La Salle Debain

I had a really good time at Debconf July 9th-17, but I had barely been home 15 minutes before I had my arm up a toilet. And it all went downhill from there reaching its nadir last week with an emergency filling extraction. I am now catching up and I'm at the point where I can think about blogging but obviously a blow by blow of my time at Debconf would be a bit pointless so I'll just jot down a few random bits and pieces.

Before going to Finland, I spent three days in England wallowing in nostalgia for my youth with my cousins. From London, I proceeded to Helsinki on the 8th with a brief stop in Copenhagen. Rather than sleep in the dorms I elected to stay at the Radisson Hotel in Espoo which is just a short walk from the conference venues. Not that it stopped me getting lost the first couple of days though.

Another slightly disorienting thing was how long the days were at this northern latitude. The other advantage of an extremely northern latitude, the Aurora Borealis is alas only at its best during winter.

Debian Day

Saturday July 9th, the day before the conference actually began, was designated as Debian Day. It was aimed more at the general public than insiders but it turned out most attendees were already Debian fans. Branden as DPL gave the keynote address. I noticed he used my "developers on every continent except Antarctica" line. I gave the first talk. It was basically the same "What is Debian?" introductory talk I have given several times before. Due to a technical glitch I wasn't able to use my slides but the slides were crappy anyway so it is not a big loss. It went pretty well I think. Video of my talk is available here .

There were lots of other interesting talks that day. One which particularly stuck out was by Juan Jose Amor about measuring the size of the Debian codebase. It included some interesting statistics such as if Sarge had been developed commercially, it would be worth (raise pinky to mouth Dr. Evil style) EIGHT BILLION DOLLARS. Unfortunately the presenter did not speak English well so he couldn't really answer questions.

During his talk, Andreas Barth mentioned, for the first time in public I think, that we were going to try and get Etch released by the end of 2006. This is welcome news to the many people who were fed up with sarges long release cycle.

I was also supposed to moderate a Q & A session with Debian leadership today but it got cancelled as we ran out of time.

Sunday 10th

I've gotten myself volunteered to moderate sessions, pass the mic around to audience members asking questions, that sort of thing. I did this for most of the rest of the conference.

Monday 11th

I ditched most of the presentations today to have a long conversation with Christian Perrier about Indian language support. This turned into a conversation with other people about the European constitution which turned into a conversation with other people about the war on terror and the psychology of suicide bombers. It's this type of thing I love about conferences like Debconf.

Tuesday 12th

AJ Towns gave a talk about debbugs the software behind the Debian bug tracking system . In a fit of enthusiasm I decided I want to try and add RSS support to it but I haven't followed up yet.

Wednesday 13th

No talks today. Instead there was an excursion to the fortress of Suomenlinna. I stayed at the hotel because I wasn't feeling well and I had some things to do. Plus it was really really hot. I know white people are prone to sunburn, even at my shade of brown I would have turned reddish in that kind of sun. But this is the first time I've seen people turn orange. Ouch!

Thursday 14th

The highlight of today was a very well-attended talk and Q & A session by Mark Shuttleworth concerning Ubuntu and his other endeavours. Interesting tidbit: He earns more in one month than the entire commercial Linux industry makes in a year! He said Ubuntu would try and stay in sync with Debian but wouldn't categorically pledge to it which was a bit disappointing even though I am not paranoid about their intentions. There was a formal dinner in the evening.

Friday 15th

I demonstrated my genius by absently walking into the plate glass doors of the Computer Science Building. A bloody nose resulted and even sadder, there were no cameras around to record the incident for Americas Funniest Home Videos. During the evening was the keysigning party. With around 180 participants is took several hours. And I still haven't sent out my signed keys. :-) Mattias Wadenstein made a much anticipated "Debian Cake" but alas he didn't have time to make it vegetarian so I couldn't have any.

Saturday 16th

I gave a talk about Debian-IN and Open Source in South Asia. This talk had a chequered history. First someone from Pakistan (who I'm not familiar with) was supposed to give it but he wasn't able to. So when the voting for talks happened it wasn't listed. I belatedly noticed this and offered to give it and it was added to the schedule. Unfortunately it was up against a very popular and interesting talk by Bdale. Then I started late and went over time. Still I got some people interested in Debian-IN so I'm happy. The slides from the talk are available here . In the evening I moderated an Adhoc BOF session to replace the Q & A that didn't take place on Debian Day.

Sunday 17th

Very low key today as people were already starting to leave.

Conclusion

I left early in the morning on Monday, once again via Copenhagen and London. I thoroughly enjoyed myself in HEL. Meeting many European DDs in person for the first time was fun and Finland is a lovely country to visit. I may be addicted to Laakahilo (Cloudberry Jam) So great job organizers and I look forward to the next Debconf in Mexico.

It looks like I may have given Martin Krafft the wrong idea about pronouncing the 'ja' sound in Manoj or for that matter Jaldhar. It is like the sound in the English word 'jump'. The German 'sch' I believe is much too aspirated. It seems German doesn't actually have this sound. (Neither incidently does Finnish.)

Although my daughter Shailaja has technically been attending preschool for a year, her class hasn't been doing much in the way of academics though I suppose they have learnt some valuable life skills such as the social unacceptability of lifting your dress up over your head. From next a year a more ambitious program of instruction is to be attempted.

It was felt that some sort of graduation ceremony (or congrajulation as Shailaja calls it) was in order and this Friday morning my wife and I joined the other parents for the proceedings. Unfortunately, although we were beaming with pride, the general reaction amongst the children was confusion and terror. Not Shailaja as she already has extensive experience of participating in ceremonies and rituals. But the other children it seems do not. After 45 minutes of hair pulling, screaming freakouts and pants wetting, everyone was successfully gradulated and pizza and fruit punch were served.

The picture shows Shailaja with her teachers Miss Shaheena and Miss Viviana.

I just posted a message to debian-devel asking for volunteers to take over most of the maintenance work for dovecot. I had already given up webmin and related packages and most of my perl packages to projects on Alioth. This means I am now the sole maintainer of only two minor perl modules in the official Debian distribution.

This hardly means I'm retiring though. I am still involved and in fact plan to increase my work in the YaST for Debian and Debian-IN projects. Theres' some documentation I'm interested in doing, and some work for DebConf 5. And I still intend to remain involved in my former packages. (For webmin, I'm still the de-facto maintainer.)

According to an article at MSN Health and Fitness, Jersey City (where I live) is the the third happiest city in America. The most depressed incidently, is Philadelphia.

If you want to do as Joey Hess did and import Advogato entries into your blog, you should take his advice and use the XML-RPC interface. To do so, may I suggest my WebService::Advogato perl module? I haven't gotten around to getting it in Debian yet, though the source does include a debian directory. A simple script to include all entries might look like this:

	#!/usr/bin/perl
	use strict;
	use warnings;
	use WebService::Advogato;
	
	my $client = WebService::Advogato->new('user'. 'password');
	
	my $numentries = $client->len('user');
	
	if ($numentries > 0)
	{
	  for my $index (0 .. $numentries - 1)
	  {
	    my $entry =  $client->get('user', $index);
	    my ($date_created, $date_lastupdated) = $client->getDates('user', $index);
	    # Now munge into whatever format your blog uses.
	  }
	}

Of course you should replace 'user' and 'password' with your real username and password.

The Official Debian Developers Home Page.

Btw do you like my new hackergotchi? A few days ago,
Antonio 'gnrfan' Ognio offered to redo my old one. With a name like gnrfan I was a little afraid he might draw a mullet on me but it actually came out very nicely. Thanks gnrfan!

The big news in Debian of late has been the meeting of members of the ftpmaster and release teams in Vancouver and the proposal for post-sarge releases that came out of it. This spawned a response of over 1000 messages which I've more or less ignored uptil now if for no other reason than such a monster kills IMAP threading with Dovecot. (Admittedly my mail server is rather underpowered which is a big factor.)

Well, last night I arrived in Atlanta and I was bored and couldn't sleep and my hotel had Internet access so I read the Nybbles thread. And read and read.

I have to admit that like many, my first reaction was consternation that we are "dropping architectures." I felt the same way initially as I have just gotten through telling lots of people at Linuxworld that one of the reasons Debian was so much better than Red Hat, is that we don't just drop arcitectures. But if you read the announcement and the clarifications posted afterwards, whatever dropping is to be done is possibly only temporary and if the porting teams can get their acts together, Etch may have just as many architectures as sarge. There seems to be some concern that the inclusion requirements are arbitrary or set too high but these are implementation details and it is after all just a proposal, not a fiat as some people seem to think. It will all be worked out in due course.

Why did it come to this? Unfortunately, for all our vaunted size, we simply do not have the manpower to keep all these architectures in sync and release in a timely manner. (Most Debian developers only care about their own packages. Relatively few work on "big picture" issues.) This proposal is an admission that for now we have bitten of more than we can chew and from now on growth must occur in a more restrained and well-planned manner. There is no cause for gloom and doom. We are still growing. The Debian product will not change in drastic ways.

As you can see, I now feel that the Vancouver proposal is a good thing minus a few blunders. (I mean, "Second Class Citizens"? Nobody at the meeting realized this would be a red rag to bulls?)

It's also time to think of "second class" maintainers. Many of the developers are simply not capable of/not interested in/don't have the time to do the hard work needed to convert a big blob of software into a stable, well-integrated operating system. Yet they have the same weight as people who work their arses off for the project. Tier 1 developers should get more powers to do NMUs and other things necessary to do their jobs without bureaucratic hassles. They would need to renew their status in some way at say 6 months to weed out deadbeats. Conversely Tier 2 developers would be easily be able to step up to Tier 1 if they wanted. These labels would cast no aspersions on the abilities or characters of the labelled. They would just be an indication of the amount of investment the person is able to make in the project. I have no illusions anything like this is going to be adopted anytime soon but it's something to think about.

The other big political thing going on is the 2005 DPL elections. Here's how I'm going to vote in reverse order.

(7) Jonathan Walther

He manages to alienate everyone he comes across. Not a good quality in a DPL.

(6) None of the Above.

(5) Angus Lees

Not understanding the constitutional process of nomination and failing to
provide an initial platform wasn't encouraging.

(4) Anthony Towns

Would make a great DPL but a large part of his platform involved being nice and people otherwise being trusted to do the right thing and sadly that just won't fly in the Debian we have today.

(3) Matthew Garrett

His platform intrigued me. He has a common-sense approach to the DFSG which I like. But he kind of wussed out in the debate and gave safe "politician" answers like everyone else.

(2) Andreas Schuldei

Also nice. Next! What do I have against nice people? Nothing at all in real life but Debian is a huge, sprawling, strongly opinionated bunch of people. It takes a forceful personality to sort out that kind of mess. Anyway Andreas and Branden are campaigning as a team so he may yet be in a position of influence.

(1) Branden Robinson

Branden has the qualities needed in a DPL. He is passionate about our ideals, able to express them articulately, and charismatically both within the project and to outsiders. He takes the initiative to get things done. In particular with the whole SPI treasurer debacle he did the best he could with a bad situation. Branden gets my vote.

Once again I organized Debians' booth at the East Coast Linuxworld. This year it was at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston instead of the Javits Center in New York. According to IDG this was due to a scheduling conflict not as I imagined a Mafia shakedown. They're holding it in Boston next year too. Originally I wasn't going to take part but I desperately needed to get out of the house and I was able to arrange some family/business type activities to justify the trip.

Before The Show

I almost dropped the ball on getting CD donations but luckily Bradley Glonka and the team at Linux Central were able to send us two boxes of woody CDs. Joe and Garry from Innovation Software who were so helpful to us last year also came through with 200 sarge CDs. We also had the customary t-shirts and some posters to sell. The t-shirts were $10 or $15 depending on the size. The posters were $5 (later reduced to $3) and the CDs were a $1 each (or $5 for an entire woody set.) We actually don't mind giving the CDs out for free but I have learned from experience that the freeloaders will mindlessly shovel anything free into their bags without even knowing or caring what it is. Charging a nominal fee ensures we still have something left to offer after 11am on the first day.

The "selling" almost caused a last minute emergency. The week before the expo, I got a call from IDG wondering if I intended to send in a sales tax form. Apparently the Commonwealth of Massachusetts requires you to collect sales tax as long as you are selling things even if you are a non-profit which New York state never did. Well they don't call it Taxachusetts for nothing. So we decided we were not going to sell things but "offer them in exchange for a suggested donation." John Goerzen in his capacity as SPI president provided me with an official letter documenting Debians status to wave at the Man if he attempted to oppress us. Fortunately he didn't.

Day 0 - Monday 14th

I took the Amtrak train from Newark in the morning. It was cheaper to take one that made local stops so I didn't get to Boston until mid-afternoon. Not being a frequent train traveller I was surprised to find the seats had power outlets. So I was able to while away the hours doing some work with my laptop.

I made a tactical error and arrived at South Station so I had to take a taxi to the Hynes Center. (Back Bay Station would have been within walking distance.) Once again I got an interesting taxi driver, an older Greek gentleman who insisted on playing Peleponnesian Name That Tune with me. Which is not so bad in of itself except when I got one wrong (i.e. every time) he would take both hands off the wheel and start gesticulating wildly. I tried to deflect him by asking where he stood on the Julian versus Gregorian calendar controversy but he was not to be put off. Luckily I did arrive in one piece.

It is my pet theory that the health of the Linux industry can be guaged by the location of the .org pavilion (we were in booth #8.) When times are tough IDG puts us up in the front. But when the going is good, the .org pavilion is off in a corner so the bejewelled and perfumed corporate attendees passing by in their sedan chairs are not forced to have to look at us noisome community peasants. 2005 must be a banner year because we were actually seperated by a wall from the rest of the show.

At the booth I was joined by Troy Murray, a local Debian user who volunteered to help us. Once again Sun had kindly let us borrow a machine (a Sunblade 1500) so we went to their booth and picked it up. We were later joined by Ari Pollak who provided the flyers and posters. Matt Taggart was unable to attend but he had sent the t-shirts via the Hewlett-Packard booth so we went and picked them up from there.

Afterwards I went and found my hotel. The room smelled of cheese, there were no toiletries, and neither the remote control for the TV or the wifi worked but it was cheap and I managed to get my first 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep since my son was born in November so I didn't mind.

Day 1 - Tuesday 15

The hotel was only providing a ridiculously overpriced continental breakfast so I walked around a bit in the morning in search of something better/cheaper. The area roundabout also contains the Boston Public Library and the headquarters of the church of Christian Science. The Convention Center is part of a larger edifice called the Prudential Center which also contains a mall. I located a Dunkin Donuts and appropriately fortified I headed to the show. The food selection in the expo hall itself was rather anemic especially for a vegetarian (The staff didn't rewally seem to understand the concept. overheard: "It's like a chicken sandwich but without chicken") The crepe lady from the Javits center was sorely missed.

We were joined by David Nusinow and the four of us were kept busy The first day is usually the busiest and this year was no exception. By the end of the day we had collected $1213 and were out of most of our good CDs.

I walked around the show floor a bit and the mood seemed to be good. We are still not quite back to dot-com era levels of exuberence though. Better swag then last year but again not dot-com era level. The only unusual item was a Bitdefender condom. (Bitdefender protects your bits geddit?) I bought a Mozilla Firefox stuffed toy for my daughter.

Day2 - Wednesday 16

Today we were joined by Mako Hill who also brought some much-needed Ubuntu CDs to replenish our dwindling stocks. Later on Andres Salomon came by to help out too. Today we made $610 for the project.

As you might know, David Harris and Mako are the authors of the Debian 3.1 Bible to which I also contributed a few chapters. We met Debra our editor from Wiley who wanted to say hello and go over a few things. Quite a few visitors to our booth asked about the availability of Debian books but unfortunately even though it is ready, the publisher can't put it out there until sarge is atleast frozen. So fix those remaining bugs Debian people!

A longstanding tradition in the Debian booth is that we get a computer from Sun and then fail to get Debian installed on it. This time thanks to Ari (with much appreciated help from Roland Mainz of x.org) we actually managed to get it to work!

Marty from Etherboot organized a party for FOSS people after the show which was underwritten by Google (who apparently were recruiting there. Very clever.) The others went but I headed off to Brookline for a more boring engagement.

Day 3 - Thursday 17

Usually the last day is pretty dead but this year there was a fair amount of traffic. We made $426 which is actually pretty good considering we had very little left to sell by this point. The grand total for the entire three days was $2249 which if I recall is slightly better than last year.

The best part of the show is meeting users and hearing the cool things they are doing with Debian. Again this year, recogniton of the Debian name is increasing. There were still a quite a few people who needed an explanation but many more who had atleast heard of us either directly or through some Debian-based distro such as Ubuntu or Knoppix, Linspire, Mepis (I met Warren Woodford of Mepis) and Xandros. It looks like the derivatives are doing a pretty good job of giving us credit for our work. Debian and derivatives were also heavily featured elsewhere in the .org pavilion.

Of course the number one question was when sarge is going to be released. But people were strangely acceptant of my vague excuses. Either they truly believe sarge is just around the corner or they've given up all hope.

All in all the experience was very good and I hope next year will be
even better.

Hmm I haven't blogged for a while. What have I been up to?

January marked my 8th anniversary as a Debian developer. And I became a saint at the Perl Monastery.

A belated contribution to some memes:

I am nerdier than 82% of all people. Are you nerdier? Click here to find out!

I am 86% loser. What about you? Click here to find out!

What is your weird quotient? Click to find out!

Once again I am organizing the Debian presence at Linuxworld which has abandoned its' traditional New York location for Boston this year. I arrived Monday afternoon and spent a couple of hours setting things up with Troy Murray and Ari Pollak. The show runs from Tuesday 15th to Thursday 17th. Debian is in booth #8 in the .org pavilion. If you would like to drop by and say hello or get cool Debian swag (we have t-shirts, posters, and CDs) and you don't already have a pass, you can download one from here.