La Salle Debain

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.)

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.

Are you ready to rock?

I said ARE YOU READY TO RAWK?!!

No? Well are you ready to see a demonstration of the new Debian installer then?

I've been visiting a number of Linux user groups this year and today I was the guest of the Greater Hartford GNU/Linux User Group. (GHGLUG) Unfortunately there isn't a direct route from Jersey City to Hartford and I am averse to driving long distances if I can help it so I ended up taking the Gereyhound bus, a four hour ride each way. But it was worth it I think. There were about 20 people in the audience. Not the biggest crowd I've spoken too but a decent number especially considering the hurricane related bad weather the East coast of the US is still suffering from. I did a demo of the new installer which people found to be suitably impressive and took questions about the project. And finally I participated in a keysigning. I had a really good time and I hope my hosts did too.

Mike Newman of GHGLUG took this picture of the presentation.

I threaten to do this every now and again but now I've finally done it. I've orphaned all my webmin/usermin packages. Why now? It's not that I have bad relations with the upstream maintainer. On the contrary Jamie has been very helpul and responsive to Debian needs. It's not the users. As far as I can tell webmin is very popular and the users I've talked to have been very appreciative of my work. It's not the code itself. Although webmin for portability and compatability reasons is written a very grotty subset of perl, I get it and can work with it.

No I'm just losing interest in it for reason I can't quite put my finger on. Lately I've had to struggle to summon up the enthusiasm to work on it particularly because there are several other things I'd like to do for Debian--particularly Debian-IN. I decided that it is not fair to the author, users or myself to let the packages rot. So I fixed a bunch of bugs, uploaded the latest versions, and let them go.

Until proper new maintainers are found I do intend to keep an eye on the packages so they don't deteriorate too badly. For instance as soon as the current packages migrate to testing, I'll do another release to fix an RC bug and add some upstream bugfixes. But hopefully someone (or a group) will step up and take over.

Well everyone is doing it. Here are my results.

• Wackiness: 24/100
• Rationality: 70/100
• Constructiveness: 50/100
• Leadership: 52/100

You are an SRDF--Sober Rational Destructive Follower. This makes you a font of knowledge. You are cool, analytical, intelligent and completely unfunny. Sometimes you slice through conversation with a cutting observation that causes silence and sidelong glances. You make a strong and lasting impression on everyone you meet, the quality of which depends more on their personality than yours.

You may feel persecuted, as you can become a target for fun. Still, you are focused enough on your work and secure enough in your abilities not to worry overly.

You are productive and invaluable to those you work for. You are loyal, steadfast, and conscientious. Your grooming is impeccable. You are in good shape.

You are kind of a tool, but you get things done. You are probably a week away from snapping.

I'm in Connecticut again for the second half of the perl class I'm teaching for Innovation Software Group. Last night I also gave a talk to the Southern Connecticut Open Source User Group SCOSUG. By now I've developed a standard song and dance mainly demoing the new installer. The audience (which I'm told was larger than usual for this type of event) were really impressed. If we can integrate something like Red Hat's kickstart into the installer, it will be unbeatable. There were also the usual questions about when sarge was going to be released. So I was happy to be able to show the message from the release team stating that we are aiming for mid-september.

I'm in North Haven Ct, teaching an introductary class in perl for Innovation Software Group who you may remember as the fine people who helped us out so much at Linuxworld. It's an all day class. Yesterday was the first day, it continues till wednesday, then we break for a week and do another Monday-Wednesday session.

The students are mostly professionals from nearby Yale university so they're very bright and motivated people. We're having fun.

Remember the article I wrote on Debian in the May issue of Linuxworld Magazine? (It's on pages 44-47.) Well, Uri Scharf has translated it into Hebrew.

This evening I gave a talk to the Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group (MHVLUG) in Poughkeepsie, New York about what's going on in Debian these days and what's coming up in sarge. I did a live demo of the new installer which suitably impressed the audience and made the requisite quota of nerdy jokes which, um, probably didn't. But they laughed so I choose to keep my self-reputation as a comedic genius intact. There were a lot of good, interesting questions from the audience then we had a small keysigning followed by dinner and lively conversation at a local restaurant. Poughkeepsie is a couple of hours away by train from Jersey City so I didn't get back home until 1:30am but I had a really great time. Thanks to Joe Appuzo and the LUG members for inviting me.

So pathetic bandwagon-jumper that I am here are my contributions to various silly things.

-- This is the I am Debian logo you may have seen in my Advogato diary. If you're going to use it please copy it to your own server rather han linking to mine.

-- My hackergotchi head.

"Wait. Want to find out what I'm offering you? Read me"

-- Page 23, line 5 of "The Demolished Man" by Alfred Bester.

I even started a license fight on debian-devel.

Baaaaa!