Mon, 15 Mar 2010

stable RC Bug Squashing, Part 2

A while ago I blogged about squashing release-critical bugs in stable. Yesterday we have reached a big milestone on that area: The amount of release-critical bugs in stable dropped below 1000 (blue graph). This might sound like it's still pretty high but given that we were well over 1600 RC bugs in stable a while ago I consider this quite a success.

This is though no time for rest. There is still way too many RC bugs in stable, there are definitely still a lot of bugs that just aren't affecting stable and thus can be marked as such meaning no upload needs to get done for them. I'm taking a close look at those with higher numbers and most of those seem to be validly affecting stable too so they might require a bit more work than just tagging them.

Thanks to all people who helped on that area, I can just remember a few names and don't want to make anyone else also working on stable to feel singled out, though I want to thank Lucas for tagging his FTBFS rounds with squeeze sid right from the start because the packages obviously have built before due to his regular rebuilds. Thanks to all, but like said, not the time to rest. The green squeeze graph is still around 250 bugs away from us!

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Mon, 22 Feb 2010

t-prot testing

The t-prot package might need your help: There is a discussion going on with the upstream developer how to proceed with respect to a hopefully helpful change in its behavior. There are several options how to address this, one of them would involve using the Getopt::Long module instead of Getopt::Mixed. Given that the benchmarks of upstream rather speak for sticking with Getopt::Mixed we would like to ask you for help:

Please test this version of t-prot (for your safety: detached gpg signature for the version) and compare it to the packaged version 2.15 that I just upload into unstable (it is installable without anything else also into (old)stable or testing). Your feedback on this is truly appreciated, please send it until the start of next week (Monday evening/Tuesday morning) to "t-prot (AT) tolot.escape.de".

Much thanks in advance!

[/debian] permanent link

Sun, 22 Nov 2009

stable RC Bug Squashing

Others are doing it, so I thought I'd join in, too. Though, from a different perspective. Often enough people claim that package maintainers don't seem to care about their packages anymore once they did hit stable because they say it isn't as easy to update packages in stable. While this is partly true it still doesn't send a too good impression to have a high and increasing release-critical bug count for stable.

UDD makes it easy. It has a field affects_stable in its bugs table, and the view bugs_rt_affects_stable is even yet better. I fiddled together two short statements that help me to find release-critical bugs for stable:

SELECT b.id FROM bugs_rt_affects_stable bas
   LEFT JOIN bugs b ON bas.id=b.id
   WHERE b.severity IN ('serious', 'critical', 'grave')
   AND b.id NOT IN (select bau.id from bugs_rt_affects_unstable bau)
   ORDER BY b.id;

The second statement is without the AND clause to see all open release-critical bugs. Going through this list isn't too complicated, and I already found a good rush of bugs to mark as not affecting stable because the reason for the bug only appeared after the lenny release. I could list their bugnumbers, but it's currently up to 39 such bugs since yesterday and I don't want to bore you with it, actually it didn't involve any touching of the package—but it will definitely make it easier to find the real release-critical bugs that do affect stable and should get addressed in an update to it.

Still lots to do, 39 bugs down isn't the world when the barrier is set to about 1500. Though, it's still more than 2% and this is something that makes me a bit happy.

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Tue, 10 Nov 2009

Things that make me happy

• when people upload to Debian with an @ubuntu.com email address
• even better, if they do that when they are DDs (so with a @debian.org address)

Yeah! Actually, doing so shows several things: That the collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu actually works out. That people that feel more attached to Ubuntu also do care for Debian. And that those people started to realize that contributing things back to Debian actually does reduce their own workload with respect to not having to maintain seperate patches, with the benefit of all involved parties.

So big kudos to you people being able to look over the corner of your little universe and see the bigger picture for the benefit of all!

[/debian] permanent link

Fri, 16 Oct 2009

Signing Jokes in Contracts

It is great to see that the collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu is improving; and I don't say that just because it probably can't be much better within the Debian/Ubuntu Games Team, we have people from both distributions working inside the team and most of the packages don't carry Ubuntu specific patches (anymore) because of that.

Actually, seeing that things do go pretty well in that area made me consider signing up to become a MOTU. To do that one has to sign the Ubuntu Code of Conduct (CoC) which is a fairly good document, actually. I wish there would be something similar within Debian that is considered binding, it would be able to reduce quite some tough and rough times, actually. It is about and explains to be considerate, be respectful, be collaborative, what to do when you disagree, when you are unsure and wants you to step down considerately. If these principles would be carried out amongst all the free software communities (and I really mean carried out and not just be there and grow old) I expect it would be much more welcoming for new people. And it's not too hard to do your part for it (... says the person who just recently had to excuse for her behavior).

Anyway, there is this one part with the CoC that itches me. It's not that one has to sign it with their GnuPG key, but related to it. Making it a requirement to sign it gives the document a much more official character, actually gives it the feeling and impression of a contract and I expect it is meant to carry that feeling. Though, there is this one part in it that I consider off for such a document:

Nobody knows everything, and nobody is expected to be perfect in the Ubuntu community (except of course the SABDFL).

Given that the acronym SABDFL refers to Mark Shuttleworth it means that one has to expect him to be impeccable—which I am sorry but cannot sign. I don't expect that from anyone else but myself, even Mark is only human and can make mistakes. Even though it's obvious that this is a tongue-in-cheek kind of joke which might be meant to make it clear that the Ubuntu community isn't just sterile having this in a document that is expected to get signed by contributors is just an extremely bad idea.

Sorry, Ubuntu, as long as this joke is part of the CoC I can't sign it with clean conscience, no matter how much I would sign the rest of it a thousands' time. It really makes me wonder how many others actually did read the "contract" carefully that they are signing but on the other hand simply didn't care. There is too many site signup stuff out there that noone reads neither.

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Tue, 06 Oct 2009

Perception of Image-Hack

In my last blog entry I used the term "image-hack". It seems like it has been considered to have a negative feeling attached to it. Even though I consider this very amusing in a community that likes to pride itself with the term "hackers" I guess I can understand why people consider it a negative term. Even though technically a mockup of a website in image form actually feels just a crude hack it wasn't meant to belittle what pixelgirl has produced. Her image-hack looks extremely well.

Unfortunately no further contact after the debconf was established and personally I'm not convinced how the tiny image would work for other pages besides the start page—and removing the DSAs and News from the start page is a no-go, we actually do receive positive feedback for that. So it is what it is, an image-hack. An extremely well done one, but still just that.

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New Face, Part 2

Like written in a former blog entry I am working on preparing for getting Kalle's Debian Redesign tested and installed. Even though some unfortunate events happened which made me reconsider my efforts and a lot of things changed for me I am still up with the effort. Mostly because I didn't became part of the webmasters just to chicken away in the face of obstacles, and also not just because yet another image-hack did pop up that neither showed anything usable or overall-thoughts or actual code/concepts or even tried to get in contact with the webteam.

I only remember to have received positive feedback in which I also include minor change suggestions like that the exact hits and other hits sections in the packages site aren't as clearly distinguishable as before. I have of course forwarded these to Kalle and we are looking for a solution that would go with the style. Speaking of the packages site I finally managed to get the packages from the main pool displayed too so it shouldn't behave differently to the old one anymore in that respect (see e.g. wesnoth for some more distributed package).

The next step I finished these last days was setting up a testsite for www as you can find it on www.deb.at. Please notice that you might want to surf that site in English (either change your Accept-Language settings or click on the English links at the bottom of the pages) because some of the changes are only recognizable there; like, the main page in other languages look immensely different.

Where to go from here? Kalle also has proposal for the BugTracking System and the Planet so that targets are the obvious next steps. I can't tell yet when they will be done, depends on how complicated it is to set up an environment for it, but I will keep you updated.

[/debian] permanent link

Thu, 01 Oct 2009

Times Are Changing

Since I returned from this year's debconf quite a lot things have changed in my life. One thing I knew way before debconf already, I switched jobs. I was working for a pretty long time (and also through great times) for Silver Server, for well over 6 years. Let's see what I can do in and for my new job. I'm still only pretty short there yet and I being to understand what's going on (and what could need improvements in some workflows) but it's too early to see that more precisely.

On a small side-note, the job change also required me to switch my mobile phone number because the old one was a company's number. I now have a private one that I don't fear of losing anymore. If you subtract the number 3933309527644 from my old one you have my new one. On the other hand you can always ask me for it in case you had my old one and wonder. ;)

Besides my mobile phone number other smaller things have changed over time too. Most of you noticed that I'm neither using my @ist.org nor my @debian.org address anymore because they did carry the wrong nick. And given that everyone was switching their gnupg keys I did so too. Like before I again created separate keys for private usage and for Debian usage. I'm not really following the procedure of sending out signing requests to people who have signed my old key(s), personally I don't follow them myself so I don't expect others to do. They are though cross-signed with the old ones just to be on the save side to keep the WoT not losing connections.

Also I finally got around to set up my own ejabberd server and did create my a new jabber ID that I also plan to keep. It is the same as my private mailaddress as you can see linked above in the key for private usage. ;) One of the reasons for the server is by the way also a testbed for the packaging of ejabberd which will get moved into team maintenance with the next upload which will be the next upstream version, 2.1.

But the biggest and most important change in my life is that I will have to rethink my spare time spending quite a lot because there will be something demanding a lot of time starting in about march next year. An extremely fortunate change and almost as happy one even though it means that I won't be able to attend next year's debconf in NY, but I hope the people whom I told that I will be there aren't too disappointed by this announcement. Sorry! :)

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Wed, 29 Jul 2009

New Face, imploding

I'm extremely uneasy. Not because of some release team announcement that if one would have tried to think along after the interview with Mark Shuttleworth got around was already clear back then. It was talking about that the Debian release will propalby get adjusted to match Ubuntu's LTS releases. It isn't a big secret that the next Ubuntu LTS release will be 10.04. And counting backward from that the freeze in december is just the obvious consequence.

What I actually am uneasy about is Agnieszka's Redesign talk. Just to make things clear I want to congratulate her on what she produced. It definitely looks nice and the reactions during the talk were quite clear on that.

But, there are several issues surrounding this that makes me actually thinking about resigning from the webteam as a whole and reduce my precious time that I invest into Debian. The reason might not be as obvious, but it contains some interesting corner data:

• Agnieszka did thank Sledge for his good help. So at least part of the DPL team was aware of it. Some weeks ago Luk, the other part of the DPL team, contacted me and said that he is acting with his DPL team hat on and that there were mails coming in to them about how to create some progress for the website. I told Luk that I am already working on getting Kalle's proposal integrated. It was cool to him and he thanked me and wished me well with the progress, but neither he nor Sledge did tell me anything about Agnieszka's work.
• Agnieszka also did thank stockholm about his help. stockholm is part of the "marketing" team (yeah, there was one appointed two years ago; didn't you notice all their great work by now??). Anyway, eventually stockholm have heard about me efforts and did stumble by in #debian-www on IRC. He asked about the new design and who's working on it, I showed him what was there at that time already and all he said was "Cool". Again no mentioning of Agnieszka's work neither.
• Like I wrote yesterday almost all of the mockups sent in contained only of images (if there even were multiple) which are hard to really decide upon—especially when they are as tiny and not clearly visible like in this presentation. Questions that were raised in the direction of wether this would actually work out were muted with the magic CSS waving; unfortunately CSS can't do magic. And with the images it's hard to decide wether it actually would work for accessibility reasons and the other things I already mentioned yesterday.
• We try very carefully to not have duplication of work in the area of packaging through the terms of ITPs. Great! We try to avoid some few hours invested in an area where we have very well over thousands of contributors. But it seems to be proper to just through away days, weeks, months of invested time, effort and energy in an area that we seriously lack contributors.

Way to go, Debian. Seriously disappointed, seriously annoyed, seriously demotivated.

[/debian] permanent link

Tue, 28 Jul 2009

New Face for the Website

Not sure if you do follow the debian-www mailinglist, but from time to time there are people mailing about that they would like to give our website a new face. Most of the time people just do some mockup in some painting tool without realizing that there is a lot more behind it, with respect to translation and sublayers and accessibility requirements. After mentioning these kind of things, most people go away.

Then there was Kalle Söderman. He took a deeper look behind it, started working for himself in 2007, did notice that there is not only www.d.o but also packages.d.o (or rather wesnoth as example), wiki.d.o, planet.d.o, bugs.d.o and others too. So he started to think about something that might work cross-service, and actually did work with the code and not a painting tool. And even though he didn't hear much from people when he presented it first he kept thinking about it.

This did manage to catch my interest and I started to think about how to move forward from here. I started to contact him and started to mail back and forth about his proposal, started to set up some small testing sites (again: testing sites. They aren't meant to be finished, likewise the proposal from Kalle isn't finished yet), and this is where we are currently: On packages.deb.at/wesnoth you can see a clone of our pkg.d.o that uses his template, feel free to exchange wesnoth with your favourite package—even though be notified that it doesn't get its data regularly updated, I don't want people to use it instead of the main site and that it somehow currently doesn't show packages from the main archive but only the external sources that are used. It's just there to get you the idea.

And we also have a working testing theme for the wiki which works directly in there (thanks to Paul Wise for installing the part that needs to sit on the server side): Follow the instructions on Kalle's page about the wiki if you like to have it enabled.

I am currently trying to get something for testing set up for bugs.d.o and www.d.o; for the later I have to send kudos to Martin Zobel-Helas for giving me a prod and a system to do it on (even though he didn't originally knew that I would want to abuse it for the theme testing ;)). For the time being you can find some more of Kalle's thoughts on his Site about his proposals together with some few pages as examples, but I will keep you lot updated about major progress on this in here.

The work that I invest here is mostly about finding out how much work it actually would be to get things changed, and also because I like what Kalle did. He invested a lot of time and I guess the outcome deserves to have some further exposure. Unlike than in other areas things aren't carved in stone yet, which even Kalle is full aware of, but things have to get started somewhere. Enjoy, send (constructive) feedback (like The distinction on the new pkg.d.o proposal between Exact hits and Other hits isn't clear enough!) and acknowledge that others are doing stuff that many people in the last years did chicken out from.

[/debian] permanent link

Fri, 19 Jun 2009

Strangest problem, ever

I think I can consider this issue the strangest problem that I ever had encountered. I am unable to enter @ or € (or any key that requires the alt-gr switch on German keyboard) in iceweasel, evolution, pidgin, gucharmap but am having no troubles in all other applications I tried (kword, OpenOffice.org, abiword, gvim, urxvt) in an current squeeze system.

If anyone has any idea or hint what might be the cause of this I would be more than grateful!

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Wed, 07 Jan 2009

Understanding Debian

It's always enlightning how some people see how Debian works. Or not. It seems to get more and more common that instead of filing a bugreport people seem to consider it appropriate to rather rant in their blogs about it. That will definitely get things fixed and done and motivates everyone involved to work on the issues that they get notified about only through third-party. And of course it's absolutely alright to change an application directly, not use dpkg-divert or similar, and then complain wildly about how unfair an upgrade of the package replaced that file.

And, Andrew, there wasn't a DSA about CVE-2008-2236 because it was considered a too minor issue for that. Thanks for the fish. Did you btw. try the version from the upcoming lenny release? It's not like it's not directly installable in etch because of dependencies...

Only once I would hope that people that are that deeply involved in Debian (like, being Debian Developers or long-time contributors) would do things like random users do: File the things they are annoyed with, even if they are as minor and awkward as some of the bugreports I receive for wesnoth.

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Tue, 09 Dec 2008

Better backports.org Support

Since last weekend backports.org has two more services supporting tracking of what's going on. I will list them in chronological order:

Tracking of Security issues in backports packages: This was one of the many topics that was discussed at the Security Team meeting in Essen at the end of last month and Florian Weimer implemented a first version of tracking security issues within backports.org. It currently compares the backported version against the one fixed for unstable, so at the moment it still has some false-positives (e.g. libspf2 because the fix was taken from lenny-security), but this is still a big step forward and helpful to track outstanding issues here, too.

Diffs between etch-backports and lenny: Something similar was available at some other places before but strangely got discontinued. In here you can see which packages in backports are older (meaning only debian revision difference), outdated (newer upstream version in lenny) newer (backported from unstable?), have a wrong version schema or are not available in lenny (propably even removed from unstable). It will hopefully help people to get their backports in sync. At least it's an indicator of how well the packages are tracked.

Hope you consider them already as useful as myself, even though there is obvious space for improvements. But they are both quite helpful already in their current state so that shouldn't hinder you from using them. :)

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Tue, 16 Sep 2008

webwml in git

Last week I wondered how much space a complete git conversion would actually need—and I was quite surprised:

$ du -hs webwml*
325M    webwml
416M    webwml.git
819M    webwml.svn

The first line is the regular CVS checkout. The third line is the SVN checkout that's available from alioth. You can see that the size is not really something one would want, especially since the real gain is extremely little: besides offline diff you rather have disadvantages with not being able to do much offline because anything history wise requires you to be online. In CVS you at least knew that revision 1.12 of a file is three commits above revision 1.9 of the same file; while in SVN you have no chance offline to know how many commits to a file happened between revision 512 and 1024, if any at all.

The conversion to git took me quite a long time, practically almost three days of (non-constant) running git-cvsimport on my laptop. The time did not completely surprise me, at least when I noticed in the end that it were well over 83 thousand commits in well over 10 years, reaching back to July 1998. My first own commit was in July 2001, which wasn't too hard to find out with git neither, and required no online operation.

git gives you complete offline access to the history. This is actually something that the build process can be based on. There propably will be some speed drawback with not being able to do simple-math for revision difference like in CVS, but that actually will have to be checked. I'm still convinced being able to do all the stuff offline without any strange hacks or needing to be online all the time is something worthwhile.

Things left to do and which I propably won't find the time in the too near future because of ... erm, you know? Lenny? That we want to release? But anyway, to not have the list of things get lost, here is a (not complete) list of things in case you are bored and want to play around a bit:

• Adapt the various scripts to not check CVS revisions but use the sha1 sums.
• Adjust translation-check translation="" value for all files to use sha1 sums.
• Check wether a full website build would work after that changes.
• Try out how submodules work and wether they might be reasonable to use for language subdirectories to allow translators partial checkouts.
• ... other things I've forgotten but that could be added to the WebsiteVCSEvalutaion wiki page.

Playing around a bit? Well, you don't have to do the whole git-cvsimport on yourself: I've pushed my webwml.git repository to alioth: "git clone git://git.debian.org/git/users/alfie/webwml.git" should get you started. Please notice to play around in a seperate branch and not directly in origin to be able to pull further and update from time to time.

[/debian] permanent link

Tue, 26 Aug 2008

scons annoys

scons claims to be a better replacement for make, or rather especially autofoo magic. Unfortunately, it isn't. To me a proper build system should definitely be able to clean up behind itself. The reasoning flying around for why scons isn't able to do so are quite hilarious, ranging from that it doesn't know what it generates (how does it generate them in the first place?) to that it's extensible and thus can't be done properly (then the extensions are broken and should add their clean informations in a hook or such, too). I haven't seen any valid reason for why it shouldn't be able to do so—yet we still seem to need to clean up cruft lying aroud like .scons* files and directories, config.log and of course the build/ directory.

People, if you really want to do some proper build system, don't forget to make it clean up after itself. It shouldn't be the requirement of application developers to fix that (which doesn't really work because a scons target trying to clean the files makes scons crash).

[/debian] permanent link

Fri, 25 Jul 2008

Blosxom 2.1

Sometimes things like these happen. Noone really did expect it, but it did: blosxom Version 2.1 got released by the new Upstream Team. It does incorporate all previous Debian patches which I'm quite happy about, and contains other long standing and needed fixes and changes.

Though, there is also a tiny drawback in that, especially for the Debian package: some of the changes might not be totally approved by all the users of the Debian package. This is unfortunate, but it had to be done to get the package finally yet in a cleaner state (maybe you remember the cleanup run when I originally took over the package). Please be sure to read the NEWS.Debian entry (apt-listchanges might help here) about the most important changes, one of them might even mean that upgrades to this package will flood planets. This is extremely unfortunate but for getting things clean unavoidable:

blosxom (2.1.0-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * This update is a major switch, all local patches have been incorporated
    into upstream version again. Furthermore, html and rss flavours are now
    included in the blosxom script directly and the old 1993 and index
    flavours are not included anymore, to get rid of some further historical
    annoyances with the packaging.

  * MOST IMPORTANTLY: This update adds a new tag into rss feeds:
    <guid isPermanentLink="true"> which helps to notice duplicates and not let
    them appear again on planets. Though, for the time of switching it might
    mean that your last entries might appear as new when planet doesn't check
    <link> (which already should be cached) when finding <guid>. This is
    unfortunate but not really avoidable. To limit impact a new plugin was
    added: 00RssLimit which turns the syndicated feed in only pick up the last
    5 entries.

  * The plugin timezone got disabled and gets only installed into a new
    /etc/blosxom/plugins-available directory which is the first step to the
    planned blosxom-plugins package. If you found it useful and made use of it
    just symlink it from the plugins directory.

 -- Gerfried Fuchs <rhonda@debian.at>  Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:19:49 +0200

Technically it means you might want to tweak the included 00RssLimit plugin to even just 1 until you blogged some more and raise it with time if your blog runs through some planet. If you do the upgrade, did set 00RssLimit to 1 and do not reappear with your last entry on your planet sites feel free to switch it back.

Again, this is an unfortunate situation, and it's not really related to the Debian package only–the addition of the <guid> tag happened upstream and will affect all users of blosxom. It's just that I added the selfwritten 00RssLimit plugin to reduce the impact for the Debian users. Hope you don't mind. ;)

Ah yes, and if you might ask where the package is: I did put it into my website for now so people have some time to stumble upon this blog entry before they install the package from unstable without prior notice and maybe not even using apt-listchanges. I will upload the package within the next day.

[/debian] permanent link

Thu, 22 May 2008

pgadmin3 for experimental

One of the things why I was on the tracks for getting src:wxwidgets2.8 into the pool was to be able to get a recent pgadmin3, too. The one we currently have in testing/unstable isn't even anymore able to cope with our default postgresql-8.3 version.

Now that wxwidgets2.8 is in experimental for a while I tried to suggest a pgadmin3 upload to experimental. Unfortunately the package maintainer seems to be quite busy these days, thus I prepared an NMU for it, planing to upload it into the pool at the start of next week. All involved parties received mails about it—that also includes the bug reporters of the bugs it would fix. For your convenience, if you are interested, you can find the package in the meantime on my private server: http://rhonda.deb.at/debian/pgadmin3/—feel free to give it a test and send feedback along.

[/debian] permanent link

Fri, 18 Apr 2008

On freedom

One of the freedoms I value is the freedom to choose what you spend your time on and who you spend it with. And while I believe that people in key roles in Debian still have those freedoms (hey, 2.1(1), don't you know), reality these days even confirms that. So long, and thanks for the fish.

[/debian] permanent link

Mon, 10 Mar 2008

APT::Acquire::Translation "none";

Quite a lot people are unhappy with how the package descriptions are translated. Different teams handle it differently, but the approach the German "team" chose is quite unfriendly from a quality point of view: The webinterface for it doesn't require any authentication at all, leading technically to anonymous translations all over the place. The so-called "review" process consists of the same not-existing authentication, leading to a situation where unknown people can put in whatever they like and have other (or potentially the same) unknown people acknowledge that.

The language team has actively chosen that way because it was said that bad translations simply won't happen and that the review (three people opening the page and clicking onto a button) will not let that happen. Well, it happened. And is happening all over the place. Things like "Gedultsspiel" and "Murmelirrsinn" are pretty tough and almost hiding translations from "counting pipe" to "Zählrohr" and "villages" to "Orte" (and no, those aren't the only examples that accumulated over the last months). As this all happens anonymously one can't even get a message to the people submitting (extremely) low quality translations, helping them to improve their skills so they won't do the same mistake in future translations; meaning things are hard to improve.

I am usual an advocate of translating stuff, did put a lot of effort into that area—but the total lack of quality in not only a small and tiny bit here but a much broader area is why I suggest to everyone (at least from a German language point of view): Put APT::Acquire::Translation "none"; into your /etc/apt/apt.conf file and don't get annoyed by them. When quantity is the only thing that counts people wanting to have quality are simply ignored with their mails on the lists.

[/debian] permanent link

Fri, 08 Feb 2008

My Efforts in Debian

... are still there, even if I don't blog about every single bit all the time. Most of the packages I care about are in good state, I even did jump on board of irssi co-maintaining and got its bugcount down a fair bit (though I won't rest at this stage, there are still some to go) and did jump onboard of the pkg-games Team.

... which brings me to wesnoth. For quite a while I am tracking the stable releases (1.2.x) of wesnoth in unstable while the development releases (1.3.x) are followed in experimental. With the upcoming stable release 1.4 this though will change. The development branch is feature frozen and thus will be (propably) compatible with the next stable release, and furthermore the current stable release isn't expected to receive any further update. My plan is thus to upload the next development release directly to unstable. If you want to give it some additional testing before that happens pull the package from experimental now and give your feedback, thanks.

Furthermore I am also tracking some packages for backports.org. I usually do the packaging of it almost synchronous to its upload into unstable although it is only allowed onto backports.org when it entered testing. For the timegap in between you can usually find it on my website repository. Directories that aren't empty there have some upload to backports pending and you can feel free to test the packages and send me feedback on them. Currently this includes bacula, slony1 and postgresql-8.3.

One last note, finally it happened: apache1 isn't anymore. There were two packages left in testing until recently which got their removal requests adjusted. Thanks to everyone involved in keeping track of this and helping cleaning up the archive.

[/debian] permanent link

Fri, 20 Jul 2007

msgmerge --previous and poedit

Since quite a while gettext has support for a feature which I was waiting for since ages: --previous. It means that when a string gets marked fuzzy it adds the previous original string as a comment so one is able to see the difference which led to the fuzzy marking. This makes translation of po files much much more comfortable because one can easily find out now what has changed. Let me give you a reallife example:

#: data/core/help.cfg:331
#, fuzzy
#| msgid "race^Mechanical"
msgid "trait^Mechanical"
msgstr "Kriegsgerät"

With out the previous string (in the "#|" line) you would propably be puzzled about what has changed because the string gets stripped off the everything before the ^ for displaying it in this case.

Though, not all translation tools behave correctly. One of them is unfortunately poedit. It moves the previous string to a wrong place and thus breaks the parsing of the file. A bugreport has been filed about it—but unfortunately it also means that upstream projects that already support (like Wesnoth) it are considering disabling it again because of this. So I wrote quickly a perl script that is able to fix that for you: pofix.pl. It's quite simple, reads from stdin and writes to stdout.
Go and support --previous before your competitors do it and hijack all your translators! ;)

[/debian] permanent link

Wed, 14 Feb 2007

Localized XMMS-SID

ccr has uploaded a new beta version of his fabulous xmms-sid extension for the X MultiMedia System which now also supports localization. I have prepared a package so you can test it, start localizing it for your language, or just enjoy it. I have noticed some possible wrong implementation of the i18n infrastructure, I had to do the msgfmt for the de.po myself — if you know what goes wrong here any input is absolutely welcome.

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Thu, 21 Sep 2006

All Praise Dunc-Tank!

Recently Dunc-Tank was created. An effort, instantiated by the current DPL, it is said to improve Debian. Personally I am quite sure it's rather the opposite, especially when the people coming up with the idea are the people in charge currently and are giving the thing a quite official feeling. And money next to never is a good motivation for quality, especially when working on parts people usually don't work on. The quality Debian has is because people work on the parts they have interest in themself to get improved — that's the way Free Software really works.

But, there's one really good thing about it: Now that people are going to get paid to work on Debian, it motivates me to take a step back and spend some more time on other things. More free time for everyone, because there are the people getting paid now! Thank you very much, Dunc, for giving us back our free time!

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Wed, 23 Aug 2006

abook in experimental

I've uploaded a CVS snapshot of abook yesterday to experimental. Cédric Duval did commit really useful stuff there, like the possibility for user defined fields and views, renaming the custom fields, and lists which can contain a quite big amount of entries.

It would be nice if you could give it some testing and send in feedback about it so that I have more than just my own impression about it for deciding if it's ready to upload to unstable for it making it into the release of etch.
Some things I've noticed so far: You can't use a comma in lists because it is used as field separator. Yes, this needs to get changed, but it is no real regression, because the only list used before was the email addresses and you wasn't able to use it there neither. The date field type isn't yet completely supported — it is planed to have content checking in it, I could think of having flexible display ways for date fields, too. So far it has its reason why it isn't released yet upstream, it has its problem, but I think it is still a great advancement over the current stable release and would make sense to get included in etch. Give it a try and report back, either to me or to the upstream list.

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Fri, 02 Jun 2006

Back in the worng timezone

After two weeks and a bit it finally happened: I hit austria again. But, first things first. I guess everyone noticed by now that at the start the network wasn't our best strengths. I helped as much as possible, collected network cable back from one path to lay it out at a different one just to find that the about 200 m were a bit too short (or rather, me was lying the cable with too much safety). Though, it was too long anyway to be relyable, to it was cut in the middle and a small access point was put in. Later it had to be replaced because we were running a bit short of specific power supplies.

But it wasn't too bad, waiting for some more rj45 plugs and other things even allowed Ganneff to spend some time in the pool and relax a bit. And given that there seem to have been a few (vegetarian) people less than registered for sponsored meals allowed stockholm and Vagrant to get extra dishes to get fed. People during the debcamp mostly enjoyed themself, mao was played, fights for the gay vegetarian sign, tetrinetx on homer when only local network was available, and I managed to translate the new wesnoth tutorial into german. It wasn't clear by then that the new release will be delayed due to other problems until after the debconf, but in my opinion the tutorial is one of the most important parts of any games because it explains the basics, so I wanted to be sure that there won't be another release without a fully translated one.

About enjoying oneself: I tried out the skirts I brought with me and considered them absolutely comfortable. You'll find me more with one, especially when it gets warmer. It helped me to be more "myself". Also I enjoyed the weird looks and repeated questions about my shoes — although it was often that I was walking barefooted; but that got a bit of a pain, especially after noon when you were able to boil eggs on the stones. And given that I forgot myself when I switched from blue/red shoes to red/blue ones you don't have to send in your guesses when it was done because I can't tell who would be the winner anyway. ;)

The end of the week came, the Debian Day was here. Closer to its happening more and more people arrived and it was becoming more crowded in the hacklab. The network became more and more stable, the video streaming setup got finalized, and everything looked alright. Some of the mexico city people stayed for the night and enjoyed the friendly atmosphere (and a beer or two ;)).

The debconf started for real, the talks started, people were busy all around, zack added me to the alioth pkg-vim project to continue helping with the hijacked debian specific syntax files. Haven't done much yet beside a checkout, still pondering where I can bug around most ;)

I was looking forward to bubulle's BoF about the i18n infrastructure. It was really inspiring, and I collected some ideas for what the tool-to-be-created should support. The second BoF later the week just showed that others were mostly thinking along the same lines, so I hadn't much to add. Still I am looking forward to join the effort to make it happen — I was playing with the idea about such a tool for ages now, and I guess this is what it will make it happen, finally. Christian is so much more able to get people interested and together for making it happen than me... :/

There were some more talks I could mention, like Enrico's talk about Advanced tools for wasting time (yes, I have submitted my gnu.cow file in the meantime), or Erin's and aj's Debian's Debugging Debacle: the Debrief (in which I finally got around to fix a RC bug incidentally), and the talk by bubulle and jfs about State of the art for Debian i18n/l10n of course, which features some of the conclusions of the two part BoF.

Some of the evening featured interesting things too, like a cheese BoF, the everywhere featured formal dinner with its mariachis, the waterfall and the blackout; special effects you wouldn't be able to plan as well as they happened — though Martin Ferrarri had a small accident with it when water rushed down onto his plate and spilled the sauce over his white shirt and the table. And then there was the hard liquour BoF where I quit after the eggnogg.

The week passed, I got my hair dyed and rid of my beard right in time for the group photo. Thank you nattie, a thousands time, it went better than I expected! Really like it. I didn't attend the fun photo in the pool the next day, was a bit late after the talk, didn't had my bathing slip with me, was worried about my newly dyed hairs and was nervous... because a person I was looking forward to meet again was late. But gladly only late, so I got rid of my nervousness and enjoyed the last official talk (formerly mentioned i18n talk) of the week, and explained to some attendee that even in languages like French, German and English (yes, no mistake) there are still areas we have to struggle with all of this, like when keeping things up to date and the likes.

It was the last evening in Oaxtepec for me because I refused to leave by bus at 4 in the morning, rather wanted to spend the night in Mexico City to at least be able to have seen a tiny bit of it and eat something my tummy enjoys completely. :) I guess I don't need to point at sandino's gallery about that evening anymore, thanks to Gunnar. And yes, I'm mentally disturbed, but that shouldn't be anything new to people who know me for a while, or is it? ;)

This night was too long (less than 4 hours of sleep is even for debconf not much), so I rather went to bed early after a small walk (just 2 blocks or such) in the city and a nice dinner with friends who are missing the nice time too and was wearing too big sort-of shoes. Went to the airport in the morning by taxi whose driver gladly was able to speak english. Met zack and Martin Ferrari again there, and some other people with whom I was taking the same plane with. They were hacking along on the airport, found the open wifi, using power supplies from different spots. Bubulle already wrote about the two loud guys, gladly I wasn't too close to them, and plugged myself into the music and movie channels from the plane. The showed Last Holiday (which I really liked, although in the ending I started to cry — mostly because I started to realize what I was leaving...) and two spanish movies of which I don't remember the titles. People started to hack away in the temporarily set up hacklab and we started to wonder how much power they might have, though they cheated: They used two battery packs...

In Madrid some more people parted and we were down to 5 people. I bought totally overpriced playingcards so we could play Mao, had a short nice session and spread the word. We did hack the baby room power supply and hacked along a bit more, and then Peter and me were off heading to vienna, finally.

All in all I really enjoyed it. Although there were its down times, sunburned, my butt hurting a bit because in the end I did jump from the 10m platform into the pool, it still was a really nice event and even though I guess many people tried to enjoy themselfes quite some things were acomplished. If not really codewise, then at least social-wise, which will benefit quite well in the future, I'm sure. Hope to see you all next year, wherever that might be.

[/debian] permanent link

Fri, 19 May 2006

Just like Ben said...

thanks, Ted, for spoiling what was expected to be the nicest evening of the debconf. And thanks to the organizers for the really great special effects with the light plays and the waterfall; really!

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Mon, 08 May 2006

Arrived in Oaxtepec

... and already liking it. Though, first things first, some notes about the trip so far: The plane from vienna took off 50 minutes late due to weather reasons. It was quite nice, though, and I hope that some of the night pictures of town lightnings are usable. At least the delay reduced my waiting time at the madrid airport quite a bit.

Which brings me to that airport. It's... HUGE! I mean... erm, it has signs telling people that it will take 25 minutes to the gate that the plane to mexico will be leaving. And that is including the trip on some underground train they have that it doesn't take you much longer than that... But appart from that, I arrived on the gate area before midnight so I was able to order some drink at the starbucks. At least some shop that knows how to let people enjoy the waiting time. :)

The plane to mexico left on schedule at 1:50, so it was completely dark outside when we started. And almost the whole trip, up until about the last 20 minutes or so of the 13 hour flight, it was completely dark outside, because we were travelling ahead of the sun. So it wasn't too bad, being able to get some good sleep, at least as good as possible on a plane.

Having arrived in mexio airport with a short delay and waiting a bit for my suitcase I finally met up with Frans Pop, because I was too scared of getting lost without any sense for the spanish language yet. We took one of the prepaid official taxis to the bus that will take us the rest of the trip. The taxi drive was really... well, interesting. It was the fastest trip I've ever seen in any car in city area, but the bad thing: I can't even tell you how fast we were at times because the speedometer was b0rked and displayed only zero all of the time. I guess taxi drivers are most the same all around the world, but this one definitely mastered the art.

The bustrip wasn't anything notable, besides a bit tiresome due to the air in the bus, the partly monotonous vegetation outside and that I was sure to not be able to watch the movie to the end, besides that the sound was too silent. :)

Finally arrived at Oaxtepec, which turned out that our hotel seems to be in some sort of recreation area, maybe even a bit of themepark... At least it has some rollercoasters, at least they showed them on the video. We'll see. I at least tried out the pool already, it's not even feeling cold for me. Not have met all the people yet that are rumoured to be around already, but I guess it might happen at lunch, which is expected soonish. Due to network not working though this blog post will have to wait until afterwards.

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Fri, 07 Apr 2006

untangle

/me wonders why people seem to prefer a webbased, flash game when we have the very same thing in our sgt-puzzles package called untangle. Wasn't Debian and sort of Planet Debian about mainly free software, back then, somehow?

[/debian] permanent link

Fri, 10 Feb 2006

PHP mail() Considered Harmful

I know for myself that picking up unparsed userdata is teh evil. But we also all know that the usual webpage and mailer script coder isn't thinking. And to my knowledge the php mail() function is the only one that perverted to parse the headers additional to an explicit given recipient list for additional recipients. Yes, you read right. Often enough people use things like mail("myown@addre.ss", "subject", $body, "From: $_POST['name'] <$_POST['email']>") without thinking about it, because, there is this extra to field anyway. Right?
Wrong! SPAMers will come and send things like email="some@jo.ke\nBcc: my@sp.am, list@is.bigg.er, than@you.rs". People that put up such webmail scripts usually don't notice it anyway, they just delete the spam right ahead, not noticing that it was an abuse of their form. And the ISP has to deal with having to get the system out of the blacklists again....

At least none of the hosts on which customers are able to put up such scripts directly affect our own mail system, it's just the shared hosts they use... Still, deadly annoying. And then people are claiming that such misfeatures aren't a problem in PHP but in the coders? If it would at least be documented in the description of the function, but if one can claim it that it is it's at most just very vague hinted...

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Mon, 14 Nov 2005

Merry X-Mas

I know, I know. A bit early, you might say. But let's face it: The shopping industry is already fully into christmas. You already get advent calendars, christmas cookies and thing in the various stores. And I got my first christmas presents the last week....

First of all I finally tried again to switch to Linux 2.6. Going through the great amount of options in my make oldconfig from 2.4 I finally tried to boot with it. The most deep changes I did was:

• Switching from APM to ACPI: This was one of the things I was worried about. But there was nothing to worry, I now can even see the temperature of the processor!
• Software Suspend: I now can shutdown my system to disk! That rocks, and seems to be more stable than the former APM sleep mode, which occasionally had problems with waking up again...
• The powerbutton now performs a shutdown. Unfortunately it is the only button that seems to get recognized, the key bindings with the function key don't do much. But I am confident that this can be settled out, they are sending keycodes. Calling acpitool manually isn't that much of an annoyance yet.
• Switching from OSS to ALSA: Another thing I was worried about. But I found out about the OSS emulation, so that reduced my worries. In the end I'm now even running without it, programs like mp3blaster I'm running with the wrapper from alsa-oss. Switched the few packages that were OSS specific on my system (like the SDL sound package) afterwards and am happy with it.
• Framebuffer module neofb works now built in! Finally I also can play around with some nice boot logo, and in connection with software suspend this isn't even wasted time. :)

This was my own christmas present. But I got some more, from a dear friend whom I'm working with and helping from time to time. More in a funny way I sent him a christmas wishlist, but he took it serious, and so there I am. Like, with a Gameboy Advance SP Kingdom Hearts Edition, including the game. I really loved the first part on my Playstation 2, am desperately waiting for the second part which shall be released in europe in spring next year... *sighs*

The second major part was a Typhoon My Mini DJ music player. Most important thing for me with it is that it plays oggvorbis files natively. Finally I'm not the only one without a portable music player!

Last but not least I'm going to attend LWE in Frankfurt/Main, and finishing my LPI Level 1 certification there. I'm not too worried about the test, though it for sure will be a good feeling to finally have something written and not only you lot telling me that I have some knowledge about it.

[/debian] permanent link

Tue, 25 Oct 2005

grml 0.5 released, some history

Yesterday night grml 0.5 - Codename Tokolytika was released. I can just repeat my last remarks: grml is a charm when it comes to restoring systems, or in other tricky situations where you need your sysadmin tools handy. Saved my day quite often so far, and I'm sure it won't stop. Get it now! I simply don't know any better live CD.

For those who wonder what I was doing in the last time: I had been to the last Friday Night Skating of this year. The last hundred meters of the almost 2 hour lasting course I got pushed because my legs had finished early... Thank you very much, Conny!
All in all it was a great event and I'm sure to visit it more regularly next year. :)

Workload both at work and private didn't really stop for quite some weeks, it was a horror. I wasn't even able to reasonably follow any mailing lists, left aside to do any real work. Though if you noticed my 1.2.2-16 upload of beep you might know that I also have invested quite much there.

Furthermore I managed to get some people of our Debienna group interested in the g++ 4.0 transition. Greek0 wrote some scripts to bring the data of mfurr's page into one (for us) better suited to use and work from. In our wiki we write down our progress to keep us updated on who's working on getting what in.
I don't have real numbers, but from tracking mfurr's list of packages needing a recompile it went down quite a bit since we started, and we don't plan to stop soonish.

And finally: I've written an article about jigdo-lite for my company's magazine. It's the 5th issue of the magazine, and my third article for it (first has been about gnupg and second about MUDs). I like writing, and from some of the feedback I received people like reading me, too. :)

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Mon, 26 Sep 2005

Rename security.d.o to lamp.d.o

Given the recent security advisories I request the following: Please rename security.d.o to lamp.d.o because it hosts all the packages anyway....
To install a server nowadays you need to wait for security.d.o or have a local cache.

[/debian] permanent link

Mon, 11 Jul 2005

First impressions of debconf5

You don't have to follow all the links in the text, take a look at the overview gallery of the different days so far: 2005-07-08, 2005-07-09, 2005-07-10, 2005-07-11.

After a while my luggage arrived in HEL. The days so far had been quite hot, enjoying hanging around with people I've only been in contact via email, irc, or even not at all yet.

Some of them were overexcited to meet again. Some others had problems getting something to eat. (But only for half an hour or such, and only the non-vegetarian ones. Had been nice watching them waiting for their food. ;))

On a sidenode, this could be called the debconf of invalidity. Holger managed to have serious problems with one of his legs right from the start requiring crutches. Jordi was hit by elmo while playing frisbee yesterday and also has problems to move on. And though Amaya is doing pretty well with trying to learn skating she got an incident last night where she managed to get a rather nasty bruise. Others are just disliked by the birds, though (that's madduck's notebook.) I'm really wondering to whom next something is going to happen.

Ah, one last thing: For those being in HEL currently, if you like to buy one of these shirts feel free to bug me, I have several with me, both the girlie shirt and the polo shirt:

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Fri, 01 Jul 2005

Mako killed my legs

Had been to the LinuxTag this year again. Some crazy people paid for my train ticket so I show up there... Well, the train had its usual delay, but finally I got there. Met some old faces I've met on events before and some new ones I really was looking forward to. Even managed to visit three talks on the first day, a new event record for me. The most interesting one has been the one from Meike Reichle about Debian-Women. Got me wondered if I really should try to participate there with hearing about the male/female ratio on the list and on IRC and that some females rather shy away than try to participate when seeing so much males in there. On the other hand I'm not really pleased with the QoT (nice acronym, got it from their own list), so am somehow sitting in between the seats here....

Next day morning I noticed that my left sandal was b0rked and I was running around the whole day without ones. It would't had been much of a problem if it weren't so damned hot. Switching from the one hall to the other running across the place outside it felt like I got burned on my feets' soles. Did the first part of LPIC-1 test there, wasn't a big deal, put some comments on the additional sheet and hope they'll be able to read it and improve it in that respect. Got me new shoes as a present for passing it. ;)

In the evening there had been the social event which was quite nice — and long. Talking to all the people takes some time, and it was funny to see that people went crazy because they weren't able to hand out beer for about half an hour or such. As if people would die if they drink something else in the meantime... And I guess you've all seen the funny pictures already that were shot there, you can find a linklist to galleries collected by Joey like every year on his infodrom pages.

On saturday there had been another talk I visited ("Free Software with a female touch" by Fernanda). And the keysigning party, with over 100 participants... Lasted long, but finally done. Just have to sign all the keys now... *sighs*
After that there was little time left to speak with all the people, gathering my stuff and disassembling the booth. We went eating pizza and then back to the AKK. I really wanted to leave that evening already, but Mako forced me to stay with stating that he wouldn't send me any abusive SMS if I'd leave. Isn't that mean?! Oh well...
There had been this university party going on that night where we went to. It was really great! Lots of people, two halls for dancing and one where they had bands playing. Mako, Dogi, Azeem and me danced the night away.... And even at four in the morning, when my legs were already complaining it wasn't able to get Mako to stop. Dude, that guy has energy!! And one of the best dancing styles I've seen. If I thought he's adorable before by reading his blog and taking a look at his pictures his dancing makes me even more adore him... That guy truly rocks! .. and killed my legs. *grrrr*

Tolimar, you aren't the only one who has to fear getting to HEL wrecked. Although it got a bit better so far I made the mistake to meet Mako and Dogi again yesterday. Just met for some hanging out (*sigh* ;)) but when I had to hurry for my subway my legs started to hurt again because I had to run.... Damn you, Mako!

[/debian] permanent link

Thu, 02 Jun 2005

I'm still alive

Yes, I'm still alive. Some people know what was going on in the last weeks with me because they were involved, but some people just read my blog and might wonder what's up. Though, often I get the impression that I'm ignored anyway.

First of all I was working on getting some late packages into the upcoming sarge release. I'm confident that it will release soonish, I even promised someone that it will release within the next two months and I'm quite sure that this promise will hold.

Last week has been the Linuxwochen Wien and because I was responsible for the organization of the community booths there I was quite stressed with preperations and stuff so it works well for everyone. I guess I didn't do a too bad job though I know I could have done much better. Also I couldn't avoid to feel responsible for the Debian booth there which just raised my stress a bit. But it was fun anyway, especially the hacknight with the included Open Source Lan Party. We played the game Hack the Net in speed 100. It was really nice, I took a late and slow start but managed to win in the end, with a respectable margin.

We also had some new shirts this year, the design really was great, and formed a new term: debienna — debi(an vi)enna. Some shots of the shirts were taken, too. We have quite some left, I'll take some to HEL with me, it would be nice to tell me if you want one, so I don't take too few with me. Keep in mind that they are limited edition anyway so some reservation might not be a too bad idea (yes, helix, yours is already reserved. :))

I was informed that a really kind person bought me a deviantART subscription for my account there. It is really a charm, the additional features are simply great, I really love it. *kisses* to you!

[/debian] permanent link

Thu, 12 May 2005

t-prot rocks!

t-prot rocks like hell. It saves one from reading so much crap and calms your mood. For intance when receiving mails like the following:

Subject: RE: Debian Weekly News - 10. Mai 2005

Sorry I don't speak german, but my wife does.

-----Original Message-----
[---=| TOFU protection by t-prot: 206 lines snipped |=---]
[---=| Overlong signature removed by t-prot: 7 lines snipped |=---]

On a different note: I received my tickets to HEL!!! Yeah!!!

[/debian] permanent link

Tue, 26 Apr 2005

grieg is online

Like you most propably have read already we have a new arm machine online that is expected to go into real operation soon. We have to thank again Harald Kapper for hosting the machine (you might remember him as the person hosting a mipsel machine that Andreas Barth is using as buildd for experimental and non-free. Many kudos, Harald!!

[/debian] permanent link

Mon, 18 Apr 2005

Debian is Doomed

Today a package hit sarge that is upstream maintained by Microsoft: pptview (Copyright file).
<comment />

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Fri, 15 Apr 2005

SPAM in Figlet

Today I received this SPAM mail:

Subject: what's the time Mr Wolf?                                               


     ______  _____         _______ _     _
    |_____/ |     | |      |______  \___/
    |    \_ |_____| |_____ |______ _/   \_

    ________________________________________

    *DAYTONA, SUBMARINER, OYSTER PERPETUAL*

    http://XXXX.XXXX.XXX/r/razor/XXXXX.XX

Now this is a really interesting way to avoid the word match filters for rolex. Never saw before the use of figlet in a SPAM message... I feel inclined to click the link just to honor the creativity of it...

[/debian] permanent link

Wed, 23 Mar 2005

Correction to rsync Entry

I have written about that rsync rocks. This obviously is still true, but I need to make a correction to it about something that might have been misunderstood: I did try it, but the idea for trying it came originally from Matthias Kopfermann. He came up with suggesting xdelta or rsync, and personally I would never have thought of testing it if it wouldn't have been for him. It was simply a result that I'd have never expected.

I want to excuse to those who have read my previous entry which was really scathing, and especially to Matthi. It was written in a bad mood and after a heated discussion about something else, so I reacted in a really bad way. I hope this will stay the only time I have to change my blog because I usually don't like these things at all, appart from typo fixes, of course.

[/debian] permanent link

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