Via Quico Llach's blog, I just learned about Google no longer hiring independent translators to work on their many web applications. Since Quico was hired by them to do their Catalan translators, a few millions of users have been benefitting from his very professional work in Google's most used services: mail, maps, search...

Like Quico, I really hope they already have deals with translation companies to take care of minorised and minority language translations. When Catalan translations were made by random volunteers, I remember the results were quite... unsatisfying, as each one of them used their own glossary and style. When Quico took over, the interfaces were normalised using the Guia d'estil and everything improved dramatically (this problem is something people involved in Rosetta as a developer, translator and team leader know well, and is tricky to solve). Having Google suddenly drop Catalan as a “supported” language would be a huge step back for Catalan on technology. Either way, we'll find out soon.

On this happy day, there's some big news coming from the Ubuntu Catalan Community. Today's Community Council meeting approved the Catalan LoCo team, with lots of praise from the council members.

<mako> this is a fantastic application
<mako> the ultimate sign of a great team is that makes people want to
       move to their community to participate, +1 from me :)
<jono> this team is setting a standard for approval applications

Ubuntaires, my apologies for not being able to attend the meeting to offer my support. It clearly wasn't needed at all, though, thanks to the amazing work you're been doing during the last months. What I like most about the Catalan LoCo is that it's the first culture-based team, as opposed to the traditional model of state, country or territory LoCo's. Quoting the wiki,

[The] Ubuntu Catalan User community gathers Catalan-speaking users of Ubuntu in all its varieties. The scope of the Catalan LoCo Team is mainly the Catalan Countries, that is, the territories where Catalan is traditionally spoken, where members and volunteers are spread practically all over their geography.

Endavant!

pusa, a server I administer at uni, suffered a massive data accident on Wednesday. When I went to see why it didn't come up from a reboot on Friday, I found out the initrd hadn't been able to mount /. Weird...

Luckily, the two new disks were already installed in the host and waiting for me to finish the migration to the RAID1 and the new Linux-VServer setup, but unfortunately I've been way too busy and it was too late for some of our data. A fsck of /dev/hda1 resulted on large portions of the data going to /lost+found. Discovering this made me feel like a great fool after not having dd'd the device before doing this (a dry-run of fsck had not reported anything useful). I found out some of the lost data in random directories, but in general lots were missing, and others made no sense:

/oldpusa/etc: gzip compressed data, was "libpng.txt", from Unix, last modified: Wed Dec 20 00:58:51 2006, max compression

I hoped for my PostgreSQL stuff being intact, so after dd'ing /dev/hda5, I fsck'd the image. The result was an empty filesystem, and a lost+found full of stuff. I can't find a directory with stuff that resembles postgresql data at all. I did find a directory with a PG_VERSION file in it, but the rest of the files in it (around 100) had numeric names and little more. If anyone thinks I might be able to rebuild my /var/lib/postgresql from this, I'll be infinitely grateful.

Anyway, I haven't written to the corrupted after I fucked up the root partition. I'm very interested in knowing what could cause corruption on all partitions, making them unmountable, but still recognisable by fsck, even if the result is not good at all. Maybe a corrupted partition table? If so, what does the Dear Lazyweb recommend me to try out? I suspect the first portion of all partitions were damaged, but maybe just that. Some “partition table shift”, which makes the filesystems lose the first superblock (trying other superblocks didn't work either)? Suggestions is very welcome by comment or email, and detail on what tools and how to use to try out things, better. My backup of PostgreSQL is not so recent, and recovering some SmartList data would also be great.

As for the mandatory “where are your backups”, the answer is basically we had no resources to store them until very recently, and when we finally got the disks I've had no time until now to set it up entirely, so some bits (db, lists, web) were still not running off the new drives. The luckiest people have been the MUD owners, who have had no data loss at all, as they were living entirely on /dev/md0. Losing MUD data probably means getting angry calls at 4AM or so. :)

The short answer is no, but as our status page easily reflects, there has been lots of work going on during the last two weeks, once etch's release unblocked the way to upload new versions to unstable. This post intends to resume the trend of updating on the status of GNOME in Debian, after we ended up deciding we'd ship etch with 2.14 for a number of reasons, most notably some complications with the GTK 2.10 transition at that time. You'll be able to find other related news items in Debian GNOME team's website.

What has the Debian GNOME team up to during the last 6 months? Our first priority was to focus on unstable's GNOME 2.14 packages again, in an attempt to fix any outstanding remaining bugs from our packaging, and get them in the best shape possible to deliver a polished GNOME desktop for etch. I think the result is really good, and Debian's default GNOME desktop is both very usable and attractive. In parallel, the preparations for a complete set of GNOME 2.16 packages continued in our Subversion repository and kept appearing, little by little, in experimental. The most visible consequence of our 2.16 efforts translated into nobse's backport of 2.16 for etch, which can be found in the corresponding repository.

And then, with etch deep frozen and nearly ready to be released, GNOME 2.18 was released, and of course the GNOME team didn't wait too much to start working on it.

Our current status is looking good: the Developer Platform is already available in unstable, although buildd's are fighting the builds on various architectures. When the dust settles (GTK 2.10's landing has generated quite a big cloud; we have a list of packages that still haven't completed the GTK+ 2.10 transition), we'll be able to prepare and upload the more complex Desktop components like the panel, nautilus, evolution or control-center. Unstable users should probably be seeing daily progress on this front, so keep an eye on your package managers!

Although Debian 4.0 released with an old version of GNOME, vast amounts of time and work have been invested to release it with the necessary backported fixes and enhancements. The newer GNOME versions have been available in Debian official ftp archives in very reasonable timeframes; this has only been possible thanks to the restless efforts of the (fortunately) growing Debian GNOME team members: giskard, feedback, HE, lool, np237, slomo, shaka, sjoerd, xaiki and not forgetting our incredible bug triager, svena. Thanks!

On the behind the scenes department, it's a pleasure to report that Loïc Minier and Jordi Mallach very recently joined the GNOME Foundation's board of advisors in representation of the Debian Project, replacing Matthew Garrett, who has been representing us for the last few years until he left the project. Thanks, Matthew!

I've been a bit offline during the last two weeks due to being in the middle of a ISP switch at home, which took me offline for a longer time than expected. Additionally, when I finally got the connection up, it was Easter time, and I ended up going to Vall, after cancelling a cycling trip with some friends down the Via Verda Ojos Negros (but this time, not during the night and spending a few days to complete the route) in the last minute, due to the horrid weather forecast. It apparently was a good idea: the river that goes along Vall overflowed, and for some reason the mobile phone service went down for more than 3 days.

On Monday night I came back to València, and I figured that the DPL election results would be out by the time. When I opened Debian's webpage, I found out some other big news: Debian 4.0 was released the day before! Soon after, I looked for the vote results, to find Sam, my candidate of choice, was the winner, very closely followed by uncle Steve. Congrats Sam, no nos falles! And congratulations to the rest of the Debian project for yet another successful, well done release. Reading comments on news sites gives a fuzzy warm feeling. Even though we were slightly delayed, people show how etch is going to make their lives easier, or how trustable Debian is at work and at home. That's the kind of stuff that keeps me and many Debian people going.

I'm pondering improvising some Etch Release Party (as the release managers deprived me of a IRC party by secretly releasing while I wasn't looking) this weekend in Barcelona, where I will be visiting, after giving up on being able to be in A Coruña for DudesConf. Anyone up for it?

So Ross was offering fame and glory to whoever would add i18n support to his nice little Tasks program. Tasks seems like something I've been looking for (there's gToDo, but Tasks is simple and clean), and I haven't done much for GNOME in a looong time, and I was bored, and hey, I can use some fame and glory, so...

Tasks, in a language Jose María Aznar can read

I need to note that it took quite a lot more time to create this screenshot than writing the patch. Go my GIMP skillz!

And by the way, Ross, what does Paris Hilton say about applications with their main function in a file named test.c?

This is already old news, but I haven't commented here yet. We already hinted this possibility in my previous blog entry on this topic, but sometime last week, we made it official.

After speaking to some people upstream, we got the impression that the GTK situation was way too risky to do a GTK 2.10 migration, with no hints on when the file selector problems would be solved. As of today, and two GTK 2.10 releases later, not all of the issues appear to have been resolved in this branch, so we may have chosen the right path.

So, with this information in our hands, we described the whole situation to the release managers, explaining what the options were, and they, of course, had no doubt on what was better for etch.

The last two months before the release, we'll try to polish the last few bits that we'd like to improve in the current 2.14 packages. For example, Joss just made a change to the session manager, to make it possible to save the user's session easily, a feature which was present until GNOME 2.12, then removed in 2.14 with apparently no sane replacement of saving sessions available for the user.

I must admit I'm a bit disappointed about not being to ship all the work we've been doing with GNOME 2.16 in experimental, although I believe it was the right choice. If the etch release is delayed for some major reason, and let's hope it's not, that might open a window to see a transition going on, if the fixes are finally in and we consider our packages release quality. If not, we're sorry, but we won't be able to sell the “latest GNOME version” argument in our release PR. ;)

The Debian GNOME team has already been talking about doing a “semi-official” 2.16 backport for etch though, so people can use stable with the current GNOME, at least for a few months. We'll see how it goes...

I haven't heard too many people asking if GNOME 2.16 will make etch. Maybe everyone just assumes it will, because the latest transitions have been pretty good, or maybe everyone just assumes it won't because nobody would expect Debian to ship with a current GNOME release, right? Or maybe Debian is immerse in what looks like the beginnings of a civil war, and that is more interesting.

The Debian GNOME team has been preemtively working on GNOME 2.16, though, as the release clock is ticking. Loïc has spent a big amount of time revamping the packaging of GTK+ and Pango, finally resulting in sane source packages people can look at. Joss, Guilherme, Loïc and others have worked on the rest of the Developer Platform packages, which is now ready for testing in experimental. The evolution team has also been rocking and all the associated packages are ready to go in experimental as well.

The GNOME 2.16 status page still shows quite some red for Desktop packages, which are now being worked on, with GTK+ 2.10 in place.

But we still haven't decided if we can go ahead and attempt a 2.14 -> 2.16 transition in time for etch. Our biggest concern are the known problems of GTK 2.10's file chooser regarding cancelling of operations. Apparently, other distributions are getting bad bug reports due to these, so we need to be very careful about it. We know there are people working on an upstream fix as I write, but we don't know when there'll be a patch for GTK+ and libgnomeui available. If we learn it's due soon, we might start speaking to our release managers about the possibility of starting a transition. If we have no news, it'll probably be too late.

GNOME 2.16 was released this week, delivering, once again to the day, the usual catalogue of improvements and polishing. Congratulations, everyone!

Catalan is, once again, very well covered in this release (99.87% completed as of this writing) thanks to the fantastic GNOME group at Softcatalà. I have only been able to contribute an update to Sound Juicer and little more, due to lack of time and, admittedly, motivation, so I'm very glad to see the group continues to be healthy and active thanks to Xavi, Jordi, Maria (from WSOP fame!), Gil (awesome GUADEC organiser) and others, under the leadership of Josep. Moltes gràcies, equip!

GTetrinet 0.7.10 is out. This release fixes a security hole (CVE-2006-3125), so you're advised to update ASAP.

The last release was assembled during UbuntuDownUnder, back in April 2005, which is a good indication about GTetrinet's development health. If you're interested in writing new features or fixing the many bugs in GTetrinet, please consider joining the mailing list. GTetrinet really needs your help!

Debian binaries are on the way to unstable; Ubuntu will hopefully suck them up soonish. Get the hot tarball from the GNOME FTP mirrors.