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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.

My Debian Activities in September 2012

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This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (1086.48 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Dpkg

I am subscribed to Launchpad’s dpkg bug tracker and I was getting annoyed with the amount of noise I got under the form of bug reports that look like “package foo failed to install/upgrade: package foo is already installed and configured”. Those reports are a combination of a bug in APT and of random other failures (often hardware related like corrupted .deb files, or I/O errors, but sometimes also real problems in other packages) but they always end up assigned on dpkg (because dpkg is outputting an error message complaining about APT’s decision to configure something that doesn’t have to be configured).

I simply don’t have the time required to manually process and inspect all those reports, so I decided to filter them at the apport level with a new “Ubuntu bug pattern” that indicates that those reports are a duplicate of LP#541595. Thanks to this, the dpkg bug count quickly went down from 130 to about 80.

Packaging

I sponsored a new upstream version of ledgersmb. I quickly updated WordPress to version 3.4.2 since it contains security relevant fixes.

I also pushed a small update of nautilus-dropbox fixing #686863 because upstream renamed the binary package that they hand out on their website from nautilus-dropbox to dropbox. Their dropbox package only conflicts with old versions of nautilus-dropbox and not with the version that Debian is shipping and thus I had to add a Conflicts on our side to forbid co-installation of both packages.

Testing wheezy’s installation

I bought a new laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad X230) and used this as an excuse to test Wheezy’s installation process. It worked mostly fine except for two things:

  1. First I noticed that it would not accept my passphrase for my encrypted partition during early boot… this turned out to be already reported as #619711 but was no longer getting any attention from the package maintainer. After some IRC discussion with Julien Cristau, we prodded Michael Prokop who had apparently already offered to take care of this issue. I tested his updated package and the result got quickly uploaded.
  2. I had weird networking problems that turned out to be related to the lack of the loopback network (i.e. on localhost). This was the result of a broken /etc/network/interfaces: it had been incorrectly modified by NetworkManager. I reported this in #688355. This issue affects people with IPv6 enabled networks.

Debian France

There’s a resurgence of activity in Debian France. Sylvestre Ledru is leading the organization of a mini-debconf in Paris on November 24-25th. And Tanguy Ortolo is now taking care of some merchandising (Polo shirts, to change from the usual T-Shirt).

I might give a talk during this mini-debconf, possibly about multi-arch.

Misc

It’s been a few months that I noticed a 2 second lag of gnome-shell everytime that smuxi (my IRC client) sent a notification. It’s very annoying, you have the impression that the entire machine freezes.

So I contacted Mirco Bauer on #smuxi and we investigated a bit. It turns out that smuxi is using an old version of the notification protocol where the picture is sent as a bytestream leading to huge dbus messages. This is clearly sub-optimal so smuxi will be fixed to be able to send the path of the picture instead of the picture itself. On the other hand, it’s really a bug of gnome-shell that it freezes during the time it takes to handle the bigger-than-usual dbus message. So I also filed a bug on GNOME Shell (Bugzilla #683829) to get this fixed.

Librement: funding free software work

I started a new project with the goal of helping free software developers to fund their free software work. It’s still mostly vaporware for now but I have a public code repository, a nice logo and lots of ideas.

If the topic is of interest to you, and you’d like to be involved, feel free to get in touch. Otherwise stay tuned.

Thanks

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

Looking back at 16 years of dpkg history with some figures

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With Debian’s 19th anniversary approaching, I thought it would be nice to look back at dpkg’s history. After all, it’s one of the key components of any Debian system.

The figures in this article are all based on dpkg’s git repository (as of today, commit 9a06920). While the git repository doesn’t have all the history, we tried to integrate as much as possible when we created it in 2007. We have data going back to April 1996…

In this period between April 1996 and August 2012:

  • 146 persons contributed to dpkg (result of git log --pretty='%aN'|sort -u|wc -l)
  • 6948 commits have been made (result of git log --oneline | wc -l)
  • 3133612 lines have been written/modified (result of git log --stat|perl -ne 'END { print $c } $c += $1 if /(\d+) insertions/;')

Currently the dpkg source tree contains 28303 lines of C, 14956 lines of Perl and 6984 lines of shell (figures generated by David A. Wheeler’s ‘SLOCCount’) and is translated in 40 languages (but very few languages managed to translate everything, with all the manual pages there are 3997 strings to translate).

The top 5 contributors of all times (in number of commits) is the following (result of git log --pretty='%aN'|sort| uniq -c|sort -k1 -n -r|head -n 5):

  1. Guillem Jover with 2663 commits
  2. Raphaël Hertzog with 993 commits
  3. Wichert Akkerman with 682 commits
  4. Christian Perrier with 368 commits
  5. Adam Heath with 342 commits

I would like to point out that those statistics are not entirely representative as people like Ian Jackson (the original author of dpkg’s C reimplementation) or Scott James Remnant were important contributors in parts of the history that were recreated by importing tarballs. Each tarball counts for a single commit but usually bundles much more than one change. Also each contributor has its own habits in terms of crafting a work in multiple commits.

Last but not least, I have generated this 3 minutes gource visualization of dpkg git’s history (I used Planet’s head pictures for dpkg maintainers where I could find it).

Watching this video made me realize that I have been contributing to dpkg for 5 years already. I’m looking forward to the next 5 years 🙂

And what about you? You could be the 147th contributor… see this wiki page to learn more about the team and to start contributing.

My Debian Activities in June 2012

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This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (168.12 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Dpkg

This month, I resumed my work on dpkg. I concentrated my efforts on some “polishing” of the “3.0 (quilt)” format. With the latest version (1.16.6 — which was uploaded to unstable shortly before the freeze), dpkg-source restores the source tree in a clean state after a failed patch application (#652970), doesn’t overwrite the patch header from the pre-existing automatic patch, updates automatically debian/source/include-binaries during dpkg-source –commit, and supports a new –no-unapply-patches option for those who dislike the auto-unapplication at the end of the process when the patches were not applied at the start.

I wanted to go further and offer a new feature that could insert the automatic patch at the bottom of the quilt series but I have been short on time to complete this feature. I just managed to factorize all the quilt handling in a dedicated Perl module (Dpkg::Source::Quilt) to have cleaner code in the module handling the source format (Dpkg::Source::Package::V3::quilt).

For those who wonder, this feature is meant primarily for the X Strike Force team which maintains packages in Git and are doings lots of upstream cherry-picks (to fix regressions, etc.). But they also use quilt on top of that tree to keep some lasting Debian specific changes. With the 1.0 format, the “automatic diff” is a bit messy but at least it gets smaller automatically when a new upstream release gets out, there’s nothing to clean out. I’d like them to be able to use “3.0 (quilt)” while keeping their workflow. I’m leaning towards allowing “--auto-commit=first:cherry-picks” that would name the automatic patch “cherry-picks” and put it in the first position in the quilt series. (Opinions welcome on that feature, BTW)

Packaging

There’s been quite some packaging in this last month before the freeze:

  • I packaged CppUTest (a test framework for C/C++), and I wrote an article about it.
  • I prepared a stable update of Publican to fix a missing dependency. I also updated the unstable version to include a backport of a fix that some user requested me to include.
  • I updated dh-linktree to improve its documentation (following a discussion that happened on debian-devel) and to deal properly with trailing slashes in its input (#673408).
  • I sponsored dblatex 0.3.4-1 and ledgersmb 1.3.18-1.
  • I updated gnome-shell-timer to a new upstream snapshot that was tagged as compatible with GNOME 3.4 (#6776516).
  • I packaged wordpress 3.4 and spent a whole day triaging the old bugs that accumulated. A few days later I developed a new infrastructure to properly manage plugins/themes/language files. The canonical directory where the user is expected to drop his custom plugins/themes is now in /var/lib/wordpress/wp-content/ and the official plugins/themes are “installed” there with symlinks pointing back to /srv/data/web/vhosts/wp.freexian.com/htdocs/wp-content/ where they actually reside.
  • I wanted to commit 2 patches for the developers-reference but then I noticed that some translations were complete and were waiting for an upload. So I cleaned the packaging (switch to dh) and I uploaded version 3.4.8 before committing the patches for #678710 and #678712.

While doing all this packaging work, I found 2 possible improvements that I filed as bug reports:

  • #676606: debcommit should be able to identify alone that a new release is prepared (when the distribution field of the changelog changes from UNRELEASED to something else).
  • #679132: lintian outputs false positives for the tag package-uses-local-diversion when neither –local nor –package is given on the dpkg-divert command line.

Debian France Booth at Solutions Linux

From June 19th to June 21th, I manned the Debian France booth at Solutions Linux together with Carl Chenet, Tanguy Ortolo and other members of the association. We answered lots of questions, sold all t-shirts and umbrellas that Carl imported from Germany and Switzerland (we really need to get our own merchandising stuff produced in France!), got people to join the association. We also presented a printed copy of the Debian Administrator’s Handbook and of the corresponding French book.

You can see Carl, me and Tanguy on this picture (click on it to see a bigger picture, thanks to Sébastien Dubois of Evolix for this one!):

I know lots of people are preparing for Debconf but I decided to not attend this year, the price of the air plane ticket was a bit too hefty for me and it was also in partial conflict with our family vacations. I thought about attending the Libre Software Meeting instead but alas I won’t go there either (but Roland Mas will be there!), I have too much work to complete before my own vacation in 2 weeks.

Thanks

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

Tags

3.0 (quilt) Activity summary APT aptitude Blog Book Cleanup conffile Contributing CUT d-i Debconf Debian Debian France Debian Handbook Debian Live Distro Tracker dpkg dpkg-source Flattr Flattr FOSS Freexian Funding Git GNOME GSOC HOWTO Interview LTS Me Multiarch nautilus-dropbox News Packaging pkg-security Programming PTS publican python-django Reference release rolling synaptic Ubuntu WordPress

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