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We started writing down a list of all the orphaned packages, for listing how many of them are tagged ITA and if there are volunteers for external maintenance.

Following the the proposal about orphaned packages I started working on a script for smoothly injecting (with svn-inject) orphaned packages in our svn repository.

Here is an example of use for this script:

archive2svn --mirror=ftp2.fr.debian.org \
                    --repository=svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/qa/test-repo \
                    --cachedir=/var/cache/archive2svn \
                    --action=inject \
                    --verbose

This script will download the unstable/main Sources.gz file and will parse it, allowing you to either grab the source packages, inject them in SVN or even list them.

At the moment, we want to gather as more information as possible about orphaned packages, we have 252 of them currently.
We try now to gather external maintainer candidates for the orphaned packages, here is a draft listing them (well, at the moment, only one is recorded)

There is a discussion currently on the debian-qa mailing list about a proposal to enhance the way orphaned packages are handled by the QA team.

The main target of this proposal is to simplify the work of integrating submitted patches on orphaned packages. Using SVN for this seems to be a good idea, it would allow anyone who want to test an updated version of an orphaned package to use svn-buildpackage and would minimize the work of the QA team.

The main “chocking” idea behind this proposal is to give write access to that SVN repository to external developers who care about the orphaned packages. This is in a way, a structure for providing smooth collaborative work between the QA Team and external developers.

I started writing a draft for summurazing this proposal, you can check it here.

As expected, the last stable release of Bugzilla, 2.18.3 has been uploaded to unstable yesterday (thanks frankie).

I’m now focusing on collecting translations for backup-manager (debconf templates and upstream po files as well) so I can release the last version in a localized shape.

Thanks a lot to every translator, I can now say that backup-manager will come fully translated in the following languages: german, french, spanish, czech, japanese and vietnamese.

This weekend, I took the train from Paris to Caen to see my family, that was the perfect time for testing my new laptop.
Using cpufreq for dowclocking the processor and reducing the LCD brightness allowed me to use my laptop for more than 4 hours without power supply. That means that I hacked a lot in the train.

I made a new upstream version of Backup Manager on friday and packaged the new upstream version of Bugzilla (2.18.3) on sunday.
That’s really funny to use the time you spend in the train for hacking, most of the other travellers must not understand what the hell you have on your laptop (No big Windows button? Is that really a laptop, eh?), but most of all, that’s really great to use this precious time.

Now, bugzilla 2.18.3-1 is waiting for an upload and backup-manager 0.5.8b-1 is ready but needs a lot of help concerning the gettext translations.
Indeed, I used podebconf-report-po to notify the debian translators, but also requested their help for the upstream i18n. I hope we’ll manage to translate the upstream bits in Czech, Vietnamese or even Japanese (all of those are almost done for the debconf templates).
As soon as backup manager has a good i18n shape, I’ll ask my sponsor to upload it (I plan to do it in a week or two).

A new release of Backup Manager is available: 0.5.8b.

This release provides two security fixes. First of all, every temp files generated are handled by mktemp, second, the archive repository can be readable and writable by a specific user and group instead of being world accessible.

Moreover, the configuration file is now validated before using it, triggering warnings if mistakes are encountered. The code has also been cleaned a bit and the french translation updated.

You can check the changelog for details.