Bubulle's weblog

What is good in "my" job in Debian are opportunities to discover new interesting packages.

While surveying the completion of debconf translations in unstable, I thus noticed a new package named "hoteldruid", that has a few questions and interaction with users.

After my usual mumble because French and a few other languages were *finally* virtually 100% in unstable for a few days...... I went on my usual task in such cases: propose a review of debconf templates and package description to my fellow debian-l10n-english co-workers (/me bends to Justin B. Rye, our tireless, picky, efficient and very clever Master Reviewer for over 5 years now).

Then I discovered what HotelDruid is about: this is a piece of PHP-based software meant to manage....an hotel or bed and breakfast...or any kind of such facility.

Real end-user software. Really useful software. For real people...:-)

Not the gazillionth obscure development language, or yet another encryption library, or yet another mysterious virtualization thing used by 10 people in the world (even if they host thousands of machines).

These are the free software pieces I like the most. Probably Marco Maria Francesco De Santis (the upstream author and Debian package maintainer) somewhere in, I guess, Italy is running a small B&B (or maybe his parents, or his wife/cousin/whatever) *and* is a free software addict. And he wanted to run his business with free software. Same for this French genealogist who once wanted to display his data over the web (and make a real use of that obscure Ocaml language.....yes, pun itended to my friends, here). Of the person who wrote LedgerSMB to manage his business. Or those who use free software to manage hospitals (hi Andreas) or schools (hi DebianEdu folks...and special hi to Petter).

Real software for real people. Of course, developed with obscure geeky things used only by those weird geeks who like to sometimes travel half a planet to just gather together and develop the best free operating system ever.

Guess what? I like this!

And guess what? I proposed the HotelDruid author to check whether we could imrove....translation, of course..:-)