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Joining Ubuntu as a Debian developer

July 7, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

I’m a Debian developer since 1998 and have been fostering cooperation between Debian and Ubuntu since its inception with various levels of success.

I recently decided to go one step further and join Ubuntu as an official member. I wanted to be able to vote and to promote best cooperation practices from the Ubuntu side as well (and not only in Debian). Joining as a Debian developer should be relatively easy, it is well known in the Debian community that Mark Shuttleworth once said:

Every Debian developer is also an Ubuntu developer, because one way to contribute to Ubuntu is to contribute to Debian.

So I sought to verify that too! Here’s the result.

I prepared my application page collecting 2 testimonials from Lucas Nussbaum and Colin Watson, I registered for the next EMEA membership meeting (which happened yesterday, irc logs here), and I attended. (I just followed the instructions on the wiki)

During the meeting, when it was my turn, I pasted my short introduction and got immediately +1 votes from several board members, they didn’t even want to hear from me, they were already convinced. 🙂 I still responded to a few questions and elaborated on my goals and was promptly accepted even if I made it clear that my technical contributions will continue to be done within Debian.

A few minutes later I was added to the ubuntumembers launchpad group and this morning I followed the instructions to add my feed to Planet Ubuntu and here I am…

The whole process has been very smooth and the meeting shows a very welcoming attitude. Even someone who was denied the Ubuntu member status was cheered for his work and encouraged to try again when he can present some testimonials from other members.

Hello Planet Ubuntu!

Reorganization of my blog, please update your feeds

June 25, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

Up to now I had a single blog hosted on ouaza.com, I used to blog in French and in English on many topics, even though free software and Debian was the main topic. Sometimes I avoided blogging on something because it would not really match the expectations of my readers (and of the various planets syndicating my blog). And I have always been annoyed by the fact that English readers were second-class on my blog because everything was configured in French.

So I decided to fix this once for all, I have created two new blogs in addition to ouaza.com. The latter is now my private blog (in French) with everything that is not free software related. And free software will be the topic of my 2 new blogs :

RaphaelHertzog.com is the English one (RSS feed) ;
RaphaelHertzog.fr is the French one (RSS feed).

I have setup some HTTP redirections on various feed URLs but if you were subscribed to my main feed, you’re now redirected to the new English feed and you might want to subscribe to the French one to continue reading my articles in French. In any case, you might want to update the feed URL that you used.

I also profited from this reorganization to switch to WordPress 3.0 and the 3 blogs are hosted on the same installation thanks to the new multisite feature and to the domain mapping plugin. The main regression in those changes is that I’m back to the (new) default theme of WordPress with the standard header image. I would like to personalize them but I have no graphics skills… but if you do and would like to work on this for me, please get in touch. I’ll make sure you get your pony in return. 🙂

More changes concerning those blogs are in the pipe but that will be the topic of other posts. Thanks for following !

About the Debian Community Poll

June 11, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

While I find the idea interesting, several of the questions can’t be correctly answered because the proposed choices are not realistic or too limited.

On the question of the usage of money, I believe we should spend money to fund important projects but I don’t want to fund “people having important positions in Debian and doing important work”. What should I reply? (Granted, there’s the other item but that doesn’t help getting a clear picture of the answers)

On the question “Do you prefer time based releases instead of the «it’s ready when it’s ready» releases?”, it is putting two concepts in opposition when the release managers recently proposed a third way that combines both: “time based freezes and release when it’s ready”. This is what I want and I can’t adequately express it either in the current poll.

Rewriting update-alternatives in C

May 27, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

Among the goals listed in dpkg’s roadmap, there’s the C rewrite of the remaining perl scripts provided by the dpkg binary package (dpkg-dev is not concerned, it will remain a collection of perl scripts). Of the remaining scripts, update-alternatives was the largest piece of code (~1100 lines of perl) and I started converting it to C a few weeks ago (based on preliminary work of Guillem). It’s now 2200 lines of C…

Thanks to the relatively extensive test-suite that I wrote last year, I’m relatively confident that this new update-alternatives won’t break your system. That said, it still needs some real-life usage to ensure everything is really ok (and users actively trying to break it are even better). Thus I would be glad if you could try it out ( binary package for i386 or .dsc) and report back to debian-dpkg@lists.debian.org.

The rewrite of the 2 other remaining scripts is almost completed in a branch of Guillem. Hopefully this can be our last project completed in time for Squeeze as far as dpkg goes. It would be a great achievement for people that would like to use dpkg in embedded environments and avoid perl due to its size.

Note: nobody sponsored that work. But it’s not too late 🙂

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