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Contributing to the translation of Debian

January 31, 2012 By Leave a Comment

If you’re not into packaging and if you asked how you could help Debian, someone probably suggested that you help to translate it.

It’s true that translating Debian is essential if we want to make Debian available to everybody on the world. There are many persons who are stuck as soon as they get a message in English, so it’s important to aim for 100% coverage in terms of localization.

Some vocabulary: localization vs internationalization

Internationalization (i18n) is the work that makes it possible to translate messages in a given application.

Localization (l10n) is the work of translating messages of said application. So as a translator, you’ll be doing “localization” but some knowledge of “internationalization” is still useful… because it will define how you’re supposed to provide the translations. We’ll come back to that later.

Join your localization team

Usually the translation work is shared among multiple translators within a localization team. Check out the Debian International page on www.debian.org to find out instructions for translators for each language.

Many teams have a debian-l10n-*@lists.debian.org mailing list used for coordination, feel free to ask questions on those lists when you start (but make sure that you have read the relevant documentation before).

Each team has its own workflow, so observe for a while to get used to what’s happening before asking your first questions.

What is there to translate?

The translation of most of the software provided by Debian is not handled by Debian. The Debian translation teams “only” handle the translation of:

Now before contributing to your first translation, I have to come back to internationalization to teach you a few things. In the above list, the projects marked with “(*)” do use PO files for their translation and the next sections will explain you how to work with those files.

Introduction to Gettext

The free software community has mostly standardized on a single internationalization infrastructure known as Gettext. With this tool, you’re provided a “POT file” which contains all the translatable strings. It looks like this:

# SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE.
# Copyright (C) YEAR Software in the Public Interest, Inc.
# This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package.
# FIRST AUTHOR , YEAR.
#
#, fuzzy
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: dpkg 1.16.1\n"
"Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: debian-dpkg@lists.debian.org\n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2011-09-23 03:37+0200\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n"
"Last-Translator: FULL NAME \n"
"Language-Team: LANGUAGE \n"
"Language: \n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
"Plural-Forms: nplurals=INTEGER; plural=EXPRESSION;\n"

#: lib/dpkg/ar.c:66
#, c-format
msgid "invalid character '%c' in archive '%.250s' member '%.16s' size"
msgstr ""

#: lib/dpkg/ar.c:81 lib/dpkg/ar.c:97 lib/dpkg/ar.c:108 lib/dpkg/ar.c:112
#: lib/dpkg/ar.c:134 utils/update-alternatives.c:1154
#, c-format
msgid "unable to write file '%s'"
msgstr ""

[…]

The lines starting with “#:” are comments that indicate the source files where the (English) string is used. This can be useful if you want check the source to have more information about how the string is used.

The lines starting with “#,” contain flags that can be important. If the “fuzzy” flag is set, the translated string is not used because it must be updated (or at least verified) since the original string evolved. The “c-format” flags indicates that the string must be a C format string, this has some implications in what’s allowed in the string (in particular when it embeds conversion specifier for arguments submitted to printf-like functions).

Another thing to note is that the translation of the empty string is used to store some meta-information about the translation itself.

Contributing a translation as a PO file

When you start a new translation, you copy that POT file to create a “PO file” for your own language (eg. fr.po for the French language). You replace some template values (identified with the upper case words in the POT file) and you replace all the empty strings on “msgstr” lines with the translation of the string that appears in the previous “msgid” line.

The result could be something like this:

# translation of fr.po to French
# Messages français pour dpkg (Linux-GNU Debian).
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: fr\n"
"Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: debian-dpkg@lists.debian.org\n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2011-09-23 03:37+0200\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: 2012-01-16 07:57+0100\n"
"Last-Translator: Christian Perrier \n"
"Language-Team: French \n"
"Language: fr\n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
"Plural-Forms: Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=n>1;\n"
"X-Generator: Lokalize 1.2\n"

#: lib/dpkg/ar.c:66
#, c-format
msgid "invalid character '%c' in archive '%.250s' member '%.16s' size"
msgstr "caractère invalide « %1$c » dans la taille du membre « %3$.16s » de l'archive « %2$.250s »"

#: lib/dpkg/ar.c:81 lib/dpkg/ar.c:97 lib/dpkg/ar.c:108 lib/dpkg/ar.c:112
#: lib/dpkg/ar.c:134 utils/update-alternatives.c:1154
#, c-format
msgid "unable to write file '%s'"
msgstr "impossible d'écrire le fichier « %s »"

[…]

If there’s already a “PO file” for your language, there might still work to do: there might be strings that have not yet been translated and there might be “fuzzy” strings which have to be updated — strings which were already translated but where the original string has been modified.

There are software that can assist you to edit PO files: poedit, virtaal, lokalize, gtranslator. There are also special extensions for vim (packaged in vim-scripts) and for Emacs.

Submit the translation for inclusion

Once you have a complete PO file, you should submit it for inclusion. Sometimes you will have been granted commit rights to the source code repository so that you can include your translation by yourself. In the other cases, you should submit your translation with a bug report tagged “l10n” and someone else will include your work in the next release.

Depending on the team, the workflow might require a review before the submission. In that case, you usually have to send a call for review on the coordination mailing list.

Go ahead!

Hopefully those explanations will be enough to get you started. There are many other things to learn¹ but it’s good to learn while practicing…

¹ For example, can you find out why the French translation above changed “%c” in “%1$c”?

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Answering questions of Debian users on various support channels

January 24, 2012 By 5 Comments

When you start your journey with Debian, you tend to have lots of questions. You’ll find some answers in various documentations but there always are remaining questions. Those can be asked on various support channels:

Those are the places where you can also start your journey as a Debian contributor… instead of asking questions, you just have to answer questions of other users! Let me share some advice if you want to do some user support.

User support is difficult…

It’s not always an easy task. Some users are more skilled than others and there might be difficulties related to the language, English is not always the native language of a user who asks a question in English.

Be respectful and courteous when you answer user questions, even if they made mistakes. You’re effectively representing Debian and you should give out a good image of the project. If you don’t have the patience or the time needed to do a good answer, don’t reply and let someone else take care of this user. I invite you to read (and follow!) the Debian Community Guidelines.

Avoid RTFM answers, instead you should show the users how they could have found (alone) the solution to their problem. We don’t want to scare people away, we want to grow our community.

But it’s also rewarding

In some cases, the problem reported by the user will be a real problem and you’ll have an opportunity to file a good bug report, thus helping to improve Debian for everybody.

Often, you don’t even have the answer to the user’s question. But you’re more skilled than him/her to do researches on the web, or you know of a good documentation that might contain the relevant bits of information, in any case you’re doing further research to help this user. In this process, you also grow your own skills since you’re learning stuff that you didn’t know yet.

At least that’s how I learned many things during my first year in the Debian community… there’s no reason why you couldn’t learn lots of stuff that way, in particular if you also read the answers of other skilled people on those channels (it takes a bit of training to learn who are the skilled people though).

I still believe that doing user support is one of the best ways to join the Debian community and to start contributing. It helps you to grow your skills, and to slowly progress from “average user” to “advanced user”.

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How to triage bugs in the Debian bug tracking system

September 16, 2011 By 6 Comments

Triaging bugs is one of the easiest way to start contributing to Debian. I’ll teach you the basics in this article.

1. Prerequisites

All interactions with the Debian Bug Tracking System (BTS) happen through email so you need to have an email account with an address that you’re willing to make public.

All the mail that you send to the BTS will be archived and publicly available through its web-interface. This also means that you should have some spam filters in place because it will inevitably be harvested by spammers. :-(

To ensure that this email address is consistently used by the various tools that we’re going to use, it’s a good idea to put this email address in the DEBEMAIL environment variable. You can also specify your full name in DEBFULLNAME (in case you don’t want to use the name associated with your Unix account). You usually do this by modifying ~/.bashrc (if you use bash as login shell):

export DEBEMAIL="hertzog@debian.org"
export DEBFULLNAME="Raphaël Hertzog"

You should also install the devscripts package, it provides the bts command that we’re going to use.

2. Find a package or a team with too many bugs

You can literally pick any popular software that’s in Debian, they almost always get more bug reports than the maintainers can handle. Instead of picking a package, you can also select a packaging team and concentrate your efforts on the set of packages managed by the team.

In any case, it’s important to receive the bug traffic for the packages that you’re going to work on. If you went for a specific package, you should subscribe to the package via the Package Tracking System (there’s a subscribe box on the bottom left corner once you selected the source package of interest). If you decided to help a team, there’s usually a dedicated mailing list receiving all bug traffic.

You can browse a list of packages with the most bugs if you have troubles finding a package to work on.

A stack of bug reports to triage

3. Triage bugs!

Bug triaging is all about making sure that bugs are correctly classified so that when a developer looks at the bug list, he can quickly find bugs with all the information required to be able to fix them!

3.1 Adding information to bug

Adding supplementary information is easily done just by sending a mail to XXXX@bugs.debian.org (replace XXXX with the bug number).

But often you want to reply to a message in the bug history, in that case “bts --mbox show XXXX” is for you. It will grab the corresponding mailbox and open a mailer (mutt by default) on it. Now you can directly reply in your favorite mailer.

3.2 Classifying bugs

The Debian BTS uses tags (click the link and read the doc!) to classify bugs. “bts tag XXXX + foo” will add the foo tag (replace the + with a – to remove a tag). If you want to explain why you’re adding a tag, you should instead reply in the bug log as explained above, put control@bugs.debian.org in Bcc (Blind Carbon Copy) and start the body of your message with your tag command:

tag XXXX + foo
thanks

But what tag should you add? When a bug is submitted, you should try to reproduce the bug. If you can reproduce it, then tag the bug “confirmed” (example in #641710). If you can’t, you should request more information (ex: a sample document triggering the bug, a configuration file, the output of some relevant command, etc.) until you can reproduce it or conclude that it was a user mistake. When you request supplementary information due to this, you should tag the bug “unreproducible moreinfo” (example in #526774). “moreinfo” should be later dropped when the requested information are provided, and “unreproducible” should be dropped if those information were enough to actually help reproduce the bug (example in #526774).

During that initial evaluation, it’s also worth differentiating packaging bugs (which are specific to Debian) from upstream bugs (which are relevant also for non-Debian users). The latter should be tagged “upstream” (and forwarded upstream if the bug is reproducible or contains enough information for the upstream developers, example in #635112).

If you saw a (viable) patch in the bug log, the bug should be tagged “patch”. This is usually done by the patch submitter but sometimes it’s forgotten (example in #632460). Take care though to not reinstate the patch tag if it was initially set but then dropped by the package maintainer after a review of the patch.

If the title of the bug report is not descriptive enough, you can change it with a “retitle XXXX new-title” command (example in #170850).

You can also change the severity of the bug report depending on the impact of the problem (with a command “severity XXXX new-severity”, what a surprise!). Request for new features are “wishlist”, most documentation problems are “minor”. On the other side of the scale, you can use “important” for bugs that are very annoying but that should not block a release. “serious”, “grave” and “critical” are used for release critical bugs, check the official definitions of the severities (examples in 502738 or #506498).

3.3 Closing non-bugs and bugs that are already fixed

If your analysis of the bug report is that it’s not really a bug but a user mistake, then you should close it by sending a mail to XXXX-done@bugs.debian.org with some explanations of the user’s mistake so that he can get past his problem (example in #592853).

If the problem was a real bug, but one that is apparently already fixed, you should try to quickly find the version that fixed the bug. If you can’t find it in the changelog (there’s a link to it in the PTS, or you can use /usr/share/doc/package/changelog.Debian.gz), you’ll make the safe assumption that the upstream version you’re currently using is the first one where this is fixed. Then you send a mail to XXXX-done@bugs.debian.org but you start your mail with “Version: version-that-fixed-the-bug” and continue with a small explanation of why you believe the bug to be fixed by this version (example in #122948).

3.4 Reassigning misfiled bug reports

Bug reports are not always filed against the proper package. Users file bugs against applications where they experience the bugs, but the real bug might be in an underlying library or application.

When that happens, you should use the “reassign XXXX correct-package version” command to get it filed against the correct package. The version parameter is optional but should be provided if possible, it should be the oldest version that we know to have the problem (example in #626232).

3.5 Forwarding bugs

Forwarding bugs means opening bug reports in the upstream bug tracker for issues that have been reported in Debian but that applies to the upstream (unmodified) source code. Be sure to include all the relevant information and a link to the corresponding Debian bug.

Depending on the upstream bug tracker, you might have to open an account to be able to file new bug reports.

On the Debian side, you must record that a bug has been forwarded with “bts forwarded XXXX upstream-bug-url”. upstream-bug-url is the URL corresponding to the upstream bug report you created (ex: http://projects.ciarang.com/p/feed2omb/issues/21/ recorded in #609345″).

If the upstream authors fix the bug you reported, you can tag the Debian bug with “fixed-upstream” so that it’s easier to find bugs to close when the next upstream release comes out (example in #637275).

3.6 Updating version information

The Debian BTS uses “version tracking” to know which package versions are affected by a given bug. It’s particularly important to have correct version information for release critical bugs since it might affect the migration of packages to testing.

You can learn more on this topic here: http://wiki.debian.org/HowtoUseBTS.

4. More advice

Colin Watson wrote a constructive rant explaining some mistakes that bug triagers are often doing. While it refers mainly to Ubuntu’s launchpad, the advice apply equally as well to Debian. Check it out to become a better bug triager!

Note that you can refer to this article with this shorter URL: http://raphaelhertzog.com/go/bugtriaging/

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Understand dpkg and don’t get stuck with a maintainer script failure

September 13, 2011 By 14 Comments

Continuing my series of articles on dpkg’s errors, this time I’ll cover a pretty common one which has several variations:

Setting up acpid (1:2.0.12-1) ...
rm: cannot remove `/etc/rc1.d/K20acpid': No such file or directory
dpkg: error processing acpid (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 acpid

Even if dpkg is failing and outputting the error message, the real problem is not in dpkg but in the installed package (acpid in the example above). As we already learned, a package contains not only files but also “maintainer scripts” that are executed at various points of the installation process (see some useful graphics to understand how they are called, thanks to Margarita Manterola).

Maintainer scripts in a package upgrade

In the introductory example it was acpid’s “post-installation script” that failed, and dpkg is only forwarding that failure back to the caller. The maintainer scripts are stored in /var/lib/dpkg/info/. You can thus inspect them and even modify them if you hit a bug and want to work around it (do this only if you understand what you do!).

One common modification is to add “set -x” at the start of the script and to retry the failing operation. That way you can see what’s executed exactly. Here’s what the output could look like after the addition of “set -x” to /var/lib/dpkg/info/acpid.postinst:

$ sudo dpkg --configure acpid
Setting up acpid (1:2.0.12-1) ...
+ dpkg --compare-versions 1:2.0.11-1 lt-nl 1.0.10-3
+ dpkg --compare-versions 1:2.0.11-1 lt-nl 1.0.6-16
+ dpkg --compare-versions 1:2.0.11-1 lt 1.0.6-6
+ rm /etc/rc1.d/K20acpid
rm: cannot remove `/etc/rc1.d/K20acpid': No such file or directory
dpkg: error processing acpid (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 acpid

This output helps you locate the command that is actually failing. Here’s it’s relatively easy since we have an error message from “rm”. And the fix is trivial too, we replace “rm” with “rm -f” so that it doesn’t fail when the file doesn’t exist (this is a fake bug I made up for this article—I just added a failing rm call—but it’s inspired by real bugs I experienced).

Maintainer scripts are supposed to be idempotent: we should be able to execute them several times in a row without bad consequences. It happens from time to time that the maintainer gets this wrong… on the first try it works, so he uploads his package and we discover the problem only later once someone ended up executing the same code twice for some reason.

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Understanding dpkg’s file overwrite error

August 1, 2011 By 3 Comments

This is probably one of the most common errors. You’re very likely to encounter it, in particular if you tend to mix packages from various origins/distributions, or if you’re using unstable. It looks like this:

Unpacking gbonds-data (from .../gbonds-data_2.0.3-2_all.deb) ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/gbonds-data_2.0.3-2_all.deb (--unpack):
 trying to overwrite '/usr/share/omf/gbonds/gbonds-C.omf', which is also in package gbonds 2.0.2-9
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)

A given file can only be provided by a single package. So if you try to install a package that provides a file that is already part of another installed package, it will fail with a message similar to the above one.

Sometimes this failure will be meaningful because dpkg prevented you to install two unrelated packages that happen to have a real file conflict. In other cases, like in the example above, this failure is just the result of a mistake.

Folder with gears

The version 2.0.3-1 of gbonds split the architecture independent files in a separate package called gbonds-data but the maintainer forgot to add the required control field in gbonds-data (Replaces: gbonds (<< 2.0.3-1)). That field allows dpkg to take over files from the listed packages.

If you want to ignore the file conflict and let dpkg take over the file (even without the Replaces), you can pass the --force-overwrite command-line option.

But you’re not using dpkg directly, you’re probably using an APT frontend (like apt-get or aptitude). Don’t worry, there’s a simple way to define custom dpkg options to use:

# apt-get -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-overwrite" install gbonds-data

The syntax is a bit weird, but the “::” after “Options” is important, it’s the syntax that defines a list item value instead of a single value. And you can effectively pass multiple options to dpkg by putting multiple -o Dpkg::Options::="…".

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Deciphering one of dpkg’s weirdest errors: unable to open ‘/path/to/foo.dpkg-new’

July 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

We already studied one weird error of dpkg, let’s do another one:

Unpacking replacement libexo-common ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/libexo-common_0.6.1-1_all.deb (--unpack):
 unable to open '/usr/share/doc/exo/html/C/images/exo-preferred-applications-internet.png.dpkg-new': No such file or directory

Rather difficult to understand on the first look right? Let’s see in detail what’s usually happening when you get this error.

The first hint comes from the file extension “.dpkg-new”. This extension is used by dpkg to unpack the updated files near the old files. When everything has been unpacked, they are renamed over the old files.

The failure happens precisely when dpkg tries to rename the file (in fact when it tries to fsync() it before the rename)… but why does it fail?

Usually because there are unexpected symlinks (or bind mounts) involved that resulted in two different files being installed in the same directory. For example consider package that provides /dir1/a-file and /dir2/a-file. Now imagine that on the target system, /dir1 is a real directory but /dir2 is a symbolic link that points to /dir1.

When dpkg processes /dir1/a-file.dpkg-new everything is fine, but when it tries to process /dir2/a-file.dpkg-new it will fail because that file is the same than /dir1/a-file.dpkg-new which has already been renamed.

Diagnosing further the problem requires to understand why there’s a symlink instead of a real directory. It might be two packages that were badly coordinated, or a problem in the package itself because it lacks some code that drops the symlink in the preinst (so that dpkg installs the real directory instead of keeping the symlink).

There might be variations in the way two files end up sharing the same directory, but this simple example should have clarified the nature of the underlying problem.

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How to squash Debian release critical bugs

July 14, 2011 By 1 Comment

Squashing release critical (RC) bugs is one of the most helpful way to contribute to Debian. Because those are the bugs that we need to get rid of in order to release the next stable version. Let’s see how you can help.

The process is really simple:

  1. Find a RC bug that you can fix
  2. Prepare a fixed package
  3. Send the patch to the BTS
  4. Get your fixed package uploaded

I have already covered points 2 and 3 in a former article: How to prepare patches for Debian packages. So I’m not going to repeat myself in this article, instead I’ll cover how to find a release critical bug to fix and how to get your package uploaded.

Find a RC bug with UDD

The Ultimate Debian Database (UDD) provides a neat interface to query the bug tracking system: http://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi. The form contains many options to customize the query, we’ll try explain some.

First, at the top, you can decide to list bugs based on whether or not they affect testing/stable/unstable. Indeed, thanks to version tracking the BTS knows if a bug applies to the version of the package present in a given distribution. I suggest you pick a choice that includes “sid” because that’s where you’re going to push your fixed package. If sid is not affected by the bug, you can’t do much about it (except if you want to join the release team and help ensure updates are flowing from unstable to testing).

I usually go for “wheezy and sid” because that filters out packages which are not in testing (and are thus not blocking the next release).

Then you have lots of filters to further reduce the list of bugs. It’s important to reduce the noise as you typically have several hundreds of RC bugs at a given time. I suggest you the following settings for a start, but you’re free to try other combinations depending on what you want to achieve (I’ll give some examples later):

  • ignore bugs tagged patch (a fix is already available);
  • ignore bugs tagged pending (a fix has already been committed to the VCS repository);
  • ignore bugs newer than 7 days (that’s the time we should leave for the maintainer to take care of the bug by himself);

I usually sort the results by source package so that I immediately see if several RC bugs are affecting the source package. And I might add “popularity contest” information to get a feel of whether the package is widely used or not.

You can see the results of the suggested query here.

Other interesting queries:

Find a RC bug with rc-alert

The downside of the above method is that you get bugs on packages that you don’t know at all and that you might not care about. Some of them might even be better removed instead of fixed.

With the rc-alert command (provided by the devscripts package), you will get a list of RC bugs
on packages that are installed on your computer. It should be much more restrictive. And you have command line options to further filter the list just like with the UDD form. Bonus feature: you can also filter by debtags allowing you to restrict the bugs to packages which are implemented in programming languages that you know.

$ rc-alert --include-dists TU --exclude-tags P+ --debtags implemented-in::perl,implemented-in::python
Package: gwibber
Bug:     608724
Title:   gwibber bypasses certificate checking when providing the login/password for OAuth
Flags:   [     S  ] (security)
Dists:   [STU] (stable, testing, unstable)
Debtags: implemented-in::python, interface::x11, role::program, uitoolkit::gtk, works-with::im, x11::application
[...]

Get your fixed package uploaded

Usually sending the patch to the BTS is more than enough. The maintainer or another Debian developer will pick it up at some point. But if you’re interested in becoming a Debian maintainer/developer, it might be worth to push your changes more quickly and get credited by a proper upload with your name.

Instead of just preparing a patch, you should also prepare a fixed package following the rules of a Non-Maintainer Upload. Put this package somewhere online (for example on mentors.debian.net).

When you send your patch to the BTS, include the link to the updated package and express your wish to get this update sponsored. If you haven’t heard anything from the maintainer after 2-3 days, try to find a sponsor on debian-mentors@lists.debian.org. NMUs are easier to review than completely new packages and many Debian developers like to kill RC bugs, so there’s a good chance that you’ll find someone.

Now happy RC bug-squashing! And if you really enjoy it, you can subscribe to debian-bugs-rc (~3000 mails per month)… :-)

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7 tips to file useful Debian bug reports and get your problem solved

July 11, 2011 By 7 Comments

Filing bug reports is the most common way for users to contribute. Even if it’s not too difficult, I’ll give you some advice to improve the quality of your reports. After all, when you go out of your way to report a bug, it is in the hope to see it fixed… so let’s see how we can make this more likely.

1. Try to reproduce the bug

If you can’t reproduce the bug, it’s next to impossible to find the root cause and thus to fix it. In that case, I would suggest you to wait until you experienced the bug multiple times. Maybe you’ll be able to find something that triggers it (or that makes it more likely to encounter it). If the application has a debug/verbose mode, it might be a good idea to enable it until you experience the bug a second time. The generated log might be helpful for the developer to understand what happens exactly.

So don’t file bug reports straight away unless you can reproduce it. The exception to the rule is when the application gives some useful information like a core-dump, a back-trace or an error message.

Obviously if the bug happens during an upgrade, it’s difficult to reproduce it (unless you have multiple computers) but you should still report it. Be sure to include all the relevant information (versions of packages before and after the upgrade, logs of the upgrade, etc.).

2. Do your best to identify the faulty package

When you report a bug to Debian, you must assign it to a package. While there are pseudo-packages useful for problems which are not directly attributable to a real package, in most of the cases you should report a bug against the specific package that seems to be the cause of the problem you encountered.

In turn this often requires you to attribute the problem to a file (for example the executable of the application that triggers the bug). Once you have a filename you can use dpkg -S to identify the corresponding package.

$ dpkg -S /usr/bin/hamster-time-tracker
hamster-applet: /usr/bin/hamster-time-tracker

Note that reportbug accepts a filename as parameter and will do the above conversion for you.

If you only know the name of the application (but not the filename of the associated executable), you can use dpkg -S with a pattern to let it return all possible matches:

$ dpkg -S hamster
hamster-applet: /usr/share/applications/hamster-applet.desktop
hamster-applet: /usr/share/gnome/help/hamster-applet/es/statistics.page
[…]
hamster-applet: /usr/bin/hamster-time-tracker
[…]

Or you can also verify in the list of installed packages:

$ dpkg -l "*hamster*"
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name            Version         Description
+++-===============-===============-==============================================
ii  hamster-applet  2.32.1-1        time tracking applet for GNOME

3. Verify that the bug is not already reported and/or fixed

If there’s a newer version of the software available, it’s a good idea to try to reproduce the problem with this version too. Because the developers tend to care only about the latest version, they will want to reproduce it with this version, and they will be annoyed if the problem that you reported is already fixed. That’s why bug reports of users of testing/unstable tend to be more useful than bug reports of stable users.

In any case, you want to verify that the bug has not yet been reported: filing a duplicate bug is useless and only generates more work for the developers to merge both bugs together. On the opposite, it’s highly appreciated to add supplementary information to an existing bug report, even a simple confirmation that the bug still exists on a newer version is useful.

Note that reportbug will automatically show you the list of open bugs before allowing you to submit a new one.

4. Use reportbug

While the Debian bug tracking system allows anyone to submit a new bug with a simple mail, you should really use a dedicated program like reportbug (or reportbug-ng) because it will automatically include lots of useful information in the generated report (version of dependencies, current architecture, etc.) and will assist you in all the steps.

5. Describe the problem so that the developer can reproduce it

Ideally your report should include everything required so that the developer can reproduce the problem on his system. If a given document triggers the bug, attach it.

Describe the steps required to reproduce the bug in great details just like you would explain it to your grand-ma. Explain how you expected the program to react and what happened instead.

You can learn much more on how to draft a good bug report in this article: How to report bugs effectively. It’s a bit long but well worth it if you intend to report bugs and thus interact with developers.

6. Be kind and willing to help

When you draft a bug report, keep in mind that you’re writing to a volunteer free software developer and not to a customer service. You should be respectful and follow the usual rules of courtesy. Developers’ attention is scarce and should not be wasted.

Be willing to help, if the developer starts investigating your problem, he might need your help to get supplementary information (in particular if he can’t reproduce it) and you should be ready to provide it. Thus it’s important to keep whatever you need to reproduce the problem.

In some cases, the Debian maintainer might be overworked and you can offer your help to forward the bug to the upstream bug tracker, it’s always appreciated. If you’re reasonably confident that the problem is not Debian-specific, you can do it straight away and set the forwarded field to the URL of the upstream bug report (for example with bts forwarded <bug> <url>).

7. Use the correct severity

The Debian bug tracking system lets you set the initial severity of the bug report (in decreasing severity: critical, grave, serious, important, normal, minor, wishlist). Pick the correct severity according to the official definitions but don’t misread them.

In particular, don’t over-inflate the severity: for instance if you lost some data due to a misuse of the software, it’s not “critical” (i.e. “rm -rf *” doesn’t warrant a critical bug against rm). If you use only a tiny part of a software, and that part doesn’t work, the package might be unusable for you but it’s not unusable for everybody, so it doesn’t warrant the “grave” severity. The “important” severity is often a good choice in those cases.

Do not under-estimate the severity either, if a problem is important enough that it must be fixed before the next stable release (for example a regression compared to the previous release), pick a release-critical severity (i.e. at least “serious”). The maintainer and the release manager can always lower the severity if they do not agree with your initial judgment.

And now, happy bug-reporting! You can refer to this article with this shorter URL: http://raphaelhertzog.com/go/bugreporting/

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Filed Under: Documentation, User Documentation Tagged With: , , , , ,

How to prepare patches for Debian packages

July 4, 2011 By 3 Comments

You want to start contributing to Debian and/or Ubuntu, you decided to help a package maintainer and you’re now looking for how to change a source package and how to submit your changes.

1. Retrieve the source package and install build-dependencies

The first step is to retrieve the latest version of the source package and to install the required build-dependencies. I already covered how to do this with apt-get in the article explaining how to rebuild a source package.

If you prefer, you can use dget (from the devscripts package) to directly grab the source package. You can find the URL of the .dsc files in the Package Tracking System for example.

Sometimes apt-get will warn you that the source package is maintained in a VCS repository, like this:

$ apt-get source wordpress
[...]
NOTICE: 'wordpress' packaging is maintained in the 'Git' version control system at:
git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/wordpress.git
[...]

In that case, you can use debcheckout to retrieve the VCS repository instead (provided that you have the corresponding VCS installed):

$ debcheckout wordpress
declared git repository at git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/wordpress.git
git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/wordpress.git wordpress ...
Cloning into wordpress...

Note however that some maintainers use their VCS in a way that’s not really compatible with the explanations that I will give below.

It’s also a good idea to install the package “packaging-dev”. It’s a meta-package depending on the most common tools that are used for Debian packaging work.

2. Do the changes

Execute dch --nmu to record the fact that you’re working on an update prepared by someone who is not the maintainer (NMU means Non Maintainer Upload). This also ensures that if we build the package, we won’t overwrite the original source package that we downloaded, thus making it possible to generate a “diff” between both versions.

2.1. Modify Debian packaging files

Now fire your text editor and do the required changes in the “debian” sub-directory. You will probably run dch -a multiple times to document each subsequent change.

2.2. Modify upstream files

If you have to modify upstream files, the proper way to do it depends on the source package format (“1.0″ vs “3.0 (quilt)” vs “3.0 (native)”, see the debian/source/format file) and on the presence or not of a patch system (the what-patch can help you identify it). In this explanation, I’ll assume that the package is using the recommended format: “3.0 (quilt)”. (It also works for “1.0″ if quilt is used and if you configured ~/.quiltrc as recommended by /usr/share/doc/quilt/README.source).

First you should ensure that all patches have been applied with quilt push -a. If there’s no patch yet, you want to create the debian/patches directory (with mkdir debian/patches). Note that you should better invoke quilt from the root of the source package (and the examples below assume this).

2.2.1. Import a patch

If the upstream changes are already in a patch file (say /tmp/patch that you downloaded from the upstream VCS repository) you can import that patch like this:

$ quilt import -P fix-foobar.patch /tmp/patch
Importing patch /tmp/patch (stored as fix-foobar.patch)
$ quilt push
Applying patch fix-foobar.patch
[...]
Now at patch fix-foobar.patch

The -P option allows to select the name of the patch file created in debian/patches/. As you see, the new patch file is recorded in debian/patches/series but not applied by default, we’re thus doing it with quilt push.

2.2.1. Create a new patch

If the upstream changes that you want to make are not in a patch yet, you should tell quilt that you’re going to create one:

$ quilt new fix-foobar.patch
Patch fix-foobar.patch is now on top

Then you must record every file that you’re going to modify with a quilt add invocation. quilt then makes a backup of those files so that it can generate the patch later on. If you’re going to modify the files with your text editor you can just do quilt edit file-to-modify, it’s the same than quilt add file-to-modify followed by sensible-editor file-to-modify.

$ quilt edit foobar.c
File foobar.c added to patch fix-foobar.patch

The last step is tell quilt to generate the patch:

$ quilt refresh
Refreshed patch fix-foobar.patch

3. Test your changes

You should build your modified package with “debuild -us -uc”. You can easily install the resulting package with “debi”. Verify that everything works as expected. If not, continue your modifications until you’re satisfied with the result.

4. Generate a patch and mail it

If you followed the instructions, you should have two .dsc files in the parent directory, like this:

$ cd ..
$ ls wordpress_*.dsc
../wordpress_3.0.5+dfsg-1.1.dsc
../wordpress_3.0.5+dfsg-1.dsc

Generating the patch to send to the maintainer is then just a matter of running debdiff:

$ debdiff wordpress_3.0.5+dfsg-1.dsc wordpress_3.0.5+dfsg-1.1.dsc >/tmp/wp-debdiff

You can send the /tmp/wp-debdiff file to the wordpress maintainer. Usually you send it via the bugreport that your update is fixing and you add the “patch” tag to the report.

This can be automated with the nmudiff utility. By default it assumes that you’re using mutt but it can also directly feed the resulting mail to sendmail. The default text that nmudiff proposes assumes that you’re actually performing an NMU and that the result has been uploaded. If that’s not the case, you should edit the text and make it clear that you’re just sending a patch.

If you have been working in a VCS repository, instead of using debdiff you can simply use the diff feature integrated in your VCS (git diff, svn diff, etc.). But note that with a distributed VCS (like git/bzr/mercurial, unlike svn) you should probably have committed all individual changes in separate changesets. And instead of sending a single patch, you’re probably going to send a series of patches (though it might be easier to just upload your branch in a public repository and give the corresponding URL to the maintainer).

Found it useful? Be sure to not miss other packaging tips (or lessons), click here to subscribe to my free newsletter and get new articles by email.

Filed Under: Contributor Documentation, Documentation Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

How to start contributing to Debian?

June 30, 2011 By 14 Comments

I often get requests of persons who would like to contribute to Debian but who don’t know where to start. Let’s try to answer this question properly so that I can give out this URL the next time that I am asked.

The Debian website has a page explaining how to help Debian. While it provides no less than 10 suggestions in a daunting text-only list, it’s difficult to know what to do next once you picked up something that you could do.

I will try to fix this by providing concrete information for each cases in upcoming articles but in the mean time I propose you another approach to start with. Before answering your question (“what can I do for Debian”), we need to know some information about you.

What motivates you?

You’re a volunteer, you’re not doing stuff for Debian because someone told you so. You must have some intrinsic motivation and the ultimate motivation is usually that you’re enjoying what you’re doing.

So what are you enjoying and/or what are your motivations ?

  • Is there something that you would like to learn? A new programming language? Packaging? Coding? System administration? A specific software?
  • Do you want to interact with smart people?
  • Do you like to help users?
  • Do you like to fix software just so that it works for you?
  • Do you like to build something remarkable and useful for millions of people?

On the opposite, make sure to know what you hate and what you want to stay far away from. Maybe you dislike a programming language so much that you don’t want to be involved in a project where you would have to use it, etc.

Write down the answers to the questions, you might need them later when you’ll ask other Debian contributors how you can help.

What are your skills?

If you’re not interested in learning new skills, then you must obviously select a task where your current skills are sufficient. Again make a list of your skills and in particular of skills that you’d like to practice! Here’s a non-exhaustive list of skills to consider:

  • What languages are you fluent with? Are you confident to write documentation or translate documentation in those languages?
  • Are you a programmer? If yes, which languages do you know?
  • Can you diagnose problems? Can you debug problems with strace and/or gdb?
  • Can you triage bugs?
  • Do you know some Debian packaging?
  • Are you an artist and/or a web designer?
  • Do you know how to work with VCS (subversion, git, bzr, …)?

How much time can you spend on Debian?

This is the last important information that you need to communicate whenever you’re asking someone else what you could do for Debian. There’s no point giving you a big task if you can only spend 30 minutes every week. On the opposite if you can work on Debian full time during a week (because you’re between 2 contracts or because you’re in vacation), it’s equally important to know.

In general contributing to Debian requires time, you should be ready to spend at least several hours per week and possibly more at the start while you’re learning everything.

Find something to do

At this point you have a generic idea of what you’d like to do but you’re still missing a concrete objective. Let’s try to find one, we’ll explore several ways to do this.

Scratch your itch

The best objectives are those that satisfy your own needs. Here are some examples:

  • Did you notice a missing feature? Try to implement it.
  • Have you been annoyed by a bug? Try to fix it.
  • Did you lose too much time on something because there was no documentation? Write the missing documentation and submit it where appropriate.
  • File bug reports for the things that you can’t fix yourself. Even wishlist bug reports for new features.
  • Do you use software that are not packaged for Debian? Create the package(s) and maintain it/them.
  • Do you need a newer version of a package compared to what’s in Debian unstable? Contact the maintainer and propose your help to update the package.
  • Do you need a newer version of a package compared to what’s in Debian stable? Contact the maintainer and propose your help to create a backport.

If you’re a good Debian citizen, you have already filed bugs for issues that bugged you. Then you can browse http://bugs.debian.org/from:hertzog@debian.org to find out some ideas of stuff to do (obviously replace hertzog@debian.org by your own email address).

Join a team

If you don’t have a specific itch to scratch, you might want to focus your work on a specific team. Head over to wiki.debian.org/Teams and browse the list of teams.

You’ll surely find one that works in an area that you like. If you select a packaging team, pick one that works on packages that you’re actually using.

Some of the teams have instructions for newcomers, follow them when that is the case. Otherwise join the mailing list and the IRC channel, and get a feel of how the team works. See if it suits you, you can follow several teams at the same time and pick the one that you prefer after a few days/weeks.

Once you have lurked a bit, if you still don’t know how you could help, then just ask on the mailing list. Include all the answers you have collected to the 3 questions on your motivations, your skills and your time available.

Focus on a specific package

You can concentrate your work on a specific package even if you’re in a team, it’s often a good idea. But I list it separately because not all packages are team maintained and you might want to help maintain a package where there’s a single maintainer currently. I leave it up to you to find a way to select a package that interests you…

Then head over to the package tracking system: http://packages.qa.debian.org/dpkg (replace dpkg by the name of the package that interests you)

Fill in the form in the bottom-left corner with your email and select “opts” in the drop-down list, then click “go”. You get a new form where you can select the information that you’ll receive, I recommend you to keep everything except “upload-binary” and to validate the form.

From now on, you get the same mails than the maintainer (and a bit more actually), and it’s a good idea to inform the maintainer that you subscribed and that you’re going to help a bit. Maybe he’s willing to grant you commit rights immediately, maybe he will ask you to send patches for a start. The important thing is to create a good relationship. In any case (even if you did not get any answer from the maintainer), you should be free to help triage existing bugs and to help deal with the flow of incoming bugs (including forwarding bugs when appropriate).

Help a Debian developer

Paul Tagliamonte once blogged Hey, DDs, need help?. He offered his help to “overworked Debian developers”. His post was missing all the information required (cf motivations/skills/time) but the approach is a good one.

The best way to start contributing is to work with existing Debian developers. Even if you “just” want to be sponsored for your own pet package, you should consider that mentoring is a burden for many Debian developers and that you’re more likely to get a sponsor if you have an existing relationship with a Debian developer that you helped. Pick a developer that works in an area that is of interest, and offer him your help.

To simplify things even further, I have created a wiki page where you can find out how you can help me and thus build a relationship with me.

That’s it for now, I hope this article will help you to start contributing. Don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter to not miss future articles for new contributors. Note that you can refer to this article with the following URL: http://raphaelhertzog.com/go/contributing/ (easier to type and remember).

PS: You might want to also check my Contributing to Debian page.

Filed Under: Contributor Documentation, Documentation Tagged With: , ,
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