Marga's blog

Decopy - Yet another debian/copyright helper

2017-01-29T16:52:02-03:00

As every responsible maintainer should know, having an updated debian/copyright file is very important but can also take a significant amount of work. A lot of copy & pasting, a lot of manual corrections, and a lot of opportunity for human errors.

There are several tools that help with this, but they all have their limitations. decopy is a newly uploaded tool (unfortunately too new for stretch) that aims to:

Detect as many licenses as possible
Parse both text and binary files
Minimize the work needed to keep the debian/copyright file up-to-date.

How to use it

In order to run it, after apt-get installing it, just go to a source package directory and run decopy in it. Depending on the size of the package, it might take a while (the thorough processing means that a lot of checking is going on). This will show you the generated debian/copyright file in stdout. If you want to store it and diff it against your current copyright file, use decopy --output /tmp/copyright.

There's more documentation in the README file.

Future changes

More licenses are coming, the intention is to support all licenses listed in the SPDX License List. Additionally, the analysis will be improved to prioritize looking for the most common licenses first, avoiding unnecessary delays.

More modes of operation are also coming. We are planning for a diff mode that shows you only the changes between the current copyright file and what the tool thinks should be there as well as an explain mode that will let the user know what the differences are in a more verbose manner.

Credits and source

Decopy was mainly written by Maximiliano Curia. I've added testing, documentation and packaging.

It's hosted in collab-maint, licensed under the ISC license. We would love to get more contributors for it :)

MiniDebConf 2014 Barcelona

2014-02-18T16:28:28-03:00

Debian Women is proud to announce that it will hold a MiniDebConf in Barcelona on 15-16 March 2014, where Debian enthusiasts from far and wide will gather to talk about the latest Debian changes and the Debian community, as well as to meet new and old friends.

The MiniDebConf is fast approaching, be sure to make your travel arrangements! It is going to be an exciting event, in a beautiful venue, in one of the most famous European cities!

Schedule

A draft schedule (still subject to some last minute changes) is already available. The list of talks promises two days packed with great talks!

If you have an exciting idea for a talk, but missed the deadline, please get in touch with us, we might still have a slot for you.

Crowd-funding

We are still raising funds to cover the costs of running the conference and to offer travel sponsorship to people who can't pay for it. Please, consider donating any amount you can, everything helps!

Sponsorship

If you want to attend the conference, but are unable to cover the costs. Please contact us! We don't have a big budget, but we will make our best to help. Naturally, priority will be given to participants who have an accepted talk.

About this MiniDebConf

We want to have a MiniDebConf with both talks and social events, to which everyone in Debian is invited but where the speakers in the talks are all people who identify themselves as female. We consider this important to

Encourage women who haven't yet given their first DebConf talk
Provide role models for women who are interested in contributing
Debunk the myth that there are not enough women who can give talks in DebConf

The idea behind the conference is not to talk about women in free software, or women in Debian, but rather to make discussion about Debian subjects more inclusive for women. If you agree with this goal, spread the word. Forward this announcement and help us make this event a great success!

About our sponsors

This event is possible thanks to the help provided by our generous sponsors. In particular, we'd like to thank our platinum sponsor, Google.

We hope to see you in Barcelona!

For more information, visit http://bcn2014.mini.debconf.org

Debian Appreciation Day Recap

2010-08-18T05:25:50-03:00

It's been a couple of very interesting days. The thank.debian.net site was quite a success, and a lot of credit is due to Valessio's awesome balloons. Even though I didn't do much marketing about it, the site was linked on Slashdot, LWN, Ubuntu's and Debian's website, Planet, the BTS, and quite a number of blogs.

We received almost 3000 thank you messages, from all over the world. Even though the site was in English, many people felt inspired to leave their thank you messages in their languages, if you browse over the site, you'll find messages in Turkish, Chinese, Russian and many other languages. On that matter, I was particularly amazed at this message in persian, which displays properly even inside mutt.

Not too surprising, one of the things that people most value of Debian is the package management. The apt team got a lot of thank you messages, and many of the ones directed to the whole community also mention apt and upgrades as something very valuable

I find it very interesting that many of the messages, came from Ubuntu users, stating that even though they use Ubuntu, they really value the work done by Debian. A number of posts also mention sidux, knoppix and mint among the many derivatives. Many people stated the many years that they use Debian, some of them have just started, some have been using Debian for quite a while.
I was happily surprised by a number of posts that included a thank you message to "guys/gals" or "guys and girls". And the image used in the "hackergotchi" of this message really brightened my day.

Finally, I'm sorry that some people were annoyed by the thank you messages. For next year, we can try to do something a bit different and hopefully not annoy those who were annoyed this time. I do think that once in a while it's nice to be able to receive some of that much love that the users have for Debian and we rarely get to know about.

Debian Appreciation Day

2010-08-16T09:24:05-03:00

Today is Debian's Birthday, and for a while I've wanted to do something special on this date. In order to raise the general motivation of the project, have a special day when everyone is invited to thank those that make our lives easier.

However long I have wanted to do this, I haven't had that much time to prepare the site itself. I've spent the past two days getting it working, with the help of Maxy, Valessio and Raphael, but there's still a lot more work to do.

In any case, it's already usable at: thank.debian.net. I invite you to use it to send thanks to those that work on Debian.

The code is temporarily hosted at code.google.com, but I plan to move it to alioth as soon as I'm not so rushed to finish it. Bugs & Patches much appreciated!

After the campaign

2010-04-24T20:47:28-03:00

I spent the whole last week in bed with an acute case of pharyngitis, so I haven't been able to gather my thoughts in a blog post up to now.

I'd like to congratulate zack on winning the election, and I have faith that he will be a great DPL. I'm happy with my second place, I'd like to thank everybody that supported me and I think that I'll probably try again in the future, although not necessarily next year.

Since zack is probably not going to have time to keep up with his bug squashing campaign, I'm going to try and continue that myself. And, if time permits I'm also going to try to put some of the ideas in my platform into action.

Finally, last friday both Maxy and me were granted the US visa that we needed to go to DC10, so we finally can say:

Running for DPL

2010-03-12T13:18:01-03:00

During DebConf8, in Mar del Plata, Argentina, there was one night where I had a terrible nightmare: I woke up one day and I was DPL :). I mentioned this to some people during the conference, and to my amazement they told me that I could actually be a good DPL.

I've been thinking about this possibility since then, but the post-DebConf stress was still too high for me to run for it in 2009. This year, however, I'm ready to stand for it, campaign, and either win or lose, whatever the Debian community decides.

I'm currently drafting my platform, but in no way do I claim having all the good ideas. So, if you -no matter if you are a developer, a contributor or a user- have any good ideas on how to make Debian better from the DPL role, I'd be glad to hear them.

Women event in Argentina

2009-12-02T15:20:01-03:00

Next Saturday a group of more than 20 women that work with Free Software in Argentina and Uruguay will gather to speak at a Free Software event in Buenos Aires, called Software Libre, Pasión de Mujeres.

It's your typical Free Software event, with talks related to the philosophy of Free Software and the Free Culture in general, and also technical talks related to using and developing Free Software. With one important difference: all the speakers will be women.

This might sound shocking to some people and normal stuff to some others, but the reaction created by the call for talks of this event was definitely not something I expected. Women from all over the country (and many also from other Latin American countries) have contacted us, to tell us about what they do in their daily lives with Free Software and how they would like to share their work with others.

The event is open for both men and women to attend, however, of the more than a 100 people that have already pre-registered, more than half are women. A ratio that is more than amazing when you have been to a Free Software event before. I think that the fact that all the speakers are women is really encouraging for many women to attend, who otherwise wouldn't.

Debian will be sponsoring the event, by paying the bus tickets of the speakers that come from the whole country, which is a great help in making this event a big success. I really expect the event to be a fantastic opportunity for the women in our country to finally show all the great work they are doing... I'm very excited about it :)

PS: Somehow, I screwed up Planet Debian, filling it with old posts. I'm sorry! :-\

Barbara Liskov, mother of Object Oriented Programming, among other things

2009-03-24T02:48:21-03:00

This post is about Barbara Liskov, for the Ada Lovelace Day.

Barbara Liskov is the first woman in the United States of America that obtained a Ph.D. from a Computer Science department, in 1968. However, this isn't by any chance her greatest achievement.

She's the creator of the CLU programming language, a language created in the mid-70s, that we would find crufty and ugly nowadays, but that with its strong emphasis in abstraction, the use of clusters (basically equivalent to what we call classes today) and iterators, was to become the rock foundation of Object Oriented Programming.

Apart from that, she worked in the design of a timesharing operating system, called Venus; designed another programming language, called Argus, that was oriented to distributed applications, and also set the foundations for much of what is currently done as distributed computing.

Aged 70, she's currently still working at MIT, as the leader of the Programming Methodology Group, researching ways to tolerate byzantine faults.

For all this work, she received the John von Neumann medal in 2004, and the Alan Turing award in 2008.

All in all, what I find the most inspiring of all her life, is the fact that she was able to pursue her career, working on a new way of creating programs, while she was also a wife and a mother; and that today, aging 70, she's still researching, leading a group, and working towards making computing better.

tzdata screwed up most computer clocks in Argentina.

2008-10-06T18:16:38-03:00

Last year, after many years of peacefully living the whole year in GMT-3, our government decided that Argentina should use DST again. This was done in a rush, but patches were written and applied everywhere to have a correct timezone.

Fixing the problem was not enough, tzdata's upstream decided to predict the future:

# From Paul Eggert (2007-12-22):
# For dates after mid-2008, the following rules are my guesses and
# are quite possibly wrong, but are more likely than no DST at all.
Rule    Arg 2007    only    -   Dec 30  0:00    1:00    S
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Mar Sun>=15 0:00    0   -
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Oct Sun>=1  0:00    1:00    S

Well, back in December 2007, October 2008 might have seemed like a long time in the future, and they assumed that sometime in the middle the correct date would be announced... But, predictably (knowing Argentina's current government), no DST has yet been announced.

However, Paul Eggert's guesses had propagated to almost all UNIX distributions, so that at 0:00 Sunday Oct 5th, all our computers were suddenly one hour ahead of time.

Affected systems: Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Red Hat, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Mac OS. Devices: ipod, maemo, Nokia N95. Websites: Clarin (a major newspaper - still broken 36 hours later), Gmail. And probably many others that I don't know of.

I even read that Windows was affected, although I don't know how that might be possible, since as far as I know they don't use tzdata.

Anyway, not satisfied with how they mistakenly predicted the future before, a few weeks ago (not enough time in advance to fix almost any systems, only sid had this release), they added this change:

# From Alexander Krivenyshev (2008-09-05):
# As per message from Carlos Alberto Fonseca Arauz (Nicaragua),
# Argentina will start DST on Sunday October 19, 2008.
#
# http://www.worldtimezone.com/dst_news/dst_news_argentina03.html
# http://www.impulsobaires.com.ar/nota.php?id=57832 (in spanish)

Rule    Arg 2007    only    -   Dec 30  0:00    1:00    S
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Mar Sun>=15 0:00    0   -
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Oct Sun>=15 0:00    1:00    S

So, they decided to take the word of a guy from Nicaragua (no bad feelings against Nicaragua, but I think that this kind of stuff should be informed by people from the affected country), and from a couple of articles that say that "According to some sources, we might have to change our clocks on the third Sunday of October". Would you change tzdata sources with such information? I definitely wouldn't.

Anyway, Aurelien Jarno has already uploaded fixed packages, with no assumption regarding when the DST will happen, which is the sensible thing to do in a case like this. Thanks Aurel!

Life after DebConf8

2008-08-31T07:24:49-03:00

Finally, after more than a year of preparation, and six months of very very hard work, DebConf8 has come and gone. Even if I'm not yet completely recovered from all that stress, I'm good enough to feel really happy about how things turned out.

DebConf8 was a great success. We had great talks, many opportunities for developing interesting ideas, a lot of social interaction, an awesome video team that allowed more than 200 people from all around the world to be part of the conference even if they weren't in Argentina, and in general almost everyone had a very good time. It was really nice to have so many people from Debian over here, and it was specially nice to see them working and enjoying themselves so much.

This was all possible thanks to our sponsors, thanks to the many hours spent during the previous months both by the DebConf orga-team (the usual suspects) and specially by the local team, which includes Tincho, Damián, Romanella, Maxy, Sebas, Zero, Mendieta, Dererk, Melisa, Angasule, Lisandro, Nueces, and also thanks to the all help of the volunteers that came to work with us during DebCamp and DebConf, which include Tomás, Tinchito, Mónica, Lucas, Germán, Diego, Fefu, Nicolás, Martín, Marcos, Hernán, Alejandro, Matías, Rodrigo, Alberto and Joaquín, and finally, DebConf wouldn't have been the great event it was without all the people that managed to travel thousands of kilometers to get here. To all of them, thanks, for making DebConf8 such a great conference

Now, at last, DebConf8 is over (although there is some stuff that we still need to do before we can really forget all about it), and life goes on. Today, I did my first NMU after a long time. I'm particularly glad to have time for fixing bugs again, but I won't lie, I'm also extremely satisfied with how DebConf8 turned out.

See you in Extremadura!

The tyranny of Spanish users

2008-05-23T21:00:20-03:00

Caution: Latin American rant ahead.

With my Latin American Spanish keyboard (xkb code "la") I can type in:

English: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Spanish, Galician, Basque, Quechua: áéíóú ñ ü
Catalan/Valencian and Occitan: l·l ç ïü àèìòù áéíóú
French: àèù âêîôû ëïÿü ç
Italian: àèìòù âêîôû é
Dutch: ëïöü
German: ß äöü
Swedish: å äöü é ç
Danish and Norwegian: æ ø å
Icelandic: áéíóúý ð þ æ ö
Finnish: åäö (apparently, the untypable žš are only used in loan words)

But not in:

Portuguese: I can't type ã or õ (no dead_tilde)
Guaraní: I can't type ãẽĩõũỹg̃ (no dead_tilde).

It turns out that for some people it's more important to have 3 (yes THREE) asciitilde (~) in the Latin American Spanish keyboard, than to allow people to write in the language spoken by 51% of South American people, or the second official language in Paraguay (spoken by 94% of the population).

The same thing happens with the Traditional Spanish keyboard (code "es"), which was initially thought only for Spain, but is now widely sold all over Latin America. It includes 2 asciitilde, but no dead_tilde.

I think this is outrageous and I'm very very pissed about this. As can be seen in the posts I've made to the bugs in Debian and in FreeDesktop.

However, it looks like we Latin Americans are overwhelmed by the amount of Spanish people in Free Software (particularly in Debian) who don't care that Brazil is the biggest economy in the region nor that other native american languages can't be written without a dead_tilde.

For the record, there are some other European languages, that can't be written with the Latin American keyboard, such as:

Polish: I can't type ąę ż, only ł ńśź
Czech: I can't type čď ěňřšťž, only áéíóúý
Romanian: I can't type ă țș, only âî

But in this case, it makes much more sense to not be able to write those than not being able to write Portuguese or Guaraní, and it's not like there are 3 macrons and no dead_macrons, there are no macrons at all (same for all others).

Languages of the world, unite!

2008-01-20T15:43:52-02:00

After reading Christian's post about the new ISO 639-3, I thought about the "what is the country in the world which as the highest number of languages listed in ISO 639-3" question, and thought, "It must be India or China", and sure enough they both have a high language count (428 and 236 respectively).

However, after clicking around a while, I found out that Nigeria has 510 languages. I thought I had found the highest one for quite a while, until I got to Indonesia, which has 742 languages, and I thought "it's not fair, that's much more than just a country, it's a huge group of islands". Not having learned my lesson, I was quite astonished when I finally found out that the country with the highest number of languages is Papua New Guinea, a neighboring group of islands (although not so big as Indonesia), with 830 languages!

In Europe, the coutry with the highest number is Turkey (36), followed by Italy (33) and France (32). It looks like Europe has gone a long way after that stupid Babel incident :).

In America, I thought Argentina would be quite up in the list, since we do have a lot of native groups, but it turns out we only have 27 languages and we are on the 9th place. The country with the most languages is Mexico (298), then USA (238), then Brazil (235).

And, after all that clicking around the site, I found a very interesting map, that has one red dot per language in the primary location of each living language. It's quite amazing to see the big red New Guinea island. I wonder what happened there that led to the creation of that many languages.

Argentina changes timezone

2007-12-29T00:04:41-03:00

In a sudden rush of stupidity, the Argentinian government decided that we should change our timezone to include DST.

For those that don't know, Argentina lies almost completely in the GMT-4 zone. 20 years ago we used to have DST, switching between GMT-4 and GMT-3. But since 1990 we've been using GMT-3 as the permanent timezone for our country. Thus, noon happens at 13:00 (or even later in more western parts of the country).

Now, since we are in energetic crisis, our government decided that we should go back to DST, but instead of GMT-4 and GMT-3, we are going to be GMT-3 and GMT-2. This means that during the summer noon will happen at 14:00 or later.

Not only this, but they decided to do this on December 21st, passed the law on December 26th, and published it on December 28th. And the day of the switch is December 30th!.

Thanks to the quick work of Clint Adams, a patch was provided, applied and uploaded to unstable today, and it's already available. After the package was uploaded, I patched Etch's version so that we could upgrade all our servers.

So, in case you need to take Argentina's stupidity into account, you can currently download tzdata_2007j-3 from unstable, or download tzdata_2007j-1etch2 from:

deb http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile stable/volatile main

Updated to reflect current situation of the package

Getting a Rhino

2007-04-18T15:14:46-03:00

Ever since I stopped doing webpages, I've been missing having my own Rhino (the one I used in the past was not mine), but since I wasn't doing any JavaScript, it didn't make sense to spend U$S 50 on a book I wouldn't use.

Now, with the interactive web inteface for Debbugs being accepted as a Google Summer of Code project, I finally decided to buy one for me. I ordered it yesterday from Amazon.

I hope it gets here soon.

Squashing the perl bug

2006-08-06T07:14:01-03:00

RC bug-squashing second-week

2006-08-03T17:06:38-03:00

So, last week was a bit bumpy since I was sick for a couple of days, and then had a power outage on Friday and Saturday, thus not being able to keep up with my daily RC bug fixing, but I've been catching up since then.

I've uploaded patches done by Arjan Oosting, for packages that wouldn't compile with autoconf2.6: #379812 (kde-style-polyester), #379813 (kxmleditor) and #379815 (klog).

I uploaded a patch by Martín Ferrari for lilo: #374477 (use MAKEDEV instead of mknod at postinst), and another patch by Martín for courier-authlib #378571 (fixing the permissions of /var/run/courier/authdaemon).

I uploaded a patch by Andreas Jochens for ntlmaps: #379700 (fixing the build-dependency). A patch by Luca Bruno for predict: #379495 (fixing a change of location of forms.h). And a patch by Mike O'Connor for stardict: #379152 (fixing a misuse of size_t that made it fail in 64bit architectures).
Stardict had a problem with rpath that made me get to know the LIBTOOL_IS_A_FOOL hack, and I had to apply that, so that the binaries were not screwed up.

I also uploaded a fixed version of yacas, that included patches from Arjan Oosting (fixing #379261 and #379895) and Braun Gabor (fixing non-RC #295413).

However, it's not like the only thing I've done is upload patches done by others. I've also done some patches myself:

#379275, fixing fillets-ng's FTBFS.
#379486, fixing a bashism in cbuild.
#379200, changing PWD for CURDIR so that sudo works for building bluez-utils.
#377781, fixing monotone so that it builds with the latest gcc, although it took a new upstream release for it to build in hppa.
#378173, adding some checks for NULL, so that the new libsdl1.2-image does not make programs segfault
#381248, dropping PAGE_SIZE in favour of sysconf(_SC_PAGESIZE) in libsdl1.2 so that it builds in powerpc

The amount of bugs currently affecting the next release is 247. It's not a secret that we are a bit behind the schedule (we should be at less than 200 bugs by now). But it's also totally possible to get back on track if we work together on fixing the current bugs and we stop uploading unneeded new releases that trigger new transitions.

RC bugsquashing days 4 and 5

2006-07-19T21:28:42-03:00

Following the trend, these are the bugs I squashed yesterday and today

#377694 (graphviz), by backporting a lua test for the configure script.
#377990 (libopengl-perl), by adding a build-dependency for libxi-dev.
#377991 (freecraft), by applying a patch by Adriaan Peeters.

As the other day, the last bug was actually fixed twice (Bas Zoetekouw also prepared the NMU). The main problem here is that the BTS is being slow, and it's difficult to know that someone else has already fixed a bug.
So I guess that if you are going to join the the "fix one RC bug per day" movement, you'd better join #debian-bugs on oftc, and say which bug you are working on, so that we don't overlap that much.

RC bugfixing, days 1, 2 and 3

2006-07-18T00:59:36-03:00

Following Sesse's example, I decided to start bugfixing one RC bug per day, so, this is the result of my first three days at bugfixing:

#377652, by fixing the source code to look for rgb.txt in the correct location.
#377365, by finding out that the bug was not present anymore.
#377608, by updating to the new usage of libavformat-dev. Actually, both Sesse and I fixed the same RC bug at the same time. :-\

It's quite rewarding to think that if you fix 1 bug a day, from today till November, 30th, you can fix about 140 bugs. With a couple of us doing this, we could tackle not only the RC-bugs but also the important ones (but we have to coordinate, so that we don't overlap again).

Maintainer Scripts diagrams updated

2006-06-11T04:02:54-03:00

When looking at 372148, I found out that my maintainer scripts diagrams had the same bug that Policy currently has.

Also, these diagrams used to document a bug in dpkg, regarding the state a package was left when removed or purged; which was fixed long ago, but I had never had the time to update them accordingly.

Tonight, finally, I've updated them. And I've also made my test-suite package much more tidy, so that now I can publish it for anyone to grab it, and use it to test which maintainer scripts are called in some particular case. The dia sources, the png images, and the packages I used for the tests are all available here.

Parallel Booting

2006-06-08T14:46:58-03:00

Following my talk about Optimizing boot time (slides and the raw material now available), we had several discussions along DebConf6 as to how to make parallel booting a real option.

So, Maxy decided to write a small C program called rcpar, that basically has the same functionality of the "shell" concurrency of /etc/init.d/rc, but since it's written in C, it's able to handle the output in a much cleaner way (and it will also handle interactive scripts in the near future).

Darcs repository: http://maxy.com.ar/~maxy/darcs/rcpar

I will probably be uploading an rcpar package to Debian experimental this weekend.

Debconf6 and other stuff

2006-05-26T17:40:32-03:00

Debconf6 is finally over, and thanks to Maulkin's nice picture, I've got a new hackergotchi and decided to reactivate my blog that had to be taken down due to spam problems

It's not a secret that I'm not really happy about how many things went in Debconf6, but I am happy of having spent those days with so many nice Debian people. It would be great if we could gather more frequently, just to hang out for a while (and maybe play one or two games of Mao).

Anyway, I'm still recovering from almost two weeks of hard-core stress, trying to keep up with everything. I'm still lagging with much of the work that I had originally intended to do during Debconf, and my backlog keeps growing. Hopefully, I'll be able to clear things up soon.

Software Freedom Day - by Debian Women

2005-09-08T16:13:10-03:00

This Saturday we are celebrating Software Freedom Day, and those of us who participate in Debian Women are going to celebrate by holding 3 different IRC activities:

Welcoming new people to the project. For this we are opening a new channel on irc.oftc.net: #debian-women-new, so if you or someone you know might be interested in Debian Women, this Saturday is the day to turn up. We will have a friendly atmosphere where you can get to know and participate in the project.
Helping people out. This is aimed for people who have questions regarding technical stuff, like packaging, or any other issue regarding Debian. This will be done at #debian-women, also at irc.oftc.net
Bug Squashing. Since bugs keep popping up, and BSPs are never enough, we will be celbrating by squashing yet some more bugs. This will be coordinated at #debian-bugs, like all the other BSPs.

So, you are all invited to celebrate Software Freedom Day with us, we plan to really enjoy these events.

Breaking dpkg by looking at it too hard

2005-07-18T00:39:06-03:00

Yesterday, I finally got Keybuck's attention on my diagrams, and on the bug that they document (that if postrm fails, the package state is still "Installed"). After he finally believed me, both he and Ian Jackson (and I believe even Wichert Ackerman) started to review the code and discovered that this bug had been present in dpkg since it started, and they fixed it!

Now I'm known as the girl who broke dpkg by looking at it too hard :) And yes, I'll need to redo the diagrams, once the fixed package is uploaded, and hopefully I'll take the opportunity to add some other diagram, like a Conflicts or Replaces one.

Pancake party at Debconf

2005-07-14T01:56:00-03:00

Some time ago, Lars had proposed throwing a pancake party himself, and I brought 5 kilos of dulce de leche with me, specially for that. Then he couldn't do it, but I had this inhuman amount of dulce de leche with me, so I decided to through the pancake party anyway.

With the help of those who brought wafflers, pans, mixers and all the other stuff, we managed to use 6 liters of milk, 35 eggs, 2 kilos of flour, and more than 1 kilo of dulce de leche.

It was quite a nice party, where not just us, but many others got to participate. I think we did have a lot of fun. Thanks to Aschwin, David, Mattias, Arto, Peter, Martin, Sebas and Maxy for making this happen and be so so cool.

However, it turns out that I didn't estimate the amount of dulce de leche to be used that well, and I still have inhuman amounts it, so I need to think up what to do with the rest of it. Ideas welcomed :)

Room Accomodation for Debconf

2005-06-02T15:01:00-03:00

Yesterday I spent about 3 hours assigning rooms for the people that will be attending Debconf5. It took me quite more than what I expected, but I'm happy with the results up to now

My main criteria is grouping people by country, because even though it's nice to be with people of all around the world during the conference, I guess that it's more comfortable to share the room with people that speak your same language. However, it's not the case for everyone, for example, there's a special room for the women of Debian-Women

I'll be publishing the first draft in the next days, if anyone has any special requests (like asking to be with someone, or asking not to be with someone), it's best if they send those requests to me now, before I finish this up.

Understanding maintainer scripts

2005-02-09T03:57:49-03:00

The order in which maintainer scripts are called, and the parameters they receive is documented in the Policy, and yet it's really hard to follow the intrincate consequences of one of the scripts failing to execute correctly.

Aiming to understand all this better, I started playing with a dummy package whose maintainer scripts told me which script and with which paramaters was being called and allowed me to state if it was going to succeed or not.

The result of this tests is the pseudo-tutorial published at the Debian-Women site. The upgrade diagram is specially interesting, since it's really complicated and has lots of different outcomes.

New UISP package - Evolution BTS status update

2005-02-08T21:51:16-03:00

As one of the last steps in my T&S; application, I've made a new package of UISP (for which I had to first do a new upstream release). Version 20050207 of UISP is temporarily available here, and will hopefully be uploaded to Debian soon.

Continuing with my Evolution work, the number of bugs is now 295, almost 70 bugs less than a week ago (and it's only 260 if you exclude woody and merged bugs). This makes me happy :). I've finished pinging, now it's time for some fixing.

Closing Evolution bugs

2005-02-05T00:59:08-03:00

In an effort to make Debian a better distribution to the end user, I'm trying to clean Evolution of some bugs. The problem was that Evolution had 361 bugs, many of them already fixed in upgrades, many not even bugs, so it is difficult to find the real ones that need attention.

So, as a first step, I'm pinging all the old bugs in the BTS, asking if it's still reproduceable. The number of bugs has already gone down to 325, in 3 days.

When I'm finished pinging, the most difficult part comes: fixing and patching. Any help is appreciated, of course.

Solving T&S tasks

2005-01-24T16:18:54-03:00

I've been going through my T&S; questions and tasks. I'm done with the questions by now, and I'm dedicating almost all my spare time to the pending tasks.

The most interesting part, of course, is solving RC bugs. I spent almost the whole weekend working on a meld/libglade2 bug: 290811. The bug is due to the fact that the GTK toolbar does not allow the use of the old API and the new API at the same time; and while meld still uses the old API, libglade2-0 has updated to the new API, and thus the program does not work.

I've made a patch for libglade2, that regresses the changes regarding the gtk toolbar API. I'm hoping it will be applied and uploaded soon, but if you are affected by the bug and would like to have the patch, you can download the package from:

http://www.marga.com.ar/~marga/debian/libglade2/

Preparing a new release of UISP

2005-01-10T03:18:13-03:00

Since Theodore Roth needed a break from all the great job he was doing regarding AVR free software I got to be project manager of uisp.

I'll be doing a new release really soon, adding the CVS patches, incorporating some extra documentation, and also changing many of the error messages to make them more user-friendly.

The BSP and my P&P questions

2005-01-10T03:12:52-03:00

Yesterday, while I was trying to fix a really nasty bug, I got the first mail from my Application Manager (Martin Würtele), and after the intial contact, I got the P&P; questions.

I had arranged to have a lot of spare time this weekend, to be able to fix some RC bugs, but I ended up spending most of Saturday and Sunday answering the P&P; questions.

Overall, it was a really nice thing to do. For most of the questions I didn't even need to research the answers, since I had learned all that I needed to say from experience. It made me feel much more sure of myself.

The nasty bug I was working on and the installation of PyBlosxom, however, added a great amount of frustration to my weekend.