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My Free Software Activities in December 2012

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This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (836.78 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Debian Packaging

I uploaded Zim 0.58, WordPress 3.5 (and I had to file a ticket about the availability of sources of minified javascript files — again) and another security update for python-django (696535).

Speaking of python-django, I forwarded one bug report of Anders Kaseorg concerning Django’s bash completion (#695811).

I also sponsored the upload of ledgersmb 1.3.25-1.

Other Debian work

I contributed some patches to improve debian-installer support in live-build. I also added a work-around for bug #652946 in live-installer and committed a fix for this same bug in a jessie branch of partman-target.

I also prepared a bugfix for a counter-productive behavior of choose-mirror (#695261, it was not possible to override the codename of the release to install via preseed if you install from a CD with a full base system).

I discovered an oddity in the Packages.diff/Index file for the architectures armhf and s390x, I reported it to ftpmasters in #696792.

(All those issues were discovered while working for a customer)

Debian France

I spent quite some time on Debian France this month again. I started by setting up an internal gitolite to manage our accounting/administrative documents.

Then I updated galette, the web application that we are using to manage our database of members. In the process, I filed two bugs that we discovered. I immediately tested Galette by registering 4 members that joined during the former mini-Debconf in Paris.

We have plans to automate the membership renewal process so we have opened a Paypal account. This month we also cleared the last steps so that I and Sylvestre Ledru have full control on the Debian France bank account.

I also registered the new officers at the “Tribunal d’instance de Sarreguemines”.

Salt bug reports

During the last mini-debconf, I discovered Salt (thanks to Julien Cristau!) and since I had to switch some servers of mine, I took this opportunity to upgrade to wheezy and try out salt at the same time.

It took much more time than expected but the result is pleasant. The configuration of all my servers is now well documented/specified in a central Git repository, and moving services is much easier than before.

In the process, I filed quite some bugs (#2865, #2851, #2866 and #2875), most of them have been fixed in the 0.11.1 release that just happened.

Thanks

I wish you a happy new year and all the best for 2013!

See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

My Free Software Activities in November 2012

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This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (692.20 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Misc packaging

I updated the publican package (a tool for publishing material authored in DocBook XML) with version 3.0, a major new upstream version. As with any important update, it had its share of problems and I created two patches that I sent upstream. I uploaded the package to experimental since we’re in freeze.

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook

Since the translation teams have been working for a few months, I wanted to put the result of their work online. I did it and I blogged about it on debian-handbook.info. By the way, we have a Polish translation that just started.

This took quite some time because many translators were not well versed with Docbook XML and its structure. So I fixed their mistakes and asked the Weblate developer (Michal Cihar) to implement new checks to avoid those basic XML mistakes.

I also added a couple of build scripts to the git repository to make it easier to rebuild translations in multiple formats. I used this opportunity to file a couple of bugs I encountered with Publican (concerning ePub output mainly, and custom brands).

I also blogged about our plans to update the book for Wheezy. Roland started to work on it but I did not have the time yet.

Debian France

The officers (president, treasurer, secretary) have just changed and we had to organize the transition. As the new president, I got administrator access on our Gandi virtual machine (france.debian.net) as well as access to our bank account. I got also got a bunch of administrative papers retracing the history of the association. Carl Chenet (the former president) gave them to me during the mini-debconf that was organized in Paris.

Indeed, Sylvestre Ledru and Mehdi Dogguy organized our second mini-debconf Paris and they did it very well. It was a great success with over 100 attendants each of the 2 days it lasted (November 24-25th). Carl managed a merchandising booth that was well stuffed (Luca Capello also brought goodies of Debian.ch)

I gave small lightning talk to present the ideas behind my Librement project (it’s about funding free software developers). BTW I have not been very good at it, it was only my second lightning talk and I have been a bit too verbose. The talk did not fit in my 5 minutes time slot 😉

Back from the mini-debconf, I have been trying to delegate some projects (like get a real website, improve the work-flow of members management, update our server which was still running Lenny).

Julien Cristau was willing to upgrade the server did not exactly knew how to upgrade the kernel (it’s a bit special since Gandi manages the kernel on the Xen hypervisor side). So I took care of this part and also did some cleanup (adding a backup with its associated remote disk, tweaking the email configuration). And Julien completed the upgrade on November 30th.

Alexandre Delanoë volunteered to have a try at the website and Emmanuel Bouthenot has been looking a bit to see if there was something better than Galette to handle our members. It looks like we’ll stay with Galette but have to take care of upgrading it to a newer version.

I also processed the first membership applications and organized a vote to extend the board of administrators (since we have two vacant seats). On Monday, we should be back to 9 administrators.

Librement

Except for the talk during the mini-debconf, I did not do much on this project. That said I got an answer from the “Autorité de Contrôle Prudentiel” saying that I might be eligible for the exemption case (see discussion of last month) and that I should fill out a form to get a confirmation.

I also contacted Tunz.com who might be able to provide the services I need (their E-money manager product in particular). They have the required accreditation as a banking/credit institution and are willing to partner with enterprises who setup platforms where you must manage flows of money between several parties. I’m now waiting for details such as the cost of their various services.

I expect to have much more to show next month… I’m working with two developers to implement the first building blocks of all this.

Thanks

See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

My Free Software Activities in October 2012

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This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (120.46 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Dpkg

At the start of the month, I reconfigured dpkg’s git repository to use KGB instead of the discontinued CIA to send out commit notices to IRC (on #debian-dpkg on OFTC, aka irc.debian.org).

I didn’t do anything else that affects dpkg and I must say that Guillem does not make it easy for others to get involved. He keeps all his work hidden in his private “for 1.17.x” branch and refuses to open an official “jessie” branch as can be seen from the lack of answer to this mail.

On the bright side, he deals with almost all incoming bugs even before I have a chance to take care of them. But it’s a pity that I can never review any of his fixes because they are usually pushed shortly before an upload.

Misc packaging

I helped to get #689336 fixed so that the initrd properly setups the keymap before asking for a passphrase for an encrypted partition. Related to this I filed #689722 so that cryptsetup gains a dependency ensuring that the required tools for keymap setup are available.

I packaged a new upstream version of zim (0.57) and also a security update for python-django that affected both Squeeze and Wheezy. I uploaded an NMU of revelation (0.4.13-1.2) so that it doesn’t get dropped from Wheezy (it was on the release team list of leaf packages that would be removed if unfixed) since my wife is using it to store her passwords.

I sponsored a new upstream version of ledgersmb.

Debian France

We managed to elect new officers for Debian France. I’m taking over the role of president, Sylveste Ledru is the new treasurer and Julien Danjou is the new secretary. Thank you very much to the former officers: Carl Chenet, Aurélien Jarno and Julien Cristau.

We’re in the process of managing this transition which will be completed during the next mini-Debconf in Paris so that we can exchange some papers and the like.

In the first tasks that I have set myself, there’s recruiting two new members for the boards of directors since we’re only 7 and there are 9 seats. I made a call for volunteers and we have two volunteers. If you want to get involved and help Debian France, please candidate by answering that message as soon as possible.

The Debian Handbook

I merged the translations contributed on debian.weblate.org (which led me to file this wishlist bug on Weblate itself) and I fixed a number of small issues that had been reported. I made an upload to Debian to incorporate all those fixes…

But this is still the book covering Squeeze so I started to plan the work to update it for Wheezy and with Roland we have decided who is going to take care of updating each chapter.

Librement

Progress is annoyingly slow on this project. Handling money for others is highly regulated, at least in the EU apparently. I only wanted an escrow account to secure the money of users of the service but opening this account requires either to be certified as a “payment institution” by the Autorité de contrôle prudentiel or to get an exemption from the same authority (covering only some special cases) or to sign a partnership with an established payment institution.

Being certified is out of scope for now since it requires a minimum of 125000 EUR in capital (which I don’t have). My bank can’t sign the kind of partnership that I would need. So I have to investigate whether I can make it fit in the limited cases of exemption or I need to find another “payment institution” that is willing to work with me.

Gittip uses Balanced a payment service specialized in market places but unfortunately it’s US-only if you want to withdraw money from the system. I would love a similar service in Europe…

If I can’t position Librement as a market place for the free software world (and save each contributor the hassle to open a merchant account), then I shall fallback to the solution where Librement only provides the infrastructure but no account, and developers who want to collect donations will have to use either Paypal or any other supported merchant account to collect funds.

That’s why my latest spec updates concerning the donation service and the payment service mentions Paypal and the possibility of choosing your payment service for your donation form.

Thanks

See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

Auto Mounting Windows Shares in GNOME with Gigolo and gvfs-fuse

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The traditional way to mount Windows (or Samba) shares involves hardcoding the credentials in a plain-text file and some /etc/fstab entry to mount it automatically at boot time. If you don’t want to store a plain-text copy of your password, you’re bound to mount your shares interactively.

This is clearly sub-optimal and I thought that there must be a better way to handle this in the context of a GNOME desktop (which already supports connecting to such shares in the file browser). So I looked for a solution and after a bit of googling I found one.

Start by installing a few packages:

$ sudo apt-get install gigolo gvfs-fuse

Launch Gigolo, setup your shares as bookmarks and mark them as “Auto-Connect”.

During (first) connection, you will be prompted for your password and you have the possibility to store it in the GNOME keyring (and here it’s encrypted, not in plain-text!).

You should also configure the Gigolo preferences so that it starts minimized in the system tray (because we’re going to run it on session startup):

The last step is to ensure that Gigolo is executed at the start of each GNOME session. Unfortunately this GNOME feature is no longer accessible from the control center so you have to execute gnome-session-properties manually (from a terminal or the command line accessible via Alt+F2). Click on “Add” to add a new startup program:

You’re done!

The main limitation is that those shares are not real mounts, instead they are available within GNOME’s virtual file system (GVFS). If you use only 100% GNOME application, then it’s not a problem but otherwise it’s pretty annoying. You can’t “cd” in those shares from a terminal for example.

There’s a workaround though, it’s called “gvfs-fuse” and you installed it right at the start of this HOWTO. This service hooks into GVFS and exports all the virtual filesystem(s) in a real fuse-based mount that is automatically setup in ~/.gvfs/. However for this to work, the user must be in the “fuse” group. So you should run something like this:

$ sudo adduser $USER fuse

By the way, I haven’t found a way to use a non-hidden directory so if you want this directory to be more visible, I suggest that you create a symlink pointing to it.

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