sukria.net

When we decided to put the Bugzilla 2.18 package into sid, a set of bug reports were triggered, one of them rather important. That lead me to work a lot on packaging issues (I must say that my sponsor, Francesco P. Lovergine, wisely predicted it), doing my best for closing bugs the right way.

We are now at a point where the package seems to be in a good shape according to last reports: it can safely upgrade 2.14, 2.16 or even previous 2.18 packages, using ucf when moving important files and upgrading some files if needed.

The source tree of the package has also been cleaned a lot, using dpatches whenever possible for handling nicely changes between upstream and Debian sources.

I met Rémi Perrot yesterday on IRC, and we spoke a bit about the status of Bugzilla packaging, he then offered me to take the package and I accepted with pleasure. I’m now glad to announce that I’m the maintainer of Bugzilla. Rémi will still be in the party, as a co-maintainer. In a way, we just switched our places.

I gave a talk at the Libr’East of Paris 2005 event about the Debian Packaging System.

It was more a tutorial than a talk, and was aimed to learn how to build a dummy package.
I chose to write a tutorial about the packaging of the famous hello world piece of software.

At the end, everyone in the audience managed to build their first .deb archive and seemed to be pretty happy about that.

That was my first public action for the Debian project, and I was really proud to come overthere in the name of our project. That’s exciting.

After talking with a co-worker about that tutorial I gave, he told me that he knows someone who handles tutorial sessions in Paris, and might be interested … To be continued…

For the french readers around, the tutorial is available here.

Bugzilla 2.18 began its way towards sarge and will be available in sid within a couple of hours. I’m pretty happy to see that, even if that means that my spare time may be strongly needed to handle new bug reports.

Moreover, this package is the first to allow database names with special characters, according to the MySQL documentation, section 9.2.2, it’s possible since MySQL 3.23.6.

Bugzilla 2.18 lives in the experimental section of the archive and some users wondered why we didn’t uploaded it to unstable.

All the issue is based on the following question: “Does the 2.18 version of Bugzilla is worth the risk of putting new problems in the archive before Sarge is released”.

If you have some ideas or comments, you can help and feed the debate on the 290775 bug entry.

It’s a while since I checked how many IP addresses there are in my blacklist, then I decided to perform a lines count on my RewriteMap file:

$ wc -l /usr/share/apache/maps/ip-baned.txt
1031 /usr/share/apache/maps/ip-baned.txt

He he, more than 1000 IPs are now forbidden to access my pages.

I’m pretty happy to see that my system works fine now, I don’t have to update that much the rules, the IP spool is big enough.

Note that the IP blacklist is still available online, help yourself!

Thanks to the Debian i18n Team, and more precisely to Christian Perrier, I’m now a bit more armed when I have to deal with Debconf translations.

Indeed, I recently started to rewrite the backup-manager’s Debconf templates, in order to fix bad wordings and DTSG violations. Doing so is a good thing, but that means that you’ll have - at a given point - to send the new templates.pot files back to every translators. If you don’t, a lot of fuzzy strings will break the Debconf translation.

After some discussions on the debian-i18n list, I managed to setup a tiny target in my debian/rules which helps me a lot:

checkpo:
        for i in po/*.po; do \
                echo "Checking: $$i"; \
                msgmerge -U $$i po/templates.pot; \
                msgfmt -o /dev/null -c --statistics $$i; \
        done

Running ./rules checkpo lets you know if some .po files need some more attention.
The tool podebconf-report-po is also a great friend to have in such circumstances, it can helps you notify the translators that some updates are required.

Thanks to Esteban Manchado, backup-manager 0.5.7-1 has been uploaded to the Debian archive and will fix three bugs.

Basically, 0.5.7-1 provides a new upstream release and some better handling of the configuration phase. The major change is the facility of choosing the Cron frequency with Debconf instead of always having a cron.daily file installed.

A care has been also given to the Debconf templates, rewriting them to fit the DTSG (thanks to Christian Perrier) and enhancing some wordings that might be misunderstood by novice users (and then lead to real issues).

By now, the top priority for the maintenance is to send the new Debconf tempaltes to the i18n team in order to receive a ACK before I send the templates to all the translation teams.

I’m glad to see that one more package of mine has passed the NEW queue. It’s the game TecnoballZ, written by TLK Games.

It really seems to me that the FTP masters improved the way they handle NEW packages. That’s pretty faster than it was a month ago, congrats to them.

Again, thanks to Neil McGovern who accepted to sponsor this package.

He he, the quest has really begun!

A first thank to Sam Hocevar and Christian Perrier who accepted to meet me in order to be able to sign my GPG key.

A second one to Fabio M. Di Nitto who accepeted to advocate me.