We've spent the last two days carefully selecting what packages we should build and upload in an order that makes life easier for autobuilders.

Yesterday, the first few libraries were uploaded, as well as the user-guide. Some people had problems because a few packages didn't make it into incoming on time so some bits were uninstallable due to gnome-keyring depending on new atk.

Today, we've continued with important libs like libgnome/libgnomeui, libbonobo, eel and gnome-vfs. We've also uploaded a few apps now: bug-buddy and nautilus have hit sid and incoming respectively. As nautilus didn't make it to unstable by a few minutes, you should be careful about doing dist-upgrades today. apt will probably want to remove nautilus entirely, so I suggest you don't do it. :) That, or you pick libeel, libnautilus and nautilus from incoming, which will also work.

Sadly, in the process of building some of these packages, pbuilder left an active bind-mount of my local Debian mirror and I, trying to get rid of the bogus unclean build dir, recursively deleted the mirror entirely. Of course, this has slowed me down a lot, to the point that I had to ask Sjoerd to sponsor libgnomecanvas for me while I pick up the bits.

Maybe I'm a bit too optimistic, but I hope that maybe tomorrow we'll be able to finish all the builds, and we'll just have to wait for the autobuilders to do their work. At first everything went smooth, but they are already stuck in dep-wait failures due to libgnome, nautilus and others not having all the build-deps in place. Hopefully all the buildd's will retry soon...

A final note, remember not to happily dist-upgrade your unstable box today. Before that, check that nautilus isn't in your "to be removed list...

Those not following Debian development closely might have missed the Debian release team opening the doors for a GNOME 2.8 upload to unstable. Today, the first libraries have started hitting incoming and are building in the buildd network. The end goal is, of course, to ship sarge with GNOME 2.8.

We hope to have the whole thing uploaded by chunks in the next few days. While seb128 is confident about everything going well, I can't help being quite nervous about it, given how some past experiences went. We're doing uploads with extreme care, though. Everything should be alright.

Due to some concerns expressed by Kamion and vorlon, we'll have to leave out a few new GNOME 2.8 modules from the default install. Most noticeably, evolution won't be installed by default when someone does a desktop install. Also, gnome-volume-manager won't replace magicdev as the default automounting device for now, as sarge's official kernel is 2.4, and gnome-volume-manager depends on Linux 2.6 features. All of this is because the space in the first Sarge CD is a bit too tight for us to add all the new GNOME modules. It'll be easy to install the missing bits though.

We'll post more stuff as it happens. :)

[ Completely irrelevant story below, unless you were around that night ]

The other day I wrote about my stay at Madrid for the Jornadas GNOME Hispano, and said we were going to Madrid to have dinner and then go out.

My fears weren't unfounded. I was forced (ok, maybe not forced, say... induced) by hordes of evil Madrileños to drink, as they probably know I succumb quite easily to that drug. First, Grex prepared a dinner in a tapas bar near the Plaza de España.

This dinner basically consisted in eating little and drinking quite a bit. After I (voluntarily) had my first beer, my glass of wine would never be empty, as there was someone around who would quickly refill it as soon as I finished it. Anyway, after a while we went to a pub, where among other things, acs challenged me to a press-ups contest. I managed to win (you suck, acs!) even if I didn't feel my arms. At one point we were out on the street again, and I was missing my wallet. 5 minutes later, it was found in acs' pocket, who was probably more drunk than me (and that has its merit).

Garnacho was kind enough to take me to the hostal, which I would have never found alone, and offered to translate my attempts to communicate with the hostal guy to get my room opened. Nothing to exciting until here, besides I really don't like being drunk. What an image must I have given around Madrid...

Ok, so my train back home was at 9:00AM. At 8:27 or so, Carlos managed to wake me up. "Dude, it's 8:30". I think I managed to be ready in about two minutes, rushed down and hoped that I didn't have to change trains in the tube to get to Atocha. The hangover was quite bad, or probably I was still drunk... at the station, I waited a few minutes for the next train, and kept looking at my mobile phone. "11 minutes, 3 stops. I can make it still".

There were two men with suitcases and luggage in the same wagon, and when we arrived to the Atocha tube station, they stepped out of the train. My spinning head managed to connect two events: "men with luggage stepping out" = "I'm at the Puerta de Atocha RENFE station". I followed them, and after a few seconds. I realised there was no indication of how to get to the railroad station. I ask the men... "Oh, that the next tube station", and at that exact moment the doors in the train close. FUCK!

Next train went by 5 minutes later. 4 minutes to go. I rush out of the tube, carrying heavy bags with me, rush to the railroad station and when I get there, I am told the train has left one minute ago. The rest of the morning involved waiting 2.5h for the next train, suffering a horrible hangover alone, in a stupid station, not being able to read my book or study any Valencian and getting a smoking ticket for the next train. D'oh! At least I saw a nice demonstration of a support group for the Saharaui people, which was nice.

In the train, I managed to find a seat in the non-smoking wagon after an hour. An American couple sitting right next to me demonstrated how sucky you Americans are at spelling. "How do you spell 'recommend'?". The guy thinks for a few seconds... "Two c's, 'reccomend'". Ugh!

I arrived at Valencia at 3PM, and at home at 4, way too late for lunch. After the horrible train trip, I needed a 3 hour long nap.

Yesterday I came to Madrid to attend to the GNOME Hispano meeting. After a few hours of train, I arrived here, and have been attending to the different talks and workshops scheduled.

The first surprise came when during the lunch someone said I should talk about "something" in the unallocated space available due to a talk that had been cancelled. As Carlos could use a bit more time to prepare his Ubuntu talk, I accepted to babble about how the Debian GNOME team was formed and how we coordinate to package the GNOME Desktop releases and other related packages. Despite barely no preparation (half an hour before the talk, people could see me asking "so, what should I talk about" in #gnome-debian), people say it went ok and I managed to fill 45 minutes without talking about totally uninteresting stuff.

When we left Uni, we pretended to have dinner at Fresc Co, but we spent around one hour to get the car parked in Madrid, so we couldn't make it. Instead, we decided to have a tiny Kebab near the hostal and after that we quickly went to bed.

Today I had to get up way too early, but the day has been quite productive. I, as a LliureX team member, have made interesting contacts with the folks from Guadalinex and Linex, and probably we'll be able to come to some agreement to fund a few Free Software projects that really interest us, libburn probably being one of them, along with it's GNOME frontend, and maybe Mergeant, for database manipulation. We're also in touch now to do a11y work and other stuff that we all badly need.

I also had the inevitable debate about the goodness of Componentised Linux with Ismael, which ended up with me not being too convinced about its advantages... we'll have to keep an eye on it though, as it seems our brother projects from Andalucía and Extremadura are moving towards it.

In the evening, we had cool talks about a variety of topics like freedesktop.org, Linex, GNOME System Tools and a general What would you change in GNOME? BOF that ended up being very interesting, all directed by Garnacho, Fer and Carlos García Campos. It's been a pleasure to be around here and meet them all.

The meeting is about to end at this point (as soon as the ongoing GNOME backup talk finishes), and we'll go to Madrid to have dinner, and after that, who knows. I need to be in Atocha at 9:00 to fetch my train so I hope the night doesn't get too complicated...

We've got a cool new Linksys wireless router at the flat, so I started looking for a PCI wireless adapter. This kind of hardware is that kind of stuff you've really want to be sure about before buying, because Linux support for the different chipsets varies a lot depending on minor details. Unfortunately, the boxes of the products in the stores never give specific details and you never know what you've got until you get home and stick it into your computer.

Nearly three weeks ago, after having waited for over two weeks to get a Conceptronics card in my usual computer store, I went to a big electronics shop and got a D-Link card. Of course, there was no indication of what kind of chip this would be, and I didn't carry a printed list of supported stuff with me, so I decided to buy it and try my luck. When I got home, I discovered in horror it was a Broadcom, and quickly went back and got another one, as these cards only work with evil binary-only drivers.

The second try revealed an Atheros chip inside. Even if this was looking better, the available Linux driver doesn't seem to be included in the stock Debian kernel image. Probably because there's some non-free/binary part to it.

At this point, the local show finally got stock of the Conceptronic cards, which besides being very cheap, were reportedly working for most people. The one I got, a new revision, had a RaLink chip, which at first sight appeared to be supported for Linux by upstream directly. Too bad: the current 2.6 kernel froze my box everytime I started pumping some traffic through the card. Argh!

Two days ago I went to the big store again to return the second card, and saw they had new stuff, including SMC2802W. After assuring this couldn't fail (Prism logo in the box and high success rate from other users), I decided to have another go. GAH! Sure, the card is a Prism, but it's not the same SMC2802W everyone's using. Those are V1, while mine is V2:

0000:00:09.0 Network controller: Intersil Corporation Intersil ISL3890 [Prism GT/Prism Duette] (rev 01)
0000:00:09.0 0280: 1260:3890 (rev 01)
        Subsystem: 1113:ee03

The driver loads, but when you configure the interface, the kernel starts spitting stuff and you get no link at all:

eth1: mgmt tx queue is still full

Oh well. At this point, I'm considering conceeding a little bit to ugly solutions like using ndiswrapper for a while, as people report that more or less work, while the prism54 driver is fixed or enhanced to support this new hardware. I'm open to suggestions and advice too, as I'm a bit fed up of all of this story. Does anyone know if it's a safe bet to wait for a better driver? Should I expect for this to take a long time? If I need to return the card to the store, I should do it at the end of next week, so I have a bit of time to decide still. TIA!

The people at Softcatalà have been awarded one of this year's National Prizes for Television, Radio Broadcast, Internet and Telecomunications of the Generalitat de Catalunya, for the Internet category.

Softcatalà is a non-profit, volunteer organization that has been working since 1997 to bring Catalan to the IT world and normalizing its usage. These people have been translating software for many years, and need to take most of the credit for the current situation of Catalan in the software world. While Softcatalà ocassionaly works on non-free software translations, with the rise of Free Software the focus of their work has clearly shifted towards it. They are responsible for the widely distributed Catalan translations of OpenOffice, Mozilla products, GNOME and even books like Stallman's Free as in Freedom. Besides the translations, one of the big achievements, in my eyes, is that their Style Guide and Wordlist are the de-facto standard policy documents when translating software into Catalan. Maybe involuntarily or as a secondary goal, they are bringing many, many people to GNU/Linux just because currently it's the only way that people have to use their computers integrally in their mother tongue.

I officially joined Softcatalà when I started working on GNOME 1.5 translations, and today's announcement has filled me, like the rest of the team, with a nice, warm feeling for this unexpected reward for many hours banging at Emacs po-mode.

Today is a big day for the Catalan Free Software communities. Congratulations, everyone!

I couldn't resist to publicly thank Thiemo Seufer for all the invisible work he (with others) has done to fix a series of problems in the mipsen toolchain. Thanks to his work on binutils and gcc, mozilla and offspring are now compilable on our 11 architectures, which was a quite big sarge blocker.

Sometimes I feel this kind of jobs are not rewarded by users as much as "package the latest GNOME/KDE/X/whatever" kind of job because it's not as visible, unless you pay attention to apt-listchanges or the BTS. But without them, there would be no GNOME or KDE packages at all!

The observative Debian developers will have noticed that the Debian ALSA team hadn't been as good as usual at delivering new upstream versions a few days^H^H^H^Hweeks after it was released.

There were several reasons for this. The three team members (StevenK, ElectricElf and me) got busy in other fronts, and the bug count didn't stop going up. At one point, the BTS was too full of ALSA bugs for us to be able to handle it, which just added a bit more to the problem, because we never found time to sit down and do triage.

Also, when we started the Alioth project, SVN or Arch weren't available, so we went for a CVS setup which involved importing the upstream sources to CVS and then working on top of that. I never quite understood why we needed the whole sources in CVS, but as I never got involved in the import business, I was more or less ok with the setup. We would then use cvs-buildpackage to build the stuff, and it worked quite well.

The problems came when ElectricElf started to be busy and away from IRC. I dared not try to import the new upstream versions myself, as I had managed to break the import twice in the past (no, it's not so trivial), requiring Elf intervention to cleanup after me. StevenK more or less managed to do stuff, but when something went wrong, he also needed ElectricElf to look after the repo. In short, we were depending on the Elf, who was just too busy to do the stuff.

ALSA 1.0.6 was released over a month ago, and we hadn't tried seriously to update the packages until now, because nobody was stepping up to do the import stuff. So the three of us recently considered adding new blood to the ALSA group, and we asked Thomas Hood, who had been very helpful doing some BTS work on our bugs in the past, to join us.

The last week has seen new vitality in pkg-alsa activity thanks to him, but again the CVS issue was a showstopper. We managed to do more or less sane alsa-oss and alsa-utils uploads, but importing alsa-driver, which is always the bitch, failed again. Thomas and I agreed that the setup was way overegineered for a few packages that never touch the upstream sources directly anyway, as we use dpatch, and I considered switching to SVN. StevenK is an Arch dude though, and was reluctant. This morning, to my surprise, he told us we could try SVN so I rushed to import our stuff in.

The result is that after the quick and clean import of just our debian/ dirs into our new SVN repo, we've done 1.0.6 uploads of the alsa-foo packages in less than one day. And we've got more fixes on the way...

Hmm. This was a long way of saying "ALSA packaging moved to SVN". Procrastination is sometimes like this... :)

Manoj: sorry if I moaned about cvs-buildpackage before... nothing wrong with that, it's just our ex-setup which was quite inconvenient...

For a long time I had been thinking about abandoning my old nick Oskuro and start using something simple like jordi.

I picked up Oskuro 8 years ago, when I got involved in a MUD at University. As I came in just a few days after Josep and Raúl started the project, I was given the chance of participating in the development, so I had to pick a nickname. As I had no experience at all in role-playing, I found it difficult to come up with a cool nickname for my Demi-God character, and at some point someone suggested me "Oskuro", as I was going to play the role of the God with bad alignment. Well, how could I imagine at that time that this nickname would follow me until mid-2004 and that so many people would know me by my nick and not for my real name...

I was directly involved in the MUD development until a bit more than 3 years ago, when I joined Debian and the time I could use for mudding activities quickly vanished. I got in touch with Debian's IRC while I was mudding though, so the nick stuck with me in the Debian world. But hey, it's a stupid nick (translates to dark in English, if you don't mind the spelling mistake), and it doesn't make much sense anymore. Many people think I'm dark-skinned when my skin is pale and my hair slightly blonde... :)

I made this change on my jabber profile months ago, and today I finally changed my nick on OpenProjects and OFTC, not yet on GIMPnet as "jordi" is owned by Jordi Mas in that network. I guess I'll stick to jordim there, which is my *.gnome.org user name. I'll keep using both randomly as a transition, but at some point I'll abandon my old nickname for good. In short, look for me at jordi@OPN/OFTC on IRC!

Today's testing run finally allowed eog 2.6 to enter testing, which was the only missing piece of the GNOME meta-packages in testing. Sarge users will get a few new packages pulled by the gnome-desktop-environment and gnome packages, and new Sarge installs will finally get a complete GNOME 2.6 desktop installed.

The only big missing bit now is gdm 2.6, which is missing an arm build (already built, just not uploaded) of libselinux. With this version of GDM in Sarge, GNOME users will be able to shutdown the computer directly when they close their session, which is probably a feature many want to see in the release. And that's about it... I guess I'll do a final sarge upload with a few minor tweaks (version bumps and other tightening), and then will start to work on updating the dependencies for the GNOME 2.7/2.8 packages in experimental.

So, in short, Sarge finally has completed the GNOME 2.6 transition. Even before GNOME 2.8 is released upstream!