Sergio pointed me at this website with real Gentoo users quotes.

I am a long time Gentoo user, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I believe that as hardware gets faster, it makes sense to migrate to a largely source-based Linux system. Binary packages encourage inconsistency and incompatibility, whearas source encourages unified development frameworks and integration.

Completely hilarious.

We get quite some people asking this everyday. When will GNOME 2.12 appear in Debian? Not yet? Why don't you upload to alioth?

For a few months we've been holding all kind of GNOME uploads unless they were absolutely necessary, to try to get GNOME 2.10 in etch. This has been a hard battle due to the unusual number of ongoing transitions in Debian at the time: glibc, gcc-4.0 as default compiler, C++ abi, XFree86 -> X.Org. At first we thought we'd be able to by-pass most of them by not uploading anything but in the end control-center got stuck behind X.Org, and that complicated things quite a bit.

Luckily, the Release Team, with help from the glibc and X maintainers, have managed to get these in testing after getting rid of the RC bugs caused by the new versions, opening the door for GNOME 2.10, which was able to enter testing (unblocking the testing transition for some 150 additional packages) coincidentally a few days after the GNOME 2.12 release. Oh well, these things happen when you want a Debian release out every half decade or so. :) We owe Loïc Minier quite some beers, because he has been tracking problems with GNOME 2.10 for a few months, and has suddenly become one of the key members in the team!

So, with GNOME 2.10 in testing, our current plan to bring GNOME 2.12 to Debian is:

1. Finish up GNOME 2.10

   To avoid making the transition even more complicated, we held any new 2.10 uploads to unstable for over two months. In that time, some GNOME components released new versions, and will now be updated so etch has a completely stable GNOME 2.10 suite. This step is ongoing and should be easy to complete, unless the long list of Mozilla RC bugs holds it for a while.

2. GNOME 2.12 to experimental

   With GNOME 2.10 safe in etch, we'll be able to focus our attention to GNOME 2.12. Some modules have been branched for experimental already, and soon you'll be able to find more and more in there. While doing experimental 2.12, our plan is to completely transition our gconf setup to install defaults in /var instead of /etc, plus start handling the update of icon caches when necessary. These transitions shouldn't be too complicated. There's another transition that will hit 2.12, though; hal/dbus 0.50 which may get a bit more complicated because it affects packages outside the Debian GNOME Team's influence (Qt/KDE being an example). We'll see how that one goes.

3. GNOME 2.12 to unstable

   By the time we're ready to do an experimental upload, hopefully the rest of testing transitions will have been cleared up, and having GNOME 2.12 in unstable and then testing should be pretty easy. Or that's my hope. :)

Be prepared to see more and more 2.12 fun in experimental in some days. When more or less is in place, we'll upload a 2.12 meta-package suit, so it'll be easy to upgrade in just one command. For now, you'll have to ask Google about how to deal with GNOME in experimental.

I'm happy to report that GNOME 2.12 is now completely translated to Catalan thanks to the hard work of Softcatalà's GNOME division. Of the four of five currently active contributors, I think Xavi Conde deserves a special mention, as he has been taking care of big modules like evolution for some time now, and I think completing this task every six months would be quite difficult without him.

It's the first time since 2.4, I think, that we hit a complete 100% coverage. Lately, we had done a few releases where we got very near the number, but a handful of strings out of 30.000 would leave us at the gates with something 99.97% or so. Sure, it's just a silly number, and it has little value when you have the core of GNOME translated. That's why since the 2.9 series, the team has focused on polishing. We've gone over most of the modules trying to find old translation errors and GNOME 2.12 in Catalan is surely going to be a high quality release on the gramatical and spelling front.

With the translation momentum I've gathered while completing GNOME, I've now started a Catalan translation of MoinMoin, the wiki software I probably like most. I hope to have it ready in a few days. After that, I should have a look at finishing my update of GnuPG's translation, which is pending a few months already.

A few days ago, Mikel, from softastur, requested the creation of an Asturian team to translate Ubuntu. As I'm quite passionate about minority and minorised languages, I quickly googled around and mailed him to find out what the state of Asturian (ISO 639 code "ast") was.

While their webpage seems a bit stale, it appears they are trying to gain a bit of momentum by translating Ubuntu. They already have some Mozilla and other free Windows programs translated, but AFAIK, they had never started a plan to translate one of the two major free desktops, GNOME or KDE. If they are going to start a Ubuntu translation, that means we'll soon see a nice GNOME translation coming up, so that's pretty cool.

One of the problems I saw from the beginning is that even if they have an ISO 639 code assigned (albeit a three letter, 639-2 code, instead a two letter code, for which they pass the requisites even better than many other languages out there), they lacked a Glibc locale data file for Asturian. In an attempt to have Ubuntu Breezy's libc support Asturian as soon as it releases next month, I spent some time writing this data file for them, as I did in the past with the Aragonese (an_ES) locale. The result is cool:

                             2005

       xineru               febreru                marzu
ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do
                1  2      1  2  3  4  5  6      1  2  3  4  5  6
 3  4  5  6  7  8  9   7  8  9 10 11 12 13   7  8  9 10 11 12 13
10 11 12 13 14 15 16  14 15 16 17 18 19 20  14 15 16 17 18 19 20
17 18 19 20 21 22 23  21 22 23 24 25 26 27  21 22 23 24 25 26 27
24 25 26 27 28 29 30  28                    28 29 30 31
31
       abril                  mayu                  xunu
ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do
             1  2  3                     1         1  2  3  4  5
 4  5  6  7  8  9 10   2  3  4  5  6  7  8   6  7  8  9 10 11 12
11 12 13 14 15 16 17   9 10 11 12 13 14 15  13 14 15 16 17 18 19
18 19 20 21 22 23 24  16 17 18 19 20 21 22  20 21 22 23 24 25 26
25 26 27 28 29 30     23 24 25 26 27 28 29  27 28 29 30
                      30 31
       xunetu                agostu              setiembre
ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do
             1  2  3   1  2  3  4  5  6  7            1  2  3  4
 4  5  6  7  8  9 10   8  9 10 11 12 13 14   5  6  7  8  9 10 11
11 12 13 14 15 16 17  15 16 17 18 19 20 21  12 13 14 15 16 17 18
18 19 20 21 22 23 24  22 23 24 25 26 27 28  19 20 21 22 23 24 25
25 26 27 28 29 30 31  29 30 31              26 27 28 29 30

      ochobre               payares               avientu
ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do
                1  2      1  2  3  4  5  6            1  2  3  4
 3  4  5  6  7  8  9   7  8  9 10 11 12 13   5  6  7  8  9 10 11
10 11 12 13 14 15 16  14 15 16 17 18 19 20  12 13 14 15 16 17 18
17 18 19 20 21 22 23  21 22 23 24 25 26 27  19 20 21 22 23 24 25
24 25 26 27 28 29 30  28 29 30              26 27 28 29 30 31
31

This will probably go in the next revision of Ubuntu's libc, while I hope Denis Barbier will include it quickly in belocs for Debian. Eventually I'll submit to the glibc upstream list, but getting them accepted upstream takes a bit more usually.

Hopefully Mikel will find enough volunteers to complete this task soon enough. I dream that it'll help promoting Asturian, one of the most endangered languages in the Iberian Peninsula. Read more about Asturian in the Wikipedia.

5 months ago, I switched my shell to GNU bash on my main workstation, and slowly that change trickled to all my other UNIX accounts where I could use zsh. Incidentally, I switched to bash on debian.org boxes just a few weeks ago, not knowing what was going on the zsh-workers mailing list.

The night I was preparing to leave to the Pyrenees, the news travelled fast on IRC: the zsh-beta package in Debian's incoming directory finally had UTF-8 support. I installed zsh-beta and switched to it, so I wouldn't forget about it when I came back, and finally switched off my desktop for a week.

Now, with the new zsh in action, I can try a few simple test. Incredible, deleting a "ç" only requires one backspace.

16631:jordi@nubol:~/ogg/R\M-C\M- bia positiva$ setopt printeightbit
16632:jordi@nubol:~/ogg/Ràbia positiva$

Still feels like black magic to me! Thanks Clint and whoever was involved in this. I hope zsh will forgive me for abandoning her during five months. I am glad to be back!

Many people involved in Free Software i18n know dealing with changes to locale data from glibc is a major pain. Changes take a lot of time to trickle into upstream glibc, and most distributions ship with a big number of patches to these files.

Denis Barbier has been doing lots of work on improving the situation by working around this bottleneck, and has been maintaining belocs, a fork of these files which aims to bring speedy fixes to locale data in Debian.

During Debconf5, he gave a talk about the internals of the locale data format, which was pretty interesting, and I used the opportunity to get a pair of locales, Catalan for Andorra and Catalan for France, which I had written some months ago. Shortly after Debconf, belocs included them.

This, and a little hacking on d-i Sergio has been doing lately for LliureX, mostly consisting on making d-i use belocs instead of glibc locales, results on a debian-installer that knows that Catalan is not only spoken in the Principat de Catalunya. :)

I wonder how many people reading this knew Andorra exists

(On a minor note, posting this screenshot made me find a translation bug... which I could only find now that d-i shows this dialog for Catalan...)

Sitting with mako in the auditorium, I decided I'm going to waste the little translation energy I've gathered in the last 3 months to translate a window manager, ion3, I will never use, only to get mako to use it in Catalan. Of course, Mako doesn't speak a word of Catalan (except for common phrases like "Ara mes que mai un sol crit nos fara recuperar la dignitat. ¡¡LLENGUA VALENCIANA MAI CATALANA!!"¹), so my only purpose is quite stupid after all.

I need to decide if I write correct Catalan, or use the Blaverian variant instead. Doing the latter would be even more stupid.

¹ For my Catalan friends in Softcatalà, don't be scared: most of the Debconf people like jvw shouting "CACALA... NO" do know about the real situation. Don't think I'm producing a blavero movement outside València!

The news is running like a lightning on IRC and the net. A few minutes ago, the European Parliament voted against the Software Patents directive that so many months we've fought against. Incredibly, the final result on the vote has been 648 in favor, 18 against, 14 abstentions, which offers no doubts. There's some coverage in Spanish media in El PAIS.es. Usual Free Software sites will probably catch up within minutes.

Many thanks to all the people who have been on the first line for years, travelling to Brussels every now and then, patiently posting status updates, patiently asking the rest of us to take action, like the many website demonstrations they have coordinated, and most importantly, informing the MEPs so they know what they were voting. We owe you so much!

Now, we just hope the Comission will not try to sneak it in again in some random farming summit.

Forget this. My mobile phone just rang, and I see a weird, unknown and long number in the display, starting with +3585... so I pick it up at first thinking it's one of those strange numbers coming from the Generalitat. At the other end, a voice, surrounded by enough noise to make me not recognise it, speaks. "Eeeeeei, Jordiiiiiiiii!!". "Óscar?", I ask. "Nooo, sóc el Guillem!". Guillem? WTH is Guillem? One and a half seconds later, my brain connects this name to the more usual handle braindmg (I really need a nap), and everything makes sense.

So, Jesús and Guillem managed to get funding from their boss at Nokia for me to attend Debconf 5 in Helsinki. I'm grateful for their big effort, and can't wait for Debconf to start in just a few weeks. It's clearly going to be great!

Now, the question is how helix will react when we meet again. Don't abandon me like you did in Mataró!

The GNOME team has completed all the many uploads needed to bring GNOME 2.10.1 into unstable. Now, please help us find the remaining bugs before the packages start trickling into etch, so people tracking testing get a polished desktop.

In parallel, the very famous seb128, kov, lool and other GNOME team members are working on getting rid of as many GNOME 1.x components as possible for the etch release. Easy victims are libgtop1 and glade1, while other libraries like gnome-libs have some more time to annoy us, as their rdepends is still too long. Adopt a GNOME 1.x application and port it to GNOME 2 today!