apt-get install debian-wizard

Insider infos, master your Debian/Ubuntu distribution

  • About
    • About this blog
    • About me
    • My free software history
  • Support my work
  • Get the newsletter
  • More stuff
    • Support Debian Contributors
    • Other sites
      • My company
      • French Blog about Free Software
      • Personal Website (French)
  • Mastering Debian
  • Contributing 101
  • Packaging Tutorials
You are here: Home / Archives for GSOC

My Free Software Activities in June 2013

July 9, 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 (106.39 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Debian France

I handled some subscriptions that we collected during Solutions Linux at the end of last month and I also worked on updating the accounts in preparation of our annual general assembly. As the current president, I wrote a “moral assessment” of the organization and I helped Sylvestre Ledru (the treasurer) to prepare an overview of our financial situation (which is rather good).

The plan for this general assembly included the renewal of 6 of our 9 board members so I tried to motivate some persons to candidate and I’m pretty happy to see that we managed to have 9 candidates for 6 seats, a real election for once. 🙂

And as usual, I updated Galette to version 0.7.4.2 and I filed a couple of tickets (#621, #622).

Debian Package Tracking System

We’re getting close to one month of work on the Google Summer of Code Project that rewrites the Package Tracking System. On average I spent a good 1h30 per day on reviewing the code, giving my feedback, and preparing the user stories for the next iteration, plus a 2 hour meeting each Wednesday afternoon. This is more than I expected but at I’m rather happy with the result so far.

We have a live test instance updated each week (after the end of the iteration) at pts.debian.net. The web interface is empty because the bulk of the work has been spent on the email interface for now, but it’s now feature complete and already has seen some improvements compared to the current implementation (fixing #340863 for example). You can interact with it by sending mails to control@pts.debian.net.

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook

The fundraising for the liberation of the original book in French met its initial target very quickly and we added new targets with supplementary rewards (more ebook from Eyrolles, donation to Debian). All the supplementary targets were met, although the last one took until the last day!

Thanks to all the supporters, we now have a French translation of the Debian Administrator’s Handbook which is free and we have collected about 2700 EUR for Debian.

Debian Packaging

I got a couple of release critical bug reports that I had to fix:

  • #713636: cpputest FTBFS due to -Werror. Dropped -Werror in Debian and submitted the patch upstream.
  • #713527: logidee-tools FTBFS due to reorganizations in the TeXLive meta-packages. Fixed the (build-)dependencies.
  • #713947: multiple security issues in WordPress. Packaged new upstream version 3.5.2 into unstable and wheezy-security (and Yves-Alexis Perez took care of squeeze-security).

And trying to anticipate future issues, I filed an upstream ticket on feed2omb (#33) to see whether upstream had plans to support the new pump.io API that identi.ca is supposed to use soonish.

Kali Linux

I filed a couple of Debian bugs: #711866 to request a new upstream version of w3af in Debian, #711044 to report a missing dependency in LSB meta-informations of the vsftpd init script.

I worked on packaging passing-the-hash. Basically this is a fork of several software just to override some NTLM authentication functions. In some cases, I managed to avoid the fork by transforming the patches in LD_PRELOAD libraries that override the specific symbol of the patched functions.

Among the forked software, there was winexe which wasn’t packaged yet. So I packaged it but we quickly ran into some segfaults (which was already reported to upstream since a few months). I investigated the problem and prepared a patch. It has been submitted to upstream and merged.

Thanks

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

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).

Liberate the Debian Handbook

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.

The Debian Booth (Tanguy on the left, Raphaël on the right)

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.

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.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Google+, Twitter and Facebook

.

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2

Get the Debian Handbook

Available as paperback and as ebook.
Book cover

Email newsletter

Get updates and exclusive content by email, join the Debian Supporters Guild:

Follow me

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • GitHub
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Discover my French books

Planets

  • Planet Debian

Archives

I write software, books and documentation. I'm a Debian developer since 1998 and run my own company. I want to share my passion and knowledge of the Debian ecosystem. Read More…

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

Recent Posts

  • Freexian is looking to expand its team with more Debian contributors
  • Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, July 2022
  • Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, June 2022
  • Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, May 2022
  • Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, April 2022

Copyright © 2005-2021 Raphaël Hertzog