Christian Perrier: 2011 week 19 Debian work
That was a damn busy week.
It was mostly centered about attending SambaXP, the annual Samba user and
developers conference, in G ttingen, Germany. The only free software
conference I attend with expenses paid by my employer, Onera. This year was the 10th edition and, as last
year, to the "who was there for the nth edition" game, I won by
staying alone as they asked who attended all editions of the
conference. :-)
That was a great week, with time spent with people as interesting as
Andrew Tridgell, Jeremy Allison, John Terpstra, Volker Lendecke, Kai
Blin, to name a few. A good opportunity, again, to get input from our
packaging work for that big piece of software, as well as getting
visibility about the future of Samba. I also had a great, even if
short talk, with the kind Karolin Seeger, the release manager of Samba
for 3 years now. We talked about....children, as she's now a mother
since last year (with a non negligible impact on her professionnal
life, as often in Germany). Great meeting, too, with Brad Kuhn, from
the Software Freedom Conservacy, who had a keynote about GPL licence
enforcment activities.
It becomes more and more sure that Samba3 and Samba4 will reconverge
together after the Samba Team releases Samba 3.6. It brings plans for
our packaging work: I think we'll stick with having samba 3.6 in
wheezy while the brand new shiny Samba4 probably stays separate in
some way. Our users (and /me first) clearly need stability in the file
and print services first.
Of course, I did some packaging work there: samba 3.6.0pre3 was
uploaded to experimental, about 10 days after its official
announcement. I also worked on the samba *binary* package bugs,
triaging them as usual. We now have 51 bugs opened against the samba
binary package: 18 unclassified, 11 moreinfo (several likely to be
closed as unreproducible or user error), 1 wontfix, 8 with a pending
patch and 13 forwarded upstream.
I'm also thinking about a possible way to ask about SMB2 support in
samba: it won't be activated by default in 3.6 (mostly because us, distros,
requested for that and, by "us", I mean Debian, RHEL, SuSe and their
derivatives, so quite a large consensus). Still, it would be good to
put some light on SMB2 support and a debconf question about it could
be a solution (not shown by default and defaulting to no SMB2).
I also worked quite extensively on packages maintained by No l K the,
Ralf Treinen and me, aka "the pkg-running team". I did setup a git
repo for my new "garmin-ant-downloader" package, that allows
downloading track files from Garmin Forerunner 405 GPS watches (guess what
is the brand and model of mine!). My first packaging git repository!
Thanks to Ralf for his advice and help in this.
I triaged bugs in the other two packages we maintain: pytrainer (more
bugs forwarded upstream) and garmin-forerunner-tools (which was later
uploaded by Ralf). I also setup a team mailign list so, now, we're a
real team...:-)
Few activity on the l10n front: a few Smith reviews are in progress
and I completed 1 or 2 French translations, and reviewed some
others. Regular activity, then. The only specific stuff is that I'm
now pushing harder for the French DDTP effort, doing many reviews and
translations there. We try to reach 100% in the "popcon500"
packages. Later, we'll try to head at reaching the hieghts reached by
the Italian and German teams, who are, on this l10n activity, way
ahead from us.
Finally, during the SambaXP conference, and as usual (except last year
because of too heavy work duties), I visited my German friends, living
"close to" G ttingen, accomppanied by Luk Claes and his friend and
colleague Ivo, who were also attending SambaXP. Great barbecue at
Andreas and Kathrin Tille's place, facing the Wernigerode castle at
sunset. And the best sp tzle ever at Meike and Alex Reichle's place in
Hildesheim, with a french touch on the salad's dressing as well as
great Chilean wine brought by Meike's coworker Wolfram. Always a great
time to see these good friends even if that means driving a few hours
(and being flashed....twice!...by german speed cameras on the way to
and back Andreas place!)
To complete the week, I ran a 34km/800m+ trail today in the Rambouillet
forest, completing it in 3h31. I'll probably blog separately about
running updates as it is now quite some time that I didn't.
Guess what? I'll be sleeping well tonight...