Ok, I felt the urge to blog about this...

From: Debian Installer <installer@ftp-master.debian.org>
Subject: libgda2_1.2.1-1_i386.changes is NEW
To: Jordi Mallach <jordi@debian.org>
Date: Fri, 08 Apr 2005 14:32:11 -0400

From: Debian Installer <installer@ftp-master.debian.org>
Subject: libgda2_1.2.1-1_i386.changes ACCEPTED
To: Jordi Mallach <jordi@debian.org>
Date: Fri, 08 Apr 2005 14:42:33 -0400

I'm sure Ganneff can do better...

It is obvious that we at the Debian GNOME team didn't hold up our promise and didn't make much progress on GNOME 2.10 Debian packages for experimental.

There are a few reasons for this, mainly the people that are more involved in this happenings being quite busy and we still were fighting the last few bits for the GNOME 2.8 packages for Sarge. People kept asking, and they kept being directed to my blog, which wasn't too helpful 3 weeks after I last wrote about this...

But don't worry! As you probably know by now, Ubuntu Hoary has been released, and this means that our mighty seb128 has not been able to upload 50 packages each day as Hoary was frozen.

What does this have to do with your shiny experimental packages, you ask? Well, many don't know, but seb128 is an upload addict. He needs to upload a minimum of 10 packages each day to rest peacefully every night. With no Ubuntu uploads to do lately, he quickly shifted his focus to Debian, and the result is that as you read this, GNOME 2.10 packages for Debian are slowly hitting incoming and experimental.

seb128 is now, officially, seb210!

(In not so important news, I stopped procrastinating and built Gustavo's libgda, libgnomedb and mergeant packages for unstable. libgda will hit incoming soon, and tomorrow we will upload the rest, aiming for a quick transition to GNOME-DB 1.2).

I'm glad I'm not a debian-devel subscriber right now. They tell me the flamewar is quite massive, and the discussion has diverted into Ubuntu and Cabal bashing here and there.

Yesterday I came quite late into office, after a nice visit to the hospital, and the first thing I got in my hands was a printed copy of Vorlon's announcement from Sergio. I was quite impressed by what I found out, and both of us agreed that this is a very positive step forward for the Sarge release and Debian's release process in general.

I understand that some people are not happy about this because the architectures they work on won't be part of etch, but let's face it: the amount of work and maintenance required to make those architectures part of a Stable release, with all the implications that has in Debian, was way too high for the very small percent of users these architectures have. It would be interesting to find out how many of the mips box using Debian out there are actually using Woody. Yeah, it's easy to say this because I have no boxes using any of these ports and I don't work on any of these ports.

I do think that the small communities that live around the ARM, s390 or MIPS ports can make something usable out of the scc archive. Not being part of etch is not the end of those ports, it's just a matter of changing how things work. Debian hasn't scaled too well in some areas for some time, and this proposal is an aggressive way of addressing the problems that have held a new stable release for way too much time.

I, for one, welcome this very much needed proposal. I think it clears the future for Debian, which wasn't too defined lately. I hope the release team and vorlon in particular will be able to go through the Planet and debian-devel storms with their morale and will to contribute their free time more or less intact. I support you guys. :)

Following up to my previous post about GNOME 2.10 packages for Debian, seb, sjoerd and a few others in #gnome-debian thought that we could tell people how they can really help us with the packaging.

Normally, doing the actual packages is not such a big problem, except when there are tricky upgrades and transitions. We've had enough past experience to handle that more or less gracefully. What we most need help on is with BTS triaging for the many bugs filed against GNOME Team packages. Specifically, we can use help from people reading, testing and commenting about the validity of the bugs filed against nautilus, evolution, control-center, gnome-panel, epiphany and in general, bugs filed against packages under the Debian GNOME team's umbrella.

Helping like this is easy. Just looking for bugs that were filed many months ago and that were obviously fixed in GNOME 2.6 or 2.8 is a good start. If in doubt, don't hesitate to ask any question in the debian-gtk-gnome@lists.debian.org mailing list, or the #gnome-debian channel in GIMPnet. Many thanks!

Six months ago, the GNOME team was able to provide GNOME 2.8 packages for experimental the day it was released. I guess people expected the same would happen for 2.10...

Well, no. We haven't started serious work on creating GNOME 2.10 packages for unstable, not even experimental. Right now, we're trying to stabilise the uploads done to sync unstable/testing with the GNOME 2.8.3 release, which happened a few weeks ago. A few buildd's haven't catched up or need to retry some libs due to missing build-deps. We're also trying to finish up the non-howl transition. It should be solved pretty soonish, and nothing should stop us from starting to work on 2.10 as soon as this weekend.

When we start, it won't take too long, because fortunately seb128 has done most of the work for Hoary, so for most tarballs it'll be a matter of syncing. Be prepared to use external repositories, though, as GNOME 2.10 includes a few new modules like gnome-menus which would trigger NEW and would probably take weeks to appear in the archive. I assume we'll use the pkg-gnome repository as we did for 2.6, until we can move to either experimental or unstable, once Sarge freezes.

What is pretty clear, just if you're wondering, is that Debian Sarge will not release with GNOME 2.10. We know this was said for 2.6 and 2.8 in the past, but this time it appears the freeze is actually close. We'll stick with GNOME 2.8.3 for the release, although it wouldn't be surprising if we end up offering a semi-official backport for Sarge in pkg-gnome.

Oh, last but not least, congrats to all the GNOME folks for another rocking and successful release!

And if you didn't know yet, you should be reading Planet Debian, to find out that I, once considered a nice member of the Free Software community, have succumbed to the dark forces that threaten the pureness of our hackers.

In reply to my post about my visit to London, Beowulf blogged about the dubious convenience of me participating in a "non-free" project as The Launchpad. Yeah, Rosetta's code isn't available at all. Is that enough reason to bash it non-stop? Is Canonical expected to release everything they do from day one, or can they decide what is more convient for them in order to build a profitable business and continue contributing to Debian and Free Software?

Beowulf, you work for a construction company or something similar, right? Are the specs of the projects they are working on freely available as open content in the Internet? Does that make you feel bad?

As far as I know, you use the Linux kernel in all or most of your computers. Maybe you should consider *BSD or even the Hurd, as, unlike Linux, they don't use a non-free tool like bitkeeper to manage their development.

If I'm helping the Rosetta people with the constructive feedback I can provide, it is because I think it's going to be a Good Thing for the i18n communities in which I'm involved. If Mark told me Rosetta will never be free, I guess I would focus on helping similar projects like Pootle, which are Free today, but the thing is that Canonical does plan to release Rosetta and the rest of Launchad under a DFSG-free licence. They will do it when the company is ready to give it away, and I will happily contribute while this happens, because I believe that Rosetta has a potential to be a revolutionary tool for Free Software l10n, specially for language teams that don't have already established translation teams like many African or Asian languages.

16298:jordi@nubol:~$ chsh
Password:
S'està canviant l'intèrpret d'accés per a jordi
Introduïu el nou valor, o premeu ENTER per al predeterminat
        Intèrpret d'accés [/usr/bin/zsh]: /bin/bash

This is not the first time I try to do this, but being used to mentally correct zsh's misshandling of UTF-8 input in the command line isn't the way one should be working everyday. While bash reportedly still has a few UTF-8/char vs. byte problems, I haven't found them yet. Zsh, on the other hand, makes me do weird stuff like backspacing twice, then Ctrl-l'ing to redisplay when I press ç instead of Enter, for example.

Of course, you can get used to this behaviour and end up doing the double backspacing without even noticing, and that's why I've been using zsh on a UTF-8 locale for years.

Switching to bash is a step backwards. I know many will argue it's not, but I really think it is. There are some features in zsh that AFAIK you can't get done in bash. While bash completion has gotten a lot better in the last years thanks to the bash_completion package, zsh's is just so much better. I'll have to get used, I guess. Or I'll switch back, which is what happened the last three times I tried to do this.

It's not that I didn't expect this fight to end up like it ended this morning, but I hoped the shameless politicians would try to somehow cloak it behind some procedure that resembles democracy in some way. No way. When so much money is involved, things end up being how corporations want things to be.

This is why I've never believed a word about the "European construction process" or anything. It's why I decided to participate in the referendum to vote No instead of staying home to contribute to the massively low turnout.

Welcome to the Banana republic.

During the past weekend, Softcatalà held a meeting with the unique goal of advancing on, or finishing if at all possible, the Catalan translation of OpenOffice.org 2.0. The meeting place was one of the research buildings in the Campus de Burjassot of the Universitat de València, and took place during two full days at one one the computer labs.

Despite there are a lot more potential translators in Catalunya, it was decided to favour a location like Burjassot, just 5 kilometres away from València to see if the event could get us a few more contributors and translators in an area where the Catalan language, here known as valencià, is not going through its best moment due to a number of reasons. We knew we would have support from Valencian users of the area for hosting the MaratOOó here, but would we have an acceptable turnout of people willing to help during the weekend?

We were delighted to find out that a good group of people showed up early on Saturday morning, which as soon as we got started was mostly used by Marc and me with two introductions about what Softcatalà is about, the conventions we use to translate software and an explanation of how to deal with gettext PO files. After this, people installed either KBabel or PoEdit and started translating more and more OpenOffice 2.0 modules.

Marc, Mireia, Jesús, Francesc came from Barcelona, being the main "foreign" group present. Two pleasant surprises were to meet Jordi and Ana from Tortosa, and some other people, like David or Laia, from towns near València, making a total of 18 translators during the day. Some of them were professional translators, or people studying it at University, and the resulting translations were very good.

After the day ended, I excused myself for not going to have dinner with the people from Catalunya as I hadn't had much sleep the day before, and I wanted to be around Benimaclet that night for the carnestoltes party, so I went ahead and had a 4h nap from 9PM to 1AM and then went out until 4:30AM. That's an excellent way of totally skewing your internal clock...

On Sunday, I arrived inevitably late after sleeping too little again and after casting my vote in the referendum about the European Constitution (but this issue deserves a blog issue for its own). There was less people, as expected, but not having to do any introduction or anything, it felt like it was a bit more productive than Saturday. Ivan Vilata, the guy who got me started doing translations, showed up in the middle of the morning, making a good addition to the team. At 5:30PM we were tired enough to officially end the MaratOOó, and the Barcelona crowd left for their 3h trip back home.

In general, we're very satisfied with the outcome. We haven't finished translating the beast, but it's probably more important that some new people have been introduced to Softcatalà and into translating software, and hopefully some will stay around and will keep volunteering their time to help us. We're grateful for everyone who gave their entire weekend for something that at times can have little or no reward like doing translations for free. I'm specially thankful towards sto, who handled our contact with the University to get the computer lab over the weekend, even if he's not into the l10n world at all, taking over tasks that I should have probably done but couldn't because I've been way too busy and half sick over the last week or two. I'm also very happy about Jesús making it to València even if he went through a serious personal problem just two days before the event. Thanks to both of you!

Softcatalà will probably make an official statement on how the two days went on the main webpage. We're also going to get a 3 page article in the El Temps magazine, besides the coverage we got over the weekend in some online Catalan news sites.

When we moved the Spanish Debian web mirror to a dedicated box, I only thought about the better Internet link, maintenance and resources the mirror would have. I never thought hardware problems would appear soon after we installed the box in the new location.

The move was done back in March or so, AFAICT from the logs in the server. In May, the box crashed for the first time due to some massive SCSI errors in the disk that had the root filesystem. Just rebooting would help it, but some weeks later we would found dmesg full of crap again.

Fernando, one of the operators at the University, found out one of the fans had stopped when he opened the box trying to find out what was going on. We thought that might be causing weird stuff, but soon after, I had to go to the computer room to fix it myself, because the damage in the file system was too big.

During that visit, I finally saw the consoles of a few boxes that I had been using for like 8 years... iluso, gong, and other famous ones like tiberio (once the best computer in the University, used to do some Chemistry simulations, IIRC) or cesar (a very big Sun computer, the current best one in València, if I'm not mistaken.

The other day I had to update httpd.conf as requested by the debian-www guys, but as I feared, the box was having problems: apache was running normally (had been for months, thanks to the binaries being in memory), but the filesystem was read only due to the same errors in the disk, so I couldn't modify anything. I tried rebooting, but as expected the box didn't come up.

Today Sergio and I went to the campus, picked up the heavy box and took it back to the zulex to have a closer look outside the freezing University server room. After booting d-i, which is our preferred rescue tool these days, we examined what the disks still had, and with a few spare SCSI drives we started rebuilding the box from scratch.

Not having a Woody CD at the office, we decided it was time to upgrade to Sarge anyway, so we did our first RAID install using Debian Installer. Man, partman just rocks. After the base system was installed, we found our first blocker: lilo-installer apparently didn't know where to install the boot block, and would suggest /dev/md/0, which failed. After a few tries we learned about the raid-specific lilo.conf parametre, and managed to finish up.

Next, the SCSI BIOS was missconfigured, and it didn't boot from the correct SCSI ID. After some thought we realised what was going on and finally I could take the box home to finish up.

To stick the new disks on the case, I had to brute-force open the lid, a problem that will go away as soon as we get the rack case we've asked for donation to the Hardware Donations team. (hi robster ;) Finding the old data was not so fun, as many files in /etc were corrupt, but I could save the ssh keys and the websync scripts for the web mirror.

Having a nice chance like this to fix things up, I moved the mirror to Apache 2, and it's hopefully working ok now. Tomorrow I'll take the box back to Uni and see if it is. Ideally sto will accept being co-admin for the mirror, as he lives nearby and is University staff anyway. :)

There's some extra-space in the box now, so we are thinking about doing an ftp mirror for the Uni, which I believe has none, while many, many servers run Debian.

I'm finally ready to power it off. This is the noisiest box I've worked on it a long time... it's going to be hard to get rid of the head ache...