Older blog entries for faw (starting at number 41)

Using qmail-ldap for quite some time (first because of my employer and then because I was used to it), the DJB license was a major pain, qmail-ldap patch is under BSD, but the original qmail was non-free. Yes, was. Yesterday DJB released qmail under Public Domain, and based on a GoogleVideo, he is going to change the license for all his existent software and for all his future works.

For some strange reason the URL direct to the video doesn't work, but if you do a search you are able to use the Watch video here option.

Yes, I know. I'm not going to say sorry, I should post more, this last three months were not exactly the best ones, and I thought about writing something about what I was doing for Debian and other projects here but ended up being consumed by University, Work, Real Life and "Other Stuff (tm)".

One of the important things on the way is the Debian i18n Extremadura Meeting to be held on December, when we expect to work on i18n.debian.net, change from CVS to SVN, improve DDTP and ddtss and work with Pootle related stuff and infrastructure.

In the meantime, we are also changing our Primary Push Server for volatile.debian.org from durin to verdi (don't worry, a proper announcement will be made on an announcement list close to you). :-)

Thanks for everybody that had the patient to wait for my replies and/or my actions, and the ones that calmly understood my undergoing situation, giving me support and offering help. Thank you very much!

Thinking about writing something for a while, about my Debian work or about my daily stuff, sometimes you lack the time or the motivation to do so, I should kept this more up-to-date so people can follow a little bit what's going on with me... specially considering that I try to keep this diary neutral about non-technical subjects, but hey! it is somewhat hard to be neutral in every single situation.

Anyway, I found that I should help to spread the word from a Brazilian colleague, Sulamita, she posted about democracy (or the lack of it) today. Two videos, about the Amazon Forest area and some of the crazy things we find in Brazil. You can watch the Brazilian Portuguese version or the English one.

A lot of people are not aware of some of the political problems that Brazil faces in the last 10 years, it is not like it doesn't exist before, but it is getting worst and worst and, for a while, I've been wondering...

A lot of friends want to leave Brazil as soon as they can, I love Brazil but I can understand their motivation.


• Where do you find the desire to stay when you look around and you can't find fairness and equality? And if you look to the houses or places that should protect people, you realize that there is no protection?
• How do you keep the passion for a country with huge levels of corruption in public government, in police forces, in your law makers? And day after day, corruption schemas, robbery and law abuse are noticed on the television?
• What to do when you realize that the perception of the disloyal advantage is shared among your colleagues and that the feeling of failure dominates a great part of the population that could actually do something to change?
• Can anybody, or group of individuals, feeling alone, work to change that? How? Specially when you look around and although you know there are people willing to help they need to take care of their lives (money, food, family)?

Or should I ask: Where's the love? (Black Eyed Peas Lyrics).

And before somebody thinks that the entire Brazil is lost, that we are under a Civil War and that monkeys and other animals are walking on our Jungle streets in the middle of the cities, no it is not... yes, we need help; yes people need to join forces; yes, we need to find ourselves and fix it; but it is still a great country to live, and yes, I love it!

Recently I saw somewhere a link to Google Video about a very nice video: How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too). So please, if you didn't see this go and watch it now: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4216011961522818645. It is a little bit large (~50 min) but I found some nice information from real experiences that could really help to improve our communication inside Debian.

So, for the curious and impatient, it is a Google TechTalk with Ben Collins-Sussman & Brian W. Fitzpatrick, SubVersion Developers, based on their experiences they show situations that can drain Project resources and they gave valuable tips, ideas and directions on how to protect the "Attention and Focus" of the Project. It is very interesting to find a lot of factors and points that we can see from time to time on Debian. Don't get me wrong, I'm really not whining, I don't think that whining would solve any problem (except if you are a 6-month hungry child), but I would love if it could give us some momentum and maybe a starting point to leave aside some old unresolved issues, giving a chance to new ideas! Which basically means, keep working together to keep building the best Operating System. :-) (But doing that with even more fun for even more people). We can too!

On a totally unrelated note: my primary MX is back for quite some time, I should report that earlier, anyway, sorry about the lack of posts, thanks for your attention and see you soon. Over.

Since last thursday (2007-02-08) my main MX server was stopped to get some maintainance (IDE problems, could be the hard disk, IDE cables or something else, amazing ahm?), anyway, we moved the important stuff away from the line, did our homework testing the secondary MX and stopped the machine. Until now the DataCenter didn't told me when the machine should be back and I'm really hoping to get it back by tomorrow (2007-02-12).

In the meanwhile, the messages are safe, waiting in a temporary queue, we are not expecting to have a downtime of four long days. Anyway, I will need to catch up with my mail in the next days, I'm trying to keep up-to-date using the web archives and doing l10n stuff for Debian. :-(

After the cloud of ideas and subjects on the last post, giving the clear idea that I should keep this blog more up-to-date, here is an important note that is missing (including old news that I should had post but didn't, sorry for that). I'm aware that a few people are interested in how the Debian NM process evolves from person to person, on my last update on that topic, I told you that I was recommended to the DAM by my AM. Almost three months later (2006-11-18) Myon (Christoph Berg, Front Desk Member) couldn't find my final report, he pinged my AM and one week later everything was fine again and I got approved to the next step: DAMnation. On the Christmas' evening I got a nice gift from Joerg, DAM approval. Yesterday (2007-01-02) I got the nice e-mail with the subject: New Debian maintainer Felipe Augusto van de Wiel (Thanks to James Troup, aka, elmo).

The entire process took me 8 months and 10 days. I would like to say thanks to everybody that helped me pass thru this experience: Otavio Salvador (my advocate and mentor), Christian Perrier and Luk Claes (Mentors and Uploaders), Clément Stenac (my AM), Christoph Berg (Front Desk), Joerg Jaspert and James Troup (DAMs). They are directly involved in my NM process, but they were not alone, thanks for every single person that helped me with tips and hints, that took some time to teach me and all the people behind different projects in Debian (I really start naming everybody but then I realize that it got very large for Planet): Debian Brasil, Debian Volatile (aba, zobel, sgran), Release Team, Debian Women, Debian i18n Task Force and Debian l10n Brazilian Portuguese, Debian Weekly News Team, buildd.net project, Alioth admins and staff, Debian Installer Team, Debian Kernel Team, Debian Mentors, DebConf Team, OFTC Staff, Debian QA Team, Debian Doc Team, Debian WWW Team, Debian Admin Team (DSA)! People, you know who you are, thank you VERY much!

You can check my Status Page to see more details about my NM process and more information about the acronyms used on this post. Now, Brazil has 17 Debian Developers (not counting the one that already retired). :-)

Alive. Birthday. Happy. Sad. Changes. Freeze. Packages. i18n. Ideas. Plans. University. Life. Family. Mother. Notebook. Frieds. DebConf. DebConf7. Edinburgh. OLS2007. LI. OpenBeach. Work. Free. Freedom. Debian. Brasil. Sorry. Smooth. Standards. Ideas. Core. Philosophy. Beliefs. World. Creed. 24. Translations. Organization. pt_BR. NMU. l10n. Past. Present. Future. Notes. Messages. Kind. Patience. Friendship. Fellowship. Party. Meeting. Food. Discussion. Debate. Cry. Try. Fix. Solve. Together. Alone. Team. Workgroup. Fast. Again. Just. Me.

I should write about this a few days ago but didn't have the time. Sorry. Well, these are great news (at least for me), a few days ago I sent the second part of my T&S and already got approved. My AM (Hi Clément) also pointed out a few changes that were needed in my packages that are already fixed and uploaded; Clément already sent the report and considering that, I'm now waiting for the Front Desk to review my application (and after that, DAMnation. I'm happy! I also finish the adoption of xless and levee. I still have to finish the MyPasswordSafe adoption, but before I have to fix a RC bug related to the use of sudo as the gain-root command (instead of fakeroot) in the alpha buildd. Thanks neuro that already give me a few tips on how to solve it.

Following the random ideas season:

• Next week, Extremadura will host the i18n Debian people, the idea is to discuss lots of ideas, specially i18n Infrastructure, but not only discuss, also code a lot!

• I do not like the idea to have sourceless firmware in main and I really like Don Armstrong proposal on that subject.

• I still have to finish the desproxy, tuxfrw and thumbs packaging work to get it in time for etch.

• I'm wondering how a tally sheet with more than 10 choices looks like

Like a lot of people already did, in the last two weeks I've been fighting SPAM in my company and also on the server of Free Software Projects that I'm part of the System Administration Team. In most cases I'm using postfix with clamscan and postgrey, but I will switch to amavisd-new to use SpamAssassin (with razor/pyzor). But I'm still studying the various alternatives in a Debian Sarge system.

Happy Birthday!!! I was waiting a little bit, in other parts of the world Debian is already celebrating, now people from Brazil (and also UTC-0300) can join the party! Last Saturday our Debian User Group celebrate the Debian Anniversary with a big barbecue, sports and good conversations during the entire afternoon! Next Saturday (19.August) different Debian User Groups in Brazil will coordinate the Debian Day in different cities at the same time. Have fun! 13 years of Debian and counting! :-)

In a quick note, I'm still moving ahead with my NM. I have to fix a few points on my packages (and I'm still waiting my sponsor -- Hi Otavio! -- to upload a couple of packages). And I have a few more to work on, I hope I find the time in the next days.

At Monday (14.August) night (20h 00min UTC-0300) I visit (pt_BR) a very small city in the state I live in Brazil. They invited me to speak about Debian and Free Software for a group of students and also for locals. It was a nice talk and one of the things that got my attention is the number of women interested, of course, I told them to visit the Debian Women Project (which reminds me that I need to translate the site -- and lots of other files). Back to the work!

On Saturday (05.Aug.2006) I sent the answers for some questions that zorglub (my AM) in reply to the first part of T&S. At the same time he sent the second part of the T&S, that I just replied with the answers. The second part was not as time intensive as the first part (but took me almost the entire weekend to finish).

CVS pserver for webwml repository is still disabled, which makes the life for non-DD translators a little bit hard, since we don't have access to CVS using SSH and all the files and/or patches needs to go throught the very cool commiters on debian-www. Recently, a new helping page (while we do not have pserver access restored), based on the mail sent by Raphael Hertzog to debian-devel, was launched by Frans Pop: tarballs of the webwml CVS repository. Thanks Frans! And I would like to point all translators that use check_trans.pl to the website statistics with a special hint to the specific language page that contains almost the same information from the check_trans.pl and could help to keep track of files being too out of date.

Thanks to Luk Claes, new translate-docformat was uploaded to fix Policy 7.6 Violation. madcoder has a list of affected packages. During the weekend I work on my packages, I'm waiting for my sponsor to get them uploaded to the archive closing the "adoption process" and fixing a few bugs and lintian warnings. There are some news from the DDTP and no news from the CVS pserver for non-DDs (and unfortunately, in this case: no news, bad news). I also sent a mail do debian-l10n-portuguese about the future of our list, we need to change a few points, create and update documentation, change our coordinators in some areas (they are MIA for quite a while now) and structure the team to be ready for future changes and also to work focused to get as much translations as possible in "etch".

That's it... end of my University Vacation. Back to classes, busy schedule for the semester, I hope to manage everything in a very good way, so I can keep up-to-date with my Debian work.