Debian Handbook

My Free Software Activities in May 2013

June 4, 2013 by Raphaël Hertzog

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 (70 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook

Spanish translation completed. The Spanish team finished the translation of the book. The PDF build process was not yet ready to build translations so I had to fix this. At the same time, I also improved the mobipocket build script to make use of Amazon’s kindlegen when available (since Amazon now requires the use of this tool to generate Mobipocket files that can be distributed on their platform).

Once those issues were sorted I made some promotion of this first completed translation because they really deserve some big kudos !

Plans for the French translation. You know that the Debian Administrator’s Handbook came to life as a translation of the French book “Cahier de l’Admin Debian” (published by Eyrolles). This means that we currently have a free translation of a proprietary book. It’s a bid of an odd situation that I always wanted to fix. I discussed with Eyrolles to find out how we could publish the original book under the same licenses that we picked for the English book… and the result is that we setup a new crowdfunding campaign to liberate the French book and then make it an official French translation of the Debian Administrator’s Handbook. Read the rest and support us on the ulule project page (a kickstarter like for people who are not based in the US).

Debian France

I updated our membership management application (galette) to version 0.7.4.1 with numerous bug fixes but the true highlight this month was “Solutions Libres et Opensource”, a tradeshow in Paris where Tanguy Ortolo, me, and other volunteers (Cédric Boutillier, Arnaud G., and some that I have forgotten, thanks to them!), held a Debian booth for two consecutive days (May 28-29). For once we had lots of goodies to sell (buffs, mouse pad, polos, stickers, etc.) and the booth was very well attended.

Google’s Summer of Code

Last month I was rater overwhelmed with queries from students who were interested in applying for the “Package Tracking System Rewrite” project that I offered to mentor as part of Google’s Summer of Code. In the end, I got 6 good student applications that Stefano and me evaluated. We selected Marko Lalic.

The “Community Bonding Period” is just starting and we’re fleshing out details on how we will organize the work. We’ll try to use the IRC channel #debian-qa on OFTC for questions and answers and weekly meetings.

Misc Debian packaging

I packaged zim 0.60 and with the release of Wheezy, I uploaded to unstable all the packages that I staged in experimental (cpputest, publican). I sponsored the upload of libmicrohttpd 0.9.27-1.

I filed a couple of bug reports that I experienced with the upcoming dpkg 1.17.0 (#709172, #709009). In both cases, the package was using a wrongly hardcoded path to dpkg-divert (the binary moved from /usr/sbin/ to /usr/bin/ a while ago and the compatibility symlink is dropped now). I also dealt with #709064 where the user reported upgrade issues related to multiarch.

I also filed an upstream bug report on publican to request some way to avoid so much duplication of files (actually I filed it as a response to the Debian bug #708705 that I received).

Kali work

I had to update OpenVAS for Kali but some parts failed to build in a Debian 7 environment. I diagnosed the problem and submitted a patch upstream.

I also got in touch with the Debian OpenVAS maintainer as I wanted to contribute the package back to Debian, but timing issues have pushed this back for a little longer.

Thanks

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

My Free Software Activities in November 2012

December 1, 2012 by Raphaël Hertzog

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

November 6, 2012 by Raphaël Hertzog

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.

My Debian Activities in July 2012

August 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 (72.65 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

This month has been a short one since I have been away for 2 weeks of vacation.

Dpkg

My dpkg work encompasses a bunch of small tasks:

I uploaded dpkg 1.16.7 with an important bugfix for a regression.
I initiated a new round of discussions about how we were going to solve the problem that source packages with “Multi-Arch: same” binary packages can’t be individually bin-nmued.
Following that discussion, I opened a bunch of bugs to plan/discuss the transition of changelog/copyright files within the package metadata (#681289 on debian-policy, #681293 on apt-listchanges, #681295 on www.debian.org for packages.debian.org).
I also filed #681292 on sbuild to get it to use dpkg’s new syntax for bin-nmus. It will allow us to do binary-only rebuilds with arbitrary versions (instead of only “+b1” suffixes). Ubuntu could use this for their +rebuild1, we could use this to build backports which do not require source changes (and share the common source package instead of duplicating it). It can also be useful if we ever get to the situation where transitions are prepared in external repositories and where we want bin-nmus in those repositories to have unique versions (even though the same package might be bin-nmued in multiple repositories in case of concurrent transitions).
I filed an unblock request for dpkg once it was almost 10 days old.
I did reconsider the bug #316521 where dpkg looses track of some shared directories with manually created files and proposed an updated patch. No words from Guillem on the patch yet. Fixing this would help to fix a bunch of piuparts issues.
And just before my vacation, I filed many bugs against dpkg itself, effectively moving some of the items that accumulated in my TODO in a public place where others can help (I’ll be happy to mentor anyone who wants to tackle one of these):
- #681443: dpkg-source –commit should be able to merge changes in an existing patch
- #681470: dpkg-shlibdeps: should also scan Build-Depends-Arch for minimal versions
- #681474: Dpkg::Vendor: should support /etc/os-release and /etc/os-release.d/*
- #681477: dpkg-vendor: implement –select-closest command
- #681480: base-files: Provide HOME_URL, SUPPORT_URL and BUG_REPORT_URL in /etc/os-release
- #681489: base-files: Add /etc/os-release.d/debian and make it easy to provide supplementary /etc/os-release.d/* files
In #595112 we discussed the specifics of a new dpkg-mainstscript-helper feature to move a conffile from one package to another.

Packaging

I updated nautilus-dropbox to version 1.4.0 and python-django-registration to version 0.8. Both have been uploaded to unstable and I initially wanted to request an unblock for the latter, but it turns out it has gained reverse dependencies and version 0.8 introduces API changes so it’s not an option at this point of the freeze.

QA work

I investigated and fixed #678356 where it had been reported that the PTS static news were no longer working as expected.

At the start of the month, I also unblocked the mostly-unknown but important “mole” service… it was out of date of several weeks and several people were annoyed that the information about new upstream versions was no longer up-to-date.

Vacation

Almost no Debian work during my vacation but the lack of Wifi nearby made me look for solutions to connect my computer through my Nokia N900 3G/GPRS connection. I discovered the “Mobile Hotspot” application (homepage) and it worked like a charm (although it required Maemo’s non-default devel repository to be able to install the alternative kernel “for power users”).

The Debian Handbook

Michal Čihař proposed us to host a Weblate instance to help translate the book with a web interface. He kindly agreed to implement some improvements to better suit my requirements. Those have been completed and the weblate instance is now live at debian.weblate.org.

There’s no requirement to use Weblate for translations teams but for those that do, it sure makes it easier to recruit volunteers who have no prior knowledge of Git and PO files. If you want to help, please checkout this page first though, you should not start using Weblate without getting in touch with the respective translations teams.

Apart from translations, I also had the pleasure to merge some patches from Philipp Kern who improved the section covering IPv6 and a few other parts. We can make the book even better if more people share their expertise in the part of the book where they know better than me and Roland. 🙂

Thanks

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

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook

Debian France

Google’s Summer of Code

Misc Debian packaging

Kali work

Thanks

Misc packaging

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook

Debian France

Librement

Thanks

Dpkg

Misc packaging

Debian France

The Debian Handbook

Librement

Thanks

Dpkg

Packaging

QA work

Vacation

The Debian Handbook

Thanks

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