[ 1 ] Choice 1: GFDL-licensed works are unsuitable for main in all cases
[ 2 ] Choice 2: GFDL-licensed works without unmodifiable sections are free
[ 4 ] Choice 3: GFDL-licensed works are compatible with the DFSG [needs 3:1]
[ 3 ] Choice 4: Further discussion

And vote.debian.org's reaction:

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

  pipe to |echo vote is over; false
      generated by gr_gfdl@vote.debian.org
      "echo" command not found for address_pipe transport

But I... I... only had two weeks to cast my vote! *sigh*, I suck.

Embarrasing enough, Ubuntu has shipped a Catalan translation for the very prominent About Ubuntu GNOME Panel menu entry which read “Quant a Ubuntutu”. It’s been there for so long that irazuzta and I really considered not fixing it at all for “hysterical raisins”.

Anyway, seb128 now has a patch to correct this at long last in Ubuntu’s gnome-panel. He promised to include it in monday's 2.14.0 upload… seb: DON’T FORGET!

In the meanwhile, Jordi Irazuzta and I just finished setting up the Ubuntu Catalan Translators team, with the mailing of some detailed instructions on how we want to get work done in the team.

It's been months of planning and designing a workflow to make a Ubuntu translation team and the openness that Rosetta offers to all the members of a team fit in Softcatalà’s high standards for the quality of the translations made by the organisation.

As soon as people start mailing back and get subscribed to the team’s mailing list, they'll get tasks assigned and we'll get the team kickstarted, with lots of work to be done before the Dapper release. The key for this team’s success is that we educate our volunteers to contribute their Ubuntu translations to the upstream projects or relevant Catalan teams, and that this is somehow coordinated. The experience will be quite good for me to identify some of the “social” problems with Rosetta, as many times people ask if their translations for Ubuntu will appear in other distributions as well.

The team is led, for now, by Jordi Irazuzta, lo noi de l'Ebre, and me.

If you're a Catalan Ubuntu user and want to lend a hand, you're more than welcome to join the mailing list to help, and become a Ubuntaire!

Ivan never has enough, and has gone ways further on his «Escriu bé» quest. Following up on my previous post on the X.Org Catalan changes, he has posted a list of characters that he still misses in our layout, in order to type really correct, orthotypograpically-wise, Catalan. Ivan, the king of nitpickers. :)

Toni also posted a mini-HOWTO on how to get your geminated l's look «aŀlucinants».

English (Queen's English) is the only real language.

After this required short announcement by our main sponsor, Daniel Stone, lets go ahead and explain something of interest to the many Catalan X.Org users out there.

Ivan and I have been looking at the issues that block a GNU/Linux user from using the compound geminate L, Ŀ, instead of the more usual “L·L” spelling.

The “ŀ” and “Ŀ” characters are unfortunately not included in ISO-8859-1, so fonts were the first big problem we faced. When modern X desktops started using True Type fonts by default, the de-facto free font in most distributions became Bitstream Vera as soon as they were licensed under a Free Software license back in 2003. Bitstream did not include the Unicode glyphs U+013F and U+0140, but some time after, chatting with daf, I learned he was working on Olwen, a Vera extension which would add proper Welsh coverage. He promptly added the Catalan glyphs, but Olwen never got widely exposed in distributions. Luckily, things are changing lately. Due to the lack of bugfixes or new releases of Vera, the list of Vera derivatives like Olwen started growing. The DejaVu project is building a font family, based on Vera, which merged many of these smaller purpose Vera derivatives, including Olwen. DejaVu, is, as far as I know, slowly replacing Bitstream Vera as the standard free, high quality true type font in free desktops.

With the font blocker easily solvable now, the next problem was making the input easy. Some terminals, such as GNOME's or rxvt, allow you to insert Unicode typing a Unicode code point. The Spanish layouts don't provide a shortcut for it though, and if you try to do Level3-Shift+l, you'll get a Polish character, “ł”, that is of no use in neither Catalan, Spanish, Galician, Basque or other languages in the Spanish state.

We wanted to replace that with ŀ, but when we had a look at it last Saturday night during our stay in Bruxelles, we couldn't find what the name for Unicode's U+0140/U+013F was in XKB-speak. So, as I said, on Sunday I went looking for Daniel and Keith to see if we would be clued up.

The solution is easy: there is no name mapping, but you can use Unicode in 0x100XXXX notation directly in your X config file to make it work. He tried in his laptop, and why not, generated a patch for X.Org 7.0's xkeyboard-config. Daniel can't be that good, so he forced me to spread lies about the English language in this blog entry if we wanted the patch committed. :) Support for X.Org 6.8 and 6.9 isn't planned, unless you bribe your X maintainer to add a tiny patch.

This has been implemented as an "es" keyboard extension (named “cat”) because other systems don't have that feature in the Spanish layout, and X.Org wants to remain compatible with the rest. We'll have to add a

        Option          "XkbVariant"     "cat"

option to our keyboard section in xorg.conf.

If you're not using X.Org 7.0, you might want to try:

xmodmap -e "keycode 46 = l L U140 U13f U140 U13f"

but I don't know if that'll work in all systems. To test in your keyboard, that'll probably be “AltGr+l” or “AltGR+L”.

What we need to do now is to add support for the character in more fonts, alternative spellings for words using the “ela geminada” (ie, “col·labora” and “coŀlabora”) in dictionaries, wordlists..., and of course, teach users about the avalability of this, and promote its usage.

During the last two months, the Debian Catalan localisation team has seen two of their major milestones completed, after some tough work.

The group managed to release Sarge with a completely translated installer, but failed to provide a translation of the Install Manual, which was a regression for us, as it had been available in Woody. We didn't give up, and thanks to the stubborness of Miguel Gea and braindmg we slowly started translating the Sarge manual months after the release, so it could at least appear in the website.

But progress was too slow, so we planned an online meeting for the beginnings of the year to try to complete the translation doing a whole lot of translations during a weekend. Soon after we learned that joeyh, fjp and the d-i team wanted to terminate Sarge d-i manual support in svn RSN, as they would start to make changes to the docs to reflect etch changes, but fortunately Frans agreed to give us a slightly extended deadline, if we agreed to finish the job by January 14th:

20:37 < CIA-7> debian-installer: fjp d-i * r33721
               /sarge/installer/doc/manual/ca/: Add Catalan translation as
               translators would like to finish it for Sarge and have promised
               to do so 14 Januari 2006 at the latest

I really didn't think we would be able to make 100% in just 10 days, but the team, assisted by a large number of minions^Wnew contributors that volunteered on #debian-catalan, managed to do it I believe a few days before the deadline. Guillem announced it on our list.

Releasing etch with an up to date Catalan manual will be a lot easier, if we try to maintain it up to date as etch development carries on.

The second milestone was yesterday's completion of the Catalan translation for all five levels of the etch debian-installer, after a year of no translation activity on that front, and months of braindmg bugging me to do my chunk of work. Although it's now showing a shiny 100%, there's a lot of review work to do, and polishing it should be our focus for the next release.

I seem to have recovered some of my interest in translations. That's good, because GNOME 2.14 is around the corner, and it wouldn't be fair for Josep if he ends up doing all the job. :)

Also, I've been quietly working with a group of people at Softcatalà in a project that will probably have lots of press in our community. It's not public yet though, but I hope that it'll be announced in the next few weeks.

After several years of chickening out in the very last moment, I finally booked plane tickets to Brussels for this year's FOSDEM.

azeem, you can stop calling me names now. :)

00:07 < jordi> vorlon: if you say yes, we can start right now
00:07 < vorlon> "yes"

And immediately, the magic started. sjoerd has uploaded the dbus/hal/avahi tripplet to unstable, unlocking the door for GNOME 2.12 and KDE 3.5 to leave their cold homes in experimental. Expect a few small bumps in the unstable road over the weekend. The wait is finally over, after the Release Team managed to get all the KDE C++ transition in place two days ago.

Following up on my previous post, here's a new status update of the whole GNOME situation.

Very soon after posting that roadmap, the two steps in the process were completed, with the ftpmasters freeing dbus into experimental, and seb128 doing a round of GTK+ family uploads. No big problems have been detected in GTK+ 2.8 in unstable, so those bits are going very well.

As soon as dbus 0.60 hit experimental, both the KDE and GNOME camps got busy recompiling their stuff. KDE 3.5.0 moved from Alioth to experimental, and sjoerd got busy in a recompile quest to make sure GNOME was installable again in experimental. The dbus 0.60 transition in experimental was done in barely a few hours, and some extra dbus-using packages have been transitioning since then.

So, what's holding our unstable upload? We first need to wait for KDE 3.4 enter testing, thus clearing the major blocker for the C++ ABI transition. The number of packages involved in this is so big it's not even funny, so it's quite complicated. In short, the GNOME team is sitting on their hands watching some C++ fun. There are a few more news bits though.

Last night, there was a round of experimental updates, bringing most of the modules to their 2.12.2 versions (just 2 or 3 are missing now), and meta-gnome2 was again updated to support these versions. If you issue your usual aptitude install gnome-desktop-environment, you'll pull newer versions of most of the stuff, if that's the way you update your experimental packages. Also, the gnome package now supports gnome-screensaver. Give it a try, and be ready to purge xscreensaver if you're happy with it!

The GNOME team has been sitting on top of ready-to-go GNOME 2.12 for way too many weeks now, but unfortunately a series of planned and unplanned transitions affecting unstable prevented us from moving them from experimental to unstable.

Today's good news is that these transitions are either going well (C++) or not at all (freetype upstream), so the release team gave us green light to start a fun GNOME 2.10→2.12 transition. There are a few aspects in this cycle that makes it a bit special and a bit more complex.

GNOME 2.12 in experimental uses dbus 0.50, which is API/bus incompatible with the previous version in testing/unstable, so when we upload GNOME 2.12, the new dbus will go in too. As KDE is also using dbus in a few places, KDE and GNOME uploads will need to happen at the same time. To make it even better, dbus 0.50 has been obsoleted by 0.60, which is again API and bus incompatible with the previous version. The GNOME and KDE teams have agreed on the following plan:

1. The Project Utopia people have uploaded dbus 0.60 to experimental, and is currently waiting in NEW.
2. The mighty seb128 will upload GTK+ 2.8 and Pango 1.10 to unstable RSN, so our first version of GTK using Cairo starts to get broadly tested in architectures other than i386 and powerpc.
3. Once dbus 0.60 is accepted in the archive, the GNOME team will rush to recompile GNOME 2.12.2 against this new dbus, and test that everything is ok with the new version.
   At the same time, the KDE camp will upload their shiny KDE 3.5 debs, compiled too against dbus 0.60, to experimental, for the first time.
4. When everything has transitioned to dbus 0.60 in experimental, GNOME and KDE will be uploaded to unstable.
5. Vorlon will take a deep breath and will try to figure out how to get the two monsters in testing at the same time. Vorlon, we love you. :)

This looks like it'll take months to do, but I really don't think it'll be the case. We hope to be ready for a full GNOME 2.12 upload to unstable, at long last, pretty soon. As always, the brave can still use GNOME 2.12 in experimental with the usual aptitude -t experimental install gnome-desktop-environment.

More updates as stuff happens!

GNOME 2.12 is mostly in experimental now (for i386, builds for powerpc are very welcome), only missing a control center and gnome-panel upload, plus gal being ACCEPTed so evolution 2.4 can be installed.

Trying these packages is easy: on an up to date unstable system, just issue:

apt-get install -t experimental gnome-desktop-environment

Due to a dbus transition, you might get some packages removed if they don't have an experimental build using the new versions. In many cases, there's nothing we can do about it so it's a matter of waiting.

The good news is that KDE has finally entered testing, so I'd expect that we'll be able to upload all of these packages to unstable quite soon. Hopefully before April, when GNOME 2.14 is due. :)

Update: By the way, in case you're still cursing about that major evolution breakage the other day... yes, it was totally me to blame. :)