A few nice things happened in the meta-gnome2 front: yesterday, aj and Kamion kicked jack-audio-connection-kit and alsa-lib into testing, clearing the way for a number of packages like gst-plugins and the packages that depended on it gnome-media, nautilus-media, rhythmbox, etc. Today, aj removed the remaining 7 days of wait for libbonobo, and this is unblocking a new set of packages; and Kinnison did a quick processing of libxslt, which was again stuck on the new/ queue in auric. This will fix the builds of most of the remaining meta-gnome2 problems, so if no new problems come up, it's should be mostly ready when a few of the affected packages get retried. When/if the "must have" packages are in, I'll consider doing a temporary upload removing the less important packages so meta-gnome2 can go in, making Sarge's testing a bit more realistic for people who are doing desktop installs. You never know, given our record of bad luck until now...

My cold isn't getting any better, and patience is not abundant anymore. Pills make me sleepy, and I can't concentrate too much to do Real Stuff when I sit down to do it.

Day 1 of the GNOME mini-freeze wasn't too successful. Abiword stumbled upon a new gcc-3.3 ICE, and while libxslt was fixed, it introduced another RC bug which makes builds using that package fail. The new libbonobo had newer shlibs, and the last buildd that needed to build libbonoboui picked that dep, so now both of the libs wait 10 days. Galeon keeps failing with a misterious "errno 3" when the buildd tries to execute gnome-autogen.sh, but just on two arches. I suggested the maintainer to stop autogen'ing galeon at build time, just to see, but it's weird anyway.

On the bright side, s390 compiled a few of the important packages that were missing like gnome-panel, gnome-applets or libbonoboui, and while they now depend on new libbonobo, it will solve some of the most important problems.

Did two uploads recently, one of them to fix an amusing bug in TWIG, which I have been trying to give away for ages now. Looks like the person in charge of taking it (hi Ignacio ;) is taking action, finally.

Some PlanetGNOME (I guess) reader mailed me a link on a blog entry by Seth Nickell just a few months ago, where he just talked about the same procrastination problem. There's a nice essay on this there. Thanks for the link, Colin & Seth!

The Debian Installer folks get a lot of reports about GNOME being completely broken when they install Sarge. This is because tasksel pulls the "gnome-core" meta-package, which suppossedly would install GNOME 2.4, but on testing, gnome-core is still the GNOME1.x-based package, so people don't even get gnome-session installed.

meta-gnome2 isn't in testing yet because a lot of its dependencies aren't in either, for a variety of reasons. So far, we've faced a GNOME 2.2 -> 2.4 transition which got a bit more complicated than expected due to a libtool bug. Shortly after, Debian got compromised just when things looked bright. Then, the buildd's weren't running. Recently, gcc broke on mips/mipsel, and python2.3 broke completely, making most of our packages unbuildable. jack-audio-connection-kit and alsa-lib are also having problems to enter testing, and that's also holding a few chunks, but Kamion has a plan for aj to fix this.

I have posted a proposal for a mini GNOME freeze to debian-gtk-gnome, with a list of the current problems and what needs to happen.

In other news, Alioth is finally back, and I've been able to commit my pending stuff, and release gnome-mud 0.10.4a-1 to incoming. The ALSA Psychos moved their CVS tree to Alioth today, but we can't upload 1.0.0rc2 because it looks like upstream changed the build system and the tree refuses to clean now. That's our only pending issue, so if you're an Debian ALSA user and want to poke at it, you're more than welcome. :)

Exams are near, so it's probably translation season again, that time of the year when I work hard on all those Catalan translations I have neglected during the last months.

This evening I've restarted my work on GNOME 2.6, due on March. The number of new strings or strings to update is long, but I normally make it. What worries me is that the proposed modules for inclusion in GNOME 2.6 will add 6000+ strings to the list, and I'm not sure we'll be able to cope with that. There's an ongoing thread on gnome-i18n discussing this.

While doing updates and assigning modules to other translators, I've noticed that our gal translation was quite outdated, but I remember Aleix had updated it recently. For some months, Evo folks have asked to translate evolution 1.4, and recently they switched their focus to 1.5. All the translation work on evolution-1-4-branch hasn't been ported to HEAD, so the gal translation was temporarily lost. Of course, I watch for these things for my team, but I wonder how many translations get lost during branch transitions at GNOME's CVS. Another example, with the libmrproper -> planner transition, we have lost our last update to libmrproper's ca.po. I need to merge them back manually using msgcat or whatever.

Besides GNOME, I had also promised Debian Installer translations for December 28, but never got near finishing it. It won't take long though, that's #1 priority right now. On the Debian Catalan l10n front, Guillem and I are planning a rebirth of the Catalan team, as the current model didn't scale too well: I was the only person reviewing what needed committing, and some of the translations that came in needed hours of correction work, so I ended burning out. Now there are other Catalan-speaking Debian developers, and hopefully we'll be able to work more efficiently in the future.