Older blog entries for Jordi (starting at number 41)

sej, after my last post, I continued looking at the ivtools thing, and cjwatson put me on the right track to know what happened exactly.

Basically, it looks like the RC bugs were open for a bit too much. ivtools got removed from testing, we think, at the beginning of April, on one of the rounds of removals. As the problems persisted for a while, woody entered the deep freeze (May 1st) and ivtools wasn't able to enter testing again.

I've read in the latest DWN that the Stable release manager is considering including packages that dropped from testing during the freeze in 3.0r1. I see there are still important issues with ivtools in its bugs (fails to build on some arches, apparently). If you want to try to get it in, the bugs need to be fixed. I'd be happy to try NMUing it, after asking Guenter, and then try to stick it in 3.0r1.

sej, I've been looking at the ivtools thing, and after checking that Guenter isn't MIA and as you say, the bug was fixed before the woody release, I have two guesses:

• the package was removed from Woody by mistake
• or more probably, the bug was fixed after it was removed from woody, and never made its way back to testing. (I remember than in the last few months, you had to ask aj to get packages back.

The package's changelog lists 2 more fixes after the alpha fix, one of them a month later (when Woody was so stale that some of us wondered what was going on).

ivtools (0.9.2-6) unstable; urgency=low

   * fixed build error behaviour, add CCLINKER

  -- Guenter Geiger (Debian/GNU) <geiger@debian.org>  Wed,  8 May 2002 13:49:59 +0200

If this fix broke any of the arch builds, I assume there was no chance for it to go back to Woody both automatically or with Release Manager intervention.

All of this I've made up, it's hard to know what happened exactly at this point, without asking aj (and I doubt he'd remember). I'm sorry ivtools isn't in woody. Hopefully Sarge will be out on 2005, so don't worry it'll be there ;p

sej

What you say about package removals is simply not true. Before a package is orphaned, it normally has been unmaintained for many months, and has been probably NMU'ed several times, after the RC bugs piled up or the package simply sucked or didn't work anymore. And when this happens, either someone else takes the package, or it gets orphaned, which doesn't mean it gets kicked out from unstable. When a package is orphaned, it starts being maintained by Debian's Quality Assurance team. It must stay in that state and have many other problems before the people at QA decide it's time to get it removed. A recent example is non-free ssh2. It has been unmaintained for like 2years+ and it's still in Debian (not for much longer).

Regarding aj's first round of package removals for Sarge, note that this is a nice way of getting people that care about the package (maintainers or non-maintainers) to fix the packages they don't want to see removed. This mostly means the entire list of proposed packages. Those that aren't saved are probably not useful for any developer or any users with the skills to tackle the bug: just sending a patch to the BTS is enough for someone else to upload the fix.

Please don't say we remove packages so happily. It's a long process.

pfremy:

Aren't you a bit obsesed with that Nautilus scripts page? What if a few people start writing scripts, even if they duplicate features in Nautilus 2.0? Maybe some of those are pointless, so what? What's the point in bashing old versions of some software? Eazel's Nautilus had flaws, good... what's the point of this GNOME-bashing now, two years later, when the "problems" you point out have been mostly solved in the current versions?

In other news...

Been a(nother) while since I last posted here. I'm quite busy with RL stuff and just keeping my INBOX tidy. In a few days, we'll start a "computer recycling workshop" in València, as the first step to create a hacklab for our area. Many people have told me in the last days that they are very interested in the GNU/Linux mini-lessons that I'm supossed to give. We'll see where I find the time to do all of this.

Things in València are looking bad these days. 4 young persons were captured by the police and then accused of "terrorism". 14 months ago, the charges would have been "vandalism" at the most, but as some website said some time ago regarding our new Internet law, "last time we checked, Spain was still a Democracy". Not that I have ever believed much in this "democracy", but the current right-wing governemnt is making this place look like Spain in the Franco era. And it's no fun at all. Yesterday there was a big demonstration in support of the imprisoned people, it was refreshing to see so many people getting involved in such a fight. Cotino, cotxino!

Six months later, I come back to advogato. I don't expect this post will have a quick followup, but at least people will know I'm not totally dead :)

I'll be free of exams on Wednesday, at long last. I've been in exam-mode for nearly 2 months, and it's exhausting. The good thing is that I've done a lot better than normally, so far. We'll see how it ends.

Free Software:

Nano's author, Chris Allegretta is more busy than ever and cannot dedicate much time to nano. Luckily, David & David & Carl and the rest of the nano-devel people have filled in the gap and development continues at a good pace. Neil Spring finally took over wmbiff's management "officially", and things are much better like this. It is up to version 0.4.5 and constantly updated to gnuTLS changes. XQF just released 0.9.9, after 6 months. That development is a bit stalled. It's a pity... it's a very nice program. Any Quakers around who hack Gtk+2? XQF could use some porting effort :) GNOME-Mud also had a very recent release, hopefully the last GNOME 1.0-based. GNOME2 porting has already started, and it looks promising. It looks like more and more people are keeping an eye on it. Finally, gtetrinet got i18n support at last, and hadess will probably start a GNOME2 port.

Oh, I also contributed very significantly to get Catalan translations up to 91% for the GNOME 2.0.0 release. Aiming for 100% in GNOME 2.0.1. It shouldn't be difficult.

Nice to see Advogato is still active and well. I'll try to follow it more regularly, as before...

It's been a while since the last serious post. Today I got back from a really quick trip to Barcelona and that puts end to a frenetic month of travelling.

I was in Madrid three weeks ago, in the HispaLinux Congress, where I more than anything met tons of other Debian people and some other people.

Then, last week I went to Madrid, to a big demonstration against the new Law of Universities passed by the gang of fascists in the Spanish government. There were like 300.000 people in the streets! We've been doing more protests in our own cities and university campus.

Finally, yesterday I went to Barcelona, gave a talk on Debian in the CSOA Les Naus, organized by the people from Kernel Panic HackLab Barcelona. We had nice political discussions about Debian's organization, etc. Finally, I came back home today. Not bad for someone who isn't too used to travelling...

Free Software:

Since the last post, some things have happened. WMBiff is up to 0.3.4, which is in testing now. GNU nano 1.0.6 was released too, and 1.0.7 should be out soonish. As Debian's nano is frozen now, it's time to upload nano 1.1.3 to unstable now, so people break it and so on. Hey, CVS nano has syntax highlighting now!

Next week will be a bit weird too, I plan sleeping the whole week in the campus, so I'll have little access to the net. I guess the government will have to backup that stupid law in the end. At the moment Aznar and the Ministress of Education just joke and mock about the protests as if they weren't important, and it's the biggest student mobilization since Franco. Fuck you Aznar, fuck you, Pilarín.

jacobo, yeah, I'm in Madrid. I'm sorry to say I'm having a really good time (this is totally unrelated to your lack of presence :) I met fxn in today's dinner, nice to meet other Advogatoers.

It's too late to write stuff, I guess I'll do some longer comment when I'm back in Valencia on Sunday.

Free Software:

I finally released WMBiff 0.3.2 on Monday, after gnutls 0.2.4 (which carried a bugfix wmbiff needed) was released too. The Debian package was done as soon as the new gnutls was in Debian, but it hasn't been installed yet, so patience... hm, <reminder>I need to do a silly, simple webpage for wmbiff</reminder>
Yesterday, omnic helped me setting up a IPv6 tunnel for my lan, and it's more or less working now. IPv6's cool! Reading addresses is a bit weird at the beginning, but once you get the idea, it's neat.
Looks like there will be another GNU nano release RSN, as Chris squished a nasty bug. 1.0.6 should be the last 1.0.x version, I hope.
Wanted to play more with GNU/Hurd, now that I have a plug for the hurdbox... had the nice idea of installing locales to get rid of perl warnings, and boom, the thing exploded into pieces. I would have tried compiling libgcrypt and gnutls on it, but the box is unusable right now.

Things:

Damned storms... I have a broken CD-ROM drive and hard disk, thanks to the last storm that came by and dropped a lightning very near our house... luckily it was an old CD drive and the HD was a small one, used for /scratch and temporary things.
I have an appointment with a "naturist" doctor the 5th of November. Let's see if he knows what the hell is wrong with my ankle, he can fix it and I can run again...

Duh... I wrote a nice, long and detailed sgml document for the GNOME-Mud Manual, and as soon as I finished it, I managed to delete it and at the same time lose my two backup copies. Cool... they say documenting sucks... doing documentation two times sucks twice...
I'm totally pissed today.

Woo! I finally finished the Catalan translation of woody's boot-floppies. At the same time, the rest of team members of Debian's Catalan l10n team finished the installation manual. Everything is being revised and corrected prior to inclusion in CVS, but I'm glad I finished with the horrible ca.po. I need to do some minor things still (modconf and so), but the big part is done.

I also completed level 3 of Tuxracer. Oh, what a wonderful day.