I grew up with the Internet and its ethics and politics have always been important in my life. But I have also been involved at other levels, against police brutality, for Food, Not Bombs, worker autonomy, software freedom, etc. For a long time, that all seemed coherent. But the more I look at the modern Internet -- and the mega-corporations that control it -- and the less confidence I have in my original political analysis of the liberating potential of technology. I have come to believe that most of our technological development is harmful to the large majority of the population of the planet, and of course the rest of the biosphere. And now I feel this is not a new problem. This is because the Internet is a neo-colonial device, and has been from the start. Let me explain.

What is Neo-Colonialism? The term "neo-colonialism" was coined by Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana. In Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (1965), he wrote:

In place of colonialism, as the main instrument of imperialism, we have today neo-colonialism ... [which] like colonialism, is an attempt to export the social conflicts of the capitalist countries. ... The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment, under neo-colonialism, increases, rather than decreases, the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world.

So basically, if colonialism is Europeans bringing genocide, war, and its religion to the Africa, Asia, and the Americas, neo-colonialism is the Americans (note the "n") bringing capitalism to the world. Before we see how this applies to the Internet, we must therefore make a detour into US history. This matters, because anyone would be hard-pressed to decouple neo-colonialism from the empire under which it evolves, and here we can only name the United States of America.

US Declaration of Independence Let's start with the United States declaration of independence (1776). Many Americans may roll their eyes at this, possibly because that declaration is not actually part of the US constitution and therefore may have questionable legal standing. Still, it was obviously a driving philosophical force in the founding of the nation. As its author, Thomas Jefferson, stated:

it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion

In that aging document, we find the following pearl:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

As a founding document, the Declaration still has an impact in the sense that the above quote has been called an:

"immortal declaration", and "perhaps [the] single phrase" of the American Revolutionary period with the greatest "continuing importance." (Wikipedia)

Let's read that "immortal declaration" again: "all men are created equal". "Men", in that context, is limited to a certain number of people, namely "property-owning or tax-paying white males, or about 6% of the population". Back when this was written, women didn't have the right to vote, and slavery was legal. Jefferson himself owned hundreds of slaves. The declaration was aimed at the King and was a list of grievances. A concern of the colonists was that the King:

has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

This is a clear mark of the frontier myth which paved the way for the US to exterminate and colonize the territory some now call the United States of America. The declaration of independence is obviously a colonial document, having being written by colonists. None of this is particularly surprising, historically, but I figured it serves as a good reminder of where the Internet is coming from, since it was born in the US.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace Two hundred and twenty years later, in 1996, John Perry Barlow wrote a declaration of independence of cyberspace. At this point, (almost) everyone has a right to vote (including women), slavery was abolished (although some argue it still exists in the form of the prison system); the US has made tremendous progress. Surely this text will have aged better than the previous declaration it is obviously derived from. Let's see how it reads today and how it maps to how the Internet is actually built now.

Borders of Independence One of the key ideas that Barlow brings up is that "cyberspace does not lie within your borders". In that sense, cyberspace is the final frontier: having failed to colonize the moon, Americans turn inwards, deeper into technology, but still in the frontier ideology. And indeed, Barlow is one of the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the beloved EFF), founded six years prior. But there are other problems with this idea. As Wikipedia quotes:

The declaration has been criticized for internal inconsistencies.[9] The declaration's assertion that 'cyberspace' is a place removed from the physical world has also been challenged by people who point to the fact that the Internet is always linked to its underlying geography.[10]

And indeed, the Internet is definitely a physical object. First controlled and severely restricted by "telcos" like AT&T, it was somewhat "liberated" from that monopoly in 1982 when an anti-trust lawsuit broke up the monopoly, a key historical event that, one could argue, made the Internet possible. (From there on, "backbone" providers could start competing and emerge, and eventually coalesce into new monopolies: Google has a monopoly on search and advertisement, Facebook on communications for a few generations, Amazon on storage and computing, Microsoft on hardware, etc. Even AT&T is now pretty much as consolidated as it was before.) The point is: all those companies have gigantic data centers and intercontinental cables. And those are definitely prioritizing the western world, the heart of the empire. Take for example Google's latest 3,900 mile undersea cable: it does not connect Argentina to South Africa or New Zealand, it connects the US to UK and Spain. Hardly a revolutionary prospect.

Private Internet But back to the Declaration:

Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

In Barlow's mind, the "public" is bad, and private is good, natural. Or, in other words, a "public construction project" is unnatural. And indeed, the modern "nature" of development is private: most of the Internet is now privately owned and operated. I must admit that, as an anarchist, I loved that sentence when I read it. I was rooting for "us", the underdogs, the revolutionaries. And, in a way, I still do: I am on the board of Koumbit and work for a non-profit that has pivoted towards censorship and surveillance evasion. Yet I cannot help but think that, as a whole, we have failed to establish that independence and put too much trust in private companies. It is obvious in retrospect, but it was not, 30 years ago. Now, the infrastructure of the Internet has zero accountability to traditional political entities supposedly representing the people, or even its users. The situation is actually worse than when the US was founded (e.g. "6% of the population can vote"), because the owners of the tech giants are only a handful of people who can override any decision. There's only one Amazon CEO, he's called Jeff Bezos, and he has total control. (Update: Bezos actually ceded the CEO role to Andy Jassy, AWS and Amazon music founder, while remaining executive chairman. I would argue that, as the founder and the richest man on earth, he still has strong control over Amazon.)

Social Contract Here's another claim of the Declaration:

We are forming our own Social Contract.

I remember the early days, back when "netiquette" was a word, it did feel we had some sort of a contract. Not written in standards of course -- or barely (see RFC1855) -- but as a tacit agreement. How wrong we were. One just needs to look at Facebook to see how problematic that idea is on a global network. Facebook is the quintessential "hacker" ideology put in practice. Mark Zuckerberg explicitly refused to be "arbiter of truth" which implicitly means he will let lies take over its platforms. He also sees Facebook as place where everyone is equal, something that echoes the Declaration:

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

(We note, in passing, the omission of gender in that list, also mirroring the infamous "All men are created equal" claim of the US declaration.) As the Wall Street Journal's (WSJ) Facebook files later shown, both of those "contracts" have serious limitations inside Facebook. There are VIPs who systematically bypass moderation systems including fascists and rapists. Drug cartels and human traffickers thrive on the platform. Even when Zuckerberg himself tried to tame the platform -- to get people vaccinated or to make it healthier -- he failed: "vaxxer" conspiracies multiplied and Facebook got angrier. This is because the "social contract" behind Facebook and those large companies is a lie: their concern is profit and that means advertising, "engagement" with the platform, which causes increased anxiety and depression in teens, for example. Facebook's response to this is that they are working really hard on moderation. But the truth is that even that system is severely skewed. The WSJ showed that Facebook has translators for only 50 languages. It's a surprisingly hard to count human languages but estimates range the number of distinct languages between 2500 and 7000. So while 50 languages seems big at first, it's actually a tiny fraction of the human population using Facebook. Taking the first 50 of the Wikipedia list of languages by native speakers we omit languages like Dutch (52), Greek (74), and Hungarian (78), and that's just a few random nations picks from Europe. As an example, Facebook has trouble moderating even a major language like Arabic. It censored content from legitimate Arab news sources when they mentioned the word al-Aqsa because Facebook associates it with the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades when they were talking about the Al-Aqsa Mosque... This bias against Arabs also shows how Facebook reproduces the American colonizer politics. The WSJ also pointed out that Facebook spends only 13% of its moderation efforts outside of the US, even if that represents 90% of its users. Facebook spends three more times moderating on "brand safety", which shows its priority is not the safety of its users, but of the advertisers.

Military Internet Sergey Brin and Larry Page are the Lewis and Clark of our generation. Just like the latter were sent by Jefferson (the same) to declare sovereignty over the entire US west coast, Google declared sovereignty over all human knowledge, with its mission statement "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". (It should be noted that Page somewhat questioned that mission but only because it was not ambitious enough, Google having "outgrown" it.) The Lewis and Clark expedition, just like Google, had a scientific pretext, because that is what you do to colonize a world, presumably. Yet both men were military and had to receive scientific training before they left. The Corps of Discovery was made up of a few dozen enlisted men and a dozen civilians, including York an African American slave owned by Clark and sold after the expedition, with his final fate lost in history. And just like Lewis and Clark, Google has a strong military component. For example, Google Earth was not originally built at Google but is the acquisition of a company called Keyhole which had ties with the CIA. Those ties were brought inside Google during the acquisition. Google's increasing investment inside the military-industrial complex eventually led Google to workers organizing a revolt although it is currently unclear to me how much Google is involved in the military apparatus. Other companies, obviously, do not have such reserve, with Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty of others happily bidding on military contracts all the time.

Spreading the Internet I am obviously not the first to identify colonial structures in the Internet. In an article titled The Internet as an Extension of Colonialism, Heather McDonald correctly identifies fundamental problems with the "development" of new "markets" of Internet "consumers", primarily arguing that it creates a digital divide which creates a "lack of agency and individual freedom":

Many African people have gained access to these technologies but not the freedom to develop content such as web pages or social media platforms in their own way. Digital natives have much more power and therefore use this to create their own space with their own norms, shaping their online world according to their own outlook.

But the digital divide is certainly not the worst problem we have to deal with on the Internet today. Going back to the Declaration, we originally believed we were creating an entirely new world:

This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

How I dearly wished that was true. Unfortunately, the Internet is not that different from the offline world. Or, to be more accurate, the values we have embedded in the Internet, particularly of free speech absolutism, sexism, corporatism, and exploitation, are now exploding outside of the Internet, into the "real" world. The Internet was built with free software which, fundamentally, was based on quasi-volunteer labour of an elite force of white men with obviously too much time on their hands (and also: no children). The mythical writing of GCC and Emacs by Richard Stallman is a good example of this, but the entirety of the Internet now seems to be running on random bits and pieces built by hit-and-run programmers working on their copious free time. Whenever any of those fails, it can compromise or bring down entire systems. (Heck, I wrote this article on my day off...) This model of what is fundamentally "cheap labour" is spreading out from the Internet. Delivery workers are being exploited to the bone by apps like Uber -- although it should be noted that workers organise and fight back. Amazon workers are similarly exploited beyond belief, forbidden to take breaks until they pee in bottles, with ambulances nearby to carry out the bodies. During peak of the pandemic, workers were being dangerously exposed to the virus in warehouses. All this while Amazon is basically taking over the entire economy. The Declaration culminates with this prophecy:

We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

This prediction, which first felt revolutionary, is now chilling.

Colonial Internet The Internet is, if not neo-colonial, plain colonial. The US colonies had cotton fields and slaves, we have disposable cell phones and Foxconn workers. Canada has its cultural genocide, Facebook has his own genocides in Ethiopia, Myanmar, and mob violence in India. Apple is at least implicitly accepting the Uyghur genocide. And just like the slaves of the colony, those atrocities are what makes the empire run. The Declaration actually ends like this, a quote which I have in my fortune cookies file:

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

That is still inspiring to me. But if we want to make "cyberspace" more humane, we need to decolonize it. Work on cyberpeace instead of cyberwar. Establish clear code of conduct, discuss ethics, and question your own privileges, biases, and culture. For me the first step in decolonizing my own mind is writing this article. Breaking up tech monopolies might be an important step, but it won't be enough: we have to do a culture shift as well, and that's the hard part.

Appendix: an apology to Barlow I kind of feel bad going through Barlow's declaration like this, point by point. It is somewhat unfair, especially since Barlow passed away a few years ago and cannot mount a response (even humbly assuming that he might read this). But then again, he himself recognized he was a bit too "optimistic" in 2009, saying: "we all get older and smarter":

I'm an optimist. In order to be libertarian, you have to be an optimist. You have to have a benign view of human nature, to believe that human beings left to their own devices are basically good. But I'm not so sure about human institutions, and I think the real point of argument here is whether or not large corporations are human institutions or some other entity we need to be thinking about curtailing. Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.

And, in a sense, it was a little naive to expect Barlow to not be a colonist. Barlow is, among many things, a cattle rancher who grew up on a colonial ranch in Wyoming. The ranch was founded in 1907 by his great uncle, 17 years after the state joined the Union, and only a generation or two after the Powder River War (1866-1868) and Black Hills War (1876-1877) during which the US took over lands occupied by Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and other native American nations, in some of the last major First Nations Wars.

Appendix: further reading There is another article that almost has the same title as this one: Facebook and the New Colonialism. (Interestingly, the <title> tag on the article is actually "Facebook the Colonial Empire" which I also find appropriate.) The article is worth reading in full, but I loved this quote so much that I couldn't resist reproducing it here:

Representations of colonialism have long been present in digital landscapes. ( Even Super Mario Brothers, the video game designer Steven Fox told me last year. You run through the landscape, stomp on everything, and raise your flag at the end. ) But web-based colonialism is not an abstraction. The online forces that shape a new kind of imperialism go beyond Facebook.

It goes on:

Consider, for example, digitization projects that focus primarily on English-language literature. If the web is meant to be humanity s new Library of Alexandria, a living repository for all of humanity s knowledge, this is a problem. So is the fact that the vast majority of Wikipedia pages are about a relatively tiny square of the planet. For instance, 14 percent of the world s population lives in Africa, but less than 3 percent of the world s geotagged Wikipedia articles originate there, according to a 2014 Oxford Internet Institute report.

And they introduce another definition of Neo-colonialism, while warning about abusing the word like I am sort of doing here:

I m loath to toss around words like colonialism but it s hard to ignore the family resemblances and recognizable DNA, to wit, said Deepika Bahri, an English professor at Emory University who focuses on postcolonial studies. In an email, Bahri summed up those similarities in list form:

1. ride in like the savior
2. bandy about words like equality, democracy, basic rights
3. mask the long-term profit motive (see 2 above)
4. justify the logic of partial dissemination as better than nothing
5. partner with local elites and vested interests
6. accuse the critics of ingratitude

In the end, she told me, if it isn t a duck, it shouldn t quack like a duck.

Another good read is the classic Code and other laws of cyberspace (1999, free PDF) which is also critical of Barlow's Declaration. In "Code is law", Lawrence Lessig argues that:

computer code (or "West Coast Code", referring to Silicon Valley) regulates conduct in much the same way that legal code (or "East Coast Code", referring to Washington, D.C.) does (Wikipedia)

And now it feels like the west coast has won over the east coast, or maybe it recolonized it. In any case, Internet now christens emperors.

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):

• Worked on nsntrace, a userspace tool to perform network traces on processes using kernel namespaces:
  • Overhauled error handling to ensure the return code of the wrapped process is returned to the surrounding environment. (#10).
  • Permit the -u argument to also accept uids as well as usernames. (#16).
  • Always kill the (hard-looping) udp_send utility, even on test failures. (#13).
  • Updated configure.ac to look for iptables in /sbin & /usr/sbin (#11) and to raise an error if pcap.h is missing (#15).
  • Drop bashisms in #!/bin/sh script (#14) and ignore the generated manpage in the Git repository (#12).
• Independently discovered an regression in the Django web development framework where field__isnull=False filters were not working with some foreign keys, resulting in extending the testsuite and release documentation. (#7104).
• Proposed a change to django-enumfield (a custom field for type-safe constants) to ensure passing a string type to Enum.get returned None on error to match the documentation. (#36).
• Fixed an issue in the Mopidy music player's podcast extension where the testsuite was failing tests in extreme timezones. (#40).
• Proposed changes to make various upstream's reproducible:
  • botan, a crypto/TLS library for C++11. (#587).
  • cookiecutter, a project template generator, removing nondeterministic keyword arguments from appearing in the documentation. (#800).
  • pyicu, a Python wraper for the IBM Unicode library. (#27).
• Integrated a number of issues raised by @piotr1212 to python-fadvise, my Python interface to posix_fadvise(2), where the API was not being applied to open file descriptors (#1) and moving the .so to a module directory (#2).
• Various improvements to try.diffoscope.org, a hosted version of the diffoscope in-depth and content-aware diff utility, including introducing an HTTP API (#21), updating the SSL certificate and correcting a logic issue where errors in diffoscope itself were not being detected correctly (b0ff49). Continued thanks to Bytemark for sponsoring the hardware.
• Fixed a bug in django-slack, my library to easily post messages to the Slack group-messaging utility, correcting an EncodeError exception under Python 3 (#53) and updated the minimum required version of Django to 1.7 (#54).
• Various updates to tickle-me-email, my Getting Things Done-inspired email toolbox, to also match / in IMAP's LIST separators (#6) and to encode the folder list as UTF-7 (#7). Thanks to @resiak.
• Clarified the documentation for travis.debian.net my hosted script to easily test and build Debian packages on the Travis CI continuous integration platform regarding how to integrate with Github (#20).

---

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday August 21 and Saturday August 27 2016: GSoC and Outreachy updates

• Satyam Zode's final report for GSOC 2016

Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed

• #834976 filed against auto-apt-proxy by Chris Lamb.
• #835637 filed against myghty by Chris Lamb.
• #835061 filed against varnish by Chris Lamb.
• #835633 filed against pleiades by Chris Lamb.
• #835625 filed against nikwi by Chris Lamb.
• #835263 filed against binutils-m68hc1x by Chris Lamb.
• #835448 filed against eekboek by Chris Lamb.
• #835143 filed against ttf-tiresias by Chris Lamb.
• #835637 filed against myghty by Chris Lamb.
• #835495 filed against broccoli by Chris Lamb.
• #835129 filed against dateutils by Chris Lamb.
• #835051 filed against sheepdog by Chris Lamb.
• #835145 filed against udpcast by Chris Lamb.
• #834983 filed against eyed3 by Chris Lamb.
• #835617 filed against congress by Chris Lamb.
• #835376 filed against lilyterm by Chris Lamb.
• #835130 filed against ircd-ircu by Chris Lamb.
• #835262 filed against radare2 by Chris Lamb.
• #835193 filed against phpdox by Chris Lamb.
• #835265 filed against argyll by Chris Lamb.
• #835259 filed against quvi by Chris Lamb.
• #835371 filed against dispcalgui by Chris Lamb.
• #835147 filed against javatools by Chris Lamb.
• #834988 filed against twitter-bootstrap3 by Chris Lamb.
• #835463 filed against fdroidserver by Chris Lamb.
• #835646 filed against dh-lua by Chris Lamb.
• #835447 filed against libmodule-build-withxspp-perl by Chris Lamb.
• #835418 filed against libfm by Chris Lamb.
• #835143 filed against ttf-tiresias by Chris Lamb.
• #834993 filed against oss4 by Reiner Herrmann.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 10 package reviews have been added and 6 have been updated this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A large number of issue types have been updated:

• Add captures_build_path issue and some packages affected by it
• Add golang_compiler_captures_build_path_in_binary and move obfs4proxy to it
• Move 7 golang packages from captures_build_path to golang_compiler_captures_build_path_in_binary
• Add new:
  • random_order_in_lua_version_substvar
  • href_links_mangled_by_node_marked
  • perl_extutils_xspp_captures_build_path
  • timestamp_added_by_java_util_properties
• Fixes for issues created:
  • perl_extutils_xspp_captures_build_path
  • random_order_in_lua_version_substvar
  • random_order_in_javahelper_substvars
• Patch for zope_random_field_order_in_dzproduct uploaded.
• Rename:
  • use_epydoc randomness_in_documentation_generated_by_epydoc so it at least matches the others
  • random_order_in_javahelper_depends issue to random_order_in_javahelper_substvars
• Fix the link for the golang issue, previous link is for random_build_path_by_golang_compiler a different issue
• Add a tip regarding how to call ./configure for rust
• Add offending source line for gcc-defaults.

Weekly QA work 29 FTBFS bugs have been reported by:

• Chris Lamb (27)
• Daniel Stender (1)
• Santiago Vila (1)

diffoscope development

• Chris Lamb:
  • Add tests for skip_unless_tool_exists helper.
  • comparators/elf.py: Specify string format arguments as logging function parameters, not using interpolation.
  • presenters/html:
    • Use html.escape over xml.sax.saxutils.escape.
    • Don't use unsafe cgi.escape method as its quote kwarg -- which enables escaping of quotation marks -- is False by default.
  • Tidy imports in Debian comparator and tests.
  • Skip Haskell tests if GHC version does not match. (Closes: #835055)
  • Use pytest.xfail over assert False.
  • Use the debian_fallback.X as the fallback for debian.DotBuildinfoFile (not debian.X).
  • Rename skip_unless_tool_exists -> skip_unless_tools_exist and fix logic.
  • Avoid ugly DRY violations in diffoscope.comparators.__init__ by dynamically importing classes via a single list.
• Satyam Zode:
  • Improve diffoscope behaviour for .changes
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Be even more verbose about failing tests
  • d/control: alternate build-dependency on default-jdk-headless default-jdk, to ease backporting to older debian releases
  • add default-jdk to the alternate packages for javap for Debian; default-jdk-headless is not available in older Debian releases
  • in the tests only, normalize xxd's output so that we can compare jessie's xxd with stretch's
  • tests:
    • skip test_squashfs.py.test_superblock if squashfs is too old
    • rewrite tool_older_than() into skip_unless_tool_is_older_than()
    • factor out a tools_missing() function
• J r my Bobbio:
  • Properly skip test requiring python-debian when unavailable
• Ximin Luo:
  • Add a --no-max flag to disable all limits and have max_report_size also honour 0 to mean "no limit"
  • Actually only scan whole file when filename ends in ".rom"
  • Show the timestamp when logging so I know which steps take longer

Holger also created another test job for diffoscope on jenkins.debian.net, so that now also all commits to branches other than master are being tested. strip-nondeterminism development strip-nondeterminism 0.023-1 was uploaded by Chris Lamb:

 * Support Android .apk files with the JAR normalizer.
 * handlers/png.pm: Drop unused Archive::Zip import
 * Remove hyphen from non-determinism and non-deterministic.
 * javaproperties.pm: Match more styles of .properties and loosen filename matching.
 * Improve tests:
   - Make fixture runner generic to all normalizer types.
   - Replace (single) pearregistry test with a fixture.
   - Set a canonical time for fixture tests.
   - Add gzip testcase fixture.
   - Replace t/javadoc.t with fixture
   - Replace t/ar.t with a fixture.
   - t/javaproperties: move pom.properties and version.properties tests to fixtures
   - t/fixtures.t: move to using subtests
   - t/fixtures.t: Explicitly test that we can find a normalizer
   - t/fixtures.t: Don't run normalizer if we didn't find one.

strip-nondeterminism 0.023-2 uploaded by Mattia Rizzolo to allow stderr in autopkgtest. disorderfs development

• Chris Lamb:
  • Add --sort-dirents=yes no option for forcing deterministic.
  • Testsuite:
    • Add tests for sorting and reversing directory entries.
    • shuffle: Test that --shuffle-dirents works as directed.
    • common: Factor out utility to get variations from mount target.
    • common: Factor out "Fail" utility.

tests.reproducible-builds.org Debian:

• Since we introduced build path variations for unstable and experimental last week, our IRC channel has been flooded with notifcations about packages becoming unreproducible - and you might have noticed some of your packages having become unreproducible recently too. To make our IRC more bearable again, notifications for status changes on i386 and armhf have been disabled, so that now we only get notifications for status changes in unstable. (h01ger)
• Link to jenkins documentation in every page (h01ger)
• The "pre build" check, whether a node is up, now also detects if a node has a read-only filesystem, which sometimes happens on some broken armhf nodes. (h01ger)
• To further improve monitoring of those armhf nodes Work to make them send mails (through an ISP which is blocking outgoing mails) has been started and should be finished next week. (h01ger)
• As one of the armhf nodes (opi2a) is acting strange, a workaround has been added to make it's deployment work despite that. (h01ger)
• Collapse whitespace to avoid ugly "trailing underlines" in hyperlinks for diffoscope results and pkg sets (Chris Lamb)
• Give details HTML elements "cursor: pointer" CSS property to highlight they are clickable. (Chris Lamb)
• The db connection timeout has been raised to a minute when using SQLAlchemy too. (h01ger).

Somewhat related to reproducible builds there has been a first Debian jenkins team maintainance meeting on the #debian-qa IRC channel, to discuss current issues with the setup and to start the work of migrating jenkins.debian.net to jenkins.debian.org. The next meeting will take place on September 28th 2016 at 19 UTC. Misc. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

When I was thinking about using Ghost, I did read the installations guide and then I just closed the browser window.
I didn't wanted to install npm, yet another package manager, and just hack init scripts. Not speaking about updating Ghost itself. Some weeks later I did think about using Ghost again. It has a nice Markdown Editor and some nice other features. Since everybody is jumping on the Docker band wagon actually and I had used it for some tests already, I thought trying the Ghost Docker image might be a good idea. If you are interested into how I did that, read on. I suppose you have installed a stock Debian Jessie.

Installing Docker

Pulling the Docker image Just in case you didn't, you need to (re)start docker to work with service docker restart

# docker pull ghost

Making Ghost (container image) run forever I did not like systemd in the first place for many reasons. But in some circumstances it makes sense. In case of handling a Docker container, using a systemd unit file makes life much easier.

# mkdir -p /srv/docker/ghost/
# cat > /etc/systemd/system/ghost.service << EOF
[Unit]
Description=GHost Service  
After=docker.service  
Requires=docker.service
[Service]
ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker kill ghost  
ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker rm ghost  
ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker pull ghost  
ExecStart=/usr/bin/docker run  --name ghost --publish 2368:2368 --env 'NODE_ENV=production' --volume /srv/docker/ghost/:/var/lib/ghost ghost  
ExecStop=/usr/bin/docker stop ghost
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target  
EOF  
# systemctl enable ghost && systemctl daemon-reload && systemctl start ghost 

This will start your container on start and even is looking for a new Docker image and is fetching it, if needed. If you don't like this behavior, just comment out the line in the config and reread it with systemctl daemon-reload. Now you should have listening something on port 2368:

# netstat -tapn   grep 2368
tcp6       0      0 :::2368                 :::*                    LISTEN      7061/docker-proxy  

Update: Jo l Dinel did send me a mail, that starting your Docker container with --restart always will take care that it is brought up again if Docker or (even) the whole system will get restarted. For real I used that before and might be a lightweight solution, but I liked the systemd unit file solution a lot more.

Persistent Data Thanks to the Docker mount option you can find all your data in /srv/docker/ghost/. So your blog will still have content, even if the ghost Docker images is updated:

# ls /srv/docker/ghost/
apps  config.js  data  images  themes  

Accessing the container To kick your ghost into production, it might be useful if you make it available on port 80 at least. This can be done for example by changing your Docker publish configuration or adding a DNAT to your firewall. But I would recommand using a proxy in front of your Docker container. This might be part of one of my next articles.

Unfortunately I could not go on stage at the 31st Chaos Communication Congress to present reproducible builds in Debian alongside Mike Perry from the Tor Project and Seth Schoen from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I've tried to make it up for it, though and we have made amazing progress. Wiki reorganization What was a massive and frightening wiki page now looks really more welcoming: Depending on what one is looking for, it should be much easier to find. There's now a high-level status overview given on the landing page, maintainers can learn how to make their packages reproducible, enthusiasts can more easily find what can help the project, and we have even started writing some history. .buildinfo for all packages New year's eve saw me hacking Perl to write dpkg-genbuildinfo. Similar to dpkg-genchanges, it's run by dpkg-buildpackage to produce .buildinfo control files. This is where the build environment, and hash of source and binary packages are recorded. This script, integrated with dpkg, replace the previous debhelper interim solution written by Niko Tyni. We used to fix mtimes in control.tar and data.tar using a specific addition to debhelper named dh_fixmtimes. To better support the ALWAYS_EXCLUDE environment variable and for pragramtic reasons, we moved the process in dh_builddeb. Both changes were quickly pushed to our continuous integration platform. Before, only packages using dh would create a .buildinfo and thus eventually be considered reproducible. With these modifications, many more packages had their chance and this shows: Yes, with our experimental toolchain we are now at more than eighty percent! That's more than 17200 source packages! srebuild Another big item on the todo-list was crossed over by Johannes Schauer. srebuild is a wrapper around sbuild:

Given a .buildinfo file, it first finds a timestamp of Debian Sid from snapshot.debian.org which contains the requested packages in their exact versions. It then runs sbuild with the right architecture as given by the .buildinfo file and the right base system to upgrade from, as given by the version of the base-files package version in the .buildinfo file. Using two hooks it will install the right package versions and verify that the installed packages are in the right version before the build starts.

Understanding problems Over 1700 packages have now been reviewed to understand why build results could not be reproduced on our experimental platform. The variations between the two builds are currently limited to time and file ordering, but this still has uncovered many problems. There are still toolchain fixes to be made (more than 180 packages for the PHP registry) which can make many packages reproducible at once, but others like C pre-processor macros will require many individual changes. debbindiff, the main tool used to understand differences, has gained support for .udeb, TrueType and OpenType fonts, PNG and PDF files. It's less likely to crash on problems with encoding or external tool. But most importantly for large package, it has been made a lot faster, thanks to Reiner Herrmann and Helmut Grohne. Helmut has also been able to spot cross-compilation issues by using debbindiff! Targeting our efforts It gives warm fuzzy feelings to hit the 80% mark, but it would be a bit irrelevant if this would not concern packages that matter. Thankfully, Holger worked on producing statistics for more specific package sets. Mattia Rizzolo has also done great work to improve the scripts generating the various pages visible on reproducible.debian.net. All essential and build-esential packages, except gcc and bash, are considered reproducible or have patches ready. After some lengthy builds, I also managed to come up with a patch to make linux build reproducibly. Miscellaneous After my initial attempt to modify r-base to remove a timestamp in R packages, Dirk Eddelbuettel discussed the issue with upstream and came up with a better patch. The latter has already been merged upstream! Dirk's solution is to allow timestamps to be set using an external environment variable. This is also how I modified FontForge to make it possible to reproduce fonts. Identifiers generated by xsltproc have also been an issue. After reviewing my initial patch, Andrew Awyer came up with a much nicer solution. Its potential performance implications need to be evaluated before submission, though. Chris West has been working on packages built with Maven amongst other things. PDF generated by GhostScript, another painful source of troubles, is being worked on by Peter De Wachter. Holger got X.509 certificates signed by the CA cartel for jenkins.debian.net and reproducible.debian.net. No more scary security messages now. Let's hope next year we will be able to get certificates through Let's Encrypt! Let's make a difference together As you can imagine with all that happened in the past weeks, the #debian-reproducible IRC channel has been a cool place to hang out. It's very energizing to get together and share contributions, exchange tips and discuss hardest points. Mandatory quote:

* h01ger is very happy to see again and again how this is a nice
         learning circle...! i've learned a whole lot here too... in
         just 3 months... and its going on...!

Reproducible builds are not going to change anything for most of our users. They simply don't care how they get software on their computer. But they care to get the right software without having to worry about it. That's our responsibility, as developers. Enabling users to trust their software is important and a major contribution, we as Debian, can make to the wider free software movement. Once Jessie is released, we should make a collective effort to make reproducible builds an highlight of our next release.

I decided I d post this monthly. It may be a bit boring, sorry, but I think it s a nice thing to have this public. The log starts on the 6th, because on the 4th I was back from Debconf (after a day in San Francisco, plus 20 hours of traveling and 15 hours of time gap). It is to be noted that every time something is uploaded in Debian for Icehouse (in Sid), or for Juno (in Experimental), there s also a corresponding backport produced for Wheezy. Saturday 6th & Sunday 7th:
packaged libjs-twitter-bootstrap-wizard (in new queue)
Uploaded python-pint after reviewing the debian/copyright
Worked on updating python-eventlet in Experimental, and adding Python3 support. It seems Python3 support isn t ready yet, so I will probably remove that feature from the package update.
Tried to apply the Django 1.7 patches for python-django-bootstrap-form. They didn t work, but Raphael came back on Monday morning with new versions
of the patches, which should be good this time.
Helped the DSA (Debian System Administrators) with the Debian OpenStack cloud. It s looking good and working now (note: I helped them during Debconf 14).
Started a page about adding more tasksel tasks: https://wiki.debian.org/tasksel/MoreTasks. It s looking like Joey Hess is adding new tasks by default in Tasksel, with OpenStack compute node and OpenStack proxy node . It will be nice to have them in the default Debian installer! :)
Packaged and uploaded python-dib-utils, now in NEW queue. Monday 8th:
Uploaded fixed python-django-bootstrap-form with patch for Django 1.7.
Packaged and uploaded python-pysaml2.
Finilized and uploaded python-jingo which is needed for python-django-compressor unit tests
Finalized and uploaded python-coffin which is needed for python-django-compressor unit tests
Worked on running the unit tests for python-django-compressor, as I needed to know if it could work with Django 1.7. It was hard to find the correct way to run the unit tests, but finally, they all passed. I will add the unit tests once coffin and jingo will be accepted in Sid.
Applied patches in the Debian BTS for python-django-openstack-auth and Django 1.7. Uploaded the fixed package.
Fixed python-django-pyscss compat with Django 1.7, uploaded the result.
Updated keystone to Juno b3.
Built Wheezy backports of some JS libs needed for Horizon in Juno, which I already uploaded to Sid last summer:
o libjs-twitter-bootstrap-datepicker
o libjs-jquery.quicksearch
o libjs-spin.js
Upstreamed the Django 1.7 patch for python-django-openstack-auth: https://review.openstack.org/119972 Tuesday 9:
Updated and uploaded Swift 2.1.0. Added swift-object-expirer package to it, together with init script. Wednesday 10:
Basically, cleaned the Debian BTS of almost all issues today :P
Added it.po update to nova (Closes: #758305).
Backported libvirt 1.2.7 to Wheezy, to be able to close this bug: https://bugs.debian.org/757548 (eg: changed dependency from libvirt-bin to libvirt-daemon-system)
Uploaded the fixed nova package using libvirt-daemon-system
Upgraded python-trollius to 1.0.1
Fixed tuskar-ui to work with Django 1.7. Disabled pep8 tests during build. Added build-conflicts: python-unittest2.
Fixed python-django-compressor for Django 1.7, and now running unit tests with it, after python-coffin and python-jingo got approved in Sid by FTP masters.
Fixed python-xstatic wrong upstream URLs.
Added it.po debconf translation to Designate.
Added de.po debconf translation to Tuskar.
Fixed copyright holders in python-xstatic-rickshaw
Added python-passlib as dependency for python-cinder. Remaining 3 issues in the BTS: ceilometer FTBFS, Horizon unit test with Django 1.7, Designate fail to install. All of the 3 are harder to fix, and I may try to do so later this week. Thursday 11:
Fixed python-xstatic-angular and python-xstatic-angular-mock to deal with the new libjs-angularjs version (closes 2 Debian RC bugs: uninstallable).
Fixed ceilometer FTBFS (Closes rc bug) Friday 12:
Fixed wrong copyright file for libjs-twitter-bootstrap-wizard after the FTP masters told me, and reuploaded to Sid.
Reuploaded wrong upload of ceilometer (wrong hash for orig.tar.xz)
Packaged and uploaded python-xstatic-bootstrap-scss
Packaged and uploaded python-xstatic-font-awesome
Packaged and uploaded ntpstat Monday 15:
packaged and uploaded python-xstatic-jquery.bootstrap.wizard
Fixed python-xstatic-angular-cookies to use new libjs-angularjs version (fixed version dependencies)
Fixed Ceilometer FTBFS (Closes: #759967)
Backported all python-xtatic packages to Wheezy, including all dependencies. This includes backporting of a bunch of packages from nodejs which were needed as build-dependencies (around 70 packages ). Filed about 5 or 6 release critical bugs as some nodejs packages were not buildable as-is.
Fixed some too restrictive python-xstatic-angular* dependencies on the libjs-angularjs (the libjs-angularjs increased version). Tuesday 16:
Uploaded updates to Experimental:
o python-eventlet 0.15.2 (this one took a long time as it needed maintenance)
o oslo-config
o python-oslo.i18n
Uploaded to Sid:
o python-diskimage-builder 0.1.30-1
o python-django-pyscss 1.0.2-1
Fixed horizon libapache-mode-wsgi to be a dependency of openstack-dashboard-apache and not just openstack-dashboard (in both Icehouse & Juno).
Removed the last failing Django 1.7 unit test from Horizon. It doesn t seem relevant anyway.
Backported python-netaddr 0.7.12 to Wheezy (needed by oslo-config).
Started working on oslo.rootwrap, though it failed to build in Wheezy with a unit test failure. Wednesday 17:
To experimental:
o Uploaded oslo.rootwrap 1.3.0.0~a1. It needed a build-depends on iproute2 because of a new test.
o Uploaded python-oslo.utils 0.3.0
o Uploaded python-oslo.vmware 0.6.0, fixed sphinx-build conf.py and filed a bug about it: https://bugs.launchpad.net/oslo.vmware/+bug/1370370 plus emailed the commiter of the issue (which appeared 2 weeks ago).
o Uploaded python-pycadf 0.6.0
o Uploaded python-pyghmi 0.6.17
o Uploaded python-oslotest 1.1.0.0~a2, including patch for Wheezy, which I also submited upstream: https://review.openstack.org/122171/
o Uploaded glanceclient 0.14.0, added a patch to not use the embedded version of urllib3 in requests: https://review.openstack.org/122184
To Sid:
o Uploaded python-zake_0.1.6-1 Thesday 18:
Backported zeromq3-4.0.4+dfs, pyzmq-14.3.1, pyasn1-0.1.7, python-pyasn1-modules-0.0.5
Uploaded keystoneclient 0.10.1, fixed the saml2 unit tests which were broken using testtools >= 0.9.39. Filed bug, and warned code author: https://bugs.launchpad.net/python-keystoneclient/+bug/1371085
Uploade swiftclient 2.3.0 to experimental.
Uploaded ironicclient 0.2.1 to experimental.
Uploaded saharaclient, filed bug with saharaclient expecting an up and running keystone server: https://bugs.launchpad.net/python-saharaclient/+bug/1371177 Friday 19:
Uploaded keystone Juno b3, filed but about unit tests downloading with git, while no network access should be performed during package build (forbidden by
Debian policy)
Uploaded python-oslo.db 1.0.0 which I forgot in the dependency list, and which was needed for Neutron.
Uploaded nova 2014.2~b3-1 (added a new nova-serialproxy service daemon to the nova-consoleproxy) Saturday 20:
Uploaded Neutron Juno b3.
Uploaded python-retrying 1.2.3 (was missing from depends upload)
Uploaded Glance Juno b3.
Uploaded Cinder Juno b3.
Fixed python-xstatic-angular-mock which had a .pth packaged, as well as the data folder (uploaded debian release -3).
Fixed missing depends and build-conflicts in python-xstatic-jquery. Sunday 21:
Dropped python-pil & python-django-discover-runner from runtime Depends: of python-django-pyscss, as it s only needed for tests. It also created a conflicts, because python-django-discover-runner depends on python-unittest2 and horizon build-conflicts with it.
Forward-ported the Django 1.7 patches for Horizon. Opened new patch: https://review.openstack.org/122992 (since the old fix has gone away after a refactor of the unit test).
Uploaded Horizon Juno b3.
Applied https://review.openstack.org/#/c/122768/ to the keystone package, so that it doesn t do git clone of the keystoneclient during build.
Uploaded oslo.messaging 1.4.0.0 (which really is 1.4.0) to experimental
Uploaded oslo.messaging 1.4.0.0+really+1.3.1-1 to fix the issue in Sid/Jessie after the wrong upload (due to Zul wrong tagging of Keystone in the 2014.1.2 point release). Monday 22:
Uploaded ironic 2014.2~b3-1 to experimental
Uploaded heat 2014.2~b3-1 (with some fixes for sphinx doc build)
Uploaded ceilometer 2014.2~b3-1 to experimental
Uploaded openstack-doc-tools 0.19-1 to experimental
Uploaded openstack-trove 2014.2~b3-1 to experimental Tuesday 23:
Uploaded python-neutronclient with fixed version number for cliff and six. This missing requirement for cliff version produced an error in Trove, which I don t want to happen again.
Added fix for unit tests in Trove: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/123450/1,publish
Uploaded oslo.messaging 1.4.1 in Experimental, fixing the version conflicts with the one in Sid/Jessie. Thanks to Doug Hellman for doing the tagging. I will need to upload new versions of the following packages with the >= 1.4.1 depends:
> ceilometer
> ironic
> keystone
> neutron
> nova
> oslo-config
> oslo.rootwrap
> oslo.i18n
> python-pycadf
See http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-September/046795.html for more explanation about the mess I m repairing
Uploaded designate Juno b3. Wednesday 24:
Uploaded oslosphinx 2.2.0.0
Uploaded update to django-openstack-auth (new last minute requirement for Horizon).
Uploaded final oslo-config package version 1.4.0.0 (really is 1.4.0)
Packaged and uploaded Sahara. This needs some tests by someone else as I don t even know how it works. Thuesday 25:
Uploaded python-keystonemiddleware 1.0.0-3, fixing CVE-2014-7144] TLS cert verification option not honoured in paste configs. https://bugs.debian.org/762748
Packaged and uploaded python-yaql, sent pull request for fixing print statements into Python3 compatible print function calls: https://github.com/ativelkov/yaql/pull/15
Packaged and uploaded python-muranoclient.
Started the packaging of Murano (not finished yet).
Uploaded python-keystoneclient 0.10.1-2 with the CVE-2014-7144 fix to Sid, with urgency=high. Uploaded 0.11.1-1 to Experimental.
Uploaded python-keystonemiddleware fix for CVE-2014-7144.
Uploaded openstack-trove 2014.2~b3-3 with last unit test fix from https://review.openstack.org/#/c/123450/ Friday 26:
Uploaded a fix for murano-agent, which makes it run as root.
Finished the packaging of Murano
Started packaging murano-dashboard, sent this patch to fix the wrong usage of the /usr/bin/coverage command: https://review.openstack.org/124444
Fixed wrong BASE_DIR in python-xstatic-angular and python-xstatic-angular-mock Saturday 27:
uploaded python-xstatic-boostrap-scss which I forgot to upload :(
uploaded python-pyscss 1.2.1 Sunday 28:
After a long investigation, I found out that the issue when installing the openstack-dasboard package was due to a wrong patch I did for Python 3.2 in Wheezy in python-pyscss. Corrected the patch from version 1.2.1-1, and uploaded version 1.2.1-2, the dashboard now installs correctly. \o/
Did a new version of an Horizon patch at https://review.openstack.org/122992/ to address Django 1.7 compat. Monday 29:
Uploaded new version of python-pyscss fixing the last issue with Python 3 (there was a release critical bug on it).
Uploaded fixup for python-django-openstack-auth fail to build in the Sid version, which was broken since the last upload of keystoneclient (which makes some of its API now as private).
Uploaded python-glance-store 0.1.8, including Ubuntu patch to fix unit tests.
Reviewed the packaging of python-strict-rfc3339 (see https://bugs.debian.org761152).
Uploaded Sheepdog with fix in the init script to start after corosync (Closes: #759216).
Uploaded pt_BR.po Brazilian Portuguese debconf templates translation for nova Icehouse in Sid (only commited it in Git for Juno).
Same for Glance. Tuesday 30:
Added Python3 support in python-django-appconf, uploaded to Sid
Upgraded to python-django-pyscss 1.0.3, and fixed broken unit tests with this new release under Django 1.7. Created pull request: https://github.com/fusionbox/django-pyscss/pull/22
Fixed designate requirements.txt in Sid (Icehouse) to allow SQLA 0.9.x. Uploaded resulting package to Sid.
Uploaded new Debian fix for python-tooz: kills memcached only if the package scripts started it (plus cleans .testrepository on clean).
Uploaded initial release of murano
Uploaded python-retrying with patch from Ubuntu to remove embedded copy of six.py code.
Uploaded python-oslo.i18n 1.0.0 to experimental (same as before, just bump of version #)
Uploaded python-oslo.utils 1.0.0 to experimental (same as before, just bump of version #)
Uploaded Keystone Juno RC1
Uploaded Glance Juno RC1

I spent last week looking into the firmware configuration protocol used on current IBM system X servers. IBM provide a tool called ASU for configuring firmware settings, either in-band (ie, running on the machine you want to reconfigure) or out of band (ie, running on a remote computer and communicating with the baseboard management controller - IMM in IBM-speak). I'm not a fan of using vendor binaries for this kind of thing. They tend to be large (ASU is a 20MB executable) and difficult to script, so I'm gradually reimplementing them in Python. Doing that was fairly straightforward for Dell and Cisco, both of whom document their configuration protocol. IBM, on the other hand, don't. My first plan was to just look at the wire protocol, but it turns out that it's using IPMI 2.0 to communicate and that means that the traffic is encrypted. So, obviously, time to spend a while in gdb.

The most important lesson I learned last time I did this was "Check whether the vendor tool has a debug option". ASU didn't mention one in its help text and there was no sign of a getopt string, so this took a little longer - but nm helpfully showed a function called DebugLog and setting a breakpoint on that in gdb showed it being called a bunch of the time, so woo. Stepping through the function revealed that it was checking the value of a variable, and looking for other references to that variable in objdump revealed a -l argument. Setting that to 255 gave me rather a lot of output. Nearby was a reference to --showsptraffic, and passing that as well gave me output like:

BMC Sent: 2e 90 4d 4f 00 06 63 6f 6e 66 69 67 2e 65 66 69
BMC Recv: 00 4d 4f 00 21 9e 00 00

which was extremely promising. 2e is IPMI-speak for an OEM specific command, which seemed pretty plausible. 4d 4f 00 is 20301 in decimal, which is the IANA enterprise number for IBM's system X division (this is required by the IPMI spec, it wasn't an inspired piece of deduction on my behalf). 63 6f 6e 66 69 67 2e 65 66 69 is ASCII for config.xml. That left 90 and 06 to figure out. 90 appeared in all of the traces, so it appears to be the command to indicate that the remaining data is destined for the IMM. The prior debug output indicated that we were in the QuerySize function, so 06 presumably means query the size. And this is supported by the response - 00 (a status code), 4d 4f 00 (the IANA enterprise number again, to indicate that the responding device is speaking the same protocol as you) and 21 9e 00 00 - or, in rational endianness, 40481, an entirely plausible size.

Once I'd got that far the rest started falling into place fairly quickly. 01 rather than 06 indicated a file open request, returning a four byte file handle of some description. 02 was read, 03 was write and 05 was close. Hacking this together with pyghmi meant I could open a file and read it. Success!

Well, kind of. I was getting back a large blob of binary. The debug trace showed calls to an EfiDecompress function, so on a whim I tried just decompressing it using the standard UEFI compression format. Shockingly, it worked and now I had a 345K XML blob and presumably many more problems than I'd previously had. Parsing the XML was fairly straightforward, and now I could retrieve the full set of config options, along with the default, current and possible values for them.

Making changes was pretty much just the reverse of this. A small XML blob containing the new values is compressed and written to asu_update.efi. One of the elements is a random identifier, which will then appear in another file called config_log along with a status. Just keep re-reading this until the value changes to CM_DONE and we're good.

The in-band configuration appears to be identical, but rather than sending commands over the wire they're send through the system's IPMI controller directly. Yes, this does mean that it's sending compressed XML through a single io port. Yes, I'd rather be drinking.

I've documented the protocol here and hope to be able to release this code before too long - right now I'm trying to nail down the interface a little, but it's broadly working.

comments

Not much progress ATM (most translations are complete and D-I has been frozen to prepare its release anyway).

• Arabic completes level 3
• Progress for Uyghur in level 2

Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files):

• 55 languages 100%: ar ast be bg bn bs ca cs cy da de el eo es et eu fa fi fr gl gu he hi id it ja kk km kn ko lo lv mr nb nl pa pl pt pt_BR ro ru si sk sl sr sv ta te th tr ug uk vi zh_CN zh_TW
• 1 language 98%: ga
• 2 languages 97%: hu lt
• 4 languages 95%: dz hr is mk
• 1 language 92%: ml
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.):

• 39 languages 100%: ast be bg ca cs cy da de eo es eu fa fr gl gu he id is it ja kk km lt lv mr nb nl pl pt ru si sk sl sv th tr uk zh_CN zh_TW
• 3 languages 99%: fi hr vi
• 4 languages 98%: dz pt_BR ro ug
• 1 languages 97%: ta
• 2 languages 94%: ar el
• 1 language 92%: sr
• 5 languages 92%: bn bs hu ko ne
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader)

• 42 languages 100%: ar ast be bg bs ca cs cy da de el eo es fa fi fr ga gl he hr id is it ja kk km lt lv nb nl pl pt ru sk sl sr sv th tr vi zh_CN zh_TW
• 4 languages 98%: hu pt_BR ug uk
• others are 90% or below

Full 100% completeness (hall of fame) for 32 languages: Asturian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Welsh, Danish, German, Esperanto, Spanish, Persian, French, Galician, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Khmer, Latvian, Norwegian Bokm l, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese

• Finnish completes level 1 and makes progress in level 2
• Danish, Persian, Hebrew are full 100% (they were indeed forgotten in last list, thanks to Phil Miller for pointing)
• Uyghur now finally listed in stats, as well as Tibetan. Sorry, the language not appearing was because I forgot a commit pending somewhere in my local copy of D-I repository.
• Marathi completes level 2
• console-data dropped from level 2 as it is not used anymore in D-I

Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files):

• 50 languages 100%: ar ast be bg bn bs ca cs da de el eo es et eu fa fi fr gu he hi id it ja kk km kn ko lo mr nb nl pa pl pt pt_BR ru si sk sl sr sv te th tr ug uk vi zh_CN zh_TW
• 1 languages 99%: ta
• 2 languages 97%: ga hu
• 4 languages 95%: dz is mk ro
• 1 language 92%: ml
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.):

• 31 languages 100%: ast be bg ca cs da de eo es fa fr gu he id is it ja kk km mr nl pl pt ru si sk sl sv tr uk zh_CN
• 7 languages 99%: eu fi hr nb th vi zh_TW
• 3 languages 98%: dz pt_BR ro
• 1 language 97%: ta
• 1 language 96%: ug
• 3 languages 94%: ar el gl
• 1 language 92%: sr
• 5 languages 92%: bn bs hu ko ne
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader)

• 38 languages 100%: ast be bg bs ca cs da de el eo es fa fi fr ga gl he hr id is it ja kk km nb nl pl pt ru sk sl sr sv th tr vi zh_CN zh_TW
• 3 languages 98%: hu ug uk
• others are 90% or below

Full 100% completeness (hall of fame) for 26 languages: Asturian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Esperanto, Spanish, Persian, French, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Khmer, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Simplified Chinese

Way before Debian, Launchpad bug tracking system just reached 1 million bugs reported with one "bug" reported against Edubuntu basically mentioning it should invade schools. What to say about this? Hard without being harsh towards my friends working in the Ubuntu "world", indeed. Still, I really think that here, too much noise kills signal and the LP BTS is often hardly usable. I counted up to 217 bugs reported against samba4 (which is, after all, not so widely used yet) just because it apparently has upgrading issues between pre 12.04 versions of Ubuntu and Oneiric. It indeed seems that some automated bug reporting is now active and whenever a user encouters an upgrade issue with a package, a bug is being reported. I guess this is somehow an opt-in system (I hope so..:-)) but the default is very clearly using it. This feature is apparently what caused the recent bump in number of bugs reported in LP, making them even less useful, particularly to Debian package maintainers. I'm sure there are tools to help dealing with that and I was already answered that work is in progress to change this (and use a dedicated website for such reports or something like this). But, still, that seems to be the scary side of popularity...the very same popularity that is slowly but constantly hiding the work we're doing in Debian to indirectly make Ubuntu popular. (moving to more general concerns) I know that things are not all black or all white, but it always saddens me to feel that slowly....but, again, constantly, more and more people tend to forget that Debian is behind Ubuntu, is the ground on which it is built and Ubuntu wouldn't exist without it. When doing work, a human need is to get reward for it...and we are getting less of it...slowly, but constantly. Don't take me wrong. I have many friends working directly for Ubuntu. Some paid by Canonical for this. Some really involved up to "top level" (yes, including the very very top level even if I killed him once). I don't want to throw offense on them. I don't even know if they can do something about what I'm expressing below. I would just have them (and others) know. Let's take an example. I recently activated a few languages in D-I (Burmese, Tibetan, Uyghur). I'm happy with that, this is something I'm doing for 8 years now. But all these new translators were indeed only interested in one thing : "have Ubuntu translated in their language". No offense intended, but they didn't really care about *Debian* being translated in their language. I think that some didn't even know what Debian is. In the same field, I am more and more "fighting" to keep the level of translation completeness in Debian (see my regular spa^W reports). In some way, I still succeed, but the price to pay is more and more and more personal investment and work. That's still working for the strong set of languages we support. That works much less for most others. When someone "disappears" (or just switches to some other priorities), it's more and more difficult to find someone else popping up. And, for the "strong set", something else is happening : work duplication. There are "strong" French, German, Italian, whatever, l10n teams in Debian.....and there are similar teams for Ubuntu. And, mostly, those do not really work together. And sometimes, this is kinda discouraging. So, seeing the explosion happening on what is, whatever we think or write, the "other side", is not somethnig that can make one entirely happy. And this is why I won't celebrate Launchpad's millionth bug report. Particularly when I see that millionth bug report not even ack'ing that this Edubuntu marvel is based on the grounds set by some pionneers many years ago in a few schools in Norway (hello, Petter and others). Yeah, sometimes sad. To balance this, let's release wheezy and have millions of people benefit from it without even knowing.

I'm happy to announce the release of wadc version 1.2. WadC is a functional programming language for the composition of Doom-format maps. Originally created by Wouter "Aardappel" van Oortmerssen, I was granted permission to take over the project over a year ago, but didn't get around to releasing anything until now. This version adds a few functions that permit you to draw two-sided lines which are textured and impassible: important for a lot of detailing techniques. You can also create friendly monsters for Boom-compatible ports. There's a new example demonstrating these features; plus a recreation of Doom 2's "entryway", courtesy of GreyGhost. See WadC for a summary, or go straight to the binaries or source on github. Discussions: reddit, doomworld.

Many of us out there writes small tools to just solve a simple task that you need. Here, I will present a tool I needed last night. I have a small job doing a wordpress site for some people, and I needed a image with the site title in a font matching some specific criteria (like a double story lowercase A and a small serif on lowercase L, while in general being a Sans Serif type). So what I needed was a application that let me write a word or a phrase, and see it written with all available fonts on the system. So, it took a little more than a effective hour and 120 lines of code to come up with this: Click to see image And if anyone cares, I have pushed the sources to git.kde.org. I m sure many of you also have various such small apps. Let s see them. That s also you Eike and your svgtoy app :) Another thing I learned from this app is that the ukij fonts targetted the Uyghyr language actually is very interesting also for western europeans.

Will I succeed maintaining a weekly log of what I'm doing in Debian? We'll see. At least, let's try. D-I work: After spending most of the end of week 16 uploading D-I components, I completed this during this week. I hunted down the remaining arch:all, arch:i386 and arch:amd64 packages that need an upload because of l10n changes. The main point was bringing published D-I work inline with the work of translators. That was mostly meant to publicly have an image with Uyghur activated (which I blogged about separately). Finally, I ended up doing some changes to the fonts-ukij-uyghur package in order to use the right font to display the language in D-I, as well as improving the readability by increasing the font size just as we're already doing for Arabic and Persian. Samba packaging: I got release managers approval to upload a new release to stable-proposed-updates. It fixes several important bugs in samba 3.5.6, often affecting Win7 clients. I'm always happy to see that we can do that even when issues are ot security or "release critical" issues. I also integrated the newly-published samba 3.6.0-pre3 in the package maintenance SVN. However, we're still having problems with symbols disappearing from libwbclient, that prevent me to upload 3.6.0pre3 in experimental. Steve Langasek's help here will be welcome. Pytrainer and "gant" packaging: I setup a mailing list for the pkg-running maintenance team so that we can move the few packages some of us maintain (pytrainer and garmin-forerunner-tools as of now, and soon "garmin-ant-downloader", the helper tool for 405 watches). I also began looking at pytrainer bugs and forwarding some of them upstream. I also began packaging "gant" (had to rename it as we already have a gant package, totally unrelated). I just got a notice from Klaus Ethgen about improvements he did to the software. We'll try to figure out what to do as this software doesn't really have a clear upstream and published versions. l10n work: a few packages introduced debconf templates and I launched reviews of English for them (while mumbling about uncoordinated work, of course..;-)). I also reviewed about one hundred package description translations in French DDTP (something I recently began to commit to do even though it means onlinen work for me, which I'm not used to). No l10n NMUs this week but a few maintainer uploads after I (gently) kicked their ass..:-)

Last week, I announced the activation of Uyghur language in Debian Installer. For once, I even went further: I rebuilt all D-I packages that include localization (at least for i386/amd64 architectures) and uploaded them. As a consequence, D-I daily builds now allow previewing how an install done in Uyghur can be like. For this, please go to the Debian Installer development page, download the netboot ISO image (not netinst) and launch D-I with "suite=unstable" passed as argument when booting the ISO image. You should end up with something like this, this or this. There are a few glitches, still: for instance, as the font we chose has no Bold variant, the screens "titles" do not use an Uyghur font but an Arabic or Persian one. As a consequence, glyphs ar enot properly joined together. I'm investigating this issue with Uyghur translators and we're trying to choose an appropriate font among the gazillion that have been created by UKIJ. Please notice that Uyghur looks like Arabic but, according to those who can read Arabic, is really different from Arabic (or Persian). I hope that this great work by Gheyret Tohti, Abduqadir Abliz and other people working on this will give ideas to other so-called "minorities", here or there in the world, who want to be able to install Debian in their language. There is still a lot of work to do, such as having end-user software localization for Uyghur and, then, a uyghur-desktop task, but this is at least the first language that gets added for wheezy. In case you would be wondering, the current count of activated languages in D-I is 71.

In the announcement of availability of D-I in Uyghur, I made a mistake : Xinjiang is also known (indeed named by the Uyghur people) as "East Turkestan" and not Eastern Turkmenistan. These things can be sensitive, so apologies to Uyghur people for misnaming their region.

I just activated a new language in Debian Installer: Uyghur. Uyghur is the language of Xinjiang or Eastern Turkmenistan. This part of the People's Republic of China is the homeland of the Uyghur people and the language is spoken by nearly 9 million people. The translation effort is driven by the Uyghur Computer Science Association (Uyghur Kompyut r Ilimi Jem'iyiti. The next D-I daily builds will offer Uyghur as a choice of language to install Debian. Given the way D-I packages are built, it will however take some time before the entire installation process can be performed by only displaying Uyghur and no more English. Indeed, the new language will appear for each D-I component when the relevant udeb package is built from GIT, which happens most of the time when a D-I developers wants a new feature or bug fix to be available. During the upcoming days, I'll try to rebuild a few packages, though, so that Uyghur users can still have a preview of what will be available when the first alpha or beta release of D-I is out. Moreover, that will help testing the translation and the possible glitches with rendering, fonts or any other display issue.

There's nothing better than listening Manu Chao's "Radio Bemba Sound System" during a family meal at home. And, later on, while working on a new font package for Uyghur language. And, I say, Piwet.

Now that I sent an update about my running activities, I have to report about what I'm doing these weeks in Debian to try keeping a fair balance for those of you who read this blog through Planet Debian. Most January was spent in preparing the release of squeeze. Of course, I didn't work directly on the release, not being involved in the release team. However, last bits of preparation for Debian Installer as well as rushing out the last remaining bits of localization work took most of my time. After the release of squeeze, time came to resume back some activities. First of all, on the l10n front, I resumed the work on "l10n NMUs", trying to get old l10n bugs fixed. I restarted proposing NMUs or, more precisely, help to perform translation updates rounds to these maintainers. Most of them had "old" l10n bugs because of the freeze. So, I indeed did not end up in doing many NMUs...but got several l10n bugs closed anyway. Work being resumed in unstable also lead to many changes in packages' debconf templates (new packages using debconf, packages introducing new templates, etc.). As these are the trigger for Smith reviews (reviews of English in debconf templates and packages' description, this activity, which was very low during the freeze, resumed again (we'll soon celebrate the 4th anniversary of this project). I also decided to invest more time in D-I again. The D-I team is currently more active than it was last years. Thanks to a few individual, work resumed in some areas and bug triaging has been very active. I recently resyned a nice improvement which had been contributed by a user to iso-scan, then polished by Frans Pop. This will allow to choose among several different ISO images when installing Debian from a USB stick while, previously, only the first found was being used. I also worked with a new translator, to prepare the activation of Uyghur translation in D-I. Some work happend in the pkg-fonts team. I had a few fonts adopted by the team, as part of the general effort to get rid of defoma. I sent patches for a few others, but many remain. If you maintain font packages, please help us in getting rid of defoma. Changes are easy to do; ask the team if you need help (pkg-fonts-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org). Samba packages also ate a significant part of my time. First of all, DSA-2175 lead to prepare fixes for samba in squeeze and lenny. Then, upstream released samba 3.5.8 which I uploaded to unstable. I briefly considered trying to get the Stable Release managers approval to push that version in squeeze, but the number of fixes made by upstream was discouraging. So, I chose to examine them slowly and cherry-pick those I consider important enough to warrant an upload for squeeze. More git wizardry learned doing so (thanks to Julien Cristau for his help). And I now have a pending proposal for three of these fixes (that represent 14 atomic patches from upstream) to be included in squeeze.

Christian is a figure of Debian, not only because of the tremendous coordination work that he does within the translation project, but also because he s very involved at the social level. He s probably in the top 5 of the persons who attended most often the Debian conference. Christian is a friend (thanks for hosting me so many times when I come to Paris for Debian related events) and I m glad that he accepted to be interviewed. He likes to speak and that shows in the length of his answers but you ll be traveling the world while reading him. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Christian. Who are you? I am a French citizen (which is easy to guess unless you correct my usual mistakes in what follows). I m immensely proud of being married for nearly 26 years with Elizabeth (who deserves a statue from Debian for being so patient with my passion and my dedication to the project). I m also the proud father of 3 wonderful kids , aged 19 to 23. I work as team manager in the Networks and Computers Division of Onera the French Aerospace lab , a public research institute about Aeronautics, Space and Defense. My team provides computer management services for research divisions of Onera, with a specific focus put on individual computing. I entered the world of free software as one of the very first users of Linux in France. Back in the early 1990 s, I happened (though the BBS users communities) to be a friend of several early adopters of Linux and/or BSD386/FreeBSD/NetBSD in France. More specifically, I discovered Linux thanks with my friend Ren Cougnenc (all my free software talks are dedicated to Ren , who passed away in 1996). You re not a programmer, not even a packager. How did you come to Debian? I m definitely not a programmer and I never studied computing (I graduated in Materials Science and worked in that area for a few years after my PhD). However, my daily work always involved computing (I redesigned the creep testing laboratory and its acquisition system all by myself during my thesis research work). An my hobbies often involved playing with home computers, always trying to learn about something new. So, first learning about a new operating system then trying to figure out how to become involved in its development was quite a logical choice. Debian is my distro of choice since it exists. I used Slackware on work machines for a while, but my home server, kheops, first ran Debian 1.1 when I stopped running a BBS on an MS-DOS machine to host a news server. That was back in October 1996. I then happened to be a user, and more specifically a user of genealogy software, also participating very actively in Usenet from this home computer and server, that was running this Debian thing. So, progressively, I joined mailing lists and, being a passionate person, I tried to figure out how I could bring my own little contribution to all this. This is why I became a packager (yes, I am one!) by taking over the geneweb package, which I was using to publish my genealogy research. I applied as DD in January 2001, then got my account in July 2001. My first upload to the Debian archive occurred on August 22nd 2001: that was of course geneweb, which I still maintain. Quite quickly, I became involved in the work on French localization. I have always been a strong supporter of localized software (I even translated a few BBS software back in the early 90 s) as one of the way to bring the power and richness of free software to more users. Localization work lead me to work on the early version of Debian Installer, during those 2003-2005 years where the development of D-I was an incredibly motivating and challenging task, lead by Joey Hess and his inspiring ideas. From user to contributor to leader, I suddenly discovered, around 2004, that I became the coordinator of D-I i18n (internationalization) without even noticing You re the main translation coordinator in Debian. What plans and goals have you set for Debian Wheezy? As always: paint the world in red. Indeed, this is my goal for years. I would like our favorite distro to be able to be used by anyone in the world, whether she speaks English, Northern Sami, Wolof, Uyghur or Secwepemcts n. As a matter of symbol, I use the installer for this. My stance is that one should be able to even install Debian in one s own language. So, for about 7 years, I use D-I as a way to attract new localization contributors. This progress is represented on this page where the world is gradually painted in red as long as the installer supports more languages release after release. The map above tries to illustrate this by painting in red countries when the most spoken language in the country is supported in Debian Installer. However, that map does not give enough reward to many great efforts made to support very different kind of languages. Not only various national languages, but also very different ones: all regional languages of Spain, many of the most spoken languages in India, minority languages such as Uyghur for which an effort is starting, Northern Sami because it is taught in a few schools in Norway, etc., etc. Still, the map gives a good idea of what I would like to see better supported: languages from Africa, several languages in Central Asia. And, as a very very personal goal, I m eagerly waiting for support of Tibetan in Debian Installer, the same way we support its sister language, Dzongkha from Bhutan. For this to happen, we have to make contribution to localization as easy as possible. The very distributed nature of Debian development makes this a challenge, as material to translate (D-I components, debconf screens, native packages, packages descriptions, website, documentation) is very widely spread. A goal, for years, is to set a centralized place where translators could work easily without even knowing about SVN/GIT/BZR or having to report bugs to send their work. The point, however, would be to have this without making compromises on translation quality. So, with peer review, use of thesaurus and translation memory and all such techniques. Tools for this exist: we, for instance, worked with the developers of Pootle to help making it able to cope with the huge amount of material in Debian (think about packages descriptions translations). However, as of now, the glue between such tools and the raw material (that often lies in packages) didn t come. So, currently, translation work in Debian requires a great knowledge of how things are organized, where is the material, how it can be possible to make contribution reach packages, etc. And, as I m technically unable to fulfill the goal of building the infrastructure, I m fulfilling that role of spreading out the knowledge. This is how I can define my coordinator role. Ubuntu uses a web-based tool to make it easy to contribute translations directly in Launchpad. At some point you asked Canonical to make it free software. Launchpad has been freed in the mean time. Have you (re)considered using it? Why not? After all, it more or less fills in the needs I just described. I still don t really figure out how we could have all Debian material gathered in Rosetta/Launchpad .and also how Debian packagers could easily get localized material back from the framework without changing their development processes. I have always tried to stay neutral wrt Ubuntu. As many people now in Debian, I feel like we have reached a good way to achieve our mutual development. When it comes at localization work, the early days where the everything in Rosetta and translates who wants stanza did a lot of harm to several upstream localization projects is, I think, way over. Many people who currently contribute to D-I localization were indeed sent to me by Ubuntu contributors .and by localizing D-I, apt, debconf, package descriptions, etc., they re doing translation work for Ubuntu as well as for Debian. Let s say I m a Debian user and I want to help translate Debian in my language. I can spend 1 hour per week on this activity. What should I do to start? Several language teams use Debian mailing lists to coordinate their work. If you re lucky enough to be a speaker of one of these languages, try joining debian-l10n-<yourlanguage> and follow what s happening there. Don t try to immediately jump in some translation work. First, participate to peer reviews: comment on others translations. Learn about the team s processes, jargon and habits. Then, progressively, start working on a few translations: you may want to start with translations of debconf templates: they are short, often easy to do. That s perfect if you have few time. If no language team exists for your language, try joining debian-i18n and ask about existing effort for your language. I may be able to point you to individuals working on Debian translations (very often along with other free software translation efforts). If I am not, then you have just been named coordinator for your language I may even ask you if you want to work on translating the Debian Installer. What s the biggest problem of Debian? We have no problems, we only have solutions We are maybe facing a growth problem for a few years. Despite the increased welcoming aspects of our processes (Debian Maintainers), Debian is having hard times in growing. The overall number of active contributors is probably stagnating for quite a while. I m still amazed, however, to see how we can cope with that and still be able to release over the years. So, after all, this is maybe not a problem Many people would point communication problems here. I don t. I think that communication inside the Debian project is working fairly well now. Our famous flame wars do of course still happen from time to time, but what large free software project doesn t have flame wars? In many areas, we indeed improved communication very significantly. I want to take as an example the way the release of squeeze has been managed. I think that the release team did, even more this time, a very significant and visible effort to communicate with the entire project. And the release of squeeze has been a great success in that matter. So, there s nearly nothing that frustrates me in Debian. Even when a random developer breaks my beloved 100% completeness of French translations, I m not frustrated for more than 2 minutes. You re known in the Debian community as the organizer of the Cheese & Wine Party during DebConf. Can you tell us what this is about? This is an interesting story about how things build themselves in Debian. It all started in July 2005, before DebConf 5 in Helsinki. Denis Barbier, Nicolas Fran ois and myself agreed to bring at Debconf a few pieces of French cheese as well as 1 or 2 bottles of French wine and share them with some friends. Thus, we settled an informal meeting in the French room where we invited some fellows: from memory, Benjamin Mako Hill, Hannah Wallach, Matt Zimmermann and Moray Allan. All of us fond of smelly cheese, great wine plus some extra p t home-made by Denis in Toulouse. It finally happened that, by word of mouth, a few dozens of other people slowly joined in that French room and turned the whole thing into an improvized party that more or less lasted for the entire night. The tradition was later firmly settled in 2006, first in Debconf 6 in Mexico where I challenged the French DDs to bring as many great cheese as possible, then during the Debian i18n meeting in Extremadura (Sept 2006) where we reached the highest amount of cheese per participant ever. I think that the Creofonte building in Casar de C ceres hasn t fully recovered from it and is still smelling cheese 5 years after. This party later became a real tradition for DebConf, growing over and over each year. I see it as a wonderful way to illustrate the diversity we have in Debian, as well as the mutual enrichment we always felt during DebConfs. My only regret about it is that it became so big over the years that organizing it is always a challenge and I more and more feel pressure to make it successful. However, over the years, I always found incredible help by DebConf participants (including my own son, last year a moment of sharing which we will both remember for years, i think). And, really, in 2010, standing up on a chair, shouting (because the microphone wasn t working) to thank everybody, was the most emotional moment I had at Debconf 10. Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? So many people. So, just like it happens in many awards ceremonies, I will be very verbose to thank people, sorry in advance for this. The name that comes first is Joey Hess. Joey is someone who has a unique way to perceive what improvements are good for Debian and a very precise and meticulous way to design these improvements. Think about debconf. It is designed for so long now and still reaching its very specific goal. So well designed that it is the entire basis for Joey s other achievement: designing D-I. Moreover, I not only admire Joey for his technical work, but also for his interaction with others. He is not he loudest person around, he doesn t have to .just giving his point in discussion and, guess what? Most of the time, he s right. Someone I would like to name here, also, is Colin Watson. Colin is also someone I worked with for years (the D-I effect, again ) and, here again, the very clever way he works on technical improvements as well as his very friendly way to interact with others just make it. And, how about you, Rapha l? I m really admirative of the way you work on promoting technical work on Debian. Your natural ability to explain things (as good in English as it is in French) and your motivation to share your knowledge are a great benefit for the project. Not to mention the technical achievements you made with Guillem on dpkg of course! Another person I d like to name here is Steve Langasek. We both maintain samba packages for years and collaboration with him has always been a pleasure. Just like Colin, Steve is IMHO a model to follow when it comes at people who work for Canonical while continuing their involvment in Debian. And, indeed, Steve is so patient with my mistakes and stupid questions in samba packaging that he deserves a statue. We re now reaching the end of the year where Stefano Zacchiroli was the Debian Project Leader. And, no offense intended to people who were DPL before him (all of them being people I consider to be friends of mine), I think he did the best term ever. Zack is wonderful in sharing his enthusiasm about Debian and has a unique way to do it. Up to the very end of his term, he has always been working on various aspects of the project and my only hope is that he ll run again (however, I would very well understand that he wants to go back to his hacking activities!). Hat off, Zack!I again have several other people to name in this Bubulle hall of Fame : Don Armstrong, for his constant work on improving Debian BTS, Margarita Manterola as one of the best successes of Debian Women (and the most geeky honeymoon ever), Denis Barbier and Nicolas Fran ois because i18n need really skilled people, Cyril Brulebois and Julien Cristau who kept X.org packaging alive in lenny and squeeze, Otavio Salvador who never gave up on D-I even when we were so few to care about it. I would like to make a special mention for Frans Pop. His loss in 2010 has been a shock for many of us, and particularly me. Frans and I had a similar history in Debian, both mostly working on so-called non technical duties. Frans has been the best release manager for D-I (no offense intended, at all, to Joey or Otavio .I know that both of them share this feeling with me). His very high involvment in his work and the very meticulous way he was doing it lead to great achievements in the installer. The Installation Guide work was also a model and indeed a great example of non technical work that requires as many skills as more classical technical work. So, and even though he was sometimes so picky and, I have to admit, annoying, that explains why I m still feeling sad and, in some way, guilty about Frans loss. One of my goals for wheezy is indeed to complete some things Frans left unachieved. I just found one in bug #564441: I will make this work reach the archive, benefit our users and I know that Frans would have liked that.

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Thank you to Christian for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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