I guess it's late enough to make this official. Once again, I won't be in DebConf5.

A pair of months ago I submitted a draft outline of what could be my talk for Debconf. My idea was to talk about teamwork in Debian, how Alioth has helped a lot to make teams of packagers, and talking about the specific GNOME Team case as an example of this. Eventually, the talk (and, I believed, my options to get some funding) was rejected, so I thought there was no way I would be in Finland this summer. When Bdale came to Castelló at the beginning of May, he told me I may be on time to ask for funding, and that I should really be in DebConf. Thanks for the kind comments bdale, :) but I took way too much time to react (I asked here and there and saw that funding was probably covered by already confirmed attendees).

Two days ago, partly to please Erinn, partly because I know I'm going to miss a great Debconf this year, I mailed Gunnar to see if there was any chance, but I knew what the reply would be. Not only funding is impossible now, but even getting some room to sleep is scarce, even in a place for 20/30 persons.

Having a look at how the full thing would cost me, including plane tickets and all, it's a no-op. Too bad, it would have been very cool to meet everyone who keep telling me "see you in Finland". Well, you won't, I'm very sorry...

Not going to Finland unblocks another plan, though. If I can't go to Debconf, I can't miss the Jornades de Programari Lliure in the UPC campus at Vilanova i la Geltrú, where it seems I will meet tbm again (OMG, no no no!) and we can do cool stuff with the local Catalan Debian community. And, between talks, the beach is so near you can go relax a bit on the sand!

Last week I learned about the newest flamewar in Debian mailing lists through the #debian-release IRC channel, while some people were busy trying to tackle the last few RC bugs in the sarge release. It seems KDE, in non-default configurations, might pop up a screensaver that might end up bringing some fresh pr0n to your monitor.

At the time I didn't even read the bug report, and quickly forgot about it, but the other morning Sergio asked me to come to see something at his work desk in office. He said it was WebCollage, the screensaver in the middle of the storm. He demoed it for me and soon enough we had a few interesting pictures in the screen: a baby, a top-less woman, Nelson Mandela...

Thanks, flame warriors! After a few years using the "blank screen" screensaver, I've found a new screensaver that brings some fun every now and then. It's cool to walk back into office after our break and find a weird composition of pics on the screen before you go back to work. :)

You already know, GNOME 2.10 has finally started to enter sid. As always, this kind of transitions tend to break installability of GNOME in unstable during a few days. Please don't file bug reports about this, we possibly have enough.

Unlike our previous transition, which ended up going extremelly well, this time the Debian GNOME team is facing a problem that is delaying a few packages that are deep in the dependency chain, like gnome-menus or gnome-panel. The problem is, for those who care, that both kdelibs-data and gnome-menus provide the file /etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu, which is part of the freedesktop.org Desktop Menu Specification. After studying the specification and lots of discussion on IRC, we saw there were three ways to address this conflict:

• Use $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS in the user's session to look for the menu files elsewhere. This has a big drawback: if someone is using KDE and uses a menu editor to tweak their KDE menu, they will get a ~/.config/menus/applications.menu with a full KDE menu layout. Now, if this user switches to GNOME, GNOME will read this menu in their home, so they will get a KDE menu in GNOME, which is not so funny.
• Add a prefix to the GNOME-provided file, to make it read gnome-applications.menu, and patch GNOME menu editors, the Panel and other apps to look there. The big drawback is that third party apps with menu-editing functionality, not provided by Debian, will not be aware of this and will write custom menus in the wrong spot.
• Make gnome-menus (and effectively, all of the GNOME desktop) conflict with KDE. This great idea was suggested by dato, but at the time we had to make the final decision, he was inexplicably quiet on IRC, so we had to discard it.

In the end, after changing our mind we decided to go with the file renaming, as the "KDE in GNOME" (or viceversa) issue is way too ugly. This may or may not be a big problem in the Desktop Menu Specification, depending on who you ask. The spec was obviously written to have just one applications.menu shared by all the desktops, but that's not feasible today, as it depends on a ton of desktop files to add the OnlyShowIn properties. When all or most desktop files in Debian have this, we might bring this up again.

Anyway, with gnome-menus sorted, we are near to be able to upload the final missing 2.10 core packages like the Panel or Nautilus. Most libraries and a good number of other Desktop applications are already in unstable, at least for i386. Other architectures will have to wait until the buildd's find their way through the maze of FTBFS due to missing build dependencies. Please be patient!

While all of this is going on, it's fun and nice to see azeem going over all the GNOME packages and quickly filing bugs about compile problems on Debian GNU/Hurd. If all goes well and the patches get applied on all the modules, GNOME 2.12 might have Hurd support out of the box for the first time.

(yes, the third alternative was a joke, no need to flame me about conflicting with KDE...)