About 10 months ago, we enabled an auto-decrufter in dak. Then after 3 months it had become the top 11th remover . Today, there are only 3 humans left that have removed more packages than the auto-decrufter impressively enough, one of them is not even an active FTP-master (anymore). The current score board:

 5371 Luca Falavigna
 5121 Alexander Reichle-Schmehl
 4401 Ansgar Burchardt
 3928 DAK's auto-decrufter
 3257 Scott Kitterman
 2225 Joerg Jaspert
 1983 James Troup
 1793 Torsten Werner
 1025 Jeroen van Wolffelaar
  763 Ryan Murray

For comparison, here is the number removals by year for the past 6 years:

 5103 2011
 2765 2012
 3342 2013
 3394 2014
 3766 2015  (1842 removed by auto-decrufter)
 2845 2016  (2086 removed by auto-decrufter)

Which tells us that in 2015, the FTP masters and the decrufter performed on average over 10 removals a day. And by the looks of it, 2016 will surpass that. Of course, the auto-decrufter has a tendency to increase the number of removed items since it is an advocate of remove early, remove often! . Data is from https://ftp-master.debian.org/removals-full.txt. Scoreboard computed as:

  grep ftpmaster: removals-full.txt   \
   perl -pe 's/.*ftpmaster:\s+//; s/\]$//;'   \
   sort   uniq -c   sort --numeric --reverse   head -n10

Removals by year computed as:

 grep ftpmaster: removals-full.txt   \
   perl -pe 's/.* (\d 4 ) \d 2 :\d 2 :\d 2 .*/$1/'   uniq -c   tail -n6

(yes, both could be done with fewer commands)
Filed under: Debian

In the last week of January, the project IT-Zukunft Schule (Logo EDV-Systeme GmbH and DAS-NETZWERKTEAM) had visitors from Norway: Klaus Ade Johnstad and Linnea Skogtvedt from LinuxAvdelingen [1] came by for exchanging insights, knowledge, technology, stories regarding IT services at school in Norway and Nothern Germany. This was our schedule... Tuesday

• 3pm Arrival of Klaus Ade and Linnea, meet up at LOGO with coffee and cake
• 4pm Planning the workshop, coming up with an agenda for the next two days (Klaus Ade, Andreas, Mike)
• 5pm Preparing OPSI demo sites (Mike, Linnea)
• 8pm Gr nkohl and Rotkohl and ... at Traum GmbH, Kiel (Klaus Ade, Linnea, Andreas, Mike)

Wednesday

• 8.30am more work on the OPSI demo site (Mike, Linnea)
• 10am pfSense (esp. captive portal functionality), backup solutions (Klaus Ade, all)
• 11am ITZkS overlay packages, basic principles of Debian packaging (Mike, special guests: Torsten, Lucian, Benni)
• 12am-2pm lunch break
• 2pm OPSI demonstration, discussion, foundation of the OpsiPackages project [2] (Mike)
• 4pm Puppet (Linnea)
• 7pm dinner time (eating in, Thai fast food :-) )
• 20pm Sepiida hacking (Mike, Linnea), customer care (Andreas, Klaus Ade)
• 22:30pm zZzZzZ time...

Thursday

read more

Going back to Android recently, I saw that all tools binaries from the Android project are now click-wrapped by a quite ugly proprietary license, among others an anti-fork clause (details below). Apparently those T&C are years old, but the click-wrapping is newer. This applies to the SDK, the NDK, Android Studio, and all the essentials you download through the Android SDK Manager. Since I keep my hands clean of smelly EULAs, I'm working on rebuilding the Android tools I need.
We're talking about hours-long, quad-core + 8GB-RAM + 100GB-disk-eating builds here, so I'd like to publish them as part of a project who cares. As a proof-of-concept, the Replicant project ships a 4.2 SDK and I contributed build instructions for ADT and NDK (which I now use daily). (Replicant is currently stuck to a 2013 code base though.) I also have in-progress instructions on my hard-drive to rebuild various newer versions of the SDK/API levels, and for the NDK whose releases are quite hard to reproduce (no git tags, requires fixes committed after the release, updates are partial rebuilds, etc.) - not to mention that Google doesn't publish the source code until after the official release (closed development) And in some cases like Android Support Repository [not Library] I didn't even find the proper source code, only an old prebuilt. Would you be interested in contributing, and would you recommend a structure that would promote Free, rebuilt Android *DK? The legalese Anti-fork clause:

3.4 You agree that you will not take any actions that may cause or result in the fragmentation of Android, including but not limited to distributing, participating in the creation of, or promoting in any way a software development kit derived from the SDK.

So basically the source is Apache 2 + GPL, but the binaries are non-free. By the way this is not a GPL violation because right after:

3.5 Use, reproduction and distribution of components of the SDK licensed under an open source software license are governed solely by the terms of that open source software license and not this License Agreement.

Still, AFAIU by clicking "Accept" to get the binary you still accept the non-free "Terms and Conditions". (Incidentally, if Google wanted SDK forks to spread and increase fragmentation, introducing an obnoxious EULA is probably the first thing I'd have recommended. What was its legal team thinking?) Indemnification clause:

12.1 To the maximum extent permitted by law, you agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless Google, its affiliates and their respective directors, officers, employees and agents from and against any and all claims, actions, suits or proceedings, as well as any and all losses, liabilities, damages, costs and expenses (including reasonable attorneys fees) arising out of or accruing from (a) your use of the SDK, (b) any application you develop on the SDK that infringes any copyright, trademark, trade secret, trade dress, patent or other intellectual property right of any person or defames any person or violates their rights of publicity or privacy, and (c) any non-compliance by you with this License Agreement.

Usage restriction:

3.1 Subject to the terms of this License Agreement, Google grants you a limited, worldwide, royalty-free, non-assignable and non-exclusive license to use the SDK solely to develop applications to run on the Android platform. 3.3 You may not use the SDK for any purpose not expressly permitted by this License Agreement. Except to the extent required by applicable third party licenses, you may not: (a) copy (except for backup purposes), modify, adapt, redistribute, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or create derivative works of the SDK or any part of the SDK; or (b) load any part of the SDK onto a mobile handset or any other hardware device except a personal computer, combine any part of the SDK with other software, or distribute any software or device incorporating a part of the SDK.

If you know the URLs, you can still direct-download some of the binaries which don't embed the license, but all this feels fishy. GNU licensing didn't answer me (yet). Maybe debian-legal has an opinion? In any case, the difficulty to reproduce the *DK builds is worrying enough to warrant an independent rebuild. Did you notice this?

Last oktober I was involved on behalf of NUUG with recording the talks at MakerCon Nordic, a conference for the Maker movement. Since then it has been the plan to publish the recordings on Frikanalen, which finally happened the last few days. A few talks are missing because the speakers asked the organizers to not publish them, but most of the talks are available. The talks are being broadcasted on RiksTV channel 50 and using multicast on Uninett, as well as being available from the Frikanalen web site. The unedited recordings are available on Youtube too. This is the list of talks available at the moment. Visit the Frikanalen video pages to view them.

• Evolutionary algorithms as a design tool - from art to robotics (Kyrre Glette)
• Make and break (Hans Gerhard Meier)
• Making a one year school course for young makers (Olav Helland)
• Innovation Inspiration - IPR Databases as a Source of Inspiration (Hege Langlo)
• Making a toy for makers (Erik Torstensson)
• How to make 3D printer electronics (Elias Bakken)
• Hovering Clouds: Looking at online tool offerings for Product Design and 3D Printing (William Kempton)
• Travelling maker stories ( yvind Nydal Dahl)
• Making the first Maker Faire in Sweden (Nils Olander)
• Breaking the mold: Printing 1000 s of parts (Espen Sivertsen)
• Ultimaker and open source 3D printing (Erik de Bruijn)
• Autodesk s 3D Printing Platform: Sparking innovation (Hilde Sevens)
• How Making is Changing the World and How You Can Too! (Jennifer Turliuk)
• Open-Source Adventuring: OpenROV, OpenExplorer and the Future of Connected Exploration (David Lang)
• Making in Norway (Haakon Karlsen Jr., Graham Hayward and Jens Dyvik)
• The Impact of the Maker Movement (Mike Senese)

Part of the reason this took so long was that the scripts NUUG had to prepare a recording for publication were five years old and no longer worked with the current video processing tools (command line argument changes). In addition, we needed better audio normalization, which sent me on a detour to package bs1770gain for Debian. Now this is in place and it became a lot easier to publish NUUG videos on Frikanalen.

By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using sysvinit as its boot system by default. But how can one keep using sysvinit in Jessie? It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes, courtesy of Erich Schubert and Simon McVittie. If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file /etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit with this content before you upgrade:

Package: systemd-sysv
Pin: release o=Debian
Pin-Priority: -1

This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid systemd as a default boot system. The end result should be that the upgraded system keep using sysvinit. If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot. Either by using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the preseed file used. First, the kernel command line argument:

preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"

Next, the line to use in a preseed file:

d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core

One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing the sysvinit-core package. I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware devices show up during boot. But on the other hand, the new default boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before Jessie is released. Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by a blog post by Torsten Glaser, added --purge to the preseed line.

We all love stats, don t we? So, here we go! Let s start with a graph: It shows the number of packages in the NEW queue since last year. You can see a big drop during April 2011, and a reasonably low rate during the last six months. You could think fellow Debian Developers stopped to upload NEW packages. Sorry, you re wrong! Since Squeeze release, 3.832 .changes files with NEW components were processed by dak, with an average of 14,85 NEW packages per day. On the FTP Team side, we had 3.732 accepts (14,47 per day), 339 rejects (1,31 per day) and 178 comments to maintainers (0,69 per day).

---

Who were the most prolific maintainers who got a NEW processing? Here is our special top ten:

1. Debian Haskell Group (362 packages)
2. Debian Perl Group (343 packages)
3. Debian Java Maintainers (161 packages)
4. Debian Ruby Extras Maintainers (124 packages)
5. Debian Multimedia Maintainers (100 packages)
6. Debian Fonts Task Force (96 packages)
7. Debian Med Packaging Team (79 packages)
8. Debian Install System Team (61 packages)
9. Debian Javascript Maintainers (54 packages)
10. Debian Python Modules Team (50 packages)

That s bad packaging teams cannot bake cookies!
Let s do the same with Changed By, this time:

1. Ben Hutchings (159 packages)
2. Joachim Breitner (138 packages)
3. Clint Adams (134 packages)
4. Jonas Smedegaard (124 packages)
5. TANIGUCHI Takaki (97 packages)
6. Nicholas Bamber (61 packages)
7. Alessio Treglia (60 packages)
8. maximilian attems (54 packages)
9. David Paleino (51 packages)
10. Torsten Werner (45 packages)

Much better now go and heat up your ovens, we know who you are

---

Another nice aspect to look at is the speed of NEW processing. Some maintainers were very happy for a fast NEW processing, someone even complained for having been too quick! So, let s find out which upload was the quickest ever. Try to gamble a bit before reading the answer, to see whether you are near to the real value Alessio Treglia, you probably already know, because your gwc_0.21.16~dfsg-1 upload has been processed in 41 seconds (yes, forty-one seconds!). Here s an excerpt from ftp-master log to certify it:

20110516120252 process-upload dak Processing changes file gwc_0.21.16~dfsg-1_amd64.changes
20110516120258 process-upload dak Moving to new gwc_0.21.16~dfsg-1_amd64.changes
20110516120339 process-new tolimar NEW ACCEPT: gwc_0.21.16~dfsg-1_amd64.changes

Alex was the super-fast FTP Team member behind the quickest accept, do you want to beat him? Join FTP Team

Tom Marble and Guillaume Mazoyer gave a talk about Jigsaw Progress in Debian during DebConf11 in Banja Luka. Guillaume is a Google Summer of Code student mentored by Tom and Sylvestre Ledru. The project is about modularizing OpenJDK which replaces the old fashioned classpath by a modulepath that knows about versioned dependencies. It can reduce the memory footprint and the startup time for applications running in the JVM. It would be interesting to match Debian package versions to Jigsaw module versions. Debian could influence the JDK version 8 in this area. Upstream is already building Debian packages but they do not follow the Debian policy and do not use the Debian packaging tools. Guillaume has uploaded 2 packages (jtharness, jtreg) to Debian. These packages are needed to run the upstream testsuite which ships 3484 individual tests. More than 99% of them are working in Debian. There is a GIT repository of his Jigsaw work at http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-java/jigsaw.git;a=summary. The slides of the talk are available at http://penta.debconf.org/dc11_schedule/events/718.en.html.

Yes I am going to attend DebConf11.

I ve passed the CSM exam of the Scrum Alliance today after having a 2 day training last week! That means that I am really agile now. The training was really good.

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

• Danke
• Thank you
• (RTL or not?) / toda
• Gracias
• / arigat
• / n ndi
• Obrigado
• Grazie
• C m n
• Kadin chey la
• / Efharisto
• Dank je wel
• Tak
• D ngge
• Merci
• Kiitos
• Tika hoki
• / dhanyavaadhamulu
• Thank you and God save the Queen
• Mul umesc
• Tack
• / didi madloba
• Gr cies
• Dakujem
• / Aabhar
• / Dhanyavadagalu
• Paldies
• / kop khun krap
• Terima kasih
• Hvala (hr)
• / Dhanyavad
• / Hvala (sr)
• Hvala (sl)
• / Akun
• / Sukriya
• Takk
• / Nandri
• Maki biyen jianbakik
• D kuji
• / Xiexie
• / Aabhari aahe
• Faleminderit
• / Kam sah ham ni da
• / Blagodaram
• / Xiexie
• Hvala (bs)

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

• Danke
• Thank you
• (RTL or not?) / toda
• Gracias
• / arigat
• / n ndi
• Obrigado
• Grazie
• C m n
• Kadin chey la
• / Efharisto
• Dank je wel
• Tak
• D ngge
• Merci
• Kiitos
• Tika hoki
• / dhanyavaadhamulu
• Thank you and God save the Queen
• Mul umesc
• Tack
• / didi madloba
• Gr cies
• Dakujem
• / Aabhar li> / Dhanyavadagalu
• Paldies
• / kop khun krap
• Terima kasih
• Hvala (hr)
• / Dhanyavad
• / Hvala (sr)
• Hvala (sl)
• / Akun
• / Sukriya
• Takk
• / Nandri
• Maki biyen jianbakik
• D kuji
• / Xiexie
• / Aabhari aahe
• Faleminderit
• / Kam sah ham ni da
• / Blagodaram
• / Xiexie
• Hvala (bs)

After nearly two years of answering questions and mostly didn't find time to do so, I'm a DD now. Thanks to all involved people, specifically to Ben Hutchings - my AM and Torsten Werner who advocate me.

Debian is preferring feature based releases over time based releases and that is why we currently have some discussion about release goals for our next version that has the codename Wheezy. I want to suggest the full removal of all software written by J rg Schilling who is well known for making trouble in projects that want to redistribute his software.

And here we are again. And we still have energy for one more day (and a half). Barely, but still. And it is actually looking good, we do think we will have a working archive when we are leaving here tomorrow at noon. And compared to last year we won t even need a session until 3AM to make this work (and still have half of the tools not working). Yay. Yesterday had Ansgar fixing up various issues until we set him onto Generate Packages/Sources files out of the database . Which got us some funny quotes later on, like are 3.6 seconds to write a Sources file ok or too slow? (compared to the roughly 90 seconds it takes today). Torsten had various bugfixes (as we all, somehow there is never an end of them) and is currently looking at DSUS , which is the result we got out of a GSOC project. Mark tried to continue the multi-archive stuff but got distracted a lot, we regularly asked him to look at other items and then we also made him restart all the thoughts on it by slightly redefining the parameters for the multiple archives. I myself continued with shell scripting around the buildd autosigning and today I take to check up on all our cronjobs (besides unchecked/dinstall which we know do work) to ensure we can turn them back on starting this afternoon.

Should you have thought we are gone, let me assure you - we are not. I just blog a bit later than I did the last days. Anyways, we did have a good day yesterday. Turns out that, when Ansgar said I don t know much Python so might not be able to do much he actually meant Just point me at problems, no matter how complicated, and I come up with the python code to fix them . And so we did point him at various problems and got lots of code. And we intend to continue this until Sunday. Yesterday Mark got his Packages/Sources tool so far that we are about ready to ditch the old things, even though he took time to finalize my generate-release changes too. Not to speak about that database changes I wrote about in my last entry, which he now seems to have finally wrapped his brain around in a way to get those done. Short cite: good god, this will overhaul about all our code and database handling . And thats where he is currently working on too. He did draw a plenty complicated thats how it works onto the flip chart, and now seems to dump his brain into some form of python code. I m curious about the result, lets see. Torsten fixed up the code that generated the Maintainers and Uploaders files. The old code was just plain silly and took about 15 minutes just for the Uploaders file. It is now doing both of them in less than two. Of course there had been lots of bugfixes and code enhances too, not really good to list in a blog like this. My work, besides getting a bit sick in the evening, consisted of writing shell scripts to enable us and wanna-build admins to handle the keys needed for the automated signing of packages build on DSA maintained buildds. I have those ready now, so we are able to start doing the autosign stuff today/tomorrow. Phil - well, did whatever buildd related stuff he has to. Different place, I dont see much of it, but he has a blog himself, look over there.

And here we are, with another day of work ahead. And another huge unchecked/dinstall run about to finish. Yesterday evening Ansgar and later on Phil turned up, so we are now 5 persons sitting here and mostly coding happily away. Mark continued trying to wrap his brain around the changes we need to properly support multiple archives, with different sets of rights attached to them. It is a complex topic giving lots of headache. Besides that he is on a very good way of letting us completly remove apt-ftparchive by importing all the data we need to write Packages/Sources files on our own. And even better, the same work we can use to rewrite our rm and cruft-report commands in a sane way, not parsing Packages files anymore. Torsten did help with various database issues around the Packages/Sources issue and continued working on importing all the source filenames into the database, so we can soon provide a Contents file for sources. My own work, besides writing blog entries and preparing meeting minutes, consists of a rewrite of the script generating our Release files, the old one just wasn t up to it anymore. Especially not as we are on our way of having more and more of our tools use parallel processing, to fully use the power our ftp-master host has. And when I am done with this I will be off to tackle the keyring maintenance part we will need to enable autosigning by buildds to work. Should get interesting, with the shit of an interface one usually finds to gpg Ansgar started out by working on changes to our NEW handling, something I started with the dpkg bug #619131 and he just finished our site of the NEW handling scripts. Which means that, as soon as the dpkg maintainers added the code on their side and support this field in the .dsc files, NEW handling for packages like linux-2.6 will be much smoother. He is now implementing version control constraints into our control-suite tool. Phil is working on wanna-build stuff. And while this is just a short overview of what we did, there is always lots of discussion and bugfixing going on. It is incredibly useful to have a team sitting in one room for some days.

Good morning, and welcome to another day of archive damage, i mean hackery. Well, at least at the time of this writing it is morning and we are starting off into another day of work. As we promised to try to have at least a once-a-day-installation run I am currently processing the queue of uploaded packages, around 4gigabytes from 431 changes files. After that a dinstall will follow to push that all out. Lets see how often we can do this again today, yesterday we managed multiple times. Yesterday my work consisted of getting the ries sync into something nice and acceptable, starting to think of the change to only use the suite codenames in future (long term making lots of code issues easier, but short term a good headache) and doing the groundwork so we can upgrade the security and backports archive to squeeze/pg9 too. Mark finished of the Built-Using flag and then moved on to think about database file tracking changes related to multiple archives/locations. Which sounds simple in so few words but is definitely not simple at all. Torsten started to work on source contents and also on generating the packages/sources files out of our database. Both together is taking a good amount of time, so he continues to work on those today. In the evening we had a meeting with the Debian Hurd porters about the future of their port within the Debian archive. The perceived Hurd situation until then was that every port has to follow certain rules or gets thrown out but Hurd doesn t seem to ever get into a releasable state . Well, we did get a clean view on both sides standpoint and in the end emerged with a solution which works for both sides: The Hurd port stays on FTPMaster until Wheezy is released. Should they have managed to get the port into a state that it is released together with all the others (probably as a technology preview), it is kept in the archive. Should they not manage this, the port will be removed from the main archive and move fully to debian-ports.org. It may then reenter the main archive whenever it is ready to get released with the next release. For today we are all continuing in our parts, Mark is yelling at the insanity of the multi-location thing (something we DO need when we want to merge multiple archives, which we do want), Torsten curses the code for Packages/Sources and while I hope that DSA can find time today to upgrade our security- and backports-archive machines to Squeeze, I try to wrap my head around the code we kindly got provided by Serafeim Zanikolas - the dinstall programming fun task I asked a while ago. Im not sure yet I will succeed. :) And then we will get more arrivals this evening, so more people doing stuff tomorrow.

I am at the next edition of Debian FTPMaster meetings in the LinuxHotel Essen currently. We arrived Sunday evening and will stay until 27th March, giving us again a nice week of time to work on outstanding archive issues. And our todo does list a good number of points. Currently we are 3 persons, all 3 FTPMasters. On Wednesday evening one wanna-build member will join and on Friday evening one FTPTeam member arrives for the weekend. While thats not all of our team it still gives us a good base to work on. And so we already did, starting Sunday evening with unbreaking some fallout from Lenny->Squeeze update of the ftpmaster host as well as discussing some of our agenda points and how to tackle them. Today I started changing our backup strategy. Instead of dumping the whole dak database at dinstall start and end, a 4gb file each time, later compressing and then expiring them, we don t dump them at all anymore. Instead we save the postgres transaction id and let the Debian Sysadmin team do the backup. Which they do anyways, using the PostgreSQL WAL stuff. Which means we can just tell them to please reset the dak db to the place of transaction $BLA . Something that only works as we are switching to Postgres 9.0 and will use replication to sync our DD-accessible machine. Torsten started work by explaining us his ORMObject idea in our database layer, then violently vomitting when I pointed him at some code to fixup. Seems that code isn t all the most beautiful one, so he switched to cleanup in a different place. Lets see if I get him back to that bad code. Mark is playing with our database and trying to get that from 8.4 to 9.0, seems like some stuff we are using isn t all that en vogue anymore in 9.0, so might need adjustments.

And so there went a day of work. Minutes done, come back tomorrow

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Okok, more text: We did lots of stuff. There was breakfast, soon after we had Lunch, and guess, Dinner also. Now, would you please come back tomorrow?

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Anyways, we did some things. One of those was to have PostgreSQL 9.0 and to enable the replication to the machine any DD can access. Which is, from today on, ries.debian.org. And for the first time ever (since that time ftp-master got closed to the public), DDs can now see the live status of the archive, literally a second after a package got accepted a dak ls on ries will show you that fact. Torsten worked on fixing up old remnants of code and database entries around contents and also tackled a problem between our usage of SQLalchemy and the python multiprocessing module. He also started working on the source contents and was weird enough to get us standardized logging into a dak tool. Mark worked with DSA on the Postgres 9.0 upgrade to fix what was to fix in out database and did some tests with our environment in squeeze and coordinated changes in python-apt needed for multiarch and xz. He then started working on some larger database changes around the built-using feature. I myself started off with getting generate-packages-sources to behave when there is an error instead of silently ignoring that. I also did a bit of groundwork to enable us to do NEW processing adding overrides for all affected binary packages, not just those from the architecture currently uploaded. That will allow stuff like linux-2.6 to pass NEW just once, not once per architecture. That involves a new field in our dsc files and the status of that is tracked in Bug #619131.