Mon, 06 Oct 2008
What you can do for Lenny
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.
Well, it's pretty hard to estimate, how fast RC bugs will be fixed, and apparently our release team was 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
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 toLenny
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:- Make backups
- Change your /etc/apt/sources.list
- Run aptitude update to get information about new packages
- Run aptitude install dpkg aptitude apt to install the newest package management
- Run aptitude full-upgrade
- Speaking of the release notes: 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.
- Install the package devscripts (you'll need
the version provided by backports.org, 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 these bugs
fixed :)
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 to fix it, yet. Bug 497290 for example didn't need deep technical skills. It just needed someone with some time to collect the needed data for the copyright file. - 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 or the debian doc mailing list if there's no local mailing list.
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
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. 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).
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
. 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.
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 intoLenny
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 ;)
postet at 17:13 into [Debian] permanent link
Wed, 01 Oct 2008
I'm done
I'm well aware of the irony of becoming a bachelor after getting married.
postet at 11:07 into [Debian/other] permanent link
Tue, 23 Sep 2008
Slightly dramatized...
You know, that you did the right thing, when you leave the company
building on your last working day, and the first thing comming to your mind
is: Free at
last!
postet at 20:04 into [Debian/other] permanent link
Thu, 04 Sep 2008
Debian not complying to licenses
Daniel Baumann writes,
that Debian wouldn't comply to some licenses due to embeded copies of
syslinux binaries in its debian-cd package. To be
exact he wrote: [..] if debian-cd is embedding a syslinux binary with a
different version, it must contain the sources for it [..]
(accentuation by me).
And -- since both debian-cd and syslinux are licensed under the terms of
the GNU General Public Licences 2 (as statet in its copyright
file) -- he is wrong. To comply to the license it is completely okay
to Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to
give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically
performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the
corresponding source code, [..]
. (Section 3b).
To the best of my knowledge we do archive all sources of all uploads
(even if not public accessible, ask an ftp-master for details about
source-morgue
). So we do
comply to the license.
Update: source-morgue
doesn't guarantee all sources to be
present. But all the syslinux sources mentioned by Daniel are present.
PS: Of course that doesn't mean embeding a binary is okay policy wise...
PS2: In future it's planed to have snapshot.debian.org for that; don't know about the state of that, yet.
postet at 21:07 into [Debian] permanent link
Fri, 29 Aug 2008
How to code... not!
The other day I had the "pleasure" to debug some PHP code. It always showed the very useful error message Database Error.
As it turned out, this error message is printed out at over 38 (!) different places of the PHP script I had to debug. It also included several other PHP scripts, which printed the very same error message.
Please, if you are to lazy to print useful error messages, at least make them unique, so the poor soul who got the task to debug your stuff knows more or less where the error happens. Even numbering all your Database Errors would have helped a bit...
postet at 16:39 into [Debian] permanent link
Tue, 19 Aug 2008
Why free is better than open
You might have noticed, that the latest issue of the Debian Project News was delayed. It where ready - more or less in time (thanks for those helping us), but for some reason it didn't passed the spam filters of our listserver.
Today listmaster explained we why. The reason: I mentioned and linked to a Debian birthday party, which was celebrated virtually in second live. It took place on their free and open Island which has the URL www.freeandopenisland.org.
Noticed anything? I'll write it down again: www.freeandopenisland.org.
That's why free is better than open ;)
PS: The pictures of that party look kind of cool. A virtual party in a virtual world where virtual people wear virtual Debian T-Shirts...
postet at 22:28 into [Debian] permanent link
Mon, 18 Aug 2008
How to make my live easier...
... (at least concerning the Debian Project News):
Often when reading planet I notice something which might be interesting for the next issue of the Debian Project News. Often I don't write something up right now, but just add a link to that on the todo list.
So when finally writing the DPN, I often end up with the link to a blog not mentioning to whom it belongs. It's quite difficult to write an article about someone bringing up a topic, without mentioning who it was ;)
So pretty please: If you want to make our life easier, make sure that the HTML version of your blog mentions somewhere who you are. Linking to a contact page is nice, but is still more work for us. Linking to your ASCII armored GPG-key is... well... even more work.
Thanks!
postet at 19:58 into [Debian] permanent link
Mon, 11 Aug 2008
Thanks to the DebConf video team
I'm not attending DebConf. I don't have much time these days :(
But if I can, I enjoy watching the video streams and participating via IRC.
So many thanks to the DebConf video team!
By the way: Something that seems to haven't found it's way to planet, yet: You can send kudos to the video team at http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf8/Videoteam/Thanks! Please add something nice to keep them motivated; they are doing a HUGE job!
postet at 22:05 into [Debian/events] permanent link
Sun, 10 Aug 2008
Bits from the DPN editors
It's more or less four months since I proposed to resurrect our newsletter. 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 here).
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 here . 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 here.
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
- Jörg Jaspert
- Jon Evans
- 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!)
postet at 22:30 into [Debian] permanent link