Search Results: "torsten"

15 February 2011

Torsten Werner: Are we slaves?

We still have more than 300 new packages in Debian that needs manual checks and we have a lot of open bugs. I don t get paid for working on dak (the Debian Archive Kit) nor do I feel a deep passion on doing such work. I am contributing to Debian because it is a great project and because contributing is my way to say Thank you to all who made (and still make) it possible. BUT: are we slaves that are supposed to do any stuff for other people? Yesterday someone asked for an enhancement for dak via IRC. I ve kindly asked him: do you want to send a patch? (words are copied from the IRC session). Instead of answering no he sent a patch for 2 plain text files within 4 minutes after I told him the URL to dak s git repository. I could not do it faster by myself and I ve got many other open tasks. I ve applied the patch and activated it on ftp-master.debian.org. But today he ranted about my rudeness and he did not even managed to quote me correctly ( Please send a patch ).

Lucas Nussbaum: Re: please send a patch

It seems that Matthew Palmer misread my blog post as a complaint against developers asking for patches in exchange of pet feature requests. He really should pay more attention, since I gave pet feature requests as an example of case where it would be appropriate to ask for a patch:
Of course, there are cases where it s perfectly reasonable to ask for a patch: when the task is expected to take hours, or when the result is of limited interest to everybody except the demander.
But even then, it s not clear. This morning I got an email from a someone involved in PHP packages maintenance, who said that Bugs Search @ UDD was a great tool, but that he would love to have a way to list all bugs affecting packages with the implemented-in::php debtag.
To produce a working patch for this would probably take him at least an hour. You need to set up a copy of the CGI on alioth, understand the DB structure, dig into the code, etc. If you don t understand SQL and Ruby, it could be a really difficult process. Also, it s probably quite uninteresting for him to do that, since he is unlikely to stick around developing UDD.
Instead, it didn t take me more than 5 minutes to produce a one-liner.
The net result for Debian in that case? 55 minutes saved by a developer. Update:
Torsten Werner wrote an angry reply to my post. It s true that yesterday s episode triggered my blog post, because I felt quite frustrated to have to provide a patch for something that simple, and would have preferred to use the time for a Debian task where I would be more efficient. But I was not particularly angry at that episode, since that s something I ve seen on several occasions. That s also why I did not mention any team in particular.
The feature request I was making was reasonable, and cannot really be considered a pet feature request (though I might be biased with my QA hat on): mentionning in the dak templates used for bug closure that packages removed from Debian can still be found on snapshot.d.o. The fact that he thinks that addressing this himself turns him into a slave raises interesting questions.

10 February 2011

Charles Plessy: Chain reaction

Now that maintain several dozens of packages in Debian, I think twice before uploading a new one. Does it have a future, a public ? Some of the packages I prepare are available on git.debian.org, and are listed in Debian Med's tasks pages. It would not take me long to finish most of them, but that does not take into account the time others will spend on it. They will make our archive bigger and our quality tests longer to execute. Somebody will translate their description. Somebody else will perhaps write a security patch someday, or a patch to make the package compilable with a new version of GCC. All in all, each package has a footprint in Debian's ecosystem. That footprint starts early, as soon as the package is sent to the NEW queue. For instance, I kept by mistake some old content in the copyright file of clustalw, that was recently freed and has to go through the NEW queue to be transferred from the non-free to the main area of our archive. That costed a small of exchange of emails, that could have been avoided. Our packages should be perfect, but that is difficult to achieve alone. For that reason, I proposed two years ago a package review system, that functions like a chain reaction. The principle is simple. After uploading to the NEW queue, download two neighbor packages and check their copyright file. The errors found can be corrected by their maintainer before the the FTP team inspects it, which save their time. For instance, after uploading tabix, I found an error in mediathekview, that was corrected. That compensates for my mistake with clustalw. If each person receiving a package review does a review of two other packages, that will create a chain reaction that will clean the queue from the simplest mistakes, leaving only the really problematic cases. As Torsten noted recently, the NEW queue is getting long. So how about trying to help ?

7 February 2011

Torsten Werner: You are uploading too fast

This is my first blog post on my new tarent blog which I am using as a replacement for blogspot. We had 451 new source packages in the NEW queue tonight. It is nice to know that Debian is the largest free software distribution but it will take some time until we (the ftp team) have processed all those new packages as we need the check every single package. I wanted to work on dak (the Debian archive kit) again after we have released Squeeze but I ll give NEW processing a higher priority. My next plan for dak is generating the contents files in dak directly instead of using apt-ftparchive. Contents generation is the slowest part of apt-ftparchive and having the package contents in dak s database is quite useful.

7 November 2010

Torsten Landschoff: Accessing the Eclipse source code

Sometimes I really want to know how Eclipse implements one feature or another, because Eclipse sometimes feels like magic. Usually it turns out they are also just cooking with water. Most open source code is easily available by checking out a project from some SCM. For eclipse it is not as easy. But there is a nice tutorial how to access eclipse source code by Lars Vogel. This post is just so I can recover the link next time instead of googling for an hour. Thanks, Lars!

28 October 2010

Torsten Werner: More Results from the Debian Community Poll

I have announced the Debian Community Poll and published first results in former blog posts. I'll publish my analysis of the remaining questions about changes to Debian now.
Should Debian remove its non-free component?

Should Debian spend more money?
  • 28.9% choose answer #5: I don't know or don't care.
  • 22.8% choose answer #3: Debian should pay people having important positions in Debian and doing important work.
  • 21.2% choose answer #1: Debian should spend more money on organizing developer conferences and team meetings.
  • 11.4% choose answer #4: Debian should not spend more money.
  • 8.0% choose other (see below) or didn't answer
  • 7.7% choose answer #2: Debian should spend more money on free merchandizing, free DVDs, having a sexy web site, and being present on IT events.
There were quite a number of other answers. One participant missed the information about how the money is currently spend. Several participants didn't want to choose one of the provided answers. They either wanted to choose multiple answers or various combinations of them. Most other answers fall into one of the following categories:
  • various marketing suggestions with different focus than answer #2
  • Debian hosted hardware, infrastructure, services
  • funding upstream development
  • QA and work on release-blocking issues
  • partners and commercial support
  • developing important features
  • security support for oldstable
  • education of prospective developers and contributors
  • documentation for users
  • improving usability and accessibility
  • certifications like LPIC
  • getting supported by hardware and non-free software vendors
  • beer
  • promoting debian in developing countries
  • help contributors running a business on Debian
  • Bounty system
  • updating stable to avoid becoming stale
  • developing multimedia codecs
  • getting compliant with FSF guidelines for a free system distribution
  • developing free replacements to non-free software
  • maintaining a database of debian-friendly hardware
  • lobbying and politics
  • visibility to wider society, even non-IT
  • hardware for driver developers
  • a more sexy DVD/CD set with graphics (like Fedora, Ubuntu)
  • membership to boards of W3C, TEI Consortium, OASIS, etc.

Do you prefer time based releases instead of the "it's ready when it's ready" releases?
  • 73.1% answered no
  • 19.8% answered yes
  • 5.1% anwered: I don't know or don't care
  • 2.0% didn't answer

Which release interval do you prefer?
  • 38.7% choose answer #2: about 12 months
  • 36.9% choose answer #3: 18 - 24 months
  • 10.0% choose answer #5: I don't know or don't care.
  • 5.9% choose answer #1: about 6 months
  • 5.5% choose answer #4: more than 2 years
  • 3.0% didn't answer

19 October 2010

Torsten Landschoff: Fun with my Sony PRS-600 eBook reader

I finally bought myself an eBook reader. To be precise, I got the Sony PRS-600 Reader Touch Edition. Two reasons: First of all, the display is only really great with a powerful light source. The reflection is a bit of a nuisance but I can live with it. What I don t like is the PDF support of the device. Viewing a normal page, the font faces are so tiny that it is not readable in any way. The zoom feature works around that, but you can t switch pages from there. Instead you have to unzoom, go to the next page and zoom again. Crappy! There is also the reflow option, which does not mix with source code figures in my books. I am glad that most of my electronic books are from The Pragmatic Bookshelf, which means that I can download them in Epub as well, all without DRM. Thanks, guys! For the PDFs I would like to carry, I googled a while and stumbled across this blog post. The example to work with source documents worked fine for The Little Book of Semaphores at least. But even with BRISS I did not (yet) manage to crop books I bought from APress. Most likely I will try doing it via a bit of python scripting and the poppler bindings for python. I also bought my first DRM content: Star Trek Vanguard: Harbinger. I really enjoyed the book, but the download was a PITA. After buying, you only get a link to a ASCM file, which is not useful by itself. One needs Adobe Digital Editions to download it. So I installed it into a virtual machine which has XP installed. After that, I was able to read it on the PC, which wasn t the goal of the exercise. To put it on the reader, one needs to authorize it from the same Windows software and upload the file. All that stuff took almost an hour and of course the digital edition of the book is more expensive than getting it from amazon germany. But at least I did not have to wait for delivery. Having finished the book I wanted to buy the second part, but of course it is only available for canadian residents on ebooks.com. I researched a number of ebook sites which mostly sell it only in the US. Funny enough, the first hits when searching where pirated versions of the book in full text. Why do they make it so hard to get stuff legally? *sigh*

19 September 2010

Obey Arthur Liu: Google Summer of Code 2010 Debian Report

Hello fellow developers, The summer is over :( but I m happy to announce that this year s Summer of Code at Debian has been better than ever! :) This is indeed the 4th time we had the privilege of participating in the Google Summer of Code and each year has been a little different. This year, 8 of our 10 students succeeded in our (very strict!) final evaluations, but we have reasons to believe that they will translate into more long-term developers than ever, all thank to you. The highlight this year has been getting almost all of our students at DebConf10. Thanks again this year to generous Travel Grants from the Google Open Source Team, we managed to fly in 7 of our students (up from 3!). You certainly saw them, presenting during DebianDay, hacking on the grass of Columbia, hacking^Wcheering our Debian Project Leader throwing the inaugural pitch of a professional baseball game or hacking^Wsun-tanning on the tr s kitsch Coney Island beach. Before I give the keyboard to our Students, I d like to tell you that it will be the pleasure and honor of Obey Arthur Liu (yours truly, as Administrator) and Bastian Venthur (as Mentor) to represent Debian at the Summer of Code 2010 Mentors Summit on 23-24 October 2010, at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View. Like last year, we expect many other DDs to be present under other hats. We will be having 2 days of unconference on GSoC and free software related topics. We all look forward to reporting from California on Planet and soc-coordination@l.a.d.o! All of our students had a wonderful experience, even if they couldn t come to DebConf, that is best shared in their own voice, so without further ado, our successful projects: Multi-Arch support in APT by David Kalnischkies, mentored by Michael Vogt apt-get install MultiArch does mostly work now as most code is already merged in squeeze, but if not complain about us at deity@l.d.o! Still, a lot left on the todo list not only in APT so let us all add MultiArch again to the Release Goals and work hard on squeezing it into wheezy. :) Debbugs Bug Reporting and Manipulation API by David Wendt Jr., mentored by Bastian Venthur Hello, I m David Wendt, and I went to Debconf10 to learn more about the development side of Debian. Having used it since the 9th grade, I ve been intimately familiar with many of Debian s internals. However, I wanted to see the developers and other Debian users. At DebConf, I was able to see a variety of talks from Debian and Ubuntu developers. I also got to meet with my mentor as well as the maintainer of Debbugs. Content-aware Config Files Upgrading by Krzysztof Tyszecki, mentored by Dominique Dumont Config::Model is now capable of manipulating files using shorter and easier to write models. Thanks to that, packagers may start experiment with creating upgrade models. Further work is needed to support more complicated config files Dominique Dumont is working on DEP-5 parser, I ll shortly start working on a cupsd config file parser.
The best thing about DebConf10 is that every person I talked with knew what I was doing. I had a mission to get some feedback on my project. Everybody liked the idea of making upgrades less cumbersome. On the other side, it was my first visit to United States, so I decided to go on a daytrip on my own (instead of staying inside the building, despite heat warnings). I had a chance to visit many interesting places like Ground Zero, the UN headquarters, Grand Central Terminal, Times square and Rockefeller Center that was a great experience. Hurd port and de-Linux-ization of Debian-Installer by J r mie Koenig, mentored by Samuel Thibault Debconf10 was great! Among other people working on the installer, I met Aur lien Jarno from the Debian/kFreeBSD team and we worked together on a cross-platform busybox package. Besides, the talks were very interesting and I ve filled my TODO-list for the year.
For instance I learned about the Jigsaw project of OpenJDK, and how Debian would be the ideal platform to experiment with it. More generally, some people think Debian could push Java 7 forward and I d like to see this happen. Smart Upload Server for FTP Master by Petr Jasek, mentored by Joerg Jaspert I must say that it was great time for me in NY, I ve met and talked and coded with people from ftp-master team like Torsten Werner who helped me to push the project a bit further and with some other people who were looking forward to release of the tool which I hope they will use quite soon. Everybody interested, everybody excited, really cool place and time. And I can t forget the Coney Island beach and stuff, lot of fun, lot of sun;) Aptitude Qt by Piotr Galiszewski, mentored by Sune Vuorela Currently, development branches support full features searching, viewing extended package s informations, performing cache and packages operations. Code and GUI still require a lot of work which will be continued. Informations about further progress could be found on aptitude mailing list and repository rss channel. Debian-Installer on Neo FreeRunner and Handheld Devices by Thibaut Girka, mentored by Gaudenz Steinlin For me, DebConf 10 started at the airport, where Sylvestre Ledru (whom I didn t know of before) was wearing a GSoC 2007 t-shirt, that is, given the circumstances, almost equivalent to say I m a hacker, I m going to DebConf 10 .
I ve spent my time at the conference attending various talks, hacking, meeting DDs and other hackers (amongst others, my co-mentor Per Andersson, Paul Wise, Julien Cristau, Christian Perrier, Cyril Brulebois, Martin Michlmayr, Colin Watson and Otavio Salvadores who I have to thank for his patience while dealing with my questions), chatting, cross-signing keys, rushing to finish eating before 7pm, getting sunburnt, sightseeing (thanks, Arthur, for the lightning-fast tour of Manhattan!), and so on. Debian Developers and community, we count on you. See you next year! (cross-posted to debian-devel-announce@l.d.o and soc-coordination@l.a.d.o)

17 September 2010

Joerg Jaspert: FTPMaster meeting, I

I announced it some while ago on debian-project, we have a FTPMaster meeting this weekend. It started out with a little workout session View image before we started discussing some things from our agenda. In the middle of the discussion we took a little sidestep, looking for a victim to promote to ftpmaster. So we selected someone not attending, he can t run away screaming. And for that: Send your condolences over to Torsten Werner. Or maybe congratulations, your call :) Right now Mark is fixing up our byhand processing and Alex is doing some other Debian work, while I m merging patches from Luca. Thats it for now, sometime soon we are going to eat, after which we put some more discussions on our agenda. Still two more days to go :)

10 August 2010

Torsten Landschoff: Merged wxWidgets 2.8.11.0 for Debian

Just in case I forget the link again: 7 weeks ago (says git) I merged upstream 2.8.11.0 into the Debian packaging git. The changes are available at a personal alioth repo if anybody cares. Edit: I just wanted to file a bug, only to notice that I did this weeks ago. Need more memory!

2 August 2010

Matt Zimmerman: DebConf 10: Day 2

Today was the first day of DebConf proper, where all of the sessions were aimed at project participants. Bits from the DPL (Stefano Zacchiroli) Stefano delivered an excellent address to the Debian project. As Project Leader, he offered a perspective on how far Debian has come, raised some of the key questions facing Debian today, and challenged the project to move forward and improve in several important ways. He asked the audience: Is Debian better than other distributions? Is Debian still relevant? Why/how? Having asked this question on identi.ca and Twitter recently, he presented a summary. There was a fairly standard list of technical concerns, but also: He pointed out some areas which we would like to see improve, including: All in all, I thought this was an accurate, timely and inspirational message for the project, and the talk is worth watching for any current or prospective contributor to Debian. Debian Policy BoF (Russ Albery) Russ facilitated a discussion about the Debian policy document itself and the process for managing it. He has recently put in a lot of time working on the backlog (down from 160+ to 120), but this is not sustainable for him, and help is needed. There was a wide-ranging discussion of possible improvements including: There was also some discussion in passing of the long-standing confusion (presumably among people new to the project) with regard to how policy is established. In Debian, best practices are first implemented in packages, then documented in policy (not the reverse). Sometimes, improvements are suggested at the policy level, when they need to start elsewhere. I m not very familiar with how the policy manual is maintained at present, but listening to the discussion, it sounded like it might help to extend the process to include the implementation stage. This would allow standards improvements to be tracked all the way through from concept, to implementation, to documentation. The Java Packaging Nightmare (Torsten Werner) Torsten described the current state of Java packaging in Debian and the general problems involved, including licensing issues, build system challenges (e.g. maven) and dependency management. His slides were information-dense, so I didn t take a lot of notes. His presentation inspired a lively discussion about why upstream developers of Java applications and libraries often do not engage with Debian. Suggested reasons included: Collaboration between Ubuntu and Debian (Jorge Castro) Jorge talked about the connections between Debian and Ubuntu, how people in the projects perceive each other, and how to foster good relationships between developers. He talked about past efforts to quantify collaboration between the projects, but the focus is now on building personal relationships. There were many good questions and comments afterward, and I m looking forward to the Debian derivatives BoF session tomorrow to get into more detail. Tonight is the traditional wine and cheese party. When this tradition started, I was one of just a handful of people in a room with some cheese and paper plates, but it s now a large social gathering with contributions of cheese and wine from around the world. I m looking forward to it.

31 July 2010

Torsten Werner: The Debian freeze has already begun


Don't get me wrong. We didn't freeze the development yet but we are freezing our developers! The air condition at the Columbia University in New York City is quite cold. Bring some warm clothes if you going to attend the DebConf that will start soon.

26 July 2010

Torsten Werner: Hey, Apple!



Hey, (Big) Apple! I'll arrive in New York tomorrow to attend the Debcamp and the Debconf. I will a talk about the Java packaging nightmare during the Java track next monday. Some other things i will work on:

- getting sensible-java done
- parallelize dak (the Debian archive kit) because we have 16 cpu cores on ftp-master.debian.org now
- autobuild all packages maintained by the Java packaging team to find FTBFS bug early
- fixing RC bugs maybe?

18 July 2010

Torsten Werner: Monday: Debian bug squashing party in Berlin


This is just a reminder that we will have a small bug squashing party in Berlin. It will take place on monday 19th july starting at 16:00 with open end in the rooms of B ro 2.0 in Neuk lln. You have to organize your accomodation by yourself if you do not live in Berlin. More information is available in the Debian Wiki. Please register there if you are planning to attend.

8 July 2010

Torsten Landschoff: How to run a single unit test/unit test module with py.test

Note to self: It is actually possible to select a single test module or a single test function in py.test. But passing the file name as argument to a py.test invocation selects only the doctest from that file (wtf!?). Instead, you need to call it like this:
1
2
$ py.test -k test_module # to run the tests from test_module.py
$ py.test -k test_func # to run tests having the function name test_func
This is documented in the section advanced test selection and running modes of the py.test documentation, although I fail to see how this is advanced.

4 July 2010

Torsten Landschoff: Postprocessing conference videos

I was planning to attend DebConf New York this year, but for a number of reasons I decided not to go. Fortunately, Ferdinand Thommes organized a MiniDebConf in Berlin at LinuxTag and I managed to attend. Thanks, Ferdinand! There were a number of interesting Talks. I especially liked the talk of our DPL, and those about piuparts and git-buildpackage. In contrast to the other LinuxTag talks, we had a livestream of our talks and recorded (most) of them. The kudos for setting this up goes to Alexander Wirt, who spent quite a few hours to get it up and running. I have to apologize for being late in bringing my Notebook, which was intended to do the theora encoding of the livestream. This was a misunderstanding on my part, I should have known that this is not going to be setup in the night before show time So to compensate the extra hours he had to put in for me, I offered to do the post processing of the videos. Basic approach for post processing The main goal of post processing the videos was (of course) to compress them to a usable size from the original 143 GB. I also wanted to have a title on each video, and show the sponsors at the end of the video. My basic idea to implement that consisted of the following steps:
  1. Create a title animation template.
  2. Generate title animations from template for all talks.
  3. Use a video editor to create a playlist of the parts title talk epilogue.
  4. Run the video editor in batch mode to generate the combined video.
  5. Encode the resulting video as ogg theora.
As always with technology, it turned out that the original plan needed a few modifications. Title animations
<video controls="controls" height="288" src="http://www.landschoff.net/blog/uploads/2010/07/mdc2010_title_anim1.ogv" width="360 "></video>
Originally I wanted to use Blender for the title animation, but I knew it is quite a complicated bit of software. So I looked for something simpler, and stumbled across an article that pointed me towards Synfig Studio for 2D animation. This is also in Debian, so I gave it a try. I was delighted that Synfig Studio has a command line renderer which is just called synfig and that the file format is XML, which would make it simple to batch-create the title animations. My title template can be found in this git repository. Batch creation of title animations I used a combination of make and a simple python script to replace the author name and the title of the talk into the synfig XML file. The data for all talks is another XML file talks.xml. Basically, I used a simple XPath expression to find the relevant text node and change the data using the ElementTree API of lxml python module. The same could be done using XSLT of course (for a constant replacement, see this file) but I found it easier to combine two XML files in python. Note that I create PNG files with synfig and use ffmpeg to generate a DV file from those. Originally, I had synfig create DV files directly but those turned out quite gray for some reason. I am now unable to reproduce this problem. Combining the title animation with the talk For joining the title animation with the talk, I originally went with OpenShot, which somebody of the video team had running at the conference. My idea was to mix a single video manually and just replace the underlying data files for each talk. I expected that this would be easy using the openshot-render command, which renders the output video from the input clips and the OpenShot project file. However, OpenShot stores the video lengths in the project file and will take those literally, so this did not work for talks of different play times I considered working with Kino or Kdenlive but they did not look more appropriate for this use case. I noticed that OpenShot and Kdenlive both use the Media Lovin Toolkit under the hood, and OpenShot actually serializes the MLT configuration to $HOME/.openshot/sequence.xml when rendering. I first tried to read that XML file from python (using the mlt python bindings from the python-mlt2 package) but did not find an API function to do that. So I just hard coded the video sequence in python. I ran into a few gotchas on the way: Things to improve While the results look quite okay for me now, there is a lot of room for improvement. Availability

Torsten Werner: Monday, 19th July: Debian bug squashing party in Berlin

A bug squashing party with take place on monday, 19th july, in the rooms of B ro 2.0 in Berlin Neuk lln. Please check the Wiki page for more information and please register yourself there if you plan to attend. Please don't forget that you have to organize your accomodation by yourself if you do not live in Berlin.

19 June 2010

Torsten Werner: Results from the Debian Community Poll

I have announced the Debian Community Poll in my former blog post. I have closed the poll today and I will start publishing its results now.
What is the codename of the current stable release?This is the only compulsory question with the intention to block spammers. The correct codename is Lenny but I have accepted almost any answer that is somehow related to Debian. Version numbers, names from Sarge to Experimental, even well known codenames and version numbers from Ubuntu have been counted as correct. 22 partipants answered wrongly and their submissions got removed from the result set. A whopping number of 3258 submissions have been accepted and get analyzed now. Thanks to all participants!
How long have you been using Debian?

On what kind of hardware are you using Debian?
Multiple answers are allowed for this question and that is why the values do not sum up to 100%.
  • 80.5% are using Debian on the desktop
  • 62.4% on the server
  • 56.9% on the notebook
  • 21.7% on the netbook
  • 11.6% on embedded device(s)
  • 3.2% on other device(s)
The following other devices have been mentioned: smartphone, virtual machine, nettop, NAS, HTPC, workstation, pendrive, live cd, cluster, thin client, router, rocket flight computer, ibm mainframe, and automatic bar tender.

Do you contribute to Debian?
  • 50.0% choose answer #5: I don't contribute on a regular base.
  • 31.2% choose answer #4: I'm regularly helping other Debian users.
  • 8.0% choose other (see below) or simply did not answer
  • 4.9% choose answer #3: I'm regularly contributing to Debian packages without uploading them by myself.
  • 4.5% choose answer #1: I'm a Debian developer.
  • 1.4% choose answer #2: I'm a Debian maintainer.
The following other answers have been provided:
  • upstream developer or contributor
  • translator
  • bug reporter
  • advocator
  • former DD or DM
  • prospective DD or DM
  • mirror maintainer
  • package/installer tester
  • documentation writer
  • donator or debconf sponsor
  • debconf organizer or helper

How do you think about the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG)?
  • 46.0% choose answer #2: I like the DFSG but it is not the most important reason for using Debian.
  • 36.6% choose answer #1: The DFSG is very important to me. I could live with many changes in Debian but I would be very upset if Debian would allow non-free software into its main component in the future.
  • 10.1% choose answer #3: I don't know.
  • 4.9% choose answer #4: I don't care.
  • 2.4% did not answer.

Are you using Debian derived distributions, too?
Multiple answers are allowed for this question and that is why the values do not sum up to 100%. There were a lot of different answers but the most frequent are:
  • 47.1%: Ubuntu (Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu)
  • 40.8%: no answer; this was the only way to say that someone does not use a derived distribution
  • 11.0%: other (see below)
  • 7.0%: damn small linux
  • 4.8%: Sidux
  • 4.3%: grml (juxlala)
  • 2.2%: Knoppix
  • 1.6%: ELive
  • 1.4%: Maemo
The other answer includes the following distributions: 64studio, ALT Linux, arch linux, ArtistX, BackTrack, BRLix, Canaima GNU/Linux, catix, cdlinux.pl, CloneZilla, CrunchBang, Custom, ddwrt, debian arm userspace for zipit z2, DebXO (?), DreamLinux, Easy Peasy, eb4, eeebuntu, EMC2 Ubuntu (linuxcnc.org), Emdebian, Estrella Roja, Fedora, Finnix, Gentoo, gNewSense, Hackable:1, Kanotix, Kuliax, LFS and CLFS, LinEx, Linux Mint, live CDs, live-helper, Mepis antix, Musix, My own LiveCD, Mythbuntu, OpenInkpot, openwrt, paipix gnu, Parsix, Peppermint, personal debian derived, proxmox, Puppy, PureOS, qtopia, SHR, simplyMEPIS, Skolelinux, slackware, SymphonyOS, Toutou, Trisquel, tty GNU/Linux, UHU Linux, Univention Corporate Server, vinux, Voyage, Vyatta, whiite, Xandros, Xarnoppix. Not all of them are derived from Debian.

- to be continued -

10 June 2010

Torsten Werner: Debian Community Poll

I have prepared a poll for users of the Debian operating system at http://tinyurl.com/3y33ska. We had the idea for the poll during the preparation of the MiniDebConf that is currently taking place in Berlin. Please spread the link and fill out the form yourself. Visitors of the MiniDebConf have the option to fill out the form on paper.

11 May 2010

Torsten Werner: Ubuntu Developer Summit

That is my second day at the UDS in Brussels. I have attended some sessions about server and cloud yesterday. The Ubuntu people are better organized than the Debian people during Debconf. They are collaboratively preparing the sessions in Launchpad and make notes with the Gobby editor during the session. Gobby allows group editing via Internet. The release date helps to keep the focus on stuff that can be done within the time frame and helps to concentrate on getting results.

It will probably be only 5 months for Maverick because Mark asked for a release on 10.10.10 which is an interesting date after removing the dots and converting it to a decimal number. I am comparing it to Debian: Toy Story 3 will be shown in cinemas soon and the Squeeze character is promoting the film. Will we use such a coincidence for more public attention and will will we release our Squeeze soon? I am afraid that it won't happen.

Our last session yesterday was about Tomcat packaging improvements. Debian and Ubuntu are using and maintaining identical packages of tomcat6 using the alioth infrastructure of the pkg-java team. Some of our plans are:

Next.

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