seb128 was just interviewed in #gnome-debian. We apologize for azeem interfering. Gosh, people are rude in Germany.

17:14 <@jordim> 1) Ok, seb, tell us a bit about you.
17:16 <@seb128> what about me?
17:16 < azeem> your favourite color
17:16 <@jordim> dunno, you're the dude being inverviewed.
17:17 <@seb128> I don't like interview
17:17 <@jordim> Ok, thank you.
17:17 <@jordim> 2) Why 128?
17:17 <@seb128> why not? no real reason, just a random 2 power ...
17:18 <@jordim> is that really why you took seb128? randomness?
17:19 <@seb128> yep. there is other "seb", no "seb128" :)
17:19 <@jordim> Ok, thank you for your time sébastien!
17:21 < azeem> seb128: this will bring your pop-star live to new levels!

Soon, more interviews to prominent Free Software hackers!

I guess it's late enough to make this official. Once again, I won't be in DebConf5.

A pair of months ago I submitted a draft outline of what could be my talk for Debconf. My idea was to talk about teamwork in Debian, how Alioth has helped a lot to make teams of packagers, and talking about the specific GNOME Team case as an example of this. Eventually, the talk (and, I believed, my options to get some funding) was rejected, so I thought there was no way I would be in Finland this summer. When Bdale came to Castelló at the beginning of May, he told me I may be on time to ask for funding, and that I should really be in DebConf. Thanks for the kind comments bdale, :) but I took way too much time to react (I asked here and there and saw that funding was probably covered by already confirmed attendees).

Two days ago, partly to please Erinn, partly because I know I'm going to miss a great Debconf this year, I mailed Gunnar to see if there was any chance, but I knew what the reply would be. Not only funding is impossible now, but even getting some room to sleep is scarce, even in a place for 20/30 persons.

Having a look at how the full thing would cost me, including plane tickets and all, it's a no-op. Too bad, it would have been very cool to meet everyone who keep telling me "see you in Finland". Well, you won't, I'm very sorry...

Not going to Finland unblocks another plan, though. If I can't go to Debconf, I can't miss the Jornades de Programari Lliure in the UPC campus at Vilanova i la Geltrú, where it seems I will meet tbm again (OMG, no no no!) and we can do cool stuff with the local Catalan Debian community. And, between talks, the beach is so near you can go relax a bit on the sand!

Last week I learned about the newest flamewar in Debian mailing lists through the #debian-release IRC channel, while some people were busy trying to tackle the last few RC bugs in the sarge release. It seems KDE, in non-default configurations, might pop up a screensaver that might end up bringing some fresh pr0n to your monitor.

At the time I didn't even read the bug report, and quickly forgot about it, but the other morning Sergio asked me to come to see something at his work desk in office. He said it was WebCollage, the screensaver in the middle of the storm. He demoed it for me and soon enough we had a few interesting pictures in the screen: a baby, a top-less woman, Nelson Mandela...

Thanks, flame warriors! After a few years using the "blank screen" screensaver, I've found a new screensaver that brings some fun every now and then. It's cool to walk back into office after our break and find a weird composition of pics on the screen before you go back to work. :)

You already know, GNOME 2.10 has finally started to enter sid. As always, this kind of transitions tend to break installability of GNOME in unstable during a few days. Please don't file bug reports about this, we possibly have enough.

Unlike our previous transition, which ended up going extremelly well, this time the Debian GNOME team is facing a problem that is delaying a few packages that are deep in the dependency chain, like gnome-menus or gnome-panel. The problem is, for those who care, that both kdelibs-data and gnome-menus provide the file /etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu, which is part of the freedesktop.org Desktop Menu Specification. After studying the specification and lots of discussion on IRC, we saw there were three ways to address this conflict:

• Use $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS in the user's session to look for the menu files elsewhere. This has a big drawback: if someone is using KDE and uses a menu editor to tweak their KDE menu, they will get a ~/.config/menus/applications.menu with a full KDE menu layout. Now, if this user switches to GNOME, GNOME will read this menu in their home, so they will get a KDE menu in GNOME, which is not so funny.
• Add a prefix to the GNOME-provided file, to make it read gnome-applications.menu, and patch GNOME menu editors, the Panel and other apps to look there. The big drawback is that third party apps with menu-editing functionality, not provided by Debian, will not be aware of this and will write custom menus in the wrong spot.
• Make gnome-menus (and effectively, all of the GNOME desktop) conflict with KDE. This great idea was suggested by dato, but at the time we had to make the final decision, he was inexplicably quiet on IRC, so we had to discard it.

In the end, after changing our mind we decided to go with the file renaming, as the "KDE in GNOME" (or viceversa) issue is way too ugly. This may or may not be a big problem in the Desktop Menu Specification, depending on who you ask. The spec was obviously written to have just one applications.menu shared by all the desktops, but that's not feasible today, as it depends on a ton of desktop files to add the OnlyShowIn properties. When all or most desktop files in Debian have this, we might bring this up again.

Anyway, with gnome-menus sorted, we are near to be able to upload the final missing 2.10 core packages like the Panel or Nautilus. Most libraries and a good number of other Desktop applications are already in unstable, at least for i386. Other architectures will have to wait until the buildd's find their way through the maze of FTBFS due to missing build dependencies. Please be patient!

While all of this is going on, it's fun and nice to see azeem going over all the GNOME packages and quickly filing bugs about compile problems on Debian GNU/Hurd. If all goes well and the patches get applied on all the modules, GNOME 2.12 might have Hurd support out of the box for the first time.

(yes, the third alternative was a joke, no need to flame me about conflicting with KDE...)

In the last few days, two of the GNOME apps I'm somewhat involved in, GTetrinet, and GNOME-Mud, have released new versions. GTetrinet probably needs little introducing to many readers of the Debian and GNOME Planets as you've probably wasted one or two weekends trying to kick seb128's ass unsuccessfully.

For those who are new to Tetrinet, well, there's an old Chinese proverb which says You have not been on the Internet if you haven't played Tetrinet. Chinese proverbs are rarely wrong, so I would go play tetrinet if I were you.

GNOME-Mud is a MUD client for the GNOME platform, which according to some users that every now and then join the mailing list or the IRC channel, has the potential to become a very good MUD client for GNU/Linux. It supports most of the features you would expect to see in a MUD client: triggers, aliases, a mapper, a profile editor, etc. Oh, by the way, if you don't know what a MUD is, I think the elder Japanese think you haven't been to Uni.

What is not so cool about both of these apps is that for the last year or year and a half, the development has more or less come to a halt. The last few releases of both gnome-mud and gtetrinet are the fruit of random patches to fix bugs that keep floating around, contributed by different people (thanks guys!).

Dani, the lead developer for GTetrinet, had been working on a branch on separating some of the gtetrinet code that handles the tetrinet protocol to prepare a new libtetrinet package, which would then be used by some KDE folks that have expressed interest in writing a KTetrinet client. Some OS X people were also interested in writing a tetrinet client for MacOS X using the library, but the delays ended in them ripping most of this code into their own client Tetrinet Aqua. Dani had made lots of progress with libtetrinet before Real Life hit him hard and stopped having time to develop it. Future plans also included supporting different tetrinet protocols, most notably Tetrinet 2.

GNOME-Mud is an old project too, it's first releases date back to 1998. At that time, it was a GTK+-only application with little features. Right now, it's in the middle of a UI rewrite to make it HIG compliant and a bit more "Just Works"-like, but again, Robin has not had time in some time, and development goes on and off for one or two weeks every many months when someone in the mailing list reminds the rest that there's this or that patch available. The result is that it's taken 15 months to release 0.10.6, which has not that many changes anyway.

So, if you want to get initiated in GNOME development, this might be the tiny project that is desperately waiting for you to help. GTetrinet might involve some fun in figuring out how Tetrinet2's protocol works, and then writing a compatible client, and learning how to write shared libraries, etc. GNOME-Mud, on the other hand, might be interesting if you like app design. It really needs some usability love to re-think and redesign how it works. The current stuff is nearly 1999 stardards. :)

Feel free to join the gtetrinet-list@gnome.org or gnome-mud-list@gnome.org lists if you want to help out!

mako, as you didn't come to the Valencian Free Software Conference, you missed this unique opportunity to be one of the characters in this scene.

The sabdfl goes wild as he obtains PREMIUM QUALITY OLIVE OIL from a dealer

So, mako, next time, come and join the other Debian guys.

Activity at UDU is quite non-stop, but I found a small gap to update on the status of the experimental packages, while Mako and I finish writing up a few entries on some funny stuff going on here.

The pkg-gnome alioth deb-line should be obsolete now, and it might be a good idea to remove it. The new ftp-masters have done a great job accepting NEW packages as soon as they were uploaded, and control-center and gnome-applets were sponsored a few days ago, making experimental the only needed apt repository.

We are still missing 2.10 versions for some minor, non-critical modules that are now officially part of the GNOME desktop, but they will continue coming in. In short, I think GNOME 2.10 is now fully usable just using packages from experimental, and in the near future, a new release of the meta-packages will be uploaded to experimental so people can easily upgrade with just apt-get install gnome -t experimental. Stay tuned!

Things move quite fast in my life lately, but what happened today was a bit extreme.

Yesterday, at 1AM, attending to Canonical's Ubuntu Down Under conference was just out of the picture. And then, Carlos appeared...

01:05 < jordi> sigh, I wish I was there.
01:07 < carlos> jordi: the conference is next week, you can join us :-)

Just for fun, I looked in some flights webpage, saw there were tickets, and why not, asked Mark if I could make it still. Shocking, he said "Take the ticket!", so I just had to ask at work...

This morning, first thing I do is ask Pablo: "So, can I go to Australia? Today?". Knowing he couldn't say "yes" with his boss hat on, but wanting me to take the opportunity, he redirected me to the head of the department, who had no problem at all.

So that's it. From having to reject Mark's invitation to suddenly having e-tickets waiting for me at the airport. Thanks to everyone involved in making this possible! I'm not looking forward to the massive amount of time I'll be inside a plane tomorrow, but I know UDU is going to be just fantastic. See you there!

Ah, have a nice day tomorrow up there in Catalunya!

The last week has seen some more activity in the Debian GNOME front. According to people who have been following a bit more closely that me (I've been totally out of the business), most of the pieces of the 2.10 puzzle are in place and many people are already using GNOME 2.10.1 in Debian.

The biggest problem right now is the lack of a newer libxklavier version than gnome-control-center requires, and gnome-applets which requires gst-backends (maintainer working on it) so we've had to put those packages in pkg-gnome's temporary repository while this gets sorted out in experimental. Remember, the apt lines you currently need should look like this:

# Debian experimental
deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian ../project/experimental main
# GNOME 2.10 pending packages
deb http://pkg-gnome.alioth.debian.org/debian experimental main

If you don't know how to upgrade with this information, you should really wait for the upload to unstable once Sarge freezes, or seek help on IRC, in #gnome-debian, because this update currently involves an upgrade to glibc 2.3.4 which can, according to some people, really mess up your install. This dependency will be fixed soon, though. 2.10 should be more or less to use right now, and quite a few people have upgraded already.

I'll announce when libxklavier, gnome-control-center, gst and gnome-applets enter experimental. Happy testing!

Last night I dreamed that, badly needing an experimental upload of gnome-panel 2.10, I went ahead and prepared the update myself. Unfortunately I fucked up, and uploaded to unstable instead of experimental...

From that point, the dream became a nightmare and I have a few memories of first rushing to write a .commands file for the upload queue, but even if I knew the syntax by heart, I kept typoing over and over. I guess I missed the small window to fix things up, because next thing I remember is going to Ganneff and elmo and asking them to remove the package from incoming, heh.

The next thing was fixing the fuckage. Leaving the package in was not possible because it depended on gnome-menus which is in experimental, plus it has a new shlib for libpanel-applet, so it would block other packages from migrating to testing. If I remember correctly, there were two options: doing a hackish version like 2.10.1.is.really.2.8.2-1 (some people will remember procmail at this point ;) or, *shudder*, add an epoch to the library... the last thing I remember is me fighting Duck and seb128 to accept the ugly version upload, with no luck...

I knew already that I don't like epochs... but to the point of violently waking up and finding out, to my relief, that this had not happened at all?