Marga's blog

Decopy - Yet another debian/copyright helper

Margarita Manterola — Sun, 29 Jan 2017 16:52:02 -0300

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 …

MiniDebConf 2014 Barcelona

Margarita Manterola — Tue, 18 Feb 2014 16:28:28 -0300

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 …

Debian Appreciation Day Recap

Margarita Manterola — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 05:25:50 -0300

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 …

Debian Appreciation Day

Margarita Manterola — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 09:24:05 -0300

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 …

After the campaign

Margarita Manterola — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 20:47:28 -0300

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 …

Running for DPL

Margarita Manterola — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:18:01 -0300

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 …

Women event in Argentina

Margarita Manterola — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:20:01 -0300

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 …

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

Margarita Manterola — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 02:48:21 -0300

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 …

tzdata screwed up most computer clocks in Argentina.

Margarita Manterola — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:16:38 -0300

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 …

Life after DebConf8

Margarita Manterola — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 07:24:49 -0300

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 …

The tyranny of Spanish users

Margarita Manterola — Fri, 23 May 2008 21:00:20 -0300

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 …

Languages of the world, unite!

Margarita Manterola — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 15:43:52 -0200

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 …

Argentina changes timezone

Margarita Manterola — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 00:04:41 -0300

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 …

Getting a Rhino

Margarita Manterola — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 15:14:46 -0300

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 …

Squashing the perl bug

Margarita Manterola — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 07:14:01 -0300

RC bug-squashing second-week

Margarita Manterola — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 17:06:38 -0300

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 …

RC bugsquashing days 4 and 5

Margarita Manterola — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 21:28:42 -0300

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 …

RC bugfixing, days 1, 2 and 3

Margarita Manterola — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 00:59:36 -0300

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 …

Maintainer Scripts diagrams updated

Margarita Manterola — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 04:02:54 -0300

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 …

Parallel Booting

Margarita Manterola — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 14:46:58 -0300

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 …

Debconf6 and other stuff

Margarita Manterola — Fri, 26 May 2006 17:40:32 -0300

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 …

Software Freedom Day - by Debian Women

Margarita Manterola — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 16:13:10 -0300

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 …

Breaking dpkg by looking at it too hard

Margarita Manterola — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 00:39:06 -0300

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 …

Pancake party at Debconf

Margarita Manterola — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 01:56:00 -0300

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 …

Room Accomodation for Debconf

Margarita Manterola — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 15:01:00 -0300

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 …

Understanding maintainer scripts

Margarita Manterola — Wed, 09 Feb 2005 03:57:49 -0300

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 …

New UISP package - Evolution BTS status update

Margarita Manterola — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 21:51:16 -0300

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 …

Closing Evolution bugs

Margarita Manterola — Sat, 05 Feb 2005 00:59:08 -0300

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 …

Solving T&S tasks

Margarita Manterola — Mon, 24 Jan 2005 16:18:54 -0300

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 …

Preparing a new release of UISP

Margarita Manterola — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 03:18:13 -0300

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 …

The BSP and my P&P questions

Margarita Manterola — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 03:12:52 -0300

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 …