Me – Page 23

February 2011 wrap up

February 26, 2011 by Raphaël Hertzog

February has been again a busy month for me. Here’s a quick summary of what I did:

Multi-Arch work

I have spent many days implementing and refining dpkg’s Multi-Arch support with Guillem Jover (dpkg co-maintainer) and Steve Langasek (beta-tester of my code ;-)). Early testers can try what’s in my latest pu/multiarch/snapshot/* branch in my personal git repository.

A Debian DVD shop

I’m always exploring new options to fund my Debian work (besides direct donations) and this month—with the Debian Squeeze release—I saw an opportunity in selling Debian DVD. Nobody provides DVD with included firmwares and quite a few people would like to avoid the SpaceFun theme. So I built unofficial Debian DVDs that integrate firmware and that install a system with the old theme (MoreBlue Orbit). Click here to learn more about my unofficial DVDs.

On my blog

In my “People behind Debian” series, I interviewed Mike Hommey (Iceweasel maintainer) and Maximiliam Attems (member of the kernel team).

I started a “Debian Cleanup Tip” series and already published 4 installments:

For contributors, I wrote two articles: the first gives a set of (suggested) best practices for sponsoring Debian packages and adapted my article as a patch for the Developers Reference. In the second article, I shared some personal advice for people who are considering participating on Debian mailing list: 7 mistakes to avoid when participating to Debian mailing lists.

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My Debian related goals for 2011

January 26, 2011 by Raphaël Hertzog

Like last year, here’s a list of Debian related projects that I’d like to tackle this year. I might not do them all, but I like to write them down, I am more productive when I have concrete objectives.

Translate my Debian book into English.
I will run a fundraising campaign with Ulule.com and if enough people are interested, I will spend a few months with Roland Mas to translate the book. Hopefully this project can be completed until the summer.
Finish multiarch support in dpkg.
I’m working on this with Guillem Jover right now, thanks to Linaro who is sponsoring my work.
Make deb files use XZ compression by default.
It’s a simple change in dpkg-deb and it would literally save gigabytes of space on mirrors. It’s particularly important so that single CD/DVD can have a more complete set of software. #556407 (on DAK) needs to be fixed first though and a project-wide discussion is in order. Some archs might want to have a different default.
Be more reactive to review/merge dpkg patches.
While we welcome help, we have a backlog of patches sitting in the BTS and it happened several times that we failed to review/merge submitted branches in a decent time. It’s very frustrating for the contributor. I already tried to improve the situation by creating the Review/Merge Queue but nobody stepped up to help review and update the patches.
As I am getting more familiar with the C part of dpkg, I hope to be able to jump in when Guillem doesn’t have the time or the interest.
Implement the rolling distribution proposed as part of the CUT project and try to improve the release process.
I really want the new rolling distribution but it will inevitably have an impact on the release process. It can’t be done as a standalone project. I would also like to see progress in the way we deal with transitions (see discussion here).
Work more regularly on the developers-reference.
Hopefully I will be able to combine this with my blog writing activities, i.e. write blog articles on the topics that the developers-reference shall cover and then adapt my articles with some docbook markup.

To the above list, I shall add a few supplementary goals related to funding my Debian work:

Write a 10-lesson course called “Smart Package Management”.
It will delivered by email to my newsletter subscribers.
Create an information product (most likely an ebook or an online training) and sell it on my blog.
The precise topic has not yet been defined although I have a few ideas. Is there something that you would like me to teach you? Leave your suggestions in a comment.
By the end of the year, have at least 1/3 of my time funded by donations and/or earnings of my information products.
More concretely it means 700 € each month or a 9-fold increase compared to the current income level (around 80 €/month mostly via Flattr).

That makes up lots of challenges for this year. You can help me reach those goals, join my Debian Supporters Guild and you’ll be informed every time that I start something new or when you can help in specific ways.

What I publish on Planet Debian and Planet Ubuntu

January 19, 2011 by Raphaël Hertzog

Up to now, Planet Debian and Planet Ubuntu were syndicating the main feed of my blog. I changed this recently (remember, I explained how I created my custom WordPress feed). Read on to learn why and subscribe to the main feed now if you want to get all my Debian/Ubuntu articles in the future.

Planet Debian/Ubuntu are supposed to be windows into the lives of the contributors. Whatever they are doing. Obviously you get a lot of infos about Debian and Ubuntu since most contributors spend a lot of time working on those distributions. Due to this, those planets have also become dedicated medias to exchange between contributors.

The problem I had is that my blog is more than just a place where I speak of what I do within Debian. As part of my evil plan, I set out my blog to become a great documentation resource for Debian/Ubuntu users. So when I wrote articles for users and/or beginners (like 5 reasons why a Debian package is more than a simple file archive or How to rebuild Debian packages), I got some remarks that it was “odd” to have those articles on Planet Debian because most contributors knew those things already.

The bottom line is that from now on I’ll decide on a case by case whether the article is suitable for Planet Debian&Ubuntu based on my feelings (and the feedback I get by email). But if you enjoyed my articles for users, I invite you to directly subscribe to my blog to make sure you’ll get them all in the future:

Click here to subscribe by RSS.
Click here to subscribe by email.
Click here to go to my Facebook page and then click on “Like”, to get my articles in your Facebook news feed.

By the way I would like to thank you all. This blog has been created last July and I’m glad to have already more than 1400 regular followers (spread over RSS/email/Twitter/Identi.ca/Facebook, not counting the thousands that read me via Planet Debian/Ubuntu).

I hope you’ll enjoy 2011 with me, and continue sharing the articles you like.

Update: if you want you can also subscribe to a feed containing only the articles not published on Planet Debian/Ubuntu. It’s here: https://raphaelhertzog.com/feed/notonplanets/.

Review of my Debian related goals for 2010

January 17, 2011 by Raphaël Hertzog

Last year I shared my “Debian related goals for 2010”. I announced that I would not be able to complete them all and indeed I have not, but I have still done more than what I expected. Let’s have a look.

Translate my Debian book into English and get it published: NOT DONE

Or rather not yet done. It’s still an important project of mine and I will do it this year. When I wrote this last year, I expected to find a publisher that would take care of everything but we failed to find a suitable one so we’re going to do it ourselves.

Cleanup the dpkg perl API and create libdpkg-perl: DONE

libdpkg-perl has been introduced with dpkg 1.15.6.

Create dpkg-buildflags: DONE

dpkg-buildflags has been introduced with dpkg 1.15.7. It’s not widely used yet and it won’t really be until debhelper 7 supports it (see #544844). It would be nice to see progress on this front this year.

Ensure the new source formats continue to gain acceptance: DONE

The adoption rate has been steady, it clearly slowed down since the freeze though. I have implemented quite a few features to satisfy the needs of users, like the possibility to unapply the patches after the build, or the possibility to fail in case of unwanted upstream changes.

Design a generic vcs-buildpackage infrastructure to be integrated in dpkg-dev: NOT DONE

I believe it’s something important on the long term but it never made it to my short-term TODO list and it’s unlikely to change any time soon.

Continue fixing dpkg bugs faster than they are reported: PARTLY DONE

We have dealt with many bugs over the year, but we still have 20 more bugs than at the start of last year (370 vs 350). We’re not doing bad compared to many other Debian teams but we can still benefit from some help. Start here if you’re interested.

Enhance our infrastructure to ease interaction between contributors and to have a better view of how each package is maintained: NOT DONE

I am convinced that we need something to have a clearer idea of the commitments made by each contributor. I don’t put the same amount of care in maintaining smarty-gettext that I do on dpkg. If we had a database of the stuff that we know we don’t do well enough, it’s easier to point new contributors towards those.

Anyway, this project is still unlikely to come to the top of my priorities any time soon.

Work on the developers-reference: NOT DONE

We have switched the Maintainer field to debian-policy@lists.debian.org to have more review of the changes suggested through the bug tracking system but that has not changed much on the global situation.

I still hope to become more active on it sometimes this year. Maybe by trying to make it more fun and creating the text for some of the wishlist bugs as blog articles first.

Rewrite in C the last Perl scripts provided by the dpkg binary package: DONE

Dpkg 1.15.8 was the first version working without Perl, I announced it in July.

Integrate the 3-way merge tool for Debian changelogs in dpkg-dev: DONE

dpkg-mergechangelogs is part of dpkg-dev since 1.15.7.

I enjoy it regularly. Unfortunately it doesn’t work well for cherry-picks. Would be nice to see this fixed, anyone up to the task? 🙂

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Multi-Arch work

A Debian DVD shop

On my blog

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