Gunnar Wolf

Steinar: You can get some (few) Dell desktop models with no preinstalled Windows, IIRC they are called the «L series». I tried, however, to get a OS-free laptop. I had to buy my XPS M1210 (sweet machine, BTW) with Windows XP. Tried on the phone, yes.

On January 13, I sent a mail to debian-private saying I'd be on a semi-vacation until around February 10 - And yes, for over a month I've basically not touched my packaging, and for around three months my general profile in Debian has been really low. I sent this message because the Institute I work at moved, and I got the task of taking care of everything related with electrons flows carrying information (namely, voice and data networks). It's not that I'm really-really-back now - Work is still too absorbing, users still come too often to me expecting me to solve their problems. I can often try to do so on the data network, but I'm far from even having access to the voice equipment (I've done my hardest effort not to get such access, because that'd instantly turn me into the phone operator for life). However, for the first time in many weeks, today I had some quiet time, I catched up with some mailing lists, and... Well, I expect to work on my QA page. Boy, team-maintainership rules! pkg-perl friends, thanks for saving me from the creepy bugs sometimes too often. I expect to pick up work I haven't even looked at since I committed to doing so with the pkg-ruby-extras team as well, specifically, getting mongrel in shape and into Debian, despite our deep differences with its author. This will make Rails roll smoother and faster in Debian. And of course, there is Debconf. After last year's burnout, I think I recovered - I'm not a core organizator anymore, but I'm back to work my way to Edimburgh ;-) As for my local activities (Mexican Free Software conferences, meetings and people): Partly because so I decided and partly because so it happened, I've been off the hook with the local community since before Debconf 6. Before, because I was too busy to think about anything besides it, and after, because I was burnt out and somewhat bitter at several facts. I've been to few regional or local conferences, also because I knew that between last October and today I'd be too tied up at work. But last week we had both CONSOL and BarCamp Mexico. Somehow I managed to be at both (well, at CONSOL I was only enough time to do my two talks, for which I miraculously managed to get prepared, and BarCamp was during the weekend). Both were very positive for me, and I'm willing again to find some time to devote to promoting and developing Free Software in our country. Oh! One more note: Thanks to Sergio Mendoza for pushing me and for co-discussing on the subject, we are getting small but tangible results pointing to a Debian-UNAM project. Not much to see yet, besides having received the domain authority, which for now just means a nicer name for Nisamox, Mexico's main (and only long-running) full Debian mirror.

One of the leading newspapers in Mexico, often associated with its left-wing ideology (and, I don't think it's a coincidence, my personal favorite newspaper) published today this cartoon: So, dear Rocha... Are you implying that many past and present Debian releases are identifiable with the corrupt Mexican government? Our de facto president is like our first official release, Buzz (1.1)? Does Rex (1.2) properly represent the worst of the PRInosauric regime? Is Hamm (2.0) a good symbol for our whole political class? Woody (3.0), the first release I had the opportunity to work on while still being in NM, is like our sadly unforgettable ex-president Fox? Does our current stable release Sarge (3.1) equal to the repression that Chiapas, Atenco, Oaxaca, Michoacán and others have suffered? This cartoon made me sad, really sad. </jokingly>

Bastian: I'm unable to provide the about:config key to prove it, but clicking on a link on my Iceweasel does open a Mutt mailto dialog. Maybe network.protocol-handler.external.mailto or network.protocol-handler.expose.mailto will do? They are booleans, so I cannot get much insight out of their respective true and false values... Keep peeking around ;-)

Russell: I don't think so. I do think that most Free Software people, even more in settings such as Debian, will tend to be in the lower-left quadrant of the political compass. Personally, I ranked Economic Left/Right: -8.00, Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.87 - No surprise for me ;-) And yes, we do have some more upper- or right- sector people, but I think our center of mass will surely fall in the lower-left quadrant. More samples needed ;-)

Ok, at least Erich states something I agree with (and, lets be fair, its also told by Marius on a comment to my previous post): XML should not be pushed where the data to be represented is flat (or flattish - Say, a INI-style configuration is enough with a not-exactly-flat-but-still-unnested configuration). Still, I do not buy XML as adequate. Erich insists on the Apache configuration file as an example of how not to do things - And I agree wholeheartedly: It sucks and makes no sense. However, it's just too easy to break proper XML nesting (for the love of the FSM, why is it necessary to repeat the element name we are closing?!) to be something I want to deal with when in a hurry. XML might be great as a data interchange language, but -in my always humble opinion- not more than that. PS- Erich, your blog is broken as well ;-) The generated RSS has URLs which repeat the '/en' part. Oh, and about my blog complaining about XML: Yes, I was syndicating another site - And the XML parsing engine I use was somehow b0rked as well. Nah, I don't feel like changing my blog's software, it's mostly fine as it is ;-)

In short, Erich says that XML, plus the right editor, Just Works(tm). Well, yes. But when you are over a slow link, or when you are desperate with a b0rken system, you just don't have Eclipse at hand to edit a config file. Of course, you could use the half-existing XML support you talk about in vim (I have not tested it, cannot be sure of it), but it is still a PITA if your /usr is not working fine or if your termcap is too dumb to manage. Yes, there are each time less of those situations, but anyway... I won't start ranting on how YAML is the right tool for every situation where XML is used - It's clearly not. XML is, after all, a standard. Some configurations can be done by XML, say, if you have any of those Java frameworks (I've only suffered^Whated^Wgot despaired^W^Wset up JBoss), but still... Configuration files, at least the important ones, should be editable by using a lightweight, easy and available tool like nvi, pico, or even cat|sed. Oh, and about YAML's site being valid YAML: Of course, it only looks like it. But cut and paste it - It works for me :) Of course, it is not meant to replace or work over HTML. I would never dream of using YAML as a web-services language or anything of that sort. There are better tools for that. But please, leave config files hand-editable. With common, light and hard-to-break editors.

Erich wonders about a sane way to reorganize the configuration file mess we have, going in fact farther than Aigars' previous rant on the topic: Not only it would be really desirable to do away with the dotfile-as-everything-but-more mess, it would be really, really nice to do it in a more or less standard way. Erich suggests four base configuration syntaxes - I won't reveal too much, as his message deserves being read as well ;-) But hey, I have a question here: I know XML is well-established and well-supported, and I'm told there are a couple several hundred thousand people who think it is really cool and even human-editable. Still, I hate XML. Configuration files are often, yes, written by the programs themselves - But one of my most beloved features of Unix-like systems is that I am free to poke in them, as they are meant to be human-editable. XML is not human-editable. I'm sorry, say whatever you want, but keeping XML valid and happy is... Just not for me. Why not pushing instead something prettier, and with almost the same feature set of XML, plus a much-enhanced readability/modifyability? Why not promoting my dear and beloved YAML? (Yes, the YAML project home page _is_ valid YAML) [update: I was kindly requested in a comment to link to the YAML project page, which hosts more information. I'm keeping the other link anyway. ] Note: No, this only looks like a rant, but it is really a question. Honest!

Many people have recently posted in Planet Debian regarding the use, usability and usefulness of having comments enabled in blogs, of using comments as the right way for following discussions, of dealing with spam, and so on. I'm sorry I'm not linking to more of them, but I'm too lazy to look them up. This is one of the down-sides of not using comments - Ideally, if I were interested on commenting on a topic, I would just leave the comment on the blog that started it. It goes somewhat against Joey's logic of posting both the comment and the posting itself - Of course, we all want everybody and their dogs to read our comments, don't we? And, given we know that (most of) our target readers regularly follow Planet Debian, we continue ranting on our personal blogs (as I'm doing now). Besides, that will rank our page higher. We all want Google to love us, right? Of course, following discussions on a bunch of blogs is not optimal, as it's easier to miss parts of it (hey, would somebody volunteer on writing threading support for Planet? It'd have to be multidimensional, as postings often refer to different threads... Bah :) ). Besides, many of us are syndicated on different planets (and many people read our blogs as individuals as well), so many of my postings start with a stupid amount of background information so the martians understand the terrans. But still, here I am, writing a post that provides nothing but a braindump, serves no purpose, and links to your posting. So there, the world is not ideal. QED. As always, MJR rants against captchas (and yes, thank you, you have commented on my blog that most captchas are trivially crackable by automated means). They do reduce spam, but they are REALLY not a strong barrier against it. I have thought of some ideas, or thought about implementations for other ideas I've read here and there, but I'm too lazy to implement them on my blogging software. I could switch, but I happen to like Jaws. I would like to contribute to making it better, but have had a permanent lack of time for a long time already :-/ I do get swamped by spam comments, and every now and then mass-delete whatever looks like spam (hundreds to thousands of comments, for crap's sake!), but anyway... It's not too important for me. I like having comments on my entries, but sometimes a long time must pass until I even read them (I read my own blog syndicated via the Planets, on a RSS reader). BTW, Lucas: I used to have trackbacks enabled. The amount of spam, and the control I have over spam in my blog, makes me favor comments against trackbacks. My trackbacks used to be so wildly abused that it almost made me cry. I hope it is not your case :)

I've been working a bit over a week on writing SmbGate, a simple and quite braindead Web app giving my users web access (read-only for now at least) their home shares in a Samba server from outside the Institute, which will be basically closed for vacations/moving to a new building for over a month. It went quite smoothly. Even using a quite ugly API (Filesys::SmbClient - It works, but in an ugly fashion), getting the basic app to work took me only two days, and I've been beautifying bits of it for around a week. I even got around to write a user manual, which -to my surprise and astonishement- has been followed by the users. Wow, I'm productive! I even think this can be useful to other people, so I'll put the code online soon - As soon as I get the workplace-specific things weeded out to a configuration file. Of course, everything has its ups and downs. Yesterday, I found a bug. Today, a user reported the bug to me. And, of course, it seems to depend on MSIE's weirdness. I really, really hate my users experiencing browser incompatibilities - That's why I installed W2k under qemu (which, when used with the non-free but downloable with no fee required kqemu kernel module is perfectly speed-comparable with the completely-non-free VMware - Go try qemu now!). I tested thoroughly the system from the guest W2k system to my development machine (which is, incidentally, the same physical box), and it worked perfectly. Of course, locally, I didn't care about setting it up in a SSL-protected area. For my users, of course, access to their files is SSL-protected. I tested the production system from Linux, using Firefox. Works like a charm. So, why am I bitching? Because browsing the directories works correctly from MSIE, but downloading the files doesn't (it says, in such a Spanish that I don't really understand the error message, that the file does not exist or the site is unavailable). Of course, debugging a HTTP request over a SSL session is not feasible. I installed an instance of this system in my regular unencrypted HTTP server - But, surprise surprise, it now works fine under MSIE. Exactly the same URL, only with the https replaced by http So... I am almost entirely non frustrated. I have hit a bug which does not like being debugged. Joy, joy. But, I promise, victory will be mine.

Wow... The amount of press/coverage inside the FS community (not necessarily good press) the Ubuntu people are receiving lately is huge. I smell the possibility where Canonical might face what many people call the ugly side of Debian - But what we, the insiders, call it the most important part of it: Our people's devotion to the Free Software ideals. Of course, even inside Debian there are all kind of opinions (to the point that Debian's main activity seems at times to be debating rather than coding), but the general perception is that we are the fundamentalist zealots. It's only funny to imagine what lies ahead. No, I'm not talking (for people not following planet.debian.org) about Ubuntu's latest big media scandal, although it might share some connections. Apparently, Canonical wants to grow and bring more people in. And, of course, being a commercial desktop-oriented distribution, being flashy (or in their words, going for the bling) is needed to keep up with the Joneses. This time, it starts (for me) with Scott's interesting and worthy posting regarding the future of binary blobs and clearly non-free drivers inside Ubuntu. In short: Scott explains why Ubuntu will apparently sacrifice some of its ideals for (what I read as) some extra popularity, and states he is not too happy with it. This, of course, has triggered a load of postings - not necessarily in chronological order, but: Mako, also an Ubuntite, asks people (users, developers) to tell their opinions on this - But he is not at all happy with the direction this might take. Many Ubuntu enthusiasts are voicing their opinions in Wiki form. I guess that Joey's peace of mind comes also because of this discussion (although I'm only stretching my views). ...There is always the debate of whether Ubuntu is good or bad for Debian, as Norbert points out. I've tried to stay away from it, quoting one of Luis Echeverría's famous it's neither good nor bad, it's just the opposite. I do think the two systems will eventually diverge too much - But I'm not at all involved in Ubuntu, and I refuse to back my claims ;-) The point of this posting is: When forming Canonical, obviously Mark wanted to gather the best of the best, people who knew their way developing and coordinating an eminently Free and high-quality distribution, but without the distraction of 1000+ developers trying to pull the whole distribution their way. By being the boss, he can ensure a single vision (and not a multitude of egos) drives the excellent work of talented hackers. However, there might be a subtle mistake: Maybe his team are too Debianites? Maybe they will show they are as strongly Free Software (and not Opensource) oriented as they were when they joined Debian? Maybe, even with the unlimited powers that being a SABDFL gives, Mark and the Ubuntu technical committee/community council will have to concede on not having the latest and flashiest, just to keep his elite team happily working? I'm not, of course, blaming them for selling their principles - Of all the commercially-oriented Linux distributions, Ubuntu is clearly the one that stays closer to what I'd like. And it's not by mere chance that it derives and keeps in constant sync (at least until now) with Debian. Still... This has the potential to make a big dent on their structure and vision.

Wow...This time I'm truly amazed. A spam just hit my debian-devel mailbox. That's sadly not strange at all, I know. Only that I started reading it. It says:

Spammers don't seem to target us for their random alias generation
tools, or        maybe they haven't got to the letter 'o' yet. com
for subsequent posts, but that whole barn door thing comes to mind.
In so doing, values are overlooked often and mistakes are made. Maybe
Microsoft will let me        change my alias.
Maybe some of it would actually be useful to me. For whatever reason, my
Microsoft email address didn't ever get        spam.

Then it goes on talking nonsense splattered with all kinds of garbage talk, some news (or whatever) about stock options of a China Health thing, and goes on throwing nonsense blabber. Sorry, I'm not linking to it (I'll probably later update this entry), it's still not available in the Web archive of debian-devel.">

[2006-10-13 18:00] There is a popular saying in Spanish, "en viernes 13 ni te cases ni te embarques" - Roughly, On Friday the 13th, don't get married and don't board a ship. That makes perfect sense - I'm already married, so I'm not worried about the first part. About the second, you never now - So I'd better take the plane to a country without sea access. Bolivia, here I go. [2006-10-13 23:30] I'm writing this blog entry as I fly out of Mexico towards Bolivia, via Panama, on Lloyd Aereo Boliviano's flight number 911. The captain just announced that dinner will be served shortly, and invited those of us who want to enjoy the meal to open the tables, in order to get a better service. I fear that if I don't open it, I might get soup served straight over my pants, or something like that. [2006-10-14 02:40] At the Panama airport. Captain informs again: "Passengers, we inform you we will replenish fuel. Therefore, if you choose not to go out for 15 minutes, we will request you to sit down with your seat belt unlocked. You will not be allowed to walk along the ailes. The bathrooms will be closed. Please do not ring the bells." Damn, that brings quite a lot of quiet about the refueling process - Of course I went down for 15 minutes, along with everybody else. BTW, shame I didn't take my laptop with me, as the battery is now at 15%... The Panama airport has (contrary to most airports I've been to in recent years) plenty of power outlets. Anyway, maybe on the way back. It's now 03:00 (Mexico time), and I think I'll have a better use for the next four hours until we arrive to Bolivia than coding.

Ok, so I am going to be in Bolivia next week - or so I hope ;-) I don't usually take care to do this, but being it Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano (more on this later), and having heard first-hand and even almost lived stories of ticketing errors, I decided to call the airline to confirm my flight details. ...Only that the airline does not have a web site any more - It was grabbed by an online casino. Or maybe... Am I getting a casino ticket? Holy crap, no, it's a casino evangelism blog, explaining you how fun and interesting it is to lose your money online, how fair are the online slot machines, and such crap... Unbelievable. Anyway, I found Lloyd's Mexican office phone number in some online directory, and called. My ticket was, yes, reserved - It was not paid, though. Or maybe yes - the clerk told me that sometimes tickets get paid in Bolivia and they don't know about that. That could explain why Álvaro almost lost his flight. Ok, we got that point fixed in ~20 minutes (thanks to Dydier and Ramiro, in Sucre and Potosí respectively). I called again Lloyd, and yes, I'm confirmed. Phew. About Lloyd: I flied with them two years ago, when I went to the IV National Free Software conference in Sucre. The only problem I had was due to myself: I spent some days travelling around after the conference, and my plane back was set to depart from La Paz, change planes in Cochabamba, then change planes in Santa Cruz, then on to Mexico. As I was in Cochabamba already, I decided to skip the first hop - Well, that accounted for a couple of hours on the phone getting my ticket back to life once it had been cancelled as a no-show :) However, Lloyd has went through a serious financially troubled period, and its reliability seems to have gone seriously down. Even two years ago, when we both were in Bolivia (in the conference I just mentioned), Álvaro had to spend over a week he didn't plan on in Bolivia, as Lloyd's transatlantic plane was being repaired (!!). I found a similar report about an Argentinian passenger stuck for a day in Mexico and three further days in Santa Cruz due to broken aircraft... I can only hope for the best ;-) Anyway, in Bolivia I'll have quite a packed schedule. As I've told to Dydier, I don't care too much about the details on what will we do each day (my hosts are free to own 100% of my time), but I'll give at least five talks (three in CCBOL in Potosí and two to diverse auditoriums in Sucre). Of course, this is prone to change somehow, but the plan is I'll have a tutorial on PostgreSQL, a set of talks regarding computer and network security, and a talk about Free Software as a model of knowledge production rather than as a technical or social movement. Of course, wherever I go I talk about Debian as well at every possible chance ;-)

Raphaël: I mostly agree with your post. Having something closer to a steering committee seems saner than having a single leader for projects such as Debian, due to a single person not able to fully follow everything such a large and diverse mass of people works on. I was among the supporters of Project Cabal^W^Wthe DPL team experiment, and of our 2IC role. However, you state that a release should determine the time a DPL team (call it committee, cabal or whatnot. I like the title, in fact: "I am an Elected Member of the Whatnot of Debian". Whee!) - I disagree on this one. Like the fact DPL is not chosen for technical but for political work - The DPL (and so should the team) mediates between parties, brings order (controversial, sometimes) to discussions, pushes forward some controversial decisions, reports on the general status of the project - That should be the Whatnot Team work (hmmm... Should I file for trademark on that name?). In any case... Were we to change our model towards this formal DPL team thingie, I advocate slow changes over strong ones - I prefer a board like this one to be replaced one person at a time, at rates not more frequent than one month, and having them there for a fixed amount of time. Of course, this would lead to a mess on managing the voting, and each vote being less important for the developers. Besides, we have had DPL elections with as little as two candidates, and topping at seven IIRC - Do we have enough people interested in being responsable for our administrative chores? Would this scheme work? Or would it lead us closer to administrative stagnation? Quoting our not-very-beloved-but-anyways-wise dictator (for the 1876-1910 period) Porfirio Díaz: "If I want something done, I do it myself. If I want it to take some time, I appoint a delegate to do it. If I don't want it ever done, I form a committee".