Advogato blog for faw

26 Feb 2008

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 14:45:17 GMT

That's it...

Student for now :-)

Damn it, I should had wrote about it a couple of days ago. Anyway, it happened last Friday (20080222), my last day at work. After 4.5 years (exactly 4 years, 6 months and a week), I quit my job to dedicate more time for my "supposed" last year studying Computer Science at the University.

In a far far away galaxy...

During the translation of packages' descriptions, when I found something that looks like a typo or a wrong reference I try to report wishlist bugs and, when possible, provide patches, I know this is somewhat noisy, it is just to register the fact, so Smith Review can also spotted it, sorry for the noise. :-)

BTW, I would still vote for a genius if we are going to elect a mascot.

Thanks: frolic

11 Jan 2008

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 19:47:35 GMT

Bits from the Debian i18n meeting (Extremadura 2007)

From December 12th to December 15th, Junta de Extremadura hosted another one of the Debian Meetings; five i18n guys shared ideas, food, buses and fun with the Debian KDE maintainers. We would like to thank Extremadura for hosting us during the Hispalinux Meeting 2007, the event was held at Universad de Derecho (Law University) in Caceres, Spain.

These are the minutes, results and notes from our work, it is a brief description but hopefully complete of what we have done and what is still missing/pending.

Thanks to Cesar (cek) we had the chance to work on churro (i18n.debian.net) locally; the server is still running a 2.4 kernel because of some "tick" problems with 2.6 series, the last one tried was 2.6.21 and we should try newer ones, in order to support upgrades and not get stuck with 2.4, we hope Cesar will find time to test new Debian kernels.

First, let me introduce everybody to the services, robots and resources being hosted by i18n.d.n:

MoinMoin wiki for local and simple reference documentation, it contains all the links to the below resources. (http://i18n.debian.net/wiki/)

Pootle experimental server

dl10n scripts, aka dl10n robots (codename Lion), these scripts are responsible for the status of pseudo URLs used by some translation teams, by the Project Smith and by the NMU Priority List for i18n NMU Campaign

Synchronization of the i18n material used by the Debian website to generate translation statistics about PO and PO-debconf

Generation of Compendium PO files per-language

Different types of statistics

Other non user-visible services like a full source mirror for stable, testing, unstable and experimental, used by the scripts and robots.

DDTP, Debian Descriptions Translation Project

DDTSS, The Debian Distributed Translation Server Satellite, a web front-end for DDTP, now integrated to DDTP to use the Database back-end instead of the e-mail interface.

And, at some point, we found important to state clear the acronyms and names used in related DDTP projects/tools:

DDTS, Debian Description Translation Server, this is the main "back-end" used in DDTP, it tends to be the interface between translator tools (present and future ones) and the database;
ddt.cgi is a CGI interface that is able to provide info for specific packages or translations, including diffs, related packages and active/inactive descriptions.
DDTC which is the old (and still functional) command line client for DDTP.

We took the chance to organize a few things on churro, old accounts were cleaned out and removed, we moved from /org to /srv and got more GBs of space to the "playground". Old files were also removed and some are schedule to deletion on early 2008. With the reallocation of /org we also find some more space to /home and /var, we reorganize some of the links on the web space (specially to remove services from people's accounts), and we changed the mirror script to also synchronize the Packages and Contents files.

Grisu and Martijn worked mainly on DDTP and DDTSS integration. DDTSS now provides statistics for stable, testing and unstable, we are also working with Debian Med to provide support and infrastructure to a specific audience, like packages related to Medicine. The conversion to talk directly with DDTP/DDTS database also provided:

Fetching new translations is almost instantaneous and marks translation as requested (avoiding duplicated works via the e-mail interface).

After sufficient reviews occurred, the upload is instant

Committed DDTS / DDTSS / DDTP website generation into SVN
Added READMEs for the above directories

DDTSS now announces the user using authentication because of its integration with the Database backend used by DDTP. Quick trivia: DDTP is now a compound of 25 languages occupying 18 GBytes.

A few days before the meeting we had the offer to use "AUTOBYHAND" to upload a package with the Translation-* files. The package is now called 'ddtp-translations' and we worked during the meeting to create scripts to build the package and to test it on the archive side. This approach allow Debian i18n Team to upload new translations and remove old ones (or inactive ones) without bother FTP Master Team. Special thanks to Anthony Town, he has been working with us to prove tips, fixes and info on how to produce the package and the scripts. The code is available in the debian-l10n SVN under pkg-ddtp-translations:
http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/debian-l10n/pkg-ddtp-translations

In our case, "BYHAND" processing consists of a simple tarball of the {main,contrib,non-free}/i18n/Translation-*, we decide to work on a set of scripts to make it easier to create new packages (ddtp-translations) in a consistent way and keeping debian/changelog up-to-date. We also made some suggestions to the script what will run on the archive side to check the tarball structure, base on the examples of debian-maintainers and debtags (tags-override).

One of our initial targets for the meeting with regards to Pootle and Debian was to try big PO files per language, fortunately, Nicolas and Friedel were able to increase Pootle performance enough to get a few languages from DDTP loaded in Pootle. Using the upstream Pootle-diet branch, which uses a database back-end for the generation of statistics, the time to browse the DDTP POs of a language (~20.000 files) went down to a dozen of seconds.

Speaking about Pootle, Friedel gave us a good picture of what is coming next in terms of Pootle's development. There are improvements planned in the areas of permissions and rights delegation, as well as file management (for projects and templates). Improved management of terminology projects is also planned.

Improvements in the QA capabilities of the translate toolkit and Pootle are planned to help with the "false positives" of the pofilter checks. Better reuse of existing translations will become possible by using better translation memory techniques. There is also work planned on formats and converters involving, for example, XLIFF, TMX, TRADOS and WordFast.

Another pending task for quite a while was the CVS migration to SVN, it is now done, with a new layout. Commits to the CVS were disabled and every single script or resource depending on CVS should be changed to use SVN. For now, we are publishing (via HTTP) the status files generated by the pseudo-urls robots until we can fix the scripts to re-enable the commit of the files. You can find them here: http://i18n.debian.net/debian-l10n/status/

We are pretty happy with the changes and results of the work during those days, but we still have some items pending on our TODO list:

More advertisement and usage information about PO Compendiums
There are two use cases are identified:

Filling new PO files.
QA work to find inconsistent translations.
Maybe Eddy would love to do that? :-)

Extend the duration of the statistics history. (Nekral)

Debian packages of the services running on churro

DDTP (Grisu)
DDTSS (Martijn)
dl10n (Nekral)

DDTP: add some scripts to handle packages with version in the description (e.g. kernel and kernel modules) (Martijn)

DDTP: Standard generation of the translation tarballs (faw)

DDTP: document the bracketed stats on the main page (faw)

DDTC: should be updated to match the current features. Documentation to ease integration with procmail. (Nekral - low priority)

Implement mail service for translation teams with their own robots (e.g. Dutch) (faw)

Collect data from http://www.debian.org/devel/website/stats/ (Nekral)

http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po/,
http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po-debconf/
are built based on the churro material. It would make more sense to build these statistics on churro (Nekral)

We could "fork" the page and add some fancy new features on these pages (Nekral)
Add information from the coordination page to indicate that a translation is ongoing. (Nekral)

Pootle: missing review indication. Hard with PO back-end. (Friedel)

There are a couple more reports to be sent but they are more focused on i18n specific questions, tools and plans for 2008. So, probably those will be sent only to debian-i18n mail list. If you are interested, please, stay tuned. :-)

Posted on d-d-a: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/01/msg00002.html
And a big thanks to Nicolas François (aka nekral), he helped me a lot making notes, preparing the text and reviewing it; and was patient enough to wait for the report while I was solving some personal problems.

30 Nov 2007

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 13:27:51 GMT

It is about time...

qmail under Public Domain

Using qmail-ldap for quite some time (first because of my employer and then because I was used to it), the DJB license was a major pain, qmail-ldap patch is under BSD, but the original qmail was non-free. Yes, was. Yesterday DJB released qmail under Public Domain, and based on a GoogleVideo, he is going to change the license for all his existent software and for all his future works.

For some strange reason the URL direct to the video doesn't work, but if you do a search you are able to use the Watch video here option.

Not only that

Yes, I know. I'm not going to say sorry, I should post more, this last three months were not exactly the best ones, and I thought about writing something about what I was doing for Debian and other projects here but ended up being consumed by University, Work, Real Life and "Other Stuff (tm)".

One of the important things on the way is the Debian i18n Extremadura Meeting to be held on December, when we expect to work on i18n.debian.net, change from CVS to SVN, improve DDTP and ddtss and work with Pootle related stuff and infrastructure.

In the meantime, we are also changing our Primary Push Server for volatile.debian.org from durin to verdi (don't worry, a proper announcement will be made on an announcement list close to you). :-)

Thanks for everybody that had the patient to wait for my replies and/or my actions, and the ones that calmly understood my undergoing situation, giving me support and offering help. Thank you very much!

3 Sep 2007

Mon, 3 Sep 2007 18:56:01 GMT

To Blog, or Not To Blog...

Amazon: in the hands of a few

Thinking about writing something for a while, about my Debian work or about my daily stuff, sometimes you lack the time or the motivation to do so, I should kept this more up-to-date so people can follow a little bit what's going on with me... specially considering that I try to keep this diary neutral about non-technical subjects, but hey! it is somewhat hard to be neutral in every single situation.
Anyway, I found that I should help to spread the word from a Brazilian colleague, Sulamita, she posted about democracy (or the lack of it) today. Two videos, about the Amazon Forest area and some of the crazy things we find in Brazil. You can watch the Brazilian Portuguese version or the English one.

A lot of people are not aware of some of the political problems that Brazil faces in the last 10 years, it is not like it doesn't exist before, but it is getting worst and worst and, for a while, I've been wondering...
A lot of friends want to leave Brazil as soon as they can, I love Brazil but I can understand their motivation.

Where do you find the desire to stay when you look around and you can't find fairness and equality? And if you look to the houses or places that should protect people, you realize that there is no protection?
How do you keep the passion for a country with huge levels of corruption in public government, in police forces, in your law makers? And day after day, corruption schemas, robbery and law abuse are noticed on the television?
What to do when you realize that the perception of the disloyal advantage is shared among your colleagues and that the feeling of failure dominates a great part of the population that could actually do something to change?
Can anybody, or group of individuals, feeling alone, work to change that? How? Specially when you look around and although you know there are people willing to help they need to take care of their lives (money, food, family)?
Or should I ask: Where's the love? (Black Eyed Peas Lyrics).

And before somebody thinks that the entire Brazil is lost, that we are under a Civil War and that monkeys and other animals are walking on our Jungle streets in the middle of the cities, no it is not... yes, we need help; yes people need to join forces; yes, we need to find ourselves and fix it; but it is still a great country to live, and yes, I love it!

Thanks: beraldo and sysdebug. And I'm happy to discover that advogato upgraded my status, I'm now a Journeyer.

14 Mar 2007

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 00:37:43 GMT

random(ideas);

Yes... we can too!

Recently I saw somewhere a link to Google Video about a very nice video: How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too). So please, if you didn't see this go and watch it now: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4216011961522818645. It is a little bit large (~50 min) but I found some nice information from real experiences that could really help to improve our communication inside Debian.
So, for the curious and impatient, it is a Google TechTalk with Ben Collins-Sussman & Brian W. Fitzpatrick, SubVersion Developers, based on their experiences they show situations that can drain Project resources and they gave valuable tips, ideas and directions on how to protect the "Attention and Focus" of the Project. It is very interesting to find a lot of factors and points that we can see from time to time on Debian. Don't get me wrong, I'm really not whining, I don't think that whining would solve any problem (except if you are a 6-month hungry child), but I would love if it could give us some momentum and maybe a starting point to leave aside some old unresolved issues, giving a chance to new ideas! Which basically means, keep working together to keep building the best Operating System. :-) (But doing that with even more fun for even more people). We can too!
On a totally unrelated note: my primary MX is back for quite some time, I should report that earlier, anyway, sorry about the lack of posts, thanks for your attention and see you soon. Over.

12 Feb 2007

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:29:42 GMT

Frustration...

No Primary MX for a while

Since last thursday (2007-02-08) my main MX server was stopped to get some maintainance (IDE problems, could be the hard disk, IDE cables or something else, amazing ahm?), anyway, we moved the important stuff away from the line, did our homework testing the secondary MX and stopped the machine. Until now the DataCenter didn't told me when the machine should be back and I'm really hoping to get it back by tomorrow (2007-02-12).

In the meanwhile, the messages are safe, waiting in a temporary queue, we are not expecting to have a downtime of four long days. Anyway, I will need to catch up with my mail in the next days, I'm trying to keep up-to-date using the web archives and doing l10n stuff for Debian. :-(

3 Jan 2007

Wed, 3 Jan 2007 04:32:31 GMT

Happy New Year! Happy 2007!

And a really happy one!

After the cloud of ideas and subjects on the last post, giving the clear idea that I should keep this blog more up-to-date, here is an important note that is missing (including old news that I should had post but didn't, sorry for that). I'm aware that a few people are interested in how the Debian NM process evolves from person to person, on my last update on that topic, I told you that I was recommended to the DAM by my AM. Almost three months later (2006-11-18) Myon (Christoph Berg, Front Desk Member) couldn't find my final report, he pinged my AM and one week later everything was fine again and I got approved to the next step: DAMnation. On the Christmas' evening I got a nice gift from Joerg, DAM approval. Yesterday (2007-01-02) I got the nice e-mail with the subject: New Debian maintainer Felipe Augusto van de Wiel (Thanks to James Troup, aka, elmo).

The entire process took me 8 months and 10 days. I would like to say thanks to everybody that helped me pass thru this experience: Otavio Salvador (my advocate and mentor), Christian Perrier and Luk Claes (Mentors and Uploaders), Clément Stenac (my AM), Christoph Berg (Front Desk), Joerg Jaspert and James Troup (DAMs). They are directly involved in my NM process, but they were not alone, thanks for every single person that helped me with tips and hints, that took some time to teach me and all the people behind different projects in Debian (I really start naming everybody but then I realize that it got very large for Planet): Debian Brasil, Debian Volatile (aba, zobel, sgran), Release Team, Debian Women, Debian i18n Task Force and Debian l10n Brazilian Portuguese, Debian Weekly News Team, buildd.net project, Alioth admins and staff, Debian Installer Team, Debian Kernel Team, Debian Mentors, DebConf Team, OFTC Staff, Debian QA Team, Debian Doc Team, Debian WWW Team, Debian Admin Team (DSA)! People, you know who you are, thank you VERY much!

You can check my Status Page to see more details about my NM process and more information about the acronyms used on this post. Now, Brazil has 17 Debian Developers (not counting the one that already retired). :-)

20 Dec 2006

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 06:07:35 GMT

Just for the record!

[*.cloud.*]

Alive. Birthday. Happy. Sad. Changes. Freeze. Packages. i18n. Ideas. Plans. University. Life. Family. Mother. Notebook. Frieds. DebConf. DebConf7. Edinburgh. OLS2007. LI. OpenBeach. Work. Free. Freedom. Debian. Brasil. Sorry. Smooth. Standards. Ideas. Core. Philosophy. Beliefs. World. Creed. 24. Translations. Organization. pt_BR. NMU. l10n. Past. Present. Future. Notes. Messages. Kind. Patience. Friendship. Fellowship. Party. Meeting. Food. Discussion. Debate. Cry. Try. Fix. Solve. Together. Alone. Team. Workgroup. Fast. Again. Just. Me.

Thanks: peretto and enerv.

30 Aug 2006

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 03:21:17 GMT

To infinity, and beyond! -- Buzz

[Debian]

I should write about this a few days ago but didn't have the time. Sorry. Well, these are great news (at least for me), a few days ago I sent the second part of my T&S and already got approved. My AM (Hi Clément) also pointed out a few changes that were needed in my packages that are already fixed and uploaded; Clément already sent the report and considering that, I'm now waiting for the Front Desk to review my application (and after that, DAMnation. I'm happy! I also finish the adoption of xless and levee. I still have to finish the MyPasswordSafe adoption, but before I have to fix a RC bug related to the use of sudo as the gain-root command (instead of fakeroot) in the alpha buildd. Thanks neuro that already give me a few tips on how to solve it.

Following the random ideas season:

Next week, Extremadura will host the i18n Debian people, the idea is to discuss lots of ideas, specially i18n Infrastructure, but not only discuss, also code a lot!

I do not like the idea to have sourceless firmware in main and I really like Don Armstrong proposal on that subject.

I still have to finish the desproxy, tuxfrw and thumbs packaging work to get it in time for etch.

I'm wondering how a tally sheet with more than 10 choices looks like

[Anti-SPAM season]

Like a lot of people already did, in the last two weeks I've been fighting SPAM in my company and also on the server of Free Software Projects that I'm part of the System Administration Team. In most cases I'm using postfix with clamscan and postgrey, but I will switch to amavisd-new to use SpamAssassin (with razor/pyzor). But I'm still studying the various alternatives in a Debian Sarge system.

Hey silva, thank you! (Journeyer certification).

16 Aug 2006

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 01:48:24 GMT

13 years...

[Debian]

Happy Birthday!!! I was waiting a little bit, in other parts of the world Debian is already celebrating, now people from Brazil (and also UTC-0300) can join the party! Last Saturday our Debian User Group celebrate the Debian Anniversary with a big barbecue, sports and good conversations during the entire afternoon! Next Saturday (19.August) different Debian User Groups in Brazil will coordinate the Debian Day in different cities at the same time. Have fun! 13 years of Debian and counting! :-)

In a quick note, I'm still moving ahead with my NM. I have to fix a few points on my packages (and I'm still waiting my sponsor -- Hi Otavio! -- to upload a couple of packages). And I have a few more to work on, I hope I find the time in the next days.

[Random Stuff]

At Monday (14.August) night (20h 00min UTC-0300) I visit (pt_BR) a very small city in the state I live in Brazil. They invited me to speak about Debian and Free Software for a group of students and also for locals. It was a nice talk and one of the things that got my attention is the number of women interested, of course, I told them to visit the Debian Women Project (which reminds me that I need to translate the site -- and lots of other files). Back to the work!