Nabble - debian-devel-announce

Debian bugs #600000 and #1000000 contest

2008-10-12T07:10:27Z

As the bug #500000 mark was turned on September 24th 2008, Debian
developers and contributors need a new challenge.

So, again, a small contest has been set up. The principle is very
simple: please place a bet (one per person) about the day bugs #600000
and #1000000 will be reported.

The winner(s) will be the person(s) placing her|his|their bet as close
as possible to the real moment bug #600000 and #1000000 are reported.

There is nothing to win but the pride of being the person who
predicted our bug report rate for the next months|years, just what
René Mayorga won by winning the bug #500000 prediction game
(http://people.debian.org/~bubulle/500000.html).

The bet page is a wiki page: http://wiki.debian.org/600000thBugContest

It will be closed on November 30th 2008. Bets will be kept statically
until bug #600000 is reported.

Then the page will be reopened with a new list of bets for bug
#1000000. Thus, we will have four sets of bets for bug #1000000 with
even more suspense and fun!.

Enjoy...

--

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What you can do for "Lenny"

2008-10-06T09:44:49Z

Hi!

You probably noticed by now, that Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 aka "Lenny" hasn't
been released in September. Well, that's a shame, but very easy to
explain: Too many release critical bugs[1].

1: http://bts.turmzimmer.net/graph-large.png

Well, our release team coordinated several transitions, took care of
release goals, but it's pretty hard to estimate, how fast RC bugs will be
fixed, and apparently they were a bit to optimistic :(

The big question is: What can you do, to help release "Lenny" at least in
this quarter? That's pretty easy: Fix rc-bugs, take care, that the fixed
packages are migrated to "Lenny", do upgrade tests, document problems in
the release-notes. Pretty simple, isn't it?

For users (or better: For everyone)
=========

Even as a "simple user" (aren't we all just users?) you may help getting
"Lenny" released. Some things you can do:

* If you are running stable (aka "Etch"), you could consider
upgrading to "Lenny" and see, if everything works fine. Currently there
are no detailed release notes documenting the procedure, so you best
way to test upgrades are to:

1. Make backups
2. Change your /etc/apt/sources.list
3. Run aptitude update to get information about new packages
4. Run aptitude install dpkg aptitude apt to install the newest package
management
5. Run aptitude full-upgrade

If something goes wrong / something unexpected happens, please report
it. If you already know a specific package, report a bug against that
package. If you don't know, please report a bug describing the problem
you experienced to the upgrade-reports package. If your problem is
something, which can't be fixed properly, but should be documented
(e.g. hardware support regressions, packages no longer available)
please report a bug against the release-notes package (Bonus points if
you not only report the bug, but also supply a paragraph to be added to
the release notes).

* Speaking of the release notes[2]: You can take a look at the bugs reported
against the release notes and see if you can help there, e.g. by
writing a paragraph describing a problem.

2: http://bugs.debian.org/release-notes

* Install the package devscripts[3] (you'll need the version provided by
backports.org[4], and run the script rc-alert --include-dists TU. You'll
get a list of release critical bugs open for one of the packages you
have installed. Guessing that you have them installed, because you are
using them and are interested in them, you should have a very high
interest to get this bugs fixed :)

3: http://packages.debian.org/devscripts
4: http://www.backports.org/

You can try to help, by trying to reproduce them and reporting that to
the bug report. There are even some easy bugs, where the maintainer
hasn't found the time, yet to fix it. Bug 497290[5] for example didn't
need deep technical skills. It just needed someone with some time to
collect the needed data for the copyright file.

5: http://bugs.debian.org/497290

* If you speak a language other than English, you might consider joining
the translation efforts. While it is to late to translate the
debian-installer or the installation guide to a new language for
"Lenny" (perhaps for the next release then?), you could start
translating the release notes to a not yet supported language. If you
are willing to do so (which can be quite time consuming, especially in
the final phase), please contact either your localization team[6] or the
debian doc mailing list[7] if there's no local mailing list.

6: http://lists.debian.org/i18n.html
7: http://lists.debian.org/debian-doc/

See? Even as a "simple user" without deeper technical knowledge you can
help us getting "Lenny" in shape to be released. If you have technical
knowledge: Very good! You might want to read the next section, too, and
see what applies to you, there :)

For maintainers (Or: For everyone with some more experience)
===============

It basically boils down to two things: If your packages have RC bugs open
in "Lenny" fix them and take care, that the fix will propagate to
"Lenny". If your packages don't have RC bugs open, fix someone else's RC
bug. Surely you don't think, the release team will fix the remaining rc
bugs, do you? And surely you understand, that your shiny rc bug free
packages are kind of useless, if they aren't released?

To search for bugs to be fixed, take a look at the unofficial rc bugs
thingy[8]. The URL lists RC bugs open in both "Sid" and "Lenny". Obviously
they should be fixed ASAP. If no one takes care about these packages,
they might be removed from "Lenny" (if possible).

8: http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php?bydist=both&sortby=packages&fullcomment=on

Again: Try to reproduce the bug, try fix it, upload an NMU (or send your
patch to the bug report and search for an sponsor). You'll notice, that
some of these bugs already have a patch. In that case, your job would be
to test the patch, report that to the bug report and offer to sponsor an
NMU.

Another interesting list is the list of rc bugs open only in "Lenny"[9].
These bugs have been fixed, but the fix hasn't propagated to "Lenny",
yet. Normally, the release team will grant freeze exceptions for these
packages if possible. However, if the changes to the fixed version are
quite grave or the package in "Sid" depends on a newer package than in
"Lenny" that's not possible. In these cases look out for packages marked
as "need tpu upload" or similar.

9: http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php?bydist=lenny-only&sortby=packages&fullcomment=on

Oh, and if you could refrain from upload new upstream versions of
packages to "Sid", you would make all our lives easier. Some reasons:

* New packages won't reach "Lenny" anyway.
* Upload new packages to "Sid" makes it harder to get a fix into "Lenny"
should a new bug be found.
* Uploading a new package makes it harder for other packages depending
on your package to be migrated to "Lenny".
* You are wasting the buildd's time.

And of course you should spend your time fixing rc bugs anyway ;)

Best regards,
Alexander "To send out release announcements I do everything" Reichle-Schmehl

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Bits from the DPL

2008-09-29T16:05:16Z

Hey folks,

At the risk of sounding like a broken record here, apologies for
taking so long to write this. It's been a few too many weeks since I
wrote my last summary. In the last couple of months, I was ill for 3
weeks (as you may have seen from my blog post[1]) and otherwise very
busy. I've been struggling to catch up with everything, but I think
I'm just about there.

So, what's up?

Debconf!
--------
Debconf 8 [2] has been and gone. We had an excellent time in Mar del
Plata, with the usual mix of great technical talks and lots of
socialising. The local orga team put in a huge amount of work to make
the conference happen, and they did astoundingly well. I'm sure there
are places where they'd disagree (*grin*), but as far as I and other
attendees could see everything ran smoothly. Woo!

Due to the typically long travel distance to Argentina (and,
therefore, the high cost of travel), unfortunately many of our
developers could not make the trip this year. However, the video team
did an amazing job this year [3] - a combination of live streams of
all the talks plus volunteers forwarding questions from IRC meant that
people could stay involved despite the distance.

For those of us that did make it down to Argentina, it was great to be
able to meet up with friends old and new, and to have some very useful
technical discussions. As ever, people came away re-invigorated and
inspired with more ideas about what to work on next. We also got to
enjoy some excellent local food, and to paddle or even swim(!) in the
South Atlantic. I'm looking forwards to Extremadura next year
already... :-)

Press
-----
A few more interviews to report on:

* I met up with Sam Varghese from ITWire when he was in the UK, and
we had a good chat [4].
* Bruce Byfield spoke to me and some of our past DPLs about how
Debian was looking on our 15th birthday [5].
* Vincenzo Ciaglia from Linux Magazine Italy[6] asked me a wide range
of questions. I don't see a copy of the article online anywhere, so
I don't know if it has made into print yet.
* At Debconf, I sat down with Barton George from Sun for an audio
interview [7] about how Debian is going.
* Another general update with Phil Manchester at The Register. [8]

There are a couple more in progress that I'll mention next time once
they're published.

More team updates
-----------------
Quite a few changes in our core teams to mention since last time. Some
of these have already been announced elsewhere, but I'll summarise
nonetheless.

The ftpmaster team has grown, adding Mark Hymers. [9] After many years
of hard work, James Troup has resigned his position in the DAM team
[10]. Martin Zobel-Helas has been invited to help out as part of the
DSA team [11], and to make more time for this new job, he has passed
on his Stable Release Manager position to Phillip Kern [12].

Please join me in wishing good luck to all of those people with their
new responsibilities. Thanks to all of them.

Google Summer of Code 2008
--------------------------
We've had excellent results again this year in the Summer of Code
programme. We were allocated thirteen spaces this year, but some early
problems meant that a couple of our chosen students dropped out even
before they started their projects. Of the remaining eleven who
started the summer with us, all were successful. More details shortly
once we've collected together a final report. Three of the Debian
mentors (me, Daniel Burrows and Dirk Eddelbuettel) will be travelling
to Google HQ for the regular post-SoC summit to join in discussions
about how things went this year and how to improve for next year.

What else am I up to?
---------------------
Although things may have seemingly gone quiet on that front, I've
continued to work through issues with several of our teams over the
last couple of months. There's still more to do yet, and I'll provide
public updates as and when possible. I'm trying to help as much as I
can, while not wishing to cause major disruption at this point before
the next release.

I've been asked to look into various trademark issues that have been
brought to my attention. It seems that there's quite a bit of work to
be done there, so it may take a while.

What else are *we* up to?
-------------------------
One obvious thing: LENNY! We're due a release candidate from the d-i
team very shortly [13], and elsewhere we're in a deep freeze state
[14] as we make the final push. There's still work to be done, of
course: we have more release critical bugs that should be fixed, and
the more installation and upgrade testing we can do now, the
better. Also, there's always more help needed on finishing off and
translating the Release Notes; please dive in if you can. Let's make
Lenny our best release yet!

[1] http://blog.einval.com/2008/09/11#still_ill
[2] http://debconf8.debconf.org/
[3] http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf8/Videoteam/Thanks
[4] http://www.itwire.com/content/view/19917/1090/
[5] http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/features/article.php/12297_3765826_1
[6] http://www.linux-magazine.it/
[7] http://blogs.sun.com/barton808/entry/an_inside_look_at_debian
[8] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/25/debian_state_of_nation/
[9] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/07/msg00001.html
[10] http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2008/08/msg00167.html
[11] http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2008/08/msg00195.html
[12] http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2008/08/msg00196.html
[13] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/09/msg00005.html
[14] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/09/msg00000.html

Cheers,
--
Steve McIntyre, Debian Project Leader <leader@...>

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Debian-Edu Skolelinux Developer Gathering in Oslo, Norway, 10th-12th of October 2008

2008-09-26T02:18:55Z

---------- Forwarded Message ----------
From: Anders Kringstad <akai@...>

Hello everyone!

Once again the board of Free software in schools Norway are happy to invite
everyone who wish to contribute to the Skolelinux-project to our developer
gathering in Oslo on the 10th-12th of October.

The gathering will be held at the dep. of informatics at the University of
Oslo, Norway.

To register for this developer gathering, please send an email to
debian-edu@... containing the following information:

Subject: Yes, I will participate in the developer gathering 10th-12th
of october in Oslo.
Body: - Your name
- Your travel expenses (if you are or plan to be an active
developer, translator or contributor to Skolelinux).
- Which part of the gathering you are joining (conference,
technical/testing, translation, system user/documentation,
facilitators)
- If you are joining us for dinner on Thursday, Friday and/or
Saturday
- If you are a developer, we would like to know which Bug(s)
you are going to work on as well. Our bugs can be found at
http://bugs.skolelinux.org/

More information about the developer gathering and the conference the
day after can be found here:
Gathering: http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2008-10-Oslo
Conference: http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2008-10-UC-Oslo

If you have questions regarding attending either the developer gathering
or the conference, please do send these to styret@...
or debian-edu@....

The board sincerely welcomes all old and new friends!!

--
(o_ / with regards
| / Anders Kringstad - <akai @ skolelinux.org>
//\-X Leader elect, Free software in schools Norway: www.skolelinux.org
V_/_ Fri programvare i skolen: www.friprogramvareiskolen.no

-------------------------------------------------------

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ssh.upload.debian.org

2008-09-21T07:59:58Z

Hi

as the possibility to upload via ssh is something people like
we just setup an upload queue supporting this.

If you want to upload using ssh please use the hostname
ssh.upload.debian.org and place the files into
/srv/upload.debian.org/UploadQueue to get them processed.

If you use this upload queue you will receive one more mail about your
upload, at the time our queue daemon moves your files over to the
ftp.upload.debian.org host.

ssh.upload.d.o does support .commands files to remove broken uploads.

The DELAYED queue is *not* supported using ssh. If you want to upload
something with a delay, you have to use ftp.

Please always only use the symbolic names for the places to upload to
(ie ftp.upload.debian.org and ssh.upload.debian.org), do not use any
machine name directly. Queues may move at any time, without further
notice and the symbolic names will be updated.

--
bye, Joerg
<Joey> Joey, provide a patch then.

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DELAYED queue and upload hostname

2008-09-20T09:30:55Z

Hi,

for the impatient people: :)

- the DELAYED queue is back on ftp-master
- there is ftp.upload.debian.org, please use that in future instead of
ftp-master.debian.org

DELAYED queue
-------------
Thanks to work from Thomas Viehmann the DELAYED queue is back on the
ftp-master host, integrated with the normal processing tools. The
current service provided by Tollef[1] is probably going away sometime
soon.

To upload your files with a waiting delay before they enter Debian,
upload them into a subdirectory of the new DELAYED/ you can find at the
normal ftp upload place. Packages uploaded into the X-day (X between 0
and 15) subdirectories of that DELAYED/ will be moved into the DEFERRED
queue and won't be placed into the archive before the waiting time is
over.

To avoid confusion, the terms used are:
DELAYED - the public ftp upload directories, reachable via DELAYED/X-day

DEFERRED - this is the place where the uploads are placed by the queue
daemon after processing and where packages wait before they
are moved into the incoming queue.

You can modify the queues (besides uploading packages) with *.commands
files, using the following syntax.

Note that any processing in the DEFERRED queue works on whole uploads
(i.e. a .changes file and all the files that came with it), whereas
operations in the DELAYED queue (and the normal ftp root directory)
work on individual files.

- To move a package from one DEFERRED directory into another, say
from 8-days to 2-days delay:
reschedule foo_1.2-1.1_all.changes 2-day

The move-target has to be without the trailing /.

- To delete an upload (and all associated files) in the DEFERRED queue:
cancel foo_1.2-1.1_all.changes

- To delete a broken upload in the DELAYED queue:
rm DELAYED/X-day/foobar.deb

or

rm --searchdirs foobar*

- The old mv command is no longer supported.

Wildcards in .commands files are only valid for the DELAYED queue and
its rm command, the DEFERRED queue commands cancel and reschedule do
not allow them.

There will be an overview of the DEFERRED queue at
http://ftp-master.debian.org/deferred.html

[1] Thank you for doing that work.

ftp.upload.debian.org
---------------------
To untie the upload queue from the archive DSA setup an alias to be used
for future uploads. Please change your configuration of dput, dupload or
whatever you use to no longer use ftp-master.debian.org but
ftp.upload.debian.org instead.

--
bye, Joerg
<madduck> and yes, the ftpmasters are not the most clueful people

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Call for testing of next Debian Installer release

2008-09-17T05:38:47Z

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Call for testing of Debian Installer
- ------------------------------------

We are approaching the Debian 5.0 (Lenny) release and the Debian
Installer team is working to fix the remaining issues for it. The
Debian Installer Release Candidate 1 is being prepared and we are
short in time to make fixes.

The installer has a lot of new and impressive features against last
Etch release and Lenny beta 2. For a better view of the changes made
on the installer since last beta, take a look on our release
announcement draft[1]. We are sure you are going to have a nice
feeling about it. We count on you to help us!

1. http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/ReleaseAnnounce

How could I help Debian Installer team?
=======================================

That is easy! Go to our development webpage[2], download the weekly
builds or daily snapshots and give it a try! This is very important
and simple way to help us since it is impossible for the team to try
all possible configurations in different hardware sets.

2. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

After installing it, please do a proper installation report[3] to
allow us to improve the installer and make it ready for Lenny release.

3. http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.i386/ch05s03.html#submit-bug

Thanks in advance,
Otavio Salvador
Debian Installer Release Team

- --
O T A V I O S A L V A D O R
- ---------------------------------------------
E-mail: otavio@... UIN: 5906116
GNU/Linux User: 239058 GPG ID: 49A5F855
Home Page: http://otavio.ossystems.com.br
- ---------------------------------------------
"Microsoft sells you Windows ... Linux gives
you the whole house."
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Comment: Processed by Mailcrypt 3.5.8+ <http://mailcrypt.sourceforge.net/>

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--
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Bits from the Debian GNU/Hurd porters

2008-09-15T03:07:16Z

Hello,

it has been more than three years since the last "Bits from the Debian
GNU/Hurd porters"[1], high time for an update on the port.

* Snapshot releases

Three new snapshot releases have been done by Philip Charles, K14, K15
(which was only done as an updated mini CD-ISO, not a full snapshot),
and K16. K16 has been released[2] on December 18th, 2007 featuring four
CDs or two DVDs. Additionally, it also features a ready-to-go
qemu-image[3] for the first time. K16 was also the first snapshot which
included TLS (Thread Local Storage), a requirement for modern glibcs.
New ported packages include Qt3, Qt4, SDL and Emacs22.

* Base and toolchain status

Currently, most base packages are current, with the notable exception of
util-linux, which has been a big problem over the last years. However,
Samuel Thibault got all outstanding issues of util-linux applied
upstream so the version in experimental is mostly working. The
toolchain is in pretty good shape as well since TLS support got
implemented; we are using the current glibc, binutils and gcc Debian
packages unmodified.

* Xen support

Besides qemu, which can be very slow to run, a Xen DomU port for GNU
Mach has been made available by Samuel Thibault. It requires a non-PAE
hypervisor and some minor manual tweaking, but is otherwise quite
functional and stable already, see its wiki page[4] for further
information. This will make people running the Hurd less dependent on
specific hardware, as a lot of newer computers do not work with the
underlying GNU Mach kernel anymore.

* Autobuilder availability and archive coverage improved

The percentage of packages built for Debian GNU/Hurd has improved from
40% to now nearly 60%[5] since the last Bits from the porters. Further,
the backlog of outdated packages has been greatly reduced. This is due
to the addition of two[6][7] Xen autobuilders earlier this year, which
made the hurd-i386 autobuilders far more robust and fault-tolerant as
they not need local admin attention anymore in case of problems with the
GNU/Hurd guests.

The remaining 40% of packages are either waiting for other packages to
become available (see [8] for a (big) graph of those relationships) or
are failing for some reason[9]; a complete list of build failures can be
found at [10].

* Developer machine

We are currently working on getting a general DD-accessible porter box
setup. In the meantime, interested people can contact
hurd-shell-account@... to get an account on one of the publically
accessible (Debian) GNU/Hurd developer machines. For further details,
see [11].

* Summer of Code 2008

This year, the GNU Hurd participated as its own organization at Google's
Summer of Code, thanks to the coordination done by Olaf Buddenhagen[12].
All of the 5 projects were carried out quite successfully. The most
practically relevant project for Debian GNU/Hurd was the implementation
of a procfs translator[13] by Madhusudan C.S., which provides a
traditional Unix-style /proc file system and the subsequent porting of
the procps package, so utilities like pgrep etc. will be available after
lenny, and procps Build-Depends no longer need to be special-cased on
hurd-i386.

Other GSoC projects were lisp bindings by Flavio Cruz, better system
debugging and tracing by Andrei Barbu, namespace-based translator
selection by Sergiu Ivanov and network virtualization by Zheng Da. More
information on the details and outcome of those projects can be found on
the wiki[14].

* Still no debian-installer

Unfortunately, the Debian GNU/Hurd port still lacks d-i support. On the
other hand, debootstrap now mostly works, even to cross-debootstrap a
hurd-i386 installation from GNU/Linux, if one works around bug #498731.
A relatively easy solution could be to use the GNU/Linux d-i to
cross-install and setup a Debian GNU/Hurd system. People who have
experience in d-i and possibly Debian GNU/Hurd are more than welcome to
contact us at debian-hurd@....

for the Debian GNU/Hurd porters,

Michael Banck

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/07/msg00006.html
[2] http://kerneltrap.org/node/15770
[3] http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/K16/debian-hurd-k16-qemu.img.tar.gz
[4] http://www.bddebian.com/~wiki/microkernel/mach/gnumach/ports/xen/
[5] http://buildd.debian-ports.org/stats/
[6] http://buildd.net/cgi/hostpackages.cgi?unstable_arch=hurd-i386&searchtype=bach
[7] http://buildd.net/cgi/hostpackages.cgi?unstable_arch=hurd-i386&searchtype=mozart
[8] http://dept-info.labri.fr/~thibault/tmp/graph-radial.pdf
[9] http://www.bddebian.com/~wiki/unsorted/PortingIssues/
[10] http://unstable.buildd.net/buildd/hurd-i386_Failed.html
[11] http://www.bddebian.com/~wiki/public_hurd_boxen/
[12] http://code.google.com/soc/2008/hurd/about.html
[13] http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/hurd/news/20080903T160206Z.html
[14] http://www.bddebian.com/~wiki/community/gsoc/

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Misc developer news (#10)

2008-09-11T06:34:18Z

The news are collected on http://wiki.debian.org/DeveloperNews
Feel free to contribute.

PTS news
--------

The PTS has been improved to show/aggregate some new info:

1. The integration with lintian has been improved. The hyperlink to the
Lintian report is now shown only if Lintian has something "to say" about
that package. Moreover, if there were warnings or errors in the last
Lintian ran, they are now shown as TODO items in the appropriate part of
the PTS web interface.

2. The availability of uploads on mentors.d.n waiting for sponsorships
are now shown as TODO items.

3. help and gift tags are now shown: the formers as problems in need of
help, the latters in the bug box, with a hyperlink to explain gift tag
semantics (see http://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/GiftTag).

All pages are now (hopefully) valid XHTML 1.0 Strict, this not only
improves accessibility, but also enables XML-based post-processing of
pages.

A lot of bugs have been squashed during DebConf8, you might want to look
at the PTS bug page to check the status of bugs you reported.

-- Stefano Zacchiroli

Casals replaced by mahler
-------------------------

The new MIPS porter machine available to all Debian developers is
mahler.debian.org and replaces the old casals.debian.org.

-- Peter Palfrader

Personnel changes
-----------------

Martin Zobel-Helas joined the DSA team and therefore will reduce his
involvement with Stable Release Management, though he is still available
as a Stable Release Wizard. His role as a Stable Release Manager has been
taken up by Philipp Kern, who was a Stable Release Assistant formerly.

-- Alexander Reichle-Schmehl

Delayed queue moves to ravel
----------------------------

people.debian.org will move to ravel.debian.org in near future, thus the
delayed queue[1] will move as well. At this occasion, we decided to move
it to /org/delayed.d.o, and add a canonical upload host
ssh-delayed.upload.debian.org. Now the upload tools need to be adjusted.

-- Martin Zobel-Helas

[1] http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/pkgs.html#delayed-incoming

Git user survey 2008
--------------------

The git developers have asked us to help them advertize their new user
survey. If you're using Git, consider taking a few minutes to answer this
survey[2].

-- The Alioth admins

[2] http://tinyurl.com/GitSurvey2008

--
Raphaël Hertzog

Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch :
http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/

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report from the Emdebian/FAI Work Session in Extremadura 2008

2008-09-11T03:02:34Z

Hi,

this is the co-authored report from the

=== Emdebian/FAI Work Session in Extremadura 2008 ===

A joyous meeting for a few days discussing and working on
[http://emdebian.org|Emdebian] in Badajoz, Extremadura, Spain. The meeting and
work session took place in the gnuLinEx center and was attended by 18 Debian
contributors.

==== Lenny bug squashing results ====

RC bug squashing with 7 or 8 closed RC bugs affecting Lenny and 3 sid only
ones. (Lesson learned: don't count the number of bugs, but list the bug
numbers.)

==== Emdebian results ====

* Cross-toolchain work - trying to fix gcc cross-multilib builds in mips/ppc.
Problem lies with differnces between gcc and debian lib64 paths. Could be
fixed with links in glibc. Disabled for now so that these arches
cross-toolchains can build.
* dpkg-cross gained cmake cross-build support
* Documentation overhaul
* emdebian Server overhauled and updated
* Exploring the need for an Emdebian system based on coreutils instead of
busybox.
* Significant reductions in the size of glibc and tzdata for Emdebian
(courtesy of Aurelien), expected to save 5Mb in all Emdebian root
filesystems.
* Improving uClibc support in Emdebian
* Emdebian '5 year plan' including a full code audit in 2009 (preceded by
NMUs to close existing cross-building bugs)
* Goals and flavours for Emdebian Squeeze
* Emdebian crush - maximally squeezed with dependency changes, package name
changes and a lot of work to ensure that Debian packages can still be mixed
in.
* Emdebian grip - smaller amounts of squeeze, as few functional changes as
possible and highest level of compatibility with Debian.
* Clearer support for native builds of Emdebian packages.
* Ideas and improvements to best handle the new buildd.emdebian.org
pseudo-package along the lines of ftp.debian.org using usercategories and
usertags.
* Work on DEB_VENDOR and how dpkg classes will, together with a few other bug
fixes, provide the basis to migrate all Emdebian patches into Debian before
Squeeze.
* debhelper patch for tags in packages.* files
* MTD support in Debian-installer discussed. Proposal for work/analysis
drafted.
* Balloon3 networking and touchscreen improvements for Emdebian
* all bugs filed against busybox 1.11.2 have been verified and fixed
upstream.

==== FAI work ====

We made FAI ready for Lenny. In that course, we fixed 1 serious, 3 important
and 16 other bugs. We also had long discussions about changelogs and quite
some fun!

==== Other relevant stuff ====

While it was hot and sunny, it wasn't as hot as it will be in July 2009 ;)
(air-conditioning is going to be *so* needed for DebConf!)

As usual when people meet keysigning party took place. (yay \o/)

30GB of DebConf7 videos (as ntsc and pal mpeg1 file formats) where uploaded,
so that DVDs can be created now.

Muchas gracias a la Junta de Extremadura for giving us this opportunity!! It
is very much appreciated!

--
regards,
Holger

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Debian/m68k meeting in Kiel

2008-09-08T02:58:48Z

Hello World,

A week ago we, that is, the m68k porters and some other people
interested in the port[1], held a weekend's meeting at the Christian
Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany. This was prompted by the fact
that the m68k port has been facing difficult problems in the past few
years, and we wanted an opportunity to discuss our respective ideas
about the port in person. In addition to this discussion, we also seized
upon the opportunity to do some porting work while there.

In light of the fact that the Debian/m68k port is going to be removed
from the archive, we had already been looking for alternatives. One of
the things we'll be doing is to move to debian-ports[2], a separate
archive network that is currently being used for the xBSD ports; we had
already decided upon that before the actual meeting, though.

The most pressing matter we discussed, however, has been what we thought
the best way to go forward was. Contrary to what some people may think,
the end of Debian/m68k on debian.org to us does not mean the end of the
Debian/m68k port as a whole; and while we may be having problems
currently, most of these problems are on their way to bein solved medium
to long term.

The problems that we were facing include:

First, there currently is no working TLS implementation for Linux/m68k.
This is being worked on by codesourcery, however, whose latest
projection predicts this to be ready by the end of the year.

Second, you may remember that a few years ago, Freescale kindly donated
us five ColdFire V4E evaluation boards[3]. Since then we tried to bootstrap
and get Debian booting on those boards. There was some good progress
lately, but knowledge about hybrid ports is still needed. So, if you
have any experience in this area, feel free to join us!

The approach of a hybrid port, as opposed to a two separate ports, was
originally chosen because of space considerations, amongst other
reasons. Since we're going to be going off the debian.org network now,
however, that last blocker is going away; and we've decided to reshuffle
some boards so that people with more free time can work on the port in
lieu of people who don't but still have a board. With this reshuffling,
we expect to be bootstrapping a ColdFire(-only) port over the next few
weeks.

As luck would have it, Freescale recently updated their Linux Board
Support Packages for their ColdFire offerings, updating the kernel to a
more recent version; this should make it easier for us to actually
bootstrap this port.

We're not yet decided on whether we'll pursue this hybrid port idea any
further once the ColdFire port has been set up; but we figure that as
we'll have to do such a ColdFire bootstrap anyway, we might just as well
do it now.

Thirdly, a problem that's been plagueing us for a very long time is the
lack of hardware of a decent speed that we can use to build our packages
on; this, in fact, was one of the reasons why I approached Freescale a
few years ago so as to receive the ColdFire boards, but as explained
above, that has so far not yet led to a solution. One way to remedy the
lack of speedy hardware is to run buildd inside of an emulator that can
run the hardware you're working on; that approach, however, is not
without its problems, as it is much harder to rule out bugs in a piece
of software that is constantly under development than it is to know
about a bad run of hardware; this may in rare occasions result in
sleeper bugs in compiled software, which are very hard to debug[4].

Given that some of the upstream developers of one m68k emulator in
particular, ARAnyM[5], are active on the debian-68k mailinglist,
actively supporting the use of Linux/m68k on their emulator; that this
emulator is Free Software and packaged for Debian; and that on modern
hardware this emulator is now capable of emulating m68k hardware at
somewhat higher speeds than actual m68k hardware, we decided that this
was worth the risk. We are, however, unanimously convinced that we
should never be fully dependent on emulated machines, even if the ARAnyM
emulator would be perfect[6].

Fourthly, we are going to attempt to provide a Lenny installation to our
users that would be as close as possible to the real Lenny available
from debian.org; and after the release of Lenny, we will try to provide
our own testing that will in some respects mirror Debian testing.

All those attending expressed a feeling that the meeting went well, and
that we appeared to be mostly in agreement about a great many things;
indeed, as Stephen said, this is the kind of consensus that is far
easier to reach when meeting in the flesh than would have been possible
through email or even over IRC.

The discussion about our future itself, and two talks that have been
held for some members of staff of the Christian Albrechts University,
have been videotaped and will shortly be placed on the
meetings-archive[7].

Greetings,

the Debian/m68k team.

[1] Attending were:

Wouter Verhelst, Debian Developer, Debian/m68k porter,
Stephen Marenka, Debian Developer, Debian/m68k porter,
Christian T. Steigies, Debian Developer, Debian/m68k porter and
organizer of the meeting,
Joey Schulze, Debian Developer, original proprietor of
kullervo.debian.org and past Debian/m68k porter; longtime
organizer of the (now defunct) Oldenburg meetings that initially
started as m68k porter hacksessions,
Roman Zippel, upstream Linux/m68k kernel hacker,
Carsten Schlote, embedded Linux developer focussing on ColdFire and
m68k-based hardware,
Ingo Juergensmann, who through his vast knowledge of Amiga hardware
has provided valuable help to the Debian/m68k port in the past,

Unfortunately, Ingo had to leave before we had been able to discuss
the matters at hand.

We'd like to thank the DPL for kindly agreeing to refund Stephen
Marenka's plane ticket with Debian money, allowing him to join the
meeting; and Christian Steigies for hosting, feeding, bedding, and
generally taking great care of us and for providing such nice
facilities.

Additionally, we had set up a live stream that allowed the following
people to join in through IRC:

Michael Schmitz, Debian Developer, Debian/m68k porter,
Geert Uytterhoeven, upstream Linux/m68k kernel hacker,

Joined through IRC at various times during the meeting, but could
not make it for the actual discussion:

Michael Casadevall, NM, Debian/m68k porter,
Simon Richter, Debian Developer, Emdebian developer.

[2] http://www.debian-ports.org/

[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/01/msg00005.html

[4] Software that fails to build (or segfaults during compilation, or
fails its own selftest) immediately signals that something is wrong;
this is much more interesting for a porter than software that
compiles, but does not work when installed (or, worse, does not work
correctly). You are enabling your packages' test suites, right?

[5] http://aranym.org/

[6] Which it currently isn't; there are some known bugs in the FPU
emulation. There are no known bugs in the main instruction set
emulation, however.

[7] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/

--
<Lo-lan-do> Home is where you have to wash the dishes.
-- #debian-devel, Freenode, 2004-09-22

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Release Update: freeze guidelines, testing, BSP, rc bug fixes

2008-08-31T23:01:29Z

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Heya,

We are happy to publish yet another issue of our highly successful
motivational status updates. This month's issue contains, as reward for
your continued interest, the name for lenny's successor.

Freeze status
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lenny has been frozen for some time now, stabilizing the package
list. To continue our release efforts, some exceptions for packages
that were waiting in the NEW queue/uploaded shortly before the freeze
are dropped. From now on, only the following rules apply:

A new version may only contain changes falling in one of the
following categories (compared to the version in testing):
- fixes for release critical bugs (i.e., bugs of severity critical,
grave, and serious) in all packages;
- changes for release goals, if they are not invasive;
- fixes for severity: important bugs in packages of priority: optional
or extra, only when this can be done via unstable;
- translation updates
- documentation fixes

Please upload packages fitting this description to unstable, then
request the freeze exception by mail to debian-release@....
You don't need to include the full diff (which we re-generate from the
uploaded packages anyway), but please include the relevant changelog
entries.

For further information on freeze exceptions, refer to our freeze
announcement [RM:FA], but note that the rules are a bit stricter now.

Upgrade and Install tests
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
With the recent migration of Linux 2.6.26 to lenny, we don't expect any
more disruptive changes to lenny. Thus, we would like to request more
intensive tests of upgrades from etch to lenny and fresh installations.

The Debian Installer team is currently preparing the first (and
hopefully final) release candidate of the lenny installer. If you want
to help to identify bugs, check the Debian Installer Website [DI:WEB]
and try the daily snapshots.

If possible, try to use Linux 2.6.26 on your box and report any problem
back to our bug tracking system. Problems not reported in the next weeks
can't be fixed in the lenny kernel.

Release critical bugs, Removals, BSP
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The release team is, as always, concerned about the number of release
critical bugs affecting testing. We are still optimistic that currently
known issues can be squashed in short time with your help. Fringe
packages with open RC bugs will be removed in the coming weeks. Use the
``rc-alert'' script from the devscripts package to identify removal
candidates that you use.

To fix as many issues as possible, we are inviting people to join us
in a bug squashing party on the next weekend (5th to 6th September).
We will coordinate our efforts in the #debian-bugs IRC channel on
irc.debian.org.

Release notes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There is still quite a lot of work to be done on the lenny release notes.
Coordination for this will happen on the debian-doc@...
mailing list (further information to appear in a mail to that list). If
you know of any issues that need to be documented, file them as bugs
against the ``release-notes'' pseudo package.

While you are pondering noteworthy things, feel free to document
important improvements, newly included packages and similiar things on
the NewInLenny page in the Debian Wiki [DW:NIL].

Release name
~~~~~~~~~~~~
We will continue to use Toy Story character names for lenny's successor,
which will be called ``squeeze'' (three-eyed space alien).

Cheers

Luk
- --
http://release.debian.org
Debian Release Team
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German and French reach 100% for po-debconf in unstable

2008-08-28T21:47:58Z

(CC'ed to several lists, reply set to debian-i18n)

On August 22nd, both German and French languages reached 100%
completeness for po-debconf translations in unstable (not counting
Debian Installer packages, handled in a specific way) [1].

For German, this is the very first time this happens and the German
l10n team deserves congratulations for that achievement.

Several others teams also made great efforts to improve the
translation ratio in that area [2] as well as other areas such as
native and non-native localization [3], web site [4] [5] or Debian
Installer [6].

The i18n work force would like to thank all translators who made this
happen as well as all package maintainers who had a very collaborative
attitude wrt localization efforts during the entire etch-lenny release
cycle.

Until (and after!) lenny is released, we will continue efforts to
bring as many localization fixes in testing.

[1] http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po-debconf/rank
(D-I packages are not omitted there, which explains you'll see
99%)
Getting statistics for testing is work under progress

[2] http://i18n.debian.net/debian-l10n-stats/testing/year/podebconf.png

[3] http://i18n.debian.net/debian-l10n-stats/testing/year/po.png

[4] http://i18n.debian.net/debian-l10n-stats/web-rrd/year/pages.png

[5] http://www.debian.org/devel/website/stats/

[6] http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/l10n-stats/

--

_______________________________________________
Debian-l10n-devel mailing list
Debian-l10n-devel@...
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-l10n-devel

----- End forwarded message -----

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Debian Live Lenny Beta1

2008-08-27T05:58:35Z

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Debian Live Lenny Beta1
=======================

The Debian Live team[0] is pleased to announce the first beta of Debian
Lenny's Live images.

Although we missed releasing images for Etch along with the installer
images, we are now prepared to release live images within the regular
Lenny release process. This is the first official release of Debian Live
and the whole team has been working hard during the past 2.5 years[1] to
make Debian's own[2] live systems become a reality.

Nevertheless, we do need your help to find more bugs and improve the
live systems, so please try them out. The images are available at:

http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/lenny_live_beta1/

Please also have a look at the known issues listed below.

Main features
=============

100% Debian
- ------------

The build process of Debian Live basically consists of creating a Debian
chroot, installing one or more kernels along with live-initramfs[3] (a
set of hooks into initramfs-tools for handling booting from read-only
media) and generating a bootable image from that.

This process is handled by live-helper[4], a collection of shell scripts
that allow us to automate and customize this process. Considerable
care[5] is taken to ensure that the resulting live system is not tainted
by the host system and that installed packages are not modified more
than absolutely necessary.

This ensures that Debian Live really *is* Debian, and not "just another"
a Debian-based live system.

Flavours
- --------

Although live-helper is a toolkit to produce your very own live systems
with only a few steps, we also provide prebuilt images that are meant to
be used as reference systems for end-users. Currently, this consists of
the three major desktop environments (GNOME, KDE and Xfce), as well as a
small 'standard' image without a graphical environment.

For the desktop environments, package selection is performed by
'tasksel' with the respective desktop task, whilst the 'standard' image
contains only packages of "Priority: standard" or greater,
notwithstanding a handful of live-specific packages (console-common,
eject, file, kbd, live-initramfs, locales, sudo and vim-tiny).

Image types
- -----------

Debian Live offers prebuilt images for CD/DVD discs, USB sticks (or any
HD-media-like device), tarballs (for PXE netboot) as well as a bare
squashfs image to boot from the web[6] directly.

Live Magic
- ----------

Live Magic[7] is an GUI frontend around the live-helper scripts,
offering a subset of the features of live-helper in an easy-to-use
graphical user interface.

live-magic 1.0 was recently uploaded to sid and is the recommended
version. It currently supports 7 languages.

Live Installer
- --------------

Live Installer[8] is a special udeb for the Debian Installer that
(optionally) replaces a part of d-i in order to install the system from
the live image instead of to bootstrapping it from .deb packages. This
way, a live system can be easily installed to the harddisk, ensuring
that the look and feel of the installation (including preseeding) works
the same as the regular installer process.

Unfortunately, live-installer does still have a few minor bugs left and
is thus not included in our builds yet; we hope to be able to include it
in the next beta.

Known issues in this release
============================

* The prebuilt images for gnome-desktop and kde-desktop are a bit too
big to fit on a CD. Although the automatic installation of
Recommends was disabled to build the images, they are still too big.
This will need further tweaking as they are supposed to fit with the
next beta.

* The rescue flavour, containing system rescue and forensic related
packages, is missing in this beta release.

* There will be a DVD image with the next beta that includes all three
desktop environments so that you can choose at boot time which
system you would like to start.

* Due to time constraints, the prebuilt images for Beta1 are only
covering i386 and amd64; with the next beta, powerpc and sparc will
follow (if you wish to test these architectures earlier, please
build them yourself).

* The new desktop artwork is not yet included.

* The syslinux menu is still the old, prompt-based one. A freshly made
new syslinux vgamenu using the official lenny desktop artwork is on
the way (the same as d-i media will use in Lenny).

* No live-installer included yet (if you wish to test live-installer
earlier, please build it yourself).

* No win32-loader included yet.

* Sid packages used - At the time of building the live images, both
live-helper 1.0.0-1 and live-initramfs 1.139.1-1 from sid were used.
Since the latter has not yet migrated to testing, it was included
manually as a local package. This is undesirable, as the release is
supposed to be self-contained - however, it is just a convenient
workaround as both were granted freeze exception and will migrate
soon.

Plans for next Beta release
===========================

We are looking forward to upload Beta2 in about two weeks from now
(maybefollowed by a third beta) with one final RC after that which
should be identical to the final release.

Some more details about the open things we would like to address in
Beta2 and later can be found at the wiki page[9].

The Debian Live team is still looking for more contributors for new
features (post-lenny, though) as well as documentation writers for the
manual (always). If you care about live systems, please join and help[10]!

Thanks
======

Last but not least, our thanks goes to everyone who has contributed[11]
and to all maintainers that have kindly fixed live-specific bugs in
their packages.

References
==========

[0] http://alioth.debian.org/project/memberlist.php?group_id=30929

[1] http://git.debian.net/?p=live-helper.git;a=blob;f=docs/NEWS

[2] http://blog.daniel-baumann.ch/2006/02/14#20060214_debian-live-initiative

[3] http://packages.qa.debian.org/live-initramfs

[4] http://packages.qa.debian.org/live-helper

[5] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLive/Guidelines

[6]
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debian-live-devel/2007-September/002133.html

[7] http://packages.qa.debian.org/live-magic

[8] http://packages.qa.debian.org/live-installer

[9] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLive/Lenny/Todo#Beta2

[10] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLive/Contribute

[11] http://git.debian.net/?p=live-helper.git;a=blob;f=docs/CREDITS
http://git.debian.net/?p=live-initramfs.git;a=blob;f=docs/CREDITS

Regards,
Daniel

- --
Address: Daniel Baumann, Burgunderstrasse 3, CH-4562 Biberist
Email: daniel.baumann@...
Internet: http://people.panthera-systems.net/~daniel-baumann/

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people.debian.org to move to ravel

2008-08-27T05:00:31Z

Hi,

we shipped one of the machines that HP had so graciously donated a while
ago to Canada where UBC Electrical and Computer Engineering kindly
agreed to host it.

This machine, ravel.debian.org, will become the new people.debian.org
machine, providing general shell services to DDs and the
http://people.debian.org/~<user>/ webpages.

We currently plan to switch the DNS entry late in September, details to be
announced on the d-i-a list[1].

If you offer files on http://people.debian.org/~<user>/ that you wish to
be available after the switch please make sure they are on ravel in
their proper place in ~/public_html. We have a copy of most of gluck's
/home filesystem as of a few days ago in /srv/gluck-home-2008-08 on
ravel so you can just move the stuff from there to your new
homedirectory and then do a quick rsync if stuff has changed (gluck
still allows password based logins).

Currently the userdirs on ravel are available at
http://newpeople.debian.org/~<user>/.

Once you are satisfied with the content on newpeople you can instruct
apache on oldpeople to redirect requests to the new place. On gluck
do the following:
echo "RewriteEngine on" > ~/.public_html/.htaccess
echo 'RewriteRule ^(.*) http://newpeople.debian.org/~'$USER'/$1 [R,L]' >> ~/.public_html/.htaccess

The webserver on ravel will only serve static pages. Gluck's apache did
PHP but a survey done by DSA showed that it is not really needed except
in one or two instances (and those really are not people.d.o stuff but
rather frontends for the services that happen to also live on gluck).
The rationale behind this is obviously an attempt to gain a little
security from badly written and/or completely unmaintained scripts (how
about a nice gallery install from around 2003, never updated since?).

Once the move has been completed we expect to make gluck restricted to
the people operating the services that will remain on gluck, so please
clean out your homedir when you no longer need it there.

Ravel is a freshly installed system so there probably are a few packages
missing that you might need. Please contact DSA at the debian-admin
mailinglist with requests. Also, ssh logins are restricted to key based
logins, password based logins are not allowed. Submit your keys to ldap
as documented on http://db.debian.org/.

Of the services currently running on gluck we expect to move at least
cvs.debian.org also to ravel. The future of the other services is not
yet decided. We also do not at this point know what we'll do with
BSMTP.

For DSA,
weasel

1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-infrastructure-announce/

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Debian marketing team

2008-08-22T06:37:19Z

Hi everybody!

The Debian Marketing Team is real. It just didnt get alot rolling yet
and no processes in place to work on anything.

But better late then never!

We look for people (both Debian Developers, Maintaners or Users)
around the world who are interested in helping.

* It would be good to collect Debian related News centrally (wiki)
and depending on its content and impact spread them locally or globally.

* We need to put together plan and understand both who uses
Debian and where Debian would fit in well and should be used.
For that we need marketing savvy people. We want to meet and work on
this. Have you been to Extremadura yet? Do you want to go there?
Sightseeing not included.

We started putting together ideas at http://wiki.debian.org/Marketing,
will use the existing mailing list debian-publicity@...
and the irc channel #debian-marketing on irc.debian.org for communication.

Moritz and Andreas

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For Those Who Care About X (Bits from the X Strike Force)

2008-08-17T14:21:45Z

Hi everyone,

the X Strike Force, as you may know, is the team responsible for the
packages forming the X Window System. That means the X server, all
video and input device drivers, as well as client libraries and various
client applications.

Status
------
Over the Lenny release cycle, the configuration of the Xorg server has
been considerably simplified. In many cases the only configuration
needed is to set the desired keymap.
We've also switched to the new "intel" driver, which handles modesetting
natively, instead of "i810". This driver, as well as "radeon" and "nv",
provide the RandR 1.2 extension to configure video output at runtime.
One of the nice things that happened recently is the packaging of the
"nouveau" driver[0] (thanks to Chris Lamb and Matthew Johnson), a
reverse-engineering effort for nVidia cards. It's not release-quality
yet, so won't be part of lenny, but please go and test it in
experimental! The "openchrome" driver has also been packaged (thanks to
Raphael Geissert) to support via chipsets instead of the unmaintained
"via" driver.

Next steps
----------
xorg-server 1.5 and mesa 7.1 are being prepared in experimental, and
will hit sid soon after the lenny release.
At around the same time, we'd like to enable hotplugging of input
devices, and their configuration through hal. This means using the
"evdev" driver for mice and keyboards instead of the traditional "mouse"
and "keyboard" drivers, which will for example use of different keymaps
for different keyboards, per-device configuration (not only statically,
but also at runtime), etc.
/usr/share/doc/hal/examples/10-x11-input.fdi and
/usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/10-keymap.fdi in the hal package
contain an example config, which you can modify to suit your needs and
install in /etc/hal/fdi/policy/ to get a feel for this.

Help needed
-----------
A quick look at [1] will show you that the XSF is responsible for quite
a few packages. A quick look at [2] will show you that those packages
need help.

Some of the packages or areas have dedicated maintainers, and are
maintained better than the rest. But we need more people to handle the
rest of the packages: we have hardly enough manpower to do basic bug
triaging and keep up with upstream, but most bugs don't get forwarded
upstream or otherwise addressed.

We would love to hear from people interested in improving this state.
You don't need to know much about X to help, just be willing to learn a
bit and sometimes dig in unholy C code. :) The code base is pretty big,
but it's quite easy to ignore the parts one doesn't understand. It's a
very good opportunity to learn many very fun things going from
hardware-dependent graphic programming (modesetting, DRI, ...) to fancy
user interfaces (Compositing/Compiz, RandR 1.2, ...). X is also
severely lacking documentation, so work on that front is very much
needed.

You don't need to be a DD, anyone who's interested is welcome. You can reach
us on #debian-x on irc.debian.org, or on debian-x@....

The upstream developers are friendly and responsive, which is a big help
for a stretched team such as ours. And it's even very easy to get
involved upstream if you feel like contributing some patches.

[0] http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/
[1] http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=debian-x@...
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/debian-x@...

Cheers,
Julien

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Upcoming changes to supported architectures

2008-08-14T11:58:12Z

Hello everybody,

with the Lenny release upcoming we are thinking about larger changes to
the Debian archive, of which one point is "Clean up the supported
architecture list to free up space for new ones".

So we had a few discussions during DebConf8 and came up with the
following rules:

- If an architecture fails to be included in 2 successive official
releases, it is moved out of the official archive (and away from the
ftp-master.debian.org host).

- We (as in ftpteam) are happy to help in any possible way in a move
from a no-longer-supported architecture to a different platform[1],
like providing all neccessary files to import currently existing
suite in the target archive (think of .changes files).

- If a removed architecture later can prove it will be able to make the
next official release, it can be re-included into the official
archive. This step additionally needs the acceptance of the Security,
the Release and the Debian Admin Team. (It needs security
autobuilders, porter machines, etc.)

- A newly included architecture has to be built completely with packages
available in plain Debian, external patches aren't allowed.

- At the time of inclusion a minimal set of binary packages will be
imported into the archive, just enough to get build-essential ready to
go and an official buildd setup and running. Everything else has to be
rebuilt from scratch. As soon as enough is rebuilt to get the initial
toolchain build on "native" Debian, this has to be rebuilt too.

- The packages imported from external source and used for the initial
build run have to be signed by one of the lead porters, who needs to
be a DD.

If you disagree - please provide sane alternative suggestions.

[1] be it debian-ports.org or whatever platform the porters of those
architectures want to use.

--
bye, Joerg
NM-fun:
The Debian project, at least for me, is not a joke, [...]

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Bits from the DPN editors

2008-08-11T09:14:20Z

Hi!

It's more or less four months since I proposed to resurrect our
newsletter [1]. We already released eight issues of the "Debian Project
News" and work for the ninth issue has already started. So I guess it's
time for a small "state of the DPN" speech, but since I'm not attending
DebConf, you will have to read this mail instead ;)

After having a rough start (and in fact missing some self-set deadlines
and completely underestimating how much work is involved in such a kind
of newsletter) we finally developed a - more or less - working flow of
work (Which is by the way documented at [2]).

Speaking of the current state sadly means to confess, that our hopes to
draw a lot of help from the community by using a system for drafting the
news with a low entry barrier were not fulfilled. We actually had a
good start, with good participation, but due to (I assume) the
aforementioned initial difficulties participation in the creation of the
DPN dropped considerably. Currently the workload of creating our
bi-weekly newsletter is shared by only two people (that being Meike
Reichle and myself), which is barely enough :(

While we at least get a hint from time to time, what we should mention
in the next issue, it rarely happens, that someone contributes by
drafting a text -- which is the real work. (At this point a BIG 'Thank
You' to those who did! (See list bellow.) It's much appreciated!)

We suffer especially, since although we are a two people team, we have
in fact no redundancy, since real live issues affecting one of us will
most likely affect the other one, too.

Therefore we mostly concentrated our work on creating the next issues
and getting them out in time, and didn't have time to answer all mails
considering suggestions for changes and improvements (yet?). We are
sorry, but at least we tried to read them briefly and keep them in mind
when drafting the next issue. As a result of this we re-added the list
of DSAs, WNPP and new and noteworthy packages due to popular demand.

There are still a lot of unanswered mails not dealing with content, but
with workflow issues / proposals (including changing from
wiki.debian.org to a special ikiwiki instance). We are sorry, that we
couldn't yet act on them and take appropriate measures, but be assured,
they are not forgotten.

Other issues the DPN currently have are "unwritten guidelines" regarding
editorial choices of DSAs to be published and which packages to list in
the "new and noteworthy package" section. Both is more or less done by
our gut feeling.

Speaking of problems the DPN are facing, we also need to mention
translations of the DPN. The current workflow makes it difficult for
translators of the DPN, since we often fail to get the final draft of
the DPN ready in time to give translators a "head start" so the
translated DPNs can be released together with (or at least with a as
small as possible delay to) the English DPN.

So here is a big call for help! We really need your help writing the
DPN. (Monitoring lists and newstickers we don't monitor ourselves would
be nice, too, but only add more work to us if you only give us pointers.)

We will both be very busy with our real live the upcoming month, and are
not sure how much time we can dedicate to the DPN. So please help us!
The current draft for the next issue of the DPN is always available at
[4]. There should already be a todo list with pointers to interesting
topics, which need to be written out. Some guidelines about style and
content are available at [5].

Last but not least, we would like to thank the following people who have
contributed to the DPN so far:

Adrian von Bidder
Ana Guerrero
Andre Felipe Machado
Bjoern Boschman
Graham Cobb
Jeff Richards
Jon Evans
Jörg Jaspert
Julian Andres Klode
Justin Rye
Luca Bruno
Martin F. Krafft
Paul van der Vlis
Paul Wise
Raphael Hertzog
Russell Coker
Sebastian
Stefano Zacchiroli
Thomas Lange
Wouter Verhelst

(Unfortunately we can't list those people, who contributed by
translating the DPN, nor do we have a complete list of the native
English speakers, who helped by proofreading. But we thank them
nonetheless!)

Best regards,
Meike and Alexander

1: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/04/msg00000.html
2: http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/Workflow
3: http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews
4: http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/Issues/Current
5: http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/Guidelines

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Bits from the GNU/kFreeBSD porters

2008-08-10T08:41:05Z

Hello, (GNU/Linux) world!

This is a status update for the Debian GNU/FreeBSD port[1]. This port
consists of two architectures: kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64.

Status
------

* We have an up-to-date toolchain (including java on both
architectures) and most of the core Debian packages are in good
shape.

* GNU/kFreeBSD kernel and related utilities are currently based
on FreeBSD 7.0 stable release (released in February 2008).

* Two independent unofficial buildds are up and building both
unstable and experimental for both kfreebsd-i386 and
kfreebsd-amd64. Build logs are available at [2], packages
status are available at [3].

* There are two DD-accessible porting machines running GNU/kFreeBSD:
io.debian.net (kfreebsd-i386) and asdfasdf.debian.net
(kfreebsd-amd64). io has been upgraded earlier this year and should
be way faster now. See [4] and [5] to know how to access them.

* For kfreebsd-i386, over 85% source packages have been built,
kfreebsd-amd64 is slightly behind kfreebsd-i386 here.
At about 95% of ever-built packages are up-to-date.
See end of [6], [7] and [8].

* We want to be in official archive, see #369797,
http://wiki.debian.org/ArchiveQualification/kfreebsd-i386,
http://wiki.debian.org/ArchiveQualification/kfreebsd-amd64.

* We would like to be an official release architecture,
for Lenny we do not fulfill some criteria [9].

* Since the beginning of the year both kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64
are hosted (archive and wanna-build) on debian-ports [10].

Short term plans (lenny)
------------------------

Currently we have a reasonable subset of lenny packages [11], but the
number of unmerged patches [12] is still too high. It seems doing real
Lenny release would be difficult. We plan to release at least snapshot
of Sid in time of Lenny release (as we did for the Etch release) for
both kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64. It is not yet decided, whether
it would be based on FreeBSD 7.0 or FreeBSD 7.1 (upstream schedule
declared for August 2008).

We need your help
-----------------

* as an ftp-master, could you please take a look at #369797.

* as a d-i maintainer, please could help us. Unfortunately,
we miss insight in this area.

* as a package maintainer, could you please look at BTS whether there
is already a kfreebsd submission and integrate it. In many cases, it
is sufficient to (auto)update config.sub/config.guess [13] or use
recent libtool [14]. Do not hesitate to ask on
debian-bsd@.... Having the package in unstable is
sufficient for us.

* as an MUer, please could you look at kfreebsd submission in BTS
(in addition to usual translations). In most cases, the fix
is really simple.

Aurelien Jarno on behalf of

The Debian GNU/kFreeBSD porters

--
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/Debian_GNU/kFreeBSD
[2] http://buildd.debian-ports.org/
[3] http://buildd.debian-ports.org/status/
[4] http://io.debian.net/ssh
[5] http://asdfasdf.debian.net/ssh
[6] http://wiki.debian.org/ArchiveQualification/kfreebsd-i386
[7] http://wiki.debian.org/ArchiveQualification/kfreebsd-amd64
[8] http://buildd.debian-ports.org/stats/graph2-quarter-big.png
[9] http://release.debian.org/lenny/arch_qualify.html
[10] http://www.debian-ports.org
[11] http://glibc-bsd.alioth.debian.org/NOTES
[12] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=kfreebsd;users=glibc-bsd-devel@...;pri0=pending:pending,forwarded,pending-fixed,fixed;ttl0=Outstanding,Forwarded,Pending%20Upload,Fixed%20in%20NMU;pri1=pending%3dpending%2btag%3dwontfix,pending%3dpending%2btag%3dmoreinfo,pending%3dpending%2btag%3dpatch,pending%3dpending%2btag%3dconfirmed,pending%3dpending;ttl1=Will%20Not%20Fix,More%20information%20needed,Patch%20Available,Confirmed,Unclassified;ord1=2,3,4,1,0,5
[13] http://glibc-bsd.alioth.debian.org/outdated.cfg
[14] http://glibc-bsd.alioth.debian.org/outdated.cfg

--
.''`. Aurelien Jarno | GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73
: :' : Debian developer | Electrical Engineer
`. `' aurel32@... | aurelien@...
`- people.debian.org/~aurel32 | www.aurel32.net

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DebConf8 video streams

2008-08-09T23:01:02Z

Hi,

in seven hours DebConf8 will officially begin, you can participate by watching
the live video streams as described on
http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf8/Streams - have fun!

The schedule for tomorrow/today is available at
https://penta.debconf.org/dc8_schedule/day_2008-08-10.en.html - follow the
links for the schedule for the other days. The times are localtime which is
ART and equals to UTC-3.

Apologies for the short notice. But it should not come totally surprising for
most of you! ;-)

regards,
Holger

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