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Bubulle's weblog, Random bits from Christian Perrier

Christian Perrier
christian@perrier.eu.org

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W00t: samba 3.2.0 in unstable
Steve Langasek just uploaded samba 3.2.0 in unstable. Right before the freeze...:)

This is being prepared for months, now, which explains why we're doing this so close to the release.

Kudos to Steve who made the final work as I'm quite unavailable for a few days and the clock was ticking down.

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D-I (and related stuff) l10n completion
Last news I gave for D-I and related stuff l10n completion was on June 15th. We're now one month later, so let's see what happened since then.

D-I "level 1" (ie the core D-I) had several templates changes which bringed the translation ratio from 100% to 99% and below several times, for all languages. Several teams have still been able to cope with that. Other levels had no changes and I therefore spent some time nagging them to complete the missing bits here and there.

The current status is:

• Level 1 (core D-I): 20 complete languages (be cs de eu fi fr gl gu ja ko nl pt pt_BR ro ru sk sv th tr vi) just like we had on June 15th
• Level 1 + Level 2 (packages with strings used in default installs): 20 complete languages as well (the same ones of course). Big improvement here as we had only 11 of them in June.
• Level 1-3 (pkgs prompting during default desktop installs or important for desktop installs): 16 complete languages. We "lose" Belarusian, Gujarati, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian.
• Level 1-4 (adding pkgs prompting during other tasks): 16 (the same ones)
• Level 1-5 (adding important stuff such as apt, dpkg, aptitude): 9 complete languages. Those languages reaching the Grand Slam are: German, French, Galician, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Vietnamese

Changes are still planned for level 1: D-I developers are really active these days, particularly with the great "come back" of Jérémy Bobbio and the constant QA work by Frans Pop.

I also tried to merge in some work done in Ubuntu's Rosetta and then interest those people who translate there to collaborate to D-I "upstream". This lead me to merge updates for Icelandic, Kazakh, Afrikaans, Malay, Welsh and Serbian.

Contacts were made with the relevant translators:

• For Icelandic, the translation updates in Rosetta come from a woman whose login is "eeinarsdottir" but I couldn't succeed in getting an e-mail address to get in touch with her. She apparently lives in Finland if I believe Google and is also using "zorglubb" as nickname. Any hint to get in touch with her would be appreciated.
• For Kazakh, I tried to get in touch with the person who translated in Rosetta but got no answer as of now. In the same time, I tried to re-wake up Talgat, who's registered as the D-I translator but wasn't very successful.
• For Afrikaans, Friedel Wolff, the main maintainer of Pootle, is very interested in working on the translation, through Pootle of course. He was however very reluctant wrt our current policy to activate languages only when people complete "sublevels" 1 and 2....which would require about 6000 words to be updated. Scary for him, as it seems. I tried to get in touch with the translator in Rosetta....but got no answer.
• For Malay, the current translator (NB Liang) was very happy to get more strings translated because of the merge with Rosetta translations. He proposed the Rosetta translator to collaborate: no answer.
• For Welsh, I got a positive contact with Jonathan Price who did some work in Rosetta, completing the old work by Daffyd Harries (Welsh used to be complete in D-I in the past). We'll see if that goes further than "I'll have a look at it".
• By far the most positive contact was for Serbian. In about one week, I managed to get in touch with Veselin Mijuskovic and Marko Uskokovic, who work for the cp6linux project, funded by the Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Society of the Republic of Serbia. This project is aimed at creating a fully localized Linux-based distribution for use in Serbia, with support for Serbian (both cyrillic and latin), as well as regional languages of Serbia. Their distribution is currently based on Ubuntu. They did a lot of l10n work which, unfortunately, did not end up upstream as of now. They gave me access to their Pootle server and I'll try to get some of their work back in Debian.

My conclusion about all this is mitigated: I'm somewhat sorry to see some work happening in Rosetta, still without any connection with "upstream" work, with people apparently working without even some internal coordination and quite anonymously. I wonder if these people know that their work has few chances to end up anywhere, except in Ubuntu (for D-I translation, I even doubt it ends up somewhere: this is just unused work....until I grab it for D-I "suptream").

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There is a cabal...
...I have proofs.

So, libwiki-toolkit-perl is now the leader of the contest for "those annoying packages which introduce new debconf templates without calling for translations"...and therefore prevent the poor german and french teams to at least have one day in the 100% heaven.

fr was just missing fourteen strings, de was missing 39. And now, there are 6 more of these....and to make things slightly more complicated and give the maintainer a chance to mess up, he introduced a typo in his debconf templates. yay.

It is indeed now about two full months since we're so close and each time we succeed in lowering down the numbers (for instance by nagging Marco enough and have him upload udev), someone pops up with yet another debconf template that was so urgent that (s)he could not even wait for a call for translations. Bummer.

Now I know. There *is* a secret conspiracy of people who watch our stats daily and introduce or change something just to make us mad. Guys, it work *perfectly*.

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Churro as production server
'churro' is the name of the Debian i18n server (i18n.debian.net), hosted by the Extremadura region in Merida (IIRC). That server was setup back in september 2006, during the first Extremadura i18n meeting.

Since then, a lot of hidden work happened on it, mostly moving all scripts that build statistics pages from Debian localization data, for instance the Central Debian translation statistics.

Thomas Huriaux, then Nicolas François, have been the people building all this, with the help of Felipe Augusto van de Wiel for the system administration.

Churro for instance has neat statistics pages, built by Nicolas François. These would just need to be packaged with nice web pages to give a great website for stats junkies(See that example showing how Swedish decreased over time, then revived recently....or that other one showing German reaching the 100% Grail).

The DDTP also uses churro as server which is an important brick for having translated package descriptions (which is now an achieved lenny release goal).

And now, since this week-end, I think we can say that Pootle is partly in production. The Pootle server is now hooked directly to the VCS of some parts of Debian-Installer related packages (including the core D-I itself) and, since last night, I am not the only one using it...:-)

That small bit:

Author: pootle-guest
Date: Sun Jul 13 20:48:15 2008
New Revision: 54294

Log:
Commit from Debian/Pootle l10n server by user pi. 413 of 413 messages translated (0 fuzzy).

Modified:
   trunk/packages/po/sublevel3/eu.po

We're still working on organizing all that scattered stuff, to finally turn churro into the central point for Debian localization and internationalization work but I think that the i18n team can really be proud of the achieved work, already.

PS: as churro turned out to be hard to pronounce for German mouths, please note that it is also called 'spaetzle' :-)

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In Bruges
Good movie. Two great irish actors (Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson), a wonderful fuckin' city which is just like a fairy tale and a quite crazy story.

A few hilarious moments, the best of which for me being that sentence (transcript from my understanding): "Bruges is not too crowded. Would it be elsewhere than in Belgium, it would be overcrowded".

And the film even features the two actors facing 'The Last Judgement' by Hyeronymus Bosch, a triptych where I remember spending more than one full hour just watching, in Groeningue Museum (if you happen to go in Bruges, go there!).

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Bug #490000
Max Stotsky reported bug #490000 on Wednesday July 9th. Yet another i18n-related bug for a round number mark: "apt-cache search and ddtp".

As bug #480000 was reported as of May 7th 2008, we're still keeping nearly exactly the pace of 2 months for 10,000 bugs, so 60,000bugs a year. Bug #500000 should then be reported around Sept 9th 2008. As a consequence, the candidates for winning the 500000th bug contest are still Miguel Gea or Kartik Mistry. The probability that they win iw now indeed very high as our bug reporting pace is obviously very constant.

I will therefore not win the contest (which many people already lost as they predicted dates that are now in the past)

See you around September 9th for celebrating Debian having half a million bugs in 15 years.

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Acronyms
It's never too late. Today, I finally figured out that "TIA", which I see here and there in mails, is meaning "Thanks in advance". After about 20 years of electronic communication, it was about time.

This is a great time for this as I recently figured out "IANAL" and "TTBOMK". Always learning, finally.

Time for me to use these now. I think I'll use their French version (which nobody uses) to make this as cryptic as those acronyms were for me:

• MDA == TIA
• PAQJLS == TTBOMK (actually PAQJLS is more AFAIK, but heh)
• JNSPUA == IANAL

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postfix, quota, gridengine, smbind...
...are the last remaining packages before I am happy (or before someone adds a package with templates or adds templates to a package)

udev, nut, flash-kernel, dtc, root-system are the additional missing ones before my German friends are happy.

Your package is listed there? Make us happy, upload with translation fixes and win a beer at Debconf8 (or 9, or 10...).

Your package is not listed there? Make us happy by NOT uploading with new or changed debconf templates without sending a call for translation update (hint: "man podebconf-report-po").

Anyway, this rush to 100% is much much more peaceful and easy than the same rush for Etch (where I think that French sustained 100% for about one week).

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Just married
Today, two friends of mine (and friends of many readers of Planet Debian) are getting married.

Too far away from here, indeed, but I send them all the best for this day and wish them the best for the upcoming dozens of years.

The Debian community is anything but a virtual community and they're proving it today.

Glückwünsche, Meike und Alex

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triggers: those great improvements Joe User will never see
My random thoughts of the day go to the "triggers" feature in dpkg.

The addition of that feature triggered a lot of noise, discussions and flames a few months ago. Actually more about the way it was added and the schedule that was followed, more than the feature itself. No need to come back on this. That's Debian's life...:-)

These days are over: the feature is here. And frankly I love it even though I probably don't understand more than 10% of it...

Today, I ran quite huge "dist-upgrade" of my laptop (where I try to stick with unstable) after 3...days not upgrading it. And I noticed that:

.../...
Dépaquetage de la mise à jour de foo
Préparation du remplacement de foo
.../...
Paramétrage de foo
.../...
Traitement des « déclenchements (triggers) » pour « menu »...
.../...

And, frankly, that rocks. This is one of these improvements that will never be noticed by Joe Random User, but exactly one that makes our favourite distro and its derivatives the best all around.

So, that random blog post is dedicated to all people who made this possible. Such things are the reason I'm still stuck to Debian after so many years.

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On random blacklisting of mail servers
Yesterday, I again got a stupid thing like:

: host YYYYYYYYYYY.de[AA.BB.CC.DDa] said: 550
    5.7.0 ... We don't accept mail from SPAM-friendly
    providers (in reply to RCPT TO command)

The original mail was sent from my home server, hosted on a fixed IP address of the French ISP provider Free. The address has reverse DNS resolution and my system never sent spam or never was used to send spam. Free has a policy to block outboind port 25 for its customers unless they explicitely request to open it...which is IMHO the best compromise to avoid thousands of zombie Windows computers to send out spam.

Blocking random blocks of IP addresses because they are "used by ISP customers" or because "one should us one's ISP mail server" is nonsense. This is not the Internet I knew and this is not the Internet I want.

I don't see any reason why my home server would be worse than Free mail servers.

I know what spam is. I receive tons of it and I had to take measures to limit and filter it. These measures never involved such stupid blocking by IP address and silly blacklisting. I use the Internet to communicate and I want people to be able to reach me, not going through weird ways to find their route to my precious mail address.

That was the random rant of the day. I know many people will maybe comment on why Filtering Is Good or why I Shouldn't Be Sending Mail Directly But Use My ISP. Feel free to do so but also think about it: aren't we using mail to freely communicate? Blocking IP addresses randomly is just the poor man's solution to spam.

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More nuts-driving packages
And the packages that drove me nuts today are....root-system and mxallowd. Congratulations, people, you succeeded in turning me mad the same day by introducing debconf templates without any prior call for translations.

So, another move back for translation teams. As a reward for that, please expect an *immediate* l10n NMU proposal by /me.

Maybe, some day, people will *learn*. I can dream...

Besides that, these packages are packages indeed coming out of NEW. I should maybe talk with the ftpmasters and see if we can enforce maintainers who introduce new packages with debconf stuff to actually:

• ask for a templates review on d-l-english
• send a call for translations

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100% for debconf: only French and German?
Yesterday, I looked at the status of debconf translations for the three top languages in the current ranking.

French and German will make it definitely. I can fairly easily NMU packages which are slow, if needed (but for most that won't be needed, except maybe udev where Marco is.....somewhere). Of course, being the nasty person I am, I'll arrange so that French makes it before German..:-)

However, Portuguese will not, IMHO. There are way too many missing translations so even though they're 96% or so, I don't think I can successfully push enough packages at the same time. Apparently, the Portuguese team has been neglecting the *needed updates* for translations they already sent in the past.

Sorry, guys, you'll stay hosed around 96-99% probably. Unless some miracle happens.

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About backports.org keyring in main
In bug #480478, Robert Millan proposes adding the backports.org keyring package to Debian main so that our users benefit from it and may use packages from backports.org, if they want to.

As one would expect, it turns out that some zealots (did I say 'bigots'?) followed up to mention that bpo is not an official Debian service and why should we promote the use of non official services and blah and blah and blah. There was even a mention of freeness!

For ${DEITY}'s sake, could some people land back on earth? Even thoug bpo is not an official service, it is one of the best services that's offered to our users. And it is maintained By DDs and not the worse of us. It is even pretty useful for us, the very pure Debian developers...just run "dpkg -s git-code" on Alioth and make your mind...

I sincerely hope that the debian-backports-keyring will make its way in main. Really. We still have a few users who didn't switch to Ubuntu and we really should make some efforts to keep them unless we want indeed what some people seem to want: having the DD's as the only users of Debian.

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Console stuff not a secret, just neglected
Marc, from my experience, there is no 'secret' in the console-tools/kbd migration work. Just low involvment of all parties.

I have watched the work on console handling stuff in Debian for a few years now, and my conclusion is just that nearly nobody cares about it now.

I do maintain console-data that provides console fonts and keymaps. I took it over slowly from Alastair McKinstry (the console-tools maintainer mentioned in Marc's blog entry) because that involved maintaining localization of keymap names....that are used and visible in the installer.

Ideas to switch the installer to console-setup and related tools are floating around. Just not achieved...because of lack of motivated manpower. Progress was made because of Anton Zinoviev and Colin Watson's work, but the project is currently hosed on a quite critical choice:

• either ask about keymap layout during install, but that requires internationalization of the model/layout names...that are in an XML file. Nobody worked on this and this is therefore a blocker.
• or use the Ubuntu way to set the keymap (by asking users to type keys and guess the right keymap from that). Colin already said to the D-I team that this is basically a big hack...but, well, it works.

Funnily, our installer (even the graphical version) *still* relies on console keymaps during the installation process and, therefore, we rely on mostly unmaintained stuff here (people who think that I maintain console-data are plain wrong: I just keep it surviving...:-))

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On battery monitoring in KDE
After last 2.6.25 kernel again dropped support for /proc/acpi, I decided to move forward and try removing things which depend on it on my laptop.

That actually involved switching from klaptopdaemon to kpowersave.

This is really a must do. I don't know if this happened in KDE tasks but if it is not, we should think about it.

Not only is kpowersave properly using /sys/class/power_supply instead of /proc/acpi/battery, but it seems much more powerful and providing reliable information.

PS: that /sys interface seems nice but finding where the hell information is stored is really a nightmare: "/sys/class/power_supply" is damn anti-natural to me... And, well, this is probably the 4th or 5th change for system information in Linux. Sometimes, I regret the stability of Windows when it comes at this (/me runs away).

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Nut drives me nuts
And the winner of the day is "nut". The debconf templates that were sucking for months were just "fixed" (guess what? They still suck).

So, we all move a little bit back away from our Grail, reaching 100%. Too bad, I wasn't in a goo dmood today and my bug report with the fixed French translation (as usual, when maintainers "fix" templates, I just changed nothing) was not nice and gentle.

I know I'll regret that tomorrow.

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On D-I releases
(hint: D-I=Debian Installer, the installation system for your favourite distro)

Commenting on the blog entry I posted yesterday about D-I releases...

I want to make it clear, in case it could be misunderstood, that writing that the next D-I release will certainly be called a Release Candidate and be the final release, is purely personal assumptions.

I am not the D-I release manager. Otavio Salvador is. So, my assumption is only based on the small experience I got from a little bit less than 5 years in the D-I team and nearly 3 entire release cycles for Debian and D-I. Pure speculation, then. I could even say "science-fiction".

I still believe that there will (should) be only one D-I release until the release of Lenny, but that decision is up to the D-I release manager(s?) and you're free to not believe me and just ask on #debian-boot or the debian-boot mailing list.

Still, when it comes at i18n, I still believe that translators should move their asses if they want to make it for the release. And that involves /me saying them that the release is bloody near no matter if it's called a Release Candidate or Yet Another Beta.

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On getting Ubuntu bug reports for our packages
Lucas pointed that the Package Tracking System now links to Ubuntu bug reports in Launchpad, for Debian packages.

This is of course an interresting feature, which I immediately tried on geneweb, my pet package.

Indeed, the only bug I found there comes from a user who was apparently not able to read a damn README.Debian file, which nicely explains what people are expected to do if they want to share the genealogical databases with Geneweb with the system-wide daemon. Maybe they should renamed README.Debian to README.Debian-but-readme-also-if-you-use-Ubuntu.

In short, the only bug is user error. Now I really wonder how I could close that thing (yes, I did log in into Launchpad) and be able to claim that I have zero bugs on my pet package.

I should do the same for samba, but I guess that Steve Langasek is more or less monitoring things there (LP is apparently Yet Another Thing You Have To Be Online To Use, which is a no-no for me).

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D-I (and related stuff) l10n completion
Now that D-I beta2 has been released, the next release of D-I *will* very certainly be called a "Release Candidate" and be the final release used in Lenny.

So, it's time for our translators to put their work in shape and we have 61 supported languages so far. In short, expect being nagged by /me quite often in the upcoming two months.

The current status is:

• Level 1 (core D-I): 20 complete languages (bg, cs, dz, eo, es, fr, gl, gu, ja, ko, lt, mr, nl, pt, pt_BR, ro, ru, th, tr, vi)
• Level 1 + Level 2 (packages with strings used in default installs): 11 complete languages (bg, cs, es, fr, gu, ja, pt, ro, ru, th, vi)
• Level 1-3 (pkgs prompting during default desktop installs or important for desktop installs): 7 complete languages (bg, fr, ja, pt, ru, th, vi)
• Level 1-4 (adding pkgs prompting during other tasks): 7 (the same)
• Level 1-5 (adding important stuff such as apt, dpkg, aptitude): 2 complete languages (fr, vi)

Please note that Level 1 partial completion (the first two "sublevels") is a requirement for a language to be activated in D-I. As of now, we "only" have about 40 languages in that case.

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[life] Manu en su casa
Yes, Manu Chao was really home yesterday in Paris Bercy. And he was obviously feeling like being home.

The concert began at 21:30 and ended up at 00:30. Yes...that makes 3 full hours concert. All that for 25 euros.

The crowd support, dance, participation was *amazing*. I often go to concerts in the Bercy arena and never saw the crowd in the upper rows being stood up all concert long.

Radio Bemba played their usual tracks first. As usual, the very Manu way to mix songs, themes from all his carreer and mix them up, distord them and make new songs from old ones. This is what always made Mano Negra, then Manu Chao oncerts unique experiences. Just imagine 20,000 people singing Clandestino a capella, most of us not knowing any damn word of Spanish...

After about 2 hours of magic without any stop, the very special moments came in. Manu, Gambit, Majiv (what a guitarist when playing rumbas de Barcelona!), Julio (de Barcelona!)...and all others were just feeling like being home with a few friends. So the encores lasted...and lasted...and lasted. They just didn't want to stop (Manu probably said about 3 or 4 times "c'est fini").

Then, they did something I never ever saw in a big 20,000 people concert since my first one back in....long time ago. Manu asked "do you have 5 more minutes?". So, they stopped for 5 minutes to get the guitars re-accorded(sp?)....the crowd just...waited...and the gig re-started again with songs from "Si Sibérie m'était contée", the special book-album he made with friends, inspired by the sad winters he spent in Paris in his early years. Soooooo special and, believe me, that *was* special. Seeing all roadies, crew, friends just dancing backstage and partying clearly showed this was not to always happen (this will probably happen again on today's concert).

He was just feeling like home. And so were we. Not wanting to leave and shut down the light.

Finally, at 00:30, all of us were dead tired and we just hugged around with Manu and left. Just like old friends.

I don't know if that will happen everywhere in the upcoming tour (some dates in France, some in Europe, a few in USA....nothing unfortunately in South America as of now)....but if you have the opportunity to go to Radio Bemba concerts, just do it.

And (IRC reference), really, Erinn, this was not about "ethnic music for white people" (really wondering where you got this idea...or if you were just kidding me). I dunno what Manu ever did to kill your ears, but just try again and, even more important, go to the gig in your fair city on August 22nd. Radio Bemba concerts will be cheap, about half the price of regular bug size concerts....just use that opportunity.

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[life] Radio Bemba
Yay, we got last minute tickets and I'll be with our son at Manu Chao and Radio Bemba's concert in Paris Bercy tomorrow (7 years after). Scheduled to be 20h-2h and sold out....

Guess I'll be tired on Thursday.

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Samba 4 in experimental
The (still alpha) 4.0.0 release of Samba is now in experimental. Both Samba 3 and Samba 4 packages are likely to coexist in the archive as Samba 3 is still for a while the production code for File and Print services while Samba 4 is the development branch of the Samba team to implement Active Directory domain control (among other things).

Samba4 packages also bring a big bunch of libraries, most of which being used to related development such as Openchange.

Expect some neat new packages in experimental, then unstable, pretty soon now.

Please do NOT replace production servers running samba 3.0.* or samba 3.2.* by samba4....not yet..:-)

The samba4 packages are maintained by Jelmer Vernooij, one of the two main developers for Samba 4 in the Samba Team (the other being Andrew Bartlett). Jelmer is someone we should stuck out from the NM queue as soon as possible..:-)

Anyway, this is again another success of that small team we built around Samba and samba-related packaging. Thanks to all involved people (Steve Langasek, Noèl Köthe, Jelmer Vernooij, Peter Eisentraut, etc.).

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[life] Running pace
Dirk often blogs about running and generally posts his running paces as minutes/mile. Well, we're both geeks, so numerical challenges are logical for us..:)

I follow my own 'performance' (or lack of) in terms of speed in kilometers per hour. Which makes the conversion fairly hard.

Just to confirm that we live on different planets, this week, I tried to get a rough idea and then calculated my usual pace (for distances ranging from 15km to 25km, as well as short distances such as 5km):

• On short distance (5km), my best pace is currently 11.75km/h, which turns to 5'06" per kilometer, or 8'19" per mile. I run such distance fairly rarely. It probably could be improved to about 12km/h. For those who care, that makes 25 minutes for 5000m while the world record is less than 13..:-)
• On medium distance (15km), my pace is around 10.75km/h, turning to 5'33" per kilometer, or 9'05" per mile.
• On my longest distance (27km), the pace was 10.16km/h, turning to 5'54" per kilometer, or 9'37" per mile (however, that time, I had to stop a few times to have a look at my map as I was using new paths). I once ran 26km at 10.5km/h, so nothing really reproducible there, still.

Anyway, for people going to Debconf, I plan to gather the Debian runners and share the pleasure of running together during the conference. I'll probably open an "event" for this in Pentabarf. Of course, the point there will be sharing the pleasure, not performance. So, even if you are a very occasionnal runner, you're welcome.

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[life] Barcelona rocks
(update with right spellings for Catalan names, thanks Guillem) So, we (Elizabeth and /me) spent four days in May-end in Barcelona...without my laptop. That was already 2 weeks ago but it took me time to cook this blog entry..:-)

Indeed, we enjoyed that a lot. That city is deeply appealing and friendly, and welcoming, and etc.

Elizabeth found a good, though expensive, hotel in the city center, close to La Rambla (career Junta de Comerç for those who care)....but far enough from La Rambla's noise..:-)

The city is of course full of tourists...just like us...but, in some way, it absorbs the "load" very well and it doesn't look like the Touristorama that Paris turns into from May to September, for instance.

It probably comes from the city having several interesting places to go without hard "hot spots" where all international buses of hurried folks run around like a sheep cattle...:-)

Of course, we went to the "famous" places and, well, we enjoyed them a lot.

For instance, the city hot spot, namely La Sagrada Familia... I wouldn't really have guessed that I would enjoy it that much. I was expecting something crazy and full of religious crap, just like Paris' "Sacre Coeur". I actually found a marvel of modern architecture. The portal of Passion is....astonishing and its modern sculpture framework is full of emotion. The inside, though still under huge work left me thrilled. That forest of pilars, the size of the ceiling and the elegance of all this is....wonderful. Really, I hope I'll live enough to see the end of this. We spent more than 4 hours there...

La Rambla is as well somethign one has to enjoy. Of course full of crappy tourist-oriented stuff....but also a really living place and a place where one just want to "ramble on".

We visited Park Güell on Friday with the best weather we had. Just sitting there on the terrace and enjoy the sun and some music by a quite good trumpetist was a great first introduction to the week-end.

We wandered a long time around Montjuich hill, enjoying the view on the city. Definitely a place I would love running in if I was a Catalan.

We also wandered through Gràcia which was a separate village in the past, though close to city's center. Nice walk in small places. Go there on evenings.

The Musuem of the City's history is also a place to go. Great visit of remainings of the Roman and post-Roman city, under places just near to the cathedral.

We were also lucky to see the Corpus Christi procession with Giants and related things (interrupted by rain, unfortunately) as well as attend a local "sardane" contest on a small place close to the cathedral on Saturday. Just friendly and nice being sitting there.

We also went on some event I have no idea about, which featured some kinds of "fratenities" of people in a procession, with many giant flags (I mean *really giant*: about 5-8 meters high and held by one single person). We followed them for 1-2 kms in the avenues around the University after seeing them from the bus...:-)

Barcelona's transport system is great. We had the great idea to buy "Barcelona cards" which just give you free access to bus, trains, metro, tram and several reduced fees to museums and such other places. This way, we could go around the city without walking too much and be too tired... If you do so some day, just use busses. They go everywhere, are very fast and they come often, even on Sundays. The metro is faster but you don't see the city. My favourite bus line is 24.

Another option is the bicycle rental system. It seems fairly easy to use and, just like Paris V'lib, you find bicycles everywhere. Just remember that you'll ride in Spain (the same stands for Paris...) so buy eyes for all around your head.

I still have so many things to say about Barcelona, but I want to complete that blog entry. In short, go there and enjoy. It deserves it.

Ah, and if you live in Barcelona (and are not veg'), just try the "Biblioteca" restaurant in Junta de Comerço (I hope I remember the name well...anyway there are not that many restaurants in that street). We went there two nights in a row just because we wanted to try more stuff from their great menu..:-).

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See you too in Mar del Plata

My flights:

ORY->MAD 2008-08-07 21:10 -> 2008-08-07 23:05 Air Europa
MAD->EZE 2008-08-08 00:55 -> 2008-08-08 09:20 Air Europa

EZE->MAD 2008-08-17 12:00 -> 2008-08-18 05:10 Air Europa
MAD->ORY 2008-08-18 07:50 -> 2008-08-18 09:50 Air Europa

(ORY is Paris' second airport, which has most of the flights to Spain)

So, I apparently share the schedule and route with Noodles but not the airline (he's probably using Iberia). I'll probably try to gather with him to take the bus to Mar del Plata, though.

In case someone flies the same day on Air Europa (should be people coming from France, UK, Hungary, Czech Rep., Poland, Italy or Israel...these are connections of Air Europa inside Europe to bring ppl in Madrid, which is their hub), get in touch with me.

And, in any case, see you in Mar del Plata.

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French po-debconf is virtually 100%
I think this is the first time this happens since etch was released: French translations of po-debconf templates are now "virtually" complete.

It means that all packages with an incomplete translation in the above linked page do indeed have a bug reported against them with the corrected translation. It's just a matter of the maintainer uploading..:-)

For several of these, a NMU work is under progress. For some others, the maintainer *will* upload. In short, we're now targeting the *real* 100%.

For what's is worth, German is now very close to "virtual 100%" and so should be Portuguese (I've not checked, this is what they claim) and Czech shouldn't be far as well.

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Macedonia votes
Yes, *Macedonia*, not "The Former Yougoslavian Republic of Macedonia" as some greek nationalists (and indeed most of Greece) are claiming loudly because "the name of Macedonia" is their property, belonging to their patrimony.

Silly, indeed. This is what prevented Macedonia to enter NATO (because of Greek veto). I don't really care about NATO, so, well....

But it could be what prevents Macedonia to enter the European Union which is somethign I care much more about, despite its defects. And still because Greece could do its best to block name for a stupid name fight. All this while most of Macedonians want their country to enter the EU.

Such sillyness and nationalist crap makes me angry. A lot. I respect cultures. Deeply. I however dislike cultures that don't respect other cultures.

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Please test samba 3.2.0-rc1
Those people who overread the previous blog entry but are interested in samba, please test the 3.2.0~rc1 packages we have in experimental.

We still haven't decided whether we'll push to have it in lenny or not (Samba 3.2.0 should be released very very soon and the Samba Team pushes for us to have it in Debian lenny....which might need solving out issues induced by the move to GPLv3)....but it deserves as much testing as possible.

I think that it's safe to use it on "semi-production" machines (those machines you might already have using testing because you want bleeding edge software). So, please, given the very various ways to use samba, please help us and our upstream to test it.

The packages are in experimental, by the way.

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News from samba packages development
There has been some hype around samba this week.

On May 21st, the Samba Team released Samba 3.0.29, an update from their stable branch. The Debian package maintainers quickly built and uploaded a package for unstable/lenny the very same day.

Then, on 27th, we got notified of CVE 2008-1005, which affects both etch, lenny and unstable (not the 3.2 versions we have in experimental).

I contacted the security team and, after some brief discussions, I uploaded with their blessing, a fixed package to stable-security (3.0.24-6etch10). Then, I immediately uploaded samba 3.0.30 to unstable (1:3.0.30-1), that version being the Samba Team response to the security issue. All this lead to DSA 1590.

Up to now, everything perfect.

In the meantime, Karolin, the Samba Team's release manager announced the Releace Candidate 1 of Samba 3.2.0. So, yesterday (Saturday), I started building it....which succeeded.

Then I started to screw up..:)

Instead of uploading that version to experimental, as planned, I uploaded 1:3.2.0~rc1-1 to unstable. Yes, AGAIN (I already did that in April). There's no excuse for that, except distraction and failure to use our tools properly ("dch -r").

Thankfully, I noticed that nearly immediately, but not immediately enough. So, I had to re-upload 3.0.30 to unstable (which is urgent: that's a security fix) and increase the epoch (we already had one as this is the second identical screwage): 2:3.0.30-2. Sorry, autobuilders...

Yesterday evening, I uploaded 3.2.0-rc1 again to experimental (2:3.2.0~rc1-2).

Then, finally, I went on the last bit of remaining work: spend some time on Jelmer Vernooij's samba4 packages. Jelmer is one of the two lead developers of Samba 4, a huge masterpiece still under heavy delveopment. To give it more exposure, it is planned to upload it a few times in experimental, then move it to unstable, block it so that it does not enter testing, and make some noise about this.

I finally uploaded samba4 this morning (triple checking that I was uploading to experimental!) and samba4 4.0.0~alpha4~20080522-1 is now waiting for NEW processing (which might take time: this is a big piece of new stuff).

I'm sad for the screwage because, apart from it, that was nearly a perfect process. But, anyway, I'm still proud of the result: 4 successful uploads for samba in a little more than a week (which included 4 day away). It could even have been 5 as the samba version in sarge is affected by the security issue, but we don't support sarge anymore.

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Portuguese vs. Czech
As of yesterday, Czech is back to 3rd place, ahead of Portuguese, in the debconf translation ratio ranking.

Funny competition, indeed, which result is....more l10n.

Jacobo is now 80 strings from his ultimate goal: make Galician the most translated language from Spain, for debconf..:-)

And French is missing 28 strings only...

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Reading blog summary
During the last 4 days, I didn't read Planet. So I started an interesting exercise and wanted to comment very briefly on a few entries I just read quickly to catch up. My Planet premium, so to say..

• (not Planet related...I read that on NASA mailing lists...some of which I'm subscribed since 1988) NASA's Phoenix lander successfully landed on Mars. This is actually the first successful soft landing on Mars since 1976 (recent landings were hard ones, with airbags....or failures). This stunning picture shows the spacecraft with its parachute during its descent on Mars. It was taken by the HiRISE camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The very first time a spacecraft photographs another one while it's landing. Amazing, right?
• Marga and the Spanish keymap: I can't disagree with your comments, Marga. Still, that's a though issue: changing the behaviour of a keymap that's used by millions of users is not a trivial change. OTOH, you're right and that tilde should be dead, indeed. I think there is barely no other option than a fork, here: have both keymaps, one with asciitilde and another one with dead_tilde on the same key combination and let users choose. That keymap should be named "es-standard" to avoid changing the existing "es".
• John Goerzen biking to work: John is among the people I never met but who I know I share ideas and vision of life with. So, seeing him comment on alternative ways to commute to/back work is a pleasure for me (alternative transportation systems with the goal of abandoning the heresy of individual cars is part of my hobbies....while I still don't always apply these principles myself). And, well, seeing someone writing that this is still possible in the flat MidWest of the country that contributes the most to climate change is a relief for me: change can happen.
• Joey reads USENET again. Long time since I last read news... In the past I used to have my own feed, through UUCP. I still receive a lot of my mails by UUCP, though (bubulle@kheops.frmug.org comes this way)
• Pollocks were in Europe. Andrew is another of these people I feel like having connections with while we never met. Next time, plan a stop in Bubulle Hotel and visit Paris, Andrew.
• Dirk mentioned Bike the Drive, which I assume to be a bike-related event in Chicago... Yet another occasion to see there's still some hope for alternatives to cars in the US of A...
• Kartik is back home in Mumbai after some months working in Bangalore (and not enjoying it). I'm happy for him that he can be again with his family.
• Ganneff also bikes. Of course, he does it the geek way. Would you have guessed? Joerg, are you ready for the DebConf daily running tour which I plan to do in Mar del Plata?
• Manoj is the last Emacs user, along with /me
• Jaldhar who I have much respect for in the project, still supports the US republican party, the most conservative party in the so-called western world. It is still completely out of my understanding how FLOSS "spirit" can fit with this (the same stands for the political stance of Eric "Gun" Raymond, indeed). Mysteries...
• Lucas wonders how to find cheap flights. Voyages SNCF (aka Expedia), the online travel agency of the French railway company, always gets my preference. Yes, French *railway*.
• MJ also posts about biking. I have to mention that easy bike-on-demande systems in cities are one of the best ways to develop this. Barcelona's system seems pretty cool. Paris' Velib is amazing and so is the system in Lyon (who initiated the movement in France). All this is something I personnally follow pretty closely (I'm a addicted reader of the French professionnal magazine named "Ville et Transport", "Town and Transportation") in the hope it also develops in my Suburbia.
• Too many technical issues on Planet. I can't follow..:-)

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Yet more news from the lenny l10n NMU campaign
Some more progress on debconf l10n...during a week-end where I was away. I like that..:-)

• Galician is not ranked 8th after passing Swedish
• However, I see some increased activity on Swedish l10n now. Would that be related? :)
• Basque is now 14th, ahead of Italian. The activity of the Basque team is pretty high while the activity on Italian localization is lower. I wonder if they're suffering the same problem we face in the French team: much much less new blood than a few years ago. I suspect some "responsibility" by Ubuntu there, attracting much more potential contributors (with all the reserves I have wrt their l10n processes, though).

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Away in Catalunya - no laptop
I'll visit Barcelona with Elizabeth for four days. No laptop, no beersigning, no electronic stuff. Only sightseeing and enjoying time together without any geek or work thinking. That was desperately needed..:-)

Back on Monday...

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[life] Why I love CGT
If you're a French person and were guessing what I have to do with the most famous French union, you've just been tricked.

CGT stands for California Guitar Trio, a band of three virtuose guitar players. We attended their French gig yesterday night at 'Le New Morning', a famous jazz club in Paris.

They came and played with Tony Levin who is, for the skilled music amateurs, one of the top world's bass player (*the* top for me).

That was an amazing concert and great experience. Just try to imagine Pink Floyd's 'Echoes' played by 3 (electrified) acoustic guitar players, just after a 'Prelude and Fugue' by J.S. Bach, played cyclically (one note per player in round-robin order....a playing method invented by Robert Fripp and the League of Crafty Guitarists). That plus Bohemian Rhapsody, several pieces of their own and a stunning composition by Tony Levin where he proved that he *is* really a virtuose bass player..:-)

I was just stunned, indeed....and, of course, also enjoyed a lot the presence in a very small club of Uncle Tony who I saw many times until now, but only in big arenas in all Peter Gabriel concerts I've attended since about 1980.

CGT will play tonight (15th) on Milan, tomorrow in Roma, on 27th in Toronto, 31th in Rouyn-Noranda (Quebec) and a few times with friends during the Quebec Summer Festival.

Then, they'll play in many places in California and all over USA. If you love eclectic music, just go listening to them.

So, yes, CGT rocks!

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[life] Limits pushed again
27km...that's what Google Maps says, while my podometer says 28km (2/3 of a marathon). Anyway, I'm happy again as I pushed my limits slightly and ran that distance on Saturday. The former record was 24km. More happily, I could run another 20km today, 2 days later, and finished it very easily (the 27km run was much harder at the end but also had much steeper slopes).

Long week-ends are good, indeed, to improve my running skills.

For Dirk: the pace is currently 9:36 after converting things to your odd units...:)...so, I'm still far far away from your performances..:)

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French over 100% !
If you look at the po-debconf stats pages, you'll see that, as of today, the French translators translated 9693 strings out of 9688...:-)

We are so clever!

This is actually an annoyance on the scripts that generate these pages. Sometimes, in packages, the debian/po/*.po files contain *more* strings than the debian/po/templates.pot files.

This happens when maintainers do not run "debconf-updatepo" in the clean target of their debian/rules files. People, there is a lintian warning for this...:)

We will try to correct this (actually, more Nicolas François than me, indeed) but that will make my stats less easy to do...

So, "sadly", we are indeed only about 99%...

That said, the NMU campaign is still going on. Portuguese is now ahead of Czech (ranked 3rd). Russian passed Swedish and is very close to Spanish for rank 7. And, among the most actives, Finnish and Basque are still climbing up quickly.

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Bug #480000
Roberto Lumbreras reported bug #480000 on Wednesday May 7th.

As bug #470000 was reported as of March 8th 2008, we're still keeping nearly exactly the pace of 2 months for 10,000 bugs, so 60,000bugs a year. Bug #500000 should then be reported around Sept 7th 2008. As a consequence, the candidates for winning the 500000th bug contest are still Miguel Gea or Kartik Mistry. Jacobo Tarrio has his chances, though.

I haven't done any MBF to keep chances of winning the contest myself.

See you around July 7th for bug #490000!

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What to do if catched by the "l10n NMU" patrol ?
It might happen that you (I mean you, gentle reader of this blog) being a Debian developer or maintainer, just receive one of my numerous "Intent to NMU to fix pending l10n bugs" or "Announce of the upcoming NMU of ". The first gives you 10 days to react....then I send the latter which opens an 8 days translation update round.

In such case, as the carefully written template for these (pretty long) mails says, please DON'T immediately upload. Speak to /me instead so that we coordinate the translation update round. That will also allow me to send you possible QA enhancements I found in your packaging while trying to build your package *and* translators to send more material.

Some (rare) maintainers just uploaded immediately after getting these mails and they're now getting what could be expected: they're receiving new translations...and are then likely to be catched pretty soon by the patrol, again..:-).

The "intent to NMU" mails are sent to the i18n mailing list and some translators find this to be a good opportunity to send translations in their language (that's why Finnish, Galician are for instance climbing up pretty quickly in statistics).

The main intent of these NMUs is to get updates done, not doing NMUs so, of course, I will welcome uploads...it is however more efficient to coordinate them.

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The "call for l10n updates" week-end
Last week-end, I sent several calls for translation updates for some key packages which I maintain localization for: apt, menu, noticeably. Also sent a reminder for Debian Installer beta2 even if Otavio already did so.

That will continue over next weeks, of course along with the running l10n NMUs for which the pace is now about 2 packages per day.

It's also good to see many package maintainers send call for l10n updates now in debian-i18n. One enhancement for the next release cycle will be avoiding to concentrate these during the last weeks/months of the release. Translators are not super(wo)men...:)

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