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My Free Software Activities in November 2013

December 1, 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 (44.52 €, 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

Wheezy update completed. Roland and I completed the update of the Debian Administrator’s Handbook for Debian 7 Wheezy. We still have some proofreading work to do but you can already enjoy the result here: https://debian-handbook.info/browse/wheezy/

Feel free to report back any problem that you discover. You can also submit us patches ready to apply if you want to go one step further.

Publican contributions. The book is generated with publican and I maintain its Debian package. This month I got a release critical bug because it stopped working… it turns out that the problem lied in libxml-treebuilder-perl and I thus reassigned #728885 while providing a tentative patch to the upstream author. After a few days without action from the pkg-perl team, and after having received a FTBFS bug on debian-handbook (of course publican was broken in unstable!), I prepared a fixed package myself and I uploaded it (I’m still part of the pkg-perl team although I’m inactive).

Since I used publican heavily this month, I filed two tickets in its bugzilla. I requested a new feature in #1034836 (the possibility to keep around the former string for fuzzy strings to update), and I reported a problem with the handling of “\n” in PO files in #1036150.

Debian France

Galette update. I updated the galette package and its paypal plugin, and I deployed those on france.debian.net. It had some fixes for the reminder mails sent to members.

Bylaws update. I also resumed my work on preparing new bylaws for Debian France. Sylvestre Ledru came up with a draft (with the help of a lawyer) a few months ago and I’m reviewing/improving them now. The main goal is to clarify that Debian France is meant to be a Trusted Organization for the Debian project.

Debian France Shop. We had the idea since a few months already but Sylvestre did the leg work to open a Debian France shop with the help of EnVenteLibre. I asked our members to prepare some CSS that better match the Debian colors and this should be fixed in a few days. The first goodies will also start to appear shortly, just in time for Christmas!

Misc Debian work

Distro Tracker. In the continuation of the Google Summer of Code, I asked the DSA team to setup a new virtual machine to host tracker.debian.org, an instance of Distro Tracker, the rewritten Package Tracking System. They have done their part of the job (except the mail setup), it’s now waiting on me to find some time to complete some cleanups and deploy the thing.

WordPress. I packaged wordpress 3.7.1 and sent a call for help on debian-mentors. I got 3 replies, I gave them some initial direction but I haven’t heard back anything since. WordPress 3.8 is expected in a few days, hopefully one of the new volunteers will take care of preparing the next update.

Dpkg regressions. I haven’t done anything for multiple months but at least I keep running the git version of dpkg and I detected two regressions. Good to have them squashed before the upcoming 1.17.2 upload to unstable.

PTS fix. I fixed some warnings that the PTS code started generating since the upgrade of its host to wheezy. They were generating some annoying backscatter mails to users of the pts@qa.debian.org bot.

Ruby security update. I helped the ruby team to prepare the required security updates of ruby1.8 and ruby1.9.1 (see #730178 and #730189). This work was sponsored by Kali/Offensive Security.

Smartcard setup. I bought 2 OpenPGP smartcards with a reader and I moved all my private keys on those devices (one card with the master key for signature/certification to be kept at home, one card for daily/mobile usage with the subkeys for encryption/signature/authentication). My laptop’s harddrive doesn’t contain any private key anymore. I have kept the required offline backup in a safe place, but in the end, my private keys are much harder to steal. I should write down my findings in another article…

Thanks

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

Will Debian’s technical committee coopt Keith Packard or Philipp Kern?

November 19, 2013 by Raphaël Hertzog

The process has been ongoing for more than a year but the Debian technical committee is about to select a candidate to recommend for its vacant seat. The Debian Project Leader will then (likely) appoint him (looks like it won’t be a women).

According to recent discussions on debian-ctte@lists.debian.org, it seems that either Keith Packard or Philipp Kern will join the committee.

If you look at the current membership of the committee, you will see:

Bdale Garbee: USA
Russ Allbery: USA
Don Armstrong: USA
Andreas Barth: Germany
Ian Jackson: United Kingdom
Steve Langasek: USA
Colin Watson: United Kingdom

That’s very Anglo-Saxon centric (6 out of 7 members). While I trust the current members and while I know that they are open-minded people, it still bothers me to see this important body with so few diversity.

Coming back to the choice at hand, Keith Packard is American and Philipp Kern is German. No new country in the mix. I can only hope that Philipp will be picked to bring some more balance in the body.

My Free Software Activities in September 2013

October 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 (86.18 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Package Tracking System^U Distro Tracker

Marko Lalic implemented quite a few interesting features in the last weeks of the Google Summer of Code (support of teams most notably). Unfortunately he didn’t deploy (yet) the latest changes on pts.debian.net.

Given the good work he made over the summer, I marked him as successful in his GSOC. Hopefully he will stick around and continue to contribute, he promised to try to handle some mass renaming that we agreed upon. Effectively, after much bike-shedding, I decided that the software would be called “Distro Tracker”.

Once those last-minute cleanups are done, I plan to request “tracker.debian.org” to Debian System Administrators. This means that it will be deployed in parallel to the current PTS at least until we’re at feature parity in the new codebase.

The new codebase should be much more easy to get started with, so I should do some promotion and invite people to contribute to it… possibly by writing some short “how to get started” documentation.

I started by creating a dedicated wiki page: http://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/distro-tracker

Misc packaging

I got two REJECTs from ftpmasters this month (one for galette, one for dolibarr). I took care of fixing the various issues in galette and the package has been promptly accepted afterwards. For dolibarr, I mentored the upstream maintainer about the various problems and got him to fix it. It took a bit more time and the package is thus still in NEW.

I packaged wordpress 3.6, and then wordpress 3.6.1 (security update). python-django also had multiple security updates this month, I took care of one or two uploads but Luke Faraone dealt with most of them (including backports to Squeeze!).

I packaged Publican 3.6.1 and uploaded dh-linktree 0.4 to fix a FTBFS issue introduced with Perl 5.18.

Of anecdotal importance, but I also filed bug #721849 after seeing how much energy was spent to ensure debian/rules didn’t contain an improper copyright statement.

Thanks

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

Finding a new name for the Package Tracking System

September 3, 2013 by Raphaël Hertzog

The Google Summer of Code rewriting the Package Tracking System is approaching its end and I’m starting to think about deploying it on debian.org. Its scope has expanded over the years and the rewritten PTS will continue this trend by bringing some new features for teams (like the possibility to subscribe to all packages of a team).

I believe that its current hostname (and name) doesn’t reflect properly the role of the PTS. Add to this the fact that there’s still some work left to be done to reach feature-parity with the current PTS, I’m considering deploying it in parallel to the current PTS under a new name.

“Package Tracking System” is also a bit too long for a name, and sounds more like a description than a name…

But if I get rid of “packages.qa.debian.org” and “Package Tracking System”, how should we call the new PTS? 🙂

The PTS is a sort of central place that brings together information from many parts of Debian. It’s currently mainly a consumer/dispatcher of information but I expect to integrate some of the external services that are useful for all Debian derivatives, and it will thus become more and more a producer of first-hand information as well.

To replace packages.qa.debian.org, Stefano Zacchiroli suggested me hub.debian.org and I must say I like it, it’s short and relatively close to what the PTS actually is (and reminds me of DEP-2 — the new PTS will be an asset to make it a reality). My other ideas were devel.debian.org, inside.debian.org, watch.debian.org, track.debian.org, … do you have better suggestions? what’s your preference?

Finding a better name is harder, but there’s room to build on the hub concept and similar images. I would like a full name that’s not too long and an associated abbreviation/short name for the top-level Python package (currently we use “pts” for that Python package). Can you come up with something original and satisfactory?

My latest thoughts end up with “DistroHub” as full name and “dhub” as Python package name. Still boring…

So, dear lazy web, I heard that we’re good at bikeshedding in Debian, so can you come up with something better? Share your suggestions in the comments!

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook

Debian France

Misc Debian work

Thanks

Package Tracking System^U Distro Tracker

Misc packaging

Thanks

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