Older blog entries for kov (starting at number 44)

So I had a very good time at my hometown this weekend. But before talking about this let me acknowledge two things: so Branden was the winner and I'm very happy about this. Having voted him as first choice for the two past years and as second choice this year I'm very confident he'll be able to help Debian get back to being a Project which we all love and have fun working on. I am very happy with the news that came from debconf5 people that we got loads of sponsorship and will thus be able to fund everyone who requested funding. More than anything, though, I would like to emphasize something Andreas said on his message:

"I think we need to re-calibrate how we think of Debian ourself and remind us that we managed to create an enormously valuable system. Now lets get our act together and lets become the kick-ass Über-distro that rules the world! Yay!" (Andreas Schuldei on debian-devel-announce)

About the weekend, we had the third Linuxchix Brasil meeting this year and it was held on my home town, organized mainly by our friends Priscilla and Caroll with the help from Sulamita and Lullys from São Paulo. Thanks, girls! It was definetely amazing! It was a very nice time meeting people, giving a course on Subversion with not a lots of materials but with some nice 'walk-through' with people doing real editing stuff and a talk on GTK+ followed by one on QT by Helio Chissini, who has some nice stuff on his blog. Btw, I love pyslide.

On the hacking front, I've been messing around with reimplementing a 'Debian Brasil Counter'. We used to have one I coded in a very bad-written PHP some years ago and I've decided to rewrite it using python (cherrypy+cheetah). It's going cool. Check out its svn repository.

I noticed I forgot to mention Matthew Garrett on my last post. Well, I like him and think he would be a good DPL. His proposals are good but I think he is wrong in the way to fix communication and to achieve consensus. I think we need stronger solutions for the problem.

As andrelop mentioned decko is working on packaging update-{notifier,manager}. We had a problem, though: update-manager only works with python2.4. Discussing this in #gnome-debian we came to the conclusion the best thing to do would be porting it so it would use python2.3, which is what pygtk is ready to support on Debian for now. I then patched it and it works.

Now the problem is Debian's python-apt lacks wrappers for DepCache stuff on libapt-pkg, which Michael Vogt developed for ubuntu and used on update-notifier. I talked to Matt Zimmerman and he said he'd upload a new python-apt version including this to experimental soon for us to use it, though. Thanks guys!

One thing I was thinking today was: what happened to all Progeny cool ideas? I watched their presentations on picax and componentized linux but never really heard of them again. Ubuntu has been able to echo much more 'till now, but I would really love to see the ideas guys from Progeny brought to Debconf4 being tried out. Especially, I'm sad we still could not integrate the python configlets a bit more on Debian. Now that we're working on bringin some ubuntu tools and even yast for Debian, maybe the Debian Desktop project should do some effort on bringing the configlets together for etch? =)

I definetely agree with Andrew Pollock's post: screen rocks my world!

I and my coworker coredump always have screen sessions running on the servers we administer together, and are always looking at logs and fixing problems together. This was also how we hacked the scripts that we used to convert all our users' mbox-based mailboxes to maildir some months ago when we fixed the mail server of the Ministry

I'm simply unable to imagine myself living in a world without screen.

About the vote... my ballot:

[ 6 ] Choice 1: Jonathan Walther 
[ 3 ] Choice 2: Matthew Garrett 
[ 2 ] Choice 3: Branden Robinson 
[ 1 ] Choice 4: Anthony Towns 
[ 4 ] Choice 5: Angus Lees 
[ 2 ] Choice 6: Andreas Schuldei
[ 5 ] Choice 7: None Of The Above

I was quite surprised by Anthony Towns running for the job this year. Although I voted for Branden twice now I decided Anthony Towns seems to be the one with the most concrete proposals on how to get Debian back to being a sane environment which is fun to work on. I still trust Branden would do lots of good on this matter, too, if elected. I decided to give the same trust to Andreas, too... while I think he'd not be as tough in some respects as Branden would I think he'd get results by using other strategies.

I don't know Angus a lot but he seemed to be sane enough to be ranked 4. Jonathan on the other hand has demonstrated that he does not deserve to be trusted and that he is able to completely change his "image" and opinions depending on convenience. I don't want someone like him as a DPL, ever.

Like Robert and Jose I had problems with the fontconfig upgrade, although I don't usually have them. I felt like living one year ago or so again when I saw this. Then I went back to fontconfig 2.2.3 to get this back. Someone said something like "why did it disable the autohinter?" on #gnome-debian when I showed the screenshots. My Bitstream Vera fonts are being rendered like crap, it seems. I know little about all this but will try to dig a bit into Robert's observations tomorrow morning.

In my last post I talked a bit about how I was enjoying to feel that Debian was understanding that "when we have problems we fix them with Really Good Work, not with long flamewars which end up seeming to just want to protect some kind of holy status quo".

Well, I think Anthony Towns expresses this idea in a practical and very easy to understand way.

Just finished reading the notes from the release team meeting a while ago. Controversial, for sure.

What I think about this is this is a great step on making Debian live again. I've been a developer since 2001 and I felt the same as Adrian Bunk many times... we like to see our work being rewarded, and one of the ways to feel rewarded is seeing your work being used on the Real World. This bad feeling surely made my motivation go down a lot.

OK, so we're droping support for some arches... in this regard what I think is we have very high expectations on the results but really lack comparably high expectations on the day-to-day work. Some time ago the GNOME packages were really badly shaped. They were, IMO because of exactly this reason, only marginally integrated into the system as a whole.

Then came the GNOME Team and proved that GNOME could become a very well packaged and maintained desktop inside Debian. The GNOME Team was good enough to raise Release Team's trustness in that it would respond fast and well enough to breakage and transitions, so GNOME 2.6 was allowed into testing, then 2.8...

The same then happened for KDE and to the Release Team itself through the time. Those teams make information flow high, so motivation and rewards are high as well. What I see is Debian understanding that when we have problems we fix them with Really Good Work, not with long flamewars which end up seeming to just want to protect some kind of holy status quo.

If you want your arch/package/anything considered for release, then get it ready and high-quality enough that it will be accepted in time. Show us the code. Great work! I feel my motivation regaining strength! Go, Debian, go!

About the new meme, my personal website, which runs on my mom's Debian GNU/Linux computer got these results:

<img src="http://homokaasu.org/pics/g/e4.jpg" width="175" height="80" alt="This site is certified 4% EVIL by the Gematriculator" /> | <img src="http://homokaasu.org/pics/g/g96.jpg" width="175" height="80" alt="This site is certified 96% GOOD by the Gematriculator" />

The days after CONSOL were a mix of sadness for having left such a great conference behind and joyness for meeting up with my friends again. I went to Belo Horizonte, my city, in the weekend and had lots of fun with friends and cousins with whom I haven't met for a long time.

I also spent some time updating apt-howto to finally build PDF files for Korean and Japanese thanks to Jens Seidel. I also must note that Osamu is doing loads of nice work on the debian-doc team, and has been the main person to blame for any APT-HOWTO infra-structure improvements for some months now.

I've been playing with mod_python these last days, too, before the trip to BH. We discussed, long time ago, this idea of having a localized BTS for the Debian Brasil project to be able to "proxy" bug reports in pt_BR to the official Debian BTS. I've been thinking, together with fatalerror, to actually implement the idea, and maybe do this using mod_python. I've done some initial playing with code, but still need to really understand some more about web session management and plan the way the tool will work.

This is surely going to be a nice toy, after all the apt-br-v2, which I started writing long time ago. apt-br is Debian Brasil's channel infobot but it had many glitches and pt_BR was not that natural to him. So I started playing with python-irclib and created a simple python bot to replace it. fatalerror has continued the work recently and now we have 'debconf' as our infobot, completely python, pt_BR and UTF-8 aware =).

Life is good.

Almost a month since I last posted here. It seems like I've been giving more attention to my "brazilian" blog. There you'll find lots of paragraphs reporting my adventures on CONSOL.

I've been hanging around with Debian people like damog, vorlon (who gave a nice talk in spanish on tuesday, ashaming both me and nanda, the brazilians who gave talks in english while the gringo talks in spanish =D) and gwolf. There are also lots of people with perl, python, FreeBSD and Gentoo background.

I've spoken about Free Software in Brasil and about Python/GTK+/Glade. I'm still amazed that most people I've met here speak english. This has made it easy for me to live here, because when my portuñol fails I can always talk in english.

I've also taken the time to submit one more proposal for this year's FISL's call for papers. I suggest you submit yours quickly, because they're due on february 28th! =)

After the sad 18th, I'm almost fully restored now. I'm doing the arrangements for going away from Brasília. My friends at the Ministry are working on a petition for me to stay... my boss has signed it, which makes me happy, as I have some documentation I was not fired, but decided to quit, at least =D.

We made loads of cool things this month there... we finally cleaned up the mess on the servers, I and coredump (a guy who also came from Belo Horizonte) have started from scratch on the Debian GNU/Linux servers and even though it's not yet perfect, at least it's much better than it was before, with a samba file server losing uid <-> username mapping every boot and a mail server having 150 load average peaks. Besides, we finally put the main site running on mambo, which was done by some friends, and now netcraft reports www.cidades.gov.br running 'Apache on Linux' instead of 'IIS on Linux' (uh? =D)

As cool as it was working on the servers, this still is the smallest part of my work... most of the time I have to bother with bureaucracy and on fixing bad administration problems, and this whole thing is still leaving me little time for hacking...

There are some more good news: fatalerror has accepted to take over 'Guia Pratico para o Debian GNU/Linux', a simple, practical guide to help people who already are into the GNU/Linux world coming to Debian, and is probably going to rewrite it in english now. Now I need someone to adopt apt-howto. He's also been helping me a bit with some gksu bugs and documentation, and we're probably going to be making a new release today or tomorrow which will make a number of people happy, I think.