Search Results: "rhonda"

8 August 2024

Jonathan Carter: DebConf24 Busan, South Korea

I m finishing typing up this blog entry hours before my last 13 hour leg back home, after I spent 2 weeks in Busan, South Korea for DebCamp24 and DebCamp24. I had a rough year and decided to take it easy this DebConf. So this is the first DebConf in a long time where I didn t give any talks. I mostly caught up on a bit of packaging, worked on DebConf video stuff, attended a few BoFs and talked to people. Overall it was a very good DebConf, which also turned out to be more productive than I expeced it would. In the welcome session on the first day of DebConf, Nicolas Dandrimont mentioned that a benefit of DebConf is that it provides a sort of caffeine for your Debian motivation. I could certainly feel that affect swell as the days went past, and it s nice to be excited about some ideas again that would otherwise be fading.

Recovering DPL It s a bit of a gear shift being DPL for 4 years, and DebConf Committee for nearly 5 years before that, and then being at DebConf while some issue arise (as it always does during a conference). At first I jump into high alert mode, but then I have to remind myself it s not your problem anymore and let others deal with it. It was nice spending a little in-person time with Andreas Tille, our new DPL, we did some more handover and discussed some current issues. I still have a few dozen emails in my DPL inbox that I need to collate and forward to Andreas, I hope to finish all that up by the end of August. During the Bits from the DPL talk, the usual question came up whether Andreas will consider running for DPL again, to which he just responded in a slide Maybe . I think it s a good idea for a DPL to do at least two terms if it all works out for everyone, since it takes a while to get up to speed on everything. Also, having been DPL for four years, I have a lot to say about it, and I think there s a lot we can fix in the role, or at least discuss it. If I had the bandwidth for it I would have scheduled a BoF for it, but I ll very likely do that for the next DebConf instead!

Video team I set up the standby loop for the video streaming setup. We call it loopy, it s a bunch of OBS scenes that provide announcements, shows sponsors, the schedule and some social content. I wrote about it back in 2020, but it s evolved quite a bit since then, so I m probably due to write another blog post with a bunch of updates on it. I hope to organise a video team sprint in Cape Town in the first half of next year, so I ll summarize everything before then.

It would ve been great if we could have some displays in social areas that could show talks, the loop and other content, but we were just too pressed for time for that. This year s DebConf had a very compressed timeline, and there was just too much that had to be done and that had to be figured out on the last minute. This put quite a lot of strain on the organisers, but I was glad to see how, for the most part, most attendees were very sympathetic to some rough edges (but I digress ). I added more of the OBS machine setup to the videoteam s ansible repository, so as of now it just needs an ansible setup and the OBS data and it s good to go. The loopy data is already in the videoteam git repository, so I could probably just add a git pull and create some symlinks in ansible and then that machine can be installed from 0% to 100% by just installing via debian-installer with our ansible hooks. This DebConf I volunteered quite a bit for actual video roles during the conference, something I didn t have much time for in recent DebConfs, and it s been fun, especially in a session or two where nearly none of the other volunteers showed up. Sometimes chaos is just fun :-)
Baekyongee is the university mascot, who s visible throughout the university. So of course we included this four legged whale creature on the loop too!

Packaging I was hoping to do more packaging during DebCamp, but at least it was a non-zero amount:
  • Uploaded gdisk 1.0.10-2 to unstable (previously tested effects of adding dh-sequence-movetousr) (Closes: #1073679).
  • Worked a bit on bcachefs-tools (updating git to 1.9.4), but has a build failure that I need to look into (we might need a newer bindgen) update: I m probably going to ROM this package soon, it doesn t seem suitable for packaging in Debian.
  • Calamares: Tested a fix for encrypted installs, and uploaded it.
  • Calamares: Uploaded (3.3.8-1) to backports (at the time of writing it s still in backports-NEW).
  • Backport obs-gradient-source for bookworm.
  • Did some initial packaging on Cambalache, I ll upload to unstable once wlroots (0.18) hits unstable.
  • Pixelorama 1.0 I did some initial packaging for Pixelorama back when we did the MiniDebConf Gaming Edition, but it had a few stoppers back then. Version 1.0 seems to fix all of that, but it depends on Godot 4.2 and we re still on the 3 series in Debian, so I ll upload this once Godot 4.2 hits at least experimental. Godot software/games is otherwise quite easy to run, it s basically just source code / data that is installed and then run via godot-runner (godot3-runner package in Debian).

BoFs Python Team BoF Link to the etherpad / pad archive link and video can be found on the talk page: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/31-python-bof/ The session ended up being extended to a second part, since all the issues didn t fit into the first session. I was distracted by too many thing during the Python 3.12 transition (to the point where I thought that 3.11 was still new in Debian), so it was very useful listening to the retrospective of that transition. There was a discussion whether Python 3.13 could still make it to testing in time for freeze, and it seems that there is consensus that it can, although, likely with new experimental features like disabling the global interpreter lock and the just in time compiler disabled. I learned for the first time about the dead batteries project, PEP-0594, which removes ancient modules that have mostly been superseded, from the Python standard library. There was some talk about the process for changing team policy, and a policy discussion on whether we should require autopkgtests as a SHOULD or a MUST for migration to testing. As with many things, the devil is in the details and in my opinion you could go either way and achieve a similar result (the original MUST proposal allowed exceptions which imho made it the same as the SHOULD proposal). There s an idea to do some ongoing remote sprints, like having co-ordinated days for bug squashing / working on stuff together. This is a nice idea and probably a good way to energise the team and also to gain some interest from potential newcomers. Louis-Philipe V ronneau was added as a new team admin and there was some discussion on various Sphinx issues and which Lintian tags might be needed for Python 3.13. If you want to know more, you probably have to watch the videos / read the notes :)
    Debian.net BoF Link to the etherpad / pad archive link can be found on the talk page: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/37-debiannet-team-bof Debian Developers can set up services on subdomains on debian.net, but a big problem we ve had before was that developers were on their own for hosting those services. This meant that they either hosted it on their DSL/fiber connection at home, paid for the hosting themselves, or hosted it at different services which became an accounting nightmare to claim back the used funds. So, a few of us started the debian.net hosting project (sometimes we just call it debian.net, this is probably a bit of a bug) so that Debian has accounts with cloud providers, and as admins we can create instances there that gets billed directly to Debian. We had an initial rush of services, but requests have slowed down since (not really a bad thing, we don t want lots of spurious requests). Last year we did a census, to check which of the instances were still used, whether they received system updates and to ask whether they are performing backups. It went well and some issues were found along the way, so we ll be doing that again. We also gained two potential volunteers to help run things, which is great. Debian Social BoF Link to the etherpad / pad archive link can be found on the talk page: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/34-debiansocial-bof We discussed the services we run, you can view the current state of things at: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianSocial Pleroma has shown some cracks over the last year or so, and there are some forks that seem promising. At the same time, it might be worth while considering Mastodon too. So we ll do some comparison of features and maintenance and find a way forward. At the time when Pleroma was installed, it was way ahead in terms of moderation features. Pixelfed is doing well and chugging along nicely, we should probably promote it more. Peertube is working well, although we learned that we still don t have all the recent DebConf videos on there. A bunch of other issues should be fixed once we move it to a new machine that we plan to set up. We re removing writefreely and plume. Nice concepts, but it didn t get much traction yet, and no one who signed up for these actually used it, which is fine, some experimentation with services is good and sometimes they prove to be very popular and other times not. The WordPress multisite instance has some mild use, otherwise haven t had any issues. Matrix ended up to be much, much bigger than we thought, both in usage and in its requirements. It s very stateful and remembers discussions for as long as you let it, so it s Postgres database is continuously expanding, this will also be a lot easier to manage once we have this on the new host. Jitsi is also quite popular, but it could probably be on jitsi.debian.net instead (we created this on debian.social during the initial height of COVID-19 where we didn t have the debian.net hosting yet), although in practice it doesn t really matter where it lives. Most of our current challenges will be solved by moving everything to a new big machine that has a few public IPs available for some VMs, so we ll be doing that shortly. Debian Foundation Discussion BoF This was some brainstorming about the future structure of Debian, and what steps might be needed to get there. It s way too big a problem to take on in a BoF, but we made some progress in figuring out some smaller pieces of the larger puzzle. The DPL is going to get in touch with some legal advisors and our trusted organisations so that we can aim to formalise our relationships a bit more by the time it s DebConf again. I also introduced my intention to join the Debian Partners delegation. When I was DPL, I enjoyed talking with external organisations who wanted to help Debian, but helping external organisations help Debian turned out to be too much additional load on the usual DPL roles, so I m pursuing this with the Debian Partners team, more on that some other time. This session wasn t recorded, but if you feel like you missed something, don t worry, all intentions will be communicated and discussed with project members before anything moves forward. There was a strong agreement in the room though that we should push forward on this, and not reach another DebConf where we didn t make progress on formalising Debian s structure more.

    Social Conference Dinner
    Conference Dinner Photo from Santiago
    The conference dinner took place in the university gymnasium. I hope not many people do sports there in the summer, because it got HOT. There was also some interesting observations on the thermodynamics of the attempted cooling solutions, which was amusing. On the plus side, the food was great, the company was good, and the speeches were kept to a minimum, so it was a great conference dinner, even though it was probably cut a bit short due to the heat. Cheese and Wine Cheese and Wine happened on 1 August, which happens to be the date I became a DD at DebConf17 in Montr al seven years before, so this was a nice accidental celebration of my Debiversary :) Since I m running out of time, I ll add some more photos to this post some time after publishing it :P Group Photo As per DebConf tradition, Aigars took the group photo. You can find the high resolution version on Debian s GitLab instance.
    Debian annual conference Debconf 24, Busan, South Korea
    Photography: Aigars Mahinovs aigarius@debian.org
    License: CC-BYv3+ or GPLv2+
    Talking Ah yes, talking to people is a big part of DebConf, but I didn t keep track of it very well.
    • I mostly listened to Alper a bit about his ideas for his talk about debian installer.
    • I talked to Rhonda a bit about ActivityPub and MQTT and whether they could be useful for publicising Debian activity.
    • Listened to Gunnar and Julian have a discussion about GPG and APT which was interesting.
    • I learned that you can learn Hangul, the Korean alphabet, in about an hour or so (I wish I knew that in all my years of playing StarCraft II).
    • We had the usual continuous keysigning party. Besides it s intended function, this is always a good ice breaker and a way to for shy people to meet other shy people.
    • and many other fly-by discussions.

    Stuff that didn t happen this DebConf
    • loo.py A simple Python script that could eventually replace the obs-advanced-scene-switcher sequencer in OBS. It would also be extremely useful if we d ever replace OBS for loopy. I was hoping to have some time to hack on this, and try to recreate the current loopy in loo.py, but didn t have the time.
    • toetally This year videoteam had to scramble to get a bunch of resistors to assemble some tally light. Even when assembled, they were a bit troublesome. It would ve been nice to hack on toetally and get something ready for testing, but it mostly relies on having something like a rasbperry pi zero with an attached screen in order to work on further. I ll try to have something ready for the next mini conf though.
    • extrepo on debian live I think we should have extrepo installed by default on desktop systems, I meant to start a discussion on this, but perhaps it s just time I go ahead and do it and announce it.
    • Live stream to peertube server It would ve been nice to live stream DebConf to PeerTube, but the dependency tree to get this going got a bit too huge. Following our plans discussed in the Debian Social BoF, we should have this safely ready before the next MiniDebConf and should be able to test it there.
    • Desktop Egg there was this idea to get a stand-in theme for Debian testing/unstable until the artwork for the next release is finalized (Debian bug: #1038660), I have an idea that I meant to implement months ago, but too many things got in the way. It s based on Juliette Taka s Homeworld theme, and basically transforms the homeworld into an egg. Get it? Something that hasn t hatched yet? I also only recently noticed that we never used the actual homeworld graphics (featuring the world image) in the final bullseye release. lol.
    So, another DebConf and another new plush animal. Last but not least, thanks to PKNU for being such a generous and fantastic host to us! See you again at DebConf25 in Brest, France next year!

      22 September 2023

      Ravi Dwivedi: Debconf23

      Official logo of DebConf23

      Introduction DebConf23, the 24th annual Debian Conference, was held in India in the city of Kochi, Kerala from the 3rd to the 17th of September, 2023. Ever since I got to know about it (which was more than an year ago), I was excited to attend DebConf in my home country. This was my second DebConf, as I attended one last year in Kosovo. I was very happy that I didn t need to apply for a visa to attend. I got full bursary to attend the event (thanks a lot to Debian for that!) which is always helpful in covering the expenses, especially if the venue is a five star hotel :) For the conference, I submitted two talks. One was suggested by Sahil on Debian packaging for beginners, while the other was suggested by Praveen who opined that a talk covering broader topics about freedom in self-hosting services will be better, when I started discussing about submitting a talk about prav app project. So I submitted one on Debian packaging for beginners and the other on ideas on sustainable solutions for self-hosting. My friend Suresh - who is enthusiastic about Debian and free software - wanted to attend the DebConf as well. When the registration started, I reminded him about applying. We landed in Kochi on the 28th of August 2023 during the festival of Onam. We celebrated Onam in Kochi, had a trip to Wayanad, and returned to Kochi. On the evening of the 3rd of September, we reached the venue - Four Points Hotel by Sheraton, at Infopark Kochi, Ernakulam, Kerala, India.
      Suresh and me celebrating Onam in Kochi.

      Hotel overview The hotel had 14 floors, and featured a swimming pool and gym (these were included in our package). The hotel gave us elevator access for only our floor, along with public spaces like the reception, gym, swimming pool, and dining areas. The temperature inside the hotel was pretty cold and I had to buy a jacket to survive. Perhaps the hotel was in cahoots with winterwear companies? :)
      Four Points Hotel by Sheraton was the venue of DebConf23. Photo credits: Bilal
      Photo of the pool. Photo credits: Andreas Tille.
      View from the hotel window.

      Meals On the first day, Suresh and I had dinner at the eatery on the third floor. At the entrance, a member of the hotel staff asked us about how many people we wanted a table for. I told her that it s just the two of us at the moment, but (as we are attending a conference) we might be joined by others. Regardless, they gave us a table for just two. Within a few minutes, we were joined by Alper from Turkey and urbec from Germany. So we shifted to a larger table but then we were joined by even more people, so we were busy adding more chairs to our table. urbec had already been in Kerala for the past 5-6 days and was, on one hand, very happy already with the quality and taste of bananas in Kerala and on the other, rather afraid of the spicy food :) Two days later, the lunch and dinner were shifted to the All Spice Restaurant on the 14th floor, but the breakfast was still served at the eatery. Since the eatery (on the 3rd floor) had greater variety of food than the other venue, this move made breakfast the best meal for me and many others. Many attendees from outside India were not accustomed to the spicy food. It is difficult for locals to help them, because what we consider mild can be spicy for others. It is not easy to satisfy everyone at the dining table, but I think the organizing team did a very good job in the food department. (That said, it didn t matter for me after a point, and you will know why.) The pappadam were really good, and I liked the rice labelled Kerala rice . I actually brought that exact rice and pappadam home during my last trip to Kochi and everyone at my home liked it too (thanks to Abhijit PA). I also wished to eat all types of payasams from Kerala and this really happened (thanks to Sruthi who designed the menu). Every meal had a different variety of payasam and it was awesome, although I didn t like some of them, mostly because they were very sweet. Meals were later shifted to the ground floor (taking away the best breakfast option which was the eatery).
      This place served as lunch and dinner place and later as hacklab during debconf. Photo credits: Bilal

      The excellent Swag Bag The DebConf registration desk was at the second floor. We were given a very nice swag bag. They were available in multiple colors - grey, green, blue, red - and included an umbrella, a steel mug, a multiboot USB drive by Mostly Harmless, a thermal flask, a mug by Canonical, a paper coaster, and stickers. It rained almost every day in Kochi during our stay, so handing out an umbrella to every attendee was a good idea.
      Picture of the awesome swag bag given at DebConf23. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi

      A gift for Nattie During breakfast one day, Nattie (Belgium) expressed the desire to buy a coffee filter. The next time I went to the market, I bought a coffee filter for her as a gift. She seemed happy with the gift and was flattered to receive a gift from a young man :)

      Being a mentor There were many newbies who were eager to learn and contribute to Debian. So, I mentored whoever came to me and was interested in learning. I conducted a packaging workshop in the bootcamp, but could only cover how to set up the Debian Unstable environment, and had to leave out how to package (but I covered that in my talk). Carlos (Brazil) gave a keysigning session in the bootcamp. Praveen was also mentoring in the bootcamp. I helped people understand why we sign GPG keys and how to sign them. I planned to take a workshop on it but cancelled it later.

      My talk My Debian packaging talk was on the 10th of September, 2023. I had not prepared slides for my Debian packaging talk in advance - I thought that I could do it during the trip, but I didn t get the time so I prepared them on the day before the talk. Since it was mostly a tutorial, the slides did not need much preparation. My thanks to Suresh, who helped me with the slides and made it possible to complete them in such a short time frame. My talk was well-received by the audience, going by their comments. I am glad that I could give an interesting presentation.
      My presentation photo. Photo credits: Valessio

      Visiting a saree shop After my talk, Suresh, Alper, and I went with Anisa and Kristi - who are both from Albania, and have a never-ending fascination for Indian culture :) - to buy them sarees. We took autos to Kakkanad market and found a shop with a great variety of sarees. I was slightly familiar with the area around the hotel, as I had been there for a week. Indian women usually don t try on sarees while buying - they just select the design. But Anisa wanted to put one on and take a few photos as well. The shop staff did not have a trial saree for this purpose, so they took a saree from a mannequin. It took about an hour for the lady at the shop to help Anisa put on that saree but you could tell that she was in heaven wearing that saree, and she bought it immediately :) Alper also bought a saree to take back to Turkey for his mother. Me and Suresh wanted to buy a kurta which would go well with the mundu we already had, but we could not find anything to our liking.
      Selfie with Anisa and Kristi. Photo credits: Anisa.

      Cheese and Wine Party On the 11th of September we had the Cheese and Wine Party, a tradition of every DebConf. I brought Kaju Samosa and Nankhatai from home. Many attendees expressed their appreciation for the samosas. During the party, I was with Abhas and had a lot of fun. Abhas brought packets of paan and served them at the Cheese and Wine Party. We discussed interesting things and ate burgers. But due to the restrictive alcohol laws in the state, it was less fun compared to the previous DebConfs - you could only drink alcohol served by the hotel in public places. If you bought your own alcohol, you could only drink in private places (such as in your room, or a friend s room), but not in public places.
      Me helping with the Cheese and Wine Party.

      Party at my room Last year, Joenio (Brazilian) brought pastis from France which I liked. He brought the same alocholic drink this year too. So I invited him to my room after the Cheese and Wine party to have pastis. My idea was to have them with my roommate Suresh and Joenio. But then we permitted Joenio to bring as many people as he wanted and he ended up bringing some ten people. Suddenly, the room was crowded. I was having good time at the party, serving them the snacks given to me by Abhas. The news of an alcohol party at my room spread like wildfire. Soon there were so many people that the AC became ineffective and I found myself sweating. I left the room and roamed around in the hotel for some fresh air. I came back after about 1.5 hours - for most part, I was sitting at the ground floor with TK Saurabh. And then I met Abraham near the gym (which was my last meeting with him). I came back to my room at around 2:30 AM. Nobody seemed to have realized that I was gone. They were thanking me for hosting such a good party. A lot of people left at that point and the remaining people were playing songs and dancing (everyone was dancing all along!). I had no energy left to dance and to join them. They left around 03:00 AM. But I am glad that people enjoyed partying in my room.
      This picture was taken when there were few people in my room for the party.

      Sadhya Thali On the 12th of September, we had a sadhya thali for lunch. It is a vegetarian thali served on a banana leaf on the eve of Thiruvonam. It wasn t Thiruvonam on this day, but we got a special and filling lunch. The rasam and payasam were especially yummy.
      Sadhya Thali: A vegetarian meal served on banana leaf. Payasam and rasam were especially yummy! Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.
      Sadhya thali being served at debconf23. Photo credits: Bilal

      Day trip On the 13th of September, we had a daytrip. I chose the daytrip houseboat in Allepey. Suresh chose the same, and we registered for it as soon as it was open. This was the most sought-after daytrip by the DebConf attendees - around 80 people registered for it. Our bus was set to leave at 9 AM on the 13th of September. Me and Suresh woke up at 8:40 and hurried to get to the bus in time. It took two hours to reach the venue where we get the houseboat. The houseboat experience was good. The trip featured some good scenery. I got to experience the renowned Kerala backwaters. We were served food on the boat. We also stopped at a place and had coconut water. By evening, we came back to the place where we had boarded the boat.
      Group photo of our daytrip. Photo credits: Radhika Jhalani

      A good friend lost When we came back from the daytrip, we received news that Abhraham Raji was involved in a fatal accident during a kayaking trip. Abraham Raji was a very good friend of mine. In my Albania-Kosovo-Dubai trip last year, he was my roommate at our Tirana apartment. I roamed around in Dubai with him, and we had many discussions during DebConf22 Kosovo. He was the one who took the photo of me on my homepage. I also met him in MiniDebConf22 Palakkad and MiniDebConf23 Tamil Nadu, and went to his flat in Kochi this year in June. We had many projects in common. He was a Free Software activist and was the designer of the DebConf23 logo, in addition to those for other Debian events in India.
      A selfie in memory of Abraham.
      We were all fairly shocked by the news. I was devastated. Food lost its taste, and it became difficult to sleep. That night, Anisa and Kristi cheered me up and gave me company. Thanks a lot to them. The next day, Joenio also tried to console me. I thank him for doing a great job. I thank everyone who helped me in coping with the difficult situation. On the next day (the 14th of September), the Debian project leader Jonathan Carter addressed and announced the news officially. THe Debian project also mentioned it on their website. Abraham was supposed to give a talk, but following the incident, all talks were cancelled for the day. The conference dinner was also cancelled. As I write, 9 days have passed since his death, but even now I cannot come to terms with it.

      Visiting Abraham s house On the 15th of September, the conference ran two buses from the hotel to Abraham s house in Kottayam (2 hours ride). I hopped in the first bus and my mood was not very good. Evangelos (Germany) was sitting opposite me, and he began conversing with me. The distraction helped and I was back to normal for a while. Thanks to Evangelos as he supported me a lot on that trip. He was also very impressed by my use of the StreetComplete app which I was using to edit OpenStreetMap. In two hours, we reached Abraham s house. I couldn t control myself and burst into tears. I went to see the body. I met his family (mother, father and sister), but I had nothing to say and I felt helpless. Owing to the loss of sleep and appetite over the past few days, I had no energy, and didn t think it was good idea for me to stay there. I went back by taking the bus after one hour and had lunch at the hotel. I withdrew my talk scheduled for the 16th of September.

      A Japanese gift I got a nice Japanese gift from Niibe Yutaka (Japan) - a folder to keep papers which had ancient Japanese manga characters. He said he felt guilty as he swapped his talk with me and so it got rescheduled from 12th September to 16 September which I withdrew later.
      Thanks to Niibe Yutaka (the person towards your right hand) from Japan (FSIJ), who gave me a wonderful Japanese gift during debconf23: A folder to keep pages with ancient Japanese manga characters printed on it. I realized I immediately needed that :)
      This is the Japanese gift I received.

      Group photo On the 16th of September, we had a group photo. I am glad that this year I was more clear in this picture than in DebConf22.
      Click to enlarge

      Volunteer work and talks attended I attended the training session for the video team and worked as a camera operator. The Bits from DPL was nice. I enjoyed Abhas presentation on home automation. He basically demonstrated how he liberated Internet-enabled home devices. I also liked Kristi s presentation on ways to engage with the GNOME community.
      Bits from the DPL. Photo credits: Bilal
      Kristi on GNOME community. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.
      Abhas' talk on home automation. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.
      I also attended lightning talks on the last day. Badri, Wouter, and I gave a demo on how to register on the Prav app. Prav got a fair share of advertising during the last few days.
      I was roaming around with a QR code on my T-shirt for downloading Prav.

      The night of the 17th of September Suresh left the hotel and Badri joined me in my room. Thanks to the efforts of Abhijit PA, Kiran, and Ananthu, I wore a mundu.
      Me in mundu. Picture credits: Abhijith PA
      I then joined Kalyani, Mangesh, Ruchika, Anisa, Ananthu and Kiran. We took pictures and this marked the last night of DebConf23.

      Departure day The 18th of September was the day of departure. Badri slept in my room and left early morning (06:30 AM). I dropped him off at the hotel gate. The breakfast was at the eatery (3rd floor) again, and it was good. Sahil, Saswata, Nilesh, and I hung out on the ground floor.
      From left: Nilesh, Saswata, me, Sahil. Photo credits: Sahil.
      I had an 8 PM flight from Kochi to Delhi, for which I took a cab with Rhonda (Austria), Michael (Nigeria) and Yash (India). We were joined by other DebConf23 attendees at the Kochi airport, where we took another selfie.
      Ruchika (taking the selfie) and from left to right: Yash, Joost (Netherlands), me, Rhonda
      Joost and I were on the same flight, and we sat next to each other. He then took a connecting flight from Delhi to Netherlands, while I went with Yash to the New Delhi Railway Station, where we took our respective trains. I reached home on the morning of the 19th of September, 2023.
      Joost and me going to Delhi. Photo credits: Ravi.

      Big thanks to the organizers DebConf23 was hard to organize - strict alcohol laws, weird hotel rules, death of a close friend (almost a family member), and a scary notice by the immigration bureau. The people from the team are my close friends and I am proud of them for organizing such a good event. None of this would have been possible without the organizers who put more than a year-long voluntary effort to produce this. In the meanwhile, many of them had organized local events in the time leading up to DebConf. Kudos to them. The organizers also tried their best to get clearance for countries not approved by the ministry. I am also sad that people from China, Kosovo, and Iran could not join. In particular, I feel bad for people from Kosovo who wanted to attend but could not (as India does not consider their passport to be a valid travel document), considering how we Indians were so well-received in their country last year.

      Note about myself I am writing this on the 22nd of September, 2023. It took me three days to put up this post - this was one of the tragic and hard posts for me to write. I have literally forced myself to write this. I have still not recovered from the loss of my friend. Thanks a lot to all those who helped me. PS: Credits to contrapunctus for making grammar, phrasing, and capitalization changes.

      30 August 2020

      Jonathan Carter: The metamorphosis of Loopy Loop

      Dealing with the void during MiniDebConf Online #1 Between 28 and 31 May this year, we set out to create our first ever online MiniDebConf for Debian. Many people have been meaning to do something similar for a long time, but it just didn t work out yet. With many of us being in lock down due to COVID-19, and with the strong possibility looming that DebConf20 might have had to become an online event, we rushed towards organising the first ever Online MiniDebConf and put together some form of usable video stack for it. I could go into all kinds of details on the above, but this post is about a bug that lead to a pretty nifty feature for DebConf20. The tool that we use to capture Jitsi calls is called Jibri (Jitsi Broadcasting Infrustructure). It had a bug (well, bug for us, but it s an upstream feature) where Jibri would hang up after 30s of complete silence, because it would assume that the call has ended and that the worker can be freed up again. This would result in the stream being ended at the end of every talk, so before the next talk, someone would have to remember to press play again in their media player or on the video player on the stream page. Hrmph. Easy solution on the morning that the conference starts? I was testing a Debian Live image the night before in a KVM and thought that I might as well just start a Jitsi call from there and keep a steady stream of silence so that Jibri doesn t hang up. It worked! But the black screen and silence on stream was a bit eery. Because this event was so experimental in nature, and because we were on such an incredibly tight timeline, we opted not to seek sponsors for this event, so there was no sponsors loop that we d usually stream during a DebConf event. Then I thought Ah! I could just show the schedule! .

      The stream looked bright and colourful (and was even useful!) and Jitsi/Jibri didn t die. I thought my work was done. As usual, little did I know how untrue that was. The silence was slightly disturbing after the talks, and people asked for some music. Playing music on my VM and capturing the desktop audio in to Jitsi was just a few pulseaudio settings away, so I spent two minutes finding some freely licensed tracks that sounded ok enough to just start playing on the stream. I came across mini-albums by Captive Portal and Cinema Noir, During the course of the MiniDebConf Online I even started enjoying those. Someone also pointed out that it would be really nice to have a UTC clock on the stream. I couldn t find a nice clock in a hurry so I just added a tmux clock in the meantime while we deal with the real-time torrent of issues that usually happens when organising events like this.
      Speaking of issues, during our very first talk of the last day, our speaker had a power cut during the talk and abruptly dropped off. Oops! So, since I had a screenshare open from the VM to the stream, I thought I d just pop in a quick message in a text editor to let people know that we re aware of it and trying to figure out what s going on.
      In the end, MiniDebConf Online worked out all right. Besides the power cut for our one speaker, and another who had a laptop that was way too under-powered to deal with video, everything worked out very well. Even the issues we had weren t show-stoppers and we managed to work around them.

      DebConf20 Moves Online For DebConf, we usually show a sponsors loop in between sessions. It s great that we give our sponsors visibility here, but in reality people see the sponsors loop and think Talk over! and then they look away. It s also completely silent and doesn t provide any additional useful information. I was wondering how I could take our lessons from MDCO#1 and integrate our new tricks with the sponsors loop. That is, add the schedule, time, some space to type announcements on the screen and also add some loopable music to it. I used OBS before in making my videos, and like the flexibility it provides when working with scenes and sources. A scene is what you would think of as a screen or a document with its own collection of sources or elements. For example, a scene might contain sources such as a logo, clock, video, image, etc. A scene can also contain another scene. This is useful if you want to contain a banner or play some background music that is shared between scenes.

      The above screenshots illustrate some basics of scenes and sources. First with just the DC20 banner, and then that used embedded in another scene. For MDCO#1, I copied and pasted the schedule into a LibreOffice Impress slide that was displayed on the stream. Having to do this for all 7 days of DebConf, plus dealing with scheduling changes would be daunting. So, I started to look in to generating some schedule slides programmatically. Stefano then pointed me to the Happening Now page on the DebConf website, where the current schedule block is displayed. So all I would need to do in OBS was to display a web page. Nice! Unfortunately the OBS in Debian doesn t have the ability to display web pages out of the box (we need to figure out CEF in Debian), but fortunately someone provides a pre-compiled version of the plugin called Linux Browser that works just fine. This allowed me to easily add the schedule page in its own scene. Being able to display a web page solved another problem. I wasn t fond of having to type / manage the announcements in OBS. It would either be a bit prone to user error, and if you want to edit the text while the loop is running, you d have to disrupt the loop, go to the foreground scene, and edit the text before resuming the loop. That s a bit icky. Then I thought that we could probably just get that from a web page instead. We could host some nice html snippet in a repository in salsa, and then anyone could easily commit an MR to update the announcement. But then I went a step further, use an etherpad! Then anyone in the orga team can quickly update the announcement and it would be instantly changed on the stream. Nice! So that small section of announcement text on the screen is actually a whole web browser with an added OBS filter to crop away all the pieces we don t want. Overkill? Sure, but it gave us a decent enough solution that worked in time for the start of DebConf. Also, being able to type directly on to the loop screen works out great especially in an emergency. Oh, and uhm the clock is also a website rendered in its own web browser :-P
      So, I had the ability to make scenes, add elements and add all the minimal elements I wanted in there. Great! But now I had to figure out how to switch scenes automatically. It s probably worth mentioning that I only found some time to really dig into this right before DebConf started, so with all of this I was scrambling to find things that would work without too many bugs while also still being practical. Now I needed the ability to switch between the scenes automatically / programmatically. I had never done this in OBS before. I know it has some API because there are Android apps that you can use to control OBS with from your phone. I discovered that it had an automatic scene switcher, but it s very basic. It can only switch based on active window, which can be useful in some cases, but since we won t have any windows open other than OBS, this tool was basically pointless.
      After some quick searches, I found a plugin called Advanced Scene Switcher. This plugin can do a lot more, but has some weird UI choices, and is really meant for gamers and other types of professional streamers to help them automate their work flow and doesn t seem at all meant to be used for a continuous loop, but, it worked, and I could make it do something that will work for us during the DebConf. I had a chicken and egg problem because I had to figure out a programming flow, but didn t really have any content to work with, or an idea of all the content that we would eventually have. I ve been toying with the idea in my mind and had some idea that we could add fun facts, postcards (an image with some text), time now in different timezones, Debian news (maybe procured by the press team), cards that contain the longer announcements that was sent to debconf-announce, perhaps a shout out or two and some photos from previous DebConfs like the group photos. I knew that I wouldn t be able to build anything substantial by the time DebConf starts, but adding content to OBS in between talks is relatively easy, so we could keep on building on it during DebConf. Nattie provided the first shout out, and I made 2 video loops with the DC18/19 pictures and also two Did you know cards. So the flow I ended up with was: Sponsors -> Happening Now -> Random video (which would be any of those clips) -> Back to sponsors. This ended up working pretty well for quite a while. With the first batch of videos the sponsor loop would come up on average about every 2 minutes, but as much shorter clips like shout outs started to come in faster and faster, it made sense to play a few 2-3 shout-outs before going back to sponsors. So here is a very brief guide on how I set up the sequencing in Advanced Scene Switcher.
      If no condition was met, a video would play from the Random tab.
      Then in the Random tab, I added the scenes that were part of the random mix. Annoyingly, you have to specify how long it should play for. If you don t, the no condition thingy is triggered and another video is selected. The time is also the length of the video minus one second, because
      You can t just say that a random video should return back to a certain scene, you have to specify that in the sequence tab for each video. Why after 1 second? Because, at least in my early tests, and I didn t circle back to this, it seems like 0s can randomly either mean instantly, or never. Yes, this ended up being a bit confusing and tedious, and considering the late hours I worked on this, I m surprised that I didn t manage to screw it up completely at any point. I also suspected that threads would eventually happen. That is, when people create video replies to other videos. We had 3 threads in total. There was a backups thread, beverage thread and an impersonation thread. The arrow in the screenshot above points to the backups thread. I know it doesn t look that complicated, but it was initially somewhat confusing to set up and make sense out of it.
      For the next event, the Advanced Scene Switcher might just get some more taming, or even be replaced entirely. There are ways to drive OBS by API, and even the Advanced Scene Switcher tool can be driven externally to some degree, but I think we definitely want to replace it by the next full DebConf. We had the problem that when a talk ended, we would return to the loop in the middle of a clip, which felt very unnatural and sometimes even confusing. So Stefano helped me with a helper script that could read the socket from Vocto, which I used to write either Loop or Standby to a file, and then the scene switcher would watch that file and keep the sponsors loop ready for start while the talks play. Why not just switch to sponsors when the talk ends? Well, the little bit of delay in switching would mean that you would see a tiny bit of loop every time before switching to sponsors. This is also why we didn t have any loop for the ad-hoc track (that would have probably needed another OBS instance, we ll look more into solutions for this for the future).
      Then for all the clips. There were over 50 of them. All of them edited by hand in kdenlive. I removed any hard clicks, tried to improve audibility, remove some sections at the beginning and the end that seemed extra and added some music that would reduce in volume when someone speaks. In the beginning, I had lots of fun with choosing music for the clips. Towards the end, I had to rush them through and just chose the same tune whether it made sense or not. For comparison of what a difference the music can make, compare the original and adapted version for Valhalla s clip above, or this original and adapted video from urbec. This part was a lot more fun than dealing with the video sequencer, but I also want to automate it a bit. When I can fully drive OBS from Python I ll likely instead want to show those cards and control music volume from Python (what could possibly go wrong ). The loopy name happened when I requested an @debconf.org alias for this. I was initially just thinking about loop@debconf.org but since I wanted to make it clear that the purpose of this loop is also to have some fun, I opted for loopy instead:
      I was really surprised by how people took to loopy. I hoped it would be good and that it would have somewhat positive feedback, but the positive feedback was just immense. The idea was that people typically saw it in between talks. But a few people told me they kept it playing after the last talk of the day to watch it in the background. Some asked for the music because they want to keep listening to it while working (and even for jogging!?). Some people also asked for recordings of the loop because they want to keep it for after DebConf. The shoutouts idea proved to be very popular. Overall, I m very glad that people enjoyed it and I think it s safe to say that loopy will be back for the next event.
      Also throughout this experiment Loopy Loop turned into yet another DebConf mascot. We gain one about every DebConf, some by accident and some on purpose. This one was not quite on purpose. I meant to make an image for it for salsa, and started with an infinite loop symbol. That s a loop, but by just adding two more solid circles to it, it looks like googly eyes, now it s a proper loopy loop! I like the progress we ve made on this, but there s still a long way to go, and the ideas keep heaping up. The next event is quite soon (MDCO#2 at the end of November, and it seems that 3 other MiniDebConf events may also be planned), but over the next few events there will likely be significantly better graphics/artwork, better sequencing, better flow and more layout options. I hope to gain some additional members in the team to deal with incoming requests during DebConf. It was quite hectic this time! The new OBS also has a scripting host that supports Python, so I should be able to do some nice things even within OBS without having to drive it externally (like, display a clock without starting a web browser).

      The Loopy Loop Music The two mini albums that mostly played during the first few days were just a copy and paste from the MDCO#1 music, which was:

      For shoutout tracks, that were later used in the loop too (because it became a bit monotonous), most of the tracks came from freepd.com: I have much more things to say about DebConf20, but I ll keep that for another post, and hopefully we can get all the other video stuff in a post from the video team, because I think there s been some real good work done for this DebConf. Also thanks to Infomaniak who was not only a platinum sponsor for this DebConf, but they also provided us with plenty of computing power to run all the video stuff on. Thanks again!

      6 April 2020

      Jonathan Carter: Free Software Activities for 2020-03

      DPL Campaign 2020 On the 12th of March, I posted my self-nomination for the Debian Project Leader election. This is the second time I m running for DPL, and you can read my platform here. The campaign period covered the second half of the month, where I answered a bunch of questions on the debian-vote list. The voting period is currently open and ends on 18 April.

      Debian Social

      This month we finally announced the Debian Social project. A project that hosts a few websites with the goal to improve communication and collaboration within the Debian project, improve visibility on the work that people do and make it easier for general users to interact with the community and feel part of the project. Some History This has been a long time in the making. From my side I ve been looking at better ways to share/play our huge DebConf video archives for the last 3 years or so. Initially I was considering either some sort of script or small server side app that combined the archives and the metadata into a player, or using something like MediaDrop (which I was using on my highvoltage.tv website for a while). I ran into a lot of MediaDrop s limitations early on. It was fine for a very small site but I don t think it would ever be the right solution for a Debian-wide video hosting platform, and it didn t seem all that actively maintained either. Wouter went ahead and implemented a web player option for the video archives. His solution is good because it doesn t rely on any server side software, so it s easy to mirror and someone who lives on an island could download it and view it offline in that player. It still didn t solve all our problems though. Popular videos (by either views or likes) weren t easily discoverable, and the site itself isn t that easy to discover. Then PeerTube came along. PeerTube provides a similar type of interface such as MediaDrop or YouTube that gives you likes, viewcount and comments. But what really set it apart from previous things that we looked at was that it s a federated service. Not only does it federate with other PeerTube instances, but the protocols it uses means that it can connect to all kinds of other services that makes up an interconnected platform called the Fediverse. This was especially great since independent video sites tend to become these lonely islands on the web that become isolated and forgotten. With PeerTube, video sites can subscribe to similar sites on the Fediverse, which makes videos and other video sites significantly more discoverable and attracts more eyeballs. At DebConf19 I wanted to ramp up the efforts to make a Debian PeerTube instance a reality. I spoke to many people about this and discovered that some Debianites are already making all kinds of Debian videos in many different languages. Some were even distributing them locally on DVD and have never uploaded them. I thought that the Debian PeerTube instance could not only be a good platform for DebConf videos, but it could be a good home for many free software content creators, especially if they create Debian specific content. I spoke to Rhonda about it, who s generally interested in the Fediverse and wanted to host a instances of Pleroma (microblogging service) and PixelFed (free image hosting service that resembles the Instagram site), but needed a place to host them. We decided to combine efforts, and since a very large amount of fediverse services end with .social in their domain names, we ended up calling this project Debian Social. We re also hosting some non-fediverse services like a WordPress multisite and a Jitsi instance for video chatting. Current Status Currently, we have a few services in a beta/testing state. I think we have most of the kinks sorted out to get them to a phase where they re ready for wider use. Authentication is a bit of a pain point right now. We don t really have a single sign-on service in Debian, that guest users can use, or that all these services integrate with. So for now, if you re a Debian Developer who wants an account on one of these services, you can request a new account by creating a ticket on salsa.debian.org and selecting the New account template. Not all services support having dashes (or even any punctuation in the username whatsoever), so to keep it consistent we re currently appending just guest to salsa usernames for guest users, and team at the end of any Debian team accounts or official accounts using these services Stefano finished uploading all the Debconf videos to the PeerTube instance. Even though it s largely automated, it ended up being quite a big job fixing up some old videos, their metadata and adding support for PeerTube to the DebConf video scripts. This also includes some videos from sprints and MiniDebConfs that had video coverage, currently totaling 1359 videos.
      Future plans This is still a very early phase for the project. Here are just some ideas that might develop over time on the Debian Social sites: If you d like to join this initiative and help out, please join #debian-social on oftc. We re also looking for people who can help moderate posts on these sites.

      Debian packaging I had the sense that there were fewer upstream releases this month. I suspect that everyone was busy figuring out how to cope during Covid-19 lockdowns taking place all over the world. 2020-03-02: Upload package calamares (3.2.10-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-03-10: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-dash-to-panel (29-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-03-10: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-draw-on-your-screen (5.1-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-03-28: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-dash-to-panel (31-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-03-28: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-draw-on-your-screen (6-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-03-28: Update package python3-flask-autoindexing packaging, not releasing due to licensing change that needs further clarification. (GitHub issue #55). 2020-03-28: Upload package gamemode (1.5.1-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-03-28: Upload package calamares (3.2.21-1) to Debian unstable.

      Debian mentoring 2020-03-03: Sponsor package python-jaraco.functools (3.0.0-1) (Python team request). 2020-03-03: Review python-ftputil (3.4-1) (Needs some more work) (Python team request). 2020-03-04: Sponsor package pythonmagick (0.9.19-6) for Debian unstable (Python team request). 2020-03-23: Sponsor package bitwise (0.41-1) for Debian unstable (Email request). 2020-03-23: Sponsor package gpxpy (1.4.0-1) for Debian unstable (Python team request). 2020-03-28: Sponsor package gpxpy (1.4.0-2) for Debian unstable (Python team request). 2020-03-28: Sponsor package celery (4.4.2-1) for Debian unstable (Python team request). 2020-03-28: Sponsor package buildbot (2.7.0-1) for Debian unstable (Python team request).

      16 August 2017

      Holger Levsen: 20170816-irssi-timezones

      How to change irssi's timezone without restart Happy birthday to all you lovely Debian people! For my future self:
      <Rhonda>   h01ger: /script exec $ENV TZ  = 'Europe/Vienna';
      

      13 August 2017

      Mike Gabriel: @DebConf17: Work for Debian and FLOSS I got done during DebCamp and DebConf... and Beyond...

      People I Met and will Remember Topics I have worked on Talks and BoFs Packages Uploaded to Debian unstable Packages Uploaded to Debian NEW I also looked into lightdm-webkit2-greeter, but upstream is in the middle of a transition from Gtk3 to Qt5, so this has been suspended for now. Packages Uploaded to oldstable-/stable-proposed-updates or -security Other Package related Stuff Thanks to Everyone Making This Event Possible A big thanks to everyone who made it possible for me to attend this event!!!

      15 June 2017

      Rhonda D'Vine: Apollo 440

      It's been a while. And currently I shouldn't even post but rather pack my stuff because I'll get the keys to my flat in 6 days. Yay! But, for packing I need a good sound track. And today it is Apollo 440. I saw them live at the Sundance Festival here in Vienna 20 years ago. It's been a while, but their music still gives me power to pull through. So, without further ado, here are their songs: As always, enjoy!

      /music permanent link Comments: 3 Flattr this

      21 April 2017

      Rhonda D'Vine: Home

      A fair amount of things happened since I last blogged something else than music. First of all we did actually hold a Debian Diversity meeting. It was quite nice, less people around than hoped for, and I account that to some extend to the trolls and haters that defaced the titanpad page for the agenda and destroyed the doodle entry for settling on a date for the meeting. They even tried to troll my blog with comments, and while I did approve controversial responses in the past, those went over the line of being acceptable and didn't carry any relevant content. One response that I didn't approve but kept in my mailbox is even giving me strength to carry on. There is one sentence in it that speaks to me: Think you can stop us? You can't you stupid b*tch. You have ruined the Debian community for us. The rest of the message is of no further relevance, but even though I can't take credit for being responsible for that, I'm glad to be a perceived part of ruining the Debian community for intolerant and hateful people. A lot of other things happened since too. Mostly locally here in Vienna, several queer empowering groups were founding around me, some of them existed already, some formed with the help of myself. We now have several great regular meetings for non-binary people, for queer polyamory people about which we gave an interview, a queer playfight (I might explain that concept another time), a polyamory discussion group, two bi-/pansexual groups, a queer-feminist choir, and there will be an European Lesbian* Conference in October where I help with the organization and on June 21st I'll finally receive the keys to my flat in Que[e]rbau Seestadt. I'm sooo looking forward to it. It will be part of the Let me come Home experience that I'm currently in. Another part of that experience is that I started changing my name (and gender marker) officially. I had my first appointment in the corresponding bureau, and I hope that it won't last too long because I have to get my papers in time for booking my flight to Montreal, and somewhen along the process my current passport won't contain correct data anymore. So for the people who have it in their signing policy to see government IDs this might be your chance to finally sign my key then. I plan to do a diversity BoF at debconf where we can speak more directly on where we want to head with the project. I hope I'll find the time to do an IRC meeting beforehand. I'm just uncertain how to coordinate that one to make it accessible for interested parties while keeping the destructive trolls out. I'm open for ideas here.

      /personal permanent link Comments: 3 Flattr this

      10 February 2017

      Rhonda D'Vine: Anouk

      I need music to be more productive. Sitting in an open workspace it helps to shut off outside noice too. And often enough I just turn cmus into shuffle mode and let it play what comes along. Yesterday I just stumbled upon a singer again that I fell in love with her voice a long time ago. This is about Anouk. The song was on a compilation series that I followed because it so easily brought great groups to my attention in a genre that I simply love. It was called "Crossing All Over!" and featured several groups that I digged further into and still love to listen to. Anyway, don't want to delay the songs for you any longer, so here they are: Like always, enjoy!

      /music permanent link Comments: 0 Flattr this

      27 January 2017

      Rhonda D'Vine: Icona Pop

      Last fall I went to a Silent Disco event. You get wireless headphones, a DJane and a DJ were playing music on different channels, and you enjoy the time with people around who can't hear what you hear. It's a pretty funny experience, and it was one of the last warm sunny days. There I heard a song that was just in the mood for the moment, and made me looking up the band to listen more closely to them. The band was Icona Pop, they have a mood enlighening pop sound that cheers you up. Here are the songs I want to present you today: Like always, enjoy!

      /music permanent link Comments: 4 Flattr this

      26 September 2016

      Rhonda D'Vine: LP

      I guess you know by now that I simply love music. It is powerful, it can move you, change your mood in a lot of direction, make you wanna move your body to it, even unknowingly have this happen, and remind you of situations you want to keep in mind. The singer I present to you was introduce to me by a dear friend with the following words: So this hasn't happened to me in a looooong time: I hear a voice and can't stop crying. I can't decide which song I should send to you thus I send three of which the last one let me think of you. And I have to agree, that voice is really great. Thanks a lot for sharing LP with me, dear! And given that I got sent three songs and I am not good at holding excitement back, I want to share it with you, so here are the songs: Like always, enjoy!

      /music permanent link Comments: 0 Flattr this

      30 August 2016

      Rhonda D'Vine: Thomas D

      It's not often that an artist touches you deeply, but Thomas D managed to do so to the point of that I am (only half) jokingly saying that if there would be a church of Thomas D I would absolutely join it. His lyrics always did stand out for me in the context of the band I found about him, and the way he lives his life is definitely outstanding. And additionally there are these special songs that give so much and share a lot. I feel sorry for the people who don't understand German to be able to appreciate him. Here are three songs that I suggest you to listen to closely: Like always, enjoy!

      /music permanent link Comments: 1 Flattr this

      26 July 2016

      Rhonda D'Vine: Debian LGBTIQA+

      I have a long overdue blog entry about what happened in recent times. People that follow my tweets did catch some things. Most noteworthy there was the Trans*Inter*Congress in Munich at the start of May. It was an absolute blast. I met so many nice and great people, talked and experienced so many great things there that I'm still having a great motivational push from it every time I think back. It was also the time when I realized that I in fact do have body dysphoria even though I thought I'm fine with my body in general: Being tall is a huge issue for me. Realizing that I have a huge issue (yes, pun intended) with my length was quite relieving, even though it doesn't make it go away. It's something that makes passing and transitioning for me harder. I'm well aware that there are tall women, and that there are dedicated shops for lengthy women, but that's not the only thing that I have trouble with. What bothers me most is what people read into tall people: that they are always someone they can lean on for comfort, that tall people are always considered to be self confident and standing up for themselves (another pun, I know ... my bad). And while I'm fine with people coming to me for leaning on to, I rarely get the chance to do so myself. And people don't even consider it. When I was there in Munich, talking with another great (... pun?) trans woman who was as tall as me I finally had the possibility to just rest my head on her shoulder and finally feel the comfort I need just as much as everyone else out there, too. Probably that's also the reason why I'm so touchy and do go Free Hugging as often as possible. But being tall also means that you are usually only the big spoon when cuddling up. Having a small mental breakdown because of realizing that didn't change the feeling directly but definitely helped with looking for what I could change to fix that for myself. Then, at the end of may, the movie FtWTF - female to what the fuck came to cinema. It's a documentary about six people who got assigned female at birth. And it's absolutely charming, and has great food for thoughts in it. If you ever get the chance to watch it you definitely should. And then came debconf16 in Capetown. The flight to there was canceled and we had to get rebooked. The first offer was to go through Dubai, and gladly a colleague did point out to the person behind the desk that that wouldn't be safe for myself and thus out of scope. In the end we managed to get to Capetown quite nice, and even though it was winter when the sun was shining it was quite nice. Besides the cold nights that is. Or being stuck on the way up to table mountain because a colleague had cramps in his lags and we had to call mountain rescue. Gladly the night was clear, and when the mountain rescue finally got us to top and it was night already we had one of the nicest views from up there most people probably never will experience. And then ... I got invited to a trans meetup in Capetown. I was both excited and nervous about it, what to expect there. But it was simply great. The group there was simply outstandingly great. The host gave update information on progress on clinical support within south Africa, from what I took with me is that there is only one clinic there for SRS which manages only two people a year which is simply ... yuck. Guess you can guess how many years (yes, decades) the waiting line is ... I was blown away though by the diversity of the group, on so many levels, most notably on the age spectrum. It was a charm to meet you all there! If you ever stop by in Capetown and you are part of the LGBTIQ community, make sure you get in contact with the Triangle Project. But, about the real reason to write this entry: I was approached at Debconf by at least two people who asked me what I thought about creating an LGBTIQA+ group within Debian, and if I'd like to push for that. Actually I think it would be a good idea to have some sort of exchange between people on the queer spectrum (and I hope I don't offend anyone with just saying queer for LGBTIQA+ people). Given that I'm quite outspoken people approach me every now and then so I'm aware that there is a fair amount of people that would fall into that category. On the other hand some of them wouldn't want to have it publicly known because it shouldn't matter and isn't really the business of others. So I'm uncertain. If we follow that path I guess something that is closed or at least offers the possibility to have a closed communication would be needed to not out someone by just joining in the discussion. It's was easier with Debian Women where it was (somewhat) clear that male participants are allies supporting the cause and not considered being women themselves, but often enough (mostly cis hetero male) people are afraid to join a dedicated LGBTIQA+ group because they have the fear of having their identity judged. These things should be considered before creating such a place so that people can feel comfortable when joining and know what to expect beforehand. For the time being I created #debian-diversity on irc.debian.org to discuss how to move forward. Please bear in mind that even the channel name is up for discussion. Acronyms might not be the way to go in my opinion, just read back up the discussion that lead to the Diversity Statement of Debian where the original approach was to start listing groups for inclusiveness but it was quickly clear that it can get outdated too easily. I am willing to be part of that effort, but right now I have some personal things to deal which eat up a fair amount of my time. My kid starts school in September (yes, it's that long already, time flies ...). And it looks like I'll have to move a second time in the near future: I'll have to leave my current flat by the end of the year and the Que[e]rbau I'm moving into won't be ready by that time to host me yet ... F*ck. :(

      /personal permanent link Comments: 1 Flattr this

      3 July 2016

      Paul Wise: DebConf16 Open Festival day 1

      Today was day one of the DebConf16 Open Festival and I attended the open hardware panel, part of the talk about Code For South Africa, shirish's experiences and the DebConf new folks session. The open hardware panel was a wide ranging discussion between bdale, Andy and indiebio. bdate talked about the experiences he has had with his rocketry hardware. bdale said "Make concious decisions about what you are buying", referencing a case where he investigated, found a GPL violation and didn't buy. Various people care about openness of different layers of the hardware. Off-the-shelf products are very strongly integrated, which is great for makers but means that people who care about lower layers like CPU micro-architecture aren't able to participate. Andy said "We are just beginning to come out of the shareware stage [of open hardware]". bdale mentioned the companies who do hardware production as a service from design files. Later in the pub some folks mentioned j-core, an open re-implementation of SuperH processors. I missed most of the code4sa talk unfortunately, but it was about government services and open data. shirish covered his journey through life to Debian. His youth, how satellite TV and knowledge of the outside world came to India around the time of the Iraq war. His experience accessing the Internet for the first time, uncensored vs the usual censorship in India's media. His experiences of Windows 95 viruses and crashes. He learned of PCTwist Linux through a magazine cover. His initial install was not a success but eventually managed to break through and install a desktop, but experienced network and other issues. Eventually he encountered Ubuntu and began contributing bug reports. His experiences there led him to Debian. He began blogging about Debian. In the last few years he and others have been going around the country doing mini-DebConfs at institutes around India. The first question was predictably about having a DebConf in India and how shirish might like to get more involved. DebConf in India sounds like a possibility some day and shirish was thinking about getting involved in publicity, marketting and the Debian installer. The DebConf new folks session was a great intro to DebConf for folks new to the community. There were some quite excellent touches added to this year's version of the event by indiebio and Rhonda. I also got some things done. Usual spam reporting. Reviewed wiki RecentChanges. Talked to the chromium-bsu/MacPorts maintainer about AX_CHECK_GL brokenness. Filed Debian wishlist bug #829292 asking to update autoconf-archive. Redirected a Hurd porterbox request to the exodar admin and quickly found out I was wrong to do that, rectified. Then we found out the LDAP sync to exodar was broken. Replied to someone who intends to sell Debian pre-installs. Thanked BunsenLabs folks for joining the derivatives list. Applied reproducible builds patch for cats from Chris Lamb. Heard about awesome new terminal-mode screensaver. Moo! Prepared a blog post about check-all-the-things.

      2 June 2016

      Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: My Free Software Activities in May 2016

      My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Debian LTS Due to some departure and increased workload, I wanted to find out a few new paid contributors for Debian LTS. So I sent a mail to debian-jobs@lists.debian.org and contrary to last time (where I posted the announce only here on my blog), I had plenty of replies I ended up enrolling 6 new contributors and refusing 3 persons that did not have the required profile. All new contributors are supposed to handle at least one LTS update on their free time to get up to speed. But from the 6 new contributors only 3 managed to handle their training update in May.  During the month I spent quite some time providing guidance to the new contributors both in private mails and on the debian-lts mailing list. I also reviewed a xen update where I had (rightfully) some doubts about the work done. Packaging work fonts-cantarell. After having diagnosed the problem last month, I got annoyed enough by the lack of a fixed package that I found a way to package a newer upstream release of fonts-cantarell without requiring a fontforge update that was likely to take some time still so I prepared and uploaded 0.0.24-1. cpputest. Bug #823711 reported some license issues with some of the files. I immediately forwarded this upstream (issue 961) and fixed it in Debian by repacking the upstream tarball. Fortunately upstream has been quick to handle his and there s a new upstream release (3.8) where the problematic files have been dropped. live-boot. Kali s live images were no longer booting (stuck in the initrd) and with the help of Ben Hutchings we diagnosed this back to #823069 which I fixed in live-boot 20160511. udev. I filed #824025 to request that the rule defining the MAC-based name of USB network interfaces be isolated in its own file so that it can be easily disabled (we do that in Kali). Misc stuff. I packaged Django 1.8.13 in jessie-backports. I filed
      #824165 against sbuild being broken with $apt_allow_unauthenticated = 1; in .sbuildrc. I filed a wishlist bug #824168 against apt-listchanges to suggest that it ignores news from auto-installed packages. I filed #825923 to report a regression in python-nltk (discovered in Kali first). Infrastructure work packages.debian.org. A few months ago, I wrote a patch for packages.debian.org so that it forwards emails to tracker.debian.org instead of packages.qa.debian.org. At that time, I was in touch with Rhonda and was hoping that she would apply it rather quickly (the patch is rather short). After a few more pings, she made it clear that she was not alone and that I should rather file a proper request so that someone else can also process it. So I filed #824085 and tried to find someone else to apply my patch. Most of the members of pkg_maint said that they were part of the group only due to generic webmaster involvement but that they did not want to touch that part. Fortunately, Martin Zobel Helas was more receptive to my request and helped me to deploy my changes. I committed my change and Martin pulled it in the live checkout on picconi.debian.org. This update is also a first step towards the possibility to use foo@packages.debian.org and/or teams+foo@tracker.debian.org in the Maintainer field of a package. With this we can get rid of dedicated mailing lists that just duplicate the work of the package tracker. And we no longer need to care about the fact that the Maintainer is handled differently than Uploaders since all (human) co-maintainers would then be listed in Uploaders only (and the package tracker would deal appropriately with mails sent to the Maintainer). Distro Tracker. I improved the import process to be able to force a new processing of source packages that were already imported. This was useful to let it recognize architectures which were newly added in its database (and that were ignored and thus not displayed up to now). I also made a first review of the AppStream patch submitted by Matthias Klump in #806740. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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      26 April 2016

      Rhonda D'Vine: Prince

      Last week we lost another great musician, song writer, artist. It's painful to realise that more and more of the people you grew up with aren't there anymore. We lost Prince, TAFKAP, Symbol, Prince. He wrote a lot of great music, even some you wouldn't attribute to him, like Sinead O'Connor's Nothing Compares To You, Bangles' Manic Monday or Chaka Khan's I Feel For You. But I actually would like to share some songs that are also performed by himself, so without further ado here are the songs: Rest in peace, Prince. And you, enjoy.

      /music permanent link Comments: 0 Flattr this

      28 March 2016

      Rhonda D'Vine: Ich bin was ich bin

      As my readers probably are well aware, I wrote my transgender coming out poem Mermaids over 10 years ago, to make it clear to people how I define, what I am and how I would hope they could accept me. I did put it publicly into my blog so I could point people to it. And I still do so regularly. It still comes from the bottom of my heart. And I am very happy that I got the chance to present it in a Poetry Slam last year, it was even recorded and uploaded to YouTube. There is just one thing that I was also told over the time every now and then by some people that I would have liked to understand what's going on: Why is it in English, my English isn't that good. My usual response was along the lines of that the events that triggered me writing it were in an international context and I wanted to make sure that they understood what I wrote. At that time I didn't realize that I am cutting out a different group of people from being able to understand what's going on inside me. So this year there was a similar event: the Flawless Poetry Slam which touched the topics of Feminist? Queer? Gender? Rolemodels? - Let's talk about it. I took that as motivation to finally write another text on the topic, and this time in German. Unfortunately though I wasn't able to present it that evening, I wasn't drawn for the lineup. But, I was told that there was another slam going on just last wednesday, so I went there ... and made it onto the stage! And this is the text that I presented there. I am uncertain how well online translators work for you, but I hope you get the core points if you don't understand German:
      Ich bin was ich bin
      F nf Worte mit wahrem Sinn:
      Ich bin was ich bin Du denkst: "Mann im Rock?
      Das ist ja wohl l cherlich,
      der ist sicher schwul." "Fingernagellack?
      Na da schau ich nicht mehr hin,
      wer will das schon seh'n." Jedoch liegst du falsch,
      Mit all deinen Punkten, denn:
      Ich bin was ich bin. Ich bin Transgender
      Und erlebe mich selber,
      ich bin eine Frau. "Haha, eine Frau?
      Wem willst du das weismachen?
      Heb mal den Rock hoch!" Und wie ist's bei dir?
      Was ist zwischen den Beinen?
      Geht mich das nichts an? Warum fragst du mich?
      Da ist's dann in Ordnung?
      Oder vielleicht nicht? Ich bin was ich bin
      F nf Worte mit ernstem Sinn:
      Ich bin was ich bin Ich steh weiblich hier
      Und das hier ist mein K rper
      Mein Geschlecht ist's auch Oberfl chlichkeit
      Das ist mein gr tes Problem
      Schl gt mir entgegen Wenn ich mich ffne
      Verst ndnis fast berall
      Es wird akzeptiert Doch gelegentlich
      und das schmerzt mich am meisten
      sagt doch mal wer "er" Von Fremden? Egal
      Doch hab ich mich ge ffnet
      Ist es eine Qual "Ich seh dich als Mann"
      Da ist, was es transportiert
      Akzeptanz? Dahin Meine Pronomen
      Wenn ihr ber mich redet
      sind sie, ihr, ihres Ich leb was ich leb
      F nf Worte mit tiefem Sinn:
      Ich bin was ich bin "Doch, wie der erst spricht!
      Ich meinte, wie sie denn spricht!
      Das ist nicht normal." Ich schreib hier Haikus:
      Japanische Gedichtsform
      Mit fixem Versmars Sind f nf, sieben, f nf
      Silben in jeder Zeile
      Haikus sind simpel Probier es mal aus
      Transportier eine Message
      Es macht auch viel Spa Wortwahl ist wichtig
      Ein guter Thesaurus hilft
      Sei kurz und pr gnant Ich sag was ich sag
      F nf Worte mit klugem Sinn:
      Ich bin was ich bin Doch ich schweife ab
      Verst ndnis fast berall?
      Wird es akzeptiert? Erstaunlicherweise
      Doch ich bin auch was and'res
      Und hier geht's bergab Eine Sache gibt's
      Die erw h'n ich besser nicht
      f r die steck ich ein "Deshalb bin ich hier"
      So der Titel eines Lieds
      verfasst von Thomas D "Wenn ich erkl re
      warum ich mich wie ern hr"
      So weit komm ich nicht Man erw hnt Vegan
      Die Intoleranz ist da
      Man ist unten durch "Mangelerscheinung!"
      "Das Essen meines Essens!"
      Akzeptanz ade Hab 'ne Theorie:
      Vegan sein: 'ne Entscheidung
      Transgender sein nicht Mensch f hlt sich dann schlecht
      dass bei sich selbst die Kraft fehlt
      und greift damit an "Ich k nnte das nicht"
      Ich verurteile dich nicht
      Iss doch was du willst Ich zwing es nicht auf
      Aber R cksicht w r schon fein
      Statt nur Hohn und Schm h Ich ess was ich ess
      F nf Worte zum nachdenken:
      Ich bin was ich bin
      Hope you get the idea. The audience definitely liked it, the jury wasn't so much on board but that's fine, it's five random people and it's mostly for fun anyway. Later that night though some things happened that didn't make me feel so comfortable anymore. I went to the loo, waiting in line with the other ladies, a bit later the waitress came along telling me "the men's room is over there". I told her that I'm aware of that and thanked her, which got her confused and said something along the lines of "so you are both, or what?" but went away after that. Her tone and response wasn't really giving me much comfort, though none of the other ladies in the line did look strangely.
      But the most disturbing event after that was to find out about North Carolina signed the bathroom bill making it illegal for trans people to use the bathroom for their gender and insisting on using the one for the gender they were assigned at birth. So men like James Sheffield are now forced to go to the lady's restroom, or face getting arrested. Brave new world. :/ So, enjoy the text and don't get too wound up by stupid laws and hope for time to fix people's discriminatory minds for fixing issues that already are regulated: Assaults are assaults and are already banned. Arguing with people might get assaulted and thus discriminating trans people is totally missing the point, by miles.

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      3 February 2016

      Thomas Goirand: Moby

      Just a quick reply to Rhonda about Moby. You can t introduce him without telling about Go, which is the title who made him famous, very early in the age of electronic music (November 1990, according to wikipedia). Many attempted to remix this song (and Moby himself), but nothing s as good as the original version.

      2 February 2016

      Rhonda D'Vine: Moby

      Today is one of these moods. And sometimes one needs certain artists/music to foster it. Music is powerful. There are certain bands I know that I have to stay away from when feeling down to not get too deep into it. Knowing that already helps a lot. The following is an artist that is not completely in that area, but he got powerful songs and powerful messages nevertheless; and there was this situation today that one of his songs came to my mind. That's the reason why I present you today Moby. These are the songs: Hope you like the selection; and like always: enjoy!

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      24 January 2016

      Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 39 in Stretch cycle

      What happened in the reproducible builds effort between January 17th and January 23rd:

      Toolchain fixes James McCoy uploaded subversion/1.9.3-2 which removes -Wdate-time from CPPFLAGS passed to swig enabling several packages to build again. The switch made in binutils/2.25-6 to use deterministic archives by default had the unfortunate effect of breaking a seldom used feature of make. Manoj Srivastava asked on debian-devel the best way to communicate the changes to Debian users. Lunar quickly came up with a patch that displays a warning when Make encounters deterministic archives. Manoj made it available in make/4.1-2 together with a NEWS file advertising the change. Following Guillem Jover's comment on the latest patch to make mtimes of packaged files deterministic, Daniel Kahn Gillmor updated and extended the patch adding the --clamp-mtime option to GNU Tar. Mattia Rizzolo updated texlive-bin in the reproducible experimental repository.

      Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

      reproducible.debian.net Transition from reproducible.debian.net to the more general tests.reproducible-builds.org has started. More visual changes are coming. (h01ger) A plan on how to run tests for F-Droid has been worked out. (hc, mvdan, h01ger) A first step has been made by adding a Jenkins job to setup an F-Droid build environment. (h01ger)

      diffoscope development diffoscope 46 has been released on January 19th, followed-up by version 47 made available on January 23rd. Try it online at try.diffoscope.org! The biggest visible change is the improvement to ELF file handling. Comparisons are now done section by section, using the most appropriate tool and options to get meaningful results, thanks to Dhole's work and Mike Hommey's suggestions. Also suggested by Mike, symbols for IP-relative ops are now filtered out to remove clutter. Understanding differences in ELF files belonging to Debian packages should also be much easier as diffoscope will now try to extract debug information from the matching dbgsym package. This means objdump disassembler should output line numbers for packages built with recent debhelper as long as the associated debug package is in the same directory. As diff tends to consume huge amount of memory on large inputs, diffoscope has a limit in place to prevent crashes. diffoscope used to display a difference every time the limit was hit. Because this was confusing in case there were actually no differences, a hash is now internally computed to only report a difference when one exists. Files in archives and other container members are now compared in the original order. This should not matter in most case but overall give more predictable results. Debian .buildinfo files are now supported. Amongst other minor fixes and improvements, diffoscope will now properly compare symlinks in directories. Thanks Tuomas Tynkkynen for reporting the problem.

      Package reviews 70 reviews have been removed, 125 added and 33 updated in the previous week, gcc-5 amongst others. 25 FTBFS issues have been filled by Chris Lamb, Daniel Stender, Martin Michlmayr.

      Misc. The 16th FOSDEM will happen in Brussels, Belgium on January 30-31st. Several talks will be about reproducible builds: h01ger about the general ecosystem, Fabian Keil about the security oriented ElectroBSD, Baptiste Daroussin about FreeBSD packages, Ludovic Court s about Guix.

      Next.