Sat, 02 Jun 2007
Report from the LinuxTag -- Part I (A bit of DebianDay and my talk)
Before I start with my report I need to fulfill my promise for those who stumble here from kushaldas.in: The URL of the web interface for the package description translation framework is for now: ddtp.debian.net (It's easy: Debian Description translation pproject). There might be some changes after DebConf, our annual conference, which will take place this month. So keep an eye on your language's team mailing list.
But more about Kushal Das later. The first part of my report will cover a bit of our DebianDay and of course especially my talk ;) More will follow later.
Friday was DebianDay and I attended
Holger's talk about
debian-community. It's a quite
interesting project, trying to solve the problem, that there's not much between
real DDs
and the rest of the world. It's more low level
than the
Debian maintainers idea floating around for a while: Look around, you'll see
much contributors to Debian, who are not maintaining any package.
The idea is basically to have kind of bonuses for contributing to Debian, as
a more direct way to say Thanks!
. Have look at the website, and think
how you could help to get things rolling.
After his talk it was my turn. I did a Debian package building for
beginners
talk... Well, actually it's a workshop stripped down by the
practical part leaving only the slides of the introduction. But who cares
;)
Again I was surprised how many people where interested in that topic. I always thought it's kind of special and not that interesting, but the room was quite stuffed. Some people where even sitting on the floor. I neither counted how many people attended my talk, nor how many seats where available. I guess I had something between 80 and 120? Perhaps Wolfgang Borgert, who moderated DebianDay, can correct me, if I'm wrong.
Since I stripped down a workshop to a talk, I needed to take special care about the timing. Well... I didn't work perfectly. I took a bit too long while answering questions, but I think all in all it was quite right. As usual I took gnujump as example; easy package, works without much tweaking of the templates created by dh_make, and if you have some time left at the end, you can show some additional stuff, like splitting of a -data package.
After the talk I got some quite interesting questions; the three most interesting ones were the following:
- Non English license texts: One guy asked me about non English
licence texts (in his case: A Japanese license text for some special
printer driver).
I asked him, to seek help by a Japanese DD, which might be okay to let the package pass ftpmaster. Sorry, but THIS IS NOT ENOUGH! I just asked Jörg Jaspert, one of the ftpmasters, and the Debian Project need's (of course) a translated version of that licence, as well as a statement of the upstream author, that the translation is okay. Otherwise the translated text has no legal binding and is therefore useless. - Installation packages: Packaging non-free stuff, which you need to download yourself, is a) sadly sometimes needed, b) useful for some people who need it and c) some kind of tricky. I could help much here; didn't did anything similar, yet. So I answered to take a look at either flashplugin-nonfree, msttcorefonts or java-package. Question to the others: Is there some kind of common infrastructure to build an installer package upon?
- The
Joomla!
problem: Again a thing I have no experience myself in; packaging web applications. According to the Joomla! guy I talked, too, there is a special problem with that (please correct me, if I understood something wrong; as said: webapps aren't my speciality).
There is demand for Joomla! packages, but so fare none exist. Major problem: While Joomla! is capable of running at multiple aliases, it is not (yet) capable of handling them to serve different content to them. So he wanted to be able to install Debian-Packages to different directories, where he would add different configurations of them. Short term solution could be to install it to /usr/share/ or so, and create a script, creating a symlink farm... long term solution should be to fix Joomla! ;)
So much for now; I'll write some more about the event in general, a goodie from an old friend from Treuchtlingen (rather short; the german entry is longer), and a small talk I had with an other Jörg later... I'm kind of tired right now.
postet at 22:43 into [/LinuxTag-2007] permanent link
Wed, 21 Mar 2007
Nice!
During the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage I did a workshop about the creation of Debian packages. Now one of my attendees contacted me and asked to review and sponsor hist first package!
After the correction of a small mistake in debian/copyright
(done in less than one hour) I uploaded it.
Cool :)
postet at 00:47 into [] permanent link
Sun, 18 Mar 2007
[CeBIT] About "Beutelratten"
Two years
ago I wondered how one could translate the german (exhibition) idiom
Beutelratte
.
I must confess, that I forgot the suggestions I got. Sorry.
But thanks to the daughter of the developer representing Scribus here at CeBIT we have a nice sign for them:
Update: Kevin Mark informed me that the term pack
rat
is often used at US tradeshows for thise kind of people picking up
everything.
postet at 17:49 into [/cebit-2007] permanent link
Mon, 05 Mar 2007
Back from Chemnitz
The Chemnitzer Linux-Tage are over and I'm back home. Again it was an outstanding event. Starting from the overall organisation to the social event (and their quiz) to the catering... I'm still stuffed with the buffet of the social event :)
The first thing in the morning I did a workshop about Debian package building. It was very well visited; only two seats were left empty. The visitors were very good; understood most very fast and corrected me a couple of times, when I did copy'n paste mistakes. It was fun to do that, and I got good feedback.
BTW: If you need a small example to show someone how to create a Debian
package, you might want to take a look an gnujump. The templates created
by dh_make work nearly out of the box (so you can concentrate on
explaining what is done, instead of fixing stuff to get it working), while the
resulting package has still place for improvements (.menu and
.desktop files; splitting the package into a arch dependent and an
arch independent; etc.) And most important: It is compiles quite fast, while
you still have something to show, so your visitors will see, that you indeed
did something.
Talking about the feedback I got after the workshop: One guy asked me about a way to check for conflicting packages, and we all wondered, that there's nothing scripted available, yet. So I promised to hack something together to at least check for conflicting files. The result is available at conflict finder (and later an svn.schmehl.info, as soon as I find out how to setup webdav/svn to allow read access to some repositories and not others).
To check for packages your package should conflict with, you need to first
build your package (or we won't know which files are in your package) and give
the path to the resulting .deb as the first parameter to the
script. If you have a Contents-foo.gz file somewhere on your hard
disc, you can specify the path to that file as the second parameter (if you use
apt-file or have a local mirror, it'll try to find it; if
everything fails the script will try to download one).
Then the script will check for each file of your Debian-Package if there is any other package having the same file. Sounds cool, but is damn slow; the repeated zgrep over the Contents-File is quite time consuming. For a quite small package (xdialog) it took nearly 15 minutes to complete. Wow, when I hacked it together, I wouldn't have thought it would be that slow.
As far as I know Alexander Wirt is already working on an improved version using some kind of database (and perl).
postet at 18:40 into [] permanent link
Fri, 02 Mar 2007
I'm off to Chemnitz
Not that this city would be a very attractive one (in my humble opinion), but they have one of the most interesting and well organized Linux events in germany.
If you have nothing to do during the weekend (or need an excuse for not having squashed any rc-bugs ;) get to Chemnitz; it's really worth it.
There'll be a Debian booth organized by Noel (Sorry, too lazy to dig out how to get your accents in HTML), as well as other interesting booths. I'll give a small workshop about debian package building. See you there!
postet at 15:45 into [] permanent link
Wed, 28 Jun 2006
Arrived in Sarajevo
Will tell a nice story about airlines later. Just a small note, we have arrived safly.
postet at 16:31 into [/DebConf-7] permanent link
Leaving for a week...
... to check with stockholm, Ganneff and Moray the DebConf-7 venues. Need to catch a train at 06:34 and pick up my ticket at the airport. Hope that works well. I feel a bit unprepared for that country; usually I try at least to learn some common phrases -- actually I once was proud to know what "Thank you!" and "pardon."means in twelve different languages. Including Chinese! Today I just know how to spell my favourite Chinese beer, and that I still hate flying.
Damn, I should have taken the train.
postet at 05:11 into [/DebConf-7] permanent link
Wed, 24 May 2006
When we arrived at home...
... yesterday evening, we fell into bed. Interesting: Although I managed to sleep very well in the airplane for something near to 10 hours (and so did alphascorpii), we still slept for another 16 hours when we got home.
I think I'm getting old; that's the worst jet lag I ever had. So here is a list of things you can do at 3:00 AM in the morning, when you can't sleep because of jet lag problems:
- Wait for your luggage to be delivered to you (British Airways finally managed to bring me my lost backpack; after promising me, that it's already on the way and will be delivered to me next morning, it wasn't delivered before 20:00...)
- Sort all the snail mail from the last weeks
- Read through all the mail from last weeks
- Watch the streams from the last weeks
tagesthemen
- chat with the other jet lagged people
- chat with the people still in Mexico
- Call your family telling them you got home in one piece (after not telling them, that you've left)
- Get angry, because your landlord hasn't done anything about the wet walls (well, at least the broken water pipe got fixed) or the mold on them
- Chat with your girlfriend whether
landlord
is the proper word for that - Finally drink some real vaso de leche milk
- Write some notes for DebConfs final report
- Throw them away
- Synchronize your private mirror
- Pay old bills
- Agree with other, that we should make a
Wine, cheese and chocolate
session next year - Write useless blog entries
- Adding stuff to the DebConf fortunes
Perhaps I just finish reading The Da Vinchi code
before someone, who
went to the movie, spoils the ending. See you in... wherever DebConf7 will be.
postet at 03:37 into [/DebConf-6] permanent link
Tue, 23 May 2006
You know, that you are back home...
... when:
- No one storms at you in a store trying to sell you something, although you are just looking around killing time
- Temperature is bellow 20 degrees Celsius, even if it's summer
- You don't need a power adapter any more
- You can eat food marked as
hot
again - fruit salad isn't served with chili and salt
- Internet is working quite fast
- You understand, what's said in the PAs
But the best sign, telling you, you are finally arrived at your home, is:
You are on your toilette, wondering where the bucket has gone, and what to do with the paper!
postet at 21:28 into [/DebConf-6] permanent link