debian

Seeing this makes me very happy. It's taken us a couple of years to get to this point but we've finally made it, mostly thanks to the dedication and persistence of Julien and Brad.

After over 7 years of working on it off and on, I'm looking for somebody to help maintain (and eventually take over) CtrlProxy. I started working on CtrlProxy somewhere in 2002, only a short while after Wilmer started hacking on BitlBee. If I remember correctly I started working on it because I didn't want to run a separate dircproxy (the only real competitor at the time) instance (with configuration) for each IRC network that I connected to. It was also just a good excuse to play with the IRC protocol a bit.

Over the years, CtrlProxy has served as a playground for me to try out new and interesting things. It's been rewritten or severely refactored several times in its early history, the latest time being the 3.0 release (from 2005). I've tried different build systems, I've tried different implementation languages, I've tried different configuration file formats, I've tried different support libraries, I've tried different version control systems, I've tried different documentation formats. So while it's definitely been a very educational project for me personally, I haven't really had the time or the interest to dedicate to the project that it deserved during the last few years. This was mostly because there were other more interesting FOSS projects I spent my spare cycles on.

These days there are plenty of other good IRC proxies out there, such as BIP, so I doubt CtrlProxy will be missed if it were to disappear. Despite that, if anybody is interested in taking over, please send me an email (jelmer@samba.org) or contact me on IRC (jelmer on the OFTC and Freenode networks).

cp: Anathema - Shroud of False

So far I'm very much enjoying my first DebCamp / DebConf. It's nice to finally meet a lot of people in person that I have worked together with or talked to on IRC in the last few years. Cáceres is a relatively small town with a nice old city center.

I arrived early for DebCamp and spent the first few days here working on fixing bugs in the Bazaar and Samba packages as well as discussing the integration between Samba 4 and Kerberos with Sam (both in general and on Debian specifically). In trying to set up a Samba 4 domain we found a number of bugs in the provisioning script, most of which seem to be fixed now.

In the last few days I've mostly worked on getting Samba 4 and OpenChange ready to go into Sid (they're in experimental only at the moment) and have discussed bzr-builddeb and related Bazaar issues with James.

My identi.ca feed is now also being forwarded to twitter here: http://twitter.com/ctrlsoft.

cp: Pixies - Velouria

I'm looking forward to going to my first DebCamp/DebConf. I won't be giving a talk, but I hope to work together with others on integrating Samba 3 and 4 better with the rest of the system and VCS integration.

After spending a little bit more than three years in the Debian New Maintainers queue, I finally became a Debian Developer.

Many thanks to the various people who have helped me through NM and have sponsored me over the past few years.

% bzr branch deb:line6-usb-source debian
Retrieving Vcs locating from line6-usb-source Debian version 0.7.4-1
Branched 354 revision(s).
% bzr merge-upstream https://line6linux.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/line6linux/driver/trunk
All changes applied successfully.
Using version string 0.7.4+svn511 for upstream branch.
The new upstream version has been imported. You should now update the changelog (try dch -v 0.7.4+svn511-1 "New upstream snapshot."), resolve any conflicts, and then commit.
% dch -v 0.7.4+svn511-1 "New upstream snapshot.
% bzr builddeb
Building using working tree
Preparing the build area: ../build-area
Purging the build dir: ../build-area/line6-usb-0.7.4+svn511
[...]
Placing result in /home/jelmer/bzr/line6-usb/result
% ls ../result
line6-usb_0.7.4+svn511-1_amd64.changes line6-usb_0.7.4+svn511-1.dsc
line6-usb-source_0.7.4+svn511-1_all.deb
line6-usb_0.7.4+svn511-1.diff.gz line6-usb_0.7.4+svn511.orig.tar.gz

cp: Phideaux - Microdeath Softstar

This slightly evil hack to bzr-svn allows using bzr-builddeb as a drop-in replacement for svn-buildpackage, making it recognize the "mergeWithUpstream" property svn-buildpackage uses.

cp: Jeff Healey - Mess O' Blues

Srini writes that a preview of the Evolution OpenChange plugin has just been published. This plugin is now developed in the Evolution Subversion repository, but is based on the original plugin that was written by the Epitech team that worked for the OpenChange project this year.

I've packaged new snapshots of Samba and OpenChange for Debian/Ubuntu, available from my personal apt repository and hopefully soon also from Debian experimental.

Update: These packages are now in Debian experimental as well as the upcoming Intrepid release of Ubuntu. I have removed them from my personal repository because of disk quota.

After being ill on and off for a couple of days, I'm now feeling a lot better and am happily hacking again. I released CtrlProxy 3.0.4 yesterday, which mainly fixes a bunch of bugs and simplifies the configuration.

It's taking me more than a year and a half to become a Debian Developer, at first due to assignment being slow and my AM being unresponsive, in the last few months due to the fact that I haven't spent enough time working through P&P. Meanwhile, I've been added to the Debian Maintainers keyring, merely *7 hours* after applying. Thanks to my sponsors and the DM keyring maintainers for making this so quick :-)

For those not familiar with the difference between a Debian Developer and a Debian Maintainer: a Debian Maintainer is allowed to upload new versions of package for which he or she is maintainer, but can not upload new packages that are not in Debian yet without the help from a Debian Developer or for example participate in votes within Debian. The status of Debian Maintainer was added last month after it was endorsed by the project.

cp: Caravan - In the Land of Pink and Grey - It's Likely to have a Name Next Week

Thanks to one of the maintainers of Subversion in Debian, Peter Samuelson, for backporting some of my fixes to the Python bindings in 1.4 to Debian's Python Subversion package. This means bzr-svn will hopefully be usable in Debian etch.

In reaction to the Novell<->Microsoft deal that creates first- and second-class citizens in the Free Software world, the Samba team has requested Novell to reconsider.

In somewhat more personal news, I found out yesterday I'm allergic to house dust mite and have a mild form of hayfever. Apparently I have to look forward to spending more time cleaning :-/

I spent most of my weekend at a-eskwadraat, for the Debian Bugsquashing Party and the UKP (qualifying round for the national championships), right after I got back from New York. Unfortunately my jetlag caught up with me on the sunday, so I overslept and woke up around four. :-(

My contribution to the BSP was small; I didn't fix any release-critical bugs though I did work on getting the next CtrlProxy out, which should fix at least one RC bug.

Currently playing: The Black Crowes - Struttin' Blues

Update(15 October): Oops, looks like I still had this entry marked as "Draft" instead of "Publish"

I'll be participating in the Google Summer of Code again this year. My project this time is Kerberos integration in CUPS.

My Debian application also finally got moving, after a little less than half a year. Hopefully I can get through this quickly.

Currently Playing: Counting Crows - Goodnight Elizabeth

In the past week, we have migrated the Debian packaging for Samba 4 to the SVN repository of the Debian Samba packaging team at alioth.

Mostly thanks to the hard work of Steinar Gunderson in the past week, the packages are now ready for, and have been uploaded to Debian's repository of experimental packages. Most importantly, it will now ask you if you want to upgrade your configuration from Samba3 to Samba4, which should give us some good testing of the upgrade scripts.

I will no longer upload Samba4 Debian packages to jelmer.vernstok.nl.

Song of the week: Porcupine Tree - Radioactive Toy

My second Debian package, NDoc, has just been accepted by ftp-master. I also signed up as new maintainer, advocated by dajobe (who also sponsored ndoc). I wonder how long the whole process is going to take, but the statistics on the nm site don't give much hope. At the moment, I'm still waiting for an application manager.

Thanks to the help of Steinar Gunderson in the past week, the Debian packages of Samba4 have had some major improvements.
I have once again started to provide snapshots. As usual, they can be used by adding the following line to your "/etc/apt/sources.list":

deb ftp://jelmer.vernstok.nl/pub/debian ./

My first package (nunit) is now in the Debian archive. It was approved by ftp-master two days ago.

Thanks go to Andrew "ajmitch" Mitchell for sponsoring and to Mirco "meebey" Bauer and Dave "Dajobe" Beckett for comments and feedback. See the pkg-mono pages for details.

Meebey has uploaded another package (gnunit) that provides a Gtk# interface to NUnit.

I'm currently fixing the last few quirks in my NUnit Debian packages, after getting a some good feedback from the folks at #debian-mono. Just a few more hours before I'll put into pkg-mono's SVN. Until then, snapshots are available at:

deb ftp://autobuild.vernstok.nl/pub/releases/nunit/debian ./
deb-src ftp://autobuild.vernstok.nl/pub/releases/nunit/debian ./

I wonder what I'll work on next. Perhaps nantcontrib or ndoc?

Now that I'm doing development using .NET at work, I was starting to wonder whether I could use Mono on Linux for development rather then Microsoft Visual Studio on Windows.

Most of the things I'll need appear to be packaged already, thanks to the folks of the Debian Mono team. I just filed my first ITP for Debian for one of the other packages I need, nunit.

I hope to be packaging the other packages I use that are not in Debian yet soon. They are: nantcontrib, nunitcontrib and ndoc.