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.

It's becoming a tradition that my upstreams coordinate the releases of the Debian packages I maintain. GNU mailutils 0.5 and GNU nano 1.2.4 have been released in the last two days.

With mailutils 0.5, Jeff and I have decided to stop packaging CVS snapshots in Debian, as the software is now quite stable and usable. It surely needs some documentation love, but it'll get there. <plug>MH users might want to test mailutils-mh, which is GNU's replacement for the MH package</plug>.

nano 1.2.4 is a minor update, with a few bugfixes, given 1.2 has been in maintenance mode for about one year and a half. In the devel branch, nano 1.3.3 should be released RSN, and the next version should finally have sane UTF-8 support. Very probably not soon enough to ship with Sarge, though.

Sorry, I know this might be boring, but people seem to want me to post here whenever there's news.

Things have improved quite noticeably since yesterday. control-center has finally entered testing today, so after your next sarge upgrade, your icons should show up as normal again. There gedit problem stands unsolved, and it'll take a while, so if you're annoyed at it, consider hand-fixing it.

Other good news is that epiphany and galeon have also entered testing, even when Mozilla 1.7 had been uploaded to unstable, managing to avoid the new dependency. A new epiphany for Mozilla 1.7 has been uploaded and I guess galeon will follow suit quickly.

Slightly unrelated, I uploaded meta-gnome2 55 today, adding gnome-cups-manager to the gnome meta-package, and the nice HIG documentation to gnome-devel. Spies report that Ross is happy now.

France was kicked out of Euro 2004, too. It's interesting to see how all the big favourites have been sent home quite early.

As people have been asking for news on the semi-disaster, here we go.

Things haven't really improved in the last week. gnome-control-center 2.6 hasn't entered testing yet, but is abou to do so. We're just missing a mips build, which has already been done by the buildd, so hopefully it'll appear in incoming in one or two days. Another of the problematic packages, gnome-applets, is in bad shape, as it hasn't been built in some architectures due to a bug in sgml-base, completely out of the control of the GNOME team. We hope this will be resolved soonish and builds start so succeed after that. There's another problem in the current set of GNOME packages in Sid, as gedit refuses to start now that libeel is at version 2.6. This is due to API breakages in eel which are not well handled upstream with soname bumps. This bug has been reported multiple times, and the bug has been forwarded upstream, but the upstream maintainers don't intend to maintain API compatibility in eel at all. They claim it's a private library in nautilus, but reality is that it's used in epiphany, control-center, abiword and others. (don't read this as a rant, I'm just trying to describe the situation). The easiest way of fixing this problem in Debian is to add unstable sources to apt, install the unstable version of gedit (2.6.x), which will pull new cupsys, libgnomeprint, kdelibs4 (if you have it installed) version. Then remove unstable again from your sources, and you'll end up having a working gedit.

On a unrelated note, those who want to play with GNOME 2.7.x can do so by upgrading to experimental. Some GNOME folks have started packaging it.

Luvly! We need a GR to ammend the Constitution to make Debian a monarchy.

Sigh. Yesterday, most of GNOME hit Sarge, and today it reached the mirrors. It seems the result couldn't be more catastrophic... we really didn't expect GNOME packages to go into Sarge today, we probably only expected GTK+2.0 and a few of the lower GNOME libraries to make it. Instead, most of the modules managed to get in, including -panel, -session, -terminal and nautilus, but not including control-center and -applets, due to gst-plugins0.8 not being ready for testing yet.

This reportedly is breaking GNOME in Sarge quite severily, as nautilus is apparently missing a needed dependency on capplets, and nobody noticed. The result is nautilus showing the default icon (a blank paper) for all folder and file icons, making your filebrowsing experience quite interesting.

We're discussing what the most quick remedy may be. One alternative is to do uploads of -applets and control-center without gstreamer support and try to get those in fast. Another one is to see if testing-proposed-updates works and feed it with the gstreamer-less packages so they hit testing immediately.

For those who have already upgraded and need a solution, you will probably be ok if you just install by hand the missing packages, capplets 2.6.1-5, and the two dependencies missing in Sarge, libgstreamer0.8-0 0.8.3-1 and libgstreamer-plugins0.8-0 0.8.1-4. You will probably need to remove acme by hand too (and gnome-desktop-environment, if you had it installed).

If you don't know how to do this, the basics are these: to remove acme, do apt-get --purge remove acme. To install the three packages, once you have downloaded them, apt-get install libxklavier8 and then dpkg -i file1.deb file2.deb file3.deb. If you are a bit more experienced with Debian packages, the easiest is to add unstable (and leave sarge in too) to your sources.list, and after updating, do apt-get install gnome-control-center/unstable. After that, remove unstable from your sources again.

Bedtime now... In 5 hours I pretend to break my record mark of 10 days without any kind of triathlon training. The joy of injuries and lack of motivation.

They keep coming in, and it seems the three members of the Debian ALSA team are too busy with RL or other Debian stuff to handle them. We have bugs with patches that not only have not made their way to unstable, but not even to our CVS repo. Maybe we should start considering asking for a 4th member to join the team, in an attempt to make ALSA packaging a bit more dynamic (as it was some months ago).

As many will have noticed, I was wrong when I said bits of GNOME would go in last night. Actually, GTK+2.4 is supossed to make it tonight, and the more difficult bits will have their chance in the following days. There has been a gstreamer0.8 upload today to fix a RC bug that may delay stuff a bit. I can also see possible problems with meta-gnome2 for 2.4 in testing wanting acme, and control-center 2.6 conflicting it. It probably just means the meta-packages have to go in at the same time as control-center, but this also adds some complexity to the equation. Next chapter, after tonight's testing run. :)

It seems there won't be Claxon Hell in the city due to this evening's Euro 2004 football match. FUTBOLEROS, VIVIDORES! ;)