Today, the first chunks of GNOME 2.6 will start entering Sarge, if nothing strange happens. Things look quite ok right now, with all the autobuilders keeping up to date and with the RC bugs sorted out. The only bit that could be a bit more complicated is the libcupsys transition to gnutls10, as a few big packages are involved: GNOME, KDE, Samba, CUPS and wine. The latter is dragging a dependency for the new alsa-lib 1.0.5 packages, which will probably delay it 5 days or so. There's an RC bug on Samba which could be problematic, but the maintainers probably will do something about it before alsa-lib is ready to go. With a bit of luck, this will go more or less smoothly in, unlike when we did the 2.2->2.4 transition, which was stalled by a series of unfortunate incidents (including the Debian security compromise).

In the last week or so I've been more active in the Debian front than usual. I've done uploads of mozilla-thunderbird-locale-ca (for version 0.6), meta-gnome2 (for GNOME 2.6), eog and nautilus-media (needed to complete meta-gnome2 deps), gtranslator (to fix a build failure with GTK 2.4), nano, qstat (with a new CVS snapshot, as upstream isn't doing real releases anymore) and a few mailutils releases (finally fixing the help2man problem). The GNOME team, and specially seb128, have done a great job in getting GNOME 2.6 on track to enter Sarge. Scary enough is that some already talk about packaging 2.7 in experimental...

Apparently, anyway.

It's the second time in less than two months that I appear in the list of speakers for a congress or party... without being informed at all. Sergio Talens pointed me this morning at the Campus Party's webpage (flash crap, sorry), where they announce the presence of Jordi Mallach, "Debian Project Manager", who will give courses and conferences, "warranting a very high level". Great. Please, can anyone mail me and tell me what am I supossed to talk about? Thanks. :)

It's been a few weeks since I last posted, but I saw Martin-Éric laments about the lack of UTF-8 support in GNU nano. Yes, it's unfortunate that the current stable version is lacking this feature, but don't despair, the development branch (1.3.x) will soonish have it, as David is completing the internal work that was needed to make this possible. As soon as Sarge freezes, I'll consider switching unstable's nano to 1.3.x, as it's quite stable and carries some good fixes in a number of areas.

Martin, I was sorry to read about your wife's miscarriage. I hope both of you are well.

Just learned about this. I have no words... :(

My condolences to the families and friends.

The first edition of the Valencian Free Software Congress finished yesterday. Sergio and I have had a very nice time with Andreas Tille from Debian-Med, and Free Ekanayaka from DeMuDi, and had nice talks with them on Custom Debian Distributions, which is what our work will be focused on from now.

We also met Jon "maddog" Hall and had a few beers with him, a time when he would start telling some cool stories of his long experience in the Free Software Community. As in the Malaga meeting, the Congress ended with a quite luxurious dinner at the Oceanogràfic complex. Poor Jon nearly got asleep while waiting for our second plate, heheh. Hopefully the congress will happen again next year and we can meet people in Valencia.

This last week, I've tried to get into Debian stuff a bit, after a few weeks of mostly nothing except for small d-i translation updates. One of the big things in the Debian planet is the ongoing vote on removing the non-free section.

I, as a supporter of the original GR of three or four years ago by John Goerzen, voted for the removal, mostly for philosophic reasons. I really think the place for most of those packages should be outside Debian mirrors, and would really like to see it continued in non-free.org or whatever.

There has been some discussion about the issue on PlanetDebian, started by Joey Hess, who explains that he voted in favour of the proposal for both a practical reason and another one more political. The first is that Debian Installer won't even ask new users if they want to use it (in Woody, it was still asked, defaulting to no), and users will be able to add it just editing their sources list. If they do this, they can just add a unofficial apt line which picks the non-free pieces. I agree with this. The second reason is that Debian, which is many times seen as the "most pure" free software collection, lately is having more and more issues with other big Free Software organizations like the FSF, which I feel is quite bad, because our goals are just the same. Of course, one of the roughest "issues" is our view on their free documentation license, but that's another story.

Following up to joeyh's post, I found Scott's post about this, where he explains that he voted against because some of the packages in non-free are there not for their non-DFSG compliant license, but because they are patent-encumbered material which cannot go in main. Well, I feel we should have this stuff in a separate section not called non-free, because it doesn't reflect what the problem is with those packages. For example, the GIMP stuff that creates LWZ-compressed .gif files could go in this category, while the rest of really non-free packages go away to non-free.org. It'd be the user's responsability to read about the legal issues with the packages in this section before deciding if it's legal for them to use it, just like they need to do with non-free licenses before they start using a non-free package.

On a related note: does anyone know if voting "1-2" and "132" in this GR gives the same points to the "keep non-free option"?

Some of the Debian GNOME maintainers are starting to package the imminent GNOME 2.6 in experimental, as it's probably too late to drop it in Sarge. Who knows, if we manage to get it in shape and tested quickly and other Sarge bits get delayed, we might try to drop it in unstable, but I don't count on having 2.6 in Sarge at this point. It also depends quite a bit on Marillat agreeing to upload 2.6 versions of his packages to experimental, which I'm not too sure about. Maybe our KDE folks are a bit more lucky and manage to stick their KDE 3.2.1 packages in Sarge in time. We'll see.

I finally got my new ATI Radeon 9200, and installed a few minutes ago. I had no problems to get X, DRI & friends to like it, but I think the display is slightly blurry. Maybe it's the monitor, but I don't think this happened with the Voodoo3.

I discovered that Wesnoth is quite a nice game, and quite addictive too... you've been warned.

Going to Malaga was really a good idea. I was happy to meet a few Debian people for the first time (Keybuk, Kamion, Mithrandir, pere, Konstantinos... and to a lesser extent, tbm ;) and had a great time with them. I think that the meetings we held were quite productive, and I'm looking forward to read teo's report and conclusions next week.

Some of the best moments where when I first met tbm and he started with the <censored> joke (censored, just so Google doesn't learn too quickly about it), and when he started harassing poor Leni in the meeting rooms area. The Cena de Gala was tremendously funny too. I was invited by Roberto, Juantomás and Miguel to sit at their table, and during the dinner, Juantomás told us how Roberto started bowing before the Spanish prince when he approached the HispaLinux stand and said "Majestad" and all the stuff. Roberto, no se puede caer más bajo! As Miguel put it, Roberto se deja impresionar demasiado fácilmente. Miguel (who by the way seems to finally know who I am ;) also killed time while waiting for the food miss-firing balls of bread at the women in the table behind us. I wanted to hide below the table... The last day, after a few guys had already left, Thimo, Bdale, Tollef, Colin, Scott, Konstantinos, Guillem and I went for lunch/dinner on our own, and later for a few beers in an Irish pub, where we had some good laughs in a small corner which glowed in blue.

Guillem and I had 6 hours from the time the Congress ended (~15:00) to the time we had to get into our train (21:00). Well, we ended up having to run a bit to not miss it. Both train trips were quite awful, as it's pretty difficult to get some sleep in such conditions, but it surely was worth it. I'm looking forward to the Valencian congress, where I hope more Debian people will be able to attend.

Now, back into the routine, I probably want to go to bed, as I have cycling training tomorrow, if the rain permits.

Following my traditions and procedures, I have more or less arranged my trip to the OSWC in the last minute, after nearly giving up yesterday. Guillem and I are taking a train tonight which after countless hours will leave us at Málaga at 9:00AM. What finally made me decide to go there regardless the quite expensive train fees is that so, so many people I really want to meet will attend: lots of non-Spanish Debian people, the people from Seville which apparently are going en masse, Softcatalà people (it was about time to finally meet them), the usual Debian Spanish mob and a long etc.

I need to do countless things this evening to get ready, but count on me for a few beers tomorrow (just a few, eh?!). See you tomorrow!

Today Robin and I released GNOME-Mud 0.10.5, which includes a number of minor but cool features. The annoying handling of connection tabs has been corrected, and tabs are now shown if there's more than one connection, as in Galeon, and the tabs have an icon that describes if the connection is active or not. The Python-GTK support for python plugins has been finally fixed and a useful python plugin (health monitor) has been included in the distribution. A few old and annoying bugs have also been killed, like being now able to use GNOME-Mud in non-UTF-8 muds properly (but this needs a proper solution still).The most noticeable change in this release is that we finally, after 6 years, have our own application icon (gnome-mud had been stealing the gnome-gmush icon that gets distributed with GNOME for ages). The icon is simple and neat, courtesy of Daniel Taylor, who recently contributed icons for gossip and Blam!. He's now writing an Inkscape tutorial, which I really hope will help me to get a clue on icon drawing.

I sponsored a few packages in the last few days: daf's ruby-gnome2 and mozilla-locale-cy packages, and ajmich's treecc, a pre-dependency for his nearly ready to upload Portable.NET packages, which are waiting for a fix for the weird shared libs handling (or just accept it as is and go with the weird dependencies that would carry, I'm getting Andrew to see how the Mono packagers dealt with this).

Finally, made new ispellcat packages to transition to the new debconf .config scripts (Agustín is doing an excellent job with dictionaries-common) and fixed gnome-common's build deps... oops. I knew adding automake1.4 to gnome-common's requirements would quickly get me some bug in the BTS, but the sad reality is that many GNOME modules still don't build with anything newer. You probably want to set REQUIRED_AUTOMAKE_VERSION=1.6 in your autogen.sh script if you want to use something else. For now, at least. Malcolm has a plan to aggressively migrate all the GNOME stuff to something newish, so this shouldn't be a problem in a few months.

Orkut status: mostly forgotten now. Enjoy my personal data, Google.