Yesterday, a General Resolution was proposed to decide if the new amd64 architecture is added to the list of supported architectures in Debian 3.1. After reading the thread (and before reading it, anyway), I can't agree more with joeyh's post on the matter: if Debian as a group can't decide about things like this in a civilised discussion in the debian-devel mailing list, it probably means we're fucked. Not so long ago, proposing GR's was an exception, something we got to when reaching a reasonable consensus was completely impossible, and never for strictly technical issues like this one. We do need to vote major political issues like wiping non-free from the archive, or ammendments to the Constitution or whatever, but voting what architectures we're going to support in Sarge is wrong.

Sure, it would be very nice to have amd64 in Sarge, but how positive are the porters that this wouldn't mean yet another delay for our release? How widely tested is the port, given it hasn't entered unstable officially? I'm all for it's inclusion in unstable as soon as our infrastructure can deal with it, but making it mandatory to ship with sarge seems too dangerous to me. Besides, there are alternatives. There are no precedents, but how crackful would it be to add the port to Sarge after it is released, say in 3.1r1 or r2? Why don't we, instead of complaining that not including it would make us not support in the next 2 years an architecture that will soon become more and more popular, commit to doing more frequent releases, so this is a not-so-big issue anyway?

As joeyh and others said, I really hope things change in the future, this situation makes Debian less and less interesting.

Firefox 0.9 is now in unstable, so it was time to do the matching mozilla-firefox-locale-ca. Unfortunately, the upstream XPI had the same problems as the new Thunderbird: by default, it writes the Catalan profile stuff to the base defaults directory, instead of using a CA/ subdirectory. It's also missing some files that were present in previous versions, so I have held the upload until I discuss in the translation mailing list.

On the GNOME front, our chances of getting gst-plugins0.8 and the packages waiting for them have temporarily vanished, as an upload of gst-plugins0.8 was made. seb128 has asked David to ask before doing new uploads, so hopefully things will go better in the future. We're still missing a build of jack-audio-connection-kit for alpha to make gst-plugins0.8 a testing candidate. I'm trying to get jbailey do the dirty job for us. :)

Last night things finally worked out as we wanted and cupsys, kdelibs, samba, wine and various GNOME bits managed to entered Sarge. Thanks to all of you who had the patience to hold off your uploads to help this happen. And big thanks to vorlon and Kamion for nursing all the stuff.

More surprising is to discover, along with all of the above, that gstreamer0.8 also made it in testing, at least according to the testing output interpreter. If this is true, it would mean all of the important problems of GNOME in testing would be solved now. In any case, when you apt-get update tonight, you testing users should finally get a working gedit and other stuff.

Update: I was obviously too sleepy to blog... what we're missing is gst-plugins0.8, not gstreamer itself.

Yesterday after lunch I decided I would spend all the evening doing pending Debian work. I uploaded mozilla-locale-eu 1.7 for the Basque guys, did my own mozilla-thunderbird-locale-ca as soon as I spotted thunderbird 0.7.1 in incoming, then moved to freeciv bug triaging and ended up fixing just two bugs (other bugs are fixed upstream for 1.15), and finally I did some bug fixing in alsa-utils, including the annoying alsaconf config path bug. I'm still missing updates for mozilla-locale-ca (waiting for upstream) and mozilla-firefox-locale-ca (waiting for the unstable upload), but the Debian TODO is a lot better now.

gimp-print now has all builds ready to go into testing. Tonight we might go to bed with the nice surprise of getting the cups stuff sorted out.

Last evening, the release guys were doing simulations on the cupsys stuff, and everything looked well: qt3 has been accepted in Sarge, thus unblocking kdelibs. The Samba RC bug had been temporarily downgraded to help things a bit. Everything looked bright, and the release team started thinking the transition would be complete in yesterday's testing run... until we spotted a gimp-print upload in incoming. This made it not possible to have the transition done last night, but fortunately, the buildd's reacted promptly and at this time, all the 11 builds have been completed successfully, with just a few remaining to be uploaded to incoming.

The catch: the upload was marked with low priority, so it would have taken 10 days to enter testing. The maintainer was then asked to reupload with a higher urgency, and that just happenned. Guys, this is bad. If you need to push some urgency so a package waits less to enter testing, don't do new uploads just for this. Instead, explain why you need the higher urgency to the release team (always reachable in debian-release@lists.debian.org or #debian-release in Freenode. They can bump these things internally in the testing scripts.

On a related note, if you maintain a package that directly or indirectly uses libcupsys, please, please don't do uploads until further notice, or you'll be blocking the transition further. Thanks.

Obviously Murphy is not on vacation yet... another day passes in the testing puzzle world.

I did my i18n workshop this evening, and I'm not too sure about the result. First, the computers at the computer lab didn't work, so we had to use a KDE-based Live-CD, which only had one of the 4 translation tools (KBabel) I wanted to demo. The USB stick with my OpenOffice presentation, for some reason, had the old version from yesterday night, and I was missing most of my slides, so I had to do the presentation from memory. Finally, I had no projector, so I had to write some of the URLs and gettext examples by hand in the chalkboard. Despite this, I think the people got the idea, and next time I do it it'll be better, hopefully.

tbm just whines about being hungry, and Robert and Guillem are planning staying all night in the University hacking their KFreeBSD port. Quite insane... Amaya and Ian are completely MIA since a few hours ago and don't answer our calls. They are going to miss today's dinner...

Sergio and I need to leave tomorrow at 7:30AM, unfortunately. The rest will stay until Saturday, when tbm will speak about Debian and Robert and Guillem about Debian GNU/K*BSD.

We have arrived at Manresa, after a longish drive from Valencia. Poor Ian is still suffering a bad jet-lag, and Amaya is still not convinced about my very clear arguments regarding Valencian and Catalan. She will give in before Friday, and it's actually true she's learning Catalan... she's asking all of us to speak Catalan with her. We have already met Guillem and Robert at the University, as well as Aleix Badia, the restless Catalan translator in our team. Guillem and Robert have gone to the airport to pick up tbm, who should be here soon, and then we'll go to the youth hostal and have some dinner. Sergio and I are trying to quickly finish up our talk and workshop for tomorrow. I hope I'll manage to finish it on time...

Once again, I couldn't ressist taking my training shoes with me, even if I know the chances of me going out to run for a while are minimal. tbm will want to make fun of this... again.

Update: Sergio stole my title. And Amaya is using Windows XP.

Tomorrow, Ian Murdock, Amaya, Sergio and I will head to Manresa, near Barcelona, to attend to the III Jornades de Programari Lliure, after the first two arrive to Valencia from Madrid. In this meeting, Sergio will talk about Custom Debian Distributions and I'll do a workshop on free software localization. tbm is also coming and will give a talk about Debian on Saturday. Additionally, Robert Millan and Guillem Jover will talk about Debian GNU/K*BSD, and giving the Debian Catalan Cabal a nice opportunity to meet in Real Life and talk about the next steps in the World Domination Plan.

tbm wants to go to the beach, so you lot should be taking a swimming suit just in case. Ok, admittedly, I want to go too. :)

The meeting has a lot more Debian presence than the organizers expected at the beginning. Besides, lots of people from Softcatalà and a few other projects I contribute to will be present, and I'm looking forward to meet them too. See you all in Manresa!

I haven't posted about this in a while, mostly due to lack of news.

As it stands now, the biggest problem with the GNOME components in Sarge is gedit not starting, and the easies solution is still to hand-fix it. This is due to the big gnutls10 transition still being stalled. The biggest problem today is kdelibs, which is waiting for a qt3 build on m68k. Hopefully, with a bit of luck, this will be resolved soon and the release mages will be able to cast the spell that makes kdelibs, GNOME stuff, Samba, CUPS and others enter Sarge at once.

Another of the GNOME problems is the lack of gst-plugins0.8 in Sarge. This is stalling gnome-applets, gnome-media and a few more. The problem this time is jack-audio-connection-kit, which is missing an alpha build and a few days of wait. With lully up and running again (apparently), one hopes that jack will be ready to go soon, thus removing a good list of packages needed by meta-gnome in testing.

Speaking of meta-gnome2, I uploaded version 56 today, adding an alternative for mozilla-xft, which has been replaced by the normal mozilla build. Little after my upload, mozilla-browser was corrected to declare a Provides: mozilla-xft, but I guess it won't harm anyone to have the alternative there for a while.

My libgnetwork packages were accepted, but failed to build do to a compile warning on some arches mixed with the usage of -Werror. I'll fix soonish, hopefully.

I need to translate gstreamer. Maybe tonight.

One of the expected surprises I found when I came back from Pont the Suert was a tremendous amount of unfiltered mail (ie, spam + non-list mail I probably have to reply to). Just one year ago, the alarm bells would have gone off if my inbox reached 40 mails or so. Today, it's probably at 400 mails, some of them that I really should reply but I have no time to. If you're waiting for a reply from me and you don't get it, I suggest you remail me and insist. IRC and jabber probably works better these days, though.