still don’t have a title

17 years… I guess the puberty is almost a thing of the past and you’re getting all grown up and stuff. You certainly changed for the better in the last years. Ok, a few rough edges here and there but overall a quite impressive development. You’re already forking regularly and even your offspring is quite handsome. No wonders with those genes if you ask me.

Thanks to Ian for starting probably the best Linux distribution out there. I hope you are proud of what you’ve started (I certainly was when I met you two years ago) and someone is killing a few beers with you right now.

Also big thanks to all the Debian Developers, Maintainers and contributors for making Debian what it is today. Keep up the good work!

DebConf was really an awesome conference. I’m happy that I have finally met so many of the fellow Debian people I only knew from the mailing lists or planet. There where lot’s of interesting talks, the hacklabs where always busy, and the overall atmosphere was very good. Now that I’m back in Berlin, I’m already missing it — I’m by the way also missing my luggage which is apparently still at the JFK airport.

This was my first DebConf, but definitively not my last. I encourage people who never made it to DebConf: Get your butt up and register for the next conference! You don’t know what you’re missing. If money is an issue: there is a sponsoring which you can apply for and chances are good that you’ll get at least partially sponsored.

Big thanks to all the volunteers who helped to organize and run this conference and to SPI for sponsoring my trip, food and accommodation!

I’m looking forward seeing some of you again in three weeks at Steve’s place in Cambridge for a nice BBQ and the rest of you next year in Bosnia and Herzegovina!

Second day in the big city and after the obligatory pancakes, scrambled eggs and bacon breakfast, I spend almost the entire day in the hacklab fixing the documentation for the debbugs SOAP interface. Thanks to Don I think I finally have the get_status part at an accurate state. Accordingly I was very busy making changes in python-debianbts which uses the SOAP interface to query the BTS. Some Bugreport attributes disappeared, others got their data type fixed, Unittests where added and docstrings updated. Finally I uploaded the new version to unstable.

Between that mess I met a lot of nice people, and heard a talk whose slides consisted almost entirely of lolcat images — which was of course awesome! I definitively have to try that in one of my next scientific talks.

Hopefully tomorrow I’ll find some time to actually prepare my talk.

Awesome! Thanks to all the sponsors and all the people helping to organize this year’s DebConf for making it happen!

See you soon in New York City!

Today I received a mail from the DebConf Travel Sponsorship Team and they informed me that I may get partially (or fully) sponsored. Ok that’s a bit vague for now, but that also means that I may come to Debconf 10 — yeah!

I also applied for this Debconf Newbies thingy, as this will be the first DebConf for me, but unfortunately there where too many applicants and not enough money and they had to decline my request.

Dear Lazyweb,

does anyone know how to run gnome applets in KDE? I’m talking about byzanz which is a software to record your desktop in an animated gif, ogg or Flash format. It provides a command line and a gnome applet, which apparently only works under Gnome. Is there a workaround to make gnome applets run under KDE as well?

This year again, I’m proposing a project for this year’s Summer of Code. Very much like my last year’s proposal, it is about adding submit- and manipulation capabilities to debbugs’ SOAP interface. The idea for this project is to add another way to communicate with our bug tracking system than email. Since we already have a read-only SOAP interface, it seems natural to add write-capabilities. Libraries like python-debianbts would adopt those features and end user applications like reportbug or reportbug-ng could use it to enhance usability.

One student has already applied. Others are also very welcome — but be quick, the deadline for student applications is April 9th at 19:00 UTC.

For a few weeks now, aptitude is really slow updating the package list — downloading the lists is actually fast as normal but it always waits for a minute or so with a 99% [Warten auf Kopfzeilen] (Waiting for headers) message. I tried apt-get update — same problem.

Now the funny thing is: LANG=C apt-get update or LANG=C aptitude -u works just fine! I also tested with LANG=de_DE, it_IT, fr_FR and even en_US — always slow, so it looks it always occurs when LANG is not set to C?

Anyone else noticed this problem? I skimmed through the bug reports of apt, but didn’t find a similar bug.

Update: Looks like google-chrome is the problem! Commenting out the content of /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list, as Jaime suggested in the comments, everything worked fine again.

Today I finally found the reason why the table in reportbug-ng was not always sorted correctly. The fix was trivial and I’m happy it’s finally corrected. As announced last week, reportbug-ng now also can optionally hide closed bugs, which makes reportbug-ng together with the complex queries a great tool for finding easy NMU candidates.

To play around with those new features, I also did 5 lazy NMUs today. Most of them where fixes for FTBFS/RC bugs which had already a patch in the BTS.

Until today you could only use reportbug-ng to query the BTS with simple queries like “packagename”, “bugnumber”, “tag:patch”, etc. But the BTS actually supports composite queries like “severity:grave tag:patch” which returns bugreports with severity grave and a patch. The underlying Python library python-debianbts also supported this right from the start, but reportbug-ng did not make use of it.

Last weekend I finally had the time to fix that and the result is on it’s way to unstable.

Composite queries provide a very convenient way to find cheap NMU candidates: the query "severity:critical severity:grave severity:serious tag:patch" will return release critical bugs which have a patch. Now you can just go through this list, pick an open bug, test the patch and do what’s necessary to release Squeeze in time.

Next item on my list is an option to hide closed bugs, maybe next weekend.