controlled through any of the standard methods.

Components are loosely coupled via JSON encoded messages sent using rabbitMQ and curl. A new client can be added at any time and it will simply pick up buildd jobs from the relevant queue.

Development has now moved to Github and if anyone wants to look at new clients and new hooks, just contact the team by email or via IRC (#pybit on irc.oftc.net). Current development is based on Debian Squeeze 6.0.6 with backports and also on Debian Wheezy - more testing is welcome. Patches are also very welcome, pyBit is licensed under GPL2+.

There is no intrinsic reason why pyBit could not support any buildd platform capable of taking source from a known location and building a set of binaries. Packages are added to the queues whenever the hook is activated, so adding new packages to the collection is simply a case of triggering the existing hook.

Another interesting challenge for pyBit would be to trigger a hook on a new source code repository and just let it work through every package until everything is built. That probably won't work with the current 0.1.0 code but if that is what you'd like to work on, join the team.

Next.