apt-get install debian-wizard

My Debian Activities in February 2012

March 1, 2012 by Raphaël Hertzog

This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (384.14 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Dpkg and multiarch

The month started with a decision of the technical committee which allowed me to proceed with an upload of a multiarch dpkg even if Guillem had not yet finished his review (and related changes). Given this decision, Guillem made the experimental upload himself.

I announced the availability of this test version and invited people to test it. This lead to new discussions on debian-devel.

We learned in those discussions that Guillem changed his mind about the possibility of sharing (identical) files between multiple Multi-Arch: same packages, and that he dropped that feature. But if this point of the multiarch design had been reverted, it would mean that we had to update again all library packages which had already been updated for multi-arch. The discussions mostly stalled at this point with a final note of Guillem explaining that there was a tension between convenience and doing the right things every time that we discuss far-reaching changes.

After a few weeks (and a helpful summary from Russ Allbery), Guillem said that he remained unconvinced but that he put back the feature. He also announced that he’s close to having completed the work and that he would push the remaining parts of the multiarch branch to master this week (with the 1.16.2 upload planned next week).

That’s it for the summary. Obviously I participated in the discussions but I didn’t do much besides this… I have a “mandate” to upload a multiarch dpkg to sid but I did not want to make use of it while those discussions remained pretty unconclusive. Also Guillem made it pretty clear that the multiarch implementation was “buggy”, “not right” and “not finished” and that he had reworked code fixing at least some of the issues… since he never shared that work in progress, I also had no way to help even just by reviewing what he’s doing.

We also got a few multiarch bug reports, but I couldn’t care to get them fixed since Guillem clearly held a lock on the codebase having done many private changes… it’s not quite like this that I expect to collaborate on a free software project but life is full of surprises!

I’ll be relieved once this story is over. In the mean time, I have added one new thing on my TODO list since I made a proposal to handle bin-nmu changelogs and it’s something that could also fix #440094.

Misc dpkg stuff

After a discussion with Guillem, we agreed that copyright notices should only appear in the sources and not in manual pages or --version output, both of which are translated and cause useless work to translators when updated. Guillem already had some code to do it for --version strings, and I took care of the changes for the manual pages.

I merged some minor documentation updates, fixed a bug with a missing manpage. Later I discovered that some recent changes lead to the loss of all the translated manual pages. I suggested an improvement to dh_installman to fix this (and even prepared a patch). In the end, Guillem opted for another way of installing translated manual pages.

Triggered by a discussion on debian-devel, I added a new entry to my TODO list: implementing dpkg-maintscript-helper rm_conffile_if_owner to deal with the case where a conffile is taken over by another package which might (or might not) be installed.

Misc packaging

At the start of the month, I packaged quilt 0.51. The number of Debian specific patches is slowly getting down. With version 0.51, we dropped 5 patches and introduced a new one. Later in the month I submitted 4 supplementary patches upstream which have been accepted for version 0.60.

This new version (just released, I will package it soon) is an important milestone since it’s the first version without any C code (Debian had this for a long time but we were carrying an intrusive patch for this). Upstream developer Jean Delvare worked on this and based his work on our patch, but he went further to make it much more efficient.

Besides quilt, I also uploaded dh-linktree 0.2 (minor doc update), sql-ledger 2.8.36 (new upstream version), logidee-tools 1.2.12 (minor fixes) and publican 2.8-2 (to fix release critical bug #660795).

Debian Consultants

The Debian Project Leader is working on federating Debian Companies. As the owner of Freexian SARL, I was highly interested in it since Freexian “contributes to Debian, offers support for Debian and has a strategic interest in Debian”. There’s only one problem, you need to have at least 2 Debian developers on staff but I have no employees (it’s me only). I tried to argue that I have already worked with multiple Debian developers (as contractors) when projects were too big for me alone (or when I did not have enough time). Alas this argument was not accepted.

Instead, and since our fearless leader is never afraid to propose compromises, he suggested me (and MJ Ray who argued something similar than me) to try to bring life to the Debian Consultants list which (in his mind) would be more appropriate for one-man companies like mine. I accepted to help “animate” the list, and on his side, he’s going to promote both the “Debian Companies” and the “Debian Consultants” lists.

In any case, the list has seen some traffic lately and you’re encouraged to join if you’re a freelancer offering services around Debian. The most promising thing is that James Bromberger offered to implement a real database of consultants instead of the current static page.

Book update

We made quite some progress this month. There’s only one chapter left to translate. I thus decided to start with proofreading. I made a call for volunteers and I submitted one (different) chapter to 5 proofreaders.

The liberation campaign made a nice leap forwards thanks to good coverage on barrapunto.com. We have reached 80% while we were only at 72% at the start of the month (thanks to the 113 new supporters!). There’s thus less than 5000 EUR to raise before the book gets published under a free license.

Looking at the progression in the past months, this is unlikely to be completed on time for the release of the book in April. It would be nice though… so please share the news around you.

Speaking of the book’s release, I’m slowly preparing it. Translating docbook files is not enough, I must be able to generate HTML, ePub and PDF versions of the book. I’m using Publican for most formats, but for the PDF version Publican is moving away of fop and the replacement (webkit-based) is far from being satisfactory to generate a book ready for print. So I plan to use dblatex and get Publican to support dblatex as a backend.

I have hired Benoît Guillon, the upstream author of dblatex, to fix some annoying bugs and to improve it to suit my needs for the book (some results are already in the upstream CVS repository). I’m also working with a professional book designer to get a nice design.

I have also started to look for a Python Django developer to build the website that I will use to commercialize the book. The website will have a larger goal than just this though (“helping to fund free software developers”) but in free software it’s always good to start with your own case. 🙂

Hopefully everything will be ready in April. I’m working hard to meet that deadline (you might have noticed that my blog has been relatively quiet in the last month…).

Thanks

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

People behind Debian: Ana Beatriz Guerrero López, member of the Debian KDE team

February 10, 2012 by Raphaël Hertzog

If you met Ana, you’ll easily remember her. She has a great and pronounced Spanish accent… 🙂 I’m glad that the existence of the Debian Women project helped her to join Debian because she has been doing a great job.

From KDE packaging to publicity/marketing work, her interests shifted over the years but this allowed her to stay very involved. As she explains it very well, Debian is big enough so that you can stop doing something which is no longer fun for you, and still find something new to do in another part of Debian!

Read on to learn more about Ana, the KDE team, Debian’s participation to the Google Summer of Code, and more.

Raphael: Who are you?

Ana: I’m Ana Guerrero López and I’m in my early 30s. I was born and raised in the wonderful city of Sevilla, Spain and I live in Lyon, France. I share my life with another Debian Developer and my paid work is doing Debian support and integration, so you won’t be surprised to read that Debian is a big part of my life.

Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian?

Ana: Although I knew about the existence of Linux since 1997 or so, I didn’t really start using Linux until the summer 2001 when I finally got a computer on my own and an Internet link at home. In the beginning, I was using Mandrake in a dual boot with Windows and later around 2003, I happily moved to only using Debian and ditching the Windows partition. Once settled as a Debian user, I knew anybody could help improve the distribution but I hesitated to join mostly due to two reasons, my perception of Debian was the one of a very elitist and aggressive club and who wants to join this kind of cult^wproject? And even if I wanted to join, I did not know how to get started.

By the summer of 2004, the Debian Women project started, it made me seeing Debian as a more welcoming project, and I started maintaining my first packages. The following summer 2005, I attended akademy 2005 (the annual KDE conference) where I had the pleasure to meet there some of the people from the KDE team and this really made a difference for me. Christopher Martin and Adeodato Simó, with the help of other people, have started the maintenance of KDE as a team a few months before and by that time most of the KDE modules where under the maintenance umbrella of the team. This was a very good move since it allowed easily to share the KDE maintenance in a more coordinated way and also eased having non-DDs, like me at that time, to join in and help.

The Debian Women project started, it made me seeing Debian as a more welcoming project.

Raphael: You’re part of the Debian KDE team. What’s your role in the team and what are your plans for Wheezy?

Ana: Nowadays, I am not as active in the KDE team as I used to be in the past. The KDE 3 to KDE 4 transition was quite tiring and changes on the KDE side like the successive marketing renames, the shorter 6 months schedule (it used to be at least 9) or the uncoordinated KDE releases mostly burnt me out. Currently, I am mostly working in helping others to get started within the team, some small fixes here and there, and helping with the uploads: an upload of the full KDE suite to the archive requires some building power and upload bandwidth not everybody have.

For Wheezy, with the tentative freeze date in June, the plan is to try to ship the latest possible point release of the KDE 4.8 series. The first release of the series, 4.8.0 was released a couple of weeks ago and while writing these lines, the packaging work for 4.8 hasn’t started yet. The next move for the team is getting 4.7.4 in unstable, currently sitting in experimental.

For Wheezy, […] the plan is to try to ship the latest possible point release of the KDE 4.8 series.

Besides the KDE packages, there is some software which users perceive as KDE, such as amarok, digikam, etc., which are not part of KDE but fall under its umbrella. These other programs have their own maintainers and their updates depend greatly in the availability of them. For the KDE office suite, we have right now KOffice in the archive. KOffice got a fork some time ago named Calligra and we should replace KOffice by Calligra in the archive before the release of Wheezy. Sadly there isn’t yet a final release of Calligra to use.

My personal goal for Wheezy was to finish the removal of all the remaining packages depending on KDE 3 and Qt 3 that Squeeze still contained. The removal of the KDE 3 libraries and all the packages using them was quickly achieved after the release of Squeeze. The removal of Qt 3 soon showed that it was task harder than expected since some popular packages (sometimes not in the Debian archive, e.g. third-party scientific software) depend on it, and also Qt 3 is a requirement for LSB compatibility. Right now, Qt 3 has been orphaned for 9 months and nobody has shown any interest in adopting it.

Raphael: KDE, much like GNOME, has been forked by people who were unhappy by the direction that the project has taken since version 4 (cf Trinity). What’s your personal opinion on KDE 4.x and what’s the position of the Debian KDE team concerning this fork?

Ana: I use KDE 4 on my laptop and I think it is a solid desktop environment and platform. However I am finding it less and less attractive for me. On one side, my usage of the computer has been slightly changing and on the other side, I do not like how the new developments in KDE are evolving, things like plasmoids or activities are not attractive for me. I have switched my other 2 systems to awesome although I continue to use mainly a bunch of KDE applications: dolphin, konsole, kate, juk, kmix, etc. So you might say my desktop environment is an awesome KDE.

Regarding the Trinity project, a lot of users complained very loudly when KDE 3 got replaced by KDE 4 in testing/unstable, so I find quite laudable the decision of some users to act instead and try to continue with a forked development of KDE 3. However the Trinity team seems to be about 3 persons (funny for a project named Trinity :)) while KDE 3 is big. In perspective, it does not look that big because KDE 4 is even larger, but it is still too much for such small team. In addition those developers need to maintain Qt3 that has been end-of-lifed years ago by Nokia/Trolltech¹. So my guess is that sooner or later the project will fade away.

Nobody from the KDE team is interested in Trinity and in case someone wants to package it for Debian, they would have to make a new team. For the reasons mentioned above: Qt3 maintenance and reduced upstream group, this would be a bad idea.

My advice if you do not like KDE 4 and you miss KDE 3, would be taking a look at razor-qt based on Qt4 and quite similar to KDE 3.

¹ I read they have plans to port it to Qt4, but frankly that could take some years… same it took to the KDE project for KDE 4.0.0 😉

Raphael: You used to maintain news.debian.net, a WordPress blog dedicated to Debian, but you stopped a while ago. A few months later you started to maintain a Debian page on Google+. Why did you stop the blog and what’s your goal with the Google+ page?

Ana: I blogged about the reasons I started news.debian.net. In short, I thought Debian needed a better system to publish news, something like a blog. I first tried to suggest the idea to the press/publicity team but they weren’t interested, so I started the project alone. IMHO the blog worked quite well and I was feeling like it should be made official. I talked about this with some people but at the time I wasn’t pushing it because I had other priorities and I knew pushing it to become official would need some extra time and energy.

Stefano decided to start the discussion about making news.debian.net official (that’s moving it to a debian.org domain) in its own initiative. After the public discussion and some private exchange of emails with DSA, the situation became frustrating and I decided to close news.debian.net after the release of Squeeze.

Later, during DebConf, an officer from the press team announced they were launching a blog and I asked Stefano if he could try to have a discussion about this to see if it could still somehow fit my ideas, and maybe contributing myself, but nobody from the press team answered Stefano’s email and the blog hasn’t started yet either.

Irony that communication didn’t work when wanting to improve communication.

About the Google+ page, everyday I follow what is going in Debian and quite often I find things I want to share. I do not want to clutter my own profiles with Debian stuff or have people following me because of that, so I decided to create the Debian page when Google+ made them available. I like the fact that people can follow that without having an account in Google+ although they can not comment anonymously. I am not happy about the fact that Google+ is a closed platform but hopefully the data will become easier to export in the near future. Right now, there are some services that provides RSS feeds of Google+ pages if you want to follow the page and you are not in Google+ (or I could setup one if several people ask me).

Raphael: Last year you helped to manage Debian’s participation to the Google Summer of Code. How did it went? Is there something that you can improve for this year?

Ana: I think last year we managed to have people in Debian more aware about what the students were doing. That also helped students to get more feedback and therefore get to know more people in the project and get more integrated. Students were sending periodic public reports available to everybody interested in the status of the projects and some of them also held their own sessions in DebConf.

We still failed to start looking for mentors early enough and to give them information about how the GSoC worked and how they could have a successful project. Having good projects in Debian is harder than in other projects because the GSoC mostly promotes having students started in Open Source *coding* for a project, while Debian is more a project about integrating software and we overall do not have so many parts that has to be coded.

My personal goal for this year is to try getting the projects earlier to attract good students from the very beginning, even if that means we have less projects than in other years.

Raphael: What motivates you to continue to contribute year after year?

Ana: Three things. I like improving the OS I use, I like the friends I have made while working in Debian through the years and because I have fun.

Also Debian is quite a big project, so if you become tired or burn out working in some area, you always can easily find interesting things to do somewhere else.

Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions?

Ana: Adeodato Simó, he is now in a long leave from the project, but it is one of those persons who made a difference in the project in his job in the release team some years ago. Aurélien Jarno because of his tireless work in (e)glibc and porting of several architectures.

I also have special admiration for all those people who have been very active in the project for more than 7-8 years because I know it is not always easy to combine it with real life.

Thank you to Ana for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading her answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

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Dpkg with multiarch support available in Debian experimental

February 7, 2012 by Raphaël Hertzog

As I announced on debian-devel, Guillem Jover uploaded a snapshot of dpkg’s multiarch branch to experimental (version 1.16.2~wipmultiarch). Beware: There will
likely be some small “interface” changes between this version and the version that will be released later in unstable (possibly in the output of dpkg --get-selections, dpkg --list, maybe other commands).

multiarch allows you to install packages from different architectures on the same machine. This can be useful if your computer can run programs from 2 architectures (eg. x86 CPU supporting i386 and amd64), or if you often need to cross-compile software and thus need the libraries of your target architecture.

Test dpkg with multiarch support

If you want to test multiarch support in dpkg, install the package from experimental (apt-get install dpkg/experimental assuming you have experimental in your sources.list).

Then you can add a supplementary architecture to your system by doing sudo dpkg --add-architecture <arch> (e.g. i386 if you are on amd64, and vice-versa). APT will automatically pick up the new architecture and start downloading the Packages file for the new architecture (it uses dpkg --print-foreign-architectures to know about them).

From there on you can install packages from the “foreign” architectures with “apt-get install foo:<arch>“. Many packages will not be installable because some of their dependencies have not yet been updated to work with in a multiarch world (libraries must be installed in a multiarch-compliant path so as to be co-installable, and then marked “Multi-Arch: same“). Other dependencies might need to be marked “Multi-Arch: foreign“. See wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/Implementation for more HOWTO-like explanations.

Now is a good time to see if you can install the foreign packages that you could need in such a setup and to help to convert the required libraries.

You can also read Cyril Brulebois’ article which quickly shows how to hunt for the problematic packages which have not been converted to multiarch (in his sample, “ucf” is not ready. Since it’s an “Architecture: all” package which can run on any architecture, it means that it’s lacking a “Multi-Arch: foreign” field).

Report bugs

If you discover any bug in dpkg’s multiarch implementation, please report it to the Bug Tracking System (against “dpkg” with the version “1.16.2~wipmultiarch”).

If you notice important libraries or packages which are not yet multiarch ready, please open wishlist bug reports requesting the conversion and point the maintainers towards the wiki page linked above. Even better, prepare patches and submit those with your bug reports.

Again, you can follow the lead of Cyril Brulebois who filed 6 bugs!

Review the multiarch implementation

If you’re a C programmer and have some good knowledge of dpkg (or are willing to learn more of it), we would certainly benefit from more eyes reviewing the multiarch branch. If you want to discuss some design issues of the multiarch implementation in dpkg (or have questions related to your review), please get in touch via debian-dpkg@lists.debian.org.

The latest version of the branch is pu/multiarch/master in Guillem’s personal repository. I have my own version of the branch (pu/multiarch/full) which is usually a snapshot of Guillem’s branch with my own submitted fixes.

$ git clone git://git.debian.org/dpkg/dpkg.git
$ cd dpkg
$ git remote add guillem git://git.hadrons.org/git/debian/dpkg/dpkg.git
$ git remote add buxy git://git.debian.org/~hertzog/dpkg.git
$ git fetch guillem && git fetch buxy

If you followed the instructions above, the relevant branches are thus guillem/pu/multiarch/master and buxy/pu/multiarch/full. Both branches are regularly rebased on top of master where Guillem merges progressively the commits from the multi-arch branch as his review progresses.

Thank you in advance for your help bringing multiarch in shape for Debian Wheezy,

My Debian Activities in January 2012

February 1, 2012 by Raphaël Hertzog

This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (213.68 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Dpkg

The “biggest change” I made is a small patch that brings to an end years and years of recurring discussions about the build-arch and build-indep targets of debian/rules (see #229357). Last year the technical committee took this issue in its hands (see #629385) but it failed to take any resolution. Fortunately thanks to this we got some concrete numbers on the colateral damages inflicted on the archive for each possible approach. In the end, Guillem and I managed to agree on the way forward.

The remaining of what I did as dpkg maintainer has not much to do with coding. I reviewed the work of Gianluca Ciccarelli on dpkg-maintscript-helper who is trying to provide helper functions to handle migration between directories and symlinks. I also reviewed a 2000-lines patch from Patrick Schoenfeld who’s trying to provide a perl API to parse dpkg log files and extract meaningful data out of them.

I updated the dpkg-architecture manual page to document the Makefile snippet /usr/share/dpkg/architecture.mk and to drop information that’s no longer releveant nowadays.

I reviewed a huge patch prepared by Russ Allbery to update the Debian policy and document the usage of symbols files for libraries. As the author of dpkg-gensymbols, I was keen to see it properly documented at the policy level.

I brought up for discussion a detail that was annoying me for quite some time: some copyright notices were embedded in translatable strings and updating them resulted in useless work for translators. In the end we decided to drop those notices and to keep them only at the source level.

I updated my multiarch branch on top of Guillem’s branch several times, all the fixes that were in my branch have been integrated (often in a modified form).

Unfortunately even if the code works quite well, Guillem doesn’t want to release anything to Debian until he has finished to review everything… and many people are annoyed by the unreasonable delay that it imposes. Cyril Brulebois tried to release a snapshot of the current multiarch branch to experimental but Guillem has been prompt to revert this upload.

I’m somewhat at a loss in this situation. I offered my help to Guillem multiple times but he keeps doing his work in private, he doesn’t share many details of his review except some comments in commit logs or when it affects the public interface. I complained once more of this sad situation.

Debian Package Maintenance Hub

That’s the codename I use for a new infrastructure that I would like to develop to replace the Package Tracking System and the DDPO and several other services. I started to draft a Debian Enhancement Proposal (DEP), see DEP-2, and requested some comments within the QA team.

For now, it looks like that nobody had major objections on the driving idea behind this project. Those who commented were rather enthusiastic. I will continue to improve this DEP within the QA team and at some point I will bring the discussion to a larger audience like debian-devel@lists.debian.org.

Package Tracking System

Even if I started to design its replacement, the PTS will still be used for quite some time so I implemented two new features that I deemed important: displaying a TODO notice when there is (at least) one open bug related to a release goal, displaying a notice when the package is involved in an ongoing or upcoming transition.

Misc packaging tasks

I created and uploaded the dh-linktree package which is a debhelper addon to create symlink trees (useful to replace embedded copies of PHP/JavaScript libraries by symlinks to packaged copies of those files).

I packaged quilt 0.50. I helped the upstream authors to merge a Debian patch that had been forwarded by Martin Quinson (a quilt’s co-maintainer). I packaged a security release of WordPress (3.3.1) and a new upstream release of feed2omb and gnome-shell-timer.

I prepared a new Debian release of python-django with a patch cherry-picked from the upstream SVN repository to fix the RC bug #655666.

Book update

We’re again making decent progress in the translation of the Debian Administrator’s Handbook, about 12 chapters are already translated.

The liberation campaign is also (slowly) going forward. We’re at 72% now (thanks to 63 new supporters!) while we were only at 67% at the start of January.

Thanks

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

Dpkg and multiarch

Misc dpkg stuff

Misc packaging

Debian Consultants

Book update

Thanks

Test dpkg with multiarch support

Report bugs

Review the multiarch implementation

Dpkg

Debian Package Maintenance Hub

Package Tracking System

Misc packaging tasks

Book update

Thanks

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