Over the last few weeks, I've implemented some new features in DDPO. The system, originally written by Igor Genibel, is a mix of Python, Perl, and PHP generated from WML, so it's quite interesting to see how these languages interact.

The main new features are the ability to add arbitrary packages to the list displayed, and an automatic listing of all NMUs and sponsored uploads in the new "uploads" section. (Thanks to Ryan Murray, Joerg Jaspert, and Joey Schulze for helping fix the projectb for that!) I won't repeat the details here, read the d-d-a posting for that. Another nice thing is the link to Ian Lynagh's popcon graphs which I had mostly ignored so far.

Have a look at my DDPO page to see the new features - feedback welcome!

Random list of things that happened:

• the day before, Werner Koch gave a talk on GnuPG
• gpg --list-keys has a short equivalent (gpg -k), it's just not documented
• I became an AM
• I got my first applicant
• entering an "appointment" in my new mobile phone does not make it ring at that time. Use "alarm" if you want to get woken up.
• thanks to weasel, most of us now have fancy black light LED thingies that we will use to really check IDs at keysigning-parties
• I uploaded a new signing-party release and at the same time, XTaran filed a new bug
• we discussed lots of stuff:
  • ways of improving the PTS
  • ways of improving the NM process
  • ways of maintaining orphaned packages (which actually turned out to be "how can we make sponsoring easier")
  • what the QA group can to for security
  • how not to release
• barbecue, tea, beer
• keysigning
• I uploaded a package for XTaran and at the same time, djpig filed a new RC bug on it
• lack of sleep
• meeting lots of nice people

Photos to come.

[Update 23:42 CET] Photos are online.

$ finger myon@db.debian.org
[db.debian.org]
uid=myon,ou=users,dc=debian,dc=org
First name: Christoph
Last name: Berg
Email: Christoph Berg <myon@debian.org>

:-)

Thanks to all who sponsored uploads for me during the NM phase (in random order): René Engelhard, Frank Küster, Gerfried Fuchs, Peter Palfrader, Alexander Wirt, Brian Nelson, Jörg Jaspert, and Marc Brockschmidt. The folks on #debian.de always made me cheer up and are great fun to hang around with. Thank you girls and guys!

Next event: the QA meeting in Darmstadt.

With the help of Alexander Schmehl I've created a Debian Quiz. Test your knowledge about Debian's distribution, people, mailing lists, etc.!

PS: Alex, you could have as well told me the reason why I have to use a TP cable going to your router right now instead of blogging it :-)

Planet posters and readers might be interested in my proposal in #323227: new list: debian-planet to distribute planet.debian.org postings; archive to enable searching.

Please follow-up on -devel for comments.

I don't like killfiles and /ignore mainly due to the fact that it's very confusing to see only one side of a conversation afterwards. I'm using some kind of "greylisting". For email, I have a procmail recipe that looks like:

# killfile
:0fhw
* !^Status:
* ^From: .*<(noob@bla.com|luser@foo.org|troll@evil.net)>
| formail -i"Status: RO"

This will mark the messages as read but leaves all threads intact. (I'm using mbox folders.) That way, I'm not bothered to read the messages unless I really want to.

In irssi, I have a /hide macro:

hide    color set $0 15 ; color save

Together with a patched version of nickcolor.pl, this will color the nick in light grey. Since that is hardly readable on white background, I can only see which troll is talking there if I have a close look.

The social event on Friday night was nice - this year, the queue in front of the buffet wasn't 50m long. At one of the sillier moments we took pictures for Hot Alfie and Hot enrico (ITPs to be submitted X-).

The main event on Saturday was the keysigning party. Peter tried a little variation of the usual "all line up" scheme by initializing it with participants 70 to 1 on the right side and 71 to 154 on the left. Surprisingly, everyone found their place quite fast and we were finished in some 80min. caff seems to be a real success this year, I've already received signatures from some 20 people using it. cabot is still used used by some. I found most other systems either hard to handle (requiring me to sign a challenge several times per key or send mail "from" a uid) or broken (someone claimed one of my keys was signing-only which isn't true). caff cannot yet handle multiple keys in batch, so I will probably implement that before having to sign every key twice.

We started dismantling the booth around 5pm, which caused a last-minute rush for the Debian T-shirts. Apparently, we sold the coolest on the whole fair :-) Back at home at 9pm, I was quite exhausted, but managed to rename all pictures and remove some of the less interesting. If I got some names wrong or omitted some, please tell me.

Overall, Saturday saw more "end users" at the booth compared to the days before, but certainly less than 2004. I don't know how many visitors managed to get one of the free "eticket" invitations, but the default 15€ per day certainly kept some away. If this trend continues, and a good part of the LinuxTag staff is quitting as rumors say, maybe there won't be a LinuxTag 2006 - which would really be sad.

[Update 21:26 UTC: image URLs fixed]

Yesterday evening saw the KALUG party which resulted in quite a lot of funny pictures of Debian folks. Alexander Schmehl won an "Etch prerelease". Later during the night, for what was declared the official German Sarge release party, Martin Zobel-Helas and Alexander Schmehl had prepared a Debian quiz show. People from the audience were "elected" to answer questions ranging from "bring sarge/slink/hamm/rex in the right order" to "how many signatures does Peter Palfrader have on his primary key?"

This morning, I took the level 101 LPI exam. The questions were mostly simple ("name a command that lists all PCI devices"), but some were outdated (USB on Linux 2.2) or wrong (the command "export set DISPLAY=:0.1" does not really make sense). The results will only be available in a few weeks, but I'm sure I passed even without any training before.

Next thing to happen: the social event.

When my brother and I arrived at the LinuxTag site on Tuesday evening, the booth was already half way set up and they were waiting for the remaining parts to arrive. Most had already had dinner, so those few who hadn't yet left for Gigi's restaurant (who can be said to be a Debian fan, since he remembers the "swirl" guys from last year). When we returned, the vitrine was set up too :-)

During the last Debian events, we had always maintained a tick list for "when will Sarge arrive?" questions. Fact was, that this was also the most common question on Wednesday, since the DVDs created for the LinuxTag didn't arrive like promised and we had to tell people to come back later.

Today was Debian Day I with talks by Joey on Debian security, Luk on i18n/l10n, Goswin on the Debian archive structure, Martin on volatile, Meike on debian-women, and Enrico on custom Debian distributions. Most of the talks were quite nice to hear and well organised. I took some pictures of the booth and the talks. (Sorry, not yet renamed/rotated/pruned.)

[Update 2005-06-24: Goswins talk was on the Debian archive structure, new pictures added, pictures rotated.]

Adam: there's randomize-lines:

Package: randomize-lines
Maintainer: Arthur de Jong 
Description: randomize lines of input text
 rl is a command-line tool that reads lines from an input file or stdin,
 randomizes the lines and outputs a specified number of lines. It does this
 with only a single pass over the input while trying to use as little memory
 as possible.
 .
 Currently randomize-lines is under development and command-line arguments
 may change slightly until a 1.0 release is made.

The sdate ITP sparked a little flamewar on -devel, but the feedback was positive enough so I went ahead. NEW processing is lightning fast these days:

18793   + 0,2K Sep 4254  9:58 Archive Adminis cb         Processing of sdate_0.2_multi.changes
18794   + 1,5K Sep 4254 10:02 Debian Installe cb         sdate_0.2_multi.changes is NEW
18795   + 0,4K Sep 4254 11:40 Debian Installe cb         sdate_0.2_multi.changes ACCEPTED

Thanks to Marc Brockschmidt for sponsoring the upload and Joerg Jaspert for the ftp-master part.

Oh, here's the current time: So Sep 4254 13:33:12 CEST 1993

I've updated my NM graphs. There were some cases where the advocate and AM entries in the NM database didn't match the Debian user name, so some people appeared with two different names. There are still lots of unconnected components in the advocate graph, which is because the "advocate" field in the NM database was added only later, and the older entries all have "sunset" as advocate which I skip when generating the graphs. If you want your advocate listed, or have advocated someone back then, please tell me so I can add that to my scripts.

Wouter mentioned that besides neato there was springgraph to create this type of graph. Coincidentally, I happened to adopt that package last week and as upstream hasn't updated it for some years, I'm probably also its new upstream. However, I haven't managed yet to produce any useful output on the NM graphs with it yet (it's still chewing on advocate.dot while I'm writing this), so I'll stick to neato for the time being. (Since graphviz is now free, I don't have any qualms against doing so.)

On a sidenote, I'm wondering how many software patents I'm touching with these scripts in our fine banana republic.

I've created two graphs that show who-advocated-whom and who-was-whose-AM for the NM process. Hopefully, I'll appear in there soon, too :-)

The remaining parts of my NM process went through surprisingly well. Marc had only a few points that I needed to clarify. He (HE) found some minor bugs in my debian/rules files and a missing copyright attribution that I fixed this evening. My application is now waiting for front desk approval. Thanks Marc for being such a responsive AM!

Afterwards, I went over the NM templates from alioth's CVS and corrected some stuff that I had spotted while I was answering the questions. The patch is mostly reformatting and grammar fixes, but got quite big:

[0] cb@planck:~/debian/newmaint/templates $LC_ALL=C wc nm_* dak.txt | tail -1
  921  6452 39307 total
[0] cb@planck:~/debian/newmaint/templates $wc nm-templates.patch
  918  6947 42773 nm-templates.patch

Let's hope it helps future applicants.

I was assigned an AM last Friday. Marc sent me the P&P questions on Sunday, and I was able to get through all immediately, so that I spent this afternoon on T&S. The first P&P half is really brain-damaging when you have to read all that legalese stuff. The second half was definitely more fun, and the first T&S part also. Now it's getting harder again, but it looks like I should be able to get through the rest of T&S quickly. Then there's the packages check left. The next endeavour2 should be released soon - let's see if it comes in time.

Today, the booth was a bit busier than yesterday, but we still had plenty of time to spend on other stuff. Today's good news was that mutt development seems to have started again and 1.5.7 should be released on Friday.

In the meantime, I'm back in Saarbrücken and put some pictures I took on the event on my website.

Yesterday evening we arrived in Luxembourg. It is a really beautiful city with lots of bridges and old castle-like buildings. The youth hostel there has a friendly staff and can really be recommended.

This morning we arrived a the LinuxDays.lu site and set up the Debian booth. We brought several boxes along, but didn't set up all yet since so far Alex and me are the only staff personnel yet. Just opposite is the symlink.ch booth, and some guys from quintessenz are just setting up their's. So far, I haven't really spotted one thing: visitors. It looks like all people here are either exhibitors or staff. Maybe the others are all hiding in the IPv6 tutorial...

In the meantime, I'm upgrading my old alpha box that suffered from random memory failures when I tried last. It looks like disassembling the case and cleaning all contacts helped. The harddisk is only 500MB, so I probably won't be able to upgrade to XFree 4 and Firefox, not to mention that it's still running a 2.2 kernel from 1999. It's still a nice ssh terminal, maybe also for XDMCP.

While writing this, some visitors are dropping in, but still not that much that we wouldn't have time for reducing mail backlog and IRCing.